Red Snow (14 page)

Rick Scarlett literally rode shotgun from the El Dorado Resort to Gill Macbeth’s chalet. Gripped in his hands was a Remington shotgun loaded with four shells. Beside him, wedged against the door, was a Winchester bolt-action rifle with a four-cartridge clip. Both he and Rachel Kidd had nine-mills holstered on their hips.

“Near as I can tell, we’re there,” said Rick.

Rachel eased the Rover off the snowy road and let it claw them up Gill’s drive. From the El Dorado, at the base of the mountains to the north, they’d snaked south through the blacked-out village and across the deserted highway to this upscale housing estate. The flat light of winter was fading fast, as they slipped through a landscape that was assorted hues of blue.

“Park here,” Rick said, jerking his thumb at a shoveled clearing that bulged off the driveway, downhill from the chalet.

Rachel pulled in.

Thick snowflakes tumbled through the somber gloom and mottled the Mounties’ winter wear as they got out of the Rover. White speckled their muskrat hats, heavy storm coats, blue scarves, black gloves, and calf-high boots. Slinging the Winchester over his shoulder, Rick swept the shotgun down the drive.

“Climb out, kids,” Rachel said, “and follow me.”

They trudged up the hill through untouched drifts, their boots kicking up puffs of powder that whitened them from head to toe. The evergreens alongside the driveway resembled alpine huts, their sloping branches shucking snow before the weight could break them. Twilight cloaked the chalet with fear.

“I’m scared,” said Becky, clutching Katt’s hand.

“I’m not,” the teenager responded. “Let’s make snow angels.” She fell back, arms spread, and fanned her limbs, prompting the younger girl to follow suit.

Gill’s chalet was a sturdy log house, its upper story tented by a steep, dormered roof. A thaw between storms had lined the eaves with icicles. By now, the light was so dim that Rachel needed a flashlight to see where to insert the key.

Inside, the power failure had killed the lights and the electric heat. The beam of Rachel’s torch swept the interior, picking out details: the stone hearth, a wood-burning stove, leather furniture surrounding a low coffee table. A staircase ascended to the bedrooms upstairs. Gill’s chalet was bigger than most people’s homes.

The first thing Rachel did was ignite a kerosene lamp. It burnished the woodwork with a bronze glow. Then she set about preparing a fire in the glass-windowed stove.

“Do you have any toys?” Katt asked Becky.

“A coloring book.”

“Where?”

“In my backpack. With my skates.”

Outside, Rick stood with his back to the chalet, sweeping the area one more time. The cold and the darkness, the darkness and the cold. Ice-crusted trees and snow were all he could see. Whistler seemed to slumber in the depths of hibernation.

Satisfied they were safe, he stepped inside, then closed and locked the door.

*     *     *

The mercenaries huddled in the white Pathfinder were camouflaged by white gloves, white pants, white boots, and white masks in the hoods of white parkas. Like ghosts in a ghost car, the five killers crept through this crystalline landscape, the headlights of their vehicle sparking off the whirling, swirling, twirling white flakes.

Now you see them, now you don’t.

The Iceman in the passenger’s seat held the receiver for the GPS tracker on the bumper of Zinc’s Rover. Thanks to this technology, the soldiers of fortune had been able to shadow the Mounties and the girls from the El Dorado to the not-so-safe safe house without fear of being spotted. They were armed with Uzis, and each also packed a Glock pistol with a silencer.

Pfft. Pfft.
You’re dead.

No fuss, no muss.

“They’ve stopped moving,” the Iceman said, pointing to the static blip onscreen.

In addition to the weapons they all carried, the Siberian had a mountain climber’s ice ax in a shoulder holster. The ax was a double-headed tomahawk with one head like a chisel. Climbers used it to chop steps into hard snow. The other head was a sharp-pointed pick used to hammer a hold into ice, and the tip of the handle was spiked with a deadly ferrule.

Joseph Avacomovitch wasn’t the only one steeped in Russian history. The Siberian knew that Leon Trotsky had been killed by an assassin armed with an ice ax on August 20, 1940.

Inspired by that, he’d made the mountain climber’s tool his weapon of choice.

As long as he got the heads to torment DeClercq, Mephisto wasn’t averse to a little skull cracking.

Ice Ax’s mission was to kill the girls.

Decades ago, a frantic call had come in to 911.

“He’s got a gun! He’s gone berserk! He’s going house to house to kill his neighbors! Oh God! Not
me
!” The sound of a door being kicked in was followed by gunshots and then silence.

The first cop on the scene was shot dead as he stepped out of his patrol car.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

The dead cop, shot in the head, was sprawled half in and half out of his cruiser. Discarded leaves stuck to the spreading pool of blood. The wail of a siren shattered the autumn afternoon as the backup police car screeched to a halt. Before those officers could swing open their doors, the madman sprayed them with machine-gun fire, blowing windshield shards at their startled faces.

