He had found Blanche and taken her to the fireplace in the inn, settling her there with a brace of double Scotches and a half-dozen copies of a skiing magazine. Now, with the mountain and the town still, the lifts inoperative, the distant snow brushed with dying color, he started climbing the mountain. He worked through the deep snow directly under the lift, the chairs hanging motionless over his head. He was wearing ski pants and after-ski boots designed for lounging beside a fire. He had forsaken his light parka for two sweaters. Before he’d left the room, he had unholstered the .38 and slipped it into the elastic-reinforced waistband of his trousers. He could feel it digging into his abdomen now as he climbed.

  The climb was not an easy one.

  The snow under the lift had not been packed, and he struggled against it as he climbed, encountering drifts which were impassable, working his way in a zigzagging manner across the lift line, sometimes being forced to leave the high snow for the Cat-packed trail to the right of the lift. The light was waning. He did not know how much longer it would last. He had taken a flashlight from the glove compartment of his car, but he began to wonder whether its glow would illuminate very much once the sun had set. He began to wonder, too, exactly what he hoped to find. He was almost certain that any tracks the killer had left would already have been covered by the drifting snow. Again he cursed Theodore Watt and his inefficient slobs. Someone should have made this climb immediately after they discovered the dead girl, while there was still a possibility of finding a trail.

  He continued climbing. After a day of skiing, he was physically and mentally exhausted, his muscles protesting, his eyes burning. He thumbed on the flashlight as darkness claimed the mountain, and pushed his way through knee-deep snow. He stumbled and got to his feet again. The snow had tapered almost completely, but the wind had returned with early evening, a high keening wind that rushed through the trees on either side of the lift line, pushing the clouds from the sky. There was a thin sliver of moon and a scattering of stars. The clouds raced past them like silent dark horsemen, and everywhere on the mountain was the piercing shriek of the wind, a thin scream that penetrated to the marrow.

  He fell again.

  Loose snow caught under the neck of his sweater, slid down his back. He shivered and tried to brush it away, got to his feet, and doggedly began climbing again. His after-ski boots had not been designed for deep snow. The tops ended just above his ankles, offering no protection whatever. He realized abruptly that the boots were already packed with snow, that his feet were literally encased in snow. He was beginning to regret this whole foolhardy mission, when he saw it.

  He had come perhaps a third of the way up the lift line, the mountain in absolute darkness now, still except for the maiden scream of the wind. The flashlight played a small circle of light on the snow ahead of him as he stumbled upward, the climb more difficult now, the clouds rushing by overhead, skirting the thin moon. The light touched something that glinted momentarily, passed on as he continued climbing, stopped. He swung the flashlight back. Whatever had glinted was no longer there. Swearing, he swung the flashlight in a slow steady arc. The glint again. He swung the light back.

  The basket was half-covered by the snow. Only one edge of its metallic ring showed in the beam of his light. It had probably been covered completely earlier in the day, but the strong fresh wind had exposed it to view again, and he stooped quickly to pick it up, almost as if he were afraid it would vanish. He was still bending, studying the basket in the light of the flash, when the man jumped onto his back.

  The attack came suddenly and swiftly. He had heard nothing but the wind. He had been so occupied with his find, so intent on studying the basket which, he was certain, had come from the end of the ski-pole weapon, and when he felt the sudden weight on his back he did not connect it immediately with an attack. He was simply surprised, and his first thought was that one of the pines had dropped a heavy load of snow from its laden branches, and then he realized this was no heavy load of snow, but by that time he was flat on his belly.

  He rolled over instantly. He held the ski pole basket in his left hand, refusing to let go of it. In his right hand, he held the flashlight, and he swung that instantly at the man’s head, felt it hitting the man’s forearm instead. Something solid struck Hawes’s shoulder; a wrench? A hammer? And he realized at once that the man was armed, and suddenly the situation became serious. He threw away the flashlight and groped for the .38 in his waistband.

  The clouds cleared the moon. The figure kneeling over him, straddling him, was wearing a black parka, the hood pulled up over his head. A red scarf was wrapped over his chin and his mouth and his nose. He was holding a hammer in his right hand, and he raised the hammer over his head just as the moon disappeared again. Hawes’s fingers closed on the butt of the .38. The hammer descended.

  It descended in darkness, striking Hawes on his cheek, ripping the flesh, glancing downward and catching his shoulder. Hawes swore violently, drew the .38 in a ridiculously clumsy draw, brought it into firing position, and felt again the driving blow of the other man’s weapon, the hammer lashing out of the darkness, slamming with brute force against his wrist, almost cracking the bone. His fingers opened involuntarily. The gun dropped into the snow. He bellowed in pain and tried to kick out at his attacker, but the man moved away quickly, gained his feet, and braced himself in the deep snow for the final assault. The moon appeared again. A thin silvery light put the man in silhouette against the sky, the black hooded head, the face masked by the scarf. The hammer went up over his head.

  Hawes kicked out at his groin.

