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‘Indian?’
‘They couldn’t say for sure. No dental records or nothing.’ He looked across at Craig. ‘Contrary to popular white Canadian myth, we’re kinda the same as you under the skin.’
Craig ran a hand over his mouth, ignoring the dig. ‘Why didn’t you mention this?’
‘I only thought of it recently. I’ve been wondering if it’s relevant.’
Craig exhaled. ‘Fuck.’
‘Sorry. It just didn’t seem that important.’
‘Where are the Native Police files kept, Hawk? At Redhorn?’
‘Yeah. The Tribal Administrator keeps them, but since the Mounties from Stoke were called in they got them too.’
‘Remember the year?’
‘Sure. Larry was born that year. 1987.’
Craig drummed the dash impatiently, his desire to have that file on his knee right now, eating at him like a hunger. The traffic was as terrible as the snow. The tailback behind the plough stretched for at least a quarter of a mile, every vehicle apart from theirs revealing by their ski racks that they contained humans in the search for fun and thrills in this white stuff. Daniel looked across at him and read his discomfort.
‘You still want me to head for the site?’
‘No. Carry on to Stoke.’
Daniel nodded as if reprimanded and fixed his eyes on the road again. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing those photos again, but it served him right for bringing back the whole sorry affair. Maybe the Kinchuinick way was best. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut. But then he wasn’t really a Kinchuinick any more. He was a policeman.
Constable Benson, stamping his feet in the snow, raised a heavily-gloved hand to the Ford as they cruised past the taped-off site. Daniel waved back. It was wilderness up there. The Trans-Canada and the rail track sneaked over this high pass like intruders, as if they knew man had little right to be here and should think twice about leaving his mark. This was the highest point, and from here they could cruise all the way back down to Stoke, still trailing the city skiers as they slid about after the plough.
Craig had driven up and down here about two dozen times since the murder. If he was waiting for that movie-cop’s moment of divine inspiration he was going to have to wait a long time. Nothing about being there, about experiencing the physical presence of Wolf Pass and its inaccessibility to the pedestrian, lit a fire under his cold, empty ignorance.
This was new territory. There had only ever been one murder in his time in Silver. A pathetic, sad murder: a summer tourist battered to death in a rage by a drunk redneck from the mines up north, allegedly for insulting his girlfriend. Ugly and savage. Sylvia’s death had been neither. It had been what they described as peaceful. Craig disagreed. There was somehow more peace in brutality, a natural order where the ripping or tearing of flesh logically and visibly resulted in the escape of the human life-force from its prison of solid matter. The insidious creeping death in which the body was attacked from within was to him a thousand times more violent. He did not associate the hollow white cheeks of his once rosy-skinned wife with any form of peace.
When the doctor had told him, in that stupid pink-carpeted room in the hospital, full of plants and shit as if that made what got said in there any better, that Sylvia’s cancer was in the womb and that it would be a matter of days, he’d experienced a kind of elation. It was anger, and unimaginable grief, but it fired him up. He would go in there and get that cancer the way he went out and pulled in a thief. Yes, it would all be okay. Staff Sergeant Craig McGee to the rescue. We Always Get Our Man. Except you couldn’t arrest cancer. She’d died so doped up with morphine Craig doubted if she’d even known he was there. But he was. He held her cool thin hand as she let out one small breath and never took another. That was her death. Banal and pointless. He didn’t even call the nurse, just sat and looked at her, knowing it was over, that she’d gone. What was that garbage some writer said about not really dying, just going into another room? She was dead. There was, as far as Craig was concerned, no other room. This life was the only room there ever was, and Sylvia had left it and shut the door quietly behind her.
He envied Estelle Reader her grief. The grotesque and spectacular end to Joe’s life seemed to have a drama, a showmanship that gave it meaning. He could never say it to anyone, but he felt it. Sylvia’s death meant nothing to anyone but him, and even then it was more about his grief than her life. Lots of people died of cancer. The hospital in Calgary checked them in and out like library books, and nothing made those guys in white surgical trouser suits raise an eyebrow. But they would have raised an eyebrow if they’d seen Joe Reader. That made Joe’s death special and Sylvia’s ordinary, and sometimes Craig could hardly bear to think that anything about Sylvia could have been ordinary.
