Snow Blind (21 page)

The weight of that realization landed on her hard and almost buckled her knees. Being responsible for her own life was one kind of terror – she’d felt that for those minutes she’d been backed into a corner holding a butcher knife. But being responsible for someone else’s was so much worse.

She closed her eyes for the millisecond that was
all they could afford before they went outside to look for Kurt Weinbeck, and when she opened them she was looking at the pegboard with its rows of keys. One of the pegs was empty.

‘Sampson.’ Her voice stopped him just as he was about to jerk open the door. ‘My keys are gone.’

‘Maybe you left them in the truck.’

‘No.’

‘It happens. You have a hard day, a lot on your mind, you forget sometimes –’

‘No.’

Something in her voice convinced him, and he went immediately still, except for his eyes. They moved slightly to the window, to the SUV that was sitting dark in the driveway, and then nodded once, silently, before easing open the door.

They stepped out onto the porch quietly, cautiously, their eyes and guns and flashlights trained on her SUV. They had a slight advantage because the porch was higher than the truck and they could partially see the interior, but there were still plenty of dark spaces their lights couldn’t reach. Plenty of space for Weinbeck to hide.

The only sounds were the hiss and chatter of ice pellets hitting the house, the windows, and the glazed trees. Iris thought she heard a beleaguered branch groan and creak under the weight of ice, but there was nothing more, not even a breath of wind.

She noticed a set of footprints leading from the porch out to her SUV. There was no telling how fresh they were, but they were already encased in ice, and for the moment, perfectly preserved. It gave her some comfort, knowing that if Kurt Weinbeck popped up out her very own truck and shot them dead, the BCA would be able to make perfect casts of those prints and put him away forever. The wires would pick up the story and
CSI
would write an episode in posthumous honor of Lieutenant Sampson and his trusty sidekick, Iris Rikker – sheriff for a day.

Slowly, excruciatingly, they moved down the stairs and began covering the short distance from porch to truck that seemed so very vast to Iris right now. In fact, all of her senses were distorted, not just her spatial perception – the light from her flash was vividly bright, the hushed crunch of icy snow beneath her boots was almost deafening, and the wool of her sweater felt like sandpaper against her skin.

They were close now, circling the vehicle, front to back, lights and guns raised as they swept the interior, and for the first time ever, Iris wondered what a bullet would feel like slamming into her chest at the speed of sound. Her light found the keys dangling from the ignition; otherwise the truck was empty.

‘He’s not in there,’ Iris said.

‘Never thought he would be.’

‘You might have told me that before I spent the last two minutes scared out of my mind.’

One his shoulders lifted slightly. ‘Figured you knew. If he had the keys and he had the vehicle, he would’ve been gone. Are you sure you didn’t leave the keys in the truck?’

‘Sampson.’ She jerked her light to the line of prints they’d avoided stepping in. ‘Those are not mine, and they’re not yours.’

‘Okay. Then why is the truck still here?’

Iris thought of her jumbled dreams, of imagining she was trying to start the SUV, grinding the battery down to its death. She opened the driver’s door and turned the key. Silence.

Sampson almost smiled. ‘Man, you gotta love that. Weinbeck breaks into your house, steals your keys, thinks he’s home free, and then the vehicle won’t start. Just beautiful.’ He swept his light around the truck, and found another set of prints heading away from the driver’s side. ‘Those tracks are going to fill in fast if this keeps up. We’ve got to move.’

It was the first time Iris noticed that the icy mix had changed over to full snow. Funny what your mind shut out when you were totally focused on a simple thing, like trying to stay alive.

They followed the prints down the drive, almost
to the barn, and that’s where Sampson stopped. His light followed the trail up to the barn door, then he moved the flash up and down the enormous length of the building. ‘What’s in there?’

Iris knew exactly what he was asking. ‘A lot of empty space, and a lot of places to hide.’

Halfway through Sampson’s nod, the old barn made one of those old barn noises it was always making. He stiffened like a dog on point, then started making funny stabbing gestures all over the place. Iris had a momentary brain freeze. One hour in class, another studying the illustrations, and she’d had all the signals down, but they looked a lot different coming from a real cop instead of a cartoonish drawing in a textbook.

