Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  “Poor deer,” mourned the girl.

  A train chugged past them on the twisting ribbon of track. Becky shoved a CD into the player and started singing along with “Jingle Bells.” As she warbled, she rolled down the passenger’s window, filling the car with blizzard.

  “Becky!”

  “Mom, we need an open sleigh.”

  At spots, the road hugged nearly vertical slopes. The frozen Shannon Falls plunged as hundreds of yards of ice.

  “Know how the falls were formed, Becs?”

  “Uh-uh,” said the girl.

  “A two-headed sea serpent named Say-noth-ka used that spillway to slither up the mountain.”

  “Cool,” said Becky, cupping her hands around her eyes to take in the falls.

  On the outskirts of Squamish, a lumber town that had buzzed with life until the pulp mill closed, there was a massive granite face almost two thousand feet high. Known as the Stawamus Chief, it was a climber’s dream in summer, but today it was shrouded in white.

  “Does that look like an Indian’s head to you?”

  “Yes,” said Becky.

  The imagination of youth, Jenna thought. All she saw was a hump of snowy rock.

  At Squamish, the road cut away from the sea and followed the Cheakamus River into the Coast Mountains. Back in the Cariboo Gold Rush of the 1860s, fortune-seekers had trudged into this harsh wilderness to reach the Lillooet Shortcut, an ancient Native trail through the mountains.

  “Did you know that old-time miners once used camels to pack their supplies up this valley, Becs? The camels refused to behave, though, so they were released to fend for themselves in the bush.”

  “Are they still there?”

  “I doubt it. That was a long, long time ago.”

  “Poor camels,” said Becky.

  Luckily, a snowplow had preceded them inland, so the highway here was in better shape than the stretch along Howe Sound.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to marry Nick?”

  Oh no, Jenna thought, her hands tightening on the wheel. “Why do you ask?”

  “’Cause I think he’d be the best dad I could ever have. Why don’t I see him more often?”

  “He’s a busy Mountie.”

  “Can’t we move up here?”

  “It’s not that easy. We’re Americans. Nick’s a Canadian. A border separates us. And anyway, your granddad was the sheriff of San Juan County.”

  “He died with his boots on,” the girl said, repeating the legend she had so often heard.

  “Yes, he did. Serving the islands. Don’t you want me to be sheriff, too?”

  “I want a dad more.”

  Hearing Becky talk like that broke Jenna’s heart. San Juan County elected its sheriff every four years. Jenna’s father, Hank Bond, had been returned to office twelve times before he was cut down by a stroke at his desk. Tough as nails on the outside but loving within, he was the best dad a tomboy could desire. For as long as she could remember, Jenna had wanted to follow in his footsteps. Lured from Orcas Island to Seattle’s FBI office, she had married an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. But instead of the happily-ever-after she’d always dreamed of, their marital bliss had morphed into a horrifying nightmare.

  “Something’s up, Jen,” Don had said over the phone one night. “Got a meet tonight. May be a lead on the cartel.”

  “But it’s your birthday!”

  “I won’t be late.”

  “I’ll wait up.”

  “Lots to celebrate if this works out.”

  That was the last time they’d talked. Don’s body was never found—all that was left was his voice on a tape sent to the DEA. They wouldn’t let Jenna hear it. Hours of Don being tortured by the cartel, every last minute recorded in an attempt to get the law to back off.

  A week later, Jenna learned she was pregnant.

  Every time she looked at Becky, she saw Don. They were as alike as she and Hank. Same fox-like face, slender chin, unruly russet hair, mischievous grin. Same hunting for an opening to crack a joke. Because she’d grown up in the protective shadow cast by Hank, Jenna knew how much the girl yearned for the love of a father.

  And Jenna still had the dream …

  Don’s screams echo up and down this hall of a hundred identical doors as Jenna searches frantically for her abducted husband. Time is everything. Don can take no more. He begs the Colombians to finish him off. “Oh, Jesus! Please, not another piece!” A hundred doors! Where is he? Tears salt her lips. Each door sticks as she tries to push it open. Damn island weather—too much moisture, wood expanding so every door always sticks. “Oh, Jesus! Not that! Leave me a man!”

