3 Requiem at Christmas (2 page)

Juliet found herself hoping for a glimpse of some other
automobile traveling her direction as the grade grew steeper and harsher, but
as visibility neared zero, she began praying there wasn’t anyone else on the
road ahead because she could be right on top of them and still never see a
thing.

Days were short and because of the storm, long before she
expected it, night began to close in. She began to feel insignificant among the
trees lashed with storm. The mountains were so much bigger, and so much more
threatening, than she had expected. The woods back east had always seemed
friendly. These weren’t. They were denser, taller.
Darker.

The grade increased until she was looking at a road that
seemed nearly vertical. The rear wheels began to slip more than they grabbed,
but she gave it more gas and the front tires held until she reached a slightly
more level spot where she could stop. Snow on the flat and snow on a grade were
two different beasts. The difference was making her hands sweat inside her
driving gloves. She finally stopped under a stand of trees that offered some
shelter from the snow and looked at the fuel gauge. She calculated. Using the
low gears was sucking up gas at an alarming rate. If she went on, she might run
out of gas before she hit another town.

Forward, backward, right and left—visibility was poor. At
the base of the next grade there was a small cabin set back in another of the
narrow ravines that fractured the cliff wall. She thought for a moment that she
saw tracks leading to the door, but it was probably just a trick of the dying
light bouncing off the snow. The shack was as dark as every other she had
passed and there was no smoke coming out the chimney.

On the map, the road looked like nothing, and railroad
grades were supposed to be gently sloped so loggers didn’t end up with runaway
trains. But, in that case, maps had nothing to do with reality. Admitting
defeat, Juliet decided to turn back while there was a place to do it. The helpful
GPS said it was thirty more miles before her “road” of uphill ice would rejoin
the highway near Strawberry. She would never make it even if the gas held out.

Turning the car was tricky. A three-point turn became more
like five. The wind was causing snow to drift, making the edge of the road hard
to judge, and even with chains she was having trouble getting traction. The
downhill ride was as harrowing as the uphill one had been and far less
controlled.

She was only a few hundred yards back the way she had come,
doing her best to see her old tire tracks through the increasing blanket
gathering on her windshield, when she turned a corner and stopped after a long
slide, dazzled by headlights. The big car was slewed sideways, blocking the
road. Its back left tire was hanging over the edge of a precipice whose depths
Juliet decided not to contemplate since she suffered from vertigo. There was no
movement except for the snow and the occasional crumble of ice and frozen rock from
under the hanging rear tire.

“Damn.” The steady downfall of nearly vertical flakes
periodically shifted ninety degrees and blew sideways. The buffets rocked the
car and felt strong enough to knock a person flat.

Squinting, she made out that the car was red, probably the one
that had passed her, though it was difficult to tell for sure because the snow
was piling up on it everywhere except the hood where the heat of the engine had
so far kept it clear.

Juliet relaxed her grip on the steering wheel and realized
that she had an urgent need to urinate. Unfortunately it would have to wait.

She backed her car up far enough to have her own headlights
pointing at the stranded auto. She left her engine running and the heater on
high. It took effort to force her door open since the wind was against her and
the locking mechanism seemed to have frozen. Eventually she was able to muscle
her way out of the car but the heavy door slammed hard behind her.

She was wearing leather boots, driving gloves, and warm
clothing, but the temperatures had dropped like a rock since she stopped to put
chains on the car and she was aware of the intense cold, especially on her face
where the gale of icy needles made her eyes tear. She hadn’t known it was
possible to feel one’s heart thudding in the eye sockets when cold threatened
the brain.

When she was a yard away from the automobile, she could hear
that the engine of the other car was still running. This struck her as ominous,
though it made sense for a driver to keep the heater on if he was stuck and
waiting for help.

Juliet was usually a great believer in following hunches.
They were her brain’s subconscious processing information which it then
categorized by emotion, which in turn led to immediate impulses which arrived
ahead of logical thought and which could—and did—sometimes save lives. It also,
almost always, made her look for evidence of chicanery since this was how her
brain was trained. This was a habit she wanted to leave behind since chronic
suspicion made no one happy.

Still, the hairs on her neck were raised. She paused,
wondering if she should go back to her car for her gun. She felt watched—maybe
by an animal. There were bears up there, weren’t there? But they should be
asleep for the winter. And if there were wolves they would be howling—at least
they always seemed to howl on those nature shows. Actually, nothing would be
abroad in the storm. As the old saying went, it wasn’t a fit night out for man
nor
beast. Even the boulders were hunched down trying to
avoid the lashes of the wind.

No, going back to her car would take time. The driver could
be badly hurt, possibly dying of a heart attack or hypothermia or heaven only
knew what while she dithered.

Juliet shook off her foreboding and forced herself forward,
pushing into the wind until she reached the Jaguar. She could tell what it was
because of the hood ornament. The silver panther looked like it was diving into
the snow.

The driver’s window was completely covered in clumps of ice
which had frozen into a solid sheet and would not break away though she tried
clearing the snow. She beat on the door and shouted but there was no answer and
no suggestion that anyone was trying to open it from inside. She began to worry
about carbon monoxide poisoning. Had the tail pipe been plugged somehow and had
the building exhaust overcome the driver?

It took some pulling since the snow had built up, but she
was finally able to get the door open about halfway before it wedged solid in
the snow.

“Oh, damn,” she said, but the wind tore her words away. Not
that the man in the car was in any state to hear her swearing.

The driver was dead, and Juliet found herself very much
wishing for her gun because the corpse had a knife in its chest. Actually in
its stomach but angled upward toward the heart. There was also a tear in the
throat that had bled heavily and a look of horror on his face. An open
passenger door suggested—in case she had had any wild theories—that this wasn’t
a bizarre suicide but rather a murder. Or a poorly timed fight that had ended
in a killing which the murderer had fled.

