The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  The footprints came to a halt beside a locked door. The guard had clearly been inside because there were slivers of hard-packed snow from where he’d stamped his boots on the step. The prints continued on to a row of trashcans hidden behind a wooden frame. Edie followed. One of the can lids had been cleared of snow. Inside the can was a small day pack. She opened up the zip, turned the pack over and shook its contents out onto the snow; several sanitary pads, some fancy underwear and a blue plastic pacifier, its rubber teat slightly withered. She picked out the dummy and put it in her pocket. As she was putting back the underwear she noticed on the inside of one of the bras a milky stain. Lifting it to her face, she sniffed. The sour, animal smell of human milk crept inside her nostrils. She felt her legs turn watery and had to steady herself on the trashcan. From somewhere inside her head she heard the faint voice of her stepson, Joe, calling her by the name he always used, reaching out to her from the spirit world. She closed her eyes to be nearer to him. Then she took a deep breath and, biting her lip, she wrapped the brassiere cups inside one another, folded them into her pocket and gave the bag a final vigorous shake. There was the sound of Velcro coming apart and something slipped out and onto the snow, a pink plastic My Kitty purse. She opened the zip, saw a wad of tissues and zipped it up, but through her gloves her fingers could feel something hard inside. Beneath the tissues, wrapped in cotton wool, was a small tin. Inside the tin were a series of thick needles, like those she and her mother Maggie and Maggie’s mother and generations of Inuit women used to sew hide clothes. With the needles was a tiny bottle of inky black liquid and a scrap of paper onto which someone had written the word IIIaXTa, Mine.

  She heard the sound of the guard’s truck approaching and realized with the full force of a musk-ox charge that she must have set off some kind of alarm. She had no choice but to run for the gate, and quick. If the guard reached it before her, he’d find the binoculars and no doubt make another search of the compound. Wherever she hid, the dog would scent her out. Being careful only to tread in the guard’s footsteps, she hurried around the front of the building, her heart banging like hail on a summer tent. The truck was close now. A light on a metal panel by the gate blinked red. She crouched low and ran with her knees bent to steady her, the way her grandfather had taught her, making sure each step landed in the footsteps the guard had left.

  She reached the gate just as the bull bar of the truck became visible through the trees. As the truck slowed to take the bend in the trail, Edie squeezed through the gap in the gate, snatched the binoculars and ran into the trees, moving her feet in figures of eight to scatter the snow around the prints, stopping only to listen to the two halves of the gate clang into place. An engine purred and the guard barked instructions to his dog. Without waiting to see any more she took off. From the track came the rumble of the truck and then there was nothing but the wind.

  Bonehead had managed to release himself from the leash and was waiting for her back at the vehicle. She opened the back door, ushered him in and got into the driver’s seat. The engine started at the first turn and Edie let off the handbrake. As she did so, Bonehead began barking and as she turned around to shush him, she saw the security guard hurrying towards her, with his hand on his pistol. Her pulse thudding at her temples, she pulled up the handbrake and unwound her window.

  When he saw it was a woman driving, the guard visibly relaxed. If he’d expected anybody, it hadn’t been her. She felt her pulse slow a little. What remained was a lurching feeling familiar to her from her old hunting days. An adrenaline surge. Her body was preparing for fight or flight. Her job now was to control it. The guard looked back at the dog, then at the binos on the passenger seat. She noticed he had native blood.

  ‘You been hunting?’

  ‘If you could call it that.’ She gave him a weary look but made sure her eyes were smiling. ‘May as well have stayed at home and baked cookies for all the good it did me.’

  ‘Not the right weather for it,’ he said. ‘Too windy. What kind of rifle you carry?’

  She flipped her head back to the trunk. ‘Regular Remmy 308. That’s fine for what I go after. You hunt?’

  The guard turned up the corners of his mouth just enough to acknowledge the remark while making clear he was done with small talk.

  ‘You see anyone around here just now, ma’am?’ he said. ‘A man? Maybe on his own?’

  She glanced up, pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  ‘Just been me and the dog.’ She looked the guard directly in the eyes and flashed him a smile. ‘I may not be the sharpest tack in the box, but if someone came by, Bonehead would let me know about it.’

