The Bone Seeker: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery (Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries) Page 5

  Tracing the activities of local people would be a lot trickier. At this time of year the population of Kuujuaq was as fluid as meltwater. Most of the local men were at summer camps spread out across hundreds of square kilometres. Every once in a while they would reappear to collect supplies, but there was no order to it. Sometimes they stayed over, other times they came and went in the same day. You never knew who was going to be in town, when and for how long.

  All in all it added up to a lot of work. He guessed he could recall Stevie Killik from summer leave, though his constable was even less experienced in this kind of thing than he was. One possibility was to ask for help from Camp Nanook. Would Klinsman be willing to cooperate if his own men were implicated? It would constitute some kind of conflict of interest. The locals certainly wouldn’t like it. They gave him a hard enough time about the camp as it was. As though he’d had any say in it. To run to the military for assistance would also undermine his own authority. No, he’d just have to manage on his own. Step one: call Klinsman about the crime scene. He checked his watch: 9.30 p.m. The colonel was unlikely to be at his desk, but he dialled the satphone number he had for him all the same. To his surprise a voice answered.

  ‘Colonel Klinsman there?’

  ‘This is he.’ It was the voice of a man a young woman might want to take back to meet her parents: solid, masculine, reassuringly modulated.

  The colonel listened to Derek’s explanation of events without interruption. In a sincere and only slightly guarded tone he thanked Derek for the notification and assured him of his full cooperation. If Derek could give him a specific time period he’d be happy to come up with a list of all personnel who were out of the camp at that time. Postponing the clean-up would be a little more complicated, since the military were officially acting on Defence Department instructions, but he agreed to call his contact in Ottawa in the morning. In principle, he didn’t see that there would be a problem.

  The two men finished the call cordially. Derek put down the phone, pushed his chair back and lit a cigarette. Klinsman had been more helpful than he’d anticipated. He had to hope the man would stay that way. He scrolled through his to-do list again and realized he’d been overambitious; even with Klinsman’s cooperation this was too much to do for one person. He was thinking about Killik when a more immediate and practical solution came to him. The phone rang. He picked up and barked his name and instead of the colonel’s voice, as he’d imagined, he got Luc Fabienne’s.

  ‘Charlie Salliaq’s just got back,’ the nurse said. ‘You need to come.’

  ‘Is Edie Kiglatuk with you?’

  Luc said she was.

  ‘Good. I’ll be right over.’

  • • •

  Edie saw Charlie enter before anyone else. It was clear from his face that his cousin had broken the news. The trembling jawline, the drooped despair in the eyes. He scoped the room then immediately came over to where the remainder of his family were sitting; he kissed his daughter on the forehead and sat down beside his wife. Then he drew both women in with his arms and for a while the three of them sat with their hands clasped together, heads touching, keeping out the world. After a time he tore himself away and, ignoring Edie, went over to speak with Luc. The two men stood huddled together, talking in low voices before moving across the room and through the door at the side that led down to the morgue. Not long after, they reappeared, Charlie in the lead, rubbing his hand across his face. Alice looked up, eyes wide and questioning, as though it was still possible that there had been a mistake and that her daughter was alive, but on Charlie’s shake of the head she slumped forward.

  Just then the outer door opened and Derek walked in, nodded to Edie and took a chair beside the Salliaqs. He spoke to them for several minutes, his forearms resting on his thighs, lifting a hand every so often to make a rolling gesture as though he was running through procedure. Edie watched a scowl gradually darkening the elder’s face. Evidently Charlie Salliaq didn’t like what he was hearing. Moments later he jumped up, and cutting the air with his right hand, said, ‘All I want to know is when you’re gonna get down to Camp Nanook and arrest whichever one of those damned sonofabitch unataqti killed my daughter.’

  Derek raised his palms in a steadying gesture. ‘I understand this probably isn’t what you want to hear right now, but we need to know a lot more about Martha’s movements, the people she hung around with. At this stage we’re not making any assumptions about who did this.’

  Salliaq closed his eyes for a moment then took a deep breath and began mumbling something in a threatening tone. Beside him, Derek bristled, then collected himself, his mouth tightening. He eye-rolled Edie, came over and took the seat beside her, a grim expression on his face.

