Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (8 page)

No food, and a second drink, might have been responsible for my uneasy night. I'd had nights like that before when I was on a case. I hadn't really been on a case for a long time, but as I drifted in and out of sleep I was out in the bush with three other men in a blizzard. We had made a shelter against the wreck of an aircraft. It was damn cold. The other three were arguing but I couldn't hear what about. Even while still half-asleep I was thinking this certainly wasn't the kind of thing I needed to consult Dr. Freud about: I was hunting for three guys in a crashed aircraft, what else would I dream about? If I'd dreamed that I'd just scored seven straight goals to give the Montreal Canadiens a 9–8 win over the Edmonton Oilers, that
would
have required professional interpretation. After all, I'm a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.

I awoke to sounds of doors closing and boots clumping. I showered, dressed and, very hungry, found the dining room simply by following the crowd. While I moved my tray along the food-laden hot tables of bacon, sausages, ham, scrambled eggs (and a guy who'd cook eggs any other way you ordered), breaded fish, English muffins, hot cakes, French toast, hash browns and French fries, I ate a smoked sausage with my fingers. Then I was among the Danishes, muffins, every known packaged cereal, juices the same, coffee, cream, milk, hot water, tea (loose as well as bags).

I took my loaded tray to an empty table by a window and as I ate, watched as men moved along the line. They'd serve themselves grandly, meagerly, or in between, then look around for company and carry the tray to this table or that. Some glanced at me but none came to mine.

There weren't many Dene or Metis that I saw, but that didn't mean much; Norman Wells was about eighty percent white, I knew from someplace. Not like Fort Norman fifty miles south, which was almost all Dene and Metis. Maxine had said once, “In Fort Norman we got about two hundred and fifty people. No goddam”—smilingly—“Inuit at all, maybe twenty white people at the most.”

Some of the men, after eating, filled paper bags with fruit, doughnuts, muffins, cartons of fruit juice and milk. These must have been for between meals, because on a table at the end of the food line other well-filled bags were labeled with names, obviously pre-ordered lunches. I thought that if I was ever out of a job and hungry I would try to get on with Esso Resources at Norman Wells.

Finally so full of food that I could think about murder again, I'd made my phone calls and then Corporal Charlie Paterson was hammering the phone booth door. I went back to my room and zipped up my down vest, pulled on my parka, placed my fur hat squarely on my head with the ear flaps hanging loose. It was still a couple of hours before daylight. Outside, Charlie was waiting. I climbed into the van beside him.

“How about something to eat?” he grinned.

Ridiculous idea. He must have known.

As we pulled out of the parking lot the headlights of a line of school buses came the other way. I hadn't noticed the Territorial school across the street the night before, just seeing another dark building. But you couldn't miss it now, with all the life, bundled-up kids yelling and horsing around, kids leaping down from the buses to mingle with those who probably lived close and therefore were arriving on foot.

Charlie honked his horn and wound down his window to call, “Hi, there!” to a boy who looked about twelve.

“My kid,” he explained. “Good kid. Takes after his old man.”

“I don't have any kids,” I said. “Yeah, you told me.”

I hadn't told him, but that didn't matter. Early in marriage I had cared, but got over it.

Snow mixed with sleet was rattling against the van's roof in gusts. “Great goddamn search weather,” Charlie said. As we reached the town's main street he turned right for a few yards and then left into the closest thing Norman Wells has to a commercial plaza. The parking area was a square of hardpacked snow and ice. Several cars and pickups and snow machines sat with vapor rising from the running engines. The lot was flanked on three sides by buildings set in the form of an open U; coffee shop, Bay store (tradition ally groceries and everything else from parkas to felt boot liners), Northwest Territories office, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Norman Wells Inn and others whose signs I couldn't read in the dark.

“What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Just showing you the lay of the land. A guy fitting the general description of your buddy the murderer was here the day of the shooting, so he could be the guy the ground agent told us about who came in on the northbound flight. He started out with coffee and something to eat over at”—jerking his head in that direction—“the Norman Wells Inn. Sat by himself After a while, not long, the waitresses say, maybe thirty minutes, he went over to the pay phone, which rang a couple of minutes later and he answered it.”

