The Bone Seeker (19 page)

‘Of course.' There was a pause while Mackie gathered her thoughts. ‘Ambien is the brand name for zolpidem. It's a short-acting hypnotic with effects similar to benzodiazepines. The tabs are small, easy to dissolve in a drink. The taste isn't great but it comes on after you've swallowed. It may be that the victim was given enough to make her drowsy then persuaded to take more once she was out of it. They're quick-acting, it's a pretty powerful sedative. She'd have started feeling the effects fifteen minutes after ingesting. At the levels that were in Martha's body, she would have experienced muscle relaxation and depressed respiratory function.' Another pause. ‘That give you enough?'

Derek said he thought so, thanked Mackie and finished the call.

‘Saxby steals Ambien from the pharmacy and it turns up in Martha Salliaq.' Derek sounded breathless. His legs were jigging up and down in his chair, his voice eager and with the tiniest hint of celebration. ‘Edie, I do believe we've got 'em.'

He dialled first the prosecutor then Klinsman and left messages.

‘I gotta go down to the port. Mix-up with some cargo. We got a shipment of snowmobile parts nobody wants. But if either the prosecutor or Klinsman calls, come get me. Immediately, OK?'

Edie smiled and saluted but the moment he turned, her smile dropped off. The circumstantial evidence pointed to Namagoose and Saxby. Now they had physical evidence too. So why was something still gnawing at her bones?

•   •   •

The
Herbert Piquot
sat anchored quietly in mid-channel, a small tarnished brooch on the grey, velvety waters of the Sound. It was on the
Piquot
that Derek had first arrived on Ellesmere, thirteen years ago. Back then, there were bergy bits and growlers littering the beach and large pans of slowly rotting ice still twirling in the currents. The
summer insects were as sparse as hot days. It took him five or six years to settle. The place was so different from anywhere he'd been before. But the job itself had never been too challenging. There really was no crime in the Arctic back then. Being a native cop was somewhere between administrator and social worker. You could take yourself out on spring patrol and return six weeks later in the certain knowledge that the only things you'd have missed would be a few drunken brawls and some loose huskies. He felt a flash of nostalgia for the old innocence of the place; its brittle, delicate, ice-laden charisma.

Sam Oolik was at the quayside leaning over a cargo crate. He stood up as Derek approached, clutching his lower back, his face wrinkling momentarily before settling back into its usual genial blank.

‘Hey, Derek.' He wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Damned heat. Must be ten degrees.' He stood up and looked Derek full in the eye. ‘I guess you must be about ready to make those arrests.'

A voice shouted his name. He looked about and spotted the balding head of Larry Larsen, the
Piquot
's captain, and, gathering himself, went down the quay towards him. For the next couple of hours, he was too busy with the supply to think about Martha Salliaq or how much everything was changing.

Returning to the detachment later, he hung up his hat on the rack behind his desk and called Edie's name. A head peeked out from the comms room.

‘Someone on the radio?'

‘Sammy Inukpuk. I don't know why he didn't just use the phone.'

‘I told him not to.' You had to admire the man's tenacity. Edie's knight in rusting armour.

Derek took off his jacket, went over to his desk and sat down. ‘No phone calls?'

Edie shook her head. She was leaning against the door jamb now, her hair loose for once and falling over her face, and he found himself oddly stirred. Perhaps Muloon was right and he had been jealous.

In the comms room the radio beeped.

‘Sammy again?'

‘Doubt it. We just signed off. You want me to get it?' Edie said.

‘No, I'll go.' He crossed the room and went past her into the corridor. It was Larsen wanting to know when he'd be down to sign off the last of the cargo. No talk of one last long, boozy onboard dinner. Another tradition gone. He promised to swing by as soon as he could. He signed off and went back into the office where Edie was sitting, in Stevie's chair, lost in thought, absent-mindedly braiding her hair. Her head shot up when she heard him and a fragile smile bloomed briefly on her face without reaching her eyes.

He knew then there was something she wasn't telling him.

