Red Snow (4 page)

Vancouver, British Columbia

“Dad!”

Searching the hordes of people streaming in from the customs hall at the Sea Island airport, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq looked right past the waving teen who’d mistaken him for her father.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

“Katt?” he said.

The young woman held up her passport. “According to this, that’s me.”

But the stylish girl leaning over the barrier to bestow a welcome hug looked nothing like the wild child in the passport mug shot. Kissing him on both cheeks as they do in Paris, she more closely resembled a Sorbonne student summoned home for Christmas break.

“Who says you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse?” DeClercq kidded.

“Oink!” replied Katt.

How does any cop come back from the death of his only child, especially when that child was killed as vengeance against
him
? Decades ago, kidnappers had shot DeClercq’s wife and abducted little Jane, snapping the girl’s neck before the Mountie could hunt them down. Guilt had squeezed him in its stranglehold for years, and eventually the stress of the Headhunter case had crushed his will to carry on. Every man has a breaking point, and that psycho had found DeClercq’s. The moment of reckoning flared in his mind like a camera’s flashbulb.

Avacomovitch was moving.

Charging across the living room toward the greenhouse door, the Russian tucked his head tight to his body and pushed off hard from one foot. At six-foot-four and 285 pounds, he smashed the wood like a human battering ram. With a crack of protest, the door split in two. In a shower of splinters, the hinges gave and the lock tore free. Potted plants tumbled from shelves and dirt filled the air as Avacomovitch somersaulted across the floor and crashed a foot through the glass.

“Don’t do it, Robert!”

With the muzzle touching his palate, DeClercq cocked the hammer and bit down on the steel …

“You got him!”

His finger closed on the trigger to end it all …

“A flying patrol brought him down!”

There was a frozen eternity while the Mountie sat at his desk with the gun in his mouth, staring down at the man sprawled on the floor tiles. Slowly, he withdrew the barrel and set the weapon down.

That was a narrow escape, and a lucky one, for as fate would have it, DeClercq found redemption in the aftermath of the carnage on Deadman’s Island.

Another flashbulb lit up his memory.

“Someone’s in the maze,” Craven yelled over the din, indicating the tangled garden near the clifftop house. Snow billowed up as the helicopter entered ground effect. The pilot jockeyed levers to set them down. While the
whup-whup-whup
of the airfoils died to a whistle, DeClercq threw open the passenger’s door and jumped onto the island.

Trees flanked the entrance to the labyrinth. Wrapped in a rug, her eyes wild with fear, a girl of about fourteen stumbled toward him. The Mountie found himself reliving a dream that had tormented him for years.
“Daddy!” Janie cries, running toward him with outstretched arms. He waits, and waits, and waits, but she draws no closer.

Then, suddenly, the shivering girl was in his arms, seeking warmth to ward off hypothermia. Only when DeClercq wrapped his coat around her did Katt’s teeth stop chattering.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Dead.”

She glanced at the house of horrors.

“And your father?”

“Don’t have one,” Katt replied. “Now I don’t have anyone left in the world.”

How strange, the twists of life.

In the beginning, it was an act of charity. DeClercq had a houseful of empty rooms haunted by ghosts. Katt was a waif with nowhere to go. To give her shelter under his roof seemed the right thing to do—at least until a more permanent solution could be found.

But he must have had rocks in his head to take on a challenge like her, the spawn of a New Age poet and practicing pagan witch. He remembered one Christmas, when Katt suggested baking gingerbread men. “I’ve never had any,” she protested, “my mom being a pagan and all.” So they’d gone shopping for ingredients and a set of cookie cutters in the usual shapes. Having whipped up a batch of dough, they punched out identical men.

“How boring,” Katt pronounced, and she began to reshape the lower leg of one man into a peg, adding the dough she’d removed to a lump on his shoulder.

“Who’s that?” DeClercq asked while she squeezed icing from the tip of a pastry bag.

“Long John Silver. See the parrot?”

Next, she used a rolling pin to flatten the legs of another gingerbread man into a skirt, then she cut off his head and tucked it into the crook of one arm.

“Marie Antoinette,” she explained, icing the gown with ruffles fit for a queen.

Not to be outdone, DeClercq trimmed dough from the sides of one gingerbread man and added it to the torso of another.

