The Dolomite Solution (10 page)

There were no other long distance calls, only a few local numbers. Jake called the most recent one which turned out to be the information desk for Axamer Litzum, a local ski resort. Probably checking on ski conditions.

The next number he tried he got a receptionist for a local company, Tirol Genetics. He wasn't sure what that was about, so he asked the woman a few questions about the company. When the name Otto Bergen came up as the president, Jake thanked the woman and hung up. He made a mental note to check on that company later.

Jake slowly finished his beer, thinking about his meeting that night with Bergen. Things were starting to get interesting.

●

The Austrian polizei had two men posted on either side of room 610 at the Innsbruck Tirol Hotel, while Martini and his assistant searched through all the drawers and a third man dusted for prints.

A nervous manager, a slight man whose uniform jacket hung over his bony frame like a wet tent, paced in the center of the room.

Martini slammed a drawer shut and gazed at the manager. “You're sure the maid said she let him into the room just a few hours ago?”

“Absolutely,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Go get her,” Martini demanded.

The manager shuffled off swiftly, and Martini went into the bathroom. It was clean just like everything else. The man was a neat freak. Then he thought of something and hurried back into the main room. He looked under the bed, scanned the area once more. He was in town on business, yet there was no briefcase. He had to have some type of paperwork. Plane tickets, if nothing else. Then he reasoned that his briefcase could still be in his rental car, which they had not found.

The manager returned with a plump, disturbed-looking maid in her mid-forties. She had a rag in her hand, which she was strangling to death.

Martini asked what the man looked like.

“Around thirty-five. Handsome. Strong. A nice smile. His German seemed Bavarian. I'd guess Munich.”

“How tall? What color hair?”

“Your height. Long dark hair.” She released the rag and pointed at the Tirol captain. “He had a nice leather jacket. It made him look...tough.”

Martini sighed and then rubbed his eyes. He felt around inside his jacket pocket, retrieved a passport, and flipped it open for the woman, keeping the name covered up. “Is that him?”

She smiled, cocking her head to one side. “Yes. But the picture doesn't do him justice. He's far more handsome than that.”

Martini thanked the woman and said she could go. Jake Adams. How in the hell had he gotten there before them?

The phone in Martini's pocket rang and he scrambled to retrieve it. “Martini.” He listened carefully and then thanked the person on the other end.

His assistant across the room looked at him. “They found Murdock's car in the parking lot at Axamer Litzum,” Martini said. “Let's go.”

The road to Axamer Litzum was still wet from melting snow from the night before. Jake's Golf crept into the ski resort parking lot, and he scanned the rows of cars parked on the snowpack. There were Mercedes and BMWs with plates from as far away as the Netherlands and Denmark, low country people with money from the looks of it.

Jake met the end of the row, turned right, and immediately saw Murdock's rental Renault, its dirty maroon shell streaked from melting snow. On the very center of the top sat a white cap that gave it the appearance of a cake with someone having licked back the frosting from the edge.

There were cars parked on either side of the Renault, so Jake took a spot a few cars down, got out, and walked cautiously toward the car. After someone had set a bomb under his car, he wasn't taking any chances. Someone had the technology, if not the C-4 or Semtex, to make a first-rate explosive.

The sun had poked out from the clouds, making him squint without his shades as he worked his way around the car peering inside. There were skis and poles thrown about inside rather haphazardly. Ski boots on the passenger side floor. Why had he left the car here? And how had he gotten himself killed in the alley?

Jake glanced around watching skiers fly down the last part of the mountain and stand in line at the chair lift to do it again. Up the valley further was the Standseilbahn, a raised funicular railway that carried skiers to the highest part of the mountain. Behind the red train that was slowly making its way up the tracks, rocky peaks poked up into the swirling clouds.

He looked back at the car. There wasn't much he could do without breaking in. As a matter of fact, he wasn't even sure what he was looking for. He just knew that something wasn't right about Murdock's death, or him being halfheartedly set up for it. Either the killer had to be the worst bungler ever, or a genius. After all, if the Austrian polizei had arrested him, how could the killer continue screwing with him?

Crouching down low, Jake looked under the car's chassis. It was dark and he could see if there was anything there. He worked his way around the front of the car, when he saw the skis in the snow bank sticking out like a crude cross on a shallow grave. Next to the skis, laying on their sides, were a pair of boots. Without touching either of them, he memorized the numbers engraved in the tops above the bindings and the name of the rental company.

He scratched a little snow off the bottom of one boot to learn it was a size eight. Either a small man or a large woman.

Turning back to the car, Jake noticed a silver Mercedes rolling up to a stop. Behind that was two green and white polizei cars.

Tirol Criminal Commissioner Franz Martini parked right behind Murdock's Renault and got out with a disturbed look on his face, as if a three-year-old had just beaten him at chess.

“Mr. Adams,” Martini said, meeting Jake at the rear of the car. “It's becoming less and less funny how you always seem to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jake tried smiling. “I told you...bad things seem to follow me around.”

By now the uniformed officers had flanked the polizei captain waiting for orders.

“I want a good, thorough search,” Martini demanded.

The uniformed sergeant nodded and fiddled with a set of electronic keys with a plastic rental company symbol.

“Wait,” Jake said, grabbing the man's sleeve. “You should have a bomb squad look it over first.”

Martini lowered his brows at Jake. “Why is that? Do you know something we don't?”

Those were good questions that Jake couldn't answer. The problem was, he knew almost nothing. “I'm just thinking about my car earlier today. What if the guy used up all his C-4 before he got to me?” Jake shrugged, and the sergeant glanced at his boss for directions.

