at him – they’d find the slug punched into a wall or the floor somewhere – and his word had been good in this county for a long time.
Of course she wasn’t quite dead yet, but the way she was bleeding, it wouldn’t be long, and all he had to do was stand here quietly and wait for it to happen.
Except it was taking too long and he was feeling a little wobbly in the knees. He should have expected that. He’d felt the same way when he’d shot Billy Hambrick just before the stupid, drugged-up kid had slipped a knife into the stomach of one of his deputies. You didn’t want to shoot, but sometimes you had to, and it always left you weak and a little dizzy and not thinking right.
He closed his eyes, just for a second, and heard the steady drip-dripping of Iris Rikker’s blood hitting the tile, but that wasn’t right. She was lying down, and the blood hadn’t been dripping, just sliding out of her without a sound. God, he hoped it wasn’t Roberta, but that couldn’t be. He’d only hit her a few times; just that once with the barrel of the.45, but goddammit he could still hear that drip, drip and it was driving him crazy.
He tried to open his eyes, managed a slit before too dizzy to stand up anymore, and had just a second to look down and see the puddle spreading around his boots before his knees gave way.
Even inside the closed house, the shots had been very loud in the quiet town. Deputy Neville was less than a mile away when the 911 ‘shots fired’ call came over the radio, and for the rest of his life, he would never remember the miraculous 180 turn he made on that narrow, snowy road, or the wild ride back to the Bitterroot parking lot with his accelerator jammed to the floor.
He didn’t even shut off the car; just jumped out and started running around the big building, knees pumping high through the snow, heart pounding, gun drawn. Someone was broadcasting a location through his shoulder unit and his spirit sank as he raced toward the street Sheriff Rikker had been walking when he’d talked to her last.
Two blocks away, then one, then he turned the final corner and stopped dead. The narrow street was filling with people, a sad, rag-tag army of women with hair flying as they ran, some dressed for the weather, but most wearing a hastily donned jacket over pajamas and slippers. They were all converging on the fourth house down, gathering at the front door in absolute silence for the briefest of moments, and then, as he watched, they burst through the door and poured into the house where the gunshots had been fired such a short time ago. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth and scream at them to wait for the officers, professionals, goddammit, didn’t they know there was a shooter in there?
He put his head down and ran toward them, waiting for the gunfire to start.
Iris was flirting with consciousness, sometimes aware, sometimes not, as if life were a dance partner with an outstretched hand held just out of reach. Occasionally she saw a searing, painful light; more often, there was complete and utter darkness that pressed down on her, making it almost impossible to breathe. Scraps of frantic conversations drifted around her head like busy gnats.
Is she alive?
Just barely… too much blood… we need a line here fast, and more of those gauze pads… how’s Bulardo?
Silence for a moment.
Dead. But Roberta’s coming around, Doctor. She’s going to make it. The ambulance is on its way, but the roads are bad…
We can’t wait. Get the stretcher.
And then there was a more familiar voice, and something about it made Iris feel safe; safe enough to drift away into sleep.
I’ll take her. Let me take her. Iris? Oh, God, Iris… DOCTOR?
Busy, chilly hands around her face, so much commotion, and then the unmistakable sense of rising up, up…
We’re losing her! Out of the way, Sampson, please!
Deputy Neville took Sampson firmly by the shoulders and pulled him away from the stretcher. ‘Sir? Let them take her up to the lot. We need to get up there and get the squad ready to take her to the hospital.’
Sampson felt his head move in a stiff nod, and let Neville lead him out the door.
Other officers had responded to the call, more were racing in, snow flying from their boots. They arrived in time to see a stretcher coming out the front door of the little house, held high by women, so many women. Those who weren’t actually bearing the load still reached out with their hands to touch the cold, steel frame of the stretcher, as if touch itself would make a difference. There must have been over a hundred of them.
‘That’s the damndest thing I ever saw,’ one of the officers murmured, and then for some reason, he took off his hat and held it over his chest.
35
Homicide was deserted by the time Gino and Magozzi got back, and that was all wrong for the middle of the day. They found everyone down the hall in the media room, huddled around one of the new oversized computer screens. McLaren was there, Tinker, and a few others – even Chief Malcherson, looking totally out of place next to all the forty-dollar sport coats in his blue pinstripe.
‘You might want to take a look at this, Detectives,’ he said when Gino and Magozzi came into the room.
‘What is it?’
McLaren tapped the computer monitor and Tinker slapped his hand away. ‘The home videos from Theodore Wirth Park keep coming in as people dig themselves out from the storm. This one’s from the sledding hill the night our boys went down.’
‘You can’t see the location of either snowman from that sledding hill,’ Gino said. The woods curl right around up at the top.’
McLaren nodded. ‘Yeah, but in this one a couple of baby Spielbergs took their video cam on the sled with them, all the way to the bottom. They got a sweeping shot of Toby Myerson down there when the camera was bouncing around. It’s a ways off and it’s fuzzy, but we got a couple frames that aren’t bad. God bless auto-focus. See?’ He touched the monitor again, and Gino and Magozzi leaned forward, squinting at the screen.
Four people building a snowman – the kind of happy, idyllic scene that took place in Minnesota every day of every winter, except this time the people were packing snow around a dead man.
‘Jesus,’ Gino whispered.
‘It wasn’t this clear when we first looked at it,’ McLaren went on, so we sent it over to the BCA lab for enhancement, got it back a few minutes ago. No chance in hell… sorry, Chief… no chance we can make any kind of an ID off this – they’re dressed for the weather, ski masks and the whole bit – but BCA managed to calibrate the size of our four happy sculptors against the stats on Toby Myerson. All of them are five six or under. They’re either kids, midgets, or women, every one of them, and from the rack on that one, I’m going with the women.’
Chief Malcherson looked at Magozzi and Gino. ‘Detective McLaren said you had your eye on Bill Warner and his wife for this.’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Right up until the minute we looked at that shot. Bill Warner goes nearly six feet, and his wife’s almost as tall.’
Gino was staring at the monitor, at the four female silhouettes, his lips pressed into a nowhere line. ‘Bitterroot, damnit. It’s gotta be.’
They were all silent for a moment, then McLaren spoke. ‘There’s one more thing.’ He used a pencil to point at the frozen photo. ‘See that white smudge on one of the figures? BCA did some pixel work on a close-up.’ He pushed a few keys and an insert frame popped up on the side of the screen. ‘The white smudge turned out to be some kind of printing on a scarf. W-T-C, and this last one’s a zero. There’s more to it, but there was a shadow and BCA can’t pull it. This is the best we’re going to get. Mean anything?’
Gino was scowling. ‘I’d say it’s part of a plate number, but that’s dumb. Who’d print their license-plate number on a scarf?’
McLaren nodded. ‘Nobody. So we were thinking monogram. Somebody makes a scarf for somebody, puts on
