Ice Cap Read Online Free

community. Only a near hero, because he also had a reputation as a ball breaker with a hair-trigger temper. Rumors of crazed and brutal brawls had for years been part of family legend, events Pete could never quite confirm or deny.
    None of which lessened the sad shock I felt closing in around my heart as I stood in the dubious shelter of the pergola and contemplated the ruins under the white-flecked sheet of blue plastic.
    *   *   *
    Danny Izard was Sullivan’s patrol officer of choice whenever the call came from Jackie Swaitkowski. This was fine with me, because I liked Danny Izard and he liked me—a bond reinforced by a few occasions where he’d likely saved my life. Accomplishments he refused to take credit for or regard as anything particularly special.
    We saw blinking blue and white lights out on the driveway. Then the jittery approach of a pair of flashlights carried by two people dressed in heavy black clothes and hats with earflaps pulled down and snapped beneath the chin.
    â€œHey, Jackie, what’re you doin’ out here?” said Danny. “You must really like the snow.”
    â€œWhat snow?”
    â€œWhat do we got?”
    I pulled back the tarp and Danny and the other cop, a stubby hedgehog of a woman named Judy Rensler, scanned the body with their flashlights, just as we had done not that long before. Nothing had changed.
    Judy immediately started taking photos with a battered digital Nikon. The stinging brilliance of the flash caused me to turn my eyes away from the body.
    â€œIt’s Tad Buczek,” I said to Danny. “Franco Raffini here found him at the base of one of Tad’s homemade hills and dragged him here,” I said, getting the worst of it out in the open right away.
    â€œWhy’d you do that?” asked Danny, an edge in his voice. He stuck the flashlight in Franco’s face.
    â€œI don’t know. The storm, I guess. It’s not that far from here, where I found him. Want to go take a look?”
    He turned and started to walk up the grade behind us, but I stopped him.
    â€œWhat about the CSIs?” I asked Danny.
    â€œOn their way. As best they can.”
    â€œI can plow the drive again,” said Dayna.
    Danny looked over at her. “Excuse me, ma’am, you are?”
    â€œDayna Red,” I said. “She and her pickup got me over here.”
    â€œOkay, sure,” said Danny. “Thank you very much.”
    After Dayna left, the rest of us walked along a path of footsteps in the snow, now nearly refilled and barely defined enough to follow to a spot at the base of a huge circular mound with gently curved sides that Tad called Hamburger Hill. On top of the hill Tad had built a huge metallic mobile. In the summer, it was driven by water pumped up and out from the sculpture’s extremities, so it looked like a giant sprinkler hallucinated by Salvador Dalí. Now it stood motionless, covered in a thin layer of snow.
    Franco brought us up to where he claimed to have stumbled over the body. You could see where a lot of snow had been disturbed, even though the edges were softened by the added accumulation. There were faint depressions in the pattern of footprints leading up to the spot from the opposite direction, which supported Franco’s story pretty thoroughly.
    After Judy took some more pictures, she let Franco walk around the crime scene and act out how events unfolded. Danny and I both took notes in little notebooks using regular pens, stopping every few minutes to brush the snow off the pages, which in my case smeared the blue ink.
    â€œSo you went back to your living quarters to get a tarp,” said Danny, counting the footprints with the beam of his flashlight.
    Franco nodded. “All our equipment’s in a barn next to the shack where Freddy and I live. Freddy’s the other hand. I knew the tarp was the only way I could drag a guy as big as Tad. I almost asked Freddy to help me,