Red Snow (12 page)

So what became of Percy Harrison Fawcett, rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones? Did he fall prey to wildlife in the steaming jungle of Brazil’s Mato Grosso, that huge, swampy wilderness that holds secrets to this day? Was he murdered by headhunting cannibals in the unexplored area beyond Dead Horse Camp by the Upper Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River? Or did he “go native” and leave his culture behind to populate the jungle with blue-eyed offspring?

Mephisto’s father had told him Fawcett’s tale as they huddled around the fire in their isolated bush camp, listening to the sounds of the Amazon night closing in. Fireflies streaked through the blackness, and nighthawks snapped at insects over the river. The shrieks of a jaguar’s prey cut through the pulsing rhythm of croaking frogs. Blood-sucking vampire bats owned the night.

“Do you know anything about Bolivia?” Fawcett had been asked by the president of the Royal Geographical Society in 1906.

“Nothing,” he’d replied.

“Look at this area,” the president said, showing him a sketchy excuse for a map. “It’s full of blank spaces because so little is known of it. The border between Bolivia and Brazil is poorly defined. That’s raising tension and could lead to war. As a neutral third party, we’ve been asked to mount an expedition to mark the borders. It’s a perilous task. The natives are known for their savagery, and could at any moment kill a surveyor and serve him up in one of their macabre feasts. The Royal Geographical Society wishes to know if you will take on the job.”

“I’m your man,” Fawcett replied, seizing on this ticket to adventure.

Before training as a surveyor, Fawcett had been an artillery officer in Ceylon and a spy in Morocco. Still, he was unprepared for what the New World jungle had in store. At night, poisonous spiders scuttled up his arm and across his throat. Though he slept under a mosquito net, it was poor protection against the fangs of the vampire bats, and he’d awake to find his hammock soaked with blood. Nature sought to kill him at every turn. Surging down rapids, Fawcett’s raft shot over a waterfall, plunging him into the roaring depths. On the trek, bushmaster snakes and anacondas lurked around him. Fording rivers gave piranha fish the opportunity to strip him to the bone, and one of his companions lost two fingers washing his bloodstained hands in a stream.

Hostile natives were also a constant threat. Amazonians wanted revenge for years of enslavement by rubber traders who hacked ears, fingers, and hands off those who failed to deliver their quota. Once, while Fawcett and his group were canoeing down the wild Heath River, they rounded a bend and ran into Indians encamped on a sandbar. Dogs barked and women ran to gather up their children as men shot arrows and blew curare-poisoned darts at the explorers.

“Can you guess how they survived?” Mephisto’s father had asked his son.

“With guns?” the boy replied.

The father shook his head. “Fawcett pulled his men back out of missile range, then had them sing ‘Swanee River,’ ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ and ‘A Bicycle Built for Two.’ So perplexed were the natives that they stopped shooting, and Fawcett quickly approached with gifts.”

“Good trick,” said the boy.

Fawcett had an interest in the occult that went back to his years in Ceylon, where he’d stumbled on a large boulder inscribed with a strange script. When he learned that it was a form of writing that only a small group of Buddhist monks could understand, he became obsessed with the idea of lost civilizations hiding just beyond the fringe of explored territory.

“Fawcett befriended many famous occultists, including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard,” said Mephisto’s father.

The boy’s eyes shone. “The authors of Sherlock Holmes and
King
Solomon’s Mines
?”

“He told Conan Doyle about Brazil’s tabletop mountains, which are completely cut off from the jungle below by vertical cliffs. Imagining the unique plants and animals that lived there, the writer penned
The Lost World
, populating a similar mountaintop with dinosaurs.”

The boy was thrilled. What a book that was!

“Fawcett endured the trenches of the First World War, winning a Distinguished Service Order and rising to the rank of colonel. By 1920, he was back in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, he discovered an eighteenth-century Portuguese document describing a lost city that natives said was populated by a tribe of red-haired, blue-eyed Indians. Fawcett dubbed the outpost the Lost City of Z and began raising money for an expedition.

