Death's Door

THERMAL LANCE

Richmond-upon-Thames, England

March 20

Undertakers they could have been, the two men who gingerly maneuvered the casket out the front door of the stately manor overlooking the Thames River from Richmond Hill. Dressed in workmen’s overalls, caps, gloves, and boots, they eased the dolly conveying the casket down the ramp over the manor’s steps to the open rear door of the hearse.

Easy does it, Andy, said the foreman. "On the count of three. One, two, three."

Both heavyset movers pushed, sliding the casket off the dolly and into the death wagon. The foreman secured the back. A butler fetched the dolly. With the corpse now ready for transport, the movers climbed into the cab of the hearse.

Undertakers they could have been.

But they weren’t.

Four men armed with handguns watched the casket being loaded. Shaded by dark sunglasses and peaked hats, the suspicious eyes of the security guards were on the lookout for poachers after more than rabbits or deer. In posture and stance, all had the bearing of ex-military men, an impression enhanced by their crisp, blue uniforms.

All clear? asked one.

All clear, confirmed the others.

Two by two, the wary guards got into their escort cars. With one car positioned in front of the hearse, the second tailing behind, the convoy drove away from the eighteenth-century manor. Unknown to those in the procession, a surreptitious watcher tracked them through binoculars from a nearby hill and radioed the fact that they were on the move ahead to Stopwatch.

Though the body in the casket had been a welcome guest at their estate for years, the lord and lady standing on the balcony of the manor were too aristocratically proud to come down to bid farewell to her. He didn’t look like a lord, this sallow fellow with the comb-over and the potbelly, but then they rarely do. She looked like a lady, but then they always do, upper-crust women who marry for status and fritter away their lives hosting snobbish high teas.

To mark this bittersweet event, the butler served them gin.

Dearly Departed, Lord Ridding said, and raised his glass in a toast.

Lady Ridding smiled at the pun.

"Dear is right, my dear."

Lord Ridding, as a peer of the realm, owned a seat in the House of Lords. So had every Lord Ridding who’d ruled this enclave since the 1600s. Upriver was Hampton Court, the favorite country palace of King Henry VIII, said to be haunted by the ghosts of two of his many wives. Downriver was Kew Palace, designed for the early Hanoverian kings and later home to the world-renowned Royal Botanic Gardens. Lesser lords and ladies had flocked to out-of-town estates along the stretch of river in between, which was now strung with waterside inns and boathouse promenades. Urban sprawl from obese London was gobbling up the greenery and would soon cannibalize those of the gentry still clinging to a bygone past, many of whom could no longer afford to hold back the advance of time. Lord Ridding had lost a bundle as a name with Lloyd’s of London, so he too was now on their endangered species list. That’s why—Dearly Departed—today’s parting had to be. To keep from going bankrupt, he was selling off the most valuable relic on his estate.

Sleeping Beauty.

The corpse in the casket.

The wide carriageway from the Georgian brick manor to the tree-lined riverside drive, beloved by landscape painters for centuries for its panoramic view over the valley to the Twickenham bank, led the convoy around the terraced grounds. There, come lazy summer, picnics would be consumed on the soft lawn in the walled rose garden, and polo would be played on the field just this side of the gate.

Phew, snorted Andy. So that’s how the other half lives.

He was riding shotgun in the bulletproof hearse.

Pardon me, your ladyship, said the foreman as he raised an ample cheek off the driver’s seat and blew a hearty fart.

Was that for Lady Ridding or the mummy in back?

Neither, said the foreman. That was for me.

Just my luck the windows are sealed.

The foreman’s name was Berk, and Berk was addicted to beer. Tapped off the wood or off the gas, he chugged pint after pint down his gullet—the first of the day with a pub lunch at noon and the last of the night at closing time.

Berk could tell you the history of every major pub in London. That research was recorded in his flesh, for his face was flushed, his chins were numerous, and his beer paunch put Lord Ridding’s potbelly to shame. Between gaseous toots, he would relate how the inns to the west of London had been haunts for daring eighteenth-century highwaymen.

