Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  From his ambush platform along the valley, the mercenary punched the button to blow the charges the Icemen had packed around the base of each hydro tower. One by one, they toppled in an explosion of sparks. Stopwatch averted his eyes as live wires snapped and lashed about like sizzling bullwhips. Those that landed across the highway formed another barrier.

  Ozone fouled the air, stinking of weak chlorine.

  Satisfied that he had earned the cash in his Swiss bank account, the soldier of fortune pointed his snowmobile toward Whistler, heading for the black hole spawned by the blackout.

  Burning Bridges

  Chief Superintendent DeClercq was questioning Niles Hawksworth, grand poobah of the El Dorado Resort, when all hell broke loose. The hotelier sat frowning behind his compulsively organized desk. Try though he might, he could express no real sorrow for the three murder victims. It was obvious that his only concern was his threatened business.

  “Two skiers killed on the slopes,” he said, “is outrageous enough. But a policeman murdered in this hotel just hours before ‘Going for the Gold’? It’s obscene.” As he spoke, he rolled an egg-shaped worry stone back and forth in his palm.

  “It’s more than that,” said DeClercq, his voice as dry as autumn leaves.

  The hotelier agreed. “The Olympic Games will put Whistler—and the El Dorado—on the map for decades to come. Bodies on the slopes hurt everyone. But a murder in this hotel! Jesus Christ!”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the cop said sarcastically.

  “Thank you,” said the oblivious hospitality manager. “And thank you as well for removing the body by the service elevator and taking it out the back door. Imagine it going through the lobby!” Hawksworth shuddered at the thought. “Now, how soon can we reopen the eighth floor? Every room is booked tonight because of ‘Going for the Gold.’”

  “The show must go on, Mr. Hawksworth?”

  With his power suit, his manicured hands, and his scalp shaved to corporate perfection, Niles Hawksworth embodied everything DeClercq disliked about the Olympic Games. If the games were really about sport and the human spirit, wouldn’t it make sense to stage them in the same place every four years, stripped of all the commercial nonsense that bleeds them of meaning? Greece could be the home of the Summer Olympics and Chamonix–Mont Blanc the Winter Games. The cash saved could be spent on humanitarian causes, and security could be state of the art.

  That made sense to Robert, but not to the world’s businessmen.

  Men like Hawksworth saw the Olympics as a giant moneymaking opportunity. They gambled with the public purse, squandering millions on a bidding process that only one country could win. A fortune more was spent on massive sports facilities needed for only a brief moment in time. Corporate shills milked the carnival for every dollar they could. Meanwhile, cops like Robert were expected to provide impregnable security at rock-bottom rates.

  “Combing a murder scene takes as long as it takes,” said the chief. “So if you want ‘Going for the Gold’ to proceed, you’re going to have to give me all the help I need.”

  The hotelier clenched his worry stone. “You’d shut us down?” he said.

  “I will if I think the El Dorado remains a hunting ground.”

  Suddenly, Hawksworth was all business. “How can I help?” he asked.

  “This woman who called to report the murder—did you recognize her voice?”

  “No, I think she’d disguised it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I can tell you precisely. I put her on speakerphone so my assistant could write down her exact words.” Hawksworth consulted a series of squiggles on a shorthand pad. “‘There’s a dead cop in room 807,’” he read aloud. “‘Have Special X figure it out.’”

  “So you called us?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want those notes.”

  Hawksworth passed him the pad.

  “Your assistant is?”

  “Jenny.”

  “I want to question her.”

  “She’s with the chef, discussing the menu for tonight, but she should be back soon. I know she didn’t recognize the caller’s voice either. Do you think that woman is the killer?”

  The Mountie showed Hawksworth the Post-it Note in the evidence pouch. “Does this handwriting look familiar?”

  The hospitality manager shook his head. “‘Ten o’clock tonight. Be discreet,’” he read. “That sounds like a pickup in a bar.”

  “Is the Gilded Man the only bar in the El Dorado?”

  “You don’t think …” Hawksworth’s earlier frown was nothing compared to the glower he took on now.

