The Bone Seeker (31 page)

They approached from the west along the coastal road, keeping an eye out for any movement from the cliff edge in case Markoosie had anticipated their arrival and was up there somewhere with a gun. The cliffs were much less busy now. Most of the birds were spending their time out at sea, feeding to build up their strength for the long flight south. A few late-born fledglings still remained on the ledges, nestling among the moss and guano, dimly anxious, waiting for parents who might not return.

They brought their ATVs to a stop where the track divided, keyed off the engines and grabbed their backpacks. From there they decided to split, Edie heading up on top of the cliff while Derek investigated the series of small caves and hollows that gave out onto the beach.

A late summer coastal fog had begun to form, rising with Edie as she clambered up the path and obscuring the view below. The wind had almost ceased now, the solemn quiet punctuated only by the cries of seabirds. She listened for the sound of footsteps, a telltale clink of metal, the swish of a parka, testing the air for the scent of human fear, but there was nothing. Slowly the mist began to creep skywards. She could see Derek moving like a ghost at the foot of the cliffs. Steeling herself, she crept upwards, her feet sliding on scree, until at last she reached the cliff edge. A handful of gulls whirled up on the air currents. She rolled her shoulders, unsheathed the pistol Derek had given her, took a breath and slunk up and over onto the clifftop, crouching in the willow like a cat.

There was no sign of Markoosie. The thought of him getting away
created a rush of hot anger in her veins. There was nothing more she wanted now than to make him pay, not just for what he'd done to Martha, though that was terrible enough, but for what he'd taken from the family, from Kuujuaq, for the gap he'd left in all their futures. But anger was a useless emotion for a hunter. A hunter had to be calm and confident of her instincts. Her instincts were telling her she was right. Markoosie was here somewhere and she would keep looking until she found him.

The rocky ledges of the plateau stretched before her, lichen-jewelled, and behind them, sheltered a little from the wind, were patches of sedge meadow and clumps of dry, battered cotton grass. Beyond that lay the new containment fence enclosing Glacier Ridge. From where she crouched, she could see the tops of the abandoned radar towers, ruins which had seemed forlorn when she'd thought of the place as an abandoned radar station, but which had taken on a darker, more sinister aspect now she had guessed at the site's real purpose.

The mist was curling over the clifftop and stealing through the low willow and sedge. She stood and crept to the edge of the cliff. A few rock ptarmigans flustered from their nests, disturbed by the sudden fall in temperature, and rose in a great whirl of wings into the blank sky. Looking down she could just make out through the mist a shadowy figure clambering up the till at the base of the cliffs. From his height and the graceful movement of his body she knew this to be Derek. From the speed at which he climbed she could tell that he had seen something and was going to investigate, using the pile of rock spill at the base of the cliff to gain access to the lower reaches of the cliff ledges and overhangs.

Suddenly she heard him shout ‘Pitoq, stop!' and what she supposed was a warning shot rang out. A spray of murres detonated from the cliffs, calling in alarm, then rose up and, banking through the mist, came in once more to the cliff face. Instinctively she dropped down and lay flat on the plateau, her weapon steadied in both hands. For what seemed a long time she could see nothing, then a gust of wind seemed to blow the mist away for a moment and there, perched on a ledge
twenty metres or so from the base of the cliff like an auk, she spotted the figure of a man. Again, Derek shouted. The man swung his head upward, searching out a route towards the top of the cliff and freedom. It had begun to rain now, and the wind had picked up, blowing away the worst of the mist and soaking the cliff face.

She heard herself shout down, ‘Markoosie, give yourself up.'

The figure froze for an instant, then began sweeping the cliff face, trying to locate the source of the voice. Both his arms were outstretched as he clung to the rapidly wettening rock. If he had a weapon, he was in no position to use it. He did not answer her, but, sensing he was cornered, began sliding his feet sideways along the ledge. A few metres from where he clung there was a dark patch in the rock marking the presence of some kind of overhang or cave, which seemed to be where he was now heading.

