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

by M. J. McGrath

  When Edie got back to the detachment there were six messages from Derek on the voicemail, each sounding more worried than the last. Edie called the number he’d left. The night desk answered and told her that the sergeant was up at Iqaluit airport and they’d get a message to him. She waited by the phone. Moments later a wired, anxious-sounding Derek came on the line.

  ‘You scared the hell out of me.’

  She filled him in on everything but her injuries. Didn’t feel like telling him she’d busted her own nose.

  ‘Tell the truth, I feel kinda dumb. I couldn’t even get out of him what he was working on. Said I wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘The man always was a condescending prick.’ His tone grew softer. ‘You OK? You sound kinda gummy.’

  ‘Summer cold.’ She glanced at herself in the reflection on the computer screen and wished she hadn’t.

  ‘My guess is Muloon will have gone to Camp Nanook. I don’t think he’ll be bothering you again. Go get some rest, Edie. It’s not over yet. You’re gonna need all the strength you can muster.’

  • • •

  She went back to her tent, exhausted, and found Sammy sitting on the sleeping skins, smoking. She sat down beside him and he put an arm around her shoulder.

  She leaned in to him and allowed herself to be comforted by the warmth of his body.

  ‘I spoke with Willa,’ he said. The smoke from his cigarette curled upwards. ‘I know you two have had your differences, but he’s a good kid, Edie. He has a big heart. Sure, he went off the rails awhile, but he’s straightening himself out. The Rangers, Lizzie, he’s making it work. You need to trust him more.’

  She knew Sammy was right, but that only made it more painful. The first step to trusting the people around her was to trust herself. But that was going to be a lifetime’s work. Maybe more. And right now she couldn’t do anything except rest.

  ‘Let’s get some sleep,’ she said.

  She turned over inside her sleeping bag and lay awake for a while thinking about Willa and Joe and Sammy in the old days, when they were all a family, and she forgot about the pain in her nose and Chip Muloon and even Martha Salliaq and slept.

  She woke to find Sammy sitting in the same corner, wrung-out and smoking, his rifle in his lap. She checked her watch. It was eight o’clock. Sunlight blasted through the canvas.

  ‘You been on guard all night?’

  ‘Most of it.’

  Her hand went to her face. ‘How’s my nose?’

  ‘Like a walrus with a cocaine habit.’

  She got up, stretched and pulled on some outerwear. ‘I’m gonna make us some breakfast.’ She knew he’d be expecting there to be a renewal of the closeness between them. That wasn’t something she could allow. ‘Why don’t you check the weather? If it’s looking good this might be the day for you to make the trip back to Autisaq?’

  He threw her his wounded look. She returned it with a quiet smile. They’d been through this a hundred times.

  ‘You know how it is when we’re together for any length of time. It starts off OK then one of us opens a bottle. Right now, Sammy, I don’t trust myself not to be the bottle-opener.’

  Outside she took a deep breath. Somewhere beneath the dank, vegetable scent she could already detect the chill, electric tang of winter. Something in her needed to be away from Sammy and from the settlement and back out on the land.

  • • •

  After breakfast she said goodbye to Sammy and, taking the coastal track, drove along to the bird cliffs and parked up on the beach, keying off her ATV. Above her the cliffs thrust skywards. Leaving her vehicle, she clambered up the path to the summit. From here there was a view across the high plateau of Glacier Ridge to where it tumbled down to meet the plain below. Beside her stood an inukshuk – a stone figure – pointing away from Lake Turngaluk. She moved forward, trudging across gravel and lichened rock, scoured and dried by the wind, until she reached the new security fence. From here she could see beyond the remnants of concrete and Cold War rubble to the spot where Martha Salliaq’s body had been found. The surface was cracked and stained rusty brown. She thought about Martha, wondering if this was where she had come to dream, long before she’d met Rashid Alfasi, Jacob Namagoose, Skeeter Saxby or Chip Muloon.

