Snow Blind (24 page)

Gino bent next to what was left of Kurt Weinbeck, checked the carotid, the huge hole in his chest, then looked up at Magozzi and shook his head.

‘This is Laura.’ Maggie Holland closed the door and gestured toward the woman in the rocking chair.

She was old, but unbelievably spry, and shot up from her seat, extending a bony hand with a lot of years on it. Magozzi was still standing with his knees bent and his weapon out front, and suddenly the posture felt a little foolish. He straightened reluctantly, shifted the nine to his left hand, and felt the old woman’s chilly flesh in his right. ‘Detective Magozzi. Minneapolis Police.’

She had new teeth in a face that looked like his not-permanent-press shirts when they came out of the dryer. Too new. Hollywood white. On a young woman, the smile would have been drop-dead. On her, it just looked weird. ‘I know who you are, Detective. Maggie told me all about you, and of
course I see you on the television every now and then.’ She folded her hands under a sagging bosom and looked around, seeming distressed for the first time. ‘Sorry about the mess.’

Magozzi felt like he was in the Twilight Zone. This was an old woman who’d just witnessed a killing. There was a man bleeding on the rug in her living room. She was supposed to be horrified, frightened, trembling, in shock.

‘But you see, he had the gun on Maggie, and I really didn’t have any choice. None at all.’ Her blue eyes moved back to him, and Magozzi noticed that they looked faded, like an old photograph about to disappear. ‘You look upset, Detective. I’ll bet you’ve had a heck of a time. All of you. Perhaps you should sit down by the fire, I’ll have Maggie bring you some tea …’

Maggie Holland tried to talk her out of it; tried to send her off to bed, in fact, which seemed a sensible suggestion for an old woman who’d had such a night; but Laura would have none of it. Up until this point, she seemed remarkably sharp and self-possessed – almost abnormally so, considering the circumstances – but now Magozzi saw the first sign of petulance in her silent, head-shaking refusal. He thought first about shock, then dismissed it. None of the signs were there. More than likely, she’d started to make that slow slide backward into
childish behavior that happens to many elderly when the mind starts to falter.

‘I will not be sent to bed like a child!’ she shouted suddenly, startling them all. ‘And I will serve these officers tea, and I will answer their questions!’ The outburst had been fast and unexpected; so was the sweet smile she instantly turned on Iris Rikker, as if there had been no outburst at all. ‘You do have questions for me, don’t you, Sheriff Rikker? I do love company.’

Creepy
, Magozzi thought.
Around the bend, or at least moving toward it in a big hurry
.

Iris smiled right back at her, which Magozzi racked up as a point in her favor. Quick on the uptake, good instincts. ‘It might be nice to chat a bit, if you’re not too tired.’

Laura reached over to pat Iris’s arm. ‘Not at all, child.’

‘She’s very old,’ Maggie Holland whispered to Gino when he followed her into the kitchen. She busied herself with boiling water and porcelain cups on a tray. They rattled when she set them down because her hands were trembling. ‘And her memory is going. She gets confused. Remembers things the way she wished they had happened, instead of the way they actually did.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

Gino pursed his lips and nodded. ‘Pretty quick on the trigger for a confused old lady.’

Maggie shot him a cold glare. ‘It wasn’t the first time I had a gun pressed to my head, Detective, and I think I’m pretty much of an expert on whether the man holding that gun is prepared to use it. She probably saved my life.’

Gino had the decency to feel bad, which didn’t mean he had the motivation to show it. Something wasn’t right, and it was eating at a part of his brain like a termite.

‘She tells some tall tales sometimes, but she’s a dear woman. Founded Bitterroot with her sister, over half a century ago. This was their land; this is her town.’

‘Gotcha. So she shot Weinbeck?’

Maggie Holland’s lips were pressed tightly together, bleeding all the color out. ‘She thought he was going to kill me. And he would have. He was crazed when he broke in. Crazed.’

‘Uh-huh. You want me to carry that in?’

‘Please.’ She hurried to follow him, and moved immediately to stand behind Laura’s chair. Her posture was rigid, protective, almost like that of a bodyguard, which Gino thought was pretty strange, considering the old lady had just saved
her
life.

Iris and Magozzi were sitting on a sofa opposite
the rocker, both with notebooks propped on their knees, when Gino carried in the tray like a college waiter. He set it down on the coffee table between them and listened.

