Snow Blind (22 page)

‘Hell, no.’

A few seconds with his light and Sampson found what he was looking for: a handmade wooden ladder buried nearby under some loose hay.

‘How’d you know that was there?’ Iris asked as he carried it over and he and Neville maneuvered it down through the trapdoor. She was looking for a diversion, anything to take her mind off what Neville had said was in the room under the floor.

‘A lot of these old barns have root cellars like
this, built deep enough to go beneath the frost line. Had to be a way to get in and out of it.’

They went down the ladder one by one, Iris last. She wasn’t really afraid, and that surprised her. She was climbing down into a dark hole in the ground to see something horrible, and all she really felt was a sense of dread.

The room was crisscrossed with cobwebs that almost made a curtain, they’d been undisturbed for so long. Little white beads were stuck to the webs and squeaked underfoot on the floor when Iris stepped down from the ladder. ‘What is this stuff?’ Iris wondered aloud.

‘Styrofoam.’ Neville pointed to the walls and toed up the edge of a rug remnant. Panels of it on the floors, walls, ceiling. Pretty good insulation in a pinch, but you’ve gotta keep it up. Deteriorates in a hurry.’ Then he directed his light to what he’d seen from above, lying on an old metal bed with a rotting mattress, and Iris caught her breath.

There wasn’t much left of whoever it had been – exposed bones that gleamed white in the reflection of their lights, draped with the tattered remnants of clothing. Iris saw thin clumps of hair on the top of the skull and what looked like a few pieces of dessicated flesh that the rats and the insects had missed. More than anything else, it looked like one of the Halloween props from a haunted house.

Iris squeezed her eyes shut for a second, trying to make sense of it. They were looking for a killer and found a rotting, dead person in her barn. It didn’t fit, it didn’t compute. It was like looking for car keys in a drawer and finding an elephant instead. Curious, maybe, but the elephant sure as hell wasn’t going to start the car.

‘Lars,’ Sampson said.

Neville looked at him. ‘You think?’

‘Maybe.’ Sampson brushed aside some of the cobwebs and moved around the room that was only a little larger than Iris’s kitchen. There was an ancient space heater in one corner; a shelf of moldering books that rats had made a mess of; and oddly, a sink and a flush toilet. ‘Damn place is plumbed,’ he murmured.

‘And wired,’ Iris said, pointing her light at a single bulb in a protective cage on the ceiling. She looked around the windowless room, at the rust-stained toilet and sink, the pathetic remains on the bed, at the only exit that couldn’t be reached from the floor without a ladder, and saw the place for the prison it had been.

She didn’t know what had happened in this room, or why; she only knew that she didn’t want to be here any longer. She went up the ladder a lot faster than she’d come down.

And how was your day, Iris? Well, just peachy. There was this bloody corpse in a snowman, then a killer hiding in my house WHILE I WAS SLEEPING, and then big surprise, the skeletal remains of a human being in my barn
…

Sampson and Neville had followed her up, closed the trapdoor behind them, and now Sampson was on his cell, listening. He flipped it closed with a snap. ‘They’ve got a break in the fence at Bitterroot, and they don’t know when it happened. Apparently the ice storm shut down all their cameras and motion detectors. We’re moving in.’

26

Iris Rikker had called Magozzi back on the way to Bitterroot, giving him a quick update on the break in the fence and frozen cameras. By that time he and Gino were already in the car, heading north.

‘Can you believe the balls of that bastard?’ Gino shook his head after she hung up. ‘He has to know every cop in the county is looking for him, and what does he do? Hangs around and breaks into the one place they’re looking for him hardest.’

‘Not balls,’ Magozzi grunted. ‘Blind, stupid rage.’

‘Whatever. Christ. I can’t believe it’s five-thirty in the morning and we’re on our way to Cow Patch again.’ Gino was in the passenger seat, slurping coffee from a jumbo travel mug while Magozzi concentrated hard on the road. The freeway was plowed and sanded and they were making good time to Dundas, but the puffy bags under his eyes were partially obstructing his vision.

‘Let’s just hope Kurt Weinbeck is the end of the road and we can tie this thing off and be back in bed by noon.’

