The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  Bobbing along the road towards them were two snowmobiles. On one sat a man, with a woman riding pillion behind. In her amaut there was a baby. A lone man was riding along beside them. She shouted into the ear of the driver and he began to signal the travellers up ahead. They slowed down until all three vehicles were stationary in the roadway, their engines idling.

  Edie pulled off the hood of her parka. Derek looked at Zach in surprise before swinging from his machine and heading over, stamping the snow out of his boots as he came. She felt a great wave of relief crest, then flecks of white anger foaming off it.

  She thanked her ride and tumbled out, trudging across to meet him.

  ‘Edie, what the hell?’ He looked worried.

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  There was a look of puzzlement on his face. He obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Zach got some time off so we drove over to Council to see some friends. We were going to stay for lunch but Zach got radioed. Someone found a dead musk-ox calf just outside Nome. A lot of blood. Looks like it was cut out of the mother. Most likely there’s some hunters out there shooting off-season without permits. What’s the big deal anyway? What are you doing here?’

  When she told him about the message, his look of bewilderment deepened. ‘We’ve got some kind of miscommunication. I told the folks at the Iditarod HQ where I’d be, left them a number. No one called.’

  The driver tooted his horn, wanting to proceed.

  Derek waved him on. He suggested they go directly back to Zach’s house, try to sort out what had happened from there.

  It was Megan who first noticed Edie’s head. They were sitting in the living room, warming up with some hot sweet tea. While Megan applied seal oil to the wound, Edie told them what had happened to her. Derek listened, an expression between worry and anger on his face.

  ‘Edie, you’re crazy, you know that? Whether Galloway is guilty of killing those boys or not, this is a desperate man.’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  Derek cut her an angry look. He was used to her taking chances. Last year, after she’d flown off to Greenland to confront a couple of geologists she thought knew something about the death of her stepson, he’d made her promise not to do anything so rash again. She’d warned him then that people didn’t always keep their promises.

  ‘Look, Police, I don’t blame Galloway for running, I don’t even blame him for thumping me on the head, though leaving me to the wolves wasn’t too friendly. I needed to find out what he knew and now that I do, I’m not at all sure that Galloway did it.’

  ‘Why are you so obsessed with this?’

  Edie grimaced. The oil felt hot on her scalp. ‘I found that little boy in the snow. That kid’s got no one who wants to uncover the truth about how and why he died.’

  ‘Except you, his knight in shining armour.’ Derek wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Maybe his kin already know the truth, Edie, they just aren’t telling you. You think about that?’

  Megan gave him a disapproving look. He raised his palms in response.

  ‘Any idea where Galloway might be heading?’ His tone was neutral now, the voice of an investigator.

  ‘Anatoly told me he came from Canada originally. Maybe there?’

  The door opened and Zach came in, stamping out the cold. Megan set the baby in her bouncer, greeted him then went to the kitchen to heat some water for tea. He sat down and rubbed his hands warm, then reached out and took his daughter into his lap.

  ‘You find out who left the calf?’ Derek asked.

  Zach shook his head.

  ‘Tourists come in for the Iditarod most likely. It happens. I put out a request to the hotels to let me know if they get anyone asking the kitchen to fry up musk-ox steaks.’

  Zach bounced the baby up and down in his lap. When Megan arrived with hot tea, he passed her over and, turning to Derek, asked if he’d had any luck with the call.

  ‘Nope.’

  A thought came into Edie’s head.

  ‘Did the police department here get any further with their investigation into that Larsen guy’s connections?’

  Zach gave her a sorry look. ‘We got the airport looking out for the scumbag pilot who flies the girls but he’s probably just the gofer.’

  ‘Larsen said Fonseca was the guy at the top.’

  ‘Right,’ Zach said. ‘The same guy the Littlefish girl says fathered her son. Derek filled us in.’

  ‘Did Larsen have any more information on Fonseca?’

  ‘We got almost nothing useful out of that pissant. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t talk. By the time me and Derek here was done with him he was ready to betray his grandma. He just didn’t know anything.’

