Bob noticed that the board had been severely damaged by what appeared to be contact with machinery. It was broken in two places, and the forward, left section of the deck had been ripped off by something with a cutting edge.
“It’s really torn up,” he said. “I wonder what happened to it.” Rabl said he would inquire, made a phone call, and spoke for a long time in German. After he hung up, he said he’d just talked with the Stubai Glacier’s slope maintenance department. The men explained that, because they’d found the board encased in hard, blue ice, they had to use the grooming machine to dig it out.
Bob knew that extracting objects from ice is difficult. Solid ice is as hard as concrete, and when hit by an ice axe, it merely chips. In his experience, a chain saw was the best tool for cutting it. That the workers had used a grooming machine made no sense to him.
Chapter 17: The Elephant in the Room
Bob often thought about the photocopy of the aerial photograph that Inspector Krappinger had shown them, and it occurred to him that he might be able to get a proper copy from Chief Gunter Geir at the gendarmerie station in Neustift. Geir had become chief a few years after Duncan disappeared, and had always been friendly. He granted Bob’s request without hesitation, giving him several photos taken from the air and on the glacier.
Sitting in their rental car in the station parking lot, Lynda and Bob looked at the images, and saw their son’s corpse melting out in the middle of the ski slope. It was a shocking sight, but at least now they had incontrovertible evidence that he hadn’t snowboarded out of bounds.
That afternoon, as they were on their way to an appointment in Innsbruck, they went into a store to buy a pair of shorts for Lynda. The shopkeeper was a friendly woman who recognized them from the evening news.
“You are the parents of that poor boy who died on the Stubai Glacier,” she said.
“Yes, we are,” Lynda replied.
“I’m so sorry. I wish boys wouldn’t take such risks, skiing off-piste.”
“Our son didn’t ski off-piste,” Lynda replied. “He died on the piste.” Bob then showed the woman a photograph of the discovery scene.
“My God!” she exclaimed. “This isn’t what I heard on the news.”
“The news lied,” Lynda said. The next day she called the reporter Alexander Huss, who’d covered the story in the Tiroler Tageszeitung, a leading newspaper in Innsbruck.
“We have photos showing that our son’s body wasn’t found off-piste, but in the middle of the slope,” Lynda said. Huss said he’d simply gone by the press release.
“The press release was false, so please print a correction.”
“I understand how you feel, Mrs. MacPherson,” Huss said, “but it’s the end of the story.”
“Maybe for Austria, but it’s not the end of the story,” she replied. She wondered if the Stubai Glacier, with its aggressive marketing program, bought ad space in the Tiroler Tageszeitung. Later she wrote to the Austrian Press Association to inquire about their source for the statement that “the then 23-year-old plunged into the free [out-of-bounds] ski area with his snowboard.” The APA never replied. How odd that a ski resort could wield so much influence in Innsbruck. The capital of Tyrol was a small city compared to Vienna, but it wasn’t that small. Was it just money, or did it also have something to do with the Stubai Glacier’s charismatic founder, Heinrich Klier?
They’d heard that Klier was a larger than life figure—a famous mountain climber and writer before he became a developer. On a few occasions they’d heard people in Neustift call him the “Godfather of the Valley,” though they weren’t sure if this was meant in earnest or tongue-in-cheek. Did Klier, like Don Corleone, “carry politicians around in his pockets like so much loose change”?
His office was located downtown, and one day they showed up without an appointment, and without announcing themselves at the entrance intercom. Instead they waited on the street for someone to exit through the locked door so they could slip in.
“We’re the MacPhersons from Canada,” Lynda said as they entered the large reception. “We would like to speak with Doctor Klier.” The startled receptionist fetched her boss, and as the seventy-seven-year-old man entered the room, Bob was surprised by how small he was—small but very fit. He invited them into his conference room adorned with spectacular aerial photographs of the Stubai Glacier.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “I know your grief; I too have lost a son.”
“In a mountain accident?” Bob asked. Tears came to Dr. Klier’s eyes.
“I cannot talk about it,” he said. “I shouldn’t be working here anymore, as I am getting old. But my son is dead, and my other children have their own interests.” Lynda looked through the glass partition between the conference room and reception, and saw a middle-aged man glancing nervously in at them. Later she would learn that he was the Stubai Glacier’s senior manager, Franz Wegscheider.
Wegscheider needn’t have worried about Klier saying something compromising, for within minutes the old man took control of the conversation. That Duncan’s corpse had emerged on the Stubai Glacier’s slope was an elephant in the room, and yet somehow Klier managed to ignore it. Instead he spoke of mountains and glaciers, famous climbers and accidents. Occasionally Lynda tried to interject, but each time he quickly went back to addressing Bob in a way that revealed his attitude towards women—helpless creatures, incapable of understanding anything.
After a few glares from Lynda, Bob finally managed to get to the point: Their son had died in a crevasse on Klier’s ski slope, even though the police had always insisted that such an accident was impossible. Furthermore, if his rental shop had simply admitted that Duncan hadn’t returned his equipment, it would have been clear that he’d died while snowboarding, and they wouldn’t have spent years and much of their retirement savings looking for him.
Klier replied that he’d long known Seppi Repetschnig, the shop manager, and was certain of his integrity. Something was amiss, and he would study Walter Hinterhoelzl’s statement to the police to get to the bottom of it. He also wanted a photograph of Duncan for a memorial. He then excused himself to attend a city council meeting.
Chapter 18: Bones on the Ice
On July 31, Lynda and Bob drove to the Stubai Glacier to visit the site where their son’s body had been found. All of the employees they encountered, starting with the girl at the gondola ticket counter, greeted them with a look of somber recognition. Like so many times before, they walked out of the Eisgrat Station to see the Schaufelferner rising up before them, but on this day much of its lower half was largely denuded of snow, which exposed patches of dirty black ice. Two slope maintenance workers were waiting for them. Though the MacPhersons didn’t know it at the time, one of them had been the supervisor of slope operations on the day Duncan disappeared.
The men gestured towards a Snowcat. Its grooming tiller, attached to the back, was in the raised (disengaged) position, and Bob studied it for a moment. Designed to pulverize compacted snow, the mechanism consisted of a large shaft on which were mounted steel tines. The shaft and tines were painted red.
They climbed into the vehicle and headed up the slope. It was a fearsomely powerful machine whose massive tracks propelled them effortlessly up the icy incline. About halfway to the top, they stopped and got out.