Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  “Quick,” said Rachel. “Let’s get every pan from the kitchen.”

  The kitchen was divided from the dining room by a counter with cast-iron cookware hanging overhead. Shuttling back and forth, Katt and Rachel lined the backs of the couches with an impregnable layer of pots and pans.

  “I’ll do the rest,” the sergeant said. “You two get upstairs.”

  Lit from below by the flames of the wood-burning stove, Katt led Becky up the staircase to the landing that overlooked the hearth. As they climbed, their shadows stalked them across the smooth-hewn logs. With the crossbow and a fistful of arrows, Katt did look like William Tell. At the top, they turned toward the bedroom in the dormer on the creek side of the roof.

  The floor creaked as they walked.

  Below them, Rachel opened the door of the stove and tossed in a pot full of water. As the fire went out, so did half the shadows besieging the kids. Rachel held her breath until they entered the room, then blew out the lamp and took up her position in the redoubt.

  Outside, the Icemen closed in.

  * * *

  Robert’s cell had recorded a message while he and Katt were discussing security measures. He hit the key to retrieve it and cringed from a blood-curdling scream.

  “Joseph?” he blurted.

  The caller’s agony was excruciating. Whatever torture he suffered, it was extreme. Gasping, gurgling, grinding his teeth, Joe struggled to speak. Robert felt sick to his stomach. Even with the manpower shortage, he should never have left Joe on his own.

  “Die …” Joe rasped.

  “Ah!” he choked, sucking in air.

  Robert was on tenterhooks.

  Die what?

  “Frame …” Joe added.

  Die? Frame? What did that mean?

  “Gate …” Joe strained.

  The recording ended. Robert tried calling back. The phone trilled and trilled until the Russian’s recording cut in.

  “Hang on,” the chief encouraged. “I’m coming.”

  After he and Joe had puzzled out the trackless double murder, DeClercq had returned to the El Dorado Resort by way of the street. But the shortest route from the morgue to the hotel—where Joe knew Robert was bound—was across the backyard and out through the rear gate. That was most likely the “gate” in his message.

  Cold with apprehension over what he would find, the chief rushed back to the morgue by that route.

  Naked Prey

  Zinc figured he was on shaky legal ground. So far, the only evidence he had that implicated Jessica in Nick Craven’s murder was a Post-it Note in her handwriting stuck to an electronic key for the door to the crime scene. That room, however, had not been registered in the redhead’s name, and it was possible that the Post-it Note and the key had stuck together after being pocketed separately. Zinc wasn’t going to botch the case by showing his cards too soon, so he risked staying undercover until she made a move.

  Undercover?

  That was another conundrum.

  An undercover cop is usually a cop who hides his official status. If a suspect makes an incriminating statement to someone who’s undercover, the rules that govern confessions to the police don’t apply. This situation was different, though. The suspect knew full well that Zinc was a Mountie, and any confession uttered to a cop under fear of prejudice or hope of advantage was inadmissible. Zinc liked to think that getting bedded by him was the greatest hope of advantage in the whole wide world. Ha, ha. So he had to wait for an attempt on his life before snapping on the cuffs.

  “Attempt” was the operative word.

  The surest way for Zinc to protect himself was to strip the redhead down. Her coat hung in the closet, so if her weapon was in one of the pockets, he was currently out of harm’s way. Her carryall lay on the bed like a ticking bomb, but for the moment, it was out of reach. That left her person. But it was hard to imagine how her tight clothes could conceal anything. And if there was any doubt about that, she put it to rest by taking him up on his suggestion of a steam.

  In Zinc’s line of work, he got to see a lot of professional strippers clinging to poles. But they all paled in comparison to the teaser toying with him now. Like a rattlesnake shedding its skin, the vamp began to peel off her fuzzy green sweater.

  His was tough work, but someone had to do it.

  “You think I’m a Barbie doll, don’t you?” Jessica asked, once her face emerged from the sheath.

  “The thought never crossed my mind.”

