Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  Dane stood stunned.

  “There’ll be hell to pay for this,” he swore to himself.

  It wasn’t blue murder.

  It was gold.

  Shrunken Head

  Snow was falling in fat white flakes as the potential podium topper stood in line for the chairlift. Too bad the weather wasn’t conducive to a little spying. With all the competitors here to test the terrain before the real thing, he’d hoped to be able to eyeball their performance-enhancement teams and compare them to his own.

  Whiteout, however, meant a blind eye.

  “Look upon the Olympics as going to war,” Will’s coach had said. “Strategy counts. So does spying.”

  As in war, it was all about national pride. As host of the world’s top winter sports event, Canada had shoveled over $100 million into its Own the Podium program, designed to identify top athletes and whip them into shape. Will had been fussed over by a gaggle of physiotherapists, biomechanists, sports psychologists, and conditioning gurus. They’d put reflective stickers on his knee and ankle joints and then videotaped him jumping for a computer to detect any “muscle activation abnormality.” Wind-tunnel testing had helped him shave seconds off the clock.

  “We have a super skier,” stated their report.

  Meanwhile, 150 researchers at dozens of Canadian universities were at work on Top Secret, a high-tech program developed to give golden boys like Will the tenth- or hundredth-of-a-second edge required to nab a gold medal. Top Secret alchemists reduced friction on suits and helmets, matched ski waxes to weather conditions, and timed the release of their best innovations so it would be too late for foreign spies to copy them.

  For Will, however, the ski was on the other foot. Wars, he knew, are won by spying on the competition, and today would have been the ideal opportunity to check out his rivals for clues to what was hidden up their sleeves.

  If not for this veil of snow.

  Sport could be so unfair.

  But all that vanished from his mind as Will clomped onto the spot where the chairlift would sweep him away. A curvy creature filling out a red ski suit slid into place beside him. A pulled-down toque, a pulled-up turtleneck, and yellow goggles masked her face. But if her looks complemented the hourglass below, Will felt he just might salvage the day. The benefit of having a physique like his was having a physique like his. He had the stamina to rock the sexual fantasies of any snow bunny he considered worth his down time.

  Show yourself, lady.

  The chairlift scooped them off the ground and carried them up into the blinding snowfall. The only sound was the bending and flexing of the cable as it circled the bullwheel and slipped over the support towers. The mountain air smelled crystalline and misted from their lungs. Reaching up behind their heads, Will grasped the restraining bar and pulled it down so they could support their skis on the footrest.

  “You’re Will Finch!” the woman said, pushing the goggles up on her brow.

  Her features did complement her figure.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Scarlett.”

  “In from where?”

  “Vegas.”

  “Sin City.”

  “So they say.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Showgirl.”

  “I should have guessed.” He looked her up and down. “Too bad I missed the show.”

  “You can still catch it.”

  “How?”

  “By a command performance.”

  “You move fast.”

  The femme fatale pouted. “I’ve only got this ride.”

  “Is the show worth it?”

  “You decide. I once worked as a stripper.”

  Like fish in a barrel, thought Will.

  Flakes tumbled around them like dandruff off the scalp of God. They seemed to be the only skiers in this frozen Garden of Eden, and Will had no doubt they’d soon be as naked as Adam and Eve. The snake was stirring.

  The sudden yelp of pain from Scarlett took him by surprise. One of her legs jerked like a frog hit by electric current in a school biology lab.

  “Charley horse!” she gasped through gritted teeth.

  “Stretch it out,” said Will.

  “I can’t! The footrest’s in the way.”

  Here was an opportunity for Will to play Galahad. The surest cure for a muscle cramp was to extend the leg, pushing down with the heel and pointing the toes toward the face. Slipping a hand under her thigh to lift the troublesome limb, Will grabbed the restraining bar and released it.

  Bending forward, he reached down to massage her calf, and that’s when Scarlett looped the metal dog collar about his neck. Hooking one end of the leash around the chairlift frame, the Ice Pick Killer pushed him as hard as she could. Will was propelled from the seat high above the slope and dropped like a prisoner through the trapdoor of a gallows.

