BLOOD SNOW Approx.
100,000 Words
a Murder Mystery
by Christopher Leadem
COPYRIGHT 2009,
All Rights Reserved.
BLOOD SNOW
Prologue
The girl, perhaps sixteen, craned her neck, trying to see: a strange
and wild man was behind her. J2 had told her he might be a little rough, but that as long as she submitted it would
be all right.
But it wasn’t. She hung naked and helpless, her wrists handcuffed to pipes above
and to either side of her, in an abandoned warehouse where no one would hear her cry for help. The small glow given
off by his hand-held mechanic’s light was worse than darkness. She could see just enough to imagine the worst.
Why hadn’t she refused the trick? Because like many
prostitutes she was also an addict, fed in small doses by her pimp until she was completely in his power: no tricks,
no fix. She knew that if she didn’t shoot up in the morning she’d be in a state worse than death.
Again she tried to turn, but the light was poor and the angle bad. All she could see was a man crouching over a toolbox
on the floor, searching among the dirty metal implements for some particular tool, or instrument of torture. Her terror
was absolute.
“What are you doing?”
she cried. She knew from experience that silent submission would have been better. But she couldn’t be silent
now. All control had been taken from her, she a self-spectator in….. What? Her mind worked desperately,
seeking for some kind of plan, the slightest ray of hope. They had made her strip first, so it had to be sex.
That was good, right? After a man had it off, got what he wanted, he became calmer, sometimes even tender. She
would settle for not-too-violent rape, and to get the hell out of there.
His voice in answering dashed
any such illusion. He whirled and growled at her like a wounded animal, cornered and enraged. He came up and stood
just behind her, unzipped his coveralls. She could smell him, sour and unwashed, his breath harsh upon her ear.
“I’m going to rape you,” he said sullenly, “the way they raped me!”
As he moved closer still, like a lion upon its prey, she felt the
pain she expected, but then another she did not. Had he clawed at her breast? She looked down and saw the blood,
even as another stab drove into her abdomen. She screamed, the first of many.
Many.
PART ONE
The Man in the Mirror
Chapter 1
Caught in the cross-hairs of a particularly disturbing dream, Matt Snow, homicide detective for
the Denver PD, wasn’t much sorry to be wakened from it. But when he realized what it was that had woken him, he
wasn’t grateful but angry. He must have left his cell-phone in the truck again, because someone had programmed
into it the last ring-tone on earth any Native American would have chosen: the bugle call and thundering hooves of a
Wild West cavalry charge.
He flipped open the phone, checked Caller ID: his partner and friend,
Lou Styles. Now he wasn’t angry, just irritated. Humor was one of the things that kept homicide detectives
from losing their minds. But there were limits. He pushed the green Accept button.
“Very
funny, fat-ass.” No reply. “The ring-tone?” Still nothing. He threw aside the covers
and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Lou?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there. Gotta take care of something, pick you up in twenty.
No screwin’ around.”
“Easy,
bro’. I’m sure we’ve had worse.”
“No. We haven’t.”
“But—”
“Twenty minutes, no bullshit!”
Snow closed the cover slowly, confused now and somewhat alarmed.
This wasn’t like Lou at all. At six-foot-seven and nearly four hundred pounds, a former Dallas Cowboys offensive
lineman, his partner was about as even-tempered as a man in their profession could be. So what if some of that muscle had
run to fat when he retired? He was still a goliath, and not afraid of anyone. He could kill most men by falling
on them. He knew who he was: a proud black man with a family, a church, and a career that made a difference.
So what could have happened to turn him so surly and (if he could believe it) scared?
Snow rose
in his boxers, made his way to the bathroom. He recycled his water, brushed his teeth, then spread his hands on the
counter, examining himself in the mirror.
Because he had just remembered: today he was thirty years
old. F. Scott Fitzgerald had called a man’s thirties a decade of thinning friends, thinning hair and thinning
hopes. Something like that. Introspective to a fault—or so his psychologist had told him—he studied
the man he had become.
No miniature himself, he stood six-foot-two and two-twenty, but in his case, rock-hard
muscle. This he owed in part to his Navajo ancestry, but also a personal obsession to remain strong in every way.
That sounded pretentious, even to himself. And he knew, far too well, the thing that could turn his own strength against
him:
His mind.
His hair
certainly hadn’t thinned, but as he ran his fingers through it, flowed back from his strong forehead in a thick raven
wave falling down to his shoulders. His Captain had tried to make him cut it as a matter of policy, been overruled by
the Chief and taken it personally.
