P Tracy - Snow Blind

Magozzi and Gino were both silent for a moment, taking it all in, then Gino shrugged. ‘So what’s the down side of dragging?’

‘It’s a big lake, Gino,’ Magozzi reminded him.

‘An enormous lake,’ Iris amended. ‘It stretches from the county offices on one end, over to the back of Bitterroot property, all the way to the land behind mine. The cost would be astronomical. The worst part is that whether or not we found anything, the dragging operation itself would make people believe the worst, no matter what the results. If we found something, bad ending. And if we didn’t, a lot of them would say we just hadn’t looked in the right place. They’d never stop believing there were bodies in that lake, and politics still rule up here. I think they’d find a way to shut Bitterroot down.’

Gino blew out an exhale that almost moved his brush cut. ‘Really tough call. What are you going to do?’

‘I was hoping if I asked nicely, you’d tell me.’

Magozzi smiled a little, and then went serious. There were too damn many moral questions to this job. Most of the time you knew which side of the line you were supposed to walk, but sometimes, the road on one side of it looked just as crooked as the road on the other.

‘Shit,’ Gino grumbled when she left the car. Apparently she and Sampson were headed over to her place to wait for the BCA. ‘I sure as hell hope nobody ever asks us for advice again.’

‘Me too,’ Magozzi said as he shifted into drive and heard the snow crunch under the tires.

He was really depressed now. Iris had half bent getting out of the car, and he’d gotten a good whiff of her hair. Fresh air, no orange; so it wasn’t shampoo. Another unsolved.

Magozzi pulled out his cell and snapped open the cover. ‘Magozzi.’

Gino raised his brows when Magozzi pulled over to the shoulder and flipped on the emergency lights. This was not a good idea, especially on this narrow country road with snowbanks towering on either side. Gino wasn’t a hundred percent sure they were on the shoulder, or if the road even had one, and this was absolutely not like Magozzi.

‘Okay, Grace. Shoot.’

Well, that explained it. Gino leaned back in the seat and tried to relax. First thing was, he didn’t like to hear his partner say ‘shoot’ to a woman who carried all the time; second thing was his door was jammed up against one of the stupid snowbanks and he didn’t have a chance in hell of getting out when the car was hit by some bohunk driving a snowplow or a tractor or whatever the hell was going to come first.

‘Jeez, Leo, get someplace a little safer and call her back, would you?’

Magozzi was listening hard, and just raised his hand to shut him up.

Gino closed his eyes and waited to die. Christ. Sometimes men were so stupid he was sorry he was one. Magozzi would take a bullet for him any day of the week, but if Grace MacBride called, all bets were off. No sense.

‘Just hold it a minute, Grace. I’m in the car with Gino. I’m going to put you on speaker… okay? Start over.’

As if Grace would ever stop if someone told her to, because she was in the middle of a sentence.

‘… so this morning we finally managed to pull the whole chat thread I told you about that kept mentioning the Minneapolis snowmen. You need to see this. How close are you to Harley’s?’

‘That’s the thing. About sixty miles away, up in Dundas County.’

Silence for a second, then, ‘Dundas County? Where they found the other snowman?’

‘Right. The guy responsible for that snowman was just greased by an old lady up here at Bitterroot. One of your clients, right, Grace?’

‘That’s right. We did some corporate security software for them last fall. How did you know?’

‘We saw your logo on one of the programs. Did you know what that place was?’

‘Some kind of mail-order business, why?’

‘You didn’t get the tour?’

‘We were there to work, Magozzi, and only on weekends, when the place was closed. We saw a couple people and the inside of the computer room. That’s it.’

‘There’s a whole town behind the corporate building, Grace, and what it is, is one giant safe house for abused women.’

‘Oh, Lord.’ Her voice was a mere whisper, and she covered the phone for a moment and said something, probably to the rest of the Monkeewrench crew. When she came back, her voice sounded tense. ‘Magozzi. Bitterroot was the subject line on that chat thread. We didn’t know what it meant at the time, but it’s starting to make a sick kind of sense. I think they’re killing abusers.’

Gino forgot about dying under the blade of a snowplow and leaned forward. ‘Who’s killing abusers?’ he demanded.

‘We don’t know that. Yet.’

Magozzi closed his eyes. ‘Read us what you’ve got, Grace.’

She took a breath that sounded fractured. ‘Okay. This came off a private chat room within a very private site we haven’t cracked yet, but the conversation is what we wanted anyway. The thread goes back for months – these two people have been talking for a long time about the legal system not being able to protect their daughters from the men who were abusing them. Frustrated blather, mostly… no, not blather, really, because it’s true and it’s sad, but what you need to hear are some of the last entries. Like this… “Do it exactly the way I told you, then put the body in a snowman. We did it here, you can do it. They’ll look for a serial.”’

Gino and Magozzi looked at each other.

‘Are you there, Magozzi? Did you get that?’

‘We got it, I’m just not sure where it’s going…’

Grace just blustered on. ‘One of the correspondents is here, in Minneapolis, and the handle is just a bunch of numbers, but the one responding calls himself “Pittsburgh.”’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Gino murmured. ‘The Pittsburgh snowman.’

‘So we pulled up the Pittsburgh police reports…’

‘You pulled them?’

Grace sighed, exasperated now. ‘They’re computerized, Magozzi, and they keep pretty current, which is a good thing. But someone out there was sure asleep at the switch, because they never ran the victim, or if they did, they left it out of their reports. The guy had a sheet, and every one of them was for domestic assault. He kept trying to kill his wife.’

‘Anything else on that website you want to read to us?’

‘There’s only one more entry after the one I just read to you. All it says is: “We do what we have to do. We take care of our own.”’

Magozzi and Gino exchanged a troubled look as they remembered Laura saying those exact words not an hour ago. It was starting to sound like a motto.

Magozzi closed his eyes and took a deep breath, almost afraid to keep prodding, although he didn’t know why. Just a feeling. One of those bad feelings he hated. ‘Keep trying to trace that thing, will you, Grace? We need a name, we need an address.’

‘We’re working on it. I’ll call if we get something.’

‘Call Iris Rikker,’ he told Gino as he pulled the car off the shoulder and started moving again. ‘Get directions to her place.’

‘Whoa, buddy, hold on just a second. Think this through. Grace finds a few spooky connections and all of a sudden you decide what? That Bitterroot’s an enclave of secret assassins that run around greasing abusers?’

‘Goddamnit, Gino, don’t make it sound stupid and simple. It isn’t either of those things, but we’ve had nothing but big fingers wagging in our faces pointing up at Bitterroot all along, and we just keep trying to get out of here. This time we’re staying until we get some real answers.’

Gino made a face. He didn’t like the sound of that. I mean, shit, there wasn’t even a decent motel up here.