Blood Runs Cold (2 page)

Breckenridge, Colorado

Downstairs at Eric’s was dark, packed and loud. The hallway was filled with kids in snow boots and giant parkas pounding pinball machines. By the entrance to the restaurant, two groups of schoolgirls stood hanging from each others’ shoulders, waiting for a table. Half of them were Abercrombied, the other half Fitched. Inside, skinny blondes too old for braids leaned against the wall by the kitchen, flashing the restaurant logo on the backs of their T-shirts:
Downstairs at
Eric’s: Because Everywhere Else Just Sucks
.

Sheriff Bob Gage sat with a beer in one hand and a clean fork in the other.

‘Damn, where is my pizza?’

‘On a little yellow piece of paper,’ said Mike Delaney.

‘Hours from registering on my weighing scales.’

Mike rolled his eyes. ‘Can forty-six-year-old men be body dysmorphic?’

‘If I knew what that was, I’d love to tell you,’ said Bob.

‘You know – when you see yourself different to how everyone else sees you. Like
you
, for example, think you’re fatter than you actually are.’

‘Really? Are you kidding me?’

‘No,’ said Mike. ‘You’re a reasonably tall guy, Bob. You can carry a few extra pounds.’

Bob gave him a side-glance. Mike used to be a tanned, blond ski bum. Now, at thirty-eight, he was a tanned, blond, ski-bum Undersheriff, his eyes always a little red, his skin a little burnt, his lips pale from sunblock. Bob had choirboy styling – polished skin, neat side-parted brown hair, conservative clothes – but it couldn’t quite hide the crazy. Most women were attracted to both of them, for different reasons.

The first night they worked together, they’d gone on a domestic violence call-out and the woman had told them she’d like to be ‘wined and dined with you, Sheriff, so’s you could laugh me right into bed with your pal, blondie, here.’ Bob had looked at her and said, ‘Didn’t Blondie sing “I’m gonna getcha”? Yeah, well, gotcha! And probably gotcha for another twenty years for beating the shit out of that poor husband of yours.’ She had looked at him and said, ‘I would never lay a finger on you, cutie. Can you smell my breath?
It’s Wintergreen. Winter in my mouth, but summer in my heart.’

Bob had shot a glance at Mike. ‘What you have is Seasonal Affective Disorder,’ he said, struggling to cuff her.

She made a grab for Mike’s crotch, but he blocked it at the last minute.

‘Yes,’ Bob said, ‘you’re clearly very SAD.’

A waitress walked toward them, raising, then lowering Bob’s hopes.

‘I have not eaten since breakfast,’ he said to Mike. ‘I shouldn’t feel bad about this.’ He raised his cellphone, showing Mike a screen that told him Bob had fifteen missed calls or messages. ‘Do you see this shit?’ said Bob. ‘Half an hour I want – of peace – after everything. Just thirty minutes.’

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office shared a building with the jail and the courthouse. A riot had stolen his previous three hours.

‘You need to keep some beef jerky in your drawer, some trail mix, anything,’ said Mike.

‘Gross,’ said Bob.

Mike started to speak, but both their phones began to vibrate. The calls were from Dispatch.

‘Look, let me take mine at least,’ said Mike. ‘Something is going on.’ He pressed the Answer key and held the phone to his ear.

‘Mike Delaney,’ he said, then paused. Bob could hear a woman’s voice talking quickly at the other
end. Mike gestured to a waitress for her notepad. He scribbled across the page, nodding as he wrote. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘Me and Bob will be along right away.’ He hung up.

‘No, no, no,’ said Bob. ‘Bob doesn’t like “along”.’

‘Ooh,’ said Mike, ‘Bob is about to go up a mountain on the coldest January day Breckenridge has seen in about fifty years.’

‘Oh, dear God, no,’ said Bob, checking his watch. ‘It’s three fifteen. I’m almost home and dry. Why?’

‘Search and Rescue got an anonymous tip-off. It all sounded a little bullshitty to them, but they checked it out and, sure enough, they found a body.’

‘What?’

Mike nodded.

‘Holy shit,’ said Bob, his eyes wide. Mike turned around to where Bob was staring.

‘It’s my pizza!’ Bob grabbed the waitress’s arm. ‘In a box, sweetheart. And I love you right now. You have no idea.’

Quandary Peak could breathe with the breath it stole from your lungs. Stony and chiseled, it could turn on you before you had the chance to conquer it. The sky overhead showered unpredictable snow and rain, beamed surprise sun. Two-hundred-year-old miners’ cabins hid in the lodgepole pines that marked the timberline before the peak grew bare and rocky up to its full 14,265 feet.

