Swastika (15 page)

Cascade Mountains, British Columbia

May 26, Now

At just after dawn on this clear-skied morning, the helicopter lifted up off its pad on Sea Island, in the mouth of the Fraser River, and began a glorious flight up the inland valley. Overnight winds from the west had cleared the valley of air pollution. Sitting in the seat beside the chopper’s pilot, Dane faced the dazzling fire mask of the rising sun as it peered over the stockade of jagged eastern peaks.

This flight to the Mountain—for him, it was always the Mountain, with a capital
M
—had actually begun decades ago, when Dane was only three.

They call it “the Graveyard of the Air,” that stretch of 120 air miles east from Vancouver to Princeton, in the heart of the Cascade Mountains. Too many pilots have crashed there, and some of their planes have never been found. The dangers are always multitudinous, but winter is the worst. Storms sweeping in from the Pacific are hurled abruptly upward as they batter the precipitous walls of the Cascades. Turbulent air screams over the towering ridges and plummets down the lee side in a whirling maelstrom, just like rapids do over rocks in rivers. Fierce winds race at all angles, for mountains also brew up their own fantastic storms. The result is a standing wave—a waterfall of wind—that can disappear from under a plane with a sickening jolt, like a floor collapsing beneath your feet.

And then there’s ice.

In an instant, damp mountain air can plaster a plane with tons of solid rime, weighting it down appreciably and disrupting the airflow that keeps the wings lifted up.

In 1945, on his liberation from the Stalag Luft POW camp, Keith Winter had returned to Canada from Bomber Command and applied to join the RCMP. The Mounties reorganized Air Division in 1946, staffing it with recruits who’d flown operations in the war. Keith rose quickly to pilot staff sergeant on the West Coast, where he flew a Beaver floatplane on the Fraser River.

Later, Keith’s son, Troy, had followed his father into the red serge and Air Division. Dane’s dad was promoted up the ranks to helicopter sergeant of the RCMP’s JetRanger. He and Papa became known as “the flying Winters.” The winter of the accident, Keith’s sister-in-law had suffered a stroke in Princeton. Because it wasn’t known how long she would live, Troy had rented a private plane to fly both his mother and his wife inland to be at his aunt’s bedside. Papa, in a cast with a broken leg, had stayed in Vancouver with three-year-old Dane.

Before that day was out, Keith was a widower and Dane was an orphan.

In the jargon of pilots who braved the Graveyard of the Air, Troy and his passengers had run into a “cumulo-granitus” cloud. The weather in the Cascade Mountains had changed en route, and the plane, ambushed by the shifting conditions, had struck a snowy peak. Just to the east of Mount Slesse—where a North Star had crashed back in 1956, killing all sixty-two people aboard—a search pilot had spotted a metallic glint in the cirque of the Razorback. Closer examination revealed it to be the tail section of a plane bearing the fuselage number of the one that Troy had rented. But before the bodies could be recovered, an avalanche had buried the wreck under tons of snow. To this day, the Razorback remained their grave.

*    *    *

The Fraser River snaked along the valley like molten gold. Upstream, the bedroom communities of Greater Vancouver gave way to the fertile farmlands of rural enclaves: Langley, Matsqui, Abbotsford, and Chilliwack. Beneath the helicopter, boats and log booms carved wakes along the river while rush-hour traffic began to clog the Trans-Canada Highway. Dead ahead loomed the peaks of the bloodthirsty Cascades, their icy fangs running red with the flush of dawn. Veering southeast off the main artery, the chopper tracked the Chilliwack River past Cultus Lake, whose waters sparkled with silver as if to promote the steelhead angling for which it was famous. The overhead rotor thumped louder as they gained altitude, climbing over Slesse Park, with its monument to those who’d died in the 1956 crash, then soaring up along an evergreen slope and around the shoulder of a wicked rampart of rock.

Dane yawned several times to unplug his ears. The helicopter flew by an ugly scar that had been gouged out of the vertical, gray granite cliff at 7,600 feet. The scar marked the spot where, driven down by a ferocious wave of wind, the North Star had crumpled and broken apart, before plummeting another two thousand feet.

“The Razorback,” the pilot said, pointing. And there it was to the east—the Mountain that had crushed the life out of Dane’s father, mother, and grandmother.

Like a stegosaurus, the Razorback had staggered triangular plates jutting up along its ridge spine.

“We’ll set down there,” the pilot told both passengers through the headphones.

