P Tracy - Snow Blind

But Maggie couldn’t turn around. Her mind was already fifteen years back in time, right after she’d stumbled for the last time in the darkened yard. She’d known then that if she didn’t move fast, Roy would catch her and kill her with the crowbar. And yet then, as now, terror paralyzed her. A single tear rolled down her cheek.

Stupid then, and stupid now, Maggie told herself just as the glass pane in the back door shattered behind her.

By the time they pulled up to the corporate building, the snow was really coming down, every light in the complex was blazing, and Dundas County cars were all over the lot.

Iris Rikker was standing in the middle of a cluster of newly arrived deputies, and although she didn’t look like much of a sheriff in her puffy parka and little moonboots, she seemed to be acting like one.

When Gino and Magozzi walked up, they heard her speaking tight, short and fast, not one extra word, just like a real cop, directing the officers in pairs wherever they were needed. Gino kept silent, brows raised, probably wondering how she’d learned to do that in the space of a day.

‘Where do you want us?’ he asked her, treating her like any other cop in command. Magozzi wondered if she knew what a compliment that was.

‘The fence was cut around the back of the property. I’ve got men tracking from that end, but they lost the trail about an acre in. Snowshoe tracks fill in fast, so now they’re just coursing. I put a contingent around Julie Albright’s place, the rest of us are doing house-to-house checks as fast as we can, but it’s a lot of houses.’

‘Point us in the right direction,’ Magozzi said.

‘I was on my way back anyway.’

She led them around the huge corporate building instead of through it. There was no road, but a path had already been beaten through the snow by the deputies who had come before them. Iris was moving fast.

‘He’s on snowshoes,’ she said as they hurried. ‘Easy to track, but we don’t know what kind of a head start he had. The ice froze the cameras so they can’t move and put the motion detectors out of business, so the communication center is blind. He could be anywhere.’

‘How tight is the cover on Julie Albright?’

‘Four outside, two in. We have Julie and her daughter in an interior room.’

Just saying Julie Albright’s name aloud hit Iris hard, and stopped the straight line of her thoughts, if not her feet. What the hell was she doing, and when had she become so arrogant? She’d run against a sitting sheriff who at least knew how to do the job, damnit, and her reasons hadn’t been one bit noble. And now it had all boiled down to this: a ruined woman and a beautiful child huddled in a house not too far from here, and whether or not they lived through this night depended on a pretend sheriff doing everything absolutely right.

She turned her head to look at Magozzi and Gino. ‘What else?’ she asked in a voice that sounded like a plea. ‘What else needs to be done? What did I forget? Sampson had to run to check on his sister…’

She looked scared to death, totally unlike the assured woman he’d seen directing deputies like a pro, and now Magozzi got it. Sampson had been her crutch all day, her teacher, probably, but he hadn’t been around for the big one. She’d done this on her own, and now she wasn’t sure it was enough. It would take years on the job before she realized you always felt like you hadn’t done enough.

‘It sounds good,’ he said, because that was the bare-bones truth, and Magozzi wasn’t big on head-patting.

‘Just like downtown,’ Gino added. ‘As long as you’ve got one of the outside guys at Julie’s pulled back for an overview, cause sometimes guys working a building get so focused they forget to look around…’

She didn’t even wait for him to finish; just started talking into a shoulder unit she had tucked under her jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Gino when she’d finished. ‘I didn’t know to do that.’

Gino shrugged. ‘You will next time.’

In the daylight, the village had looked idyllic; at night, it looked like a beautiful Christmas card gone wrong. A lot of the little houses still sported holiday lights, their colors softened and muted by the snow, and every tree branch glistened with a brand-new coating of ice. But there were armed men and women patrolling the narrow street now, approaching the cheery front doors like malevolent trick-or-treaters, and occasionally a fearful, cautious face peered from a lighted window.

‘You need to get those people away from the windows,’ Magozzi said, and Iris nodded.

‘We just started on this block. I had them cover the ones that backed up to open land first, the ones that were in a direct line from where the fence was cut.’

‘Let’s cover it, then.’

The three of them split up, moving fast, and after ten minutes and four houses, Magozzi thought that if he never saw that haunted look in a woman’s eyes again, it would be too soon. God. Every single face behind every single door looked the same.

He and Gino finished their last houses on the block at the same time, and met up in the middle of the narrow street. They saw Sheriff Rikker standing under a streetlight just ahead, making marks on a damp, wrinkled piece of paper, snow accumulating on her head and shoulders.

‘She stands still much longer in this, we’re gonna have to dig her out,’ Gino observed as they approached.

It was quiet on the block now, with all the houses searched. A few officers remained behind, assigned to patrol, but the snow deadened the sound of their movements. They could hear the shushing noise of their own boots pushing through the white stuff, even the scratch of Iris’s pen on the paper; but that was all.

‘This block next,’ Iris stabbed at a map of the village layout, then started leading the way.

They barely had a chance to move before they heard the shot. It was off to their left, down a continuation of the narrow street that cut into open land.

The sound had been muffled, Magozzi thought as all three of them started running; but you could tell it had started out big; maybe as big as the sound of the gun Kurt Weinbeck had used to blow a hole in Steve Doyle’s chest.

The mansion was silent except for the regular clicking of Grace’s keyboard. Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner were grabbing catnaps after working most of the night. She was exhausted herself, and sometimes, while she waited for a new line of programming to run, she’d feel her eyes start to flutter closed. But then she’d remind herself of what Magozzi had said about a killer being at the end of that chat room thread, and that woke her right up. There were three dead men in snowmen already, but maybe they could make sure there wouldn’t be a fourth.

The firewalls were getting harder and harder to break through. They’d found a second, then a third, and now Grace was beginning to wonder how many more there were, and how much time they had.

She pushed herself away from the desk and glared at the monitor. ‘I can’t keep doing this,’ she said aloud, and then suddenly realized how true that was; that of course she couldn’t keep doing this – and she didn’t have to. It was like when she used to keep Charlie’s big bag of food underneath the overhanging shelf in the pantry, just because that’s where she’d always kept it. Every morning she’d bend to retrieve it, and a lot of mornings she’d stand too quickly, forgetting the overhanging shelf, and bang her head. How many times had she bumped her head before it occurred to her to move the dog food? It didn’t matter how intelligent you were; sometimes routine and procedure blinded you to the obvious solution.