Snow Blind

5

Harley Davidson’s mansion looked as if it had been styled for a Currier and Ives Christmas card reproduction. Normally it looked foreboding from the street, but dressed with fresh snow and the holiday decorations he had yet to take down, the place looked more like a fairy-tale gingerbread castle than the red-stone lair of Summit Avenue’s biker-ogre. Even the wicked spikes that topped the wrought-iron fence looked whimsical with their white mushroom caps of snow. A tasteful display of twinkle lights sparkled along the eaves of the carriage house, and a lovingly restored, antique sleigh sat in front of the big wooden barn doors, as if waiting for a handsome team of harness horses to be hitched up.

Except at Harley’s, horsepower had a whole different meaning, and the carriage house was really a tricked-out garage; anybody who looked inside would get the Currier and Ives fantasy blown right out of their mind. But all the priceless cars and motorcycles and the big luxury motorcoach Monkeewrench used as a sort of traveling Crime Stoppers unit were all tucked away under blankets and tarps, waiting for warmer weather and dry roads. And it was driving Harley nuts.

At the big house, in the third-floor Monkee-wrench office, lights were blazing. The leather-clad lord of the manor was stationed at his mammoth desk, polishing off the last of his Carnivore Special from a local pizza parlor, while Roadrunner paced the floor with a clipboard, reading aloud from a punch list. His gangly, six-foot-seven frame was clad in a white Lycra bike suit today, and Harley thought he looked like an origami crane.

‘Clean up graphics on level two,’ Roadrunner recited.

Harley gave him a distracted nod while he mopped tomato sauce out of his black beard. ‘I’m working on it now.’

Roadrunner made a meticulous checkmark on his list and continued. ‘Okay. Fonts are inconsistent on -’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m working on that, too.’

‘Improve load speed between levels three and four.’

‘That’s your problem, buddy – my level transitions work just fine.’

Roadrunner gave him a grumpy look. ‘You haven’t even started writing code for your levels yet.’

‘I know that, but when I do, they’ll be perfect. What else?’

Roadrunner was still annoyed, but he turned back to his list without comment. ‘There are some minor glitches that carried over from the beta version, but it looks like Annie and Grace have those covered… oh. Here’s one. In all caps: HARLEY. DRESS THE DAMN ICE PRINCESS.’

Harley glowered at him. ‘Who wrote that? Annie?’

‘The Ice Princess needs clothes, Harley.’

‘She’s dressed already.’

‘She’s wearing a bikini.’

‘Like I said, she’s dressed. That’s PG material.’

‘This is supposed to be a children’s spelling game. Ages five to ten. It’s totally inappropriate.’

Harley spun his chair around and stared out the window. ‘Look at that. They haven’t plowed yet. You know, nothing says we can’t go out and buy a couple sleds right now and shred Summit Avenue.’

‘Are you going to take care of the Ice Princess or not? Because if you don’t want to do it, I will.’

‘Great, then she’ll end up looking like Lance Armstrong.’

Roadrunner’s cheeks flared red and for a moment, Harley was certain he was going to chuck his freshly sharpened pencil at his head.

‘Christ, Roadrunner, relax. Okay, I’ll dress her in a turtleneck, a nun’s habit, whatever you say.’

‘And you can’t impale the Snow Pixies on icicles when the kids spell a word wrong.’

‘That was a joke. Would you just take it easy? This is supposed to be fun, remember? At least that’s what you keep telling me, but you’re taking things way too seriously.’

‘This is serious. It’s for a good cause, Harley. The proceeds from this game are going to help out a lot of kids who need a safe place to go after school, and you know from personal experience how important that is. We all do – that’s why we picked this charity in the first place, remember?’

‘Kiss my ass, of course I remember. And I’m damn happy to do it, and all the other pro bono stuff. But this is the kind of programming I can do in my sleep. Plain and simple? I’m bored.’

Roadrunner sighed, moped over to his own desk, and slumped into his chair. ‘I know what you mean. But we all agreed we needed to take a few months off after the Four Corners thing. Plus, we can’t take the rig on the road in this weather.’

‘I know, but I’m ready for some action. Hey, what do you say we send out our virus and shut down a couple spammers?’

Roadrunner gave him a disapproving look. ‘Spam isn’t illegal. If we get caught, we go to jail.’

‘You know what I got in my in-box this morning? A spam that said “Dikkie 2 small? Not UR falt!” That should be illegal.’

‘Maybe somebody’s trying to tell you something.’

‘That doesn’t even dignify a response.’ He turned to his computer and started typing.