  Jenna reaches out to shove open door 13, but it opens a crack by itself, and the DEA agent who will later refuse to let her hear the tape of the torture session peers out at her. “Don’t worry, Jenna. It’s all under control. I’ll make sure the Geneva Conventions get followed in here. They won’t disturb your daughter with the way Don looks. He’ll be long gone before she’s born.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Don gibbers. “Don’t cut off my—”

  “Mom?”

  Jenna turns sharply.

  Oh, God. No!

  Becky stands behind her in the hall.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Jesus!” Don beseeches. “Don’t let her see me!”

  “Back to bed, honey.”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “Go back to bed, back to sleep, and it’ll be gone by morning.”

  “Mom …

  “Mom …”

  “Mom?”

  Jerking out of her reverie, Jenna returned her attention to the treacherous highway.

  “What, Becs?”

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost.”

  “Where’s Nick gonna meet us?”

  “Alpha Lake. A-L-P-H-A. Watch for the sign.”

  Function Junction—an industrial park with a recycling facility—marked the beginning of Whistler Valley. The map on her lap told Jenna that the mountains owned the right flank of the road. She could sense them, rather than see them. Along the left side of the road ran a string of lakes: Alpha, Nita, and Alta. The railway clung to their far shores. Like the mountains, the lakes were lost to sight.

  “Turn, Mom! Turn! It’s Alpha Lake!”

  Blind faith guided Jenna through the maze of streets to the parking lot. No sooner had the car stopped than Becky jumped out and trudged to the basketball court. The hoop was hung with icicles, the wire mesh full of snow. Left to lug her daughter’s skates, the equipment manager caught up with the girl just as a well-aimed snowball snapped the last icicle off the ring.

  “What an arm!”

  Becky grinned and was off again.

  A footbridge arced over a small creek to a windbreak of white-barked birches. White, white, white, wherever the eye focused. A white pagoda and swing set in the play area. White willows and picnic tables beside the lake, which itself was frozen white and blanketed with snow. Jenna felt caught in the snow globe at the start of Citizen Kane.

  Rosebud, she thought.

  “Hurry up, Mom! Bring my skates!”

  Becky was kneeling on a bench, rocking with excitement. The girl rubbernecked, trying to spy Nick. The wind was picking up, and random gusts tore sightlines through the snow. Now you see them, now you don’t. A skater with a shovel cleared the ice. A showoff with his face masked by a balaclava spun and jumped like an Olympian. Kids supported by both parents wobbled around for their first skate.

  Down on one knee like Prince Charming fitting Cinderella with a glass slipper, Jenna laced Becky into her skates. The bench was so close to the lake that ice froze her kneecap numb.

  “Stay on the shoveled path,” cautioned Jenna. “No thin ice.”

  “Watch for Nick.”

  “I will.”

  “Marry him, Mom. Please!”

  Jenna’s sigh was
stolen by the gusts. Off went Becky to circle the rink. She was like Halley’s Comet, slipping off on a far-flung orbit that would eventually return her to Mother Earth.

  Rosebud, Jenna thought. Innocence lost. That word of regret in the dying gasp of Charles Foster Kane. Her daughter had lost her father to Colombian thugs. God knows what psychological damage was done while she was kept caged by Mephisto. In Nick, she’d found a surrogate father who helped heal those wounds. But he couldn’t abandon the job that made him feel whole again, and that left Jenna with a major impediment to her ambition.

  Guilt made her shudder.

  What would Hank think, she wondered, if he knew she was willing to put aside Becky’s happiness to fill his boots as sheriff of San Juan County?

  I can’t do that, she thought.

  So, sitting on the bench at the edge of the ice, Jenna rummaged in her pocket for her cell. As she scrolled through the menu for Nick’s name, she took her eyes off the ice. From out of the snowfall came the man in the balaclava, winding up for his Olympic stunts. He bent his torso forward and extended one leg straight behind him, forming his body into the shape of a T.

  “Look out!” someone shouted.

  Jenna glanced up.

  Exposing her throat.

  Within striking distance of the bench, the skater whirled on his supporting leg to execute a camel spin. His razor-sharp blade spun 360 degrees, slashing across Jenna’s neck and slitting her throat to the bone.

