Red Snow (8 page)

Robert’s first thought on seeing the body was that he was back in Egypt. When the archeologist Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922, he found the boy pharaoh’s mummy encased in three coffins, one within another in the oblong sarcophagus. Each coffin was molded in the king’s image. The innermost was made of solid gold.

The view from the door of room 807 transported the Mountie back to the Cairo museum he and Katt had visited a few years earlier. Gilded gold from head to foot, the body on the bed reminded Robert of the innermost coffin, except that the image was a likeness of Nick Craven, not King Tut. Naked, Nick lay face up on a black satin sheet, his wrists crossed over his heart. One arm ended with a stump where his prosthetic hand had been. The hand was on the bedside table, alongside Nick’s prosthetic ear.

I get it, Robert thought, clenching his fists to quell his roiling anger.

Dane Winter had called his cellphone as he, Katt, and Napoleon, their German shepherd, neared the outskirts of Whistler on the Sea to Sky Highway. Despite their early start, they had slowed to a crawl as the weather deteriorated. Behind them in her car, Gill and Joe had faded, then vanished in a scrim of blurry snow.

“DeClercq,” he’d answered.

“Chief, it’s Dane Winter. Brace yourself …”

The link between Nick’s gilding and the scene of the crime struck the psycho hunter as he drove past the Gilded Man pub in the El Dorado Resort. As a lifelong historian with several books in print, he was well read in the literature of the Holy Grail, Atlantis, Shangri-La, King Solomon’s Mines, and El Dorado. The banner flapping above the hotel’s entrance confirmed the link: “Meet Olympic Hopefuls at ‘Going for the Gold.’”

“Why are we stopping here instead of driving to the cabin?” Katt had asked. She knew Nick well, so Robert had yet to tell her.

“Something I must check.”

“Was it bad news?” Katt pressed. “You’ve been spacey since you took that call.”

“Time will tell. I need half an hour. Park the car and take the dog for a walk.”

Napoleon barked his agreement.

“Goody,” Katt said with exaggerated glee, rubbing her palms together. “It’s joy-ride time!”

Moments after Robert’s car disappeared, Gill’s materialized ghostlike from the snow, and the Mountie’s cell hummed again.

“DeClercq,” he responded.

“It’s Corporal Hett, Chief. Looks like we’ve found the head from yesterday’s snowboarder. It’s shrunken and painted gold, and what’s more, we have
another
beheading.”

The digital image that zoomed to his phone from Jackie’s showed a miniature human head dangling from a chairlift frame. Nick’s gilded body linked him to the golden severed head, which in turn reminded the chief of the Headhunter case. Was someone trying to jab his memory?

Who would do that? he wondered.

And
love
doing it?

Now, they stood at the threshold to room 807—the psycho hunter, the pathologist, and the forensic scientist—while Dane indicated the path he’d taken to the bed to check Nick’s vital signs. He had hugged the walls in the hopes that would keep him from trampling on vital clues.

The four pulled on latex gloves and plastic booties, then approached the body. Gazing down at the man he had saved twice from disaster—when Nick had stood trial for the death of his mother, and when Mephisto had cut him apart piece by piece—Robert struggled to view the crime scene objectively. The tradition was etched in stone: kill a Mountie and you take on the entire force. And history had shown that in those instances, they
did
always get their man.

But the chief didn’t want emotion blinding his logic. He knew the run-of-the-mill serial killer was a slave to fantasy. Acting out that fantasy created a normally subconscious “signature” that could be profiled by crime scene analysts. In this case, the signature was not subconscious but displayed on the bedside table for the chief and all the world to see.

The gilded man had been stripped of his prosthetic hand and ear. By returning Nick to his handless, earless self, this killer had left his signature in the overblown, gilt-edged scrawl of a malignant narcissist.

*     *     *

Goldfinger!

The first connection cracked through Gill’s mind like a bolt of lightning. In Ian Fleming’s book, the megalomaniac with an obsession for everything gold could attain sexual climax only by romping with gilded women.

Megalomaniac …

That was the second connection.

Mephisto, she thought.

Strange how at times like this, you remember only the good parts. Looking back, their love affair had been doomed from the start. Gill and Nick had come from different places and were going different places. She was classical music, while he was rock ’n’ roll. Gill was born into money, raised in the sun of Barbados, and blessed with a mother who set an example as a leading pathologist. Nick was born prematurely on a bathroom floor during a blustery winter storm in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Later that night, his dad shot himself. His mom toiled in the laundry of a mental hospital to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. Having raised hell as a teenager, Nick became a cop to atone for the disappointment he’d caused her.

What Gill and Nick had in common was what they did in bed. She was a champagne partner for him, and he was a hot young stud for her. That she was turning forty was a factor in the equation. But when the ghosts of his past came haunting, that wasn’t enough to see them through the turmoil.

