If Sandy hadn’t gone through the Stoney Nation until close to midnight, where had she been from suppertime onward? Where was she now?
“This dotted line. Is it a real road running north, or one of those hiking trails?”
“Neither, really. That part of Richards Road isn’t maintained. A Quadrunner or snowmobile might get you through, but no road vehicle.” He put his finger on a spot closer to the wavy blue line of the Ghost River. “SAR teams are going south from there to meet the ones coming north. I was their liaison until I got called up here. If she wandered into the bush before that second big snow dump, we might never find her.”
How terrible that would be for Dennis and his family, and for Loreena.
“How long is that unmaintained bit of road?”
“Maybe two kilometres. It comes out about ten K south of the Ghost River crossing.”
Lacey laid her finger flat, estimating distances. “We’re less than twenty kilometres from Highway 1A? I had no idea this deep wilderness was so close to civilization.”
“By road it’s a lot longer. No connection west of Highway 40.”
Nearly fifty kilometres back along the winding Black Rock road, and another fifteen south to the Ghost. It was a miracle Markov had reached her as soon as he had. Six months ago, it had seemed unreasonable for the RCMP to take an hour to respond to a prowler call in Bragg Creek, but now that she knew the Cochrane detachment’s territory a bit better, she figured they were doing damn well for a small staff with all these square miles of prairie and forest to cover. Not to mention hundreds of kilometres of highway and probably thousands more of back roads.
The tow truck winch whined again. This time the little red car rose steadily, and soon its wheels touched the road. The tow truck pulled ahead, setting the vehicle flat. Markov unclipped his flashlight and yanked a pair of latex gloves from the box in his car. Lacey peered over his shoulder as he opened the passenger door. Shoes, gloves, a window scraper, and a DQ bag lay loose in the front footwells. A yellow case held candles, matches, chocolate bars, and a space blanket still in its wrapper. Markov opened the glove box to reveal a registration folder, a first aid kit, and a stash of power bars. He ran his hands under the seats and came up empty.
“I don’t see a backpack.” Lacey straightened up, giving him room. “In the trunk, maybe?”
But there was no backpack and no envelope for JP there, either. Against all training and common sense, Eric had abandoned his shelter, food, and survival gear. For what? And then there was the car’s position. “Markov, do you see any way this car could have gone over in this spot if it was heading downhill, toward the chalet?”
“Nope. Almost guaranteed it was going uphill. You can see from the front bumper that it hit those trees down there nose first. If it had gone off on the downhill it would have to slide sideways, and hit side-on. Someone going uphill missed the turn in the whiteout, or dumped it over deliberately.”
“That’s what I thought.” If Eric had gone over here, climbed back up through the underbrush from his wrecked car, and struggled on foot through a blizzard for twenty minutes down the road again, his poppy would almost surely have been lost. More likely he’d driven right down past here to JP’s yard, met his killer there, and then, after he’d been locked in the woodshed, the killer drove his car up a few turns and pushed it over the edge, expecting everyone would assume Eric had gone off the road in the blizzard. Not, Lacey reminded herself, that she was putting any stock in the idea that Eric had shown Zoe his route to the chalet. That was just an odd coincidence.
Markov looked at his watch. “I’m stuck here with the evidence, but you don’t need to stay.”
Lacey hadn’t gone three steps when he called after her.
“If you’re heading toward town, can you take a message to the north SAR staging area, to say I won’t be back? There’s no cellphone coverage over there.”
The other search. The SAR workers there would know if Sandy had been found. “Show me where exactly it is.”
“Which way?” Lacey lifted her sunglasses to look around. A sign on the right, past Zoe’s bent head, read Richards Road.
Zoe peered at the map on Lacey’s phone. “I think this is that Y junction. We keep going south here.”
