The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘That walrus fart doesn’t speak Russian or he’d know he was having his chain yanked,’ Derek said. ‘Bolvan is Russian for “moron”.’

  The girl had told Larsen her name was Peaches, but she couldn’t pronounce it right. She had some kind of foreign accent, but Larsen, who had spent all his life first in Wisconsin then in Alaska, couldn’t tell one foreigner from another.

  ‘We have no trace on her as yet,’ Derek said. The Nome PD had run a quick search in all the obvious places – cheap hotels, rental rooms, bars, even unoccupied buildings – but they hadn’t turned anything up. Nome was surrounded by thousands of square miles of empty tundra dotted here and there with tiny settlements of native people who were generally pretty hostile to the police and would be likely to shelter anyone they thought might be vulnerable to interference from authority. Someone, in other words, exactly like ‘Peaches’.

  ‘But here’s the punchline. Bolvan told Larsen that when he called the number Bolvan had given him, he should say Fonseca had recommended him.’

  The name set Edie’s heart rattling.

  ‘Edie, you there?’

  ‘Yeah, let me think a moment.’

  ‘What we got?’

  ‘Right now? One hell of a tangle, Derek, that’s what we got.’

  ‘Whoever Fonseca is, he’s dirty. Sounds like he’s running girls, really young girls, over the Bering Strait from Chukchi, first to Nome then who knows where, Anchorage, maybe, Meadow Lake for sure.

  ‘He’s the link to TaniaLee Littlefish too. She seemed to think Fonseca was her husband, remember? We find Fonseca, we’re more than halfway there.’

  Derek paused to light a cigarette. ‘Didn’t you say Peter Galloway knew TaniaLee?’

  ‘So his wife said.’

  ‘Everyone seems pretty fixed on the idea that Galloway killed those kids.’ Derek toked too hard and coughed it out.

  ‘Everyone? If the Dark Believers exist and those babies were murdered as part of some horrific sacrifice, either by Galloway or by any of his Dark Believer cohort, don’t you think it’s odd that they would mark the bodies with a cross they’ve spent 400 years resisting?’

  ‘It’s all weird, Edie.’

  She said, ‘It may be about to get even weirder.’ She told him about Galloway’s escape.

  ‘When does someone with nothing to hide go into hiding?’

  ‘When he knows he won’t get justice, because of his beliefs, or because someone has something to gain by discrediting him and keeping him in jail, or because he’s angered someone in power, or because he knows too much. Or all of those things.’

  There was a pause while Derek registered the truth of what Edie had said.

  ‘You think he’ll go after Schofield?’

  ‘I would. Leastwise if I’d been framed.’

  Derek coughed again. ‘Edie, you know there’s a good chance we’ll never get to the bottom of any of this.’

  ‘The way I prefer to look at it, there’s a good chance we will.’ The tiredness had left her now. She checked her watch. 5.25 a.m. No point in trying to get any more sleep.

  ‘I’m proud of you, Derek,’ she said.

  ‘You are?’ For a moment he sounded inordinately pleased, then he checked himself.

  ‘You didn’t have to go and do that thing at the Chukchi Motel.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You’re wrong about that,’ he said. His voice sounded exhausted.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ she said.

  ‘What are you gonna do?’

  She planned on dealing with the night’s unfinished business, but, not wanting to alarm Derek, she said, ‘I’m gonna get some breakfast.’

  Afterwards, she slopped down the shared stairway onto the street, trudging along the icy pavement to the newspaper dump on the next block. It was the deep mauve of predawn, quiet, or as quiet as the city ever got, the street lights pouring grey light over the parade of cheap apartment blocks and shabby stores. A woman appeared up from a side street, then another. They appeared to be carrying placards. Edie watched them disappear into the gloom for a moment, wondering where they were off to, then picked up the morning’s Courier and went down the street to the Snowy Owl Café which was just opening up for morning trade.

  Stacey came over bringing her smile and the menu.

  ‘You’re early this morning. Decide to steal a march on the day?’

  The word ‘march’ reminded her.

  ‘Say, you see a couple of women with placards earlier, heading downtown direction?’

