Snow Blind (10 page)

‘So we’re thinking this is how it went down,’
Gino continued. ‘Tommy Deaton was ahead of Myerson on the trail, and the killer was waiting for him under the cover of trees and surprised him point-blank just as he was skiing out of the woods. Myerson sees his friend get shot, takes off a glove and goes for his gun. But the killer either gets lucky or is a dead-eye dick and hits him in his shooting arm, which explains the blood trail. Myerson skis all the way to the other side of the field, which is no mean feat, considering the arm shot shattered the radius, then he caught one in the back of the neck, probably real close to where the snowman was built around him, because that slug most likely paralyzed him instantly.’

Malcherson took a moment to process the scene Gino had just laid out, his mask of Scandanavian ice still intact. ‘Unfortunately, what bothers me most about this scene does absolutely nothing to dispel the serial-killer notion. In fact, it may support it.’

Magozzi asked, ‘What’s that, Chief?’

‘The carrots.’

Magozzi smiled at him. Underneath the great suits and polished personna of the Chief, there was still an investigator, alive and well and still thinking like a cop. ‘Good call, sir. A lot of people carry rope in their cars for emergencies, but the carrot’s a dead giveaway. Whoever it was came prepared to build a snowman.’

Malcherson’s phone lit up. ‘Please excuse me a moment, gentlemen.’

Magozzi smiled a little at the Chief’s pervasive politeness, then watched Malcherson answer the phone and reach for a fresh tablet. For what seemed like a long time he took fast and furious notes without saying much to the person on the other end. ‘I’ll call that up immediately, Sheriff,’ he said at last. ‘As it happens, Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth are in my office right now. If you’d stay on the line for just a moment, I’ll put this on speaker.’ He pushed hold, and Magozzi noticed the Chief was three shades paler than he’d been a few minutes earlier.

‘This is Sheriff Iris Rikker from Dundas County.’

Gino nodded, recognizing the name from the papers a few months back. ‘The green-as-grass deputy who skunked the sitting sheriff.’

‘Correct. She may have a snowman of her own. You need to listen to what she has to say.’ He pushed
SPEAKER
and nodded at Magozzi, who inched closer to the phone.

‘Leo Magozzi here, Sheriff Rikker. The Chief tells us you’ve got another one of our snowmen up there.’

‘As I told your chief, I’m not entirely certain, Detective. From what I saw on the news last night, it doesn’t look precisely like the ones you discovered
in Theodore Wirth Park yesterday, although it may have originally. It’s difficult to assess that at this point.’ Magozzi frowned, trying to sort the relevant from all the words she’d spewed out. It was like talking to an FBI agent. ‘Explain, please.’

‘Your snowmen looked very carefully crafted; almost artistic, in fact.’

‘And yours?’

‘Well, we’ve had freezing rain here this morning, then sleet, and now snow …’

‘Same here.’

‘… so even if this had started as a recognizable duplicate, the weather conditions would have altered it considerably. I’ve sent a photograph to your chief so you can make an assessment for yourself.’

Magozzi saw Chief Malcherson at his computer on the credenza behind the desk, downloading a file from online.

‘In the meantime,’ Sheriff Rikker went on, ‘we are preserving the scene as well as we can under the circumstances, which of course means we haven’t begun to dismantle the snowman yet, and without at least rudimentary examination of the deceased, we haven’t yet determined with any degree of certainty that this was a homicide.’

Gino yawned noisily, and even Magozzi was getting a little impatient. ‘You
are
sure there’s a body in there, right?’

He could almost hear a backstep in the pause that followed, and then a snippiness in her speech. ‘I’m very sure, Detective. His hands were exposed. You’ll see that in the photograph.’

‘Any chance it could just be someone who got caught out in the storm and then covered with snow?’

Another long pause, and Magozzi sensed a little temper in there somewhere. That was the trouble with a lot of woman cops, in his experience, especially women in power spots. They couldn’t take a little good-natured ribbing like a man could. ‘There is a very definite structure to this form, Detective. Whether or not it was perfectly executed, and in spite of the weather damage, it was obvious to all of us that someone constructed a snowman around this body. Whether or not it relates to your case remains to be seen. From our perspective at least, this was a courtesy call. After you’ve examined the photograph, you may be able to better determine the necessity of sending your people up here in these weather conditions.’

