Read Snow Blind for Free Online Page B

waitingmonths for a decent snow. Tommy said he’d probably spend the night at Toby’s. He lives a lot closer to the park, and those two like a few beers after they ski. Tommy’s a real stickler about driving after he’s had a drink, so he stays over at Toby’s a lot in the winter.’
    ‘A real responsible fellow.’ Gino smiled at her.
    ‘Yes, he is.’
    She kept talking about him in the present tense, which always made Magozzi uncomfortable when he was talking to surviving family members. It wasn’t really denial. Sometimes it just took a long time for death to trickle down into speech patterns.
    Gino chuckled softly. ‘You know, I stay out all night, even when I’m on the job, and my wife’s all over me on the cell the next morning. Where am I, what am I doing, when am I getting home … that sort of thing.’
    Mary Deaton looked at him as if she’d never heard of such behavior. ‘Really?’
    ‘Oh, yeah.’
    She almost smiled. ‘Tommy wouldn’t like it one bit if I tried to check up on him like that. He’s pretty much his own man, you know what I mean?’
    ‘I do.’
    Mary Deaton’s parents arrived then and made a beeline for their daughter, eliciting a fresh gush of tears and the pathetic, quiet wailing of a full-grownwoman slipping immediately back to childhood when the arms of a parent could protect you against almost anything. Magozzi and Gino moved well back, looking anywhere but at the clustered three-some, trying not to listen to that first flush of shared grief that could drown the hardest cop after a while if he let himself hear it.
    Eventually the father broke away and walked over, introduced himself as Bill Warner, and shook both their hands. He was taller than Gino, shorter than Magozzi, with a gray brush cut, a well-lined face, and a trim body he carried in a very familiar way.
    Gino took one look at him and said, ‘You’re on the job.’
    Bill Warner gave him a sad smile. ‘Was. Twenty years with MPD. Retired two years now, but glad to hear it still shows. Mary says you’ve been real nice to her. I thank you for that. Did you have a chance to ask her what you needed to?’
    ‘All we need for now,’ Magozzi replied. ‘There may be more later.’
    Mr Warner nodded. ‘There always is. Anything we can do. Any of us.’ He took a card out of his wallet and handed it to him. ‘Alice and I are going to take Mary home with us today. Home number’s there, and my cell. Any chance you can give me something about what really went down? All Marycan say is he’s gone, and so far the news is just a bunch of talking heads trying to reword the same old bullshit. I’ve got purple prose coming out of my ears and I only had fifteen minutes to listen to it on the way over here. Goddamn vultures just keep harping about all the traumatized kids, like that was the only tragedy here …’ He stopped himself and took a breath, and cooled down the red in his face a couple of shades. ‘Sorry. I’m reacting all wrong. It’s just that we didn’t even hear two cops had been murdered until Mary called. The news just keeps yammering about the goddamned snowmen getting knocked down …’ He almost lost it again, and apologized again.
    ‘Don’t sweat it. But for the record, the word that they were cops hasn’t leaked yet.’ Magozzi put his hand on the man’s arm, something he rarely did when dealing with survivors, and then he broke a cardinal rule and gave the man a sketchy summary of what they knew so far, because Bill Warner was one of them, and he’d know enough to keep his mouth shut. He still had a bone-chilling image of Toby Myerson, paralyzed and helpless, still alive and maybe conscious while someone packed snow around him, dying by inches and probably knowing it. He glossed over that in a big way, guessing that the man would know his son-in-law’s partner, but Warner still went pale. At least Deaton’s death hadbeen quick, and he could give him that much. Bill Warner listened without