Red Snow Read online

  Now to make it a tsantsa. A shrunken head.

  He carried Boomer’s flaccid face to the sauna off the rear bathroom. When he pulled open the wooden door, the blast of heat was as dry as a desert wind. The skin had shrunk, but Boomer’s mane had not, so the killer hung the trophy by its hair from a ceiling hook and left it to dehydrate in the warmth.

  “Enjoy the spa,” he said.

  Returning to the kitchen, the man selected round stones of various diameters from a metal box, then arranged them around a burner on the stove. Next, he partially filled a frying pan with sand meant to grit icy sidewalks and provide traction for snowbound cars. Molding a tsantsa from flayed flesh required the skill of a chef.

  Poof! Poof!

  Igniting both burners, the cook left the stones and the sand to heat.

  By the time he’d retrieved the head from the sauna, the skin was dry enough—still pliable, but not squishy. He set it down on the kitchen table, flanking it with several tools instead of the usual knife, fork, and spoon. Then he lit a candle for macabre atmosphere.

  Flick.

  Out went the kitchen lights. As darkness closed in around him, he was back in the Amazon.

  He fantasized he was Jivaro.

  As a boy, he’d been led on a spirit quest by his headhunting father. The rainy season was at its height, and the jungle was steaming. Fog rolled in as they approached the waterfall, and mist choked the undergrowth the way the vines and tendrils did the branches overhead. Required to fast, he could drink only tobacco juice. When they reached the tumbling river, his father fed him nightshade to help him hallucinate and acquire his arutam.

  Back and forth they paced, the boy’s mind swimming in delirium until he saw a huge disembodied head. Running as hard as he could with his arm outstretched, he touched the vision sought by his spirit quest. As it exploded into a fireball, it filled him with an overwhelming desire to kill.

  Suddenly, he was a man.

  From that point forward, he would hunt heads.

  “The power you feel,” his father explained, “is the spirit of a wakani, an ancestor. Arutam will protect you from injury, disease, and most attacks. If you’re killed by an enemy, your protective spirit will avenge your death, hunting down your killer and destroying him.

  “Blood revenge,” stressed his father.

  “If you kill an enemy who has arutam, his protective spirit will come after you. To paralyze that vengeful ghost, you must trap it inside a tsantsa. If you do that, you will thwart his blood revenge and add the power of his arutam to your own. Turn enough heads into tsantsas and you will be kakaram, a powerful one. A warrior invincible to attacks by anything.”

  So here he sat, with gloom encircling him, shrinking Boomer’s head down to the size of a fist. With a knife, he scraped the inside of the half-dried skin clean of tissue. He pulled the upper lashes down to shut the gaping eyeholes, then stitched the lids tight with black cord to blind any vengeful spirit. After skewering two-inch splinters through the lips, he lashed them together like sails cinched to deck cleats. The nose and ear holes were plugged with cotton. Finally, he sewed together the slit up the back of the head. Boomer now looked like an empty rubber glove.

  “Gotcha!” the killer said to the spirit trapped inside. “You won’t get out.”

  Donning an oven mitt to insulate his hand, he carried the trophy to the stove and used a pair of tongs to drop the largest stone from the burner into the gruesome pouch. The stench of barbecued flesh wafted to his nostrils. To guard the skin from scorching, he rolled the stone around like a gambler tumbling dice in a box. Minutes later, he gripped the head by its hair with his bare hand and dumped the cooling stone into the mitt’s palm.

  As each subsequent stone decreased in size, so too did Boomer’s face. Eventually, even pebbles were too big for the task, so the killer stuffed the head with sand from the pan hissing on the stove. The hot grit filled crevices in the ears and nose the stones couldn’t reach. Every four minutes the killer replaced the sand, and as the trophy shrunk to the size of an orange, he molded the features of Boomer’s boneless face to maintain his likeness.

  “Almost done,” he said. “Is that a tight fit? You’ll never escape to haunt me, so get used to it. Vengeance will not be yours. I own you body and soul.”