  She walked back to the inukshuk and stood beside it, following the direction of its pointing hand with her eyes, pondering what it was about Lake Turngaluk that made even stone men turn away. A surprising thought filtered into her consciousness and began to take root in her mind and for a long time she was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the detachment plane until it had passed directly overhead and was banking before making its approach into Kuujuaq.

  By the time she got back Derek’s ATV was already sitting outside the detachment. She stomped up the steps into the office, shouting his name.

  The man himself appeared from the kitchenette a moment later, carrying a tray on which sat two steaming bowls.

  ‘I got us some real food.’ Her face stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Jesus Jones, did Muloon do that?’

  ‘No, why, you think it doesn’t suit me?’

  ‘On the contrary. If I was a walrus I wouldn’t be able to keep my flippers off you.’

  She laughed and took a bowl from the tray.

  ‘That’s more or less what Sammy said.’

  The food he’d cooked was some kind of hamburger, caribou she suspected, but whatever it was, it took some chewing and the state of her nose made her unable to taste it. While her jaw worked Derek filled her in on his trip to Iqaluit. He’d come back gloomy about the prospects of concluding the case.

  ‘You see those cop shows on the TV where they have a team of forensics and a team of detectives and everyone except the murderer wants to solve the crime. This is kind of opposite to that. A murder investigation where the forensics don’t show up for days, there are no teams of anything and no one gives a shit about solving the crime.’

  Edie swallowed a lump of meat. ‘We do.’

  ‘But we’re not going to solve this crime, Edie, unless we get some kind of breakthrough. All we’ve got so far are leads running into blind alleys.’ Derek rubbed his eyes. His skin was ruddy from the summer sun but where it thinned and at the temples you could see the pallor of exhaustion beneath. He flipped open his pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. ‘If I don’t get some sleep pretty soon I’ll go crazy.’

  She picked up the bowls, put them back on the tray and went out into the kitchen. Her mind ran through the thoughts she’d been having up at Glacier Ridge. She washed up the bowls and put them on the drainer to dry. The sound of raised voices reached her from the other room. Dropping the dishcloth, she came out. Joe Oolik was standing beside the door. He was wet through and dripping. His arms were flailing about and he was trying to say something but he was speaking too fast to be comprehensible. Derek had him by the shoulders and was telling him to calm down. As Edie came into the room Derek’s head swung round to meet her.

  ‘I think he’s found something.’

  Oolik was repeating the Inuktitut word for ‘trailer’.

  Edie strode over to the door. At the bottom of the steps leading from the detachment was Joe’s ATV. A soaked and crumpled tarp lay over the trailer, strapped on with elastic bungees. Edie took one look back then ran down the steps. Joe was shouting at her now, but she couldn’t hear the words above the thick pulse of her own heart. She reached the base of the steps, rushed over to the trailer and pushed the tarp aside.

  Rashid Alfasi’s eyes stared blankly up at her.

  32

  In any normal circumstances it would have seemed beyond doubt that the death of Rashid Alfasi was a suicide. When Joe Oolik found him, face up in shallow water, Alfasi was wearing a backpack weighted with rocks. A thick notebook serving as a diary lay on the table inside his cabin. On top of the notebook he’d left a photograph of Martha Salliaq at the bird cliffs matching the one Edie had found in her bedroom just after her death.
>
  It would have been usual procedure to take the body to the morgue, inform the next of kin and get started on the necessary administration in the morning. A sad fact of High Arctic life was that young men killed themselves at an alarming rate. But Rashid Alfasi was both a suspect in Martha Salliaq’s murder and on secondment to the military and Derek was concerned that, if he didn’t act quickly, the Defence Department would find some excuse to remove his jurisdiction.

  And so over the next few hours he busied himself with transporting the body into the morgue and making the necessary phone calls to the medical examiner and the police in Vancouver and filling in incident reports and other paperwork. While he worked Edie scanned the pages of the notebook, trying to put together the pieces of Alfasi’s life that might tell the story of his death.

  What was immediately clear was that Rashid Alfasi had been a hopelessly conflicted young man, torn between his identity as a Muslim and the paths he had taken. From Edie’s reading of the notebook, it looked as if two incidents had come together in the same day which, in Alfasi’s view, had made his life unendurable.