‘What are you doing? You’re not doing anything stupid, are you?’

‘Relax. I’m just checking my mail.’

‘You’re finished working for the day, aren’t you?’

‘It’s Saturday. I might have a hot date.’

‘Then I’m going home.’

‘You’re not biking home in this weather.’

‘Why not? It’ll be good exercise. Besides, it stopped snowing.’

‘It’s not going to stop snowing for another day. Look it up.’

Roadrunner pouted at his computer screen. ‘I’ll take a cab, then.’

‘Don’t be a jackass. I’ll give you a ride… Just hang on a minute.’

Roadrunner knew that ‘a minute’ in Harley’s lexicon could end up being an hour, so he started surfing the websites of the local news channels, looking for weather reports. What he found instead were streaming video footage and photos from Theodore Wirth Park, and damned if he didn’t catch a glimpse of Magozzi and Gino standing in the background of one of the stills.

‘Harley. We’ve gotta turn on the TV.’

Across the Mississippi in a different world, Magozzi pulled the unmarked into a broad driveway carved between two fresh snowbanks and shut it down. He and Gino looked at Tommy Deaton’s house through the windshield, one of the prewar brick two-stories that peppered the back streets of Minneapolis, especially near the lakes. Neither one of them made a move to get out of the car.

‘Ten years ago this neighborhood was right in the toilet,’ Gino said.

‘I remember. Wonder what these houses go for now?’

‘This close to the lake? Quarter of a mil, at least, and all thanks to the MPD. Bump up the patrols, pull the dirt-balls off the street, pretty soon you have cops living in the neighborhood and property values skyrocket. You ask me, the department oughta get a percentage. Isn’t that Polish butcher shop around here somewhere?’

‘Kramarczuk’s? Not even close.’

‘Kramarczuk’s could be a thousand miles away, and it’s still close enough. Man, you don’t get sausage like that anywhere else in the country. I bring home a package from that place, and as far as Angela’s concerned, I can do no wrong for about a week. We gotta make a run over there one of these days.’

Magozzi released his seat belt, but didn’t make any move to get out of the car. ‘I can’t believe we’re sitting out here freezing our tails off talking about some goddamn stupid sausage.’

Gino sighed. ‘We do this every time we have to make a notification. Last time we spent five minutes in the driveway talking about lawn fertilizer runoff.’

‘We did?’

‘Anything to keep from going in there. You notice the driveway? Somebody did a real nice job with the blower on this one.’

Magozzi nodded and finally lifted the door handle. ‘Maybe a service. Or maybe Mrs Deaton. We should ask about that.’

‘Yeah, and isn’t that a nice touch? “Gee, Mrs Deaton, I’m sorry to tell you your husband is dead, but on a lighter note, who cleared your driveway?” Christ. It’s a damn miracle these people don’t pull out a gun and shoot us.’

It took a long time for Tommy Deaton’s wife to answer the front door, and the moment he saw her, Magozzi understood why. She was a tiny thing with bruised and blackened eyes, a swollen face, and a big white bandage over her nose. She examined their badges very carefully before letting them inside, and then their expressions as they tried not to stare at her ruined face. She was a cop’s wife, and knew what they were thinking. ‘New nose,’ she explained with a quick, embarrassed smile. ‘Thirtieth-birthday present from my husband.’

Magozzi’s thoughts went off on a side track, wondering what the world was coming to when husbands gave their young wives plastic surgery for their birthday. What the hell kind of statement was that? Happy birthday, honey, and, for Chrissake, go get your face fixed.

Tommy Deaton’s wife was looking at him with polite uncertainty, probably wondering why they were there. She collapsed on the foyer rug when they told her.

After she came around, Gino and Magozzi helped her make some phone calls, then had about fifteen minutes to ask all the terrible questions they had to ask, while Mary Deaton sat ramrod straight on the sofa, tears running down her face, but answering everything. She knew the drill.

The normally smart-mouthed, hard-nosed Gino was tender with her, as he always was when he did this kind of thing, his heart sticking out all over the place. ‘So you had no reason to worry when Tommy didn’t come home last night?’

‘No. Like I said, he was crazy for cross-country skiing. Him and Toby both, and they’d been waiting months for a decent snow. Tommy said he’d probably spend the night at Toby’s. He lives a lot closer to the park, and those two like a few beers after they ski. Tommy’s a real stickler about driving after he’s had a drink, so he stays over at Toby’s a lot in the winter.’

‘A real responsible fellow.’ Gino smiled at her.

‘Yes, he is.’

