by Jim Heskett
Where could Victoria be? He checked his watch, and his eyes bugged out when he saw it was almost midnight. He’d had no idea how late it was. All the other guests were in their bungalows, awaiting the arrival of snowcats tomorrow. Hoping and praying their forced stay at the SMRC would end soon.
After this quick break away from the safe to clear his head, Layne returned to the task at hand. On his knees, twisting the dial, ear against the safe. Trying to still his heart to make it beat as slow as possible, to focus all his energy on listening.
Then, the front door opened.
Layne quickly replaced the swath of carpet over the top of the safe and then crept over to the bedroom door, pressing his body against the wall. He slinked to the edge of the door frame. A set of keys clinked into a bowl, and then a pair of shoes dropped onto the floor. Victoria had come home.
Shit. Not fast enough.
Layne stared through the opening of the door from his angle, thinking of the best way out of here. If Victoria discovered him, he would lose any leverage in interrogating her. He’d already been kicked out, and the next step would be to have him arrested.
The problem was, he couldn’t see a direct route to the back door, which was the best option for escape. She was between him and his first choice. So, he would have to flee via the front door. That meant waiting for Victoria to either go to the bathroom or wander into the kitchen. Maybe she’d have a glass of wine before bed, and he could crawl along the hallway and time his exit with the refrigerator opening or closing.
But none of those things happened.
The back door opened. Victoria wasn’t presently near the back door.
Layne's adrenaline spiked. The back door had been locked. Layne had broken in, and he had locked it behind him. He was sure of it.
Whoever was at the back door wasn't supposed to be here. From his angle in the room, Layne couldn’t see much, but he noted a shape clad in black race across the living room and then disappear out of view.
Victoria shrieked. Something fell and then broke, cracking on the floor.
Layne jumped out of his hiding spot and raced into the living room. He arrived just in time to see a tall and thin male figure dressed from head to toe in black advance on Victoria. He slashed a knife across her midsection. Blood spurted from the cut. Victoria stumbled back into her desk, knocking over a canister of pens and pencils. Then, she collapsed to the floor amid a rainfall of home office supplies.
The attacker spun, wearing a dark ski mask, leaving only his eyes visible. Deep brown eyes, Caucasian skin around those eyes. Looking directly at a stunned Layne.
The attacker rushed straight for him. Layne, without a weapon, was facing a man with a knife. Long, serrated, dripping with Victoria’s blood.
Layne scanned his immediate area and saw nothing he could use as a weapon. This attacker would be on him in less than a second. All he could do was clench his fists and lower his center of gravity.
The attacker closed the distance. Layne tried to pivot, but he was too close to the nearby wall and didn’t have any room to evade. He swung a right hook that caught the attacker on the jaw, sending a trail of spit to the side.
But the attacker recovered in a heartbeat.
Before Layne could get in another punch, the attacker had stomped on his shin, sending a sharp jolt of pain up through Layne's leg. He didn't fall, but he did stumble back a step, which gave the black-clad man enough room to attack. He turned the knife in his hands, exposing a thick metal base on the hilt of the knife. Like a paperweight the size of a baseball.
He jabbed this in Layne's face, smacking Layne in the eye. And then, another hit immediately landed on the other side of his face. With the flurry of activity, the blows took Layne by surprise.
With both of his eyes forced to shut, he tried to lift his hands to protect his face, but it did no good. The attacker was too quick. Layne felt his legs being swept out from underneath him, and his head cracking against the edge of an end table near the couch.
Layne's bulky body collapsed to the floor, and he became instantly woozy. The last thing he saw before he passed out was Victoria Overton, on the floor a few feet away from him, the life draining out of her as she bled to death.
30
Layne woke to the sound of a door opening and closing in the next building over. His eyes flicked open, and the first thing he noted was the daylight, filtered through a light gray cloud cover, streaming in via the window of the bungalow.
But, he wasn’t in his bungalow.
He blinked a few times and first felt slickness under his hand. His eyes adjusted to the level of light in the room. The slickness was blood. Not his blood. At least, he didn’t think so.
All at once, memories of the last few hours came into focus. Sneaking into Victoria's bungalow. Snooping around, finding nothing of interest. Trying to break into her safe. Victoria returning home suddenly. And then, an assassin slithering in and murdering her. A heavy, weighted base on a knife that the assassin used to knock Layne out.
The assassin was gone, and so was Victoria’s body.
Left in its place was a puddle of blood and no trace of the assassin’s presence. Layne scooted back from the puddle to keep it away from his clothes. His head swiveled around, checking for any clues in the immediate area. He found none.
What the hell had happened here last night? The whole episode had lasted thirty seconds, if even that long.
Layne rose to his feet and eased into the bathroom first. He washed the blood off his hand, the only part of him that seemed tainted. Then, he splashed water on his face and shook his head a few times to clear out the confusion. The weighted base of that assassin's knife blade had been terribly heavy.
Victoria was dead. All of Layne's scheming, plus his assumptions about this investigation, were all wrong. There were entirely new factors he had never considered.