On its south side, Blue Lakes Road stretched two and a half miles off Highway 9 to meet it. In winter, it was plowed halfway. A small group of Search and Rescue volunteers stood by the trailhead sign, like a spread from a North Face commercial. Others sat in their 4x4s, gunning their heating against the outside minus sixteen. They all had different day jobs, but came together every Wednesday night to train for Search and Rescue. They were twenty-two to sixty-two, high-energy, wired and bold.

An empty Ford 150 was the last vehicle in the line. It belonged to the Summit County Coroner, Denis Lasco, aka – depending on who you talked to – the Slowmobile, Heavy D, or Corpses Maximus.

‘Can you believe the Slowmobile got here before we did?’ said Bob.

‘He was probably looking for a place to hibernate,’ said Mike.

‘With a mouthful of nuts,’ said Bob.

‘Lasco couldn’t keep anything in his mouth without swallowing it.’

‘That’s pretty shitty,’ said Bob. ‘He’s probably got a gladur thing.’

‘It’s glandular,’ said Mike.

‘No – gladur,’ said Bob. ‘Glad you’re full, refrigerator, glad you’re full.’

They cracked up.

‘Right,’ said Mike, ‘we’re going to have to step out of the vehicle.’

‘Ugh,’ said Bob. ‘You first.’

One of the volunteers walked toward them as they got out of the Jeep.

‘Hey, Sheriff, Undersheriff,’ he said.

‘Hello, Sonny,’ said Bob. ‘Mike, this is Sonny Bryant. His father, Harve, and me go way back. I’ve known Sonny nineteen years or, as the tired saying goes, since he was in diapers.’

‘Yeah, I’m over them now,’ said Sonny, smiling.

‘They’ll come back around,’ said Bob. ‘It’s like fashion trends. I’m only a few seasons away from them myself.’

Sonny and Mike laughed.

‘Good to meet you,’ said Mike, shaking Sonny’s hand.

‘You too, sir,’ said Sonny.

‘What have we got?’ said Bob.

‘There’s a body up there, all right,’ said Sonny.

‘Man, woman, child …?’ said Bob.

‘I don’t think I’m allowed to say,’ said Sonny. ‘Mr Lasco …’

Bob rolled his eyes. ‘Let me guess: wouldn’t let you commit.’

Sonny smiled shyly. ‘Yes.’

‘He’s some piece of work,’ said Bob. ‘Is he up there alone?’

Sonny nodded. ‘Yes, he went up with a team of three and sent them back down once he knew where he was going. He said he hates people trampling his scenes.’

‘That is too true,’ said Bob. ‘And too repeated. Soon, the day will come when Lasco won’t even allow himself into a crime scene.’

Sonny laughed. ‘OK, I’m going to take you up there,’ he said. ‘Are you both coming?’

‘Sadly, yes,’ said Bob.

‘Should take about an hour,’ said Sonny. ‘We need to get going – that sun is starting to heat up.’

Denis Lasco was standing by the body with his back to them. He was dressed in a giant sapphire-blue parka and green ski pants. His head was bent over his digital camera. He half-glanced over his shoulder when he heard their footsteps in the snow.

‘You all need to stand back,’ he said, raising a hand.

‘Jesus, Lasco, we’re frickin’ miles away,’ said Bob.

‘This accident slash murder could have
happened
miles away,’ said Lasco.

‘Hackles,’ said Bob loudly, ‘are the erectile hairs on the back of an animal’s neck, particularly a dog. For the purposes of the moment, I am a dog. And it appears that, yes, I can confirm, my hackles are up.’

‘Professionalism,’ said Lasco loudly, ‘is the art of performing one’s job to the highest possible standards. For the purposes of this moment and
all moments, I am a professional. And it appears that, yes, I can confirm, this is what makes me a grown-up and the sheriff a jealous baby.’

‘America’s Biggest Loser,’ said Bob, loudly, ‘is a –’

Lasco went rigid.

‘All right, all right,’ said Mike. ‘That’s enough of that. We can come closer, Denis, right?’

‘Sure you can,’ said Lasco. ‘I’ve taken my wide shots from where you’re standing, so just walk in my tracks.’

Bob muttered to Mike. ‘Yeah, they’re deep enough to leave a lasting impression on the landscape.’

Her face was masked in a layer of clear ice. Her warm, dying breath had melted the snow that covered her. The carbon dioxide she exhaled had no place to go except back into her lungs. She was wedged from the chest down into the snow. She was zipped into a maroon ski jacket with white stripes down the arms. A navy blue Quiksilver hat covered her head. The angle of her neck was not an angle for the living.

Lasco crouched down to the eerie eyes of the body, wide open, their frozen silver centers sparkling in the sun; a cruel trick of nature.

‘Pupils fixed and dilated,’ said Lasco. He stood up. ‘I love saying that.’

‘So,’ said Bob, pointing, ‘the glass-mask tells me she was buried alive, but how come her hat is still on? An avalanche would have ripped that right off her, right?’ He turned to Mike.

‘I guess so.’