“Always an asshole,” he said to his reflection.
Then he leaned closer to examine his face: hawk nose, large eyes, high, swept-back cheekbones: all Native.
Except that those eyes, penetrating and intense, were blue instead of brown, his skin more tanned than bronze.
For he was that most unwanted of anomalies, the half-breed. His Navajo mother, Soft Spring, had died in giving birth
to him. His father was white, CIA, and at the time working counter-espionage at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Facility.
It was a wonder he hadn’t been born with two heads. Or maybe he had. He’d been diagnosed two years
before as Bipolar. It had taken a long time to get his head around that one. He still hadn’t done it completely.
“And all those years, I just thought I was crazy.”
So much for inventory.
Just another day in which anything at all was possible. That was both the lure and curse of police work. You saw
things no one else did, but then you had to live with them. And you never knew when that one case, the sight of that
one victim might break you, or at the least, drive you to an early retirement. There weren’t many homicide detectives
the far side of fifty.
He dressed as usual, blue jeans and athletic shoes, black t-shirt, black leather jacket,
the shoulder harness beneath. He had been issued the standard ‘detective’s special’, a snub-nosed
.38 caliber revolver—which was great, unless you actually wanted to hit someone you couldn’t as easily shake hands
with. So he, like many others, had unofficially upgraded: a Colt .357 magnum, with snow white grips and a four-inch
barrel. What was the use of chasing bad guys if when you caught them you were hopelessly outgunned? He and Lou
had a few more surprises in the SUV, bought before the assault weapons ban had made M-16’s, Uzi’s and Kalashnikov’s
illegal. A strange dynamic, that. You didn’t want scum packing automatic weapons, but sometimes you needed
them yourself. Best to just get what you needed and keep your mouth shut.
His cell-phone had begun
to sound again. He flipped the cover and said, “On my way.” He grabbed two Pepsis from the refrigerator
on his way out the door, moving as quickly as he could without running. Gotta keep a clear head. Jumping into
Lou’s lifted Ford Excursion, one of the few vehicles he could fit in, he closed the door just in time for his partner
to floor it, spraying gravel and sending him flying back into the seat.
“Jesus, Lou.” When
he had righted himself and put on his seat belt he straightened, and offered the big man a Pepsi. Usually he refused,
but this time he pulled over to the side of the road, braking as hard as he had accelerated. Snow was just grateful
for the seat-belt, or he might have had to marry the dashboard. Lou held out one enormous hand.
“Gimme.”
Without a word Snow gave him a bottle, only to see him open it roughly,
drain off about a third (for him little more than a sip), then pull quite a different kind of bottle from beneath his seat.
He opened it with his teeth, spit the cap out the open window.
Smirnov fucking Vodka. Then he brought the
two bottles together, and started to pour himself a drink.
“Don’t do it, partner.”
Snow was becoming genuinely concerned. And angry. “I’m talking to you,” he said, in a voice
edged with steel.
The big man turned and shouted.
“You got something to say to me?” Snow had to wrestle down his demons, remember who this was.
“Yeah. Several things, actually.”
“Like what?”
“Like
it’s five o’clock in the morning, we’re on duty, and you don’t drink anymore.”
“Yeah, well maybe I should start.”
“Start
tomorrow,” said Snow. He wasn’t going to let his friend ruin his life again, not if there was anything he
could do about it. He held out both hands, themselves large and strong. “Give ‘em to me now.
Right now.”
Lou hesitated, snarled, then threw them both out the window.
Then something
seemed to break in him, and he covered his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Snow gave him a minute.
“You wanna tell me what the hell’s going on?” He couldn’t believe it. This man who’d
taken a bullet square in the collarbone, and instead of crying out in pain had simply yelled at the paramedics, telling them
what to do until they finally had to sedate him, was now on the verge of tears.
“It’s
so bad,” he said, low and hopeless.
“Every murder’s bad, Lou.”
“You don’t understand.”
Snow could see his friend needed help getting it out, his thoughts
all tangled up with shock and rage. And fear. They knew each other; they helped each other. Snow would do
anything for him, and thought he knew how to help him now: ask questions, get him going.
“Well,
who called it in?”
“I did.”
That got Matt’s attention.
“Someone tipped you off?”
“He did.”
".....the perp? The killer told you what he’d done?”
“Yeah. On my home phone, in my own house.”
Snow was baffled. That number was unlisted, to say the least.
It would only ring if it recognized the incoming caller. Otherwise it just took and recorded messages, giving out no
identity at all. Lou was careful. A cop with two teenage daughters had to be.
