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

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

  She left him in the corridor and made her way to the office to check the passenger manifests for the last week.

  Sonia Gutierrez’s name was nowhere on any of them.

  • • •

  She sensed that the hotel was empty the moment she walked in. She strode up the stairs two by two. When she got to the top she turned down the corridor and saw immediately that something was very wrong. The door to room number 7 was open and the room itself was completely empty. The sun beating through the window exposed a thin layer of newly gathered dust. She went back down to the kitchenette, opened the cupboards. A few packets of dry goods, a half-can of rancid-smelling tuna in the refrigerator, as though Gutierrez had left in a hurry. The phone log in which guests were supposed to record the destination and length of their calls had a couple of recent entries in Gutierrez’s handwriting. These suggested she’d made a call to a number in Ottawa then another to Iqaluit.

  The Ottawa number was answered by an RCMP officer who claimed to have no knowledge of Gutierrez’s call. The Iqaluit number rang directly through to Chris Tetlow at the Arctic Circular. The journalist said he hadn’t had any contact with Sonia Gutierrez since they’d spoken briefly a few days back. He said she’d usually call him when she came through Iqaluit and they’d have a drink together. He gave Edie the lawyer’s office and home number in Ottawa. If she wasn’t there he didn’t know any other place she’d be likely to have gone.

  ‘She’s kind of a workaholic,’ he explained. ‘She doesn’t really have much of a private life.’

  Edie asked Tetlow to phone the detachment if he heard from the lawyer then finished the call. Both the numbers Tetlow had given her went straight through to voicemail. She left messages but didn’t hold out much hope.

  From the downstairs hallway, she went back up to the rooms, beginning with number 7 then working her way through the rest, checking shelves, closets, peering under beds and lifting mattresses. Outside, the sun had disappeared and been replaced by wet sleet. The wind had picked up. From the windows she could see the birds on the overhead cables bobbing up and down, their feathers opened like fading flowers.

  She was about to give up when from the corner of her eye she saw something moving in the room at the end of the corridor. Her hunter’s instinct told her to crouch low and listen. From behind a door, past Sonia Gutierrez’s room, was coming a not quite regular slapping sound. She began to inch along the wall. At the door she stopped and listened. The sound continued unabated. The wet, rhythmic thwack of something swinging. She laid an ear up against the wood. The noise was definitely coming from inside. She thought about Alfasi and a sudden sickening fear came over her that Gutierrez had taken her life and was hanging in the bathroom. Fumbling for the handle, she threw open the door, which swung back then bounced a little off the weight of something lying behind it. The slapping sound continued. She felt a breeze, looked towards the window and saw the gap where it had come open; a piece of the vertical blinds had become detached and, now exposed to the rain, was swinging sodden against the window frame. Her body relaxed.

  Behind the door was a black daypack with a dark-blue trim. Inside there were a few papers annotated in what she recognized as Sonia Gutierrez’s handwriting. Either the lawyer had forgotten the bag when she’d moved the rest of her things or she’d left it there deliberately. Shouldering the bag, Edie padded down into the communal room, took a chair and emptied the papers out onto the low coffee table. There was a series of plans of Glacier Ridge, dated 1960 and 1974, what appeared to be an order for construction materials and a memorandum about the clean-up with a faint annotation reading ‘IRG categorically forbids’ ringed in pen at what looked like some later date. Pushing the papers back inside, Edie zipped up the bag, went back outside and made her way towards the nursing station.

  • • •

  The body of Rashid Alfasi lay part-covered on a gurney. Evidently, he hadn’t been long in the water when Joseph Oolik found him. There were patches of lividity on his face and his lips were set in the grimace of rigor mortis, though from the slackening around the eyes it seemed that the rigor was already beginning to leave him.

  Anna Mackie stood beside the gurney outlining her plan for the autopsy to Derek. As Edie came in she fell silent, her eyes first narrowing then slaloming between the police sergeant and his VPSO.

  ‘Now wait a minute, guys . . .’ Her arms wrapped around each other defensively. ‘What is this, an ambush?’

