national news, killing him would be utterly impossible.’
Gino nodded reluctantly at a truth he’d seen a thousand times.
‘But you dream about it, especially afterward, and maybe when you get very old and the mind and the memory dim, the dreams become reality, and reality becomes the dream. That’s the place where Laura is living now. I did warn you that she wasn’t quite -’ She stopped talking abruptly when Laura came back into the room, looking bewildered to find it full of strangers.
‘We have company?’ she asked in a small, timid voice. ‘At this hour?’
Gino cleared his throat. ‘We just stopped in to use your phone, ma’am, if that’s all right.’
‘Oh. Well, Maggie, I think I’d like to go to bed now.’ She left the room without once looking at the body of the man she’d killed, lying on the rug.
Iris touched Magozzi’s shoulder as he got up to leave. ‘I have to stay until the others come.’
‘You have some kind of crime unit?’
Iris shrugged. ‘Such as it is. I radioed Lieutenant Sampson when I came in. He’ll take care of it.’ She gestured vaguely toward Kurt Weinbeck’s body. ‘This seemed pretty cut and dried. I don’t think we’ll need the BCA.’
‘Probably not.’
‘But I’d like to ask your advice on something else. Will you wait?’
Magozzi nodded. ‘No problem. We’ll be in the car.’
29
Gino was shaking his head, clucking his tongue, as they walked back to the car. ‘Man, was that goddamned weird or what? Walking into that house, listening to the old lady talk about shooting people, pouring tea while Kurt Weinbeck is getting stiff on the living room floor… Jesus. I felt like I just walked through the looking glass or fell down the rabbit hole or whatever the hell it was.’
‘It was pretty weird.’
‘Pretty weird? Are you kidding me? I feel like I just dropped acid or something.’
Magozzi smiled as they moved through the rapidly accumulating snow. ‘Nobody drops acid anymore, Gino.’
‘Whatever. I hope Rikker hurries it up. I just want to get the hell out of here and never come back. This place is freaking me out.’
‘So you think there’s any truth to it?’
‘What?’
‘The “bodies in the lake” business.’
‘Hell, I don’t know. The old gal showed her chops pretty good tonight. I can see her popping her husband way back when, especially after he knocked up her own sister, but I sure as hell can’t see her as a frequent flyer. Either way, it’s not our problem. We’ve got our own case to worry about, and this mess really burned us for time.’
A few of the Dundas County cars were leaving the parking lot by the time they made it back, but most of them were still in place. The deputies not working the scene clustered around idling squads, rehashing, embellishing, doing what cops did while they waited for the last of the adrenaline to burn away. An ambulance was pulling in, and one of the officers broke away from a group to direct the driver.
When they got to their own SUV, Gino flipped open his cell. ‘I’m going to call McLaren and fill him in. Maybe he has some news. At least we can make Tinker’s day, telling him a ninety-year-old lady plugged Weinbeck with the same caliber he used to kill Steve Doyle.’
There was definitely poetic justice in that, Magozzi thought sadly; it was just a damn shame Doyle wasn’t around to appreciate it. He climbed into the car, started the engine, and turned the heater on full blast. Gino opted for staying outside and pacing figure eights in the fresh snow while he talked to McLaren. Gino hated the cold, but he hated making calls sitting down even more.
‘So what’s up?’ Magozzi asked when Gino had finally finished and climbed into the passenger seat.
Gino sighed. ‘The end of a dream. Bona fide proof that we wasted a day and a half’s worth of golden hours on finding Deaton’s and Myerson’s killer. McLaren just confirmed a Friday-night alibi for Weinbeck. No way he could have done it.’
Magozzi sighed. ‘Well, that’s what we kind of figured all along. Is it tight?’
‘Totally. His sister and about forty of his hair-ball friends threw a party for him.’
Magozzi frowned. ‘So why didn’t that turn up right away?’
‘It’s classic, stupid, drowning-in-a-shallow-gene-pool stuff,’ Gino muttered, rubbing his hands together in front of a heat vent. ‘They picked Weinbeck up from prison, took him straight to a bar, and got him skunk-drunk. Stayed there until closing time, then took it back to her house and went all night. Major parole violation for Weinbeck, obviously, and she knew it, so she got real paranoid when McLaren called her up, sniffing around for info about her brother. So she did what comes naturally to people like that – she played stupid. Her loyalty lasted about as long as it took McLaren to threaten to book her as an accessory for Deaton and Myerson, then she spilled her guts. What a pisser. And usually the dumb factor works in our favor. Go figure.’
‘Shit.’ Magozzi let out a frustrated sigh and pushed on the steering wheel, suddenly feeling claustrophobic in this car, in this place, in this county. ‘So now what? Head to Stillwater, put the screws to the Snowman?’
Gino lifted a shoulder noncommittally. ‘I suppose that makes sense. Just because he didn’t hire Weinbeck to kill Deaton and Myerson doesn’t mean he didn’t hire somebody else, right?’
‘Right.’
‘It’s the strongest lead we’ve got.’
‘It’s the only lead we’ve got.’
They were both quiet for a long moment. ‘So why do neither one of us like it?’ Magozzi finally asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s more like a weird feeling than anything else. Kinda like diet pop.’
Magozzi lifted a brow at him and braced himself for another Gino metaphor. ‘Diet pop.’
‘Yeah, you know, you take a sip and it tastes just great, just like the real thing. Then a couple seconds later it gets a little thin on the palate and you can start tasting the artificial sweetener. It’s just not right, and you know it, but it’s hard to peg.’
‘Well, whether or not it sits right, we’ve got to look at it anyhow.’
‘I know.’ Gino’s leg was starting to jiggle impatiently. ‘Where the hell is Rikker, anyhow?’
A few minutes later, a black sedan pulled into an empty parking space across and kitty-corner from them, under one of the big sodium vapor lamps. Magozzi and Gino watched as a man and a woman got out, and then both their jaws dropped simultaneously.
‘Jesus, Leo, are you seeing who I’m seeing? That’s Mary Deaton’s parents.’
Magozzi nodded, finally understanding why his brain had stumbled a little when he heard Laura ask if Alice and Bill were coming. ‘Alice and Bill Warner. Which makes Alice the grand-niece that Laura and her sister raised right here.’
Gino blinked a lot of times at the overload of coincidences. ‘Goddamnit, Leo, I’m sinking down into that dark place, ’cause this stuff is really getting to me. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, we just figured out that we’ve been working on two totally unrelated cases, and yet every single goddamned thread to both of them leads us straight to Bitterroot every time. What’s that about?’
Magozzi was just shaking his head, trying to clear his mind, trying to focus. Bitterroot. Gino was right – it felt like it had to be central to both cases, because it just kept popping up, but when you looked at it close, there was nothing here to connect it to the Deaton and Myerson murders. Except the two people he was watching as they hurried through the snow, around the corporate building to the village in back. ‘I don’t know, Gino, but there can’t be anything to it. Weinbeck was up here for his wife. He saw the news about Deaton and Myerson and put Doyle in a snowman to buy himself time. And Alice Warner just happens to be related to somebody who lives here. With four hundred residents and six degrees of separation, maybe that’s not such a coincidence.’
Gino pressed both hands to his forehead. ‘You know those smoothies when they put a bunch of different fruit in a blender and turn it on high? That’s what my brain feels like right now. A big pink-and-gray smoothie. And I got that diet soda feeling again.’
Magozzi’s eyes followed Alice and Bill Warner until they moved out of sight. He totally missed Iris walking up to
