‘Oh. Good. Steve who?’
So Tinker gave him a quick rundown, and Johnny listened quietly, trying not to look elated that it wasn’t Tinker, it was only one of his friends who might be in trouble. When Tinker shoved the picture of the brutalized ex-wife under his nose, he caught his breath.
‘Jesus. They let this guy out?’
‘They did.’
‘And right now the only person who knows where this woman is, is the guy that did this to her?’
‘You got it.’
‘Whose job is it to find her?’
Tinker shrugged. ‘By the time I follow that trail he could be in Julie Albright’s backyard. I put Tommy Espinoza on it. He’s hacking into a bunch of secure websites as we speak, breaking all kinds of laws trying to find her. If he can’t, he’s going to call the Monkeewrench people.’
‘So we wait on that one. What about your friend?’
‘That’s a waiting game, too. The scene’s weird, but there’s no place to go with it from what I saw. So I called in Crime Scene, hoping they might pull a rabbit out of the hat. Told them it was a possible, which is a hell of stretch from the physical evidence. I’m going to get called on the carpet for this one.’ He jumped when the phone rang and grabbed it before McLaren even thought to move, hoping to hear Espinoza’s voice, or maybe even someone from the Crime Scene Unit, but it was only Evelyn on the switchboard. He spent a few minutes calming her down – funny, that he was so good at calming other people when he felt like jumping out of his own skin – then hung up. ‘Snowman calls keep coming in,’ he explained to McLaren. ‘Evelyn’s running out of Valium.’
McLaren shrugged it off. ‘It’s been like that all morning. A kid builds a snowman in his own front yard, ten seconds later the next door neighbor’s dialing 911 trying to get a unit sent out to knock it down, see if there’s a body inside. You know how many snowmen the kids in this city build after a storm?’
‘Probably a lot…’
‘You got no idea. And then you’ve got the do-it-yourselfer paranoiacs who bust up the neighbor kid’s snowman themselves, the kids freak, the parents get pissed, want their neighbor arrested for trespassing and destruction of private property and traumatizing their kids, blah, blah, blah. They got a double shift running in the 911 center and they’re still swamped, and God help the poor bastard who tries to call in a real emergency.’
Tinker took a breath and switched gears from Steve Doyle and Julie Albright back to the job he was supposed to be doing today. ‘So where is everybody? I thought we were going to have a full house.’
McLaren headed back to the coffeemaker. ‘We do. Everybody’s in. A lot are out in the field, muscling informants or doing the last of the interviews on people who were at the park yesterday; others are locked in dark rooms all over the house, watching the newsvideo and a ton of out-of-focus home movies of red-cheeked kids with snot running out of their noses, which is a colossal waste of time, if you ask me. No way the doer hung around for family photos.’
‘Some of the really sick ones do.’ Tinker finally got around to hanging up his coat, pushing to the back of his mind the involuntary thought of Steve Doyle’s coat hanging in the empty parole office.
‘Yeah, I know. It’s got to be done, but it’s a pain.’
‘Where are Magozzi and Gino?’
McLaren looked confused for a moment, then rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. ‘Oh, man, of course you didn’t hear…’
‘Hear what?’
‘We might have another snowman up in Dundas County.’
Roadrunner’s face, feet, and hands were completely numb and his body was encased in what had to be a half- inch of icy snow, which made him think about the snowman murders yesterday. He shivered, but it had nothing to do with the temperature. If he made it to Harley’s before he froze to the seat of his bike and turned into a snowman himself, he’d be lucky.
In spite of the nasty weather and impending hypothermia, he paused on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to catch his breath, as he always did when he took this route, looking at the great, frozen Mississippi, the Stone Arch Bridge beyond, and the old brick riverfront mill buildings that had long since been renovated to store people instead of flour and grain. They looked like old postcards superimposed on the backdrop of downtown’s sleek, modern high-rises. It was a pretty city, even in the snowy gloom of January, and it didn’t seem right that such horrible murders could happen in a nice place like this.
He stayed there as long as he could stand it, then pedaled hard across the bridge, taking two bad falls on the ice before he realized there was no way he was going to make it to Harley’s on his bicycle. He turned around and headed back to his house.
The path Roadrunner had shoveled down his driveway was a perfect fit for his mountain bike, but it wasn’t nearly wide enough to accommodate even one of Harley’s Hummer’s oversized tires. But five-foot drifts were child’s play for the massive vehicle, and Harley plowed straight up to the front door and leaned on the horn.
Roadrunner waved from the front window of his colorful Nicollet Island Victorian, closed the shades, and hurried out the front door, limping slightly. ‘Thanks for the ride,’ he said as he clambered into the huge truck and buckled himself in.
‘I can’t believe you were stupid enough to even try to bike over today. How’s your knee?’
Roadrunner touched the throbbing goose egg he’d sustained on one of his falls and cringed. ‘It’s okay. I put ice on it. And I had to give it a try. Cabs and buses aren’t running today.’
‘You’ve gotta get yourself some wheels one of these days, you know that?’ He patted the steering wheel tenderly. ‘Get one of these little honeys and it’ll change your life. Might even be able to score yourself a date.’
‘This thing is obscene. I can’t believe you bought it.’
‘Lighten up. I’m a big man and I need big wheels. Besides, it’s not like I live in L.A. and I’m shuttling kids to soccer practice in it. This is strictly a winter vehicle, and we live in Minnesota.’
‘You could have bought a hybrid. They have some nice hybrid SUVs now.’
‘Right. They’re nice if you hate cars. I mean, do you see Arnold driving a hybrid? I don’t think so.’ Harley put the Hummer in reverse and stomped on the accelerator. It didn’t even shimmy as it munched over an icy drift.
Roadrunner rolled his eyes and gave up on a losing battle. ‘So why are you so hot on working today? I thought you were bored.’
‘I was, until I started playing around on the Web last night and came across some pretty wild stuff about that whole snowman thing in the park yesterday.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, just for the hell of it, I plugged the Monkeewrench crime stat software in to cruise the net before I went to bed last night, just to see if any twisted sister had ever put a body in a snowman before. When I got up and checked the run record this morning, the thing had worked six hours before it pulled one hit, some renegade thread from a chat room, and it didn’t say much – just “Minneapolis snowmen” and a couple lines in all caps that said, “Kill him while there’s still time. Put him in a snowman.”’
Roadrunner shrugged. ‘So what? There’s a million crazies on the Web saying sick crap like that.’
‘I’m with you a hundred percent on that, but the thing is, that message was posted at nine a.m. Central Standard Time, yesterday morning.’
‘Uh… okay. Is that supposed to mean something?’
Harley scowled at him. ‘Hell, yes, it means something! Think, Roadrunner – Magozzi and Gino didn’t find the bodies until noon Saturday. Three hours after the original post. Somebody knew about those bodies in the snowmen a long time before they were discovered.’
Roadrunner’s mouth dropped open. ‘Holy shit, Harley. Did you go into the chat room? Did you trace the thread?’
‘I sure as hell tried. I couldn’t hack that site to save my life.’
‘Come on…’
‘I’m serious. This thing’ll drive you nuts. The URLs keep shifting, the codes keep changing, and I’m thinking they’ve got this thing programmed to reroute on some kind of a weird loop. You know the last time I couldn’t hack into any site?’
‘Never.’
‘Exactly.’
