Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (5 page)

Chapter 8

The stripped-down interior of the Sikorsky S-76’s cargo hold was all bare, unpainted metal. The incurving walls and low ceiling were metal. The thin, dully gleaming skin of the floor was metal. Even the perforated bucket seat Jack Willows sat on was metal. He braced himself against a protruding metal rib as the helicopter dipped and the flank of the mountain slid in on them and then fell away, a dizzying blur of green.

Willows was sitting behind and slightly to the left of the pilot, his back against a riveted bulkhead. Rossiter had the co-pilot’s seat. The second mountie, a man named Dickie, sat directly opposite Willows. They were so close their knees almost touched.

Nobody said anything. There was too much noise from the pair of Allison turboshafts, the main and tail rotors, and the junkyard bouncing around in the rear of the cargo hold: odd-shaped chunks of iron, outsized tools with no obvious function. A stack of threaded steel bolts half an inch thick and five feet long, an electric motor salvaged from a dead washing machine. What looked like part of a child’s backyard swing set. A red painted five-gallon can of gasoline and the big Husqvarna chain-saw Dickie had hauled out of the boot of the RCMP cruiser.

The tin-can acoustics doubled the racket: the echo was at least as bad as the original noise. And, anyway, all the questions had been asked down on the logging road, during the long wait for the helicopter: Dickie standing a shade too close to Willows, a hunter’s look in his small dark eyes; Rossiter silent, hardly there at all, maybe a little bit upset by Dickie’s enthusiasm for the cross-examination, but not speaking up. There was something between the two men, but Willows had no idea what it was.

The pilot turned, gestured towards Willows, and then pointed down. Willows twisted in his seat as much as his seatbelt would allow. Through the dirty plexiglass of the downward vision window he saw a thin trickle of silver, the small blue rectangle of his tent. Off to one side the distorted shadow of the Sikorsky took a bite out of the edge of the meadow where Willows had seen the pileated woodpecker. He noted that even when the machine was hovering, it seemed full of motion.

The whine of the engines increased in pitch. They swung around the meadow in a wide oval, and then Willows felt his stomach lurch as they lost altitude and the abstract of greens and blues below him turned into a detailed and very realistic landscape of rocks, grass, the white froth of the waterfall.

There was no need for him to point out the girl’s body. From thirty feet up, it was impossible not to see.

The pilot moved his machine laterally, inch by inch. With a main rotor diameter of forty-four feet, there wasn’t a lot of room to spare. Willows watched the sword ferns on the face of the cliff whip back and forth in the turbulence, as if seeking desperately to escape the wind and noise.

The nose dipped. There was a small thump and then a much larger one as they touched down.

The wash from the blades made Willows’ tent puff up like a balloon. A perfect circle of daisies lay down as if in homage. The ashes of the dead campfire sprang up into the air and vanished. Willows blinked as Dickie slid open the starboard side door and the afternoon sun hit him full in the face. He smelled exhaust fumes, hot engine oil. The shrill whining in his ears slowly faded. Looking around, he had no sense at all of déjà vu.

The pilot switched off. Rossiter unbuckled his safety-belt, jumped out of the helicopter and started across the meadow towards the creek. Dickie stuck a spark plug wrench in the back pocket of his jeans and picked up the can of gasoline and the Husqvarna. He was maybe an inch under six foot, but his weight made him seem shorter. He had a regulation haircut, close-set eyes, a big nose with wide, flaring nostrils. His hair was blond but his bristly, aggressive moustache had a reddish tinge. He wasn’t very light on his feet, but he looked strong. Crouched in the doorway, he turned to Willows and said: “You get the stretcher.” Then he went out the hatch in a paratrooper’s stance, as if they were still a couple of thousand feet up. Willows half-expected him to yell Geronimo. The pilot said it instead, but softly. Grinning, Willows scooped up the portable stretcher and followed Dickie out of the helicopter.