  ‘What about the girl, Larsen’s…’ she couldn’t bring herself to say it ‘…whatever? She give out any leads, any other names?’

  ‘We never found her and I don’t think the Nome PD or any of the agencies looked too hard. A foreign national, probably got no papers, no records in this country, not someone people around here are gonna miss too much.’

  ‘That stinks worse than a dog fart.’

  Zach’s brows moved up in a pained shrug. ‘Welcome to my world. If the Nome PD had pressed it, they’d have had an investigative unit from Anchorage crawling all over them. Last thing they want. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m just thinking maybe whoever made that call telling me to get up here must have been trying to distract me, get me to leave Anchorage.’

  ‘You saying the Nome PD’s behind that?’

  ‘Uh nuh, no.’

  Zach had started making funny faces at his daughter. The little girl was laughing and reaching out for his face. Maybe he was signalling that he didn’t want to get too involved. Edie could see he was in a difficult position, caught between her and Derek and the Nome PD and she didn’t want to push him. He had his kid to think about.

  She remembered Aileen’s warning in the Klondyke bar. The voice on the phone message hadn’t sounded like Aileen’s but voicemail could be distorting, so it was possible. Then there was Kathy, Detective Truro’s assistant. The investigative unit down in Anchorage had behaved weirdly towards her from the start, trying to sculpt her testimony, get her to pump up the connection between the Believers and Lucas Littlefish’s spirit house coffin. She considered other candidates. Natalia? Annalisa Littlefish? Then there was Schofield’s assistant Sharon. Truth was, she just didn’t know.

  Breaking off from her thoughts she saw Derek coming towards her with a piece of paper in his hand.

  ‘I thought to ring Stevie, get him to check if Galloway had any history in Canada.’ Constable Steve Killik was Derek’s subordinate up on Ellesmere Island, the only constable in a detachment of two, serving an area the size of Great Britain. He was holding the fort while Derek was away, which most of the time meant doing nothing because nothing happened in Kuujuaq. Steve was loyal and totally without ambition; both qualities, Edie always thought, which made him perfect for the job.

  ‘The fella’s more than he’s giving out. He’s Canadian, all right, out of Quebec City. Got himself involved in some biker gang about fifteen years ago, got done for a string of misdemeanours, passing bad cheques, that kind of thing. Twelve years ago there was some kind of feud between gangs and Galloway ended up breaking a rival gang member’s legs with a baseball bat. He did three years, got out for good behaviour and was rearrested for cooking up meth. When the Mounties searched his house, just routine, they found a bunch of pornography featuring underage girls. He said it was his roommate’s, his roommate said it was his, nobody could prove anything either way, so he was done for the meth and cautioned for the other stuff. This is not a good guy.’

  ‘Like I need reminding.’ Edie’s hand went to the sore spot on her head. A thought suddenly occurred to her, as though brought to the surface by the pain. When she’d asked Tommy Schofield if he knew Fonseca, he’d said he hadn’t been following the story but the name Fonseca
hadn’t been mentioned in the press coverage of the story. No one apart from herself, TaniaLee and the investigators on the case had any reason to connect the name to Lucas Littlefish’s death. Unless they had some inside information.

  She said: ‘What’s the quickest way to Homer from here?’

  Zach looked up. Edie saw his face stiffen, a moment of resolve come across it. From out of the corner of one eye she just caught Megan wrinkle her nose in silent agreement.

  ‘In my Piper,’ he said.

  28

  As they buffeted through a cloud wall, Zach dropped the plane a couple of hundred feet and in the seat behind, Derek tensed and went silent. His fists were balled and his mouth was a streak of pure tension. Zach checked in his rear mirror and chuckled. ‘Hey, Edie, looks like we got ourselves a fly-baby.’

  They’d come up with a plan on the ground in Nome. Edie had put in a call to Schofield’s office as tourist development officer Maggie Inukpuk. Schofield’s assistant Sharon had answered the phone and said that the developer was away on business for an indeterminate time and couldn’t be contacted. It was beginning to look as though that was just a polite way of saying the man had gone into hiding. The plan was for Edie to head over to Schofield’s offices anyway. But if they couldn’t hunt down the man himself, they might find something among his papers. After that, Edie and Derek intended to rent a truck and head over to his cabin in the woods above the town. If the man himself wasn’t there, then evidence of his activities might well be.

