The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I already told you guys, some place in the boonies. They said the baby’d be there.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘I don’t know any names. There was one guy who spoke regular and another who had some kind of foreign accent.’ She leaned forward. Her eyes had a pleading look. ‘Look, they said the little boy was an orphan, that we were doing him a favour taking him.’

  ‘I’m guessing this was the kind of favour you pay for.’

  The woman drew a hand over her face and looked away.

  She said, simply, ‘My husband dealt with the money side. If I’d have known there was something wrong about it…’ She tailed off. Her eyes watered with tears then brimmed over. For a moment, Edie just allowed her to sob. ‘You have no idea how hard we’ve tried. The endless fertility treatment, then the adoption agencies. There was always something. You’re too white-collar, you’re too old.’

  Edie said, ‘I heard India and China were the places to go for people like you. Maybe Central America too.’ She’d seen a TV show about it.

  Darlie Stegner was shaking her head.

  ‘We didn’t want that.’

  Edie’s brow wrinkled up involuntarily. ‘Because you wanted a white kid?’

  The woman took in a deep breath, but she did not look at Edie.

  ‘Because we wanted a kid who could have passed for ours.’

  Edie tutted. ‘Hard to come by, nice, perfect little white babies.’

  Darlie Stegner looked down at her hands. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘No,’ Edie said, ‘it never is.’

  A man in coastguard uniform came by the door, peered in and, without acknowledging them, checked his watch. Edie sensed he was waiting for someone.

  ‘You notice anything unusual on the kid when you picked him up? A tattoo?’

  Darlie Stegner looked up, surprised.

  ‘I just assumed it was something the orphanage put there.’

  ‘The orphanage?’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, as though this all made perfect sense. ‘The orphanage where he came from. In Russia.’

  ‘Right.’ Edie couldn’t tell if the woman was lying just to her, or to herself too. She dived in her pack and brought out a notebook and pencil and drew the tattoo.

  ‘Did it look something like this?’

  Darlie Stegner hesitated.

  Edie said, ‘You’re in a lot of trouble, lady. It’s best you cooperate.’

  Stegner reached for the pad, nodded and handed it back.

  ‘You know what it means?’

  ‘It means “mine,” Edie said, ‘that’s as in not yours.’

  Edie put the pad back in her pack then walked to the door, peeped out of the glass to make sure no one was coming and reached out for the handle.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Stegner. You’ve been real helpful.’

  She walked back along the corridor. Zach Barefoot and Chris Taluak had disappeared and Derek was waiting on his own. He smiled thinly at her.

  ‘I just remembered something I didn’t tell you before. One of the girls I met in Anchorage, the sex workers? She had a kid, a baby actually. It was like she was hiding him, like she was scared someone would take him away.’

  Edie gave him a beady look. ‘Your brain fall off the cliff the same time as your precious lemmings?’

  Derek held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  Edie said, ‘You think you could find her again when we get back to Anchorage?’

  29

  Chris Taluak opened the door to his garage. Sitting inside in the gloom was an old-style Land Rover. Derek and Edie peered in.

  ‘There you go.’ Taluak slapped his hand on the hood. ‘Marriage material. What she ain’t got in looks she makes up for in low maintenance. We been together fifteen years and she still runs like a young ’un.’ Chuckling at his own joke he held out the key and turning to Edie said, ‘You driving, lady?’

  Derek stepped up and swiped the keys from Taluak’s hand.

  ‘Edie doesn’t drive. She bulldozes.’

  Derek drove. They turned along the main drag, past the museum on one side, the gas station and Safeway on the other.

  Derek said, ‘You think Schofield was running the Lodge in Meadow Lake as an underage brothel?’

  ‘We’ve pretty much established that.’

  They looked at one another. There was a look of disgust on Derek’s face. He wiped a hand over his forehead and across his hair. ‘What I’m thinking is too fucked up.’ He pulled into the verge and pulled up the handbrake. ‘It wasn’t just an underage brothel, was it?’

