Red Snow (5 page)

It was a sultry night in Laurel Canyon. The actress Grace Kelly stood in her bedroom with the lights on. The curtains were open, the blinds were up. As if she had just returned from a night on the town, she removed her hat and slipped off her gloves. Slowly, she slid the straps of her evening gown from her shoulders, then let the clingy crepe de Chine drop and pool around her high heels. A flick of her fingers unsnapped her bra, and she stepped out of her lace panties and—pausing to turn the tables on the master of suspense—snuffed the lights.

Across Laurel Canyon, a mile away, Alfred Hitchcock sat with his eye glued to a powerful telescope and watched the star whose Hollywood career he’d made strip for him. The scene was straight out of
Rear Window
, their second film together, in which James Stewart, immobilized by a leg cast, spies on his neighbors to keep from getting bored. Scopophilia, sexual gratification through gazing, was one of Hitchcock’s many kinks, and Kelly’s striptease was intended solely for him.

The man who had told Mephisto that story was the plastic surgeon who’d botched the work on his face, turning him from a notably handsome man into a deformed freak. The doctor had paid for his bungling with an operation of his own. By the time Mephisto was finished with his scalpel, the rejuvenator of aging Hollywood stars was unrecognizable as a human being.

That, however, was nothing but foreplay compared to the vengeance Mephisto would wreak on Special X. He’d planned out every moment of the revenge he intended to exact on those who had foiled him in the past.

First up was Craven.

Beheading Boomer was a calculated gamble. Craven had returned to Special X for the Olympics. Because he was recognized as the best skier among Whistler’s Mounties, the odds were good he’d be called to the murder scene. Boomer’s link to the Gilded Man would lead the corporal to Scarlett. And Scarlett would finish what Mephisto had started by taking Craven’s hand and ear.

Now, the gamble was about to pay off.

No need for plan B.

This megalomaniac left little to chance.

So here he sat, like Hitchcock had across Laurel Canyon, with his eye to a telescope, spying at the darkened window of room 807 in the El Dorado Resort. Suddenly, the black square lit up, and there was Nick Craven framed by the open door, his hand on the light switch. Mephisto watched his prey answer a cellphone and carry on a conversation while the door swung shut. No sooner did the cop ring off than he turned his head and spoke to someone hidden from sight. Then he walked to the window and drew the drapes.

No matter.

Mephisto wasn’t James Stewart.

There was no need for him to wonder what was afoot.

He
knew
what was going on behind those blinds.

Mephisto strode to his terrarium of Venus flytraps. Each one was a starburst of heart-shaped leaves tipped with yawning jaws. They were like human hands, the open palms and curving fingers poised to clap. Each red palm oozed a line of sweet nectar droplets along the base of the fingers. At the moment, a beetle had crawled up one leaf and was feasting on the honey.

Brush
…

The bug’s leg tripped a trigger hair inside the trap.

Touch it again, Mephisto thought.

Brush
…

That did it!

The trap snapped shut, the fingers locking like crossed swords to clamp the beetle in both palms. A leg stuck out, flailing to free itself. But the Venus flytrap squeezed tighter, and there was no escape.

The bug was Nick.

And soon he would be clamped in a similar trap behind the closed drapes.

Along the wall were several bear traps, one with open jaws. In outline, the large steel frames resembled the flytraps on the windowsill. Mephisto enjoyed imagining the damage the bear traps would do. Reaching for a broom handle leaning against the wall, he rammed it down on the trigger mechanism that sprang the leg-hold jaws.

Snap
…

Crack
…

Splinter
…

Slivers burst out in all directions as the metal teeth clanged together, smashing the wooden pole like they would human bones.

Mephisto could hear the screams.

And see the pain twisting the features of his prey into masks of agony.

Yes, he thought. These will do.

He walked into the kitchen to fetch the cans of spray paint he had used to finish off the shrunken head. Then, after bundling up against the cold and hiding his disfigured face, he left the chalet to trudge down to the El Dorado Resort.

The madman had another trap to set.

Vancouver

It wasn’t hard to spot him.

