‘But it doesn’t explain why we saw the girl from Nome in the woods, or why she drew IIIaXTa on the windshield.’
‘You know what?’ Edie said, braiding and unbraiding her hair, ‘until that day in the forest, I never once in my life felt lost. Not really, truly lost. Feeling lost happened to other people, to qalunaat people. But the last few days it’s like it’s become a permanent condition.’
Derek leaned in and switched off the TV. The phone was ringing. Edie picked up. It was Detective Truro.
Half an hour later, she was walking through a small group of protestors holding ‘Ban the Believers’ signs, and through the revolving doors of the APD building. This time Truro came out to greet her personally.
‘It’s good of you to come in at such short notice,’ he said.
He flipped his ID on the reader and ushered Edie through an opening security gate. A light sweat sheened across his cheeks and his eyes were reddened by lack of sleep. ‘I couldn’t go into it on the phone.’ He pressed the elevator button. A door slid open. Edie looked at the tiny tin interior. The scene from The Bellboy with Fatty Arbuckle trapping Buster Keaton inside the security gate sprang to mind.
‘I’ll walk,’ she said.
He looked at her and decided not to argue.
‘I’ll be waiting for you on the eighth floor.’
He took her into a blank meeting room, kitted out with melamine office furniture and asked if he could get her anything. She sucked on her teeth.
Truro ignored the gesture. ‘Miss Kiglatuk, we’ve found another body. A little boy like before, as yet unidentified. A Jonny Doe, you could say.’
Edie closed her eyes, hoping to find inside herself some sense in any of this, some means by which it could at least be partly understood, but there was only a bleak kind of horror and a hollowing feeling of repulsion.
Detective Truro had pulled a docket from his desk and was rooting around in it. Plucking out a file within the docket, he said, ‘As you know, because you handled the body of Lucas Littlefish, Miss Kiglatuk, he was wrapped when you found him. We think the manner in which his body was wrapped is probably significant. Would you be able to look at a picture of this latest find and tell us if the wrapping is the same? I mean exactly the same?’
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. Didn’t trust the fellow.
Sensing her reluctance, Truro pulled a print from the file and held it between his fingers, picture down.
‘Let’s just get on with this, shall we?’
She nodded, feeling vaguely ashamed, and he passed the photo. Her face felt hot.
‘Whenever you’re ready.’
She took a breath and turned the picture face up, sweeping her eyes across the image to reduce its power, in the hope that she might prevent whatever she saw from coming back to her in the years that followed. Truro watched her intently.
‘That hot tea you offered?’
He blinked and nodded. ‘Of course.’ Then, scoping around for his assistant and, not seeing her, he got up to fetch the beverage himself.
She watched him from the corner of her eye. The moment she could no longer see him, she grabbed the file and pulled it towards her, willing herself to look hard. In among the photographs were images of a brightly painted spirit house very similar to the one in which she’d found the body of Lucas Littlefish. There were pictures of the baby’s forehead just visible beneath the elaborate coverings, then there were images of the coverings themselves and, finally, of the baby’s body, a sight so tender and peculiarly terrible that for a moment or two Edie had to fight for breath. The baby was perfect, his plump little body, still frozen, lying naked on what she supposed was the autopsy table, tiny fingers and toes curled in death. Edie’s hunting experience told her that he must have been two to twelve hours dead, his body still in rigor when it was frozen. The length and thickness of the ice crystals suggested that, like Lucas Littlefish, Jonny Doe had been frozen and stored maybe weeks before he’d been put out in the forest.
She flipped over the pictures until she came to a series of close-ups. The baby’s face seemed tenderly familiar. She ran her gaze over the tiny chin, the forehead, but it was his eyes that were the giveaway. She’d seen those eyes before in her cousin Tuviq’s baby – perfect almonds, the lids occluded, smooth. Holding the picture away from her slightly she recognized the moonface.
