White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  An idea was forming in her mind, a huge, unstoppable idea, growing less fragile minute by minute, like a great ice field at the moment just before it sets hard. Someone else might have called it a hunch but to Edie this was no work of her own, but a notion that had been planted in her head by whatever was with her, what had come to her in Joe's room.

  She stumbled into the store room and took out her telescopic rifle lens, the same one she'd used to read the diaries. Part of her wished Derek Palliser was around, but she also knew that she needed to do this alone. Trembling, she switched on her desk lamp and held the film close to the light, but her grip was so uneven that getting a focus on the contents proved impossible.

  Growing impatient with herself, she stood up after a short while, went to the DVD player and switched it on. In a few moments, she felt calmed. Taking a bulldog clip from the desk drawer, she attached the film to the light and used two hands to steady the lens. The brown flakes resolved in the scope into a series of papery fragments, not brown close up, but a kind of mottled purple, and criss-crossed with a series of fine lines into tiny and uneven geometric shapes.

  Human skin, she thought, but of an odd, unusual colour, not simply skin that had long since been discarded or rubbed off, more like skin left out on the tundra. She moved the scope over the square. Human head hairs, blue-black and dead straight, and towards the middle of the wrap two of another kind, shorter and with white follicles at the ends, too short to be pubic, too thin to be from the eyebrow. More like nostril hair.

  Fumbling about in the cupboard under the sink, Edie drew out a pair of vinyl washing-up gloves and pulled them over her hands. She knew that at some later date, a defence lawyer standing in some southern court might say she had tampered with the evidence after what she was about to do, but it seemed to her that she was on the brink of something irreversible, some irrefutable proof written in hair and skin, and that in the light of this, the inflated to-ing and fro-ing of some abstract system suddenly seemed impossibly distant.

  Returning to her desk, she pulled out a piece of paper and laid it across the surface, placing the square of film carefully on top. Then slowly, painstakingly, she began unwrapping it, fold by fold. It struck her how neatly it had been done, with an almost origami-like precision. Nothing Joe did was ever this neat. With the exception of his nursing textbooks, which he'd always set aside and treated as though they were made of some delicate, membranous fabric, the remainder of his few possessions had always been stacked in shaggy piles into which he'd dig tunnels from time to time, like a lemming.

  She brought the scope to focus on the purplish brown flakes again. When he came back from Craig, the skin on Joe's nose and two of his fingers had been slightly frostbitten from his journey. Frostbite usually made the skin mottle, then darken, and peel. She prodded the plastic with a gloved finger until she could see a flake clinging to it, then slowly pulled the wrap open a little further, mindful of keeping its contents from spilling, until there was before her on the table a large rectangle, serrated on one side where the plastic had been torn from the roll.

  Like the folding, the removal of the sheet had been done with care, she noticed, an almost perfect serration. Whoever had excised it from the roll had been meticulous about it. Nothing about this suggested Joe. She spread the sheet out, and then noticed the hole. It was small, less than the circumference of a cent, and the edges were relatively smooth, as though it had been sucked out. Beside it, only a centimetre or so away, there was an indentation of about the same size and shape, but here the film was still present, though it had been distorted by stretching. Between these two marks, or rather, very slightly below them, was another, larger and more uneven impression in the film and it was here that that the greatest concentration of skin flakes clung to what looked like grease. Inspecting it more closely, Edie could see a band of stretched film lying above the hole, running the length of the hole and its twin indentation. She gazed for a while at the configuration of stretches and tension marks until she was conscious of a dull ache running along her neck and realized that she had twisted her head around forty-five degrees to the horizontal. She straightened up until the ache stopped and slowly turning the plastic a hundred and eighty degrees she saw it, clear as a good spring day. It was unmistakeable. Imprinted onto the plastic film was the impression of a face, with a hole where the left nostril would have been.

