Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (315 page)

That was the first question Chris had demanded when Victor Whitehead stumbled down the hillside. As a precaution, the officer had cuffed him, but Green suspected he had no fight left in him. He was pale to the point of collapse and tears poured down his cheeks.

“I had nothing to do with this,” he’d sputtered in response. “None of this was supposed to happen. I’m just an advisor.”

“You weren’t here to take Pete out the back door, once he’d killed the others?”

“No. No! Are you crazy? Olivia and I were just supposed to look for a feasible land route to the mine, linking to the old mine road on the other side of the river!”

“Bullshit, Whitehead!” Chris snapped. “This was obviously the rendezvous point.”

“No! We were all supposed to meet at the claim site to collect samples. Pete knew we were coming in from the Little Nahanni. He must have decided to escape this way.”

“In all this wilderness, he just happened to find you?”

“This is the only route in!” Spots of colour had returned to Whitehead’s cheeks. “For fuck’s sake, the bastard had a gun to my head! You think we were friends?”

Chris’s reply was lost in the roar of the river as Green walked away. He’d heard it all so often before. One weasel turning on another when the plan went sour.

He stopped by the campsite in the middle of the forest, wondering where to look. Had Hannah escaped over the canyon bluff? Was she hiding in the dense brush, still too terrified to realize she was safe? Green wasn’t even sure it was Hannah they had seen fleeing along the beach. It could have been Olivia or Whitehead running from Pete. But if she wasn’t here, where was she?

Sullivan joined him. “Anything?”

Green shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start. Where she might have gone.”

“Dad?”

Green whirled. Stared at the trees, at the low lying bush.

The overturned canoe.

“Hannah?”

The canoe shifted. “Dad?” Quavering. Up an octave.

Green dropped on all fours beside the canoe and peered underneath. There, deep in the sheltered gloom of the hull, two huge, incredulous eyes stared back at him.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Little Nahanni cabin, April 26, 1945

My darling, darling love of my life,

I pray you are well. No letters have come from you, and I fear someone is keeping them from me. Strange things are happening. I think someone was in the cabin while I was out on the line. They didn’t take anything, but they were looking for something. Why didn’t they wait for me? Why were they sneaking around? I think they were after the rubies. The samples or some kind of proof. Maybe Gaetan put them up to it. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he found new work. The Indians at the Butte say he was not working up on the pipeline, and Nicolette and his daughter haven’t heard from him either. Maybe all that talk about the good-paying job was a lie.

I think he’s up to something. I think he and the geologists are lying to me. I have tracked the creeks and I think I know where the stones are coming from. I want to take some samples on the mountain just above the cabin. I will make very little money from the pelts this year. Without Gaetan paying his share, there will be no money for core sampling this summer. If I don’t do it myself, no one will.

It is warm now and soon the snow will be melting on the mountain. It will soon be time to come out. But before I leave, I will take some samples myself up on the mountain. And I will get them tested in Vancouver. I do not trust Edmonton. I know there are rubies!

Your humble, devoted husband, Guy

p.s. I have hidden the map, but if anything happens to me, check the will. But don’t tell anyone, especially not Gaetan.

 M
esmerized, Green watched her sleep. He listened for every small catch in her breathing, watched for every small quiver in her face. She looked incredibly tiny, a pale wraith against the crisp whiteness of the hospital sheets. Her hair, not orange or blue but fine brown like his, spilled onto the pillow in sweaty disarray from the nightmares and the tossing.

Two days. At first, during the evacuation, she’d done nothing but cling to him and shake, barely letting the paramedics near her to do their job. Then later at the hospital in Yellowknife, during the tedious round of doctors, CT scans, and blood tests, she couldn’t stop talking. Two weeks of terror, trauma, rage, and grief came tumbling out. Rage at Scott for telling her nothing of his plans, for tricking her into coming on a mission that had nothing to do with a river adventure. “Fucker lied to me,” she kept ranting over and over, as if each time it was a new discovery.