  From what Edie could piece together, it seemed that Rashid Alfasi had been seeing Martha in secret for about five months. They met mostly at the bird cliffs and sometimes, when the weather was bad, in one of the abandoned buildings at Glacier Ridge. The meetings were marked in the diary, along with the occasional annotation ‘left flowers’, presumably to mark those times that Martha couldn’t get away but Alfasi wanted her to know he had waited for her. The diary entry on the Friday before Martha died was of particular interest. Long and anguished, the writing by turns compressed and scrawling, it narrated a series of momentous events in Alfasi’s life.

  Alfasi had been working at the weather station. In the afternoon, he had called his parents in Vancouver from the satphone there. It was his mother’s birthday and he’d wanted to wish her a happy day. But the conversation drifted into more painful territory. Evidently, Alfasi hadn’t told his parents about his secondment to the military. But they had found out from Alfasi’s brother. They disagreed with the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan and saw their son’s secondment as a betrayal. Alfasi’s mother had threatened never to speak to her son again.

  This must have been echoing in his head as Alfasi went to meet Martha that Friday after school. According to the notebook, he didn’t tell Martha about the row with his parents. Instead, they talked about Martha’s desire to move to Vancouver and study there. She wanted Alfasi to move with her. They could be married. ‘I imagined what my mom would say to that and panicked,’ he wrote in the notebook. He told Martha to forget the move because he didn’t want to be with her any more.

  Alfasi had told them the rest of the story when they’d interviewed him. He ran because he knew that his relationship with Martha would be discovered eventually and he supposed that he would get the blame for her death.

  By the time Derek had finished with the papers and Edie had been through the notebook it was early morning. There was no point in trying to get some sleep. Anna Mackie was due to arrive before too long and Derek needed to stay awake in order to make arrangements with the Vancouver Police family liaison. Alfasi’s parents had already decided that they wanted to fly to Ellesmere to pick up their son’s body.

  Derek made coffee for himself and tea for Edie and they sat in the office and talked about Edie’s findings.

  ‘You think he could have killed her?’ Derek asked after Edie had outlined Alfasi’s version of events.

  ‘Unlikely, I’d say. His story adds up. It explains why Martha was upset on Friday night and why she took the Killer Whales to the Shoreline Bar, knowing Alfasi would be working in the Shack at the back. Wanted to make him jealous.’ It also explained what it was she was trying to tell Willa, Edie thought, though she kept this to herself. ‘Namagoose said Martha had told him she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. Turns out he was telling the truth.’

  ‘Any firm evidence as to why Alfasi killed himself?’

  ‘Nothing you can take directly from the notebook. There’s no suicide note,’ Edie said. ‘I had to guess, it was a combination of things. Family disgrace for one. Then the sense that he was about to be accused and bring more shame on his family. Guilt, maybe. If he hadn’t finished it with Martha she wouldn’t have hooked up with Namagoose and Saxby.’

  She watched Derek pour himself another cup of coffee and suppress a yawn.

  ‘That damned notebook tells us a whole lot about Martha Salliaq except for the one thing we most need to know. Who killed her?’

  33

  A few hours later Anna Mackie’s plane touched down in Kuujuaq. Edie and Derek were at the landing strip to meet her.

  ‘I hope you got some strong coffee brewing,’ Mackie said. ‘It was kind of an early start.’ She registered the state of Edie’s nose. ‘That looks sore.’

  ‘It’s how we’re wearing them up here this summer,’ Edie said.

  ‘Funny,’ Mackie said. She didn’t seem to be in the mood for humour.

  Derek cut in. ‘You didn’t return my call the other day.’

  Mackie touched the palm of her right hand to her forehead in an unconvincing gesture intended to convey ditziness. No one less ditzy than Mackie.

  The pilot had opened up the hold and was passing out the forensic bags. Derek grabbed a couple and heaved them onto the trailer.

  He suggested Edie drive Mackie and the baggage trailer out into the parking lot then strode off after the pilot to complete some paperwork and speak with Alice and Lizzie Salliaq who had accompanied Charlie on the same flight.

