Red Snow Read online

  About the Author

  Criminal lawyer MICHAEL SLADE has acted in over one hundred murder cases. His specialty is the law of insanity. He argued the last death penalty case in Canada’s highest court. Backed by his forensic experience, Slade’s Special X Mountie Noir thrillers fuse the genres of police and legal procedure, whodunit and impossible crime, suspense, history, and horror. Slade was guest of honor at both the Bloody Words crime convention and the World Horror Convention. As Time Out puts it, “A thin line separates crime and horror, and in Michael Slade’s thrillers, the demarcation vanishes altogether.” Slade was guest speaker at the international Police Leadership Conference and several RCMP regimental dinners. As Reader’s Digest puts it, “The Slade books have developed a strong following among police officers because of their strict adherence to proper police procedure.” For the stories behind his plots, visit Slade’s Morgue at www.specialx.net.

  Also by Michael Slade

  Headhunter

  Ghoul

  Cutthroat

  Ripper

  Zombie

  Primal Scream

  Burnt Bones

  Hangman

  Death’s Door

  Bed of Nails

  Swastika

  Kamikaze

  Crucified

  RED SNOW

  Michael Slade

  RED SNOW

  All Rights Reserved © 2010 by HEADHUNTER HOLDINGS LTD.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Headhunter Holdings Ltd.

  Originally published by Penguin Canada.

  The poem “Whisky or Whiskey?” by Stanley Bruce reprinted with permission.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Steve Pohl

  Epigraph

  And, as his strength

  Failed him at length,

  He met a pilgrim shadow—

  “Shadow,” said he,

  “Where can it be—

  This land of Eldorado?”

  “Over the Mountains

  Of the Moon,

  Down the Valley of the Shadow,

  Ride, boldly ride,”

  The shade replied,—

  “If you seek for Eldorado!”

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE, “ELDORADO”

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: White Gold

  Chapter Two: Bushwhacked

  Chapter Three: El Dorado

  Chapter Four: So This Cop Walks Into a Bar …

  Chapter Five: Snow Bunnies

  Chapter Six: Tsantsa

  Chapter Seven: Pitcher Plant

  Chapter Eight: Waif

  Chapter Nine: Winter Heat

  Chapter Ten: Venus Flytrap

  Chapter Eleven: From Russia, with Hate

  Chapter Twelve: Biohazard

  Chapter Thirteen: Hell Dorado

  Chapter Fourteen: Blue Murder

  Chapter Fifteen: Shrunken Head

  Chapter Sixteen: Gilded Man

  Chapter Seventeen: Slit

  Chapter Eighteen: Murder Bag

  Chapter Nineteen: Thin Ice

  Chapter Twenty: Stopwatch

  Chapter Twenty-One: Burning Bridges

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Ice Pick

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Curare

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Eyewitness

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Lost City of Z

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Headhunters

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Phantom Footprints

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Vamps

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Ice Ax

  Chapter Thirty: My Lai

  Chapter Thirty-One: Blowgun

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Crossbow

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Honey Trap

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Wet Job

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Umbrella Assassin

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Hot Love

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: “Die … Frame …”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Naked Prey

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Jaws

  Chapter Forty: Venom

  Chapter Forty-One: Conquistador

  Chapter Forty-Two: Bloodhound

  Chapter Forty-Three: Shattered Glass

  Chapter Forty-Four: Skeleton

  Chapter Forty-Five: Player on the Other Side

  Chapter Forty-Six: Dogs of War

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Winter Warfare

  Chapter Forty-Eight: King of the Royal Mounted

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Black Ice

  Chapter Fifty: Going for the Gold

  Chapter Fifty-One: Morph

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Endgame

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Teeth

  Author’s Note

  White Gold

  Whistler, British Columbia

  December 2009

  “Yippie kay-yah! Powder super G!”

  It had puked the night before, so white gold sprayed behind him in a big rooster tail as he rode his board down four thousand vertical feet of virgin snow. “Puking” was snow hound slang for a hard snowfall, and all those Olympic hopefuls who’d been lured to Whistler for the upcoming weekend’s trial runs were currently snapping on skis or boards to schralp both mountains. “Schralp” as in laying down tracks till the fat conditions were gone. Call it OCD, but what the hell. For Boomer, the thrill of boarding was in going where no one had boarded before, just him and a landscape of untracked powder, free from the affront of some yahoo’s name peed in the snow.

  “Yee-hah! Ride ’em, cowboy!”

  Boomer had spearheaded the throng, taking the first lift up to the summit that morning. From there, he’d had his pick of over eight thousand skiable acres, including three glaciers, twelve alpine bowls, two hundred trails, and forty lifts. As any boarder will tell you, “Friends don’t have friends on powder days.” It’s every man for himself in a post-snowfall feeding frenzy. The Olympic herd had complicated things, however, for they were all top-notch, and each one yearned to conquer a virgin run. As the day progressed, the white gold had begun to mine out.

