This time Sampson rolled his head all the way left to look at her, and she could see his face for the first time. He was smiling, just a little. ‘That would be you, Sheriff Rikker.’
11
Magozzi awakened at five a.m. to the sound of sleet hitting his bedroom window. He rolled over, jammed pillows to his ears to block out the sound, then remembered that someone was killing cops and stuffing them in snowmen.
Half an hour later he was showered and dressed, scrambling eggs and deli ham in the same skillet, ignoring the evangelist who had popped onto the television screen when he’d turned it on. Shit. Sunday morning. Even in a state of news and weather junkies, religion topped the bill on the airwaves one day a week, and if you wanted to hear if the world had ended overnight, you had to wait until the men in black robes finished telling you that God’s love was everywhere. Magozzi figured none of those guys ever watched the news.
He channel-surfed while he ate and found a local news brief that was little more than all the stuff they’d run last night, but a couple of the cable news channels were running with the Minneapolis story, mostly because the video was so good. There were a couple of shaky, amateur clips Magozzi hadn’t seen last night – civilians were already cashing in on shooting their happy kids building snowmen, and then the MPD knocking them down, looking for corpses. He pushed away his plate and dragged a napkin across his mouth.
He heard the rumble and scrape of the city plow and sand truck out on the street, and felt that old twinge of disappointment, still with him almost thirty years later. When he was a kid, a snowfall like yesterday’s would have shut down the city for a day at least, maybe two – joyous, unexpected holidays that kept everyone home and turned back the clocks about a hundred years. Dads pulled their kids on sleds right down the middle of the street, moms stayed home and baked cookies and cooked up big pots of homemade soup, and every house smelled like wet woolen mittens drying on a radiator. But eventually you’d hear the dreaded sound of the big trucks pushing the plows, parents’ faces would sag in relief that everything was getting back to normal, and kids would groan and grumble and scramble to complete the homework they’d cast aside.
The Department of Transportation had come a long way since then, and Minneapolis had learned to handle just about anything nature could dish out. This city cleared roads and sidewalks and parking lots faster than any other place in the country, and Magozzi couldn’t remember the last time schools and businesses were closed for a whole day, let alone two in a row. Progress wasn’t always such a good thing, he decided.
Gino called just as he was heading out the door. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just going outside to find some kids and pull them on a sled.’
‘You’ll kill them. It’s icy out there. Come to work instead. Malcherson wants us both in his office as soon as you get in.’
‘You’re there already?’
‘Just pulling into the lot now, which is pretty full for a Sunday morning, by the way.’
‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
‘Not in one piece, you won’t. That stuff they put on the roads to keep the ice melted isn’t doing so hot this morning. I did a three-sixty on the freeway, sailed right through about four red lights on Washington, and I am not getting in a car again until the spring thaw. Wear your booties. There’s more snow coming.’
Chief Malcherson was the perfect embodiment of Minnesota’s stoic, Scandinavian sensibility – the man probably had actual emotions, but if he did, they weren’t for public viewing. But this morning, the gravity of losing two men was strikingly evident on his hang-dog face. The loose skin around his mournful eyes and his remarkable bloodhound jowls seemed to have dropped a couple of inches since the press conference, as if he’d been dragging his hands down his face all night. He barely looked up from the papers on his desk when Magozzi and Gino walked into his office. ‘Good morning, Detectives. Please have a seat.’
Even Gino, who rarely missed an opportunity to comment on the Chief’s sartorial savvy, was subdued and respectful and got straight to the point. ‘Morning, Chief. You did an excellent job with the press conference last night. That couldn’t have been easy, just standing there looking composed while all those reporters kept busting your balls.’
Malcherson ignored him. If he ever thought too hard about Detective Rolseth’s compliments, he would probably have to fire him.
‘We need to move very quickly on this case, Detectives. The press has its teeth in the serial-killer scenario, and we are going to have to address that, and hopefully eliminate it as a possibility. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything in your reports last night that would do that.’
‘Neither did we, Chief,’ Gino said. ‘But it could have been the ex-con with a grudge, like you said, or some nut-bag out of the asylum or who knows what. Serial killers aren’t the only sickos out there. The press just gloms onto them ’cause they’re ratings grabbers. And that’s the difference between us and the press. They jump to conclusions; we have to wait for the facts.’
Malcherson nodded, closed the folder containing last night’s reports, and filed it in a drawer. He never cluttered his pristine desk with anything he wasn’t using at the moment, including photos of his family, which were neatly arranged in their own cubbyhole in a bookcase. ‘Do you have anything new for me this morning?’
Magozzi nodded and laid a fat manila folder on his desk, feeling almost guilty for messing it up. ‘Copies of the ME’s and the BCA’s preliminary reports.’
Malcherson looked wearily at the volume of paperwork. ‘Can you summarize the new information for me?’
Magozzi opened his own folder and started ticking off points. ‘All the slugs from the scene were.22s, and ballistics is working on them now. We should hear something by noon. There’s some trace, but both scenes were so contaminated, Jimmy Grimm isn’t optimistic it will yield anything. Also, the BCA found a blood trail after we left the scene yesterday that matched Toby Myerson’s blood type, along with one of his gloves.’
‘So we’re thinking this is how it went down,’ Gino continued. ‘Tommy Deaton was ahead of Myerson on the trail, and the killer was waiting for him under the cover of trees and surprised him point-blank just as he was skiing out of the woods. Myerson sees his friend get shot, takes off a glove and goes for his gun. But the killer either gets lucky or is a dead-eye dick and hits him in his shooting arm, which explains the blood trail. Myerson skis all the way to the other side of the field, which is no mean feat, considering the arm shot shattered the radius, then he caught one in the back of the neck, probably real close to where the snowman was built around him, because that slug most likely paralyzed him instantly.’
Malcherson took a moment to process the scene Gino had just laid out, his mask of Scandanavian ice still intact. ‘Unfortunately, what bothers me most about this scene does absolutely nothing to dispel the serial-killer notion. In fact, it may support it.’
Magozzi asked, ‘What’s that, Chief?’
‘The carrots.’
Magozzi smiled at him. Underneath the great suits and polished personna of the Chief, there was still an investigator, alive and well and still thinking like a cop. ‘Good call, sir. A lot of people carry rope in their cars for emergencies, but the carrot’s a dead giveaway. Whoever it was came prepared to build a snowman.’
Malcherson’s phone lit up. ‘Please excuse me a moment, gentlemen.’
Magozzi smiled a little at the Chief’s pervasive politeness, then watched Malcherson answer the phone and reach for a fresh tablet. For what seemed like a long time he took fast and furious notes without saying much to the person on the other end. ‘I’ll call that up immediately, Sheriff,’ he said at last. ‘As it happens, Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth are in my office right now. If you’d stay on the line for just a moment, I’ll put this on speaker.’ He pushed hold, and Magozzi noticed the Chief was three shades paler than he’d been a few minutes earlier.