CRIES FROM THE COLD: A bone-chilling mystery thriller. (Detective Calista Gates 1)

by Bernadette Calonego

  The inspector stands up.

  “I wish you every success in Port Brendan. Good weather for flying tomorrow. You’re staying at the Hotel North, aren’t you? You’ll be called when the plane’s ready. Go have a big steak at Jungle Jim’s—it’s today’s special, good price. Steak Night.”

  I don’t have any desire for a steak, not even at a special price, but I thank him because he probably divulged more to me than he wanted to.

  Something crosses my mind at the door.

  “How do you actually bury people here in winter? The ground’s frozen solid, after all.”

  His face adopts a good-natured expression. I’ve taken on my proper role again: the ignorant policewoman from Vancouver.

  “With ice axes,” he replies, “or with a jackhammer if need be.”

  4

  The hotel phone wakes me up at six a.m.

  “A taxi will pick you up in an hour. Your flight is at eight,” an unknown man’s voice informs me. “The weather turns bad again around noon.”

  That’s one of my first lessons in Labrador. Weather determines everything.

  I’ve had an unexpectedly good sleep and feel rested. And hungry. The breakfast room is filled with men and women in work clothes. They must be using this window of good weather for a flight somewhere, too.

  I’m way too warmly dressed for the sweat-inducing room temperature. As if they’re trying to overcompensate for the cold. My taxi driver, a bearded man with thick fingers, comes a little earlier than agreed.

  “It’s always good to have some wiggle room,” he explains.

  We’re out of Happy Valley-Goose Bay so fast that I only get a fleeting impression of the town. The car window is fogged up. I see commercial buildings with vinyl facades, a Chinese restaurant, and a pub. The taxi driver engages me in conversation about the military base.

  “The Americans pulled almost all their people out some years ago. They think they aren’t needed here because the Cold War is over. The Yanks used to leave a lot of money here—that helped the whole town. And then the Yanks got furious because the police accused an American pilot after his girlfriend disappeared, and that was the final straw.”

  “Nobody was accused; the police only interrogated the pilot,” I correct him.

  The driver gets upset.

  “They should have left him alone. He was in the restaurant and had nothing to do with it. It was somebody from Port Brendan. They found her last week. And what do we get out of it now? I used to drive Yanks around all the time. This thing has totally wrecked my business.”

  I can’t control myself. Ignorance always does provoke me.

  “The police were only doing their duty. If it had been your daughter, wouldn’t you have expected them to be fully committed?”

  My words throw oil on the fire.

  “My daughter would have had nothing to do with a Yankee,” the driver hisses. “But the local men aren’t good enough for a lot of women. Before that, when Yanks were stationed all across Canada, the girls were crazy about them. You know how many women from Newfoundland and Labrador crossed the border with their American boyfriends? Thirty thousand—can you believe it? Thirty thousand or more.”

  “From when to when?”

  “What do I know? Twenty years maybe.”

  If he’s right, then that was a big hemorrhage. Especially in Labrador. There aren’t even thirty thousand inhabitants here, total.

  “Did Lorna Taylor want to go to the US with the pilot?”

  “No idea. Wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of girls move away from here. My daughter lives in St. John’s on the island.”

  He must mean Newfoundland. If he likes to talk so much, well then, I can pump him a little bit.

  “What could have happened to Lorna, in your opinion? Have you heard anything?”

  “If you ask me, she definitely had a jealous boyfriend somewhere, a pretty girl like that. Yeah, some guy went nuts.”

  There’s no mention of that in the files. Lorna had a previous relationship, but it was over before she moved to Happy Valley-Goose Bay five years ago. Her ex-boyfriend was already working in Alberta, where he has a new girlfriend today.

  A gray rectangular building comes into view. The taxi spits me out. My body shrinks like a snail that’s been touched by an ice cube. Cold, so cold. I feel I’m in a freezer. My one thought is to escape the cold as quickly as possible.