“Waiting for a call at a specific time, right?”

The corporal looked at me. “Don't know what I'd do without your Native intuition,” he said.

“I'm famous for it.”

“So I've been hearing—anyway, after the call he left. Nobody could say what he left in, as far as I could check. Or which way he went. But what seems to have been the same man arrived maybe fifteen minutes later at the Mackenzie Valley Hotel, which sort of sits by itself farther south along on the road you take to the airport. He had a double Scotch, then more coffee. After a while, same thing with the phone, he took a call on the pay phone there, again as if he'd been waiting for it. It was only a short call, the guy on the desk happened to notice.”

That might have been about the time Jules Bonner in Inuvik made what I'd thought must be a long distance call, from the number of coins he used.

“After that call,” the corporal went on, “he left. The desk clerk, a lazy bugger, did stroll to the window and notice that the guy was driving a Skidoo Elan. That's the model you thought it was, remember? Lots of pep. The clerk noticed because he's got one the same.”

I asked, “If it's our guy and he's not from here, where would he get the snowmobile?”

“Rented, for Chrissake,” the corporal said with what sounded like a tone of disgust, but not with me. “Somebody early in the day phoned the dealer here saying he was from Esso and wanted to rent a snowmobile that afternoon. The dealer thought it was a local call but probably it wasn't. The guy showed up just a little while after the plane from the south came in, gave a name, no doubt phony, Esso tells me they have no record of a John Williams, paid a one-hundred dollar deposit, seventy dollars to be returned when he brought the machine back, and took off.”

“And never brought the machine back,” I said.

“You got it. Oh, yeah, and the dealer tells me it has a five-gallon fuel tank, meaning more range than the three-gallon jobs. Anyway, seems like it's the same guy we traced until he left the Mackenzie Valley Hotel with the clerk watching. He said the guy turned right as if he was going back into town but a few minutes later an Elan went by in the other direction and he could've sworn it was the same guy. That time he definitely drove out of town.”

“Where does that road go?”

“If he went a bit and turned left, which we gotta figure he didn't, it goes to the airport. If he keeps on going, it's called the D.O.T. road. I'm going to show you.”

He circled the van to get back on the main road and turned left. A few minutes later he slowed at a driveway where a sign read MACKENZIE VALLEY HOTEL, a building whose lights we could hardly see through the snow and dark of a little after nine a.m. Then we drove on until we saw a sign pointing left, reading airport. He drove past that without turning and continued a bit until we came to another intersection. To our right a road sloped gently downhill toward the river. We turned left, away from the river.

“Now this road,” he said as we were driving along it a couple of minutes later, “can you figure out where we are right now?”

Best I could do was guess, but I did know the airport runway would take 737s, which meant it had to be close to 6,000 feet long.

“We must be on the edge of the airport, maybe close to the end of the runway.”

The van, just crawling along, stopped.

“Right. Now, if the guy on the snowmobile kept on going this way he coulda been heading for Nahanni Air's float base, but there's nobody around there in winter. Past Nahanni Air this road goes to the stone quarry where the oil company's contractors get the stone to make the artificial islands they drill from. But nobody in his right mind goes up to the quarry just for fun. In winter, anyway. Which means there's no reason for a guy on a snowmobile to go up this road by himself.”

“I have a feeling you're going to say, ‘However . . .'” I said.

“Smart bastard.
However
, if he came this far, right where we're stopped now, and turned left off the road he could go through that bit of bush”—we both looked that way but couldn't see much except blowing snow—“he'd come out on the airport with the fence no problem because his end run had taken him around it. Then he could cruise along without lights to get so close that when the flight came in, all he had to do was move up a little, wait for the steps to come down and the people come out, then run over and do it.”

“Yeah,” I said. I could see the whole sonofabitching thing in my head, plainly. Too plainly.