  ‘Nope.’ Stacey reached out to the next table, plucked up the condiment set and transferred it to Edie’s table. ‘Oh,’ she said, as though the thought had only just occurred to her, ‘yeah, there’s supposed to be some kind of protest going on at the police department building today.’

  ‘What kind of protest?’

  Stacey shrugged. ‘I guess maybe about that guy who escaped? The one who killed those kids. My sister’s, like, a Mommabear? It’s kind of this chat forum for Alaska moms. She sent me an email about it, some link, I don’t know, I didn’t get time this morning to follow it. She says they’re pretty mad about that whole thing.’ She took a breath. The smile returned. ‘Now, what can I getcha this morning?’

  24

  At the bend in the road leading to the Old Believer compound there was another roadblock. A uniform – municipal police, State Troopers, she didn’t know which and didn’t care any – waved her down and asked what her business was. Searching around her head, quickly, the way a hunter has to when faced with a musk-ox stampede, then, thumbing behind, she said, ‘Delivering a dog.’

  The trooper raised his eyebrows. He was young, wouldn’t know any better.

  ‘Inupiaq huntin’ dog.’

  The trooper leaned in, gave Bonehead the eye.

  ‘Careful,’ she said, ‘he can be real mean.’

  The trooper offered up an uncomfortable little smile. ‘I’m not really supposed to let anyone through. This whole area’s a crime scene.’ Then, as if not wanting to seem unfriendly, he added, ‘Never heard of an Inupiaq hunting dog. That the same as a husky? He looks a lot like a husky.’

  She gave an indulgent little laugh. ‘This here is a special dog. That’s why the Believers want him. Nothing this dog can’t hunt. Not one thing. Wolverines, muskrat, moose. You want it, he’ll get it. Hunt you a pretty girl if you need one.’

  The trooper blushed and smiled.

  ‘You got dogs?’ she said.

  ‘I got one, but my uncle keeps him up at his cabin.’ He looked wistful, as if nostalgic for another life. ‘We hunt with him sometimes.’

  ‘I’m like you, come from dog people,’ she said. ‘My man is up running the Iditarod right now,’ she said. She mentioned Sammy’s competitor number. The trooper looked impressed.

  ‘Expensive business. That’s why we’ve gotta sell this old thing, pay the bills.’ She spoke quickly so the trooper wouldn’t have time to gather up his thoughts about not letting her through. ‘Listen, I don’t want to take any more of your time, you’ve got your job to do, so suppose I just go on by, drop off my delivery, then I’ll be on my way.’

  The young man thought about this for a moment, checked up and down the road, and hesitated.

  ‘Ten minutes do it?’

  ‘Fifteen and you got yourself a deal.’ Edie stuck her arm out and shook the trooper’s hand. When she glanced back in the rear-view mirror, he was standing where she’d left him, wondering what had just happened.

  She found Anatoly and Natalia standing outside on the steps of their house, waiting for her. The Believer who routinely manned the gate had radioed in five minutes before, announcing her arrival.

  ‘Police let you in? They’re not letting anyone in. Our home has become a prison.’ Anatoly flapped his hands impotently to indicate his irritation with the situation.

  Natalia offered up a fragile smile. The young woman’s face was puffy from crying.

  ‘I thought you’d come ba
ck,’ she said. ‘We have someone to see you.’

  They beckoned Edie inside to the kitchen, where the mother was sitting with a lean man with wind-tanned skin who could have been anything from thirty-five to sixty but was most likely the former while looking like the latter. Anatoly offered her a seat, and took one himself. Natalia followed. Edie looked around the table. Without exception the faces were rutted with worry. The mother rose from her chair and began to busy herself making tea.

  Anatoly spoke a few words in Russian to Natalia, who stood up, flashed another little smile at Edie, and left.

  He said, ‘We are very private. For hundreds of years we have avoided worldliness and worldy people.’ He checked the door to make sure his daughter was out of earshot, then added in a quieter voice, ‘What is happening, God is telling us that we should not have accepted a worldly person among us.’ He looked up, briefly, as though passing a thought to heaven, then said by way of explanation, ‘But we are a very small community and it is difficult for us to find wives and husbands who aren’t close relations. This man we took to us, Natalia’s husband, he’s an Outsider, a worldly person, but he’s a good man.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe God is testing us so we can prove that.’

