The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  There was a pause in which nothing was said but an awful lot communicated.

  ‘I gotta stay here until the dogs fly out, tomorrow maybe. I need a favour?’ He tipped his head round and shot Edie an awkward look, went rosy around the cheeks. ‘Would you mind calling Nancy, tell her what happened?’

  At the name Edie tried not to look surprised or, worse still, disappointed. This was something she hadn’t anticipated, but she had no right to complain. Whatever she felt about Sammy now, she had to remind herself that it was she who’d left him. ‘I thought you guys had broken up.’

  Sammy gave a sheepish little chuckle.

  ‘You know how it is.’

  Edie knew exactly how it was.

  ‘One thing I just can’t figure out,’ Sammy said, ‘is how that damn brake bar cracked. The only weak point was at the bolt where it joined onto the mainframe of the sled but the darnedest thing is, the metal fractured on a straight section of tubing about ten centimetres from the joint, exactly where the stress to the metal should have been the weakest.’

  A thought went through Edie’s head. Derek was cutting her a look. The same thought was going through his head too.

  Trying to make it sound casual, Edie said, ‘Hey, Sammy, I guess no one coulda handled the sled when you weren’t around?’

  ‘Man, Edie,’ Sammy gave her a searching look. He tried and failed to disguise his disgust. ‘These people are my friends,’ he said in a defensive tone. Any case, why would anyone want to trip me up? I’m a rookie here, just a bit player. I was never even a prospect for the top ten.’ He lowered his eyes and tutted quietly. ‘Which you’d know if you’d come out to the course more, met up with me at a couple of the checkpoints maybe.’

  Edie felt herself getting hot. She went to open her mouth then saw Derek giving her the eye and thought better of it. He was right. You don’t kick a man when he’s down unless it’s your intention to see him bleed.

  Sammy went on, ‘I had this crazy idea, that I could bring Autisaq back some good news. But that’s gone now too.’

  A man walked by with a husky pup under his arm and gave Edie an idea.

  ‘Hey, when did we ever care about qalunaat rules?’ she said.

  Derek raised his eyebrows.

  ‘OK, OK, so it’s Derek’s job to care just a little bit. But me and you, Sammy, we never gave a ptarmigan’s ass, did we?’

  Sammy’s eyes narrowed and he gave Edie a sideways glance. Edie returned it with one of the looks she reserved for Sammy alone.

  ‘What you cookin’ up, Edie Kiglatuk?’

  ‘You can’t complete the race officially, so what? Who in Autisaq’s gonna know the difference, or care for that matter? They gotta have dogs out there in Koyuk they’ll rent us. You ask me, won’t take us more than a coupla hours to put together another team. You could be on the trail again by sundown.’ She chin-flicked to his injuries. ‘Think you could manage that?’

  Sammy’s face lightened and he began to smile. He looked at Derek and thumbed towards Edie.

  ‘Pikkaniqtuq.’ She’s a clever one.

  35

  ‘That’s a pretty big thing you’re alleging. You sure of your facts?’

  Aileen Logan picked up the bleeping cell phone sitting on the table, checked the caller ID and pressed the off switch. Around them, Iditarod volunteers buzzed to and fro, preparing for the race finish.

  Derek pulled the brake bar from Sammy’s sled out of his pack and laid it on the table.

  ‘Here’s the evidence, Aileen. See this? He pointed to the fracture in the tubing. This is no fatigue break. If it had been down to wear and tear, the surface here would have been rough. This is smooth, more like a typical crack fracture. But the point is, see, the bar cracked at the point of least stress.’

  Aileen glanced at the bar but seemed more interested in the volunteers. Derek flashed Edie a look of exasperation. She returned it with what she hoped was a sign of encouragement. Derek went in for a second time, holding out the bar so that Aileen could get a better look and running his finger along the cracked edge.

  ‘We think someone took a chisel to this bar. What you’re looking at right here is a crack fracture begun by someone deliberately introducing a stress line.’

  Aileen gave a sympathetic little smile. She was leaning on her elbows with her hands curled around her chin in a gesture of motherly concern. ‘You know, guys, you’ve been under a lot of stress yourselves. I’m just wondering if you’re not making too much of this?’

