Read Chapter 18: The Drift of Suspects

The wind had teeth.

It ripped across the saddle of the ridge, screaming past the granite outcrops and flinging ice crystals hard enough to sting through Élise's jacket. She lay where she'd landed, half-buried in the snowdrift, the breath knocked out of her lungs and her left ankle screaming in a way that promised something worse than a twist.

The two tourists—a German couple in matching red jackets, Klaus and Marta, she'd learned their names an hour ago—were already scrambling to their feet. Klaus had his arm around Marta, who was crying, her face buried against his shoulder. Neither of them looked back at her.

Typical.

"Élise!"

The voice came from above, barely audible over the wind. Then a figure dropped down the slope, moving with the practiced economy of someone who'd spent a decade reading terrain. Luc. His face was a mask of controlled fury, the kind she'd seen on him only once before, on that glacier in Chamonix when a client had walked onto a snow bridge and vanished into the crevasse below.

He didn't ask if she was all right. He dropped to his knees beside her and ran his hands over her legs, her ribs, her collarbone, checking for breaks with a perfunctory efficiency that made her feel like cargo. When his fingers brushed her left ankle, she hissed.

"Sprain. Maybe." He looked at her boots, then at her face. "You're done."

"I had to—"

"You had to what?" Luc's voice cracked against the wind like a whip. "Follow two suicidal tourists into a drift field because you thought you could save them? You nearly got yourself killed, Élise. Again."

She pushed herself up onto her elbows, the pain in her ankle flaring into a hot pulse. "They were leaving. You saw them. I couldn't just let them wander into that."

"You also couldn't let me handle it."

"With Philippe back with the group, you have a dozen people to watch. I could cover two. I was covering two. Then the snow gave way."

Luc said nothing. He pulled a length of tubular webbing from his pack and started wrapping her ankle, his movements brisk and precise. She watched his jaw work, the muscle ticking beneath three days of stubble.

"The snow didn't give way," he said finally. "The snow collapsed. There's a gap under this whole slope. The whole damn thing's riddled with voids."

She knew what he meant. The crevasse system had shifted, had eaten the snowpack from beneath. It made her stomach go cold.

Behind them, Klaus and Marta had stopped their retreat, standing huddled together, watching the exchange with animal wariness. Luc shot them a look that sent them both shrinking backward toward the line he'd marked on his map.

"Leave them out there," she said. "They'll wander off again, and I won't be around to fetch them."

Luc glanced at her, then at the couple. He pulled out his radio, thumbed the transmit key, and spoke to whoever was holding down the main group. A minute later, Klaus's radio crackled with instructions in German, and the couple began trudging reluctantly back toward the ridge line.

"Orti and Anna will keep them on a short leash," Luc said, pocketing the radio. "Now let me look at you."

He was too close. That was the problem. The wind had died slightly, and they were alone in a small pocket of stillness, the mountains around them a white cathedral of noise and silence at once. She could smell wood smoke on his jacket, and something else, a scent she knew was him and had missed for years.

"I'm fine," she said.

"You've got a POTS flare coming on, and I can see it in your face." His eyes were too sharp. "I'm not an idiot, Élise. I know what altitude and adrenaline do to you. You shouldn't be out here at all."

The words landed like a blow. She looked away, over his shoulder, toward the gaping dark hole in the snow where she'd fallen. Something dark lolled at the edges of the depression, half-buried in the debris from her slide.

"What's that?" she said.

Luc turned. Then he got to his feet and walked a careful circle around the edge of the collapse, his boots testing the snow with each step. He crouched. When he stood again, his face had gone pale beneath its windburn.

"What is it?" she said.

He didn't answer. He pulled a folded ice axe from his pack and began digging at the debris, clearing snow away with careful, deliberate strokes. She watched the shape resolve—first the dark blue of a jacket sleeve, then a hand, rigid and ungloved and the wrong, mottled color of dead flesh.

Her camera bag was still over her shoulder. The glove was still in the outer pocket.

"That's your climber," Luc said. "From earlier."

She said nothing. The body had shifted, turned over in the snow cave collapse. No—the body had been sitting upright inside a short crevasse mouth, and the collapse had spilled it out like a dropped doll. The face was preserved, frozen in an expression that might have been surprise or might have been terror. It was impossible to tell.

Luc crouched beside the body, studying it for a long moment. Then he reached into the jacket's chest pocket and pulled out a wallet. He flipped it open, squinted at the cards.

"Belgian passport. Name's de Vries. Jasper de Vries." He read further, and the stillness in his body shifted. Something in his voice hardened. "He's got an INTERPOL flag card."

"What does that mean?"

Luc set the wallet down. He'd closed his eyes. Behind him, the wind shrieked across the gap in the ridge, picking up the loose snow and spinning it into a corkscrew of white. Élise felt the temperature drop another few degrees.

"Luc. What does that mean?"

He opened his eyes and looked at her. There was something in them she hadn't seen before: a war, a reckoning. He spoke slowly, as if weighing every word.

"Eight years ago, there was a group climbing in the Bernese Oberland. Four guides, three clients. They were caught in an avalanche." He paused. "One guide survived. He'd triggered the slab by accident, crossed a wind-loaded slope he shouldn't have by about a hundred meters. He got out. The others didn't."

She waited. She knew him. She knew where this was going.

"That survivor," he said, "changed his name. Disappeared. There was an investigation—founded on negligence, manslaughter charges—but he vanished before they could press charges."

The dead man stared up at the white sky with frozen eyes.

"He was supposed to be dead," Luc said. "And instead he's here. On our mountain. At the top of a route he had no business being on, during a storm window when no one should have been climbing." He looked down at the body. "If he caused an avalanche back then, Élise, from a slope he wasn't supposed to be on…"

She understood. The words struggled out of her throat. "He might have caused the one that trapped us, too."

Luc didn't answer. He looked east, where the main group waited in the refuge, where Philippe lay injured and the radio hummed static and the storm front approached like an inevitable verdict.

"Or," he said slowly, "he was running from something else entirely. And what he was running from is what got him killed."

Élise's breath fogged in front of her face. The wind gusted, and she could feel the cold now, seeping through her jacket where the sweat had cooled. She looked at the dead man, then at Luc's face, at the set of his shoulders.

"We could leave him," she said quietly.

Luc's eyes flicked to her. "What?"

"We could cover him back up. Pretend we never found him. Focus on the living—get the group down, get Philippe to a hospital." She swallowed. "He might have killed people. He might have caused this. Do you want to risk the group's lives—risk Philippe's life—digging out a criminal who's not going anywhere?"

The words hung between them in the frozen air.

Luc looked down at the dead man's hand, frozen in its final gesture. Then he turned to face her, and she saw the exhaustion in him, the weight of the years, the cracks in the armor he wore so well.

"There's no pretending we didn't find him," Luc said. "There's no pretending he's not here." He stood up slowly, his knee creaking. "But you're right. He's not going anywhere. The snow will hold him until the storm passes."

He reached down and pulled her to her feet, careful of her ankle. She sagged against him for just a moment—longer than she should have—and felt his hand press against her back, steadying her.

"You need to stop doing this," he said quietly. "Putting yourself between me and the mountain."

"Someone has to."

He met her eyes. "No. Someone has to live."