Now, scowling down at Nick’s gilded body, Gill was sickened by the stench of lacquer. So thick was the coat of paint that she couldn’t even see the tattoo on his upper arm: an hourglass running out of sand, with the words “Here Comes” above and “the Night” below. But worst of all were his eyes. The killer had left them open, gazing vacantly at the ceiling, then had sprayed the eyeballs with glittery gold.

Gill couldn’t help it.

Tears rolled down her cheeks.

*     *     *

Having never met Nick, Joseph Avacomovitch was all business.

“I don’t see a wound on the body, do you? He looks serene, as if he’s simply fallen asleep.”

“Poison?” Dane suggested. “Spiked with a syringe? Maybe there’s a puncture wound beneath the gunk.”

The Russian turned to Gill as she wiped away her tears. “It seems to me that Nick was painted postmortem, yet there’s not a trace of gold on the black satin. That indicates the killer changed the linen so he or she could display the corpse for maximum shock value. May I turn him over to look for a wound?”

Gill glanced at Robert for approval.

The chief nodded.

The paint was sticky to the touch as Dane and Joseph gripped Nick at the shoulder and hip and eased him onto his side. The sheet adhering to his back was peeled away. There wasn’t a patch on the underside that wasn’t gold, and a careful examination revealed no signs of trauma.

“Poisoning by mouth?” Dane suggested.

“Likely,” Joe replied.

“Where can I do a postmortem?” asked Gill.

The question drew Robert’s focus to her. The image of Gill dissecting her former lover furrowed a deep crease into his brow.

“He’s gone,” she said, aware of what Robert was thinking. “All that’s left are Nick’s remains. The answer to
who
killed him lies in the cause of death. Your pool of suspects will scatter before his body even reaches Vancouver. I’m the pathologist
here
. I owe it to Nick to help catch his killer.”

“I’ll assist,” Joe offered, sealing the deal.

“Instead of the medical center,” Robert suggested, “use the trauma room that’s been created for officers hurt while securing the Olympics. It’s nearby and private.”

“Hopefully, when we wipe the gilt off Nick, we’ll see how he died,” said Gill.

“There’s another puzzle,” Dane interjected. “The room was locked from
inside
. So how did the killer escape?”

An aisle led from the door of room 807 to the far window. The bed flanked the left-hand wall. Above it hung a framed painting of Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, the rising sun adorning their ski runs in gold. Between the bed and the window, on the side where Joe and Dane stood, there was a door giving access to the adjoining suite.

“The only way in or out,” said Dane, “is through one of these two doors. The window doesn’t open, and there’s no egress whatsoever in the right-hand side.”

He gestured from the window to the writing desk, TV stand, luggage rack, bathroom, and wardrobe.

“The deadbolt on the connecting door was engaged when we broke in through the main one.”

“As it is now?” confirmed Joe.

“Yes,” agreed the sergeant. Turning to the lock, Dane gripped the thumb-turn by its narrow ends, not its flat sides, to avoid smudging any prints, and gave it a quarter twist to vertical. The connecting door opened to reveal no keyhole on the outer side. The wood was intact, as was the wood of the door securing the adjoining suite.

“See the problem?” asked Dane. “Each deadbolt securing each door has an
exit-only
function. The rod will retract only if someone rotates the cylinder by twisting the knob on the
inside
of his door. A deadbolt can’t be jimmied with a card or a tool, and because there isn’t a keyhole, it can’t be picked with a bump key. To lock this door, you need someone alive on this side, and Nick was obviously dead when the killer escaped.”

“Puzzling,” Joseph mused, examining the oiled lock.

“To join the rooms, each occupant unlocks his deadbolt from
inside
his suite. If the killer fled through this door to the next room, how did he lock it behind him?”

“It would appear,” the Russian replied, “that he escaped by way of the entrance door.”

“I don’t see how,” said Dane. “That puzzle is even tougher. There were three barriers preventing us from breaking in: an electronic lock, a deadbolt, and a swing bar. Setting the deadbolt and swing bar again requires someone alive inside the room. To break in, we needed the hotel’s master key and a pair of bolt cutters to sever the knob in the swing bar.”

“So,” said Joseph, “who set the three locks?”

“A woman,” Dane replied.

“Why do you say that?” asked the chief.

“In searching his clothes, I discovered this in Nick’s pocket.” The sergeant held up a magnetic keycard in an evidence pouch. “It springs the lock on the entrance door. The door keeps a log of the times the card is used. This card was used at ten last night, and the door wasn’t opened again until we broke in this morning.”

“So why a woman?” asked Gill.

Dane produced a second evidence pouch containing a yellow Post-it Note.

“This was stuck to the key.”

The note read: “Ten o’clock tonight. Be discreet.”

