Read Online Snow Blind by P.J. Tracy - Free Book Online Page B

at the corners of her mouth, not the slightest memory of a frown between her brows. It was like looking at the blank canvas of a baby’s face, before the joy and the heartache of life left their lovely marks, and it always made Magozzi a little sad. But sometimes, if he looked very closely, he could see things in her eyes that never went any further.
    â€œI’m sorry, Magozzi,” she said, and he felt a door close on the outside world and all the terrible things that happened there.
    She took his hand and led him back to the kitchen, checked whatever was simmering on the stove, then poured two glasses of wine and sat opposite him at the kitchen table. “Tell me about it,” she said, and it occurred to Magozzi that a woman had never said those words to him before. It sounded like a magic incantation.
    This is what Gino has with Angela, he thought. You come home dragged out and frustrated and there stands this amazing woman who really wants to know what kind of a day you had. This was not a little thing. This wasn’t just sharing the time you had together; this was wanting to share the time you spent apart, too, and as far as Magozzi was concerned, that boiled down to wanting to share a life. He wondered if Grace knew that was what she was doing.
    â€œWhat are you smiling at, Magozzi?”

    M AGOZZI WAS starting to hate his own house. It was dark, empty, and, worse yet, there was no woman and no dog. It had been unbelievably hard to leave Grace’s tonight, but he had an early call and a hefty stack of accumulated reports to go through before morning, and reading would have been out of the question with Grace sitting next to him in her flannel pj’s.
    He grabbed a Summit Pale Ale from the refrigerator, turned on the television, and steeled himself for the ten o’clock news.
    The news teams had had all day to polish up this story for maximum impact and it showed. Dramatic, inflammatory scripts laced with adjectives like horrific, shocking, and ghastly played well against the backdrop of skillfully edited montages that made what ultimately had been a well-managed, controlled crime scene look like a soccer stadium stampede. Especially effective were the images of screaming, crying children as they watched the boys in blue knocking down one snowman after another. Without exception, every single broadcast made the MPD come off like a bunch of heartless jackasses.
    They all ran snippets of Chief Malcherson’s press conference, and none of it had been good. The man was a master of the calm, forthright presentation, but it wasn’t working this time. He made a good case for an ex-con with a grudge going after the cops who had put him away, but the press kept hammering him with the one question that even the cops were asking themselves: What kind of killer poses bodies in snowmen? That was B-movie stuff.
    Kristin Keller of Channel 3 was putting an even more salacious spin on it. As they showed the tape of him and Gino no-commenting their way through the reporters at City Hall, she did a somber voice-over in her best end-of-the-world tone. “One has to wonder if the Minneapolis Police Department is concealing the truth, trying to avoid panicking the population of this city. A retired criminal psychologist who wishes to remain anonymous has told this reporter that the elaborate posing of these bodies in snowmen is the unmistakable mark of a psychopathic serial killer…” She paused dramatically, looking straight into the camera. “A killer who will most probably strike again.”
    Before he had time to put his fist through the TV screen, the phone rang, and he didn’t need to look at the caller ID to know who it was.
    â€œGino.”
    â€œLeo, I want you to feel free to mentally insert as much profanity as possible into my side of the conversation, because I’m sitting here with my kids and I can’t do it myself.”
    â€œI take it you’re watching