  Edie had been leaving the talking to Derek. But now she couldn’t help herself. ‘What we’re saying is, there’s no way this could have happened accidentally. Sammy Inukpuk got off light. He could have gotten killed out there.’

  ‘The Iditarod’s always been a dangerous race,’ Aileen replied defensively. ‘Folks are aware of that when they apply. Leastwise they should be.’

  ‘You’re missing the point.’

  Derek followed up. ‘Ms Logan, we’ve received warnings, threats,’ he said.

  Edie glared at him. Since one of the warnings had been from Aileen herself, it seemed to her they were heading into tricky territory. But if Aileen took Derek’s remark as aimed at her, she didn’t show it.

  ‘About what?’ she asked, impassively.

  Edie said, ‘We’re just saying, it seems like there’s stuff going on and we don’t feel comfortable about it.’

  Aileen glanced between Edie and Derek until something seemed to give. She sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘You want me to set up an investigation?’

  Derek leaned forward and stretched a hand out over his knee. ‘Don’t you think that would be the most appropriate response? If this kind of thing’s allowed to go by, how can people be expected to trust the Iditarod is clean?’

  ‘You find anything cleaner than this race in Alaska, sergeant, you come let me know and I’ll raise a hallelujah chorus.’ Aileen’s face tightened and a hard light came from her eyes. ‘You want some input on this, we can give you input, but the first person we gotta interview is Sammy which is kinda hard to do while he’s still out there on the trail. I have to tell you, we don’t encourage that. We don’t encourage it at all. Some will say Sammy’s not playing clean himself.’

  Edie took this for what it was, an attempt at deflection. But Aileen wasn’t going to get off that easy. ‘We can wait.’

  ‘Till after what? Week from now we’ll all be back in our day jobs. You want an investigation, you can have an investigation, but you’ll need to pull Sammy off the route. Officially, he’s out of the race anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’ She glanced at her watch, then at the crowd of reporters and cameramen jostling for their finish line accreditation up by the desk. ‘I have a busy morning preparing for Mrs Hillingberg’s speech at the Pioneer Women’s Lunch.’ And with that, she gave a little nod, turned and disappeared in among the crowd.

  Edie and Derek trudged back along Front Street in thin sleet to Zach Barefoot’s house and found him sitting on the floor of the main room playing with his daughter. He and Megan had been asleep when Edie and Derek had finally got back from Koyuk this morning and they hadn’t yet had a chance to catch up.

  ‘How’s Sammy?’ Zach said, raising his eyes from his daughter just long enough to cut them a worried look.

  ‘Unofficially back in the race.’

  Zach’s expression relaxed. ‘I’m real glad to hear that.’ He held out the index finger of each hand and let Zoe make a grab for them. ‘Hey, you guys eat yet?’ He picked up the baby and handed her to Edie. Without waiting for an answer, he said, ‘I’ll go fetch you something.’

  They watched him disappear into the kitchen. The little girl grabbed for one of Edie’s braids and jammed the end into her mouth. Edie set a kiss on the top of her head. Her skin was as soft as a hare. She held the tiny body close to her heart. The baby smelled fresh and true, like a tundra summer.

  Zach came back a moment later, carrying two bowls of meaty-smelling soup. His put down the bowls and rea
ched out for Zoe.

  Edie said: ‘You mind if I hold her a bit longer?’

  While Edie stayed with the baby, Derek filled Zach in on last night’s events and this morning’s conversation with Aileen Logan. He then pulled out the sled bar.

  Barefoot’s eyes moved over it and he pulled it towards him and began inspecting the break.

  ‘A crack fracture. That’s weird, wouldn’t you say?’ Derek observed.

  ‘I don’t know, you guys,’ Barefoot said. ‘What would someone get from putting Sammy out of the race? It’s not like the man was ever gonna place.’

  Edie said, ‘You remember that false alarm I got a few day’s back?’

  Barefoot blinked, then gave a little nod.

  ‘Tommy Schofield’s assistant, Sharon, admitted to making the call.’

  The front door opened and there was the sound of boots being taken off. Megan Avuluq appeared through the door to the snow porch, shaking out the cold.

  ‘Hey, Edie, Derek,’ she said, scooping her daughter from Edie’s hands. Burying her face in the baby’s, she rubbed noses and plastered the baby’s face with tiny kisses. ‘That’s just too bad about Sammy. How is he?’

