LITMIR.BIZ

       3

      Her face was masked in a layer of clear ice. Her warm, dying breath had melted the snow that covered her. The carbon dioxide she exhaled had no place to go except back into her lungs. She was wedged from the chest down into the snow. She was zipped into a maroon ski jacket with white stripes down the arms. A navy blue Quiksilver hat covered her head. The angle of her neck was not an angle for the living.

      Lasco crouched down to the eerie eyes of the body, wide open, their frozen silver centers sparkling in the sun; a cruel trick of nature.

      ‘Pupils fixed and dilated,’ said Lasco. He stood up. ‘I love saying that.’

      ‘So,’ said Bob, pointing, ‘the glass-mask tells me she was buried alive, but how come her hat is still on? An avalanche would have ripped that right off her, right?’ He turned to Mike.

      ‘I guess so.’

      ‘Depends,’ said Lasco.

      ‘You are a commitment-phobe,’ said Bob.

      ‘It’s written into our contract,’ said Lasco. ‘Commitment comes back and bites you in the ass.’

      Thirty feet back, Sonny Bryant stood beside the split stretcher he had assembled, ready to transport the body down to the trailhead. Lasco sent Bob and Mike over to join him and stayed with the body, taking the GPS co-ordinates and sketching a map of the crime scene.

      ‘What do you think happened to her?’ said Sonny, nodding in their direction.

      ‘Wood poisoning?’ said Bob. Wood poisoning was skier versus tree.

      ‘Could there be some skis buried under there?’ said Sonny.

      ‘Who knows?’ said Mike. ‘I’ve given up speculating. I’m always wrong.’

      ‘Come on, speculate,’ said Bob. ‘Make something up.’

      Mike shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Corpses Maximus said no guesses. It plants things in people’s heads.’

      ‘Nothing gets planted in this head,’ said Bob. ‘Nothing at all.’

      Mike and Sonny laughed.

      The wind rose, whipping around them, fighting their balance. Mike and Bob had their back to it, buffering Sonny from the worst.

      ‘Hey,’ shouted Sonny, pointing to a figure higher up the peak.

      Bob shook his head. ‘Same idiots, different season. You could paper Breck with “Get off the mountain by midday or we will shoot to kill” and these people would still not get out of their beds in time to haul ass.’

      Lasco didn’t hear him and was waving from where he stood, holding something in the air, fighting to be heard over Bob and the wind.

      ‘Oh, shit,’ said Sonny. He lunged through the gap between Bob and Mike, lifting his spotting scope to his eye. He saw a man on backcountry skis, moving east–west across a snowfield. Bob, Sonny and Mike stood mesmerized, a combined weight of fear suspending any motion. Above them, the wind had raked the promontories, packing snow into ravines and chutes, pressing it deep into every hollow. The skier didn’t know what he was crossing; the difference between fallen and driven snow. He didn’t know that the black rock beneath him was a magnet to the afternoon sun. He didn’t know that the underside of the snow was heating up, turning to water, trickling downwards, weakening the platform beneath him.

      Shooting cracks broke out under his feet, followed by the desperate sound of air rushing out of snow.

      ‘Jesus Christ!’ roared Bob. ‘Avalanche!’

      ‘Go right,’ roared Mike. ‘Go right.’

      In seconds, a huge plume of white exploded into the sky as thousands of pounds of compacted snow shifted, plummeting toward them, four foot deep, warming as it moved, gaining the momentum to bury everything in its path, a deafening blast in the tranquil afternoon.

      For seconds that felt longer, Mike was flying in an exhilarating powdered-snow rush. He was a snowboarder, busting a huge air, applause drowning out his proud cries. But somewhere inside, his instinct kicked in and he started to swim.

      Bob felt like a rug had been pulled from under his feet, a rug he had been very happy with, the type that had protected him from the cold concrete underneath.

      Lasco had descended barely four feet from the corpse when it was dislodged, hitting him hard in the back, forcing the wind from his lungs, sending them both plunging toward the ridge below.

      Sonny became a centerpiece to the erupting snow, the height of its power, quickly descending to its crushing, savage depth.

      In ten seconds, it was over. The snow had settled – twenty feet deep at the toe of the slide. Minutes passed before its powdery shower lifted, leaving in its wake a desolate white vacuum.