The byway that passed in front of the gate to Lord Ridding’s estate ran parallel to the main road, close by the river. Between the trunks of budding trees, Berk and Andy caught glimpses of sculls being rowed on the Thames. Quaint English villages dotted the bank. A traffic accident was blocking the route where it cut through the village ahead. Two cars with bashed fenders were angled across the byway. One of the drivers was on a mobile phone, relaying information. He didn’t seem as angry as one might expect.

They’re turning, cautioned Andy.

Aye, replied Berk.

The escort car was detouring into a one-lane alley that led to the parallel riverside road. The hearse did likewise, followed by the rearguard. This alley divided the pub from the adjacent warehouse. The brick walls to either side lacked doors and windows. The pub was in the shape of an L angled around its Thames-front courtyard, where patrons would have been welcomed in coaching times. The short leg of the L ran along the alley, and as the escort vanguard thumped over flat metal doors set in the cobblestones, a sensor tripped a red traffic light to stop them from shooting out onto the riverside road.

All three vehicles idled, waiting for the light controlling cross-traffic to change.

Crooked House, said Berk. That’s what it was called.

What was? Andy asked.

The pub beside us.

Why? The walls are crooked?

Aye, said Berk. And this same pub is where Heath hid out.

Ned Heath? The highwayman?

Berk bobbed his head.

I thought he waylaid coaches at Putney and Wimbledon?

He did, said the foreman. But after Ned shot and killed a Bow Street runner, this is where he fled to hide from the law.

A crook in the house?

Aye. Crooked House. Before the name was changed to the Highwayman.

Andy sniffed the air.

You smell something burning?

Probably off the river. Diesel fuel.

Beads of perspiration popped out on Andy’s brow.

Heath hanged here?

Aye, said Berk. The cops nabbed him in this pub in 1793. He laughed as he climbed the steps to the gallows, then waved to the mob before he went down with a rose between his teeth. His mom had always said he’d die with his boots on, so Ned kicked them off before he hanged.

Cheeky bugger.

That was darling Ned. His corpse hung in chains at the crossroads until it rotted.

Trickles of sweat ran down between the pimples on Andy’s face.

Christ, it’s getting hot.

Aye, said Berk. Turn off the heater.

I’d kill for a pint, Andy said as he reached for the knob.

Berk crooked a thumb at the wall of the pub beside them. "If only this Highwayman would waylay our coach, mate."

Highwaymen as bold as Ned Heath can still be found in Europe. Stopwatch was the code name of the best of the best. Split-second timing was his trademark, and so the name. Had he been heisting in 1963, Britain’s Great Train Robbery would have been just his style. It wasn’t only the money that motivated him, however; it was the thrill he got from pulling off the perfect job. Stopwatch saw himself as an artist akin to a Swiss watchmaker, and clients paid a suitable sum for his skill.

The man who’d hired him for this job was a regular client. All transactions were via the Internet. This proposal had come by e-mail, and once he had determined its feasibility, this highwayman had sent back his contract price. The money got transferred from one to the other through shady Asian banks, half on agreement and half on delivery. The two crooks had never met, and never would, for both were professionals of the highest rank.

The loot this client desired was the mummy in the casket. Stealing the casket from the estate was too big a risk, because the manor’s security system was state of the art. Waylaying it en route to London was dangerous too, but Stopwatch—as always—had conceived an audacious plan. The byway past Lord Ridding’s gate was the only road. The safest, shortest route for the convoy to take was in this direction. Standard procedure for such a convoy encountering an obstacle, like an accident blocking the way, was to detour, not stop. By arranging the accident where he had, the mastermind had ensured that the convoy would detour down this alley, and would be forced to brake to a halt at this traffic light.

And right above the thermal lance.

The loot’s in the alley. They fell for it.

Those words, phoned to him by one of the drivers in the bogus accident, were received by the audio plug in Stopwatch’s ear.

The loot’s in place.

Time to act.

