Free Red Snow by Michael Slade Page B

not King Tut. Naked, Nick lay face up on a black satin sheet, his wrists crossed over his heart. One arm ended with a stump where his prosthetic hand had been. The hand was on the bedside table, alongside Nick’s prosthetic ear.
    I get it, Robert thought, clenching his fists to quell his roiling anger.
    Dane Winter had called his cellphone as he, Katt, and Napoleon, their German shepherd, neared the outskirts of Whistler on the Sea to Sky Highway. Despite their early start, they had slowed to a crawl as the weather deteriorated. Behind them in her car, Gill and Joe had faded, then vanished in a scrim of blurry snow.
    “DeClercq,” he’d answered.
    “Chief, it’s Dane Winter. Brace yourself …”
    The link between Nick’s gilding and the scene of the crime struck the psycho hunter as he drove past the Gilded Man pub in the El Dorado Resort. As a lifelong historian with several books in print, he was well read in the literature of the Holy Grail, Atlantis, Shangri-La, King Solomon’s Mines, and El Dorado. The banner flapping above the hotel’s entrance confirmed the link: “Meet Olympic Hopefuls at ‘Going for the Gold.’”
    “Why are we stopping here instead of driving to the cabin?” Katt had asked. She knew Nick well, so Robert had yet to tell her.
    “Something I must check.”
    “Was it bad news?” Katt pressed. “You’ve been spacey since you took that call.”
    “Time will tell. I need half an hour. Park the car and take the dog for a walk.”
    Napoleon barked his agreement.
    “Goody,” Katt said with exaggerated glee, rubbing her palms together. “It’s joy-ride time!”
    Moments after Robert’s car disappeared, Gill’s materialized ghostlike from the snow, and the Mountie’s cell hummed again.
    “DeClercq,” he responded.
    “It’s Corporal Hett, Chief. Looks like we’ve found the head from yesterday’s snowboarder. It’s shrunken and painted gold, and what’s more, we have another beheading.”
    The digital image that zoomed to his phone from Jackie’s showed a miniature human head dangling from a chairlift frame. Nick’s gilded body linked him to the golden severed head, which in turn reminded the chief of the Headhunter case. Was someone trying to jab his memory?
    Who would do that? he wondered.
    And love doing it?
    Now, they stood at the threshold to room 807—the psycho hunter, the pathologist, and the forensic scientist—while Dane indicated the path he’d taken to the bed to check Nick’s vital signs. He had hugged the walls in the hopes that would keep him from trampling on vital clues.
    The four pulled on latex gloves and plastic booties, then approached the body. Gazing down at the man he had saved twice from disaster—when Nick had stood trial for the death of his mother, and when Mephisto had cut him apart piece by piece—Robert struggled to view the crime scene objectively. The tradition was etched in stone: kill a Mountie and you take on the entire force. And history had shown that in those instances, they did always get their man.
    But the chief didn’t want emotion blinding his logic. He knew the run-of-the-mill serial killer was a slave to fantasy. Acting out that fantasy created a normally subconscious “signature” that could be profiled by crime scene analysts. In this case, the signature was not subconscious but displayed on the bedside table for the chief and all the world to see.
    The gilded man had been stripped of his prosthetic hand and ear. By returning Nick to his handless, earless self, this killer had left his signature in the overblown, gilt-edged scrawl of a malignant narcissist.
    *     *     *
     
    Goldfinger!
    The first connection cracked through Gill’s mind like a bolt of lightning. In Ian Fleming’s book, the megalomaniac with an obsession for everything gold could attain sexual climax only by romping with gilded women.
    Megalomaniac …
    That was the second connection.
    Mephisto, she thought.
    Strange how at times like this,