  The bush plane is already waiting on the snow-covered tarmac. It’s equipped with skis. I watch some men carefully pushing a metal box onto it. Lorna Taylor’s skeleton. A man comes up to me. The inspector. I don’t recognize him at first because a fur cap with flaps covers his ears and half his face. By way of a greeting, he hands me a brown cardboard box. I can only hear the words documents and dentist when the propeller begins to roar.

  Minutes later I’m sitting on the plane. So this is it: I’m on my way to Port Brendan. My post for the next three years. My stomach nerves are vibrating. What I see down below doesn’t make me feel very confident. An unending, white vastness. I can spot forests, then plains buried in snow, among snakes that are probably rivers, and lakes like frozen dinner plates. An inhospitable no-man’s-land. Everything’s quite flat at the beginning; then the mountains come into view. The pilot doesn’t say much, drops a name sometimes that I don’t remember. Only Mealy Mountains sticks in my mind. Mountains of flour. They really do look white, as if coated in flour, but the name comes from an explorer, the pilot says. It’s a national park now. I came across the indigenous name of the park on the internet, a name I couldn’t pronounce that was cobbled together from the Innu Indian and Inuit languages.

  Lorna Taylor was already dead when the park was officially established. Her remains are flying with us, and I send a plea to the Great Goddess that we arrest her murderer so that she and her family finally find peace. The pilot drops the word Wonderstrands into my thoughts. I read something about that as well, before going to sleep. A forty-kilometer-long sandy beach, mentioned in reports by the ancient Vikings. In a flight of optimism I saw myself wandering barefoot on the sand, sandals in hand, the sun on the sparkling water, my loose hair down past my shoulders—until I read about the madly biting horseflies in summer and the wolves that often turn up on the beach. Seen from the small plane, the snow-covered beach mocks my naïve desire for the joys of swimming and summertime frolicking.

  Ah, Calista, whatever is waiting for you?

  The houses of Port Brendan appear on the horizon half an hour later.

  They look as if somebody at one time tossed them onto the rocky coast, and now they are desperately clinging to it. I can make out bay after bay with some effort, as if the ocean has regularly breached the coast. It looks rocky everywhere, in spite of the snow cover; only the surrounding forest gives a clue that there is soil here, too. The most unearthly feature is the ice that lays siege to the coast like a frozen lava flow. The North Atlantic. The Arctic begins not so far from Port Brendan, as it shows on the map. It’s a mystery to me why people want to live here at all. What kind of foreign, unforgiving world have I gotten myself into? Suddenly I have trouble swallowing.

  Three figures are waiting near the runway. The plane roars toward them on its skis and fortunately can stop in time. When I hop into the snow, a long drink of water of a man comes toward me. In a matter of seconds the cold nestles into my body again. Am I wrong, or is it colder here than in Happy Valley-Goose Bay?

  “Constable Gates. I’m Bernard Closs.”

  Constable. My new boss shows me my place right away with his welcome. That’s a fine start.

  “Are these your bags?” he asks. “We’ll go to the office first and then to your house.”

  Two men put down the metal box.

  “That’s Lorna’s remains,” I say. “And this box has the documents from the Happy Valley-Goose Bay RCMP.”

  He nods and takes the box from me. I can’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. The sun isn’t shining now. But the snow is blinding.

&nb
sp; “There’s enough room for Lorna in here, too.”

  Closs, Detective Sergeant Closs, opens the rear door of his SUV, a white police car.

  Then he threads his way into the vehicle; the motor’s running already. I sit down on the passenger seat. The warmth feels good.

  “I’ll make a loop so you can see something of Port Brendan right away.”

  Closs has taken off his hat: he has short hair, which makes his head look boney. When he turns his face toward me, he appears less severe. That’s how an explorer looks after a successful expedition: haggard, but proud. Like an ascetic marathon runner.

  We turn onto a road that is narrowed on both sides by high walls of snow. A white tunnel without a roof. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but I feel imprisoned.

