Snow Blind (16 page)

Gino nodded. ‘That’s what she told our detective on the phone. We might need your help talking her into it.’

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly do that. She’s much safer here than she would be with you. Perfectly safe, in fact.’

Gino got a little impatient when he still had a long drive to make it to Angela’s spaghetti. ‘Listen, we saw the security you’ve got out here, and let me tell you, a fence, a couple of guards, and a metal detector might put a damper on corporate espionage or whatever the hell you’re worried about, but it’s not going to stop a man like Kurt Weinbeck. He already killed a man to get to her. Your little fence isn’t even going to slow him down.’

‘There’s a little more to it than a fence and a couple of guards, Detective Rolseth.’ Ms Holland pressed a button on her desk computer and a portion of a wall parted to reveal an enormous computer screen. She pressed a few more keys and a mosaic of live video feeds appeared.

Magozzi recognized the guardhouse at the entrance, the parking lot, and the lobby they’d just passed through, but there were at least twenty other
views displayed, some outside, some showing various offices and labs he assumed were somewhere in this building. He examined them all carefully.

‘This screen is displaying views from all the security cameras in what we call Quadrant One. Bitterroot is divided into twenty quadrants, all monitored with cameras and motion detectors and analyzed in real time by our security staff in the media room, twenty-four hours a day. It’s based on the surveillance the casinos in Las Vegas use.’

‘Impressive. How many cameras?’

‘Hundreds of them. But we can’t possibly monitor every square inch of a thousand-acre compound, so we had a local software company integrate the motion detectors and the cameras. Now when something moves out of camera view, the detectors direct the nearest camera to adjust the view to follow it.’

Gino was jabbing Magozzi with his elbow, jerking his head toward the screen, but Magozzi had already seen it: a tiny Monkeewrench logo at the bottom of the screen.

‘We also have security around the clock patrolling the compound and particularly the perimeter. And there are more layers of security, but I think you get the picture. Nothing you have on the outside can offer this level of protection to Julie.’

Magozzi looked straight at her while his thoughts
moved fast, racing through the details his cop’s eyes had recorded for the brain to sort through later. ‘So just exactly how many Julie Albrights do you have living here?’

He’d surprised her with that one, and Maggie Holland didn’t look like the kind of woman who surprised easily. ‘Very good, Detective. Quite a leap, actually, in view of the little you’ve seen …’ She glanced at Sampson. ‘Or were you told in advance?’

Magozzi caught the look. ‘No. And it wasn’t that much of a leap. The only people I’ve seen here so far are all women, including the ones on your camera screens up there. Now that probably isn’t so unusual for a cosmetics company, but your security guards are all women, too, and you don’t see a lot of that. Add Julie Albright and the security to the mix and it makes you wonder. Plus, you’ve got a real faint scar across your throat that looks a little ragged for surgery, and your nose has been broken and healed a couple of times. Way I figure, that makes two of you, at least.’

Gino had been frowning hard, trying to follow the underpinnings of the conversation. Suddenly his face cleared. ‘Oh, man, it was right there in front of my nose and still I was about ten steps behind on that one. And there are at least three, by the way. The guard at the metal detector had some broken fingers on her left hand, never set. Twist injury,
from the way they healed. So how many more?’

Ms Holland looked at him calmly. ‘All of them.’ She glanced over at Sampson, who was looking down at the floor, but of course he had always known; and then over at poor Sheriff Rikker, who was struggling to put it all together.

Iris had been staring at the scar on Maggie Holland’s neck ever since Magozzi mentioned it. It was unforgivably rude, which was totally unlike her, and yet she couldn’t pull her eyes away. It was one thing to watch the news stories and learn the statistics in class; even listening to all the domestic calls that came over dispatch still kept her one step removed. But to see evidence of the reality was like a hard slap across the face. She felt like she’d been sucked up from her world and abruptly dropped into a new one, where men didn’t leave their wives, they beat the crap out of them.

‘Every woman who lives here came because she wasn’t safe on the outside,’ Ms Holland was saying.

‘Same thing with the men?’ Gino asked.