They wound down into a valley and crossed a box girder bridge over the ice-rimmed Ghost River. Up the other side, they passed a large house on a windswept knoll guarded by barbed-wire fences and No Trespassing signs. Another sharp bend took them west and south again. Lacey’s phone pinged. No more cell signal. A sign near a gate read Saddle Peak Trail Rides. Several vehicles lined the road, and beyond them stood a small travel trailer. Lacey pulled up behind the last truck and got out. Through the gate a road led toward the western mountains. To the south was an open stretch between scruffy trees, straight as a road and filled with hillocks of snow disturbed by parallel snowshoe tracks. This would be the dotted line on Markov’s map: two kilometres straight south to the Civic. No way Sandy could have walked this far in the middle of the night, not through fresh drifts. She’d surely be found nearer the Civic.
A white-haired man in a scarlet SAR vest leaned out of the trailer. “Help you?”
“Constable Markov asked me to tell you he won’t be back. Another constable will have to come out as liaison.”
“Tell them not to bother. The teams are working back north now, and we’ll pack up. No sign of anyone having passed through. We’ll check up the road a ways to be sure, but she’d have gone to one of those houses if she’d made it that far.”
Lacey thanked him. Returning to the Lexus, she shook her head at Zoe’s questioning look. The phone pinged as the signal returned. No way would she phone home with this report. Some things had to be said in person. They cruised down toward the bridge.
“Can we stop so I can pee?” Zoe asked. “All that tea and this bumpy road …”
Lacey pulled over. Leaving Zoe to tramp down into the bushes, she walked onto the bridge and looked along the valley. The dark water of the Ghost River bisected a wide, snow-topped swath of gravel. No houses were visible from here, not even the big one on the south ridge. Wild mountains stabbed the pale western sky. Much closer, a rocky outcrop covered in icicles glittered in the midday sun, not even half as high as that icefall she and Boney had been trapped behind. That had been five days ago. The day Sandy was supposed to return.
Downstream, the water reflected the sky, disturbed here and there by eddies around the snow-capped stones. Someone had built a rock berm out from the south bank. Every so often a wave washed over its tip, sending a froth of bubbles downstream. As she watched one little patch of foam whirl out to the main channel, her eye caught a flash of vivid yellow between two rocks. It shifted as the water flowed around it. A plastic bag? She couldn’t leave it there to wash downstream in the spring melt and tangle some hapless wild creature. Leaving the bridge, she edged down the rocky slope to the shore.
“Where are you going?” Zoe called.
“Picking up some trash.” At the water’s edge, she stooped. It wasn’t a plastic bag at all, but a child’s yellow purse. As she looked closer, purple and pink sequins flipped back and forth in the current, erasing and re-forming a unicorn’s head. Sandy had run her hand up and down her granddaughter’s purse, demonstrating the flip sequins to Lacey and Dee beside the Christmas tree. It couldn’t be the same one. Not this far from the Civic.
Lacey hunted along the shore for a stick and dragged the purse from the river. Ignoring the freezing drops falling on her pant legs, she fumbled the zipper open. A familiar face stared up from a driver’s licence photo.
A cloud swept along the river, dimming the light and turning the water black.
Lacey stood clutching the purse to her chest and scanned the stony shores, looking for any snow-covered lump the size of a body. The water wasn’t deep enough to float a dead weight, or even to roll it over. But maybe that rocky outcrop upstream, with all the icicles coating its face …
As th
e cloud moved off, the sun sparkled on the water once more, reflecting up under the bridge. It glanced off a fall of icicles and cast a translucent glow into the triangular wedge where the bridge met the abutment. There seemed to be a lot of snow in that wedge. Snow that looked suspiciously like a puffy, white winter coat. Scrambling toward the bridge, she pulled out her cellphone. Two bars was barely enough power to get a call out.
“Bull,” she said, staring along the underside of the bridge deck, “I found Sandy’s purse with her driver’s licence still inside. It’s at the bridge over the Ghost River, not far north of the SAR staging area at Saddle Peak road. I’m starting a search of the immediate area.”
“Understood. I’ll send help.”
Lacey disconnected and yelled up to Zoe. “Stay in the car!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
When the first SAR truck reached her, Lacey was crouched on the rocks by the bridge’s north end. Breathing deeply to quell her nausea, she waved an arm. The two-man team arrived at a jog. She couldn’t speak, so she pointed. One man pulled out a radio, but moved away as he spoke. The other yanked a space blanket from his pack and wrapped it around Lacey. “Come away now,” he said. “You’ve done your bit.”