But fled where? There was nowhere to go.

Juliet spun around, looking for danger, but in the snow it
was impossible to see if anyone was near her. There had probably been tracks and
maybe blood in the snow but they were long since filled and she had no idea
where the killer was.

Horror swamped her usual prescience, but her brain made note
of several things for later recall as her eyes darted among the trees. The dead
man was wearing a kilt in a tartan that belonged to Clan Buchanan. She wasn’t
an expert on tartans, but the Buchanan tartan was exotic enough to recall since
it looked a bit like Halloween had thrown up all over a circus tent. The knife
in his chest was what the Scots called a
sgian
dubh
. Most people thought of them as
Scottish costume accessories, like a sporran or tam, but they could be—and in this
case it obviously was—completely functional. The corpse wore a gold signet ring
on manicured hands. Custom kilt, jewelry, Jaguar—the man had died wealthy.

Juliet craned her neck to look in the back, just in case
there was another person or perhaps an injured dog. In the backseat on the
passenger side there was a leather satchel and sticking out of it was a musical
score. She couldn’t see the full title but it began with REQU. There was also a
Las Vegas
newspaper,
and a torn bag in thick creamy
paper that said
Winter’s Candies and
Confections
and a few pieces of red and green rectangular foil on the seat
and floor, and the odor of chocolate in the air which blended sickeningly with
the smell of blood. The dead man must have had quite a sweet tooth and no
regard for his upholstery, because some of the wrappers had left chocolate
smears on the leather. Indeed there seemed to be some chocolate wafers on the
floor and seat. What had he been doing?
Unwrapping
his
chocolates to eat them all at once? Or opening and then dropping them if he
didn’t like the flavor?

That was crazy. No one would be playing with candy while
having a knife fight in a blizzard. There had to be some other explanation but
she couldn’t think of it.
Couldn’t think period.
Her
pulse was beating so hard that she feared her eyeballs might actually leave
their sockets.

Juliet shivered and it wasn’t just with cold, though that
was getting to be a danger all its own since she was losing feeling in her
extremities.

She shouldn’t interfere with a murder scene but…. Juliet
reached in and switched off the engine. There was no smell of gasoline but why
take chances on there being a fire if there was some damage to the car that she
couldn’t see? And the man was past caring about the weather. A part of her
wanted to look for a wallet, to put a name to the body, but the dead man was
very bloody and there was gore all over his sporran, the only place where he
might carry a wallet on his person.

Instead she forced the door closed and tried to think what
to do. Her brain seemed frozen and she wondered if she was slipping into
hypothermia.

For starters, she would get her gun. Then she would try
calling for help. She had been warned by Garret that reception was spotty up in
the mountains, but that was the first thing to do.

With the wind at her back, she made good time back to her
car, but the driver-side door refused to open. She ended up going around to the
passenger’s side of the car and, after digging away some of the snow, managed
to get the door open far enough to crawl inside. The heat was a benediction and
after a moment her teeth stopped chattering though her eyes continued to tear.
That might not have been because of the cold.

Even with gloves, her fingers were numb and barely able to
open her purse, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t get a signal on her phone.
She also had her “baby Glock” but admitted her hands were so cold that she
probably wouldn’t be able to release the safety catch, let alone fire it, even
if danger knocked on her door.

And she really, really needed to go to the bathroom. She
wanted that more than she did her next breath.

“W-w-well h-h-hell.”

The Jaguar was blocking the road. The keys were in it, but
if it had been possible to pull it back onto the lane, surely the killer would
have taken the car, even if it meant being encumbered by a corpse. Or he could
have tossed the body in a ravine. Whatever, he surely would have taken the car
instead of risking death in the storm had it been possible to move the car.

Assuming she managed it, going off and just leaving the body
didn’t feel right, but Juliet did not want to be encumbered with a corpse
either.
Especially not a bloody one that didn’t have an
official death certificate explaining that the knife wasn’t hers.
The
police got upset when people were murdered and you took the body with you. They
often blamed whoever had the body in their possession until something better
came along.

Of course, they also blamed people who left the scene
without making a statement, she thought groggily. Not that she had any chance
of getting around the Jaguar with her own car, and trying to make it up the
hill going the other way wasn’t an option either.

But clearly, whether blocked in or not, she couldn’t stay
where she was. Her gas tank was more than half full, but the chances of anyone
coming along to rescue her before she ran out of fuel and froze solid were
slim. And the storm was worsening. And it was nearing full dark. There were no
other cars and no houses. If she was going for help, she had to leave at once.

The ranger station—at least the sign for it—had only been a
few miles back. They would have a radio if not a landline. They could get help.
She wasn’t a material witness who was fleeing a crime scene and callously
abandoning a dead man. She was doing her best to report a murder to the
authorities. Even though she wanted to be involved in another homicide investigation
like she wanted a root canal.

“W-well, I p-p-planned to g-go skiing.”

Fortunately, her suitcase was in the backseat. This time she
dressed with care. Her brief foray into the premature dusk had taught her
respect for a high Sierra storm. Leather boots were exchanged for ski boots and
wool socks. She struggled into a ski jacket and added heavy gloves and a ski mask.
She slung her purse across her body and tucked her phone and gun inside and
added a flashlight from the glove compartment, praying she could get back to
the ranger station before it was completely dark.

Since there was a killer out there somewhere, she would have
preferred to have kept the gun ready, but it wouldn’t be possible to ski, use
poles, and also hold a handgun. Not without shooting her foot off.