“Winter,” he answered.
“Dane, this is Rachel. You’ve got another murder.”
The Midas Touch
North Vancouver
Leaving the helicopter pad on Sea Island, in the deltoid mouth of the Fraser River, Dane drove straight north across Vancouver with the U.S. border behind his back and crested the harbor on Lions Gate Bridge, parking his car at Lonsdale Quay. As he neared the waterfront high-rise that was the murder scene, he phoned Sergeant Rachel Kidd to come down and meet him.
“Was the scene secured in time?” Dane asked when both sergeants stood face to face.
“Yes. We got lucky. Only two civilians know: the maid who went in to clean this morning and found Midas dead on the bed, and the high-rise manager, a very uptight guy. He’s afraid the building will be cursed by the gods of economics if word gets out. He shut the maid up by threatening her job before he called us. The guy’s so afraid of a leak that he didn’t call 9-1-1.”
“Midas?” Dane said. “The exec in the papers?”
The other sergeant nodded. “He really pissed someone off. Wait’ll you see what was done to him.”
“I hope you’re not pissed at me.”
“What? For usurping the case?”
Dane nodded in turn.
“It’s for the better,” Kidd said, shrugging with resignation. A tinge of disappointment lowered her voice. “This murder will be your ticket into Special X. I’m not their favorite poster girl, as you know.”
Unlike so many forces around the world, the RCMP remains mostly free of corruption. Its officers take their unofficial motto—“The Mounties always get their man”—very seriously, even when it comes to one of their own. It’s a badge of honor in the ranks to take down a dirty cop, but if you go after one of your own, you had better make damn sure that your allegation sticks.
That had been Rachel’s downfall.
Until the 1970s, there were no women and no blacks in the RCMP, so Constable Rachel Kidd had been a PR man’s dream. Very quickly, she began a meteoric rise up the ranks. Dane had come in to the force at the same time, but he couldn’t compete. Everyone understood that Kidd would soon be a dreamboat inspector. But then she overreached by charging Corporal Nick Craven with the murder of his mother, and when that member of Special X walked out of court a free man, his accuser had paid the regimental price. Her booster rocket had sputtered; her career had crashed to earth. And the would-be inspector was now, like Dane, a sergeant with GIS.
“You responded to the first case, so this one is yours. We’re cool,” Rachel confirmed.
“Good. Beam me up.”
“Beam me up” was the ideal way to describe the ascent to the penthouse suite at the top of the most phallic tower in Lonsdale Quay. The suite’s private glass elevator waited up at the skyline until the king of the castle summoned it down to one of two levels: the waterfront walk along the harbor, or the access-controlled parking lot below.
The sergeants were on the quayside, and Rachel used a remote control to recall the elevator. It had returned to the top of the tower while they were talking.
“This control belongs to the manager,” she explained. “If it’s okay for the maid to clean, she gets the control from him. The other control—there are only two—was used by Midas. It’s not in the penthouse, but he is, so the killer must have taken it away.”
“Security cameras?”
“Uh-huh. But they were turned off. The cameras also work off the remote control.”
“The killer turned them off?”
“Midas, probably. That’s what he usually did when he escorted his bedmates here.”
“That’s why the maid had to check?”
“You got it,” Rachel said, nodding. “This penthouse isn’t where he lived. It’s where he came for sex.”
“We’re looking for a woman?”
“A woman or a man. Kurt Midas used sex as a way to flaunt his money and power. Word is that he had a penchant for seducing the wives and lovers of his rivals—and saw it as a coup to bed their yes-men, too.”
“That’s a lot of enemies.”
“The guy was disturbed. You’d have to be to want to ruin as many lives as he did.”
“So how do you think it went down?”
“Midas was in the company of someone he wanted to bed. They drove into his private area of the parking lot. He punched off the security cameras, and they rode the elevator up. The attack occurred on the bed in the penthouse. With Midas dead, his killer used the remote to descend to the lot, and then he or she escaped in his car.”
“It’s missing?”
“Uh-huh. And it’s not at his home.”