Sonia Gutierrez approached Glacier Ridge from the coastal road, where she was less likely to be spotted. The track took her as far as the bird cliffs then up onto the ridge itself. From there she turned off and bumped over the willow to the crude boundary fence. Clambering from her ATV and checking that she was not being observed, she pulled up the wire and slunk underneath.

For the first few days after the discovery of Martha's body Sonia had thought of the girl's death, tragic though it was, as a kind of sorry sideshow to the main event. But she was beginning to see that it had lifted a rock and dark things had scuttled out and headed for the shadows and it was her job to make sure they were not lost. Somewhere, someone didn't want Glacier Ridge cleaned up and they were prepared to do whatever they had to – including, perhaps, murder – to ensure it wasn't. What she didn't know was why. But she meant to find out.

She wandered along the old track, picking her way through the debris of frost-heaved concrete and rusted metal, among the remnants of buildings ruined by years of freezing and thawing, and thought about the past. For centuries Britain, the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark and Sweden had battled it out for ownership of the Arctic, treating it as nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they could paint their flags. The desires and needs of the Inuit people, who had made the place their home for thousands of years and for whom the idea of owning land – in the sense of legally possessing it – was an affront to the natural order, had been completely ignored. It was only
in the last few decades that Inuit had entered the fray and begun to voice their ancestral claims to the territory and its resources.

Now, she sensed, the terms of engagement were shifting. In one way, the annual Canadian military patrol had come too late. The battle was no longer between nation states or even between Inuit and nation states, but between land developers, oil and gas companies, mining and mineral extractors and shipping interests. If development of the Arctic was to take any account of the people living there, Inuit would have to divert their attentions away from national politics and take on the corporations and the institutions working in the Arctic directly. If they did nothing there would come a time in the not too distant future when they would find themselves effectively living on reservations surrounded by mineral mines and oil derricks. The thought of that hollowed her heart.

She stopped at a high point and took in the layout of the old radar station. A rough, dry wind whistled over from the northwest. Clumps of summer flowers had blossomed in the shelter of south-facing walls and some cottonheads scrambled along the water run-off at the edges of the pathways. Caribou had left tracks and there were a few scattered hare droppings but to the unknowing eye it looked as though no human being had set foot on the site for decades. Sonia knew this was an illusion. In fact, dozens of surveyors and clean-up engineers had tramped through the place over the years since its closure.

On the visit she'd made the day after Martha's body was found, she'd come across a bunch of tundra flowers in one of the outbuildings. Out of curiosity she went back there now to see whether whoever had left them had returned. She allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness. After a while the earth floor resolved itself and she saw it was sprinkled with mosses and tiny patches of lichen. A single pink campion trembled beside the window. It appeared that the flower man or woman hadn't come back.

From there she took herself to the northern boundary of the site facing the patchwork of black-water pools and bitter-looking mud of
Lake Turngaluk. Palliser had partially enclosed the area in police tape, as though the lake was itself a crime against the surrounding tundra. The lake had never been the focus of her energies. The environmental impact report suggested that the contamination in that area was low level. Some tar, petroleum, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, dioxin and heavy metal deposits. It had recommended lake drainage, but that was as far as it went. There
was
an undeniably creepy atmosphere about the place. She could understand why the locals avoided it and said it was taboo. Inuit always took their cue from nature and there was something about Lake Turngaluk that nature didn't recognize as its own.

It was the landfill site to one side of the lake that was of particular interest now. From her scrutiny of the plans she believed the area marked the position of what would once have been the underground bunker and it was the bunker that was somehow key. There were too many anomalies surrounding its construction; the fact that it had been commissioned by the Department of Defence and not by the Canadian or US military who were jointly responsible for the site, then left off the plans and only made reference to once it had been stripped of its original purpose and filled in. Why would you keep anything in a bunker unless you wanted it hidden? And why would you leave it off any plans unless at some point you wanted to be able to deny it was ever there?