  She folded her sweater and draped it over the back of a nearby chair. After pulling off her boots, she shimmied her ski pants down her hips, her thighs, and her calves. Stepping out, she smoothed them over the same chair. “I had a Barbie once. A Ken doll, too. But they were boring. Want to know why?”

  “Why?” Zinc asked.

  “Their knees didn’t bend.”

  “That’s important?”

  “It was to me. My parents had this sex manual in their bookcase. I studied a chart of the various sex positions and tried to mimic them with my dolls. Because their knees didn’t bend, Ken and Barbie could only fuck missionary style.”

  “Did you torture and mutilate her?” Zinc asked.

  Jessica frowned. “Barbie?”

  “I read about some research done on girls who played with Barbie. Of all products tested, Barbie provoked the most violent emotions. Girls confessed to gleefully maiming their dolls—hacking the hair, twisting off heads, burning, breaking, and microwaving. Is that what happens when you can’t live up to body image?”

  “Not me.”

  “So I see.”

  “Torturing Barbie, I mean.”

  Jessica turned her back on him, reached around to unhook her bra and shuck it off, then lowered her panties and kicked them up to catch them in mid-air. Looking over her shoulder, she said, “Why torture Barbie when I can torture you?”

  And with that, without turning around to expose her front to Zinc, Jessica abandoned the bedroom and sashayed like a sex goddess into the sauna next door.

  Torture, indeed, thought Zinc.

  Was that both a figurative and a literal double entendre?

  * * *

  The steam hit him like a blowtorch. She had splashed a ladle of water onto the burner, so the sauna was as foggy as Jack the Ripper’s London. Enveloped in a haze that blurred her features, she lounged on the upper bench, legs crossed and arms folded in front of her chest.

  “Where’d the muscles come from?” Jessica asked.

  “I was raised on a farm.”

  “Where?”

  “Rosetown, Saskatchewan.”

  “Making hay while the sun shone, eh?”

  “Sort of.”

  “How’d you get so battered?”

  “It comes with the job.”

  “That scar on your shoulder? What’s the story?”

  “Two mercenaries tried to kill me in Africa. Y’ever see the movie Naked Prey?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it was like that. Run through the jungle.”

  “And the scar on your forehead?”

  “A souvenir.”

  “From where?” asked the vamp.

  “Hong Kong.”

  “You get around. What about that one?” She pointed at his thigh.

  “It’s a coral cut from a cannibal cave in the South Pacific.”

  “You’re shitting me!”

  “I wish I was. It hurt when I got it.”

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering if I’ve got scars, too.”

  “From what?”

  “Implants,” Jessica said, spreading her arms to reveal her breasts. “I don’t.”

  “You’re shitting me,” he echoed, genuinely impressed.

  “Cop a feel if you want.”

  The steam had condensed, or evaporated, or whatever it is mist does in a sauna. The cop was beaded with sweat. The vamp was completely naked but for a small gold crucifix around her neck. Sweat ran in rivulets down her skin and trickled like a river through
the Grand Canyon between her breasts. An overwhelming urge to lick it seized the Mountie.

  Christ, Zinc thought.

  Get a grip.

  You’re playing the schmuck again.

  What if that cross around her neck is a plunger, and a poisoned needle is tucked up the stem? “Lick me,” she says, and you bury your face between her tits. And that’s when she jabs you in your spine.

  Femme, as in “woman.”

  Fatale, as in “You’re stone cold dead.”

  * * *

  They showered together and lathered each other’s skin with soap. He didn’t know which was more erotic, his hands on her flesh or hers on his.

  Adrenaline was Zinc’s drug of choice. He was a danger junky. To feel alive—really alive—he had to teeter on the edge of the cliff, with life and death hanging in the balance. This game he was playing offered the added attraction of sex, and Zinc grasped what was going on in his brain.

  The human brain is actually three brains in one. The vamp’s body language came from her reptilian brain, the R-complex crowning the top of her spinal cord. The cop’s reaction to her came from his old mammalian brain, the irrational limbic lobe at the center of his skull. Home to the Four Fs—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking—it had kicked in for sex and survival. The last to evolve, his cerebral cortex, was the center of rational thought. And it was becoming clear that if he didn’t keep his wits about him, he’d end up a dead schmuck.