Though it was late May, the dead-end valley was still an avalanche cauldron. The chopper closed in on a flattish saddle between two precipitous walls of rock, a spot selected by the pilot because it had no snowcap to drop on the landing site. At 8,200 feet, it was near the summit of the Razorback. So precariously unstable were the snow masses clinging to this horseshoe of icebound pinnacles that the thumping of the rotors as they flew over the cirque sent tons of white thundering down the right-angled cliffs like a waterfall.

As the chopper landed, snow billowed from the ground.

Two men climbed down from the helicopter. The pilot remained in the cockpit … to be ready, just in case. Dane wore the Mounties’ famous red serge, an icon almost as internationally recognizable as the Coca-Cola logo. The other man’s tunic was also red, but the rest of his uniform differed. Instead of the Stetson, he wore a Glengarry hat with a regimental bison-head badge on the side. Instead of blue breeches with a yellow side-stripe, he wore a kilt with a sporran. Instead of riding boots with spurs, he wore knee-high argyll socks with red garters and white spats over black oxfords. Tucked into the top of his right sock was a boot knife: the
sgian dubh
.

Every thread in the tartan of the kilt had meaning. The background theme color matched Dane’s dark blue riding breeches and the saddle blanket of the Musical Ride. The scarlet cross-hatch picked up the red tunic of the frontier riders of the plains. The yellow thread represented Dane’s cavalry stripe; the sienna brown thread the bison at the heart of the Mounties’ badge; the forest green thread the maple leaves around the edge of their crest; the sky blue thread their new peacekeeping role with the United Nations. The accent color was white, which has spiritual significance for Native peoples and symbolizes strength and endurance. White was also the color of the lanyard that Dane had strung around his neck and attached to the butt of his gun. If he dropped his weapon in the heat of a shoot-out, it would still be at hand.

“Ready?” the pipe major asked.

Sucking in a deep breath, Dane nodded and walked to the edge of a precipice that plunged thousands of feet to the constantly stirring, crevassed snowfield below. Then he crooked his right arm to his hat in the RCMP salute.

The first note of the last post cut cleanly through the thin air of the mountain wilderness. Keith had done his duty both in war and in peace, and the time had come for Dane to do his duty by Papa. Troy had gone to his grave here, so the bugle blew for his duty, too.

Old Celtic legend holds that of all the musical instruments created, the bagpipes speak to the other world. The dead can hear them, and know they are mourned. That’s why the lone piper bids farewell to the fallen at Mountie funerals, and it’s why the wheeze of filling bagpipes sounded now, followed by drone pipes and the finger-holed chanter mourning Keith and Troy with a Scottish lament, “Flowers of the Forest.”

As he listened to the pipes and stood mute in the minute of silence that followed, Dane experienced a strange epiphany. All his life, he had feared this dreaded place, but now that he was up here at the top of the world, where Gabriel could be blowing his trumpet at the gates of heaven, the sergeant was overwhelmed by the awesome energy of the Mountain. We all have to die and rest somewhere, and no place on earth could be more exultant than this.

His soul leaped at the bugle call of “The Rouse”—what the layman incorrectly calls reveille—its stirring notes calling out to the fallen in the next and better realm. Dane found himself awaking to who he was as a man, as if all the threads of his being had woven together into a pattern with as much meaning for him as that tartan had for the Mounted Police.

Reaching into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife, he opened the box of cremated remains and slit the plastic sack with the blade. As the blue windbag of the pipes wheezed again, Dane scattered his grandfather’s ashes to the breeze, watching as they drifted out over the valley, then wafted down slowly to rest at long last with the spirits of his beloved wife, his dutiful son, and his daughter-in-law.

With the honors for Keith and Troy complete, the goodbye turned to the mother and the grandmother Dane could not remember. If there was a more inspiring tune in this world than “Amazing Grace” played on the bagpipes, he had yet to hear it. Echoes from the Razorback’s steeples joined the notes of the lone piper as the wilderness honored the Winters with its phantom pipe band.

*    *    *

Less than ten minutes after the rotors of the chopper had ceased whirling back at the heliport—and while he was still changing out of the red serge and into plainclothes—Dane got a call on his cell.

“Winter,” he answered.

“Dane, this is Rachel. You’ve got another murder.”

North Vancouver

Leaving the helicopter pad on Sea Island, in the deltoid mouth of the Fraser River, Dane drove straight north across Vancouver with the U.S. border behind his back and crested the harbor on Lions Gate Bridge, parking his car at Lonsdale Quay. As he neared the waterfront high-rise that was the murder scene, he phoned Sergeant Rachel Kidd to come down and meet him.

“Was the scene secured in time?” Dane asked when both sergeants stood face to face.

