least knew how to do the job, damnit, and her reasons hadn’t been one bit noble. And now it had all boiled down to this: a ruined woman and a beautiful child huddled in a house not too far from here, and whether or not they lived through this night depended on a pretend sheriff doing everything absolutely right.
She turned her head to look at Magozzi and Gino. ‘What else?’ she asked in a voice that sounded like a plea. ‘What else needs to be done? What did I forget? Sampson had to run to check on his sister…’
She looked scared to death, totally unlike the assured woman he’d seen directing deputies like a pro, and now Magozzi got it. Sampson had been her crutch all day, her teacher, probably, but he hadn’t been around for the big one. She’d done this on her own, and now she wasn’t sure it was enough. It would take years on the job before she realized you always felt like you hadn’t done enough.
‘It sounds good,’ he said, because that was the bare-bones truth, and Magozzi wasn’t big on head- patting.
‘Just like downtown,’ Gino added. ‘As long as you’ve got one of the outside guys at Julie’s pulled back for an overview, cause sometimes guys working a building get so focused they forget to look around…’
She didn’t even wait for him to finish; just started talking into a shoulder unit she had tucked under her jacket. ‘Thank you,’ she said to Gino when she’d finished. ‘I didn’t know to do that.’
Gino shrugged. ‘You will next time.’
In the daylight, the village had looked idyllic; at night, it looked like a beautiful Christmas card gone wrong. A lot of the little houses still sported holiday lights, their colors softened and muted by the snow, and every tree branch glistened with a brand-new coating of ice. But there were armed men and women patrolling the narrow street now, approaching the cheery front doors like malevolent trick-or-treaters, and occasionally a fearful, cautious face peered from a lighted window.
‘You need to get those people away from the windows,’ Magozzi said, and Iris nodded.
‘We just started on this block. I had them cover the ones that backed up to open land first, the ones that were in a direct line from where the fence was cut.’
‘Let’s cover it, then.’
The three of them split up, moving fast, and after ten minutes and four houses, Magozzi thought that if he never saw that haunted look in a woman’s eyes again, it would be too soon. God. Every single face behind every single door looked the same.
He and Gino finished their last houses on the block at the same time, and met up in the middle of the narrow street. They saw Sheriff Rikker standing under a streetlight just ahead, making marks on a damp, wrinkled piece of paper, snow accumulating on her head and shoulders.
‘She stands still much longer in this, we’re gonna have to dig her out,’ Gino observed as they approached.
It was quiet on the block now, with all the houses searched. A few officers remained behind, assigned to patrol, but the snow deadened the sound of their movements. They could hear the shushing noise of their own boots pushing through the white stuff, even the scratch of Iris’s pen on the paper; but that was all.
‘This block next,’ Iris stabbed at a map of the village layout, then started leading the way.
They barely had a chance to move before they heard the shot. It was off to their left, down a continuation of the narrow street that cut into open land.
The sound had been muffled, Magozzi thought as all three of them started running; but you could tell it had started out big; maybe as big as the sound of the gun Kurt Weinbeck had used to blow a hole in Steve Doyle’s chest.
27
The mansion was silent except for the regular clicking of Grace’s keyboard. Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner were grabbing catnaps after working most of the night. She was exhausted herself, and sometimes, while she waited for a new line of programming to run, she’d feel her eyes start to flutter closed. But then she’d remind herself of what Magozzi had said about a killer being at the end of that chat room thread, and that woke her right up. There were three dead men in snowmen already, but maybe they could make sure there wouldn’t be a fourth.
The firewalls were getting harder and harder to break through. They’d found a second, then a third, and now Grace was beginning to wonder how many more there were, and how much time they had.
She pushed herself away from the desk and glared at the monitor. ‘I can’t keep doing this,’ she said aloud, and then suddenly realized how true that was; that of course she couldn’t keep doing this – and she didn’t have to. It was like when she used to keep Charlie’s big bag of food underneath the overhanging shelf in the pantry, just because that’s where she’d always kept it. Every morning she’d bend to retrieve it, and a lot of mornings she’d stand too quickly, forgetting the overhanging shelf, and bang her head. How many times had she bumped her head before it occurred to her to move the dog food? It didn’t matter how intelligent you were; sometimes routine and procedure blinded you to the obvious solution.
She heard Harley’s footfalls coming up the stairs just when she was about to go down and wake him. An unappetizing, vegetal miasma preceded him into the room, and Grace recognized the odor of his latest obsession – some hideous herbal tea he brewed secretly every morning and tried to push on all of them. God knew what was in it, but Grace hoped it was legal.
‘I’m not drinking that tea, Harley,’ she said without turning around.
‘You need more green stuff in your diet.’
‘Not in liquid form, I don’t.’
Harley set a mug of the stuff on her desk anyway. ‘I had on the tube while I was brewing this. They’ve got another snowman.’
Grace closed her eyes. They were already too late.
‘Don’t look like that, Grace. It wasn’t here. It was in Pittsburgh. So maybe our killer isn’t even in the state anymore. Maybe he’s on the move. Or maybe it’s a copycat. They don’t know much yet. Either way, we’ve got to get into that chat room.’
‘I was just about to come downstairs. I have something new to try, but I need you and Roadrunner.’
‘And Annie.’
‘Actually, we can let her sleep. You and Roadrunner can handle it.’
‘Are you shitting me? If I don’t wake her up and we crack into this thing, she’ll have my balls on a skewer. Be right back.’
Five minutes later Roadrunner stumbled in behind Harley, screwing his fists into his eyes like a kid trying to wake up. He found his way to the coffee machines, pushed the button on the one that held his Jamaican Blue, then stood there, watching it drip. It didn’t pay to talk to Roadrunner until he was well into his first cup. He wouldn’t hear anyway.
He was wearing a new Lycra suit this morning – lilac in color – and once Grace looked at him, she had a hard time pulling her eyes away. She’d never seen him in pastels before. He looked like a long, tall Easter egg.
Annie hadn’t even bothered to get dressed – she was wearing her silk kimono robe and a pair of bedroom slippers with marabou puffs. ‘Thanks a lot, Grace,’ she grumbled as she shuffled over.
Grace smiled. ‘I take it Harley broke down your bedroom door.’
‘Oh, hell, that would have been a kindness. Damn bastard sneaked in. Guess what it’s like to wake up and see that big hulking brute standing over your bed, watching you sleep.’
Harley sighed. ‘It was a Sleeping Beauty moment. I think my heart stopped.’
‘Pig.’ Annie flounced down at her computer in a flutter of shedding marabou.
‘Hey, Gracie thinks we’re going to bust this thing wide open. She wanted to let you sleep, but I’d thought you’d want to be here.’
‘Thank you, Harley. That was very thoughtful. But you’re still a pig.’ She turned to Grace. ‘So there’s a new snowman in Pittsburgh. Something real bad is going on out there, Grace. What’s your new plan?’
‘We’ve been going at this thing all backward. I thought we’d stop trying to break down the steel door and go to an open window.’
‘Oh, honey, do not talk in metaphors. The sun isn’t up yet.’
Grace swiveled her chair to look at them. ‘We’ve been trying to crack into a chat room with the best security