“If” Charlie said, emphasizing, “that's all
if
the guy we're talking about wasn't just some other guy who might not have come this way at all, but just kept right on going along the D.O.T. road to some shack out in the bush, into the arms of some husky dusky maiden.”

“Let's pretend we're talking about the murderer,” I said. “It's more fun.” It also supported the idea that somebody masterminding this thing had arranged for him to come in here either from Edmonton or Yellowknife on the morning flight, and had phoned well ahead of time to arrange a snowmobile rental.

He started the van again. “I want to show you something else.”

We went uphill a few hundred yards further. Now I could see great chunks of windswept stone ahead and to the right; obviously, the quarry. Before getting there he turned left on what wasn't more than a rough trail, deep ruts in the snow, the kind of place only a four-wheel drive vehicle like this one could go and hope to get turned around and out. Charlie went along that trail maybe a hundred yards, then braked and reversed into a sharp turn so that the back end of the van headed uphill and we were looking downhill.

Even with the snow I could see that we were on a shelf overlooking the Mackenzie. Below and to our right I could dimly see the airport lights, blinking through the squalls. Between us and the airport, even though there wasn't much light yet, we could see a straight white line cutting through the bush like a chalk mark on a blackboard. It vanished in the distance in both directions. Everyone flying in the North along the Mackenzie sees miles of these straight white cutlines through the bush. Many were cleared originally in the 1960s for Canadian National Telegraphs but now were shared here and there by International Pipelines and in some places from about mid-January to mid-March, by the vital winter road. That's the only time when ice at the river crossings is thick enough to hold big transports.

I stared at the outline, nodding, saying to myself, yeah, yeah. When he got that far after the murder, which way did he turn? I didn't ask it but Charlie answered it anyway.

“Ned Hoare picked up the guy's trail coming off the airport property,” he said. “He could do that because nobody else goes across the airport on a snowmobile. But the farther Ned went, the less he could be sure he was following the right track. At the cutline, of course, it was game over. Snowmobile tracks in both directions.”

These cutlines in summer are too rough to travel except on foot with a backpack. Winter is another matter. I knew the geography. If a cutline connects one community with another, like Fort Norman and Norman Wells, or even comes close, almost automatically it becomes a winter road. Transports large and small, normally limited by strictly local road systems, move supplies and equipment. Places that don't have a winter road, like Fort Good Hope a hundred miles north, downriver, near the narrow part of the Mackenzie where it runs between high cliffs called The Ramparts, sign petitions and beefs to their legislative members. They feel that civilization is passing them by.

“So which way do you think?” I asked.

“Hard to say. If you weren't trying to fool anybody, Fort Norman would be a piece of cake. Can't ignore north, of course, but jeez that road north is tough. A truck slid off a cliff once this winter already.”

Anyway, Mountie detachments along the river both ways had been alerted. Any stranger would be getting very searching looks.

I asked, “Did you manage to fly the cutline yesterday at all?”

“Got a chopper up for about an hour before the weather forced us in. Saw some snowmobiles towards Fort Norman. Pengelly from the detachment there came the other way on his machine and checked them out. All local. Saw nothing to the north. Like I say, can't rule north out, but if the guy went south, what time's the murder, around five-thirty, he could have been in Fort Norman by midnight, except that he wouldn't be that dumb.”

We were on the same wavelength. The fugitive couldn't have expected to last long unspotted if he stayed in the open. If he ran without lights, which he probably did, he couldn't make good time. If he ran with lights, say toward Fort Norman, anyone out to intercept him could stop and turn out his own lights and spot anything coming.

“I don't think the guy would be heading for a settlement at all,” I said.

“So where?” Charlie asked.

“Some hideout, even a place he'd specifically fixed up himself in advance.”

“If he knew the bush,” the corporal mused, emphasizing the if, “he could stick it out for weeks or maybe months. I mean, an experienced trapper could, easy. Some of them do. Go out after freezeup and come back starving, eating ptarmigan and their goddamn dogs and, and, well, girl friends—”