If anyone was ordinary it was him. At least he had been. Now though, he could hardly remember the thick-skinned unthinking cop he’d been for nearly two decades, letting the extraordinary events of life and death that were unavoidable in his job float past him as though he were immune. Not the kind of immunity that made him feel immortal. More as if he didn’t really notice he was alive. Taking things for granted. That time in Scotland, they’d walked on the beach in the Outer Hebrides and Sylvia had lain down on the cold wet sand, sifting through some shells. She’d picked ten tiny, delicate half-moon pink shells and laid them out in front of her.
‘Look. Babies’ fingernails.’
He’d crouched down behind her, his arms round her neck which was swathed in woollen scarves against the ridiculous weather, and looked at those beautiful fragile things.
She reorganized them earnestly, as though the order mattered. ‘Our baby will have tiny nails like that and you can bite them for him. Stop him scratching his face.’
Yes, he’d thought. That’s right. We will. No doubt about anything. The McGees were married, they would have children and they would grow old and proud of those children. That’s how life went.
Craig was not superstitious then and nor was he now, but the memory of the gust of wind that ripped across the sands on that huge, freezing, empty beach, came back to him often, the wet wind that had whipped away those paper-thin shells and made Sylvia laugh as she tried in vain to gather them up again. He thought about that a lot now. His life, no longer on those invisible oiled rails that carry a person through without having to ponder direction, was now as fragile as those shells. The wind would come, he knew, and swipe him away too. And what kind of wind would it be? Joe’s had been a hurricane. A huge, angry hurricane. That’s the way Joe went, and he was jealous. Joe, Joe, Joe. Must keep thinking about Joe.
The murder on the Redhorn reserve could be nothing or something. But he was anxious to know, and by the time they viewed the squat grey town of Stoke beneath them, he was bursting with impatience.
Daniel had been quiet throughout the journey, the pair of them sitting like eavesdroppers as the police radio occasionally spat out other people’s conversations. When he spoke, they had been silent for at least three-quarters of an hour.
‘You ever police a reserve, sir?’
Craig was hauled back from the pit of his thoughts.
‘Nope. Ten years in Vancouver, two in Banff, eight in Silver.’
It was Craig’s turn to be defensive now. ‘Why do you ask? Does it make me a bad cop ’cause I didn’t spend twenty years chasing illicit whisky stills and locking up wife-beaters?’
Daniel didn’t smile. ‘Guess not. It’s just a different kind of police work, that’s all.’
‘And you’re saying this because …?’
Daniel made a dismissive movement with his shoulders. ‘Sometimes what white cops think is abnormal on a reserve is pretty normal for the Indians who live there.’
‘Like wife-beating and child-abuse.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Bull shit. Violence and abuse isn’t normal anywhere, Hawk. I don’t give a damn if it’s an Indian, a Caucasian or a fucking Martian. Anyone who jumps the bones of their five-year-old needs locking up till they rot.’
‘Sure. But they don’t see it that way.’
‘Big deal. Who cares how they see it? They have to learn to stop doing it.’
Constable Hawk sighed and shifted in his seat. ‘Yeah, but that attitude’s not going to help you if you have to get them to co-operate.’
Craig snorted and put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘No. No you’re right. Hey, it’s okay to beat your woman into a pile of bloody mush if you just tell me everything you know about this corpse. Is that what you’re saying? Is it?’
Daniel shook his head as if Craig was a lost cause. ‘Listen, I’m no social worker. I just know a lot about these people since I am one of these people.’
‘No you’re not, Constable Hawk. You’re a Kinchuinick Indian, but you’re not a filthy piece of scum who fucks kids and hits women. Try to separate the two. Native Canadians don’t have exclusive rights to those crimes. Whites do it too.’