  Edie took in a deep breath which expanded in her chest like water turning to ice. ‘You know what I think? I think the girls had kids and Schofield sold them to infertile couples desperate for perfect white babies.’ It was an unbearable thought. Children raped to produce more children, human beings sold like farm animals. But if nowhere else, within its own frame of reference, it made sense. ‘The word the girl drew on our windshield, the little tattoo template I found in the trash at the Lodge, the one that was on Jonny Doe was also on the infant the Stegners were trying to buy when they got caught this morning.’

  It all seemed clear now. Edie had seen Tommy Schofield’s particular brand of ruthless opportunism before. He was the kind of man who flourished in places with few controls and almost limitless opportunities, a man who had made the step from thinking he could own land to imagining he could do the same with human beings, the kind of frontiersman whose psychopathic tendencies had for years been tolerated because they brought results.

  Like any business, this one depended on supply and demand. There would be a network of men and women whose perverted sexual needs or warped sense of entitlement to parenthood only he could satisfy. Edie guessed Schofield’s clients would be wide-ranging and diverse, but they would have one thing in common: their willingness to turn a blind eye.

  Derek started the engine again and turned onto the road that led to the Spit. They drove up the Spit past the souvenir stores and chandleries towards the offices of Schofield Developments. Derek jammed on the brakes and slowed. A man in uniform appeared to be loitering outside.

  ‘You see that?’

  Edie peered out. ‘They already got an alarm in there. Control panel’s inside. He’s using the same security detail up at the Lodge.’ She gave him a quizzical look. ‘What does he need extra security there for?’

  ‘We’re about to find out,’ Derek said.

  The security guard standing outside the blue clapboard building looked like the mean kind. He was a huge, hard-bodied guy in his late twenties, some Indian blood, a surly expression on his face. Edie watched Derek paste on his best friendly smile, introduce himself and pull his police badge from his pocket. While the guard scrutinized it, squinting in the cool wind, Derek checked his name tag. Eric Fleetfoot.

  Fleetfoot’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where you come from? I ain’t never heard of Ellesmere Island.’

  Derek had already anticipated this. His eyes widened and he smiled indulgently.

  ‘For real?’

  Fleetfoot flashed him a look. It wasn’t pretty.

  ‘That thing that happened this morning, they seconded me in on the investigations team.’

  Eric Fleetfoot looked off into the distance, shrugged. ‘You gonna need a warrant to search Mr Schofield’s office.’

  Derek laughed. It sounded phony but Fleetfoot didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘We’re not interested in your boss. But that alarm he’s got in there? Something’s tripped it. It’s not sounding out here, but it keeps flashing at the alarm company. They called the PD. I was on my way over the Spit anyway, said I’d give you a heads-up. Either you got a loose circuit in there, bud, or someone’s been in.’

  Fleetfoot looked sceptical for a second, then relieved. He pulled a ring of keys from a chain stashed in the pocket of his parka, swung around to the front door of Schofield’s office and let
himself in. Derek moved forward.

  ‘I’m gonna help you here.’ He reached out and took the door from Fleetfoot, stepped inside. ‘You want I stay up front to keep an eye on things while you check the control panel?’ Fleetfoot turned and sized him up, then grunted a yes.

  Derek went to the door and signalled with his finger. A second or two later, Edie’s face appeared around the door. She slid inside and into the corridor leading to Schofield’s office. Moments later she reappeared carrying a stack of files. Derek waited until she was back inside the Land Rover, then he shouted out to Fleetfoot from the front door, ‘Oh hey, you know what?’

  Fleetfoot appeared around the door. ‘What? I ain’t finished yet.’

  ‘That’s just too bad, bud, because I am.’

  30

  Sitting in Taluak’s truck as they wound up the hill towards the forested ridge above Homer, Edie read the estimate she’d pulled out of Schofield’s drawer. The paper bore the name Meadow Lake Construction and was addressed to Schofield Developments. It referred to ‘Improvements to Lodge at Meadow Lake’. The signature at the bottom belonged to Gregor Nodgorov.