It was dark and dank in the cellar of the pub. In days of yore, when beer was shipped to the Crooked House by boats on the Thames, the kegs were unloaded dockside and lugged underground by means of a tunnel beneath the river road. These days, beer was trucked from local breweries by lorry and unloaded directly into the cellar through the metal drop doors set in the alleyway’s cobblestones. The doors under the idling hearse were released, exposing the vehicle’s undercarriage and flooding the subterranean passageway with light. Sporting a fireproof Nomex suit like the kind racecar drivers wear, his head encased in a welder’s helmet, the highwayman aimed an acetylene torch at a spot beneath Berk’s seat. Heating the metal until it glowed red hot, he swapped the torch for the lance a henchman held.

A thermal lance is an awesome tool. What Stopwatch took in both gloved hands resembled a flamethrower from the Second World War. It consisted of a six-foot-long magnesium tube, which he raised up through the doors so its top end was against the spot heated by the torch. A handpiece with a trigger was attached to the base of the tube. The trigger controlled how much oxygen was released from a portable tank. When the highwayman pulled the trigger, raw oxygen shot down the 3/8-inch hollow tube and was ignited by the red-hot metal on the undercarriage of the hearse. At 8,000°F, the blast of a thermal lance will slice through a foot of cold steel in seconds.

The undercarriage of this hearse was nowhere near as thick.

Inside the cab of the vehicle, Andy was turning to ask Berk if he thought the engine was overheating when the blast from the lance burst up through the floor and the driver’s seat, coring the foreman from his buttocks to the top of his skull. The human body, we are told in anatomy class, is mostly made up of water. Berk’s bloated body was largely made up of beer, his water content greater than most, and at this searing temperature, that water turned to steam. The steam expanded with violent force, literally blowing Berk apart.

In that harsh moment before the heat hit him, Andy saw the foreman’s eyes explode from their sockets an instant before Berk’s skull mimicked the big bang. His chest tore open from the slam of sudden evaporation, spewing forth organs and cracked ribs in a splash of scarlet gore. So hot was the heat that marrow frying in his bones burst them, fracturing his skeleton while his flesh ignited in flames. Charred and melted, all that would remain of Berk was a bone-spiked mess of mush on the smoldering seat.

Huugghh!

Andy’s gasp of shock was what did him in. For what he inhaled with that sharp intake were superheated gases that caused his throat to constrict and go into spasm, clogging his airway and strangling him to death. Unable to raise the alarm, he thrashed about in the hearse while tinted glass and the divider between the cab and the casket space hid the drama from the escort guards in front and behind.

Meanwhile, Stopwatch used the lance to vaporize a large access hole to the casket space farther back along the rear undercarriage. Aided by burly henchmen, he reached up into the hearse, and once they got a grip on the cargo coveted by his anonymous client, they extracted the casket from the vehicle and hauled it down to a dolly positioned in the cellar below.

Everything about this heist was carried out with exact precision, from inside information acquired for a pile of money. Stopwatch knew the dimensions of each vehicle in the triple-car convoy, and he knew that this hearse would be the same armor-plated tank hired for sensitive funerals with terrorist potential. That’s how he had calculated where it would idle in the alley, and why he had secured the lance to gut its underbelly.

Tick … tick … tick …

Around the highwayman’s neck hung his trademark stopwatch, an Interpol legend.

Tick … tick … tick …

It counted off precious seconds.

What determined how long it would take for the gas tank to blow from this smoldering heat was a simple law of physics.

Tick … tick … tick …

Make every second count.

While Stopwatch shut the overhead doors to protect the cellar from the imminent blast and gathered up the tools of his trade, the torch and the lance, his henchmen trundled the casket through banks of beer barrels to escape by the river tunnel.

Tick … tick … tick …

Up in the alley, smoke began to billow out of the hearse.

Something’s wrong, the rear escort radioed to the vanguard.

Tick … tick … tick …

Let’s check it out.

With guns in their fists, the four guards scrambled out of their cars.

Running along the tunnel beneath the guards’ feet, burdened by all the equipment slung over his shoulders, Stopwatch glanced down at the luminous dial bouncing on his chest.

