Snow Blind (23 page)

‘Where do you want us?’ he asked her, treating her like any other cop in command. Magozzi wondered if she knew what a compliment that was.

‘The fence was cut around the back of the property. I’ve got men tracking from that end, but they lost the trail about an acre in. Snowshoe tracks fill in fast, so now they’re just coursing. I put a contingent around Julie Albright’s place, the rest of us are doing house-to-house checks as fast as we can, but it’s a lot of houses.’

‘Point us in the right direction,’ Magozzi said.

‘I was on my way back anyway.’

She led them around the huge corporate building instead of through it. There was no road, but a path
had already been beaten through the snow by the deputies who had come before them. Iris was moving fast.

‘He’s on snowshoes,’ she said as they hurried. ‘Easy to track, but we don’t know what kind of a head start he had. The ice froze the cameras so they can’t move and put the motion detectors out of business, so the communication center is blind. He could be anywhere.’

‘How tight is the cover on Julie Albright?’

‘Four outside, two in. We have Julie and her daughter in an interior room.’

Just saying Julie Albright’s name aloud hit Iris hard, and stopped the straight line of her thoughts, if not her feet. What the hell was she doing, and when had she become so arrogant? She’d run against a sitting sheriff who at least knew how to do the job, damnit, and her reasons hadn’t been one bit noble. And now it had all boiled down to this: a ruined woman and a beautiful child huddled in a house not too far from here, and whether or not they lived through this night depended on a pretend sheriff doing everything absolutely right.

She turned her head to look at Magozzi and Gino. ‘What else?’ she asked in a voice that sounded like a plea. ‘What else needs to be done? What did I forget? Sampson had to run to check on his sister …’

She looked scared to death, totally unlike the assured woman he’d seen directing deputies like a pro, and now Magozzi got it. Sampson had been her crutch all day, her teacher, probably, but he hadn’t been around for the big one. She’d done this on her own, and now she wasn’t sure it was enough. It would take years on the job before she realized you always felt like you hadn’t done enough.

‘It sounds good,’ he said, because that was the bare-bones truth, and Magozzi wasn’t big on head-patting.

‘Just like downtown,’ Gino added. ‘As long as you’ve got one of the outside guys at Julie’s pulled back for an overview, cause sometimes guys working a building get so focused they forget to look around …’

She didn’t even wait for him to finish; just started talking into a shoulder unit she had tucked under her jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Gino when she’d finished. ‘I didn’t know to do that.’

Gino shrugged. ‘You will next time.’

In the daylight, the village had looked idyllic; at night, it looked like a beautiful Christmas card gone wrong. A lot of the little houses still sported holiday lights, their colors softened and muted by the snow, and every tree branch glistened with a brand-new coating of ice. But there were armed men and women patrolling the narrow street now,
approaching the cheery front doors like malevolent trick-or-treaters, and occasionally a fearful, cautious face peered from a lighted window.

‘You need to get those people away from the windows,’ Magozzi said, and Iris nodded.

‘We just started on this block. I had them cover the ones that backed up to open land first, the ones that were in a direct line from where the fence was cut.’

‘Let’s cover it, then.’

The three of them split up, moving fast, and after ten minutes and four houses, Magozzi thought that if he never saw that haunted look in a woman’s eyes again, it would be too soon. God. Every single face behind every single door looked the same.

He and Gino finished their last houses on the block at the same time, and met up in the middle of the narrow street. They saw Sheriff Rikker standing under a streetlight just ahead, making marks on a damp, wrinkled piece of paper, snow accumulating on her head and shoulders.

‘She stands still much longer in this, we’re gonna have to dig her out,’ Gino observed as they approached.

It was quiet on the block now, with all the houses searched. A few officers remained behind, assigned to patrol, but the snow deadened the sound of their movements. They could hear the shushing noise of
their own boots pushing through the white stuff, even the scratch of Iris’s pen on the paper; but that was all.

‘This block next,’ Iris stabbed at a map of the village layout, then started leading the way.

They barely had a chance to move before they heard the shot. It was off to their left, down a continuation of the narrow street that cut into open land.

The sound had been muffled, Magozzi thought as all three of them started running; but you could tell it had started out big; maybe as big as the sound of the gun Kurt Weinbeck had used to blow a hole in Steve Doyle’s chest.