  Beneath them the land slid by, green etched in white. They were crossing over Lake Clark wilderness now, heading southeast towards Homer. Ahead of them the frozen expanse of Cook Inlet dazzled. Zach pulled up his headphones, tuned in to the radio frequency for the flight control at Homer airstrip and announced himself. She saw his face brace, his nostrils flaring, a ticking start up in the muscle of his jaw. He flashed a look at Derek, and then took a longer look at Edie in his mirror. His voice sounded tinny against the whine of the engine.

  ‘There’s been some kind of incident down at Homer, they got the coastguard and the police out there. We’re gonna have to land on the ice, but we might have to do a few circuits before we get cleared.’ He sounded calm but you could see from the pulse in his forehead that he wasn’t. Break-up was only a couple of weeks away. To land on the ice this late in the season was horribly risky but to turn back to the landing strip at Kalifornsky or risk landing across the bay at Seldovia would put them miles away from Homer and with no way of getting to the town. For a moment all three caught each other’s gaze. They were all thinking the same thing.

  What the hell are we doing?

  For fifteen minutes, the Piper circled high above Kachemak Bay, banking over the glaciated bowls of the Kenai Mountains, scooping over Halibut Cove to the neck of the bay at Razdolna. They needed to land on a patch of smooth ice in the channel, clear of the pressure ridges where the shore-fast ice met the moving pack nearer to the coast. The plane lost altitude, Zach scanning the ice and waiting for permission for the final descent into the area. When the call came through, Zach turned the little plane in towards the long needle of Homer Spit and they began dropping through cloud. On the ground at Homer Spit they could see the flashing lights of the police and coastguard. Below them, the Kachemak ice pan stared.

  Zach shouted over the engine buzz, ‘It’s gonna be a bumpy landing.’

  They were parallel to the ice now, moments from touching down. In the passenger seat, Derek was rapid-blinking, trying to control his breath. Then the skis hit and the frame gave an almighty groan and they were bouncing at speed across the sea ice. Zach pulled in the engine and the plane shuddered and slowed and they came to a gradual stop. Zach leaned in to Derek and slapped him on the back.

  ‘How’s our fly-baby doing?’

  Derek returned the slap with the kind of shoulder punch that wasn’t as jokey as it might seem. ‘Never been better.’

  ‘Copy that,’ said Zach.

  They waited beside the plane for transport and not long afterwards a snow coach in coastguard livery came bobbing along the ice towards them. A man got out and peeled off his snow goggles. Zach gave a little whoop.

  ‘Chris Taluak, you old dog. They didn’t tell me.’

  Taluak said, ‘So now you got a nice surprise.’ Laughing, he grabbed Zach’s arm with both hands and shook the hell out of it. He was a native man, deeply wind-burned, with spiked hair and teeth that looked like they’d been chipped from a berg. ‘That there was a landing. You got lucky. A couple of minutes later, they’d have sent you back to Soldotna or someplace. It’s a mess back there.’ He strode around the back of the snow coach and opened up the luggage hold. Taluak showed them into the coach, keyed the ignition and as they began to bump along the ice he told them what had happened.

  Sometime in the predawn, around 4.15, a chartered Fairchild had taken off from Homer for Sitka on what had gone down in the flight logs as a routine cargo flight. Twenty minutes out of Homer the pilot made a distress call to say that the plane had run into a flock of geese, the engines had stalled, they were losing altitude and he was going to try to make an emergency landing at Chenega Bay. The airport official in turn contacted the coastguard, who requested details of the cargo. Routine procedure, to make sure there was nothing dangerous on board. The plane checked out as having been leased to Aurora Logistics, a subsidiary of Hallstrom Enterprises, for a cargo of wood veneer. Coastguard assumed it was material to be used in refurbing Hallstrom’s cruise liners when they came up to Sitka in May and duly sent out a Jayhawk to pick up the pilot and co-pilot. Taluak had been cage operator.