The track edged around the site and dipped down and around the lake but from her vantage now she could see there was a more direct route to the landfill area, down the rocky scree. Shouldering her backpack, she picked her way through and twenty minutes later found herself standing at the spot. It was larger than it had looked from the top of the ridge and she could see now that there was considerable subsidence, which had been disguised from further away by a sparse covering of low sedge. She picked a stem and crushed the leaves between her fingers but, unusually for sedge, the leaves smelled of nothing and left a sticky residue which she wiped off on her shirt. Pulling out her camera, she walked the circumference and took a few pictures, then knelt down for a closer look. The ground had been filled in with ballast
and poured concrete. She tested a foot on the ballast but was not confident that it would take her weight. The place was dangerous but there were no notices, no warning signs or other structures around it.

She started to make her way back to the ridge. The wind picked up, whistling across the tundra from the northwest towards the sea. About halfway up the incline, she spotted half-a-dozen men in military uniform busying themselves unloading several rolls of razor wire and what looked like fencing from a utility vehicle. A jeep sat off to one side. She stopped for a moment, breathing in the sweet Arctic air, trying to figure out what was going on. She hadn't heard them arrive – the sound of the engine and their voices must have been obscured by the wind – and it was a shock now to see them there. Could it be that the clean-up had been given the go-ahead after all? It surely looked that way. A pulse of adrenalin tapped her temple and she moved ahead, picking a path along the loose scree towards the truck, waving and shouting. As she ran, a needling thought ran through her. Neither Klinsman nor Palliser had been courteous enough to update her with this latest development. Well, that hardly mattered now. She found herself grinning, her foggy mood burned off in the fierce light of relief. This was Canada after all, not some chaotic and impoverishing military dictatorship. Here, of all places, the law was king.

As she approached, the officer in charge left his spot beside the jeep and came over to meet her. She held out a hand. ‘I'm Sonia Gutierrez, the attorney for the hamlet of Kuujuaq.' If he had heard her name before, it didn't seem to register now. She went on. ‘How long are you expecting this to take?'

He raised his eyebrows as though surprised by the question. She thought she detected a little impatience too.

‘We should have it all wrapped up by this afternoon, ma'am. Is that your ATV over there?' He pointed.

‘I meant for the whole programme?' The agreement included an estimated time frame but it didn't hurt to check with the people on the ground.

‘Like I said. A few hours.'

A soldier bustled up, saluted and asked his boss where to begin setting the fence posts. The officer pointed along a line marked with yellow pegs, and told the soldier he'd be along to advise in a few minutes. As the soldier saluted again and walked away, the officer turned his attentions once more to Sonia.

‘I'm gonna need you to leave the area now, ma'am.'

‘Oh no,' she said, ‘I'm the attorney for the settlement of Kuujuaq.' She began to sketch out her role. The officer waited politely for her to finish before repeating his request. She told herself not to get riled, the legal training kicking in.
Remain calm and reassert the position.

‘What I'm saying, officer, is this is Inuit land. It belongs to the people of Kuujuaq.'

The officer stiffened and took a step back, an implacable expression on his face. ‘No, ma'am. I guess you were not informed correctly. This land has been requisitioned. As from 9 a.m. this morning, this area legally belongs to the Department of Defence.'

Edie was in the kitchen trying to rustle up something delicious from half a walrus head and a caribou ear – not so easy, it turned out – when the sound of the door slamming and Sonia Gutierrez's voice sent her back out into the detachment office. The lawyer was standing in the middle of the room, with her face as dark as seaweed and a mad cast to her eye, shrieking what sounded very much like a string of Spanish expletives. Derek was there too, sitting frozen behind his desk like a cornered animal.

‘Jesus, Edie, you tell her to calm down. I tried and look what happened.' Displays of emotional intensity left Derek floored. It was the Inuk in him, Edie thought.

‘You can carry on bellowing like a wounded musk ox all you like, Ms Gutierrez, but it won't do you any good,' she said.

Derek flashed Edie a grateful look then cleared his throat.

The lawyer shuffled deeper into her skin and rearranged her features.

‘OK, Ms Gutierrez, I'm guessing this isn't a social call, so how's about we start over?' He waved the lawyer to a chair.

Gutierrez parked herself, sweeping her hair back over her shoulder and crossing her legs elegantly.

‘This is not a performance, Sergeant Palliser.' Her accent was thicker when she was angry.

‘All the same, Ms Gutierrez, you seem to be the only one with the script.'