“Funding came from a group of financiers called the Glove. With his son, Jack, and Jack’s buddy, Raleigh Rimell, the colonel—then fifty-eight years of age—set out for this black hole in 1925. His plan was to travel to Dead Horse Camp, then head northeast to the Xingu River and on through the jungle to the Serra do Roncador, where the Lost City of Z was rumored to be hidden.

“Fawcett’s final words to his wife, sent from Dead Horse Camp on May 29, were ‘You need have no fear of failure.’ Then—like the city he sought—he vanished from history.”

Mephisto’s father went on to explain that many expeditions had tried to pick up Fawcett’s trail, and more than a hundred men had perished along the way. In 1928, the first search party found a metal plate from one of the colonel’s trunks strung around the neck of a native chief’s son. In 1932, Indians from another tribe said Fawcett had passed through, producing his compass as proof. In 1951, Kalapalos Indians confessed to clubbing the colonel to death, but the bones recovered from them weren’t his.

The story the boy liked best, however, was this: “In 1932,” Mephisto’s father said, “a German stopped at an Indian village near the Xingu River. With persistent questioning, the village chief finally produced a small bag made from tree bark. Loosening the tie with his teeth, the headhunter withdrew a shriveled trophy. The features of the shrunken head, the German later swore, matched those of Colonel Fawcett exactly.”

*     *     *

How lucky Mephisto was to have an adventuresome father, an archeologist obsessed with finding lost realms. His father had taught him many things, including how to make an Amazonian blowgun. “Split that palm stem with this.” He handed the boy a knife. “Hollow out the pith and rub the bore until the tube is smooth and free of snags.” He passed the boy a length of stripped liana vine, the kind of creeper Tarzan used to swing through the trees. “Bind the halves together with this, and you have a blowpipe.”

Next, his father taught him how to make darts. “Cut the midrib of that palm leaf into two-inch lengths.” The boy did so. “Now sharpen the points.” He whittled the end of each missile. “Stick a wad of pith on the other end, so each dart fits snuggly into the blowpipe.”

The boy made a slew of small arrows.

“Good,” praised his father. “Now where’s your poison?”

From his knapsack, the boy withdrew a glass jar full of the curare his father had made from ingredients purchased in a Mato Grosso village.

The archeologist ruffled his son’s hair.

“Tomorrow, we go hunting.”

Dawn brought another day of insufferable heat. Mist rose from the river as father and son slipped downstream in their dugout canoe. The languid air was thick with the smell of rotting vegetation. The lower branches of overhanging trees sank into the festering water. Caymans crawled through the underbrush and a boa constrictor stretched along a limb, waiting to drop on floaters-by.

Forsaking the river for the rainforest, they hid the canoe and crept toward an isolated hut on the edge of a glistening pool. Choked by vines as taut as garrotes, towering trunks reached for the burning sky. Up where howler monkeys screeched, the canopy was shot through with sunbeams. On the ground, as the hunters picked their way around backwater marshes, the citrine smell of ants swarming through hollow logs promised they’d be eaten alive if they stumbled against the bark.

“Stop,” his father whispered.

The boy crouched beside his dad.

An Indian had just come out of his hut. Necklaces of jaguar teeth and boar tusks looped down his naked chest. Iguana skins ringed his wrists, and parrot feathers crowned his brow. His lips were dyed indigo, and a macaw feather pierced the septum of his nose. He was painted to look like the spirit people a shaman meets in visions, and it was clear the man was stoned on
yagé
.

The visionary vine.

The sounds of the jungle masked their approach. The Amazonian was lost in another reality. As the shaman saw serpents wrapped in fire and angry claws tearing at the sky, the boy unscrewed the lid on his jar of poison and dipped the tip of a dart. As the Amazonian sucked the breast of a jaguar woman, the boy carefully inserted the dart into his blowgun. As the visionary rode a viper to heaven, where he was introduced to the spirits of the dead, the boy aimed the blowpipe at his neck. Standing before a solitary tree, the shaman watched a door open into nothingness as the boy blew the dart from the blowgun.

Phhhh!