  As Derek explained that Rashid Alfasi’s death and Martha Salliaq’s were most likely connected, little darts of anger shot across Mackie’s face.

  ‘You should have told me. Dammit, I can’t believe you’re putting me in this situation. I told you the department made me sign a gagging order. I even mention the Salliaq case I could lose my job.’ The ME left the examination table and went over to the sink. She flipped her face mask down and leaned back against the metal, thinking.

  ‘You listen to the dead, Anna,’ Edie said. ‘That’s your job.’

  The ME let out a snort of annoyance but she knew there was no answering this. Her body softened. ‘OK, OK, I get it. You’re still on the Salliaq case.’ Her head turned, checking the room. ‘Is it safe to talk here?’

  Derek went over to an old radio sitting on the windowsill and turned it up high. The odd hoot of throat-singing filled the room.

  ‘It is now.’

  They huddled beside the radio. ‘The Defence Department sent two of its men round. Todd Ransom seemed to know all about it. They carried out a bunch of tests on Martha Salliaq’s body. Bone samples.’

  ‘Bone samples?’ Edie asked. She recalled the memorandum among Charlie Salliaq’s papers. A theme seemed to be emerging.

  ‘I wouldn’t consider that to be standard procedure in this case. Bone samples would usually only be of importance if the body was skeletonized, or if there had been sharp or blunt force injuries which might have caused fracturing or breakage.’ She glanced at the body on the gurney. ‘Were they lovers?’

  At Derek’s nod she looked away. The thought obviously pained her. Then she gathered herself and went on. ‘Bone fragmentation analysis is often used where there are gunshot wounds and in a number of other situations, none of which apply in the Martha Salliaq case. You’d biopsy bone marrow for toxicology purposes, especially if blood wasn’t available.’

  She pulled off her glasses and tried to wipe the tiredness from her face. Derek turned off the radio and the room fell silent once more.

  ‘What should I do now?’ Mackie said.

  ‘Your job, Anna.’ Derek laid a reassuring hand on the ME’s shoulder. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.’

  Mackie let out a bitter laugh. ‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.’

  • • •

  As they walked back out into the waiting room Edie updated Derek on her visit to the hotel.

  ‘I think Gutierrez left those papers somewhere they’d be found,’ Edie said. ‘She was afraid for her safety.’ She told him about the memorandum on animal bones. They looked at one another and smiled. They were getting somewhere.

  As if on cue, Luc appeared carrying a set of files. Derek beckoned him over and asked him what he knew about bone marrow. The nurse paused a moment. ‘You’re talking about Charlie.’

  ‘Should we be?’ Derek said. He had that look of intense focus Edie had seen on him once or twice before. It was the look he only pulled out of the bag on special occasions, the look which transformed him from the Boonies policeman who spent his days rounding up stray dogs to the investigator capable of cracking cases that might well have confounded entire departments of big city cops.

  ‘Charlie’s leukaemia. It’s a disease of the bone marrow.’

  Derek’s eyes were sharp enough to cut water from the beach. ‘How do you get that, Luc?’

  ‘A variety of ways. Exposure to toxins, radiation.’

  ‘Contamination.’


  ‘Could be,’ Luc said.

  Derek turned to Edie but she was already one step ahead of him.

  ‘I’ll go see the old man, tell him we need to look at his papers.’

  • • •

  Charlie Salliaq was propped up on a pillow, IVs leading from both arms to a frame from which several bags hung. Beside the bed a heart monitor peeped like a hungry fledgling. As they went in, he turned his head very slowly, a thin smile on his lips. His face looked as broken as frost heave, the skin pale as winter.

  Edie took a seat on the blue plastic chair beside his bed. The room smelled of sickness and chemicals.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Lemming Police’s girl. I should have that blood transfusion.’

  ‘You’re an old fool not to.’

  ‘What business you got with an old fool, then?’

  ‘I was your daughter’s teacher, avasirngulik.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes clouding over. His chest heaved and for a moment he struggled with the effort to contain whatever was in his heart.

  ‘You familiar with the clear-up agreement for Glacier Ridge, Charlie?’