  ‘The man was going to have a dorm built for trafficked girls. You’d think he’d have done it on the wink,’ Edie said.

  ‘Tax write-off. The fella’s a businessman, remember?’

  He pulled the wheel around a pile of drift. A pair of loons flew across the road, calling to each other with a haunting ha-oo. ‘It’s documentary proof he owns the Lodge, even if it doesn’t prove he knew what was going on there.’

  They came to a row of mailboxes. Edie said, ‘Turn left here.’ Derek slowed and took the turn. She thought back to the moment she’d felt the ghostly presence of the spirit bear. She could smell him now. A warm, musky scent at odds with the crisp, medicinal odour of pine resin. ‘A week ago I wouldn’t have been able to do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This. Direct us through the forest.’

  The contours of the land no longer looked the same to her. From among the spruce she could now pick out alder, western hemlock, aspen, cottonwood and feltleaf willow. Without warning, an image of Lucas Littlefish’s frozen body sprang into her mind and an odd, choking sound bubbled up from her belly so that she had to blink hard and swallow in order to gather herself.

  ‘There was an itemized phone bill on Schofield’s desk.’

  Derek’s gaze briefly left the road. He shot her an expectant look.

  ‘My number was on it.’

  Derek made a clicking sound in his throat. ‘You gave the guy your phone number?’ His tone of voice said just one more crazy.

  ‘I guess I must have done when I went to see him. Either that, or he got it from the Iditarod office.’

  There was a pause, then Derek said, ‘Edie, Schofield didn’t know you had any connection to the Iditarod.’

  This was true.

  He carried on, ‘He must know something’s up, or there wouldn’t be a security detail outside his office.’ Derek reached over and checked the glove compartment for Megan Avuluq’s service pistol then flipped his head to indicate the Remington 308 hunting rifle they’d borrowed from Taluak lying on the seat behind. ‘We may be needing these two.’

  They drove on awhile. Otis Littlefish had said the developer’s cabin was on a dog-leg bend in the road at the top of the hill a couple of miles from them. Edie was pretty confident she could find it. At a smaller track branching off to the right, she told Derek to keep driving straight. They soon came to a hollow covered in crab apple and dogwood. A buck moose burst from the undergrowth and lumbered across the track. Edie reached around for the rifle and felt Derek’s hand on her arm.

  ‘Sorry, old habits.’

  The moose stared at them for an instant then disappeared back into the forest. The track rose on a soft incline. At its apex, they found what had to be Tommy Schofield’s cabin. They drove past then pulled the Land Rover into the verge a little way along, took up their weapons and tromped back in deep drift through the trees around the side of the property.

  The cabin was a fancier, uglier affair than the Littlefishes’, made not of uncut logs caulked together in the traditional way but from some kind of treated cinder block, a style more suited to the suburbs of Anchorage than the middle of the forest. A garage sat beside the cabin and behind it was what looked like a meat cache and field-dressing shed. Fresh footprints led from the cabin to the garage and there were tyre tracks on the driveway leading out but no sign that anyone was still inside. Evidently, the Homer PD hadn’t yet made the connection between Schofield and the Stegners, which wasn’t altogether surprising since Schofield had been canny enough to use an intermediary while the Stegners seemed unable to recall any real names of the people they dealt with.

  From their position in among the trees they could see through the French windows at the back of the property. They moved cautiously forward in hunter’s gait, low and with their knees bent until they got to the edge of the trees, then slipped across the cleared area and flattened themselves against the side of the cabin. To the right of where Edie was standing there was a small window. She cupped her hand around her face and peered in to a simple bathroom. From the brand of shampoo in the shower and the shaving foam on the wooden shelf beneath the mirror, it was clear that a man lived here alone.

