Snow Blind (6 page)

When Weinbeck showed up a few minutes later, Doyle turned down the TV, took his place at his desk, and did a quick visual inventory of his newest client. Parolees generally came in three basic models: fat and mean, muscular and mean, or skinny and mean. This one fell into the latter category, with big, bobbling eyes that raced around the room, and a sinuous, slinky body that moved and twitched like a meerkat on crack.

‘You’re thirteen minutes late, Mr Weinbeck. You realize I could have called in a warrant on you.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.’

‘Make sure it doesn’t. For future reference, show up early, and if you can’t show up early, show up on time at the latest. That’s one of the rules, and if you follow the rules, we’ll get along just fine.’

‘Yes, sir, I know.’

Doyle made a show of paging through his file. ‘I see that this is your third time on parole. Do you think we can make this your last?’

Weinbeck nodded enthusiastically and launched into his predictable spiel of bullshit about how he was genuinely remorseful, how he’d finally learned his lesson, how grateful he was for another chance, and how he would make it work this time around, blah, blah, blah. Doyle nodded at the appropriate moments, but his eyes kept drifting back to the TV.

‘Something going on?’ Weinbeck asked, following Doyle’s gaze.

‘Nothing that concerns you.’ He slid some paperwork across the desk. ‘This is your bible. It lays out the rules and regs, procedures, where you’ll be staying, where you’ll be working …’

‘… when I can eat, sleep, take a piss … I know the drill.’

‘I’m sure you do, but look it over anyhow. If you have any questions, now’s the time to ask.’

‘When can I talk to my wife?’

Doyle stared at him. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘She’s my wife.’

‘She divorced you two years ago. You got the papers. You get within a hundred yards of her, you’ll be back inside before you can take a breath.’

Weinbeck tried for a friendly smile. ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that? Nobody’ll tell me where she is. Besides, I just want to talk to her. A phone call is all I’m asking. They told me you’d have the number.’

‘It’s not going to happen, Weinbeck, and you know it’s not going to happen. You’ve been through this before. You want to just throw in the towel now and head straight back to Stillwater, save us all some trouble?’

Kurt Weinbeck’s manner changed instantly, and so did his countenance, softening into a practiced
expression of deference and obedience. ‘No, sir. I certainly don’t. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I just worry about her. I’d like to know that she’s doing okay, that’s all.’

Doyle studied the man’s face for a long moment. Man, he hated these guys, hated the way they thought they could play you with a smile and a pretense of acquiescence, as if you were some kind of idiot. They were all self-serving, deceptive bastards. He really believed that. And yet somewhere beneath his hard-won shell of cynicism, a stupid, irritating flicker of idealism still lingered. He couldn’t get rid of it, which was probably why he was still in this job after all the years of disappointment. His head knew better, but his heart still wanted to believe that the worst scumbag was still a human being, that if the right person offered a little charity at just the right time, he could find his way back. And what would it cost him? Just a single sentence, a few words of reassurance.

‘I talked to your wife myself. She’s doing just fine.’

This time Weinbeck’s smile was genuine, and it made Doyle feel better about himself than he had in months.

‘Thank you, sir. It means a lot to hear that. Are we finished here?’

‘Ten more minutes.’

‘Can I get something to drink? A Coke or something? I saw a vending machine down the hall.’

Doyle pushed a few forms across the desk. ‘I’ll get it. Start signing wherever you see a flag. The sooner you finish, the sooner you’re out of here.’ He picked up Weinbeck’s file to take it with him, pausing as he walked around the desk to make sure Weinbeck was signing in the right place. Some of these guys were so dumb that, red flag or not, they couldn’t figure out where to put their name.

He saw the blade as it slashed up toward him, but not soon enough.

7

Midafternoon on a Saturday, and City Hall was buzzing like a blown-out amplifier. The entrance was jammed with what looked like every reporter and camera operator in the state, and as usual, where the cameras went, the politicians followed.

As he and Gino carved a ‘no comment’ path through the din of shouted questions that followed their entrance, Magozzi recognized no less than three city council members, several legislators, PR people from the mayor’s office, and bizarrely, the media spokesman for the Department of Transportation, though God knew what he was doing here. Probably looking for an increase in the snow-removal budget so they could get rid of all the white stuff someone was hiding bodies in.

