Red Snow Read Online Free PDF

streaming in from the customs hall at the Sea Island airport, Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq looked right past the waving teen who’d mistaken him for her father.
    “Don’t you recognize me?”
    “Katt?” he said.
    The young woman held up her passport. “According to this, that’s me.”
    But the stylish girl leaning over the barrier to bestow a welcome hug looked nothing like the wild child in the passport mug shot. Kissing him on both cheeks as they do in Paris, she more closely resembled a Sorbonne student summoned home for Christmas break.
    “Who says you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse?” DeClercq kidded.
    “Oink!” replied Katt.
    How does any cop come back from the death of his only child, especially when that child was killed as vengeance against him ? Decades ago, kidnappers had shot DeClercq’s wife and abducted little Jane, snapping the girl’s neck before the Mountie could hunt them down. Guilt had squeezed him in its stranglehold for years, and eventually the stress of the Headhunter case had crushed his will to carry on. Every man has a breaking point, and that psycho had found DeClercq’s. The moment of reckoning flared in his mind like a camera’s flashbulb.
    Avacomovitch was moving.
    Charging across the living room toward the greenhouse door, the Russian tucked his head tight to his body and pushed off hard from one foot. At six-foot-four and 285 pounds, he smashed the wood like a human battering ram. With a crack of protest, the door split in two. In a shower of splinters, the hinges gave and the lock tore free. Potted plants tumbled from shelves and dirt filled the air as Avacomovitch somersaulted across the floor and crashed a foot through the glass.
    “Don’t do it, Robert!”
    With the muzzle touching his palate, DeClercq cocked the hammer and bit down on the steel …
    “You got him!”
    His finger closed on the trigger to end it all …
    “A flying patrol brought him down!”
    There was a frozen eternity while the Mountie sat at his desk with the gun in his mouth, staring down at the man sprawled on the floor tiles. Slowly, he withdrew the barrel and set the weapon down.
    That was a narrow escape, and a lucky one, for as fate would have it, DeClercq found redemption in the aftermath of the carnage on Deadman’s Island.
    Another flashbulb lit up his memory.
    “Someone’s in the maze,” Craven yelled over the din, indicating the tangled garden near the clifftop house. Snow billowed up as the helicopter entered ground effect. The pilot jockeyed levers to set them down. While the whup-whup-whup of the airfoils died to a whistle, DeClercq threw open the passenger’s door and jumped onto the island.
    Trees flanked the entrance to the labyrinth. Wrapped in a rug, her eyes wild with fear, a girl of about fourteen stumbled toward him. The Mountie found himself reliving a dream that had tormented him for years. “Daddy!” Janie cries, running toward him with outstretched arms. He waits, and waits, and waits, but she draws no closer.
    Then, suddenly, the shivering girl was in his arms, seeking warmth to ward off hypothermia. Only when DeClercq wrapped his coat around her did Katt’s teeth stop chattering.
    “Where’s your mother?”
    “Dead.”
    She glanced at the house of horrors.
    “And your father?”
    “Don’t have one,” Katt replied. “Now I don’t have anyone left in the world.”
    How strange, the twists of life.
    In the beginning, it was an act of charity. DeClercq had a houseful of empty rooms haunted by ghosts. Katt was a waif with nowhere to go. To give her shelter under his roof seemed the right thing to do—at least until a more permanent solution could be found.
    But he must have had rocks in his head to take on a challenge like her, the spawn of a New Age poet and practicing pagan witch. He remembered one Christmas, when Katt suggested baking gingerbread men. “I’ve never had any,” she protested, “my mom being a pagan and all.” So