She kept talking about him in the present tense, which always made Magozzi uncomfortable when he was talking to surviving family members. It wasn’t really denial. Sometimes it just took a long time for death to trickle down into speech patterns.

Gino chuckled softly. ‘You know, I stay out all night, even when I’m on the job, and my wife’s all over me on the cell the next morning. Where am I, what am I doing, when am I getting home… that sort of thing.’

Mary Deaton looked at him as if she’d never heard of such behavior. ‘Really?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

She almost smiled. ‘Tommy wouldn’t like it one bit if I tried to check up on him like that. He’s pretty much his own man, you know what I mean?’

‘I do.’

Mary Deaton’s parents arrived then and made a beeline for their daughter, eliciting a fresh gush of tears and the pathetic, quiet wailing of a full-grown woman slipping immediately back to childhood when the arms of a parent could protect you against almost anything. Magozzi and Gino moved well back, looking anywhere but at the clustered three-some, trying not to listen to that first flush of shared grief that could drown the hardest cop after a while if he let himself hear it.

Eventually the father broke away and walked over, introduced himself as Bill Warner, and shook both their hands. He was taller than Gino, shorter than Magozzi, with a gray brush cut, a well-lined face, and a trim body he carried in a very familiar way.

Gino took one look at him and said, ‘You’re on the job.’

Bill Warner gave him a sad smile. ‘Was. Twenty years with MPD. Retired two years now, but glad to hear it still shows. Mary says you’ve been real nice to her. I thank you for that. Did you have a chance to ask her what you needed to?’

‘All we need for now,’ Magozzi replied. ‘There may be more later.’

Mr Warner nodded. ‘There always is. Anything we can do. Any of us.’ He took a card out of his wallet and handed it to him. ‘Alice and I are going to take Mary home with us today. Home number’s there, and my cell. Any chance you can give me something about what really went down? All Mary can say is he’s gone, and so far the news is just a bunch of talking heads trying to reword the same old bullshit. I’ve got purple prose coming out of my ears and I only had fifteen minutes to listen to it on the way over here. Goddamn vultures just keep harping about all the traumatized kids, like that was the only tragedy here…’ He stopped himself and took a breath, and cooled down the red in his face a couple of shades. ‘Sorry. I’m reacting all wrong. It’s just that we didn’t even hear two cops had been murdered until Mary called. The news just keeps yammering about the goddamned snowmen getting knocked down…’ He almost lost it again, and apologized again.

‘Don’t sweat it. But for the record, the word that they were cops hasn’t leaked yet.’ Magozzi put his hand on the man’s arm, something he rarely did when dealing with survivors, and then he broke a cardinal rule and gave the man a sketchy summary of what they knew so far, because Bill Warner was one of them, and he’d know enough to keep his mouth shut. He still had a bone-chilling image of Toby Myerson, paralyzed and helpless, still alive and maybe conscious while someone packed snow around him, dying by inches and probably knowing it. He glossed over that in a big way, guessing that the man would know his son-in-law’s partner, but Warner still went pale. At least Deaton’s death had been quick, and he could give him that much. Bill Warner listened without interrupting, like a cop would, but in the end he sagged into a chair and put his head in his hands.

By that time the house was starting to fill up and any pretense of private conversation became impossible. Family and friends had started to gather, and there was a steady stream of blue uniforms through the living room and foyer as the department closed ranks around one of their own.

Magozzi took a last look at Mary Deaton as he and Gino made their way to the door. She looked tiny and helpless in the swelling crowd, like a shell-shocked child surrounded by protective soldiers.

Once outside, they waited by the side of their unmarked, taking deep breaths of the frigid air while the uniform who’d parked them in moved his car. The place looked like a police convention. Patrol cars filled the driveway and double-parked on the street, which made them feel a little better about leaving Tommy Deaton’s widow, and a lot worse about what had happened.

‘Thank God we don’t have to do this twice,’ Gino grumbled. ‘McLaren called when I was in the can. We’ll hook up at the hall when he and Tinker get back from making the other notification.’

‘Was Myerson married?’

‘It’s almost worse. Happy bachelor, barely twenty-eight, just moved back in with his mom when she got real sick, spends most of his off-time taking care of her. McLaren knew the guy, and he is beyond bummed. Goddamnit, Leo, he’s killing cops. Good ones. And he’s doing it big-time in our face, at an MPD-sponsored festival, no less. This one’s so personal it scares the crap out of me. Damn, it’s freezing out here. Tell me the temp didn’t drop twenty degrees when we were in that house.’

Magozzi opened the car, then lifted his face toward the westerly wind. It was starting a slow pickup, and he could smell more snow coming.