“Yes. We got lucky. Only two civilians know: the maid who went in to clean this morning and found Midas dead on the bed, and the high-rise manager, a very uptight guy. He’s afraid the building will be cursed by the gods of economics if word gets out. He shut the maid up by threatening her job before he called us. The guy’s so afraid of a leak that he didn’t call 9-1-1.”

“Midas?” Dane said. “The exec in the papers?”

The other sergeant nodded. “He really pissed someone off. Wait’ll you see what was done to him.”

“I hope you’re not pissed at me.”

“What? For usurping the case?”

Dane nodded in turn.

“It’s for the better,” Kidd said, shrugging with resignation. A tinge of disappointment lowered her voice. “This murder will be your ticket into Special X. I’m not their favorite poster girl, as you know.”

Unlike so many forces around the world, the RCMP remains mostly free of corruption. Its officers take their unofficial motto—“The Mounties always get their man”—very seriously, even when it comes to one of their own. It’s a badge of honor in the ranks to take down a dirty cop, but if you go after one of your own, you had better make damn sure that your allegation sticks.

That had been Rachel’s downfall.

Until the 1970s, there were no women and no blacks in the RCMP, so Constable Rachel Kidd had been a PR man’s dream. Very quickly, she began a meteoric rise up the ranks. Dane had come in to the force at the same time, but he couldn’t compete. Everyone understood that Kidd would soon be a dreamboat inspector. But then she overreached by charging Corporal Nick Craven with the murder of his mother, and when that member of Special X walked out of court a free man, his accuser had paid the regimental price. Her booster rocket had sputtered; her career had crashed to earth. And the would-be inspector was now, like Dane, a sergeant with GIS.

“You responded to the first case, so this one is yours. We’re cool,” Rachel confirmed.

“Good. Beam me up.”

“Beam me up” was the ideal way to describe the ascent to the penthouse suite at the top of the most phallic tower in Lonsdale Quay. The suite’s private glass elevator waited up at the skyline until the king of the castle summoned it down to one of two levels: the waterfront walk along the harbor, or the access-controlled parking lot below.

The sergeants were on the quayside, and Rachel used a remote control to recall the elevator. It had returned to the top of the tower while they were talking.

“This control belongs to the manager,” she explained. “If it’s okay for the maid to clean, she gets the control from him. The other control—there are only two—was used by Midas. It’s not in the penthouse, but he is, so the killer must have taken it away.”

“Security cameras?”

“Uh-huh. But they were turned off. The cameras also work off the remote control.”

“The killer turned them off?”

“Midas, probably. That’s what he usually did when he escorted his bedmates here.”

“That’s why the maid had to check?”

“You got it,” Rachel said, nodding. “This penthouse isn’t where he lived. It’s where he came for sex.”

“We’re looking for a woman?”

“A woman
or
a man. Kurt Midas used sex as a way to flaunt his money and power. Word is that he had a penchant for seducing the wives and lovers of his rivals—and saw it as a coup to bed their yes-men, too.”

“That’s a lot of enemies.”

“The guy was disturbed. You’d have to be to want to ruin as many lives as he did.”

“So how do you think it went down?”

“Midas was in the company of someone he wanted to bed. They drove into his private area of the parking lot. He punched off the security cameras, and they rode the elevator up. The attack occurred on the bed in the penthouse. With Midas dead, his killer used the remote to descend to the lot, and then he or she escaped in his car.”

“It’s missing?”

“Uh-huh. And it’s not at his home.”

The elevator was tinted so that outsiders couldn’t gawk in as it scaled the face of the high-rise. It showed the Mounties a panorama of the inner and outer harbors as it soared.

“Nice view,” Dane said understatedly.

“Y’ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

The doors behind them opened on a single octagonal-shaped room, which, except for the floor, was made entirely of glass. Up here, the view was 360 degrees. Gazing around to take some of it in, Dane felt like the lamp in a lighthouse. Up here, he could see it all, from the ski slopes on the North Shore Mountains to the ships out at sea. An aerie like this was created for an out-of-control ego. From what Dane had heard about Kurt Midas, it fit him to a T.

“Jesus Christ! Is that him on the bed?”

“Like I said,” Rachel reiterated, “he
really
pissed someone off.”

*    *    *

When Dane Winter was at the University of British Columbia working toward his law degree, he had to take a science credit. Because he knew he was destined to follow his dad and his granddad into the Mounties, Dane chose zoology as his elective. He figured that all those lab dissections would prepare him for autopsies. The crime scene now before him reminded him of that dissection room more than any of his trips to the morgue ever had.

