The Ides of Matt 2015

by M. L. Buchman

  “Of course!” Rikka then explained to the others over her shoulder, knowing they wouldn’t get it. “There would be a groove cut in the bottom lip of the ice by the wire running in the direction it was being pulled from.”

  Sam pointed in the direction her lens had gone.

  Rikka latched onto Sam’s arm as he led the way. She was so glad to see him she was feeling all bubbly and chirpy and…and…girly, she decided. Maybe it was okay to feel that around him, but just him.

  Sam led them directly to Senator Waring’s Edwardian mini-palace of a fish shack. Patrice unlocked the heavy deadbolt for them.

  There, in the middle of the living room, was an open fishing hole cover. Beside it, a heavy-duty fishing reel with a motorized winding spool was attached to a small stand. Her lens dangled in its evil clutches.

  “Where did that come from?” Waring protested but no one believed him. It certainly hadn’t been there last night when she and Patrice had returned to the scene or they would have noticed it.

  Rikka retrieved her lens and tested it. It seemed none the worse for its dunking after she’d dried it off with a plush maroon towel that matched the leather furniture.

  There was a sharp snap of handcuffs. Patrice had latched Senator Waring to the circular staircase leading up to his eagle’s aerie lounge, “I hereby arrest you for the attempted murder of Governor Llewellyn.”

  He sputtered and protested as she read him his rights.

  Meanwhile, Rikka led Sam to the hole where the Governor’s wife had been decapitated.

  The wire-notch goose chase then led them to Congressman Marvin Maxwell’s cabin. That meant that Marvin had set the trap in Senator Waring’s bedroom that had killed the Governor’s wife shortly after he’d slept with her.

  It didn’t take much digging around among the beer kegs behind the bar to unearth another powered spool.

  “The Congressman,” Patrice inspected it carefully, “must have hidden this away after he killed First Lady Llewellyn, but before he was in turn killed. Yes,” she held up the end of the wire. “There are several long blond hairs still wound around the wire. No one on the deep ice but the First Lady has hair this long.”

  Marilyn Maxwell’s was shoulder-length and Patrice’s was even shorter.

  Rikka also found a fancy looking remote control with two tiny joysticks, “It’s like those things to radio-control those toy drones.”

  Sam had continued his search. Behind a keg of Bud Lite, he unearthed a small submarine as long as Rikka’s forearm.

  “I,” everyone turned to look at Marilyn—except for the military security guy they’d left asleep in the Governor’s shack and Senator Hamilton Waring who was still shackled to the staircase of his own fish shack for safe keeping. “I gave each of the boys one of those last summer. Three remote-controlled submarines that they could have mock battles with out on the lake.”

  “I remember that,” Patrice was nodding.

  “They must have used them to carry a lead under the ice and each set up a trap,” Rikka tried to think it through. “First, Congressman Maxwell must have tried to murder Senator Waring. But he killed poor First Lady Lulu Llewellyn instead when she entered the Senator’s bedroom.”

  “Then someone decapitated poor Marvin,” Marilyn shook her head though she didn’t appear too sad about the loss.

  “And just now,” Patrice picked up the line of logic, “Senator Waring tried to kill Governor Llewellyn but by pure chance caught your camera lens instead.”

  Sam didn’t even need to point to the hole where Congressman Marvin Maxwell had died for Rikka to know the next question.

  “Now, let’s find out where Marvin’s head has gone.”

  One last time her Sam…her Sam, she kind of liked the way that sounded…plunged his hand into the icy depths. She found him a Bavarian-brown towel to dry his hand with as he rose to his feet and slowly turned to face Governor Llewellyn.

  They left Maxwell’s Bavarian beer hall and crossed the ice once more to Llewellyn’s Greek temple completing the sides of the triangle. Back in the Governor’s palace of white, in an open fishing hole close beside the claw-foot bathtub—white of course—dangled Marvin Maxwell’s head caught in a loop of wire.

