The Bone Seeker: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery (Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries)

by M. J. McGrath

  • • •

  Back at the detachment, Edie was downing a third mug of tea in the vain hope that it would stop her thinking about having something stronger. Some days she found it relatively easy to keep the urge at bay but today was not one of those days. Today was a day for imagining the unimaginable.

  Why had Martha Salliaq sought Willa out on Friday night? And why had he not told her? Why would Martha want to confide in her sister’s boyfriend if their affair really was over? Was there some kind of rivalry going on? A love triangle perhaps? Common enough. And if the younger sibling was ‘everyone’s favourite’ as he’d said, then why had Willa given Martha up for Lizzie? Had Willa been playing the two sisters off against one another? From there the thoughts only got crazier and more tangled. Was it true that he’d failed to show at hers on Saturday evening because his ATV had broken down? What was he keeping from her, that sweet, solid little boy from another life, who would pass his evenings cuddled on the couch watching Laurel and Hardy movies? That sweet, solid little boy who became a drug addict, a brawler and a thief, who lost his brother in terrible circumstances but who had pulled through and seemed to have found new purpose in the Rangers. Willa the murderer? Could she imagine that?

  Then there was Chip Muloon, a man she barely knew and who had done everything to ensure she never would, a man who was as much a blank now as he had been nearly a month ago when they’d first met. Why in all the time she’d spent with Muloon had he never mentioned ordering a hunting knife or having any connection to Klinsman at Camp Nanook? Perhaps he was secretive because he had reason to be? What else hadn’t he revealed? Supposing those mentoring chats with Martha about life in the south had taken a less innocent turn . . .

  Way out possibilities. Almost . . .

  It was the ‘almost’ that made her want to drink.

  • • •

  She welcomed the distracting tramp of boots on the steps. Moments later Derek came bursting through the door wearing a dark expression.

  ‘Your boyfriend . . .’ He stepped back from whatever it was he was about to say.

  ‘My ex.’

  The phone rang. They both looked at it for a moment. After what seemed like a long time, Derek went over and picked up. She heard him say ‘I’ll switch to speaker’, then to Edie he said: ‘It’s Anna Mackie.’

  ‘I worked all through the night but the results are inconclusive,’ Mackie said.

  ‘Give us what you got, Anna.’

  • • •

  The medical examiner began to detail her findings. In all probability Luc was right, she said, and the cause of death was exsanguination. She’d come to that conclusion partly by ruling out drowning. There were head injuries but these were post-mortem, almost certainly as a result of the corpse being buffeted about in shallow water. As a general principle, a corpse didn’t bleed, but the congestion of the head with blood as the result of the buffeting could have led to gross post-mortem bleeding; though in Anna’s judgement Martha almost certainly bled out while she was unconscious, but alive. The catastrophic loss of blood made it difficult to test for the disturbances of blood electrolytes normally associated with drowning but she didn’t think there was enough fluid in the lungs to support a drowning case. She’d found foam in the airways, which was common in victims of drowning but this was also consistent with drug overdose. Temperature and stomach contents analysis suggested a time of death as being between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Saturday, though it wasn’t possible to be more precise because of the length of time that the body had lain in the water.

  She hadn’t been able to find any foreign DNA on Martha’s body and the immersion meant that she was very unlikely to come across anything conclusive. Mick Flaherty had been focusing on the two suspects’ clothing. He’d found Martha’s hair on both. In addition, there were traces of Martha’s blood on Namagoose’s trousers, though this was menstrual blood and its distribution was commensurate with the suspect having had sex with the victim. From analysis of Martha’s hormone levels she thought it likely that the girl was at the end of a period, which backed that up. No defensive wounds. Nothing under the fingernails. No abrasions around the genital area. In Mackie’s opinion, Martha hadn’t been raped, except with the blade, of course.

