Snow Blind

38

By the next morning the close-up of the four women building a snowman around Tommy Deaton’s body was the lead shot on every local television station newscast, and on the front page, above the fold, on every paper in the Midwest. The politicos behind the scene at MPD did what they could to trace the leak, hopefully back to the BCA and not to one of their own, but in a matter of hours the damage had been done. Bitterroot hit the national airwaves.

Magozzi and Gino ignored what they could, gritted their teeth at the rest, and did their job. Monkeewrench had finally traced the chat-room thread to its origin – the Minneapolis Public Library computers. Anyone could walk in off the street and use those computers, which left them nowhere as far as pinning accessory charges on Bill Warner.

For fifteen days, more than fifty officers from MPD, Dundas County, and the Department of National Resources searched every house, every building, every one of the thousand acres owned by Bitterroot. They found a lot of weapons, all of them registered, not one a ballistics match to the slugs the ME had pulled out of Officers Tommy Deaton and Toby Myerson. They also found hundreds of scarves like Grace’s, like the one in the photo. The Minneapolis Crime Lab and the BCA each sorted through the scarves, comparing them to the freeze-frame Grace had enhanced – there were subtle differences in each scarf, created by the tremors in an old woman’s hand – but they found no definitive points of comparison. Certainly there were a lot more out there somewhere – Laura said she’d been stitching them for years, ever since they’d founded the place – but the search for a match was fruitless.

Every day that the search went on, the press gathering outside the gates grew larger and more vocal, demanding entrance, demanding answers. The media wouldn’t let the story go. When current news gave it a rest, the talk shows picked up the ball and ran with it. The idea of abused women turning killer was simply too salacious to leave alone. The Dundas County Council meetings were mobbed by residents and politicians alike, demanding what would certainly be the inevitable end to the story – the closure of Bitterroot.

Gino and Magozzi interviewed each and every current resident of the place, but they kept coming back to Maggie Holland. As longtime manager of the complex, it seemed reasonable to assume she had knowledge of everything that happened there, but after the first interview, their questioning became a simple exercise of going through the motions. She quickly became impatient with the process, but she submitted without complaint, kept her hostility under wraps, and kept what she knew, if anything, to herself. More than once, Magozzi caught himself almost admiring her courage and endurance. If she were truly a murderer, she wasn’t the kind he and Gino were used to interrogating. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that if they ever latched on to the kind of solid evidence that would connect Bitterroot to the crimes, this woman would take the fall all by herself, whether she’d been involved or not, in the hope that it would help keep the place open.

It was their last day in Dundas County. The search teams were packing up their gear and their dogs, getting ready to pull out, and Gino and Magozzi were sitting opposite Maggie Holland’s desk for the last time.

She was standing at the window, looking out across the fields in the direction of the gated entrance. ‘So you’re leaving.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Magozzi said.

‘And you found nothing.’

‘Not yet. The case is open. It will stay open until it’s solved. We still have two murdered police officers, one of whom, I’d like to remind you, was not abusing anybody.’

Her head moved in a nod, but she didn’t turn around. ‘But you accomplished one of your goals, didn’t you? They’re going to close us down.’

‘Our only intention was to catch a killer.’

She turned at last, came back to her desk and slumped in her chair. For the first time she looked almost beaten. ‘Have you considered, Detectives, that even if some of the women at this complex took it upon themselves to do what they felt they had to do to save a life, the others might be totally blameless? Totally unaware that such a thing had even occurred.’

Gino nodded. ‘We’ve considered that a lot.’

‘When those gates close for the last time, those particular women, those innocents, will have no safe place in this world. The journalists outside that gate will follow every one of them, convinced that each one is a cold-blooded killer.’

Gino leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. ‘You know, I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on the coverage of this thing – all the TV shots of the press hammering at the gates, locked out of the place that does God knows what inside – and I’ve been thinking that you’re crafty in a lot of ways, Maggie Holland, but in other ways, you’re just about as snow blind as we were during this whole damn case.’

Her gaze sharpened. ‘Really.’

‘Yeah, really. You know what I’d do if this was my place? I’d open the damn gates, let the press inside, let them see what you’re really about. Show them the other side of the story. And show them your neck, Maggie. Show them the scars that built that fence.’

Maggie was silent for a long moment, and although her gaze remained hard, there was something new in her eyes – an almost imperceptible flicker of light, of hope, as she considered what Gino had said. ‘Sheriff Rikker goes home today,’ she finally said.

Magozzi smiled. ‘We know.’

‘Of course you know. The nurses tell me you’ve both been at the hospital every day.’

Gino shrugged and looked away. ‘Yeah, well, we were up here anyway. It’s a cop thing, you know?’

‘It’s a human thing, Detective.’

‘Whatever.’

Back in the car, Magozzi turned to Gino. ‘You’re supposed to be a hard-ass. I can’t believe you told Maggie Holland to court the press. Great idea, by the way.’

Gino shrugged. ‘Yeah, I thought so. The way I was figuring it, we couldn’t bag the Warners, we couldn’t bag Maggie Holland or anyone at Bitter-root; that basically we couldn’t do shit to close unsolveds on a couple of cops, and the one and only thing we managed to accomplish with this whole investigation was to close down a place that really did some good. Total loss, beginning to end, and it pissed me off. This was kind of a salvage operation.’

‘Well, you sure opened a can of worms.’

‘Good. Maybe people will look at it. And maybe some of those people will call the useless sacks of nuts in the legislature and get them to stop releasing the other useless sacks of nuts we’ve been trying to keep locked up since we first put on the blues.’

Magozzi faced front, smiled, and started the car. Gino always was a dreamer. ‘I suppose that would be some kind of a happy ending.’

Gino snorted. ‘Bottom line? We got people out there who got away with murder, Leo, and Pittsburgh’s in the same boat we are. If it really was Bill Warner in that chat thread, he’s a damn good tutor. There is no happy ending to this case. I told you that, right from the start.’

Magozzi pressed the accelerator and the squad crunched its way out of the lot. ‘We do what we can, Gino. It may not turn out perfect, but sometimes, it’s not half bad.’