P Tracy: Snow Blind

Immediate damage control out on the snowman field had been a challenge. The kid’s scream had started a stampede, and by the time Magozzi and Gino realized what they were dealing with, at least fifty people were bearing down on them as fast as they could, knees pumping high over the deep snow, shouting, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Get away from that kid!’ and other more colorful phrases that made it perfectly clear what they were thinking.

There were a lot of things you could predict with a hundred-percent accuracy in this city – one of them was that if a child screamed, any adult within earshot came on the double. No waiting for the second scream, no thought of personal safety, no hesitation at all. Four attempted child abductions had been foiled in just such a way within the past year – during the last attempt, the cops had to pull what seemed like an entire neighborhood off a sleazebag who would never again recognize his own face in the mirror. Last Magozzi heard, the creep had filed suit from his prison cell against every one of the people who stopped him from driving away with a five-year-old girl.

It was one of the things that made Minneapolis a nice place to live, but in this particular case, it was going to make the job a lot harder. He wasn’t sure what worried him more: the impending destruction of a crime scene, or getting beaten to a pulp by well-meaning citizens.

He stepped away from the boy and held his badge high, showing it to the crowd. It slowed them down a little, but neither his nor Gino’s furious shouts stopped them until they were close enough to see the boy unharmed and in his father’s arms. Unfortunately, that also put them close enough to see the exposed, cookie-dough face and cloudy eyes that had been concealed by the skiing snowman’s Elvis sunglasses. That was the sight that finally stopped them in their tracks and dropped every mouth into a horrified gape. But more were coming in from all directions, including a few park police, who rushed past them, probably expecting a fist-fight or a heart attack and getting a lot more than they bargained for. They were as stunned as the rest of the gawkers, and any crowd-control training they might have had went out the window.

Magozzi called it in on his cell while Gino stomped around like an asylum escapee, flailing his arms, waving people back, screaming ‘MPD! Keep clear!’ until he was red-faced and hoarse. The crowd ebbed a little, but not far enough, and Gino felt like he was sticking his finger in a bursting dam. Frankenstein and the angry mob came to mind.

Fortunately half a dozen MPD patrols had been trolling the Winter Fest area and got to the scene fast. The uniforms took charge immediately, clearing the area around Gino and Magozzi within a minute.

‘Damnit anyway,’ Gino grumbled, watching the suddenly obedient citizens nodding respectfully to the patrols and backing off as they were told. ‘This is the kind of thing that makes you want to put on the blues again. I’m waving my badge all over the place and it didn’t mean crap. Those guys show up in brass buttons and, bingo, everybody listens.’

Magozzi was looking over the cops holding the line, hoping for someone he knew well enough to work. ‘You should have lost the hat. Earflaps diminish authority.’

‘Yeah, well, you weren’t doing so hot either, Mr Topcoat.’

The two of them were silent for a moment as they stared at the snowman, thinking and feeling things they would never talk about, not even to each other.

‘That couldn’t have been easy,’ Gino finally said, shaking his head.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You ever think about how hard it would be to get a body inside a snowman?’

‘Not until this minute.’

‘I mean, how do you get a floppy dead guy to stand up while you pack snow around him?’

Magozzi thought about that. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t floppy.’

‘You mean, like rigor or something?’

‘Yeah. Or something. The killer could have had help.’

Gino thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know. This is so damn weird, and the really weird stuff is usually a solo job. I’ll bet you a million bucks we plug this into NCIC and won’t get a match.’

‘No bet.’

‘Damn. And I had you pegged for easy money.’ Gino backed up a few feet and continued his scrutiny. ‘He could be propped up with something, I suppose.’

‘We don’t even know if there’s a body under there. It could just be a head.’

‘Jesus, Leo.’

‘Hey, you’re the one who’s obsessed with the logistics, I’m just sharing some possibilities. But I think a better question is why you’d want to put a dead guy in a snowman in the first place. That’s not exactly a body dump of convenience. This guy took some serious risks, doing something like this in a public park the night before an event like this.’

Gino went through three stages at every homicide scene. The first stage was that single moment when he saw the victim as a person. He usually moved out of that one pretty fast, before it weighed him down too much. The second stage was the disconnect, when what you had to do at a crime scene overcame humanity. The third stage was out-and-out rage, and once it hit, it stayed with him until the day they closed the file. It was coming too fast this time, Magozzi thought, watching his partner’s face turn red.

‘Goddamnit, this really pisses me off, you know? This is a contest for kids, for Chrissake. What kind of a sick bastard would plant a body where kids could find it?’ He tugged out his cell phone and punched speed-dial. ‘I gotta stop Angela before she heads over here with our kids.’

While Gino was talking to Angela, Magozzi waved over a couple of uniforms who were slogging through the snowy field of snowmen, looking for a crime scene to mark, rolls of neon yellow tape looped over their wrists. ‘Give me a fifty-footer around the snowman.’

‘No problem. Which one?’

Magozzi jerked his thumb over his shoulder and the cops took a closer look.

The younger of the two caught his breath and took a quick step backward. The older one looked at the dead eyes inside the snowman, then moved even closer as his face went slack. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ he whispered. ‘That’s Tommy Deaton.’

Magozzi dug in his coat pocket for his notebook. ‘You know this guy? You’re sure?’

‘Hell, yes, I know him. Rode with him for a couple weeks before he shifted over to the Second.’

‘Wait a minute. He’s one of ours?’

The old cop nodded, keeping his stone face on. ‘Damnit, he was a nice kid. Loved the job.’

Magozzi felt like someone had just punched him in the stomach. He turned his head to look hard at the face inside the snowman, trying to see something familiar. In a city with this many cops, a lot of them changing precincts, changing shifts, changing jobs, no way you could know them all. Magozzi felt guilty for not knowing this one.

He glanced at Gino, who was tucking his cell back in his pocket. ‘You heard?’

‘Yeah, I heard. Man, this just keeps getting worse.’

There was a sudden commotion by the parking area as the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension crime-scene van inched its way through a massing crowd of media, gawkers, and the frazzled patrols who were scrambling to clear a path. Reporters shouted questions from behind the barrier of blue the minute Jimmy Grimm and his techs got out and started unloading equipment.

‘Look at that,’ Gino said in disgust. ‘They’re worse than buzzards. What the hell do they think the BCA is going to tell them now? They haven’t even been on scene yet.’

‘Jimmy never talks to the press. I think there’s a bounty on his head. First reporter to get a grunt out of him goes national.’