In his mind, the gunman was back in Vietnam, caught in the chaos of Pinkville on March 16, 1968. Pinkville. The codename for the hamlet of My Lai, where, according to military intelligence, the gooks were lurking in tunnels under the huts of their families. Charlie Company’s mission was to search and destroy. “Go in there aggressively, engage the enemy, and wipe them out for good,” they were told. Burn the houses, kill the livestock, destroy the food, and pollute the wells.

Fucking A!

These draftees had been dropped in ’Nam just three months earlier. Already, they’d lost five to mines and booby traps. Here was a chance to pay the Viet Cong back with higher body counts and kill ratios.

At shortly after eight in the morning, they’d stormed Pinkville with firearms, grenades, and bayonets, shooting, blasting, or spiking anything that moved. Quickly, the massacre had spiraled out of control. Smoke billowed from thatched homes the GIs set ablaze, turning the rice paddies into hell on earth. Women were gang-raped, and entire families were lined up in ditches and mowed down by furious gunfire. A praying old man was shot by a crying soldier. The slaughter heaped carnage five feet high.

“It’s getting away!” a soldier yelled, pointing at a baby trying to crawl out of a ditch.

His buddy took a shot.

The shot missed.

Those watching laughed.

The GI moved closer and fired again.

The shot missed.

More laughs.

Finally, pissed off, the errant marksman strode over and plugged the baby at point-blank range, then tossed it back into the ditch.

Gooks that refused to come out of their huts were blown out with hand grenades. Body parts hung from the silkwood and papaya trees like Christmas ornaments. The sun cast macabre shadows on the dirt as trophy hunters roamed among the bodies, harvesting scalps, tongues, hands, or ears.

Whup, whup, whup
…

A helicopter descended as the psychotic soldier watched a pair of GIs carve the words “C Company” into the chest of a mutilated Vietnamese. Even before he turned, he somehow knew it was
them
: the three traitors who’d landed their chopper at My Lai and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to stop them from saving the enemy.

“Turncoats,” he cursed, about to open fire on the bleeding hearts.

That’s when a sniper in the hovering police helicopter took a shot that hit the madman between the eyes, dropping him like a chestnut in the gutter of his terrified neighborhood.

The tale his neighbors later told homicide detectives was of a paranoid teenage draftee who’d come back from Vietnam to find himself a pariah to those on both sides of the political spectrum. Counterculture protesters had branded him a war criminal, while conservative patriots blamed those at My Lai for turning public opinion against the war.

In the end, the troubled vet had been unable to hold a job. He’d married his childhood sweetheart, and they’d had a son. But she’d eventually fled from his abusive drinking, and he’d turned into a nasty recluse hiding away in his dead mother’s rundown house. With all that pressure seething inside, was it any wonder he’d snapped and wreaked vengeance on his neighbors?

The cops who later searched the madman’s home found the pigsty they expected: piles of dirty dishes, cartons of crusty takeout food, and empty booze bottles. The door to the cellar was padlocked, so they used a crowbar to bust it open.

Christ, what a stench!

One corner of the basement had been converted into a “tiger cage” like those found on Con Son Island, off the coast of Vietnam. Built by French colonialists, the pens were later used by South Vietnamese torturers to break political prisoners. This cage was a concrete container, five feet wide, nine feet long, and six feet high. Steps led to a mesh catwalk that doubled as a roof. The stench—now recognizable as the smell of decaying human flesh—came from the cage.

The first cop down to the cellar followed his flashlight beam up the steps to the grate. Straddling the bars, he shone his torch into the dark, dirty, hot, humid pit—and illuminated the remains of a decomposing female on the floor. A matted tangle of hair adhered to her scalp, but the flesh of her face had been gnawed away. The ghastly skull, with its toothy grin, glared up at the cop. The rest of the corpse was a bloody mush of half-chewed organs and jutting bones, as if a scavenging jackal had been chased away from its meal.

Obviously, the madman’s wife hadn’t escaped from her husband’s abuse after all.

The spooked cop jerked, rattling the grate, when something down there moved. His flashlight beam swarmed with flies as it slid along a chain bolted to the floor. At the end of the chain was a shackle clamped around the ankle of a naked, gore-smeared boy. The cowering child was curled up in a ball, his skin pocked with cigarette burns. To survive, he had been reduced to feasting off his mother.

The army dog tags around the boy’s neck were strung with a dozen Vietnamese ears.

*     *     *

The child psychologists assessing the traumatized orphan were dismayed by how serene the boy became after he was released from the tiger cage. It was as if his every memory from before that moment had been erased. He was a walking example of tabula rasa: the theory that individuals are born with no built-in mental content, and that knowledge is built up gradually from life experiences. In the boy’s case, however, the blank slate dated not from birth but from the day he was freed from the cage.

“Imagine a stage that hides a chamber of horrors,” said one of the shrinks. “The boy has no recollection of what happened to him. He’s like an actor who’s forgotten what the stage hides, so he’s fooling both himself and his audience.”

To this day, Mephisto still lived on that stage.

And when he looked in the mirror, he had no memory of that tiger cage buried in a corner of his mind.

