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

by M. J. McGrath

  Derek shouted up but his voice got lost in the sound of the rain.

  ‘I’m finished here,’ Markoosie continued. ‘I want to do this the Inuit way. I want to join Nora.’

  Derek was below him now, his weapon trained on the man.

  ‘Edie!’ Derek called up to her.

  For a moment her eyes cut from Derek to Pitoq. They came back to rest on the policeman.

  ‘Let him go!’ she shouted.

  There was an instant when Derek seemed to hesitate. Markoosie Pitoq must have seen it too, for in that same moment he released his grip from the rock. She saw him step out into the air then fall, his body twisting, bouncing from the cliff face until it landed with a thud onto the beach. For a second or two the muscles twitched. A pink drizzle mixed with the rain and began to make its way through the shingle to the waves.

  ‘Stay there.’ Derek’s voice came to her through the rain. A comforting sound.

  She watched him clamber back along the cliff onto the till then slide down on the loose rock until he reached the shingle. A long time later he appeared at the top of the cliff. She felt the rope tighten.

  The tide was coming in as they made their way back onto the beach. A single raven sat on Markoosie Pitoq’s broken body, gathering courage to take his eyes. A little further away a fox and her cubs eyed the body and licked their chops.

  39

  A military ATV sat empty outside the Kuujuaq detachment. Evidently, someone had reported the incident at the bird cliffs to Klinsman and he’d come to find out exactly what had happened.

  Edie wasn’t in much of a mood for explanations. It was late and her heart still hurt at the thought of what Martha Salliaq had suffered at her uncle’s hands. She was glad that he had made the choice to die. It made it cleaner somehow.

  Thinking about Klinsman made her feel hot, like everything she touched might melt away.

  Derek swung off his vehicle. ‘Sooner or later we’re gonna have to tell them they’ve got the wrong men for Martha’s murder. So it may as well be now.’ He turned and began to walk towards the detachment. It was at times like these his cool was an asset. Reaching the bottom of the steps, he waited for her. ‘It’ll be OK. Just let me do the talking,’

  They went up in silence. The sun bounced off the windows and threw back light into their eyes.

  As they entered the detachment two men in expensive outdoor gear stopped rifling through papers and drew their handguns. They weren’t military or even military police. D-men, Edie presumed. Between them Klinsman stood waiting.

  ‘You have to leave before I arrest you for interfering with an investigation,’ Derek said. After the low grade harassment on the beach a day ago it was clear that the police sergeant hadn’t anticipated this. Edie glanced towards the door. One of the men, a tall fella with the swing of an ape, moved into the space, blocking her view.

  ‘You seem to have forgotten that the case is no longer your jurisdiction,’ Klinsman said.

  ‘You’d do well to go back to Camp Nanook and instruct your paymaster to release Namagoose and Saxby. You know they didn’t do it and we have proof that they didn’t. You set up your own men, Klinsman. What kind of man does that?’

  ‘Namagoose and Saxby don’t matter,’ Klinsman said, turning to the D-men, who came forward, the taller of the two sliding behind them. ‘They never did.’

  Derek stepped back. He pulled himself up to his full height and looked Klinsman in the face. ‘You don’t have any jurisdiction over this police detachment or any of the officers in it.’

  It was a bluff and Klinsman knew it.

  ‘Unfortunately you’ve made it necessary for us to take you in. I gave you plenty of warnings and you chose to ignore them. We can cuff you or we can do this the civilized way, but whichever way we do it, you’ll be shot if you don’t cooperate. Now, your weapons, please.’

  As the two men came forward, Derek raised a staying hand. ‘You can call your goons off.’ He reached for his service weapon and laid it on the desk beside him. Following his lead, Edie did the same. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ he said flatly.

