Red Snow by Michael Slade Page A

TV stand, luggage rack, bathroom, and wardrobe.
    “The deadbolt on the connecting door was engaged when we broke in through the main one.”
    “As it is now?” confirmed Joe.
    “Yes,” agreed the sergeant. Turning to the lock, Dane gripped the thumb-turn by its narrow ends, not its flat sides, to avoid smudging any prints, and gave it a quarter twist to vertical. The connecting door opened to reveal no keyhole on the outer side. The wood was intact, as was the wood of the door securing the adjoining suite.
    “See the problem?” asked Dane. “Each deadbolt securing each door has an exit-only function. The rod will retract only if someone rotates the cylinder by twisting the knob on the inside of his door. A deadbolt can’t be jimmied with a card or a tool, and because there isn’t a keyhole, it can’t be picked with a bump key. To lock this door, you need someone alive on this side, and Nick was obviously dead when the killer escaped.”
    “Puzzling,” Joseph mused, examining the oiled lock.
    “To join the rooms, each occupant unlocks his deadbolt from inside his suite. If the killer fled through this door to the next room, how did he lock it behind him?”
    “It would appear,” the Russian replied, “that he escaped by way of the entrance door.”
    “I don’t see how,” said Dane. “That puzzle is even tougher. There were three barriers preventing us from breaking in: an electronic lock, a deadbolt, and a swing bar. Setting the deadbolt and swing bar again requires someone alive inside the room. To break in, we needed the hotel’s master key and a pair of bolt cutters to sever the knob in the swing bar.”
    “So,” said Joseph, “who set the three locks?”
    “A woman,” Dane replied.
    “Why do you say that?” asked the chief.
    “In searching his clothes, I discovered this in Nick’s pocket.” The sergeant held up a magnetic keycard in an evidence pouch. “It springs the lock on the entrance door. The door keeps a log of the times the card is used. This card was used at ten last night, and the door wasn’t opened again until we broke in this morning.”
    “So why a woman?” asked Gill.
    Dane produced a second evidence pouch containing a yellow Post-it Note.
    “This was stuck to the key.”
    The note read: “Ten o’clock tonight. Be discreet.”
    Gill’s glare darkened. “It looks to me like Nick got picked up in a bar.”

Slit
     
    The Sea to Sky Highway had almost cost Whistler the Olympics.
    During the last ice age, the Pacific coast sagged under an immense weight. Creeping glaciers gouged cliffs and valleys into the bedrock. Once the ice retreated, the land rose up and the sea surged in, forming fiords such as Howe Sound. It took dynamite blasts to cut through the granite so train tracks and a cramped road could snake along the shore. Nature constantly threatened to block the only route to Whistler under crushing landslides.
    “What’s that, Mom?”
    “What’s what, Becky?” Jenna Bond was afraid to take her eyes off the icy, winding road. Along the so-called Killer Highway, deaths were common.
    “Those windows up the mountain.”
    Chancing a glance, Jenna squinted through the veil. A sob of wind from the sea buffeted their car, almost pushing it onto the shoulder of the slippery road. Beyond the window, Jenna could just make out a staircase-shaped structure climbing the mountainside.
    “That’s a concentrator, Becky,” Jenna explained, passing on something Nick had told her during a romantic ski weekend. “It’s a gravity mill for a copper mine. The story is that a long time ago, a doctor shot a deer on this mountain. The thrashing legs of the dying buck exposed some copper ore. That’s how Britannia Beach became a huge copper mine.”
    “Poor deer,” mourned the girl.
    A train chugged past them on the twisting ribbon of track. Becky shoved a CD into the player and started singing along with “Jingle Bells.” As she warbled, she rolled down the passenger’s window,