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‘By the way, I think you’ll find the murder weapon’s going to prove problematic.’
‘In what way?’
‘No traces to indicate any metal instrument whatsoever. There are usually tell-tale signs that can lead us to identify at least the nature of the weapon. You know, serrated or unserrated, steel or base metal and so on. Everything leaves minute particles behind. In this case, nothing. Yet the incisions were as fine as scalpel cuts … Barbara? It’s Larry.’
Craig waited expectantly, until Brenner put his hand over the receiver and turned to face him. ‘May I?’
‘Sure. Go ahead. I’ll be right outside.’
Craig McGee closed the door on his own hessian-lined office and poured himself a drink from the water cooler. From the other side of the door came the sound of Brenner laughing on the phone.
Craig McGee couldn’t phone home and laugh because there was no Mrs McGee any more to pick up the phone and smile at the sound of his voice. The phone would ring alone and unanswered on the blue painted table by the front door, secure in its secret plastic knowledge that Sylvia wasn’t ever going to come running out from the kitchen again, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and pick it up. Why phone home when your wife is dead? In fact if he didn’t have to feed her cats, Craig sometimes wondered why he went home at all. Everything there had her mark on it, her smell on it, her touch to it. Her absence mocked him, from the coffee jars full of shells she collected on holiday in Scotland, to the ridiculous carved magazine rack she bought at a heart foundation sale. Sometimes he woke in the night and stretched out to touch her neck, only to find the empty strip of bed as cold as marble.
He wondered if Brenner knew how lucky he was to be able to perform that simple but delicious act of phoning home.
Staff Sergeant McGee let his forehead rest against the wall above the cooler. He crushed the waxed paper cone in his hand and let it fall to the floor.
* * *
‘Don’t know why they don’t just send us out in a carton pulled by a sow. Be as much use as this heap of shit in the snow.’
Constable Sonny Morris was not enjoying trying to control the Ford Crown Victoria in the thickening blizzard, and his partner Dan Small made a nasal sound in agreement. Highway patrol was a joke in conditions like these. They’d be lucky to find anyone moving, never mind speeding.
‘You got to drive fast to keep control. I keep telling you. Drive fast.’
Sonny glanced sideways at Dan.
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Sure. It works. You see, the slower you go the more traction you lose. Tried it last winter in my wife’s Honda. Got the thing all the way up to Ledmore in one go. Three feet of fresh fall, and I made it in one go. You have to drive fast.’
The driver remained unimpressed, and maintained the stately twenty miles per hour that was taking them back to the detachment in Silver.
‘Like to have seen that.’
‘God’s truth. In one go.’
‘Nah. Not the driving bit. Just the fact you were in Moira’s Honda.’
Dan squirmed.
‘Hey come on. The pick-up was bust. I had to get to Calgary. What was I goin’ to do? Walk?’
‘Better than being in Moira’s Honda.’
Dan gave him the finger and was formulating a riposte when they saw the truck. Ahead, a tear in the white curtain of snow revealed an eighteen-wheeler sitting in the viewpoint parking bay. By the depth of the snow on it, and the fact that no tracks led from the highway to its current position, it had been there a long time.
Sonny brightened considerably, moving forward in his seat as though the action would turn the Crown Vic into a Land Cruiser.
‘Lookee here. Some rough-neck’s sure going to be glad to see us.’
They glided to a standstill behind the truck, and Sonny reached for his hat on the dash. Dan got on the radio. ‘Two Alpha Four Calgary. We’re ten-seven on the Trans-Canada, ’bout two miles west of Silver. Over.’
There was a crackle, a long pause and eventually a female voice. ‘Calgary Two Alpha Four. Read you. Over.’
Dan looked at Sonny.
‘Nice to know they care, huh?’
Sonny made a wide-eyed expression of horror. ‘Oh no! Could it be that here in Alberta we’re not as professional as the detachment you worked with in BC? Now I don’t think I’ve heard you mention that before.’
Dan grabbed his hat. ‘Yeah, well you’ll eat shit when you pull over a maniac one day and no one knows you’re out here or what the plate is. That’s all I’m saying. They should make you tell them. Run it through the computer. This could be a stolen truck. That’s all I’m saying.’