  Removing the splinters, he dried the lips with the press of a heated knife, then stitched them with a black thong that he could ornament with beads and fray into tassels. The only feature that hadn’t shrunk was the hair, so it now seemed three times as long as it was when Boomer lost his head.

  “Aren’t you hirsute?” said the killer.

  Normally, a Jivaro would rub powdered charcoal into the skin to blacken it and encase the spirit in darkness. But that would undermine what the headhunter had planned, so instead he reached for the glittering gilt of El Dorado …

  A noise foreign to the jungle interrupted him. It was the sound of a door opening into his psychosis.

  Poof!

  The psycho morphed back to the here and now.

  “I wish I had a hotrod,” the killer said, “so I could hang you from the rearview mirror.”

  He set the shrunken head down on the oilcloth, then blew out the candle. Pushing away from the table, he opened the door into the living room of the chalet. As he stepped into the glare, he saw himself reflected in the full-length mirror.

  His ugliness made him wince.

  Not long ago, he’d been a strikingly handsome man. But then he’d tried to outwit the Mounted Police with radical plastic surgery, and the doctor had botched the job.

  Now look at him!

  The face he saw in the mirror rivaled that of the shrunken head in the kitchen.

  “How’d it go?” he asked the woman shucking off her coat.

  “I’ve hooked a Mountie,” she said.

  “Which one?”

  “Nick Craven.”

  The headhunter grinned. Any Mountie would have fitted his plan, but Craven was a bonus.

  “When do you reel him in?”

  “Ten o’clock tonight.”

  “Good. Come here,” he said, “and I’ll show you what you’ll use to kill him.”

  Pitcher Plant

  “Scarlett” had been her stage name for as long as she could remember. It came from her mother’s obsession with the movie Gone with the Wind. “Fiddle-dee-dee!” her mom would say as she dressed her daughter up as a Southern belle for child beauty pageants. And whenever they lost to some “little tramp,” her snarl of rejection was always the same: “Tomorrow is another fuckin’ day!”

  Even then, the girl was aware of her sexual hold over men. She’d seen the ogling eyes of those who attended the various pageants, had noticed how they fidgeted when she performed the vamp routine her mother had taught her.

  “Let’s play motorboat.”

  Her stepfather’s name was Hake, but her mom called him Rhett. He was a cokehead who constantly hatched lowlife scams to make a buck, though he succeeded only once. Motorboat was the game they always played before Scarlett went to bed. With one hand, Hake would grab her around the side of her chest, below the armpit; his other hand would slip down to fasten onto her thigh. Like a weightlifter doing curls, he’d raise her horizontally in front of his face, nuzzling his mouth into the gap where the top and bottom of her pajamas met. “Bbbbrrr.” His lips would vibrate against her naked tummy, mimicking the sound a boat motor makes, while his little finger tickled her crotch.

  Fittingly, her mom had died on Scarlett O’Hara. Having taken the train to L.A., she located Vivien Leigh’s star on Hollywood Boulevard—near Elvis’s—then pulled a pistol from her purse, yelled “I don’t give a damn, either!” and blew out her brains.

  It made the papers.

  After that, Hake assumed control of Scarlett’s career. Internet porn was his obsession, and he finally made his bundle off “Scarlett, the Southern Belle.” But the hardcore stuff also landed him a stretch in jail.

  Left to fend for herself, Scarl
ett earned a tawdry living by role-playing in men’s sexual fantasies. Modeling, peep shows, stripping, hooking—she had done it all. Finally, she took a job as a chorus girl in Vegas.

  That’s where she was when Hake got out of jail: kicking her legs in the air so men could eye her crotch. You’ve come a long way, baby, since those kiddie pageants.

  Fiddle-dee-dee.

  It wasn’t far enough.

  Hake had tracked her down and waylaid her outside the stage door on a sweltering Friday night.

  “Yo, Scarlett. Miss playing motorboat?”

  “Hake?” she gasped.

  Oh, how she loathed his voice.

  He stepped out of the shadows, rumpled, stubbly, and drunk.

  “Daddy’s home. And you owe me.”

  “For what?”

  “Flaunting your naughty wares on the Internet cost me pussy for too many years.”

  “You ruined me, Hake.”

