Everett’s lips quivered for a moment, then the life drained out of his eyes and he died right there.

Her stunned father slowly lowered Everett’s dead body into the snow and then called out for his daughter.

“Rachel, are you all right?”

“Yes,” she answered. “You?”

Her father nodded.

Suddenly, they heard a noise behind them and both whirled around.

Just in time to see John sprawl into the white snow, blood still dripping from his open wound.

He let out an enormous sigh, then dropped the just-fired service revolver from his open palm and passed out.

X

They were halfway back down the southern face of the Matterhorn when Grant closed his cell phone. He looked across the cable car’s small aisle at his daughter and the still unconscious Frankel leaning against her. His wound was no longer bleeding; Grant and Rachel had wrapped it tightly in every piece of clothing they could spare without freezing to death themselves.

“The medics down below said we’ve done all the right things for him.”

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

“The real miracle was that when John passed out in the cavern, he rolled up against that jagged piece of the glacier.”

“The one from the picture, right? That Everett gave you?”

Grant nodded. Like he’d told Frankel on the way up the mountain, his father’s religious fervor hadn’t done much for him. But there were times in life when Grant couldn’t deny someone, somewhere, was looking out for certain people.

Case in point: the glacier’s ice had stanched the blood long enough to keep Frankel alive, and then the freezing cold had woken him back up. It kept him conscious just long enough to stumble out of the cavern and fire one shot into Everett’s chest—saving the woman he loved and her father from getting a Roman numeral ten carved in his forehead.

“I have to say I hadn’t planned spending New Year’s Eve dressing gunshot wounds,” Rachel said.

The rifle had been another oddity.

Rachel said she’d been surprised to see Everett bring it up the mountain with them. Her uncle had told Rachel that if she or Grant had ever bothered to come visit him in Zermatt, they would have known there was a hunting as well as a ski season. “It’s good to be overprepared,” Everett had said.

“A lot of things happened tonight I never could have imagined,” agreed Grant.

Rachel managed a smile. “Some retirement party, huh?”

“Believe it or not, I actually preferred that one at the Yard.”

Rachel told her father she was just glad it was finally over.

“For me, maybe,” said Grant. “But you still have your article to write.”

“Oh. That.”

“You’ll get to it eventually.”

“I guess,” she said. “I think I came up with a title for it, though.”

“You did?”

“Well, actually you did.”

“Really now.”