  “It seems,” Chief Patrice Smith noted in a dry voice, “that the Governor didn’t want any competition for his run at the White House either. After all, he’d know that only forty percent of our Presidents were governors first. His chances against both Maxwell and Waring would have been poor. He had to level the playing field.”

  “I would never—”

  The Secret Service agent ignored the Governor’s protests as he cuffed him to the clawfoot tub.

  “They’ll have to go to trial for—” Patrice started but the not-so Secret Service man cut her off.

  His look of disgust gave him away. Rikka knew from experience that the U.S. Secret Service would never reveal any judgment about the people they protected. Well, if he wasn’t Secret Service…

  “We are not going to have the two Chairmen of the Congressional Armed Services Committees and a dirty Governor besmirching the news nor the next Presidential election with their petty rivalries. Now if you would all kindly leave.” He sounded more like a special troubleshooter for a political party—perhaps the one that all three men had shared. He rousted the military man and sent him stumbling out to get in their car. The man sounded dangerous and borderline psychotic.

  Rikka checked in with Sam.

  Sam and the troubleshooter squared off and eyed each other for a long moment. There was no question Sam would win if it came down to a fight, but she also knew that no one loved his country more than Sam. Getting his hands dirty in its name was not a foreign concept to a Marine Force Recon soldier, retired or not.

  His slight nod of agreement was enough for her. If Sam thought it was best to stay out of this guy’s way, she wouldn’t argue.

  Kate was going to hate this, but Rikka shut down the camera and pulled out the memory card. Then she reached into her boot and pulled out the second copy she’d made as they came back out on the ice this morning, and handed them both to the agent.

  Patrice drove Marilyn, Sam, and Rikka back to Patrice’s ice shack where she made them all freshly-brewed coffee. It was as cozy and feminine inside as it was cute outside. The Police Chief had faced her shack so that the view wasn’t polluted by the three ridiculous buildings grouped at the outer edge of safety. Instead, the windows faced the distant shore and the sun climbing above the dark tree line.

  Rikka wasn’t overly surprised by the loud thump behind her. She ignored the groan of protest that echoed briefly through the ice beneath the ice shack.

  By unspoken agreement they waited until the Not Secret Service agent’s vehicle had passed by on its way to clear out the morgue and Patrice’s coroner files. They finished their coffee before they went outside to look at the empty horizon to the north across Lake Winnibigoshish.

  No three fishing shacks. No crystal red Cadillac SUV. No three men at war over the Presidency of the United States by whatever means necessary.

  Something had broken the ice, perhaps the papers would attribute it to the excess weight of the extravagant fish-shack palaces and massive SUVs out on the deep ice.

  Whatever the actual cause, everything had disappeared from view. By tonight, the ice would be refrozen over the shattered chunks that now filled that area of the lake. In a week it would be walkable. A team of special divers would surely be called, but a thorough investigation would have to wait until spring and melt-out.

  The four of them went back inside to prepare for the Lake Winnibigoshish Northland Chowder-Off that would be starting in a few hours.

  7

  “You know,” Kate Stark sat back in her chair after tasting the four dozen chowders that had been entered in the contest, “that’s quite some story, Rikka.”

 
“I know. I almost didn’t tell you, but Sam thought you’d like to know.” She’d filled Kate in on all of the details she could remember while the chowders had been cooking on portable stoves, in between when Kate had wandered from chef to chef for “on the ice” interviews.

  The Chowder-Off was a near-shore event, with a section of the ice polished for an ice skating rink, Genuine Lake Winnibigoshish Ice snow cones, and a fairway of game booths and crafts. Everyone was bundled up in heavy parkas and making merry of the sunny day that had reached a balmy ten degrees above zero.

  Rikka was definitely going to put in for an equatorial assignment next time.

  “Odd that all three men thought to use the same method,” Kate remarked.

  “Maybe one thought it up, told it as a joke to the others, and then they each decided to give it a go.”

  “Could be,” Kate admitted and started flipping through her scoring notes again. “Could be.” She began handing losers to Rikka.