  She’d left testing of the knife till last on the grounds that it was the least likely to yield any significant evidence, because of the length of time it had lain in the mud and water. There were traces of blood on it matching Martha’s type but that was no surprise given where it had been found. Mick Flaherty had retrieved a hair wedged into the handle which had a sharp cut at one end and looked as though it probably belonged to Martha. That was being tested now. The balance of probabilities suggested that the wooden-handled knife Edie had pulled from the mud was most likely the one that killed the victim.

  ‘We’ve both done as much as we could in the time. It’ll take longer to confirm the DNA evidence,’ Anna said.

  ‘Thank you. We’re grateful.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ Anna added ruefully.

  Edie asked about the drug analysis.

  ‘Of course. Sorry, guys, it’s been a long night. The preliminaries on Martha’s blood suggest she’d had the equivalent of a small beer, probably sometime in the early afternoon, and we can confirm she had Ambien in her system.’

  ‘Enough to knock her out?’ Derek asked.

  ‘Plenty enough to quieten her up some. I think she was probably semi- or fully unconscious when the knife went in.’

  ‘That’s a mercy, at least,’ Edie said.

  Derek pulled a notebook towards him and began frantically making notes.

  ‘Can you say more about the Ambien, Anna? How it might have gotten into her system, how long it would have been before it took effect?’

  ‘Of course.’ There was a pause while Mackie gathered her thoughts. ‘Ambien is the brand name for zolpidem. It’s a short-acting hypnotic with effects similar to benzodiazepines. The tabs are small, easy to dissolve in a drink. The taste isn’t great but it comes on after you’ve swallowed. It may be that the victim was given enough to make her drowsy then persuaded to take more once she was out of it. They’re quick-acting, it’s a pretty powerful sedative. She’d have started feeling the effects fifteen minutes after ingesting. At the levels that were in Martha’s body, she would have experienced muscle relaxation and depressed respiratory function.’ Another pause. ‘That give you enough?’

  Derek said he thought so, thanked Mackie and finished the call.

  ‘Saxby steals Ambien from the pharmacy and it turns up in Martha Salliaq.’ Derek sounded breathless. His legs were jigging up and down in his chair, his voice eager and with the tiniest hint of celebration. ‘Edie, I do believe we’ve got ’em.’

  He dialled first the prosecutor then Klinsman and left messages.

  ‘I gotta go down to the port. Mix-up with some cargo. We got a shipment of snowmobile parts nobody wants. But if either the prosecutor or Klinsman calls, come get me. Immediately, OK?’

  Edie smiled and saluted but the moment he turned, her smile dropped off. The circumstantial evidence pointed to Namagoose and Saxby. Now they had physical evidence too. So why was something still gnawing at her bones?

  • • •

  The Herbert Piquot sat anchored quietly in mid-channel, a small tarnished brooch on the grey, velvety waters of the Sound. It was on the Piquot that Derek had first arrived on Ellesmere, thirteen years ago. Back then, there were bergy bits and growlers littering the beach and large pans of slowly rotting ice still twirling in the currents. The summer insects were as sparse as hot days. It took him five or six years to settle. The place was so different from anywhere he’d been before. But the job itself had never been too challenging. There really was no crime in the Arctic back then. Being a native cop was somewhere between administrator and social worker. You could take yourself out on spring patrol and return six weeks later in the certain knowledge that the only things you’d have missed would be a few dru
nken brawls and some loose huskies. He felt a flash of nostalgia for the old innocence of the place; its brittle, delicate, ice-laden charisma.

  Sam Oolik was at the quayside leaning over a cargo crate. He stood up as Derek approached, clutching his lower back, his face wrinkling momentarily before settling back into its usual genial blank.

  ‘Hey, Derek.’ He wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Damned heat. Must be ten degrees.’ He stood up and looked Derek full in the eye. ‘I guess you must be about ready to make those arrests.’

  A voice shouted his name. He looked about and spotted the balding head of Larry Larsen, the Piquot’s captain, and, gathering himself, went down the quay towards him. For the next couple of hours, he was too busy with the supply to think about Martha Salliaq or how much everything was changing.

