Last Resort of Murder (A Lacy Steele Mystery Book 9) (13 page)

“We had to get special permission
and have Mr. Schmidt, the chemistry teacher, oversee us,” she said.

“Why?” he prompted.

“Because the chemicals were dangerous.
We had to use potassium cyanide.” Her eyes widened. She looked from the
photograph to Jason, and then smiled. “Jason, come on. Do you really think
Snaps could be a murderer? You just compared him to Winnie the Pooh. Boy
couldn’t even make it through show choir without breaking down in tears. There
is no way he’s a murderer.”

“You said he develops software.
What kind?”

“I don’t know. Apps, I think?”

“Like maybe a weight loss app?
Something that could be revolutionary to the industry? Something that could
make a lot of money? Something you could use on your phone?”

“Oh,” she said. She sounded as
breathless as he felt.

“Where exactly is Lacy?”

“Wherever snowy owls have been
spotted? Somewhere off the beaten path probably. She said they had to ski and
she was nervous about that,” she said.

“Geez,” Jason breathed. He grasped
Kimber by the shoulders. “Go find Detective Green and tell him everything we
just talked about. Then tell him to get some men and help me find Lacy.”

“Do you really think she’s in
trouble? I mean, it’s Snaps.”

“If what we think is true, he’s
already killed one woman. What’s to stop him from killing another? And this one
is a novice on skis,” Jason said.

“Maybe he has no intent to hurt
her. Maybe he thinks he’s getting away with it since the attention has been on
Sven.”

“Let’s hope so. Maybe she won’t say
anything to tip him off. What we need is a stroke of good luck.”

“It’s Lacy,” Kimber said.

“I’d better hurry,” Jason replied
and jogged in the direction of the ski lift.

“I don’t think this is a good idea.
Please, let me go.”

Snaps had a hand on Lacy’s giant
yellow snowsuit, anchoring her in place. “It’ll be fine, I promise.”

“What if the chair knocks me down
and I fall? What if it takes you away and I’m stuck here in the snow?” Lacy
said.

“Then you’ll die on this mountain,”
Snaps said, then catching sight of her horrified expression, laughed. “Lacy,
it’s going to be fine. We’ve been over this. The lift will come and bump the
back of your legs. You’ll sit. We’ll go. The world will go on spinning.”

Lacy was still uncertain. “The
system looks complex.”

“The ‘system’ is a wooden chair
that moves,” Snaps said. “Come on, after all your hard work this weekend, don’t
let the chairlift defeat you. You stuck to your diet, you lost the weight. You
can conquer sitting on a moving chair.”

He was right. Even better, he got
it. Why couldn’t Jason understand how important it was for her to have made it
through the weekend with her discipline intact? He made it seem like dieting
was some sort of issue for her when, really, the lack of dieting was the issue.
Wasn’t it? Was her relationship to food so unhealthy that she couldn’t see the
difference anymore?

“I’ve lost you,” Snaps said.

“No, I’m here. My mind wandered for
a minute.” She took a breath. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s do this thing.”

They stepped forward. The lift came
toward them. He grasped her wrist. The chair tapped the back of her knees and
she sat.

“That was it?”

“That was it,” he said.

“That was so easy, way better than
the evil tow rope. Why do they put that on the bunny hill and the chair down
there?” she asked.

“Probably because kids could fall
off and die,” he said.

At that she made the mistake of
looking down.

“Don’t look down,” he said.

“Too late.” The ground was
dizzyingly far away. “What happens when it’s time to get off?”

“We get off,” he said.

“How?”

“The chair deposits us gently on
the snow.”

“What if I fall?”

“Then I’ll help you up. It’s not
like in some cartoon where we’ll be perched on the edge of a precipice and
begin immediately sliding downhill. In fact, we’ll be going parallel for a
while, not downhill at all. Try not to worry.”

Lacy nodded. She was making too big
a deal of things, a fact which became apparent as soon as it was time to get off.
The lift deposited them gently on the snow, as Snaps had said. She did
overbalance and fall over, but Snaps helped her back up. And the “mountain,” if
the a slope could be described as such, was barely more of an incline than the
bunny hill.

“This isn’t so bad,” she admitted.
“I think I could ski this.”

“Maybe later. For now we have an
owl to watch. Follow me.”

He dug in his poles and headed off.
Lacy attempted to mimic his movements and found that cross-country skiing was
no less challenging than downhill. Sure, she wasn’t losing her balance and
sliding away, but the muscles it took were ones she hadn’t used in a while, and
they were still sore from her brutal massage. Snaps raced ahead of her, looked
back, then paused for her to catch up.