She was to go to the right around the building; he would go left. No noise.

Iris didn’t stop to think about it; she didn’t dare. She just started to move the way she’d been taught, and the second she took her first step through the knee-deep, ice-crusted snow that had drifted up against the building, her brain seemed to close the door on everything except the information her senses were feeding it. The animal-like focus lasted for two more steps, until she heard the sirens and saw the reflection of red and blue lights against the weathered siding as squads started to pull into the driveway.

‘Go!’ Sampson yelled at her, because the sirens had stolen the advantage of silence, and now they had to move faster.

By the time they met on the back side of the barn, there were five other officers slogging as fast as possible through the deep snow to join them.

Sampson and Iris both had their flashlights on a trail of bizarre-looking tracks that started at one of the barn’s back doors and headed straight across the snowy field into the night.

‘What the hell kind of tracks are those?’ someone asked.

‘Snowshoe,’ Iris said, remembering Mark’s notion to embrace winter sports once they had moved out to the country. He’d abandoned that idea after five minutes on the netted paddles last November, almost as fast as he’d abandoned his marriage. ‘My ex-husband had a pair hanging in the barn.’

Deputy Neville, the blue-eyed, baby-faced officer who’d stood near Steve Doyle’s body and wished her a pleasant good morning, moved next to Iris, playing his flashlight over the rolling field that grew corn in the summer and snow in the winter. ‘What’s on the other side of the field?’

‘Sarley Game Preserve,’ Iris said. ‘Five thousand acres of trees and swamps.’

Sampson stared hard at nothing, seeing the Dundas County plat map in his mind. ‘Damnit.

Lake Kittering backs up to the far side of that preserve. Courthouse on the east side of the lake, Bitterroot land on the west. He’s got a straight shot and big head start.’ He jerked his head toward Iris.

‘You have a sled?’

Iris shook her head.

‘Kendall, get on the horn, get the snowmobiles over here fast, as many as they’ve got, then all the rest of you head for Bitterroot, double up on the perimeter patrols. Neville, stick around, we’re going to have to take a look in that barn, just in case …’ He looked down at where Iris was digging under his jacket, around his belt line. He didn’t know what to make of that.

‘Cell phone!’ Iris said, and snatched it away the second he had it out of the holster. While Sampson continued to bark out orders, she called dispatch, pulled all the patrols in tight around Lake Kittering and the game preserve, and then called Maggie Holland at Bitterroot and got her out of bed. When she finished, Sampson took the phone and made one last call to Detective Magozzi’s cell.

Son of a bitch, it was cold, even with all the heavy winter gear he’d found in the basement. If it hadn’t been for that lucky little score, he’d probably be as dead as a doornail by now, laying out here in the
field, turning into a snowman himself. Now, there would be some irony.

The snowshoes had been another stroke of luck. They sure as hell took some getting used to, and they were a pain in the ass, collecting snow and bogging him down every couple hundred yards, but he couldn’t have gotten this far, this fast, without them.

And come to think of it, that whole basement thing could have ended badly if the owner of the house had decided to come down to clean the litter box or throw in a load of dirty laundry while he was snoring away by the furnace. But it hadn’t gone down like that, and Kurt Weinbeck was starting to believe that his fortune was finally turning for the first time in his life. Things happened for a reason. Maybe this whole plan of his was destiny, and that fate or the gods or whoever was running the show was on his side, smiling down on him, making sure he had his chance to make things right.

The only problem was, he still wasn’t sure how he wanted his plan to end, or how to make things right. Part of him – the weak part of him – wanted to give Julie another chance, take her and the kid down to Mexico with him and start over, build a new life together. Maybe buy a little place by the beach, get a small trawler, and set up a fishing charter business or something. He wasn’t a wealthy man by any
stretch, but he had done pretty well for himself selling insurance and bartending part-time … His thoughts ground to a halt.

