Snow Blind (30 page)

Gino fiddled with the heater controls for a minute, then flopped back in his seat. ‘You know, the Chief kinda pissed me off today with that little lecture about the whole search-warrant deal. I was just about ready to fly off the handle and say something stupid, but then he threw me with that
crack about Hitler’s bunker. Did you catch that? He actually sounded like a cop.’

‘He is a cop.’

‘You know what I mean. An actual human-type cop. Anyhow, I’m not so sure he’s thinking this through. What we got is a hell of a lot more than an old lady going on about offing her husband – that and the bones at Rikker’s make you think it could be a family thing, you know? All the women in one family popping off their men over the generations. It was the other thing that really creeped me out, because if there are bodies in that lake, Laura was talking about killing other people’s husbands, and that ain’t self-defense any way you look at it. Plus, if we tie that video to Bitterroot, you’re not looking at one family anymore, you’re looking at a whole damn town that might be justifying murder, and that scares the crap out of me. I don’t want it to be an ex-cop with a clean service record; I don’t want it to be a bunch of women who think they’re saving their own lives, but, man, the stuff keeps piling up, just like this snow. It’s cumulative, Leo, and that ought to be worth something.’

‘The Chief can’t support a warrant without cause.’

Gino grunted. ‘Maybe not, but he could have supported our reasons for wanting one. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. To tell you the truth, I don’t
hold out a lot of hope for the monogram thing.’

‘I don’t, either, but we’ll have Grace pull the roster for us anyhow. What I really wanted was for her to play around with that disk. BCA might be a top lab, but I’ll still put my money on Monkeewrench magic.’

They didn’t hear Charlie’s customary welcoming woof before Grace opened the door, and Gino’s face showed his disappointment. ‘Hey, Grace, long time no see. Where’s my dog?’

‘He’s still at Harley’s. I’m on my way back there as soon as we finish here. Hi, Magozzi.’

She was wearing her usual black T-shirt and jeans instead of plastic wrap, and she wasn’t holding a martini. Magozzi smiled at her anyway. ‘Thanks for doing this.’

‘No problem. Come on in the kitchen and get a cup of coffee before we get started.’

Magozzi and Gino sat at the table while she stood at the counter and filled three mugs. ‘You said you needed a couple things. I’ve got the photo-enhancement program up and running. What else?’

Magozzi said, ‘The roster from Bitterroot. The names of all the current residents.’

She turned around and looked at him. ‘You think somebody who lives at Bitterroot killed your two cops in the park? Just because Bitterroot was the subject line on that chat thread?’

‘There’s a little more to it than that. Turns out one of the cops was abusing his wife, and it was getting worse. She has family at Bitterroot, hell, her great-grandmother and aunt founded the place, and this may not be the first time those people have killed to save a woman.’

Grace sat down between them and looked from one to the other. ‘You said Bitterroot was basically one big safe house for abused women, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And all the women who live there are abuse victims.’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Then it’s impossible. Both of you know the psychology of abuse victims. Those women don’t fight back. They’re incapable of it.’

‘Almost all of them are,’ Gino put in. ‘But once in a blue moon it happens, especially when they’re trying to protect someone else, like family, like Tommy Deaton’s wife. She was one of their own, hell, her mother grew up there, and she wouldn’t take their help. We think they might have taken the proactive route.’

Grace shook her head. ‘That sounds like a really big leap to me, Gino.’

‘There’s a lot more backstory, Grace,’ Magozzi said. ‘Reasons to think maybe some of the women at Bitterroot have killed other men in the past to
protect themselves. We’re not sure about that, but it’s possible. Right now we need to focus on the two murders we
know
happened, and for that, we need the roster.’

‘I don’t have one. I don’t even know if such a thing exists.’

‘Of course it exists, Grace. It’s a corporation, and it has to keep corporate records. You’ve been in and out of their computer system installing your software, so you know how to get it.’

‘You want me to break into a client’s confidential records?’

‘Yes.’

That surprised her. It wasn’t the first time Magozzi had wanted information from some illegal site, but he never said it out loud. ‘Why do you want it?’