Sonny looked sardonically towards the Peterbilt. ‘You know you’re right, Dan. Guess we just don’t know the half of it way out here in the sticks. Never heard of a joy-rider stealing an eighteen-wheeler for kicks. Still, police work is a learning experience. Now shall I go fetch the poor stranded hauler, or do you think we’d better call for assistance? Could be a gang of Hispanic drug dealers using a twenty-ton trailer as cover.’
‘Fuck off, Morris.’
Sonny laughed and opened the car door to a flurry of huge snowflakes. Dan followed him from the passenger door, battling to open it against the wind.
There was little sign of life from the truck, which sported a two-foot crown of undisturbed snow. The blizzard whipped mini-storms under its belly, blowing the snow out between the axles in random but concentrated blasts.
Sonny approached the driver’s door and stepped up on the foot plate. The window was more ice than glass, impossible to see through. He shouted and tugged at the handle. Frozen. Dan walked round the front, kicking his way through a drift that had built up round the front wheels, while Sonny continued to tug uselessly at the handle.
Fishing in his breast pocket, Dan found his lighter and put it to the handle of the passenger door. The ice gave way in ungracious rivulets and when he pulled on the metal the door creaked open reluctantly.
It had been a man. Now it was ice. The eyes were swollen horribly, the result of their moisture freezing and expanding, and they stared, boggling, out of the windscreen into nothing. The tongue protruded like a gargoyle, long and pointed and white, and the hands still gripped the wheel as though this man of ice was shouting maniacally at a driver who’d just cut him up bad.
Dan stared at it for a long time, his own mouth open, almost aping the frozen figure he beheld. Sonny, unable to open the driver door, joined Dan at his elbow.
‘God almighty.’
Dan stepped down, still staring at the nightmare, and let Sonny in. He climbed up and touched the figure gingerly with a gloved finger. It was hard as rock.
Sonny looked round the cab. Full of snow. Snow on the floor, snow banked up on the seat against the door, snow in a cornice along the windshield. What the hell had this guy been doing?
Why would you let the cab fill with snow, shut the doors, and then sit at the wheel until you froze to death? He cleared the dash with the back of his hand and found the driver’s ID.
Ernie Legat. Fifty-five years old.
He sighed and backed out of the cab. Poor Ernie. The guy must have planned it like this. Probably had gambling debts or something. Sonny had seen plenty creative suicides, but they never got any easier to deal with. Poor Ernie.
9 (#ulink_a4ab988a-d770-58bc-952f-505260cbfc02)
Keeping the yard from clogging with snow was impossible. That was probably why Wilber Stonerider had been given the task. Flakes the size of golf balls were driving through the chicken wire in the compound as though his shovel were their sole target. No big deal. He would have a drink soon. He felt the half-bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket bumping against his thigh with every thrust of the shovel and let himself imagine the moment when he could slip behind one of the dismantled buses in the compound and take a long, delicious mouthful. Inside the shed, the engineers were clattering around their machines, shouting to each other and playing the radio loud, their noise echoing round the huge tin building as though they were in a drum.
The buses that ended up here were like sick animals. They stood passively inside the shed and out in the yard, waiting to be attended by the gang of mechanical surgeons who would strip back their bodywork and probe their insides. Wilber, meanwhile, got to sweep the yard. But then Wilber was not exactly a regular employee of Fox Line Travel. Wilber was putting in some community service hours, penance for being drunk and disorderly in the Empire Hotel when he managed to smash three chairs and assault a waitress called Candy.
He’d figured this would be preferable to a couple of days in the slammer but now, with the snow making his task Herculean, he wasn’t so sure. The RCs didn’t dare touch you these days. No way. The band had hired that fancy lady lawyer from Edmonton who’d throw the book at them if any Kinchuinick Indian came out of their custody with so much as a scratch. Sure, they would call you every name in the book and some that didn’t make it into the book, but they couldn’t break your face. She was the best thing the band ever bought. Even looked after off-reserve Indians like Wilber. All you had to do was use your one phone call to her and, bingo, she’d get you off the hook. Of course from Silver, calling the band office was long distance, but that didn’t matter none. So far Wilber had called the lady lawyer four times. He was really getting value for money. Okay, value for the band’s money. Except this time, he wished he’d taken the days in pokey. You got food and sleep, and it was warm. Of course there was no liquor or tobacco, and that was hard to go without for three days. He felt the bottle again on his leg and decided that he’d made the right choice. He ran his tongue over dry lips, catching a flake as it tried to fly into his mouth. Now was as good a time as any to step quietly behind the bus and have a small refreshment. He shovelled noisily towards the bus and slipped behind its great frozen flanks, out of sight of the open shed door. With his back to the chicken wire, he propped the shovel against the bus and fished in his light blue parka for the bottle. Even the warmth of his body hadn’t made any impression on the whisky, and it was as cold as a beer straight from the ice-box when he put it to his lips and threw his head back.