One eye remained on the door through which Detective Truro had left; with the other she flipped through the remaining close-ups, stopping at a side view of the baby’s head. There was a faint blur on the skin, under the hairline, just above the ear. It might be nothing, but her instincts told her otherwise. The final photo was another profile of the same, left, side. There the faint blur appeared closer and clearer. If you hadn’t seen it before, you might mistake the feature for nothing more sinister than a birthmark or, perhaps, a scar. If you had seen the shape before, it was absolutely unmistakable – IIIaXTa. Mine.
Truro returned with the tea. They spoke about the wrapping. So far as she could see from the photos, it was exactly the same as that which she’d found on Lucas Littlefish. She knew better now than to mention the tattoo. His reaction to her at Lucas’s funeral had only convinced her further that he wasn’t about to let anything get in the way of the story he’d already constructed in his mind. Maybe he knew about the tattoo. Maybe he thought it was some satanist mark.
And maybe he was right.
Leaving the APD as quickly as she could, she pushed through the now swollen ranks of protestors, returned to the studio and found Derek heating pizza.
‘How d’you eat that stuff?’ Anything other than meat or fish was just a waste of a chew.
She told him about the tattoo on the dead boy’s head.
‘You think the girl in the woods could be the mother?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
Derek finished his pizza and licked his fingers.
‘Why would anyone do that, tattoo a baby?’
‘I’m not all that bright, as you know, Police, but my guess would be, to identify them, either as individuals or as part of a group, a kind of tribe if you like.’
She went to the kettle, checked the water and put it on the ring.
‘Who would need to put identifying marks on a baby?’
‘Who do you think? Someone who wanted to come back and claim him.’
Derek thought about this for a second. ‘But why scrawl it in the snow on some stranger’s windshield?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe we need to think about the mothers, what they have in common. Maybe that was why their babies wound up dead.’
‘The girl we saw in the forest, the one I also saw in Nome, I’m pretty sure she was Russian.’
Edie fell silent, following a train of thought. ‘Stacey told me she’d seen TaniaLee hanging around with some Russian prostitutes downtown. I didn’t see any tattoo on Lucas Littlefish, though.’
‘Who’s Stacey?’
Edie ignored him. She was thinking.
‘Misha,’ she said.
At the mention of his ex-girlfriend, Derek coughed up his tea. Edie brought him a cloth to wipe himself with. ‘Goddammit, Edie.’ There was an expression of deep irritation etched across the policeman’s face. ‘What’s Misha got to do with anything anyway? Misha’s gone, finished, kaput.’
Edie rolled her eyes. ‘Why is it I only have to mention that woman and your brain shrinks to the size of a lemming’s and migrates south?’
The lines on his forehead cleared. He sighed.
‘What I mean is, you speak Russian.’
‘And…’ he said, haltingly, relieved that she wasn’t asking him to get back in touch with the woman who had ruined his life.
‘And so if you wanted to find out about Russian working girls, where would you go?’
Derek’s eyes narrowed. ‘Strip joints, lap-dancing clubs, I guess.’
She winked at him.
‘Holy walrus, Edie,’ he said, with a weary sigh. ‘I’m
a cop, who’s gonna talk to me?’
‘Not on this trip you’re not.’
‘What then?’ He looked momentarily flummoxed.
‘Ordinary garden-variety sleaze.’ She patted him on the shoulder. ‘Play to your strengths, Derek. You’ll do great, I feel it in my bones.’
He gave a bitter snort, checked his watch and, figuring there was no way out, rose from the table. ‘And what exactly you gonna be doing while I’m risking my career pretending to be a scumbag?’
‘What d’you think? I’m heading back up to Hatcher Pass. We got unfinished business, remember?’
18
The day’s cool breeze was too soft to drive the spindrift up from yesterday’s snow, and the ploughs had been out, so the drive north was pretty uneventful – a few slides, a couple of spins, but not bad considering. Bonehead sat in the back. She needed the expertise only a canine nose could bring to things.