…
better determine the necessity
…? Who the hell talked like that? Magozzi rubbed at his temple and saw Gino doing the same thing, a pained expression on his face. The woman was giving them both a headache.

‘Fine, Sheriff Rikker. I see the Chief has your
photo loaded now. Can you hold a moment while we take a look?’

‘Certainly.’

Malcherson pushed the hold button, then stepped aside so Gino and Magozzi could see the computer screen.

‘Jeez, she’s touchy,’ Gino grumbled. ‘Like talking to a porcupine.’ Then both he and Magozzi stared at the digital image for a long moment.

‘Oh, man,’ Gino said. ‘We got another one.’

Magozzi leaned over and punched the speaker button on the Chief’s phone. ‘Sheriff Rikker? Sorry to keep you waiting. Detective Rolseth and I will be up there as soon as we can. You have any problem with BCA handling the scene?’

‘The BCA was my next call.’

‘Let us do that. I’d like the same guys who worked the park snowmen.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

Magozzi raised his brows. First she was snippy, now she was calling him ‘sir,’ and then she made nice by giving them detailed driving directions and closed with thanks to all of them – at least that was what Magozzi thought she was doing. All very polite and proper and way too long, mentioning them each by name as if reading from her notes, which she probably was. If she was a cop, Magozzi was a bowl of cornflakes.

‘Doesn’t sound like any cop I ever met,’ Gino remarked after the Chief had closed the call.

‘In point of fact, she was an English teacher before she entered law enforcement,’ Malcherson said.

‘No kidding? Well, that explains it. Only an English teacher would take five hundred words to say what she could have summed up in four. I’d hate to get Mirandized by her – she’s probably got her own ten-page version.’

Malcherson gave him a sour look. ‘I happen to find her linguistic precision refreshing. And I’m certain I don’t have to remind both of you to treat Sheriff Rikker with the same respect you would afford any other elected official and fellow law enforcement officer, elocution notwithstanding.’

‘No problem, Chief. She has my respect until she screws up, and so far, she seems to be handling things okay. I just wish she’d get to the point a little faster. Most of the stuff we do on the job is time sensitive, you know?’

Up in Dundas County, Iris Rikker hung up the phone, closed her eyes so she couldn’t see the office she was sitting in, and replayed the conversation in her mind, trying to shake the feeling that the Minneapolis detective thought she was a total idiot.

A cursory rap on the door frame interrupted her thoughts, and Lieutenant Sampson stomped in, throwing back the hood on his parka and scattering snow all over the place. ‘MPD coming?’

Iris mentally added a verb and prepositional phrase so that she could understand the question. ‘Detective Magozzi and Detective Rolseth are on their way. They’re also sending the same BCA team that processed the Minneapolis scene.’

Sampson flopped down in a big leather recliner and jerked up the foot rest. ‘Good deal.’

She got up and looked out the wall of windows over the lake, thinking how convenient it was to have a crime scene right outside the sheriff’s window. She couldn’t see much through the thickening snowfall, and was glad of that. ‘We need to put up some sort of plastic sheeting to preserve as much of the scene as possible. Do we have such things in the building?’

Sampson didn’t say anything for a second, so she turned around and looked at him. She didn’t like him lying back in the recliner as if he were in his own living room. It was disrespectful, wasn’t it? And if she ever intended to take charge of this office and do the job well, it was important that she establish the ground rules of respect right at the beginning, and now was as good a time as ever to start …

‘That was good thinking about the plastic sheeting,’ he said, messing up the mental speech she was planning about behavior modification, thoroughly confusing her because she thought he may have actually said something nice to her. ‘But a little slow. I already had some boys pick up a tent from the rental shop. They’re putting it up now. Christ, what a morning. You going to put lace curtains up in here or what?’

Iris just stared at him for a minute, finally deciding that she had a better chance of modifying the behavior of an earthworm. The truth was, a man like Sampson belonged in this office more than she did. He looked different with the hood pushed back. Dark hair, which seemed appropriate for some reason, squinty dark eyes, and the scruff of a weekend beard. Precisely the appearance of a man you’d expect to find in a wood-paneled office with a flat-screen television, leather recliners, and a stack of
Playboy
s on a table.