  Murder Bag

  Joseph Avacomovitch never attended a murder scene without his Murder Bag. He even traveled with it.

  Television these days was wall-to-wall forensics. Quirky but lovable CSI nerds were the new detectives, working in state-of-the-art labs and solving murders through magic. A machine jiggles test tubes or whirls them around, then miraculously tells a computer the results. On scene, a tech opens a stainless steel case packed with glowing wands that catch stains the human eye can’t see. A squeeze of fluid from an eyedropper and the cell door clangs shut.

  All of which dates back to a handful of guts.

  The Crumbles Case.

  The patron saint of CSIs—for those who know their history—is Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The British pathologist shot to fame through his work in the Crippen Case, the Brides in the Bath Murders, the Brighton Trunk Murders, the Blazing Car Murder, and other forensic puzzles of the early 1900s.

  In 1924, Spilsbury traveled to a rented bungalow on a barren strip of the Sussex shore known as the Crumbles to help Scotland Yard piece together a dismembered woman. Patrick Mahon had butchered his lover, Emily Kaye, to keep her pregnancy from ruining his life. A trail of blood ran from the sitting room, where Mahon had struck Kaye with an ax, across a hall and through a bedroom to the scullery. There, using a knife and a saw, he’d cut his mistress apart for disposal.

  Blood and body grease were splattered everywhere. Boiled human flesh slimed a saucepan and a tub. Kaye’s heart and other internal organs were stuffed in a biscuit tin. A trunk bearing her initials contained rotting body parts. Over a thousand charred bone fragments littered the fireplace.

  When Spilsbury entered the bungalow, he was shocked to see a detective chief inspector using his bare hands to scoop up mounds of putrid flesh and dump it into buckets.

  “Are there no rubber gloves?” he asked.

  The Yard man gave him a puzzled look. “I never wear gloves. No one I know has worn gloves in the seventeen years of the Murder Squad. This is how we do it.”

  The smell was so foul that Spilsbury set up a table outside. There, with hundreds of locals gawking over the fence, he reconstructed Kaye’s body like a jigsaw puzzle. Pieced together, it was found to be missing its head, uterus, and right leg.

  Mahon confessed to having thrown portions of the corpse from the train on a trip to London. He said he burned the head in the fireplace during a thunderstorm. The heat had caused Kaye’s eyes to pop open just as a clap of thunder shook the room. Shocked, Mahon fled from the house. Later, he smashed the skull to bits with a poker.

  To test that tale, Spilsbury burned a sheep’s head at the bungalow. He thereby established that fire did make a skull brittle enough to reduce it to splinters.

  Mahon was hanged that fall.

  Since 1842, when Scotland Yard established its detective branch, homicide investigators had been collecting evidence with their bare fingers and wrapping it in paper or envelopes for safekeeping. Spilsbury suggested introducing a Murder Bag, a standard kit to be carried by any detective responding to a homicide. The bag contained rubber gloves; brushes to dust for fingerprints; a ruler to measure distance; a compass to establish direction; a magnet, tweezers, and other means to lift clues; swabs, bags, and containers to store evidence; and although it wasn’t on Spilsbury’s official list of contents, a bottle of whisky to fortify detectives at the grisliest of crimes.

  Although Joe had traded the whisky for vodka, the Murder Bag he fetched from Gill’s car was in all other ways based on Spilsbury’s original design. That’s because he believed in the principle of Occam’s razor: “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” Or, put another way, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.

  Keep it simple, stupid.

  With that in mind, the Russian bypassed the entrance door to room 807. It had three locks, one of which was electronic, making it much more complicated than the connecting door. That infringed Occam’s razor.

  Skirting the end of the bed to reach the other door, Joe set down his Murder Bag and knelt on the floor in front of the deadbolt. As he opened the bag, Dane joined him, squatting down on his heels to see what was up.

  “Find something?” asked the sergeant.

  “Not yet, but I have a theory.”

  “Give me a clue?”

  “What’s the first step a salvage yard takes when it receives a load of scrap metals?”