Reaching the Hatcher Pass turn-off, Edie directed the truck down the track and began to swing to and fro, the tyres sliding through the icy ruts in the pavement. At the bend in the road where the path came out, she pulled to the side of the drift, switched off the engine, got out and let the dog out too.
She took a deep breath and stepped off the track into the forest. Immediately, the panicky feeling of being pressed upon set in and to steady herself she had to stretch out her hand and remind herself of the sky. The snow was crusty and a little dry, squealing as her boots punched holes in it. A pair of startled eagles scattered upwards, leaving the branches of spruce where they’d perched swinging softly and powdering the ground below them in snow. It became still. Edie found it unnatural, how still the forest world could be.
A raven whirred by and landed further along the path. She stopped then and listened. Bonehead whined, anxious to move. Not for the first time since she’d arrived in Alaska, Edie felt the raw, hollowing pull of homesickness. It was just under a week since she’d got lost in the woods following the bear. Just under a week since she’d unwrapped the body of Lucas Littlefish and held him in her arms. She wanted all this to stop, wanted to be allowed to finish the race and go back to Autisaq. She looked about for footprints, but of the girl who had appeared there was no sign. She wondered then who they were, the blond bear and the fragile, wide-eyed girl. Whether they had come from the same place, carrying the same message.
She tramped across dry, sandy snow through the aspens and descended into a hollow of swampy ice where there were moose tracks and up a short incline onto a narrow deeply rutted route running southwest to northeast between trees. It might be a logging track, she thought, or even a firebreak. Having had no experience of such things it was impossible to say. At the southwest end, Edie figured, this route would connect with the track where she’d left the rental, only somewhat further to the west, which made it likely that what she was looking for lay to the northeast. This was the way she turned, relieved to put at least a little space between herself and the sinister crumple of the surrounding trees. The track here was well used; it had been salted for vehicles and recently driven on, the tyre ruts were not completely frozen. She stopped for a moment, listened for the sound of vehicle engines but heard only the rustle of wind and the flapping of birds in the trees. The day had clouded over and it was beginning to spit sleet. Edie pulled up the hood of her parka and tromped on with Bonehead beside her, intently smelling the air. After a kilometre or so she came to a large gate topped with razor wire, marking the edge of some kind of compound. Two cameras sat atop the wire, watching the area around; there was also a large, expensive-looking video intercom.
Instinct told her to get out of the way of the cameras. This she did by ducking off the path into the trees, making her way through bushy alder to the compound fence where it cut through the forest. Here, too, the chain-link reached four or five metres and was topped with razor wire, but there were no cameras. Where she was from, the only places that had fences were the air force bases and the military installations. But this was neither. No uniforms, no official notices. Someone owned this place and whatever was going on behind that fence, the owners were in no hurry to sell tickets.
Her vantage point gave Edie a reasonable view across the interior. Inside the fencing were three large wooden cabins connected by covered walkways. Storm windows made it impossible to see inside the buildings, but there were two SUVs parked outside and the subtle shifts of light told her there was movement inside.
The girl had to have come from one of the cabins inside this fence. When they’d seen her, she’d been wearing a flimsy kind of dress, maybe a housecoat, but nothing you could survive a night outside in. This and the Old Believers compound were the only clusters of buildings for miles around. The way Edie reasoned, there were three possibilities. The girl had been moved, she was dead or she was still in there.
She lowered herself onto her haunches and waited.
When she was a kid, her mother had often scolded her for her impetuousness. It was a shadow on her spirit, Maggie would say. Up in Autisaq, impatience could lead you to make a move that could get you killed. Something about the scene in front of her told her that it was the same here.
Sit, watch and wait.