‘Jeez, are you listening to motivational tapes or
something? It never goes down that easy and you know it. None of us ever really liked Weinbeck for killing Deaton and Myerson. The way I look at it, we got called out of bed to freeze our asses off stomping through some snowy nowhere just so we can talk to the guy long enough to cross him off the suspect list for sure. Meanwhile, Iris Rikker catches a murderer on her first day in office, and you and I get hammered for making a bunch of road trips on somebody else’s case while our own Minneapolis cop killer runs around loose. We are not getting a happy ending out of this.’

‘You want to turn around and go home?’

‘Nah. The puke killed Doyle for sure. Maybe we’ll get lucky and corner Weinbeck in the woods by our lonesome, slap him around a little just for fun. That’d make me feel better. You hear anything new on the Pittsburgh snowman this morning?’

Magozzi kicked the speed up a few notches while Gino wasn’t looking. ‘I called again before I left the house, talked to their night guy. They’re still thinking copycat.’

Gino nodded. ‘That’s what I figure. Our case just gave every sociopath in the contiguous forty-eight plus Alaska a cool, new way to pose bodies. Mark my words, snowmen will start cropping up all over the place, then somebody’ll write a book, and then they’ll make a TV movie of the week.
Minneapolis – Ground Zero for Every Lunatic in the Country
. The Chief will just love that. The poor guy still hasn’t gotten over “Murderapolis,” and that was over a decade ago.’ Gino sighed and squinted ahead into the beams of the headlights. ‘Oh, shit. Is that snow?’

The southernmost edge of the storm front seemed to end right at the Dundas County line. Once they made the turn off the freeway, the county roads deteriorated fast, and there were an alarming number of cars in the ditch for a place that was so sparsely populated.

‘Jesus,’ Gino muttered under his breath. ‘It looks like a used-car lot out here.’

Magozzi pointed to sagging, ice-coated power lines that looked like silver filament when they caught the light. ‘Looks like they got an ice storm.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I see that, just keep your eyes on the road. Man, that little track into Bitterroot is going to be a bitch.’

Maggie didn’t often leave her little house at night, and certainly not alone. As the longtime manager of Bitterroot, she knew better than anyone that the complex was as safe as technology, caution, and human ingenuity could make it. There probably wasn’t a safer place in the entire world for a woman to walk alone after dark. The reasoning part of her brain knew that. The other part – the one that
stored the memory she’d been trying to forget for fifteen years – that was what kept her inside after the sun went down.

The chase had lasted a long time, starting in the house, leaving a wreckage of furniture behind as Maggie had dodged from one hiding place to another, finally making it out the door and into the front yard, screaming, bleeding, crying. She knew the neighbors would hear; she also knew it would be too late, because Roy was right behind her, still swinging the crowbar, and by then he didn’t even look like her husband anymore, just a horror-movie package of blind, red-faced rage because Maggie had done the unthinkable by trying to fight back for the very first time in her life. There had been no moon, just stars stitching a lacy pattern in a dark, dark sky. Even in her terror she had noticed that, just before the crowbar came down one last time on the back of her skull
.

There was still a definite depression where bone had finally knitted itself together – a ledge, really, that made her look like a Neanderthal with his face on backwards – but she covered that by fluffing her hair. Only a few people knew it was there. Laura was one of them, and Laura’s house was where Maggie belonged in times of trouble. A victim of abuse herself, she’d founded Bitterroot with her sister Ruth sixty years ago, and had devoted every year since to creating a haven where women could live without fear. As far as Maggie was concerned,
the old woman had saved the lives of every single resident in Bitterroot – her own included – and that gave her the strength to face her night demons and hurry through the ice and snow to Laura’s old farmhouse as soon as Iris had called.

Not that she believed Kurt Weinbeck or any other uninvited man would actually make it into the complex. The cameras would be on him the moment he touched the fence, the monitors would notify perimeter patrol, and a team of very well-trained and well-armed women would be on-site before he made it to the other side. No one ever made it past the perimeter patrol. Not anymore.

The farmhouse wasn’t far from the main residential section, but it was far enough, and isolated enough to make the trip a harrowing one for a woman afraid to go out after dark. Maggie had been inordinately proud of herself for making the journey, thinking that after all this time, perhaps she was finally getting a little better.