  The mother brought tea in the same delicately painted glasses as before. They all took a sip, and then Medvedev carried on. ‘When the guard radioed to tell me you were here, I asked Gregor Nodgorov to come.’

  The man nodded a greeting but didn’t volunteer any words.

  ‘He was out looking for hare the other day, he saw you running from the hunting lodge up by Hatcher Pass. He saw you before; he knew who you were. We don’t get many visitors.’

  Nodgorov nodded enthusiastically. Edie got the impression that he was only just following what was being said.

  ‘Some of us work Outside. We do construction mostly.’

  The Old Believers’ reputation as builders sounded vaguely familiar. She tried to recall who had told her. The priest at the church in Eagle River maybe?

  ‘Gregor and three of the other men worked as labourers on the hunting lodge, the one just up the road for a time, when it was being remodelled.’

  Nodgorov nodded. He was very good at it, Edie thought, given that it was the only thing he seemed able to do. Maybe that was where he got his name from.

  Edie was eager to know what Gregor had to say, but first she needed to understand what Anatoly had to gain by telling her.

  ‘Why is this something of interest to me?’ she said.

  Anatoly gave her a little smile, an acknowledgement that he realized she was checking him out and was OK with it.

  ‘The hunting lodge is owned by Tommy Schofield.’ Edie opened her eyes wider, keen for him to go on. ‘You will need to be a bit patient with Gregor’s English, but he will tell you, Gregor will tell you.’ The old man indicated to his younger companion to go ahead.

  ‘We dig out basement,’ the man began. His accent was thick but Edie had no trouble understanding him. ‘We make big bedroom, many beds, not beautiful, cheap.’

  ‘A dormitory,’ Anatoly said.

  Nodgorov nodded then went on. ‘Then, at back, we make small rooms, very beautiful.’ He hesitated. ‘A cousin of me make beds from wood, very decorate, very expensive.’

  Edie wondered where this was going.

  ‘Later, we miss something on one bed, so we come back.’ He looked at his hands. His face flared and twitched. ‘There is girls, lots of girls very young…’ He hesitated. ‘In one part of big bedroom they are putting…’ He made a slicing motion to indicate some kind of partition or screen, and then started laying out rectangles in the air with his right hand. ‘For babies.’

  Edie felt something compressing her chest. She drank a little tea to steady herself. A picture was forming in her mind.

  ‘Why didn’t you say any of this before?’

  Immediately, Anatoly’s expression darkened and he held up a hand.

  ‘It’s not Gregor’s fault. They were threatening. And besides, we don’t interfere with worldly matters.’

  ‘But you’ve told the police now?’

  He shook his head. ‘Miss Kiglatuk, we have been persecuted for ever since—’

  ‘1666.’

  Anatoly looked startled.

  ‘I know the date, and what people say about it.’

  A great shadow moved across his face. His fingers worked at the tea glass in his hands. For a moment he could not make eye contact with her. He was trying to hold himself together so that he would not shout at her. His head began to shake violently from side to side.

  ‘You see, you are the same as the worldly people who want to hate us,’ he said, dismissing Edie with a hand. ‘You want to believe there is such a thing as the Dark Believers, you will not believe us when we say the Dark Believers do not exist. You have seen how the police are, the newspapers, how everybody is. And now it is how you are, too.’ He met her with his eyes. ‘You judge us for not speaking out, but who can we trust to listen to us?’

  ‘I will listen, but in return you need to tell me the truth. Do you know where Peter Galloway is?’ She needed to be able to speak with him face to face to know if he was telling the truth. And if he was, he had information about Schofield which might be of interest to her investigation.

  Anatoly shook his head. ‘The police think we do, but that is because they don’t understand the Believers. Peter would never have burdened us with this. So no, I don’t know where Peter Galloway is, and neither does Natalia.’ He cast his calm gaze on her face. He wanted to trust her with something, some confidence.

