Snow Blind

33

They went through the village on their way back to the car. The snow was getting too deep to walk anywhere but on the little plowed road, and it was still coming down; big, fat flakes that belonged on a kid’s tongue.

But today there were no kids, and the village was silent. Kurt Weinbeck had done that.

It was a sad thing, Magozzi thought, when you finally learned that the one place you always felt safest wasn’t that safe after all. Any burglary victim had a taste of that when they came home to see their doors or windows shattered, their home trashed, their possessions missing. Here, Magozzi had to multiply that feeling by four hundred souls who’d lived a lot of their lives in fear, and thought they’d finally found sanctuary. He wondered how long they’d stay locked in their houses.

None of them spoke until they got back in the county car, and Sampson had started the heater. ‘I have a problem with this one,’ Gino said. ‘Half of me wants to book those two and toss them in the can for life; the other half wants to turn my back and pretend I don’t know what they did.’

‘Half of you is going to get its wish,’ Magozzi said.

‘Yeah, but which half?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Half of you is still going to end up pissed.’

Iris turned around in the front passenger seat. ‘I don’t understand how you can be so certain they’re guilty. They didn’t actually say anything incriminating in the interview. Even admitting that he threatened his son-in-law doesn’t seem to count for much. Any father would have done the same.’

‘Or brother,’ Sampson added from the driver’s seat. ‘I said it myself a few times. But it isn’t what they said. It’s the way they were.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Faces,’ Magozzi said. ‘You do enough interviews over a long enough time, you learn to read the faces first, and listen to the words second.’

Iris turned back around in her seat and stared out the windshield. ‘I’m not there yet.’

‘Well, jeez, Iris Rikker, you’ve been on the job for almost two days already,’ Gino said. ‘How long is it going to take you to catch on?’

She smiled a little at that, but didn’t let him see it. ‘Do you have enough to get a search warrant for the Warners’ home?’

‘Maybe if we strong-arm a judge and do some fancy stepping with probable cause, but Bill Warner’s a cop. No way he’d leave a crumb behind.’

‘Which leaves us exactly nowhere,’ Magozzi said. ‘We have nothing on them. No forensics, no ballistics, no witnesses, and even if we trace that chat room right back to Bill’s PC, it doesn’t prove a thing. And those two sure as hell aren’t going to give each other up on the alibi.’

Gino nodded. ‘They’re pretty much Teflon.’

‘So where do you go from here?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Where we always go. Back to the scene. Back to the beginning. We do it all over again.’

Iris cracked the back door. ‘Sampson, would you mind giving the Detectives a ride back to their car? I want to stay until the last of our people have cleared out. It’s time to give these women back their town.’

‘No problem. I’ll be back in half an hour to pick you up.’

Two dozen deputies had stayed on at Bitterroot, going house-to-house for the second time, reassuring the frightened occupants that the intruder had been apprehended. Most of the women already knew that Kurt Weinbeck hadn’t exactly been ‘apprehended’ – he’d been dropped in his tracks by a very old woman with a very big gun – news traveled as fast in this small town as any other – but still, the deputies had to go through the motions.

Each deputy took one side of a block, working opposite sides of the narrow, curving, snow-clogged street. Except for Kenny. He was working the town alone, after the other deputies had moved on.

He wore his hat-brim low against the falling snow, which hid most of his face, but he had the badge high on his department-issue parka so the women wouldn’t be afraid to open their doors. Every single one of them thanked him politely and informed him that another deputy had already stopped to announce that the danger was over. Invariably, Kenny smiled, touched the brim of his hat and apologized for disturbing them twice.

He knew a little about the town layout, but never before had he seen the insides of the houses. Some of them were a little larger than others, probably for the women who had kids and needed extra bedrooms, but otherwise the interiors were almost identical. After peering over a dozen women’s shoulders when they opened the door, Kenny had it down. Living room in front, kitchen in back, bedrooms on the left. There had to be over 300 of them in the town, and by his fifteenth stop, he began to wonder if he’d have enough time to find her. He was moving a lot faster than the other deputies, but as soon as they finished and cleared out someone was bound to wonder why one man lagged behind, checking houses that had already been covered. He could probably bullshit his way out of that, but he didn’t really want to get put in that position. He started to move a whole lot faster.

