Sampson pushed himself up from the recliner, apparently weary of her silence. ‘Well, I just wanted to see if the Minneapolis boys were going to show or if we had to start processing the scene ourselves. I’ve got to get back out there.’ He stopped at the doorway. ‘I suppose you want to interview the night janitor who found the body.’
Iris blinked. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘I’ll send her in. Margie Jensen, in case you haven’t met.’
‘Thank you.’
Iris waited until he was well out of the office before she sagged back down into the stupid leather chair and started wishing she were dead, or at least home, with her cat throwing up on her foot.
She’d never even thought to ask who had found the body. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing. And Sampson knew it.
You’re not fooling anyone, Iris. You never walked the street or manned a patrol or processed a crime scene. You don’t even speak the same language as these people.
A short older woman in coveralls rapped on the door frame with a broom handle and walked right in. ‘I’m the janitor, Margie Jensen, and I don’t know anything.’
Iris smiled at her. That makes two of us.
12
It was pushing nine a.m. and snowing hard by the time Magozzi and Gino finally got on the road in one of the department SUVs and headed north out of the city.
Magozzi was behind the wheel, Gino was rigid and still in the passenger seat, giving himself a gastric bypass with a too-tight seat belt, staring out the windshield as if he could prevent catastrophe by not blinking. ‘I hate these damn SUVs,’ he said. ‘We’re too damn high. Bet we tip over twenty times on the way up there.’
‘Can’t tip over,’ Magozzi said. ‘The ice ruts under the snow are too deep.’
The morning’s icy pellets had turned to snow, the wind was gusting, and the plows were having trouble keeping up, even on the city freeways. Magozzi figured visibility was about two car-lengths, give or take. It got worse once they cleared the shelter of the downtown buildings; worse yet when they left the suburbs behind and hit open land.
‘Starting to feel like we’re driving off the edge of the world here, Leo. I can’t see for shit.’
‘We’ve got swampland on both sides, nothing to stop the wind. It’ll get better once we hit some woods.’ Magozzi was four-wheeling it through the new four inches that had accumulated since the last plow run.
‘You sure there are woods up here?’
Magozzi was concentrating hard, trying to see the edges of the road. ‘Hell, I don’t know. We’re heading north. There are woods in northern Minnesota, right? Lean back. You’re fogging the windshield.’
Gino tried to sit back and relax, but within seconds he was canted forward again, squinting through the driving snow. ‘You’re going too fast.’
‘Goddamnit, Gino, relax. You’re driving me nuts, and you sound like an old woman. Back when we were on the street you used to drive like a maniac.’
‘Yeah, but then I got married and had kids, and I’d like to make it to their graduations.’
Magozzi sighed and eased up on the accelerator. ‘There. I’m going thirty. Can you live with that?’
‘I’ll let you know. Damnit, this trip better not be for nothing – it already took at least ten years off my life.’
‘It’s either the same guy or a copycat. Bad either way, and I’m not exactly clicking my heels about working a tandem with this particular sheriff.’
‘Tell me about it. Chief said English teacher, and I had a high school flashback to Miss Kinney, smacking her ruler on the desk. Tall, sour-faced old biddy. Pursed her lips all the time like she was pissed off at the whole world. She talked just like this Rikker woman, and I could never understand her, either. Spewed words like they were old pennies she was dumping out of a jar all at once. Just because you know a lot of words doesn’t mean you have to use them all in the same sentence, you know?’
‘Maybe she was nervous.’
‘Whatever. Just get ready to translate for me. When cops get more than one adjective going I think it’s multiple choice and my brain stops dead… Jeez, Leo, the damn snow’s going sideways. Can you see the road?’
‘Nope.’
It took them exactly two hours to travel sixty miles, and that was on the freeway. By the time they took the right exit and hit the secondary roads, Magozzi was wishing he’d brought a snowmobile instead of an SUV. They sailed sideways through the first turn, then kissed the ditch a couple of times plowing through the rutted snow on a puny two-lane road with no shoulders. Gino was not happy.
‘Man, this is starting to look like Fargo. Don’t they have snowplows up here?’
Magozzi’s knuckles were white on the wheel, something that rarely happened. ‘Open fields in this spot, nothing to stop the wind. They could have plowed this ten minutes ago, and you wouldn’t be able to tell. Keep an eye out for road signs, we got another turn coming up.’
‘Thanks for the great news. Are we gonna go through that one sideways, too?’
‘You want to drive?’
‘I don’t even want to be in a car in this stuff. We pass any kind of a hotel, just drop me off, pick me up in April.’
Another twenty minutes and they were fishtailing through the left turn onto Kittering. Once the SUV straightened out, Magozzi hugged the right edge of the road, looking for some purchase on the snowcovered slope. Gino squinted through the snow, but couldn’t see the top of the hill. ‘Forget Fargo,’ he grumbled. ‘This is a mountain, and the way our luck is going, it’s probably Donner Pass… Oh, man, that’s a hell of a drop-off on the left, Leo, so you don’t want to be doing any of that sideways stuff on this road, okay?’
‘Spoilsport.’
Magozzi felt the back end begin to slide and eased up on the accelerator, hoping like hell they didn’t start sliding backward down the hill. By the time they finally reached the top, it took a full five seconds for him to unclench his jaw. He pulled up between two county cars parked along the side of the sheriff’s office and shut down the car. He and Gino just sat there for a moment, breathing.
Finally Gino stirred and released his seat belt. ‘I kind of feel like we oughta get out and kiss the ground or something.’
Magozzi shook his head. ‘Can’t do it. The country boys could be watching from inside, and they drive that road all day long. We’d look like a couple of wusses.’
‘We are a couple of wusses.’
‘No need to lay that out right at the start.’
The female deputy behind the dispatch station eyed their badges and nodded. ‘Good morning, Detectives. The sheriff’s expecting you. She’ll be right down. How bad was the drive?’
Gino grunted. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. The only way I’m going back down that hill is behind a salt truck.’
‘They never salt that hill. The runoff pollutes the lake.’
‘Oh, yeah? You’d think the dead bodies from all the people sliding off the drop-off into the lake would pollute it a hell of a lot more than a little salt, and we were nearly two of them.’
The deputy blinked at him. ‘You’re kidding me. You actually came up Kittering Hill?’
‘Left on Kittering, up the hill to the sheriff’s office. Those were the directions.’
She let out a silent whistle. ‘Man, nobody drives that hill in this kind of weather. That’s just plain suicide. You should have come the back way.’
Gino’s face was getting red. ‘There’s a back way? A better way?’
‘Well, sure, you just pass Kittering until you get to Cutter. That sort of loops around the hill, easier grade, and the trees pretty much protect it from the weather. What joker gave you those directions, anyway?’
Gino and Magozzi remained stone-faced, and the deputy’s face reddened as she made the connection.