Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller

by John Nicholas

  "I said I'm asking the questions!" Anthony spat back. "And he's fine, for…about a day, I'd say. After that I'm not responsible for him."

  "Anthony," Hart cut in, "Let's get this over with."

  "Whatever," Anthony replied. "Here's the problem. Your boyfriend Alex left without a fight. Problem isn't what he left without, but what he left with."

  "Anthony, it wasn't him!" Hart said.

  He knelt down in front of her. She stopped struggling and looked directly into his eyes. "He outsmarted you, huh?" she said, now grinning herself. "I figured he would. There's a reason he was the leader, you know."

  "Will you two quit dancing around each other so she can tell us where the goddamn map is!?" Hart interjected.

  "It was the map?" Sarah was laughing now. "That'll be pretty important!"

  Hart struck her in the face. He swung his hand toward her nose and connected solidly with a painful thud. Pulling his hand away, he noticed that it had been clean—there wasn't any blood anywhere. He hit her again, with the back of his hand, and felt the warm flow of blood. "There is nothing funny going on," he growled. "Tell us what happened to the map or so help me, you can stay here until you starve to death."

  "You're pathetic, Anthony!" Sarah yelled, wiping the blood away from her upper lip. "You just couldn't stand not being in charge! You're pathetic and nothing else! And Hart…" she gazed at him with nothing in her eyes, "look at you. Nothing but muscle. A hired goon. I thought there was more to you! I thought you'd changed, you bastard! You bastards!" Her voice rose as she said this and began to crack.

  "Where the hell is it!?" Anthony howled, thrusting his foot into Sarah's chest and causing her to lurch with pain.

  "Alex knew!" she shouted, emotion filling her voice and throwing it in a hundred different directions. "He knew you'd double-cross him sooner or later! He knew if he took something to remember you by you'd come after him again!"

  Hart looked at Anthony blankly. "So what now?"

  "I'll tell you what now! We get moving!" Anthony produced his knife from his pocket and held the agonizingly cold blade against Sarah's neck. "Untie her. We're going to start moving, now."

  Sarah, aware of the blade, sat perfectly still while Hart worked to open the knots. At last it was loosened enough for her to pull herself free.

  "All right, Sarah," Anthony grinned. "Lead the way. And remember: we have the guns. If you try to pull a fast one and leave us without directions, we'll know."

  Sarah, still fighting back her emotions, stood up and rubbed her wrists. Then she began walking quickly north, watching the sun hide from the world below the solidifying clouds. I can hardly blame it, she thought bitterly.

  An hour later, Alex realized that he would no longer be able to guide himself without the sun, and set a distant storm bank as a landmark, pressing on towards it and watching it grow closer and further away simultaneously.

  He eventually lost track of the movements of the clouds, as, through the night sky, it was difficult to see where they were. He had a vague sense, as the night darkened and the second hour of his exodus dragged on, that something was blanketing the sky, but neither knew nor cared what it was.

  He tried to do what he had done so many times before—lose himself in the walking, fall into a rhythm, stay there for as long as it took. But the more he trudged, now navigating by nothing more than what he believed to be a straight line, the more he found that this was impossible. The weight of his banishment hung too heavily on him—his mask, which even Jake had been unable to remove, was now gone. It had been Anthony, the one he had held farthest from him, who had finally looked upon his face.

  The wind harried him constantly, covering his every action in biting, numbing sheets. He felt everything acutely—fatigue, mounting hunger, the weight of the rifle he still carried, and the crumpled shape of the map in his back pocket. The only time he didn't feel horrible was when he thought of the latter, the only revenge he'd managed to get against Hart and Anthony. There was a part of him that still took refuge in small victories.

  As the second hour closed and the third began, Alex looked at the familiar night and had a strange thought. He pictured himself from far away, as if being watched by somebody standing on a cliff a hundred feet behind his position. He saw a boy walking through half-thawed snow with a rifle in his hands, heading on a course he may or may not have lost an hour ago, toward a place at which he didn't know what awaited him; and he wondered how he could have come to be here.

  That led him to the thought that kept him walking. What came to his mind was the silent pact he had made with himself, over a month ago at the threshold of his prison in Woodsbrook. For a few minutes he struggled to remember what it was. The words came to him in a rush, and he was mad at himself; he'd sworn to never forget them.

  If I cross this threshold, if I am nearly killed or fully killed, if I die or if I live, I will never return. That's my vow.

  He realized then where he was. He was freezing, hungry, weary, weighted by emotion, with no allies left in the world but one, but he was alive, he was moving, and he was free. Conspiring with Jake in his treehouse, tossing notes in French class, he could never have dreamed of this.

  I'll press on for Cold Lake, he thought, if for no other reason than that Alex Orson from a month ago would have wanted me to.

  He raised his head, and then, instead of simply dragging his weight, he began to walk. Something surged through him, and Alex was off on another voyage, alone, as he had begun.