  ‘Well, OK, then,’ the guard said. He knew he’d messed up and didn’t want anyone else to know it. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  She drove home in a state of fury. This was it, the confirmation she’d been looking for. Tommy Schofield was running underage girls, most likely trafficking them from Russia, the girls were having babies, and at least two of those babies had been killed.

  25

  At his breakfast meeting with the Mommabears at their downtown offices, Chuck Hillingberg had gone on an all-out charm offensive to reassure the mothers of Alaska that he sympathized with their issues and was absolutely on the case. He’d begun by expressing disgust at the hacking of the Mommabears’ website. He shared their indignation. He couldn’t imagine who might have a vested interest in depriving Alaska’s hardworking mothers of a voice. What had happened represented nothing less than an attempt to do away with the constitutional right to free speech and, as their elected mayor, he would do everything in his power to support Police Chief Mackenzie in investigating the crime without in any way holding up or impeding the ongoing hunt for Peter Galloway, which, he assured them, was everyone’s first priority.

  He knew the Mommabears were beginning to soften when they started eating the breakfast muffins. Damn he was good! It was a secret source of pride to him that he’d been able to come to rely on the vote of a large swathe of the electorate he found physically repellent without them ever suspecting a thing. Over the years he’d made an art of being able to surround himself by all those sagging, maternal examples of the weakness of the flesh and have them imagine that there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He’d done it at the meeting this morning and by the time they were wrapping up, he’d had them purring like cats in front of a fire, feeling strong and heard and, most importantly, in control.

  Not that they were, of course. Increasingly, it seemed to him that no one was really steering this thing in the way it needed to be steered. Mackenzie had proved himself completely inadequate for the job. If he’d kept a firm grip on Detective Truro right at the beginning, Jonny Doe would most likely never have been found and this whole thing could have been shut down long before it got to the stage of his having to step in to soft-soap a bunch of hysterical women who’d got it into their heads that their babies were about to be snatched up and sacrificed by satanists.

  But they were where they were. Which, in Chuck’s case, was now in the mayoral limo en route to the next firefight, an informal meeting over coffee at the mayor’s office with a group of church leaders.

  Personally, he thought all the talk about satanic rituals, the ‘Dark Believer Fever’, as it was already being labelled in the media, was a crock of shit. In his view, the Old Believers were pretty harmless as a group. He viewed the hysteria over the date of the raskol for what he knew it to be – the silly superstitions of a bunch of gullible people led by a group of opportunists who should know better. By his own reckoning, there had been one bad apple in the barrel. They’d identified him pretty quickly and, until yesterday at least, had him behind bars.

  Naturally enough, that’s not what he’d be saying at the church leaders’ meeting. The challenge, as Chuck saw it, was to pretend to take the concerns of the interested parties seriously, allay their fears until such time as Peter Galloway could be located and then distract them away from the ca
se altogether and back onto the gubernatorial campaign.

  Once he’d mollified the church leaders, he was scheduled to head over to the Seafood Shack for a lunch with Marsha and the new guy in town, Byron Hallstrom, and his young wife, Sandy. Just the four of them in the Shack’s private function room overlooking Cook Inlet. He’d managed to overcome his previous reluctance to hustle Hallstrom when he heard how much money he was thinking of giving away. It was a lunch from which Chuck hoped to return with half a million dollars for the Hillingberg campaign. Exactly what Hallstrom would want in return, Chuck didn’t yet know, but he was sure of one thing: the billionaire wasn’t likely to be shy about asking.

  The driver pulled up outside the mayor’s office. As usual, Chuck opened his own door – to wait for the driver to do it would make him look like an East Coast preppy or, worse, some slick European – gave a nod to the two or three protestors outside the building, pushed his way through the doors into the foyer and waited for the elevator to take him to the sixth floor conference room.

