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

by M. J. McGrath

  IRG categorically forbids.

  That name again, Iain Rogers-Garvin, Associate Minister for Defence, this time actively stymieing what was supposed to have been an independent report into contamination at the Glacier Ridge DEW station. Here was proof that the department had actively interfered in a supposedly independent assessment report then, finally, buried it and replaced it with their own.

  Last time they’d spoken, Sonia had picked up Klinsman’s uneasiness about his role as Department of Defence stoodge. If the colonel didn’t already know about this, then it might be the piece of evidence he needed to help him begin to push back. It was worth a try.

  • • •

  The guard at the Camp Nanook sentry gate informed her that the colonel wasn’t seeing any visitors. She’d already allowed for this possibility.

  ‘You won’t mind if I use the bathroom? I’ve been here before, so I remember where it is.’

  The guard looked uncomfortable, then relented, on condition that she leave her vehicle at the barrier and wasn’t long about it. Sonia slipped under the barrier and along the boardwalk. At the corner she turned back to check that the guard had returned to his screen, then slipped around a corner and hurried towards the administration block. Klinsman was in his office. The instant he saw her, his hand went to the phone.

  ‘Really? For a woman?’

  Klinsman flushed and waved Sonia to a seat. His eyes cut to the clock on the wall. ‘I’ll give you four minutes.’

  Sonia smiled to herself. This was just like court. She suddenly felt very firmly on home turf.

  ‘I have evidence that the installation at Glacier Ridge was more than a DEW radar station and that it was engaged in covert activities during the seventies and eighties,’ she began.

  Klinsman looked up from his desk briefly and shrugged. His indifference took her by surprise.

  ‘It was the Cold War,’ he said blandly.

  She tried again.

  ‘I can also prove that the Defence Department was actively manipulating impact and assessment reports on the decontamination. Which was illegal at the time.’ ‘Prove’ was maybe stretching it, but right now that didn’t matter.

  Klinsman glanced at the clock again. He’d already decided that she was wasting his time.

  ‘I’m sure that’s all very interesting but you need to make your representations to the appropriate body, Miss Gutierrez. Now, if you don’t mind?’ He leaned forward in his chair as if about to stand and see her out.

  She lifted a manicured hand.

  ‘As I recall you said four minutes, colonel. Unless time moves more quickly at these latitudes, I believe it’s been two.’

  Klinsman sighed but conceded the point.

  ‘I know about the underground bunker. The only rationale for a bunker that size is armaments. My money is on nuclear.’

  Klinsman blinked. Something hard moved across his face.

  ‘If you need to speak with us again, Ms Gutierrez, I suggest you call counsel office.’ His fingers tapped on the desk.

  She stood and brushed herself down. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

  • • •

  The hotel phone was ringing as she entered. She picked up.

  ‘Sonia? This is Chris Tetlow. Doesn’t anyone up there believe in answer machines?’

  ‘You got me now.’

  ‘Listen, Son, my editor called. She just got an anonymous call to the tip line. Look, this is kind of awkward, but it was stuff about your past. Bad stuff.’

  24

  It took Derek a few seconds to figure out the owner of the voice. It was his old pal from Yellowknife days, Milt Drei, returning his call of a day or two ago.

  ‘I got some news for you, bud.’

  When Derek met him up in Yellowknife, Drei had been a newly discharged Gulf War vet trying to make a new life for himself in the police force. These days he worked at the Mounties headquarters in Ottawa in a white-collar crime unit. Derek had asked him to run a background check on Chip Muloon, find out if he needed to worry about the fella. Drei had access to all kinds of databases and wasn’t interested in any kind of probable cause bullshit.

  ‘Appreciate that, Milt. Good of you to call on a weekend.’

  ‘Nothing’s too much trouble for my old pal,’ Drei said amiably. ‘How’s life in Kuujuaq anyway? I’m guessing you’ve been kinda lonely since Misha left.’ Derek felt a needle inching up his spine. Why did Drei have to mention the nightmare that had been his two years on and off with Misha and remind him that, in spite of everything, he still missed her sometimes?

  ‘Oh, you know, getting by,’ he said.