“I’m sorry I’m slowing you down,”
she called.

“You’re fine,” he replied. “I don’t
mind.” He sounded sincere. Maybe he liked to have company on these birding
adventures. Did he usually go alone? She didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t know
much about him, outside the fact that they had been friends in high school and
he developed software for a living. Did he have friends? Did he date? He didn’t
seem lonely, but maybe he was good at putting up a front.

“Here we are,” he announced after
what felt like a hundred miles but in reality was probably only about one.

Lacy hadn’t realized how wobbly her
arms and legs felt until she stopped. And she was sweating profusely under her
puffy yellow snowsuit. She wished there were a way to take it off, but unless
she undid the skis and boots, she was stuck.

Snaps had come prepared for
seemingly everything, though. He reached into the pocket of his fancy ski
jacket and pulled out an emergency foil blanket. Unfolding it, he spread it on
the ground and motioned to Lacy to sit. She tried, but things didn’t go well.
The skis made every task more awkward and difficult. First she tried putting
them parallel and sinking toward the ground. When that didn’t work, she tried
to stick them perpendicular into the ground and plop down. Finally Snaps noticed
her dilemma and used his poles to unsnap her skis.

“Thank you,” she said. She didn’t
know why she hadn’t thought to ask him for help, except that getting the skis
on and off seemed like such an ordeal to her that she hadn’t wanted to bother
him with it.

He snapped off his skis and sat
beside her on the blanket.

“What exactly are we looking for?”
she asked.

“Movement.”

He was looking through a monocular
device that was much smaller and lighter than binoculars.

“Aren’t owls nocturnal?” she asked.

“Snowy owls hunt during the day.
They’re native to the arctic tundra. They have to make hay while the sun shines
or, in their case, hunt rodents while they’re still awake.”

“How did you learn so much about
birds?”

“I spent a ton of time birding when
I was a kid. It’s a good hobby for the lonely and disenfranchised. If you’re
walking around in the woods alone, you look like a weirdo. But if you’re
walking around looking for birds, you look intelligent and interested in
nature.”

“I should have taken it up much
earlier, then,” Lacy said. If she was annoying him with her conversation, he
didn’t let on. “Do you go birding a lot?”

“When I can. My work keeps me busy.
I don’t keep regular hours. I work on a project until it’s finished and then
take some time off.”

“So you’re between projects right
now.”

He set the monocular down with a
frown. “Sort of. I’ve been working on something, but it’s taken a frustrating
turn. Do you want to take a look through the scope?”

She was interested in his job; he
was the first software developer she’d met. She took the scope and held it up
to her eye, but she saw nothing but trees. “How so?”

“I developed this new app and it
showed a ton of potential, but the prototype had a ton of kinks. Someone was
testing it for me, but it didn’t go well.”

Lacy blinked her un-monocled eye.
Had they had this conversation before and her tired brain didn’t remember?
There was something familiar about it. “A prototype?” Where had she heard that
word before?

“Yeah, you know, like the test
project you use to refine your final product. But it had a lot of kinks. I’m
sure I can get them worked out, but it’s going to take some time.”

It
had a lot of kinks.
She was sure she had heard that phrase recently, but
where? “That’s funny. I feel like I was just talking to someone else who said
that same thing.”

His head whipped in her direction.
“Really? Who?”

“I can’t remember. It’s ringing
around in my head, though—
a
prototype with lots of kinks.
Weird. I must know more than one inventor.”
She smiled and handed him the scope. His smile looked a bit strained. Lacy
wondered why. What could she have said to offend him?

“Small world,” he said and peered
through the scope again.

“Derek,” she announced, and Snaps
dropped the scope.

“What?”

“It was Derek who said the thing
about a prototype with kinks, but I can’t remember what he was talking about.”
She yawned. Her brain felt mushy from the lack of sleep the past couple of
days. Or maybe it was from the lack of substantial food.

“Hmm,” Snaps said.

“Surely he’s not an inventor. I
mean, he works as a desk clerk. Not that desk clerks can’t be inventors, but
you know what I mean. He doesn’t strike me as the overly ambitious type.”

“I bet you can’t wait to leave
here,” Snaps said, abruptly changing the topic.

“It’s been nice to be with my
family,” Lacy said.

“Yeah, but with all the hubbub and
the police interference, it can’t have been relaxing,” he said.

“It was okay.”

“Now you can go back to real life
and stop thinking about murder,” Snaps said.

“You’d be surprised how often that
comes up in my real life,” Lacy said.

“I admire what you’ve been doing
for Sven. You tried your best for him. You can go home with a clear
conscience,” he said.