Gill Macbeth stood behind the waist-high barrier outside the arrivals hall at the Sea Island airport—no more than a couple of feet from where DeClercq had waited earlier that day—and scanned the passengers exiting the customs area. The moment she spied a giant in a Russian fur hat with the earflaps tied at the crown, she knew this was her man. Gill tailed him along the barrier until it ended.

“Dr. Avacomovitch, I presume?”

“Dr. Macbeth?” he replied, taking the hand Gill offered for a gentlemanly kiss.

“My, my. You must teach Robert that.”

“Would you prefer my bear hug?” the Russian asked.

The pathologist took in his girth—as massive as an old-fashioned, wood-staved beer barrel—and smiled. “I’d like to keep my skeleton intact.”

Even with his hat doffed, Avacomovitch towered over Gill, and his slicked-back white pompadour added inches to his height. Luckily, he tended to stoop, which helped shrink him down to the size of most people, but even so he barely fitted into Macbeth’s BMW.

“How kind of you to greet me.”

“Robert sends his regrets. His daughter, Katt, arrived on a flight from London earlier today. They have a lot of catching up to do, and she hasn’t seen her dog and cat for a long time. He thought it unfair to make her spend hours waiting at the airport.”

“I could have taken a taxi, Dr. Macbeth.”

“Call me Gill.”

“I’m Joseph. Joe.”

“It’s the least I can do. If not for you, Robert says he would have blown his brains out.”

The forensic scientist shook his head. “Those were ugly times. You had to have seen Robert with Jane to truly understand. How he loved that baby girl!”

Both were silent as Gill eased her car out of the parking garage and began to follow the same route to the North Shore that Robert and Katt had taken earlier in the day.

“When I defected to the West from the Soviet Union,” Joe said, breaking the silence, “I knew no one here. I chose to resettle in Canada because it reminded me of home. The Mounties offered me a job because of my forensic work in Russia.”

“I hear you’re the best.”

“I’m fortunate some governments think so,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “When the Mounties employed me, the first friend I made was Robert. Many a night, back when he was zooming up the ranks as a homicide detective, he and his wife entertained me in Montreal. We’d talk for hours, sipping cognac in front of the fire, with Jane asleep in his lap.”

Macbeth was attractive—handsome, not pretty—with auburn hair and emerald eyes. She was independently wealthy, having inherited several Caribbean hotels, but she’d still chosen to follow the feminist trail her mother had blazed as a forensic pathologist. Gill sensed the Russian appraising her, and hoped she would compare favorably to Robert’s dead wife.

“Robert blamed himself, of course, for what happened to Jane, and when the Headhunter case came along, it brewed up a perfect storm,” said Joe. “The killer was hacking the heads off women and sending Robert photos of them mounted on poles to taunt him. Eventually, panic fueled a riot in the streets, and there were calls for
Robert’s
head. When he couldn’t stop the killings, his remorse got mixed up with unresolved guilt about Jane. Those demons, combined with too much booze and Benzedrine, pushed him to the brink, and he ended up sticking his revolver in his mouth.”

“Thank God you’re so big,” said Gill.

“It was just a greenhouse door.”

“Joke all you want, but Robert wouldn’t be alive today if not for you.”

Joe shrugged again, embarrassed by her words. “Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “I was lured back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

“By what?”

“An offer I couldn’t refuse. The end of Communism exposed a plague of serial psychos. Chikatilo—the Rostov Ripper. Ryakhovsky—the Hippopotamus. Onoprienko—the Terminator. Pichushkin—the Chessboard Killer.”

“Was that the guy trying to kill one person for each square on a chessboard?” asked Gill.

“Yes,” Joe replied. “The
new
Kremlin asked me back to head up a state-of-the-art lab. It was an opportunity to rub Communist noses in my Western success, and to go home a hero. Revenge and ego satisfaction make a potent cocktail.”

“So what brings you back here?”

“The Winter Olympics in 2014 will be in Sochi, Russia. Terrorism is now a global business, so we’re sharing information we’ve gathered with Special X. We help them now, and later they’ll help us. With the added perks that I get to ski Whistler and see Robert again.”