  ‘Back in the race.’

  She sat down, dandling the baby in her lap. After a few moments she looked up, distracted. ‘Remind me why I go to that Pioneer Women’s Lunch every year.’ She shook her head, smiled at Zoe, and said, ‘Mamma’s getting sick of hearin’ ’bout Helen Callaghan and Nellie Trosper and all those white ladies who made Alaska what it is today.’ She looked up. ‘Alaska Nellie this, Alaska Nellie that. You’d think Mrs Marsha Hillingberg sprung clear from Alaska Nellie’s belly. All that down-home, field-dressing hokey. Ask me, the only thing that woman ever field dresses is her gym bunny body.’ She was running a finger along the baby’s chest. ‘You and me and your daddy, baby, we’re the real Alaska people.’

  She looked up suddenly and blushed.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I interrupt something?’

  Barefoot reached out and squeezed her hand.

  ‘Derek and Edie think Sammy’s sled was sabotaged.’

  Megan gave everybody a quizzical look. There was a moment of silence while everyone wondered how much to fill Megan in on, then Edie broke it.

  ‘You remember that girl in the Chukchi Motel? Her “client”…’ Edie laced the word with the irony it deserved, ‘told Zach and Derek here that the guy at the top was called Fonseca. Me and Derek went down to Homer, found out that Fonseca is the cover name for Tommy Schofield, a developer based down there. Schofield is also the father of Lucas Littlefish.’

  ‘The kid you found?’

  Edie pursed her lips in a yes.

  ‘Schofield was smuggling underage girls in from Chukchi, through Nome. We think he took them to a hunting lodge down near Meadow Lake. He had a dorm specially built, with some fancy rooms for servicing “clients”’ – the heavy irony again – ‘and a nursery.’

  Megan’s eyes grew wide.

  ‘A nursery?’

  ‘Seems he was letting the girls get pregnant then selling their babies to couples who wanted a nice new white baby more than they wanted to examine their consciences.’

  Megan had stopped stroking the baby’s hair now. Her face bore an expression of disgust. ‘That’s awful,’ she said simply.

  Edie nodded and went on. ‘One of those babies belonged to TaniaLee Littlefish.’

  ‘Schofield tried to sell his own son?’

  ‘Seems that way,’ Derek said.

  Megan pinched her eyes together hard.

  Edie carried on. ‘TaniaLee couldn’t bear the idea of losing Lucas so she smothered him to stop it happening. Schofield put the body in the fish freezer at his office.’

  Megan looked at Edie uncomprehending. ‘Why would he do that?’

  Edie shrugged. ‘Lucas died shortly after Thanksgiving. Ground’s pretty frozen then. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t be able to dig a hole to dump the body in. Maybe he was just buying himself some time. We don’t know. He wasn’t in any hurry. Didn’t have to be. TaniaLee Littlefish couldn’t stand what she’d done…’

  ‘…so she went crazy,’ Megan finished. She held Zoe in close.

  ‘No one had any reason to tell the truth,’ Derek chipped in. ‘If Lucas was traced back to his father, it would have been easy enough to indict him as an accessory after the fact and charge him with statutory rape. TaniaLee Littlefish was thirteen years old when Tommy Schofield got her pregnant. Plus Schofield didn’t want his smuggling operation rumbled and the Littlefishes were trying to protect their daughter from going to prison.’

  ‘So he pinned it on those Russian folk?’

  Derek said, ‘Schofield was trying to get the Believers to sell him a strip of prime shoreline in Kachemak Bay. We think he probably already had a buyer for the land, some cruise-liner operator named Byron Hallstrom, quite a hustler. Maybe Schofield had been overconfident, thought the Believers would be easier to persuade than they turned out to be. Got himself into trouble with Hallstrom as a result.’

  ‘I’m tearing up,’ Edie said drily.

  ‘I think he’s smart enough to know that the Old Believer story would stick.’ Derek finished off the last of his soup and pushed the bowl away. ‘Those folks are outsiders. People’re wary of ’em.’ It all kinda came together. He needed to get rid of the body of Lucas Littlefish in a way that was unlikely to be traced back to himself.’