  Returning to the detachment later, he hung up his hat on the rack behind his desk and called Edie’s name. A head peeked out from the comms room.

  ‘Someone on the radio?’

  ‘Sammy Inukpuk. I don’t know why he didn’t just use the phone.’

  ‘I told him not to.’ You had to admire the man’s tenacity. Edie’s knight in rusting armour.

  Derek took off his jacket, went over to his desk and sat down. ‘No phone calls?’

  Edie shook her head. She was leaning against the door jamb now, her hair loose for once and falling over her face, and he found himself oddly stirred. Perhaps Muloon was right and he had been jealous.

  In the comms room the radio beeped.

  ‘Sammy again?’

  ‘Doubt it. We just signed off. You want me to get it?’ Edie said.

  ‘No, I’ll go.’ He crossed the room and went past her into the corridor. It was Larsen wanting to know when he’d be down to sign off the last of the cargo. No talk of one last long, boozy onboard dinner. Another tradition gone. He promised to swing by as soon as he could. He signed off and went back into the office where Edie was sitting, in Stevie’s chair, lost in thought, absent-mindedly braiding her hair. Her head shot up when she heard him and a fragile smile bloomed briefly on her face without reaching her eyes.

  He knew then there was something she wasn’t telling him.

  20

  Sonia Gutierrez approached Glacier Ridge from the coastal road, where she was less likely to be spotted. The track took her as far as the bird cliffs then up onto the ridge itself. From there she turned off and bumped over the willow to the crude boundary fence. Clambering from her ATV and checking that she was not being observed, she pulled up the wire and slunk underneath.

  For the first few days after the discovery of Martha’s body Sonia had thought of the girl’s death, tragic though it was, as a kind of sorry sideshow to the main event. But she was beginning to see that it had lifted a rock and dark things had scuttled out and headed for the shadows and it was her job to make sure they were not lost. Somewhere, someone didn’t want Glacier Ridge cleaned up and they were prepared to do whatever they had to – including, perhaps, murder – to ensure it wasn’t. What she didn’t know was why. But she meant to find out.

  She wandered along the old track, picking her way through the debris of frost-heaved concrete and rusted metal, among the remnants of buildings ruined by years of freezing and thawing, and thought about the past. For centuries Britain, the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark and Sweden had battled it out for ownership of the Arctic, treating it as nothing more than a blank canvas onto which they could paint their flags. The desires and needs of the Inuit people, who had made the place their home for thousands of years and for whom the idea of owning land – in the sense of legally possessing it – was an affront to the natural order, had been completely ignored. It was only in the last few decades that Inuit had entered the fray and begun to voice their ancestral claims to the territory and its resources.

  Now, she sensed, the terms of engagement were shifting. In one way, the annual Canadian military patrol had come too late. The battle was no longer between nation states or even between Inuit and nation states, but between land developers, oil and gas companies, mining and mineral extractors and shipping interests. If development of the Arctic was to take any account of the people living there, Inuit would have to divert their attentions away from national politics and take on the corporations and the institutions working in the Arctic directly. If they did nothing there would come a time in the not too distant future when they would find themselves effectively living on reservations surrounded by mineral mines and oil derricks. The thought of that hollowed her heart.

  She stopped at a high point and took in the layout of the old radar station. A rough, dry wind whistled over from the northwest. Clumps of summer flowers had blossomed in the shelter of south-facing walls and some cottonheads scrambled along the water run-off at the edges of the pathways. Caribou had left tracks and there were a few scattered hare droppings but to the unknowing eye it looked as though no human being had set foot on the site for decades. Sonia knew this was an illusion. In fact, dozens of surveyors and clean-up engineers had tramped through the place over the years since its closure.

  On the visit she’d made the day after Martha’s body was found, she’d come across a bunch of tundra flowers in one of the outbuildings. Out of curiosity she went back there now to see whether whoever had left them had returned. She allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness. After a while the earth floor resolved itself and she saw it was sprinkled with mosses and tiny patches of lichen. A single pink campion trembled beside the window. It appeared that the flower man or woman hadn’t come back.