Rage at Scott for ignoring her health too; for putting his obsession, however noble, above their very survival. “Daniel knew I had a concussion,” she said. “He told Scott a hundred times, but the bastard didn’t give a damn about me. Or Daniel.”

Whenever her thoughts lighted on Daniel, they ricocheted off again into hurt and confusion. “What the hell happened to him?” she wailed. When she went to bed he was asleep in the tent he shared with Pete, and the next morning he was gone. Vanished without a trace, without a word of goodbye.

“He’s dead?” she cried in horror when Green finally told her. “Oh my God, we left him there? Pete told us he’d just left. Said this wasn’t the trip he’d signed on for, Scott was a domineering prick, and he’d had enough. He was going back down to the Nahanni to hitch a ride with another group.”

When she learned the truth she wept for a long time for the gentle young doctor who’d tried to care for her. Her reaction to Pete’s trickery was more muted. She had already endured his worst. She’d watched him turn his rifle on Scott and her, chillingly deaf to their pleas for mercy and Scott’s last-ditch effort to bargain for her life. She’d watched him aim and fire from ten feet away, seen her lover’s chest explode in red, seen the rifle turn on her. And after that, her scrambling, tearing, stumbling, breath-searing flight for her life.

The terror of that would never leave her. Even now, when she’d finally fallen into an exhausted sleep, the panic welled up within her. She was running and running from wolves, but when she rounded a bend, there was Pete. Face hard and eyes dead, as they had been when he pulled the trigger on Scott.

From that memory, finally, came her grief. Overwhelming, regretful grief for the young man whose longing for the truth and determination to protect his grandfather’s land had cost him his life. Grief that he’d been betrayed by one of his rare friends, duped into leading the enemy straight to the prize.

Green never asked her to explain or to connect the scattershot of her memories. He was not the cop here, he didn’t have to build a case. He simply held her, and waited.

By the third day, when she was recuperating in the Yellowknife hospital, the RCMP were clamouring to talk to her. She held the key to two deaths. Pete was in custody, spinning a ludicrous story about self-defence in which it was Scott and not he who had started it all. The RCMP investigative team from Yellowknife headquarters were late on the scene. They had interviewed everyone else involved, including Sullivan and Green, but the one witness who might know the whole story was out of their reach. Green, backed up by her doctors, refused to allow them access to her until she was stronger.

He got unexpected help on that front from the young RCMP constable from Fort Simpson. Chris Tymko had flown the prisoner to Yellowknife and had requested to stay on, hovering around the fringes to assist in the investigation. On Hannah’s third morning in hospital he had come to check up on her. He looked pale and sad, and readily accepted Green’s invitation for coffee down in the cafeteria.

“How’s Olivia?” Green ventured once they were both seated at one end of a long table.

Chris stirred his coffee, his gaze fixed on the swirls of milk. Green could sense him drawing up his courage. Finally he shook his head. “Her parents are flying in this afternoon. They’re going to talk about pulling the plug.”

“I’m sorry.”

Chris shrugged. “Once they do the autopsy, we’ll know who actually shot her. It doesn’t really matter. Pete Carlyle meant to kill her, and we meant to save her, but in the moment …”

“These things happen,” Green said. Knowing his words were hopelessly inadequate.

“She … I know she wasn’t innocent in this. She shouldn’t have stepped into the middle of a firefight. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place, working with that weasel Whitehead to help the mining company. She was in bed with crooks and liars and murderers, and she —”

“Was she?” Green interrupted softly.

“According to Hunter Kerry, absolutely. Hunt’s usually not a big talker, but a whole day down at Yellowknife headquarters had him covering his ass big time. He says he would never have gotten into this if it wasn’t for Olivia. She approached him last month, said she knew he was flying Scott and the others up the Nahanni, and asked him to find out where they were going. Eavesdrop, steal, she left it up to him, but there would be big money in it for him. So it was Hunt who hid the day pack under the seat. He started to have second thoughts about her when the group disappeared, so he brought the pack to me. If she hadn’t done that … Maybe she wouldn’t have died.”

“But did she know what Pete was up to? That he was going to double-cross Scott?”