  Time for poaching.

  A poacher was a boarder who cruised the backcountry, that fabled realm beyond the boundary ropes, where only the laws of nature applied. The ski patrol had closed this face because wind-whipped snow deposited on the lee side of its ridges had formed unstable tongues of ice. What looked like meringue was really a time bomb set to collapse on those below. But Boomer knew a run that bypassed the cornice hazards, and he felt compelled to shred that chute after every big dump.

  “Yabba dabba doo! Tarzan doesn’t pay taxes!”

  So here he came, riding the run as free as a dude can be, a poacher ripping through “pow” on waves of white. His weight on his back foot and leaning into lazy turns, Boomer carved wide arcs down to the glades. Wisps of snow whipped his boots and lassoed his bent knees. Small avalanches of slough followed him into the trees. The only noise was the sound of snow flattening under his board. Then the trees closed in and the run plunged steeply, forcing Boomer to slash across the fall line with air between his turns.

  Swoosh …

  Cold, crisp wind rushed past his ears, the snow parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. All board runs weren’t created equal, and as this run went from eighties rad to über cool, his speed increased.

  Whap! Whap!

  A switch or two revved things up, then …

  Shwwt!

 
; “Hi-ho, Silver!”

  Boomer rode his ribbon of white gold down the crook of the gully. Ahead, the chute ended in a sudden cliff drop. There, this poacher would abruptly transform into a huckster, a boarder with a penchant for hurling himself off bone-breaking precipices.

  High noon. The sun overhead beamed into the gully, and Boomer chased his shadow down the chute. In a second, he would launch off the lip of the gully like a ballistic missile, hanging for long, effortless moments in thin air. Reaching down to grab his board, he’d drop, drop, drop, until he landed steep, smooth, and soft at the bottom of the jump.

  Pulling himself into a tuck as he approached the lip, Boomer saw his shadow vanish over the cliff face. Then his board soared into the bright blue yonder, his feet sliced off cleanly above the ankles. Propelled as far as momentum could carry it, his headless body spewed blood across the powder. He, however, lagged behind, hanging in midair until gravity yanked his severed head face down into red snow.

  Bushwhacked

  Corporal Nick Craven had no trouble tracking the path of contamination to the crime scene. Normally, most bodies were found sprawled on a patch of floor or ground. The killer’s route to and from the corpse was a potential gold mine of clues, so the Mounties would cool their spurs until the Ident techs had created a clean corridor for them to follow.

  But no need here.

  This case had opened with two lovers having an adulterous nooner. A premature climax resulted when a snowboard smashed through the window and knocked the man unconscious in mid hump. The woman started screaming and scrambled from the tangled sheets to call 911. The medics who responded took one look at the severed feet riding the wayward board and concluded there was a man uphill with no way down.

  Thus, the ski patrol was called to the rescue.

  There was always some fool running into trouble, a backcountry maverick who thought hazard signs didn’t apply to him. A boarder could trip over a buried tree branch at a thousand miles an hour and break a leg or two. Or veer off course and tumble headfirst into a tree well, suffocating himself.

  This, however, was new. A tale to tell at happy hour in Whistler’s après-ski bars. What could slice a snowboarder off at the shins?

  The ski patrol found out.

  That’s why the Mounties had been called.

  And since Nick was the best skier among the cops currently posted to Security at Whistler, he was the one now shadowing the path of contamination to the crime scene.

  For once, there was no need for Ident to mark the route. The Mountie was free to take any path untouched by the tracks of Boomer’s board.

  No tracks meant no forensic clues.

  With his blond hair and prosthetic ear tucked under his black toque, the corporal followed the line a snowball would travel if it rolled down through the glades to the gully. At the chute, where both flanks were thick with trees, he snowplowed over the swath the ski patrol had churned up. Luckily, he knew this wasn’t the route the killer had taken, for the ski patrol had already found snowshoe tracks leading down one side of the chute to where the trap was set.

  Ski tips together and heels spread, Nick plowed down to the body, which had come to rest just this side of the ledge that would have launched the boarder into the air.

  The ski patrollers guarding the corpse were known as Moe and Curly. Moe was Moe’s real name, and Curly, of course, had curly hair. There was a Larry, too, but he was sick with the flu. The fourth member of the patrol, off on another rescue, was named Gene. The Stooges, however, had dubbed him Iggy.

  “Stop!” Curly shouted as Nick approached. Waving one arm of his ski patrol jacket, red with white crosses on the chest and upper sleeve, he stood uphill from the body, which was sprawled in a drift of bloody snow. “Want to lose your head?”

  Nick dug in his edges. “Fill me in,” he replied.

  “Boomer got bushwhacked.”

  “Boomer?” said Nick. His breath billowed out like a dialogue bubble in a cartoon.

  “Dominick Ricci. Everyone called him Boomer. His dad was one of the Crazy Canucks.”