The twenty-sixth house didn’t look a whole lot different than the first twenty-five, but the minute a woman opened the door it felt like home to Kenny. In one quick, powerful motion he shoved her aside and stepped into the house, closing the door behind him.

‘Hello, Roberta.’

Some things never changed. She just stood there for a second, eyes cast down, every bit as still as the bronze statue of that pioneer woman in front of the library. That’s what she’d always done whenever he’d come up on her suddenly, and he used to do that a lot, just to see her like this.

Christ, it was the middle of the night, almost sunrise, and she still looked good; the kind of woman who turned men’s heads no matter how many years were on her. They hadn’t just had a decent life together; they’d had a perfect one, until the night she’d left that shitty little note and…

‘Goddamnit, Roberta!’

She was moving now, backing into the little divider that separated the foyer from the living room, and she wasn’t allowed to do that. She had her eyes on him now, too, instead of looking down at the floor like she was supposed to, and he didn’t like that one bit. ‘Stop right there.’ And she did, but she was still watching him. He decided to let that go, because this was sort of like training a not-too-bright hunting dog: you had to balance punishment and praise just so. ‘That’s good, Roberta. That’s real good. Now put your coat and boots on and we’ll get you home where you belong.’

She didn’t move for a minute, then she shook her head, and damnit, she was still staring right at him.

‘Do not do that Roberta. Do not make me repeat myself, Goddamnit.’

Roberta knew what was going to happen now. She’d been through it a hundred times before. Halfway through that hundred, the fear had stopped escalating to terror, and downshifted into a black hole of apathetic resignation. After that, whenever Kenny got that wild look that advertised her near and terrible future, all she hoped was that he’d hurry up, hit her and get it over with. The actual impact of fist or boot was almost better than the fearful agony you went through waiting for it.

There would be pain and blood and probably broken bones, then hours later, or sometimes days, the apologies, the loving words, the promises never to do it again, and of course, the question: Why do you make me do that Roberta? Why do you make me hit you?

The first thing they started to teach you when you came to Bitterroot was how to protect yourself, how to fight back, and Roberta had been a very good student. After three months she could over-power anyone in the defense classes, even though most of them were younger, and the sense of empowerment filled her with a great resolve. She would never back into a corner again. She would never drop to the floor and cover her head and curl into a fetal ball and wait for it to be over. Not ever again.

Until this moment she had actually believed that. It was only now, with Kenny this close, that she realized the truth. If a stranger ever attacked her, she wouldn’t hesitate to slam her heel into his instep and break the bones in his foot, or jam her thumbs into his eyes to blind him – but to do these things to Kenny? It would be unthinkable. She didn’t know why.

There was nothing left for her to do, except what she had always done. Find a corner, because where walls came together they offered a little protection from the roundhouse swings; then drop, curl, cover your head and pray. There was just such a corner in the living room. She’d kept it clear of furniture, as she had kept another corner clear in her old house, and whenever another Bitterroot woman visited her, she would find that corner with her eyes and look at Roberta as if they were sharing a sad secret. Almost every house in Bitterroot, the safest place in the world, had a corner just like hers – empty, waiting, just in case.

Kenny wasn’t expecting it when she moved so suddenly. I mean, Christ, he hadn’t even raised a hand to her, hadn’t even thought of raising a hand to her, and she was running anyway, scooting into the living room really, really fast.

That was the thing about Roberta. Everybody always said she was built like a ballerina, but man, she scurried like a spastic rabbit when she got scared. Kenny had always thought that looked kind of funny. She was ten steps into the living room by the time he closed his hand around her forearm and jerked viciously.

Roberta didn’t have enough breath to scream, so she actually heard the sharp cracking sound of her bone breaking within the sheath of her arm.

She didn’t feel the puppet-like flopping of the part of her arm that swung uselessly beneath the break, but Kenny did, and it grossed him out.

‘Jesus Christ, Roberta, you stupid bitch, look what you did!’

She’d hurt herself again, and that always made Kenny angry. Now it begins, she thought, but then she saw the arc of his big, hard fist driving toward her head, and thought instead, And maybe now it ends.