Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (19 page)

“I rather dislike wolves,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“I should've warned you.” After a pause, “Well, back to business.”

We circled again, wider and wider, but couldn't pick up the snowmobile trail again.

“Damn strange,” Stothers yelled at me.

Not really. A possibility occurred to me that seemed possible, even likely, but needed checking.

“Can you land here?” I yelled. “Right where the herd crossed?”

“Sure.” He went into a shallow bank, landed, and bumped along a bit to the outside edge of the caribou crossing where there'd be a smoother takeoff run.

I reached for my parka and pulled on my fur hat with the ear flaps down. It was warm in here but outside the cutting northwest wind seemed to be rising. He was unscrewing the coffee Thermos as I clambered out of my seat toward the door just behind me. The jump to the ground was easy enough and I turned and slammed the door shut. It would have been easier walking if I'd thought to grab my snowshoes, but what I wanted to see wouldn't take that long.

I walked along in the thin sunshine with the silence of the north all around me, the moisture crystals from my breath whipped away on the wind in little white disappearing clouds.

Out here somewhere William had been, maybe looking for others not far away.

I wasn't more than a few dozen feet into the churned snow-chunks left by the caribou's passing before I found what I wanted. Caribou droppings are small, not much more than half-inch pellets, quite a bit like those of a deer. Droppings from the herd just gone by were easy to see because their soft freshness slightly stained the snow. When I stepped on a few of these they squished, with only a thin outer crust frozen so far. But mixed among them also were droppings frozen through, as hard as a hockey puck. They could be an hour old, three, five, possibly more. Kicking at the snow I uncovered other frozen droppings of much older vintage. Some were buried nearly a foot. They'd been there for days at least.

I clumped back to the Beaver, climbed in, secured the door and slid back into my seat. Stothers had a steaming cup of coffee in his right hand. The gesture with his left I later came to know. It was what he did when he had a question. He put his left hand alongside his face, the heel of his hand on his chin, the fingers together up towards his left ear, his expression quizzical.

“I guess you found what you wanted,” he said. “Old droppings. A regular caribou crossing.”

Exactly. William hadn't turned merely so he could enjoy the ineffable experience of bashing along on a highway paved with caribou droppings. When he reached the crossing place two days ago he'd known the odds were good that there'd be more caribou along in the next hours or days, obliterating his snowmobile tracks. Moving caribou sometimes act as if they are going by road maps. “He must've turned on the same course as the caribou,” I said. “Either where they were coming from or where they went. He might have been heading for this crossing all along. He lived here long enough to know.”

So now we had two possibilities, that he had turned left on the course the caribou followed, or turned right to where they'd come from.

“Let's try both ways,” I said. “It might be only a matter of a few miles before he'd branch off. If he branched off.”

“You're the doctor.”

West toward the Franklins and even into them a few dozen miles to where a winter tractor road ran along the Mackenzie, was rough country. In it were many places where someone flying over would have to be lucky to see what someone didn't want seen. In the absence of any other possibility I could think of, if William had an educated idea that he'd find something or somebody out here, let's say somebody who would prefer not to be found, to the west they'd be difficult to spot from the air. More so than in the big open spaces to the east.

I said, “East.”

Stothers looked surprised but said nothing, starting up. The engine roared instantly and we taxied for take-off.

“My hunch is west,” I yelled. “I thought if we try east for a while and get blanked, then we turn back and try west until you run out of gas.”

“Thanks a lot!” he yelled.

We found nothing to the east except the caribou we'd seen passing, and then stayed on the much older but still visible trail of earlier herds. The course wavered this way and that, depending on the terrain. Every time I thought of turning back west I kept thinking, just a few more miles, but there was never a snowmobile trail leaving the caribou's route. Eventually Stothers raised his eyebrows at me and I said, “Yeah, let's turn around.”

When we crossed the Big Smith again it was the same game, but the country more rugged, with the caribou trail winding among gullies, valleys and minor watercourses defined mainly by the few scrubby trees along the banks. By late afternoon, sometimes circling miles to either side, both Stothers and I were beginning to imagine things. The lengthening shadows made errors easy. When a trail seemed to lead off somewhere, he'd point or I'd point and we'd go down sometimes perilously close to the crests of hills to find an animal track, a shadow or nothing.

The Franklins aren't mountains in the sense of the Rockies, but even the foothills that we now were in seemed high enough to two guys in a single-engine Beaver. Time was getting on. The shadows below were getting darker.