The BMW drove through the forest of Stanley Park, almost an island of evergreens caught in the throat of the harbor. Recently, the city had suffered a freak windstorm that had leveled trees faster than loggers with chainsaws. It would take generations for the park to recover. Ahead, the necklace of lights outlining Lions Gate Bridge was marred by dozens of burnt-out bulbs. At least those would get replaced for all the wallets coming to town.

“How’s Robert now?”

“All patched up,” said Gill. “He has Katt, and me, to fill the void.”

“And no Headhunter.”

“Actually, it’s worse. Now he’s hunting a monster who threatens to be his nemesis.”

“Mephisto.”

“You know about him?”

“From what Robert says in his emails, they’ve battled twice. First, when Mephisto kidnapped a member of Special X—”

“Corporal Nick Craven,” Gill offered.

“—and began cutting him to pieces. From what I recall, he refused to stop until Robert found some sort of Scottish artifact. Was it something linked to Stonehenge?”

She nodded. “The Silver Skull.”

“Why did Mephisto want that?”

“Only
he
knows for sure. But from what Special X was able to put together, Robert concluded that he was interested in the zodiac inscription on the skull, said to be the secret of the stones. It most likely has something to do with human sacrifice. Stonehenge has a Slaughter Stone outside the main circle, and the idea of sacrificing virgins to the summer solstice would be right up Mephisto’s alley.”

“Mephisto sounds like a
nasty
piece of work.”

“According to the psych profile Special X worked up on him, he has a narcissistic personality disorder with psychopathic features, paranoid traits, ego-syntonic aggression, and a complete lack of conscience. It’s a mouthful, but it basically means he’s a megalomaniac of Olympic proportions. His obsessive-compulsive need for power manifests itself in delusions of greatness. All through Nick Craven’s captivity, Mephisto wore the tartan of a Scottish laird. He’s a borderline psychotic, and he relishes cruelty. Like Brady with Hindley and Bernardo with Homolka, he lured a woman named Donella into his fantasy. She played the role of his Celtic highland queen and mutilated Nick on his command.”

“How did he get so warped?”

“We don’t know,” said Gill. “Malignant narcissists usually harbor a massive inferiority complex from some childhood trauma. He may have been rejected, abandoned, teased, bullied, or sexually abused. Whatever it was, it must have been severe for him to overcompensate in such a vicious way. Mephisto isn’t the stereotypical asylum Napoleon, with one hand stuck in his shirt. He
kills
for his delusions of greatness.”

“What happened to Craven?” asked Joe.

“He was saved by Robert and an American sheriff’s deputy named Jenna Bond.”

“So Craven can ID Mephisto?”

“Yes.”

“And so can you, I believe?”

Gill nodded. “And so can Jenna’s daughter, Becky Bond. Mephisto grabbed Becky for a series of bizarre experiments, and he lured me to his clinic on Ebbtide Island. The
same
island he had used for his first psychotic scheme.”

“To thumb his nose at Robert, I assume?”

“Precisely. What a megalomaniac craves is a worthy challenger to defeat. A Moriarty needs his Holmes. A Mephisto needs his DeClercq.”

“What sort of clinic was it?”

“I had a nip and a tuck. The clinic was supposed to be a recovery spa, but that was just the front. Behind the façade was a sick laboratory for human experimentation, just as his own slick façade hides as cold-blooded a reptile as a man can be.”

“A chameleon?”

“Who changes his skin with each psychotic scheme. For the Silver Skull, he wrapped himself in the tartan of a Scottish clan. For the clinic, it was Egyptology and a plot that was somehow tied to a
reverse
Fountain of Youth.”

“What is he? A mad Indiana Jones?”

“You don’t take the name of the devil unless devilry is what you’re plotting. Role-playing is how a malignant narcissist conquers his mental demons. Mephisto creates a
subjective
image of himself and inhabits it so completely that those around him are tricked into responding to his delusion
objectively
.”

“The ultimate self-absorption. So where is Mephisto now?”

“Who knows? He escaped again.” Gill turned the BMW off Marine Drive and followed a road down through the dark trees to a house fronting the ocean. “The only thing we do know is that one day, Mephisto will return for revenge.”

“With another grandiose plot?”

“And a new delusion.”

“It could be worse,” said Joe.

“How?”

The Russian tapped the briefcase at his feet.

“He could be armed with this.”