  • • •

  They travelled in the military vehicle. The D-men made no attempt to restrain them but Edie noticed they kept their hands near to their holstered weapons. As they approached the Camp Nanook sentry gate the two D-men slid their guns out of sight. Edie caught Derek’s gaze and flicked her eyes in their direction. Derek flared his nostrils to indicate that he’d understood. Whatever game they were playing, not everyone on the base was in on it. The same guard who two weeks ago had ticked them off his clipboard saluted the colonel and waved the party through. It was late now, and though the sun still shone, the personnel vehicles were parked up, the cranes and diggers silent and the soldiers mostly in barracks, asleep. A great time, Edie thought, to smuggle in a couple of off-register non-prisoners, the kind of detainees Klinsman and his Defence Department bosses could lose in the system indefinitely. Or make disappear altogether.

  The ATV drew up outside K-block and they found themselves walking down familiar corridors. Klinsman peeled off at his offices but the two goons pushed them forward through a series of locked doors into a dismal, windowless atrium. A cage lay along a corridor to the right, striping shadows on the opposite wall; inside something moved. They were patted down again and pushed along the corridor to the cage, at the back of which, on a hard bench, sat Sonia Gutierrez.

  The D-men keyed the lock, pushed Derek and Edie inside and disappeared through the atrium back out into the main building.

  They waited until they could hear their footsteps retreating before Gutierrez said drily, ‘The way this would go in the movies, you guys would be rescuing me.’

  ‘I never was a big fan of the movies,’ Derek said. He gave Gutierrez a sorry smile. ‘We missed you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sonia said. ‘I can’t stand sad endings.’

  ‘Your ATV’s up at the landing strip. We assumed you’d flown out to Iqaluit. It was only when I checked the passenger manifests we realized you hadn’t,’ Edie cut in.

  Sonia slammed her hands on her thighs and looked away.

  ‘Hijo de puta! They’re smart, these guys.’

  ‘Not so smart they remembered the manifests,’ Edie said. The cage was tiny and airless, with the bench at one end and a chemical toilet. She looked for cameras but saw none. No air cooling system either. It was hot. If there was one thing Edie couldn’t stand, it was heat.

  ‘You any idea where they’re from?’ Derek asked.

  Gutierrez gave a shrug. ‘Freelance is my guess. Working for the Defence Department. They won’t let me call a lawyer,’ she said, rubbing her arms.

  ‘We found your backpack.’

  Gutierrez stopped her arm rubbing and glanced at them sideways.

  ‘We spent most of a day trying to decipher the papers,’ Edie said. She pulled off her summer parka and handed it to the lawyer. Gutierrez acknowledged it with a ‘thanks’. She saw the lawyer’s nose wrinkle.

  ‘It’s sealskin,’ she said. ‘You can be cold or you can smell of seals.’

  Gutierrez gave an awkward smile and slipped the parka over her head.

  ‘You read my papers you’ll know what this is about,’ Gutierrez went on, serious now.

  ‘We have an idea.’

  Gutierrez crossed her legs and, leaning one elbow over her thigh, said in a low voice, ‘What I think we are talking about is a covert programme of nuclear testing at Glacier Ridge, maybe even across the whole of the North American Arctic, in direct contravention of international and Canadian law. If I’m right, the United States and Canada lied to their people on a massive scale.’

  ‘I wish I could say I’m surprised,’ Derek said.

  ‘But I think there’s more.’ Gutierrez lowered her voice. ‘You heard of Downwinders?’

  Derek and Edie shook their heads.

  ‘The fallout from the nuclear testing in the Nevada desert in the sixties blew directly over Utah. The US Depa
rtment of Energy knew this would happen. They took a calculated risk that the locals wouldn’t kick up a fuss. For the most part the affected population were Mormons living in remote communities. They kept themselves separate, didn’t have much of a voice. The women started miscarrying and by the seventies the population was starting to develop radiation-related cancers. People outside the community were beginning to notice. So the Energy Commission moved the testing to the Aleutian Islands. Which had the advantage of being away from the mainland and near to Soviet Russia and Japan.’

  ‘But it also had a population of Aleuts,’ Edie said.