‘We’re looking for murderers. They might be on that list. Is that reason enough?’

She didn’t hesitate long before getting up from the table and leading the way back to her office, but Magozzi could tell that the hunt had changed for her, just as it had changed for all of them when they realized they weren’t looking for a crazed psychopath; they were looking for desperate women trying to save their own lives and the lives of people they loved. You had to be careful not to think about that too much, not to let yourself slip into that gray area
where sympathy could step all over the simple fact that in the end, murder was murder, no matter who did it or why.

It only took a few minutes for Grace to bring up the roster on the screen. She rolled her chair sideways to give them a clear view. ‘There it is. What are you looking for?’

Magozzi handed her the disk. ‘This is a home video from the park the night of the murder. There are a couple frames on here that show four women building a snowman around one of our dead cops at Theodore Wirth. BCA enhanced them enough to get some initials off what looks like a monogram, and we want to match them against the roster. In the meantime, we want you to try getting some more detail out of these shots that might help with a specific ID.’

Grace closed her eyes briefly. ‘Four women?’

‘That’s right.’

She didn’t say anything after that; just took the disk and slotted it into a drive and fiddled with the image that came up on an adjacent monitor until it was clear. ‘That’s about as good as it’s going to get. I see W, T, C …’ She stopped speaking.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Gino said. ‘And then a zero. We know that. We were thinking it might be a date, only they couldn’t clarify the rest of it. So how do you make this thing page down?’
He pointed at the monitor showing the roster.

Grace reached over mindlessly and pushed the scroll button. Gino and Magozzi hunkered close to the screen, watching the names go by until the list finally ended on somebody called Muriel Zacher.

‘Nothing, damnit,’ Gino muttered, straightening up and pressing his hands to the small of his back. ‘Back to the drawing board.’

‘It was a long shot,’ Magozzi said. ‘But we had to try. What do you think of the photos, Grace? Any chance you can show up the BCA on enhancements? Maybe get some bone structure from under those masks for your facial-recognition program?’

Grace nodded without taking her eyes off the video frame on the second monitor. ‘I can try. Give me fifteen minutes alone with it.’

37

‘Holy shit.’ Gino was peering out Grace’s living room window, looking up at the sky like Chicken Little. ‘It’s the end of the world. It stopped snowing. Has it been fifteen minutes yet?’

Magozzi was flopped on the couch, arm over his eyes to block the daylight. ‘Jeez, Gino, relax, give her some time. That program is slow.’

‘Relax, he says. Are you kidding me? This friggin’ case is driving me insane. We’ve come at it in four ways and we’re still empty-handed. We went through Weinbeck, the Snowman, the Warners, and Bitterroot, and we can’t prove shit.’

‘That about sums it up.’

‘So where do we go from here?’

‘I don’t know.’

Back in her office down the hall, Grace was going through the motions with her own advanced photo-enhancement program. The computer assessed probabilities, adding pixels of color in the most likely configurations, but there was no hope of getting enough off the poor-quality shots to justify using the facial-recognition software. All it had been
able to accomplish was clarifying the rest of the monogram on the close-up of the scarf, but that was all she needed.W-T-C-0-0-0.

Cops were so single-minded sometimes, she thought. They got the idea of numbers into their heads and couldn’t let go. It never occurred to them that the zero wasn’t really a zero; that maybe it was the letter
O,
imperfectly stitched by the shaky hands of a very old woman. She pushed her chair away from the counter and closed her eyes, remembering the last day she’d worked at the Bitterroot offices last fall.

It’s lovely, Maggie. Thank you
.

Just a little something to remember us by. I told Laura you admired mine on your first visit, and she insisted on making you one
.

Laura?

Yes. She’s one of the original founders of Bitterroot. She’s very old now, and her needlepoint isn’t what it used to be, but she’s always so flattered when someone appreciates it
.

What does this stand for?

It stands for what we stand for. Bitterroot, and all the places like it. W-T-C-O-O-O. We Take Care of Our Own. Laura makes them for all our girls
.