“Yeah,”
he said. “At first I thought it was you, tryin’ to rouse my black ass out of bed.”
“What’d he say?”
“Told me all about it, the rape, the murder.”
“Scary, but it can’t be any worse—”
“You just don’t get it! He threatened to do the
same to my kids: said he liked little black girls, too.”
“Mother-fucker.” Nobody messed with a cop’s family. “You got
uniforms guarding the house?”
“Yeah. Took some yellin’ this early in the morning,
but I got ‘em. Told Rose to keep the girls home from school until I could figure something out. But you
know how hard it is to shake a determined stalker.”
“Yeah.” Too damned well.
It occurred to Snow suddenly he had no idea where
they were going. They’d been heading north on York Street toward Five Points. Didn’t every major city
have a Five Points: poor, black, desolate and dangerous? Denver sure did. Here the very worst of it was
separated (or at least divided) by the I-70 viaduct, an elevated section of highway supported by ancient concrete pillars.
All natural light beneath was blocked, with only the dimmest of streetlights at uneven intervals. Some of the bulbs
hadn’t been changed for years. Lou drove straight through it, barely aware of the horizontal black hole they had
just passed through. Snow had to remind himself that his friend had grown up just south of here. Bad neighborhood.
Worse than the rez? Good thing it wasn’t a contest; they’d both lose.
Finding the crime
scene was not difficult, even if Lou hadn’t known every block for miles around. A carnival of light and sound surrounded
some kind of disused warehouse or factory. There were police cruisers with their top-lights strobing, TV trucks with
their antenna towers raised, the whole place cordoned off by yellow police tape and saw-horse barricades, with uniformed patrolmen
and plain-clothed officers trying to keep the reporters and onlookers back, telling them over and over:
“No
comment at this time. I can neither confirm nor deny that allegation. There will no doubt be an official briefing
sometime later in the day.”
Snow
used to wonder how they got there so fast, the reporters. Nothing like police work to disillusion you about computer
media, press and TV: tragedy and death delivered by fashion models and talking heads, reading words from the prompter
that meant less than nothing to them. They all had police band radios, along with banks of TV’s in every newsroom,
in case some other ambulance-chaser got the story first. But what bothered him most was when they were tipped off from
inside, by cops whose dedication no longer matched their greed. Such traitors wouldn’t be so easy to find, he
thought, if they actually paid cops a living wage.
And it all happened so quickly. The average time
it took for a disaster to appear on NCC (NewsChannel.com) was something like fifteen minutes. Average length of follow-up
and public interest (unless it was something truly horrible, which they could milk for all it was worth), about the same fifteen:
Andy Warhol’s prediction come true, and in the worst possible way.
Lou had maneuvered the SUV within
walking distance, then gotten out faster than Snow had ever seen him move, except perhaps in his playing days. He remained
worried. Daughters or not, detectives (or cops of any kind) had to keep a cool head, and maintain a safe emotional distance
from both the crime and the criminal. Otherwise you went crazy, shot at the first felon who ran, or had slipped through
the cracks of the so-called Justice System. First law of homicide: don’t make it personal.
Lou was shouldering (and bellying) his way through the crowd, coming up on the first police barricade. A young blue,
probably a rookie (anyone else would have known him) said, “Sir, I’m afraid you can’t go in there.”
“Yes, he can,” said Snow quickly, holding up his badge.
Lou had already passed the man, himself struggling to keep up.
Captain Cunningham saw them, waved them
over. “Where the hell have you two been?” Short, bald, and with an attitude about both, he had a way
of making every question sound like an accusation.
“We’re here now, boss,” said Snow.
“Are the crime scene guys going to let us do our job?” CSI’s weren’t bad, they just watched
too much TV: saw themselves personally solving the crime, confronting the villain and shooting it out at the circus.
Or some shit.
“Yeah, they’re up there. But Swift (the Medical Examiner) isn’t here
yet, so don’t fuck anything up.”
“Try
not to,” said Snow. Lou was off again, heading for a corrugated steel door mounted on 2x4’s. Light
streamed out of it. He went in. Snow had never had to chase him like this before. It was like trying to walk a
rhinoceros. Finally he gave up, stepped through the door, stopped for a moment to take in his surroundings. A
big, empty warehouse, two stories, the upper level reached by a flight of metal stairs and (if it still worked) an ancient
freight elevator. The lower floor was concrete, the upper, three-quarter inch plywood on prefabricated tube-steel beams.
Lou was out of sight.