Gill’s glare darkened. “It looks to me like Nick got picked up in a bar.”

The Sea to Sky Highway had almost cost Whistler the Olympics.

During the last ice age, the Pacific coast sagged under an immense weight. Creeping glaciers gouged cliffs and valleys into the bedrock. Once the ice retreated, the land rose up and the sea surged in, forming fiords such as Howe Sound. It took dynamite blasts to cut through the granite so train tracks and a cramped road could snake along the shore. Nature constantly threatened to block the only route to Whistler under crushing landslides.

“What’s that, Mom?”

“What’s what, Becky?” Jenna Bond was afraid to take her eyes off the icy, winding road. Along the so-called Killer Highway, deaths were common.

“Those windows up the mountain.”

Chancing a glance, Jenna squinted through the veil. A sob of wind from the sea buffeted their car, almost pushing it onto the shoulder of the slippery road. Beyond the window, Jenna could just make out a staircase-shaped structure climbing the mountainside.

“That’s a concentrator, Becky,” Jenna explained, passing on something Nick had told her during a romantic ski weekend. “It’s a gravity mill for a copper mine. The story is that a long time ago, a doctor shot a deer on this mountain. The thrashing legs of the dying buck exposed some copper ore. That’s how Britannia Beach became a huge copper mine.”

“Poor deer,” mourned the girl.

A train chugged past them on the twisting ribbon of track. Becky shoved a CD into the player and started singing along with “Jingle Bells.” As she warbled, she rolled down the passenger’s window, filling the car with blizzard.

“Becky!”

“Mom, we need an open sleigh.”

At spots, the road hugged nearly vertical slopes. The frozen Shannon Falls plunged as hundreds of yards of ice.

“Know how the falls were formed, Becs?”

“Uh-uh,” said the girl.

“A two-headed sea serpent named Say-noth-ka used that spillway to slither up the mountain.”

“Cool,” said Becky, cupping her hands around her eyes to take in the falls.

On the outskirts of Squamish, a lumber town that had buzzed with life until the pulp mill closed, there was a massive granite face almost two thousand feet high. Known as the Stawamus Chief, it was a climber’s dream in summer, but today it was shrouded in white.

“Does that look like an Indian’s head to you?”

“Yes,” said Becky.

The imagination of youth, Jenna thought. All she saw was a hump of snowy rock.

At Squamish, the road cut away from the sea and followed the Cheakamus River into the Coast Mountains. Back in the Cariboo Gold Rush of the 1860s, fortune-seekers had trudged into this harsh wilderness to reach the Lillooet Shortcut, an ancient Native trail through the mountains.

“Did you know that old-time miners once used camels to pack their supplies up this valley, Becs? The camels refused to behave, though, so they were released to fend for themselves in the bush.”

“Are they still there?”

“I doubt it. That was a long, long time ago.”

“Poor camels,” said Becky.

Luckily, a snowplow had preceded them inland, so the highway here was in better shape than the stretch along Howe Sound.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to marry Nick?”

Oh no, Jenna thought, her hands tightening on the wheel. “Why do you ask?”

“’Cause I think he’d be the best dad I could ever have. Why don’t I see him more often?”

“He’s a busy Mountie.”

“Can’t we move up here?”

“It’s not that easy. We’re Americans. Nick’s a Canadian. A border separates us. And anyway, your granddad was the sheriff of San Juan County.”

“He died with his boots on,” the girl said, repeating the legend she had so often heard.

“Yes, he did. Serving the islands. Don’t you want me to be sheriff, too?”

“I want a dad more.”

Hearing Becky talk like that broke Jenna’s heart. San Juan County elected its sheriff every four years. Jenna’s father, Hank Bond, had been returned to office twelve times before he was cut down by a stroke at his desk. Tough as nails on the outside but loving within, he was the best dad a tomboy could desire. For as long as she could remember, Jenna had wanted to follow in his footsteps. Lured from Orcas Island to Seattle’s FBI office, she had married an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. But instead of the happily-ever-after she’d always dreamed of, their marital bliss had morphed into a horrifying nightmare.

“Something’s up, Jen,” Don had said over the phone one night. “Got a meet tonight. May be a lead on the cartel.”

“But it’s your birthday!”

“I won’t be late.”

“I’ll wait up.”

“Lots to celebrate if this works out.”

That was the last time they’d talked. Don’s body was never found—all that was left was his voice on a tape sent to the DEA. They wouldn’t let Jenna hear it. Hours of Don being tortured by the cartel, every last minute recorded in an attempt to get the law to back off.

A week later, Jenna learned she was pregnant.

Every time she looked at Becky, she saw Don. They were as alike as she and Hank. Same fox-like face, slender chin, unruly russet hair, mischievous grin. Same hunting for an opening to crack a joke. Because she’d grown up in the protective shadow cast by Hank, Jenna knew how much the girl yearned for the love of a father.