The sun had long been on its downward course and now was no more than four or five degrees above the horizon. I was torn, but still I could only go on my guess that William had come out here for some purpose so far unknown, but more specific than assuaging his grief. I was wondering if I should get Stothers to land me. But I really couldn't think why. If there was something to go on, being out here on snowshoes might have some merit, but for all we knew William might have gone east all the way to the Johnny Hoe River south of Great Bear Lake, or west all the way to Blackwater Lake. Somewhere, there had to be a break.

“We're going to have to turn back in a few minutes,” Stothers said. “Too dark on the ground to see anything clearly now anyway.”

I nodded. “Could you raise Fort Norman and ask whether William got on that plane to Yellowknife today?”

He did so, and got the reply: “Affirmative.”

“What are you thinking of?” he asked.

“Coming back out tomorrow. Can you do it?”

“Sure.” He gave me that sideways quizzical look. “I'm starting to get interested.”

“Okay,” I said. “Home, James.”

He banked the Beaver around the crest of a hill to head north. I think both of us saw at the same time the flash of a snowmobile headlight a thousand feet below. We saw it only for as long as it would take a watchful man to hear a sudden noise above the sound of his snowmobile, glance up, see the Beaver, and switch off his headlight and maybe his engine.

With the dark shadows below, the headlight beam gone, he was invisible. He could have stopped, could have steered into the meager cover. Anyway, the sign of him had vanished.

“I had a thought I could turn off my engine and see if we could still hear his,” Stothers said. “Then I had another thought. This machine is not a real champion at re-starts in the air.”

“Can we get back right here tomorrow?”

He was making marks on his map. “So young Cavendish is in Yellowknife, which means this is someone else.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Oscar Frederickson and his missing gasoline.

 

The flight took longer going back. The northwest wind that had been on our tail outward bound had grown through the afternoon and was now a substantial headwind. We were being buffeted, bounced around. Some of the buffeting was going on in my head, as well. That snowmobile whose light we had glimpsed so briefly might be the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. If it belonged to the man who had murdered Morton Cavendish, had hidden somewhere for a few days, then had stolen Oscar Frederickson's gasoline—the intention could only be to make sure of enough fuel for a substantial trip—how did we manage to be out here with a dog team through most of yesterday, fly along more or less the same course and more today, and never see a sign of it? The answer obviously was that it had not been in any of the territory we had covered.

When we landed and the Beaver was tucked away for the night, still loaded for tomorrow, Stothers offered to drive me into town. We'd gone scarcely a half mile when he said, “My place is just ahead—feel like a drink?”

“I thought you'd never ask”

He glanced sideways at me and grinned.

“Line I picked up in a movie,” I said. “Has no Inuvialuit equivalent.”

He turned almost immediately in to park beside a long, low log house. The windows were dark and the wind had filled his path to the side door with snow and scoured it into ripples and peaks and bare spots. He grabbed a snow-scraper from a drift by the door and cleared the way with about three scoops and gestured me in. The door wasn't locked and when I was in he reached around me to the light switch.

The house was unlike anything I could remember in the North. On the Quebec side near Ottawa, maybe. Outside blasts of ground-drift snow swirled against the windows but the dining table I recognized as mahogany, with high-backed chairs set around it. The rest of what I could see was like a northern adaptation of something in Ottawa's up-market enclaves like, say, Rockcliffe—except that instead of a discreet Tom Thomson or Riopelle hidden away under its own lighting system over your run-of-the-mill deputy minister's fireplace, these walls were hung with photographs of people old, young and in between. The most striking one was over the log fireplace, a young smiling woman in an officer's uniform of the Women's Royal Naval Service. The Wrens, they were called. No doubt there were still Wrens, I'd even met some of them in Ottawa, but if this one had been in the Wrens when Stothers was a young officer in the Royal Air Force, they'd be about the same age and somehow I had an idea that was the case. But he obviously lived alone, so if my guess was right she wasn't here. Anyway, I didn't ask about her or any of the others in the photographs. I figured he'd tell me if he wished. Bookshelves were everywhere. I didn't ask what he read, either.

He poured me a Barbados rum and ginger and himself a Scotch, which he downed quickly and poured himself another.

“Living alone requires rules,” he sighed, coming back to his chair with his new drink. It looked darker than the first. “One of mine is two drinks per night. The only trouble is I drink mine too quickly and then have the whole rest of the evening to deal with.”