Zoe was back in the TFB office, finishing a late takeout lunch of chili with garlic bread, when her phone pinged. She hit pause on the video she’d been streaming, freezing the screen on a shot of the dark-haired admiral from the Pegasus and her lover, the blond Cylon. There was so much truth about women’s toxic relationships right there: manipulation and gaslighting while smiling and acting like a best friend. The inevitable betrayal would be hideous.
The text was from Lizi: Can we Skype? She opened the connection in a corner of her screen.
“Hi, Mom!” Lizi waved at the camera. “Are you okay there by yourself? Are you remembering to brush Toomie? You know he gets cranky if he swallows too much hair.”
Zoe made a face. “I stepped on a hairball this morning, thanks. He thoughtfully left it on the bathroom tile instead of the hall carpet. Are you guys having fun?”
“It’s a blast. Clem, say hi to my mom.”
“Hi, Zoe. Thanks so much for letting me come up and stay with Lizi.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it. What have you girls been up to?”
The highlight of the trip for both girls was learning to snowboard. This very morning they had both successfully landed their first jump on the real course, although sadly there were no photos.
“No flips yet,” Lizi added, “but we’re gonna try some grabs tomorrow, like those girls in the Olympics.”
“Don’t get too adventurous too fast. You don’t want to break anything.” Zoe looked past their glowing, laughing faces and expanded the window for a better view. The girls were in a luxurious living room, all varnished wood and big beams, with a gas fireplace taking up half the opposite wall. “Where are you? That looks like a private home.”
“TJ got a suite. A bedroom each for him and his mom, plus the living room.”
Zoe inwardly cringed. Please don’t let Lizi get a taste for the lifestyle JP’s kids enjoy. “Nice that he can afford it. Where’s Dad?”
“Downstairs, having a drink with Arliss and the boys. They won’t let us in the bar.”
“Well, I’m glad of that. I’ll give him a call.” She signed off without mentioning Eric’s car. If Aidan wanted to break that news to Clemmie while she was up there, let him pick the time. Meanwhile, Lizi and Clem’s budding friendship sounded healthy, centred on learning new skills and testing their physical limits, not fretting about clothes or competing for male attention. On her screen, the blond Cylon gazed at the admiral it had manipulated to the edge of insanity. The creature — or the actress — looked a bit like Phyl Thompson there, with red exit lights tinting her spun-gold hair. Phyl had come to Canada a mere secretary, risen to executive assistant, married the boss, and gone home to England a millionaire’s wife in all of ten years. Nobody did that well out of the oil patch without a plan and a significant degree of ruthlessness. Phyl, like the blond Cylon, had been determined to win.
Resisting the pull of Eric’s interest in the video screen, Zoe called Nik’s phone. The bar noise overwhelmed his greeting. He moved away from wherever he had been sitting, and it diminished.
“Is that better?” he asked. “How are you doing there? Are you coming up in the morning?”
“God, I wish.” Zoe blinked back sudden tears. “I miss you. I really want to be there, having an uncomplicated holiday with you and the kids.”
“Hon, are you crying? What’s wrong?”
Zoe sniffed. “What isn’t wrong? I’m at work tracing possible accounting fraud at TFB, and this morning at Black Rock, I stumbled on Eric Anders’s missing car.” He started to speak, but she kept going. “And two hours ago, I was with that Victim Services woman when she found a dead body.”
“Another body?” Nik’s voice rose, and probably his blood pressure along with it.
“I didn’t see it. Lacey made me wait in the car. I’m so glad she did, because it must have been bad. She looked a wreck when she came back, and she’s an ex-cop, so she’s seen plenty.” She pulled in a calming breath, and another. “I wish you were here tonight, so I could lean on you and be warm. I need a big hug.”