  When the coastguard reached the site, they were startled to see, along with the pilot and co-pilot, a man and a woman huddled together. Neither the pilot nor the manifest had mentioned passengers. Taluak’s colleague, Don Harrington, a Homer native and sixteen-year veteran of the coastguard search and rescue, winched down to assess the situation and to evacuate what appeared to be two crew and two passengers. As he neared he radioed up to say the woman was holding a baby in her arms trying to protect it from the up-draught with her body.

  There was something about this story that was beginning to make Edie’s spine prickle. She threw a look at Derek, who returned it.

  Taluak went on.

  ‘We thought better of questioning anyone until we were safely back in Homer but in the meantime neither Don nor me could get any of those folk we’d just rescued to make eye contact, which we thought was pretty weird given that we’d just saved their lives.’

  Pulling up at the airport terminus, Taluak now cut the engine and came round to the luggage portal.

  Tod, the pilot, had taken the precaution of radioing in to request police attend the helicopter’s arrival. ‘It seemed like the woman overheard the request and began to panic. She was shoutin’ and screamin’ that they’d done nothing wrong. By the time we got to Homer she was near hysterical. When the Homer PD approached her she tried to run out of the terminal building clutching the baby. Police thought it was better not to try to move her. They’re still in here questioning them.’

  Edie and Derek exchanged glances once more. Taluak handed Edie her pack. Outside in the parking lot there were three patrol cars and a coastguard truck. A few troopers were standing around waiting for something to happen. The coastguard helicopter was parked a way off near the runway.

  ‘You folks down here for some recreation?’

  ‘Thought I’d show ’em some of our famous Alaskan hospitality,’ Zach said.

  Taluak tipped his hat and gave a little grimace.

  ‘Sorry to say, you folks aren’t getting the best of us right now.’

  They walked up the steps into the terminal building and were met by a uniform, who asked them for ID, then seemed to lose interest and waved them through.

  They waited for Zach to sign off on his flight forms. Taluak grinned. ‘What’s Zach got in mind for ya? Glacier skiing? Cross-country? We got great ice-fishing round here.’ />
  Edie cut a glance to either side. The terminal building was built in an L shape, the short arm being given over to luggage facilities and a waiting room, and the longer arm comprising offices. Excusing herself to use the bathroom, she made directly for the administrative section. The doors had glass peepholes. In the first two offices senior airport officials sat at their desks talking on phones. The third was empty but in the fourth there was a short, wiry-haired woman in her mid-forties turning her parka string over and over in her hands. She looked like she’d been doing a lot of crying. There was no one else in the corridor. Plucking Patricia Gomez’s ID from her pocket, Edie knocked on the door and went in.

  The woman looked up. In a voice thick with sorrow, she said, ‘Where have you put my baby?’

  Edie flashed the ID. She didn’t even have to introduce herself. The woman showed no sign of caring who she was.

  ‘We’re taking good care of the baby,’ Edie said. ‘You want to tell me what happened?’

  The woman looked up wearily.

  ‘I’ve been through this a dozen times already.’

  Edie pulled up a chair across the table from her. They were in some kind of meeting room, with a long board table and matching plastic chairs. A screen in the corner was silently playing the weather channel.

  ‘In that case, I guess one more time won’t make much difference to you. I’m sorry, Mrs…’ Edie rubbed her eyes, as though exhausted from the morning’s events. ‘How d’you spell your name again?’

  The woman looked tired and irritated. ‘Which. Darlie or Stegner?’ On Edie’s prompting, she spelled out her last name.

  ‘And your husband…?’

  ‘Morris.’ She spelled out the letters. ‘Like I said, he runs a franchise of farm equipment stores out of Heartland.’

  Edie smiled encouragingly.

  ‘It was all arranged on the phone.’ She hesitated. ‘Morris arranged it. We were told to buy a regular fly-drive package in Anchorage over the period of the Iditarod. They told us to drive down to Homer and gave us a location to go to.’