  ‘The forensics team won’t be here till Thursday.’ He spoke quietly but in an urgent tone, one eye on the Salliaqs. ‘They’ve given some qalunaat business down in Iqaluit first priority. Short of flying down there myself and kidnapping them, there’s nothing I can do about it. It means we’re gonna have to do some of the preliminaries ourselves.’

  Edie sat up and swung around to face him. ‘We?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve checked the books and I can squeeze some money out of the budget for a Village Public Safety Officer.’

  ‘I’m not the sharpest icicle on the roof, but I have no clue what you’re talking about,’ Edie replied.

  ‘It’s an idea I’m borrowing from Alaska. A temporary post.’

  She swung back and held up a hand. ‘Wait up there. I’ve got kids to teach. In any case, what about Stevie?’

  Derek gave her a look to say he’d already thought this through. If Stevie didn’t complete the course he was likely to get overlooked for promotion.

  ‘Besides, he hasn’t had the experience. Please, Edie, I could really use your help. I can ask the school head to sort out another supply teacher for a while. We can make this work. Look, I got a forensics unit that won’t play ball, a population who’ve already decided who killed Martha Salliaq and five hundred soldiers who may or may not be cooperative. Plus Charlie Salliaq hates my guts.’ His voice had taken on a pleading tone she didn’t like. It sounded too much like desperation.

  ‘I don’t know, D. I don’t want to let those kids down. And, really, I’m a stranger here.’

  He grabbed her hands in his and leaned in. ‘That’s what makes you perfect for the job. No axe to grind. No enemies.’

  An image of Martha came to mind. The hand touching her hair. The sweet, sly smile of adolescence. Going somewhere special? She felt her resistance crumbling.

  ‘You sure you can square it with the school?’

  ‘Hand on heart. I’ll match whatever the school are paying you so long as it isn’t much. I’d like to say the role comes with regulation uniform but my spare won’t fit.’ He winked then grew sombre. His eyes cut to Charlie Salliaq.

  ‘Your first job is to halt that particular stampede. In fact, he’s yours for as long as the investigation lasts. Break it to him that we’re gonna need them to stay somewhere else until forensics has been over their house. Anyone requires any personal items, you can fetch them, but you’ll have to wear shoe protectors and overalls. I got spares at the detachment. It’s late now. Tomorrow morning we’ll interview the family again.’

  He got up and went over to the door, leaving Edie alone with the family. She stood and approached Charlie.

  ‘Avasirngulik,’ elder, using the polite form. She explained the situation. The old man’s face was covered with tiny reticulations, as though it had been colonized by a red rock lichen. There was something wrong with him beside grief, she thought. A kind of sickness.

  When she was finished, Salliaq reached out a bony hand.

  ‘We want justice. Not southern justice. Inuit justice. Do you understand?’ For a moment he locked eyes with her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes I do.’

  5

  The Salliaqs’ house seemed eerily untouched by the cataclysm which had just befallen the
family. In the front yard sat the usual mess of outdoor gear, old snowbie parts, dog chains. While Derek hitched Martha’s ATV up to his own and towed it back to the detachment, Edie went in, noting the family’s boots and parkas hanging in the snow porch, the knick-knacks, laundry basket still full of unwashed clothes, the crockery carefully stacked in the kitchen, all nothing more than remnants now, mere shadows of another life forever lost.

  She pulled on a pair of vinyl gloves and, following Charlie Salliaq’s directions, went along a corridor at the back of the house to the second door on the right. A plastic sign, flowery, announced Martha’s room, in fancy script. It was more of a cubbyhole than a room, four almost bare walls, simply furnished with a bed, a nightstand, a cheap lamp, and a plywood dresser. On one side was a small, built-in closet opposite a window which looked out over the yard behind.