  Zzhhhh …

  His weight cinched the noose tight, while the razor blade inside the collar sliced into his flesh and didn’t stop constricting until it had sundered one vertebra from another.

  Scarlett gripped Will’s head by the hair as his decapitated body plunged in a geyser of blood that reddened the snow.

  The siren swapped the head for the trophy she carried in her backpack and tied it to the chairlift frame. Just short of the bullwheel at the top of the run, she skied off on her escape route.

  A voice from the chair behind was in hysterics.

  * * *

  At the foot of the chairlift, an Austrian couple sidestepped onto the marks to wait for the next carrier. The seat spun around the bullwheel and scooped the lovebirds up. As the newlyweds leaned together to snuggle for the ride, they found themselves confronting a grisly chaperone.

  A shrunken human head hung from the chairlift frame.

  Gilded Man

  Robert’s first thought on seeing the body was that he was back in Egypt. When the archeologist Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922, he found the boy pharaoh’s mummy encased in three coffins, one within another in the oblong sarcophagus. Each coffin was molded in the king’s image. The innermost was made of solid gold.

  The view from the door of room 807 transported the Mountie back to the Cairo museum he and Katt had visited a few years earlier. Gilded gold from head to foot, the body on the bed reminded Robert of the innermost coffin, except that the image was a likeness of Nick Craven, not King Tut. Naked, Nick lay face up on a black satin sheet, his wrists crossed over his heart. One arm ended with a stump where his prosthetic hand had been. The hand was on the bedside table, alongside Nick’s prosthetic ear.

  I get it, Robert thought, clenching his fists to quell his roiling anger.

  Dane Winter had called his cellphone as he, Katt, and Napoleon, their German shepherd, neared the outskirts of Whistler on the Sea to Sky Highway. Despite their early start, they had slowed to a crawl as the weather deteriorated. Behind them in her car, Gill and Joe had faded, then vanished in a scrim of blurry snow.

  “DeClercq,” he’d answered.

  “Chief, it’s Dane Winter. Brace yourself …”

  The link between Nick’s gilding and the scene of the crime struck the psycho hunter as he drove past the Gilded Man pub in the El Dorado Resort. As a lifelong historian with several books in print, he was well read in the literature of the Holy Grail, Atlantis, Shangri-La, King Solomon’s Mines, and El Dorado. The banner flapping above the hotel’s entrance confirmed the link: “Meet Olympic Hopefuls at ‘Going for the Gold.’”

  “Why are we stopping here instead of driving to the cabin?” Katt had asked. She knew Nick well, so Robert had yet to tell her.

  “Something I must check.”

  “Was it bad news?” Katt pressed. “You’ve been spacey since you took that call.”

  “Time will tell. I need half an hour. Park the car and take the dog for a walk.”

  Napoleon barked his agreement.

  “Goody,” Katt said with exaggerated glee, rubbing her palms toge
ther. “It’s joy-ride time!”

  Moments after Robert’s car disappeared, Gill’s materialized ghostlike from the snow, and the Mountie’s cell hummed again.

  “DeClercq,” he responded.

  “It’s Corporal Hett, Chief. Looks like we’ve found the head from yesterday’s snowboarder. It’s shrunken and painted gold, and what’s more, we have another beheading.”

  The digital image that zoomed to his phone from Jackie’s showed a miniature human head dangling from a chairlift frame. Nick’s gilded body linked him to the golden severed head, which in turn reminded the chief of the Headhunter case. Was someone trying to jab his memory?

  Who would do that? he wondered.

  And love doing it?

  Now, they stood at the threshold to room 807—the psycho hunter, the pathologist, and the forensic scientist—while Dane indicated the path he’d taken to the bed to check Nick’s vital signs. He had hugged the walls in the hopes that would keep him from trampling on vital clues.