‘So he broke in, grabbed Maggie, pointed a gun at her head, and asked where he could find Julie, is that about right?’

Laura was nodding emphatically. ‘Exactly right. So I did my little-old-lady act, told him I’d get a map, and toddled out to the kitchen.’ She looked at Iris and smiled. ‘I don’t usually toddle, you know. I do stretching exercises every morning to keep myself limber. That was just an act.’

Iris smiled back. ‘That was very clever.’

‘I thought so. And I do have a map of the village in the kitchen drawer. But that’s also where I keep the gun.’

‘Ah.’ Iris nodded. ‘The .357 on the table over there.’

Gino sat down in an armchair and actually started pouring tea. Christ, this was weird.

‘Yes, indeed. Maggie said I couldn’t put it back in the drawer, although that’s where it belongs. She said I had to put it down and leave it so you people could check it. For what, I just don’t know.’

‘It’s just procedure, Miss Laura.’

Funny how she knew to call her that, Gino thought.

‘So you came back into the living room, what? Holding the gun under the map?’

Laura beamed at her. ‘Now, you’re the clever one, because that’s exactly what I did. Toddled back in, pretending to study the map, then when he reached for it, I shot him.’ She looked over at Kurt Weinbeck’s body and shook her head. ‘I just hate doing that.’

Magozzi felt a chill run up his spine. ‘You hate to shoot people?’ he asked conversationally.

‘Well, of course I do, Detective. Don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Then you understand. It’s dreadfully distasteful, but … we do what we have to do. We take care of our own. Not that I’ve shot that many, of course. Not personally.’

Not that many? Not personally? Whoa
.

He glanced at Maggie Holland, whose features suddenly looked paralyzed. When she caught him looking, she rolled her eyes and actually tapped a forefinger on the side of her head.

Iris was still bent over her little notebook, continuing to write, as if Laura hadn’t said anything unusual. Magozzi had to bite his tongue to keep from firing questions. Batty or not, you couldn’t just let a statement like that hang there without a token follow-up, at least.

Iris stopped writing and looked up a second later,
her expression blandly pleasant. ‘How many, do you think?’ she asked Laura.

Way to go, Iris Rikker
.

The old woman blinked, then her eyes wandered to follow her brain. ‘Oh, my. All together?’

‘Yes, if you please.’

‘Goodness. I guess … I’m not quite sure …’ She was blinking faster now, and her eyes were starting to water. ‘Well … I guess we could look in the lake. Is it important?’

Maggie Holland closed her eyes.

‘Not really,’ Iris said. ‘Is that Lake Kittering?’

‘That’s the one. You live on Lake Kittering, don’t you, dear?’

Iris stopped writing, but she kept looking down at her notebook. ‘Close to it. I didn’t realize you knew that.’

Laura chuckled a little. ‘Of course I know that. We all do. You bought Emily’s place.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, just so you know, Edgar isn’t in the lake.’

Iris started writing again, but the script was a little shaky. ‘He isn’t?’

‘No. We buried him. Of course we were much younger, then. Ruth – she was my sister, did I tell you that? – at any rate, she was even younger than I was, and Emily was just a little swell in her tummy …’ Her eyes wandered and seemed to lose
focus until her gaze found Maggie, standing right next to her. ‘Oh, Maggie. Hello, dear.’

Gino and Magozzi exchanged a knowing glance. This sure as hell wasn’t going to go much further. The old woman was losing it, if she ever had it in the first place.

‘Are Alice and Bill coming?’

Magozzi’s mind twitched a little at the names, but he let it go when Maggie answered her.

‘They’re on their way. I called them before the officers came in, remember?’

‘Oh. Should I go to the bathroom first?’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Oh, yes, very much.’

It took her a while to get out of the rocker this time, as if the muddle in her mind could no longer manage to control the still-limber body.

The moment they heard the bathroom door close behind her, Iris looked at Maggie Holland. ‘Who was Edgar, Maggie? The one they buried?’

Maggie looked disgusted. ‘Don’t be silly. Nobody buried anybody.’

‘And I don’t suppose there are any bodies in the lake, either?’

‘Of course not.’

For some reason, Magozzi believed her.

‘Quickly, before she comes back,’ Iris said, and Maggie sighed.

