The Bone Seeker: An Edie Kiglatuk Mystery (Edie Kiglatuk Mysteries) Page 8

  Toolik grunted and went back to the game. ‘They’re with the qalunaat woman, the one with lotsa hair.’

  ‘I’ve come to see you.’

  The old man looked up in mild surprise.

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me when you last saw Martha?’

  ‘I don’t keep track of the days too well,’ the old man said, inspecting the rough terrain of his hands. ‘Saturday, was it? Yeah, maybe then.’ When he looked up again his expression had changed. ‘This is iktuariik, young lady.’ Taboo. He began wagging his index finger. ‘We don’t talk about this.’ He seemed a little bewildered. She wondered how much he’d really been able to take in.

  ‘I respect the old ways, avasirngulik, but we need to find whoever took Martha away before he does it to someone else’s granddaughter,’ she said.

  ‘Them men at the base took her. The way those qalunaat are. Think they have a right to anything they like the look of.’ His eyes, clouded over with cataracts, became suddenly beamy and intense. ‘It was up to me, I’d take the culprit to those cliffs at the back and push him off. But that won’t happen. Nothing will happen.’ He shrugged, defeated, his eyes moving back to the screen. ‘I don’t know, I don’t like to talk about tariaksuit.’

  Edie went into the kitchenette and put some water on to boil for tea, using the break to begin on a different tack.

  ‘Martha seem any different on Saturday? As though she’d been drinking, maybe?’

  Toolik chuckled. ‘Oh, so that’s what it was. Markoosie won’t have booze in the house, even though he knows I like a drop. Calls it qalunaat water. He says that’s how they control us. He’s my son and I love him, but he’s got some funny ideas.’

  ‘Do you remember what you and Markoosie did the rest of the day?’

  His head swivelled round and there was a quizzical expression on his face, as though he found the question oddly amusing.

  ‘We watched the game, then I listened to my son’s radio show. It was a good show on Saturday. Lots of music, not too much chat. I can’t stand listening to people grousing and moaning about one another.’ He took the tea and for a while seemed to drift off in the steam. When he lifted his head, his eyes had gone back in time. He was looking at the floor now, as though the past was a ledge on a cliff, from where he could watch the waves battering against the rocks below and still feel the bittersweet sting of their spray on his face. He opened his mouth to speak but the words were gone. Then, with a look of puzzlement on his face, he said,

  ‘What are you doing here, young lady, and where’s Martha?’

  8

  Edie walked back to the detachment and retrieved the remains of the fish heads from the kitchenette. Through the back window she could see Derek returning from feeding his lemmings.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked.

  She told him it looked as though Martha had been drinking on Friday night.

  ‘Any idea who with?’

  ‘No, not yet.’ Edie downed the last of her tea and went on. ‘But I’m beginning to get the feeling something happened in Martha’s life to make her stop talking to the people she loved. Chip told me she was asking him about the south. Maybe she was thinking of moving down there? Perhaps that’s why she started drinking. Couldn’t face breaking the news to her folks.’ She picked up the last fish head and sucked out the eyes. ‘Klinsman get back with that list yet?’

  ‘Not yet. But one of us should go tell Gutierrez that running to Klinsman behind our backs could be construed as interfering with an investigation. I’m not opening up the site because she says so. We don’t yet know where Martha was first attacked but my guess is that it was likely to have been somewhere in those old buildings.’ The old radar station consisted of half-a-dozen units in various states of disrepair scattered across a rocky plateau which sloped down to Lake Turngaluk. ‘We’re gonna need to drain that pool, see if we can’t find the murder weapon. I’ve called Joseph Oolik and told him to stand by.’ Sam Oolik’s cousin drove the settlement honey truck and emptied the sewage tanks twice weekly.

  Edie stood and picked up her empty plate. ‘I’ll go have a chat with Gutierrez. Woman to woman.’