  The highway map resting on the glove compartment told Ordoñez that the road he had found was known by few and used by even fewer—the routes were colored according to usefulness, the number of places you could use it to get to; and his route was only useful only for somebody who wanted to get to Cold Lake Provincial Park from Alberta or British Columbia, something decidedly rare this time of year.

  He drove steadfastly alone, the top on his convertible down despite the conditions, watching the flurries dance slowly to the earth through the beams of his headlights. So graceful and content in the air, he thought, yet when they hit the ground—bam!—they die. Never knew what hit 'em.

  He reflected over what he knew and what had happened to him. It was not in his nature to comprehend unfathomable things, so he worked to force his situation into a manageable brief.

  First, he thought, I'm out of the Moose Killers. Nothing wrong with that—he'd always wanted to go into business for himself. However, there was the problem that they were still trying to kill him. That can be overcome. I'm Alberto Ordoñez. I don't get killed. That's just how it works.

  Second, he thought, that stupid boy. Alex Orson had put him directly in his least favorite spot in the world: a dilemma. Used to problems he could know the answer to, Ordoñez attempted to consider it. If I kill him, I get my revenge, but the Moose Killers get what they want. If I don't kill him, I undermine Potard, but the little crap survives and somebody else might just plug him anyway.

  Ordoñez glared at the inexorably passing lines dotting the highway, getting faded and less maintained as the third hour of driving wore into the fourth. On an impulse, he pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and, leaving the engine idling, devoted himself to his thought.

  There was one thing he wondered most—on more than one occasion he could have shot Alex and left him to bleed to death, like he had with his annoying friend. But he hadn't. At first he was following Roland's orders—Alex was to be returned to him alive. But then he received a call telling him that Roland's wishes were to take a backseat to those of the MK. After that, what had kept him from shooting? Lack of confidence in his own skill? Could that be why he had enlisted Levache?

  Or was it something deeper? Ordoñez pounded the dashboard with his hand—he despised Alex for doing this. He'd put his soul behind him a long time ago—why could the boy not have just let it rest as well? No, he had to keep evading him, to keep ruining him. Ordoñez clutched his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Alex had carried his
dying best friend out of a building with an angry mob yards behind him. Alberto would have done the same. But Ordoñez…he never would have.

  He thought then of Alex and Alberto together—and then tried instantly to stop. We killed our mothers while they gave birth to us. We fled from our fathers with dreams to go everywhere, do everything. Even the initials are the same.

  He started the car again to forget what he'd thought and continued driving along the fading yellow line. Alberto had been shot before—and if Alex needed to die so Ordoñez's soul could finally be buried, then his life was nothing more than a necessary sacrifice.

  Ordoñez allowed himself a small smile. The next time he saw Alex Orson, his firing hand would not be stayed.

  A week after returning from the church, filled with new revelations, Machry found himself once again lying with his head in his arms on his desk. Pieces of paper, some crumpled, some open, some that had been crumpled and opened again, littered the surface of the table. The whiskey bottle, uncapped and drained to half its capacity over the course of the week, stood monolithically over the scene.

  He knew it; he knew exactly what was going on. The same ideas were scribbled and reiterated time and time again across the scattered papers. The problem was that he was powerless. He, nothing more than a social worker, was unable to alter the course of events. He could do nothing about the machinations of Roland Orson, determined to ruin a boy's life for the sake of his own purchased redemption; nothing about Ordoñez, at that moment driving east and deciding the best part of Alex's body to shoot him in; nothing about the faceless Moose Killers, sitting in Ottawa, planning god-knew-what.

  He heaved his head off of the desk, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the clock. The rest of the office had gone home, and the lights were all off except for those directly above Machry's desk. Gleaming through the soft illumination of his table lamp, the red numbers spelled out 6:54. He was considering giving up—again—and going home for the night, when he heard jarring footsteps pound through the hallway leading to the large room that held Machry's desk along with five others. He got to his feet in time to see Dave swing the door open, and hurry past it, allowing it to fall shut and slam back into its frame.

  "Henry," he panted, without greeting, "you won't believe what I just saw. You need to come and see this, right now. Get in your car—"

  "Dave!" Machry said emphatically, holding out his palms. "Take a couple of deep breaths. What did you see?"

  "I—I was driving through town to my house, and I turned onto the street that leads to my street—didn't think anything of it—and then I saw flashing lights, and this one house surrounded by police cars and—"

  He stopped, inhaled deeply, and exhaled again. Then, he continued, as though ripping off a bandage in one motion. "Henry—Irving Edbrough's dead."

  It was as though Machry had been struck in the stomach and head simultaneously, and as though he had never felt those feelings before and did not even know what it meant to be struck. This was it—the final nail in the coffin of his case, the only man with near the reach to put his knowledge into action; gone, pulled from the world like a rug from under his feet. His hangover from the day before, maliciously throbbing toward his thought-center all afternoon, resurged, causing him to clutch his head, and subsequently clutch the desk to keep from falling. His stomach had been weighted with stones, his mind was clouded.

  "What happened?" he asked at last, straightening up.