  Drei took the hint and moved on. ‘Well, listen, I got something peachy for you.’ The disembodied voice crackled over an increasingly poor phone line. ‘Muloon looks squeaky clean from the outside. Guy hasn’t even got a speeding ticket. Your regular angel. But you asked me to check if he had any connection to the military, so I went into his employment records. Five years back he was working in health strategy for the Nova Scotia provincial government. Then he kind of went off the radar for a bit before turning up at U Calgary.’

  ‘He claims he’s doing research into the long-term health impacts of the relocation of Inuit from Quebec up to Ellesmere in the 1950s,’ Derek said.

  ‘That’s what it says on the U Calgary website too. But his money’s not coming from the university. It’s coming from the Defence Department. Kinda weird for a civilian health monitoring project. So anyways, old Milt did some digging around. I still got a few friends from back in the glory days. Seems that Muloon spent his lost weekend working out of Kabul as a special advisor. Hard to know what he actually did out there, but I very much doubt he was singing show tunes in hospitals. I had to guess, I’d say intelligence gathering had something to do with it.’

  ‘On a health brief?’

  ‘Some of our boys out there came back real sick. Gulf War Syndrome. Gave the Defence Department a lot of grief.’

  Derek thought back and remembered seeing some stuff in the papers about soldiers complaining of nausea, fatigue, and the government, foreseeing a class action suit, trying to insinuate that the men were nut jobs.

  ‘It may be Muloon was monitoring the troops. I could try to find out, but in all honesty, there’s so much secrecy surrounding that stuff, I don’t know how far I’d get.’

  Derek reached for a cigarette. ‘No, thanks, Milt. That’s plenty.’ So Edie was right, he thought. ‘I owe you a beer.’

  ‘Come down this way sometime,’ Drei said. ‘Meet the wife, kids.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Derek was putting down the phone when Edie appeared with Sonia Gutierrez following on behind.

  ‘Good time to talk?’ This from Edie. The two women had taken off their boots and outerwear, which suggested that, like most of Edie’s questions, this one was rhetorical. ‘Sonia has a progress report.’

  They sat. He offered Sonia a drink and poured a couple of shots of whisky for the two of them. He’d begun to warm to the lawyer, to admire her tenacity even, but as he listened to her recount her visit to Camp Nanook and the phone call from Tetlow a growing feeling of disappointment came over him. Edie keeping secrets, now Gutierrez stealing from her clients. Why was it he always fell for the sparkle of new snow when it only served to hide the rot underneath?

  ‘I’m not proud of it but I had my reasons,’ Gutierrez went on. ‘My nephew Albertito, my sister Carlita’s son, needed surgery in the US. Either I came up with the money or . . .’ She swung her legs in the chair, uncomfortable with the memory. ‘I raided the escrow account of a land claim I was working on at the time in Winnipeg. The client agreed not to go to court. I had my licence suspended and I spent the next five years paying the money back, with interest.’ Derek gave her a hard stare. ‘OK, so that’s not the point. It was a shitty thing to do.’ She leaned in. ‘Look, if a civilian was being threatened, that would be Ellesmere Island Police business, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You asking me for
protection?’ Derek said. You had to respect the woman’s chutzpah.

  Batting away a mosquito, Gutierrez said, ‘Chris Tetlow is an old friend of mine. If I go see him I can probably persuade him not to publish this. But you folks don’t know the Defence Department like I do. This isn’t gonna stop here. They’re gonna keep coming after me until they get what they want. To shut me up.’ She lifted a finger to her lips and let it hover there.

  Derek sent Edie a warning not to react. The decision to pursue the Martha Salliaq case clandestinely meant that they needed to tread carefully, particularly with someone like Gutierrez, who had a direct line to Klinsman, whatever her claims that someone was trying to smear her.

  ‘My guess is that the military police will charge Namagoose and Saxby and the case will be closed.’

  Sonia stared at him with incredulous eyes. ‘Those two men are chicken feed. Don nadies. Believe me, the department has bigger things on its mind.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ms Gutierrez, this just isn’t our case to investigate any more.’