‘Edgar was Laura’s husband. That’s according to Laura’s grand-niece – she’s the woman on her way here now, and certainly in a position to know since Laura and her sister raised her right here at Bitterroot. Apparently he was an abusive, hateful man. He kept both sisters virtual prisoners on the original farm, which happened to include your land in those days, Sheriff. He beat them, treated them both like chattel, impregnated Laura’s sister, and then simply disappeared. God knows where he went.’

Just like Lars
, Iris was thinking, but she didn’t say anything.

‘There was no outside help for mistreated women in those days. Not that there’s all that much these days,’ she added bitterly, touching the scar on her neck. ‘Laura and Ruth suffered under that reality, and after Edgar left, they were determined to create a sanctuary where things like that never happened to women. That was the beginning of Bitterroot.’

‘So they didn’t kill anybody,’ Gino said, and Maggie glared at him.

‘You don’t understand, Detective. You can’t possibly. You suffer under abuse long enough, you start to fantasize about killing your abuser. You don’t act on it, of course, because that’s the nature of your own psychology. You love your abuser, or at least convince yourself you do. Except in a very
few cases, all of which make the national news, killing him would be utterly impossible.’

Gino nodded reluctantly at a truth he’d seen a thousand times.

‘But you dream about it, especially afterward, and maybe when you get very old and the mind and the memory dim, the dreams become reality, and reality becomes the dream. That’s the place where Laura is living now. I did warn you that she wasn’t quite –’ She stopped talking abruptly when Laura came back into the room, looking bewildered to find it full of strangers.

‘We have company?’ she asked in a small, timid voice. ‘At this hour?’

Gino cleared his throat. ‘We just stopped in to use your phone, ma’am, if that’s all right.’

‘Oh. Well, Maggie, I think I’d like to go to bed now.’ She left the room without once looking at the body of the man she’d killed, lying on the rug.

Iris touched Magozzi’s shoulder as he got up to leave. ‘I have to stay until the others come.’

‘You have some kind of crime unit?’

Iris shrugged. ‘Such as it is. I radioed Lieutenant Sampson when I came in. He’ll take care of it.’ She gestured vaguely toward Kurt Weinbeck’s body. ‘This seemed pretty cut and dried. I don’t think we’ll need the BCA.’

‘Probably not.’

‘But I’d like to ask your advice on something else. Will you wait?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘No problem. We’ll be in the car.’

29

Gino was shaking his head, clucking his tongue, as they walked back to the car. ‘Man, was that goddamned weird or what? Walking into that house, listening to the old lady talk about shooting people, pouring tea while Kurt Weinbeck is getting stiff on the living room floor … Jesus. I felt like I just walked through the looking glass or fell down the rabbit hole or whatever the hell it was.’

‘It was pretty weird.’

‘Pretty weird? Are you kidding me? I feel like I just dropped acid or something.’

Magozzi smiled as they moved through the rapidly accumulating snow. ‘Nobody drops acid anymore, Gino.’

‘Whatever. I hope Rikker hurries it up. I just want to get the hell out of here and never come back. This place is freaking me out.’

‘So you think there’s any truth to it?’

‘What?’

‘The “bodies in the lake” business.’

‘Hell, I don’t know. The old gal showed her chops pretty good tonight. I can see her popping
her husband way back when, especially after he knocked up her own sister, but I sure as hell can’t see her as a frequent flyer. Either way, it’s not our problem. We’ve got our own case to worry about, and this mess really burned us for time.’

A few of the Dundas County cars were leaving the parking lot by the time they made it back, but most of them were still in place. The deputies not working the scene clustered around idling squads, rehashing, embellishing, doing what cops did while they waited for the last of the adrenaline to burn away. An ambulance was pulling in, and one of the officers broke away from a group to direct the driver.

When they got to their own SUV, Gino flipped open his cell. ‘I’m going to call McLaren and fill him in. Maybe he has some news. At least we can make Tinker’s day, telling him a ninety-year-old lady plugged Weinbeck with the same caliber he used to kill Steve Doyle.’

There was definitely poetic justice in that, Magozzi thought sadly; it was just a damn shame Doyle wasn’t around to appreciate it. He climbed into the car, started the engine, and turned the heater on full blast. Gino opted for staying outside and pacing figure eights in the fresh snow while he talked to McLaren. Gino hated the cold, but he hated making calls sitting down even more.