Prologue
“Holy fuck,” the police officer hissed as she scanned the scene.
Her rookie partner, twenty-four years her junior, said nothing.
“You okay?” she said to him.
It was a wasted question; his complexion blended in pretty well with the snow around them. He opened his mouth, but said nothing, merely shrugged his shoulders and looked as if he was choking. He rested for a moment against the patrol car they had just stepped out of. Then he gulped and spoke.
“I’ve . . . I’ve never seen so much . . . blood . . . so much blood and . . .” He retched, trying to suppress, then gave in to the urge, turned away and threw up.
“No. I guess training doesn’t prepare you for this.” She gave him a sympathetic rub on the back as he stood up straight and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his mouth.
Then she thought on. Truth was, she’d never seen so much blood either. Or corpses. At least, not in one place.
In one place?
Well, not exactly.
And that was the weird thing here. The bodies weren’t in one place as such, but spread around – some a few yards into the woods that cloaked the road, the rest randomly scattered across the snowy road surface. There was no obvious pattern to the method of killing either. And the vehicles were pretty unscathed, so this was no car wreck. Also, there were no survivors – only the poor guy with the snowplow whose job it had been to reopen the north end of the road that morning, and who had come face to face with the hideous scene and immediately called the cops.
And what with this being Thanksgiving Day, the poor jerks who had been on duty weren’t exactly inundated with emergency calls, so were on the scene within minutes.
They’d found ten dead bodies. So far.
She glanced around again, still unable to make any sense of it all. That was when she started to doubt herself. After twenty-two years as a serving officer in the Denver Police Department, she should have been able to use her experience and knowledge to at least have an educated guess at what had happened here. But no. Not this. This was as unfathomable as it was obscene.
“Why do they call this road the Ice Line?” she heard her partner ask.
She didn’t reply. Hardly even heard. Was still looking, hunting for clues.
But the clues just wouldn’t come. And despite her best efforts to concentrate, her mind drifted across to her partner’s question. He was fresh out of California, which would explain why he hadn’t heard the standard description of the Ice Line. Phrases jumped into her mind either side of attempts to ascertain what the hell had happened here.
The Ice Line. Northwest of Denver. Notorious and desolate. Die-straight. Some sections protected by forest; others infamous for Winter snow blockages. Air often still, occasionally punctuated by freak gusts of wind. Visibility usually good, although the road was sometimes shrouded in dense fog. In short, not to be trusted. And most people around these parts knew it.
As her mind wandered, her attention was attracted to a rough-legged buzzard gliding along the middle of the road; it was serene, graceful, carefree. Her eyes tracked the creature until it slowed down, somehow halting its horizontal movement at precisely the moment its talons grasped a spare section of tree branch, landing with machine-like precision yet also with comfortable poise and elegance.
Yes, that creature must know the Ice Line pretty well.
The buzzard preened itself for a few seconds then stood motionless, staring at the bodies below – the dead and the living.
The officer thought for a crazy second that the buzzard was staring directly at her, perhaps trying to convey memories of what it had witnessed.
She shook those dumb thoughts from her head and glanced around for clues again – just anything that would even hint at an explanation for the scene of carnage around her.
But no.
She was out of her depth. This was a case where they would have to rely on forensics.
She grabbed her radio, took a last look left and right,
then muttered to herself, “Just what in the name of all that’s good and holy
happened here last night?”
Chapter 1
On the seventh floor of Cottonwood Heights, three blocks south of downtown Denver, Emily Spinks was jabbering away like a madwoman as she flitted from room to room of her apartment, her eyes darting as they scanned her neatly arranged possessions.
“Do I have their gifts?” she muttered, flicking a finger at the shopping bags next to her suitcase by the front door. “Yep. But will they like them? Well, that’s a totally different question. I try my best, that’s all that matters.”
Her cell phone bleeped. She drew the back of her hand across the tiny beads of sweat on her forehead as she read the message aloud.
“Waiting outside. Lottie.”
She grunted out a curse.
Why didn’t her sister just call her?
Of course, if Charlotte could hear the question, she would reply that calling and actually speaking was so yesterday, the implication being that Emily was so retro for even asking the question. Never mind the fact that a call would have let Emily quickly reply that she was nearly ready and would be down to the car in two minutes.
Whatever. Emily quickly texted back that she was just leaving, and put her phone in her jeans pocket.
And she was just leaving. Again, she made a visual check of the small suitcase and two bags of Thanksgiving presents in the hallway. All she had to do now was grab those items and her coat, then leave. Oh, and of course fetch her insulin from the refrigerator. Mustn’t forget that.
