Snow Blind

36

Snow was still coming down hard when Magozzi and Gino left City Hall with the disk and headed for Grace’s. The program they needed was on her home computer, and she’d promised to meet them there.

‘Man, I can’t believe it’s still snowing,’ Gino said, tightening his seat belt as Magozzi fishtailed onto Washington Avenue. ‘What do you figure we got so far?’

‘Probably close to three feet since it started Friday.’

Gino pressed his face against the window and looked skyward. ‘What if it never stops? What if this is global warming and we’re entering a new ice age?’

‘Maybe we should start looking at high-rises.’

Gino fiddled with the heater controls for a minute, then flopped back in his seat. ‘You know, the Chief kinda pissed me off today with that little lecture about the whole search-warrant deal. I was just about ready to fly off the handle and say something stupid, but then he threw me with that crack about Hitler’s bunker. Did you catch that? He actually sounded like a cop.’

‘He is a cop.’

‘You know what I mean. An actual human-type cop. Anyhow, I’m not so sure he’s thinking this through. What we got is a hell of a lot more than an old lady going on about offing her husband – that and the bones at Rikker’s make you think it could be a family thing, you know? All the women in one family popping off their men over the generations. It was the other thing that really creeped me out, because if there are bodies in that lake, Laura was talking about killing other people’s husbands, and that ain’t self-defense any way you look at it. Plus, if we tie that video to Bitterroot, you’re not looking at one family anymore, you’re looking at a whole damn town that might be justifying murder, and that scares the crap out of me. I don’t want it to be an ex-cop with a clean service record; I don’t want it to be a bunch of women who think they’re saving their own lives, but, man, the stuff keeps piling up, just like this snow. It’s cumulative, Leo, and that ought to be worth something.’

‘The Chief can’t support a warrant without cause.’

Gino grunted. ‘Maybe not, but he could have supported our reasons for wanting one. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. To tell you the truth, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the monogram thing.’

‘I don’t, either, but we’ll have Grace pull the roster for us anyhow. What I really wanted was for her to play around with that disk. BCA might be a top lab, but I’ll still put my money on Monkeewrench magic.’

They didn’t hear Charlie’s customary welcoming woof before Grace opened the door, and Gino’s face showed his disappointment. ‘Hey, Grace, long time no see. Where’s my dog?’

‘He’s still at Harley’s. I’m on my way back there as soon as we finish here. Hi, Magozzi.’

She was wearing her usual black T-shirt and jeans instead of plastic wrap, and she wasn’t holding a martini. Magozzi smiled at her anyway. ‘Thanks for doing this.’

‘No problem. Come on in the kitchen and get a cup of coffee before we get started.’

Magozzi and Gino sat at the table while she stood at the counter and filled three mugs. ‘You said you needed a couple things. I’ve got the photo-enhancement program up and running. What else?’

Magozzi said, ‘The roster from Bitterroot. The names of all the current residents.’

She turned around and looked at him. ‘You think somebody who lives at Bitterroot killed your two cops in the park? Just because Bitterroot was the subject line on that chat thread?’

‘There’s a little more to it than that. Turns out one of the cops was abusing his wife, and it was getting worse. She has family at Bitterroot, hell, her great-grandmother and aunt founded the place, and this may not be the first time those people have killed to save a woman.’

Grace sat down between them and looked from one to the other. ‘You said Bitterroot was basically one big safe house for abused women, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And all the women who live there are abuse victims.’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Then it’s impossible. Both of you know the psychology of abuse victims. Those women don’t fight back. They’re incapable of it.’

‘Almost all of them are,’ Gino put in. ‘But once in a blue moon it happens, especially when they’re trying to protect someone else, like family, like Tommy Deaton’s wife. She was one of their own, hell, her mother grew up there, and she wouldn’t take their help. We think they might have taken the proactive route.’

Grace shook her head. ‘That sounds like a really big leap to me, Gino.’

‘There’s a lot more backstory, Grace,’ Magozzi said. ‘Reasons to think maybe some of the women at Bitterroot have killed other men in the past to protect themselves. We’re not sure about that, but it’s possible. Right now we need to focus on the two murders we know happened, and for that, we need the roster.’

‘I don’t have one. I don’t even know if such a thing exists.’

‘Of course it exists, Grace. It’s a corporation, and it has to keep corporate records. You’ve been in and out of their computer system installing your software, so you know how to get it.’

‘You want me to break into a client’s confidential records?’

‘Yes.’

That surprised her. It wasn’t the first time Magozzi had wanted information from some illegal site, but he never said it out loud. ‘Why do you want it?’

‘We’re looking for murderers. They might be on that list. Is that reason enough?’

She didn’t hesitate long before getting up from the table and leading the way back to her office, but Magozzi could tell that the hunt had changed for her, just as it had changed for all of them when they realized they weren’t looking for a crazed psychopath; they were looking for desperate women trying to save their own lives and the lives of people they loved. You had to be careful not to think about that too much, not to let yourself slip into that gray area where sympathy could step all over the simple fact that in the end, murder was murder, no matter who did it or why.

It only took a few minutes for Grace to bring up the roster on the screen. She rolled her chair sideways to give them a clear view. ‘There it is. What are you looking for?’

Magozzi handed her the disk. ‘This is a home video from the park the night of the murder. There are a couple frames on here that show four women building a snowman around one of our dead cops at Theodore Wirth. BCA enhanced them enough to get some initials off what looks like a monogram, and we want to match them against the roster. In the meantime, we want you to try getting some more detail out of these shots that might help with a specific ID.’

Grace closed her eyes briefly. ‘Four women?’

‘That’s right.’

She didn’t say anything after that; just took the disk and slotted it into a drive and fiddled with the image that came up on an adjacent monitor until it was clear. ‘That’s about as good as it’s going to get. I see W, T, C…’ She stopped speaking.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Gino said. ‘And then a zero. We know that. We were thinking it might be a date, only they couldn’t clarify the rest of it. So how do you make this thing page down?’ He pointed at the monitor showing the roster.

Grace reached over mindlessly and pushed the scroll button. Gino and Magozzi hunkered close to the screen, watching the names go by until the list finally ended on somebody called Muriel Zacher.

‘Nothing, damnit,’ Gino muttered, straightening up and pressing his hands to the small of his back. ‘Back to the drawing board.’

‘It was a long shot,’ Magozzi said. ‘But we had to try. What do you think of the photos, Grace? Any chance you can show up the BCA on enhancements? Maybe get some bone structure from under those masks for your facial-recognition program?’

Grace nodded without taking her eyes off the video frame on the second monitor. ‘I can try. Give me fifteen minutes alone with it.’