●

Sitting a hundred meters across the parking lot in a gray Opel Omega, Marcus Quinn tapped along to Led Zeppelin's Ramble On. It was lower than he would have liked it, but he didn't want the local cops taking special interest in him. He had followed the line of polizei cars from his hotel. Seeing them leave in such a hurry from his old friend's room, he figured they must have been up to something.

He almost regretted having left the rental skis behind like that in the snow bank. But what the hell, he had to give them some hope before blowing them all into tiny pieces. Even if they happened to track down the ski rental place, he was sure the man who had waited on him would never remember his face.

Looking through his binoculars again, he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw Adams standing next to that polizei captain. “Damn it, Adams,” he whispered into the noisy flow of music. “You weren't supposed to be here.”

Adams was pointing to the skis and then to the underside of the car. Now Quinn knew his plan may have a setback.

●

It took the bomb squad almost an hour to get there, and another hour to disassemble the C-4 device.

Jake was standing back behind the cordon on a snow bank when Martini approached. His expression was more forgiving this time. Jake didn't want to rub it in, but he knew his caution had possibly prevented the death of Martini and his men. Leverage went a long way with professional courtesy.

“Thanks Jake,” Martini said with great difficulty. “This was the real thing. Semtex. There was enough underneath the gas tank to blow all of us off this mountain.”

“How was it wired?”

“The trunk latch. The electronic release had been disengaged, so it would have only gone off after we used the key.”

Jake thought about that for a moment. That was well planned out. Murdock is killed...of course the cops would want to take a look at the car when they found it. “The killer couldn't afford to have the thing go off just at any time. The signal might have been the same for another rental sitting in the area. No, he wanted you to find the car. Wanted you to blow up. You and your men.”

Martini couldn't argue with him. His jaw tightened like it had the first time Jake had met the man in the funeral home. “This sucks. Isn't that what Americans say?”

Jake laughed. “Yeah. It doesn't feel too good when someone fucks with you, does it?”

“When I find this man,” Martini said, “he better hope I'm in a good mood.”

●

Quinn had left as soon as the bomb squad arrived, his hope for a glorious spectacle shot all to hell by Adams. He'd make the bastard pay for that.

Now he was sitting in his car outside the Super Ski Rental in the town of Axams. The young man who had rented him the skis flipped the sign to closed, and that was Quinn's cue to get out.

He looked up and down the street, but there wasn't much traffic. Quinn knew he should have taken care of this long ago. Perhaps he had simply gotten lazy, which was totally out of character for him.

He tapped on the door window. The young man was back behind the long counter where he would set the skis to adjust them for each person, pointed angrily at the sign, saying they were closed. Quinn pretended like he couldn't hear the man, waving for him to come closer.

While the man turned to round the counter, Quinn slipped out his gun from inside his ski jacket, cocked the hammer, and planted it behind his right leg.

The young man stopped a foot from the glass. “We're closed,” he said adamantly.

Quinn smirked at the guy, raising the gun to a few inches from the glass. The man was looking right at his intense eyes, his crooked, upturned lips, and didn't see the gun. Glass barely shattered as the two bullets shot through the door, penetrated the man's chest, and sending him hurtling backwards. His knees buckled and he dropped like a cow in a slaughterhouse.

Slipping the gun back inside his jacket, Quinn walked back to his car casually, thinking how nice his grouping was that time. It pays to practice.

The Alfa Romeo seemed to glide and float out of the mountains following the famous Brenner Pass. They had been delayed at the border by a huge accident involving more than twenty cars and trucks, closing the northbound lanes entirely. Toni and Professor Scala had sat by helplessly as workers unraveled the mess and removed countless victims from the wreckage. Toni couldn't help thinking how if she had been driving a few miles per hour faster they would have been in the wreck. Even faster yet and they would have never seen the accident at all. Fate was a strange thing indeed, Toni knew.

Toni had not said a word to Professor Giovanni Scala since slowly pulling away from the accident scene. As they had sat paralyzed in the traffic jam, she had told Scala about his friend and colleague's death that morning. He was still numb, not sure at first if he should believe her, and then realizing that she had nothing to gain by lying.

She found herself driving slower than normal now.

Clouds swirled around the setting sun, exposing the valley below in an eerie hue of blue and green.

Toni was thinking about asking him more about his research, which he had managed to avoid up to this point. She had already told him she planned on sticking with him until he could present his findings to his sponsor, Tirol Genetics, in the morning. He had seemed somewhat comforted by that thought.

“Do you have a copy of everything?” she finally asked, breaking the silence.

“What?” He turned, confused.

“Do you have a copy of all your research?”

“I would be a fool not to. Wouldn't you say?”

“What about Leonhard? Did he have copies made?”

He thought for a moment, having a hard time thinking of his friend, whom he had worked so closely with for two years, in the past tense. “We knew our studies were important, but didn't expect someone to try to kill us for the results.”

“Is that a no?”

“I don't know,” he screeched, showing a side she had not seen in the man. He took a deep breath. “I'm sorry. We made copies of everything we did on the computer. That was my fault. I still don't trust machines. I was the consummate note taker. Leonhard transposed my notes into the computer and made a copy for me.”

She thought about visiting Leonhard Aldo's house that morning, and how she had found no computer disks. “Did you have a lab at Passo di Villa?” She knew the answer already, but he didn't need to know that.

“We immersed ourselves into the village,” he said. “As you probably know, much of my work is done studying empirical data based on our DNA samples. We would send our blood samples to the university once a week, our graduate research assistants would do the initial isolation, and then Leonhard and I would follow up on the weekends. We had talked about setting up a lab, and even moving into the same house to save expenses. But we thought to really understand what made the place special, how to unfold the mystery, was to become one of them. We even rented houses on opposite sides of the village so we could maintain an objective eye. It worked. I'm certain of that.”

“So are a lot of other people,” she said. “You've made a number of groups of people nervous.”

He raised his brows. “How could we have done that?”