She took two paces across her compact but perfectly functional kitchenette toward said refrigerator, but her ears were then subjected to the disgusting sound of her cat trying to regurgitate food. For a moment she wondered whether a more unpleasant sound existed; the creature sounded like he was trying to turn himself inside out.
The thought turned out to be prescient; seconds later his insides were, in a very messy sense, outside – streaked in a big fat slimy line all over the kitchenette tiled floor, to be exact.
“Goddammit, you certainly pick your moments, Jangles.”
She let out a sigh, a curse, then crouched down to check out Jangles. He ignored her and started to give his fur a good lick, so clearly the exorcism had done him good. She gave him a scratch behind the ear to show there was no ill feeling. A quick run to the bathroom, a run back with some toilet paper, and she was able to start mopping up the prime quality food she’d put down in its undigested form in a bowl only ten minutes before; it had been meant as a goodbye present to Jangles, not as an excuse for her to stay longer with him.
“Hope you don’t do this kind of attention seeking when Susan comes round to feed you in the morning.”
She took a break from wiping the floor to give Jangles more fuss than the old man really deserved considering what he’d just done. Yes, he was a pain in the butt at this moment, but Emily wouldn’t see her four-legged lodger for two days and would miss him. Charlotte was picking her up to travel north over to their parents tonight, tomorrow was Thanksgiving Day, and the following day they would return to Denver. The thought of that time away probably explained why she spent far longer fussing the warm furball than she should have done.
A fleeting image of her irate sister sitting in her car and tapping the steering wheel in frustration brought her back to the clean-up matter in hand, so she kissed her cat’s head, then mopped up what that same head had ejected only minutes before. The thought made her a little queasy, which wasn’t exactly ideal before a long journey. She had to pause and stand up to take in some fresher air. Then she needed a second run for more toilet paper, and then she stepped toward the under-sink cabinet to grab some antibacterial spray.
Then her phone bleeped again.
“Shit!”
She knew who it would be. And she wasn’t answering it with this stuff on her hands. She’d already texted that she was on her way; that would have to be enough.
A few minutes later, floor gleaming with a film of antibacterial liquid, soiled toilet paper safely flushed away, she washed her hands and picked up her phone.
“Where the hell are u???” she read, noting the three question marks that her sister reserved for super-urgent questions.
She shook her head half in dismay, half in anger.
But there was no point replying. Quicker to simply go. She gave Jangles a farewell stroke along his back, put on her warmest winter coat, then grabbed her suitcase and bags of presents, and left.
The more she urged the elevator to speed up, the slower it seemed to descend. Likewise, as she was forced to stand idle, she could do nothing to control the short vignettes of the two sisters’ teenage years that flitted about in her head.
A constant theme ran through those vignettes.
There was the time Charlotte borrowed Emily’s best velvet dress without asking (well, you were out and I just knew you wouldn’t mind) only to return it with a free wine stain. Then there was the time Charlotte went out for a drink with Emily and her new boyfriend, Oscar, who over one very drunken evening stopped being Emily’s boyfriend and became Charlotte’s boyfriend – for three whole days before being dumped by her because he was “such a nerd when you got to know him.” There had been countless occasions after they had both moved to Denver when Charlotte had needed to crash at Emily’s place having spent all her cash in local bars and couldn’t afford a cab home – and, of course, had to borrow the cab fare home the following day.
Mom and Dad had always been trusting parents and keen not to interfere with the girls’ personal lives, but their thoughts were obvious from the subtle differences between what they said to each daughter. They said Lottie attracted men like a pretty flower attracts bees. Of course, the complications and risks that attractiveness brought with it never worried them. Oh, no. Their concerns were instead 100% directed at Emily, because she didn’t turn men’s heads in the same way, so they feared she would end up on the shelf. And nobody had told them that ‘the shelf’ wasn’t really a thing anymore.
Thanks, Mom and Dad. Thanks for hanging a ‘boring’ label on the daughter that doesn’t sleep around.
To be fair, deep-down Emily knew their parents had a point; Charlotte was only two years older than twenty-year-old Emily, but everyone had long since lost count of the number of men Charlotte had been involved with, and she seemed to have the knack of controlling them with accomplished but understated ease. Emily, on the other hand, felt unable to commit herself even to dates, despite Charlotte repeatedly telling her that she shouldn’t worry, that this or that guy “doesn’t want to marry you, he only wants to bone you.” Yeah. Thanks, sis. Very reassuring – not.
There had been so many occasions when Emily was on the edge of hating her sister, only pulling back on that emotion by convincing herself that it wasn’t hatred driving her, but jealousy. If she was brutally honest, there had been so many times in her short life when being slightly timid around men – the total opposite of Charlotte – had made her heart ache.