  The blow did nothing to stop the man’s attack. It glanced off his thigh, missing target as the hammer came down, but throwing him off balance slightly so that the hammer struck without real force. Hawes threw a fist at him, and the man grunted and again the hammer came out of the new darkness. The man fought desperately and silently, frightening Hawes with the fury of his animal strength. They rolled over in the snow, and Hawes grasped at the hood, tried to pull it from the man’s head, found it was securely tied in place, and reached for the scarf. The scarf began to unravel. The man lashed out with the hammer, felt the scarf coming free, pulled back to avoid exposing his face, and suddenly staggered as Hawes’s fist struck home. He fell into the snow, and all at once, he panicked. Instead of attacking again, he pulled the scarf around his face and began to half run, half stumble through the deep snow. Hawes leaped at him, missing, his hands grabbing air. The man scrambled over the snow, heading for the pines lining the lift. By the time Hawes was on his feet again, the man had gone into the trees. Hawes went after him. It was dark under the trees. The world went black and silent under the pines.

  He hesitated for a moment. He could see nothing, could hear nothing. He fully expected the hammer to come lashing out of the darkness.

  Instead, there came the voice.

  “Hold it right there.”

  The voice startled him, but he reacted intuitively, whirling, his fist pulling back reflexively, and then firing into the darkness. He felt it connecting with solid flesh, heard someone swearing in the dark, and then—surprisingly, shockingly—Hawes heard the sound of a pistol shot. It rang on the mountain air, reverberated under the pines. Hawes opened his eyes wide. A pistol? But the man had only a hammer. Why hadn’t…?

  “Next time, I go for your heart,” the voice said.

  Hawes stared into the darkness. He could no longer locate the voice. He did not know where to jump, and the man was holding a pistol.

  “You finished?” the man asked.

  The beam of a flashlight suddenly stabbed through the darkness. Hawes blinked his eyes against it, tried to shield his face.

  “Well, well,” the man said. “You never can tell, can you? Stick out your hands.”

  “What?” Hawes said.

  “Stick out your goddamn hands.”

  Hesitantly, he held out his hands. He was the most surprised human being in the world when he felt the handcuffs being snapped onto his wrists.

  The office from which Theodore Watt, sheriff of the town of Rawson, operated was on the main street alongside an Italian restaurant whose neon sign advertised LASAGNA é SPAGHETTI é RAVIOLI. Now that the snow had stopped, the plows had come through and banked snow on either side of the road so that the door of the office was partially hidden by a natural fortress of white. Inside the office, Theodore Watt was partially hidden by the fortress of his desk, the top of which was covered with Wanted circulars, FBI flyers, carbon copies of police reports, a pair of manacles, a cardboard container of coffee, a half-dozen chewed pencil stubs, and a framed picture of his wife and three children. Theodore Watt was not in a very friendly mood. He sat behind his desk-fortress, a frown on his face. Cotton Hawes stood before the desk, still wearing the handcuffs that had been clamped onto his wrists on the mountain. The deputy who’d made the collar, the selfsame Fred who had earlier pulled the ski pole from Helga Nilson’s chest, stood alongside Hawes, wearing the sheriff’s frown, and also wearing a mouse under his left eye, where Hawes had hit him.

  “I could lock you up, you know,” Watt said, frowning. “You hit one of my deputies.”

  “You ought to lock him up,” Hawes said angrily. “If he hadn’t come along, I might have had our man.”

  “You might have, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had no right being on that damn mountain,” Watt said. “What were you doing up there?”

  “Looking.”

  “For what?”

  “Anything. He gave you the basket I found. Apparently it was important enough for the killer to have wanted it, too. He fought hard enough for it. Look at my cheek.”

  “Well now, that’s a shame,” Watt said dryly.

  “There may be fingerprints on that basket,” Hawes said. “I suggest…”

  “I doubt it. Weren’t none on the ski pole, and none on the chair, neither. We talked to the two loaders, and they told us the one riding up with Helga Nilson was wearing gloves. I doubt if there’s any fingerprints on that basket at all.”

  “Well…” Hawes said, and he shrugged.

  “What it amounts to, hmmmm,” Watt said, “is that you figured we wasn’t handling this case to your satisfaction, ain’t that it? So you figured you’d give us local hicks a little big-time help, hmmmm? Ain’t that about it?”

  “I thought I could possibly assist in some…”

  “Then you shoulda come to me,” Watt said, “and asked if you could help. This way, you only fouled up what we was trying to do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve got six men on that mountain,” Watt said, “waiting for whoever killed that girl to come back and cover his mistakes. This basket here was one of the mistakes. But did our killer find it? No. Our helpful big-city detective found it. You’re a lot of help, mister, you sure are. With all that ruckus on the mountain, that damn killer won’t go anywhere near it for a month!”

  “I almost had him,” Hawes said. “I was going after him when your man stopped me.”

  “Stopped him, hell! You’re the one who was stopping him from doing his job. Maybe I ought to lock you up. There’s a thing known as impeding the progress of an investigation. But, of course, you know all about that, don’t you? Being a big-city detective. Hmmm?”

  “I’m sorry if I…”

  “And of course we’re just a bunch of local hicks who don’t know nothing at all about police work. Why, we wouldn’t even know enough to have an autopsy performed on that little girl, now would we? Or to have tests made of the blood on the chair, now would we? We wouldn’t have no crime lab in the next biggest town to Rawson, would we?”