  "You should go over there," Dave said. "It's near my house, like I said. Gary—you know, my brother, the homicide sergeant—he's in charge of the whole thing. I can't guarantee what he'll let on, though." He gestured to the door, realized that both he and Machry knew where it was, and shifted his hands behind his back.

  "It's the best chance I've got really," Machry said, sighing as he shook his head back and forth slowly in another attempt to clear it. "You drive. Use your car; mine's about to cave in. And I think I'll need a drink of water—I'll catch up. See you in the parking lot."

  Fifteen minutes later they turned onto the street in Woodsbrook's residential district that led to Dave's home. The aforementioned police cars, with their lights now turned off, were parked in a semicircle surrounding a two-story house painted a color of white that might have blended with the clouds on an overcast day. Machry had long admired the residential areas of Woodsbrook as one of the few things with which to recommend the town. The city planners, adapting to the perennially wintry conditions, had lined all the streets with evergreens, which would cover with snow in the cold months and produce an atmosphere which would lift your spirit to look at it. The most interesting part of it, to Machry, was that the houses did not seem to have been produced on an assembly line but dreamed into being by their inhabitants, whose lives and living habits you could often see with a cursory glance. Edbrough's house, however, seemed to have been built to match his mind—orderly, dull, functional purely due to its rigid structure, and presumably with nothing much on the deep interior to recommend it either.

  Dave shifted his automatic transmission into park, then glared at Machry, whose impatience manifested itself with a tendency to leap out of cars before the engines had stopped running, or before they had even fully halted. Machry recognized Gary from their previous meeting, standing at the open door of the house, calling out orders. He strode hastily up to the yellow crime-scene tape and called out. "Sergeant Henderson!"

  "There'll be a press release issued for you by tomorrow. In the meantime I'll ask that you not interfere with the investigation," Gary barked without turning around.

  "Gary," Dave shouted, running toward the tape boundary. "We need—"

  "Dave," Gary began, turning around at last and speaking in a tone reminiscent of a cross between a disciplinarian and a kindergarten teacher, "I know we're brothers but I'm trying to lead an investigation here. If I let you know anything more than what I told you already it'd be a serious breach of protocol. You can read it in the newspaper tomorrow like everybody else."

  "It's not about that, Gary. Well—you've met Henry Machry, right?"

  "I remember him, yeah," Gary replied. "Wanted to use the handwriting analyzer."

  "I just need you to tell him what you told me. Trust me, he needs to know more than I do."

  Gary sighed and approached the gate. "No more favors," he said, glaring at Dave. "Mr. Machry," he said politely, steadying his face and adopting the stoic demeanor Machry remembered.

  "Sergeant Henderson," Machry said, nodding back. "What is there that you can tell me, legally?"

  "Let's see…" Gary counted on his fingers, "no evidence, no suspects, no reasons for suspicion, none of our procedures, and most of the forensic stuff is off-limits too."

  "What's left?"

  "Here're the bare facts. The victim apparently left work early today. Time of death was around 4:30, reported by some neighbors who heard the gunshots. Edbrough was shot three times in the chest, no signs of a struggle, and not much blood either."

  Machry voiced a wonder he'd been nursing since hearing the news. "You don't think it might have been suicide…?"

  Gary smiled. "You're sharper than Dave." His brother cast him a dirty look, and he went on, "Well, if you want to kill yourself, you're going to want to do it quickly, right? This guy, though, just like I said—" he extended the thumb and forefinger on his right hand and mimed firing a gun held at his waist, "three times in the chest. Anybody can figure out that he didn't off himself."

  "So who—"

  Gary held up his hand warningly. "I remember saying something about no suspects."

  Dave turned to Machry. "Does that help at all?"

  "No," Machry replied sourly. He opened his mouth again and realized that he had nothing to say. Without a word to Dave or Gary, he turned and began striding purposefully toward. After a few yards, this melted away, and he began to wander aimlessly to the side. It was over—he knew it now for a fact. Alex is dead. Edbrough is dead. Ordoñez is gone. The Moose Killers are untouch
able. And Roland Orson…Johnson…

  Suddenly, he was no longer wandering aimlessly. Dave and Gary were no longer watching him quietly and sympathetically, but rather with surprise—he turned around quickly and rushed back to the gate, stopping abruptly and stumbling awkwardly.

  "Sergeant Henderson," he said hurriedly, as he righted himself, "I know who killed him."

  It had been two days earlier than this when Edmund McTavish entered his employer's office and found Jean le Potard donning a heavy coat and clutching a piece of paper in his right hand. As he pulled his right arm into the jacket's sleeve, the paper slipped through his finger and drifted to the floor. He cursed. "Get that, would you, McTavish?" he said, noticing his second-in-command standing near the doorway, unsure of himself. McTavish dutifully strode over to Potard, knelt on the plush carpet, and retrieved it. He held it in front of his eyes for a moment longer than he should have and began, against his better judgment, to examine it. Air Canada, First Class, nonstop to Calgary—