It was the first time Magozzi had seen Alice Warner exhibit any emotion at all. It wasn’t a bit hostile, but it wasn’t pretty, either. She looked down at her lap to hide it, then took a deep breath and met Iris’s eyes. ‘I was sexually abused by my father. My mother sent me away. Here, where she knew I’d be safe.’
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And I’m also very sorry to tell you that we found the remains of what may very well be your father in my barn this morning.’
Magozzi had never seen anyone’s eyes glitter before. Oh, you read about it in books, and people used the expression all the time, but he’d never really seen it on another human face.
‘Oh, my,’ Alice Warner said. ‘That’s very disturbing.’
But she didn’t look disturbed. Not at all.
33
They went through the village on their way back to the car. The snow was getting too deep to walk anywhere but on the little plowed road, and it was still coming down; big, fat flakes that belonged on a kid’s tongue.
But today there were no kids, and the village was silent. Kurt Weinbeck had done that.
It was a sad thing, Magozzi thought, when you finally learned that the one place you always felt safest wasn’t that safe after all. Any burglary victim had a taste of that when they came home to see their doors or windows shattered, their home trashed, their possessions missing. Here, Magozzi had to multiply that feeling by four hundred souls who’d lived a lot of their lives in fear, and thought they’d finally found sanctuary. He wondered how long they’d stay locked in their houses.
None of them spoke until they got back in the county car, and Sampson had started the heater. ‘I have a problem with this one,’ Gino said. ‘Half of me wants to book those two and toss them in the can for life; the other half wants to turn my back and pretend I don’t know what they did.’
‘Half of you is going to get its wish,’ Magozzi said.
‘Yeah, but which half?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Half of you is still going to end up pissed.’
Iris turned around in the front passenger seat. ‘I don’t understand how you can be so certain they’re guilty. They didn’t actually say anything incriminating in the interview. Even admitting that he threatened his son-in-law doesn’t seem to count for much. Any father would have done the same.’
‘Or brother,’ Sampson added from the driver’s seat. ‘I said it myself a few times. But it isn’t what they said. It’s the way they were.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Faces,’ Magozzi said. ‘You do enough interviews over a long enough time, you learn to read the faces first, and listen to the words second.’
Iris turned back around in her seat and stared out the windshield. ‘I’m not there yet.’
‘Well, jeez, Iris Rikker, you’ve been on the job for almost two days already,’ Gino said. ‘How long is it going to take you to catch on?’
She smiled a little at that, but didn’t let him see it. ‘Do you have enough to get a search warrant for the Warners’ home?’
‘Maybe if we strong-arm a judge and do some fancy stepping with probable cause, but Bill Warner’s a cop. No way he’d leave a crumb behind.’
‘Which leaves us exactly nowhere,’ Magozzi said. ‘We have nothing on them. No forensics, no ballistics, no witnesses, and even if we trace that chat room right back to Bill’s PC, it doesn’t prove a thing. And those two sure as hell aren’t going to give each other up on the alibi.’
Gino nodded. ‘They’re pretty much Teflon.’
‘So where do you go from here?’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘Where we always go. Back to the scene. Back to the beginning. We do it all over again.’
Iris cracked the back door. ‘Sampson, would you mind giving the Detectives a ride back to their car? I want to stay until the last of our people have cleared out. It’s time to give these women back their town.’
‘No problem. I’ll be back in half an hour to pick you up.’
Two dozen deputies had stayed on at Bitterroot, going house-to-house for the second time, reassuring the frightened occupants that the intruder had been apprehended. Most of the women already knew that Kurt Weinbeck hadn’t exactly been ‘apprehended’ – he’d been dropped in his tracks by a very old woman with a very big gun – news traveled as fast in this small town as any other – but still, the deputies had to go through the motions.
Each deputy took one side of a block, working opposite sides of the narrow, curving, snow-clogged street. Except for Kenny. He was working the town alone, after the other deputies had moved on.
He wore his hat-brim low against the falling snow, which hid most of his face, but he had the badge high on his department-issue parka so the women wouldn’t be afraid to open their doors. Every single one of them thanked him politely and informed him that another deputy had already stopped to announce that the danger was over. Invariably, Kenny smiled, touched the brim of his hat and apologized for disturbing them twice.
He knew a little about the town layout, but never before had he seen the insides of the houses. Some of them were a little larger than others, probably for the women who had kids and needed extra bedrooms, but otherwise the interiors were almost identical. After peering over a dozen women’s shoulders when they opened the door, Kenny had it down. Living room in front, kitchen in back, bedrooms on the left. There had to be over 300 of them in the town, and by his fifteenth stop, he began to wonder if he’d have enough time to find her. He was moving a lot faster than the other deputies, but as soon as they finished and cleared out someone was bound to wonder why one man lagged behind, checking houses that had already been covered. He could probably bullshit his way out of that, but he didn’t really want to get put in that position. He started to move a whole lot faster.
The twenty-sixth house didn’t look a whole lot different than the first twenty-five, but the minute a woman opened the door it felt like home to Kenny. In one quick, powerful motion he shoved her aside and stepped into the house, closing the door behind him.
‘Hello, Roberta.’
Some things never changed. She just stood there for a second, eyes cast down, every bit as still as the bronze statue of that pioneer woman in front of the library. That’s what she’d always done whenever he’d come up on her suddenly, and he used to do that a lot, just to see her like this.
Christ, it was the middle of the night, almost sunrise, and she still looked good; the kind of woman who turned men’s heads no matter how many years were on her. They hadn’t just had a decent life together; they’d had a perfect one, until the night she’d left that shitty little note and…
‘Goddamnit, Roberta!’
She was moving now, backing into the little divider that separated the foyer from the living room, and she wasn’t allowed to do that. She had her eyes on him now, too, instead of looking down at the floor like she was supposed to, and he didn’t like that one bit. ‘Stop right there.’ And she did, but she was still watching him. He decided to let that go, because this was sort of like training a not-too-bright hunting dog: you had to balance punishment and praise just so. ‘That’s good, Roberta. That’s real good. Now put your coat and boots on and we’ll get you home where you belong.’
She didn’t move for a minute, then she shook her head, and damnit, she was still staring right at him.
‘Do not do that Roberta. Do not make me repeat myself, Goddamnit.’
Roberta knew what was going to happen now. She’d been through it a hundred times before. Halfway through that hundred, the fear had stopped escalating to terror, and downshifted into a black hole of apathetic resignation. After that, whenever Kenny got that wild look that advertised her near and terrible future, all she hoped was that he’d hurry up, hit her and get it over with. The actual impact of fist or boot was almost better than the fearful agony you went through waiting for it.
There would be pain and blood and probably broken bones, then hours later, or sometimes days, the apologies, the loving words, the promises never to do it again, and of course, the question: Why do you make me do that