‘There are no men. That’s what keeps the women safe.’

Gino was frowning. ‘Wait a minute. How many people live here?’

‘Almost four hundred.’

‘And not one of them is a man.’

‘That’s correct. No man ever enters this property
without a day pass and an escort.’ She smiled at Sampson. ‘Not even police officers.’

Gino looked at Magozzi. ‘Is that even legal?’

‘Probably. It’s private property. We keep men out of the safe houses in the city, and basically, that’s what this place is starting to look like. One big, permanent safe house.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘It’s not a safe house. It’s a town that happens to be safe. That’s all any of us wanted, a place we could be safe from rape, murder, assaults against our children … It didn’t take long for the founders of Bitterroot to figure out that all they had to do to eliminate those dangers was one thing: eliminate the men.’

Eliminate the men
. Magozzi’s brain ran into the brick wall of those three words and revved there like a useless, speeding engine. He tried to remember that his real job was back in the Cities, trying to find the murderer of two cops, that Kurt Weinbeck probably didn’t have a thing to do with his real case, that he had a job and a sort-of life and a woman he cherished who wouldn’t talk to him – but he was having trouble focusing. He kept hearing those same three disturbing words over and over in his head, and the worst part was the brain tickle that told him he’d heard those words before, or something like them. ‘That’s a pretty damn extreme solution,’ he finally managed to say.

Maggie Holland nodded. ‘But it
is
a solution. We haven’t had one violent crime in Bitterroot in the sixty years of its existence. Can you think of one other town in the entire country that can make that claim?’

Magozzi didn’t reply.

‘And when you really think about it, it isn’t that extreme at all.’ Maggie’s eyes shifted to Iris. ‘You live alone, do you not, Sheriff Rikker?’

Iris nodded.

‘Well, in a sense, is what we do here so very different from what you do in your own home? You lock your car doors, you lock the doors to your house when you come home, your ground-floor windows when you go to bed, and you probably don’t admit strangers readily. These are sensible precautions women everywhere employ to keep themselves safe. Bitterroot does the same thing, only on a larger, even more secure scale, because our residents are higher risk.’

‘So you built yourself a prison and put the innocents inside,’ Magozzi commented, sounding much more judgmental than he’d ever intended.

Maggie smiled, but the smile had a real hard edge to it. ‘We may have prison-style security, Detective, but it’s not to keep the innocents inside, it’s to keep the monsters out, and we do that very well.’

And you couldn’t argue with that, Magozzi
thought. If Bitterroot really hadn’t had a single violent crime in sixty years, they were doing a hell of a job protecting people he and Gino and Sampson and Sheriff Rikker couldn’t. That kind of failure was a tough admission for any cop, and probably a big part of the reason he was finding it hard not to be defensive. It just all seemed so wrong – the law was supposed to provide refuge, not inspire mass exodus to a high-security facility that probably put San Quentin to shame.

Apparently his thoughts were printed in big type across his forehead, because Maggie Holland was looking straight at him with one of those little smiles people reserve for idiots who just don’t get it. ‘I think it’s time you saw the real Bitterroot,’ she said quietly, but Magozzi wasn’t going for the carrot.

‘We need to speak with Julie Albright. That’s why we’re here.’

‘Of course. But Julie’s daughter has a cold today, so we’ll go to her house instead of having her come here. It isn’t far, and you can see a bit of the village on the way.’ And then her demeanor shifted abruptly from all-business to all-roses, and she looked at each of them with one of those kindly, grandmotherly expressions Magozzi imagined the Big Bad Wolf had used on Little Red Riding Hood. Damn woman was a shape-shifter.

18

Magozzi, Gino, Sampson, and Iris followed Maggie Holland down a hallway and out a side door into an enclosed parking lot. The only vehicles parked there looked like something Walt Disney dreamed up.

‘What the hell are those things?’ Gino asked. ‘They look like golf carts on growth hormones.’

Maggie laughed politely. ‘You’re very close, Detective Rolseth. They’re electric, like golf carts, but with the large tires and high clearance of ATVs. Enclosed, of course, to allow for our weather, and large enough to accommodate all of us if you don’t mind close quarters for a few moments. They’re the only vehicles allowed in the village.’

