Snow Blind

7

Midafternoon on a Saturday, and City Hall was buzzing like a blown-out amplifier. The entrance was jammed with what looked like every reporter and camera operator in the state, and as usual, where the cameras went, the politicians followed.

As he and Gino carved a ‘no comment’ path through the din of shouted questions that followed their entrance, Magozzi recognized no less than three city council members, several legislators, PR people from the mayor’s office, and bizarrely, the media spokesman for the Department of Transportation, though God knew what he was doing here. Probably looking for an increase in the snow-removal budget so they could get rid of all the white stuff someone was hiding bodies in.

Oddly enough, Homicide was the only relatively quiet place in the whole building. They heard Gloria’s excessively polite phone voice coming from the other side of the door that divided the reception area from the office proper, and Magozzi didn’t know which was more disturbing: that Gloria had come in on a Saturday, or that she was actually being civil to someone. ‘The detectives are still at the scene, sir. Yes, I certainly will pass that on.’

She was big and black and sharp-tongued, fastidious about her appearance, and slavish to a wild style that was uniquely her own. They were used to seeing her in anything from tiny braids to colorful turbans; one day in a sari, the next in a miniskirt and platform heels, but this was something entirely new.

She was standing at the front desk, hands on ample hips, glaring down at all the blinking lights on her phone, looking like a very big, very black Priscilla Presley. Her black hair was glued into some kind of a flip; the rosy dress was full and shiny and made crinkly little noises when she moved. Gino hadn’t seen one like it since his dad showed him his high school prom picture from sometime during the dark ages. He opened his mouth to say something, but Gloria glared and pointed a finger at him.

‘You like your balls, Rolseth?’

‘I do.’

‘Because this day is too black for wisecracking.’

Gino nodded. ‘I was just going to say that so far you’re the best thing in it. You look good in red.’

‘Hmph.’ Her big shoulders relaxed a little. ‘This is not red, you fool, it’s cherry blossom, and you think this dress is bad, you should have seen the bride. Looked like she was wearing a big fat doily.’ She plopped back into her chair with a rustle and a grunt.

‘The Chief just called. He was halfway to his lake place when the news hit; won’t make it back before the five o’clock news, which might be a good thing. Local media has already been all over the tube with bulletins, and CNN picked it up. They’re runnin’ crawl lines and calling it the Minneapolis Snowman Killing Fields. Bastards think they’re cute.’

Magozzi felt his jaw muscles tighten. ‘Goddamnit, we’ve got two dead officers here.’

‘Yeah, well cop-killer is a favorite headline, but it takes second place on the hit parade when you’ve got film of a bunch of uniforms knocking down hundreds of snowmen in front of a crowd of crying kids.’

‘Jesus. They’re showing that?’

‘You bet they are. Local, national, probably international by now. They’ve got the damn thing on a loop. Chief’s doing a live thing with the press at nine tonight; he wants everything you’ve got on his desk by eight so he can cull through it.’

Johnny McLaren and Tinker Lewis were halfway across the room at their desks, working the phones, already buried in paperwork; otherwise the place was empty. Magozzi and Gino rolled a couple of chairs over to Tinker’s desk, primarily because McLaren’s looked like the inside of a Dumpster during a garbage strike.

Tinker thanked someone on the phone and gently set it back in its cradle. The man did everything gently – always had, as long as Magozzi had known him, which was a pretty rare demeanor to find in Homicide. He had brown eyes that always looked sad; today they were downright mournful. ‘Second Precinct is red-lighting over everything they’ve got on Tommy Deaton and Toby Myerson. Recent performance reviews, arrest reports, the private stuff they kept in their lockers, anything that might not be in the master files. Nothing flashy stood out in the Sarge’s mind – not that he’d be able to think of it today, anyway. They’ve all got their brains wrapped in black over there.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘We need to tear it all apart, see if this is a cop thing or maybe even a Second Precinct thing.’

‘Yeah, they’re a little worried about that.’ He glanced over at McLaren, who had one ear glued to the phone while he scribbled on a scrap of paper. ‘Johnny’s talking to one of the guys over there that hung with Myerson off-time. You get anything from Deaton’s family?’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘We got what we could, but nothing that really jumps out. Wife went down like a redwood when we told her. She was pretty messed up. How about Toby Myerson’s family?’

Tinker leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and saw Toby Myerson’s mother again, braced crookedly in her wheelchair, one side of her wrinkled face sagging from the stroke that took half her body and most of her speech, but left awareness and emotion and a pair of eyes that said more than Tinker wanted to hear. ‘No family except the mother. Toby took care of her. Don’t know what’s going to happen to her now.’