It didn’t help that Emily had never gotten over the OI – the Oscar Incident – after which Charlotte had defended herself by joking that all was fair in love, war, and bodacious guys. Emily always knew she should have been harder on Charlotte; she should have told her what kind of behavior was and wasn’t acceptable between sisters. But she also knew Charlotte would have had a wisecrack reply to that too – probably a thinly veiled dig at Emily for being too safe and boring.
As the elevator door opened, Emily put all that behind her.
Or tried to.
Chapter 2
Approximately twelve miles from Cottonwood heights, Caleb Smith sat at the wheel of a dark blue cargo van. The engine was running partly to keep some heat blowing through the cab, but mostly to provide for a quick getaway. Caleb had long since filtered the chugging noise of the engine from his mind, and in truth he didn’t need warming up; nervous tension was doing a pretty good job of keeping the biting cold at bay.
Caleb was listening to his mother. She wasn’t actually there with him, but he was listening to her nonetheless. He found her words calming; they took his mind away from what he was about to do.
She talked about her poor but happy childhood on a remote Colorado farmstead, she asked if she could get him a coffee from the kitchen, then she asked him how he was getting on at school. When he had no answer to that, she talked about her own schooldays, then said she had no idea where his father had gotten to, and then asked him again if she could get him a coffee from the kitchen. As usual, Caleb politely declined the offer, feigned interest in talk of how her father didn’t like any of her boyfriends, but switched off when she talked about how she was going to get the house and garden up to scratch come springtime. Caleb switched off a lot when listening to his mother; it was less painful that way. The less he spoke, the less likely he was to imply that she wasn’t actually in a house, or accidentally let slip that she didn’t have a garden or kitchen of her own anymore. God forbid that he told her the truth; that would have made her cry – well, no, it would merely have made her more confused than she already was.
The place fed her, kept her warm, made sure she took her medication, but did little else for the money. And it cost a lot of money – money Caleb was struggling to find.
Caleb was stirred from his daydream by the sound of a woman moaning and grunting her way to orgasm. He turned to his right and opened his mouth to complain, but he wasn’t in the mood for an argument. Whatever kept Brandon happy was cool. For now.
Caleb, Brandon, and Hayden sat with varying levels of patience across the seats of the van, which was parked a hundred yards up a minor gravel road, facing the road’s junction with the Ice Line.
Caleb mostly stared straight ahead at that junction, his attention heightened whenever a vehicle appeared over the brow of the hill coming from Denver way. It was mid-afternoon, meaning visibility was good here, especially at this time of year when the surrounding fields were covered in a foot or more of snow, and when anything not white might as well have been highlighted with a fluorescent green marker pen. Visibility mattered a lot today.
The middle seat was occupied by Brandon, a restless mix of sniffs, facial tics and head jerks, the actions making him by far the most noticeable of the three. He was also currently by far the noisiest, snickering like a cartoon character at the video clips playing on the cell phone he was hunched over.
“Hey, that’s enough,” Caleb said to him after catching sight of a particularly distasteful image of a woman who was more girl than woman and definitely didn’t look like she was enjoying herself.
“Exactly what she was sayin’ to me,” Brandon replied after a juvenile cackle. “Course, I took no notice and screwed her till she almost split in two.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, me and Hayden don’t wanna see your dick on video whatever hole it’s going into. Just put your cell phone away.”
Brandon shrugged. “What else do you expect me to do with no cell signal? All I got for entertainment’s my home movies.”
“You knew before we came here that there’s no signal for miles around. I must have told you that ten times. It’s the whole point why we’re here. Now put your cell away. It’s distracting us from the job in hand.”
Brandon tried a token stare-out. Caleb couldn’t allow that.
“Will you just try to be professional here, Brandon? Put it away. Concentrate on the cars passing by over there in front of us.”
Brandon sighed acquiescence and did as he was asked. “What we looking for again? Mini, wasn’t it?”
“Bright orange Mini,” came the prompt from stage right.
They were the first words to pass between Hayden’s lips for twenty minutes.
Hayden was an afterthought. Until recently, Caleb had taken only Brandon on the small building jobs he specialized in, but for the past few months Hayden had been coming along for the ride too. He’d originally been taken on as a cheap pair of hands courtesy of some or other subsidized government job scheme. Not yet 20, Hayden was a quiet guy with no discernible physical or mental skills, but turned out to be competent and reliable as long as the task was straightforward, so was used for casual labor once in a while. Hayden didn’t misbehave, didn’t give any backtalk, remembered what Caleb told him to remember and did only what Caleb told him to do and no more. He was particularly useful as an extra set of hands when it came to setting up the scaffolding needed for some building jobs; being a rangy six foot six tended to be an advantage in that regard. He was also around 240 pounds with a shaven head and heavily tattooed neck and shoulders. Looked intimidating. Wasn’t at all. Useful.