The poisoned missile hit the Amazonian’s jugular vein, and the curare went to work. The shaman’s legs buckled, and by the time the stalkers had reached their prey, he was gasping for breath.

“Here,” said Mephisto’s father, unsheathing a machete. “Hack off his head and we’ll shrink it.”

*     *     *

Now, decades later, Mephisto studied his butchered face in the bathroom mirror. The longer he eyed his features, the angrier he got. Not at the surgeon, who had already suffered for his crime, but at DeClercq for forcing him to erase his father’s image. The face in the mirror no longer resembled the son of the fantasy father Mephisto’s psychotic imagination spawned years ago. Erasing those features had sparked his severe case of body dysmorphic disorder. He was like an astronaut whose lifeline to the space station had snapped, leaving him drifting into nothingness.

His
actual
father wasn’t a globetrotting archeologist, and he had never ventured into the Amazon with him.

He had repressed all memory of his early life and replaced it with a fantasy because of a long-ago atrocity committed in a hellish jungle on the far side of the world.

Inspector Zinc Chandler’s steel gray hair—the source of his name—had been that way since birth. His eyes were the same metallic hue, and so was the two-inch scar along his right jaw line. His sharp-angled features made for a ruggedly handsome face, and he moved with the fluid stealth of a panther. Savvy people sensed that Zinc should not be provoked, understanding instinctively that this man thought well under pressure and would be most dangerous with a knife at his throat.

Something about the inspector was sexually attractive to prowling women, so that made him the ideal bait for the femme fatale who had waylaid Nick Craven. DeClercq was certain she worked for Mephisto, and he knew that megalomaniac wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to squash the chief’s second-in-command.

White knight to black king 4, thought the Mountie.

The chief circled around to the driver’s door of the inspector’s vehicle and pulled him aside to brief him on all that had happened while he was out of contact.

“Nick’s dead too!” Zinc exclaimed.

“Yes, but we don’t know how. The evidence suggests that he was picked up in a bar and was killed while engaged in sex in this hotel. So far, we’ve found no wounds on his body, so poison is likely.”

“We’re talking the bar in the El Dorado?”

“That would be my first guess. But the only solid lead we have is this Post-it Note found stuck to a room key in Nick’s pocket.”

The chief gave Zinc a Xerox of the note and showed him the original to compare.

“If Nick got picked up in the Gilded Man, it was probably yesterday afternoon. If we find the woman, she could lead us to Mephisto.”

He passed Zinc Nick’s driver’s license to show to the bartenders, Karen and Stew.

“Smoke her out,” he said.

“What about the girl?” The inspector glanced at the child curled up in a fetal ball in the Rover’s backseat.

“I’ll take care of her. Mephisto must be trying to eliminate survivors of his prior schemes. Nick, Becky, and Gill were the three people who could identify him. Nick’s dead, and I’m off to look for Gill. To safeguard Becky, Rachel and Rick will hide her at Gill’s chalet.”

“Why not use our detachment in the village?”

“This crisis has too many strangers going in and coming out, and the staff’s stretched too thin responding to all the emergency calls. Becky may not be safe enough at the detachment. It’s a risk, but I doubt that Mephisto would suspect I’d hide Becky at Gill’s chalet.”

“Right. That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Can we use your Rover instead of the marked car?”

“Sure,” said Zinc. Lowering his voice and arching an eyebrow, he asked, “Why Rachel and Rick?” Both had lost the chance to join Special X when they’d botched important cases.

“We’re shorthanded.” The chief shrugged. “I know it’s not ideal, but I guess they were the best Ghost Keeper could get me under the circumstances. As soon as Dane and Jackie are free, I’ll send them in as relief.”

Zinc tossed him the keys.

Unnoticed by the Mounties, the weary skier who’d been regrouping with a cigarette across the road began to approach. Passing in front of Zinc’s vehicle, he lost his footing and slipped off the curb, crashing to the ground in a clatter of equipment. Sheepishly, he struggled to his feet, then gathered up his skis and poles to shuffle his leaden legs into the hotel.

While on the ground, out of sight, Stopwatch had stuck a GPS tracker to the Rover.

