Snow Blind (Joe Gunther Mysteries) Read online

  I shook my head to Blake’s request. “Show me the body first.”

  “What?”

  “You told me you didn’t do it. You going to throw away the best chance you have to prove that? I’m a trained investigator.”

  “Why would you want to help me?” he asked. “I threatened to kill you.”

  “It’s not about helping you. If you didn’t do it, somebody else did. He’s the guy I want.”

  He thought about that for a moment, but then pointed to the chair again. “Forget it. You’re just trying to mess me up. Put your butt over there.”

  I shrugged. “Which tells me all your ‘I didn’t-do-it’ crap was just that.”

  He half raised his hand to either hit me or ward me off like an evil spirit. “What the hell do you know? You son-of-a-bitch.”

  I stared at his wide, bewildered eyes without comment.

  After a long moment of suspended animation, he slowly capitulated, and said in a near whisper, “She’s in the bedroom.”

  Now that I could, I didn’t move. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

  “Nothing,” he said sulkily. “I came to see her, I found her dead, I left.”

  I pointed at the gun in his hand. “What about that?”

  He looked at it as if I’d just put it there. “It’s hers. I took it ‘cause I knew I was screwed.”

  “Why’d you come here in the first place? You said she was your ex-girlfriend.”

  He actually hung his head like a kid, reinforcing the notion that I could probably just snatch the gun away. If I’d still been interested.

  “I just wanted to see her.”

  “At night? In the middle of a storm?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted simply.

  Perhaps more than anything he’d said or done so far, that one comment–and the complex of feelings behind it–made me believe him.

  “Who broke off the affair?” I asked.

  “She did.” I could barely hear him in the silent house.

  “Why?”

  “I hit her.”

  I didn’t respond, his response settling like an all-too-familiar cold stone in my chest. He looked up at that, his expression pleading. “I know it was wrong. I was drunk and pissed off. I told her I was sorry. But she threw me out and had a restraining order put on me.”

  “That still in force?”

  He began getting worked up again. “Hell, yeah. Why do you think I tried to run for it? I know what this looks like. I’m a guy with no job, a drinking problem, I got a history of beating my girlfriend, and now she’s dead. This ain’t rocket science. I even have a record with you guys–assault and battery. Perfect, huh?”

  “When was that?” I asked quickly.

  He stopped with his mouth half open. “What? I don’t know. Five years ago. I got into a fight with some guy–broke his nose.”

  A silence fell between us. I took advantage of it to move toward the bedroom door. He watched me, obviously wondering whether to stop me. I tried heading him off before he could decide.

  “Okay,” I said authoritatively. “I’ll check this out. Don’t move around more than you have to. I don’t want you messing up any potential evidence.”

  I reached the door and twisted the knob, pushing it open. The room beyond had one wall lamp burning. There was a double bed, a rickety chest of drawers, a night table made from a crate. Sprawled across the bed was a young woman, blond, fully clothed in jeans and a work shirt. She lay on her back, with her arms flung out to both sides. Her face was bruised and bloody, and her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. I checked for a pulse, despite the obvious lack of need.

  She was already cold, her fingers and jaw stiffening.

  I straightened and simply looked at her for a moment, wondering how and if she might have avoided ending up like this–and wondering, too, how many times I’d gazed at the bodies of dead young women in the past, and asked myself the same question.

  I heard a ragged sob behind me and saw Roger in the doorway, tentatively looking in. “This the way you found her?”

  “Yeah,” he murmured, his eyes welling up.

  “You didn’t try to revive her at all? Take her pulse?”

  “I half picked her up–lifted her head. But I knew she was dead.”

  “How?”

  He flinched, wiped his nose. “Look at her, man.”

  “How?” I repeated, almost resentful of his sorrow.

  “She was cold. And her neck …” He didn’t finish.

  “Let’s see your hands.”

  He shook his head, but only in resignation. Still holding the gun, he pulled off his gloves, saying, “That’s what I mean. I’m up shit creek. I knew it’s the first thing you people would do.”

  I studied his right hand. “How’d you cut your knuckles?”

  “You’re not going to believe me.”

  “Not if you don’t tell me.”

  “I punched the wall in my apartment. I was pissed, I was lonely. It was just before I came out here to talk to her.”

  I nodded. He was right about the circumstantial evidence. It made for a strong case. “Let’s go back to the other room,” I suggested.

  He led the way, his back to me, the gun dangling by his side.

  “Sit,” I told him, pointing to a chair while I opened the stove and fed a couple of pieces of wood into it from a nearby box.