  ‘Exactly. Who also began dying. But the Energy Commission kept that secret. It wasn’t till after the Cannikin explosion that people on the US mainland really became aware that anything much happened at all. But Cannikin was un gran error, a real own goal. It caused so much catastrophic damage that the government couldn’t cover it up.’

  ‘So they transferred the programme to Ellesmere in secret,’ Edie said.

  ‘Some of it, for sure. The dirtiest part. They knew that the Kuujuamiut wouldn’t cause them a problem. You guys had never heard of Cannikin or the nuclear testing programme or even the Cold War. The government figured that you would likely put the deaths of your babies down to bad spirits. Canada always said it never carried out any nuclear testing. People in the south wouldn’t be on the lookout like they were in the US. This was the seventies. The government in Ottawa saw the whole of its north as a giant bargaining chip, principally with the US. It had strategic importance but that was all. When I first arrived in Canada from Guatemala, Ellesmere Island hadn’t even been formally mapped. Most southerners hardly knew the place existed, let alone that there were people living here. The perfect place to test their bombs out.’

  Gutierrez bit her lip, for the moment lost in thought. ‘I think they will want to disappear us.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The Department of Defence. Somehow, they’ve cornered Klinsman into taking orders from them. They won’t want any of this to get out. Can you imagine the scandal if it did? The Canadian government using their own people as nuclear guinea pigs? Then putting their soldiers in to clean it up without telling them what they were getting into. And framing two of their own men for a murder so as to help keep a lid on the thing. Think of the press. Not to mention the lawsuits.’ She smiled. ‘If they don’t kill me first they will make me a rich woman.’

  ‘If they were going to . . .’ Edie choked over the words, ‘. . . get rid of us, wouldn’t they would have done it already?’

  ‘And risk the personnel at Camp Nanook finding out?’ Sonia shook her head. ‘A couple days back I heard one of them mention Alert.’ The Alert station was nearly nine hundred kilometres away at the tip of Ellesmere Island. The station was nominally a meteorological facility, with surveillance and intelligence gathering capacity, manned by a rotating staff of military and scientific personnel.

  ‘I think they might take us there,’ Gutierrez said.

  40

  Not long afterwards the lights went out and for the first time in several months Edie found herself completely in the dark.

  ‘It’ll be like this for a few hours now,’ Gutierrez said. ‘Unless anyone has any better ideas, we may as well get some sleep.’

  For a long time Edie lay on the floor of the cell with the dark engraving patterns behind her eyelids, listening to the softening breaths of her cellmates. The combination of the moist heat of the room and the darkness was both novel and unwelcome. It was hard enough to think as it was. If this was how the tropics were supposed to be, you could keep them, she thought. If she ever got out of here, she’d stick to vacationing on ice.

  Somewhere a blue light flickered on. A familiar voice began whispering her name. After a while it came to her that the voice and the light were both coming from outside and that the voice belonged to Willa. Remembering suddenly where she was, she sprang from the floor. She felt a small rush between her legs and realized with a flush of irritation that her period had started.

  Beside her, Derek turned, groaned and opened his eyes.

  Willa Inukpuk was standing outside the cage with his finger on his lips. She could hear footsteps down the corridor and instinctively knew they didn’t have much time.

  ‘How did . . . ?’

  ‘I saw you coming in.’

  The footsteps began to draw nearer and the goon with the ape’s gait appeared carrying a tray of bottled water and wrapped pastries.

  ‘They’re gonna move you to Alert. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.’ Willa was speaking rapidly now, in Inuktitut. ‘They sent me up there a couple days back to teach ice rappelling to Canadian special ops forces. Counterterrorism guys. Whatever this is, Edie, it’s not some regular transfer. Believe me, you don’t want to get sent to Alert.’

  The ape-man was standing beside them now, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. There was the smell of old sweat on him. He keyed open a little hatch in the cage and pushed the tray through. Derek caught it on the other side.