This was because of somebody else. Maybe Victoria had never even engaged in human trafficking. So far, they’d only found circumstantial evidence. Maybe Rudy and Grant weren’t involved, either. As weird as it seemed, it was looking more likely that their deaths had been coincidences.
He took his phone out of his pocket and checked for service. One bar faintly blinked in the upper left of the screen.
He dialed the number.
“Hello. Greater Cleveland Jacuzzi Service, how can we help you?”
“I’ve had a problem with my Jacuzzi, and I was hoping I could get a technician to do an in-home visit. Today, if possible. It’s an emergency.”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir. Do you have—”
The call ended abruptly, and Layne looked at his phone. No service.
“Shit.” He had to hope he’d said enough to get the message across to Daphne that everything had flipped upside down. But, with the weather still too bad for exfiltration, what could she even do?
He spent a couple minutes cleaning anything he thought he might have touched. Then, clutching his coat in one hand, he rushed out of the bungalow via the back door, then he circled around to the front, arriving at the main row of bungalows. A handful of guests were already out and about, some of them trudging the snowy path toward the cafeteria for breakfast. Some were already setting suitcases outside their bungalows. Hopeful clusters of carry-on bags and luggage to be checked, itching to get back to their non-snow-drenched homes.
Layne looked down and noted a streak of blood still on the back of his hand. He shoved the hand in his pocket as a few of the retreat guests eyed him. He must have looked like a crazy person being outside in these frigid temps with no jacket on. He could feel a hint of steam rising from his head after the sudden change from the warmth of Victoria’s bungalow.
An intuition danced around inside his head, something he had to check out. With Victoria gone, it seemed like a logical suspicion. He jogged over toward the infirmary on the east side of the main lodge.
This could lead to more trouble, but he had to know.
Layne bopped t
he edge of his fist on the infirmary door. When a few seconds passed, and there was no response, he knocked again.
Almost a minute later, someone finally came to the door. "Can I help you?" said a young man, opening the door only a sliver.
"I need to come inside."
"Sorry, the infirmary is closed right now."
Layne shoved against the door, pushing the young man back a few steps. His white medical coat fluttered as he pinwheeled his arms to keep from falling.
“What the hell are you doing?” the young man said. “This is not appropriate.”
Layne stormed into the room, his eyes shooting everywhere. "Where are the bodies of Rudy Costello and Grant Paluski?"
The young infirmary worker, looking exasperated, shrugged and gesticulated with his hands. "Please: you’re not allowed to be here. I could get into so much trouble for letting you in.”
“Where are they?”
“I have no idea what you're talking about, sir.”
Layne gritted his teeth. "I know you’re keeping them here, in your cold storage. I don't have time to play twenty questions with you about it. Just let me see the bodies."
After a brief hesitation on the young man's face, he relented. He escorted Layne to the far side of the room and then paused. “If anyone finds out about this, sir…”
“No one is going to know. Trust me.”
With a sigh, the guy pulled back a freezer door. At first, fog obscured Layne’s vision, and then it settled. In the room were two gurneys, both covered with bedsheets. But there were no bodies under those bedsheets.
"What the hell?" said the young man.
Someone had stolen the bodies.
31
Layne left the infirmary to head back across the campus. More of the retreat guests now stood out in front of their bungalows, buried under layers of clothing, with tentative luggage at their feet. The bags rapidly accumulated new snow as these people waited for departure via snowcats.
With Victoria dead, the snowcats probably weren’t coming, if they ever were in the first place. For all he knew, Victoria had been planning to drug them all and sell them into slavery. Or, maybe she’d had nothing to do with trafficking at all. Maybe she’d been assassinated for an entirely different reason. Layne doubted if he would ever know the truth.
He checked his watch. A few minutes past seven in the morning. He pressed on toward his bungalow, shuffling through snow up to his knees in spots. When he opened the front door, Harry, snoozing on the couch, sat up with a start.
The hacker looked dazed. “Oh, crap. What time is it?”
“Seven. You been there all night?”
“Aww, damn. I meant to come check on you after we split up last night, but I sat down for a second, and just passed out. All that hiking yesterday wore me out. Shit. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Boukadakis. I understand.”
“What did I miss? Did you confront Victoria last night?”
Layne filled him in on her death, the missing assassin, and the theft of all three of the dead bodies accumulated so far at the retreat center. Harry’s eyes widened with each new detail.
When Layne finished, Harry took a long moment to reflect, and eventually asked, “What’s happening here?”
“I don’t know, man. But I think it’s time we visited the weapons cache. My senses are telling me that something ugly is coming. We need to be ready for anything.”
“Do you think the assassin is one of these guests?”
“I’ve been debating that,” Layne said. “It seems unlikely, but it also would be unlikely for someone to get in and out of campus without anyone seeing or hearing a snowmobile or some other way to travel. Also, it was unlikely for us to have two deaths in two days, so who the hell knows? Either way, getting the guns can only help.”
“Do you know for sure the drop is there?”
Layne swished his lips back and forth. “No, but Daphne said she would leave it for us. I have to trust it’s there, and she was able to leave it in place before the weather turned.”
