Snow Blind (7 page)

This evening, inside the snug little house she’d converted into a fortress, she was practicing the MacBride version of slovenliness.

No one ever saw Grace dressed like this, except Charlie, of course, and since human speech was the only trick the dog hadn’t mastered yet, he wasn’t talking. The flannel pajamas had been a gift from Roadrunner; soft and warm and, bless the stick man, black. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into the purchase, because the pants were wide enough to provide easy access to the derringer she kept strapped to her ankle when she was working at home. But the very softness of the lightweight flannel felt dangerous. Grace liked weighty fabrics between her and the rest of the world.

If it had been anyone but Magozzi, she wouldn’t have opened the front door. He got a silly little grin on his face when he saw her outfit. ‘You’re in pj’s. I find that enormously encouraging.’

‘You’re early, Magozzi.’

‘I thought I could help you cook.’

‘Supper’s already on the stove. I was just about to get dressed.’

‘Or I could help with that.’

Grace rolled her eyes and stepped aside while
Magozzi hung up his coat and greeted Charlie. These days he was here so often that the dog no longer went completely ballistic when he walked in. The joy was still there, but it was a little more subdued, almost respectful, as if in Charlie’s wee brain Magozzi had made the transition from playmate to master. Grace wasn’t sure how she felt about that. ‘You’re in a pretty good mood for a cop with two new homicides on his plate.’

Magozzi didn’t even look up from patting the dog. ‘You heard?’

‘Harley and Roadrunner called, made me turn on the television.’

He straightened and looked at her, and there was nothing good-humored in his expression. ‘They were cops, Grace. Both of them.’

In the year and a half he’d known her, Magozzi had rarely seen Grace visibly express any emotion. She was closing in on the mid-thirties, and yet there wasn’t a line on that face; not a smile crinkle at the corners of her mouth, not the slightest memory of a frown between her brows. It was like looking at the blank canvas of a baby’s face, before the joy and the heartache of life left their lovely marks, and it always made Magozzi a little sad. But sometimes, if he looked very closely, he could see things in her eyes that never went any further.

‘I’m sorry, Magozzi,’ she said, and he felt a door
close on the outside world and all the terrible things that happened there.

She took his hand and led him back to the kitchen, checked whatever was simmering on the stove, then poured two glasses of wine and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, and it occurred to Magozzi that a woman had never said those words to him before. It sounded like a magic incantation.

This is what Gino has with Angela,
he thought.
You come home dragged out and frustrated and there stands this amazing woman who really wants to know what kind of a day you had
. This was not a little thing. This wasn’t just sharing the time you had together; this was wanting to share the time you spent apart, too, and as far as Magozzi was concerned, that boiled down to wanting to share a life. He wondered if Grace knew that was what she was doing.

‘What are you smiling at, Magozzi?’

Magozzi was starting to hate his own house. It was dark, empty, and, worse yet, there was no woman and no dog. It had been unbelievably hard to leave Grace’s tonight, but he had an early call and a hefty stack of accumulated reports to go through before morning, and reading would have been out of the question with Grace sitting next to him in her flannel pj’s.

He grabbed a Summit Pale Ale from the refrigerator, turned on the television, and steeled himself for the ten o’clock news.

The news teams had had all day to polish up this story for maximum impact and it showed. Dramatic, inflammatory scripts laced with adjectives like
horrific, shocking,
and
ghastly
played well against the backdrop of skillfully edited montages that made what ultimately had been a well-managed, controlled crime scene look like a soccer stadium stampede. Especially effective were the images of screaming, crying children as they watched the boys in blue knocking down one snowman after another. Without exception, every single broadcast made the MPD come off like a bunch of heartless jackasses.

They all ran snippets of Chief Malcherson’s press conference, and none of it had been good. The man was a master of the calm, forthright presentation, but it wasn’t working this time. He made a good case for an ex-con with a grudge going after the cops who had put him away, but the press kept hammering him with the one question that even the cops were asking themselves: What kind of killer poses bodies in snowmen? That was B-movie stuff.

