Magozzi said.
‘Don’t we all. Doesn’t mean it’s the way it went down.’
They all looked up at the heavy click of Gloria’s heels on the floor and saw her fill the aisle between the desks with pink. ‘I’m going to catch a bite before the Chief gets back. You’re getting those reports pulled together for him, right?’
Skinny, red-haired McLaren looked at her and grinned, forgetting for a second that there were dead cops and a bad case and a late night ahead. ‘You gotta tell me how you get that skirt to stick out so far.’
Gloria ignored him. ‘Switchboard’s screening till I get back, but Evelyn’s on tonight, so cut her some slack. Last time she hung up on the city council chair and put through some idiot who said the CIA was planning the overthrow of the government in his living room. Chief damn near had her canned.’
‘Can’t really blame the woman,’ Gino said. ‘Chair of the city council or a paranoid idiot. Kind of a toss-up, if you ask me.’
She scowled, turned on her heel, then spun at the last moment and looked straight at McLaren. ‘Crinolines,’ she said, then disappeared out the door.
‘What’re crinolines?’ McLaren whispered.
Gino gave him a look. ‘You are such a fashion fetus. They’re really stiff slips. They got plastic hoops in them so they stick way out. Fifties stuff. Must have been a retro wedding. Can’t believe she even went to one of those things, let alone dressed up in a getup like that.’
McLaren was still staring at the place he had seen Gloria last.
It had been full dark for an hour, and Grace could still hear the irritating scrape of shovels against concrete from inside her house. In a workingclass neighborhood like this, there weren’t a lot of snowblowers, and the shovels had been busy all day, clearing yesterday’s storm from walks and driveways. A few of them were manned by intrepid youngsters who trolled from house to house, picking up a little extra cash for a lot of hard labor. There weren’t many such baby entrepreneurs these days; most kids were parked in front of the TV or a PlayStation, hands out for allowances earned by their mere existence. The few who worked the small, older houses on Ashland Avenue in St Paul never bothered to knock on Grace MacBride’s door.
She’d had high-tech heating grates built into her sidewalks and driveway before she bought the place six years earlier, and you could Rollerblade on those sidewalks in a blizzard. Not that Grace minded physical labor, but she’d been hiding from a lot of people in those days, and there was no way she would expose herself long enough to shovel a path through a Minnesota winter. Supposedly no one was trying to kill her anymore, but it was just plain silly to take chances.
This evening, inside the snug little house she’d converted into a fortress, she was practicing the MacBride version of slovenliness.
No one ever saw Grace dressed like this, except Charlie, of course, and since human speech was the only trick the dog hadn’t mastered yet, he wasn’t talking. The flannel pajamas had been a gift from Roadrunner; soft and warm and, bless the stick man, black. Clearly a lot of thought had gone into the purchase, because the pants were wide enough to provide easy access to the derringer she kept strapped to her ankle when she was working at home. But the very softness of the lightweight flannel felt dangerous. Grace liked weighty fabrics between her and the rest of the world.
If it had been anyone but Magozzi, she wouldn’t have opened the front door. He got a silly little grin on his face when he saw her outfit. ‘You’re in pj’s. I find that enormously encouraging.’
‘You’re early, Magozzi.’
‘I thought I could help you cook.’
‘Supper’s already on the stove. I was just about to get dressed.’
‘Or I could help with that.’
Grace rolled her eyes and stepped aside while Magozzi hung up his coat and greeted Charlie. These days he was here so often that the dog no longer went completely ballistic when he walked in. The joy was still there, but it was a little more subdued, almost respectful, as if in Charlie’s wee brain Magozzi had made the transition from playmate to master. Grace wasn’t sure how she felt about that. ‘You’re in a pretty good mood for a cop with two new homicides on his plate.’
Magozzi didn’t even look up from patting the dog. ‘You heard?’
‘Harley and Roadrunner called, made me turn on the television.’
He straightened and looked at her, and there was nothing good-humored in his expression. ‘They were cops, Grace. Both of them.’
In the year and a half he’d known her, Magozzi had rarely seen Grace visibly express any emotion. She was closing in on the mid-thirties, and yet there wasn’t a line on that face; not a smile crinkle at the corners of her mouth, not the slightest memory of a frown between her brows. It was like looking at the blank canvas of a baby’s face, before the joy and the heartache of life left their lovely marks, and it always made Magozzi a little sad. But sometimes, if he looked very closely, he could see things in her eyes that never went any further.
‘I’m sorry, Magozzi,’ she said, and he felt a door close on the outside world and all the terrible things that happened there.
She took his hand and led him back to the kitchen, checked whatever was simmering on the stove, then poured two glasses of wine and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, and it occurred to Magozzi that a woman had never said those words to him before. It sounded like a magic incantation.
This is what Gino has with Angela, he thought. You come home dragged out and frustrated and there stands this amazing woman who really wants to know what kind of a day you had. This was not a little thing. This wasn’t just sharing the time you had together; this was wanting to share the time you spent apart, too, and as far as Magozzi was concerned, that boiled down to wanting to share a life. He wondered if Grace knew that was what she was doing.
‘What are you smiling at, Magozzi?’
Magozzi was starting to hate his own house. It was dark, empty, and, worse yet, there was no woman and no dog. It had been unbelievably hard to leave Grace’s tonight, but he had an early call and a hefty stack of accumulated reports to go through before morning, and reading would have been out of the question with Grace sitting next to him in her flannel pj’s.
He grabbed a Summit Pale Ale from the refrigerator, turned on the television, and steeled himself for the ten o’clock news.
The news teams had had all day to polish up this story for maximum impact and it showed. Dramatic, inflammatory scripts laced with adjectives like horrific, shocking, and ghastly played well against the backdrop of skillfully edited montages that made what ultimately had been a well-managed, controlled crime scene look like a soccer stadium stampede. Especially effective were the images of screaming, crying children as they watched the boys in blue knocking down one snowman after another. Without exception, every single broadcast made the MPD come off like a bunch of heartless jackasses.
They all ran snippets of Chief Malcherson’s press conference, and none of it had been good. The man was a master of the calm, forthright presentation, but it wasn’t working this time. He made a good case for an ex-con with a grudge going after the cops who had put him away, but the press kept hammering him with the one question that even the cops were asking themselves: What kind of killer poses bodies in snowmen? That was B-movie stuff.
Kristin Keller of Channel 3 was putting an even more salacious spin on it. As they showed the tape of him and Gino no-commenting their way through the reporters at City Hall, she did a somber voice-over in her best end-of- the-world tone. ‘One has to wonder if the Minneapolis Police Department is concealing the truth, trying to avoid panicking the population of this city. A retired criminal psychologist who wishes to remain anonymous has told this reporter that the elaborate posing of these bodies in snowmen is the unmistakable mark of a psychopathic serial killer…’ She paused dramatically, looking straight into the camera. ‘A killer who will most probably strike again.’
Before he had time to put his fist through the TV screen, the phone rang, and he didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know who it was.
‘Gino.’
‘Leo, I want you to feel free to mentally insert as much profanity as possible into my side of the conversation, because I’m sitting here with my kids and I can’t do it myself.’
‘I take it you’re watching Channel Three.’