She stood up and made her way along the clifftop towards her quarry, searching for an outcrop to which she might attach her rope. Finding a boulder a few metres from her starting point, she began to work steadily, lassoing the rope around the rock and fixing it with the knots her mother had taught her in the days after her father had left and they were hungry enough to go egg collecting together. There was a long wide ledge seven or eight metres down where she could crouch comfortably. If she lowered herself she would be sitting within two or three metres of Pitoq's overhang. This way, she hoped to persuade him to give himself up. Making a loop for her feet and another around her waist, she lowered herself over the edge. The rope tensed around her. She righted her position and found a purchase for her feet on the cliff face. Her thoughts went back, first to her mother bouncing the rope from one gull's nest to another, and then to Willa at rappel camp only a few days before, setting both memories in the little caches in her mind to which she could return when needed, her mother's trick for mustering courage.

The wind blew up, flinging rain into her eyes. Pitoq was six or seven metres below and to her left, edging his way towards the overhang. She called to him again but got no answer. Slowly she went down, legs
braced against the rock, the muscles in her arms tense from effort, fingers thrumming. Pitoq had reached the overhang now. She saw him lunge towards the concavity and all but disappear from view, only his feet visible from where she hung. Derek was below her now, stealthily making his way upwards.

‘Markoosie.' Her voice ricocheted off the rock wall.

From inside the cliff there came a shout. She saw the feet disappear then Markoosie's hand appeared around the ledge, followed by his face. He looked first down to Derek then up at Edie.

‘There's nowhere to go, you're trapped.'

He had moved into the open now, his face raised, taking in the rain. Though he was in plain sight, he didn't seem afraid that they might shoot him. ‘My spirit and my conscience are free,' he said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard, but he sounded calm.

‘Two men are in jail for what you did.'

‘
Qalunaat
law means nothing to me.'

‘What about your father? What does he mean to you? He's alive, by the way.'

The man slumped back a little. ‘That's too bad. It was his time.'

‘Is that why you killed Martha? Because it was her time?'

Pitoq shook his head, closed his eyes as though remembering. ‘Martha was my
hanaji
and my punishment. Every day we had her was a day I was reminded that she was not our own and that sooner or later she would leave us.' He was looking directly up at Edie now, blinking away the rain. ‘And when she went back to Alice she took my Nora with her and I was left with nothing. But it seemed that wasn't enough for her. She wanted to get away from us again. Who would she have taken with her this time?' Edie could see the cords in his neck straining from the effort of projecting his voice. ‘My niece was a bad spirit, a troublemaking spirit.' His feet were poised over the ledge now, the hands clinging on to the slick rock. ‘The spirit is in the blood, Edie Kiglatuk, isn't that what we say? Martha's spirit came up from Lake Turngaluk. All I did was send her back there. She didn't even suffer. It was like she just went to sleep.' Markoosie was looking alternately down at the
beach and out to sea now. It seemed he was trying to come to some decision.

Derek shouted up but his voice got lost in the sound of the rain.

‘I'm finished here,' Markoosie continued. ‘I want to do this the Inuit way. I want to join Nora.'

Derek was below him now, his weapon trained on the man.

‘Edie!' Derek called up to her.

For a moment her eyes cut from Derek to Pitoq. They came back to rest on the policeman.

‘Let him go!' she shouted.

There was an instant when Derek seemed to hesitate. Markoosie Pitoq must have seen it too, for in that same moment he released his grip from the rock. She saw him step out into the air then fall, his body twisting, bouncing from the cliff face until it landed with a thud onto the beach. For a second or two the muscles twitched. A pink drizzle mixed with the rain and began to make its way through the shingle to the waves.

‘Stay there.' Derek's voice came to her through the rain. A comforting sound.

She watched him clamber back along the cliff onto the till then slide down on the loose rock until he reached the shingle. A long time later he appeared at the top of the cliff. She felt the rope tighten.

The tide was coming in as they made their way back onto the beach. A single raven sat on Markoosie Pitoq's broken body, gathering courage to take his eyes. A little further away a fox and her cubs eyed the body and licked their chops.

A military ATV sat empty outside the Kuujuaq detachment. Evidently, someone had reported the incident at the bird cliffs to Klinsman and he'd come to find out exactly what had happened.