  The four pulled on latex gloves and plastic booties, then approached the body. Gazing down at the man he had saved twice from disaster—when Nick had stood trial for the death of his mother, and when Mephisto had cut him apart piece by piece—Robert struggled to view the crime scene objectively. The tradition was etched in stone: kill a Mountie and you take on the entire force. And history had shown that in those instances, they did always get their man.

  But the chief didn’t want emotion blinding his logic. He knew the run-of-the-mill serial killer was a slave to fantasy. Acting out that fantasy created a normally subconscious “signature” that could be profiled by crime scene analysts. In this case, the signature was not subconscious but displayed on the bedside table for the chief and all the world to see.

  The gilded man had been stripped of his prosthetic hand and ear. By returning Nick to his handless, earless self, this killer had left his signature in the overblown, gilt-edged scrawl of a malignant narcissist.

  * * *

  Goldfinger!

  The first connection cracked through Gill’s mind like a bolt of lightning. In Ian Fleming’s book, the megalomaniac with an obsession for everything gold could attain sexual climax only by romping with gilded women.

  Megalomaniac …

  That was the second connection.

  Mephisto, she thought.

  Strange how at times like this, you remember only the good parts. Looking back, their love affair had been doomed from the start. Gill and Nick had come from different places and were going different places. She was classical music, while he was rock ’n’ roll. Gill was born into money, raised in the sun of Barbados, and blessed with a mother who set an example as a leading pathologist. Nick was born prematurely on a bathroom floor during a blustery winter storm in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Later that night, his dad shot himself. His mom toiled in the laundry of a mental hospital to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. Having raised hell as a teenager, Nick became a cop to atone for the disappointment he’d caused her.

  What Gill and Nick had in common was what they did in bed. She was a champagne partner for him, and he was a hot young stud for her. That she was turning forty was a factor in the equation. But when the ghosts of his past came haunting, that wasn’t enough to see them through the turmoil.

  Now, scowling down at Nick’s gilded body, Gill was sickened by the stench of lacquer. So thick was the coat of paint that she couldn’t even see the tattoo on his upper arm: an hourglass running out of sand, with the words “Here Comes” above and “the Night” below. But worst of all were his eyes. The killer had left them open, gazing vacantly at the ceiling, then had sprayed the eyeballs with glittery gold.

  Gill couldn’t help it.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  * * *

  Having never met Nick, Joseph Avacomovitch was all business.

  “I don’t see a wound on the body, do you? He looks serene, as if he’s simply fallen asleep.”

  “Poison?” Dane suggested. “Spiked with a syringe? Maybe there’s a puncture wound beneath the gunk.”

  The Russian turned to Gill as she wiped away her tears. “It seems to me that Nick was painted postmortem, yet there’s not a trace of gold on the black satin. That indicates the killer changed the linen so he or she could display the corpse for maximum shock value. May I turn him over to look for a wound?”

  Gill glanced at Robert for approval.

  The chief nodded.

  The paint was sticky to the touch as Dane and Joseph gripped Nick at the shoulder and hip and eased him onto his side. The sheet adhering to his back was peeled away. There wasn’t a patch on the underside that wasn’t gold, and a careful examination revealed no signs of trauma.

  “Poisoning by mouth?” Dane suggested.

  “Likely,” Joe replied.

  “Where can I do a postmortem?” asked Gill.

  The question drew Robert’s focus to her. The image of Gill dissecting her former lover furrowed a deep crease into his brow.

  “He’s gone,” she said, aware of what Robert was thinking. “All that’s left are Nick’s remains. The answer to who killed him lies in the cause of death. Your pool of suspects will scatter before his body even reaches Vancouver. I’m the pathologist here. I owe it to Nick to help catch his killer.”

  “I’ll assist,” Joe offered, sealing the deal.

  “Instead of the medical center,” Robert suggested, “use the trauma room that’s been created for officers hurt while securing the Olympics. It’s nearby and private.”

  “Hopefully, when we wipe the gilt off Nick, we’ll see how he died,” said Gill.