  “We are having a lot of snow this winter,” Bernard Closs remarks.

  “How long does it take for these walls to disappear?”

  “Probably until the end of May.”

  End of May. Makes me dizzy.

  When we get to the village, there are no more walls. Closs introduces me to Port Brendan’s infrastructure like a tour guide.

  “This is the center of town: gas station, supermarket, post office, funeral home, hairdresser, pub. The building over there is the Office of Fisheries, and the bank is on the ground floor.”

  He heads for the port, where several colorful boats are pulled up on land.

  “Powell Motors sells snowmobiles, and if you’re lucky you can pick up a good used car.”

  On it goes: the Anglican church, Pentecostal church, gift shop, hardware store, the school with a gym. My head is spinning. A modern building with four gables looms up in front of us.

  “That’s the clinic, the pride of Port Brendan.”

  It’s the only building that makes any claim to being aesthetically pleasing. The other structures are obviously built primarily to be protected from the hard climate. The clinic is an imposing building for the area, I must admit, although my boss’s well-intended informational tour is depressing. I’ve seen only a handful of people and a few approaching cars. I long for a hot coffee.

  “What’s that up there?” I point to a bulging tower on one of the hills.

  “That’s the old American radar station. It was shut down in 1968.”

  “Americans were stationed here?”

  “Yes, that was part of the early warning system, the DEW Line, in case the Soviets decided to attack the United States with bombers. The Americans built dozens of these radar stations in Canada’s north. This one was built in 1953, as far as I know.”

  “The Americans built it, and not Canada?”

  “The Canadians didn’t have the money for something like that, or the know-how. That’s why the personnel were American, too.” He looks me in my astonished face. “Couldn’t imagine it today, eh?”

  His lips relax; that’s probably his smile.

  “But there are still Americans stationed in Happy Valley-Goose Bay?”

  “That’s a NATO training center. Airmen come there from many countries. The US reduced their personnel to a minimum.”

  Until now I had almost no idea how strong the presence of American forces was in Canada.

  “Did the American pilot really have nothing to do with Lorna’s death?”

  “I don’t think so. He certainly didn’t stuff the body into a crate in Port Brendan. Here we are.”

  He stops in front of a brown brick building that stands out from those around it. All the other houses I’ve seen are clad in metal or vinyl. We get out. It’s wonderfully warm inside. It smells of coffee. A woman is standing behind the reception desk; she has bobbed hair of an indeterminate color and looks at me full of curiosity. Even her age is uncertain. Forty? Fifty?

  “This is Wendy, our dispatcher,” Closs introduces her without mentioning her surname. And he suppresses my name, too, but I fix that.

  “I’m Calista Gates,” I say.

  “How was your trip?” she asks.

  Before I can answer the lady, Closs calls: “Coffee for me and Constable Gates, Wendy,” and makes for his office. I smile at the dispatcher and follow him.

  “What’s with Lorna’s box?” I ask.

  It didn’t escape me that Closs didn’t even lock the SUV. He bangs the box with the documents onto the desk.

  “I’ll wait till the others are here. They’ll arrive in an hour. I’ve got the early shift today.”

  Besides Closs, there are three other men at this post.

  He takes off his jacket and I follow suit. I’ve become hot. The rooms are completely overheated.

  “Or do you think we should check to see if our colleagues in Happy Valley-Goose Bay palmed off the wrong skeleton on us?” Closs says dryly, and I’m not sure whether he’s joking.

  “It might be instructive to take a look at the skeleton,” I suggest.

  “I’ve seen it. I was at the medical examiner’s in Happy Valley-Goose Bay three days ago.”

  Wendy comes in with a pot of coffee and mugs, sugar, and condensed milk. I feel I’m in an old film. The RCMP in Vancouver has an espresso machine in every office. The personnel brews coffee for themselves. I like mine strong and black, like the Greeks. What I’m drinking now is so thin and tasteless that I almost can’t get it down. Doesn’t seem to bother Closs.

