Red Snow (9 page)

Joseph Avacomovitch never attended a murder scene without his Murder Bag. He even traveled with it.

Television these days was wall-to-wall forensics. Quirky but lovable CSI nerds were the new detectives, working in state-of-the-art labs and solving murders through magic. A machine jiggles test tubes or whirls them around, then miraculously tells a computer the results. On scene, a tech opens a stainless steel case packed with glowing wands that catch stains the human eye can’t see. A squeeze of fluid from an eyedropper and the cell door clangs shut.

All of which dates back to a handful of guts.

The Crumbles Case.

The patron saint of CSIs—for those who know their history—is Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The British pathologist shot to fame through his work in the Crippen Case, the Brides in the Bath Murders, the Brighton Trunk Murders, the Blazing Car Murder, and other forensic puzzles of the early 1900s.

In 1924, Spilsbury traveled to a rented bungalow on a barren strip of the Sussex shore known as the Crumbles to help Scotland Yard piece together a dismembered woman. Patrick Mahon had butchered his lover, Emily Kaye, to keep her pregnancy from ruining his life. A trail of blood ran from the sitting room, where Mahon had struck Kaye with an ax, across a hall and through a bedroom to the scullery. There, using a knife and a saw, he’d cut his mistress apart for disposal.

Blood and body grease were splattered everywhere. Boiled human flesh slimed a saucepan and a tub. Kaye’s heart and other internal organs were stuffed in a biscuit tin. A trunk bearing her initials contained rotting body parts. Over a thousand charred bone fragments littered the fireplace.

When Spilsbury entered the bungalow, he was shocked to see a detective chief inspector using his bare hands to scoop up mounds of putrid flesh and dump it into buckets.

“Are there no rubber gloves?” he asked.

The Yard man gave him a puzzled look. “I never wear gloves. No one I know has worn gloves in the seventeen years of the Murder Squad. This is how we do it.”

The smell was so foul that Spilsbury set up a table outside. There, with hundreds of locals gawking over the fence, he reconstructed Kaye’s body like a jigsaw puzzle. Pieced together, it was found to be missing its head, uterus, and right leg.

Mahon confessed to having thrown portions of the corpse from the train on a trip to London. He said he burned the head in the fireplace during a thunderstorm. The heat had caused Kaye’s eyes to pop open just as a clap of thunder shook the room. Shocked, Mahon fled from the house. Later, he smashed the skull to bits with a poker.

To test that tale, Spilsbury burned a sheep’s head at the bungalow. He thereby established that fire did make a skull brittle enough to reduce it to splinters.

Mahon was hanged that fall.

Since 1842, when Scotland Yard established its detective branch, homicide investigators had been collecting evidence with their bare fingers and wrapping it in paper or envelopes for safekeeping. Spilsbury suggested introducing a Murder Bag, a standard kit to be carried by any detective responding to a homicide. The bag contained rubber gloves; brushes to dust for fingerprints; a ruler to measure distance; a compass to establish direction; a magnet, tweezers, and other means to lift clues; swabs, bags, and containers to store evidence; and although it wasn’t on Spilsbury’s official list of contents, a bottle of whisky to fortify detectives at the grisliest of crimes.

Although Joe had traded the whisky for vodka, the Murder Bag he fetched from Gill’s car was in all other ways based on Spilsbury’s original design. That’s because he believed in the principle of Occam’s razor: “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” Or, put another way, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.

Keep it simple, stupid.

With that in mind, the Russian bypassed the entrance door to room 807. It had three locks, one of which was electronic, making it much more complicated than the connecting door. That infringed Occam’s razor.

Skirting the end of the bed to reach the other door, Joe set down his Murder Bag and knelt on the floor in front of the deadbolt. As he opened the bag, Dane joined him, squatting down on his heels to see what was up.

“Find something?” asked the sergeant.

“Not yet, but I have a theory.”

“Give me a clue?”

“What’s the first step a salvage yard takes when it receives a load of scrap metals?”

Dane had been to junkyards. “Ferrous and nonferrous. Divide iron and steel from other metals.”

“What’s the first thing we learn about iron in school?”

“It’s magnetic.”

“Why?”

“As I recall, it’s something about electrons lining up.”

Joe nodded. “Every electron, by its nature, is a tiny magnet. For a metal to be magnetic, it must have electron spin. Normally, the countless electrons in a metal are oriented in random directions. A metal is ferromagnetic—like iron and steel—if its electrons line up when drawn by a magnet. A metal is diamagnetic—like copper and zinc—if its electrons don’t line up. You’ll note that the thumb-turn on this door is copper.”

“So it’s not magnetic?”

