P Tracy - Snow Blind

Sometimes you had to have quiet, to think about things, or stop thinking about them. Women didn’t get that. It was one of the ten million things he’d simply accepted and stopped trying to understand a long time ago. Women’s and men’s minds worked differently. It didn’t make one method better than the other; it just made working with the opposite sex – on the job or in a relationship – a whole lot tougher.

‘Ah, shit,’ Gino said suddenly, and Magozzi smiled. Typical male conversation starter.

‘What?’

‘Damn watch stopped. You know I hate these things. My dad’s watch stopped, he wound it back up. Nowadays you have to make a trip to the store, wait in line for some gum-cracking kid to sell you a battery, wait again while they try to figure out what battery fits and how the hell to get the case apart… crap. How come the dash clock doesn’t work?’

‘Probably because no one had time to read the two-hundred-page manual and learn how to set the thing.’

‘New cars, new watches, and we still can’t make anything work. The world is going to hell.’

‘In many ways.’

Gino let out a noisy sigh, as if he’d been holding his breath for thirty minutes. ‘I gotta tell you, Leo, Bitterroot kind of messed me up. Left me conflicted. I looked at Julie Albright’s face, thought to myself, we’re spitting in the ocean here. A couple days ago we’re all on top of ourselves ’cause we got that woman out of the trunk before she died, and then… Christ, I can’t even remember her name…’

‘Betty Ekman.’

‘Yeah, damnit, and then we find out there’s a whole goddamned town filled with Betty Ekmans and Julie Albrights, and why the hell couldn’t we get to them before they got stuffed in trunks or cut to pieces?’

Magozzi closed his eyes. ‘We do what we can, Gino.’

‘Oh, yeah? Then how come four hundred women had to build a whole damn town to keep themselves safe? Shit. How am I supposed to go home and tell Angela about that? She’ll give me a drink and a plate of pasta to die for, pat my head because I feel bad, but all the time she’ll be giving me that doe-eyed look, the sad one, like I should be able to fix it.’

‘She does not think that, and you know it.’

‘Maybe not, but the thing is, you feel personally responsible for one woman, you start feeling personally responsible for all of them, and Bitterroot was an in-your-face reminder of how goddamned short we fall.’

‘So maybe you skip Bitterroot when you tell Angela about your day.’

‘You’re kidding. Whaddya think? You get to keep this stuff to yourself when you’re married?’ Gino looked immediately contrite. It was getting harder and harder to remember that Magozzi had been married once, and that Heather hadn’t given a shit about Leo’s job. ‘Sorry, buddy. I keep forgetting about Heather.’

‘I wish I could.’

It was barely after five, and already full dark by the time they got back to City Hall. It wasn’t the worst thing about winters in the Midwest, but it came close. Dark when you left for work in the morning, dark when you came home at night. Magozzi wondered if he’d remember what color his house was come spring.

Homicide had cleared out for supper, with the exception of Johnny McLaren, who was barely visible behind the towering piles of paperwork on his desk. The whole place reeked like microwave popcorn and scorched coffee, and trash cans were overflowing with empty soda cans and take-out containers.

‘Did we miss the party?’ Gino asked, poking around for leftovers.

McLaren was bleary-eyed and about as messy looking as his desk, but he was genuinely happy to see them. ‘Yeah. The dancing girls just left.’

‘If Gloria sees this pigsty, she’s going to have your hide, Johnny.’

‘That’s what I’m hoping for.’ He pushed back from his desk and stifled a yawn. ‘Hey, did you guys do a drive-by out front? Is the building still under siege?’

Magozzi was at his desk, leafing through message slips. Half of them were from reporters, the other half from garden-variety crazies who claimed they’d seen alien spacecraft, the Loch Ness monster, a yeti, and the ghost of Karl Marx building snowmen in Theodore Wirth Park Friday night. Nothing from Grace. Not that she’d ever leave a paper trail. ‘We parked in the underground lot and snuck in that way. There were still satellite vans on Fourth, though. They’ll probably camp out until the ten o’clock news.’

McLaren shook his head in disgust. ‘I watched the early news – you should hear all the talking heads playing profiler. I didn’t know whether to laugh or puke. They’ve got their hearts set on some diabolical serial killer who was beaten and tortured as a child in front of Christmas cartoons.’

‘Sounds plausible,’ Gino said, sampling a half-eaten lemon bar.

‘Any mention of the Dundas snowman?’ Magozzi asked, dragging a chair up to McLaren’s desk and sagging into it.

‘No. Kind of a miracle, isn’t it? I don’t know how you guys managed to keep that under wraps for this long, but whatever you did, it worked.’

‘Simple – nobody lives in Dundas County,’ Gino said. ‘You could test nukes up there and it would take a month before anybody noticed the tap water was glowing… Johnny, you shouldn’t eat this microwave popcorn.’ He pointed to a stainless-steel bowl brimming with unnaturally yellow puffs. ‘They use that fake butter that stays in your bloodstream for the rest of your life.’

‘No kidding?’

‘That’s what I heard. Hey, where’s Tinker?’

McLaren winced, suddenly remembering that Magozzi and Gino hadn’t gotten the full story when they were up in Dundas. ‘He went to notify Steve Doyle’s wife. He didn’t mention this to you on the phone, but I guess he was a pretty close friend. That’s how he got wind of it in the first place – Doyle’s wife called him at home early this morning in a panic.’

Gino’s hand had stopped halfway to the bowl of poison popcorn. ‘Damnit. I knew he sounded funny on the phone when I told him Steve Doyle was the Dundas snowman. How’s he doing?’

‘He’s taking it hard, and, man, does he want Weinbeck. BCA called in a prelim on the Dundas scene, and so far they’ve got zilch for forensics. Same thing with the body. Nothing that would really point a legal finger at Weinbeck.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘I thought everything pointed a finger at Weinbeck. He had an appointment with Doyle, there’s blood and signs of a struggle in the parole office…’

‘Yeah, yeah, we even got some partials of Weinbeck’s on the remote for the TV up there, but the only tune he has to sing is that he showed for the appointment, he and Doyle talked, watched a little TV, that Doyle was alive and well when he left, and as of now, we can’t prove him wrong.’

‘The file with his ex-wife’s address is missing.’

McLaren shrugged. ‘So Doyle took the file with him, maybe headed up to Bitterroot to talk to Julie Albright, and on the way the psycho snowman serial killer mugged him.’

Gino blew a raspberry. ‘That’s a crock of shit.’

‘I know that. You know that. We just can’t prove it. Hell, we’ve got a prosecutor who thinks circumstantial evidence against jaywalkers should get them the chair, and even he wouldn’t touch this one.’

‘We need to place Weinbeck in Dundas County.’

‘That would help. Finding Doyle’s car up there with Weinbeck’s prints all over it, something like that.’

Gino started fishing for popcorn again. ‘Dundas is looking. At least I hope they are. That new sheriff’s got less experience in the field than my two-year-old. I don’t know what her idea of a dragnet is, but it probably involves setting out a plate of cookies with a net over it.’