Tick … tick …

Time’s up.

BOOOOOOMMMMMMM! The hearse blew above.

Even down below, concussion from the explosion blasting the drop doors flattened Stopwatch to his hands and knees, loosening the bricks of the tunnel and raining a hail of powdered mortar down on the fugitive highwayman.

Above ground, a broiling fireball surged along the alley, damning every living thing in its path to the flames of hell on earth. The screams of the guards shrieked in the scorching heat of the narrow passage.

Pandemonium reigned as the heisted loot was loaded onto a getaway boat moored by the tunnel’s open end. Groups of frantic villagers tried to save possessions from the flames, too preoccupied to notice the heist taking place beneath their noses. While the sirens of emergency vehicles wailed from all directions, Stopwatch stood astern to enjoy his handiwork as the boat chugged downriver.

It would be days before the cops figured out what had happened.

Not a trace of evidence would survive this blast.

By tonight, Stopwatch would be safely back home in Zurich, and the mummy in the casket would be in the cargo hold of an Air Canada flight to Vancouver from nearby Heathrow Airport.

Stopwatch grinned.

Good-bye, Sleeping Beauty.

WOLF-DOG

Galiano Island, British Columbia

Oww! Oww! Owwhoo-oo-oo …

The howl of the rabid wolf-dog sent chills up and down their spines. Armed with Colt AR-15s, the current long arms of the force, semi-automatic rifles with thirty rounds of .223 Remingtons to a clip, the three stalking Mounties crept through the moonlit woods. The point man of this triangle was Inspector Bob George, Ghost Keeper, if you preferred his Native name. A full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, born in a one-room shack on the local reserve, Ghost Keeper had honed his tracking skills when he was sent out alone as a boy to survive in northern wilds on a spirit quest. Flanking him as backup was Sergeant Ed Mad Dog Rabidowski. The Mad Dog was the son of a Yukon trapper raised in the Arctic, and he could take out the eye of a squirrel with a .22 at one hundred feet before he was six.

Oww! Oww! Owwhoo-oo-oo …

They were getting close.

The Mountie in command held the lowest rank of the three. The Outer Gulf Islands detachment of the Mounted Police, a small force of only four men, patrolled the islands clustered off the coast of Vancouver. As officer-in-charge of that detachment, it was Corporal Nick Craven’s jurisdiction, and therefore he was head of this hunt. It had been a month since the beast’s first kill on Saturna Island, where it had torn Rod Stewart apart. Rod was the strutting cock in Senator Healey’s henhouse, and the senator himself had witnessed the crime.

It’s a wolf, I tell you, the politician had told Nick over the phone.

A wolf, Senator? was the Mountie’s reply.

I know my dogs. It was no bow-wow. If it wasn’t a wolf, it was a wolf-dog.

Describe it.

Huge! With bloody fangs.

So Nick had boated across the sound from Otter Bay on Pender Island to Saturna, a trip that had more to do with smoothing the senator’s ruffled tail feathers than it did with gathering up those torn from Rod Stewart. A pissed-off politician must be appeased, so Nick had done his best to hunt down the elusive wolf. But in the end, the Mountie had failed to get his man, or whatever had done Rod in.

An unsolved case.

One for the cold file.

The case, however, had heated up a few weeks later, when two sheep, a deer, and the Dalai Llama had suffered the same slaughter on Mayne Island. Not the Dalai Lama, the exiled chief monk of Tibet, but a real llama, with wool and long ears, from South America. Again, the beast that had been witnessed at the scene was described as a wolf-dog.

Nick figured the canine killer had crossed from Saturna to Mayne by way of narrow Boat Passage at Winter Cove. The elusive predator was island hopping.

Bad news, Corporal.

This call had come in from the vet, two days after the detachment’s search on Mayne had failed to turn up the animal.

How bad, Doc?

Real bad, said the vet, sighing. I ran rabies tests on the animals killed. In each case, saliva slathered into the wounds proved hydrophobic.

"A rabid dog?"

