we’ve ever seen. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s taking too long. I thought we could try piggybacking Harley’s and Roadrunner’s virus on the specific chat threads that caught our attention in the first place, let the virus lead us into the thread, if not the site itself.’
‘Goddamn,’ Harley murmured, then there was the sound of his knuckles cracking as he flexed his fingers over the keyboard. ‘This is going to work.’
Annie said, ‘Then why didn’t you think of it, genius? It’s your stupid virus.’
‘Because, Sleeping Beauty, I am a bull of a man. Charging right in, breaking things down, that’s what I do. This subtle stuff is for girls.’
‘Smart girls.’
‘I’ll give you that.’ He shoved the disk containing the virus program into his drive.
‘Way to go, Grace,’ Roadrunner gave her a sleepy smile as he set an extra mug of his precious Jamaican Blue on her desk. ‘That’s pretty far outside the box for someone who said we weren’t allowed to use that virus for anything except shutting down kiddy porn sites.’
Grace nodded. ‘Viruses bad,’ she reiterated their mantra, then grinned at him. ‘Except when they do good.’
‘It’s pretty good at shutting down the porn sites.’
‘And it was pretty good saving a thousand lives back in Wisconsin last summer.’
Roadrunner’s smile broadened at the memory. ‘You like my new suit?’
‘I love your new suit.’
‘Roadrunner, get your skinny ass over here. I can’t get the damn thing to launch.’
It took exactly ten minutes for Roadrunner to pull up the entire chat thread on his monitor. ‘I think I’ve got it.’
The others were behind his chair in an instant, reading over his shoulder in absolute silence.
Harley finally straightened. ‘Oh, man. This is all bad.’
‘And sad,’ Annie added.
Grace’s eyes had been busy while the text had been scrolling by, but when it stopped, she glanced up at the top of the monitor and frowned. ‘Look at the subject line of this thread,’ she pointed.
Harley squinted at it. ‘Bitterroot. Wow, that’s the second time in two days that name’s come up. How weird is that, and what the hell does it mean?’
28
It was an old house – one of those massive boxy numbers they built in farm country when the state was new, and couples prayed for many sons to help work the land. Probably the original farmstead, Magozzi thought, but someone had taken a lot of care with it. The paint was fresh, the big front porch was new, and a modern air- conditioning unit was squatting between some bushes on one side. Funny, the things you noticed when you didn’t even think you were looking.
They hadn’t run far from the clustered houses of the village – maybe a hundred yards – but they all were breathing hard, and Magozzi felt the burn in his thighs from lifting his legs over the snow. Now they were crouched behind the last cluster of trees near the house, weapons drawn, senses screaming, catching their breath before they moved in.
Suddenly the front door opened wide, to show a woman-shape with light behind it. Magozzi squinted through the driving snow, but couldn’t see clearly enough to be sure there was no one behind her.
‘Officers?’ the woman called out, and he recognized Maggie Holland’s voice. ‘Officers, are you out there? It’s Maggie Holland, and it’s all right for you to come in now.’
Iris, Magozzi, and Gino exchanged wary glances, then Gino stabbed a forefinger at Iris’s chest.
Iris nodded, then called back. ‘Ms Holland, it’s Sheriff Rikker. Are you alone in there?’
‘Not exactly. This is Laura’s house. She’s here… and Julie Albright’s husband, but he’s dead.’
Gino and Magozzi looked at each other, then started to move toward the house, bent over in a crouching run, dodging between the scant cover of single tree trunks, just as if Kurt Weinbeck were alive and well and waiting behind the door with a gun on Maggie Holland. You never knew.
Iris mimicked their movements, cursing her short legs because she couldn’t move as fast through the snow. She fell twice, took a closer look at Maggie Holland smiling, waiting patiently in the doorway, then said the hell with it, stood up straight, and walked toward the porch.
‘Goddamnit, Rikker, get down!’ Gino whispered at her, but she was already at the porch and not dead yet. She poked her head in the doorway, then turned back and motioned them in.
It was like walking into a Freddy Krueger Disneyland. A fire crackled in the fireplace, cozy armchairs and old photos, even a little old white-haired lady sitting in a rocking chair with knitting in her lap, smiling in greeting, as if they’d dropped in for some holiday cheer. The only thing that didn’t quite fit was the body bleeding all over a faded area rug with roses on it. Sheriff Iris Rikker stood over it, looking like a bewildered child who’d walked into the wrong house by mistake.
Gino bent next to what was left of Kurt Weinbeck, checked the carotid, the huge hole in his chest, then looked up at Magozzi and shook his head.
‘This is Laura.’ Maggie Holland closed the door and gestured toward the woman in the rocking chair.
She was old, but unbelievably spry, and shot up from her seat, extending a bony hand with a lot of years on it. Magozzi was still standing with his knees bent and his weapon out front, and suddenly the posture felt a little foolish. He straightened reluctantly, shifted the nine to his left hand, and felt the old woman’s chilly flesh in his right. ‘Detective Magozzi. Minneapolis Police.’
She had new teeth in a face that looked like his not-permanent-press shirts when they came out of the dryer. Too new. Hollywood white. On a young woman, the smile would have been drop-dead. On her, it just looked weird. ‘I know who you are, Detective. Maggie told me all about you, and of course I see you on the television every now and then.’ She folded her hands under a sagging bosom and looked around, seeming distressed for the first time. ‘Sorry about the mess.’
Magozzi felt like he was in the Twilight Zone. This was an old woman who’d just witnessed a killing. There was a man bleeding on the rug in her living room. She was supposed to be horrified, frightened, trembling, in shock.
‘But you see, he had the gun on Maggie, and I really didn’t have any choice. None at all.’ Her blue eyes moved back to him, and Magozzi noticed that they looked faded, like an old photograph about to disappear. ‘You look upset, Detective. I’ll bet you’ve had a heck of a time. All of you. Perhaps you should sit down by the fire, I’ll have Maggie bring you some tea…’
Maggie Holland tried to talk her out of it; tried to send her off to bed, in fact, which seemed a sensible suggestion for an old woman who’d had such a night; but Laura would have none of it. Up until this point, she seemed remarkably sharp and self-possessed – almost abnormally so, considering the circumstances – but now Magozzi saw the first sign of petulance in her silent, head-shaking refusal. He thought first about shock, then dismissed it. None of the signs were there. More than likely, she’d started to make that slow slide backward into childish behavior that happens to many elderly when the mind starts to falter.
‘I will not be sent to bed like a child!’ she shouted suddenly, startling them all. ‘And I will serve these officers tea, and I will answer their questions!’ The outburst had been fast and unexpected; so was the sweet smile she instantly turned on Iris Rikker, as if there had been no outburst at all. ‘You do have questions for me, don’t you, Sheriff Rikker? I do love company.’
Creepy, Magozzi thought. Around the bend, or at least moving toward it in a big hurry.
Iris smiled right back at her, which Magozzi racked up as a point in her favor. Quick on the uptake, good instincts. ‘It might be nice to chat a bit, if you’re not too tired.’
Laura reached over to pat Iris’s arm. ‘Not at all, child.’
‘She’s very old,’ Maggie Holland whispered to Gino when he followed her into the kitchen. She busied herself with boiling water and porcelain cups on a tray. They rattled when she set them down because her hands were trembling. ‘And her memory is going. She gets confused. Remembers things the way she wished they had