“I wish that, too. Don’t worry. I’ll look out for the kids and bring them all home safely on Tuesday. You take good care of yourself. When this is over, you deserve every minute of that holiday someplace warm. Don’t go getting soft on JP and letting him talk you out of it.”
“No worries. I won’t.”
She was about to say goodbye when Nik said, “Arliss is here and wants a word.”
“Hi, Zoe. What’s this about a body? Don’t tell me you found another one at the chalet.”
“No, miles away: a woman missing since Boxing Day. And it was Lacey who found her.”
“That’s grim.” The distant background of voices and laughter filled Arliss’s brief silence. “I guess today’s not a good day to call her about whatever it was she wanted to know.”
Zoe struggled for a moment to remember what Lacey had wanted to ask Arliss about, but her eyes still stung with tears that wanted to fall — for Eric’s lost potential, for her shaky sanity, for missing the ski trip, and … well, for everything. She just wanted to finish this call so she could have some space. “Tomorrow might be better,” she said. “She was pretty rattled when she dropped me off. But there is something you could do for me.”
“Oh?”
“Keep an eye on Clemmie. Aidan may tell her sometime today that Eric’s car has been found, once the police tell him. Don’t you bring it up. Just, if she looks upset, ask her what’s wrong. I don’t know if she’ll tell you. Compared to Lizi, that child is a sphinx.” Zoe breathed deeply. Was that the last of her responsibilities today? Could she go back to tracing the accounting problem, which was mercifully all immutable numbers on paper and not filled with messy emotions? She was on the verge of asking Arliss whether JP had mentioned the malware at the last board meeting, but Eric’s voice bounced from corner to corner of her consciousness. No, no, no! Keep it quiet. Who to trust? She asked for Nik back, said goodbye, and rang off. Around her, the muted rumble of air conditioning and the other sounds of an empty office building amplified her isolation. Calling up her favourite Baroque radio station on her laptop, she let harpsichords and violins sooth away the morning’s tumult.
Her spreadsheet of payments to Cylon Six Inc. kept growing through the afternoon. The mental image of the soulless blond from the TV show intruded each time that name appeared in the cheque registry. Whoever had written the code must have been a fan. There were no payments after mid-October, when Eric had first reported it to JP, so he’d scared off whoever did it. As she worked back through earlier payment runs, a pattern emerged: thirty-three legitimate expense payments between cheques to Cylon Six, with the count carrying forward to the next print run to maximize the appearance of randomness. Each faked che
que’s amount was 33 percent of the payment immediately before it in the run, a figure unlikely to attract an accountant’s eyeball scan for anomalies. The address on the invoice was a post box in Canmore.
When last April’s scam payments were listed, she subtotalled the column. In oil company terms, it wasn’t much more than petty cash, varying amounts averaging a thousand a month. She rolled her neck and shrugged her shoulders. Time to pack it in for today. She could start again in the morning, dragging files up from the basement archives to look back further. “Happy New Year to me,” she said into the hush, and clicked on the Cylon’s face. She’d finish that episode before heading home to a hungry, bored cat and a lonely New Year’s Eve.
Lacey shifted the blanket from her shoulders and swung her legs off the couch. “The whole afternoon gone and I’ve done nothing.”
“You’re still shaking.” Dee reached for the mug with its syrupy dregs. “I can get you a refill.”
“I’ve had enough.” And she meant it in more ways than one. Huddling under a blanket, sobbing so hard her ribs hurt, she certainly didn’t feel like the tough ex-cop Tom or Wayne or anyone else would recognize. Hell, she didn’t even recognize herself. She’d never wept over a dead body in her life. And yet, when she’d stumbled in the door, shaking and teary, Dee and Loreena had rallied round with everything they could muster. Loreena might have turned white on hearing Sandy’s body had been found, but she’d dragged Lacey to the couch just the same and wrapped her in the heated blanket. Dee had plied her with hot, sweet tea and fresh tissues. They’d both murmured soothingly and stroked her hair. Then more tea and more sobbing. Now she was done, but done what? She couldn’t explain to herself why finding Sandy had hit her so hard; how could she explain it to them?
Where the Ice Falls Page 25