The elevator was tinted so that outsiders couldn’t gawk in as it scaled the face of the high-rise. It showed the Mounties a panorama of the inner and outer harbors as it soared.
“Nice view,” Dane said understatedly.
“Y’ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
The doors behind them opened on a single octagonal-shaped room, which, except for the floor, was made entirely of glass. Up here, the view was 360 degrees. Gazing around to take some of it in, Dane felt like the lamp in a lighthouse. Up here, he could see it all, from the ski slopes on the North Shore Mountains to the ships out at sea. An aerie like this was created for an out-of-control ego. From what Dane had heard about Kurt Midas, it fit him to a T.
“Jesus Christ! Is that him on the bed?”
“Like I said,” Rachel reiterated, “he really pissed someone off.”
* * *
When Dane Winter was at the University of British Columbia working toward his law degree, he had to take a science credit. Because he knew he was destined to follow his dad and his granddad into the Mounties, Dane chose zoology as his elective. He figured that all those lab dissections would prepare him for autopsies. The crime scene now before him reminded him of that dissection room more than any of his trips to the morgue ever had.
Smack dab in the middle of the glass-domed penthouse was a king-size bed. At night in that bed, you would be encased by a vault of stars and the moon above, with absolutely nothing to obstruct your view. Because the tower was the highest on the quay, no Peeping Tom could peek in, and the tinted glass would thwart any telescopes aimed down from the North Shore peaks. A square hole in the floor revealed a staircase that stepped down a level to where the bathroom, Jacuzzi, sauna, steam room, and other amenities awaited.
The guy on the bed had been skinned.
When Dane was a boy, Papa had bought him a plastic model kit called the Visible Man. It was a human body with all the internal organs on display through a plastic skin. As he approached the flayed man on the bed, that model came back to him.
“Good morning, Sergeant.” Dr. Gill Macbeth, the same sawbones who’d responded to the Mosquito Creek crime and done the post-mortem on the Congo Man, was standing over the body.
“Morning, Doc.”
Dane caught the evil eye that Gill flicked at Rachel. The doc had been pregnant with Nick Craven’s child throughout his murder trial and had suffered a miscarriage in the aftermath. To make matters worse, Gill was currently in a romantic relationship with Robert DeClercq, Craven’s boss at Special X and the man who’d saved him from jail.
Dane felt sorry for Rachel.
She was a good cop.
But a mistake was a mistake, and she’d forever have that albatross around her neck.
“Is there a moral here?” Dane asked.
“Yep,” said Rachel. “Fuck with innocent people’s life savings, and you could end up like this.”
* * *
It was like that song by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue.” If you start a child off in life with the wrong name, there’ll be aftershocks. But in this case, it was a family name, so that was a little different. Go through life with the moniker Midas, and you might grow into it.
The Midas touch.
Like in the Greek myth.
When King Midas was granted a single wish by the god
Dionysus, he asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. In the world of capitalism and Forbes magazine, those with the golden touch—men like Murdoch, Maxwell, Branson, and the Donald—are hailed as gods. Until things went south, Kurt Midas had been soaring to that level. Every deal that passed through his fingers was rumored to turn to gold.
Fool’s gold, actually.
Stockholders of Enron and WorldCom know only too well what happens when greedy corporate executives mistake their companies’ earnings for their own personal piggy banks. Kurt’s company had been listed on the stock exchange, and he had driven it straight into bankruptcy. Its loyal employees had invested their futures in its pension plan. Where all that money was now, no one seemed to know, for just before the gold rush had gone bust, Kurt Midas had mined the company of all that wealth. Perhaps it was squirreled away in some tax haven guarded by a phalanx of lawyers, and by the time prosecutors unraveled his Gordian knot of financial manipulations and extradited him to America to stand trial, Midas would be approaching the age of Methuselah.
In the meantime, Kurt had lived like a king.
Until last night.
“Cause of death?” Dane asked.
“A blow to the head,” said Gill. “See where the skull has caved in on one side?”
“Weapon?”
“Ident recovered a bloody champagne bottle from the floor beside the bed,” said Rachel.