  ‘Or should that be woman to wolf bitch? While you’re at it, you might mention the drainage thing to Gutierrez, check there’s nothing in that water that’s likely to be dangerous. She’ll have the list for the decontamination works, I’m guessing. But, Edie . . .’ He lowered his voice, though there was no one else about. ‘That water has a lot of Martha’s blood in it. I want to keep that part from the family as far as I can. You know how Inuit can be about blood. Source of spirit, all that stuff. If Charlie Salliaq finds out, it’s bound to cause trouble. I don’t want the locals all over us saying we’ve disrespected the culture.’

  ‘Leave it to me, boss.’

  • • •

  Edie pulled on her outerwear and headed for the hotel. After she called out, a door upstairs opened and the lawyer appeared on the landing. They sat on a couple of unloved chairs in the bleak TV area.

  ‘How’s the family bearing up?’

  Gutierrez sighed and rubbed her hands lightly along her thighs. ‘Do you have a sister?’

  Edie shook her head.

  ‘I do, back in Guatemala. Her name is Carlita,’ Gutierrez went on.

  Edie was struck by how unusual the lawyer was. Most of the qalunaat in the High Arctic were escapees, adventurers, desperadoes, drunkards, criminals and misfits. If they had families they didn’t talk about them.

  ‘Carlita and her family mean everything to me, but there was a time when I hated her.’ She shot a sideways glance at Edie. ‘Do you see my point?’

  ‘I can be quite stupid when I want to be and sometimes even when I don’t. Like now,’ Edie said. She hoped Gutierrez didn’t always talk in puzzles.

  ‘You asked me about the family. My answer is that it’s terrible for everyone, but it’s worse for Lizzie. Even in death Martha outshines her. And soon, even in memory.’ The lawyer pressed her hands together and, changing gear, said, ‘But you came for something? Maybe Sergeant Palliser has reconsidered his position?’

  ‘Once Derek’s made up his mind, he rarely changes it,’ Edie said.

  Gutierrez’s face immediately darkened. For a moment she struggled to collect herself.

  ‘You know, I have a lot of experience of the military. Where I grew up, in Guatemala, there was a succession of military governments.’ She leaned forward in her chair. ‘The military have their own rules, Ms Kiglatuk. They justify their actions by claiming to be working for us, the people. But they are generally working only for themselves.’ She pulled back and crossed her legs. ‘So, why are you here?’

  Edie outlined the plan to drain the pool at Lake Turngaluk and asked Gutierrez about possible contaminants.

  ‘So far as I’m aware the water contains heavy metal deposits, PCBs, petroleum and creosote, that kind of thing. It’s noxious but not life-threatening. Make sure whoever is doing it is well covered and wears a face mask.’

  Eddie nodded. ‘We’d rather keep the details from the Salliaqs. It might be distressing for them.’

  Gutierrez took this in without comment. ‘And what about the site?’ she said.

  ‘Ellesmere Island Police are going to need to keep the whole area cordoned off for the foreseeable future. No access.’

  • • •

  Edie returned to the detachment with the impression that, in spite of the appearance of cooperation, Sonia Gutierrez was not a woman to take no for an answer. Derek was in the front yard packing the trailer of his ATV. She noticed his service rifle there, then remembered the bear. There had been no sighting of it since the search and rescue flight but July was a hungry month for bears. The earlier the ice broke up, the more desperate they got.

  ‘She doesn’t have to like it. She has to respect it,’ Derek said when Edie filled him in. ‘I told Joe Oolik we’d meet him down by the lake. He said he’d bring his coveralls and face mask. Sounds like that should be OK.’


  They headed inland, following the track through the sedge meadows to Lake Turngaluk. In the far distance, Camp Nanook glittered in the sun and a halo of heat haze shimmered above it. The entry gate was busy with vehicles and men heading off to exercises. A whole different world.

  Joe Oolik had already parked on the mud beside the pool and was working the controls of the pumping mechanism on his truck. A loud rattle obscured the sound of their engines but he caught sight of them as they drew nearer and stood waiting for them, his hands on his hips.