He sounded slightly melancholy but, perhaps fighting a rearguard action in defence of his second drink, firmly put it down and wandered over to a map of the western Arctic. He slowly trailed one forefinger along the course we'd followed today, then stood and stared at it.

“What do you see?” I asked.

He shrugged and shook his head. “Nothing.”

One question had been bugging me, I realized, ever since I saw that snowmobile headlight and tried to fit it in to everything else I knew about this case, its principals, and the shrinking space that had become the action area. Stothers knew the country better than I, better than Pengelly, better than anyone except maybe William Cavendish and No Legs and the friends they'd grown up with. Farther north among my own people I had always used—took for granted—what you might call insider information. I needed the same thing badly, here. How badly I hardly realized until I noticed that I still hadn't finished my first rum.

I asked, “If you were in Fort Norman two nights ago and had just stolen a couple of cans of gasoline and wanted to get to where we saw that snowmobile's headlight without anybody seeing you, is there a way it could be done?”

He didn't have to think about it at all. “That's really why I was looking at the map, trying to remember things. The thing is, I've rarely crossed the Franklins right where we went into them today. Never seemed necessary when I could fly safer inland like we were today, or down the Mackenzie . . .”

He stopped suddenly and commanded sharply, “Answer the question, Stothers!” and then turned his head, shrunk a little, and said obsequiously, “Right, sir,” as if re-enacting some long-ago incident in an RAF mess. He was maybe a little drunk. “So okay, I can't say exactly how somebody could get from here to there without attracting attention. But I think it could be done, with a little luck. Or absence of bad luck—I mean, absence of the bad luck of running into someone who might ask questions, or notice more than you wanted anyone to know. It would also mean having a definite, probably mapped and pinpointed, destination. In the second or two, no more, that we saw the light, it was moving west. That means he was trying to reach someplace over near the Mackenzie, or even across it.”

“Could he get to where we saw him without running in the open where he'd be visible?”

Stothers wandered around the room, avoiding the rest of his second drink as if it were shooting out deadly gamma rays.

“The key would be two nights ago after he'd stolen the gasoline. If he's your man, even if he has no firsthand experience of these parts but still knew where he had to get to, he'd sit around somewhere in the bush northeast of Fort Norman until he figured he'd be pretty safe, all the drunks and lovers home in bed, and then he'd move. There are lots of snowmobiles that run every day near the town, so even if somebody out late did see him he'd be pretty safe. He'd cross the Bear River a few miles east of here, go south a bit and then head west, again staying in snowmobile traffic areas. Up to there, clear night, there was a nearly full moon, he might even run without lights. He wouldn't go too far west, wouldn't want to chance the winter road with everybody in the North looking for him. But when he got what he figured was far enough west he could simply turn south. It'd be slow going, running at night, no trail broken.”

“And around daylight he'd have to stop,” I said. “That would mean making camp with both his tent—I assume he has one—and the snowmobile under cover so he couldn't be seen from the air.”

“Right.” Stothers stopped pacing and finished his drink, quickly.

Everything made perfect sense. Out with Edie and No Legs and the dogs, I'd been fixated on William, forgetting there was someone else to look for, and, until I learned about the stolen gas, not suspecting he might be this close. Certainly he'd be holed up by day. Maybe he even saw us go by in the open, with the dogs. Then he'd move south again by night and make camp for the day, maybe by then close to the caribou trail. Hidden again, he'd probably been aware of the Beaver. But he'd be anxious to move as soon as he could and, as a guess, with the wind carrying our engine noise away from him, he might have lost us and thought we'd gone home while really we were still fooling around farther south. Add up that and darkness coming on, he must have thought it was safe to move. That would take him to where we saw whatever it was we saw.

While I was going through that, saying some of it aloud, Stothers poured himself a third drink, with a small apologetic smile. “I don't have company every night,” he said, as if in explanation. “The thing is, tell me where you think he might have been going. You've got a theory. It's been sticking out all over you. Maybe I can give it an outsider's assessment.”

“I think the Cessna is down somewhere between where we saw that snowmobile and the river. It might have gone to a pre-arranged landing spot. Maybe it had been arranged that Morton Cavendish's murderer was to hide out until the first heat of the search was off—after all, there aren't enough Mounties in the world to cover every old trapper's cabin or every snowbank in the bush—and then rendezvous with the people on the aircraft.”

“And after that?”

“If they came down at a safe, pre-arranged place, they would plan to take off from there and fly somewhere they'd figured out in advance, maybe even have a car waiting, take the money, ditch or hide the Cessna, and live happily ever after. There's only one piece that doesn't fit.”

