Snow Blind

37

‘Holy shit.’ Gino was peering out Grace’s living room window, looking up at the sky like Chicken Little. ‘It’s the end of the world. It stopped snowing. Has it been fifteen minutes yet?’

Magozzi was flopped on the couch, arm over his eyes to block the daylight. ‘Jeez, Gino, relax, give her some time. That program is slow.’

‘Relax, he says. Are you kidding me? This friggin’ case is driving me insane. We’ve come at it in four ways and we’re still empty-handed. We went through Weinbeck, the Snowman, the Warners, and Bitterroot, and we can’t prove shit.’

‘That about sums it up.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘I don’t know.’

Back in her office down the hall, Grace was going through the motions with her own advanced photo-enhancement program. The computer assessed probabilities, adding pixels of color in the most likely configurations, but there was no hope of getting enough off the poor-quality shots to justify using the facial-recognition software. All it had been able to accomplish was clarifying the rest of the monogram on the close-up of the scarf, but that was all she needed.W-T-C-0-0-0.

Cops were so single-minded sometimes, she thought. They got the idea of numbers into their heads and couldn’t let go. It never occurred to them that the zero wasn’t really a zero; that maybe it was the letter O, imperfectly stitched by the shaky hands of a very old woman. She pushed her chair away from the counter and closed her eyes, remembering the last day she’d worked at the Bitterroot offices last fall.

It’s lovely, Maggie. Thank you.

Just a little something to remember us by. I told Laura you admired mine on your first visit, and she insisted on making you one.

Laura?

Yes. She’s one of the original founders of Bitterroot. She’s very old now, and her needlepoint isn’t what it used to be, but she’s always so flattered when someone appreciates it.

What does this stand for?

It stands for what we stand for. Bitterroot, and all the places like it. W-T-C-O-O-O. We Take Care of Our Own. Laura makes them for all our girls.

At the time it had seemed like such a wonderfully human motto in a world where corporations were usually so impersonal, and it wasn’t such an unusual phrase. People said it all the time about their families, their communities, their countries, so it hadn’t rung any bells when she’d read it on that chat room thread. Now the motto on the scarf seemed a lot more sinister.

Magozzi and Gino went to join her when they heard Grace leave her little office and go into the kitchen.

‘Did you get something?’ Gino asked hopefully.

She turned to face them, and Magozzi thought her eyes were empty, as if she’d used up everything behind them. ‘Do you have any idea of how many women have been murdered by their partners in this country since you walked through my front door?’ she asked quietly.

Magozzi’s eyes held hers. ‘Tell me how many minutes it’s been and I’ll tell you how many women. We know the stats, Grace. It’s our job to know them. It’s also our job to change them. Ours, and every other cop’s. Nobody else’s.’

Grace thought about that for a moment, then nodded. ‘You said an old woman killed someone at Bitterroot this morning.’

Gino said, ‘That’s right, but it was self-defense, plain and simple. Well, not exactly self-defense. The guy had a gun on another woman.’

‘And I can make sense of that,’ Grace said. ‘It’s one thing to kill someone who breaks into your house with murder in mind, like the old woman did this morning. But seeking them out to kill them in advance, like Tommy Deaton? It’s almost like…’

‘Hunting,’ Magozzi said, and he felt his heart speed up. She’d found something, something that connected the snowmen in the park to Bitterroot. ‘But for what’s it worth, if people from Bitterroot were involved, they probably thought it was the only thing they could do to save Mary Deaton’s life. Even Gino and I were having problems with that one. Half of you knows it’s murder, the other half gets it.’

‘Exactly. But then you have to start multiplying.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How many abused women are at Bitterroot?’

‘Four hundred,’ Gino remembered.

‘Okay. And for every one of them there’s probably a man out there who might kill them one day. If you start making excuses for Deaton’s murder, you have to make the same excuses for three hundred ninety-nine others.’

Gino stared at her. He’d had his head wrapped so tight around what he would do in Bill Warner’s place that he’d almost lost sight of the job itself, and why he did it.

Grace pushed herself away from the counter and went to a drawer, pulled out the soft, folded scarf and laid it on the table between them.

Gino pulled it closer, fingered the imperfect embroidery, then sucked in an audible breath.

Oddly, Grace almost smiled at him. ‘It wasn’t me in that video, Gino. It wasn’t the same scarf. Just one like it.’

He exhaled slowly. ‘I knew that,’ he grumped. ‘Jeez, Grace.’

‘They gave it to me the last day I worked there. Apparently the old woman makes them for all the women out there, and those aren’t zeroes, those are Os. The inscription stands for the Bitterroot motto. “We Take Care of Our Own.” We found that phrase in the chat-room thread I read to you, remember? I just didn’t make the connection.’

Magozzi and Gino just stood there for a minute, looking at each other. Normally the big break in a tough case was cause for jubilation. That didn’t happen this time.

Gino shoved his hands in his pockets angrily. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, I was half-afraid of this. I mean, a town without men creeped me out at first, but the thing is, that place worked, and you can’t tell me all the women up there are in on this. So what you’ve got is a few bad apples ruining a really good thing for a bunch of scared women who have no other safe place to go. We’re going to get a warrant on Bitterroot out of this, and then there’s going to be an investigation, and the scandal will shut that place down forever, whether or not we find the evidence to nail the real killers.’

‘I hate this,’ Grace whispered, and Magozzi wondered if abuse was part of her past, which he still knew nothing about after a year of loving the woman. ‘But one of those women passed out free murder advice in that chat room that led to the Pittsburgh killing.’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘We think that was Bill Warner, Mary Deaton’s father. He may not have been at the scene, but he sure as hell was in on the planning, and now he’s spreading his know-how.’

‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘Probably to some other poor schmuck of a father who lies awake at nights waiting for the call that his own daughter’s dead… Christ, I don’t know who to hate and who to feel sorry for. This case turns me in circles one more time, I’m going to look like a corkscrew. I’m going to go warm up the car.’ He stomped down the hall, grabbed his coat, and slammed the door on his way out.

‘Gino’s having a really hard time with this one,’ Grace said. She was looking down at the floor.

‘So are you. We all are.’

She walked him to the door and watched him shrug into his coat. She looked as exhausted and troubled as he felt, and he knew that this was one of those times when Grace had to be alone. She didn’t work her way through problems or sadness the way other people did, by talking about it. She just retreated someplace to which Magozzi had never been able to follow.

‘You want to forget dinner tonight?’ he asked her.

She opened the door for him. Her eyes looked faded in the bright light from the outside, and he couldn’t read them. She reached up and touched his cheek, then kissed him on the mouth very briefly, a peck, really, like the kind a woman might give to her husband in the morning when he left for work.

‘Bring your pj’s,’ she said.