P Tracy - Snow Blind

Jimmy was a nice guy in general, but he was especially kind to kids, animals, lost souls, and the uninitiated – he didn’t have to know her history to figure out that she was out of her element and stumbling up a sharp learning curve, and he made the effort to put her at ease. ‘If you have any questions, Sheriff, come to me – these two don’t know anything – they’re just a couple of pretty faces. We let ’em hang around so they can schmooze the media.’

Iris smiled, shaking his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Grimm, and thank you so much for coming.’

Jesus, Magozzi thought. She’s standing in a tent with a dead body and a bunch of crime-scene techs and she sounds like a hostess at a cocktail party. ‘So what have you got so far, Jimmy?’ he said, interrupting the nice-fest.

‘Take a look for yourselves. Make a hole, boys,’ Jimmy directed the techs with cameras, and they cleared a space for Gino and Magozzi to step in closer.

Gino looked at the thing, then his face crunched up like it did that time he took a bite of McLaren’s anchovy pizza. Rikker had been right. If it had started out like one of the storybook snowmen in the park, the weather had made a mess of it. The big head was sleet-pitted and misshapen, with icy rivulets frozen on the fat cheeks, as if the damn thing had been crying. But the snowman shape was absolutely there, and the guy attached to those blue-white hands sure as hell hadn’t built it around himself.

‘Could be number three,’ Magozzi said, standing next to him, and Gino nodded.

Iris stood rock-still a few paces back, feet, hands, and nose already numbed by the cold, trying to look somber and professional, although what she really wanted to do was jump up and down and clap her hands. Number three meant it was the Minneapolis killer, and that meant it was their case, and they’d snatch the investigation right away from her. Oh, darn. She kept her smile deep inside.

‘Or it could be a copycat,’ Magozzi said.

Iris’s inside smile faltered.

‘I don’t like the posing thing,’ Detective Rolseth was saying. ‘Damn fishing pole freaks me out as much as the skis did. Almost worse if it is a copycat – that means there might be more than one out there this sick.’

‘Maybe it’s not posed,’ someone said from behind them, introducing himself as Lieutenant Sampson when they turned around. ‘Seems I heard the two you found in the park were skiing when they caught it. Maybe this guy was ice-fishing.’

‘No way anybody’s going fishing in this kind of weather,’ Gino said.

Sampson shrugged. ‘It’s winter. It snows. Weather doesn’t bother the fish, and it sure doesn’t bother the fishermen. Every one of those shacks out there is pumping smoke right now.’

‘Pumping smoke?’

‘From the heaters.’

‘They got heaters in those things?’ Gino asked.

‘Heaters, TVs, beer coolers. Standard equipment. But those are the players. The die-hards still sit outside in the weather, like this guy. Easier to move yourself than a shack when it’s time to auger a new hole.’

‘This is the damnedest way to have a good time I ever heard of.’

Sampson smiled at him. ‘You ought to give it a try sometime.’

‘No way. God made ice for hockey and scotch, and that’s about it. But either way, posed or not, we’ve moved on to another winter sport here…’

‘And another killing field,’ Magozzi added. ‘If it isn’t a copycat, we got a traveler.’

Gino looked down at his boots. ‘Shit.’

‘All yours.’ A tech carrying all the cameras passed Jimmy on his way out of the tent. ‘I’m going to get these back in the van.’

Magozzi looked around at all the faces inside the tent. ‘Where’s Anant?’

Dr Anantanand Rambachan was chief medical examiner for Hennepin County; philosopher of the world, as far as Magozzi was concerned; and the one person he knew in the whole system who’d managed to retain every ounce of his humanity. More important, he’d examined Deaton’s and Myerson’s bodies in the park yesterday after Gino and Magozzi left, and Magozzi had really wanted him on this scene, too.

‘He’s back in the Cities with a five-year-old girl on the table,’ Jimmy answered. ‘Went through the ice on Cedar Lake last night, and you know how Anant feels about kids.’

Magozzi did. No matter what else he was working on, if a child came through the ugly swinging doors, Anant tended them before all others. Always, Detective Magozzi, we put the babies to bed first. In life, and in death, this is the right thing.

‘So who do we have?’ he asked Jimmy.

‘Dr Dredlock.’

Magozzi gave him a disapproving head shake.

‘Hey, I call him that to his face all the time. He thinks it’s funny. Besides, his real name’s Rowland, and it plain doesn’t go with hair like that. Anyway, he’s good, Anant likes him, I like him, and he assisted on Deaton and Myerson yesterday, so he’s running with the book. He already did a prelim and pronounced our friend here, then hightailed it back to the van to warm up. He’ll come back out for the finish once we get the snow peeled away.’

Jimmy watched the rest of his crew snugging a plastic tarp all around the ice-fishing snowman, and when they were satisfied, he rubbed his mittened hands together. ‘Okay, just like yesterday at the park, boys and girls. Let’s crack this snowman, see what we’ve got.’

Iris held her ground but closed her eyes and listened to the sound of snow chunks being laid carefully on the plastic tarp. She opened them when she heard a big piece fall to the plastic and someone hiss, ‘Oh, shit.’

The snowman – what was left of it – looked bizarre. Although the head was relatively intact, all of the snow on the man’s torso had fallen away at once. Probably, Iris thought in a detached, scientific part of her mind, because all the blood had kept it from sticking properly. The man’s chest was a mess. So you had Frosty the Snowman’s head stuck on top of a horror movie.

Iris felt herself start to tip over, and then she felt a strong, mittened hand on her upper arm, pushing against her, holding her steady.

‘Deep, slow breaths,’ a voice said very quietly. ‘Move your eyes away, don’t close them. Just breathe.’

If she made the tiniest movement, like turning her head to see the face, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she would pass out in a dead faint. Or maybe throw up. But she recognized the voice. Rolseth, of all people, was saving the day, trying to make her look like an actual cop.

When they removed the snow from the head, Iris stared at the exposed bluish face; the closed, swollen eyes; the gaping mouth.

‘Anybody know this guy?’ Magozzi was asking.

Nobody did.

‘And I don’t suppose we have a chance in hell of printing those hands until he thaws.’

Jimmy Grimm shook his head. ‘Not a full set. They’re frozen tight to the pole. Try to move the fingers, they’ll snap like pretzel sticks. Try to pull the pole out, we’ll be ripping some serious skin.’ He crouched down for a closer look. ‘Might be able to give you something off that one thumb, though. It’s sticking out a little.’

‘Give it your best shot. The sooner we ID him, the sooner we’ll be able to look for a connection with the other two.’ Magozzi glanced back at Iris. ‘You’re hooked up to the database, right?’

Iris opened her mouth to speak, pretty excited to know the answer to at least one question, but Lieutenant Sampson beat her to the punch. ‘You get a print, I can run it from my squad in about ten minutes. Faster if he’s been printed by the state. We’ve got them all set up to run through the Minnesota database first. Saves a lot of time.’

That got Gino’s attention. ‘Wait a minute. I can’t make a cell call out here and you got computers in every squad with that kind of muscle?’