  The lawyer sucked on her teeth and rose to leave. ‘We have a saying in Guatemala, sergeant. You spend too long counting the corn, someone will steal the farm.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Derek said.

  A few moments after she’d left Tom Silliq appeared at the door. His wife, Susie, followed on behind.

  ‘I told her I already came to you with this,’ Silliq growled, thumbing Susie. ‘I said that’s what young men do, they go off sometimes, but she don’t wanna listen to me.’

  ‘Rashid hasn’t shown up for three shifts and Tom has been round to his cabin twice but there’s no sign of him,’ Susie added.

  It did seem odd, Derek thought, though hardly a priority.

  ‘Have you been up to the trout lake?’ Edie cut in. ‘He told me he goes fishing up there sometimes.’

  ‘You think it’s my job to go running after strangers, like a puppy?’ Silliq hawked up a gobbet of phlegm, looked around for somewhere to spit it and, seeing nowhere, swallowed it back again. ‘Missing persons is police work, ain’t it? You find him.’

  Susie blinked an apology.

  ‘We’ll try to check it out,’ Derek said.

  ‘You said that last time.’

  ‘I’m saying it again.’

  Derek waited for the sound of their footsteps to fade. He slipped a cigarette from the packet on his desk and lit up.

  ‘We got no reason to connect this kid to Martha, do we?’

  ‘He said he hardly knew her and what he did know he disapproved of. I think he keeps himself to himself.’

  Derek started playing with the pencil on his desk again. ‘You believe that?’

  Edie shrugged. ‘I guess.’

  Derek took this in. ‘OK, well, I need to head out to the trout lake anyway. Wildlife wants a report on the health of fish stocks. It won’t take more than an hour and I could use the thinking time.’ The smoke curled up from his mouth.

  Reaching for her parka, Edie said, ‘I’ll go look at the cabin.’

  Derek cracked a weary smile. ‘Thanks, partner.’ At the door he stopped and turned. ‘If you knew something that might have a bearing on the case, even something small, you know it would be your duty to tell me, don’t you?’

  Edie took a breath then nodded, but it was the breath that said it all.

  • • •

  A thin layer of tundra dust had settled over the interior of Alfasi’s cabin. No sign of his summer-weight outerwear in the snow porch. No food in the kitchen. The way Edie figured it, the kid had probably gone out with an Inuk family to their summer camp, or maybe joined one of the launches that took hunters to Hell Gate. Forgot to tell his boss. Perhaps he thought now there were no soldiers coming to town, Susie Silliq wouldn’t need him any more. Decided to leave the Shack before he was pushed.

  She walked into the bedroom. In front of her was a small chest of drawers containing clothes, immaculately folded; mostly fleeces and winter-weight garb but among them hats bleached brilliant white and some kind of ceremonial robe. Above that sat a short shelf, empty save for two green plastic bookends between which, pasted to the wall, was a piece of paper filled with hand-drawn Arabic script, an excerpt from the Qur’an, Edie guessed. On the nightstand sat a pretty bouquet of tundra flowers. She went over. They’d been tied with distinctive yellow cord and were in the process of drying, the outer petals already crisp, but there was no card to indicate either who they were from or for whom they might once have been intended. Intriguing though. She’d never known a man pick flowers for himself.

  It was late when she got back. Derek wasn’t in so she left him a note, went into the kitchen and fixed up a batch of bannock bread. While it was in the pan she heated the last of the soup and poured it into a thermos. Taking her meal back outside, she swung open the tent canvas and crept inside, looking forward to a quiet hour or two alone with her thoughts and a long, recharging sleep, but to her surprise, she saw Sammy Inukpuk sitting on the sleeping skins at the back of the tent, chipping at a piece of soapstone. She went over and swapped breath with him, nose to nose, the old way.

  ‘What you doing here?’

  ‘Waiting for my supper,’ Sammy said. ‘See you’ve brought it.’

  She squatted beside him. ‘You’re gonna have to earn it first.’

  Her ex reached into the bag beside him and pulled out a couple of juicy char. ‘These do?’

  She turned the fish over in her hands. ‘Maybe. Depends how long you’re thinking of imposing yourself on me.’

