Snow Blind (17 page)

‘It’s impressive. But we do need to remind you that your ex-husband still hasn’t been apprehended, and that we’re presuming he kidnapped and murdered his parole officer for one reason: to get to you.’

Julie nodded. ‘Maggie told me.’

‘Did she tell you the officer was murdered here in Dundas County, not so far from Bitterroot? He knows where to find you, Ms Albright.’

One of her hands crept up to finger a rope of scar tissue near her mouth. ‘He’s always been able to find me, Detective. No matter how far I ran, or how well I hid, he’s always found me. He’s very good at that.’

Gino was looking over a planter into a cozy living room with toys on the floor and a playpen in the corner and windows on every wall. Sure, the front
door had a deadbolt, but that didn’t do a hell of a lot of good in a glass house. ‘Listen, Ms Albright, you gotta understand. He could still be in the area, the guy’s a killer, and I don’t care how good the security is out there on the perimeter. If he finds a way into this town, you’re an open target in this place. You ask me, you’d be a whole lot safer under guard someplace in the Cities, out of the area.’

‘How many guards?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Excuse me?’

‘How many guards will there be at this place in the Cities you’re talking about?’

‘Well, I don’t know. A couple, maybe. Police officers. One inside, one out, whatever we need to secure the place.’

Julie tried to smile again. ‘No offense, Detective, but I have a whole town protecting me out here.’

Gino was getting frustrated. ‘No offense back at you, but you’ve got four hundred untrained
women
out here and a hell of a lot of space to cover, and I don’t care how good their intentions are, they can’t protect you like a couple of highly trained cops in close quarters –’

‘It didn’t do me a lot of good the last time,’ she interrupted quietly, and Gino’s mouth closed slowly. ‘I know you mean well; I know there are good men who would do anything to stop this from happening. I had two of them guarding my house
the night Kurt broke in and cut me. They meant well, too.’

Gino’s eyes screwed up. ‘Yeah, but were they cops?’

She looked at him for a minute as if she felt sorry for him, and Gino didn’t get that until she answered. ‘Yes, they were. MPD.’

There wasn’t a lot more to say after that. Just Sheriff Rikker’s assurances that the county would keep a heavy patrol schedule around Bitterroot until Weinbeck was caught; Magozzi’s feeble, paternalistic reminder to Julie Albright that she lock her doors, keep a phone close, and avoid trips out of the complex until further notice. She nodded politely, as if everything they said had meaning, even though they were part of the system that hadn’t been able to protect her in the first place.

Gino shook her hand as he went out the door, which was an unusual thing for him to do. ‘Be safe,’ he said, and she would have had to be blind not to see how deeply he meant that.

They were halfway down the front walk when Julie called out to Iris. ‘I forgot to congratulate you on the election, Sheriff Rikker. I voted for you. We all did.’

The ride away from Bitterroot and back toward the sheriff’s office was silent for a time, then Gino started spewing words like a volcano that just blew
the cork off. ‘Jesus Christ, Magozzi, MPD right there on duty when Weinbeck did that to her face? How the hell does that make you feel?’

‘Like shit.’

‘Tell me about it. And I’d like a word or two with the sergeant of the two assholes that pulled that duty, because there’s no way you can justify it. No way that animal should’ve gotten to her. And why the hell didn’t we ever hear about it? Hell, Kristen Keller should’ve been all over it, abysmal failure of MPD to protect its citizens, shit like that, man, somebody’s sleeping with somebody or we never would have dodged a bullet like that one.’

‘It happens,’ Sampson said quietly, ending Gino’s rant. ‘No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you get somebody dead-set on getting to somebody else to do them harm, they’ll find a way.’

Magozzi looked at the slice of the man’s profile he could see from the backseat. ‘You speaking from personal experience? I’m only asking, because you said you had a friend in Bitterroot.’

‘Actually, it’s my sister. Another one who did everything right. Got restraining orders, went to a bunch of different shelters, but the son of a bitch kept coming after her. I’m a cop and I couldn’t even protect my own sister. Not without going down for murder, anyhow.’

Iris was turned sideways in the passenger seat,
watching his face. ‘So you knew about this place all along.’

‘For a few years now.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess I figured it was the kind of place you had to see for yourselves. I could have told you that Julie Albright is safer here than anywhere; I could have told you what Bitterroot was all about, and that they haven’t had a single incident in sixty years; but that doesn’t mean much until you see the kind of security they have.’