  Zinc knew he should step back from the brink right away. But he was addicted to danger and this was a delicious thrill, so he continued on with the perilous game as Jessica toweled him dry, then led him like a stud to slaughter on the bed in the other room.

  It’s in the bag, he thought.

  Whatever she’d used to kill Nick.

  This was when he was most alive and knew it most completely. Whatever went on in the murderous mind of the femme fatale was also a mix of sex and death. So if Jessica planned to kill him for a sexual thrill, like the black widow spider, she would do it when she had him in her coital clutches.

  “Well, slave?” she said, removing her carryall from the bed and depositing it on the night table. Grabbing the covers, she stripped the bed to its sheet. So voluptuous was this creature stretched out on the altar that the horned beast in Zinc hoped the cop was wrong so he would be free to have her.

  “What’s my name?” she asked.

  “Cleopatra.”

  “What’s your role, slave?”

  “To satisfy you or else, mistress.”

  “One way or another, I want your balls. So crawl on top of me and let’s see you perform.”

  Like a panther after its prey, Zinc closed in on hands and knees from the foot of the bed. But now the thrill of the hunt trumped the thrill of sex in the Mountie, and his cerebral cortex—his new mammalian brain—took control.

  “We need a condom,” Jessica said, reaching for her bag.

  Zinc’s heart beat faster, his nerves tingled, and his muscles tensed for action.

  Now, he thought.

  “Why did you write the note that invited Nick Craven up to room 807?”

  Jessica froze with her hand at the mouth of her carryall. “Hey, what is this?” she asked.

  “We found the note stuck to the key. I compared the handwriting with yours.”

  Judging by the scowl on her face, it had dawned on the vamp that she was caught in a honey trap.

  “You bastard!” she snarled, baring her teeth as her hand sank into the bag.

  Jaws

  The gush of arterial blood had spread so wide that red snow extended beyond the perimeter of the flashlight beam. The Mountie stood just inside the gate to the back of the trauma center, shivering as he looked down at the corpse of his friend. Joseph lay sprawled at the center of the pool of light. The snow around him had been churned up as he’d thrashed in agony, trying to claw himself free of the leg-hold trap. Buried under the snow at the mouth of the gate, the deadly device had been positioned so anyone leaving the yard would step on the pressure plate and set off the trap.

  Snap …

  Crack …

  Splinter …

  Like the jaws of a monstrous Venus flytrap, the large steel frame had slammed shut on Joe’s leg, smashing bones, severing arteries, and hurling him into shock. In his imagination, Robert saw the blood spurting from his friend’s leg as he struggled to choke out his cryptic dying message. It would have been obvious to a forensic scientist steeped in the pathology of fatal wounds that he wouldn’t crawl away from this trap.

  “Die …”

  “Ah!”

  “Frame …”

  “Gate …”

  What had Joe been trying to say with his last gasps?

  The Mountie was shaken to his core. Never had he felt as trapped as he did now, not even in the darkest hours of the Headhunter nightmare. Mephisto had him caught in a trap as deadly as the one locked on Joe’s leg.

  Twice in the past, the chief had played a chess game like this with the psycho killer. Both times he had failed to grasp what motivated him. Mephisto seemed to have deluded himself into thinking that causing doomsday would give him a place in history. And Grof’s Frankenvirus might be just what he needed to bring on Armageddon.

  Was it possible that Mephisto was the buyer of the Soviet scientist’s bio weapon? What if he’d bought Grof’s supervirus and had had it on the boat with him when he tried to escape from Ebbtide Island? A Coast Guard cutter had sliced the boat in half. Did that send the virus to the bottom of the sea? Joe said no one knew why the bio weapon had never been used. Maybe it took Mephisto all these years to recover it. Is that why he returned to the island for his Fountain of Age plot? To search where the scotched boat sank?