  “The way you were handling the investigation…” Hawes started.

  “…was none of your damn business,” Watt concluded. “Maybe we like to make our own mistakes, Hawes! But naturally, you city cops never make mistakes. That’s why there ain’t no crime at all where you come from.”

  “Look,” Hawes said, “you were mishandling evidence. I don’t give a damn what you…”

  “As it turns out, it don’t matter because there wasn’t no fingerprints on that pole, anyway. And we had to get our men up the mountain, so we had to use the lift. There was a hell of a lot of confusion there today, mister. But I don’t suppose big-city cops ever get confused, hmmmm?” Watt looked at him sourly. “Take the cuffs off him, Fred,” he said.

  Fred looked surprised, but he unlocked the handcuffs. “He hit me right in the eye,” he said to Watt.

  “Well, you still got the other eye,” Watt said dryly. “Go to bed, Hawes. We had enough of you for one night.”

  “What did the autopsy report say?” Hawes asked.

  Watt looked at him in something close to astonishment. “You still sticking your nose in this?”

  “I’d still like to help, yes.”

  “Maybe we don’t need your help.”

  “Maybe you can use it. No one here knows…”

  “There we go with the damn big-city attitu—”

  “I was going to say,” Hawes said, overriding Watt’s voice, “that no one in the area knows I’m a cop. That could be helpful to you.”

  Watt was silent. “Maybe,” he said at last.

  “May I hear the autopsy report?”

  Watt was silent again. Then he nodded. He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and said, “Death caused by fatal stab wound of the heart, penetration of the auricles and pulmonary artery. That’s where all the blood came from, Hawes. Wounds of the ventricles don’t usually bleed that much. Coroner figures the girl died in maybe two or three minutes, there was that much loss of blood.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Broke her ankle when she fell out of that chair. Oblique fracture of the lateral malleolus. Examiner also found traces of human skin under the girl’s fingernails. Seems like she clawed out at whoever stabbed her, and took a goodly part of him away with her.”

  “What did the skin tell you?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. Our killer is white and adult.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. At least, that’s all from the skin, except the possibility of using it later for comparison tests—if we ever get anybody to compare it with. We found traces of blood on her fingers and nails, too, not her own.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Blood on the chair, the girl’s blood, was in the AB grouping. Blood we found on her hands was in the O grouping, most likely the killer’s.”

  “Then she scratched him enough to cause bleeding.”

  “She took a big chunk of skin from him, Hawes.”

  “From the face?”

  “Now how in hell would I know?”

  “I thought maybe…”

  “Couldn’t tell from the skin sample whether it came from the neck or the face or wherever. She coulda scratched him anyplace.”

  “Anything else?”

  “We found a trail of the girl’s blood in the snow under the lift. Plenty of it, believe me, she bled like a stuck pig. The trail started about four minutes from the top. Took her two or three minutes to die. So, assuming the killer jumped from the chair right soon’s he stabbed her, then the girl…”

  “…was still alive when he jumped.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Find any tracks in the snow?”

  “Nothing. Too many drifts. We don’t know whether he jumped with his skis on or not. Have to have been a pretty good skier to attempt that, we figure.”

  “Well, anyway, he’s got a scratch,” Hawes said. “That’s something to look for.”

  “You gonna start looking tonight?” Watt asked sarcastically.

  Blanche Colby was waiting for him when he got back to the room. She was sitting up in his bed propped against the pillows, wearing a shapeless flannel nightgown that covered her from her throat to her ankles. She was holding an apple in her hand, and she bit into it angrily as he entered the room, and then went back to reading the open book in her lap.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She did not answer him, nor did she even look up at him. She continued destroying the apple, continued her pretense of reading.

  “Good book?”

  “Excellent book,” she answered.

  “Miss me?”

  “Drop dead,” Blanche said.

  “I’m sorry. I…”

  “Don’t be. I enjoyed myself immensely in your absence.”

  “I got arrested, you see.”

  “You got what?”

  “Arrested. Pinched. Pulled in. Collared. Apprehen—”

  “I understood you the first time. Who arrested you?”

  “The cops,” Hawes said, and he shrugged.

  “Serves you right.” She put down the book. “Wasn’t it you who told me a girl was killed on this mountain today? Murdered? And you run off and leave me when a killer…”

  “I told you where I was going. I told you…”

  “You said you’d be back in an hour!”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know I was going to be arrested.”

  “What happened to your cheek?”

  “I got hit with a hammer.”

  “Good,” Blanche said, and she nodded emphatically.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss my wound?” Hawes asked.

  “You can kiss my…”

  “Ah-ah,” he cautioned.

  “I sat by that damn fireplace until eleven o’clock. Then I came up here and…what time is it, anyway?”

  “After midnight.”

  Blanche nodded again. “I would have packed up and gone home, believe me, if the roads were open.”

  “Yes, but they’re closed.”

  “Yes, damn it!”

  “Aren’t you glad I’m back?”

  Blanche shrugged. “I couldn’t care less. I was just about to go to sleep.”

  “In here?”

  “In the other room, naturally.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19