Read Chapter 15: The Missing Skier

The first sign was the smell. Not rot exactly, not yet, but something sweet and wrong carried on the wind. Camille had volunteered for firewood duty without being asked, pulling a sled behind her toward the treeline, and Luc watched her progress from the east window where he was pretending to check the seals.

The storm had stripped the mountain clean, sculpting drifts into spines that looked like frozen waves. Camille reached the edge of the larches and stopped. She bent down, reached into a drift at the base of a wind-bent trunk. When she straightened, she was holding something in her gloved hand. Even from forty meters away, Luc recognized the shape of a boot.

She didn't call out. Just stood there, frozen, staring down at the snow. Luc grabbed his jacket and was out the mudroom door before he'd fully thought through what he was doing.

The cold bit at the exposed strip of skin above his neck gaiter as he slogged through the powder. Ali was already moving too, emerging from the side door with his awkward, high-stepping walk. They reached Camille at nearly the same moment.

"It's a leg," she said quietly. Her face was pale, but her voice was steady. Trained, Luc thought. Nurses don't panic at bodies. "The rest of him is under the drift."

The boot was leather, worn at the heel, pointing upward at an angle that was deeply wrong. Luc followed the line of it down, saw the swell of a thigh beneath the snow, the dark shape of a torso buried in the lee of the slope.

"Shit," Ali said. Just the one word.

Luc dropped to his knees and started clearing snow with his hands. It was packed tight from wind and melt, crusted in layers. He scraped down the chest first. The man was wearing a dark blue insulated jacket, expensive, with a technical membrane feel. Not a guide's coat. Visitor gear.

They worked in silence, weeks of snow fall coming away in chunks. The face emerged last. Camille rested her hand on Luc's shoulder as he brushed the final crust from the features.

He was young. Thirty, maybe. Clean-shaven except for a patch of stubble missed near the jawline. His eyes were closed, lips slightly parted, skin a mottled white that had nothing to do with cold alone. Blood had pooled in the snow beneath his head, frozen now into a dark wine-colored halo. The blow had come from above and behind. A crushed depression in the skull where the wool cap had compressed into the wound.

"Anyone recognize him?" Luc asked.

Ali shook his head. Camille leaned closer, studying the face with a medic's intensity.

"He's not one of us," she said. "Viktor's group, the staff, the pilot—I know all of them. I've done their intake checks for the clinic. He was never in the chalet."

Luc forced himself to think past the blood, past the frozen horror of the scene. The man's face tugged at something. Not a personal memory, not exactly. A shape. A quality of the features. The way the nose had been broken and reset slightly off-kilter. The thin scar through the left eyebrow.

"I've seen this face," Luc said slowly. "I don't know where. But I know it."

"Alpine rescue database?" Ali suggested. "You used to work with the gendarmerie."

"Maybe." Luc pulled the man's jacket collar aside, searching for a tag. Nothing. No nametape. The inside pockets were empty, wiped clean. The man's hands were bare despite the cold—no gloves. His fingers were white with early frost nip. Luc lifted the right hand, examined the nails.

Clean. No dirt, no oil, no rope burn.

"This man didn't die climbing," Luc said. "He fell out here, or he was brought out here. But his hands tell me he wasn't working."

Ali knelt on the other side, clearing more snow from the legs. "He's wearing ski pants. No boots on the right foot."

They dug deeper, revealing the body's full position. Sprawled on his back, one arm raised above the head like he'd been reaching for something. The right foot was bare. The boot Camille had spotted was a replacement, too new, mismatched to the worn left one.

"He was re-dressed," Luc said. The words came out harder than he meant. "Someone put that boot on him. Someone who wanted him to look like a missing skier but didn't have a second pair."

Camille stood up, wiping snow from her knees. "How long has he been out here?"

Luc pressed two fingers to the exposed skin of the man's forearm, testing the resistance. Rigor had come and gone, partially. That was a rough timeline in cold conditions—two, three days minimum, modified by freezing temperatures.

"The storm brought him up," he said. "If he'd been here when the slide hit, he'd have been swept further down. He was buried in the drift during the avalanche and he's only surfacing now as the wind changes."

"He was here before the slide," Ali said. "Before we were trapped."

Luc nodded. The weight of the implication settled over them like a second storm front moving in. Everyone in the chalet had an alibi for after the avalanche. If this man had been killed before the slide, the timing was open. Anyone could have done it.

"We need to tell the others," Camille said. But her voice lacked conviction.

"Do we?" Luc asked.

Ali and Camille both looked at him. The wind picked up, whistling through the larches, driving loose snow along the ground.

"There's a saboteur in that chalet," Luc said. "We all know that. If the saboteur left a body out here before the avalanche, that's evidence. And that's dangerous. For us."

"They've already tried to kill you once," Ali said. "Twice, if you count the bridge."

"Three times, if you count the door." Luc turned the dead man's face gently with his fingertips. "I know this face. I saw it on a wanted poster in a police station in Chamonix three years ago. It took me a second, but I remember now. This man was a con artist. He ran an investment scheme out of Paris, bilked a dozen wealthy clients and disappeared."

Camille turned pale. "A con man. Here."

"The chalet is full of wealthy people." Luc stood up, brushing snow from his knees. "What if the con artist was one of them? What if he was already here, pretending to be someone else, before the avalanche hit?"

Ali's eyes widened. He looked toward the chalet, smoke curling from the chimney, its windows glowing warm and safe in the fading light. "Then someone in there isn't who they say they are."

They stood in silence, the body between them like a claim. Luc pulled the photo from his inner jacket pocket—his father with the scarred man—and held it next to the dead man's face. Nothing. No resemblance. The scarred man was older, broader, with a deeper set to the eyes.

But then something else clicked into place. The carved face in his memory, the wanted poster, had listed the conman's name. Luc had read it three years ago and forgotten it. Now it surfaced with sudden clarity, and the realization hit him so hard he nearly lost his balance in the snow.

"Mikhail Voss," he said. "That's his name. But what he called himself when he went after victims—he always used an alias to match the mark."

Ali's jaw tightened. "Which one of our guests would a con artist target?"

Luc looked past them, up at the chalet, at the window where he thought he saw a figure slip away from the glass. A small movement, a silhouette disappearing into shadow.

"I don't know," he said. "But one of them is a fraud. And the real question isn't which one. It's whether the body we just found was the conman—or his mark."

Camille made a sound low in her throat. She was looking at the boot again.

"There's something in the lining," she said.

She knelt and worked the boot off the dead man's foot. Inside the liner, wedged next to the insole, was a scrap of paper folded smaller than her thumb. She opened it carefully.

A receipt. A fuel purchase. Credit card imprint smudged but legible. A date from two weeks before the storm.

And a name in the signature line.

Nadia.