‘Tasty?’
Wilber choked on the liquid burning down his throat and coughed like a consumptive. His eyes were streaming as he pirouetted round to see who had addressed him from the other side of the wire.
A man, a man just like him, stood smiling from the sidewalk outside the compound, his eyes piercing Wilber like skewers.
‘What the fuck …’
The man put one hand up to the wire, coiled his fingers through the diamond-shaped hole and with the other hand put a finger to his lips to make a hushing mime, as if to a baby crying in its cot.
Wilber was confused and not a little pissed off. He wrestled his coughing under control, and blinked at the guy like he was crazy. Still hanging on the fence the man put his hand back into his pocket and spoke deliberately, in the manner of someone making an announcement.
‘I am …’ he paused as if for dramatic effect, and smiled, ‘… Sitconski.’
Wilber blinked at him at again. He screwed the top back on his whisky and stepped back slightly from the wire. ‘Yeah?’
The man stood perfectly still, waiting.
Wilber flicked through a mental filing cabinet of what this guy wanted. He took a guess. ‘You from Welfare?’
There was an almost imperceptible change in the man’s demeanour, but Wilber Stonerider picked it up. Was it anger? Why would a total stranger be angry at him? He’d done nothing. Well, nothing he wasn’t already paying for. But there it was in this guy’s eyes. Anger. Definitely.
This time the man spoke softly, and if Wilber were honest with himself, menacingly.
‘My name is Sitconski.’ He scanned the forty-two-year-old Indian’s face as if searching for a concealed message, a smile forming on his lips again. This time, an unmistakably cruel smile. ‘Moses Sitconski.’ The smile gave way to a dry laugh, like ice cracking under a boot.
Wilber was out of his depth here. The guy was obviously a nut. And he was a nut interfering with the only serious drinking time he might grab this morning. Any moment now the foreman would walk out of the shed looking for him and it would be too late to take another swig. If he wasn’t here to pin something on him, this guy could get lost.
‘Nice meeting you, Mr Sitconski.’ He turned his back on the guy and picked up his shovel. There was, after all, eight feet of wire netting between them. The voice that came back at him this time made Wilber freeze like an animal in headlights.
‘Do you know my name?’
What was wrong with that voice? It was a human voice. Was it though? There was something horrible running beneath the syllables, like a sewer running under a sidewalk. Frightened, Wilber turned round slowly to face the man again. The snow was falling thick and silent between them and Wilber’s breath sent white clouds billowing between the flakes. If the man was breathing at all it was like an athlete. There was no vapour from his mouth or nose at all. Wilber realized the hand holding the shovel was shaking and that he still held his bottle in the other. He leaned the shovel on the fence, unscrewed the bottle and took a long draught. Of course he could always run away, but something told him no one would ever run fast enough from this man.
The whisky hit the spot and gave him back his voice. He laughed nervously. ‘Sure. Sure I know your name, mister. You just told me it. Moses Sitconski.’
Wilber thought he saw ripples in the man. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the guy had something under his clothing. No, under his skin. And it was stirring, getting restless.
‘Do you know my name?’
He wanted to cry now. What was this? Something was happening to the air between them, and all the alarm bells had just gone off in Wilber Stonerider’s brain. What did he mean? The crazy son of a bitch had told him his name about three times. He found himself looking to the side to see if anyone in the shed could see them from here, but he’d made sure they were well out of sight when he’d sneaked behind the bus. Through the wire, he could see the white blanketed scrubland on the other side of the road. In short, no one could see Wilber Stonerider and his insane visitor Moses Whatever.
‘Look, mister. I don’t want no trouble. I know your …’
‘DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?’
The force of the words, spoken quietly, almost gently, was so unexpected that Wilber fell back against the side of the bus. The voice had come from somewhere distant and dark and although its volume was that of an explosion, he knew somewhere deep inside him, that only he, Wilber Stonerider, had heard it. It contained so much malice, so much rage, it stunned him. He started to weep. There was something happening to the man, something Wilber couldn’t even begin to address. It wasn’t so much that he was changing, more that he was becoming what he was. The tears rolled down his cheeks as he pressed himself against the bus.
