Magozzi and Gino stepped aside and watched Jimmy take a long, hard look at the snowman. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. ‘We’re going to have to bag the whole damn snowman. There could be trace anywhere in there.’
Magozzi moved a little closer to him and kept his voice low. ‘There’s a possible ID, Jimmy. Tommy Deaton. Works out of the Second.’
Grimm kept his eyes on Magozzi’s for a long moment, took a shallow breath, then turned to his team and started barking out orders like a drill sergeant. ‘Shoot the pictures, then get some polyurethane around Frosty here and peel him like an egg. Make damn sure you don’t lose a flake, and for God’s sake, be careful. I’m guessing we’re going to find some kind of a support somewhere under all this snow, and I want some more photographs of him in situ before we take him down…’
The old cop stringing tape eased over to Magozzi and Gino while Jimmy was still talking. His radio was silent, but his hand was still on his shoulder unit. He looked at them for a minute without saying anything, then took a deep breath. ‘We’ve got another one,’ he said quietly. He tipped his head toward a circle of blue surrounding a snowman on the other side of the field. ‘And it’s another one of ours, name of Toby Myerson. He worked the Second, too.’
Jimmy was still talking in the background; uniforms on the line were still herding onlookers back from the scene; the media reps were still shouting questions – everything in the park looked and sounded exactly as it had five seconds ago. The three men who knew it wasn’t – Magozzi, Gino, and the old cop – just looked at each other silently for a few seconds, afraid to look anywhere else.
Finally Magozzi let his gaze travel around the field, focusing on one snowman, then another, then another. ‘How many you figure there are?’
‘At least a hundred,’ Gino said.
The old cop shook his head. ‘More like twice that. What do you want us to do?’
Magozzi and Gino exchanged a glance, then both looked back at the parking lot where all the long lenses were recording everything.
‘Knock ’em all down,’ Magozzi said.
4
There were well over a hundred officers of one sort or another in the park, but it still took a good half hour to destroy the work of children. Gino and Magozzi had moved to the center of the open field so they could see as much of it as possible, busy eyes and knotted stomachs waiting for a blue-coated arm to rise or a cry to go out announcing another terrible find.
They were just snowmen, but for some reason, Magozzi felt as if he were watching a massacre as crime-scene techs and cops systematically and carefully dismantled them one by one. With each one that went down, he cringed and held his breath, expecting the worst – pessimism was an occupational hazard that moved in fast and stuck around for the long haul – but so far, the rest of the field was clean.
Most parents had whisked their children away long ago, but there were a few left who watched the proceedings with feral glee, oblivious to the terrorized expressions on the faces of their off-spring.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Gino fumed. ‘Can we arrest those assholes for child abuse?’
‘I don’t think it would hold up.’
‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? All their kids are gonna wake up screaming every night for a month, and then they’ll sue the department for not providing grief counselors. And why? Because they just had to stick around for the peep show, hoping like hell they’d see some poor dead bastard and feel happy that it wasn’t them on a slab at the end of the day.’
The sad thing was, Gino was only half-joking, and probably more than half-right.
One of the younger uniforms broke away from an anonymous sea of blue at the far side of the field and crunched over, his ears and nose bright red from the cold, his expression a mix of relief and misery. ‘That’s all of them, Detectives. Nothing else.’
‘Thank God,’ Gino said, releasing a sigh.
The cop nodded, his eyes preoccupied with the decimated field that had turned to slush under heavy foot traffic and the afternoon sun. ‘Did you know them?’ he finally asked.
Magozzi and Gino shook their heads somberly.
‘Me either. But I feel like I did.’ He drifted off without another word, no doubt contemplating his own mortality for the first time.
Magozzi and Gino followed, and ran into Jimmy Grimm halfway.
‘I was looking for you guys. We’ve got the first one uncovered. Come over and take a look.’
The first thing they noticed was that Tommy Deaton’s body was lashed to a wooden ski trail marker with common yellow synthetic rope – the kind you could find just about anywhere, from gas stations to grocery stores. His chin had dropped to his chest without the packed snow to brace it up, and Gino thought it was the saddest thing he ever saw.
‘Oh, man, can’t you cut him down?’
‘Not until Dr Rambachan sees it in place. He got caught behind a twenty-car fender-bender on 494, but he should be here soon.’
‘There’s the answer to your question, Gino,’ Magozzi said.
‘What question?’ Jimmy wanted to know.
‘How you get a dead body to stand up straight so you can build a snowman around it.’
Jimmy nodded. ‘And the skis weren’t just a prop. This guy was hard-core. That suit he’s wearing goes for six hundred bucks minimum, add another thousand or so for the skis and poles.’
‘You been watching the Home Shopping Network again?’
‘I wish. Three kids, two of them on the ski team, and I’m broke every Christmas. Been trying to talk them into something cheaper, like the debate team, but no joy.’ He walked over to Deaton’s body and pointed at the side of his head. ‘One shot, small caliber, probably dropped him on the spot. No exit wound, so we should get a slug out of the autopsy. And there’s stippling on the scalp, so it was real close.’
He stooped down in front of a tray of neatly arranged evidence bags and plucked one out that held a tooled leather wallet. ‘I just pulled this off him. ID, credit cards, two hundred seventy-eight bucks cash.’
Magozzi’s eyes drifted down to Tommy Deaton’s belt holster, where his service piece should have been but wasn’t. ‘But no weapon.’
‘Right.’
‘How about Myerson? Is he uncovered yet?’
‘I’ve got a team over there now. Let’s take a walk while my guys get the shots of Deaton without the snowman.’
They were careful to give wide berth to the crime-scene tape that cordoned off the ski trail that wound through a sparse patch of woods – the only trail that drew a line directly from Tommy Deaton to Toby Myerson. Of course the hundreds of people tromping through here before the tape went up hadn’t been so careful, and Magozzi knew the chance of getting any tracks was beyond hope; but there were a couple BCA guys in the woods proper, and they were crouched by a skinny maple, carefully collecting shredded bark with pairs of tweezers – a good sign.
‘Did you find something?’ Jimmy asked hopefully.
‘Maybe. We’ve got lots of fresh bark confetti, and as far as I know, beavers hibernate, so we’re hoping for a slug.’
‘Pull some guys from the field and widen the grid around the trail a few hundred yards. Take a look at every tree.’
‘They’re on their way. We’ll keep you posted.’
Toby Myerson looked very much like his Second Precinct partner, right down to the skis and the yellow rope that held him upright against another trail marker, but this man’s right arm hung at an awkward angle, and the sleeve of his ski suit was shredded and stained almost black.
Magozzi stood quietly, moving only his eyes, taking it all in. ‘That arm wound had to have bled like crazy. So where’s the blood?’
Jimmy actually smiled at him. ‘Good question, Grasshopper. We uncovered a little that filtered down through the snow, but not enough. My guess is he didn’t take the arm shot here. We’re looking for a blood trail between the two snowmen.’