At the time it had seemed like such a wonderfully human motto in a world where corporations were usually so impersonal, and it wasn’t such an unusual phrase. People said it all the time about their
families, their communities, their countries, so it hadn’t rung any bells when she’d read it on that chat room thread. Now the motto on the scarf seemed a lot more sinister.

Magozzi and Gino went to join her when they heard Grace leave her little office and go into the kitchen.

‘Did you get something?’ Gino asked hopefully.

She turned to face them, and Magozzi thought her eyes were empty, as if she’d used up everything behind them. ‘Do you have any idea of how many women have been murdered by their partners in this country since you walked through my front door?’ she asked quietly.

Magozzi’s eyes held hers. ‘Tell me how many minutes it’s been and I’ll tell you how many women. We know the stats, Grace. It’s our job to know them. It’s also our job to change them. Ours, and every other cop’s. Nobody else’s.’

Grace thought about that for a moment, then nodded. ‘You said an old woman killed someone at Bitterroot this morning.’

Gino said, ‘That’s right, but it was self-defense, plain and simple. Well, not exactly self-defense. The guy had a gun on another woman.’

‘And I can make sense of that,’ Grace said. ‘It’s one thing to kill someone who breaks into your
house with murder in mind, like the old woman did this morning. But seeking them out to kill them in advance, like Tommy Deaton? It’s almost like …’

‘Hunting,’ Magozzi said, and he felt his heart speed up. She’d found something, something that connected the snowmen in the park to Bitterroot. ‘But for what’s it worth, if people from Bitterroot were involved, they probably thought it was the only thing they could do to save Mary Deaton’s life. Even Gino and I were having problems with that one. Half of you knows it’s murder, the other half gets it.’

‘Exactly. But then you have to start multiplying.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How many abused women are at Bitterroot?’

‘Four hundred,’ Gino remembered.

‘Okay. And for every one of them there’s probably a man out there who might kill them one day. If you start making excuses for Deaton’s murder, you have to make the same excuses for three hundred ninety-nine others.’

Gino stared at her. He’d had his head wrapped so tight around what he would do in Bill Warner’s place that he’d almost lost sight of the job itself, and why he did it.

Grace pushed herself away from the counter and went to a drawer, pulled out the soft, folded scarf and laid it on the table between them.

Gino pulled it closer, fingered the imperfect embroidery, then sucked in an audible breath.

Oddly, Grace almost smiled at him. ‘It wasn’t me in that video, Gino. It wasn’t the same scarf. Just one like it.’

He exhaled slowly. ‘I knew that,’ he grumped. ‘Jeez, Grace.’

‘They gave it to me the last day I worked there. Apparently the old woman makes them for all the women out there, and those aren’t zeroes, those are
O
s. The inscription stands for the Bitterroot motto. “We Take Care of Our Own.” We found that phrase in the chat-room thread I read to you, remember? I just didn’t make the connection.’

Magozzi and Gino just stood there for a minute, looking at each other. Normally the big break in a tough case was cause for jubilation. That didn’t happen this time.

Gino shoved his hands in his pockets angrily. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, I was half-afraid of this. I mean, a town without men creeped me out at first, but the thing is, that place worked, and you can’t tell me all the women up there are in on this. So what you’ve got is a few bad apples ruining a really good thing for a bunch of scared women who have no other safe place to go. We’re going to get a warrant on Bitterroot out of this, and then there’s going to be an investigation, and the scandal will shut that place
down forever, whether or not we find the evidence to nail the real killers.’

‘I hate this,’ Grace whispered, and Magozzi wondered if abuse was part of her past, which he still knew nothing about after a year of loving the woman. ‘But one of those women passed out free murder advice in that chat room that led to the Pittsburgh killing.’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘We think that was Bill Warner, Mary Deaton’s father. He may not have been at the scene, but he sure as hell was in on the planning, and now he’s spreading his know-how.’

‘Yeah,’ Gino said. ‘Probably to some other poor schmuck of a father who lies awake at nights waiting for the call that his own daughter’s dead … Christ, I don’t know who to hate and who to feel sorry for. This case turns me in circles one more time, I’m going to look like a corkscrew. I’m going to go warm up the car.’ He stomped down the hall, grabbed his coat, and slammed the door on his way out.