‘Depends,’ said Lasco.

‘You are a commitment-phobe,’ said Bob.

‘It’s written into our contract,’ said Lasco. ‘Commitment comes back and bites you in the ass.’

Thirty feet back, Sonny Bryant stood beside the split stretcher he had assembled, ready to transport the body down to the trailhead. Lasco sent Bob and Mike over to join him and stayed with the body, taking the GPS co-ordinates and sketching a map of the crime scene.

‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Sonny, nodding in their direction.

‘Wood poisoning?’ said Bob. Wood poisoning was skier versus tree.

‘Could there be some skis buried under there?’ said Sonny.

‘Who knows?’ said Mike. ‘I’ve given up speculating. I’m always wrong.’

‘Come on, speculate,’ said Bob. ‘Make something up.’

Mike shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Corpses Maximus said no guesses. It plants things in people’s heads.’

‘Nothing gets planted in this head,’ said Bob. ‘Nothing at all.’

Mike and Sonny laughed.

The wind rose, whipping around them, fighting
their balance. Mike and Bob had their back to it, buffering Sonny from the worst.

‘Hey,’ shouted Sonny, pointing to a figure higher up the peak.

Bob shook his head. ‘Same idiots, different season. You could paper Breck with “Get off the mountain by midday or we will shoot to kill” and these people would still not get out of their beds in time to haul ass.’

Lasco didn’t hear him and was waving from where he stood, holding something in the air, fighting to be heard over Bob and the wind.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Sonny. He lunged through the gap between Bob and Mike, lifting his spotting scope to his eye. He saw a man on back-country skis, moving east–west across a snowfield. Bob, Sonny and Mike stood mesmerized, a combined weight of fear suspending any motion. Above them, the wind had raked the promontories, packing snow into ravines and chutes, pressing it deep into every hollow. The skier didn’t know what he was crossing; the difference between fallen and driven snow. He didn’t know that the black rock beneath him was a magnet to the afternoon sun. He didn’t know that the underside of the snow was heating up, turning to water, trickling downwards, weakening the platform beneath him.

Shooting cracks broke out under his feet, followed by the desperate sound of air rushing out of snow.

‘Jesus Christ!’ roared Bob. ‘Avalanche!’

‘Go right,’ roared Mike, ‘Go right.’

In seconds, a huge plume of white exploded into the sky as thousands of pounds of compacted snow shifted, plummeting toward them, four foot deep, warming as it moved, gaining the momentum to bury everything in its path, a deafening blast in the tranquil afternoon.

For seconds that felt longer, Mike was flying in an exhilarating powdered-snow rush. He was a snowboarder, busting a huge air, applause drowning out his proud cries. But somewhere inside, his instinct kicked in and he started to swim.

Bob felt like a rug had been pulled from under his feet, a rug he had been very happy with, the type that had protected him from the cold concrete underneath.

Lasco had descended barely four feet from the corpse when it was dislodged, hitting him hard in the back, forcing the wind from his lungs, sending them both plunging toward the ridge below.

Sonny became a centerpiece to the erupting snow, the height of its power, quickly descending to its crushing, savage depth.

In ten seconds, it was over. The snow had settled – twenty feet deep at the toe of the slide. Minutes passed before its powdery shower lifted, leaving in its wake a desolate white vacuum.

Mike Delaney knew that he wasn’t driving this motion, he was at the mercy of it. There was no skill to the rotations of his body. The sound he was hearing was the avalanche’s freight-train roar. If there was an audience that wasn’t being swept up and deposited all around him, they would have seen a spectacular final display … but would have turned away for the crash landing that was strangely void of sound.

A waitress kept trying to serve Sonny Bryant cocktails. His hand shook as he took each one and dropped it to the ground.

‘What is your
problem?’
she kept saying.

‘You don’t get it. I’m freezing,’ he kept answering, again reaching out a shaking hand. ‘I’m freezing. Is this hot?’ He dropped the glass again.

‘What is your
problem?’

He jerked awake. ‘I’m
freezing
.’

With the exception of one gloved hand, Sonny Bryant lay completely buried.

Denis Lasco was on his back, pinned beneath his charge, the pair taking the shape of a skewed cross on the snow. The corpse’s vitreous mask had cracked open, leaving a pale cheek an inch from Lasco’s lips. As he breathed frigid air through his nose, a slim strand of her hair was sucked against his nostrils. Lasco’s head shook violently, struggling to exhale it away. But the rise of his chest was restricted. In his panic, his neck muscles went rigid, supporting him long enough to observe a contributory factor to the woman’s death; a massive exit wound. A mash-up mix of reds and blacks had been ripped through the back of her snowsuit. It was the last thing Lasco saw before his breath exploded out of him and the picture went black.

