Iris and Sampson snugged their parka collars over the lower half of their faces, tried not to breathe, and followed Deputy Neville through the maze. The odor of years of mold cementing hay bales together wasn’t offensive in itself, but the minute you took the dustiness into your lungs, you knew it was noxious.
From the outside, the bales looked as if they’d been stacked haphazardly, but the deeper they went in, the more purposeful they seemed, like the boxwood maze at the botanical gardens.
The trapdoor was all the way back, set into the wooden floor near the outside wall. Their lights picked up the metal ring Neville had tripped on, poking up through a layer of hay dust, and then the long, heavy metal slide that snugged deep into a rusty hasp, locking it from the outside. It took some effort to kick the slide free of the hasp. It hadn’t been moved in a long time.
Neville lifted the door and aimed his flash down into the hole. ‘Deep,’ he said. ‘Ten, maybe twelve feet.’ He went down on his knees, and then on his belly, poking his head into the space and moving his light around. Suddenly the light stopped moving and Iris heard him hiss, ‘Oh, Jesus…’ He scrambled back from the hole on his hands and knees, blue eyes big in a very white face.
‘Weinbeck?’ Sampson whispered.
‘Hell, no.’
A few seconds with his light and Sampson found what he was looking for: a handmade wooden ladder buried nearby under some loose hay.
‘How’d you know that was there?’ Iris asked as he carried it over and he and Neville maneuvered it down through the trapdoor. She was looking for a diversion, anything to take her mind off what Neville had said was in the room under the floor.
‘A lot of these old barns have root cellars like this, built deep enough to go beneath the frost line. Had to be a way to get in and out of it.’
They went down the ladder one by one, Iris last. She wasn’t really afraid, and that surprised her. She was climbing down into a dark hole in the ground to see something horrible, and all she really felt was a sense of dread.
The room was crisscrossed with cobwebs that almost made a curtain, they’d been undisturbed for so long. Little white beads were stuck to the webs and squeaked underfoot on the floor when Iris stepped down from the ladder. ‘What is this stuff?’ Iris wondered aloud.
‘Styrofoam.’ Neville pointed to the walls and toed up the edge of a rug remnant. Panels of it on the floors, walls, ceiling. Pretty good insulation in a pinch, but you’ve gotta keep it up. Deteriorates in a hurry.’ Then he directed his light to what he’d seen from above, lying on an old metal bed with a rotting mattress, and Iris caught her breath.
There wasn’t much left of whoever it had been – exposed bones that gleamed white in the reflection of their lights, draped with the tattered remnants of clothing. Iris saw thin clumps of hair on the top of the skull and what looked like a few pieces of dessicated flesh that the rats and the insects had missed. More than anything else, it looked like one of the Halloween props from a haunted house.
Iris squeezed her eyes shut for a second, trying to make sense of it. They were looking for a killer and found a rotting, dead person in her barn. It didn’t fit, it didn’t compute. It was like looking for car keys in a drawer and finding an elephant instead. Curious, maybe, but the elephant sure as hell wasn’t going to start the car.
‘Lars,’ Sampson said.
Neville looked at him. ‘You think?’
‘Maybe.’ Sampson brushed aside some of the cobwebs and moved around the room that was only a little larger than Iris’s kitchen. There was an ancient space heater in one corner; a shelf of moldering books that rats had made a mess of; and oddly, a sink and a flush toilet. ‘Damn place is plumbed,’ he murmured.
‘And wired,’ Iris said, pointing her light at a single bulb in a protective cage on the ceiling. She looked around the windowless room, at the rust-stained toilet and sink, the pathetic remains on the bed, at the only exit that couldn’t be reached from the floor without a ladder, and saw the place for the prison it had been.
She didn’t know what had happened in this room, or why; she only knew that she didn’t want to be here any longer. She went up the ladder a lot faster than she’d come down.
And how was your day, Iris? Well, just peachy. There was this bloody corpse in a snowman, then a killer hiding in my house WHILE I WAS SLEEPING, and then big surprise, the skeletal remains of a human being in my barn…
Sampson and Neville had followed her up, closed the trapdoor behind them, and now Sampson was on his cell, listening. He flipped it closed with a snap. ‘They’ve got a break in the fence at Bitterroot, and they don’t know when it happened. Apparently the ice storm shut down all their cameras and motion detectors. We’re moving in.’
26
Iris Rikker had called Magozzi back on the way to Bitterroot, giving him a quick update on the break in the fence and frozen cameras. By that time he and Gino were already in the car, heading north.
‘Can you believe the balls of that bastard?’ Gino shook his head after she hung up. ‘He has to know every cop in the county is looking for him, and what does he do? Hangs around and breaks into the one place they’re looking for him hardest.’
‘Not balls,’ Magozzi grunted. ‘Blind, stupid rage.’
‘Whatever. Christ. I can’t believe it’s five-thirty in the morning and we’re on our way to Cow Patch again.’ Gino was in the passenger seat, slurping coffee from a jumbo travel mug while Magozzi concentrated hard on the road. The freeway was plowed and sanded and they were making good time to Dundas, but the puffy bags under his eyes were partially obstructing his vision.
‘Let’s just hope Kurt Weinbeck is the end of the road and we can tie this thing off and be back in bed by noon.’
‘Jeez, are you listening to motivational tapes or something? It never goes down that easy and you know it. None of us ever really liked Weinbeck for killing Deaton and Myerson. The way I look at it, we got called out of bed to freeze our asses off stomping through some snowy nowhere just so we can talk to the guy long enough to cross him off the suspect list for sure. Meanwhile, Iris Rikker catches a murderer on her first day in office, and you and I get hammered for making a bunch of road trips on somebody else’s case while our own Minneapolis cop killer runs around loose. We are not getting a happy ending out of this.’
‘You want to turn around and go home?’
‘Nah. The puke killed Doyle for sure. Maybe we’ll get lucky and corner Weinbeck in the woods by our lonesome, slap him around a little just for fun. That’d make me feel better. You hear anything new on the Pittsburgh snowman this morning?’
Magozzi kicked the speed up a few notches while Gino wasn’t looking. ‘I called again before I left the house, talked to their night guy. They’re still thinking copycat.’
Gino nodded. ‘That’s what I figure. Our case just gave every sociopath in the contiguous forty-eight plus Alaska a cool, new way to pose bodies. Mark my words, snowmen will start cropping up all over the place, then somebody’ll write a book, and then they’ll make a TV movie of the week. Minneapolis – Ground Zero for Every Lunatic in the Country. The Chief will just love that. The poor guy still hasn’t gotten over “Murderapolis,” and that was over a decade ago.’ Gino sighed and squinted ahead into the beams of the headlights. ‘Oh, shit. Is that snow?’
The southernmost edge of the storm front seemed to end right at the Dundas County line. Once they made the turn off the freeway, the county roads deteriorated fast, and there were an alarming number of cars in the ditch for a place that was so sparsely populated.
‘Jesus,’ Gino muttered under his breath. ‘It looks like a used-car lot out here.’
Magozzi pointed to sagging, ice-coated power lines that looked like silver filament when they caught the light. ‘Looks like they got an ice storm.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I see that, just keep your eyes on the road. Man, that little track into Bitterroot is going to be a bitch.’
Maggie didn’t often leave her little house at night, and certainly not alone. As the longtime manager of