*     *     *

DeClercq’s beef with Corporal Rick Scarlett went back to the Headhunter case.

Everything about Rick was wound too tight. Athletic and lean, he looked strained even when he was relaxed. Every strand of his short brown hair was slicked into line, and his mustache was clipped as neatly as Errol Flynn’s. The swashbuckler in him, however, had little respect for rules, and his “ends justify the means” attitude had run him afoul of DeClercq on more than one occasion.

Rick was too free with his fists.

And that lost cases.

Sergeant Rachel Kidd had overreached as well. There was a time in the tenure of Mounties still on active duty when there were no women and no blacks in the ranks. As the first black female to make corporal, Rachel had been a PR man’s dream. Everyone knew her rocket was shooting up to inspector or beyond, and all she needed to reach the stars was a high-profile conviction. To that end, she had charged Nick Craven with the death of his mother, only to watch the case crumble when DeClercq proved his innocence.

The chief had not been impressed.

Rachel’s rocket had sputtered and crashed, stalling her career at sergeant.

Now, the two minders leaned against the fender of the marked four-wheel-drive, cooling their heels until DeClercq finished talking to Zinc. As he approached with their orders, the two pushed away from the vehicle and stood at loose attention.

“You know what’s going on?” he asked.

“Mephisto,” Rachel replied.

“Three eyewitnesses can ID him. One’s dead. Gill’s another. And the third is the girl you see in the backseat of the Rover. I want her taken to this address”—he passed Rachel a slip of paper—“and kept safe until I call.”

“Yes,
sir
,” Rick said, seeing his chance for redemption.

“You defend her with your lives. Understand?”

Both nodded.

“Do this properly, and I’ll forget the past.”

*     *     *

Joseph called as they were walking to Zinc’s vehicle. Robert stepped away from the bodyguards for privacy.

“Can you come to the morgue?” asked the Russian. “I think we’ve found the head from the body on the chairlift. Use the front door to preserve the crime scene.”

“I’m off to look for Gill.”

“No need. She’s here,” said Joe.

*     *     *

While Robert was on his cellphone, Katt peered into the side window of Zinc’s vehicle. Inside, the terrified girl clung tenaciously to her mother’s blanketed corpse, as if to hold her in this realm by refusing to release her to whatever might lie beyond. Dry sobs had replaced tears.

Gently opening the door, the teen crouched and leaned in.

“Hi. My name’s Katt. You must be Becky. I know the hurt you’re feeling. I lost my mom, too.”

“She’s
dead
!” the girl rasped, her face twisted from heartache.

“Let her go, Becky, and come to me. What you need now is your sister.”

“I don’t
have
a sister!” wailed the girl.

“Yes, you do. From now on, I’m your sister.”

Katt held her arms open and waited patiently. Becky was afraid to let go, but she desperately craved comfort. She needed someone to make it all right.

Just then, a tear rolled down Katt’s cheek, and that convinced the miserable girl. Loosening her grasp on the lifeless bundle, she crawled through the space between it and the front seat, burying her face in Katt’s shoulder and enclosing arms.

Behind her, Zinc cracked the far door and retrieved Jenna’s body. Rick helped him transfer the remains to the other vehicle.

Becky didn’t look back.

Pocketing his cellphone, Robert rounded the Rover and poked his head in through the far door. “Becky, I want you to go with these two officers,” he said. “They’ll keep you safe.”

“I’m going, too,” Katt said. “Sisters stick together.”

Whatever magic they’d used at that London “finishing school,” Robert thought, had worked a charm.

My, how Katt had grown up.

*     *     *

Stopwatch reported in to Mephisto.

“DeClercq just drove away in a marked car with the body of Jenna Bond.”

“He’s going to the morgue,” said the psycho killer. “He’s in for a shock.”

“We’ve got a tracker on the unmarked car transporting the girl to Macbeth’s chalet. Two cops, Becky Bond, DeClercq’s daughter, Katt, and a dog. The Icemen are following. They’ll strike at the supposed safe house.”

“Katt, too!” Mephisto was thrilled. “That’s a bonus. Bring me the heads of
both
girls.”