Afraid so. You’d better find it.

The hunt was well under way the day before on Mayne when a hysterical call came in to 911.

"Help me! Jesus! Someone help!"

A child was screaming in the background at the top of its lungs.

It’s biting my boy! It’s killing my dog!

The emergency dispatcher could hear a vicious dog fight raging in the background.

Are you on a cell?

Yes! cried the woman.

Where? asked the operator at 911.

"Oh, God! It’s a wolf! Foaming at the mouth!"

Where are you?

"At home on Galiano! The thing is in our yard! My son is on his trike! He’s standing on the seat! Our dog is trying to protect him! Do something! Please help! I only have a broom!"

The dispatcher heard a clatter at the end of the line as the woman dropped the phone.

Crying!

Shrieking!

Yelping!

Get back! yelled the mother.

The operator was sweating. There was no help to send.

The Galiano constable was currently off island, on the other side of Active Pass, where all four members of the detachment were out hunting for this beast on Mayne. It had somehow traversed the strait at slack tide to reach Galiano.

"Mommy!" wailed the boy.

The operator felt sick. Her hand was shaking as she punched in the numbers for Nick’s cellphone.

The battle was over by the time the cops responded to the emergency at the waterfront farm. The mother had managed to haul her son off the seat of his tricycle as the family pet sacrificed itself to give her the opportunity to get the boy into the house. The Mounties had found them cowering behind the kitchen door, the boy in need of immediate medical attention for his chewed leg, the mother in need of a sedative to calm her down. Left to die from its wounds by the rabid wolf-dog, a panting collie lay on the ground beside the child’s trike. The doctor treating the family had moved them away from the yard so Nick could put the animal down with a shot from his service pistol.

Bam! The blast pierced the island silence. The collie lay still.

Nick’s eyes followed the bloody paw prints left by the rabid monster across the yard and into the bush beyond. Of all the Gulf Islands under his protection, Galiano was the worst to have a crisis like this. Because most of the land was thick forest controlled by a lumber company, hunting this beast in the bush would be taxing, and the cops tasked with the job were transplanted city boys.

It was time for the specialists.

So Nick had called Special X.

The helicopter from Vancouver had set down in the yard. Before he’d naively abandoned HQ for what had turned out to be anything but a laid-back country lifestyle, Nick had worked with Ghost Keeper and the Mad Dog. Both men were dressed in the bush uniform of the Mounted Police, blue baseball caps with the RCMP bison-head crest on front, blue shirts under blue fleece vests under blue waist-length patrol jackets, and blue combat pants with yellow side stripes and large cargo pockets tucked into heavy-duty black boots. Armed with assault rifles and force carryalls stuffed with tracking equipment, they climbed down through the swirling dust blown up by the chopper’s rotors and could have been fresh troops arriving to fight a jungle war.

The Mad Dog read Nick’s mind, and he sniffed the island air.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning, Ed said, mimicking Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.

Ghost Keeper swept his sharp eyes around the yard as a bald eagle circled overhead. Without assistance, he picked up the animal’s trail.

Okay. Let’s do it, he said.

With the Cree tracker in the lead, the marksman and the corporal flanking him from behind, the hunters had spent the day advancing north through the woods. Darkness fell at 6:45 p.m., so the men had strapped night-vision goggles over their eyes and continued on through a green world iridescently lit by starlight magnified thirty thousand times. It was now after midnight and into the first day of spring, the landscape an eerie shimmer under the fat face of the moon. The cops were closing in on the rabid howl of their prey when—

Oww! Oww! Owwhoo-oo-oo …

There was the feasting demon. The hunters had come across the beast as it ripped apart the flesh from its meal—the body of a naked human rotting in the green salal close to the bush trail. Half wolf, half dog, the 150-pound creature from hell heard the call of the wild, a call that told it that these men were its worst enemy, and that it was dead if it didn’t kill them first.

The monster attacked.

With the precision of a British colonial regiment going into action—for that was the model upon which the Mounted Police was based—Ghost Keeper retreated a few steps so the Mad Dog, the marksman of the group, could assume the point position.

