Slade's Morgue:
Red Snow
Someone is bushwhacking athletes preparing for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games at Whistler Mountain. The first trap:
The second trap is sprung by a femme fatale, the Ice Pick Killer, Scarlett:
There's something reptilian about Mephisto: he's that cold-blooded. "The psycho to end all psychos," says The Vancouver Sun. Ambushing athletes is merely the warmup to what Mephisto has planned. His most vicious traps are set for the Special X psycho-hunters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He will grind Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq's face into the ice.
In a post 9/11 world, it was a reckless gamble to select Vancouver to host the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The scattered venues stretch for over 100 miles, with skating down near the American border, curling and hockey in the city of Vancouver, snowboarding on the North Shore mountains, and alpine events off hell and gone along one of North America's most precarious roads. They don't call the Sea to Sky Highway that snakes 70 miles along ocean cliffs and through jagged mountains to Whistler "the Killer Highway" for nothing.
The deadliest mercenary for hire is the Austrian code-named Stopwatch. The soldiers of fortune that he recruits for Mephisto are the Icemen. Trained by European armies that embrace winter warfare, the Norwegian, the Finn, the Latvian, and the Swede are poised to strike. The specialist in skull-cracking is the Siberian called Ice Ax.
A raging winter blizzard cuts Whistler off from the air.
The only way in or out of Whistler Valley is the Sea to Sky Highway and the parallel rail line. At one end of the valley, the Icemen blow the Killer Highway and train links to Vancouver.
Stopwatch blows the other end of the valley, and its power transmission towers.
The explosions have a side-effect.
Whistler is islolated, with red death closing in.
Mephisto has the motive.
Mephisto has the means.
And now, Mephisto has the opportunity.
Motive, means, and opportunity are all Mephisto needs to pull off History's Greatest Crime.
But that's not enough ego-satisfaction for this malignant narcissist. Not until he brings Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq to his knees. Mephisto has a score to settle with the head of Special X, and as the proverb goes, "Revenge is a dish best served cold."
So what about the gilded man in room 807 of the El Dorado Resort?
There's not a mark on his body, and curare poison doesn't work by ingestion. So how was he killed, and how did the femme fatale escape from the locked room?
And what about the bodies sprawled in the center of trackless snow, each stabbed with an ice pick left jutting from one heart?
As time ticks down, the bodies pile up, the impossible crimes go unsolved, and unbearable anguish moves closer to DeClercq, Mephisto's meticulous plan unfolds like clockwork.
Then, a killing goes wrong. A wrench gets thrown into the works.
Mephisto may have underestimated the Mounted Police.