‘Are you pullin’ your pecker back there, chief?’
It was the foreman. Wilber opened his mouth to yell, but found he couldn’t. The thing through the wire looked back at him with a wrath that promised to erupt into frenzy. It whirled its head round to where the shout came from and as it broke contact with his eyes, Wilber ran. He ran, skidding in the snow, round the bus and into the chest of foreman Taylor. They fell together in the snow, Wilber’s bottle smashing with a thud instead of a tinkle in the snow a few feet away. The alcohol melted a tiny patch of snow round the shards before it disappeared into the ground.
‘Ah! You fuckin’ moron.’
Taylor, clad only in his work jeans and an ex-army sweater, tried to peel the jabbering Indian off him as he rolled on his back like a turtle. Wilber clutched at him like a two-year-old, making gasping noises and dribbling from the mouth and nose. Taylor pushed him off and struggled to his feet, leaving Wilber on the ground, his arms covering his head.
‘Get up! I said get up, you drunken shit.’
Taylor was really angry. An Indian with DTs was not what he called help. He was cold and wet now, sweater soaked through, jeans covered in snow, and it was this snivelling idiot’s fault. How did the numbskull manage to get so sauced in such a short time? He’d handed him the snow shovel only twenty minutes ago and the Indian had been sober. Look at him now.
Wilber peeled one arm from round his head and pointed to the bus. ‘He’s there. He’s goin’ to get me. Crazy guy. Keeps asking me his name.’
He was still weeping. Taylor swept the snow angrily off his thighs and marched over to where Wilber was pointing. Nothing. Of course. He came back round the front of the bus, stood over the wreck of a human being and hauled him up roughly by the arm. Wilber resisted, but Taylor was a powerful man and the Indian was on unsteady feet before he could protest further. Taylor shook him by the collar of his frayed and dirty parka. ‘Now I don’t need to tell you there’s nothin’ over there. And I also don’t need to tell you you’ll be back with the RCs faster than you can say I fuck dogs unless you pick up that shovel and shift this snow.’
Wilber looked towards the bus, then up at Taylor. ‘He gone?’
‘Don’t give me that. Get shovelling.’
He let go of Wilber’s jacket with a push and stood with his hands on his hips until the sniffing man walked gingerly to the edge of the bus and peeked round. It was true. No one there at all. Just the shovel lying on the ground where it had slid off the fence.
He walked round the back of the bus, looking left and right as though expecting an ambush, picked up the shovel and scurried back into the foreman’s sight. Where did the guy go? There was no one in the road at all. Not even a car. Unless he’d run off into the scrub, he couldn’t have just disappeared. There were no tracks leading to the scrub, but then as Wilber looked back at the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, he noted that there were no tracks at all. Anywhere.
Taylor spat, and tramped back into the shed in search of dry clothes, leaving Wilber Stonerider with the horror that maybe it was true, the sauce was hitting him bad. He looked forlornly at the smashed bottle in the snow and scooped it up in the plastic snow shovel.
A large black bird was perched motionless on the wing mirror of the broken bus and it stared at Wilber.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’
He resumed his shovelling.
The bird looked back at him for a long, long time, then flapped its waxy wings and flew off.
10 (#ulink_d736ff1b-a707-5cfd-933b-fc41b8571142)
Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three (#ulink_d736ff1b-a707-5cfd-933b-fc41b8571142)
‘Well? Are they going to move?’
Angus McEwan looked up from his makeshift table in the centre of the cabin, glaring past the man who stood in front of him as though speaking to a ghost at his side.
‘I fear it is more complex than that, Mr McEwan.’
McEwan allowed his eyes, raising them slowly and insolently, to find the face of the speaker. What an absurd figure the Reverend Henderson made. His considerable height, twinned with a slight build, made a mockery of the sombre black clothes he wore. He had the appearance of a gangly adolescent forced into ill-fitting Sunday best for a relative’s funeral, the white dog-collar rendering him almost comic, aided in its farce by a nose and cheeks turned purple by the cold. But he spoke these savages’ language, and the man was indispensable.
‘Complex in what respect, Reverend?’
Henderson stamped his great feet in a vain attempt to keep warm, and cleared his throat.
‘I have already explained their campaign to you. That is unchanged. I think it unlikely they will move at all. Not without force that is, and that would clearly be inadvisable, not to mention illegal.’