She frowned. “I can’t leave him
hanging after I promised to help. I earnestly believe he didn’t do it. I can’t
set him adrift because I’m going home. I would never be able to live with
myself if an innocent man went to jail for something he didn’t do.”

His shoulders sagged. He stuffed
the scope back in his pocket. “I think we’re done here.”

“That was fast. I had the idea
birding took a long time.”

“Sometimes you get a sense that
nothing is going to happen,” Snaps said. “If there was a snowy owl here, it’s
long gone.”

“I’m sorry. I was really hoping to
see one today,” Lacy said.

“I was hoping things would turn out
differently, too,” he said. He held her hand to pull her up and helped her snap
into her skis.

“So, do we go back the way we came
and ski down the hill?” She asked. She peered into the distance toward the
gentle slope they had come from. The side of the mountain they were on now was
steeper and filled with pine trees.

“No.” There was a hard blow to her
back and then she was sliding down the mountain.

“Wha…?” she gasped, but there was
no time to wonder over what happened. Her arms windmilled wildly, trying to
keep her balance. Poles, where were her poles? Not in her hands, that was for
sure. The trail was bumpy with sticks, brush, branches, and stumps, but those
were the least of her problems. Up ahead loomed the greatest danger—a thick
grove of pine trees. There was no way to avoid them, and she was gaining speed.
She would hit one and be killed. This was how celebrities died, not her. It
wasn’t fair; she wasn’t a thrill seeker. She was supposed to be the sort of
woman who went out to retrieve the mail in her pajamas in winter, got locked
out, and died from exposure. Or maybe one day she would trip on her cat and
choke on a doughnut, but not this, not speeding down a mountain.

One thing she knew for
certain—she had to stop before she hit a tree. And the only way to stop
was to force herself to fall now, but falling while going downhill at a high
rate of speed went against nature. Her instincts were warning her to stay
aloft. It was only by the greatest discipline that her mind overrode her
instincts. If she had any chance of staying alive, she would have to fall now.
But for the first time in her life, falling seemed easier said than done. She
was doing it—she was actually skiing downhill. How was it possible that
she hadn’t been able to make it up the bunny hill but now she was hitting bumps
and brush at a high rate of speed and unable to fall down? How did one stop
without poles? She was supposed to do something with her feet, but getting them
to do anything other than slide downhill seemed impossible. What if she just
plopped down?

She tried to crouch, but that made
her go faster, so she stood up straight. She leaned forward, hoping to
overbalance and topple over, but that made her go faster, too. It was
indicative of her life that the one time she desperately needed to fall, she
couldn’t. A sapling was coming up. She leaned for it, grasped it, and pulled it
from the ground.

She stared at the thing, amazed.
How had she uprooted a tree with her bare hands?
Did I get bitten by a radioactive spider?
Or was she going that
fast?

The pine trees were coming up
quickly. In a few seconds, she would be there. In a final act of desperation,
she threw her arms over her head and lurched to the side. At last her body
responded. She toppled hard to the ground—face first—and spun
wildly out of control. The rough terrain tumbled her over and over until
eventually she wound up on her back.

She knew enough about falling to
try and draw her body into the fetal position, but it wouldn’t cooperate. Her
arms and legs were flying in all directions and she screamed hysterically. To
the outside observer, she probably looked like SpongeBob Squarepants careening
down a mountain, but the giant yellow snowsuit saved her a lot of pain. Things
were hitting her, to be sure, but the impact was absorbed by several inches of
cheerful golden polyester.

After what seemed like
forever—but was probably only a few seconds—it was over. Her body
stopped sliding. She lay still, panting, trying to regain her orientation. Was
anything broken or bleeding? She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. Her
body felt numb, whether from cold, shock, or multiple contusions, she didn’t
know. Could she get up? She didn’t know. But even if she did, what then? How
would she get back? She had no idea where she was.

A gentle swooshing sound grew
louder and closer. Lacy looked up and saw Snaps heading toward her. Unlike her
pell-mell descent down the hill, Snaps was picking his way carefully around
each obstacle. Should she call out for help or try to hide? Her brain felt like
it was on the spin cycle. She had no cause to be afraid of Snaps, did she? But
if not, why had that pain in her back felt like a hard shove down the mountain?

Her inner turmoil didn’t amount to
anything because she was once again stuck on her back like an overturned
turtle. Snaps skied up to her and stared down, an undreadably serious
expression on his face. Lacy’s first clue about his intentions should have been
the fact that he didn’t ask how she was doing.

“Well, this is a pickle,” he said.

“Help me up?” Lacy tried.