Identification techs in white coveralls were at work doing forensic tests on areas of the penthouse not yet cleared to make a path fit for contamination. Among the exhibits in evidence bags was a bottle of top-end champagne.
“Prints?”
“Nope. Just the vic’s. The killer used gloves or wiped down the scene with a cloth.”
“Was Midas skinned alive?”
The pathologist shook her head. “The flaying was post-mortem. If I were to guess, I’d say he most likely stripped off his clothes and climbed onto the bed. Perhaps the killer was supposed to pop the champagne cork. Instead, he or she brained Midas across the head. After he was dead, his skin was peeled away.”
The hair remained in place, but the face was gone, as was the skin of the torso and the abdomen, down to, and including, the genitals. The arms and legs were flayed as far as the elbows and knees. But the eeriest thing for Dane was the eyes. They stared up at the glass ceiling from red, raw facial muscles.
“Was the skin taken as a trophy?”
“No,” said Rachel. “It’s mounted over there.”
The sergeant swiveled around to follow the direction of her finger, which pointed toward an octagon window on the right-hand side of the elevator. So shocked had Dane been by the bloody mess on the bed when the elevator doors opened that he had failed to catch sight of it in his peripheral vision.
“Definitely a case for Special X,” Rachel said, ushering him over to the skin display.
“Definitely,” Dane agreed. “The international aspect of both crimes—Liberian refugee from Africa and corporate pillager from the States—would transfer it anyway. And then we have the signature left at both scenes.”
The skin that had been stripped off Kurt Midas was plastered to the window by its bloody underlay. An aerosol can had been used to spray the human hide with gold paint. The gilded trophy had the torso, genitals, stumpy limbs, and face of a humanoid form. The artwork bore the signature of its creator. Carved into the skin of the forehead was a Nazi swastika.
Wonder Weapons
Nordhausen, Germany
April 4, 1945
“Fritz!” Streicher snapped. “Where are you?”
The Hitler Youth returned to the sparks above Nordhausen.
The memory of that winter morning on the Appellplatz faded.
“Sorry, Father. I drifted off.”
“There’ll be no drifting off. I have a task for you.”
The Hitler Youth clicked his heels.
“For you and Hans.”
Jackboots stomping, the SS general led his sons and the corpse-counting bureaucrat into the yawning maw of Tunnel B. As soon as they entered, a deafening din assaulted them. Massive rockets rumbled toward them along the railroad tracks. Each thirteen-ton leviathan received its tail, fins, guts, and open-jawed snout at workshops in the cross-halls as it emerged from the deep. Like an army of ants, thousands of tiny slaves swarmed through the tunnel, one line going in and the other coming out. Lathes, drills, machine presses, jigs, files, and hammers produced a cacophony that ricocheted off the tight confines of the rock walls and down into the bowels of the assembly line. Countless clogs clomped across the concrete floor. Huge slabs of sheet metal clanged and moaned as welders bent and fused them into place. The stench of burned oil hung heavy in the air.
Up where the tunnel’s walls met the rounded roof, ventilation shafts panted like monstrous pneumatic lungs. The tunnel was alight with the brilliant blue rays of the welders and the yellowish cast of the bulbs that shone down from the ceiling. Slaves cried out under the blows of the Kapos like the choirboys of some satanic cathedral.
Tunnel A was the supply tunnel. It was used to send parts down to the cross-halls, where they were added to rockets cradled horizontally on railroad bogies that rolled them from north to south along the assembly line in Tunnel B. When a rocket was finished, it was moved to Hall 41, where it would be inspected and approved. Hall 41 had been excavated well below the floor level to give it more than fifty feet of clearance. A giant spanning crane hoisted the rockets off their cradles and stood them up on the tips of their tail fins. Several galleries scaled one whole side of Hall 41. Slaves and Nazi overseers worked on the various levels, inspecting the top-end components of each missile’s guidance system and tightening lugs, nuts, seals, and fittings in the open stomach of each upright shark.
Normally.
But not at the moment.
“How many hangings does this make?” Streicher asked.