Had
done pretty well. Past tense.
Had
done pretty well for himself until that goddamned fucking bitch had sent him to prison. And he just wasn’t sure if he could live with her after that. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of torture she’d put him through; what it was like in hell day after day, month after month, year after year, and know you’d never be able to erase those memories, no matter how hard you tried. No way she’d ever felt that kind of pain.

He felt a white-hot rage building and boiling inside as he thought about the injustice of it all, and his anger, so pure and perfect, gave him the moment of clarity he’d been seeking, just like it always did. Suddenly, he knew exactly what to do. He needed to show her the pain, needed to make her understand what she’d done to him. That was the only way justice would be served. It was payback time.

And then he’d probably have to kill her, because odds were, she wouldn’t survive the road trip south once he was finished teaching her a lesson.

The snow was coming down hard now, and visibility was so bad, he almost ran smack into the fence before he saw it. With a little friendly
persuasion, Steve Doyle had been kind enough to warn him about all of Bitterroot’s security, so he’d come prepared to deal with the fence – the bolt cutter he’d found on the basement tool bench would make short work of it.

He examined the fence a little more carefully, looking for the security cameras Doyle had told him about – there was something that could have been a camera perched on a metal stalk about three feet to his right, but it was so crusted with ice and snow, there was no way it was picking up anything but white. Yes indeed, luck was on his side today.

He went down on his knees and put the bolt cutter to work.

25

There was a row of overheads in the peak of the thirty-foot roof, but they didn’t do much to light up the interior of the barn. Not one of them believed that Weinbeck was still in there, but the place itself was enough to spook anyone, with or without an armed killer hiding behind a post or molding hay bale. The intermittent creaks and groans of the old barn that always seemed to shift and complain, even on the stillest of nights, made it sound like the building was about to come down around their heads.

‘Nice bed,’ Sampson said, training his light on the big four-poster. ‘You sleep out here, or what?’

Iris saw the tarp coverings thrown aside and piled on the dirt floor. There was the indentation of someone’s body in the old feather mattress, and she remembered running her hands over that tarp just this morning. Had he been under there then? ‘Not me,’ she tried to say, but her voice cracked and her legs felt rubbery.
Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Fairy-tale lines screamed in her head.

Neville was over on the far side of the barn, his
neck scarf pressed over his nose and mouth as he moved through a maze of haphazardly stacked hay bales that spewed decades-old mold whenever he brushed against them. ‘Clear over here!’ he shouted as he started to weave his way out, then Iris heard him grunt and fall, and then mutter, ‘Goddamnit.’

He appeared a few seconds later, took the scarf off his face, and coughed hard. ‘What’s under the trapdoor?’

Iris frowned. ‘What trapdoor?’

‘Haven’t you ever been back there?’

‘Not a chance. Mark had allergies, and I wouldn’t go near that hay. It smells, and it’s filled with mold.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Then he shrugged and tied the scarf around his face again. ‘Gotta take a look, I suppose.’

Iris and Sampson snugged their parka collars over the lower half of their faces, tried not to breathe, and followed Deputy Neville through the maze. The odor of years of mold cementing hay bales together wasn’t offensive in itself, but the minute you took the dustiness into your lungs, you knew it was noxious.

From the outside, the bales looked as if they’d been stacked haphazardly, but the deeper they went in, the more purposeful they seemed, like the boxwood maze at the botanical gardens.

The trapdoor was all the way back, set into the wooden floor near the outside wall. Their lights picked up the metal ring Neville had tripped on, poking up through a layer of hay dust, and then the long, heavy metal slide that snugged deep into a rusty hasp, locking it from the outside. It took some effort to kick the slide free of the hasp. It hadn’t been moved in a long time.

Neville lifted the door and aimed his flash down into the hole. ‘Deep,’ he said. ‘Ten, maybe twelve feet.’ He went down on his knees, and then on his belly, poking his head into the space and moving his light around. Suddenly the light stopped moving and Iris heard him hiss, ‘Oh, Jesus …’ He scrambled back from the hole on his hands and knees, blue eyes big in a very white face.

‘Weinbeck?’ Sampson whispered.