  “Have you read the report?” he asks. “It’s sealed.”

  He shoves the package over to me.

  “Inspector Allen is from the old guard. He still hasn’t made it into the twenty-first century. I’ve got all this in the computer.”

  I lay a protective hand on the box.

  “What did the medical examiner say?”

  “Lorna was strangled. The lingual bone is broken and the larynx bruised.”

  I’m mystified.

  “All the small bones and cartilage were still in the crate?”

  He nods. “Yes, that crate was well built.”

  I want to inspect it later, but I’m more interested at this moment in the cause of death.

  “The perp strangled the victim with his bare hands?”

  “So we assume.”

  That’s important. Hate is frequently behind a crime like this one. Strangling with bare hands is a personal contact; the perp wants to be close by as his victim slowly takes her last breath. A horrible death. The primary aim surely wasn’t to shut Lorna up. The perp wanted to act out his hate.

  Closs puts his coffee mug on the table.

  “Otherwise no injury other than the left little finger. It’s missing.”

  “The whole finger’s missing?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t simply lost in the water. Somebody cut it off. Antemortem.”

  Before death. Lorna was still alive when it happened to her. That means the medical examiner could tell that the metacarpal had time to start to heal.

  Strange. We had a case in Vancouver where the perp cut off all a body’s fingertips to make the identification difficult or impossible. We found out anyway. But just the little finger. Was the perp somehow prevented from cutting off all the fingers? Or did he change his mind?

  I’m not touching my coffee anymore.

  “Are those the only bones that are missing?”

  “Yes, the crate was apparently well anchored. There was a tiny opening on the lid that allowed the fish lice to push in.”

  “How long was the crate in the water?”

  “About three months. Everything is definitely in there.” He points to the cardboard box.

  I’ll read that report carefully, but I want information from him directly. The sergeant is used to asking the questions and not being asked himself.

  I try to recall everything I’ve read about fish lice. They’re very efficient and quick to clean up bones. Though they’re tiny—most of them only two millimeters long—they can make the flesh of a large sea animal disappear without a trace in a few weeks. All that’s left is the brightly polished surface of the skeleton.

  “Was the crate intact whe
n found?”

  Water, even saltwater, can’t do much harm to good wood over decades.

  “It was apparently intact until Scott Dyson hacked up a corner of it with an ax. “If you can believe him.”

  “That’s Ernie Butt’s cousin?”

  Closs looks at me questioningly. I tell him about my encounter with Ernie.

  “As far as I know, they’re not related,” he says. “Ernie probably wanted to show you what a big shot he was. Because he’s got a government job, he thinks he’s something special. Dyson on the other hand . . . he gathers driftwood on the beach. That’s how he discovered the crate.”

  “Is he a suspect?”

  Closs empties his mug and quickly pours himself another.

  “Sure, as part of the investigation. Personally, I don’t think he had anything to do with the murder. He wouldn’t want to make a scene with something like that. It’s widely known that he often fishes illegally. He for sure wants to let sleeping dogs lie. He used to deal drugs. Served a little time in the slammer for it. Right around the time Lorna vanished. Since then we haven’t caught him at anything.”

  “Wouldn’t sharks or other large predators try to break into the crate to get to the body?”

  “The crate must have been sunk near the coast. Where the big beasts don’t go.”

  I still don’t understand the perp’s motive.

  “How long did it take for the fish lice to clean off the bones? One week? Two?”

  “Ten weeks, I’d guess.”

  “So the bones are something like a trophy. Where do you think he hid them afterward?”

  “In the woods. In a cave. Or in a hunting cabin. There are so many possibilities.”

  “We could search all the cabins in the surrounding area.”

  “Yes, that’s an approach. Even though it’s a hard one. There are probably around eighty homemade shacks around here. And many we don’t have any idea about. People are supposed to notify the proper offices about them, but few of them do, and it’s very hard to keep an eye on it.”

  “Maybe we can take a helicopter up over the area?”