Snow started for the stairs, trying not to let his partner’s anxiety rub off
on him. Bad for the job, bad for the heart. Bad for the mind. So he ascended slowly, his head first approaching,
then rising above the level of the floor. As he reached the top and looked out across the broad expanse of plywood and
ceiling pipes, and saw the victim.....
He stopped dead, as if struck by a physical blow. “No.”
It was the girl from the dream. Or had he gone over the edge at last? He tried to rationalize.
Déjà vu? Maybe, but it was more than just that. Much more. He was getting a buzz, a sense
of unreality he could in no way explain. It was as if he’d actually seen it happen, was, in a way, reliving it
now. Lou stood next to the corpse, hanging his head and shaking it mournfully from side to side: for the young
life already lost, and others who might follow in her wake. Because, as he had not yet told his partner, the man on
the phone had been truly insane, not bragging, not threatening, but promising:
“I will step through
the mirror to murder your children.” What the hell was that supposed to mean?
The feeling in
Snow persisted, as if he had not only been here, but..... What? He felt a surge of fear, forced it down.
It was impossible. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, trying to focus his mind, push aside all distractions.
It worked to a point. His heart was calmer and his mind clearer, but still the feeling of otherworldliness
remained. He circled the crime scene as if he knew it, stepping over chalk outlines on the floor, avoiding things he
shouldn’t touch without even looking at them.
It was gruesome, horrible. The girl’s death,
her head hanging down like an abandoned marionette, was, as in the dream, a kind of crucifixion. And yet the soft blond
hair, flowing down across her sweet young face looked so alive. The same could not be said of her body, punctured by
forty wounds at least.
He knew it.
He knew it all. Speaking into his hand-held digital recorder, almost unaware that others around him were watching and
listening, he moved in and began his narration.
“White female, approximately sixteen years of age.
Prostitute: witness needle marks along the inner arm, number and frequency indicating advanced heroin or morphine addiction."
Sarah Nielson, one of the younger (and prettier) CSI’s, came up and
observed him more closely, curious, while others watched from their distance, including Lou. Were they listening to
the masterful break-down of a crime scene, or pure delusion? Snow’s bipolar wasn’t exactly a secret.
“She takes off her clothes and lays them on the floor, lets the killer cuff her to the pipes without resistance:
no disturbance in the dust surrounding. The killer then turns to.....”
He looked at the hard,
rectangular imprints in the dust behind, which moved in a fan shape at slight intervals, as if the thing had been jostled
backward. It had to be something metal, but how did he know what it was?
“A tool box, something
that contained the murder weapon, perhaps other tools, or implements of torture.”
He looked at Sarah quickly, hoping he had not shocked her. No. She remained intensely curious, both about
the crime, and Snow’s stream-of-consciousness reading of it. But not shocked. This was what they did.
Lou also looked surprised, his eyes asking, in a brotherly way, Are you in some kind of zone, or are you just making this
shit up? But zone didn’t begin to say it. Everything around him faded. He didn’t hear the others,
saw nothing but the corpse, wasn’t even aware he’d started speaking again.
“Whatever he
wanted from the tool box, he couldn’t find under the clutter, as if it had all been thrown together recently.
But something set him off: the way his right foot pivots suddenly, and the footprints go straight towards her back.
He gets up behind her, very close, glowers and threatens her. Then penetrates her. Again he means to wait longer
but he can’t: his twisted passions overpower him. He reaches around and begins to stab her. The murder
weapon,” he looked down at a chalk outline on the floor, then turned to Sarah. She moved to the portable evidence
cabinet, returned with a bloody eight-inch nail in a sealed plastic bag, the butt end wrapped with mechanic's tape to form
a handle.....
“A shank,” he said, “such as prisoners use, made from whatever materials
they can come by. Suspect must either have been recently released from prison or escaped.....with a mechanical background,
an apparent hatred of women, beauty, or both. Blaming the victim, punishing a child. As perhaps he was punished.”
He reexamined her upper body from the front, then moved around behind.
“But when he had done it, when
she was dead or dying, he seems to have been overcome by remorse, a complete mood swing, maybe even a separate personality.
Smeared blood and grease across her ribs seem to indicate that he then embraced her, tried to comfort her. Victim’s
wet hair on the left shoulder may mean that he rested his chin against it and cried, apologized, tried to explain.”
His audience, whom he’d forgotten, were dumbfounded.
The rest could be explained away as instinct and good detective’s skills. But how had he understood the killer’s
mind, his motive? His insanity.
How had he? Matt wondered himself. Had the killer projected
it into his mind as he slept? Or the girl? Such telepathy wasn’t unheard of, though it usually occurred
between siblings.