“Jack Sprat and his wife?” guessed Katt.

“No. Elvis in the early years and final Vegas days.”

Slathering a gingerbread man from head to foot with icing, Katt used the knife tip to groove bandage lines. “The Mummy,” she declared.

“I’ll see your mummy and raise you this.” DeClercq kneaded the leftover dough into a ball, then flattened it into a big circle with the rolling pin. Raisins were gobbled-up victims peering out of the brown ooze. “The Blob,” he announced.

In the end, Katt had fostered
his
redemption. It used to be that he gazed into the bathroom mirror and watched a ravaged man emerge from the shaving cream. Life with Katt, however, rejuvenated him, and soon the face DeClercq saw each morning seemed to shed years, as if he were actually turning back the hands of time.

Then he learned that Katt’s mom wasn’t actually her mom. In fact, Luna Darke had kidnapped her as a baby, and the teen’s birth mother was very much alive. DeClercq had uncovered the secret and could have kept it to himself, but having endured the loss of Jane, he knew he couldn’t foist that torment on another human being. So he had let her go, and Katt was now living in England, where her mother, a Bostonian, had found work.

“How’s your mom?” the Mountie asked, wheeling her suitcase through the airport from the arrivals hall to the exit for the parking lot.

“She met a man. I think she’s in love! That’s why I called you. My Christmas gift to her is
no me
.”

“Lucky me. And what’s with calling me Dad? Didn’t it used to be Bob?”

“‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,’” the teenager quoted. “‘But when I became a woman, I put away childish things.’”

“A little education is a dangerous thing.” DeClercq rolled his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I now realize that you’re a better father than any bio-dad could be.”

“How much do you want?”

“Millions,” Katt said, laughing.

They crossed the road between the terminal and the parking lot. Katt was on the lookout for his Benz—the car she had dubbed the “old-fogey-mobile”—so her eyebrows rose when they approached a brand-new, metallic red 350Z.

“Uh-oh! Midlife crisis?” she asked.

“It’s a birthday present from Gill.”

“The shame of it,” Katt moaned, burying her face in the crook of her arm. “Dad’s a kept man.”

“I prefer to view it as Dad’s got a rich girlfriend.”

“Can I drive?”

“Well …”

“Driving on the left has
vastly
improved my skill.”

Sighing, he tossed her the key.

It was an hour-long trip from the airport—on an island in the mouth of the Fraser River—through the high-rise canyons of the downtown core to DeClercq’s waterfront home on Burrard Inlet. Katt
was
a better driver—or so he thought, until she slammed on the brakes so hard that dear old Dad would have smashed through the windshield if not for his seatbelt.

Screeeech!

Standing bewildered in the headlight beams on the road in front of the car was a small, scruffy white cat. Katt gave it a short honk, but the animal didn’t move. She gave it a flick of the high beams, but the feline didn’t blink. Finally, she put the car in neutral, yanked on the handbrake, activated the hazard lights, and left it blocking traffic.

From the passenger’s seat, DeClercq watched Katt crouch down in the glare and talk to the cat. When waving her hands before its eyes elicited no response, she bundled the feline up in her arms and carried it back to the car.

“I think it’s blind,” she said on climbing in.

DeClercq knew this was one of those “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” moments. He found himself eyeing his reflection in the glass: a middle-aged cop with dark, wavy hair silvering at the temples and eyes jaded from having seen too much death and cruelty on the job. The face in the windshield was watching to see how he would react.

“Poor little waif,” said Katt.

Any ordinary cat a moral man could just shoo off the road. “Shoo, shoo, kitty. Go fend for yourself.” But a
blind
cat, that was a test of ethics. If he abandoned the waif by the side of the road, it would most likely be crushed by the next car along. If he took it to the SPCA, kitty would probably get the needle. Either course of action would haunt him later.

No, fate had placed this cat in front of
his
car, and the best dad in the world had only one choice.

The same choice he’d made with another waif.

“Okay, we’ll take it home—”

“Hooray!” said Katt.

“—for now,” he added quickly. “Tomorrow, we’ll board it at the vet’s, and we won’t make a final decision until we get back. Agreed?”

“Get back from where?” the teenager asked, combing the cat with her fingers.