  From there she took herself to the northern boundary of the site facing the patchwork of black-water pools and bitter-looking mud of Lake Turngaluk. Palliser had partially enclosed the area in police tape, as though the lake was itself a crime against the surrounding tundra. The lake had never been the focus of her energies. The environmental impact report suggested that the contamination in that area was low level. Some tar, petroleum, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene, dioxin and heavy metal deposits. It had recommended lake drainage, but that was as far as it went. There was an undeniably creepy atmosphere about the place. She could understand why the locals avoided it and said it was taboo. Inuit always took their cue from nature and there was something about Lake Turngaluk that nature didn’t recognize as its own.

  It was the landfill site to one side of the lake that was of particular interest now. From her scrutiny of the plans she believed the area marked the position of what would once have been the underground bunker and it was the bunker that was somehow key. There were too many anomalies surrounding its construction; the fact that it had been commissioned by the Department of Defence and not by the Canadian or US military who were jointly responsible for the site, then left off the plans and only made reference to once it had been stripped of its original purpose and filled in. Why would you keep anything in a bunker unless you wanted it hidden? And why would you leave it off any plans unless at some point you wanted to be able to deny it was ever there?

  The track edged around the site and dipped down and around the lake but from her vantage now she could see there was a more direct route to the landfill area, down the rocky scree. Shouldering her backpack, she picked her way through and twenty minutes later found herself standing at the spot. It was larger than it had looked from the top of the ridge and she could see now that there was considerable subsidence, which had been disguised from further away by a sparse covering of low sedge. She picked a stem and crushed the leaves between her fingers but, unusually for sedge, the leaves smelled of nothing and left a sticky residue which she wiped off on her shirt. Pulling out her camera, she walked the circumference and took a few pictures, then knelt down for a closer look. The ground had been filled in with ballast and poured concrete. She tested a foot on the ballast but was not confident that it would take her weight. The place was dangerous but there were no notices, no warning signs or other structures around it.

  She started to make her way back to the
ridge. The wind picked up, whistling across the tundra from the northwest towards the sea. About halfway up the incline, she spotted half-a-dozen men in military uniform busying themselves unloading several rolls of razor wire and what looked like fencing from a utility vehicle. A jeep sat off to one side. She stopped for a moment, breathing in the sweet Arctic air, trying to figure out what was going on. She hadn’t heard them arrive – the sound of the engine and their voices must have been obscured by the wind – and it was a shock now to see them there. Could it be that the clean-up had been given the go-ahead after all? It surely looked that way. A pulse of adrenalin tapped her temple and she moved ahead, picking a path along the loose scree towards the truck, waving and shouting. As she ran, a needling thought ran through her. Neither Klinsman nor Palliser had been courteous enough to update her with this latest development. Well, that hardly mattered now. She found herself grinning, her foggy mood burned off in the fierce light of relief. This was Canada after all, not some chaotic and impoverishing military dictatorship. Here, of all places, the law was king.

  As she approached, the officer in charge left his spot beside the jeep and came over to meet her. She held out a hand. ‘I’m Sonia Gutierrez, the attorney for the hamlet of Kuujuaq.’ If he had heard her name before, it didn’t seem to register now. She went on. ‘How long are you expecting this to take?’

  He raised his eyebrows as though surprised by the question. She thought she detected a little impatience too.

  ‘We should have it all wrapped up by this afternoon, ma’am. Is that your ATV over there?’ He pointed.

  ‘I meant for the whole programme?’ The agreement included an estimated time frame but it didn’t hurt to check with the people on the ground.

  ‘Like I said. A few hours.’

  A soldier bustled up, saluted and asked his boss where to begin setting the fence posts. The officer pointed along a line marked with yellow pegs, and told the soldier he’d be along to advise in a few minutes. As the soldier saluted again and walked away, the officer turned his attentions once more to Sonia.