  “Who worked the bar yesterday?”

  “Jenny will know.”

  “Are the same people working today?”

  “The entire staff’s doing ‘Going for the Gold.’”

  “This company that booked room 807, how do I—”

  Ka-boom!

  That’s when the first explosion roared in from the south, rattling the windows of the hospitality office and the murder room on the eighth floor, where Joe had just solved the puzzle of the deadbolt.

  “What was that?” asked Hawksworth.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before the chief’s cellphone went mad. Calls were coming in like waves washing a beach. The first to reach Robert was Jackie Hett, who had just returned to the Special X detachment after responding to the decapitation of the skier on the chairlift.

  “Chief, a tanker truck explosion has blocked both the road and the rail links to Vancouver. It took out three bridges and caused a major pileup. I called the local clinic. Doctors are responding, but all available medical help is urgently needed at the scene.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Keep me informed.”

  “Roger,” said Jackie.

  By the time the Mountie finished his call, the manager’s assistant, Jenny, had returned from consulting with the chef. Like her boss, she hadn’t recognized the voice of the woman reporting the murder. Nor could she identify the handwriting on the Post-it Note.

  “Who tended the bar yesterday?” asked the chief.

  “Karen and Stew in the afternoon,” said Jenny. “Marco and Trixie took over at night.”

  “Are Karen and Stew here now?”

  “No, but they will be soon. Everyone’s working the ‘Going for the Gold’ event.”

  The Mountie turned to Hawksworth. “Do you have medical staff on call?”

  “Why?” the hotelier asked suspiciously.

  Ignoring him, Robert phoned Gill Macbeth on his cell. The pathologist had accompanied Nick Craven’s corpse from the room on the eighth floor to the nearby trauma facility. She was to be joined there by the Russian forensic scientist as soon as he had finished examining the crime scene.

  “What’s going on?” she answered. “That’s more than thunder.”

  “A tanker truck explosion has caused a lot of injuries. We need every doctor on scene.”

  “But what about the postmortem?”

  “Joe can start without you, searching Nick’s body for wounds and stripping off the paint. When you’re finished at the accident scene, you can conduct a full autopsy.” Robert looked back at Hawksworth. “Hold on, Gill. You may have passengers.” He covered the phone. “Well?” he asked. “I need medical personnel.”

  “We use doctors from the nearby clinic. If they’ve already been called out, I can only suggest trying one of our guests,” said Hawksworth.

  “Who would that be?”

  The hospitality manager turned to his assistant. “Jenny, what’s the name of the Finn who’s trying to land a sports medicine job at the Olympics?”

  “I can’t pronounce it, but he’s in room 312.”

  “Call him down,” the Mountie said, returning to his cell. “Gill, it looks like I’ll have someone to ride shotgun at your—”

  That’s when a succession of explosions rumbled in from the north, shaking the town o
f Whistler like an earthquake. Suddenly, all the lights in the El Dorado went out, plunging Hawksworth’s office into dimness.

  Ice Pick

  With her skis and poles balanced on her shoulder and a backpack strapped to her spine, Scarlett could have been any one of a number of disappointed Olympians forsaking the mountains for the safety and comfort of the bars and restaurants of Whistler Village. What differentiated her from the rest of the pack was the concealed weapon she carried and the head of the skier she’d stored in a waterproof bag in her backpack.

  With one mission complete, the Ice Pick Killer was now stalking Gill.

  Architecturally, Whistler Village was a nest of snakes. There wasn’t a straight street or walkway to be had in the hoity-toity community sandwiched between the highway and the mountains. Twisting and turning back on themselves, pedestrian rambles hid countless nooks and crannies. One of these was an oblong yard of virgin snow tucked away behind the RCMP’s trauma center. Come the Olympics, heavily armed response teams would muster here. But this afternoon, only Scarlett waited.

  She checked for a text message and found one glowing on her cell.

  Kill time, she thought.