Rossiter was standing on the low, brush-choked bank that had given Willows so much trouble with his back-cast. He didn’t pay any attention when Willows and Dickie walked up. Staring out over the water, he snapped a small twig from a branch and busied himself stripping away the bark.

Willows looked down at the gravel beach. There were many small puddles where, overnight, his footsteps had filled to the brim with seepage. He noticed that the scale of things seemed to have changed. The bright light of day, the presence of the other men, and the looming bulk of the Sikorsky made the meadow and stream appear much smaller than they had before.

He watched Dickie unscrew the spark plug from the Husqvarna, examine the gap with a critical eye, run a thumbnail across the firing tip. Satisfied, Dickie screwed the plug back into place, tightened it with a quick twist of the wrench. He checked the oil level and wiped his hands on his jeans. Willows could see he was the type who liked to tinker, didn’t mind getting a little grease under his nails. It should have made Dickie more likeable, but somehow it didn’t.

Dickie adjusted the choke and gave the starter cord a yank. The engine fired immediately. He gave it some gas and switched it off.

“Somebody’s got to go upstream and get over to the other side and cut the body loose,” Dickie said, still hunched over the saw.

“You going to volunteer?” said Rossiter.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Because I’ll do it, if you don’t want to.”

“No,” said Dickie, “it’s okay. I don’t mind at all.”

Rossiter smiled. “In fact you’re kind of looking forward to it, aren’t you?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Dickie stood up, the wrench still in his hand. Rossiter looked at the wrench. Dickie stuck the wrench in his back pocket and picked up the chain-saw. “How far am I going to have to go before I can get across?” he said to Willows.

Willows indicated the egg-shaped boulder. “Just the other side of that rock.”

Dickie nodded. He turned his back on Willows and Rossiter and trudged along the bank, moving purposefully through the grass and scrub.

Rossiter chewed on his twig. “You’re probably wondering why we get along so well,” he said.

Willows shrugged noncommittally.

“Last week, Tuesday night, we busted a local kid. He’d broken into the hardware store, set off a silent alarm. We chased him for about three blocks, on foot. He ran down a lane, started to climb over a fence. We yelled at him to stop, but he kept going. Just as he was going over the top, Dickie shot him in the hip.”

Rossiter examined the frayed end of the twig, spat out a fragment of pulp.

“See, the point is we’d had a good look at him and we both knew who he was. All we had to do was wait a while and then drive over to his parents’ house and pick him up.”

“But Dickie couldn’t wait?”

“He’s the kind of guy who’s always in a hurry, if you know what I mean.” Rossiter stared venomously after Dickie’s retreating back. “I’m going to wade out and catch the body when it comes downstream. You want to give me a hand?”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Well then, let’s do it as if it was.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” said Willows. “Call me if you need help.”

He walked back past the helicopter and struck his tent, searched for and found the battered coffee pot. When he had all his gear together, he stowed it away in the Sikorsky. The pilot sat in the shade of his machine, his back against a strut. There were two empty coke cans between his sprawled legs, a third can in his lap. When a fly landed on the lip of the can he was drinking from, he made no effort to shoo it away.

Willows unlaced his boots and put on his waders. He walked back to the stream and found Rossiter squatting at the edge of the water in his jockey shorts.

Dickie had managed to get into position on the far side of the creek, at the foot of the waterfall. Willows watched him lower the chain-saw to the ground, put a foot on the carrying handle, bend over the machine and suddenly straighten. There was a puff of thick blue smoke. A split second later Willows heard the harsh crackle of the engine. Dickie picked up the chain-saw. He leaned cautiously out over the water, his arms fully extended. Bright sunlight bounced off the wide blade.

Willows waded into the river. Rossiter followed him, swearing at the first shock of the icy water.

Fifty feet upstream, Dickie thrust the tip of the saw into the water and let out the clutch. A frothy white column of river jetted back at him, hit him square in the chest and face. He jerked back and then leant forward again, putting his weight into the work.

Sawdust began to drift past Willows, and small jagged pieces of yellow, freshly cut wood. Dickie leant a little harder into the saw. Willows saw him stagger, topple over, and then vanish beneath the boiling surface of the water at the foot of the rapids.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted Rossiter.

