P Tracy - Snow Blind

‘I can’t believe you were stupid enough to even try to bike over today. How’s your knee?’

Roadrunner touched the throbbing goose egg he’d sustained on one of his falls and cringed. ‘It’s okay. I put ice on it. And I had to give it a try. Cabs and buses aren’t running today.’

‘You’ve gotta get yourself some wheels one of these days, you know that?’ He patted the steering wheel tenderly. ‘Get one of these little honeys and it’ll change your life. Might even be able to score yourself a date.’

‘This thing is obscene. I can’t believe you bought it.’

‘Lighten up. I’m a big man and I need big wheels. Besides, it’s not like I live in L.A. and I’m shuttling kids to soccer practice in it. This is strictly a winter vehicle, and we live in Minnesota.’

‘You could have bought a hybrid. They have some nice hybrid SUVs now.’

‘Right. They’re nice if you hate cars. I mean, do you see Arnold driving a hybrid? I don’t think so.’ Harley put the Hummer in reverse and stomped on the accelerator. It didn’t even shimmy as it munched over an icy drift.

Roadrunner rolled his eyes and gave up on a losing battle. ‘So why are you so hot on working today? I thought you were bored.’

‘I was, until I started playing around on the Web last night and came across some pretty wild stuff about that whole snowman thing in the park yesterday.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, just for the hell of it, I plugged the Monkeewrench crime stat software in to cruise the net before I went to bed last night, just to see if any twisted sister had ever put a body in a snowman before. When I got up and checked the run record this morning, the thing had worked six hours before it pulled one hit, some renegade thread from a chat room, and it didn’t say much – just “Minneapolis snowmen” and a couple lines in all caps that said, “Kill him while there’s still time. Put him in a snowman.”’

Roadrunner shrugged. ‘So what? There’s a million crazies on the Web saying sick crap like that.’

‘I’m with you a hundred percent on that, but the thing is, that message was posted at nine a.m. Central Standard Time, yesterday morning.’

‘Uh… okay. Is that supposed to mean something?’

Harley scowled at him. ‘Hell, yes, it means something! Think, Roadrunner – Magozzi and Gino didn’t find the bodies until noon Saturday. Three hours after the original post. Somebody knew about those bodies in the snowmen a long time before they were discovered.’

Roadrunner’s mouth dropped open. ‘Holy shit, Harley. Did you go into the chat room? Did you trace the thread?’

‘I sure as hell tried. I couldn’t hack that site to save my life.’

‘Come on…’

‘I’m serious. This thing’ll drive you nuts. The URLs keep shifting, the codes keep changing, and I’m thinking they’ve got this thing programmed to reroute on some kind of a weird loop. You know the last time I couldn’t hack into any site?’

‘Never.’

‘Exactly.’

Roadrunner’s eyes started jerking back and forth the way they did when he got upset. ‘We’ve got to find a way, Harley. We’ve got to trace that thread, and then we’ve got to call Magozzi.’

‘Now you know why we’re all working today.’

Grace was trying to coax magic out of one of the several Monkeewrench computers when Harley and Roadrunner got up to the third-floor office in Harley’s Summit Avenue mansion. Annie Belinsky was hovering behind her, all her glorious excess poundage decked out in a red velvet dress with white ermine trim and matching knee-high stiletto boots.

‘Any luck yet?’ Harley asked as he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it on the floor.

Annie shook her head in disgust. ‘We’ve been going at it from separate angles, and a few minutes ago Grace managed to break through a firewall. In the time it took me to walk from my desk to hers, it kicked her off.’

Grace pushed herself away from the desk and rubbed her eyes. ‘And I just figured out why. There was another firewall behind the first one; probably another one behind that. We did what? Seven corporate security jobs in the past three months? And this is as good as anything we did. Maybe better, and it’s just a stupid chat room.’

Annie click-clacked back to her own desk and cleared her screen. ‘Lord, I hate it when people try to keep me out of a conversation. Forward the path you took, Grace. I don’t care how many firewalls there are, I’m going to knock them down one by one until I get in there.’

‘I put the path on the network so we could all work it, but this is going to take a while…’ The phone interrupted her. She picked up when she saw Minneapolis Police come up on the caller ID. She listened for a minute, then said, ‘Give me the name, and then give us five minutes.’ She ended the call quickly, then spun her chair to look at the rest of them. ‘Forget the chat room for now. That was Tommy Espinoza from MPD. He needs some help in a hurry.’

‘Something to do with the snowman murders?’ Annie asked.

‘No. It’s a different case. We have to find a woman before her ex-husband does.’

‘Is it bad?’

‘It sounds like it might be real bad.’

Harley brought his screen to life with the jiggle of his mouse. ‘What do we have to go on?’

‘Just a name. Julie Albright.’

‘Great. Do we even know what state she’s in?’

‘We’ll start with Minnesota.’

‘Why are the cops having such trouble finding her?’ Roadrunner asked.

‘She’s in hiding.’

‘But if the cops can’t find her, how’s the ex-husband going to?’

‘He stole some files. He knows where she is.’

‘So does the IRS,’ Harley said, his fingers flying over his keyboard. ‘Why didn’t Espinoza try that?’

‘He did. It’s a sealed file.’

Harley’s hands dropped to his lap. ‘Jeez, Grace, the confidentials are a bitch to break into. This is going to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes.’

‘Then we’d better get started.’

Ten minutes later, while the rest of them were still clattering on their keyboards, Annie clapped her hands and said, ‘Found her… oh, for heaven’s sake, would you look at that. Her address is Bitterroot.’

‘Our Bitterroot?’ Grace asked.

‘The very same. Dundas County.’

Harley made a face. ‘That place up in the sticks where we tweaked all that high-tech security last fall? Who the hell lives at a corporation?’

Grace picked up the phone and started to dial Tommy Espinoza. ‘She probably uses her place of work as a mailing address. She’s in hiding, remember?’

By the time Gino and Magozzi started to head back to the Cities, the snow had stopped and the clouds had moved east into Wisconsin. As far as Gino was concerned, the view had been a whole lot better when snow was obliterating the landscape. He eyed the snow-drifted fields and scattered farms with the deep suspicion of a man who has found himself in a foreign country.

‘I don’t know, Leo. You ask me, farmland is just plain butt-ugly. Too many empty fields with nothing to look at.’

Magozzi smiled, mostly because he was in a warm car on his way back to the city, and the snowplows had managed to swipe the roads since the harrowing drive out here. ‘In the summer those so-called empty fields produce a lot of what makes you the corn-fed beauty you are.’

‘Well, they ought to scrap some of the cornfields and grow a few restaurants. I swear to God, when we passed those cows a minute ago, I started salivating.’

‘Five miles to Dundas City and that place Sampson recommended.’

Gino snorted. ‘Yeah, right. The Swedish Grill, which has got to be a local joke. You ever see a Swedish chef with his own cooking show? There’s a reason for that, aside from the fact that all their food is white. They’ve got no cuisine, no palates, and no business grilling stuff.’