  At last, I settled into the armchair he’d wanted me in from the start.

  “Now what?” he asked, having apparently given up trying to be in charge.

  “Tell me about Jenny,” I said. “When did you two break it off?”

  He was sitting slumped in his chair, the gun held loosely between his knees. “A month-and-a-half ago.”

  “This her house?”

  “Yeah. I mean she rents it, but she’s been here a couple of years.”

  “What’s she been up this last month? Any new boyfriends?”

  His expression soured. “I guess. She got around.”

  “Is that what you fought about?”

  “That and other things. I don’t guess I was too good there, either … and there was the drinking … I can’t believe she’s dead …” His voice trailed off.

  I scanned the room from where I was sitting. “Where’s her cat?”

  His brow furrowed. “Cat? I don’t know. How did you know …?”

  I pointed to a smudge on the edge of the refrigerator door, about a foot up from the floor. “My girlfriend used to have cats,” I explained. “They rub their scent glands on corners like that–it leaves a stain after a while. Besides, there’s hair on all the furniture.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s an indoor cat. It’s always here.”

  I got up and began walking around the room, checking into corners, under a chest, behind a closet door. I repeated the same routine in the bedroom, with similar results. Signs of the cat were plentiful and recent, including some half-eaten moist food in a bowl. But the animal itself was missing.

  I stood for a moment on the threshold between both rooms, my eyes traveling from where Jenny lay on the bed to the front door, trying to reconstruct what had happened. I finally approached the wood stove again and crouched next to it.

  “What?” Roger asked from his seat.

  “Looks like blood on the corner here,” I said. “And a few drops on the floor. It’s hard to see mixed in with the burn marks.”

  I rose and crossed to the front door, buttoning my coat and pulling my flashlight out of my pocket.

  Roger sat forward, alarmed, and pointed the gun at me as if he’d just discovered it there. “Where’re you going?”

  “Outside to look around,” I answered, pointedly not looking at him. “If you can find another light, you can help.”

  He rose and began searching the cabinets in the kitchenette, shoving the pistol into his waistband. I left him to it and stepped outside.

  It was still snowing, but just barely, and visibility was much improved. I st
ood on the top step and played the light’s halo around me in ever widening arcs, hoping reality would confirm what was in my mind’s eye.

  I found it just as Roger opened the door behind me.

  “Wait there,” I told him, and stepped carefully into the fresh snow by the side of the steps. I walked about fifteen feet out in a straight line, to where the flashlight beam had revealed a slight, oblong depression in the powdery surface. There, I reached down gingerly, found what I was looking for after a few seconds of groping around, and extracted the frozen stiff body of a small, gray cat.

  “Holy Jesus,” Roger said from the steps. “That’s it. How’d you figure that out?”

  I returned to the house and stepped past him into the living room. “Educated guess,” I told him. “Did Jenny keep any plastic bags around?”

  He closed the door and walked over to the counter with the gas burner on it, pulling open a few drawers until he found what he was after. “Are bread wrappers okay?”

  “They’ll do. And show me where she kept her personal papers.”

  I examined the cat carefully before he gave me the bags, which I then used to carefully and completely wrap up the animal’s stiff legs and head.

  Roger had approached a small school desk in the meantime, and now lifted its lid to reveal a jumble of bills, letters, and junk mail. “This is the only place I know that she kept stuff.”

  I sat before the desk and began sorting through its contents. Ten minutes later, I discovered why the cabin had seemed so familiar to me earlier. Satisfied, I placed several documents in my pocket and looked up at him, pointing to his belt as I did so. “You don’t want to carry a gun that way. Could mess you up if it went off.”

  He looked embarrassed and laid his hand on the weapon’s wooden butt. “Damn. I didn’t think of that.”

  He hesitated a moment before gingerly pulling the pistol free and handing it to me, almost apologetically, along with my own gun from inside his coat. “I guess maybe you should keep these.”

  I took them both and put them away, suppressing a paradoxical mixture of relief and anger as I did. “Yeah–maybe.”

  After a telling pause, he asked, “What happens now?”

  “That’s a loaded question, Roger,” I admitted, the anger just barely riffling the surface. “Technically, you’ve committed some pretty serious crimes–assaulting a police officer, reckless endangerment, kidnapping. We could even pile on your putting my car in the ditch. None of which even touches the young woman in the next room and how she ended up dead. You can’t be accused of being overly smart.”

  He didn’t deny any of it. All the turmoil, frustration, and anxiety that had fueled him earlier seemed to have dissipated into simple lethargy. “I know.”

