P Tracy - Snow Blind

It was the first time Iris noticed that the icy mix had changed over to full snow. Funny what your mind shut out when you were totally focused on a simple thing, like trying to stay alive.

They followed the prints down the drive, almost to the barn, and that’s where Sampson stopped. His light followed the trail up to the barn door, then he moved the flash up and down the enormous length of the building. ‘What’s in there?’

Iris knew exactly what he was asking. ‘A lot of empty space, and a lot of places to hide.’

Halfway through Sampson’s nod, the old barn made one of those old barn noises it was always making. He stiffened like a dog on point, then started making funny stabbing gestures all over the place. Iris had a momentary brain freeze. One hour in class, another studying the illustrations, and she’d had all the signals down, but they looked a lot different coming from a real cop instead of a cartoonish drawing in a textbook.

She was to go to the right around the building; he would go left. No noise.

Iris didn’t stop to think about it; she didn’t dare. She just started to move the way she’d been taught, and the second she took her first step through the knee-deep, ice-crusted snow that had drifted up against the building, her brain seemed to close the door on everything except the information her senses were feeding it. The animal-like focus lasted for two more steps, until she heard the sirens and saw the reflection of red and blue lights against the weathered siding as squads started to pull into the driveway.

‘Go!’ Sampson yelled at her, because the sirens had stolen the advantage of silence, and now they had to move faster.

By the time they met on the back side of the barn, there were five other officers slogging as fast as possible through the deep snow to join them.

Sampson and Iris both had their flashlights on a trail of bizarre-looking tracks that started at one of the barn’s back doors and headed straight across the snowy field into the night.

‘What the hell kind of tracks are those?’ someone asked.

‘Snowshoe,’ Iris said, remembering Mark’s notion to embrace winter sports once they had moved out to the country. He’d abandoned that idea after five minutes on the netted paddles last November, almost as fast as he’d abandoned his marriage. ‘My ex-husband had a pair hanging in the barn.’

Deputy Neville, the blue-eyed, baby-faced officer who’d stood near Steve Doyle’s body and wished her a pleasant good morning, moved next to Iris, playing his flashlight over the rolling field that grew corn in the summer and snow in the winter. ‘What’s on the other side of the field?’

‘Sarley Game Preserve,’ Iris said. ‘Five thousand acres of trees and swamps.’

Sampson stared hard at nothing, seeing the Dundas County plat map in his mind. ‘Damnit.

Lake Kittering backs up to the far side of that preserve. Courthouse on the east side of the lake, Bitterroot land on the west. He’s got a straight shot and big head start.’ He jerked his head toward Iris.

‘You have a sled?’

Iris shook her head.

‘Kendall, get on the horn, get the snowmobiles over here fast, as many as they’ve got, then all the rest of you head for Bitterroot, double up on the perimeter patrols. Neville, stick around, we’re going to have to take a look in that barn, just in case…’ He looked down at where Iris was digging under his jacket, around his belt line. He didn’t know what to make of that.

‘Cell phone!’ Iris said, and snatched it away the second he had it out of the holster. While Sampson continued to bark out orders, she called dispatch, pulled all the patrols in tight around Lake Kittering and the game preserve, and then called Maggie Holland at Bitterroot and got her out of bed. When she finished, Sampson took the phone and made one last call to Detective Magozzi’s cell.

Son of a bitch, it was cold, even with all the heavy winter gear he’d found in the basement. If it hadn’t been for that lucky little score, he’d probably be as dead as a doornail by now, laying out here in the field, turning into a snowman himself. Now, there would be some irony.

The snowshoes had been another stroke of luck. They sure as hell took some getting used to, and they were a pain in the ass, collecting snow and bogging him down every couple hundred yards, but he couldn’t have gotten this far, this fast, without them.

And come to think of it, that whole basement thing could have ended badly if the owner of the house had decided to come down to clean the litter box or throw in a load of dirty laundry while he was snoring away by the furnace. But it hadn’t gone down like that, and Kurt Weinbeck was starting to believe that his fortune was finally turning for the first time in his life. Things happened for a reason. Maybe this whole plan of his was destiny, and that fate or the gods or whoever was running the show was on his side, smiling down on him, making sure he had his chance to make things right.

The only problem was, he still wasn’t sure how he wanted his plan to end, or how to make things right. Part of him – the weak part of him – wanted to give Julie another chance, take her and the kid down to Mexico with him and start over, build a new life together. Maybe buy a little place by the beach, get a small trawler, and set up a fishing charter business or something. He wasn’t a wealthy man by any stretch, but he had done pretty well for himself selling insurance and bartending part-time… His thoughts ground to a halt.

Had done pretty well. Past tense. Had done pretty well for himself until that goddamned fucking bitch had sent him to prison. And he just wasn’t sure if he could live with her after that. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of torture she’d put him through; what it was like in hell day after day, month after month, year after year, and know you’d never be able to erase those memories, no matter how hard you tried. No way she’d ever felt that kind of pain.

He felt a white-hot rage building and boiling inside as he thought about the injustice of it all, and his anger, so pure and perfect, gave him the moment of clarity he’d been seeking, just like it always did. Suddenly, he knew exactly what to do. He needed to show her the pain, needed to make her understand what she’d done to him. That was the only way justice would be served. It was payback time.

And then he’d probably have to kill her, because odds were, she wouldn’t survive the road trip south once he was finished teaching her a lesson.

The snow was coming down hard now, and visibility was so bad, he almost ran smack into the fence before he saw it. With a little friendly persuasion, Steve Doyle had been kind enough to warn him about all of Bitterroot’s security, so he’d come prepared to deal with the fence – the bolt cutter he’d found on the basement tool bench would make short work of it.

He examined the fence a little more carefully, looking for the security cameras Doyle had told him about – there was something that could have been a camera perched on a metal stalk about three feet to his right, but it was so crusted with ice and snow, there was no way it was picking up anything but white. Yes indeed, luck was on his side today.

He went down on his knees and put the bolt cutter to work.

There was a row of overheads in the peak of the thirty-foot roof, but they didn’t do much to light up the interior of the barn. Not one of them believed that Weinbeck was still in there, but the place itself was enough to spook anyone, with or without an armed killer hiding behind a post or molding hay bale. The intermittent creaks and groans of the old barn that always seemed to shift and complain, even on the stillest of nights, made it sound like the building was about to come down around their heads.