  She was hit by an odd sound then, somewhere between the cry of a baby and the howl of a wolf, realizing only an instant later that this was her own voice letting loose the months of grief. Here it was, proof incontrovertible: someone had murdered Joe Inukpuk and the murder weapon was clinging to her hand.

  * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  The moment the warning alarm on the instrument panel started beeping Derek Palliser knew the plane was going down. There was nothing to be done about it because there was no knowing where the damned pilot had got to and Derek didn't know how to fly. From where he was sitting, in the co-pilot's seat, the interior of the plane seemed to disappear off into a deep gloom. The warning bleeps continued and Derek suddenly found himself transported into a darkened room. It took him a moment to realize he'd woken up.

  He brushed his hand over his face, reached out to the clock on the bedside table, hit the snooze button and deduced from the flashing LED that the power must have cut sometime in the night. In reaching for his watch he managed to sweep it off the bedside table onto the floor, so he tried pulling open the drapes, then remembered it was dark more often than not, now, in September. Soon, the last sunset of the year would be upon them.

  The beeping continued; someone was trying to get through on the radio. Derek got up, turned on the light, pushed on his mukluks and pulled on his down parka, then picked up his watch, read the time and cursed. There was only one person who would radio him at four thirty in the morning.

  The temperature differential hit him full in the face. He made a note to himself to turn up the thermostat, then remembered that it was Misha who liked to keep the place overheated, whereas he preferred it cool. Just one of the many ways in which he didn't miss her. Though it was painful to admit, he'd been having his suspicions about the timing of her arrival, only a day or two after his indiscreet conversation with the Russian scientists at the Eureka weather station. The woman had tipped him completely off-orbit. Was it too fanciful to imagine she was some kind of spy? He smiled grimly to himself. Paranoia, he thought. Where did I pick that up from?

  In the comms room he leaned into the mike and greeted Edie Kiglatuk.

  'How did you know it was me?'

  'Male intuition.' He was still pissed off at her for treating him as though he was some kind of personal assistant, to be drafted in at her convenience. 'Is this about Saomik Koperkuj? I talked to Toolik and Silliq. Nothing doing.' Much though he disliked the dismal duo, he didn't have anything to link them to the old man's disappearance.

  'Derek, you need to get back here.' He noted the tension in her voice.

  'Edie, I just got home. Stevie's still in Autisaq. Whatever it is, he can handle it.' He was sick of her telling him what to do. She was beginning to sound like a bully.

  'I need you.'

  Wasn't that what most men wanted, to be needed by a woman? Why, then, did it make him feel a sudden desperate desire to be somewhere else? He fumbled about in his pocket for a cigarette then remembered he had his pyjamas on.

  He said: 'I guess you already know what a crackpot you are.' Reaching into the desk for one of his many caches of emergency Lucky Strikes, he took one out and lit it. He waited for the nicotine to hit.

  'Right.' There was a pause. 'You don't want to help, that's fine. I'll do this on my own.'

  Derek said: 'Yes.'

  'Yes what?'

  'Yes, you've been doing it on your own since the spring, remember? And some time soon I'm going to have to come in on it.' She cut him off with a little wounded sounding 'uh huh' which made him feel bad. 'And yes, unofficially I'll help.
I'm in Autisaq in a couple of days anyway for the election.' He looked at his watch. 'Tomorrow, I'm there. You can tell me what you've got up your sleeve then. If it still fits up your sleeve, that is, what with the giant tangle of paranoia already there.'

  There was some interference on the radio for a moment, then Edie's voice came through mid-sentence,'. . . so it has to be later on today.'

  Dammit, the woman could be maddening. She was like some appalling avalanche. He sat back and thought about it. What difference would a day make? He could put his foot down, but then she'd keep at him. He had finished his business in Kuujuaq for the time being and planned to fly over anyway. He guessed a few hours earlier wouldn't make any difference. He could camp down in the detachment office in Autisaq overnight and be ready to supervise the ballot box first thing on Wednesday morning. The more he thought about it the more he realized it might actually work out better that way.

  He said: 'What you got?'