She opened one with a key card and settled behind the wheel while the rest of them piled in behind her. There were three rows of two seats, one to a side. Gino and Magozzi took the ones at the rear and automatically looked for seat belts.

‘You won’t need them, Detectives,’ Maggie called back. ‘Top speed on these is fifteen miles an hour, and the streets curve a bit too much to ever go that fast.’

The heaters kicked in immediately – the one and only good thing about electric vehicles, Gino thought, his eyes busy as he watched Maggie open the lot gate with a remote, then head out onto a narrow strip of tar that curved sharply to the right and nowhere else.

‘This is the one and only way into the village,’ he heard Maggie explaining to Iris, who was riding next to her. He felt like he was on a tour bus with one of those annoying, chatty guides. ‘Through the corporate complex with all its security, then the locked parking lot and onto this road. And as you can see, the road is much too narrow to accommodate a standard-sized car.’

Gino was scowling out at the thick stands of mature trees crowding the road that looked more like a bike path. ‘The people who live here can’t drive their own cars to their own houses?’

‘That’s correct. There is no road that connects to this one. It begins and ends at the enclosed parking lot we just left.’

‘So you come back from town with a buttload of groceries and do what? Hoof it all the way through the building to get to the carts? Sounds pretty damn inconvenient, if you ask me.’

Maggie smiled at him in the rearview mirror, a little wickedly, he thought. ‘Not as inconvenient as having your nose broken.’

Gino shut up and looked out the window. They were moving into a residential area that looked like any small town in America about a hundred fifty years ago, before they widened the streets for traffic. It was an idyllic scene of uniform, well-kept homes that could have been transplanted right off the set of
Leave It to Beaver
, complete with tidy shrubs, charming lampposts, and an ensemble cast of smiling, red-faced children playing in the fresh snow. Without exception, every single one of them stopped what they were doing and waved at the cart as it passed.

Gino nudged Magozzi and said under his breath, ‘When was the last time some kid on the street waved to you for absolutely no reason?’

‘Five years ago. He waved, then chucked a rock at my back window.’

‘That’s what I thought. Does the word
Stepford
ring any bells?’

Magozzi sighed and watched the scenery roll by: an open, parklike area with a gazebo and playground equipment, and adjacent to that, a larger brick building that looked very much like a school.

‘That looks like a school,’ he heard Iris echoing his thoughts from the far front seat.

‘It is indeed. Multiple grades and fully accredited, for any children who might be at risk on the outside. But just as many attend public school.’

And the school and the houses and the park were just the tip of the iceberg, Magozzi realized as they drove farther into the village. There were businesses, too – a mom-and-pop grocery store, presumably without the pop, a beauty salon, a little coffee shop, even a health clinic. It was the perfect reproduction of a perfect little town; a tranquil snapshot of traditional Americana, at least at first glance. But if you looked a little closer, it was anything but traditional, because this town belonged exclusively to women. For some reason, that made Magozzi very sad.

Julie Albright greeted them at the front door of her little house, and every one of them except Maggie Holland had to concentrate furiously not to wince at the woman’s face, which looked like a jigsaw puzzle put together very badly. It wasn’t as though Magozzi hadn’t seen it a hundred times before, but it always set him back on his heels. She was such a tiny thing – a full foot shorter than he was, at least, with watchful, wary eyes, still haunted by the lingering remnants of terror. He wondered if that look ever went away.

Her eyes finally found his and stayed there. It was a funny thing about abused women, he thought. No matter how many female officers they took on a call, the victims ultimately always sought solace in the very gender that had treated them so badly.

‘Won’t you all please come into the living room and sit down?’

All five of them were crowded onto a small section of tiled floor by the entrance, their boots dripping melted snow.

‘Thank you, no,’ Magozzi smiled at her. ‘We won’t take that much of your time. We just needed to confirm personally that you’re aware of the situation, and prefer to stay where you are.’

Julie Albright’s smile might have been pretty once. It wasn’t anymore. ‘You’ve seen the security?’