Oddly enough, Homicide was the only relatively quiet place in the whole building. They heard Gloria’s excessively polite phone voice coming from the other side of the door that divided the reception area from the office proper, and Magozzi didn’t know which was more disturbing: that Gloria had come in on a Saturday, or that she was actually
being civil to someone. ‘The detectives are still at the scene, sir. Yes, I certainly will pass that on.’

She was big and black and sharp-tongued, fastidious about her appearance, and slavish to a wild style that was uniquely her own. They were used to seeing her in anything from tiny braids to colorful turbans; one day in a sari, the next in a miniskirt and platform heels, but this was something entirely new.

She was standing at the front desk, hands on ample hips, glaring down at all the blinking lights on her phone, looking like a very big, very black Priscilla Presley. Her black hair was glued into some kind of a flip; the rosy dress was full and shiny and made crinkly little noises when she moved. Gino hadn’t seen one like it since his dad showed him his high school prom picture from sometime during the dark ages. He opened his mouth to say something, but Gloria glared and pointed a finger at him.

‘You like your balls, Rolseth?’

‘I do.’

‘Because this day is too black for wisecracking.’

Gino nodded. ‘I was just going to say that so far you’re the best thing in it. You look good in red.’

‘Hmph.’ Her big shoulders relaxed a little. ‘This is not red, you fool, it’s cherry blossom, and you think this dress is bad, you should have seen the bride. Looked like she was wearing a big fat doily.’ She plopped back into her chair with a rustle and a grunt.

‘The Chief just called. He was halfway to his lake place when the news hit; won’t make it back before the five o’clock news, which might be a good thing. Local media has already been all over the tube with bulletins, and CNN picked it up. They’re runnin’ crawl lines and calling it the Minneapolis Snowman Killing Fields. Bastards think they’re cute.’

Magozzi felt his jaw muscles tighten. ‘Goddamnit, we’ve got two dead officers here.’

‘Yeah, well cop-killer is a favorite headline, but it takes second place on the hit parade when you’ve got film of a bunch of uniforms knocking down hundreds of snowmen in front of a crowd of crying kids.’

‘Jesus. They’re showing that?’

‘You bet they are. Local, national, probably international by now. They’ve got the damn thing on a loop. Chief’s doing a live thing with the press at nine tonight; he wants everything you’ve got on his desk by eight so he can cull through it.’

Johnny McLaren and Tinker Lewis were halfway across the room at their desks, working the phones, already buried in paperwork; otherwise the place was empty. Magozzi and Gino rolled a couple of chairs over to Tinker’s desk, primarily because McLaren’s looked like the inside of a Dumpster during a garbage strike.

Tinker thanked someone on the phone and
gently set it back in its cradle. The man did everything gently – always had, as long as Magozzi had known him, which was a pretty rare demeanor to find in Homicide. He had brown eyes that always looked sad; today they were downright mournful. ‘Second Precinct is red-lighting over everything they’ve got on Tommy Deaton and Toby Myerson. Recent performance reviews, arrest reports, the private stuff they kept in their lockers, anything that might not be in the master files. Nothing flashy stood out in the Sarge’s mind – not that he’d be able to think of it today, anyway. They’ve all got their brains wrapped in black over there.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘We need to tear it all apart, see if this is a cop thing or maybe even a Second Precinct thing.’

‘Yeah, they’re a little worried about that.’ He glanced over at McLaren, who had one ear glued to the phone while he scribbled on a scrap of paper. ‘Johnny’s talking to one of the guys over there that hung with Myerson off-time. You get anything from Deaton’s family?’

Magozzi shook his head. ‘We got what we could, but nothing that really jumps out. Wife went down like a redwood when we told her. She was pretty messed up. How about Toby Myerson’s family?’

Tinker leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and saw Toby Myerson’s mother again, braced
crookedly in her wheelchair, one side of her wrinkled face sagging from the stroke that took half her body and most of her speech, but left awareness and emotion and a pair of eyes that said more than Tinker wanted to hear. ‘No family except the mother. Toby took care of her. Don’t know what’s going to happen to her now.’