He started sliding neatly labeled file folders across the desk, some fatter than others. ‘Reports are starting to trickle in, but it’s going to be an avalanche soon. Must have been hundreds of people out there today; plus we’ve got to go through all the film and stills the media took; then there’s the door-to-door on all the houses around the park, and you know how that goes. As soon as people find out there was a murder, we’re going to hear about a million parked cars that, now that they think of it, looked kind of suspicious…’ He blew a frustrated sigh out of puffed cheeks that drooped a little lower every year he was on the job. ‘The book on this one is going to weigh a ton.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘You have Espinoza on it?’

‘Yeah. We’re copying him on everything, he’s plugging it into the Monkeewrench software, but there’s still a lot of stuff that needs eyes on.’

‘Always is.’

Johnny McLaren finally hung up the phone and rolled bloodshot eyes in their direction. Rumor had it the flame-haired detective started every weekend with a Friday-night toot that lasted forty-eight hours, and looking at him on a Saturday made Magozzi believe it. ‘I got a little. Could be good, could be bad. Toby Myerson and Tommy Deaton were together last night. Both of them were cross-country ski fanatics; couldn’t wait to get off last night so they could hit the trails.’

Gino nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s what Deaton’s wife told us. You know, I took one look at that first snowman and thought whacko serial killer posing his trophy. Then we found the second one, and I’m thinking, holy shit it’s like serial-killer winter Olympics. Then we find out they were both ours, and it started to look like some asshole with a hard-on for cops. Now that we know those guys were together, we might have to look for a personal angle. Like maybe only one of them was the target, and the other just happened to get in the way.’

Tinker liked that. ‘So maybe it didn’t have anything to do with them being cops.’

‘That would be the dream scenario.’

‘I like that angle a lot better than some serial killer just plugging people at random, or cops in particular,’ Magozzi said.

‘Don’t we all. Doesn’t mean it’s the way it went down.’

They all looked up at the heavy click of Gloria’s heels on the floor and saw her fill the aisle between the desks with pink. ‘I’m going to catch a bite before the Chief gets back. You’re getting those reports pulled together for him, right?’

Skinny, red-haired McLaren looked at her and grinned, forgetting for a second that there were dead cops and a bad case and a late night ahead. ‘You gotta tell me how you get that skirt to stick out so far.’

Gloria ignored him. ‘Switchboard’s screening till I get back, but Evelyn’s on tonight, so cut her some slack. Last time she hung up on the city council chair and put through some idiot who said the CIA was planning the overthrow of the government in his living room. Chief damn near had her canned.’

‘Can’t really blame the woman,’ Gino said. ‘Chair of the city council or a paranoid idiot. Kind of a toss-up, if you ask me.’

She scowled, turned on her heel, then spun at the last moment and looked straight at McLaren. ‘Crinolines,’ she said, then disappeared out the door.

‘What’re crinolines?’ McLaren whispered.

Gino gave him a look. ‘You are such a fashion fetus. They’re really stiff slips. They got plastic hoops in them so they stick way out. Fifties stuff. Must have been a retro wedding. Can’t believe she even went to one of those things, let alone dressed up in a getup like that.’

McLaren was still staring at the place he had seen Gloria last.

It had been full dark for an hour, and Grace could still hear the irritating scrape of shovels against concrete from inside her house. In a workingclass neighborhood like this, there weren’t a lot of snowblowers, and the shovels had been busy all day, clearing yesterday’s storm from walks and driveways. A few of them were manned by intrepid youngsters who trolled from house to house, picking up a little extra cash for a lot of hard labor. There weren’t many such baby entrepreneurs these days; most kids were parked in front of the TV or a PlayStation, hands out for allowances earned by their mere existence. The few who worked the small, older houses on Ashland Avenue in St Paul never bothered to knock on Grace MacBride’s door.

She’d had high-tech heating grates built into her sidewalks and driveway before she bought the place six years earlier, and you could Rollerblade on those sidewalks in a blizzard. Not that Grace minded physical labor, but she’d been hiding from a lot of people in those days, and there was no way she would expose herself long enough to shovel a path through a Minnesota winter. Supposedly no one was trying to kill her anymore, but it was just plain silly to take chances.

This evening, inside the snug little house she’d converted into a fortress, she was practicing the MacBride version of slovenliness.

No one ever saw Grace dressed like this, except Charlie, of course, and since human speech was the only trick the dog hadn’t mastered yet, he wasn’t talking. The flannel pajamas had been a gift from Roadrunner; soft and warm and, bless the stick man, black. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into the purchase, because the pants were wide enough to provide easy access to the derringer she kept strapped to her ankle when she was working at home. But the very softness of the lightweight flannel felt dangerous. Grace liked weighty fabrics between her and the rest of the world.

If it had been anyone but Magozzi, she wouldn’t have opened the front door. He got a silly little grin on his face when he saw her outfit. ‘You’re in pj’s. I find that enormously encouraging.’