  I stood up. “That having been said, I think we should hitch a ride on the first plow truck that comes through here and deliver you home.” I leaned forward slightly so that our eyes were just a foot apart. “With one understanding.”

  The uncertain relief on his face was palpable. “What?”

  “You stay put there. If this works out the way I think it will, you might be asked to tell the prosecutor or a judge about how you came here and found Jenny dead, and then stopped me for help on the road, but that should be it. Jenny’s killer will be behind bars and there’ll be no reason for anyone to know what else you did tonight.”

  “You’d do that?” He sounded incredulous.

  I took hold of his shoulder and squeezed hard. “Yeah. But if you do me dirt–disappear, act stupid, anything at all–I’ll make sure you go to jail. Understood?”

  He nodded once, his eyes wide and clear. “Yes, sir.”

  Two days later, I climbed the staircase of an old, red brick throwback to the Industrial era that had been cut up into dozens of tiny, dark, airless apartments overlooking Main Street on one side, and the railroad tracks on the other. It was a toss up about which was the preferable location, given the distinctly different, but equally jarring noise levels emanating from both.

  Roger Blake lived over the street, and answered at the first knock.

  “Hi, Lieutenant,” he said, his nervousness making him awkward and shy. “How’re ya doin’?”

  “I’m doing fine,” I answered. “More to the point, so are you. You won’t have to talk to a judge after all. The man who killed Jenny confessed.”

  “How?” he blurted, straightening with a start. “Who was it?”

  I stepped past him uninvited and walked into the one-room apartment, drawn by the sun pouring in through the dusty window opposite the door. I stood next to it, feeling the heat on my face, along with an unexpected resurgence of the mixed emotions I’d felt when last in this man’s company.

  “Her landlord,” I answered him. “When I went through her papers that night, I saw she was behind in the rent. He’d written her a letter that if she didn’t pay up, he’d come by personally to collect what she owed him–one way or the other. I knew the guy, as it turns out. I couldn’t put my finger on it when you and I were there, but I’d been in that cabin years ago to interview him about a sexual assault. Given that, I figured he’d done what he’d promised her he would, probably just before the storm broke, considering how long she’d been dead.”

  Roger was standing behind me. In the window’s reflection, I could see him shaking his head. “Wow–that’s incredible. I mean, everything pointed to me. You really saved my butt, just on a hunch.”

  I turned to face him, his gratitude raising my ire. “Not really. The cat’s head had been smashed against the corner of the wood stove. No reason to have done that unless it had hassled the killer first. You didn’t have any scratches, nor did Jenny’s body, and there were traces of skin in the cat’s claws.”

  “The landlord?”

  I nodded. “His hand was not only all scratched up, but bruised from hitting Jenny. DNA analysis will bear it all out, but the confession should stand in any case. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time–and you acted like a jerk.”

  Now it was Roger’s turn to stare contemplatively out the window. “I thought I didn’t have any choice.”

  “You didn’t think at all,” I corrected him, my voice tightening with a simmering anger I was surprised I couldn’t control. “You just made assumptions, and sold everyone short, including yourself.”

  “I knew how it would look …”

  “You had no idea.” I interrupted, and pointed to a hole in the wall next to his rumpled bed. “That where you messed up your hand?”

  He nodded.

  “Punching the wall in rage against Jenny, just before you set out in mid-storm to confront her?”

  He was utterly still, seemingly frozen by my tone of voice.

  “What were you going to do, Roger, if you hadn’t found her dead? You didn’t stop somewhere to bring her flowers, did you?”

  “I wasn’t gonna to kill her,” he whispered.

  I moved closer to him, forcing him to look at me, a professional lifetime of pent-up resentment and frustration pushing to find expression. “The landlord didn’t set out to kill her, either. But he’d hit women before, just like you hit Jenny that once. She didn’t put up with it from you, and she wasn’t going to take it from him. The only difference was that he didn’t take no for an answer. He was farther down the road than you are, Roger, but it’s still the same road. And as sure as I’m standing here, you’ll end up in the same place.”

  He didn’t say a word, not surprisingly, but his uncomprehending silence triggered a burst of pure rage in my brain, like a single electrical spark from an overloaded fuse. I smacked his forehead with the heel of my hand, hard enough to send him staggering a step or two backwards. He stared at me, open-mouthed, his hands at his sides.

  “Focus on that fine line, Roger. Stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself and think about what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Is that too much to ask? From one human being to another?”

  He blinked a couple of times. “No.”
/>   In control once more, I crossed over to the front door and stepped out into the hallway, turning to look back at him. “I hope not.”

  But I knew it was just a matter of time.