Snow Blind by P. J. Tracy Read Free Book Online

interrupting, like a cop would, but in the end he sagged into a chair and put his head in his hands.
    By that time the house was starting to fill up and any pretense of private conversation became impossible. Family and friends had started to gather, and there was a steady stream of blue uniforms through the living room and foyer as the department closed ranks around one of their own.
    Magozzi took a last look at Mary Deaton as he and Gino made their way to the door. She looked tiny and helpless in the swelling crowd, like a shell-shocked child surrounded by protective soldiers.
    Once outside, they waited by the side of their unmarked, taking deep breaths of the frigid air while the uniform who’d parked them in moved his car. The place looked like a police convention. Patrol cars filled the driveway and double-parked on the street, which made them feel a little better about leaving Tommy Deaton’s widow, and a lot worse about what had happened.
    ‘Thank God we don’t have to do this twice,’ Gino grumbled. ‘McLaren called when I was in the can. We’ll hook up at the hall when he and Tinker get back from making the other notification.’
    ‘Was Myerson married?’
    ‘It’s almost worse. Happy bachelor, barelytwenty-eight, just moved back in with his mom when she got real sick, spends most of his off-time taking care of her. McLaren knew the guy, and he is beyond bummed. Goddamnit, Leo, he’s killing cops. Good ones. And he’s doing it big-time in our face, at an MPD-sponsored festival, no less. This one’s so personal it scares the crap out of me. Damn, it’s freezing out here. Tell me the temp didn’t drop twenty degrees when we were in that house.’
    Magozzi opened the car, then lifted his face toward the westerly wind. It was starting a slow pickup, and he could smell more snow coming.

6
    It was Saturday afternoon and Steve Doyle should have been at home blowing snow so his wife and kids could get into the driveway that night when they came home from Northfield. He should have been cleaning up the sinkful of dirty dishes that had piled up during a week of bachelor dinners. And above all, he should have been on the couch, sipping a cold beer and watching the Gophers’ hockey game. Should have been.
    Instead, he was sitting at his desk on a precious day off, reading the nauseating bio of yet another scumbag he was supposed to babysit – all because the damn blizzard had shut down every bus and most of the roads yesterday, so the newly released Kurt Weinbeck hadn’t been able to make it to his Friday-afternoon parole meeting. And for some reason known only to God and the criminal justice system, his supervisor had decided it was a good idea to reschedule and make Doyle come in on a weekend so that he could give his lecture on piss tests, gainful employment, and the halfway house that would be the scumbag’s home for the nextseveral months. As if it would make a difference.
    He drained his coffee and poured himself another cup, even though he was already flying on caffeine, and turned his attention back to the file in front of him. The more he read, the more depressed he got. Kurt Weinbeck was a multiple felon with no hope of rehabilitation that he could see – one of those frequent flyers who kept getting regurgitated back onto the streets by a system that wasn’t just blind, it was brain-dead. Doyle had always thought that guys like this should be turned into fertilizer, because they were nothing but bags of manure to start with.
    Even though he was barely forty and by all accounts a few years away from total burnout, Doyle was pretty sure he’d already crossed that threshold. His wife had been begging him for two years to change jobs, and he was actually thinking about listening to her for a change. In fact, Kurt Weinbeck might be the very last case he’d ever take, and the thought actually buoyed his spirits a little.
    He’d started this job as a young, devout Christian hopeful, believing