Kristin Keller of Channel 3 was putting an even more salacious spin on it. As they showed the tape of him and Gino no-commenting their way through
the reporters at City Hall, she did a somber voice-over in her best end-of-the-world tone. ‘One has to wonder if the Minneapolis Police Department is concealing the truth, trying to avoid panicking the population of this city. A retired criminal psychologist who wishes to remain anonymous has told this reporter that the elaborate posing of these bodies in snowmen is the unmistakable mark of a psychopathic serial killer …’ She paused dramatically, looking straight into the camera. ‘A killer who will most probably strike again.’

Before he had time to put his fist through the TV screen, the phone rang, and he didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know who it was.

‘Gino.’

‘Leo, I want you to feel free to mentally insert as much profanity as possible into my side of the conversation, because I’m sitting here with my kids and I can’t do it myself.’

‘I take it you’re watching Channel Three.’

Gino sputtered, but apparently couldn’t manage to eke out a G-rated word.

‘They haven’t really said anything we haven’t been thinking ourselves, Gino.’

‘It isn’t what they said; it’s the way they said it. Bunch of bullshit scaremongering. Kids are going to be afraid of snowmen. They’ll stop building them. Then they’ll grow up and won’t let
their
kids
build snowmen. The networks will never show the
Frosty the Snowman
cartoon again, and all the radio stations’ll pull the song off their playlists. Gene Autry’s family will never see another residual check again. This could change the winter landscape of the whole country just because Kristin Keller’s got a hard-on for a network slot.’ He finally wound down his rant and signed off, leaving Magozzi with a warm beer and a mountain of paperwork.

8

Kurt Weinbeck blinked himself awake, then jerked upright in the seat and looked around in a panic, wondering how the hell he’d managed to fall asleep in the first place, and what had awakened him. The cold, probably. Or maybe it was a gust of wind, rocking the little car. No, that couldn’t be it. This piece-of-crap tin was locked so tight in the holes that four bald tires had dug, it would have taken a hurricane to move it a fraction of an inch.

The ditch was ridiculously deep, and any Minnesota boy knew what that meant. They’d built the damn road right through the middle of a swamp, hauling in enough fill to raise it above the water line, and not a crumb more. So all through the state you had these roads towering above the surrounding land with ditches so deep, you could drown in them during the spring. Driving on them in winter was like an Olympic automobile balance-beam competition. One tire one inch too far one way or the other, and you were toast.

He’d known it the minute he’d felt the car skid and go airborne. If there hadn’t been two feet of
fresh snow waiting at the bottom, he would have busted an axle when it finally smacked down. No way he was going to get it out, but still he tried, rocking back and forth as long as the tires grabbed snow, digging himself in another few inches when they spun, until the friction of the tires finally froze the snow around them into ice and they locked up tight. Worse yet, he’d dug himself in so far that the snow had packed around the doors and there was no way he could push them open.

Goddamned snow coffin, is what it was. Ol’ Cameron Weinbeck just dug himself in so deep, the snow packed the doors shut and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to get out. ’Course he was pretty well pickled like always, so maybe it wasn’t so bad, sitting there waitin’ for his eyelids to freeze open and his fingers break and fall off. Probably had himself a high old time until he emptied the last bottle, then I suspect things went downhill from there
.

It wasn’t your standard run-of-the-mill eulogy, but it was the story he’d heard most, standing around his dad’s coffin as an eight-year-old. And here he was, twenty-four years later, about to relive a family legacy.

He’d almost wet his pants right then, until he remembered to roll down the window and squeeze out that way.

It had been snowing hard by the time he crawled out of the car and got to the top of the ditch, and
the temperature was dropping way too fast for his thin coat and tennis shoes. He looked around at the snowy woods, empty land, and deserted road and thought,
Middle of nowhere,
which was an overused phrase in this state until you realized it was the place you got to whenever you turned a corner this far north of the Cities.