And Jenna still had the dream …

Don’s screams echo up and down this hall of a hundred identical doors as Jenna searches frantically for her abducted husband. Time is everything. Don can take no more. He begs the Colombians to finish him off. “Oh, Jesus! Please, not another piece!” A hundred doors! Where is he? Tears salt her lips. Each door sticks as she tries to push it open. Damn island weather—too much moisture, wood expanding so every door always sticks. “Oh, Jesus! Not that! Leave me a man!”

Jenna reaches out to shove open door 13, but it opens a crack by itself, and the DEA agent who will later refuse to let her hear the tape of the torture session peers out at her. “Don’t worry, Jenna. It’s all under control. I’ll make sure the Geneva Conventions get followed in here. They won’t disturb your daughter with the way Don looks. He’ll be long gone before she’s born.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Don gibbers. “Don’t cut off my—”

“Mom?”

Jenna turns sharply.

Oh, God. No!

Becky stands behind her in the hall.

“What are you doing here?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Jesus!” Don beseeches. “Don’t let her see me!”

“Back to bed, honey.”

“I had a bad dream.”

“Go back to bed, back to sleep, and it’ll be gone by morning.”

“Mom …

“Mom …”

“Mom?”

Jerking out of her reverie, Jenna returned her attention to the treacherous highway.

“What, Becs?”

“Are we there yet?”

“Almost.”

“Where’s Nick gonna meet us?”

“Alpha Lake. A-L-P-H-A. Watch for the sign.”

Function Junction—an industrial park with a recycling facility—marked the beginning of Whistler Valley. The map on her lap told Jenna that the mountains owned the right flank of the road. She could sense them, rather than see them. Along the left side of the road ran a string of lakes: Alpha, Nita, and Alta. The railway clung to their far shores. Like the mountains, the lakes were lost to sight.

“Turn, Mom! Turn! It’s Alpha Lake!”

Blind faith guided Jenna through the maze of streets to the parking lot. No sooner had the car stopped than Becky jumped out and trudged to the basketball court. The hoop was hung with icicles, the wire mesh full of snow. Left to lug her daughter’s skates, the equipment manager caught up with the girl just as a well-aimed snowball snapped the last icicle off the ring.

“What an arm!”

Becky grinned and was off again.

A footbridge arced over a small creek to a windbreak of white-barked birches. White, white, white, wherever the eye focused. A white pagoda and swing set in the play area. White willows and picnic tables beside the lake, which itself was frozen white and blanketed with snow. Jenna felt caught in the snow globe at the start of
Citizen Kane
.

Rosebud, she thought.

“Hurry up, Mom! Bring my skates!”

Becky was kneeling on a bench, rocking with excitement. The girl rubbernecked, trying to spy Nick. The wind was picking up, and random gusts tore sightlines through the snow. Now you see them, now you don’t. A skater with a shovel cleared the ice. A showoff with his face masked by a balaclava spun and jumped like an Olympian. Kids supported by both parents wobbled around for their first skate.

Down on one knee like Prince Charming fitting Cinderella with a glass slipper, Jenna laced Becky into her skates. The bench was so close to the lake that ice froze her kneecap numb.

“Stay on the shoveled path,” cautioned Jenna. “No thin ice.”

“Watch for Nick.”

“I will.”

“Marry him, Mom.
Please!
”

Jenna’s sigh was stolen by the gusts. Off went Becky to circle the rink. She was like Halley’s Comet, slipping off on a far-flung orbit that would eventually return her to Mother Earth.

Rosebud, Jenna thought. Innocence lost. That word of regret in the dying gasp of Charles Foster Kane. Her daughter had lost her father to Colombian thugs. God knows what psychological damage was done while she was kept caged by Mephisto. In Nick, she’d found a surrogate father who helped heal those wounds. But he couldn’t abandon the job that made
him
feel whole again, and that left Jenna with a major impediment to
her
ambition.

Guilt made her shudder.

What would Hank think, she wondered, if he knew she was willing to put aside Becky’s happiness to fill his boots as sheriff of San Juan County?

I can’t do that, she thought.

So, sitting on the bench at the edge of the ice, Jenna rummaged in her pocket for her cell. As she scrolled through the menu for Nick’s name, she took her eyes off the ice. From out of the snowfall came the man in the balaclava, winding up for his Olympic stunts. He bent his torso forward and extended one leg straight behind him, forming his body into the shape of a T.

“Look out!” someone shouted.

Jenna glanced up.

Exposing her throat.

Within striking distance of the bench, the skater whirled on his supporting leg to execute a camel spin. His razor-sharp blade spun 360 degrees, slashing across Jenna’s neck and slitting her throat to the bone.