“Young Cavendish,” he said.

“Yeah.” I wondered if William had chosen the safe landing place to start with. I still couldn't think of him as part of the deal to murder his father. But maybe I was wrong. Everything else fitted.

Back at the detachment, Nicky was watching the Disney Sunday movie. He gave me his usual cheerful welcome. I read the day's messages, which yielded nothing. Flights west of the Mackenzie in the widening grid laid out by the baffled Search and Rescue people again had come up zero. Nicky came out during a commercial and said, “Hey, that dog-team lady was in lookin' for you. Wants you to call her or go see her when you have a chance.”

I thought of her frostiness at our last parting. I'd worry about her later, if at all. I called Inuvik and was patched through to Ted Huff's home. In some respects I'd rather do a thing and explain later. But what I had in mind might wind up with a search party going out for me. If so, Ted, who would have to give that order, had a right to know what I was proposing to do.

“Matteesie!” he said. “Jeez, that was fast!”

I didn't get it.

“Can't be more than three minutes ago I got Pengelly at home and told him to find you for me!”

I didn't tell him that the other phone was ringing and Nicky answering and then looking over at me and grinning while he said in a low voice, “Yeah. They're talkin' right now.”

At the same time Ted was saying, and not in any low voice, “We got a screw-up here. Bonner. I think I told you we didn't hold him on the Gloria thing, beating her up.”

“Yeah, matter of fact I wondered why.”

“Two reasons. One, he might lead us to some evidence in the drug case, not bloody likely, him not being stupid, but possible. Two, the kind of assault charge we had in mind was confused somewhat by the number of stitches he needed from where Maxine hit him with the ski.”

I loved that image.

“Anyway, we just told him not to leave town. But he caught the flight out today. Told the agent he was going to Yellowknife for the service for Morton. Didn't even use a fake name. Might even have gone on to Edmonton, the flight isn't in there yet so we haven't been able to check. Or he could have got off at Norman Wells. If so, and where the hell he'd go from there, Charlie Paterson is trying to find out. If we pick him up we'll let you know. Meanwhile, if he shows up there . . .”

It was a lot to take in. It wasn't all bad. Depending on where he did get off, it could have been just a decision to run and hide, or the kind of desperate move Bonner might make if he knew all along where the Cessna was heading and was trying to catch up to his share of the money.

Ted went on, “We've issued a warrant now on him beating up Gloria, so anybody who sees him can grab him.”

I thought of another way. “Maybe we shouldn't grab him,” I said. “Just watch him, follow him. Even in Edmonton if he gets that far.” I was thinking, if Bonner really is trying to get to his share of the money before it disappears, it might be just the kind of break we've been waiting for.

Should I change my plans for tomorrow? I didn't think so. But before I could tell Ted what I had in mind, the original reason for my call, he went on to say he'd heard from Yellowknife that William had arrived and was staying at the Yellowknife Inn.

“Maxine's sister is there, too. One of our people said that she and William had been in the bar together.”

That reminded me. Gloria might be one person close enough to William to find out more than the rest of us had. Like what William's snowmobile trip had been all about. After I'd told Ted my intentions, I'd give her a call.

So I told him that, forgetting Bonner until he showed up somewhere, I thought we should go on what I had. He listened without interrupting. When I was finished he still didn't speak for a few seconds. Call it a thoughtful pause. “Well, sounds like you're doing it the hard way, Matteesie,” he said finally. “Wouldn't it be better to pick up the search by air where you left off today?”

I said I thought I could do better on the ground.

“Well . . .” I could imagine him thinking I was a stubborn bastard, but then that would be no surprise to him.

He went on, “Then how about I get on to Search and Rescue and have their aircraft comb that district again. If you're on the ground and need help, you could radio. They'd be on you right away.”

“I could do that anyway,” I said. “I wouldn't need a goddamn air force zooming around right in the area and scaring everybody under cover. The advantage of me being out there—the possible surprise—would be lost. If everything is the way I'm thinking it is, whatever shape that Cessna is in, it's been well hidden and will stay that way until somebody comes at it on the ground. If I can do that, I won't go riding in like the bloody cavalry. I'll hole up myself and report by radio and then you can send in the troops.”

“But it'll take you most of the day just to get to where you thought you saw that snowmobile. God knows where that guy will be by the time you pick up his trail, if you can find it at all.”

I said it wasn't going to take me a whole day to get there.

“How you going to arrange that?”