He forced himself back into the real world. There had to be an explanation, and he
would find it. He had to find it.
For now Detective Dick Wyman approached, seeming to mentally tick
off where Snow’s conclusions had been based on the evidence at hand, and where they crossed the line into pure speculation.
Fifty-three, drab suit and hat, charcoal-gray hair and a tired face, he was still a good and honest cop. Pre-judgment
simply wasn’t part of his makeup.
“You wanna know what I got?” he asked Snow.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay.
You see the boot tracks, the few we outlined instead of trampling?”
“The blood-stained tracks
that begin beneath her and move away?” asked Snow, “and the clean ones that come up from behind?”
Of course. “You got something on the boots?”
“The feet don’t fit ‘em,” said Wyman simply. “By the way the
ball of the right foot leans inward, I’d say they were several sizes too big for him.”
“Strange,”
said Snow, though half heard voices were whispering inside him.
“Yeah,” continued the veteran
detective. “Sometimes that’s done to disguise the murderer’s real size, but in this case, with so
little attempt to hide his identity, maybe he just doesn’t care. His right foot—somebody’s right foot—was
standing in a puddle of blood, then seemed to move right through her, as if he had pushed her aside and walked forward, away
from her. Walks off just like that, prints as clear as a stamp of red ink. You got any psychology on that?”
Snow had a degree in Criminal Psychology, one of the reasons he had risen to detective so fast.
“As
far as not disguising the crime,” he said thoughtfully, “I’d say he either wants to be caught, or is too
far gone to care.”
“I’ll
go for the second half of that,” said Wyman. “The guy is nuts.”
“Yes, and the oversized shoe may be a sign of his psychosis, though
I’ll have to think about that..... Did you find anything outside? Footprints, tire-tracks?”
“Yeah. The footprints aren’t so good, thanks to
some enterprising reporters who got to them before we could cordon off that side of the building. The tire tracks are
better: knobby tires, close-set, four-wheel-drive. They seemed to slide laterally as he turned fast in the grass
and mud before hitting the street. Wheel base front to back and side to side aren’t that much different.”
Lou approached. He loved four-wheel-drives, and knew more
about them than most. “Sounds to me like a Jeep,” he put in, “because of the knobbies and the wheel-base.”
Wyman nodded. “And one that’s been lifted, to judge by the high center of gravity, which led to the top-heavy
swerve in the grass.”
“Sounds right,”
said Wyman, “though I’m not sold on the lift job.”
At that moment Dr. Swift, the Medical Examiner, arrived in his omnipresent lab-coat. He wasn’t
tall, but appeared so because of his long neck and slender form. His hair was blonde and short, combed in a center part
above a pale forehead. He wore spectacles through which he seemed to squint regardless, and was known for two things:
thoroughness, and a complete lack of human understanding. Unless of course the humans were dead, in which case he knew
everything, and was happy to tell you so.
Snow made room for him, and together the group discussed the corpse,
pointing things out to him, exchanging mental notes. The strange thing was, that after a couple of minutes Snow found
himself taking the lead again, at least in questioning Swift. By now he had gloves on, though both he and Dr. Death
(one of his many nicknames), were still careful not to mark the body in any way.
“Addict?” asked
Snow, showing him the needle marks. He remained confident of his conclusions, this one at least, but needed to hear
it from someone colder and more objective. They didn’t come any colder than Swift.
“Probably.”
“Prostitute?” he asked, indicating various scars and tooth-marks.
“Possibly,
though I’ve seen similar marks on abused women of every kind. There are some sick people out there.”
Didn’t he know it? “She may have enjoyed it. Not all the sick people are men.”
This was too much. Snow felt an overpowering urge to bury his fist
in that smug, soulless face.
“Enjoyed it?” he said, barely able to master his rage. “Then
what are these?” He pointed to her wrists, partly obscured by the hand-cuffs. Two horizontal scars showed
plainly where she had slashed her wrists, trying to end the nightmare. “Sodomy, brutality and murder! Did
she enjoy those too, you insensitive son of a bitch?”
Seeing his partner’s dangerous mood, Lou came up quickly and took hold of his arms from behind.
Snow tried to shake free. Not from that powerful grasp.
“All right,” he said at last, the
big man letting go as his partner turned away. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Together they descended the stairs, and pushing aside the crowd
of reporters and cameramen, made their way back to the Excursion. They both got in, closing their doors against the
madness. Lou let out a caged breath, and backed out onto the street.
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