Snow Blind (3 page)

Gino adjusted the black pelt on his head a little self-consciously. ‘Laugh now, freeze your ass off later, Leo. The wind chill is about fifty degrees below zero, and dressed like that, you’re going to be running for the car in five minutes. What, are you shopping with the Chief now? You look like a mobster.’

Magozzi smoothed the front of his new cashmere overcoat – a Christmas gift from Grace MacBride. ‘I heard it was supposed to warm up. Look, the sun’s coming out already.’

‘When the sun comes out in Hawaii, it warms up. When the sun comes out in Puerto Vallarta, it warms up. When the sun comes out in Minnesota in January, you just go snow-blind.’

‘And therein lies the real truth as to why you live here.’

‘So I can go snow-blind?’

‘No, so you can complain about the weather.’

Gino mulled that over for a good, long time and finally nodded. ‘That’s actually a good point, Leo. The only thing worse than bad weather is boring weather.’ He bent down and swept up a mitt full of dry, powdery snow. ‘You want to tell me how the hell I’m supposed to build a snowman out of this?’

Magozzi gestured toward a group of kids who were working with spritzer bottles full of water. ‘Watch and learn. You use the water like glue.’

‘Okay, Michelangelo, go pull your gun on them and requisition a water bottle for the MPD.’ He looked hopefully at the thermos Magozzi was carrying. ‘Tell me you got schnapps in that thing.’

‘Hot chocolate. You’re not supposed to drink in the cold. It dilates your blood vessels and you get hypothermia faster.’

‘I already have hypothermia, so what’s the difference?’ Gino turned back to his misshapen, pathetic half-snowman that was shedding vast portions of its body with each gust of wind. ‘Christ, look at this.
This is the worst snowman in the whole contest.’

Magozzi took a few steps back and eyeballed it. ‘Maybe there’s a conceptual-art category. You could enter it as
Snowman with Psoriasis.’

‘You’re just full of wisecracks today, aren’t you?’

‘I’m trying to cheer you up. Aren’t Angela and the kids coming?’

‘Later, for the judging. And I want to get at least an honorable mention, so help me out here.’

‘Okay, I’m ready. Where do we start?’

‘I think we need a theme.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘Good plan. Like what?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. Maybe we should do something cop-related, since we’re cops.’

‘I’m with you. I think a cop snowman would be appropriate.’

‘But nothing too flashy. See that one over by the woods?’ Gino pointed to a nearby snowman that had cross-country skis sticking out of its base, ski poles propped against its torso, and a pair of Elvis-style reflective sunglasses perched atop a carrot nose. ‘It’s too skinny if you ask me, but nice execution overall. I’m thinking we could use it as a template.’

‘Whatever you say. You’re the visionary, I’m just the free labor. Tell me what to do.’

‘Make me a head that won’t fall apart.’

Gino and Magozzi started working fast, rolling
and molding and shaping. The sun was on their side, because it was bright and high in the sky now, softening up the snow and making it easier to work with. A half hour later, they had a respectable-looking basic snowman.

‘That’s a damn fine start,’ Gino said, stepping back to admire their handiwork. ‘A few details, maybe a couple trimmings, and we’ll have ourselves a contender. What do you think?’

‘I think its butt looks fat.’

Gino rolled his eyes. ‘Snowmen are supposed to have fat butts.’

‘Maybe some arms would balance him out a little.’

‘Great idea. Go get some twigs from those bushes over there.’

‘It’s illegal to pick foliage in parks.’

‘I don’t give a shit. I’m not signing off on this thing until it has some limbs. And don’t make any smart-ass remarks about the Disability Act.’

Magozzi wandered over to the straggly thicket that bordered a margin of woods, stopping to look at the skiing snowman on the way. The sun was hitting it full-on now, and its left side was starting to look glazed and a little mushy. With any luck, it would melt before judging and they’d have one less competitor.

‘This yours?’

Magozzi looked down at a little red-haired kid who’d suddenly appeared at his side.

‘No.’

The kid couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, but he was circling the snowman with the critical eye of a seasoned judge. ‘It’s pretty good. Better than that one the fat guy’s working on.’ He pointed to Gino.

‘That’s my partner you’re talking about.’

The kid looked up at him, nonplussed. ‘You don’t look gay.’

The ever-evolving English language, Magozzi thought. Seemed like every word had multiple meanings nowadays. Somebody was going to have to make up some new ones eventually. ‘Not that kind of partner. We’re cops.’

Now the kid was impressed. ‘Did you ever shoot anybody?’

‘No,’ Magozzi lied.

‘Oh.’ Disappointed, the kid turned back to the skiing snowman, dismissing Magozzi as quickly as he’d engaged him. Clearly, inanimate objects were more interesting than cops who didn’t shoot people.

Magozzi looked around to make sure Park Service wasn’t hovering in the bushes, waiting to ambush him, then started harvesting illegal arms for their snowman.

A few seconds later the screaming started. Magozzi spun toward the source, his hand on his holster even before the pivot, and saw the red-haired kid standing in front of the skiing snowman, staring up at it with wide blue eyes and an impossibly wide mouth.

He was at the kid’s side in seconds, looking at the carrot nose tilting downward in the melting face, the sunglasses sliding down the carrot, and the big, terrorized milky eyes the sunglasses had been hiding. The real nose behind the carrot was a waxy white, right off the color palette of the dead.

Oh. Shit
.

The kid was still screaming. Magozzi put his hands on his shoulders and turned him gently away from the snowman that wasn’t a snowman, toward the red-haired man and woman running frantically toward their terrified son.

3

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.’

Magozzi was still staring off into the distance, watching Jimmy Grimm and his team as they tromped across the field toward them in their white jumpsuits, looking too much like animated versions of the snowmen they were dodging.

‘Happy new year, Detectives,’ Jimmy said morosely as he approached.

‘It was, up until an hour ago,’ Gino muttered.

‘I hear you. I caught the story about you saving that woman in the car trunk yesterday and figured that was a good omen.’