Red Snow (11 page)

With her skis and poles balanced on her shoulder and a backpack strapped to her spine, Scarlett could have been any one of a number of disappointed Olympians forsaking the mountains for the safety and comfort of the bars and restaurants of Whistler Village. What differentiated her from the rest of the pack was the concealed weapon she carried and the head of the skier she’d stored in a waterproof bag in her backpack.

With one mission complete, the Ice Pick Killer was now stalking Gill.

Architecturally, Whistler Village was a nest of snakes. There wasn’t a straight street or walkway to be had in the hoity-toity community sandwiched between the highway and the mountains. Twisting and turning back on themselves, pedestrian rambles hid countless nooks and crannies. One of these was an oblong yard of virgin snow tucked away behind the RCMP’s trauma center. Come the Olympics, heavily armed response teams would muster here. But this afternoon, only Scarlett waited.

She checked for a text message and found one glowing on her cell.

Kill time, she thought.

From the service bay at back of the El Dorado Resort, the Ice Pick Killer had followed the hotel’s delivery van the short distance by road to the trauma center. Emerging from the van with a somber expression, Gill had wheeled the gurney carrying Nick’s body in through the street door. Now she was locked inside the makeshift morgue.

Time you joined him on the slab, thought Scarlett.

Like the Olympics itself, Whistler was besieged by commercial hangers-on. If there was a buck to be made, Whistler was the place to make it. So in addition to skiing, you could dogsled, bungee jump, heli-ski, snowmobile, snowshoe, go tubing, or ride a sleigh drawn by giant Percheron horses. Or for a change of pace, you could “strengthen your core” in spas catering to your wellness needs with yoga, Pilates, facials, waxing, acupuncture, massages, aromatherapy, Vichy showers, and mud baths. Shucks, you could even get little yellow happy faces painted on your toes.

But then …

Boom! Boom! Boom!

… the juice stopped, and the fantasy faded.

One minute, Whistler had been a fantasyland of lights and sounds, with neon signs beckoning folks to come on in and spend, and rock ’n’ roll cajoling drinkers to chugalug. Then, in the blink of an eye, the mirage was extinguished and the jukebox fell mute. This gaudy manifestation of the Winter Olympics had been transformed into a ghost town.

*     *     *

“What are you making?” Scarlett had asked Mephisto days earlier in his mountainside chalet.

“Curare,” he’d replied. “South American arrow poison.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

“In Brazil. From my father. He was an archeologist. When I was a boy, he took me on an expedition to the Mato Grosso. He hoped to pick up the trail of Colonel Percy Fawcett.”

“Who’s he?”

“A British adventurer who vanished in 1925 while searching for El Dorado.”

“Like Indiana Jones?”

“Only the
real
thing.”

“Did you find him?”

“No, but I learned some useful skills. Like how to shrink a human head and how to make curare.”

Scarlett watched Mephisto mix bark scrapings from the poisonous
Strychnos toxifera
and menisperm plants with venom harvested from the fangs of tropical snakes. The concoction was boiled in water for a couple of days, then strained and evaporated to extract a dark paste with a bitter taste.

“Watch,” he said, lifting a frog from a jar.

Freed from captivity, the feisty amphibian hopped across the kitchen floor. Fetching it, Mephisto pricked it with a pin dipped in the paste. When he set it down so it could hop again, the frog collapsed after one leap.

“That’s strong curare,” he said with a satisfied smile.

“Who’s it for?” asked Scarlett.

“You,” Mephisto responded. “It’s what you’ll use to snuff Nick Craven.”

*     *     *

Now, as planned, the Mountie was dead from curare poisoning. His body, hiding the method, lay inside the trauma center. His killer stood in the shadows by a rear corner, where the outside walkway rounded the building from the front door to the backyard. Sheltered by the overhang of the roof, the walk bore only a smattering of snow. From there, Scarlett had a clear view of the untouched yard.

Abruptly, a square of light from the rear window fell across the snow. All Olympic venues and most hotels had backup power supplied by diesel generators or long-life batteries. So even in the midst of this debilitating blackout, some lights came on. Obviously, the trauma center was equipped for power cuts, and Gill had found the switch.