“Supposedly,” said Joe, fetching a handheld electromagnet from his Murder Bag.

Dane watched the Russian apply the prongs to the outside face of the door, so they lined up with the arms of the thumb-turn on the other side. Flicking a switch electrified the tool. A quarter-turn of Joe’s wrist turned the knob of the deadbolt as well. The rod emerged from the lock in the edge of the door.

“So it isn’t copper?” said Dane.

“Let’s see.” With a screwdriver, the scientist removed the screw in the center of the thumb-turn. Holding the knob in his fingers, he showed the Mountie the edge that usually faced the wood. “What color is that to you?”

“Gold,” said Dane.

“The same color as Nick’s skin.”

With the blade of a knife, Joe scraped off the layer of paint to reveal two iron plugs set into the outer tips of the thumb-turn.

“I’ll be damned. How’d you twig to that?”

“The lock on the entrance door is released by the keycard’s
magnetic
strip. That got me thinking of magnets. And I noticed that this lock had been oiled when we examined it earlier. I put one and one together.” He shrugged.

Joe tried the electromagnet on the locked door to the other suite, to no avail.

“What if the killer had access to
both
rooms?” he suggested. “The door of the next room was left unlocked while she—I assume it’s a she—waited in here for Nick to arrive. After using the key, he triple-locked the entrance door for privacy, then fell prey to the trap. Maybe an accomplice lurked next door?”

“That’s probable,” said Dane. “Can you imagine one person lifting Nick’s body?”

“Unlock the thumb-turn on this door and step into the next room. Turn and close this door, and lock it from the outside with the magnet. Then close the other door and turn its deadbolt from inside the next room. Would that not present us with the puzzle we face—and allow escape from the adjoining suite?”

“Tricky,” said Dane.

Just then, a far-off explosion boomed loudly enough to rattle the snow-flaked window.

“What was
that
?” asked Joe.

Winter was Inspector Zinc Chandler’s favorite season.

Most adults, the Mountie knew, loathed the winter months. To them, exile to Siberia would be no worse than suffering through a deep freeze on the prairies. How many folks died from heart attacks while shoveling snow? How many homeless men and women froze to death? How many drivers trapped in snowbound cars asphyxiated while running the engine for heat? Did you hear about the guy who crawled out of his trapped vehicle and made it to a phone booth? While he was talking to his wife, telling her not to worry, a snowplow passed in the whiteout and buried him alive.

Ah yes, winter in the Great White North!

Zinc, however, still saw winter through the eyes of a bundled-up schoolboy. Two pairs of socks in thermal boots, two pairs of mitts tethered by a string around his neck, long johns beneath a flannel shirt and jeans inside a snowsuit. His mom would throw open the door of the farmhouse in Rosetown, Saskatchewan, and let in a blast as cold as Jack Frost’s breath. No sooner would Zinc step outside than he’d have to pee.

Brrrrr
…

People who weren’t from Saskatchewan didn’t
know
snow. Spraying the yard produced a personal skating rink. Freezing a snowdrift made a slide. Burrowing under the surface created a maze of tunnels and caves. Zinc could glide on the frozen sloughs or play hockey on the road. Lash the toboggan behind a horse and off he’d go. Drifts became forts for snowball fights. Easter egg dye gave him snow churches with stained-glass windows. On flat days bled of color, snow would fall, and Zinc, facing skyward, would capture flakes on his tongue. Once, he’d stuck his tongue to a piece of cold metal, learning a lesson to last a lifetime.

Ouch!

When he came in from the blizzard, he’d be struck by a wave of heat. Standing by the wood-burning stove in a cocoon of warmth, Zinc would peer out at the white world, stark and eerie, through an overlay of reflected Christmas lights. The next morning, he’d draw faces in the rime on the pane.

Winter …

Now that boy was a man on the cusp of forty. Transplanted to the gray blahs of Lotusland, where the rain, rain, rain replaced the requisite white, Zinc was forced into the mountains to enjoy his favorite season. Luckily, this year the Olympics had moved him up to Whistler, so the back of his Range Rover was stocked with all his winter gear: downhill and cross-country skis, snowboard, toboggan, and skates. That afternoon, he was slated to meet with Robert DeClercq, which had severely limited his options for outdoor exercise. That’s why he was seated on an icy bench beside frozen Alpha Lake, lacing up his blades, when the Latvian Iceman slit Jenna’s throat.

*     *     *

A spurt of blood arced across the falling snow, its warmth melting the flakes into drops of red rain. The skater completed his slashing spin with a reverse check that left him facing the carnage. His toe pick gouged a crimson hole in the ice.