The lawyer took in a deep breath.

‘Since you are partly behind this, I'm relying on you, Sergeant Palliser, to tell me what the hell is going on.'

Derek threw up his hands.

‘The Defence Department instructs Joint Forces North to take back the Glacier Ridge site and you expect me to believe you know nothing about it. Hardly likely is it, sergeant?'

Derek frowned then grabbed his chin between his fingers. ‘I agree. All the same, it seems to be what has happened.' He looked across to Edie, who shrugged.

Gutierrez muttered something in Spanish then gestured to the pack of cigarettes lying on Derek's desk. He picked it up and held it out. She took a cigarette and allowed him to light it for her.

‘One of my contacts at the departmental counsel's office said there's some legal ambiguity in the land claims agreement. In other words, I screwed up one of the subclauses. But that's bullshit.' She pronounced the word ‘bollsheet'.

‘What is Klinsman saying?' Derek asked.

‘Colonel Klinsman isn't answering his phone. I already put a call through to the Nunavut premier and to the parliamentary legal counsel challenging the basis of this decision. I don't think there's any question that the department is in breach of its agreement, let alone its fiduciary duty.' Her eyes were wet rocks sparkling in the sun. ‘It's too much. My contracts are always immaculate. Immaculate. It'll take time but I will drag anyone and everyone who had anything to do with this through every court in Canada if I have to. People think they can screw me, they need to know who's got her fist around their balls.' She cast a glance at Derek then at Edie.

‘You really didn't know anything about this, did you?'

They shook their heads.

Gutierrez's eyes narrowed. ‘Then you don't understand what this means for you.'

Derek and Edie swapped blank looks. ‘The land belongs to the Defence Department. You no longer have jurisdiction over the case.'

Gutierrez stubbed her cigarette out and stood to leave. At the door she turned, wrapping her coat more tightly around her body and addressing herself to Derek.

‘You might feel like doing a little screaming yourself.'

•   •   •

The area around Lake Turngaluk was wired off with electric fencing. Defence Department signs warning trespassers hung from the fence posts. Here and there, remnants of crime tape rustled in the wind but the area behind the wire had been indiscriminately churned by the tracks of military vehicles, effectively destroying the crime scene.

Derek slowed his ATV right down. They were outside the Camp Nanook perimeter fence now.

‘If they think we'll just roll over . . .'

The guard at the sentry gate made a phone call and told them Colonel Klinsman wasn't available.

‘We can wait.' Derek folded his arms.

The soldier checked his watch, uncertain as to how to proceed. ‘He's busy all evening.'

‘Then we'll stay here until he isn't.'

The soldier's face contorted. He began rubbing his hands. ‘Look, he's not going to see you guys, OK?'

Edie caught Derek's eye and raised a single eyebrow. Her eyes glittered. ‘They ever teach you the Eskimo roll, soldier?'

The soldier looked puzzled. ‘The kayak manoeuvre?'

‘That's the one. Basic safety procedure, right? Kindergarten stuff. The Eskimo rolls under the water and disappears. But then, just when you're least expecting it, back he pops.'

Derek throttled up his ATV, turned it around until he drew up alongside the guard.

‘You give Colonel Klinsman a message from the Ellesmere Island Police. You tell him to expect an Eskimo roll.'

•   •   •

Back at the detachment the voicemail light was winking – Anna Mackie saying that Ransom had given her orders to release the forensics in the
Martha Salliaq case to the military investigator. She signed off with an apology and a contact number for her at home.

‘Don't call the office.'

Derek pushed the phone away and reached for a cigarette.

‘Damned if this makes any sense to me.' He swivelled his chair around and began to bite at his fingernails then checked himself. ‘One minute Klinsman's begging us for a date, the next he's washing his hair. Why take over jurisdiction when we're so near to making arrests?'

‘Maybe they want control over what happens to Namagoose and Saxby?' Edie said. She was feeling shitty for Derek but another part of her was relieved. Something told her that whoever arrested the Killer Whales would wind up regretting it.

They sat for a moment.

‘Maybe they've got new information that someone else at the camp was involved, someone higher up?' Edie offered.

