Her face was masked in a layer of clear ice. Her warm, dying breath had melted the snow that covered her. The carbon dioxide she exhaled had no place to go except back into her lungs. She was wedged from the chest down into the snow. She was zipped into a maroon ski jacket with white stripes down the arms. A navy blue Quiksilver hat covered her head. The angle of her neck was not an angle for the living.
Lasco crouched down to the eerie eyes of the body, wide open, their frozen silver centers sparkling in the sun; a cruel trick of nature.
‘Pupils fixed and dilated,’ said Lasco. He stood up. ‘I love saying that.’
‘So,’ said Bob, pointing, ‘the glass-mask tells me she was buried alive, but how come her hat is still on? An avalanche would have ripped that right off her, right?’ He turned to Mike.
‘I guess so.’
‘Depends,’ said Lasco.
‘You are a commitment-phobe,’ said Bob.
‘It’s written into our contract,’ said Lasco. ‘Commitment comes back and bites you in the ass.’
Thirty feet back, Sonny Bryant stood beside the split stretcher he had assembled, ready to transport the body down to the trailhead. Lasco sent Bob and Mike over to join him and stayed with the body, taking the GPS co-ordinates and sketching a map of the crime scene.
‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Sonny, nodding in their direction.
‘Wood poisoning?’ said Bob. Wood poisoning was skier versus tree.
‘Could there be some skis buried under there?’ said Sonny.
‘Who knows?’ said Mike. ‘I’ve given up speculating. I’m always wrong.’
‘Come on, speculate,’ said Bob. ‘Make something up.’
Mike shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Corpses Maximus said no guesses. It plants things in people’s heads.’
‘Nothing gets planted in this head,’ said Bob. ‘Nothing at all.’
Mike and Sonny laughed.
The wind rose, whipping around them, fighting their balance. Mike and Bob had their back to it, buffering Sonny from the worst.
‘Hey,’ shouted Sonny, pointing to a figure higher up the peak.
Bob shook his head. ‘Same idiots, different season. You could paper Breck with “Get off the mountain by midday or we will shoot to kill” and these people would still not get out of their beds in time to haul ass.’
Lasco didn’t hear him and was waving from where he stood, holding something in the air, fighting to be heard over Bob and the wind.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Sonny. He lunged through the gap between Bob and Mike, lifting his spotting scope to his eye. He saw a man on back-country skis, moving east–west across a snowfield. Bob, Sonny and Mike stood mesmerized, a combined weight of fear suspending any motion. Above them, the wind had raked the promontories, packing snow into ravines and chutes, pressing it deep into every hollow. The skier didn’t know what he was crossing; the difference between fallen and driven snow. He didn’t know that the black rock beneath him was a magnet to the afternoon sun. He didn’t know that the underside of the snow was heating up, turning to water, trickling downwards, weakening the platform beneath him.
Shooting cracks broke out under his feet, followed by the desperate sound of air rushing out of snow.
‘Jesus Christ!’ roared Bob. ‘Avalanche!’
‘Go right,’ roared Mike, ‘Go right.’
In seconds, a huge plume of white exploded into the sky as thousands of pounds of compacted snow shifted, plummeting toward them, four foot deep, warming as it moved, gaining the momentum to bury everything in its path, a deafening blast in the tranquil afternoon.
For seconds that felt longer, Mike was flying in an exhilarating powdered-snow rush. He was a snowboarder, busting a huge air, applause drowning out his proud cries. But somewhere inside, his instinct kicked in and he started to swim.
Bob felt like a rug had been pulled from under his feet, a rug he had been very happy with, the type that had protected him from the cold concrete underneath.
Lasco had descended barely four feet from the corpse when it was dislodged, hitting him hard in the back, forcing the wind from his lungs, sending them both plunging toward the ridge below.
Sonny became a centerpiece to the erupting snow, the height of its power, quickly descending to its crushing, savage depth.
In ten seconds, it was over. The snow had settled – twenty feet deep at the toe of the slide. Minutes passed before its powdery shower lifted, leaving in its wake a desolate white vacuum.
Mike Delaney knew that he wasn’t driving this motion, he was at the mercy of it. There was no skill to the rotations of his body. The sound he was hearing was the avalanche’s freight-train roar. If there was an audience that wasn’t being swept up and deposited all around him, they would have seen a spectacular final display … but would have turned away for the crash landing that was strangely void of sound.
A waitress kept trying to serve Sonny Bryant cocktails. His hand shook as he took each one and dropped it to the ground.
‘What is your problem?’ she kept saying.
‘You don’t get it. I’m freezing,’ he kept answering, again reaching out a shaking hand. ‘I’m freezing. Is this hot?’ He dropped the glass again.
‘What is your problem?’
He jerked awake. ‘I’m freezing.’
With the exception of one gloved hand, Sonny Bryant lay completely buried.
Denis Lasco was on his back, pinned beneath his charge, the pair taking the shape of a skewed cross on the snow. The corpse’s vitreous mask had cracked open, leaving a pale cheek an inch from Lasco’s lips. As he breathed frigid air through his nose, a slim strand of her hair was sucked against his nostrils. Lasco’s head shook violently, struggling to exhale it away. But the rise of his chest was restricted. In his panic, his neck muscles went rigid, supporting him long enough to observe a contributory factor to the woman’s death; a massive exit wound. A mash-up mix of reds and blacks had been ripped through the back of her snowsuit. It was the last thing Lasco saw before his breath exploded out of him and the picture went black.
When he was fourteen years old, Bob Gage had to dissect a cow’s eyeball in biology class. He remembered how it flinched under his scalpel, how he fought to secure it, finally piercing what he expected would be soft, yielding flesh. But it crunched as the blade hit its center. What the butcher had given him was a frozen eyeball. And it had turned Bob’s stomach more than cutting into the flesh of something that could have oozed.
Bob now stared at the heavy white world that surrounded him, possessed by the icy cold of his eyeballs, no less sickening now than a thirty-year-old memory. He knew nobody would be dissecting his eyeballs if he didn’t make it out of this, but he knew a sharp blade would be coming into his dead world and it was more than he could take. You can’t scream from the top of your lungs when they’re searching for oxygen that isn’t there. But Sheriff Bob Gage gave it his best shot.
For the second time that afternoon, an all-call went out and pagers across Summit County beeped, one of them under the snow of Quandary Peak. Twenty volunteers were called to a scene most of them were already at. The ones who hadn’t made it first time around were paged again and told why, this time, they might want to show up.
Bob could see something