He started sliding neatly labeled file folders across the desk, some fatter than others. ‘Reports are starting to trickle in, but it’s going to be an avalanche soon. Must have been hundreds of people out there today; plus we’ve got to go through all the film and stills the media took; then there’s the door-to-door on all the houses around the park, and you know how that goes. As soon as people find out there was a murder, we’re going to hear about a million parked cars that, now that they think of it, looked kind of suspicious …’ He blew a frustrated sigh out of puffed cheeks that drooped a little lower every year he was on the job. ‘The book on this one is going to weigh a ton.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘You have Espinoza on it?’

‘Yeah. We’re copying him on everything, he’s plugging it into the Monkeewrench software, but there’s still a lot of stuff that needs eyes on.’

‘Always is.’

Johnny McLaren finally hung up the phone and rolled bloodshot eyes in their direction. Rumor had
it the flame-haired detective started every weekend with a Friday-night toot that lasted forty-eight hours, and looking at him on a Saturday made Magozzi believe it. ‘I got a little. Could be good, could be bad. Toby Myerson and Tommy Deaton were together last night. Both of them were cross-country ski fanatics; couldn’t wait to get off last night so they could hit the trails.’

Gino nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s what Deaton’s wife told us. You know, I took one look at that first snowman and thought whacko serial killer posing his trophy. Then we found the second one, and I’m thinking, holy shit it’s like serial-killer winter Olympics. Then we find out they were both ours, and it started to look like some asshole with a hard-on for cops. Now that we know those guys were together, we might have to look for a personal angle. Like maybe only one of them was the target, and the other just happened to get in the way.’

Tinker liked that. ‘So maybe it didn’t have anything to do with them being cops.’

‘That would be the dream scenario.’

‘I like that angle a lot better than some serial killer just plugging people at random, or cops in particular,’ Magozzi said.

‘Don’t we all. Doesn’t mean it’s the way it went down.’

They all looked up at the heavy click of Gloria’s
heels on the floor and saw her fill the aisle between the desks with pink. ‘I’m going to catch a bite before the Chief gets back. You’re getting those reports pulled together for him, right?’

Skinny, red-haired McLaren looked at her and grinned, forgetting for a second that there were dead cops and a bad case and a late night ahead. ‘You gotta tell me how you get that skirt to stick out so far.’

Gloria ignored him. ‘Switchboard’s screening till I get back, but Evelyn’s on tonight, so cut her some slack. Last time she hung up on the city council chair and put through some idiot who said the CIA was planning the overthrow of the government in his living room. Chief damn near had her canned.’

‘Can’t really blame the woman,’ Gino said. ‘Chair of the city council or a paranoid idiot. Kind of a toss-up, if you ask me.’

She scowled, turned on her heel, then spun at the last moment and looked straight at McLaren. ‘Crinolines,’ she said, then disappeared out the door.

‘What’re crinolines?’ McLaren whispered.

Gino gave him a look. ‘You are such a fashion fetus. They’re really stiff slips. They got plastic hoops in them so they stick way out. Fifties stuff. Must have been a retro wedding. Can’t believe she even
went to one of those things, let alone dressed up in a getup like that.’

McLaren was still staring at the place he had seen Gloria last.

It had been full dark for an hour, and Grace could still hear the irritating scrape of shovels against concrete from inside her house. In a workingclass neighborhood like this, there weren’t a lot of snowblowers, and the shovels had been busy all day, clearing yesterday’s storm from walks and driveways. A few of them were manned by intrepid youngsters who trolled from house to house, picking up a little extra cash for a lot of hard labor. There weren’t many such baby entrepreneurs these days; most kids were parked in front of the TV or a PlayStation, hands out for allowances earned by their mere existence. The few who worked the small, older houses on Ashland Avenue in St Paul never bothered to knock on Grace MacBride’s door.

She’d had high-tech heating grates built into her sidewalks and driveway before she bought the place six years earlier, and you could Rollerblade on those sidewalks in a blizzard. Not that Grace minded physical labor, but she’d been hiding from a lot of people in those days, and there was no way she would expose herself long enough to shovel a
path through a Minnesota winter. Supposedly no one was trying to kill her anymore, but it was just plain silly to take chances.