  Young and wild, with a kamikaze flair, the Crazy Canucks had burst upon the European ski scene in the 1970s. With a fearlessness that knew no bounds, the Canadians raced downhill as fast as they could, scoring fifteen World Cup wins, and even laying claim to the downhill title that Europe had never lost. A witness to their antics—which included as many spectacular falls as it did spectacular wins—had once muttered about those “crazy Canucks,” and the name stuck.

  “You sure it’s Boomer?”

  “Yep,” Curly said. Ice was caked to the curls hanging stiffly to his shoulders. “On powder days, Boomer always rides this run. The season’s pass clipped to his jacket says it’s him. We tracked his bleeper and found this.”

  Worn by off-piste snow hounds, a bleeper transmits a high-pitched signal that can be used to rescue mavericks lost in the backcountry or buried beneath avalanches. A radio transceiver homes in on the beacon and calculates its location.

  “Show me what happened,” said Nick.

  Releasing the skis from his boots, he swapped them for snowshoes and tailed Curly down the gully to where Moe stood beside a warning barrier fashioned from crossed skis. Although his face was browned by a tanning parlor, Moe looked exhausted from what Nick suspected were too many nights entertaining snow bunnies.

  Ah yes, Whistler!

  Sex, drugs, and white gold.

  “The killer descended from there,” said Curly, pointing up through the trees. “You can see the line of snowshoe tracks leading down from the ridge to the trap.”

  “How do you get to the ridge?”

  “Ski down from the peak till the treeline becomes a dead end. It’s dangerous because the route passes under one of the cornice hazards that has closed this face permanently.”

  “A poor run for a trap,” said Nick.

  “Not if you knew that Boomer poached. On powder days, he’d invariably shred this run.”

  “Who knew that?”

  “Regulars at the Gilded Man. Those who haunt the pub call this Boomer’s Run.”

  “And the ski patrol?”

  “Sure. Boomer wasn’t a fool. We don’t sweep closed slopes when the sun goes down, so he always carried a bleeper and notified us before boarding here. If we didn’t hear from him within a few hours, two of us would ski Boomer’s Run.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Nah. This run has no cornice hazards. The slope’s closed because the surrounding runs do.”

  “I meant that you could have run into the trap, too. Maybe Boomer was bait for the ski patrol.”

  Curly frowned. “Why?”

  “Who knows? Motives for murder vary as much as the personalities of the killers.”

  “You think we were the intended victims?”

  “Most likely not. But I want your input into who might have done this. Let’s assume the killer knows that Boomer chutes this run. He—or she—skis to the ridge above the gully, then snowshoes down through the trees. Show me the trap.”

  Curly ushered the Mountie around the makeshift barrier of crossed skis to a pair of trees flanking the lip that would launch a poacher into space. The sun no longer shone into the depths of the gully, but despite the rising shadow line, Nick easily spotted the two blades strung across the chute. The lower was a cutlass wedged into the tree trunks just above the surface of the bloody snow. The upper, no wider than a tape measure, crossed the path at what would have been the throat level of a boarder pulling himself into a tuck to shoot off the ledge.

  Shewww …

  Nick imagined he was Boomer roaring down the gully. Ahead, he saw the blue sky and a momentary glint of sunlight off steel. The upper blade slipped under his chin and slit through his neck like a knife through butter. The cutlass below thwacked his shins. The snowboard, with both feet still attached, soared off the ledge and kept on skidding until it shattered the cabin window below. The headless, footless body vanished into scarlet mist.
The human brain can remain conscious after beheading for up to a minute. The last thing Boomer would have seen as his head somersaulted to the snow was a dark figure emerging from the trees.

  “Where’s the head?” Nick asked.

  “It landed there,” said Curly. He pointed to an indent in the snow. “See where the snowshoes switch back to skis? The killer took the head and skied off the ledge.”

  El Dorado

  They, too, had come for the gold.

  The conquistadors.

  Drawn to the Amazon rainforest by Christopher Columbus, who said: “Gold is the most exquisite of all things. Whoever possesses gold can acquire all that he desires in the world. Truly, for with gold he can gain entrance for his soul into paradise.”

  Cortez conquered the Aztecs, taking gold from Montezuma, their chief, in Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. Pizarro subjugated the Incas, forcing their ruler, Atahualpa, to buy his own life with a room filled with gold. Then he’d executed him anyway. From these South American natives, the Spaniards heard the legend of el hombre dorado, “the gilded man.” El Dorado. They were told that in a ceremony at Lake Guatavita, near Bogota, the Muisca had smeared the naked body of their chief with pitch and covered him with gold dust until he shone from head to foot. On a raft made of rushes, the gilded man and several masked shamans drifted across the blue waters to the center of the lake. There, El Dorado offered the heap of gold at his feet to the lake god, then plunged into the icy water himself to rinse the gilt from his skin.