Gino was shaking his head. ‘I still can’t believe this place has been around for that long and nobody’s ever heard of it. Why’s it a secret?’

‘It’s not a secret, exactly, they just don’t advertise. Adds another layer of security.’

‘Then how do the women find out about it?’ Iris asked. ‘How did your sister?’

‘There’s kind of an underground network – and I hear there’s a website you can access if you know the right people to ask.’

‘A lot of their security is pretty high-tech,’ Magozzi pointed out. ‘Stuff that hasn’t been on the market for sixty years, like the motion detectors and the cameras. So what did they do for security before?’

Sampson shrugged. ‘They always had their guns. Maggie said we’d be surprised at how many of the
bastards turn tail and run when they see women holding weapons, instead of cowering in a corner, like they’re supposed to.’

Magozzi wasn’t surprised by that at all. Most of the men who beat women were instantly docile when they faced someone who could fight back. But there were always a few exceptions: the ones so crazed by rage that even an armed cop couldn’t stop them from making one last desperate lunge at the woman.

He’d been on half a dozen domestic calls like that back when he still rode a squad, and he couldn’t imagine a single one of those men turning tail and running at the sight of a gun.

19

Magozzi and Gino rode in comfortable silence for the first half hour of their trip back to the Cities from Dundas County, which was exactly what they both needed. Magozzi thought that if the discrimination police would let you get away with it, it should be written into department policy. Men partnered with men, women with women.

In his early days on the force, he’d been paired with a savvy female officer as good at the job as anyone he’d known then or since. She could control the bad guys, hysterical victims, her weapon, her career – anything but her mouth, as if silence were some fearful thing she had to keep at bay with constant conversation. There wasn’t anyone he would have rather had watching his back, and still, after about two weeks with her in a closed patrol unit he started to have fantasies about running the car into a tree – on her side.

Sometimes you had to have quiet, to think about things, or stop thinking about them. Women didn’t get that. It was one of the ten million things he’d simply accepted and stopped trying to understand a
long time ago. Women’s and men’s minds worked differently. It didn’t make one method better than the other; it just made working with the opposite sex – on the job or in a relationship – a whole lot tougher.

‘Ah, shit,’ Gino said suddenly, and Magozzi smiled. Typical male conversation starter.

‘What?’

‘Damn watch stopped. You know I hate these things. My dad’s watch stopped, he wound it back up. Nowadays you have to make a trip to the store, wait in line for some gum-cracking kid to sell you a battery, wait again while they try to figure out what battery fits and how the hell to get the case apart … crap. How come the dash clock doesn’t work?’

‘Probably because no one had time to read the two-hundred-page manual and learn how to set the thing.’

‘New cars, new watches, and we still can’t make anything work. The world is going to hell.’

‘In many ways.’

Gino let out a noisy sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath for thirty minutes. ‘I gotta tell you, Leo, Bitterroot kind of messed me up. Left me conflicted. I looked at Julie Albright’s face, thought to myself, we’re spitting in the ocean here. A couple days ago we’re all on top of ourselves ’cause we got that woman out of the trunk before she died, and
then … Christ, I can’t even remember her name …’

‘Betty Ekman.’

‘Yeah, damnit, and then we find out there’s a whole goddamned town filled with Betty Ekmans and Julie Albrights, and why the hell couldn’t we get to them
before
they got stuffed in trunks or cut to pieces?’

Magozzi closed his eyes. ‘We do what we can, Gino.’

‘Oh, yeah? Then how come four hundred women had to build a whole damn town to keep themselves safe? Shit. How am I supposed to go home and tell Angela about that? She’ll give me a drink and a plate of pasta to die for, pat my head because I feel bad, but all the time she’ll be giving me that doe-eyed look, the sad one, like I should be able to fix it.’

‘She does not think that, and you know it.’

‘Maybe not, but the thing is, you feel personally responsible for one woman, you start feeling personally responsible for all of them, and Bitterroot was an in-your-face reminder of how goddamned short we fall.’

‘So maybe you skip Bitterroot when you tell Angela about your day.’

