Snow Blind

4

There were well over a hundred officers of one sort or another in the park, but it still took a good half hour to destroy the work of children. Gino and Magozzi had moved to the center of the open field so they could see as much of it as possible, busy eyes and knotted stomachs waiting for a blue-coated arm to rise or a cry to go out announcing another terrible find.

They were just snowmen, but for some reason, Magozzi felt as if he were watching a massacre as crime-scene techs and cops systematically and carefully dismantled them one by one. With each one that went down, he cringed and held his breath, expecting the worst – pessimism was an occupational hazard that moved in fast and stuck around for the long haul – but so far, the rest of the field was clean.

Most parents had whisked their children away long ago, but there were a few left who watched the proceedings with feral glee, oblivious to the terrorized expressions on the faces of their off-spring.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Gino fumed. ‘Can we arrest those assholes for child abuse?’

‘I don’t think it would hold up.’

‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? All their kids are gonna wake up screaming every night for a month, and then they’ll sue the department for not providing grief counselors. And why? Because they just had to stick around for the peep show, hoping like hell they’d see some poor dead bastard and feel happy that it wasn’t them on a slab at the end of the day.’

The sad thing was, Gino was only half-joking, and probably more than half-right.

One of the younger uniforms broke away from an anonymous sea of blue at the far side of the field and crunched over, his ears and nose bright red from the cold, his expression a mix of relief and misery. ‘That’s all of them, Detectives. Nothing else.’

‘Thank God,’ Gino said, releasing a sigh.

The cop nodded, his eyes preoccupied with the decimated field that had turned to slush under heavy foot traffic and the afternoon sun. ‘Did you know them?’ he finally asked.

Magozzi and Gino shook their heads somberly.

‘Me either. But I feel like I did.’ He drifted off without another word, no doubt contemplating his own mortality for the first time.

Magozzi and Gino followed, and ran into Jimmy Grimm halfway.

‘I was looking for you guys. We’ve got the first one uncovered. Come over and take a look.’

The first thing they noticed was that Tommy Deaton’s body was lashed to a wooden ski trail marker with common yellow synthetic rope – the kind you could find just about anywhere, from gas stations to grocery stores. His chin had dropped to his chest without the packed snow to brace it up, and Gino thought it was the saddest thing he ever saw.

‘Oh, man, can’t you cut him down?’

‘Not until Dr Rambachan sees it in place. He got caught behind a twenty-car fender-bender on 494, but he should be here soon.’

‘There’s the answer to your question, Gino,’ Magozzi said.

‘What question?’ Jimmy wanted to know.

‘How you get a dead body to stand up straight so you can build a snowman around it.’

Jimmy nodded. ‘And the skis weren’t just a prop. This guy was hard-core. That suit he’s wearing goes for six hundred bucks minimum, add another thousand or so for the skis and poles.’

‘You been watching the Home Shopping Network again?’

‘I wish. Three kids, two of them on the ski team, and I’m broke every Christmas. Been trying to talk them into something cheaper, like the debate team, but no joy.’ He walked over to Deaton’s body and pointed at the side of his head. ‘One shot, small caliber, probably dropped him on the spot. No exit wound, so we should get a slug out of the autopsy. And there’s stippling on the scalp, so it was real close.’

He stooped down in front of a tray of neatly arranged evidence bags and plucked one out that held a tooled leather wallet. ‘I just pulled this off him. ID, credit cards, two hundred seventy-eight bucks cash.’

Magozzi’s eyes drifted down to Tommy Deaton’s belt holster, where his service piece should have been but wasn’t. ‘But no weapon.’

‘Right.’

‘How about Myerson? Is he uncovered yet?’

‘I’ve got a team over there now. Let’s take a walk while my guys get the shots of Deaton without the snowman.’

They were careful to give wide berth to the crime-scene tape that cordoned off the ski trail that wound through a sparse patch of woods – the only trail that drew a line directly from Tommy Deaton to Toby Myerson. Of course the hundreds of people tromping through here before the tape went up hadn’t been so careful, and Magozzi knew the chance of getting any tracks was beyond hope; but there were a couple BCA guys in the woods proper, and they were crouched by a skinny maple, carefully collecting shredded bark with pairs of tweezers – a good sign.

‘Did you find something?’ Jimmy asked hopefully.

‘Maybe. We’ve got lots of fresh bark confetti, and as far as I know, beavers hibernate, so we’re hoping for a slug.’

‘Pull some guys from the field and widen the grid around the trail a few hundred yards. Take a look at every tree.’

‘They’re on their way. We’ll keep you posted.’

Toby Myerson looked very much like his Second Precinct partner, right down to the skis and the yellow rope that held him upright against another trail marker, but this man’s right arm hung at an awkward angle, and the sleeve of his ski suit was shredded and stained almost black.

Magozzi stood quietly, moving only his eyes, taking it all in. ‘That arm wound had to have bled like crazy. So where’s the blood?’

Jimmy actually smiled at him. ‘Good question, Grasshopper. We uncovered a little that filtered down through the snow, but not enough. My guess is he didn’t take the arm shot here. We’re looking for a blood trail between the two snowmen.’

Gino nodded. ‘No glove on the right hand. You find it around here?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did you test the hand for GSR?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Huh. So he never got a shot off, but he sure as hell tried.’

Jimmy frowned at him. ‘How do you figure that?’

Gino poked at his forehead with his big mitten. ‘I see it right here, that’s how. Two guys skiing together right after the first snow, bad guy jumps out from behind a tree and pops Deaton, Myerson sees his partner buy it, rips his glove off to get at his weapon, but before he can get a shot off, the killer nails him in the shooting arm and he loses his piece.’

Magozzi rolled his eyes, but Jimmy looked fascinated. ‘Then what happened?’

‘Poor Myerson tries to get away, that’s what, pumping away with his good arm, but he only makes it this far before he bleeds out.’

Jimmy Grimm looked at Magozzi. ‘Where does he get this stuff?’

‘He makes it up. Does it all the time. Only this time, I think he’s got something. It makes sense.’

Grimm nodded solemnly. ‘Except for one thing. He didn’t bleed out. The arm shot shattered the bone, but it wasn’t lethal.’ He walked around the pole Toby Myerson was lashed to and pointed to a small hole in the back of the dead man’s neck. ‘The son of a bitch chased this man down and put a bullet right through his spine. Doesn’t look like a killing shot, but it probably paralyzed him instantly.’

Gino frowned. ‘Then what killed him?’

Grimm looked away and shrugged. ‘Who knows? You’ll have to wait until the doc gets inside to find that out. Could have been a heart attack, could have been hypothermia, massive organ failure…’

‘Jesus,’ Magozzi whispered. ‘Are you saying he could have been alive while they were building a snowman around him?’

‘Maybe. Maybe even for a long time after that.’

Magozzi closed his eyes.