  “Tough luck, kid. From now on, Scarlett works for me. Damn if your T&A won’t make ol’ Hake a bundle.”

  “No way!”

  “Want me to slash your face?” He waggled a barber’s razor in the light from the stage door. “Let’s go to my place so I can see what you got.”

  He had a room in a flophouse motel on the outskirts of town. Neon lights and walls so thin you could hear the tricks turn next door. A bed was banging the studs.

  “Quite a rack you’ve got, kid. Yer all grow’d up. Are those titties real or fake? Give Hake a peek.”

  Without a word, she unbuttoned her top and stripped it off. Hands reaching behind her, she unclasped her bra. Hake was drooling when she shimmied out of the cups.

  “Let’s play motorboat,” she said.

  “Bbbbrrr,” he replied.

  Knees half-bent, Hake nuzzled his face into her cleavage, pressing his prickly mouth against her breastbone and shaking his head from side to side while his lips vibrated.

  Motorboat.

  The tit man’s version.

  Any smart Vegas showgirl carries a weapon for her own protection, and Scarlett was no exception. Sliding the ice pick, which was masked as a nail file, from the waistband at the small of her back, she aimed the tip at the nape of Hake’s neck and plunged the steel into his brain as hard as she could.

  Her breasts muffled his squeal.

  Bang, bang went the bed next door as Hake dropped dead.

  The next day, the Vegas cops hauled her in for questioning. “Ice Pick Killer Strikes!” screamed the newspapers. Her relationship with Hake trapped her in suspicion like a spider’s web. But stabbing him had felt so good that Scarlett yearned to stick another pig. If she got free, she knew she could become another Aileen Wuornos—“Ice Pick Killer Strikes Again!” read the headline in her mind. Since the cops didn’t have the weapon and their case was circumstantial, her lawyer advised her to say nothing. So she kept her mouth shut.

  “You’re free to go,” a cop said a short time later. “Lucky for you, your alibi checked out.”

  What alibi?

  A mystery man fell into step beside her outside the station. “I’m the guy who sprung you,” he said. “May I buy you a coffee? You owe me nothing, but I do have a proposition.”

  “My life is one big proposition.”

  “Money, not sex,” he replied. “I need someone with your looks. And your … cool.”

  She laughed. “Save your breath. I won’t confess.”

  “I don’t expect you to. You obviously didn’t speak to the police. That’s why the alibi worked.”

  “What alibi?”

  “Don’t you remember? I hired you to strip for a private poker party. When I arrived to pick you up at the stage door after your show, a man was bugging you. He ran off when I approached. Turns out he was a child abuser who got iced while you were stripping for us.”

  “Says who?”

  “All four players at the party.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say I have the means. The cops had zilch on you except your past ties to a child pornographer. I came forward because of what I read in the paper, and you were cleared.”

  “So what’s your proposition?”

  “I’m offering you a fortune for about a week’s work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing you haven’t done before.”

  * * *

  So here she was a few months later, in Whistler, British Columbia, shedding her overcoat and following the man who’d given the Ice Pick Killer an alibi across to the plants lining the sill of the window overlooking the El Dorado Resort.

  “This colorful beauty,” the man said, “is Sarracenia purpurea, the purple pitcher plant. An insectivorous meat-eater, it’s the floral emblem of Newfoundland.”

  He picked up a jar squirming with bugs, opened the lid, and extracted a beetle with tongs. The pitcher plant was a squat tube with a frilled, sloping hood bristling with stiff hairs. Gingerly, the botanist released the bug on the crest of the garish trap.

  “Watch,” he said.

  The hood was patterned with red veins baited with nectar. Slowly, the beetle followed the veins down the purple spout to the gaping mouth. The downward-pointing hairs kept it from climbing back up. At the rim of the pitcher, in which water had collected, the foothold changed to wax. The bug slipped and fell into the deadly pool.

  Scarlett peered in and watched it thrash around.

  “Cool,” she said. “Will it drown?”

  “Yes, then enzymes in the water will digest the beetle. That’s how the plant feeds.”

  “I’ll bet the bug is male.”

  “Why?”