Daniel looked impassive. ‘And a lot more besides.’
‘Yeah. A lot more besides. But our behaviour doesn’t excuse theirs. We’re all human. We’re all trying to be better at it.’
They were arriving in town and Daniel gratefully peeled off from the traffic and headed for the Stoke Detachment. It was a low, modern building in the centre of town, the compound piled high with snow that wasn’t going anywhere until spring. Daniel pulled up to the line of Crown Vics abandoned outside and stepped on the foot brake.
‘You want me to wait here sir?’
‘No, constable. I want you to come with me.’
Hawk reached for his hat and put it on while Craig studied his face.
‘You don’t want to see this stuff again, do you?’
‘Part of the job I guess.’
They left the car and walked up the concrete ramp to the door. Part of the job, yes. But Constable Hawk could have lived without it.
‘That’s it, Craig.’
The file, a thin one, slapped onto the table.
Sergeant Cochrane rested his hand on the metal back of Craig’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the pastel green cardboard cover.
‘Thanks, Bob. Any chance of a coffee?’
‘Sure. Dan, you know where it is. How’s about it?’
Daniel Hawk took the hint gratefully and left the interview room. Bob Cochrane sat down on the other chair as Craig flicked open the file.
Hawk was right. Not similar. Identical.
The photos and the autopsy report told the same story. The corpse, found in a buckskin sack, had been slit up the spine, the organs removed, the heart stuffed up the anus, the penis in the mouth. Twenty years had concealed a lot of detail, but miraculously the body was mummified and still sufficiently intact to tell a tale. A man. They thought about fortyish and possibly, though not definitely, Indian. Interviews with almost every family on the reserve and surprise, surprise, nobody knew anything.
The ground the body had been buried in was unusual in two ways. Firstly, in its extreme dryness – almost pure sand, in fact. A geologist would recognize it as the million-year-old, raised dry remains of the Horn River bed, whose modern course now ran peacefully only a quarter of a mile away. That had been the factor that left the poor bastard looking like Tutankhamun. Even Craig knew that extremely wet or arid land leaves bodies even hundreds of years old whole enough to shake hands with. This corpse’s skin was stretched tight like parchment with barely an inch tainted by decay or infestation, leaving the grisly evidence of what had happened to it well preserved. The other unusual factor was that the ground was sacred. That was interesting to Craig. There had been big trouble from some of the elders when the chief had chosen that ground as the sight of the rodeo centre. It had been in the local rag. Everyone knew Chief Powderhand was a corrupt old piece of ass-wipe and the money he would cream off the rodeo centre made the sacred nature of the ground a joke. What chance did the spirit world have against the mighty buck? Powderhand drove a big shiny Buick and wore suits, and no amount of protest from the elders and their supporters could stop him if he wanted to do something. He held the purse-strings and even though the visitor could be forgiven for thinking Redhorn was one of the poorest places in Canada, it was a pretty full purse. Strange how none of it got to anyone on the reserve. Not until the chief’s elections rolled round that is, when suddenly there was a lot of coinage kicking around to those who voted the right way.
He was one irritated chief though, when the white workers dug up that body. Apparently he’d offered them money to keep quiet and bury it again. The Mounties at Stoke thought about prosecuting the old stoat for that little indiscretion. Then they thought again. It didn’t do to go upsetting the chief of the local tribe. Not with the government breathing down your neck. Keep them happy, keep them poor, keep them drunk, keep them quiet. The unwritten constitution of Canada.
So the file was opened and closed. With no reported missing persons on the national computer who even remotely fitted the vital statistics of the corpse, and no one in Redhorn with anything to say at all, the file was stacked away as an unsolved.
This was bothering Craig a lot. The use of the organs was the worst part. Methodical. Repulsive and methodical. Two murders, within twenty years, but more importantly within one hundred miles of each other, and the same bizarre, nauseating outrage. It had to be the same person. And it looked as if Joe might have died for being half-Indian. Only problem with that was why the Indian-hating killer would wait twenty years to strike again. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of Native Canadians to tempt him to take one out. Why now? Why Joe?