Why do I get the feeling my household just grew by one? wondered the Mountie, gazing at the vacant eyes as the cat began to purr.

“Whistler,” he said. “Come morning, I’m taking you with me on a working holiday. While I review security measures for the Olympics with Zinc and Nick, you can ski the slopes with Gill.” He looked over at Katt and her new charge. “I’m thinking of popping the question.”

“A rich stepmom! I won the lottery. How much will I inherit?”

Whistler

The Blonde? The Redhead? Or the Raven?

In the end, curiosity got the better of him. He had to know
which
snow bunny had slipped him that key while he was drinking in the Gilded Man.

Nick’s relationships with women were a shambles. His love affair with Gill Macbeth had not survived after he’d caused the shipwreck that had made her miscarry. Gill had moved on to a future with Nick’s boss, Robert DeClercq, while Nick had lost a hand and an ear to a megalomaniac. That torture had brought him romance with Jenna Bond, a sheriff’s deputy in Washington State. But now that romance was foundering on the reef of irreconcilable differences. Jenna planned to run for sheriff south of the border, to fill the boots of her father, a legendary lawman of the San Juan Islands. Nick’s family history was in the Mounted Police, and his disability had forced him to fight hard to keep his job. With a stretch of ocean between them and the ferry times a logistical nightmare, their ardor had chilled.

It was bad enough that long-distance love had claimed two more casualties, but Jenna’s six-year-old daughter was caught in the middle. Becky had embraced Nick as a surrogate for the dead father she had never known. Nick feared it would tear the child apart to have him abandon her, too.

What a vise!

The stress had the corporal yearning for some form of escape—a night of respite from
all
commitment that would hold his guilt at bay. That’s why Nick found himself riding this elevator up to the eighth floor.

Cherchez la femme
, old boy.

If not for the booze, he might have sniffed the danger. After all, it was a femme fatale who had caused his mutilations, by luring him into a trap for Mephisto and cutting him apart to force the cops of Special X to find the Silver Skull, a relic rumored to reveal the secret behind Stonehenge.

But this was Whistler, the mecca of casual sex, where high-rolling jetsetters from around the shrinking globe gathered to get royally fucked.

So why not Nick?

A roll in the hay would do him a world of good in his depressed frame of mind. But would the farmer’s daughter turn out to be the Blonde, the Redhead, or the Raven?

Hey, this was Whistler!

Maybe he was destined for a three-on-one.

Just kidding.

What decent guy would desire that?

Whistling, Nick used the electronic key to pop the door. Reaching into the dark, he flicked on the lights. The room could have been any one of a million in North America, with its queen-size bed, two night tables, armchair, writing desk, TV stand, and luggage rack. All that indicated this was a ski resort was the wooden door leading to a sauna off the bathroom.

Nick glanced around.

There seemed to be no one home.

The cell in his pocket buzzed.

“Craven,” he answered.

“Hi. It’s Jenna. Is now convenient to talk?”

“Sure.”

“Are we still on for tomorrow?”

“You bet. I promised Becky I’d teach her how to ski.”

“Do you know what you’re going to say to her about our break-up? She’ll take it hard.”

“I’ll tell her the truth, as gently as I can. And if it’s okay with you, I’ll add that she can always call on me as her friend. This is about me and you, not me and her. Neither of us can abandon our life and be who we want to be. But that doesn’t mean I won’t love
her
from now on.”

“Expect tears.”

“I will.” Nick had a lump in his throat.

“We’ll catch the early ferry and get there about noon. Where should we meet?”

“Have Becky bring her skates. Alpha Lake is frozen over. You’ll see it on the road in to Whistler. I’ll find you there and take you to the cabin.”

“See you then,” Jenna said, ringing off.

Suddenly, Nick was aware of how hot it was. His forehead beaded with sweat, and his clothes were plastered to his body. The blast from the sauna felt as searing as the heat from Death Valley. He turned to see a naked woman standing in the doorframe, her skin trickling perspiration.

Well, well, he thought.

“Girlfriend troubles?” she asked.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“You look hot.”

“I am.”

“You dropped your room key in the bar. I thought I should bring it up.”

“Close the drapes, lock the doors, strip off your clothes, and come on in,” she said, crooking her finger at Nick. “I’ll teach you the meaning of
winter heat
.”