  “In my experience, men are more likely to succumb to the pitfall of a deep, wet cavity.”

  The headshrinker grinned maliciously.

  “Well put,” he said. “When you meet the Mountie tonight at ten, I want him killed with this.”

  He picked up a jewelry box from the sill next to the pitcher plant.

  “For you,” he said.

  Lifting the lid, Scarlett peeked inside. Her eyes widened as she began to understand.

  “Wicked!” she exclaimed.

  Waif

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  “Dad!”

  Searching the hordes of people streaming in from the customs hall at the Sea Island airport, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq looked right past the waving teen who’d mistaken him for her father.

  “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “Katt?” he said.

  The young woman held up her passport. “According to this, that’s me.”

  But the stylish girl leaning over the barrier to bestow a welcome hug looked nothing like the wild child in the passport mug shot. Kissing him on both cheeks as they do in Paris, she more closely resembled a Sorbonne student summoned home for Christmas break.

  “Who says you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse?” DeClercq kidded.

  “Oink!” replied Katt.

  How does any cop come back from the death of his only child, especially when that child was killed as vengeance against him? Decades ago, kidnappers had shot DeClercq’s wife and abducted little Jane, snapping the girl’s neck before the Mountie could hunt them down. Guilt had squeezed him in its stranglehold for years, and eventually the stress of the Headhunter case had crushed his will to carry on. Every man has a breaking point, and that psycho had found DeClercq’s. The moment of reckoning flared in his mind like a camera’s flashbulb.

  Avacomovitch was moving.

  Charging across the living room toward the greenhouse door, the Russian tucked his head tight to his body and pushed off hard from one foot. At six-foot-four and 285 pounds, he smashed the wood like a human battering ram. With a crack of protest, the door split in two. In a shower of splinters, the hinges gave and the lock tore free. Potted plants tumbled from shelves and dirt filled the air as Avacomovitch somersaulted across the floor and crashed a foot through the glass.

  “Don’t do it, Robert!”

/>   With the muzzle touching his palate, DeClercq cocked the hammer and bit down on the steel …

  “You got him!”

  His finger closed on the trigger to end it all …

  “A flying patrol brought him down!”

  There was a frozen eternity while the Mountie sat at his desk with the gun in his mouth, staring down at the man sprawled on the floor tiles. Slowly, he withdrew the barrel and set the weapon down.

  That was a narrow escape, and a lucky one, for as fate would have it, DeClercq found redemption in the aftermath of the carnage on Deadman’s Island.

  Another flashbulb lit up his memory.

  “Someone’s in the maze,” Craven yelled over the din, indicating the tangled garden near the clifftop house. Snow billowed up as the helicopter entered ground effect. The pilot jockeyed levers to set them down. While the whup-whup-whup of the airfoils died to a whistle, DeClercq threw open the passenger’s door and jumped onto the island.

  Trees flanked the entrance to the labyrinth. Wrapped in a rug, her eyes wild with fear, a girl of about fourteen stumbled toward him. The Mountie found himself reliving a dream that had tormented him for years. “Daddy!” Janie cries, running toward him with outstretched arms. He waits, and waits, and waits, but she draws no closer.

  Then, suddenly, the shivering girl was in his arms, seeking warmth to ward off hypothermia. Only when DeClercq wrapped his coat around her did Katt’s teeth stop chattering.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “Dead.”

  She glanced at the house of horrors.

  “And your father?”

  “Don’t have one,” Katt replied. “Now I don’t have anyone left in the world.”

  How strange, the twists of life.

  In the beginning, it was an act of charity. DeClercq had a houseful of empty rooms haunted by ghosts. Katt was a waif with nowhere to go. To give her shelter under his roof seemed the right thing to do—at least until a more permanent solution could be found.

  But he must have had rocks in his head to take on a challenge like her, the spawn of a New Age poet and practicing pagan witch. He remembered one Christmas, when Katt suggested baking gingerbread men. “I’ve never had any,” she protested, “my mom being a pagan and all.” So they’d gone shopping for ingredients and a set of cookie cutters in the usual shapes. Having whipped up a batch of dough, they punched out identical men.