Scarlett watched a silhouette form on the square of white as Gill approached the window to draw the curtains shut. She wondered if the pathologist had figured out how the poisoning was done. Probably not. She hadn’t been in there long enough before the lights went out.

Soon, as one of too few doctors on hand, she’d emerge to help the casualties from the explosions. The shortest route from the trauma center to her car in the El Dorado lot was across this yard of virgin snow, then out through the back gate. That’s when Gill would die from an ice pick to her neck, making it obvious to DeClercq who had killed his lover.

Nick Craven was dead.

By now, an Iceman had killed Jenna and Becky Bond.

Gill was the only one left who could identify Mephisto. With her dead, it would be safe for him to come out of hiding.

Scarlett cocked an ear.

Was that a knock around front?

Her mind conjured up a knock-knock joke.

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Police.

Police who?

Police let us in. It’s cold out here!

The knock repeated.

Gill was at work in back.

Scarlett nodded.

Kill time, said the clock.

Guided by his flashlight and a map sketched by Hawksworth’s assistant, Jenny, Joseph Avacomovitch, with the Finnish sports medic in tow, followed the snowy sidewalk from the El Dorado to the trauma center’s front door.

It took three knocks for Gill to answer.

“Dr. Gill Macbeth,” Joe said by way of introduction, “meet Pekka Viljakainen.”

“I won’t shake your hand,” Gill replied, holding up a gilt-smeared latex glove.

The Finn grinned. His eyes were masked by yellow goggles designed to enhance dull light, and his angular chin sported stubble worn for style. He was the athletic type, the sort of jet-set skier you meet in top-notch resorts.

“Pekka’s not a doctor, but he excels at sports medicine,” explained Joe. “He’s offered to help.”

“Good,” said Gill, smiling back. “I’ll get my coat. But first, you must excuse us for a moment. Joe and I need to talk.”

They left the Finn on a chair by the front door and retreated along the hall to the makeshift morgue at the back. It opened on the left, halfway to the rear exit.

In every case, the corpse of a murder victim must be protected from contamination until the postmortem is done. Usually, it remains in place as crime scene investigators do an initial search. Sealed in a body bag, it’s then transported to the morgue by the body removal service, shadowed by a police car. There, it rests in a secure locker until the pathologist can perform an autopsy, at which time evidence samples are collected for forensic analysis.

Because Whistler was cut off from Vancouver, Gill had to improvise some. But the RCMP trauma center was a poor substitute for a hospital morgue. Nick’s gold-painted body was stretched out on an examination table, nothing protecting it except the lock on the door. In a crisis, you make do with what you’ve got. And now Gill was about to hand over the search for Nick’s cause of death to a forensic wizard from Moscow.

“My gut says Nick was poisoned with curare,” she said. “There’s no sign of overt trauma on his body. A needle prick would be covered by the lacquer.”

“Why curare?” asked Joe.

“Because I know Mephisto, and that’s how he operates. He’s obsessive-compulsive. Pieces must fit together. This headhunter stuff is aimed at Robert, because that’s what made him crack before. Mephisto is taunting him. Shrunken heads are the hallmark of the Jivaro, and they also used curare as arrow poison. So of all the poisons Mephisto could have chosen to dispatch Nick, that’s the one that fits.”

“What an ugly way to die.”

Curare’s an alkaloid that blocks impulses between our nerve axons and the contracting mechanism of skeletal muscles. It kills by asphyxia, by relaxing those muscles until they paralyze. The heart goes on beating even after breathing stops. The horror of curare poisoning is that victims remain aware of what’s happening to them as paralysis progresses and they slowly suffocate.

In effect, Nick was buried alive in his own body.

“I’ll find the wound. Trust me,” said Joe.

“The wound will be in his back,” said Gill.

“Why?” asked the Russian.

“Because Mephisto set a honey trap. Nick got picked up by some femme fatale in a bar, and his body was left naked on a bed. What better way for a killer to take a man by surprise than to jab him in the back during intercourse? He’d think it was her fingernails until it was too late. And she’d get the erotic thrill of feeling him expire in her clutches.”

Joe blew out a long sigh, then removed his hat and overcoat, and got down to business. Opening his Murder Bag, he pulled out a magnifying glass worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

“I’ll be going,” said Gill. “Call me with what you find.”

