P Tracy - Snow Blind

As they drove inside the gates, all that could be seen in any direction were woods and fields, all buried under snow. ‘What complex?’

‘Over the next hill.’

And indeed it was. A cluster of modern buildings with a courtyard and landscaped parking lot. It looked like a dozen other corporate complexes that grew like weeds all over the Minneapolis suburbs. Except this one was out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a ten-foot-high cyclone fence with armed guards at the gate. It wasn’t the first time Magozzi had seen elaborate corporate security, but this seemed a little over the top for a place that made jelly and face powder. So did the metal detector and second armed guard at the building entrance.

A woman Sampson introduced as Maggie Holland was waiting for them in a large office just off the lobby. She could have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years old – Magozzi was finding it harder and harder to tell these days – but it was an age span that made him a little uneasy, probably because a lot of women in that group were long past the time when they expected anything extraordinary from men. Fractured fairy tales, he thought. We all take the rap for that.

Ms Holland greeted them all cordially enough, but made a particular fuss over the new sheriff, just as the guard at the gate had. Iris Rikker apparently had a fan club out here she didn’t know about.

After the pleasantries, she slipped straight into no-nonsense mode. ‘Julie Albright will not go with you.’

Gino nodded. ‘That’s what she told our detective on the phone. We might need your help talking her into it.’

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly do that. She’s much safer here than she would be with you. Perfectly safe, in fact.’

Gino got a little impatient when he still had a long drive to make it to Angela’s spaghetti. ‘Listen, we saw the security you’ve got out here, and let me tell you, a fence, a couple of guards, and a metal detector might put a damper on corporate espionage or whatever the hell you’re worried about, but it’s not going to stop a man like Kurt Weinbeck. He already killed a man to get to her. Your little fence isn’t even going to slow him down.’

‘There’s a little more to it than a fence and a couple of guards, Detective Rolseth.’ Ms Holland pressed a button on her desk computer and a portion of a wall parted to reveal an enormous computer screen. She pressed a few more keys and a mosaic of live video feeds appeared.

Magozzi recognized the guardhouse at the entrance, the parking lot, and the lobby they’d just passed through, but there were at least twenty other views displayed, some outside, some showing various offices and labs he assumed were somewhere in this building. He examined them all carefully.

‘This screen is displaying views from all the security cameras in what we call Quadrant One. Bitterroot is divided into twenty quadrants, all monitored with cameras and motion detectors and analyzed in real time by our security staff in the media room, twenty-four hours a day. It’s based on the surveillance the casinos in Las Vegas use.’

‘Impressive. How many cameras?’

‘Hundreds of them. But we can’t possibly monitor every square inch of a thousand-acre compound, so we had a local software company integrate the motion detectors and the cameras. Now when something moves out of camera view, the detectors direct the nearest camera to adjust the view to follow it.’

Gino was jabbing Magozzi with his elbow, jerking his head toward the screen, but Magozzi had already seen it: a tiny Monkeewrench logo at the bottom of the screen.

‘We also have security around the clock patrolling the compound and particularly the perimeter. And there are more layers of security, but I think you get the picture. Nothing you have on the outside can offer this level of protection to Julie.’

Magozzi looked straight at her while his thoughts moved fast, racing through the details his cop’s eyes had recorded for the brain to sort through later. ‘So just exactly how many Julie Albrights do you have living here?’

He’d surprised her with that one, and Maggie Holland didn’t look like the kind of woman who surprised easily. ‘Very good, Detective. Quite a leap, actually, in view of the little you’ve seen…’ She glanced at Sampson. ‘Or were you told in advance?’

Magozzi caught the look. ‘No. And it wasn’t that much of a leap. The only people I’ve seen here so far are all women, including the ones on your camera screens up there. Now that probably isn’t so unusual for a cosmetics company, but your security guards are all women, too, and you don’t see a lot of that. Add Julie Albright and the security to the mix and it makes you wonder. Plus, you’ve got a real faint scar across your throat that looks a little ragged for surgery, and your nose has been broken and healed a couple of times. Way I figure, that makes two of you, at least.’

Gino had been frowning hard, trying to follow the underpinnings of the conversation. Suddenly his face cleared. ‘Oh, man, it was right there in front of my nose and still I was about ten steps behind on that one. And there are at least three, by the way. The guard at the metal detector had some broken fingers on her left hand, never set. Twist injury, from the way they healed. So how many more?’

Ms Holland looked at him calmly. ‘All of them.’ She glanced over at Sampson, who was looking down at the floor, but of course he had always known; and then over at poor Sheriff Rikker, who was struggling to put it all together.

Iris had been staring at the scar on Maggie Holland’s neck ever since Magozzi mentioned it. It was unforgivably rude, which was totally unlike her, and yet she couldn’t pull her eyes away. It was one thing to watch the news stories and learn the statistics in class; even listening to all the domestic calls that came over dispatch still kept her one step removed. But to see evidence of the reality was like a hard slap across the face. She felt like she’d been sucked up from her world and abruptly dropped into a new one, where men didn’t leave their wives, they beat the crap out of them.

‘Every woman who lives here came because she wasn’t safe on the outside,’ Ms Holland was saying.

‘Same thing with the men?’ Gino asked.

‘There are no men. That’s what keeps the women safe.’

Gino was frowning. ‘Wait a minute. How many people live here?’

‘Almost four hundred.’

‘And not one of them is a man.’

‘That’s correct. No man ever enters this property without a day pass and an escort.’ She smiled at Sampson. ‘Not even police officers.’

Gino looked at Magozzi. ‘Is that even legal?’

‘Probably. It’s private property. We keep men out of the safe houses in the city, and basically, that’s what this place is starting to look like. One big, permanent safe house.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘It’s not a safe house. It’s a town that happens to be safe. That’s all any of us wanted, a place we could be safe from rape, murder, assaults against our children… It didn’t take long for the founders of Bitterroot to figure out that all they had to do to eliminate those dangers was one thing: eliminate the men.’

Eliminate the men. Magozzi’s brain ran into the brick wall of those three words and revved there like a useless, speeding engine. He tried to remember that his real job was back in the Cities, trying to find the murderer of two cops, that Kurt Weinbeck probably didn’t have a thing to do with his real case, that he had a job and a sort-of life and a woman he cherished who wouldn’t talk to him – but he was having trouble focusing. He kept hearing those same three disturbing words over and over in his head, and the worst part was the brain tickle that told him he’d heard those words before, or something like them. ‘That’s a pretty damn extreme solution,’ he finally managed to say.