Very useful.
Especially on the last day of a job when they’d tidied up, dismantled any scaffolding, and packed their equipment away; that was traditionally the cue for the customer to explain why they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, which happened more times than Caleb cared to remember. Over the years he’d heard all the excuses:
I’m afraid we’ll have to settle up next week.
That wall isn’t quite true.
I’m waiting for a check to come through.
You left cement stains all over my driveway.
Etc. etc.
Funny how he never got any excuses when Hayden was there. On those occasions the customer always paid in full.
And boy did Caleb need that money.
He would have ditched Brandon and employed Hayden instead, but Brandon was an experienced and qualified bricklayer who actually did a professional job whenever he wasn’t eyeing up or occasionally even hitting on female customers. Goddammit, on one occasion Caleb even found the man casting lecherous glances at a woman old enough to be his mother and then some. When Caleb asked him if he was serious, he replied that he was serious about anything with a pussy. Caleb didn’t feel like asking whether that included children or animals.
But today wasn’t about building.
No, sir.
Today’s job was far more important than any extension or new wall. Initially Caleb was going to manage today’s task without Hayden, but the more time he spent alone with Brandon, the more he was minded to consider both Hayden’s intimidating presence and his diluting effect on Brandon’s annoying behavior. It also helped that Hayden’s cut for the job was tiny. The guy was about as good at negotiation as he was at conversation.
“Help yourself to a gold star, that man,” Caleb said to Hayden. “A bright orange Mini is exactly what we’re expecting to appear over that hill any minute now. Both of you keep your eyes straight ahead. Anyone falls asleep gets the serious end of my revolver up his nose.”
Caleb patted the rosewood grip of the weapon, which was lodged behind his belt, to emphasize the point.
The revolver meant a lot to Caleb. A Smith and Wesson model 36, run-of-the-mill but for that rosewood grip his father had painstakingly carved, the piece had been his father’s best buddy, or so Caleb had been told a hundred times or more. Caleb’s father had used it for shooting practice out back, for scaring off anyone stupid enough to trespass on the family farm, and eventually – when coping with his wife’s rapidly deteriorating health became too much for him – for decorating the outbuilding wall with his brains.
Now the revolver had been passed down to Caleb, and it seemed ironic how the weapon that had taken the life of his mother’s main caregiver was now going to help pay for her care.
If everything went to plan.
Chapter 3
On the road outside Cottonwood Heights, Charlotte floored the gas pedal of her sunburst orange Mini just as Emily was still getting herself settled in the passenger seat, causing the car electronics to beep wildly and flash up an alert light, in turn making Charlotte sigh and shake her head.
“Will you just wait up a second?” Emily squealed as she fumbled with the seat belt buckle.
Charlotte stared ahead, chewing gum as if the rate of chewing would somehow make the car go faster.
Emily buckled up and the beeping and flashing stopped. She turned to her sister and said, “Hey, Lottie, are you okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, are we cool or have I done something to upset you?”
“Upset me, like, ever? You wanna list?”
“Hey, cut that out. You’re behaving like you had a bad day, is all. You’re on edge. Don’t deny it.”
She knew Charlotte wouldn’t. And right on cue, Charlotte let out a longer sigh, her nostrils twitching as a warning that she was about to have her say.
“I’m just trying to figure out what took you so long. You messaged me that you were on your way out when you were obviously so not on your way out. What the hell were you doing in there? Did you have to, like, take a shower just before you left?”
“No.”
“Well, what then? A dump?”
“Lottie!”
“Just asking is all. I was waiting, like, forever. What the hell kept you?”
Emily gave her sister a scolding stare, but that didn’t work as she was playing her ‘I can’t see you because my eyes are on the road’ card. That forced Emily to ignore her sister’s rudeness and explain.
“Look, I was on my way out, I really was literally about to open the front door, and then Jangles puked up all over the kitchen floor and I had to clean it up; I wasn’t going to leave it for Susan to sort it out. By tomorrow morning it would have gone all sticky like glue and—”
“Hey, hey, stop there. I don’t need that amount of detail.”
“Right, but by the time I—”
“Enough! Doesn’t matter now. Damage is done. All it means is I’ll have to kick this thing a little.”
“What do you mean? What’s the rush? Mom and Dad are expecting us sometime tonight – sometime anytime. We’ll be there in an hour or two no sweat, yeah?”