  The meeting turned out to be more challenging than he’d anticipated. Marsha had warned him that there would be some strong opinions in the room, but he’d radically underestimated how charged and resentful people felt about the presence of the Old Believers, even before their passions had been reignited by the deaths of the two kids. He quickly realized that all his planned entreaties for the group to remember the rights granted to Americans in the First Amendment would be seen as bleeding hearts claptrap so he shut up about it. However ridiculous he personally found the idea of there being a group of ‘Dark Believers’ practising what amounted to witchcraft in the forests around Meadow Lake and Homer, the churches really did seem exercised about it. In trying to defuse the situation at the start, rather than grabbing it by the balls, Chuck realized he’d completely misplayed his hand.

  Coming out of the meeting bruised, he guessed he shouldn’t have been so surprised by the leaders’ reactions. He didn’t get the religious element but he didn’t have to. For nearly half a century Alaska had been the Cold War frontier. Elsewhere, people might have moved on, but ordinary Alaskans had taken a lot longer to warm up. The Old Believers were still Russians and in many Alaskans’ eyes, the Ruskies were still the enemy. It was a lesson to him that when it came to Alaska politics, his wife’s instincts were usually better than his own.

  The meeting had gone on longer than scheduled, which left him running late for lunch. To make matters worse, the limo got stuck behind a snowplough. By the time he was shown up to the private dining room, Marsha and the Hallstroms were already seated in front of glasses of chilled white wine, chatting animatedly about the view from the window across the ice. Byron Hallstrom immediately got up from the table and came round to shake his hand, on his face that expression of jovial, condescending bonhomie rich men adopt when meeting people less powerful than themselves. Chuck didn’t know much about the man other than what Marsha had told him; that he was a newcomer and had a vision of Alaska’s future which had nothing to do with salmon or oil and everything to do with cruise ships, theme parks and mass tourism. He certainly looked the billionaire part: hair slicked, shoes handmade, suit bespoke, the kind of uniform which might go down well in the boardrooms of Chicago or New York but didn’t cut much ice up here in Alaska. Chuck Hillingberg clasped the giant hand held out to him and smiled to himself. Hallstrom was a hopeless outsider and he knew it.

  ‘I’ve heard great things about your plans for Homer,’ Hillingberg said, ‘and I’m looking forward to seeing how I might be able to assist you with them.’

  Hallstrom gave Chuck a penetrating, slightly anxious look that warmed his heart. The man was feeling ever so slightly vulnerable. They took their seats. Without glancing at the menu, Chuck flung himself back in his chair and said, ‘Why don’t we order the ultimate Alaskan combo: snow crab and Alaskan steamed clams?’

  Hallstrom nodded politely, aware that this was not a question.

  Chuck raised his glass. ‘Here’s to ultimate Alaskan combos.’ Everyone around the table laughed. Chuck felt his stomach relax. It was going to be OK. So long as nothing went terribly wrong Hallstrom would be serving up his half-million-dollar pledge somewhere between the snow crab and the brandy.

  Afterwards, he and Marsha stayed behind to debrief.

  ‘Well, that was easier than I thought,’ he said, pushing his napkin away. ‘Hallstrom’s idea to turn southern Alaska into a new Dubai seems kinda whacked, but who cares?’

  Marsha looked at him, cold. He didn’t like being made to feel jumpy. It made him talk too much. ‘I thought it was genius,’ she said.

  Chuck took this in. ‘You’re right. In any case, if that’s what he wants, that’s what he can have. There’ll be objections from the tree-huggers but I don’t think we’ll have to worry about those.’

  ‘Really?’ Marsha raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten the northern spotted owl?’

  He had, in fact, momentarily forgotten the owl. But he recalled the controversy now. The logging industry claimed that protection of the animal in the nineties, under both the Endangered Species Act and the National Forest Management Act, lost the Pacific Northwest timber industry 30,000 jobs. Environmentalists said the industry was on the decline anyway. The argument became a symbol of the fight between developers and conservationists, a fight that seemed to have deepened and become so personal and bitter in recent years that both parties often couched it in terms of the battle between good and evil.

  ‘The optimum strategy would be to pitch the tree-huggers against the salmon fishery, watch them slug it out until they destroy one another,’ Marsha said. ‘Save us the trouble. It’s not like either has a long-term future in Alaska. Quotas will continue to shrink the fishery and the environmentalists will soon find there aren’t any jobs to be had that aren’t in oil or resource development of one kind or another or construction. Outside entrepreneurs like Hallstrom might find it hard to get a toehold, but in ten years’ time Alaskans are gonna be begging for the jobs men like Hallstrom bring in.’