The minutes passed, then, after what seemed like a long time, the back door to the largest of the cabins opened and two men appeared. One, whom Edie didn’t recognize, was about the same age as her, but three or four times her size. He was wearing hunting gear and he walked like an auk, the legs scooting sideways under the vast expanse of belly. As he sauntered towards the gate he held on to the Remington 700 slung over his shoulder. His companion, a lean man in his fifties, whose face was obscured by an Anchorage Bucs baseball cap, made his way along a gravel path towards the carport. Stopping at a late model Mercedes SUV parked there, he readjusted the cap by lifting it briefly from his head and in that instant Edie caught a glimpse of the features and realized where she’d seen him before. He’d been standing in uniform in the foyer at the APD headquarters, looking like he was waiting for his driver. He was a high-up, a top cop.
The SUV backed up, turned in the driveway and slid out of the gate. The auk gave a brief wave, then locked up and made once more for the back door. Edie watched the SUV crawl along the track out of sight. When she turned her attention back to the main building, the auk was at the doorway he’d come out of. A tall, reedy woman opened the door. Her face was obscured in shadow, but Edie could tell from the looseness of her posture that she was young. They exchanged a word or two, then the auk with the rifle stepped back inside, closing the door behind him.
For the longest time afterwards, Edie sat still on her haunches in the snow and watched.
19
Derek Palliser had never paid for sex, though, like most guys, he’d thought about it. Once, while on a training course in Yellowknife, he’d been offered a blowjob in a titty bar and would have taken it if he hadn’t run out of cash buying the girl a glass of fake champagne, but that single time aside, need had never collided with opportunity. He’d revisited the Yellowknife moment many times in his mind, however, until it had become emblematic, somehow, of his inability to follow through, his general lily-liveredness, his apathy. The fact was, he could have made that blowjob happen. He could have got cash out of the ATM or traded his watch or used his police credentials either to borrow money from the bar owner, or to hustle the blowjob for free. Instead, he thanked the girl for the offer, gulped down the remains of his drink and got out of the bar as fast as his pride had allowed.
Driving around the streets of Anchorage now, he realized that he hadn’t done any of those things for the same reason that he let so much in his life go: because he couldn’t quite muster sufficient energy, erotic or otherwise, to make things happen. It wasn’t laziness that held him back; it was a kind of lack of effect. His generalized sense of dissatisfaction never seemed to find a target. He was too apt to accommodate himself to the status quo. Time and time again he felt himself holding back. With the exception of Misha, his
ex, and his research into lemmings, he couldn’t actually recall the last occasion on which he’d wanted anything really badly.
Until now.
This realization had come to him, driving around the ill-lit, salty streets of Anchorage. It was an odd epiphany and he knew he’d have to give it some more thought before he could really get his head round it. Nonetheless, there it was. What he badly wanted, he realized, was to see Sammy Inukpuk through to the end of the Iditarod. Sure, he was fond of Sammy and he admired the guy’s grit and determination, particularly after the horrors of the murder of his son. He was on Sammy’s side. That said, there was something else, something about Sammy’s endeavour Derek needed for himself. Something to do with follow-through.
He turned his rental into Spenard Road towards the airport. A quick look in the business directory told him he would probably find what he was after here. He was in a neighbourhood of strip malls, bars and lube shops. Up ahead, halfway along the next block, a neon sign reading ‘Buddy’s Bar’ glowed beside a parking lot. He’d stop for a quick beer and ask around. If anyone knew where the cathouses were, he thought, it would be the clientele in somewhere like Buddy’s Bar.
‘You working the North Slope?’ The barman slid a tankard of Hard Apple Ale across the bar. He was a thick-built man with a skinful of tattoos and a biker’s beard, a booming voice, used to making himself heard above the din of thrash metal in the bar. Derek flipped open his roll, peeled off three twenties.
‘Consultancy.’
He took a gulp of his beer and smacked his chops.
The barman nodded. ‘Never known anyone not like Hard Apple.’
Derek pushed the twenties over. The barman cut a glance over at a broad-bellied biker sitting at the other side of the bar, then squeezed his lips together and took the money.
The Boy in the Snow Page 12