Sampson pushed himself up from the recliner, apparently weary of her silence. ‘Well, I just wanted to see if the Minneapolis boys were going to show or if we had to start processing the scene ourselves. I’ve got to get back out there.’ He stopped at the doorway. ‘I suppose you want to interview the night janitor who found the body.’

Iris blinked. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’ll send her in. Margie Jensen, in case you haven’t met.’

‘Thank you.’

Iris waited until he was well out of the office before she sagged back down into the stupid leather chair and started wishing she were dead, or at least home, with her cat throwing up on her foot.

She’d never even thought to ask who had found the body. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing. And Sampson knew it.

You’re not fooling anyone, Iris. You never walked the street or manned a patrol or processed a crime scene. You don’t even speak the same language as these people
.

A short older woman in coveralls rapped on the door frame with a broom handle and walked right in. ‘I’m the janitor, Margie Jensen, and I don’t know anything.’

Iris smiled at her.
That makes two of us
.

12

It was pushing nine a.m. and snowing hard by the time Magozzi and Gino finally got on the road in one of the department SUVs and headed north out of the city.

Magozzi was behind the wheel, Gino was rigid and still in the passenger seat, giving himself a gastric bypass with a too-tight seat belt, staring out the windshield as if he could prevent catastrophe by not blinking. ‘I hate these damn SUVs,’ he said. ‘We’re too damn high. Bet we tip over twenty times on the way up there.’

‘Can’t tip over,’ Magozzi said. ‘The ice ruts under the snow are too deep.’

The morning’s icy pellets had turned to snow, the wind was gusting, and the plows were having trouble keeping up, even on the city freeways. Magozzi figured visibility was about two car-lengths, give or take. It got worse once they cleared the shelter of the downtown buildings; worse yet when they left the suburbs behind and hit open land.

‘Starting to feel like we’re driving off the edge of the world here, Leo. I can’t see for shit.’

‘We’ve got swampland on both sides, nothing to stop the wind. It’ll get better once we hit some woods.’ Magozzi was four-wheeling it through the new four inches that had accumulated since the last plow run.

‘You sure there are woods up here?’

Magozzi was concentrating hard, trying to see the edges of the road. ‘Hell, I don’t know. We’re heading north. There are woods in northern Minnesota, right? Lean back. You’re fogging the windshield.’

Gino tried to sit back and relax, but within seconds he was canted forward again, squinting through the driving snow. ‘You’re going too fast.’

‘Goddamnit, Gino, relax. You’re driving me nuts, and you sound like an old woman. Back when we were on the street you used to drive like a maniac.’

‘Yeah, but then I got married and had kids, and I’d like to make it to their graduations.’

Magozzi sighed and eased up on the accelerator. ‘There. I’m going thirty. Can you live with that?’

‘I’ll let you know. Damnit, this trip better not be for nothing – it already took at least ten years off my life.’

‘It’s either the same guy or a copycat. Bad either way, and I’m not exactly clicking my heels about working a tandem with this particular sheriff.’

‘Tell me about it. Chief said English teacher, and I had a high school flashback to Miss Kinney,
smacking her ruler on the desk. Tall, sour-faced old biddy. Pursed her lips all the time like she was pissed off at the whole world. She talked just like this Rikker woman, and I could never understand her, either. Spewed words like they were old pennies she was dumping out of a jar all at once. Just because you know a lot of words doesn’t mean you have to use them all in the same sentence, you know?’

‘Maybe she was nervous.’

‘Whatever. Just get ready to translate for me. When cops get more than one adjective going I think it’s multiple choice and my brain stops dead … Jeez, Leo, the damn snow’s going sideways. Can you see the road?’

‘Nope.’

It took them exactly two hours to travel sixty miles, and that was on the freeway. By the time they took the right exit and hit the secondary roads, Magozzi was wishing he’d brought a snowmobile instead of an SUV. They sailed sideways through the first turn, then kissed the ditch a couple of times plowing through the rutted snow on a puny two-lane road with no shoulders. Gino was not happy.