Chris deflated. His flush of emotion faded. “Probably not. At least not the whole story. Victor Whitehead is singing like a canary too. After his brush with death, he says he’s a reformed man. Deception and betrayal have no part in honest resource development, he says. None of them knew Pete was capable of murder. He was just working for the company. They didn’t know exactly where this mine was, you see, because the original map from the claims office was missing. So Pete arranged to go along with Scott, who was the only one with any clue. Victor and the rest of the company had no idea to what lengths he would go.”

Green grunted. “Of course not. Snakes never recognize each other.”

“Well, his story is consistent with the two company directors’. RCMP officers interviewed the two professors down in Vancouver and Waterloo, and they both hung Pete out to dry. They claimed to be a legitimate company exploring a potential mineral development in the north. Pete had been sent up to locate and stake a promising deposit, based on information from an expired mining claim, and they both thought Scott was onside as well. Whitehead had contacted them this spring, wanting in on the mining company, and they figured he might be useful because of his connections and influence in the north. So they signed him on, mostly for lobbying work, but they also contracted him to scout out possible land and bridge access routes. Olivia … she was the student of one of the professors, very interested in getting a piece of the action, her professor said. He had absolutely no knowledge of her offering Hunt Kerry a bribe —”

“Absolutely not,” Green said drily.

“They said they hired her because of her mining expertise, but I’m guessing that her knowledge of the Nahanni backcountry and her skill as a wilderness guide were even more useful. I don’t think they’d have been interested in her at all except for that. She was just a kid from a small town with big stars in her eyes. Her father said she believed in responsible mining and got into this thinking she could keep the company accountable. She got in over her head. Way over her head.” Chris pursed his lips together. He swallowed. “Kind of … like me.”

Green felt sorry for him. Chris’s own losses — of innocence and of love — were etched on his pallid face. But that very pain was heartening. How many years would it take before he was as detached and hardbitten as the detectives assigned to this case? Or as he and Sullivan, for that matter.

“Chris,” he said, “don’t shortchange yourself. Without you, who knows… And now I have one last favour to ask. We have to get it past the investigating team, but I think I can persuade them.”

An hour later, Chris was seated at Hannah’s bedside. No notebook, no backup, no intimidating formality. Just a young, soft-spoken RCMP constable in shirtsleeves, preparing to guide her through her story. Green sat by the window, listening and trying not to interfere. The RCMP detectives hadn’t objected nearly as loudly as he’d expected. Perhaps they were intimidated by his rank and experience. Perhaps his bull-headed insistence that it was this way or no way had won them over.

Or perhaps they had more common sense that he’d thought.

Hannah was sitting up in bed, looking wan and fragile amid a mountain of pillows. But as she sized the young officer up, Green detected a hint of that familiar challenge in her eyes. His heart swelled. Hannah was coming back.

Maybe Chris too had noticed the challenge, for he seemed to be having trouble figuring out how to begin. He looked around at the dozens of flower bouquets that graced every surface, half of them from Green. He produced a bright smile that trembled at the edges.

“Any roses left in Yellowknife, do you think?”

Hannah didn’t even blink. Flustered, he cleared his throat and changed tactics. “That was a terrible ordeal for you. Are you okay? To talk about it, I mean.”

She shrugged. Didn’t help him at all.

“We’ve interviewed a lot of the others involved, including your father here, and we’ve pieced a lot of things together. But you were there, at the heart of it all from the beginning.”

Still she said nothing. She lowered her eyes and picked at the IV bandage on her hand. Took a shaky breath. Green felt her slipping under again. He bit his lip to keep from intervening. Chris must not be coached.

Finally the young man seemed to find his stride. “Why don’t you start at the beginning? When you four were planning this trip.”

“That’s not the beginning.”

“Okay, your beginning then. Please.”

She sighed. “It started in January. After his father died, Scott began clearing out his papers from the basement, and he started to go weird. Not right away, but he had a fight with his professor and quit the program. Over his grandfather’s letters. No, I mean the mine.” She stopped and pressed her fingers to her temple. “Well, I didn’t know that then. Sorry, can’t go too fast. It hurts to think.”