The corpse-counting bureaucrat consulted his tally board. “Sixteen on March 3. Fifty-seven on March 11. Thirty on March 21. Thirty again on March 22. Plus these.”
SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, the commandant of Auschwitz from May 11, 1944, until its evacuation in January of this year, had become the new head of Dora-Mittelbau on February 1. Escaping the onslaught of the Red Army with him had been his SS executioners and thousands of living skeletons—most of them Jews. Days without food in those boxcar pens had taken their toll, and often more dead bodies than live prisoners had come down from the trains. Baer had dumped the hopeless transport cases and Mittelwerk casualties at the Boelcke Kaserne barracks in Nordhausen and left them to die slowly. Ironically, the RAF bombing raid had thwarted that plan. Then, to root out sabotage in the rocket factory, Baer had embarked on a slew of mass hangings in Hall 41.
Hangings like those that the Streichers and the corpse-counter had just walked in on.
The overhead crane spanned the hall like a rolling bridge. Hooked to it was a plank with twelve hangman’s nooses attached. The nooses were cinched around the necks of twelve trembling slaves, each with his wrists tied behind his back and his mouth gagged by a chunk of wood that was fastened at the base of his skull like a horse’s bridle. The gags were to prevent outbursts that might insult the SS. At the first mass hanging, a Russian had condemned them to eternal damnation, and Baer wasn’t the kind of commandant to stomach that.
With a whir, the crane began to rise.
Work had ceased in Hall 41 so that the hangings could be witnessed by all: the twelve slaves who would follow this dozen; their comrades, who would survive to work another shift; and the rocketeers still in the Mittelwerk.
Slowly, slowly, the crane rose to a height of twelve feet, lifting the soles of the hanged men five feet off the floor. At first, it seemed that nothing was happening, that the bodies were inert. But then the wretched marionettes began to stir. They kicked their legs about wildly, as if hunting for a foothold, then lifted their knees to their chests, then dropped them, then lifted them again. As the t
witching and twisting continued, the bodies banged about, and legs began trying to climb other legs to loosen the grips of the ropes. Soon, frenzied spasms overwhelmed their muscles. Clogs dropped from feet and loose pants fell to ankles. As if gripped by that winter wind that had blown through Fritz’s memory, the hanged men thrashed around and kicked the empty air until—slowly, slowly—the kinetic frenzy waned. One by one, they settled down—a shudder here, a tremble there—with their heads angled sharply from their shoulders, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, and the ropes of the mechanical gallows dug deep into their necks.
With a whir, the crane began to lower.
A loosening of the nooses and the dead fell to the floor, where the undertaker slaves gathered them in their handcarts, heads and feet sticking out, to trundle the “pieces” off to Camp Dora’s crematorium.
With a whir, the crane began to rise.
The last twelve men hanged would be left to dangle for days as a deterrent to the other slaves. As each shift came in or went out, the men would have to push through this obscene display, setting the corpses swinging gently from their long noosed ropes in a literal danse macabre.
* * *
Hall 41 was the climactic fusion of the rocket and the Reich. Here hung the proof that modern industrial technology was morally compatible with slavery, mass murder, and barbarism. The rocketeers, not the SS, had been the ones to suggest solving the wartime manpower shortage by using slave labor to build von Braun’s V-2. Arthur Rudolph, the production manager of the assembly line at Peenemünde, had returned from a tour of the slave-driven Heinkel aircraft plant north of Berlin convinced that he held the key to their labor problem. Now that the rocket factory was in these tunnels, so was the office of von Braun’s production manager. At least once a day, Rudolph would stroll the assembly line, occasionally stopping to down a glass of schnapps with SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Forschner, the commandant overseeing the horror.
Magnus von Braun—Wernher’s brother—was head of gyroscope production. His office, too, was in the Mittelwerk. The guidance system of the V-2—a technical innovation called the Vertikant—used three gyroscopes: a pair to orient the missile in outer space and a third to shut off the engine at the correct velocity. The final gyroscopic tests could not be carried out on a horizontal missile, so Magnus von Braun did them in Hall 41.
Swastika Page 15