Bob Cochrane interrupted Craig’s nightmarish thoughts. ‘You think there’s a connection?’
‘Of course.’
Cochrane leaned back on his chair, swinging on the two back legs. ‘Heck of a long time ago. You’d think if it was a serial killer, he’d have killed again before now.’
‘Maybe he has. But not here. Can we run this on the computer?’
Cochrane leaned forward, his chair coming back to earth with a thump. ‘Craig. I know how you feel but you know you’re not supposed to be doing this.’
‘I haven’t been told who’s going to be the investigating officer from Edmonton yet.’
‘But you will. Leave it for him. You were too close to Joe.’
Craig looked across at Bob Cochrane. He had known Joe too. Yet it would be deemed suitable for Cochrane to investigate and not Craig just because they were in different detachments. It was stupid.
‘So what would you do, Bob? Just leave it if you thought you had a lead?’
‘Yeah. I think you should. You don’t want your wrists slapped. This isn’t much of a lead anyhow.’
Craig laughed in a hollow sarcastic way. ‘You think an identical murder only a hundred miles away, albeit twenty years ago, is no lead?’
‘We came up with nothing last time.’
‘So we have a chance to nail the bastard this time. Joe’s body wasn’t lying there for twenty years. It’s fresh in the morgue, Bob.’
Daniel came back in with three coffees and a sad little plate of cookies.
‘Don’t like to hurry you sir, but the pass’ll be pretty much blocked when the ploughs stop.’
Craig snatched a cookie from the offered plate while still looking angrily at Cochrane. ‘Can I take this file, Bob?’
‘You know you can’t, Craig. It’s here for when the investigating officer needs it.’
Craig crunched his cookie and nodded. It wasn’t the investigating officer who was going to have to go back to Silver right now and fob off the press with maybes and don’t knows, while all the time knowing they had something that looked like an Indian-killer on their hands. An Indian-killer who’d got away with it maybe more than once and then made a big mistake. He’d killed a cop.
Craig kicked back his chair and shut the file. ‘Thanks, Bob. We’ll get back to you.’ He looked across at Daniel Hawk, holding the cookie plate like a mother at a child’s birthday party. ‘Through the proper channels, of course.’
He made to leave, and then hesitated. ‘Incidentally, how long from the discovery of the body until they stopped investigating?’
Bob Cochrane swung back on the chair again. ‘Two, maybe three months. Like I said, there was nothing to find out.’
Craig looked across at Daniel Hawk, then back at Cochrane.
‘They closed it because it was just an Indian, didn’t they?’
‘No. Like the file says, they can’t be sure it was an Indian.’
‘The file says the body was wrapped in a stitched buckskin sack. Is that an Indian burial, Hawk?’
‘It’s an old way. It’s pretty unique to the Kinchuinicks. Usually used for someone important. They use pine boxes now like everyone else.’
‘And the investigating officers at the time knew that?’
‘Sure they knew it. I worked on this case, remember?’
Craig grunted and looked back at Cochrane.
‘Doesn’t mean it was an Indian. We got no proof of that.’
‘Get real, Bob.’
Bob looked at Daniel with some embarrassment. Both Craig and Daniel saw that it was true.
The two men left the room, bracing themselves for a fight through the snow back to their homes on the other side of Wolf Mountain, and for the storm that they felt brewing between those green cardboard sheets.
14 (#ulink_e25aae92-022f-5a37-a374-5af93e4a8622)
She was always waiting at the window and Katie always pretended to hide behind the big Engelmann spruce in Mrs Chaney’s front yard. Katie peeped from behind the trunk and saw Jess laughing behind the glass, while Mrs Chaney approached from behind with her tiny coat as though it were a net in which to snare her.
Jess was all dressed and ready with her mittens on when Katie stomped the snow off her boots in the lobby of the big old house, its floorboards thumping to running feet, and the high rooms booming with the shouts and shrieks of the other children still waiting to be picked up.