  If so, Mephisto had created the perfect opportunity to use the Frankenvirus. Whistler was cut off from help. No one could get in or out. The murders of Nick, Jenna, and the two skiers had triggered the herd instinct in the hundreds of Olympic hopefuls, who were now congregating at the El Dorado Resort, looking for protection in numbers. It would be an easy thing, Robert realized, for Mephisto to infect them, and each infected person would then scatter to his own corner of the globe. Then, it was only a matter of time until the incubation period ran out and the Frankenvirus exploded.

  By striking now instead of in February, Mephisto had taken crippling aim at Whistler’s Achilles heel: its lack of pre-Olympic security. The bridge explosions and ensuing avalanches had sucked every available cop out to the highway or up the mountain slopes. And with Safesite tests taking place in Vancouver, both VISU and the Mounties’ own biohazard team were out of the picture. Leaving Mephisto free to set his supervirus loose.

  This was about revenge as much as megalomania.

  Getting even.

  Settling the score.

  By snuffing Nick, Jenna, Becky, and Gill, Mephisto would both avenge himself on those who had escaped his clutches and eliminate everyone who could identify him. As an added bonus, those deaths would also tear Robert apart emotionally.

  Checkmate!

  With snow above and snow below and snow eddying around, the chief glowered down at the bloody jaws clamped on his longtime friend. Lost in the blinding curtain of white lay the corpse of his lover, and in the morgue beyond her lay his poisoned corporal. For all he knew, Zinc was dead in the hotel behind him, and Katt and Becky had fallen prey to professional mercenaries at Gill’s isolated chalet.

  Tick … tock …

  Time was running out.

  Venom

  The instant the redhead’s hand plunged into her carryall, Zinc responded by closing the mouth of the bag around her forearm like the cuff of a boxing mitt. Jessica’s yelp of pain was disproportionate to the pressure of the Mountie’s squeeze, and suddenly she stopped reacting to his accusation.

  Her arm went limp.

  She appeared to be in a drugged stupor.

  Moments later, she began hyperventilating.

  Zinc had no idea what was happening
. The redhead had seemed perfectly healthy until she’d put her hand into the bag. Now, her entire body was slick with perspiration, but the skin touching his wasn’t feverish.

  His free hand felt her pulse.

  Her heart wasn’t racing.

  Whatever malady had seized her, it didn’t affect circulation. Instead, her limbs slackened from their tips toward her torso. They lay like deadwood on the sheet and the night table, while her lungs struggled for breath and she began convulsing. Her gasps were like death rattles. As Jessica slowly asphyxiated, suffocated by her own flesh, the horror in her eyes told Zinc that she was conscious and acutely aware of her fate.

  The Mountie tried CPR.

  No use.

  He couldn’t get her breathing.

  Once it was clear that her lungs had shut down and she had lost consciousness, he felt her pulse again and found that her heart went on beating … beating … beating.

  And then it stopped.

  Curare? Zinc wondered. Mixed with tropical snake venom?

  Stepping off the bed, the inspector gently pulled the bag from the dead woman’s hand. The first thing he noticed was a fresh puncture wound on her palm. Had she jabbed herself with a needle while reaching into the bag?

  Zinc confirmed that by emptying the carryall’s contents onto the desk. Out cascaded the clutter you’d expect to find in a woman’s bag: a box of condoms, a cellphone, and … a hypodermic needle? The protective cap had come off the spike. The plunger was two-thirds depressed, and only a little poison remained. Zinc figured the weapon had been readied for him, but when he’d seized the bag, he had jarred the cap loose and she had inadvertently jabbed herself instead.

  It was clear now how Nick had died, but not where the vamp had stuck the needle. The autopsy would probably reveal that, but Zinc had a kinky inkling from having seen femmes fatales spin their webs in film noirs with Alex. Staring down at the dead vixen, he could picture himself locked between her legs as one hand reached back and spread the cheeks of his ass—ah yes, Whistler girls!—and the other hand jabbed the needle where the sun don’t shine.