‘You’re kidding. Whaddya think? You get to keep this stuff to yourself when you’re married?’ Gino looked immediately contrite. It was getting harder
and harder to remember that Magozzi had been married once, and that Heather hadn’t given a shit about Leo’s job. ‘Sorry, buddy. I keep forgetting about Heather.’

‘I wish I could.’

It was barely after five, and already full dark by the time they got back to City Hall. It wasn’t the worst thing about winters in the Midwest, but it came close. Dark when you left for work in the morning, dark when you came home at night. Magozzi wondered if he’d remember what color his house was come spring.

Homicide had cleared out for supper, with the exception of Johnny McLaren, who was barely visible behind the towering piles of paperwork on his desk. The whole place reeked like microwave popcorn and scorched coffee, and trash cans were overflowing with empty soda cans and take-out containers.

‘Did we miss the party?’ Gino asked, poking around for leftovers.

McLaren was bleary-eyed and about as messy looking as his desk, but he was genuinely happy to see them. ‘Yeah. The dancing girls just left.’

‘If Gloria sees this pigsty, she’s going to have your hide, Johnny.’

‘That’s what I’m hoping for.’ He pushed back from his desk and stifled a yawn. ‘Hey, did you guys
do a drive-by out front? Is the building still under siege?’

Magozzi was at his desk, leafing through message slips. Half of them were from reporters, the other half from garden-variety crazies who claimed they’d seen alien spacecraft, the Loch Ness monster, a yeti, and the ghost of Karl Marx building snowmen in Theodore Wirth Park Friday night. Nothing from Grace. Not that she’d ever leave a paper trail. ‘We parked in the underground lot and snuck in that way. There were still satellite vans on Fourth, though. They’ll probably camp out until the ten o’clock news.’

McLaren shook his head in disgust. ‘I watched the early news – you should hear all the talking heads playing profiler. I didn’t know whether to laugh or puke. They’ve got their hearts set on some diabolical serial killer who was beaten and tortured as a child in front of Christmas cartoons.’

‘Sounds plausible,’ Gino said, sampling a half-eaten lemon bar.

‘Any mention of the Dundas snowman?’ Magozzi asked, dragging a chair up to McLaren’s desk and sagging into it.

‘No. Kind of a miracle, isn’t it? I don’t know how you guys managed to keep that under wraps for this long, but whatever you did, it worked.’

‘Simple – nobody lives in Dundas County,’ Gino
said. ‘You could test nukes up there and it would take a month before anybody noticed the tap water was glowing … Johnny, you shouldn’t eat this microwave popcorn.’ He pointed to a stainless-steel bowl brimming with unnaturally yellow puffs. ‘They use that fake butter that stays in your bloodstream for the rest of your life.’

‘No kidding?’

‘That’s what I heard. Hey, where’s Tinker?’

McLaren winced, suddenly remembering that Magozzi and Gino hadn’t gotten the full story when they were up in Dundas. ‘He went to notify Steve Doyle’s wife. He didn’t mention this to you on the phone, but I guess he was a pretty close friend. That’s how he got wind of it in the first place – Doyle’s wife called him at home early this morning in a panic.’

Gino’s hand had stopped halfway to the bowl of poison popcorn. ‘Damnit. I knew he sounded funny on the phone when I told him Steve Doyle was the Dundas snowman. How’s he doing?’

‘He’s taking it hard, and, man, does he want Weinbeck. BCA called in a prelim on the Dundas scene, and so far they’ve got zilch for forensics. Same thing with the body. Nothing that would really point a legal finger at Weinbeck.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘I thought everything pointed a finger at Weinbeck. He had an appointment with
Doyle, there’s blood and signs of a struggle in the parole office …’

‘Yeah, yeah, we even got some partials of Weinbeck’s on the remote for the TV up there, but the only tune he has to sing is that he showed for the appointment, he and Doyle talked, watched a little TV, that Doyle was alive and well when he left, and as of now, we can’t prove him wrong.’

‘The file with his ex-wife’s address is missing.’

McLaren shrugged. ‘So Doyle took the file with him, maybe headed up to Bitterroot to talk to Julie Albright, and on the way the psycho snowman serial killer mugged him.’

Gino blew a raspberry. ‘That’s a crock of shit.’

‘I know that. You know that. We just can’t prove it. Hell, we’ve got a prosecutor who thinks circumstantial evidence against jaywalkers should get them the chair, and even he wouldn’t touch this one.’