‘It's possible.' Derek sighed, slapped his thighs and stood up. ‘Either way, we're not gonna find out tonight. It's late and I could use a drink and some thinking time on my own. Let's call it a day and come at it fresh tomorrow morning.'

•   •   •

At the entrance to her tent Edie hesitated. Derek's mention of drink had kicked off the urge. The sensible move would be to step inside, creep under the sleeping skins and wait for sleep. Something about this case filled her with
taulittuq
, the sense of endlessly trudging in circles and going nowhere. They said that
taulittuq
was caused by
ijirait
, bad spirits, dragging the living back into the past. But what if there was nowhere
else to go? She thought how much she longed for a little dark right now. To be able to see the stars and know there was something up there bigger than you, bigger than
taulittuq
, bigger even than the bad spirits on your back.

Turning away from the tent, she set off along the path that led towards the Anchor Bar. Alcohol had always been a short, straight road to oblivion but at least oblivion was somewhere to go. Inside it was mayhem. A crowd of locals were making the most of the arrival of the
annual supply before the community ran out of whisky or the mayor decided to declare a dry week. The blast of boozy air brought with it the familiar sourness of a previous life and right now that smelled good. Pushing her way through the crush Edie reached the bar and, throwing down a few notes, shouted above the din to the barman for a beer with a triple rye chaser. Two glasses appeared. The sight of the booze had an instant calming effect. It was funny how it could do that to her. For a while she took pleasure in watching the bubbles sliding around on the rye meniscus, the head on the beer gently subsiding into the liquid like old snow in the beat of an amber sun, and her mind faded out everything but the magic inside those glasses. Then a man with a five-toothed grin and yellow, jelly eyes sidled up and slurred a hello and the smell of his breath brought the world back in. She found herself back in the bar, looking at a girl not far off Martha's age. A look she recognized, the same slightly defiant stance. She smiled, but the girl looked away and suddenly the conversation with Martha flooded back into her mind and she heard herself mouthing the words
Going somewhere special?
After that she didn't feel like drinking any more. She stood up and began to elbow her way back through the throng of people. At the entrance she turned, hoping for a last look at the girl. Instead she saw the yellow-eyed man clasping the rye to his breast as you might a sleeping baby.

A short time later she found herself on the path leading to Chip Muloon's house. At her knock, the locks slid back and Chip's face emerged, blinking away sleep.

‘It's late, Edie, go home.'

‘I can't,' she said. Home was 70 kilometres away.

Chip looked about, sighed and eye-rolled. ‘Come in, then. But only for a little while, OK?'

He cleared away a bunch of papers lying on the table, offered her some hot tea and went into the kitchen to boil the water. She sat on the couch and waited. It had never struck her before how Spartan, almost lifeless, the place was and in that observation she felt the old
taulittuq
creeping over her and the
ijirait
tap tap tapping on her back.

Chip reappeared carrying two mugs. He stopped for a second. She saw him stiffen, the cords in his neck tightening.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?'

She blinked and looked away. He came over to the couch and put the mugs on the table, taking a seat on the chair opposite.

‘Have you been drinking?'

Her clothes smelled of the bar. ‘Almost,' she said.

He frowned. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and modulated. ‘Look, Edie, we were never going anywhere, you know that. You got wrapped up in the case and I got tired of wondering whether or not you were gonna show and that's that.'

A small, involuntary laugh escaped her lips. It sounded more bitter than she felt. He thought she was trying to woo him back. The vanity of the male.

‘You spoke to Klinsman.'

His eyes grew wider then he slumped back into his chair.

‘Christ, this isn't about the fucking knife again, is it?'

‘No, it's not about the knife.'

There was a pause in which everything that needed to be said was said.

‘I thought you might be pleased,' Chip said finally. ‘This way you get to go back to your teaching.'

‘Klinsman told you, didn't he? He told you that the Defence Department have taken over jurisdiction in the case.'

Muloon's lips were parted and she saw from the implacable stare, the bunched jaw and tight neck that her hunch was correct. Her ex-lover put his mug back on the table, crossed his arms and stood.

‘I think you should go now,' he said.