  ‘And he caught a lucky break when Detective Truro was assigned to investigate the death. Man’s a dedicated evangelical. He had the Believers down as some kind of satanic group right from the start.’

  Zoe was fast asleep in her mother’s arms now. Megan tucked a blanket around the baby. ‘Didn’t they find another little boy not long after Lucas? How does he fit into all this?’

  ‘Edie found a home-made tattoo kit at the Lodge. A Russian word, IIIaXTa,’ Derek said. ‘It means “mine”.’

  ‘I saw the same word tattooed behind the ear of the second baby, Jonny Doe. It wasn’t completely clear in the pictures, but I’m sure that’s what it said.’

  Edie and Derek exchanged a look. Edie felt a swell of something in her belly, a wave of nausea bubbled up. Someone had to say it, she thought. However awful it was, someone had to say what needed to be said. ‘It’s possible that Jonny Doe was a product of the sick kind of breeding programme.’

  She saw Zach Barefoot’s mouth fall open. Beside him, on the sofa, Megan groaned.

  ‘That girl Derek saw outside the Chukchi Motel resurfaced in the forest near the Lodge. We tried to follow her, but we didn’t know about the Lodge then and we lost her tracks. She wrote out the word IIIaXTa in the snow on the windshield of our truck.’

  Megan looked up. An idea went through her mind. She turned her head toward her husband. Zach’s face tightened into an expression of disgust.

  ‘Thing makes me sick to my stomach,’ he said.

  ‘That kid, the second one, didn’t he have Down Syndrome?’ Megan’s eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Tell me that’s not why they killed him. Tell me that didn’t happen.’

  ‘But it did,’ Edie said.

  They sat for a moment taking this in, then Zach said, ‘You mean that fella they found dead this morning in the Chugach never did anything?’

  Edie swung a wild look at Derek, who returned it. Her pulse began to rise. She had to hold in her voice until she could trust it to come out and make sense.

  ‘Which dead fella?’

  ‘The guy whose body they found outside this morning, the Old Believer dude, the prime suspect.’ His gaze slalomed between Edie and Derek, then something clicked. He jumped up from the sofa, tapped into his laptop and brought up the front page of the Anchorage Courier.

  Baby horror suspect found dead in Chugach forest.

  The article reported that Peter Galloway’s body had been found on the forest floor by a hunter. The body had been substantially compromised by animals, but preliminary forensics suggested Galloway had di
ed only hours after escaping from a prison vehicle while being transported from a correctional facility in Anchorage to one in Eagle River. It had been cold, even for March, and Galloway had been dressed only in regulation overalls. The police were not treating the death as suspicious.

  Edie went over to the laptop and reread the piece.

  ‘That doesn’t add up. I saw Galloway up in the Alphabet Hills two days after his escape. He was wearing proper outerwear.’ She prowled around her mind for a moment, looking for ideas. ‘Zach, mind if I google something?’

  Zach got up from the chair beside the laptop. ‘Go ahead.’

  Edie sat. ‘Me and Derek found an ice hole down in Homer, Tommy Schofield’s truck parked nearby. There were footprints leading to the hole and none leading back.’ She keyed in the letters then scrolled through the search results and found a single reference to Tommy Schofield’s death on a Homer community website.

  ‘Suicide?’ Zach said.

  ‘That’s what it says here. Only there was something not quite right about the prints. And there was no splash around the hole. A guy falls through a hole in the ice, even a guy who wants to fall through that hole, even a guy whose aim is to die in the water, he’s gonna make a splash.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking maybe no body ever actually fell through that ice. I’m thinking it’s weird that Galloway and Schofield apparently die on the same day, no one finds Schofield’s body, and Galloway’s body is apparently so messed up by animals it has to be ID’d from DNA.’

  The phone rang. Zach picked up, nodded a couple of times, saying uh huh, then passed the phone across to Edie. She took it and mouthed ‘Who is it?’ Zach shrugged. She flipped the mic to speakerphone and answered.

  A heavily accented voice said, ‘This is Lena, friend of Olga.’ Edie sucked in air, trying to recall. From the corner of her eye, she saw Derek look up in surprise then start gesticulating for the phone. She passed it over and he introduced himself, then she saw his expression fade.