The newscasters started hammering viewers over the head with the winter driving rules sometime in mid-November. You had to have a kit in the trunk: candles, matches, canned soup, blankets, and a bunch of other stuff that was supposed to save your life if you were ever stupid enough to do what he and his father and scores of other Minnesotans did every winter. Trouble was, people who were stupid enough to get stuck in a ditch in the middle of a snowstorm were apparently too stupid to carry a kit, because there sure as hell wasn’t one in this car. Damn hatchback didn’t even have a trunk.

So on to the second rule, and this was the big one: Stay with the car. Someone will find you. He looked around and thought that was pretty unlikely. Besides, being found wasn’t exactly first on his list. He knew then that he’d have to walk out, he’d have to find himself another car, and then he’d have to get out of this damn state, and, by God, he was never coming back.

But first he had one last piece of business to take
care of, and he hadn’t for one second considered leaving it undone. He’d spent the last three years stewing in a cell, thinking about it, waiting for the day, and now the day was here.

So he’d cleared the snow away from the exhaust pipe, then crawled back into the car to warm up a little before his trek; see if he couldn’t dry out his shoes a little. He’d turned the heater on high, leaving the window open a crack so he wouldn’t gas himself to death.

A good move, he thought, because the heat had put him right to sleep for a solid two hours – it was three a.m. already – and chances were, the new snow had blocked the exhaust a while back.

He shut off the car and climbed out the window for the second and last time, and started walking. He didn’t know where the hell he was, but he knew where he had to be. Back to the lake, then just follow the shore, because if there was one place in Minnesota you’d find some kind of civilization, it was anywhere near water. Damn lakeshore property sold for a small fortune, even at the tippy-top of the tall state. The lake wasn’t that far back, and maybe slogging it wouldn’t be so bad.

You live long enough in prison where the lights are on all the time, you forget what real dark is like. Even in a landscape buried in white, you had to have a little illumination to reflect off it, or you were
walking blind. The moon was ideal – lit up the world like a big strobe in the winter – but even starlight was enough when you had this much snow. But there was no moon, no stars, and he had to work at staying on the road to find his way back.

He found the lake after half an hour, but already, he couldn’t feel his feet. The snow around the lakeshore was even deeper than it had been on the road, crawling up over his knees, soaking his jeans and then freezing them solid, until they scratched his calves every time he took a step.

Another half hour, and most of his face was stiff and the nerves had shut down, and still he hadn’t seen a single house, a single structure of any kind, except the ghostly shadows of fish shacks on the ice he’d passed earlier. A lot of them had heaters, and, Lord, he’d been tempted, but he couldn’t go back there.

Fifteen minutes more and he decided that this was the biggest lake in the state, the only one without houses on it, and that he was going to die. The funny thing was that it wasn’t even that cold out; not by Minnesota standards. Ten, maybe even fifteen degrees, and freezing to death in that kind of balmy winter temperature would be just plain embarrassing.

So he pushed on for another agonizing ten minutes, veering away from the lakeshore, up a
shallow hill to a flat, empty field that seemed to go on forever. The hill, shallow as it was, had damn near killed him. By the time he got to the top he’d fallen twice, his lungs were burning, and the sweat was freezing his hair to his forehead. That’s when he started counting steps instead of minutes, and he knew that was a bad sign. Bend a knee, he told himself, then let the thigh muscles scream while he lifted a foot he could no longer feel above the snow, then stop to breathe and cough and then do it all over again with the other leg. He stopped counting at five, because he couldn’t remember the number that came next. And that’s when he saw it.

Such a dim, tiny light, barely visible in the distance through the falling snow, maybe a mirage, but maybe not. He started counting steps again.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of shelter he’d been hoping for, but it was out of the wind, a few degrees warmer than the outside, and by God it was going to save his sorry life, and the truth was that for the first time in a long time, he had a lot to live for.

Payback,
he thought, stumbling around on half-frozen feet, feeling his way in the darkness with half-frozen fingers until he found what he needed to survive the night.