  The old man shrugged. ‘Was once, I guess. But all that stuff got crowded out of my head. You’d be better asking the lawyer.’

  She decided that telling him Sonia Gutierrez was missing might be too much for him so she asked to see his copies of the documents. The old man described a box in the shed at his house.

  ‘If I’d known what trouble it was gonna cause, I’d never have started that damned claim,’ he said.

  At the door Edie turned back to him. ‘Your job there, at Glacier Ridge. What did you do?’

  The old man’s forehead wrinkled and he rubbed his eyes with a skinny hand.

  ‘Nothing special,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t let Inuit do much except routine maintenance, janitor stuff.’

  ‘You think about that transfusion,’ she said.

  34

  Edie and Derek stayed at the Salliaqs’ house only for as long as it took to pack the old man’s files into a Chinese laundry bag. The place still smelled of fingerprint powder and forensic solvents. The family had been back only fleetingly. Lizzie and Alice preferred to be at the Pitoqs’ house these days. Edie could see why.

  Back at the detachment they split the contents of the bag in two.

  ‘What are we even looking for here?’ Edie asked. She wondered how any of these densely typed sheets and scribbled memoranda were going to help track the whereabouts of Sonia Gutierrez or uncover once and for all who had killed Martha Salliaq. She shifted through the pile. Paper trails, memoranda, letters of agreement, this wasn’t the way they did things up here. She heard herself give a little sigh.

  Derek paused in his reading. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. These here are qalunaat footprints. They are the trails that white fellas leave. You want to beat these guys, you got to play them at their own game.’

  Retreating to Stevie Killik’s desk she bundled the paper into a neat pile and scanned the top sheet. As the unfamiliar jargon of the law swam before her eyes, a Barrenland of dry subclauses and bullying-sounding addenda, Derek’s explanation began to make more sense. He had a better grasp of the qalunaat world. Looking at it as a trail of prints to be followed made the job less intimidating to her. She began to think of it as a hunt for an as yet unknown quarry.

  An hour passed, then two. Derek smoked almost non-stop. Every so often one or other of them got up to make tea to keep them going. At one point a group of children began to play a game of football on the path at the front of the detachment and the policeman went out and told them to move further along. Edie heard a boy’s voice shout, ‘My dad calls you Sergeant Lemming and says you’re dumb enough to jump off of a cliff.’ Derek returned not long after, shaking his head and mumbling.

  The documents stretched way back to the late 1960s but the vast bulk dated from the mid-90s or later, when the land claims negotiations were taking place. These were mostly surveys, boundary line maps and memoranda from the Defence Department, the finance and foreign ministries, the territorial government of the Northwest Territories and, after the creation of Nunavut in 1999, from the regional government in Iqaluit. In earlier documents it seemed as though Charlie Salliaq had been the only Inuk working with a series of lawyers but as the years went on a handful of other Inuit names appeared.

  ‘I don’t recognize many of these names,’ Derek said. ‘They must have died before I got here. Most of the ones I do know have passed on now too. It seems that the Kuujuamiut don’t make old bones.’

  Bones were becoming a theme, Edie thought, returning to her papers. A later batch, dating from the last ten years or so and relating to the various clean-up tasks – from removal of waste, tar, creosote, building materials, paint, fuel and other contaminants to reconstruction and replanting – had been negotiated solely by Sonia Gutierrez after she took over as chief counsel in the case. By this time it was the early 2000s and the negotiations had been rumbling on for a decade without much progress. From what Edie could make out, Gutierrez’s argument was that the contaminated land lay very close to the bird cliffs from which the Kuujuamiut regularly harvested both eggs and birds. She had drafted a press release and the Arctic Circular had picked it up. Some of the southern papers took note too. It seemed that it was the press interest that had forced the department to reach a settlement.

  A sudden rattle on the steps. The door swung open and Klinsman appeared with the Camp Nanook counsel, Marty Fielding, following behind. Derek very discreetly pushed a plain file cover over his papers and got up from his chair. The colonel eyed them momentarily then held out a hand.