  From the service bay at back of the El Dorado Resort, the Ice Pick Killer had followed the hotel’s delivery van the short distance by road to the trauma center. Emerging from the van with a somber expression, Gill had wheeled the gurney carrying Nick’s body in through the street door. Now she was locked inside the makeshift morgue.

  Time you joined him on the slab, thought Scarlett.

  Like the Olympics itself, Whistler was besieged by commercial hangers-on. If there was a buck to be made, Whistler was the place to make it. So in addition to skiing, you could dogsled, bungee jump, heli-ski, snowmobile, snowshoe, go tubing, or ride a sleigh drawn by giant Percheron horses. Or for a change of pace, you could “strengthen your core” in spas catering to your wellness needs with yoga, Pilates, facials, waxing, acupuncture, massages, aromatherapy, Vichy showers, and mud baths. Shucks, you could even get little yellow happy faces painted on your toes.

  But then …

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  … the juice stopped, and the fantasy faded.

  One minute, Whistler had been a fantasyland of lights and sounds, with neon signs beckoning folks to come on in and spend, and rock ’n’ roll cajoling drinkers to chugalug. Then, in the blink of an eye, the mirage was extinguished and the jukebox fell mute. This gaudy manifestation of the Winter Olympics had been transformed into a ghost town.

  * * *

  “What are you making?” Scarlett had asked Mephisto days earlier in his mountainside chalet.

  “Curare,” he’d replied. “South American arrow poison.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “In Brazil. From my father. He was an archeologist. When I was a boy, he took me on an expedition to the Mato Grosso. He hoped to pick up the trail of Colonel Percy Fawcett.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A British adventurer who vanished in 1925 while searching for El Dorado.”

  “Like Indiana Jones?”

  “Only the real thing.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “No, but I learned some useful skills. Like how to shrink a human head and how to make curare.”

  Scarlett watched Mephisto mix bark scrapings from the poisonous Strychnos toxifera and menisperm plants with venom harvested from the fangs of tropical snakes. The concoction was boiled in water for a couple of days, then strained and evaporated to extract a dark paste with a bitter taste.

  “Watch,” he said, lifting a frog from a jar.

  Freed from captivity, the feisty amphibian hopped across the kitchen floor. Fetching it, Mephisto pricked it with a pin dipped in the paste. When he set it down so it could hop again, the frog collapsed after one leap.

  “That’s strong curare,” he said with a satisfied smile.

  “Who’s it for?” asked Scarlett.

  “You,” Mephisto responded. “It’s what you’ll use to snuff Nick Craven.”

  * * *

  Now, as planned, the Mountie was dead from curare poisoning. His body, hiding the method, lay inside the trauma center. His killer stood in the shadows by a rear corner, where the outside walkway rounded the building from the front door to the backyard. Sheltered by the overhang of the roof, the walk bore only a smattering of snow. From there, Scarlett had a clear view of the untouched yard.

  Abruptly, a square of light from the rear window fell across the snow. All Olympic venues and most hotels had backup power supplied by diesel generators or long-life batteries. So even in the midst of this debilitating blackout, some lights came on. Obviously, the trauma center was equipped for power cuts, and Gill had found the switch.

  Scarlett watched a silhouette form on the square of white as Gill approached the window to draw the curtains shut. She wondered if the pathologist had figured out how the poisoning was done. Probably not. She hadn’t been in there long enough before the lights went out.

  Soon, as one of too few doctors on hand, she’d emerge to help the casualties from the explosions. The shortest route from the trauma center to her car in the El Dorado lot was across this yard of virgin snow, then out through the back gate. That’s when Gill would die from an ice pick to her neck, making it obvious to DeClercq who had killed his lover.

  Nick Craven was dead.

  By now, an Iceman had killed Jenna and Becky Bond.

  Gill was the only one left who could identify Mephisto. With her dead, it would be safe for him to come out of hiding.

  Scarlett cocked an ear.

  Was that a knock around front?

  Her mind conjured up a knock-knock joke.

  Knock, knock!

  Who’s there?

  Police.

  Police who?

  Police let us in. It’s cold out here!