  ‘Speak English.’ The ape was directing himself to Willa.

  ‘Listen, man, my job is to act as indigenous liaison. These people speak Inuktitut.’

  ‘I don’t care if they speak the language of the gods. You need to start talking in English,’ the ape repeated. There was a hint of menace in his tone.

  Willa nodded. He moved forward a little so the ape couldn’t see his face and flared his eyes. Edie had seen that look on a dozen duck hunts, him standing there, an anxious boy, her hanging back, trying to get him to take the lead. Day after day they’d be out hunting, relying mostly on eye signals to communicate. She knew exactly what his eyes were saying. Tell me what to do. He hadn’t come just to warn her. He’d come to help. Now he was asking her how best to go about it. He raised his eyebrows. Now, quickly.

  She glanced at Derek but he was still manhandling the tray. She saw then that she and Willa were on their own. In the great canvas of their life together she understood finally how absolutely central he was, not, as she’d previously imagined, simply Joe’s shadow, the faint outline of a dead boy, but her own breathing, present, difficult, maddening, loyal Willa. And he was relying on her now.

  She felt the heaviness in her belly, the soft throb between her legs.

  ‘We like to watch movies,’ she said, meeting his puzzled frown with a steady look, willing him to understand that she was talking in code. Beside him, the ape was checking his watch, only half listening. Willa looked away for a moment and when he met her eye again he was ready.

  ‘Laurel and Hardy. That’s what we usually watch. Flying Deuces is a great movie but our favourite is Liberty.’ Her fingers were working, turning backwards, asking him to return to another time. A bloom of understanding crossed his face. His jaw softened and he blinked slowly.

  ‘You have a favourite scene?’ he said.

  Edie smiled. Her heart rattled in her chest. He’d remembered their conversation at the rappel camp. He’d remembered his childhood, the good times they’d had together. He’d remembered.

  ‘The car chase.’ They’d watched it over and over together. He let her know with a glance that it was playing in his mind now. ‘We could watch it this afternoon, at four, say.’

  For a moment Willa looked uncertain. ‘At four?’

  The ape looked up. He had caught the tail end of the conversation. His brow was furrowed and he was swinging his head like a big, dumb pendulum. Directing himself to Edie he said, irritably, ‘No one’s going to be watching any movies.’ He made a waving motion with his hand. ‘OK, fellas, this little party is over.’

  Edie winked at Willa then turned her back. She waited until the door at the top of the corridor swung shut and the footsteps had died away. When she looked up Derek and Sonia were staring at her.

  ‘I can explain,’ she said.

  • • •

  While they ate, she outlined the plan in Inuktitut. Gutierrez picked up the gist and for the rest Edie wro
te key words with her finger on the concrete and worked signs in the air. If their conversation was being monitored it would have to be by an Inuktitut speaker. No Inuk was likely to give them away.

  ‘Won’t Klinsman guess?’ Gutierrez asked.

  Edie shook her head. ‘It won’t occur to him. You’re forgetting, he’s qalunaat.’

  ‘Why four?’ Derek said.

  ‘Willa told me before that’s when the groups come in from exercises. There are a lot of people around. Security’s seen us all come and go before, so as long as Klinsman and his goons don’t spot us, we should be able to drive right out.’

  ‘Drive?’ Derek looked puzzled.

  Edie smiled and winked. ‘Don’t worry, that’s Willa’s job. He knows what he has to do.’

  At three minutes before four, Edie began her preparations. They arranged themselves, Edie on the bench with Sonia kneeling beside her, Derek standing towards the front of the cage. Then Sonia and Derek began to yell.

  There was a muffled grunt before the door at the end of the corridor swung open and footsteps came pounding. The sound of heavy breathing and the ape appeared, panting and clutching a handgun. He took one look at the scene inside the cage and blanched.

  ‘What the fuck?’ His voice was coarse and high with fear. For a moment or two he just stood there staring, unable to decide what to do.