Ears erect and aimed at Mad Dog Rabidowski, its bloody forehead wrinkled over blazing red eyes, its lips peeled back in a vicious snarl that bared two-inch fangs dangling shreds of meat, the wolf-dog leaped over the half-eaten horror and rushed toward the sergeant in a straight-for-the-jugular onslaught.

The Mad Dog had barely a moment to cock the gun in his hands. Because he had been trailing Ghost Keeper on this hunt, Ed had lugged his AR-15 on an empty chamber. Trip with a loaded chamber and the gun might have gone off, shooting the Cree in the back. The swiftness with which their quarry mounted an all-out blitzkrieg caught Ed by surprise, and in his haste to release the safety and tug back on the T-shaped cocking handle attached to the bolt, the Colt jammed. The cartridge failed to slip cleanly from the clip and caught in the bend between the magazine and the firing chamber.

A second later, the wolf-dog was in the air.

It seemed to Rabidowski as if time had slowed down to a crawl. By the gleam of the watching moon, he could almost count the teeth going for his throat. The matted monster was eager to sink those razor-sharp rippers in him, and here they came in a stream of slathering saliva and frothing foam. The animal’s jaws cocked sideways for a better chomp, then the huge paws hit the cop’s chest as blood spewed everywhere. The Mountie tumbled back on the ground with the monster on top of him, and he gazed up at those savage eyes glaring down at his. Suddenly, the red gleam behind them began to fade.

The bullet fired by Ghost Keeper from behind and to the side had whizzed over Ed’s shoulder to catch the wolf-dog in mid-leap, drilling it through the brain just inches shy of the sergeant’s throat. A sudden jerk in the wrong direction and it would have been the man, not the monster, who was dead. But if Ghost Keeper hadn’t taken the shot, Ed would have been dead for sure.

A calculated risk.

Decided in a split second.

No way did Nick have the confidence to take a shot like that.

With the butt stock in his armpit and the trigger grip in his hand, Ghost Keeper closed in to stand over the supine sergeant.

Y’okay?

I think so.

You weren’t bitten?

No.

Good.

"I owe you one. Holy shit, Tonto. That was a hell of a shot."

"We aim to please, kemosabe."

And I’m damn pleased with your aim.

As Ghost Keeper hoisted the mangy monster from the Mad Dog’s chest, then offered him a hand to pull him to his feet, Nick was on the radio to the pilot up in the chopper.

We’ve got a body down here. I’ll guide you in. Shine some light down through the trees.

One hunt had led to another.

It would be a long night.

ETERNAL SPRING

West Vancouver, British Columbia

Can a bird wolf-whistle?

Binky could.

The green-winged macaw sat on a perch in the huge aviary-cum-solarium he shared with a West African gray parrot named Gabby. The gilded beams of the morning sun on this first day of spring ignited the multiple colors in the feathers of both birds, and twirled rainbows from the dangling prisms that danced with the solar rays. As Binky and Gabby eyed Gill, the woman eyed her naked contours in a full-length mirror.

"Srrit … srreeew!" from Binky.

Hot mama! Gabby said.

Behave yourselves, boys, she chided the birds, an empty admonition if ever there was one, for it was Gill who’d trained them to admire her new shape.

Ruffle my feathers, baby!

Where’s the Viagra! squawked Binky.

Gill turned from the mirror to pout for the wolves like Brigitte Bardot in full male-meltdown mode in And God Created Woman. In her case, however, God was really Dr. David Denning and the UltraPulse CO2 laser he had used to rejuvenate her face and reshape her body. Gill was on the downside of forty, but she looked as young as she had in her heyday again.

Life owed her this, she figured.

With eyes as green as everglades and tussled hair as auburn as maple leaves in late autumn, Gill Macbeth was a good-looking woman, handsome, not pretty. Her mom was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth, a role model who had inspired her daughter to aspire to a similar height, which decades of dedicated work had seen Gill achieve. The cost to her as a successful woman was the onerous price so many feminists had borne: a family life put on hold for the sake of her career. Suddenly, she had found herself trying to rewind a rundown biological clock, and though she’d snuck under the wire to start a family with Nick Craven, she had lost her last crack at motherhood to a bombed ship and a cold dunk in a cruel, aborting sea.