  Derek had told her to check for anything unusual in the girl’s bedroom. As a woman, she’d know better than he what that meant, he said. She scoped about and, seeing nothing untoward, began to search more thoroughly, going through drawers in the dresser, feeling beneath the mattress. Under the bed she found a tattered world atlas bearing the school library stamp. Unusual? A little, she guessed, at least for an Inuk kid. But nothing you’d think odd, not if you knew Martha. The top drawer of the dresser contained the usual paraphernalia of Inuit girlhood: hair oil, a few fishing lures, some shower gel the girl didn’t want to leave in the bathroom, nothing to arouse any suspicion. In the next drawer down, under a pile of underwear, she found a photograph of the girl sitting below the cliffs near Glacier Ridge holding a basket of dovekie eggs, a big smile on her face, her hair not yet tinted blue. Nothing written on the back to indicate who had taken it and when, but this past late spring had been freakishly warm and the dovekies had started breeding early. That fact and the vegetation around Martha dated it to early July this year. A couple of weeks back. Nothing special about the picture, except that it had been hidden. Edie slid it into her bag and made a mental note to ask the family.

  She sealed off the room with crime tape, did a quick check of the rest of the house, pressed a length of tape across the front door and went back along the track towards the nursing station.

  The sun had painted the rubble of ice and seawater on the horizon a deep pewter. A week or so ago you could still hear ice music in the breeze but the rot had set in for the summer and even the shore-fast ice here at the margin was too soft be played by the wind and currents. Far out on the Sound patches of dark light reflected from the open water. More distant still, a band of clouds dazzled with ice blink, sunlight reflecting back from some faraway ice floe. She went down to the shingle beach, feet crunching over patches of sea lungwort and scurvy grass, and looked out for a moment. A berg floated across her field of vision, moving west on the current, and she was reminded of the old Inuit saying, that water was just melted ice. Qalunaat thought the opposite of course. One of the many ways Inuit were profoundly different from those living to the south. Murder was another, she realized now. For qalunaat it was the taking of a life, but for Inuit it was something else, the removal of a body from its rightful owner. Not an offence against life, which went on regardless, but something more elemental: an outrage against the spirit.

  When she got back to the nursing station Luc and Derek were in the office in deep discussion. Luc had swivelled his monitor around so that Derek could read the screen. As she walked in, he was saying,

  ‘A lot of what I’m saying here is educated guesswork. I’m a nurse not a pathologist. When people die, that’s usually where I leave off.’

  He stopped. Both men looked at Edie. Luc hastily returned the monitor back to face his side of the desk.

  ‘You find anything in the house?’ Derek said.

  ‘Maybe.’ She took out the photo. Derek studied it for a moment or two, flipped it over to check the back, then turned it face side up again.

  ‘Any idea who took this?’

  ‘Must have been taken between two weeks and a month ago.’

  She detailed her earlier observations about the image.

  Derek pointed to the amulet on the girl’s wrist. Edie and Luc both craned over to look.

  ‘Was this in Martha’s room?’

  Edie shook her head. She was certain she would have seen it if it had been there, but that was unlikely. Those Inuit who wore amulets rarely took them off.

  ‘She looks happy,’ Luc said.

  There was a pause while they took this in. Martha’s face rose up in Edie’s mind, like something gradually surfacing from the bottom of the sea. She found herself smiling at the wry grin, the sense of something illicit and delicious just behind the eyes. Then, once more, it was gone.

  ‘What’s on that screen you don’t want me to see?’ she said.

  Luc shifted in his chair. His left knee began knocking on the underside of the table.

  Edie eye-rolled Derek.

  ‘Just tell her what you told me, Luc. I could do with hearing it one more time myself.’

  Luc sat back and began to scan the screen. ‘It’s been a long day. But, like I said before, if I had to guess – which, by the way, I have – I’d say the knife pierced the uterine artery and caused significant exsanguination. There seems to be some water in the lungs but whether Martha Salliaq died of blood loss or from drowning I don’t know. The amount of blood in the water and the absence of any traces of it around the lake suggests that she was alive but probably unconscious or only semi-conscious when she went in the water.’ He looked up, an expression of distaste on his face.

  ‘You got a time of death?’

  ‘Sometime on Saturday night. I can’t be more specific than that.’

  ‘Anna, the medical examiner, should be able to give us a death window,’ Derek said, adding bitterly, ‘If she ever shows up.’ He gestured for Luc to continue.