Dickie’s blonde head bobbed to the surface. He was swept by the current into the deep water at the heart of the pool, and then went under again. It was a full minute before he bobbed to the surface, another twenty feet downstream. His mouth was wide open. His eyes bulged. He was coughing and sputtering and his face was blotched with purple.

As Dickie slowly drew nearer, Willows saw that the corpse of the girl was only a length behind him. It was Rossiter’s case; Willows decided it was only fair to let him have the body. He moved a little to his left, towards Dickie. The water was only waist-deep, but Dickie was too far gone to stand upright.

Willows braced himself. Dickie was floundering, barely managing to keep his head up. His skin was white, pebbled. There was a wild look in his eye. Willows reached out, and got his arms around Dickie’s chest. He was surprised to see that Dickie had not let go of the saw. He started moving backwards, hauling Dickie and the chain-saw out of the water and up on the beach. The steel blade of the saw clattered on the rocks. Dickie’s teeth were chattering, too. He was shivering uncontrollably.

“You okay?” Willows asked, crouching down next to him.

Dickie didn’t seem to hear the question. His eyes were on Rossiter.

Willows stood up. He went over and unrolled the portable stretcher. Rossiter struggled with the body. It was stiff and ungainly, cold as a block of carved ice. Finally he got a grip under the girl’s armpits. Her heels left parallel grooves in the sand and gravel as he dragged her out of the water.

“Give me a hand getting her on the stretcher,” Rossiter said to Willows. He had seen right away that Dickie wasn’t going to be any help.

Willows grasped the girl’s ankles. Her flesh was soft and pulpy. She was much heavier than he had expected. Together, he and Rossiter lowered the naked body on to the stretcher. There was a tattoo high up on the inside of the forearm, a smudge of blue that was distorted by the swollen skin.

“What the hell is that?” said Rossiter.

Willows knelt for a closer look. “A Smurf,” he said.

“A what?”

“Smurf. Little cartoon character. Don’t you ever watch television on Sunday mornings?”

“Not if I can sleep in.”

Willows found himself staring at the girl. She would have been very pretty. Embarrassed, he looked away.

Dickie’s close-cropped hair lay flat on his head. He fiddled with his moustache. Water dripped from his shirt and blue jeans. He leaned over and hit the chainsaw with the heel of his hand. “I’m going to have to strip this fucker right down to the frame,” he said. “Wash all the parts in gasoline, wipe ’em down with an oily rag. Replace the gaskets and probably the wiring.”

Rossiter was getting into his trousers. “Life is damn hard,” he said. “But death is a whole lot worse.”

Dickie ignored him. He ground the toe of his boot into the gravel and pointed at the corpse. His hand shook but he didn’t try to steady it. “That’s Naomi Lister. Her dad runs the Chevron station down by the highway.”

“I don’t think I recognize her,” Rossiter said.

“She left town a little over a year ago. Went down to Vancouver.”

Willows gave Rossiter an enquiring look.

“I’ve only been stationed here six months,” Rossiter explained. To Dickie, he said, “What’d she do down in the city?”

“How should I know?” Dickie said. He climbed unsteadily to his feet, took a few steps away from them, and threw up.

Willows stared upstream, past the white froth of water and the curving black bulk of the huge egg-shaped boulder. He looked at Rossiter, and Rossiter nodded. They were both thinking that the girl had probably taken off her clothes to go swimming, that if she had, the clothes had to be up there somewhere.

“Jack and I are going to take a little stroll,” Rossiter said to Dickie’s hunched back.

Dickie made a gagging sound.

Half a mile upstream, they came upon an overgrown logging road and a crumbling corduroy bridge made of cedar logs. The disused road was little more than two faint parallel depressions in the grass. What made it easy to see was the absence of large trees. There were tread marks and torn soil where a four-wheel drive vehicle with a short wheelspan had braked hard. Willows found traces of oil, a few small globules of heavy grease.