Standing in the snowdrifts outside the makeshift morgue, Joseph Avacomovitch was in his element. The forensic scientist had an impossible crime to challenge his brain, and solving it would help Robert DeClercq, the man who, more than anyone else, had helped Joe adapt after he defected.

“Gill and Pekka were the only ones who crossed this yard. No one stepped in their tracks or marked the snow in any way. Both victims were stabbed in the back while standing, then pitched forward, the way I found them. A single wound to the top of his spine either paralyzed the Finn or killed him instantly. Gill was stabbed three times in the back with the ice pick that’s still in her heart. Do you agree that’s what happened?”

“Yes,” said Robert. “But it doesn’t make sense.”

“We’re missing something.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So first things first,” said Joe. “We know the killer brought three things with him—or her.”

“Or they. There could be more than one.”

“The ice pick,” said the Russian, indicating the handle that jutted from Gill’s back.

“The ski pole,” added the Mountie, glancing in the direction of the morgue.

“And the severed head. Before we do anything else—including moving Gill and Pekka—let’s examine the hardware the killer left behind for clues.”

Gill’s wound had frozen around the ice pick, so the investigators removed the spike from her heart with difficulty. Then they retraced their steps to the edge of the yard. There, Joe pulled the ski pole—with the head still mounted on top—from the ground. Having wrapped the head in a plastic bag, he trailed the chief through the rear entrance to the morgue. Pausing in the hall that linked the front and back doors, Joe held the pole like a spear, then gave the bagged head a twist to try separating it from the handle.

Shewww
…

A streak shot past Robert’s ear and pierced the wall to his left in a spew of plaster. It took a moment for Joe to grasp that he had almost skewered his friend.

The chief glanced over his shoulder and asked, “Is this the missing piece?”

The ski pole was more like a headhunter’s blowgun. Instead of blowing in one end to propel a dart, though, you activated a compressed-air mechanism hidden within the hollow metal shaft. Twisting the handle—as Joe had done—shot a projectile down the tube and out a hole at the tip. The spike jutting from the wall behind the chief had a taut nylon line leading back to the blowgun, like the tether on an underwater spear gun.

“Check it for blood,” said the Russian.

The Mountie advanced to examine the projectile in the wall. The metal was streaked red. “Affirmative,” said the chief.

“Let’s see what happens in reverse,” said Joe. “Better move along the hall in case there’s any backlash.”

Robert stepped toward the front door.

When Joe turned the head back to where it had been, the line whipped back into the shaft, yanking the ice pick with it. It reminded him of a tape measure retracting or a fly-fisherman backhanding a cast.

Now, except for the grisly trophy on the handle, the ski pole looked like any other on the slopes.

“You’re right,” said Joe as the chief closed the gap between them. “There were two killers: Pekka and the phantom. The phantom must have been lurking along the path that skirts the side of the trauma center.”

Robert picked up the narrative, as was their style. The friends had worked as a team on numerous murder cases. “After moving into position near the back door, he or she aimed the blowgun at the Finn’s spine.”

Joe nodded.

“Meanwhile, as Gill and Pekka reached a point halfway across the yard, the Finn stabbed her three times in rapid succession. He left the ice pick stuck in her heart as Gill pitched forward into the snow.”

Robert flinched but quickly recovered. To quell his emotions, he focused on the puzzle. “That’s when the phantom took Pekka by surprise,” he said. “Gill’s killer didn’t know that he was marked for death, too.”

“The phantom fired the blowgun as Pekka stood over Gill’s body.” The Russian’s eyes gleamed with the thrill of the chase. “The spike stabbed him at the base of his skull. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s poisoned with curare. As the pick got yanked back by its tether line, the Finn pitched forward beside Gill. The second killer left no footprints, and if blood was cast off as the spike recoiled, the snowfall soon covered it.”

“Leaving the ski pole behind as a mount for the head is the sort of arrogant taunt Mephisto favors,” said the chief. “He feeds off our stumbling over how smart he is.”

“So where do we go from here?” asked Joe.

“The first thing we need to know is
how
Nick died. Zinc Chandler—my second-in-command—is hoping to flush out the woman who gave Nick the room key. I don’t want him falling prey to the same outcome.”

“Leave it to me,” said Joe.

“I can’t leave you here alone with who knows how many psychos on the loose.”

“If I was a target, would they not have killed me by now?”

“I don’t know, Joe. I really don’t like the idea of leaving you without protection. But this manpower shortage has us in a bind. There’s literally no one to spare.”

“Robert, I appreciate your concern, but I’ll be fine. Trust me.”

“Okay. But I’ll get you some help as soon as I can. And I don’t want to leave Gill and Pekka’s bodies out there any longer than—”

The chief stopped talking.

“What’s wrong?” asked the Russian.

“It’s clear from how this scheme has unfolded so far that Mephisto’s henchmen are armed with all kinds of high-tech gadgets.” The chief was thinking aloud.

“And?” Joe pressed.

“Just before the girls left for the safe house, a skier fell down, out of sight, at the Rover’s front bumper.”