Magozzi looked around at all the faces inside the tent. ‘Where’s Anant?’
Dr Anantanand Rambachan was chief medical examiner for Hennepin County; philosopher of the world, as far as Magozzi was concerned; and the one person he knew in the whole system who’d managed to retain every ounce of his humanity. More important, he’d examined Deaton’s and Myerson’s bodies in the park yesterday after Gino and Magozzi left, and Magozzi had really wanted him on this scene, too.
‘He’s back in the Cities with a five-year-old girl on the table,’ Jimmy answered. ‘Went through the ice on Cedar Lake last night, and you know how Anant feels about kids.’
Magozzi did. No matter what else he was working on, if a child came through the ugly swinging doors, Anant tended them before all others. Always, Detective Magozzi, we put the babies to bed first. In life, and in death, this is the right thing.
‘So who do we have?’ he asked Jimmy.
‘Dr Dredlock.’
Magozzi gave him a disapproving head shake.
‘Hey, I call him that to his face all the time. He thinks it’s funny. Besides, his real name’s Rowland, and it plain doesn’t go with hair like that. Anyway, he’s good, Anant likes him, I like him, and he assisted on Deaton and Myerson yesterday, so he’s running with the book. He already did a prelim and pronounced our friend here, then hightailed it back to the van to warm up. He’ll come back out for the finish once we get the snow peeled away.’
Jimmy watched the rest of his crew snugging a plastic tarp all around the ice-fishing snowman, and when they were satisfied, he rubbed his mittened hands together. ‘Okay, just like yesterday at the park, boys and girls. Let’s crack this snowman, see what we’ve got.’
Iris held her ground but closed her eyes and listened to the sound of snow chunks being laid carefully on the plastic tarp. She opened them when she heard a big piece fall to the plastic and someone hiss, ‘Oh, shit.’
The snowman – what was left of it – looked bizarre. Although the head was relatively intact, all of the snow on the man’s torso had fallen away at once. Probably, Iris thought in a detached, scientific part of her mind, because all the blood had kept it from sticking properly. The man’s chest was a mess. So you had Frosty the Snowman’s head stuck on top of a horror movie.
Iris felt herself start to tip over, and then she felt a strong, mittened hand on her upper arm, pushing against her, holding her steady.
‘Deep, slow breaths,’ a voice said very quietly. ‘Move your eyes away, don’t close them. Just breathe.’
If she made the tiniest movement, like turning her head to see the face, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she would pass out in a dead faint. Or maybe throw up. But she recognized the voice. Rolseth, of all people, was saving the day, trying to make her look like an actual cop.
When they removed the snow from the head, Iris stared at the exposed bluish face; the closed, swollen eyes; the gaping mouth.
‘Anybody know this guy?’ Magozzi was asking.
Nobody did.
‘And I don’t suppose we have a chance in hell of printing those hands until he thaws.’
Jimmy Grimm shook his head. ‘Not a full set. They’re frozen tight to the pole. Try to move the fingers, they’ll snap like pretzel sticks. Try to pull the pole out, we’ll be ripping some serious skin.’ He crouched down for a closer look. ‘Might be able to give you something off that one thumb, though. It’s sticking out a little.’
‘Give it your best shot. The sooner we ID him, the sooner we’ll be able to look for a connection with the other two.’ Magozzi glanced back at Iris. ‘You’re hooked up to the database, right?’
Iris opened her mouth to speak, pretty excited to know the answer to at least one question, but Lieutenant Sampson beat her to the punch. ‘You get a print, I can run it from my squad in about ten minutes. Faster if he’s been printed by the state. We’ve got them all set up to run through the Minnesota database first. Saves a lot of time.’
That got Gino’s attention. ‘Wait a minute. I can’t make a cell call out here and you got computers in every squad with that kind of muscle?’
Sampson shrugged. ‘Sure. Wireless computers, satellite GPS. Just like downtown.’
Gino folded his arms over his chest and grunted. His car didn’t have GPS.
Sampson was as good as his word. He slogged back from his squad in the lot within five minutes, holding a printout. ‘Got a hit in about two seconds. The guy’s a parole officer out of Hennepin County. Lives in Minneapolis. Name of Stephen P. Doyle. Ring any bells?’
Magozzi looked down at the sorry remains of one Stephen P. Doyle and shook his head. The man was wearing a gold wedding band. ‘It’s going to ring a real sad bell with somebody.’
15
Johnny McLaren was alone in Homicide by the time Tinker finally made it to the office. He was standing by the coffeemaker, mug in hand, watching the drips come out as if there were a speed limit on the damn things. His red hair was sticking out as if he’d been electrocuted, and his narrow face was the unhealthy color of a vanilla milk shake.
‘Sorry I’m late, Johnny.’
‘Jeez, Tinker, I almost called the dogs out on you. Janis called three hours ago, said you were going to make a quick personal stop. I figured you were nose down in a ditch somewhere, and I couldn’t get through to your cell.’
Tinker hung up his coat, straightened it on the hanger, then slumped into his chair. ‘Yeah, I was working the cell pretty hard. The personal stop turned into what might be some bad business.’
McLaren held his breath. If he had any kind of a curse attached to his Irish heritage, it wasn’t his weekend love affair with fine aged whiskey – that had nothing to do with being Irish, and everything to do with being a cop and a lonely man. His real curse was his morbid and fearful imagination. Ten seconds after Tinker said ‘bad business,’ his mind had leaped to the conclusion that the personal stop was a doctor appointment, and that Tinker was dying of some horrible terminal illness, would probably drop dead at his desk before the day was over.
‘Jesus, Tinker, what is it? Are you okay?’
‘I don’t know. The whole thing feels wrong…’ Tinker looked up at McLaren’s face, falling by the second, and almost rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, come on, Johnny. You’re always doing this. One of us gets a hangnail, you’re up all night worried we’ve got flesh-eating bacteria or something. You’ve got to stop or you’ll drive yourself crazy. I’m fine. It’s Steve I’m worried about.’
‘Oh. Good. Steve who?’
So Tinker gave him a quick rundown, and Johnny listened quietly, trying not to look elated that it wasn’t Tinker, it was only one of his friends who might be in trouble. When Tinker shoved the picture of the brutalized ex-wife under his nose, he caught his breath.
‘Jesus. They let this guy out?’
‘They did.’
‘And right now the only person who knows where this woman is, is the guy that did this to her?’
‘You got it.’
‘Whose job is it to find her?’
Tinker shrugged. ‘By the time I follow that trail he could be in Julie Albright’s backyard. I put Tommy Espinoza on it. He’s hacking into a bunch of secure websites as we speak, breaking all kinds of laws trying to find her. If he can’t, he’s going to call the Monkeewrench people.’
‘So we wait on that one. What about your friend?’
‘That’s a waiting game, too. The scene’s weird, but there’s no place to go with it from what I saw. So I called in Crime Scene, hoping they might pull a rabbit out of the hat. Told them it was a possible, which is a hell of stretch from the physical evidence. I’m going to get called on the carpet for this one.’ He jumped when the phone rang and grabbed it before McLaren even thought to move, hoping to hear Espinoza’s voice, or maybe even someone from the Crime Scene Unit, but it was only Evelyn on the switchboard. He spent a few minutes calming her down – funny, that he was so good at calming other people when he felt like jumping out of his own skin – then hung up. ‘Snowman calls keep coming in,’ he explained to McLaren. ‘Evelyn’s running out of Valium.’