  ‘You can trust me to listen,’ she said. ‘Beyond that, there are no guarantees.’

  He acknowledged this with a little tip of his head. For a moment he sat thinking, then, making his decision, he began to describe their remote hunting hide, deep in the forest. It was possible Galloway might be holed up there.

  ‘As you say, Miss Kiglatuk, beyond that there are no guarantees.’

  From the Believers compound she drove up the winding track towards the Lodge. The ice was up now, and a few times the truck slalomed across the route and she toed the brakes and pulled it down a gear. As she drove she thought about the young girl who had been first up at the hotel in Nome then in the woods, trying to make sense of what she knew. The bodies of Lucas Littlefish and Jonny Doe had been meant to be found, she was sure of that. They had been so meticulously prepared, so carefully situated. Whoever had left Lucas out in the woods had kept the body frozen for more than three months before making his move. Perhaps the same was also true of Jonny Doe. If Anatoly Medvedev was right and Tommy Schofield had framed Galloway, then it seemed likely that Schofield had planned it, that he had either killed Lucas in order to frame Galloway or he was killing two birds with one stone so to speak and had concocted the frame-up as a convenient way of disposing of Lucas’s body. Unless the death of the second baby was some sort of copycat killing, which was unlikely given what Edie knew about the way the bodies were identically wrapped, it followed that Schofield must have known something about Jonny Doe’s death, too. None of this proved that Schofield was the killer, only that he knew that the two boys were dead.

  Edie thought about Sammy, battling his way along the Yukon River and hoped, when he found out, that her ex would understand.

  She stopped at the bend in the track from where the footpath snaked off into the woods and eventually came out at the Lodge. Pulling the truck onto the verge, she emptied Bonehead from the back and swung a pair of binoculars over her shoulder. For a while, they trudged through thick snow into deep forest. At the clearing, where the young girl had doubled back, Edie and the dog carried on until they reached the boundary fence marking the perimeter of the Lodge. She stopped for a while, listening for the sounds of car engines or human voices, but the only noise was made by the wind calling through the spruce.

  Bonehead lifted his nose, scenting the air. He stiffened and the hairs between his shoulder blades rose. He began a soft, low growl
. Another dog. She took him by the collar, told him to be quiet. Once more there was no sound except the breeze. Most likely the strange dog was upwind, and hadn’t scented either of them yet. Flipping his leash over a sapling, she ordered Bonehead to sit quietly and wait, then she went ahead, keeping low along the side of the fence. A few hundred yards further along she spotted movement among the trees inside the compound. A man in uniform was blowing on his gloved hands and stamping his feet. Beside him a German Shepherd shook snow off its coat. Edie waited for the pair to move away, then continued to pick her way along the boundary, making sure to keep herself downwind, until she had a good view of the Lodge. Then, crouching down, she sat and watched. The buildings gave all the appearance of being unoccupied. Shutters lay across the windows and from below one of the second-storey windows an alarm box blinked. A truck, marked Guardwell Security, sat under the carport. A single set of tyre marks led from the truck to the security gates.

  The guard and his dog disappeared around the far side of the building then reappeared on the near side. The guard loaded the dog into the back of his truck then walked over to the front door and pushed the handle, as if testing the lock. He went back to the truck and flipped open the door on the driver’s side, picked up what looked like a clipboard from the passenger’s seat and began to make some notes. She saw him punch a few numbers into his cell phone, then back the truck out of the carport, his lips moving as he did so. She crept quickly round towards the gate, crouching low and sheltering behind an outcrop of alder. The gates clicked and began to open and the truck moved through and off up the track. There was another click and the gates began to close back up again. Edie waited until the truck was out of sight and darted out. The fence was razor-wired along its length. If she was going to enter, the only way out would be the way she went in. She yanked off her binocular strap, lurched towards the closing gates and jammed the instrument into the crack. There was a grinding sound but the gate panels stopped moving.

  Edie thanked the spirits for making her small and squeezed herself through the gap. She followed the path the guard had taken, stepping inside his footprints. Though she couldn’t see past the shutters everything told her that the place was empty. Round the back it was the same, closed up.