  “There’s another puzzle,” Dane interjected. “The room was locked from inside. So how did the killer escape?”

  An aisle led from the door of room 807 to the far window. The bed flanked the left-hand wall. Above it hung a framed painting of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, the rising sun adorning their ski runs in gold. Between the bed and the window, on the side where Joe and Dane stood, there was a door giving access to the adjoining suite.

  “The only way in or out,” said Dane, “is through one of these two doors. The window doesn’t open, and there’s no egress whatsoever in the right-hand side.”

  He gestured from the window to the writing desk, TV stand, luggage rack, bathroom, and wardrobe.

  “The deadbolt on the connecting door was engaged when we broke in through the main one.”

  “As it is now?” confirmed Joe.

  “Yes,” agreed the sergeant. Turning to the lock, Dane gripped the thumb-turn by its narrow ends, not its flat sides, to avoid smudging any prints, and gave it a quarter twist to vertical. The connecting door opened to reveal no keyhole on the outer side. The wood was intact, as was the wood of the door securing the adjoining suite.

  “See the problem?” asked Dane. “Each deadbolt securing each door has an exit-only function. The rod will retract only if someone rotates the cylinder by twisting the knob on the inside of his door. A deadbolt can’t be jimmied with a card or a tool, and because there isn’t a keyhole, it can’t be picked with a bump key. To lock this door, you need someone alive on this side, and Nick was obviously dead when the killer escaped.”

  “Puzzling,” Joseph mused, examining the oiled lock.

  “To join the rooms, each occupant unlocks his deadbolt from inside his suite. If the killer fled through this door to the next room, how did he lock it behind him?”

  “It would appear,” the Russian replied, “that he escaped by way of the entrance door.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Dane. “That puzzle is even tougher. There were three barriers preventing us from breaking in: an electronic lock, a deadbolt, and a swing bar. Setting the deadbolt and swing bar again requires someone alive inside the room. To break in, we needed the hotel’s master key and a pair of bolt cutters to sever the knob in the swing bar.”

  “So,” said Joseph, “who set the three locks?”

  “A woman,
” Dane replied.

  “Why do you say that?” asked the chief.

  “In searching his clothes, I discovered this in Nick’s pocket.” The sergeant held up a magnetic keycard in an evidence pouch. “It springs the lock on the entrance door. The door keeps a log of the times the card is used. This card was used at ten last night, and the door wasn’t opened again until we broke in this morning.”

  “So why a woman?” asked Gill.

  Dane produced a second evidence pouch containing a yellow Post-it Note.

  “This was stuck to the key.”

  The note read: “Ten o’clock tonight. Be discreet.”

  Gill’s glare darkened. “It looks to me like Nick got picked up in a bar.”

  Slit

  The Sea to Sky Highway had almost cost Whistler the Olympics.

  During the last ice age, the Pacific coast sagged under an immense weight. Creeping glaciers gouged cliffs and valleys into the bedrock. Once the ice retreated, the land rose up and the sea surged in, forming fiords such as Howe Sound. It took dynamite blasts to cut through the granite so train tracks and a cramped road could snake along the shore. Nature constantly threatened to block the only route to Whistler under crushing landslides.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “What’s what, Becky?” Jenna Bond was afraid to take her eyes off the icy, winding road. Along the so-called Killer Highway, deaths were common.

  “Those windows up the mountain.”

  Chancing a glance, Jenna squinted through the veil. A sob of wind from the sea buffeted their car, almost pushing it onto the shoulder of the slippery road. Beyond the window, Jenna could just make out a staircase-shaped structure climbing the mountainside.

  “That’s a concentrator, Becky,” Jenna explained, passing on something Nick had told her during a romantic ski weekend. “It’s a gravity mill for a copper mine. The story is that a long time ago, a doctor shot a deer on this mountain. The thrashing legs of the dying buck exposed some copper ore. That’s how Britannia Beach became a huge copper mine.”