  'Proof.'

  'Proof of what?'

  'Murder, homicide, unlawful killing, I don't know what you call it, but I got proof.'

  He thought about asking her to elaborate, then decided it was best not to talk about it over the radio.

  'OK, Edie, I give in,' he said. 'Weather permitting, I'll be with you by late afternoon.' Official police tone: 'This better be good.'

  The flight into Autisaq was, for the Arctic at least, relatively smooth. Derek preferred it when he could not see the ground below, though today there was enough moonlight reflecting off the ice to bring into relief just how little ice there was for a September day and just how many leads criss-crossed the floe.

  The plane came in over the mountains, bumping a little across the direction of the wind. As they drew near the strip, Derek could see that the terminal building had been festooned in bunting. In the twenty-four hours he'd been away the place had been transformed into what looked like a celebration of the Great Leader in some totalitarian flea- pit. Simeonie Inukpuk's face grinned from every window and announcement board. Even Elijah Nungaq, who was on shift hauling cargo at the airstrip, was dressed in a Vote Simeonie Inukpuk tee.

  'Am I going mad or is he supposed to be the opposition?' Pol said, as they made their way across the landing strip into the terminal building.

  Derek said: 'Seems to me, we're all going mad, one way or another.'

  The incumbent mayor was waiting for them just outside the terminal, talking to Stevie.

  'Heard you were coming in a day early.' Simeonie clapped Derek on the back and waggled a finger. 'Spying, eh?'

  The smell of alcohol and barbecuing meat and the sound of loud music drifted from the Town Hall. While Derek went inside the police office, Stevie parked the ATV. Derek's plan was to check on Willa, debrief Stevie on the search for the old man then take himself off to Edie's house. He lit a cigarette. From the snow porch, two scantily clad men were clearly visible, clinched together in a bear hug in the mayor's office in what looked like an Inuit wrestling match. It was one step beyond weird.

  'Don't ask me, D,' Stevie said, strolling in. 'I'm just the grunt.'

  Willa was asleep on the cell cot and Derek saw no reason to wake him. He returned to the office and instructed Stevie to release him the moment he stirred. To keep him locked up any longer without formally charging him was against regulations. The irony of this sudden shot of punctiliousness tickled Derek. He'd spent the past few months gradually jettisoning the regulations one by one until the police service was so light it almost never touched the ground. Still, there were lines in the sand, even for Derek. He couldn't keep the kid without charging him and he wasn't about to give him a criminal record on some whim of Edie's.

  Stevie handed him a steaming mug.

  'How'd the S&R go?'

  'Black hole.' Stevie had been to Koperkuj's cabin and found his gun and skiff missing. Otherwise, nothing. 'Wouldn't be surprised he's just gone AWOL, D. The type, by all accounts. I guess there's not much to be done but wait. That cabin though, Jesus Jones, what a state.'

  'What kind of a state?'

  'A mess, crap everywhere.'

  'No sign of burglary?'

  'Nah, just your basic bachelor stuff.' Stevie thought for a moment, blushed, then offered his boss a repentant look.

  'Sorry, D, I didn't mean it like that.'

  Derek went through to the bunk room to freshen up, intending to take a few moments' shut-eye before heading down to Edie's, but the instant his head hit the pillow he found himself back in the pilotless plane. Only this time there were no warning lights. He woke with a start and immediately detected the presence of someone in the room.

  'Bad dream?' Edie was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the door. There was a hard glitter in her eyes, which made her very beautiful, and Derek surprised himself with his awkwardness at being disturbed in such intimate circumstances. He'd never thought of himself as shy.

  'How long have you been sitting there?'

  'Stevie let me in.'

  He swung his legs round so he was sitting up on the bed.

  'Shall we do this in the office?'

  She hesitated.

  'I don't know if Stevie should hear this. The thing is, Derek, we're going to have to dig up Joe.'

  The idea was so preposterous he assumed she was joking. Even Edie knew you couldn't go around exhuming the dead. He let out a short, bitter laugh.