  They slipped around to the back of the property, then reaching the French windows they peered in. There was a bottle of Scotch on the coffee table and a single glass. Edie sensed that the room had been recently occupied. Next to the Scotch sat a recent photograph of Schofield beside a halibut almost as tall as himself. To one side, towering over Schofield, stood Byron Hallstrom.

  They retraced their steps. As they were about to turn to the front of the property, Edie caught a flash of yellow out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head and went over to the field-dressing shed. On a shelf under the window stood a can of bright yellow paint. She went over to the log splitter, pulled out the axe and went back over to the door of the shed. Hearing the sound, Derek came running up.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She raised the axe, chopped the padlock and popped the twisted metal in his hand. Then she yanked open the door. The raw, ferrous smell of old blood hit her nostrils like a bad clam hits the belly. Inside, a tangle of meat hooks hung from the ceiling. On a shelf to one side, a line of assorted animal skulls stared out, their pelts hanging companionably to one side. A series of knives clung to a magnetic strip above the stained dressing table. In a corner were an empty blood bucket and several pairs of gloves. The floor and walls had recently been wiped down, the swooshes made by the cloth still visible.

  A paintbrush rested on top of the yellow paint can, still smelling of turpentine. Below the shelf was a work table. Edie crouched until her eye line was level with the wood. The table had been scrubbed and smelled like the paintbrush.

  ‘Sex trafficker, baby smuggler and spirit-house carpenter,’ Derek said darkly. ‘Is there anything our man can’t do?’

  Edie pressed her lips together and swallowed hard. ‘Get away with it.’

  They went around to the front door of the main cabin. It was locked, but there was no deadbolt and the lock gave way easily.

  Edie took a deep breath and drew herself up. A look passed between them.

  Derek said, ‘I’ll start in the bedroom.’ She flashed him a smile of thanks. From what she already knew of Tommy Schofield, the man’s bedroom wasn’t somewhere she wanted to be.

  She began at the back of the living room, near the tiny kitchenette, turning over everything lying on the floor, then pulling out drawers and cupboards, peering under chairs and running her fingers along the rough plank floor, feeling for something, anything, that might turn out to be of significance and finding nothing. She worked her way methodically round the room until coming to an old battered leather easy chair in the corner. Lying to one side of the chair was a souvenir ashtray from Kodiak Island and inside it the abandoned stub of a cigar. She
picked up the ashtray. Beneath lay the cigar wrappers. Sammy had smoked all through their marriage and she’d become used to clearing away the leavings. Checking herself she put it down again.

  Derek emerged with something in his hand and passed it to her. It was a yearbook picture of freshmen students at Homer High School. Edie cast her eye along the rows of young faces until she came to one she recognized.

  TaniaLee Littlefish.

  All of a sudden, it was as though she had moved beyond the treeline and could see out across the tundra. Her heart quickened, her throat closed and she felt a sweat break out on her brow. Going back to the ashtray she removed a cigar wrapper and checked a small, diamond-shaped paper label attached to it.

  ‘Derek, I think I got something.’

  The policeman came over and took the wrapper from her hands.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned.’ In red writing stamped onto a gold background was the word ‘Fonseca’.

  ‘Cuban,’ he said. ‘Pretty rare.’

  The light was beginning to fade as they drove back into Homer. The remains of the sun sat rosy on the hill to the west of the town and an easterly breeze blew spruce branches briefly into the orange motes from the street lamps. Across Kachemak, they could see the odd sparkle at Halibut Cove and Jakolof Bay and the lights along Homer Spit dazzled off the sea ice and gave the thin fang of land a glow all its own.

  Chris Taluak was waiting for them back at his house with a bowl of sticky salmon roe and bottles of ice-cold beer and cans of soda. The coastguard’s house was modest but cosy. Logs smouldered in the stove. Taluak had built it himself from cedar way back when Homer was just a tiny pioneer town with a halibut fishery attached.

  ‘How was the hunting?’

  ‘We got what we came for,’ Edie said.

  Derek shot her a warning look and rapidly changed the subject. ‘That business this morning sorted out?’