  ‘You got a few minutes, sergeant? Maybe a stroll down to the sea?’

  Palliser stared at the hand but did not take it. He was angry and not feeling polite about it. ‘Take a look around, colonel. This look like some spy hole-up? Some security intelligence outfit? This is a country police detachment at the end of the world and you’ve parachuted in and crapped all over it.’

  The colonel blinked and stood his ground.

  ‘A stroll by the sea,’ he said.

  • • •

  They walked down to the shoreline in silence and stood looking out over the spangle of Jones Sound. The tide was low, and on the exposed shingle a huge Arctic lion’s mane jellyfish lay dead, the two metre wide crimson bell still shiny in the sunshine, the flame-coloured tentacles so long you could measure off a basketball court and have some to spare.

  Fielding stood back, unwilling to move closer.

  ‘You still want that stroll?’ Derek asked.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Itqujaq,’ Edie said. ‘In the whaling time, the qalunaat whalers called it the sea devil. We sometimes say it’s a drop of blood from Sedna, our sea spirit. The tentacles can be dangerous even after death. They usually stay out in deep sea but they’ve started coming in to the shallows.’

  They picked their way to the shoreline. The iceberg that had been part-obscuring the view of Devon Island earlier in the week had moved on, leaving the bruise-coloured cliffs a hundred kilometres to the south shimmering in heat on the horizon.

  ‘I thought I’d been some places till I came here,’ Fielding said. He raised his hand to shield his eyes and gazed out across the water, squinting in the flare of reflected light.

  Edie smiled to herself. She was glad the Arctic had unsettled him. He and others like him. Maybe that way they might stay away.

  ‘Sonia Gutierrez is missing,’ Edie said.

  Klinsman’s shoulders tightened. ‘This is dangerous terrain, Ms Kiglatuk. People go missing all the time. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that.’ In a softer tone, he added, ‘You’re going to have to get used to sharing the High Arctic, you know that, don’t you?’

  Edie turned to look at him but he would not meet her eye. ‘Our kind of sharing and your kind of sharing aren’t the same,’ she said. ‘We remember how you “shared” our whales.
Two million of them. Stripped the blubber to render into oil, kept the baleen and threw away the rest. Just one of those whales could have kept an entire Inuit settlement alive for a year. Now you’re telling us you want to “share” oil, gas, minerals. You want to “share” the fish, the seas, the animals. We’ve already seen how you share things that don’t belong to anybody and you want to keep “sharing” until there’s nothing left. Except us, colonel, we’ll be left. By the time you have finished sharing, we’ll be left with nothing.’

  Klinsman and Fielding laced their arms behind their backs.

  ‘What you’re describing is inevitable, Ms Kiglatuk. There is nothing you can do to stop it. Whatever you think you’re looking for, you won’t find it. I advise you strongly not to keep on looking. Everything has its natural depth. Fish, humans, institutions. That creature there . . .’ He thumbed at the jellyfish. ‘It likes deep waters, you said. But look what happened. It overreached itself. It wandered into the shallows. Believe me, you are out of your depth here.’

  His eyes were flat but there was a weariness in his voice, Edie thought. Whatever game was being played, he had begun to tire of his role in it.

  ‘Saxby and Namagoose will be tried for the murder of Martha Salliaq in a military court and I have every expectation they will be found guilty. That’s all we can offer. It’s a good deal. Make it enough.’

  The colonel turned and began to make his way back up the beach, Fielding following close behind. At the track he stopped and turned. ‘You want me to send a couple of men to move that thing off the beach before someone’s child steps on it?’

  Derek gave a low snort. ‘It’s a little late for your offers of protection, colonel, wouldn’t you say?’

  • • •

  Edie and Derek waited for the jeep to disappear. They had always thought that they understood what trouble looked like. Up here it looked like avalanches and white-outs and hungry bears. It did not look like a fastidiously dressed man in a jeep and his spineless nose bot of a sidekick. But the truth now lay right before their eyes on that beach. The bloody tentacles of the beast reached further and deeper than the military were prepared to acknowledge publicly. That was a new kind of trouble.