When he was fourteen years old, Bob Gage had to dissect a cow’s eyeball in biology class. He remembered how it flinched under his scalpel, how he fought to secure it, finally piercing what he expected would be soft, yielding flesh. But it crunched as the blade hit its center. What the butcher had given him was a frozen eyeball. And it had turned Bob’s stomach more than cutting into the flesh of something that could have oozed.

Bob now stared at the heavy white world that surrounded him, possessed by the icy cold of his eyeballs, no less sickening now than a thirty-year-old memory. He knew nobody would be dissecting his eyeballs if he didn’t make it out of this, but he knew a sharp blade would be coming into his dead world and it was more than he could take. You can’t scream from the top of your lungs when they’re searching for oxygen that isn’t there. But Sheriff Bob Gage gave it his best shot.

For the second time that afternoon, an all-call went out and pagers across Summit County beeped, one of them under the snow of Quandary Peak. Twenty volunteers were called to a scene most of them were already at. The ones who hadn’t made it first time around were paged again and told why, this time, they might want to show up.

Bob could see something blue sticking out of the snow. He turned on his side and rolled on to his knees. He crawled uphill toward it, staggering to his feet when he saw it was a gloved hand. He trampled a path to it, then fell down and started digging.

‘We’re going to get you out,’ he said. ‘Hang in there. Hang in there.’ For a moment, he thought it might be the corpse. He pulled off the glove and felt a lukewarm hand and a weak pulse.

‘Shit, come on,’ he said, replacing the glove,
working harder to tunnel an airway to whoever lay beneath the surface.

‘I’m getting there,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’

He could hear desperate, muffled groans. He looked around into the blank white.

‘Help,’ he shouted. ‘Someone help.’

He kept going, scooping back snow, his arms trembling, his heart pumping hard. His body was on fire. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. In his panic, he couldn’t pin down the passing of time; did he still have a chance, or was it too late? Had he been there for wasted hours or just minutes? Finally, he heard a huge intake of breath.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Thank God. Jesus Christ. Who’s down there?’

The voice was faint. ‘Sonny.’

‘OK, Sonny. You wait right there …’ He paused. ‘I mean, I’m going to get help. You’re going to get out of there, OK?’

He heard a muffled reply. He sat back on the snow, his breath heaving. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He grabbed the radio from his belt and radioed down to the trailhead to call in Flight-for-Life, the medevac helicopter run out of Frisco, ten miles north of Breckenridge.

‘I need to go check on Lasco,’ he said to Sonny. ‘I’m sure my buddy, Mountain Mike, is already back at the office.’

Further down the slope, by a small stand of trees, Denis Lasco lay on his back on top of the snow.
Bob dropped to his knees and checked him for a pulse. He found one. But he couldn’t rouse Lasco.

The gentle snowfall quickly turned heavy.

‘Lasco, you wake the fuck up by the time I’m back,’ he said, hurrying up the slope to Sonny, slumping to the snow beside him. He pulled off one of his snow-shoes and used it to start digging. In ten minutes, Sonny’s head and shoulders were exposed. But the rest of his body was compressed so tightly, Bob had to hide his fear.

‘We need to keep you hydrated,’ he said. He took a bottle of water from his jacket and held it to Sonny’s mouth. Sonny’s eyes started to close.

‘No you don’t,’ said Bob. ‘Wakey, wakey, OK? Jesus, I’m the one who’s just done the physical exertion. If anyone gets to sleep here, it’s me.’ He wiped his sleeve across his forehead.

Sonny smiled a drunken smile, but opened his eyes wide. He sipped more water.

‘Good,’ said Bob. ‘Keep looking at me. It’s not easy, I know …’

Sonny blinked instead of smiling. Bob scanned the area for Mike, but found nothing. ‘I’ve never been in an avalanche in my life,’ said Bob. ‘It’s the scariest fucking shit …’ He laughed through the panic rising in his chest. Sonny’s skin was almost gray, his eyes shadowed and sunken, his lips pale and dry. Sonny was failing.

Bob’s radio struck up. A calm voice said, ‘Flights’re on their way.’

‘That’s great,’ said Bob. He looked up and down the slope. They were near the bottom, but there was no ground nearby at the right angle for a helicopter to land. And by the time the SAR team made it up to them from the trailhead, another half-hour would have gone by.

Sonny Bryant had got a perfect score in his EMT exams, so he knew exactly how he was going to die. He knew that the kind, smiling sheriff beside him knew how he was going to die. His limbs were crushed. As soon as the weight of the snow was taken away, toxins would rush to his bloodstream. His kidneys wouldn’t take it. There were no IV fluids. There was only a half-liter of water that was almost gone. That was it. It wasn’t enough. Bob Gage was holding his hand. Should he look him in the eye when they pulled him free? He didn’t really want to leave Bob with an image that could haunt him for life. But he didn’t want to stare into the blank white snow. Just in case wherever he was going was blank too.