  They parked up, keyed off their ATVs and walked over to where Oolik was standing.

  The man flipped up his face mask. His mouth was turned down. ‘You said contaminants. You didn’t say nothing about blood.’ The mosquitoes had mostly dissipated, discouraged by the vibrations from the pump, but the smell was if anything worse than before.

  ‘It’s a crime scene. Blood comes with the territory,’ Derek said.

  Oolik didn’t move. His jaw started working. Not happy. ‘This stuff I’m sucking up, where do I take it? I can’t just dump it.’

  Derek took off his police cap and scratched his head. He hadn’t thought it through. Neither of them had.

  ‘How’s about you wait for the outgoing tide and let it run out into the sea?’ Edie offered. ‘We’ll say a prayer.’

  Oolik looked from one to the other and blinked agreement. ‘OK, if that’s how you want it,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need to tell anyone exactly what you found here, Joe,’ Derek said. ‘The condition of the water, the mosquitoes, the bad smell. Hard for the family to hear that stuff. Better not to mention you were here at all, but if anyone asks, the official line is we drained the pool in the hope of finding the murder weapon. Oh, and, you find an amulet in that water, we need to hear about that too. In fact, whatever you find, you come tell us.’

  Oolik raised his head. ‘What if I don’t find anything? You want me to start somewhere else?’

  Derek and Edie exchanged glances. The lake bed was dotted with dozens of watery concavities. The killer could easily have thrown the murder weapon into any or none of them.

  • • •

  Back at the Kuujuaq Hotel, Sonia Gutierrez was scanning the decontamination contract on her laptop. She’d considered raising the issue at her morning meeting with the Salliaqs but Charlie was clearly in no mood to focus on anything but the murder investigation. She was looking for anything time sensitive in the programme of works, hoping to find some loophole that might force Palliser’s hand. Having helped draft it, she was pretty familiar with the contract, and couldn’t think of anything that might help her case. Her reading now only confirmed that. Beside her laptop, the pages yellowing, the print on them slightly fading, was the environmental impact report, which had been drawn up just before she’d taken on the case and with which she wasn’t so familiar. Checking through it now, it appeared that the contamination was all old, historical stuff from Glacier Ridge’s life as an active Cold War radar station. The station had been officially closed for twenty years and non-operational for thirty. It would be hard to go back to the courts and argue that any of the work was urgent from an environmental point of view. She considered it unlikely that a case on grounds of physical safety would be successful either. The site was three kilometres from the settlement and no one really went up there, so it would be hard to argue that the condition of the buildings on the site rendered them so unstable and dangerous as to make their immediate demolition a priority.

  All in all, it was disappointing and she was about to close the report when she noticed the sign-off. When she’d seen it before nothing had stood out. Then again, she hadn’t been looking. But now, she could see, there was definitely an anomaly. The report’s author, Dr Richard Price, had added ‘Environmental Impact Division, Department of National Defence’ under his signature. Yet, from her strong recollection, the environmental impact survey was supposed to have been carried out by an independent body. In all the years she’d been working with the department she’d never heard of an Environmental Impact Division and she was pretty damned sure no such division existed.

  • • •

  Edie and Derek decided to make a check of the area around the lake again. It was always possible that Edie had missed something the first time around. They moved slowly in circles, covering the ground in the Inuit way, looking for evidence as they went. The patches of broken willow Edie had first spotted were still there and they saw a dark stain that might have been oil from an engine and which she hadn’t noticed before. Nothing else stood out except a circular area of rubble over on the far side of the pool, on the outer boundary of the lake itself. On closer inspection, though, they decided it must have lain undisturbed for a long time because there were cotton grasses and sedges scrambling over the surface. After an hour or so, and without finding anything else, they drove along the track around the lake which led to the old, abandoned buildings of the Glacier Ridge Distant Early Warning radar station. For a while they wandered around here too, but the site was littered with half-demolished buildings, rusted metal and dead equipment and it soon became clear that, with only the two of them looking, it would be a miracle if they found anything. The sun was winding around the horizon towards the north. Before too long the heat would begin to leak from it, leaving only the blank light of late afternoon.