  Rikka read the tasting notes and was once again awed by Kate. There were nuances and subtleties marked down that Rikka didn’t even know about, never mind might have noticed.

  For her, there was one pretty clear winner, but maybe she was biased.

  Kate finally winnowed the stack down to the top three, and flicked one of her perfectly manicured but unpainted nails against the winner. Well, Rikka was pleased to have been right about that.

  “Maybe,” Kate said quietly as the crowds gathered to hear the final judging and prize awards, “a fourth person suggested it to each of them individually. Though there’s no way to tell who now.”

  Rikka blinked at that, then Kate gave her a nudge toward a good camera position as she moved to the carved ice podium and began speaking. Rikka got the camera aimed and gave her friend a nod that she was recording.

  Kate was funny, of course, and charming. There was a reason the woman ran the Number One food network on television with the most popular shows being the ones she did herself.

  A fourth person, Rikka considered.

  Marilyn Maxwell, the dead-Congressman’s wife, had given each of the “boys” one of the toy submarines.

  And slept with each one, though clearly not as freely as the Governor’s wife had. Maybe just once or twice, to suggest the idea of the trap.

  Kate awarded third place amid a large round of cheers and applause.

  Rikka tracked a great bearded man in her viewscreen. He was on the verge of weeping with joy as he lumbered forward and wrapped Kate in a great hug that drew laughter and more applause from the audience.

  But what would make all three men set their traps on the same day? Perhaps because of it being the day before the Chowder-Off? It still didn’t sound right.

  What if Marilyn had slept with each merely in order to convince the men to give her a key so that she’d have access to each of their cabins?

  Kate called up the second place winner. A tiny elderly woman came trotting forward with her gray braids flapping about her. She was clearly well loved and also garnered much heartfelt applause that made Rikka feel more kindly toward Minnesota than she had since reading the first weather report of her latest assignment.

  And then Rikka remembered one fact she hadn’t thought to tell Kate.

  Who had tugged on the back of her coat and stopped Rikka from sticking her neck into the trap set at the Governor’s shack?

  No one had admitted to it, but only one person had come to check on her after she’d sprung the trap and lost her lens down an ice hole.

  She swung the camera to locate her as Kate called out the winner.

  There was a roar of approval as the name was announced.

  The camera caught Police Chief Patrice Smith’s radiant smile, the first Rikka had ever seen cross her features. And the look bloomed further a moment later when Marilyn Maxwell threw herself into the victor’s arms and kissed her soundly.

  Rikka captured their moment—one that she’d edit out later and perhaps send to them privately—then panned into the cheering crowd capturing some great footage for the television show.

  Rikka herself wouldn’t miss the three men from the upcoming Presidential race and she doubted if Patrice or Marilyn would miss them in the years to come.

  Patrice Smith, who—Rikka finally recalled from her prep work—had placed a consistent fourth over the years, came to the podium to collect her First Place prize for the best Ice-Caught Fish Chowder.

  And the cheering continued as the cooks and fans of the Annual Lake Winnibigoshish Northland Chowder-Off proved that they definitely weren’t going to miss the three men at all.

  Heart of the Storm

  Some stories are born out of thin air…in this case very thin air high atop the fourteen thousand foot peak of Mt. Rainier.

  I set out to learn the backstory of Delta Force operator Michael Gibson. I needed to know more about him before writing his romantic suspense novel, Bring on the Dusk (the sixth novel in the main flight of my series The Night Stalkers).

  Colonel Michael Gibson materialized out of thin air while I was writing the very first book in the series, The Night Is Mine. And he refused to leave. Book after book, when the mission got truly ugly, Michael was there at the heart of it. And the fans were constantly asking me for more about him.

  I had been writing about him in desert situations, so I decided to toss him into a very different environment and sat back to see what happened. I set him high on the slopes of Mt. Rainier, alone in the middle of a winter blizzard. You know, a training hike…Delta Force-style.