Edie wasn't in much of a mood for explanations. It was late and her heart still hurt at the thought of what Martha Salliaq had suffered at her uncle's hands. She was glad that he had made the choice to die. It made it cleaner somehow.

Thinking about Klinsman made her feel hot, like everything she touched might melt away.

Derek swung off his vehicle. ‘Sooner or later we're gonna have to tell them they've got the wrong men for Martha's murder. So it may as well be now.' He turned and began to walk towards the detachment. It was at times like these his cool was an asset. Reaching the bottom of the steps, he waited for her. ‘It'll be OK. Just let me do the talking,'

They went up in silence. The sun bounced off the windows and threw back light into their eyes.

As they entered the detachment two men in expensive outdoor gear stopped rifling through papers and drew their handguns. They weren't military or even military police. D-men, Edie presumed. Between them Klinsman stood waiting.

‘You have to leave before I arrest you for interfering with an investigation,' Derek said. After the low grade harassment on the beach a day ago it was clear that the police sergeant hadn't anticipated this. Edie glanced towards the door. One of the men, a tall fella with the swing of an ape, moved into the space, blocking her view.

‘You seem to have forgotten that the case is no longer your jurisdiction,' Klinsman said.

‘You'd do well to go back to Camp Nanook and instruct your paymaster to release Namagoose and Saxby. You know they didn't do it and we have proof that they didn't. You set up your own men, Klinsman. What kind of man does that?'

‘Namagoose and Saxby don't matter,' Klinsman said, turning to the D-men, who came forward, the taller of the two sliding behind them. ‘They never did.'

Derek stepped back. He pulled himself up to his full height and looked Klinsman in the face. ‘You don't have any jurisdiction over this police detachment or any of the officers in it.'

It was a bluff and Klinsman knew it.

‘Unfortunately you've made it necessary for us to take you in. I gave you plenty of warnings and you chose to ignore them. We can cuff you or we can do this the civilized way, but whichever way we do it, you'll be shot if you don't cooperate. Now, your weapons, please.'

As the two men came forward, Derek raised a staying hand. ‘You can call your goons off.' He reached for his service weapon and laid it on the desk beside him. Following his lead, Edie did the same. ‘You're making a mistake,' he said flatly.

•   •   •

They travelled in the military vehicle. The D-men made no attempt to restrain them but Edie noticed they kept their hands near to their holstered weapons. As they approached the Camp Nanook sentry gate the two D-men slid their guns out of sight. Edie caught Derek's gaze and flicked her eyes in their direction. Derek flared his nostrils to indicate that he'd understood. Whatever game they were playing, not everyone on the base was in on it. The same guard who two weeks ago had ticked them off his clipboard saluted the colonel and waved the party through. It was late now, and though the sun still shone, the personnel vehicles were parked up, the cranes and diggers silent and the soldiers mostly in barracks, asleep. A great time, Edie thought, to smuggle in a couple
of off-register non-prisoners, the kind of detainees Klinsman and his Defence Department bosses could lose in the system indefinitely. Or make disappear altogether.

The ATV drew up outside K-block and they found themselves walking down familiar corridors. Klinsman peeled off at his offices but the two goons pushed them forward through a series of locked doors into a dismal, windowless atrium. A cage lay along a corridor to the right, striping shadows on the opposite wall; inside something moved. They were patted down again and pushed along the corridor to the cage, at the back of which, on a hard bench, sat Sonia Gutierrez.

The D-men keyed the lock, pushed Derek and Edie inside and disappeared through the atrium back out into the main building.

They waited until they could hear their footsteps retreating before Gutierrez said drily, ‘The way this would go in the movies, you guys would be rescuing me.'

‘I never was a big fan of the movies,' Derek said. He gave Gutierrez a sorry smile. ‘We missed you,' he said.

‘Don't,' Sonia said. ‘I can't stand sad endings.'

‘Your ATV's up at the landing strip. We assumed you'd flown out to Iqaluit. It was only when I checked the passenger manifests we realized you hadn't,' Edie cut in.

Sonia slammed her hands on her thighs and looked away.

‘
Hijo de puta!
They're smart, these guys.'