  Derek suggested they take a look around the spot where Martha had her picture taken and so they made their way along the edge of the cliffs and down the winding, rocky track towards the sea. Above them, hundreds of thousands of murres and their chicks stirred and flustered, and from a distance it looked almost as though the rock itself was alive. They parked their vehicles and walked for a while along the shoreline, their legs shin-deep in the luxuriant, guano-fed cottonheads growing there. The stink and the roar were mind-blowing and as Edie and Derek made their way they had to shout above the cacophony to make themselves heard. Not that there was much to say. Soon they’d reached the end of the bluff without seeing anything. Martha Salliaq wasn’t yet three days dead and already the natural world had entirely erased her from the place she loved best.

  Derek decided to check in on Joe Oolik once more then head back to the detachment. They rattled back towards the lake. He and Joe exchanged a few words then the policeman came striding back.

  ‘Joe says some woman showed up just after we’d gone. From the description, I’d say it was Sonia Gutierrez.’ He turned and pointed up towards the rocky incline leading to Glacier Ridge. ‘She headed up there. I think we should go check it out.’

  They drove around the lake and up the steep path onto the ridge, from where they could see a covered ATV making its way back towards Kuujuaq along the coastal road. Putting on some speed, they caught up with Gutierrez just outside the settlement. The lawyer brought her vehicle to a stop.

  ‘What the hell do you think you were doing tramping around an active crime scene?’ Derek said.

  Gutierrez raised her eyebrows. She seemed put out. ‘Trying to make sense of things, sergeant, same as you.’ She offered a half-hearted apology, but any fool could see she was completely unrepentant.

  ‘Next time you’ll ask my permission,’ Derek said.

  As she bumped off along the track, he reached up under his hat, scratched his head and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  ‘We need to watch that one,’ he said.

  • • •

  The personnel list Klinsman had promised them was waiting in Derek’s email inbox when they got back. He pulled it up, hit a key, then another. On a table beside his desk, the printer began to tick. He removed a print-out a few pages long. Dividing the list up, Derek sat at his desk and began to run his eyes along the names. Edie went over to Stevie Killik’s desk and did the same.

  ‘Jacob Namagoose sound like an Indian name to you?’ she said.

  Derek’s head shot up. ‘Cree. My mother counted Namagooses among her relations.’

  ‘Royal Canadian Infantry Corps. He’s a p
rivate.’ She marked the name with a cross. They continued on, but when nothing else sprang out Derek reached for the phone and pressed speaker.

  A young-sounding voice patched him through to Klinsman.

  Derek listed the name and regiment and asked if Private Jacob Namagoose was a big fellow.

  ‘We got five hundred personnel here, sergeant. Army, navy, air force and Rangers.’ The colonel sounded distracted. ‘We don’t list them by size, but if you’ll hold a couple minutes, I’ll get someone to check his profile.’

  They heard him relay the information then he came back on the line.

  ‘According to his file Jacob Namagoose is one hundred ninety centimetres. One oh five kilos. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘We’d like to interview him,’ Derek said.

  A pause, then Klinsman again. ‘Can I ask on what basis?’

  ‘At this stage? Person of interest.’

  There was a pause, then the sound of a keyboard. ‘He’s on a local exercise, but nothing I can’t pull him off. An hour be OK? I’ll have someone leave your name down on the list at camp security.’

  9

  In the early evening light two ATVs bumped along the track towards Camp Nanook. The last of the day’s heat was rising from the tundra, the horizon shimmering silver-grey. To the north the great icy peak of Mount Aqiatushuk lay silhouetted in the sun. Beyond it lay the central cordillera, bound together by the great icecaps and glaciers of the remote interior.

  At the sentry gate Klinsman acknowledged them both with a weak smile.

  ‘I can’t imagine you see many murders around here.’ His face was solemn now, with a distant expression, as though he was going through the motions.