“Ah, I guess so.” Charlotte looked left and right at the junction. “I just wanted to get out of town before it got busy.”
“Well, I’m sorry I made us late, but I couldn’t help it.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m sorry too. Bummer about Jangles. He wasn’t to know. Not his fault, not yours. I’m sorry.”
They continued in silence for another four miles, reaching the freeway.
“Shit!” Emily muttered under her breath.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“I won’t if you don’t.”
Sometimes Charlotte – Lottie to close friends and family – was a painful thorn in Emily’s side. She was quick with the insults and curses, quick also with the apologies, only to follow them up with more wisecrack remarks that effectively cancelled out the apologies, usually leaving Emily totally confused and with no means of responding to any of the insults or apologies or wisecracks.
So there was no point mentioning to her sister that in her panic to leave after clearing up the mess Jangles had made – panic that was due to Charlotte’s jerky and impatient text messages – Emily had forgotten to grab her insulin from the refrigerator. There was no point telling her sister because they both knew that Emily kept a supply at Mom and Dad’s place and they would be there in a couple of hours at the most.
There was also no point mentioning it because if she did, Charlotte would casually – far too casually – dismiss the concern, tell her to chill and not fret so. Which would annoy her. Charlotte was like that. Nothing phased Lottie, nothing worried laid-back old Lottie.
So Emily said nothing.
She said nothing at all until the next major junction, where Charlotte took a turn Emily wasn’t expecting her to.
“What are you doing?” Emily said.
“Going to Mom and Dad’s a different way.”
“Why?”
“Why are we going to Mom and Dad’s place? Because it’s Thanksgiving Day tomorrow. Didn’t you know?”
“Don’t speak to me like that, Lottie.”
“I’m sorry. But the freeways are all rammed, we all know that. I was told an alternate route.”
“By who?”
“I just thought I’d try it. Does it matter who told me?”
Clearly it didn’t matter to Charlotte. It didn’t matter because if Charlotte had hold of the steering wheel, then Charlotte was God. No, not even God. That would be unfair to God. Even God didn’t tend to just do exactly what he wanted and screw everyone else.
Emily silently fumed at not even being asked about taking a different route, but told herself to be diplomatic. As always. She told herself that despite the arguments, and despite Charlotte’s selfishness that might indicate otherwise, they were close sisters – the only two children of the family – and they loved each other unconditionally, so Emily shook those bitter thoughts from her head and tried to be strong but polite in the here and now. “You know,” she said slowly, “you could have asked me if I wanted to go a different route. You could have just suggested it to me. Don’t you get how annoying it is when you don’t even ask?”
Emily fully expected some kind of acidic retort from her sister. Instead, Charlotte’s mouth opened, but nothing came out, after which she threw a glance at Emily. Her expression cracked slightly, as though apologetic, which was very much unlike the usual carefree Lottie. That confused Emily; Charlotte wasn’t normally one for the niceties of fondness or reconciliation, she rarely went so far as compromise, let alone any further along that path.
The reaction slightly melted Emily’s heart. Her fault was always that she gave in too easily, but she just couldn’t help it; it was as if being conciliatory was in her DNA.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Lottie,” she said. “I know it’s your car and your gas money and you’re giving me a lift. I should be grateful for that much.”
“No, you’re right and I should have asked you first,” Charlotte said. “But it’s for the best. Don’t you remember last Thanksgiving? Five hours at the wheel. Mom and Dad were worried sick. I don’t want that again.”
“Five hours? It wasn’t five hours.”
“Hey, I can do without a boring domestic argument when I’m driving on these icy roads. Let’s just try going this new route, huh? Please?”
Emily knew she was never going to win the argument. Like always. “Sure,” she said, a little more shrew-like than she’d intended. Like always.
Truth was, Emily did remember last Thanksgiving pretty well, but it was obviously a different Thanksgiving to the one Charlotte experienced. As far as she remembered, the journey was well under four hours, and only that long because of an accident, and Mom and Dad weren’t worried at all because they’d heard about the traffic jam on the radio and Emily must have called from her cell three or four times to keep them in the loop about progress.
But, as usual, correcting Charlotte on these points wouldn’t have helped; Charlotte wouldn’t change her mind, and would always find a way to come out on top when the sisters disagreed. So Emily put the thought to the back of her mind and tried to be positive, her mind’s eye imagining the welcoming smiles from Mom and Dad, the usual extravagant meal they would have prepared, and the four of them opening their presents.
She also tried to forget that although the freeways might have been rammed, at least they were pretty damn sure to be clear of ice and snow, which couldn’t be said for the icy backroads that Charlotte seemed to be taking them along.