27

The mansion was silent except for the regular clicking of Grace’s keyboard. Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner were grabbing catnaps after working most of the night. She was exhausted herself, and sometimes, while she waited for a new line of programming to run, she’d feel her eyes start to flutter closed. But then she’d remind herself of what Magozzi had said about a killer being at the end of that chat room thread, and that woke her right up. There were three dead men in snowmen already, but maybe they could make sure there wouldn’t be a fourth.

The firewalls were getting harder and harder to break through. They’d found a second, then a third, and now Grace was beginning to wonder how many more there were, and how much time they had.

She pushed herself away from the desk and glared at the monitor. ‘I can’t keep doing this,’ she said aloud, and then suddenly realized how true that was; that of course she couldn’t keep doing this – and she didn’t have to. It was like when she used to keep Charlie’s big bag of food underneath the
overhanging shelf in the pantry, just because that’s where she’d always kept it. Every morning she’d bend to retrieve it, and a lot of mornings she’d stand too quickly, forgetting the overhanging shelf, and bang her head. How many times had she bumped her head before it occurred to her to move the dog food? It didn’t matter how intelligent you were; sometimes routine and procedure blinded you to the obvious solution.

She heard Harley’s footfalls coming up the stairs just when she was about to go down and wake him. An unappetizing, vegetal miasma preceded him into the room, and Grace recognized the odor of his latest obsession – some hideous herbal tea he brewed secretly every morning and tried to push on all of them. God knew what was in it, but Grace hoped it was legal.

‘I’m not drinking that tea, Harley,’ she said without turning around.

‘You need more green stuff in your diet.’

‘Not in liquid form, I don’t.’

Harley set a mug of the stuff on her desk anyway. ‘I had on the tube while I was brewing this. They’ve got another snowman.’

Grace closed her eyes. They were already too late.

‘Don’t look like that, Grace. It wasn’t here. It was in Pittsburgh. So maybe our killer isn’t even in the state anymore. Maybe he’s on the move. Or maybe
it’s a copycat. They don’t know much yet. Either way, we’ve got to get into that chat room.’

‘I was just about to come downstairs. I have something new to try, but I need you and Roadrunner.’

‘And Annie.’

‘Actually, we can let her sleep. You and Roadrunner can handle it.’

‘Are you shitting me? If I don’t wake her up and we crack into this thing, she’ll have my balls on a skewer. Be right back.’

Five minutes later Roadrunner stumbled in behind Harley, screwing his fists into his eyes like a kid trying to wake up. He found his way to the coffee machines, pushed the button on the one that held his Jamaican Blue, then stood there, watching it drip. It didn’t pay to talk to Roadrunner until he was well into his first cup. He wouldn’t hear anyway.

He was wearing a new Lycra suit this morning – lilac in color – and once Grace looked at him, she had a hard time pulling her eyes away. She’d never seen him in pastels before. He looked like a long, tall Easter egg.

Annie hadn’t even bothered to get dressed – she was wearing her silk kimono robe and a pair of bedroom slippers with marabou puffs. ‘Thanks a lot, Grace,’ she grumbled as she shuffled over.

Grace smiled. ‘I take it Harley broke down your bedroom door.’

‘Oh, hell, that would have been a kindness. Damn bastard sneaked in. Guess what it’s like to wake up and see that big hulking brute standing over your bed, watching you sleep.’

Harley sighed. ‘It was a Sleeping Beauty moment. I think my heart stopped.’

‘Pig.’ Annie flounced down at her computer in a flutter of shedding marabou.

‘Hey, Gracie thinks we’re going to bust this thing wide open. She wanted to let you sleep, but I’d thought you’d want to be here.’

‘Thank you, Harley. That was very thoughtful. But you’re still a pig.’ She turned to Grace. ‘So there’s a new snowman in Pittsburgh. Something real bad is going on out there, Grace. What’s your new plan?’

‘We’ve been going at this thing all backward. I thought we’d stop trying to break down the steel door and go to an open window.’

‘Oh, honey, do not talk in metaphors. The sun isn’t up yet.’

Grace swiveled her chair to look at them. ‘We’ve been trying to crack into a chat room with the best security we’ve ever seen. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s taking too long. I thought we could try piggybacking Harley’s and Roadrunner’s virus on
the specific chat threads that caught our attention in the first place, let the virus lead us into the thread, if not the site itself.’