  There is a silence that wraps around Michael. It is a silence that I’ve heard up on those slopes (though I was there in the summer and didn’t go anywhere near the glacier-shrouded peak). But I’ve heard the wind slipping over the ice field with the soft rattle of ice granules. I’ve followed the melt-out stream upslope until it was at first ice-covered and finally frozen solid.

  Against his desire for a little peace and silence, he is soon wrapped up in a high-mountain rescue—drawn back into the world he was trying to avoid for a little time.

  Two unexpected things happened at that point for me as a writer.

  I needed a helicopter, a crazy-good one flown by a top pilot. Who better than then-Captain Mark Henderson and members of his newly formed 5th Battalion D Company. I had not expected to discover the origins of the company I’d already written five novels about while in a short story about a Delta Force operator. I also learned why Colonel Michael Gibson just always seemed to be there at the tip of the spear with the Night Stalkers of the 5D.

  It was over a year later that this little story offered up its second surprise. The woman rescued by Michael and Mark high atop the slopes that winter was a small character, practically a throw away.

  Except she refused to be thrown away. When I finally launched my Delta Force romantic suspense series, she stepped to the fore and said, “Book Number Two. That one is mine!” When Melissa Charlene Moore speaks, you listen.

  I’m glad I did. She totally rocked Heart Strike, earning fantastic reviews. Rock it, Charli!

  Five Years Ago

  1

  Major Michael Gibson of U.S. Army’s Delta Force was at eleven thousand feet, less than two hundred feet below the summit of Little Tahoma Peak when he heard the distress call on his radio. It was pure chance that he heard anything.

  The January winds were howling down upon him, caught in the funnel of Little Tahoma and Mount Rainier’s nearby peak that climbed another three thousand feet above him. The Arctic northerly, driving in the frigid Canadian air and dumping several feet of overnight snow, still howled beneath a sky so blue it could have been a child’s spilled paints.

  At least it was blue where last night’s storm scrubbed the sky clean before departing southward to rush over Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood on its way to bury the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California. The n
orthern sky already looked to be gearing up for the next onslaught through the Cascade Mountain Range.

  Michael had escaped the ceaseless roar of the icy wind when he tucked down behind a sharp crag for a minute to chew on an energy bar and drink some water. He wasn’t hungry, or thirsty. But his high-altitude survival training had reinforced what he’d already known—by the time you noticed hunger or thirst at altitude, it was already too late. And this broken bit of volcanic rock was probably his last refuge before the summit—two hundred feet and perhaps an hour and a half above him. He should have just enough time to take the peak and get clear. Maybe he could cut the ascent time down to an hour.

  Hunkered down behind his rock, he was offered one of the best views on the planet. From southeast sweeping around to southwest, the lush forests of Washington State spread over the rugged terrain. Doug Fir, Larch, White Pine, all underlaid with Oregon grape and blackberries so thick that even a Special Operations soldier would go looking for a way around.

  North down to northwest revealed relative flatlands, no less green. In the far distance the waters of Puget Sound glittered beneath the low morning sun. If he’d been willing to remove his snow goggles and pull out his binoculars, Tacoma and Seattle would come easily into view despite the fifty miles of distance. As it was, the big airplanes climbing out of SeaTac Airport were the only encroachment from the big cities; he could feel the passengers snapping blurred pictures through plastic windows from their warm, plush seats as they flew over.

  Immediately below him in all directions were the glaciers of Mt. Rainier National Park. From his vantage point high on Little Tahoma’s flank, Emmons, Ingraham, Cowlitz, and the bound shoulder of Nisqually Glacier lay like a broken carpet of blinding white; constantly tearing at the volcano’s rocky sides to bring the old girl down. Good luck with that.

  Straight ahead Mount Rainier rose to fourteen thousand-four hundred feet, her rounded peak in stark relief—permanently-glaciered blinding white against the blue sky. He’d ridden out last night’s brief but vicious blow at the base of Little Tahoma in a snow cave.