‘You’re early, Magozzi.’

‘I thought I could help you cook.’

‘Supper’s already on the stove. I was just about to get dressed.’

‘Or I could help with that.’

Grace rolled her eyes and stepped aside while Magozzi hung up his coat and greeted Charlie. These days he was here so often that the dog no longer went completely ballistic when he walked in. The joy was still there, but it was a little more subdued, almost respectful, as if in Charlie’s wee brain Magozzi had made the transition from playmate to master. Grace wasn’t sure how she felt about that. ‘You’re in a pretty good mood for a cop with two new homicides on his plate.’

Magozzi didn’t even look up from patting the dog. ‘You heard?’

‘Harley and Roadrunner called, made me turn on the television.’

He straightened and looked at her, and there was nothing good-humored in his expression. ‘They were cops, Grace. Both of them.’

In the year and a half he’d known her, Magozzi had rarely seen Grace visibly express any emotion. She was closing in on the mid-thirties, and yet there wasn’t a line on that face; not a smile crinkle at the corners of her mouth, not the slightest memory of a frown between her brows. It was like looking at the blank canvas of a baby’s face, before the joy and the heartache of life left their lovely marks, and it always made Magozzi a little sad. But sometimes, if he looked very closely, he could see things in her eyes that never went any further.

‘I’m sorry, Magozzi,’ she said, and he felt a door close on the outside world and all the terrible things that happened there.

She took his hand and led him back to the kitchen, checked whatever was simmering on the stove, then poured two glasses of wine and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, and it occurred to Magozzi that a woman had never said those words to him before. It sounded like a magic incantation.

This is what Gino has with Angela, he thought. You come home dragged out and frustrated and there stands this amazing woman who really wants to know what kind of a day you had. This was not a little thing. This wasn’t just sharing the time you had together; this was wanting to share the time you spent apart, too, and as far as Magozzi was concerned, that boiled down to wanting to share a life. He wondered if Grace knew that was what she was doing.

‘What are you smiling at, Magozzi?’

Magozzi was starting to hate his own house. It was dark, empty, and, worse yet, there was no woman and no dog. It had been unbelievably hard to leave Grace’s tonight, but he had an early call and a hefty stack of accumulated reports to go through before morning, and reading would have been out of the question with Grace sitting next to him in her flannel pj’s.

He grabbed a Summit Pale Ale from the refrigerator, turned on the television, and steeled himself for the ten o’clock news.

The news teams had had all day to polish up this story for maximum impact and it showed. Dramatic, inflammatory scripts laced with adjectives like horrific, shocking, and ghastly played well against the backdrop of skillfully edited montages that made what ultimately had been a well-managed, controlled crime scene look like a soccer stadium stampede. Especially effective were the images of screaming, crying children as they watched the boys in blue knocking down one snowman after another. Without exception, every single broadcast made the MPD come off like a bunch of heartless jackasses.

They all ran snippets of Chief Malcherson’s press conference, and none of it had been good. The man was a master of the calm, forthright presentation, but it wasn’t working this time. He made a good case for an ex-con with a grudge going after the cops who had put him away, but the press kept hammering him with the one question that even the cops were asking themselves: What kind of killer poses bodies in snowmen? That was B-movie stuff.

Kristin Keller of Channel 3 was putting an even more salacious spin on it. As they showed the tape of him and Gino no-commenting their way through the reporters at City Hall, she did a somber voice-over in her best end-of-the-world tone. ‘One has to wonder if the Minneapolis Police Department is concealing the truth, trying to avoid panicking the population of this city. A retired criminal psychologist who wishes to remain anonymous has told this reporter that the elaborate posing of these bodies in snowmen is the unmistakable mark of a psychopathic serial killer…’ She paused dramatically, looking straight into the camera. ‘A killer who will most probably strike again.’

Before he had time to put his fist through the TV screen, the phone rang, and he didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know who it was.

‘Gino.’

‘Leo, I want you to feel free to mentally insert as much profanity as possible into my side of the conversation, because I’m sitting here with my kids and I can’t do it myself.’

‘I take it you’re watching Channel Three.’

Gino sputtered, but apparently couldn’t manage to eke out a G-rated word.

‘They haven’t really said anything we haven’t been thinking ourselves, Gino.’

‘It isn’t what they said; it’s the way they said it. Bunch of bullshit scaremongering. Kids are going to be afraid of snowmen. They’ll stop building them. Then they’ll grow up and won’t let their kids build snowmen. The networks will never show the Frosty the Snowman cartoon again, and all the radio stations’ll pull the song off their playlists. Gene Autry’s family will never see another residual check again. This could change the winter landscape of the whole country just because Kristin Keller’s got a hard-on for a network slot.’ He finally wound down his rant and signed off, leaving Magozzi with a warm beer and a mountain of paperwork.