  ‘It’s almost like someone held her there until she bled out,’ Luc said. ‘She wasn’t in deep water. There’s a small knife wound on the wrist which looks like it was made sometime prior to the final assault. It’s very superficial. It may or may not have been the same knife that caused both injuries, but if it was, the intention was different. Whoever nicked her wrist wasn’t intending to hurt her. That amulet you pointed out in the photo, it’s my guess someone cut it off her and broke the skin in the process. It definitely happened before she died but I see no signs that she resisted. I couldn’t find any restraint marks or other defence wounds, either on her arms or upper body or on her thighs. If there had been a struggle I imagine we’d see more evidence of it. Skin or maybe blood and hairs under the fingernails. Certainly more scratches or knife cuts. A lot more bruising.

  ‘The internal injury is of another kind altogether of course.’ The nurse rubbed a hand across his hair. He wasn’t finding this any easier the second time around. ‘The knife went right up into her body. In my opinion, whoever did it intended to bleed the body out. That’s kind of interesting because the killer could have achieved the same thing more easily by cutting Martha’s throat or wrists.’

  ‘So why go into her vagina? Some kind of sexual thrill?’ Edie said.

  Luc frowned. ‘It’s possible, but I doubt it. I’ve seen plenty of sexual violence and there’s almost always some other kind of injury, often to the breasts or genitals, sometimes to the face. Bruising, bite or punch marks, that kind of thing. This . . . it’s more like as if the killer was trying to reach Martha’s core . . .’ He tailed off and gestured at Derek for a cigarette. Derek sparked up his Zippo and lit one for him. ‘Of course, we’re talking as though there’s some kind of answer to this. But there never is to any murder, is there? Not one that makes any sense.’

  ‘It’s our job to try and find one,’ Derek said.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind betting that she was either taken completely by surprise,’ Luc went on. ‘Or that she knew and trusted the guy who killed her or that she was drugged.’ He looked up. ‘You were right about the hair, Edie. There were little pieces of it
stuck to her clothes. She wore it in traditional braids, didn’t she?’

  ‘Tinted blue.’ Edie smiled to herself at the remembrance of their last conversation. ‘Her little act of rebellion.’

  ‘If I had Charlie Salliaq for a father, I’d want to rebel some,’ Derek said.

  Edie’s eyes narrowed. ‘But why would anyone cut it?’

  ‘I don’t know any more than you do, but my sense is that it was a memento of some kind.’ He shifted his weight. ‘Ask me, this whole thing’s a puzzle. This guy chooses the most intimate way of taking Martha’s life, but he doesn’t seem to have wanted to cause her pain or humiliation. He cuts her braids – assuming it was him – but he leaves her pubic hair untouched; and, apart from that knife wound, he doesn’t mutilate her.’

  ‘Any evidence of penetrative sex, consensual or otherwise?’ This from Derek. He’d taken a notebook out of his pocket and was writing in it.

  ‘I would say no. There’s no bruising around the inner thighs, but you’re not gonna find any semen, not the way she was cut or how long the body was in the water. Another oddity – there’s no damage done by fish, larvae, waterworms, anything like that.’

  ‘That’s an easy one at least,’ Derek said. ‘Lake Turngaluk is dead water. No life in there at all. I guess that’s one of the reasons it holds such a powerful taboo with the locals.’ He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘About those samples?’

  ‘I’ll do them before I leave tonight.’ Luc glanced at his watch. ‘I could run a preliminary toxicology test if you want,’ he added helpfully. ‘But you’ll need to bear in mind that it would only be preliminary and the results might even be misleading.’

  ‘Thank you, Luc. Whatever you can do would be great. We’re running a paper and string operation here. Everyone understands that.’ Derek gave the nurse a reassuring pat on the shoulder. ‘Are we any good to you here?’

  On Luc’s head shake, Derek pushed back his chair and stood. He spun his pack of Lucky Strikes across the desk towards the nurse, then turning to Edie he said, ‘Let’s go get a couple hours’ sleep, then talk to the Salliaqs first thing in the morning.’