  The knock repeated.

  Gill was at work in back.

  Scarlett nodded.

  Kill time, said the clock.

  Curare

  Guided by his flashlight and a map sketched by Hawksworth’s assistant, Jenny, Joseph Avacomovitch, with the Finnish sports medic in tow, followed the snowy sidewalk from the El Dorado to the trauma center’s front door.

  It took three knocks for Gill to answer.

  “Dr. Gill Macbeth,” Joe said by way of introduction, “meet Pekka Viljakainen.”

  “I won’t shake your hand,” Gill replied, holding up a gilt-smeared latex glove.

  The Finn grinned. His eyes were masked by yellow goggles designed to enhance dull light, and his angular chin sported stubble worn for style. He was the athletic type, the sort of jet-set skier you meet in top-notch resorts.

  “Pekka’s not a doctor, but he excels at sports medicine,” explained Joe. “He’s offered to help.”

  “Good,” said Gill, smiling back. “I’ll get my coat. But first, you must excuse us for a moment. Joe and I need to talk.”

  They left the Finn on a chair by the front door and retreated along the hall to the makeshift morgue at the back. It opened on the left, halfway to the rear exit.

  In every case, the corpse of a murder victim must be protected from contamination until the postmortem is done. Usually, it remains in place as crime scene investigators do an initial search. Sealed in a body bag, it’s then transported to the morgue by the body removal service, shadowed by a police car. There, it rests in a secure locker until the pathologist can perform an autopsy, at which time evidence samples are collected for forensic analysis.

  Because Whistler was cut off from Vancouver, Gill had to improvise some. But the RCMP trauma center was a poor substitute for a hospital morgue. Nick’s gold-painted body was stretched out on an examination table, nothing protecting it except the lock on the door. In a crisis, you make do with what you’ve got. And now Gill was about to hand over the search for Nick’s cause of death to a forensic wizard from Moscow.

  “My gut says Nick was poisoned with curare
,” she said. “There’s no sign of overt trauma on his body. A needle prick would be covered by the lacquer.”

  “Why curare?” asked Joe.

  “Because I know Mephisto, and that’s how he operates. He’s obsessive-compulsive. Pieces must fit together. This headhunter stuff is aimed at Robert, because that’s what made him crack before. Mephisto is taunting him. Shrunken heads are the hallmark of the Jivaro, and they also used curare as arrow poison. So of all the poisons Mephisto could have chosen to dispatch Nick, that’s the one that fits.”

  “What an ugly way to die.”

  Curare’s an alkaloid that blocks impulses between our nerve axons and the contracting mechanism of skeletal muscles. It kills by asphyxia, by relaxing those muscles until they paralyze. The heart goes on beating even after breathing stops. The horror of curare poisoning is that victims remain aware of what’s happening to them as paralysis progresses and they slowly suffocate.

  In effect, Nick was buried alive in his own body.

  “I’ll find the wound. Trust me,” said Joe.

  “The wound will be in his back,” said Gill.

  “Why?” asked the Russian.

  “Because Mephisto set a honey trap. Nick got picked up by some femme fatale in a bar, and his body was left naked on a bed. What better way for a killer to take a man by surprise than to jab him in the back during intercourse? He’d think it was her fingernails until it was too late. And she’d get the erotic thrill of feeling him expire in her clutches.”

  Joe blew out a long sigh, then removed his hat and overcoat, and got down to business. Opening his Murder Bag, he pulled out a magnifying glass worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

  “I’ll be going,” said Gill. “Call me with what you find.”

  “Here,” said Joe, passing her another map drawn by Jenny. “It’s a shortcut through the backyard to the El Dorado lot.”

  “I know the route. Having a chalet at Whistler makes me a local.”

  Joe followed Gill into the hall, where she motioned Pekka toward her from his seat by the front door and donned her ski parka. Opening the rear door, she stepped out into the cold. The blizzard had faded enough to reveal the far gate. As Gill and the Finn began their trudge across the pristine yard, the deepening snow squeaked under their boots.