  Chuck’s private phone began beeping. He checked the caller ID. Mackenzie. He was secretly relieved. Unlike the police chief, his wife made him feel outclassed.

  Marsha took out her BlackBerry and slipped from the room to make a call of her own.

  ‘Hey.’ MacKenzie sounded rattled. ‘We might have a problem. Maybe we got one.’

  An involuntary rumble bubbled up from the mayor’s gut. He held his hand to his belly, blinking slowly, letting his eyes close and flood a little, feeling tired as all hell. He made a mental note to get a check-up.

  Mackenzie said, ‘The bloods on Jonny Doe show likely origin in the Caucasus.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘In Russia, boss.’

  Chuck said, ‘So?’ then made the link before Mackenzie had time to answer: ‘But we got rid of everything, right? You told me you checked this out.’

  ‘Right.’

  Chuck felt reassured. Half the kids in Alaska probably had Russian blood. Until 1867, the place was Russian.

  ‘There’s something else, just a small thing.’ Mackenzie was hesitant, unwilling to say what he was about to say but knowing he had no choice. ‘When they were clearing out the Lodge, they found one of the security cameras had no tape in it. Probably just an oversight.’

  Chuck felt his spirit sink into his boots. It was as though someone had picked up his party balloon and used it to stub out their cigarette. He was tired of the whole business of the Lodge. When it started he’d been swept up in it, in the feeling of power it gave him. And the pleasure. But like most things, he’d become habituated. Now he was tired of all the code names and private phones and petty subterfuge. It no longer felt dangerous or forbidden, even though he knew it was. A slip now would not only put an end to his career, it might well put an end to his freedom.

  ‘When were they last checked?’

  A long pause.

  ‘That’s just it. They haven’t been.’
/>   ‘Dammit, that was Schofield’s job.’ The door opened and Marsha’s face popped round the door.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ Chuck said.

  ‘What was Schofield’s job?’ Marsha’s voice was sharp with anxiety.

  ‘They got a security tape missing from the Lodge.’

  She looked at him wearily and rubbed her hand across her forehead. ‘That place again.’

  There was a knock on the door. It was Don Reynolds, the owner of the Seafood Shack, wanting to know if the meal had been up to par. April Montalo followed closely behind. Chuck had a budgetary committee meeting at city hall he was already late for and Marsha was due at a high school girls’ soccer game photo op.

  The meeting dragged on for hours. In the car on the way back to the scruffy room in the anonymous downtown office hutch that served as his campaign HQ, Chuck dialled Tommy Schofield’s private cell. He hadn’t forgotten the conversation he’d overheard between Schofield and his wife but her resentful outburst earlier made him wonder if there was something going on he didn’t know about. He wasn’t about to ask direct, but he had it in mind to poke around in Schofield’s head, see what he could find there. The call went straight to voicemail and he didn’t leave a message. Next he tried the man’s office.

  Schofield’s assistant, Sharon, answered and, when he gave his name and asked to speak to the boss, she said, ‘I’m real sorry, Mayor Hillingberg. Mr Schofield’s not around. I think he may be at his cabin, but there’s no phone reception there.’

  Chuck thanked Sharon and hung up. He made up his mind that this one wasn’t going away unless he made it do so. He dialled his wife’s number and left a message for her to call him. In two hours he was due at a fundraiser at the Sheraton downtown, which gave him just enough time to draft some notes for a speech for his upcoming tour of the north, organized to coincide with the finish of the Iditarod. He’d hand them over to Andy in the morning. He set the alarm on his watch. For an hour and forty-five minutes he wrote, then, when his watch pinged, he went to the closet in his office and changed into his tux. At 6.55 p.m. precisely his driver called to remind him it was time to leave. It was only when he got out into the street and saw his wife sitting in the limo in her emerald-green gown that he remembered she hadn’t called him back. He opened the door and clambered inside. She gave him a beady look.