“Here,” said Joe, passing her another map drawn by Jenny. “It’s a shortcut through the backyard to the El Dorado lot.”

“I know the route. Having a chalet at Whistler makes me a local.”

Joe followed Gill into the hall, where she motioned Pekka toward her from his seat by the front door and donned her ski parka. Opening the rear door, she stepped out into the cold. The blizzard had faded enough to reveal the far gate. As Gill and the Finn began their trudge across the pristine yard, the deepening snow squeaked under their boots.

Joe shut the door and locked it.

From her hiding place in the shadows, Scarlett raised her ice pick for the kill.

The myth of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was inspired by cops who triumphed in winter weather. Sam Steele, the hard-assed lawman of the Klondike Gold Rush. The trackers who chased Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, across 150 snowbound miles of the Northwest Territories in February 1932. The crew of the
St. Roch
, under Sergeant Henry Larsen, who cracked through the polar ice in 1942, becoming the first men since Roald Amundsen to conquer the Northwest Passage.

There were still rugged cops like that in the Mounted Police, and the chief had two under his command. But Sergeant Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski had almost been stabbed to death, and he was still on leave with his wife, Brit, recovering. Inspector Bob “Ghost Keeper” George was a full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, who was more comfortable in the woods than in the city. Unfortunately, Ghost Keeper was stuck in Vancouver, having been left in charge in the absence of both DeClercq and Chandler.

“Mephisto’s playing us, G.K. Of that, I have no doubt,” DeClercq said into his cellphone as he peered over the shoulders of Hawksworth and Jenny to see what they’d pulled up onscreen. He had commandeered the office of the El Dorado’s hospitality manager, much to the annoyance of the hotelier, who was still whining about his “Going for the Gold” event. The man seemed unable to grasp that something more important than the Olympic Games was happening.

The chief wished he could slap him out of his economic hysteria.

“I don’t know how he killed Nick—Gill’s at work on that—but he lured him to a room booked by a company called Ecuador Exploration,” Robert said into the phone. “The hotel has pulled up everything it has on the company, and I’m about to send it to you. I need whatever you can find on them ASAP.”

The Mountie reached between Hawksworth and Jenny to hit the Send button.

“What in hell’s going on up there?” Ghost Keeper asked. “Reports say the highways north and south—”

“Hold on,” interrupted the chief. “Zinc’s been out of contact, but my call display says that’s him.” Switching from one inspector to another, he barked, “Where are you?”

“I’m on my way from Alpha Lake to join you, Chief. A skater slit Jenna Bond’s throat with his blade, then he grabbed Becky.”

“Is Jenna dead?”

“Yes. But Becky’s safe.”

“And the killer?”

“He’s dead. He fell through the ice as we shot it out. His body’s still in the lake.”

“Where’s Becky now?”

“She’s with me in my Rover. So is her mother’s body. She won’t let go of it.”

“I’ll meet you out front of the El Dorado Resort. If anyone tries to waylay you, shoot to kill.”

Robert switched back to Ghost Keeper. “First Nick,” he said, “and now Jenna Bond has been killed. Zinc foiled an attempt on the life of her daughter, but Mephisto is obviously out for revenge. He’s the mind behind Ecuador Exploration. Hopefully, you can track that company’s cyberspace dealings back to an address in Whistler. Meanwhile, I need a guard detail, armed to the teeth, to protect the girl against another attack. Get on the radio and round up a team. Have them out front of the El Dorado as soon as possible.”

“Will do,” confirmed the inspector.

Robert hung up and made for the door.

Behind him, Hawksworth asked, “Does that mean we can carry on with ‘Going for the Gold’?”

Forget about a slap.

The Mountie yearned to punch him.

*     *     *

The El Dorado Resort was trying to have it both ways. The Beautiful People demanded all the amenities of a five-star hotel, from beauty salons offering the latest styles and tints to ski shops selling gear so expensive that no one would dare use it on the slopes. The decor, however, harked back to the rustic days when this was London Mountain, known locally as Whistler because of the shrill sound made by the western hoary marmots living among its rocks. A century ago, when Myrtle and Alex Philip opened a fishing camp called the Rainbow Lodge, it was a three-day journey—by steamer, horse, and foot—up from Vancouver. From the pioneer photographs hung on the walls to the totem carvings decorating the lobby, the El Dorado was an imitation of the real thing. But if friends at home wanted proof that you were hardy enough to survive in this wilderness, a shop off the lobby would sell you a genuine Bullwinkle moose wearing Mountie garb.