Smack dab in the middle of the glass-domed penthouse was a king-size bed. At night in that bed, you would be encased by a vault of stars and the moon above, with absolutely nothing to obstruct your view. Because the tower was the highest on the quay, no Peeping Tom could peek in, and the tinted glass would thwart any telescopes aimed down from the North Shore peaks. A square hole in the floor revealed a staircase that stepped down a level to where the bathroom, Jacuzzi, sauna, steam room, and other amenities awaited.

The guy on the bed had been skinned.

When Dane was a boy, Papa had bought him a plastic model kit called the Visible Man. It was a human body with all the internal organs on display through a plastic skin. As he approached the flayed man on the bed, that model came back to him.

“Good morning, Sergeant.” Dr. Gill Macbeth, the same sawbones who’d responded to the Mosquito Creek crime and done the post-mortem on the Congo Man, was standing over the body.

“Morning, Doc.”

Dane caught the evil eye that Gill flicked at Rachel. The doc had been pregnant with Nick Craven’s child throughout his murder trial and had suffered a miscarriage in the aftermath. To make matters worse, Gill was currently in a romantic relationship with Robert DeClercq, Craven’s boss at Special X and the man who’d saved him from jail.

Dane felt sorry for Rachel.

She was a good cop.

But a mistake was a mistake, and she’d forever have that albatross around her neck.

“Is there a moral here?” Dane asked.

“Yep,” said Rachel. “Fuck with innocent people’s life savings, and you could end up like this.”

*    *    *

It was like that song by Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue.” If you start a child off in life with the wrong name, there’ll be aftershocks. But in this case, it was a family name, so that was a little different. Go through life with the moniker Midas, and you might grow into it.

The Midas touch.

Like in the Greek myth.

When King Midas was granted a single wish by the god Dionysus, he asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. In the world of capitalism and
Forbes
magazine, those with the golden touch—men like Murdoch, Maxwell, Branson, and the Donald—are hailed as gods. Until things went south, Kurt Midas had been soaring to that level. Every deal that passed through his fingers was rumored to turn to gold.

Fool’s gold, actually.

Stockholders of Enron and WorldCom know only too well what happens when greedy corporate executives mistake their companies’ earnings for their own personal piggy banks. Kurt’s company had been listed on the stock exchange, and he had driven it straight into bankruptcy. Its loyal employees had invested their futures in its pension plan. Where all that money was now, no one seemed to know, for just before the gold rush had gone bust, Kurt Midas had mined the company of all that wealth. Perhaps it was squirreled away in some tax haven guarded by a phalanx of lawyers, and by the time prosecutors unraveled his Gordian knot of financial manipulations and extradited him to America to stand trial, Midas would be approaching the age of Methuselah.

In the meantime, Kurt had lived like a king.

Until last night.

“Cause of death?” Dane asked.

“A blow to the head,” said Gill. “See where the skull has caved in on one side?”

“Weapon?”

“Ident recovered a bloody champagne bottle from the floor beside the bed,” said Rachel.

Identification techs in white coveralls were at work doing forensic tests on areas of the penthouse not yet cleared to make a path fit for contamination. Among the exhibits in evidence bags was a bottle of top-end champagne.

“Prints?”

“Nope. Just the vic’s. The killer used gloves or wiped down the scene with a cloth.”

“Was Midas skinned alive?”

The pathologist shook her head. “The flaying was post-mortem. If I were to guess, I’d say he most likely stripped off his clothes and climbed onto the bed. Perhaps the killer was supposed to pop the champagne cork. Instead, he or she brained Midas across the head. After he was dead, his skin was peeled away.”

The hair remained in place, but the face was gone, as was the skin of the torso and the abdomen, down to, and including, the genitals. The arms and legs were flayed as far as the elbows and knees. But the eeriest thing for Dane was the eyes. They stared up at the glass ceiling from red, raw facial muscles.

“Was the skin taken as a trophy?”

“No,” said Rachel. “It’s mounted over there.”

The sergeant swiveled around to follow the direction of her finger, which pointed toward an octagon window on the right-hand side of the elevator. So shocked had Dane been by the bloody mess on the bed when the elevator doors opened that he had failed to catch sight of it in his peripheral vision.

“Definitely a case for Special X,” Rachel said, ushering him over to the skin display.

“Definitely,” Dane agreed. “The international aspect of both crimes—Liberian refugee from Africa and corporate pillager from the States—would transfer it anyway. And then we have the signature left at both scenes.”

The skin that had been stripped off Kurt Midas was plastered to the window by its bloody underlay. An aerosol can had been used to spray the human hide with gold paint. The gilded trophy had the torso, genitals, stumpy limbs, and face of a humanoid form. The artwork bore the signature of its creator. Carved into the skin of the forehead was a Nazi swastika.