and hurried after him down to the shoreline and out onto ice that was surely waiting for the city girl’s single misstep before cracking and sucking her down into the frigid depths. She decided that that was why he’d told her about the car, the bastard. So she’d know the ice could crack at any moment beneath her weight.
Bastard, bastard, bastard, she repeated mentally as she slogged after him through the frozen drifts that looked like choppy waves, sweating inside her layers of clothing, telling herself she could do this. If she survived the walk, examining a dead body was going to be a piece of cake. After all, she’d seen bodies before. She’d been to funerals. And of course she’d imagined seeing her ex-husband dead a million times, preferably next to the nineteen-year-old slut he’d run away with less than a month after he’d moved her into a broken-down old farmhouse so far from the city that the people seemed to speak a different language – one without complete sentences.
She almost ran into Sampson’s back when he stopped suddenly. Iris squinted through the driving snow and saw two deputies in winter gear just standing there. One of them glared at her, saying nothing. The other, all baby fat and blue eyes, gave her a nod. ‘Morning, Sheriff. Deputy Neville.’
‘Good morning to you, Deputy Neville,’ Iris said, then caught her breath when the deputies moved aside, showing her what was behind them.
In one way, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared – no blood, no gore, no immediate sense that what she was looking at was a dead human being – but in another way it was worse, because Iris may not have had a decent hot-water heater or an adequate furnace, but she did have a television, and she’d watched it long into the night.
‘Oh, Lord,’ she murmured, looking at the fat, ice-encrusted snowman leaning against one of the ice fishing shacks. Snowman head, snowman body – not as storybook perfect as the ones she’d seen on the news last night, but close enough – totally encased in hard-packed snow, except for the hands. Those were exposed, whitish blue, and unmistakably human, wrapped around a fishing pole.
‘I take it you saw the news last night,’ Sampson said.
Iris could only nod.
‘From the look of it, I’d say we’ve got snowman number three out here.’
Iris found enough to breath to ask, ‘Have you called the coroner?’
‘Right after you.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘Mexico.’
‘Mexico?’
Sampson shrugged. ‘It’s January in Minnesota. Everybody’s in Mexico. MPD and the BCA are going to want to cover this one anyway. My guess is they’ll beat feet to get up here five minutes after our call.’
‘From Minneapolis?’ Iris blew frosty air out into the coming dawn. ‘It’s going to take them hours to make the trip on these roads.’
‘Yep.’
‘When did you place the call?’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t have the authority.’
Iris blew an exasperated sigh into the frosty air of the coming dawn, wishing she’d spent a few of those quiet nights on dispatch reading the department handbook, if they even had such a thing. ‘Well, then, who does?’
‘Just the sheriff.’
Iris closed her eyes, then fumbled in her parka pocket for her cell phone. ‘So whom do I call, and what’s their number?’
Sampson kicked at the snow with heavy lace-up boots that looked a lot warmer than hers. ‘Well, if it was me, I’d call Minneapolis PD and ask for Detective Magozzi or Detective Rolseth. They caught the snowman scene down at the park yesterday. But you’re going to need a landline for that, especially in this weather. I had to go inside just to call you.’
‘Fine. In the meantime, are you the department’s homicide investigator?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, whoever he is, get him out here to take charge of the scene.’
‘Homicide investigator’s here already.’
Iris’s eyes fixed on the other two deputies stretching crime scene tape in a rectangle around the snowman. ‘Which one is he?’
This time Sampson rolled his head all the way left to look at her, and she could see his face for the first time. He was smiling, just a little. ‘That would be you, Sheriff Rikker.’
11
Magozzi awakened at five a.m. to the sound of sleet hitting his bedroom window. He rolled over, jammed pillows to his ears to block out the sound, then remembered that someone was killing cops and stuffing them in snowmen.
Half an hour later he was showered and dressed, scrambling eggs and deli ham in the same skillet, ignoring the evangelist who had popped onto the television screen when he’d turned it on. Shit. Sunday morning. Even in a state of news and weather junkies, religion topped the bill on the airwaves one day a week, and if you wanted to hear if the world had ended overnight, you had to wait until the men in black robes finished telling you that God’s love was everywhere. Magozzi figured none of those guys ever watched the news.
He channel-surfed while he ate and found a local news brief that was little more than all the stuff they’d run last night, but a couple of the cable news channels were running with the Minneapolis story, mostly because the video was so good. There were a couple of shaky, amateur clips Magozzi hadn’t seen last night – civilians were already cashing in on shooting their happy kids building snowmen, and then the MPD knocking them down, looking for corpses. He pushed away his plate and dragged a napkin across his mouth.
He heard the rumble and scrape of the city plow and sand truck out on the street, and felt that old twinge of disappointment, still with him almost thirty years later. When he was a kid, a snowfall like yesterday’s would have shut down the city for a day at least, maybe two – joyous, unexpected holidays that kept everyone home and turned back the clocks about a hundred years. Dads pulled their kids on sleds right down the middle of the street, moms stayed home and baked cookies and cooked up big pots of homemade soup, and every house smelled like wet woolen mittens drying on a radiator. But eventually you’d hear the dreaded sound of the big trucks pushing the plows, parents’ faces would sag in relief that everything was getting back to normal, and kids would groan and grumble and scramble to complete the homework they’d cast aside.
The Department of Transportation had come a long way since then, and Minneapolis had learned to handle just about anything nature could dish out. This city cleared roads and sidewalks and parking lots faster than any other place in the country, and Magozzi couldn’t remember the last time schools and businesses were closed for a whole day, let alone two in a row. Progress wasn’t always such a good thing, he decided.
Gino called just as he was heading out the door. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just going outside to find some kids and pull them on a sled.’
‘You’ll kill them. It’s icy out there. Come to work instead. Malcherson wants us both in his office as soon as you get in.’
‘You’re there already?’
‘Just pulling into the lot now, which is pretty full for a Sunday morning, by the way.’
‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
‘Not in one piece, you won’t. That stuff they put on the roads to keep the ice melted isn’t doing so hot this morning. I did a three-sixty on the freeway, sailed right through about four red lights on Washington, and I am not getting in a car again until the spring thaw. Wear your booties. There’s more snow coming.’
Chief Malcherson was the perfect embodiment of Minnesota’s stoic, Scandinavian sensibility – the man probably had actual emotions, but if he did, they weren’t for public viewing. But this morning, the gravity of losing two men was strikingly evident on his hang-dog face. The loose skin around his mournful eyes and his remarkable bloodhound