“Mommy!”

The shriek of raw horror raised the hackles on Zinc’s neck. Out of the snowfall emerged a girl on wobbly skates, obviously circling the rink for Mom’s praise. Eyes wide and mouth agape, the child was transfixed by the spewing blood. Her howl of anguish shattered the brittle air.

Ka-boom!

*     *     *

The explosion was loud enough to reverberate off the heights of Whistler Valley, setting off avalanches that could be heard but not seen. The Latvian Iceman nodded, for that meant the other Icemen had launched their assaults, too.

Once professional soldiers trained in the tactics of winter warfare, the Icemen had been hand-picked for this work, the money from which would provide each killer with a platinum retirement plan. Their history went back to 1242 and the legendary Battle of the Ice, when Roman Catholic Teutonic Knights advanced against Russian pagans. During the battle, fought on frozen Lake Peipus, the pagan cavalry forced the knights onto thin ice, which gave way under the weight of their heavy armor, causing many to drown. From that point forward, the armies of northern Europe developed their winter warfare tactics, culminating in the greatest battle in the history of the world: the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad.

Winter warfare was defined as armed conflict in exceptionally cold weather and snowy, icy terrain. Survival depended on sub-zero equipment: warm clothing and footwear, nutritious food, white camouflage, tents and thermal sleeping bags, heaters and adequate fuel. Winter warriors learned that snow holes made good shelter, and that frostbite and hypothermia were constant enemies. For ambushes and attacks, ski-equipped troops could rival the speed of and distance covered by light cavalry.

Also, the Latvian could figure skate.

That’s why he was assigned to kill Jenna and Becky Bond.

Frozen with shock, the child stood on the ice in front of the bench, watching as two women tried frantically to stanch the spurts of arterial blood. Others in the park were also rushing to help, so the Iceman decided to put some distance between himself and the do-gooders, in case they mobbed him while he was busy killing the girl.

Pushing off with one blade, the Latvian stormed toward Becky, wrapping an arm around her waist and scooping her off the ice. Captor and captive shot into the blizzard, heading for the middle of the lake. If not for the child’s colorful clothes, they’d have vanished completely, for the Iceman wore the white camouflage of a winter warrior.

Snow, snow, fast-falling snow …

Hurled in all directions by the erratic wind …

Here, thought the killer, skidding to a halt.

Yanking the toque from her head, he dropped the girl on her back on the cold crust of the lake. The blade of one skate pinned Becky’s hair to the snow-covered ice. The other—blood-splattered from what it had done to her mother—stood poised above the girl’s throat like the blade of a guillotine.

*     *     *

What’s the roughest sport? British rugby? American football? Canadian hockey?

At six-foot-two, with 195 pounds of brawn, Zinc Chandler was built to throw the bodychecks of the bullish northern game. Though he lacked the fancy footwork of the masked blade runner, the Prairie boy knew how to power a puck across the ice and shoulder his bulk to take out anyone blocking his path.

Whack!

The guillotine was coming down when Zinc’s bodycheck cracked the killer’s ribs and launched him off the ice. The Latvian went spinning in an incomplete Axel jump. Figure skaters, however, learn the tricks of quick recovery, and the Iceman landed on both skates and kept going, intent on escape. Zinc was hot on his heels, fumbling to draw his Smith & Wesson through too many layers of clothes.

The Iceman was better prepared.

Zinc burst out of snow-blindness into a wormhole tunnel cleared by the wind. The Latvian was skating backwards, and the muzzle of his Beretta took aim at the pursuer’s heart.

Bang!

The bullet should have ripped through Zinc’s chest. But instead, the Iceman was airborne again. The bang was not a gunshot but the sound of the mercenary hitting the edge of a summer swimming platform—hidden by the snowfall—and flipping into a reverse somersault.

Bam!

That was a real shot, but it went wild.

The platform had marked the end of solid ice. The crust at the heart of the lake wasn’t thick enough for human weight, and the Latvian’s hard landing cracked it into a spider’s web. When that gave, in he plunged.

Zinc finally cleared his gun of its confining outerwear as he shaved the rink of ice to halt his forward motion. Still moving, he tucked his ankles up and hit the platform on his knees, skidding across to the far edge, just shy of taking an ice bath, too.

Gun in hand, the Iceman surfaced directly in front of Zinc. But before the swimmer could shoot, the inspector fired from his hip. The Latvian’s head snapped back as a red hole appeared in the white balaclava. The frigid water turned crimson as the bloody mask sank.

Ka-boom
…

Boom
…

Boom
…

More explosions made avalanches tumble down the peaks. But these were to the north.

Boom!