  ‘It’s such a tragedy, the region losing its young men in this way,’ Mackie said. ‘Derek told me he left a note?’ Neither Ransom nor Mackie knew about Rashid Alfasi’s connection to Martha Salliaq yet. Derek hadn’t wanted to give them any excuse to stall.

  ‘More of a diary.’ They reached Derek’s vehicle. Mackie ran her eyes over the bags, mentally ticking them off, and the two women began to transfer them onto the police trailer.

  ‘So there’s nothing I should be looking out for outside a suicide by drowning.’ Mackie voiced this as a statement, not a question. She caught Edie’s eye and held her gaze, eager for affirmation.

  ‘No,’ Edie said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Relief came over the ME’s face.

  • • •

  Derek reappeared and took the key Edie handed him. She told him to go ahead with Mackie. Being at the airstrip had reminded her to check and see if Sonia Gutierrez’s vehicle was somewhere in the vicinity. Edie hadn’t seen her around for a couple of days and the last time they’d spoken the lawyer had seemed anxious about her safety. In all the tumult of the events of the past couple of days Edie had forgotten about her. Now she remembered her saying she was thinking about going to Iqaluit. Edie hoped that was where she was now. After a quick check of the parking lot and the administrative building, she finally spotted the lawyer’s vehicle hiding behind a bank of rotten snow at the end of the landing strip, parked up and empty. It struck her as a strange place to leave it. She went back inside the terminal building, intending to check the passenger manifest, and ran into Markoosie Pitoq, who was standing in the corridor, smoking.

  ‘How’s your brother-in-law?’ Lizzie and Alice had been told the news about Alfasi. They’d decided to keep it from Charlie until he was stronger. Edie didn’t know whether or not Markoosie knew.

  ‘We’re waiting for the gurney trailer. You can see for yourself, he’s in there.’ Markoosie flipped his head to indicate a side room off the main terminal building. He followed her in.

  A qalunaat nurse was standing beside the old man’s bed, checking his IV. She said she’d accompanied the patient from Iqaluit. Kind eyes. Something dry in the smile. Edie introduced herself and went over to the old man.

  ‘Avasirngulik, it’s me.’ Charlie’s eyes opened and a half-grin appeared on his face.

  ‘The Lemming Police’s girl.’ He chuckled weakly then blinked.
His face wrinkled with concern. ‘What happened to your nose?’

  ‘Nothing important.’ What she saw lying in the bed was a dying man. ‘How are you?’ she said.

  He raised his eyebrows and beckoned to the nurse with his hand. ‘Tell the girl what the doctor said. I can’t remember all the names.’

  ‘Dr Applebaum’s diagnosis is acute myoblastic leukaemia. It’s sometimes called “white blood”. Unfortunately Mr Salliaq has refused any further treatment, so the doctor had no choice but to let him come back home.’

  Salliaq chuckled. ‘I’m non-compliant, apparently.’

  ‘Among other things,’ the nurse said, with feeling.

  The old man sighed. ‘These people are crazy. They think they can cure “white blood” by pumping me full of white blood. But I said to them, the only blood that’s going to run in these veins is Inuit blood.’ He gave a little snort. ‘The doctor says that’s racist, but he doesn’t understand our traditions.’

  ‘I see,’ Edie said. Her inclination was to agree with the doctor but there wasn’t much point in saying so. ‘Did you talk to Sonia Gutierrez about this?’ Edie wondered if there was some legal loophole which might keep everyone happy.

  ‘I haven’t seen her or spoken to her,’ Charlie said.

  Odd, Edie thought. Worryingly so. If Gutierrez really was in Iqaluit, wouldn’t she have visited the old man in hospital? The two were close. She made her excuses and went to the door, promising to come and see Charlie at the nursing station. Markoosie followed her out and laid a hand on her elbow to indicate that he had something to say to her.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about the amulet, the one I made for Martha. I’d like it returned. It still has power. I would like my brother-in-law to have it.’

  His face told her that he was serious. For some reason she thought about the tupilaq she’d found outside his house.