She’d found Laura sitting in her favorite chair by the fireplace, bundled in a worn terry robe several sizes too large for her fragile frame. It was faded from years of washing, and frayed past mending around the cuffs, but the robe had belonged to her sister, Ruth, gone these many years, and she refused to give it up. Maggie hadn’t been surprised to find the old woman out of bed at such an hour. More
and more lately, Laura had been getting day and night confused.

‘We have to lock the doors tonight, Laura,’ Maggie had told her, and at that moment Laura’s eyes had narrowed and sharpened, and, in them, Maggie saw the stalwart, intelligent woman she had been before her good brain had started to deteriorate.

‘What happened?’

‘Julie Albright’s ex-husband is on his way here. The sheriff thinks he’ll try to get to her.’

A little of her old fire had flashed in Laura’s eyes. ‘Let him try. He’ll never get past the perimeter.’

But less than half an hour later Maggie got the call from Security, telling her that the ice had frozen the cameras and motion detectors and that the fence had been cut. She knew the news would devastate Laura, send her quickly back down that gray hole of mindlessness that overcame her when she was tired or stressed, but Laura surprised her.

‘Where’s Julie?’ she demanded, as alert and acute as Maggie had seen her in some time.

‘In her house, under guard. By our people and several deputies. We had to open the gates for them, Laura. They’re coming in force, to search the whole property. They’ll be going door to door, checking on everyone.’

Laura closed her eyes, and seemed to shrink in on
herself as Maggie watched. ‘My poor girls,’ she whispered. ‘Strange men in the compound, banging on doors … they’ll be so frightened.’

‘The call system is notifying everyone. They’ll know they’re policemen, here to help. Some of them will be women.’

Laura was shaking her head strongly, because she knew that wouldn’t make a difference. The walls had been breached, the strangers were inside, and the sense of safety would evaporate with the first man who walked their streets unescorted. ‘Sixty years, Maggie. A lifetime to build this place, to make it safe, and it’s gone in a second …’

‘No, Laura, that’s not true,’ Maggie insisted. ‘You made a utopia here. You saved our lives, every one of us.’

‘So we build Utopia, and all it takes is one crazed man to bring it down? That’s not right, is it?’ Laura looked up at her, and Maggie saw the eyes clouding, wandering, following the erratic path of thoughts that had already started to scatter and lose focus. ‘Did you drink my tea? I can’t find my tea. Someone took my tea. Do you have it in your pocket?’

Maggie looked away quickly and brushed at her eyes. It always broke her heart a little to watch Laura’s quick shifts from apparent lucidity to muddled confusion. It was like watching a normal
mind suddenly blink out like an old lightbulb. ‘I must have taken it into the kitchen by mistake. I’ll make more, Laura. And I’ll bring you a cookie.’

‘Really? That would be so nice.’

Maggie went to the kitchen and set the tea kettle on to boil. She was slicing a lemon when she heard the soft thud from the back porch that stopped her heart.

Stop it, Maggie. It’s just a clump of snow falling off the roof. Nothing more than that. You did so well tonight. Don’t lose it now just because of a little noise. Move, damnit. Don’t just stand here like a frozen rabbit. Slice the lemon. Prepare the tray. Get the cookies, because there’s nothing out there
…
except maybe a deputy. Remember? Now, don’t you feel silly? It’s probably just a deputy coming up the back steps. And all you have to do is turn around and look and you’ll see that, and everything will be all right
.

But Maggie couldn’t turn around. Her mind was already fifteen years back in time, right after she’d stumbled for the last time in the darkened yard. She’d known then that if she didn’t move fast, Roy would catch her and kill her with the crowbar. And yet then, as now, terror paralyzed her. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

Stupid then, and stupid now
, Maggie told herself just as the glass pane in the back door shattered behind her.

*

By the time they pulled up to the corporate building, the snow was really coming down, every light in the complex was blazing, and Dundas County cars were all over the lot.

Iris Rikker was standing in the middle of a cluster of newly arrived deputies, and although she didn’t look like much of a sheriff in her puffy parka and little moonboots, she seemed to be acting like one.

When Gino and Magozzi walked up, they heard her speaking tight, short and fast, not one extra word, just like a real cop, directing the officers in pairs wherever they were needed. Gino kept silent, brows raised, probably wondering how she’d learned to do that in the space of a day.