“If it’s where we’re expecting, it won’t be too far from the cave with the beacon. Maybe I can make another go of hacking it in person since I haven’t had much luck remotely. At the very least, we can disable it, and maybe that will stop whatever ugliness is coming.”
Layne agreed and waited for Harry to gear up for another hike through the snow, which would surely be deeper and more draining this time. Fortunately, they’d kept the snowshoes they’d borrowed. After everything that had happened, returning the snowshoes had seemed like a low priority.
Layne made sure to take a couple steak knives from the kitchen, in case they encountered any wolves before they made it to the weapons cache. Also, emergency blankets. Never knew when those would come in handy. He asked Harry to grab their sunglasses in case the sun decided to make an appearance. Harry yelled from the other room that he would.
A couple minutes later, they gathered in the main room, clutching all their gear. As Layne opened the door, they stepped out onto a retreat campus filled with even more people wandering around in a hazy and confused state, grumbling about the lack of snowcats. Trying to find anyone who would answer their questions.
No answers were coming. Soon, they would all arrive at that conclusion, and then, panic would break out.
Through the cafeteria window, Layne watched Janine eating her breakfast. Wearing no makeup and with disheveled hair, she lifted a spoon to her mouth and shoved in a bite of cereal. A spot of milk dribbled out from between her lips. She didn’t even seem to care. Janine was like a ghost, staring blankly across the room as others shuffled their trays in the food line and picked out spots at the long, communal tables.
With Victoria dead, Layne didn’t know what to think of Grant’s passing. Would it have been better for Janine to believe he’d died of a real heart attack or had died because he knew the wrong people and they needed him gone for some reason?
A couple guests were standing outside Victoria’s bungalow, trying to get her to come to the door. With her dead and gone, no one could help them. With any of it.
Something was going on here. Something bad. Malice lurked in the sky above the retreat center.
“Do you have cell service?” Harry asked as they crossed the campus and trudged beyond the tennis court area.
“Nope. Was spotty yesterday, but it’s been non-existent since I woke up. I tried to call the Jacuzzi service, but the call got disconnected.”
“That’s not a good sign. I haven’t had service, either. This could be a problem, not just trying to check in, but also trying to find the cache.”
Layne nodded. “I take your point, but I have a pretty good idea where to go. Daphne and I reviewed the map together, so I know where it should be, at least. Assuming it’s there and assuming the drone was able to withstand the winds.”
Harry, brow scrunched, made no reply to this.
The mountains were shrouded in clouds, but Layne knew the general area to use as his destination. The snowshoes weren’t much help this time around, with the snow even deeper than before. Layne sunk down to his ankles with each step, and sometimes, all the way to his knees. Harry heaved and gasped, and again, they stopped for frequent breaks.
Layne pictured his last meeting with Daphne, at the apartment in Boulder, Colorado. How they had hunched over her laptop and scanned through Google Earth to choose the spot where the drone drop of the weapons cache would happen. Layne had argued a hand delivery would be more reliable, but Daphne had convinced him otherwise.
Either way, the drop had to be post-arrival at the SMRC. Much easier to source equipment locally and deliver it that way rather than trying to bring in materials from the United States.
If Layne remembered right, the cache would be about a mile from the campus, a few thousand feet diagonal from the beacon cave. They should have spent the extra time to go there yesterday, but it had seemed like a different scenario then. What a difference twenty-four hours
had made.
They trudged for a solid hour, across open snowy plains, up and down hills, and through dense, wooded areas. The wooded parts were the easiest to traverse since the downed logs and tree stumps were more forgiving than the deep snow out in the open.
Finally, after a couple hours and several extended breaks, Layne paused. Held up a hand. “This should be it. Somewhere nearby.”
Harry sipped from a water bottle, drained down to the last couple inches. “Any idea exactly where?”
“No, but I remember this general area from Google Earth.” Layne pointed at three mountain peaks nearby, all right next to each other.
And the hunt began. They stomped around, squinted at the area, and retraced their footsteps. He knew they wouldn’t see the actual drop, because, depending on how long it had been here, the crate could be buried under two feet of snow. So, he focused on trying to locate any unusual bumps that weren’t tree stumps or boulders.
Proper identification turned out to be much harder than he’d anticipated.
After a half hour, Layne was ready to concede defeat. Maybe Daphne hadn’t been able to complete the drop, after all. If the snow had kept the drone away or caused it problems, who knew where the crate would be. The drone could have crashed miles from here, with their guns spread out across a rocky mountainside.
“There,” Harry said, lifting a finger. He pointed to a small clearing where an odd bump sat in the middle of an otherwise smooth area.
Exactly the shape they were looking for.
“You might be right,” Layne said, and then hustled toward it. But, as soon as he’d broken from the trees and had sprinted thirty feet, he paused. This wasn’t just a clearing, it was a lake. And, judging by the cracking sounds underneath his feet, it wasn’t frozen all the way.
He pivoted. “Back, Harry. This isn’t safe.”
Harry froze, then took a dozen steps in the other direction. Layne looked down at his feet, clad in snowshoes and sunken down to the ice. Carefully, he reached down and unlatched the straps from his feet. Once they were free, he wiped snow away from the area around him.