Superimposed on all this “authentic” Canadiana was the essence of the Olympic Games. Banners invited one and all to the “Going for the Gold” event, where any schlub could rub shoulders with the champions of tomorrow. The banners were festooned with logos lauding the official sponsors for the Winter Games, including Coca-Cola, Petro-Canada, Panasonic, McDonald’s, 3M, and—rather tellingly—the Royal Canadian Mint and the B.C. Lottery Corporation.

Katt now knew every detail of the El Dorado’s lobby. After Napoleon’s walk, she’d waited just inside the entrance—ready to retreat if someone approached to complain about the dog—until Robert had returned with the gut-wrenching news that Nick was dead.

Ever since, she’d been crying quiet tears for the man who had seen her through Luna Darke’s death. Although DeClercq had taken her in after the carnage on Deadman’s Island, it was Nick who—having lost his own mom shortly afterwards—had truly understood her misery.

So now, while Robert was in the office of the hospitality manager, Katt mourned Nick as she and Napoleon paced the lobby, from the door to the Gilded Man pub to the Grand Ballroom at the far end. There, Katt could see a bartender constructing a pyramid out of what had to be hundreds of newly branded cans of Coke.

As an official sponsor of the Whistler games, Coca-Cola was also going for the gold.

Ka-ching!

When Robert emerged from Hawksworth’s office with his cell to his ear, Katt and Napoleon were gazing into a huge glass case displaying the three Olympic mascots in their many commercial forms: stuffed toys, T-shirts, ball caps. Whatever would make a buck. There was Sumi, with what appeared to be a colander on his head, the wings of a thunderbird, and the legs of a bear. A sign said Sumi liked skiing and hot chocolate. There was Miga, a sea-going “spirit bear” with a dorsal fin as a cowlick. A sign said Miga liked snowboarding and eating salmon. And there was Quatchi, an ear-muffed, mukluk-sporting sasquatch with a goatee, an inukshuk tattoo, and Olympic rings on his chest. A sign said he liked playing hockey and dreamed of becoming a world-famous goalie.

Weren’t they the cutest little profits you ever saw?

Katt frowned.

How spiritually depressing!

To think that what had once been a celebration of the prowess of amateur athletes had degenerated into a billion-dollar cash grab.

Get back to the basics and cut the crap, thought Katt.

She turned on hearing Robert’s approaching voice. His brow was furrowed with concern, and the cell still hugged his ear.

“I can’t reach Gill. That’s not like her, Joe. How long ago did she leave the morgue?” The chief listened, then said, “I’ll give her five more minutes.”

“What’s up?” Katt asked.

“Come with me.” Robert led the teenager and the dog through the revolving door to the hotel’s front entrance. The street was filled with frightened skiers straggling in from the avalanches, some so exhausted from their struggle down the mountain that they were using their equipment as crutches.

“Jenna has been murdered,” Robert informed Katt. “Zinc saved Becky, but she’s traumatized. He’s on his way here with her now. A guard team will drive her to Gill’s chalet for safekeeping. Until I know what’s going on, I want Becky hidden away. Not in the middle of the crowd in Whistler Village.”

A Range Rover came into view.

“Here’s Zinc now.”

Not long after, a four-wheel-drive bearing the insignia of the RCMP also pulled into the loop.

“The guard team,” Robert said. Then he saw who it was and rolled his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Katt asked.

“Nothing,” he lied.

The cop who climbed out of the driver’s seat was Sergeant Rachel Kidd. The cop riding shotgun was Corporal Rick Scarlett.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the chief’s entire plan was overheard. For one of the seemingly exhausted skiers, slumped nearby for a much-needed cigarette, was the mercenary who’d blown the bridges to cut Whistler off from outside help. His toque, caked white with snow, hid an earplug that picked up every word Robert said to Katt with a parabolic mike.