  ‘Cousin Eric lent me his boat,’ Sammy said. ‘I thought I’d stay a few days, take Willa fishing.’

  Edie poured the soup and handed him the mug.

  ‘So I guess you and Nancy broke up?’ The couple were on and off like a pair of switches. Sammy had a habit of showing up at Edie’s door whenever the switch was in the off position. They joked about it. Sort of joked.

  ‘How are you and that qalunaat getting along?’ he said.

  ‘If you mean Chip Muloon, we’re not.’

  Sammy put his mug to his mouth and mumbled into his soup.

  ‘You got something to say, Sammy Inukpuk?’

  ‘Well, now you ask, actually I do. How in darned’s name did you ever think you were going to get along with a qalunaat?’

  Edie finished chewing on her bannock. ‘You’re forgetting, my dad was a qalunaat. Was or is.’ She hadn’t seen the man in about a quarter century.

  Sammy finished up his soup. They looked at each other for a moment. ‘Well, Edie Kiglatuk, I guess you’re gonna be needing a shoulder to cry on.’ Her back fizzed a little where his arm went around it. Their faces were so close now that she could feel his breath on her cheek.

  ‘A shoulder will do for a start,’ she said, giving him the eye.

  25

  Derek got back from the trout lake, read Edie’s note and went to bed. If Alfasi hadn’t turned up by the morning he’d call his employers, but he didn’t see any real need to worry. Young men came up to the Arctic looking for adventure and for the most part they found it. Then they went back down south, got mortgages, wives, kids and spent the rest of their lives reliving the glory days. Alfasi was off somewhere making memories. Right now he was low on Derek’s list of priorities. By the time he’d taken a shower and slipped under the bedcovers Derek had forgotten all about the kid.

  As usual, sleep eluded him. Every summer he went through the same thing, wondering how much longer he could take life on Ellesmere while at the same time knowing he could never leave. Part way through the night he pinged off his eye mask and checked the time. It was 4.30. In a couple of hours the workday would begin. Rising from his bed, he went out to the back shed to feed his lemmings. They too were awake and energetically going about their business and it made him feel better to watch them for a bit. They were dumb, instinctive creatures but they’d managed to eke out an existence all the way up here on the margins of life and you had to take your hat off to them because, hol
y freaking walrus, it took some doing sometimes.

  Returning to the detachment, he put on some water to boil and took a shower. Then he sat down with a bowl of ramen noodles and opened the Martha Salliaq file. A tiny part of him was hoping things would turn out the way he’d presented them to Sonia Gutierrez, that the Killer Whales would be proven to have been Martha’s killers, that Klinsman would charge them and that the whole thing would go away. But the better part of him thought it was worth investigating Muloon further just in case. If he was the valuable Defence Department asset Milt Drei made him out to be, then who was to say the military weren’t about to frame Namagoose and Saxby in order to protect him? Gutierrez seemed to think they were capable of it. He hadn’t liked the way Muloon had been when questioned about the knife. His air of smug invincibility. If Muloon had anything to do with Martha’s death, anything at all, Derek wanted to be the one to wipe the grin off his face.

  The aroma of roasting meat met his nostrils. All of a sudden his ramen noodles didn’t taste so good any more. He went to the window. Outside Edie’s tent a large goose was twirling on a home-made spit over a heather and willow fire. The woman herself was sitting beside it, stuffing what looked like a pillow with white feathers. A kettle sat on a Coleman stove beside the fire. Steam rose from the spout. The scene was so perfect it made his eyes hurt. He knocked on the glass. Edie looked up and beckoned to him. For a moment he felt a twinge of something – desire maybe – but then Sammy Inukpuk appeared in his field of vision and whatever it was faded.

  He went out onto the steps and took a deep breath in. The air smelled wonderfully of home. Only a woman could make the air smell that way. For a split second it made him think of Misha. But his ex had never been that kind of a woman.

  ‘Breakfast?’ Edie was holding up a mug of something.

  He came down. The tea was as she always made it, strong as an ox and unnaturally sweet. He took a couple of gulps and grimaced.