‘Not so smart they remembered the manifests,' Edie said. The cage was tiny and airless, with the bench at one end and a chemical toilet. She looked for cameras but saw none. No air cooling system either. It was hot. If there was one thing Edie couldn't stand, it was heat.

‘You any idea where they're from?' Derek asked.

Gutierrez gave a shrug. ‘Freelance is my guess. Working for the Defence Department. They won't let me call a lawyer,' she said, rubbing her arms.

‘We found your backpack.'

Gutierrez stopped her arm rubbing and glanced at them sideways.

‘We spent most of a day trying to decipher the papers,' Edie said. She pulled off her summer parka and handed it to the lawyer. Gutierrez acknowledged it with a ‘thanks'. She saw the lawyer's nose wrinkle.

‘It's sealskin,' she said. ‘You can be cold or you can smell of seals.'

Gutierrez gave an awkward smile and slipped the parka over her head.

‘You read my papers you'll know what this is about,' Gutierrez went on, serious now.

‘We have an idea.'

Gutierrez crossed her legs and, leaning one elbow over her thigh, said in a low voice, ‘What I think we are talking about is a covert programme of nuclear testing at Glacier Ridge, maybe even across the whole of the North American Arctic, in direct contravention of international and Canadian law. If I'm right, the United States and Canada lied to their people on a massive scale.'

‘I wish I could say I'm surprised,' Derek said.

‘But I think there's more.' Gutierrez lowered her voice. ‘You heard of Downwinders?'

Derek and Edie shook their heads.

‘The fallout from the nuclear testing in the Nevada desert in the sixties blew directly over Utah. The US Department of Energy knew this would happen. They took a calculated risk that the locals wouldn't kick up a fuss. For the most part the affected population were Mormons living in remote communities. They kept themselves separate, didn't have much of a voice. The women started miscarrying and by the seventies the population was starting to develop radiation-related cancers. People outside the community were beginning to notice. So the Energy Commission moved the testing to the Aleutian Islands. Which had the advantage of being away from the mainland and near to Soviet Russia and Japan.'

‘But it also had a population of Aleuts,' Edie said.

‘Exactly. Who also began dying. But the Energy Commission kept that secret. It wasn't till after the Cannikin explosion that people on
the US mainland really became aware that anything much happened at all. But Cannikin was
un gran error
, a real own goal. It caused so much catastrophic damage that the government couldn't cover it up.'

‘So they transferred the programme to Ellesmere in secret,' Edie said.

‘Some of it, for sure. The dirtiest part. They knew that the Kuujuamiut wouldn't cause them a problem. You guys had never heard of Cannikin or the nuclear testing programme or even the Cold War. The government figured that you would likely put the deaths of your babies down to bad spirits. Canada always said it never carried out any nuclear testing. People in the south wouldn't be on the lookout like they were in the US. This was the seventies. The government in Ottawa saw the whole of its north as a giant bargaining chip, principally with the US. It had strategic importance but that was all. When I first arrived in Canada from Guatemala, Ellesmere Island hadn't even been formally mapped. Most southerners hardly knew the place existed, let alone that there were people living here. The perfect place to test their bombs out.'

Gutierrez bit her lip, for the moment lost in thought. ‘I think they will want to disappear us.'

‘They?'

‘The Department of Defence. Somehow, they've cornered Klinsman into taking orders from them. They won't want any of this to get out. Can you imagine the scandal if it did? The Canadian government using their own people as nuclear guinea pigs? Then putting their soldiers in to clean it up without telling them what they were getting into. And framing two of their own men for a murder so as to help keep a lid on the thing. Think of the press. Not to mention the lawsuits.' She smiled. ‘If they don't kill me first they will make me a rich woman.'

‘If they were going to . . .' Edie choked over the words, ‘. . . get rid of us, wouldn't they would have done it already?'

‘And risk the personnel at Camp Nanook finding out?' Sonia shook her head. ‘A couple days back I heard one of them mention Alert.' The
Alert station was nearly nine hundred kilometres away at the tip of Ellesmere Island. The station was nominally a meteorological facility, with surveillance and intelligence gathering capacity, manned by a rotating staff of military and scientific personnel.

‘I think they might take us there,' Gutierrez said.