  Dane had been to junkyards. “Ferrous and nonferrous. Divide iron and steel from other metals.”

  “What’s the first thing we learn about iron in school?”

  “It’s magnetic.”

  “Why?”

  “As I recall, it’s something about electrons lining up.”

  Joe nodded. “Every electron, by its nature, is a tiny magnet. For a metal to be magnetic, it must have electron spin. Normally, the countless electrons in a metal are oriented in random directions. A metal is ferromagnetic—like iron and steel—if its electrons line up when drawn by a magnet. A metal is diamagnetic—like copper and zinc—if its electrons don’t line up. You’ll note that the thumb-turn on this door is copper.”

  “So it’s not magnetic?”

  “Supposedly,” said Joe, fetching a handheld electromagnet from his Murder Bag.

  Dane watched the Russian apply the prongs to the outside face of the door, so they lined up with the arms of the thumb-turn on the other side. Flicking a switch electrified the tool. A quarter-turn of Joe’s wrist turned the knob of the deadbolt as well. The rod emerged from the lock in the edge of the door.

  “So it isn’t copper?” said Dane.

  “Let’s see.” With a screwdriver, the scientist removed the screw in the center of the thumb-turn. Holding the knob in his fingers, he showed the Mountie the edge that usually faced the wood. “What color is that to you?”

  “Gold,” said Dane.

  “The same color as Nick’s skin.”

  With the blade of a knife, Joe scraped off the layer of paint to reveal two iron plugs set into the outer tips of the thumb-turn.

  “I’ll be damned. How’d you twig to that?”

  “The lock on the entrance door is released by the keycard’s magnetic strip. That got me thinking of magnets. And I noticed that this lock had been oiled when we examined it earlier. I put one and one together.” He shrugged.

  Joe tried the electromagnet on the locked door to the other suite, to no avail.

  “What if the killer had access to both rooms?” he suggested. “The door of the next room
was left unlocked while she—I assume it’s a she—waited in here for Nick to arrive. After using the key, he triple-locked the entrance door for privacy, then fell prey to the trap. Maybe an accomplice lurked next door?”

  “That’s probable,” said Dane. “Can you imagine one person lifting Nick’s body?”

  “Unlock the thumb-turn on this door and step into the next room. Turn and close this door, and lock it from the outside with the magnet. Then close the other door and turn its deadbolt from inside the next room. Would that not present us with the puzzle we face—and allow escape from the adjoining suite?”

  “Tricky,” said Dane.

  Just then, a far-off explosion boomed loudly enough to rattle the snow-flaked window.

  “What was that?” asked Joe.

  Thin Ice

  Winter was Inspector Zinc Chandler’s favorite season.

  Most adults, the Mountie knew, loathed the winter months. To them, exile to Siberia would be no worse than suffering through a deep freeze on the prairies. How many folks died from heart attacks while shoveling snow? How many homeless men and women froze to death? How many drivers trapped in snowbound cars asphyxiated while running the engine for heat? Did you hear about the guy who crawled out of his trapped vehicle and made it to a phone booth? While he was talking to his wife, telling her not to worry, a snowplow passed in the whiteout and buried him alive.

  Ah yes, winter in the Great White North!

  Zinc, however, still saw winter through the eyes of a bundled-up schoolboy. Two pairs of socks in thermal boots, two pairs of mitts tethered by a string around his neck, long johns beneath a flannel shirt and jeans inside a snowsuit. His mom would throw open the door of the farmhouse in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, and let in a blast as cold as Jack Frost’s breath. No sooner would Zinc step outside than he’d have to pee.

  Brrrrr …

  People who weren’t from Saskatchewan didn’t know snow. Spraying the yard produced a personal skating rink. Freezing a snowdrift made a slide. Burrowing under the surface created a maze of tunnels and caves. Zinc could glide on the frozen sloughs or play hockey on the road. Lash the toboggan behind a horse and off he’d go. Drifts became forts for snowball fights. Easter egg dye gave him snow churches with stained-glass windows. On flat days bled of color, snow would fall, and Zinc, facing skyward, would capture flakes on his tongue. Once, he’d stuck his tongue to a piece of cold metal, learning a lesson to last a lifetime.