  'You know how insane that sounds, right?' From the fixed expression on her face Derek could see that she was beyond the point of caring about the consequences of her actions.

  'Edie . . .' He didn't know how to put this delicately.

  '... you're not, you know, you don't think maybe, the drinking?'

  'My son was killed, Derek. Besides, I quit.'

  Stepson, he thought, your stepson, but judged it best not to say.

  She went on, drawing from her pocket what looked like a plastic bag, describing how she'd come across the sheet of Saran Wrap, how she'd unwrapped and inspected it and what she'd found. He listened until she'd finished. It was certainly odd, more than odd, sinister. On the other hand, suicides were notoriously hard for family members to accept. This crazy idea that something had happened to Joe on Craig had become a kind of obsession with her. The thought even occurred to him that she had invented the Saran-Wrap story planted the hairs in it, made the indentations, the hole through which she claimed Joe might have struggled to take a final breath, in order to get him on her side. In her present state of mind, he wouldn't put it past her.

  On the other hand, what if this so-called evidence was what she said it was? She'd been right about Samwillie Brown's murder when everyone else had put his death down to an accident. And there was a great deal they still didn't know about the deaths of Andy Taylor and Felix Wagner and which Simeonie in particular didn't seem to want them to find out. Could he afford not to take her seriously?

  'The lab results are pretty undeniable,' he said, lamely. 'The kid had enough Vicodin in his body to fell a walrus.'

  'I know what it looks like but the body never went for a full post-mortem. I guess everyone was so sure it was a suicide. Derek, the moment we saw those blister packs neatly stacked up in the drawer next to his bed, I knew something was wrong. I just didn't follow through. I wish I had. He'd already taken a Xanax, he would have been so out of it, anyone could have done anything to him by then.'

  She was right. If he'd been following proper procedure he would have insisted on a full autopsy. He'd made desultory inquiries but there was no pathologist available to fly up and like everyone else he'd assumed the evidence was pretty tight and hadn't pushed for any further forensic investigation. There was the added problem that Joe's parents, like many Inuit, were against any kind of interference with the body but, really, he probably should have insisted.

  'How'd they get it into him?'

  'Easy,' she said. She had it all figured out. 'By injection.

  You crush up the pills with water, administer the solution and you've got you
rself a suicide.'

  'Then why use the plastic?'

  'Pills are unreliable. People throw up, they lapse into comas, they don't die outright. I don't know. Maybe whoever did this really wanted to be sure Joe wound up dead.'

  'But why? All we have on him is a bit of petty dope- dealing and a few gambling debts.'

  Edie shook her head. 'Not the gambling debts. We were wrong about that one. To get an online account you need a credit card, and Joe didn't have one. We were wrong about a lot of things.'

  'The question remains.'

  Edie took a deep breath. 'Here's my thinking. Some of it I know for sure, other stuff I'm having to guess at.'

  Derek thought immediately of the Brown case.

  'I know what you're thinking,' she said. 'But just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I'm wrong.'

  He couldn't help but laugh. The woman had an answer to everything.

  'Felix Wagner was trying to pin down the exact location of a gas reserve,' she went on, 'maybe a huge one. He got Bill Fairfax to sell him a fragment of meteorite, which Sir James Fairfax had traded with my great-great-great-grandfather, Welatok, along with three pages from the explorer's diary describing where Welatok had originally found the stone. Fairfax was in some kind of financial trouble, he needed the money and I guess he didn't know the significance of the meteor. It was a particularly rare kind, one with a high concentration of iridium, characteristic of rocks that act as a kind of plug in an astrobleme, a meteorite crater. You take out the meteor and whoosh, up comes the gas.'

  He took a good look at her and felt bad for ever thinking of her as an avalanche. She was a sunburst, a great ray of light.

  'Normally, you can locate astroblemes very precisely from the magnetic field created by the fragments of meteorite all around it,' she went on. 'Only up here . . .'