Middle age, with no kids.

That was Gill’s future.

That was Gill’s now.

Hooters! Hehehe! said Binky.

Shake that booty for Daddy! added Gabby.

Cool your jets, boys. Or I’ll wash your beaks out with soap.

Hubba-hubba!

"Ooh-la-la! If you want this birdy … Binky Stewart began, strutting along his perch while crooning the chorus from Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?"

Ah, Binks. A disco classic, said Gill, laughing.

At forty plus, thanks to the skill of Dr. Denning, Gill was taking one last stab at playing a Barbie doll. Was this how Gloria Steinem felt in that Playboy Bunny suit?

Hmm, Gill thought. I’d look good in one of those. Naughty me.

Youth is wasted on the young, according to a hoary proverb. Time is, time was, and time is past. Time and tide wait for no man. Take time when time comes, lest time steal away. It is too late to call back yesterday. There’s no turning back the hands of time …

But Gill had done just that.

Dr. David Denning was one of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. Tinseltown is a meat grinder that chews through female stars. When the camera stops loving you, baby, your days at the top are numbered. Perhaps it was because he was such an odd-looking fellow himself, with simian features and a short, squat physique, that the doctor was such an artist with a scalpel and a laser. Hollywood goddesses who wished to have work done with skill and discretion snuck north on holiday to his surgical clinic in Vancouver. The name of Denning’s clinic was Eternal Spring, and the rumor whispered by those rich enough to afford such rejuvenation was that the name alluded to the Fountain of Youth.

Denning was a wizard.

And Gill could afford him.

If the legacy from her mother was a drive to accomplish anything she desired, the legacy from Gill’s father was money to burn. She had inherited his string of top Caribbean hotels, and by splitting the profits with on-site managers, leaving them to run the day-to-day business, Gill was free to enjoy life as an independent woman of means, pursuing the same career as her mom.

Through sacrifice, Gill had worked her way to the top, and by letting youth slip away while she struggled up the ladder, she was now the best forensic pathologist on the West Coast. The problem, when Gill looked back, was that her memories of the good times were almost all related to death, and not to romance, red-hot passion, and other youthful joys. So while there were those who would heap scorn on her decision to go under the plastic surgeon’s knife—those who made up the let’s-grow-old-gracefully crowd—Gill had set her mind on fighting age tooth and nail.

Could she recapture what she’d let slip away?

Affairs of the heart?

Torrid flings?

Bites from the forbidden apple?

Like a menopausal male with a new red sports car, Gill had a sleek chassis she was dying to take out for a spin.

Vroooom!

Vroooom!

Vrooooooooom!

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

The younger woman winked at herself.

Spring was in the air when Gill stepped out of her front door to return to work at the VGH morgue, her first day back since the surgery. Her house was a West Coast modern of cedar and glass that crowned Sentinel Hill at the edge of West Vancouver, the most affluent community in Canada. The daffodils were yellow and the plum blossoms pink, and the view from her yard as she crossed to her car was a 360-degree vista of natural splendor. With the north shore mountains’ snow-capped, sun-splashed peaks at her back, Gill paused for a moment to take in the panorama at her feet—the harbor, the city, the river, the delta—stretching south to the border Canada shared with the States.

Spring was in the air.

Spring was in her step.

Her BMW shone like new in the glare of the morning sun. When she climbed in behind the wheel and turned on the ignition, the tune that greeted Gill from the radio was Dusty Springfield’s A Brand New Me. On the drive down to the harbor to cross Lions Gate Bridge to Stanley Park, an exuberant Gill Macbeth sang along. The song ended long before she reached the hospital beyond False Creek, but she couldn’t get the catchy melody out of her head. So that’s what the happy woman was humming when she strolled into Vancouver