‘Goddamn,’ Harley murmured, then there was the sound of his knuckles cracking as he flexed his fingers over the keyboard. ‘This is going to work.’

Annie said, ‘Then why didn’t
you
think of it, genius? It’s your stupid virus.’

‘Because, Sleeping Beauty, I am a bull of a man. Charging right in, breaking things down, that’s what I do. This subtle stuff is for girls.’

‘Smart girls.’

‘I’ll give you that.’ He shoved the disk containing the virus program into his drive.

‘Way to go, Grace,’ Roadrunner gave her a sleepy smile as he set an extra mug of his precious Jamaican Blue on her desk. ‘That’s pretty far outside the box for someone who said we weren’t allowed to use that virus for anything except shutting down kiddy porn sites.’

Grace nodded. ‘Viruses bad,’ she reiterated their mantra, then grinned at him. ‘Except when they do good.’

‘It’s pretty good at shutting down the porn sites.’

‘And it was pretty good saving a thousand lives back in Wisconsin last summer.’

Roadrunner’s smile broadened at the memory. ‘You like my new suit?’

‘I love your new suit.’

‘Roadrunner, get your skinny ass over here. I can’t get the damn thing to launch.’

It took exactly ten minutes for Roadrunner to pull up the entire chat thread on his monitor. ‘I think I’ve got it.’

The others were behind his chair in an instant, reading over his shoulder in absolute silence.

Harley finally straightened. ‘Oh, man. This is all bad.’

‘And sad,’ Annie added.

Grace’s eyes had been busy while the text had been scrolling by, but when it stopped, she glanced up at the top of the monitor and frowned. ‘Look at the subject line of this thread,’ she pointed.

Harley squinted at it. ‘Bitterroot. Wow, that’s the second time in two days that name’s come up. How weird is that, and what the hell does it mean?’

28

It was an old house – one of those massive boxy numbers they built in farm country when the state was new, and couples prayed for many sons to help work the land. Probably the original farmstead, Magozzi thought, but someone had taken a lot of care with it. The paint was fresh, the big front porch was new, and a modern air-conditioning unit was squatting between some bushes on one side. Funny, the things you noticed when you didn’t even think you were looking.

They hadn’t run far from the clustered houses of the village – maybe a hundred yards – but they all were breathing hard, and Magozzi felt the burn in his thighs from lifting his legs over the snow. Now they were crouched behind the last cluster of trees near the house, weapons drawn, senses screaming, catching their breath before they moved in.

Suddenly the front door opened wide, to show a woman-shape with light behind it. Magozzi squinted through the driving snow, but couldn’t see clearly enough to be sure there was no one behind her.

‘Officers?’ the woman called out, and he recognized Maggie Holland’s voice. ‘Officers, are you out there? It’s Maggie Holland, and it’s all right for you to come in now.’

Iris, Magozzi, and Gino exchanged wary glances, then Gino stabbed a forefinger at Iris’s chest.

Iris nodded, then called back. ‘Ms Holland, it’s Sheriff Rikker. Are you alone in there?’

‘Not exactly. This is Laura’s house. She’s here … and Julie Albright’s husband, but he’s dead.’

Gino and Magozzi looked at each other, then started to move toward the house, bent over in a crouching run, dodging between the scant cover of single tree trunks, just as if Kurt Weinbeck were alive and well and waiting behind the door with a gun on Maggie Holland. You never knew.

Iris mimicked their movements, cursing her short legs because she couldn’t move as fast through the snow. She fell twice, took a closer look at Maggie Holland smiling, waiting patiently in the doorway, then said the hell with it, stood up straight, and walked toward the porch.

‘Goddamnit, Rikker, get down!’ Gino whispered at her, but she was already at the porch and not dead yet. She poked her head in the doorway, then turned back and motioned them in.

It was like walking into a Freddy Krueger Disneyland. A fire crackled in the fireplace, cozy armchairs
and old photos, even a little old white-haired lady sitting in a rocking chair with knitting in her lap, smiling in greeting, as if they’d dropped in for some holiday cheer. The only thing that didn’t quite fit was the body bleeding all over a faded area rug with roses on it. Sheriff Iris Rikker stood over it, looking like a bewildered child who’d walked into the wrong house by mistake.