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

by Bernadette Calonego

“Are you here because of that?” Her voice grows sharper. “You ask me all these questions and tell me nothing! How am I supposed to trust you when you aren’t open with me?”

  I clarify for her that the next of kin must be notified first.

  She clenches her fingers together.

  “Is it really murder?”

  “We’re treating the circumstances around the death as suspicious.”

  “What happened? Who did it?”

  “Unfortunately we cannot give out any details because it’s an ongoing investigation.”

  I brush the bread crumbs off my lips with my napkin.

  “Now that you know about Kris Bakie’s death, I have to ask you some questions. Where were you yesterday at two o’clock?”

  She suddenly stiffens up.

  “Why do you want to know? Am I being dragged into this business?”

  “It’s part of our routine; we’d like to get to the bottom of this case as fast as possible.”

  “I already told you: I was painting in the house. I didn’t hear anything.”

  I modify my tactics.

  “Why did Bakie go to the Viking house? Did he plan to meet someone there?”

  “How should I know? We wanted to put on a banquet in the Viking house. Maybe he was going to see how we could arrange the tables.”

  “There’s no electricity there.”

  “Kris has a mobile kitchen in a minibus.”

  “How was he going to get the minibus out there?”

  “On runners. Over the ice.”

  I still don’t get it.

  Fred speaks up again.

  “Did you leave the house at any time yesterday?”

  Shannon looks him up and down.

  “Is this an official interrogation? Am I perhaps a suspect . . . ?”

  “No, at this point we don’t suspect anyone. We’re trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “I can’t help you any further. I must digest all of this. It’s so awful. I hope you understand.”

  She reacts as I expected: she doesn’t want to talk to us anymore. I ask where the bathroom is. I phone Closs from there and inform him that news of Bakie’s violent death has reached Shannon Wilkey.

  “Come to the office, and I want to have Fred here, too,” he orders.

  I blow my nose with a tissue and step on the lever of the shiny chrome garbage pail. A crumpled cigarette pack is lying in the trash. I recognize the brand instantly. Karelia. A Greek brand. I only know that because my father got upset years ago about the name of an actress in a TV soap opera. The character’s name was Karelia.

  “That’s a kind of cigarette!” he exclaimed. “How can a woman be named after a cigarette?”

  “But nobody in North America knows that,” my mother retorted. Since then it’s been a private joke in our family—out of Dad’s hearing range, of course. Otherwise he never talks about Greece. He never goes to visit his family there, unlike my mother. Dad forbids her to travel to Greece with me or my six siblings. He must have experienced something horrible in his native country, but he never talks about it, and neither does my mother.

  I have a difficult relationship with my father. Dad can’t comprehend why I’m working for the RCMP. He can’t bring himself to understand why I’m haunted in my dreams even today by the desperate scream of my schoolmate. He won’t hear a word about that warm summer night when his daughter, who was lying half-awake by an open window, heard a blood-curdling cry for help. “Stop! You’re hurting me!” His daughter, who did all she could to find the girl who screamed out her pain and her fear, but got no help. Dad never wanted to acknowledge that the policewoman in me was born during those weeks. Perhaps my father’s stubborn attitude is the reason I’ve never really been interested in Greece.

  And now a Karelia cigarette pack in Shannon Wilkey’s bathroom. The brand has become very trendy in Vancouver, at least among dyed-in-the-wool smokers. I’d never have expected anybody in Port Brendan to know it.

  20

  There is so much tension in the air at the station that you can make electricity out of it. Closs has gathered me and the three others on the team around him. Situation review. Forensic evidence from the Viking house hasn’t yielded much. No results yet for the fingerprints on the flashlight Fred and I found. It’s a cheap Chinese model and for sale in Port Brendan. Austin Sullivan found that out. I’m still frustrated that Closs put him in charge of the forensic evidence and not me. I think Sullivan’s mouth is bigger than his competence. He likes to brag about his time with the RCMP in White Hills in Northern Ontario. He let me know that, compared to then, working in Port Brendan is a walk in the park. All his swagger during murder investigations has to do with physical conflicts and not with sensitive details. One of his favorite topics is his performance in his personal workout room in the basement that he generously invited others on the team to use. He didn’t invite me.

  Sullivan thinks as Fred and I do, that the murder weapon is the Viking knife. It’s being examined at this moment in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, as is Bakie’s body. Frank Delgado lets Sullivan do the talking. Didn’t he see anything of interest? Closs doesn’t encourage him to say anything.

  Fred must be also annoyed that he wasn’t allowed to keep working at the crime scene. He asks the question that was on the tip of my tongue: “What was the victim knocked down with?”

  “We’re still looking for whatever it was,” Sullivan informs us. “I assume that the perp is a strong man, because I think a single blow rendered the victim helpless.”

  “Do you know why the perp took a knife off the wall afterward and stabbed him? He could have just kept on hitting him.”

  “Out-of-control desire for revenge, maybe.”

  Now I had to disagree with that. “With only three not very convincing knife thrusts?”

  I’ve investigated several knife murders in Vancouver that were committed in a furious frenzy. The medical examiners once counted over twenty stab wounds.

  Sullivan shoots back at once. “Now what motive might my dear colleague find in this murder case? An argument about wooden spoons?”

  Closs speaks up. “What do we know at this point about the snowmobile tracks?”

  “One of the snowmobiles had wide runners,” Delgado explains, finally breaking his silence. “It must be a rather large model.”

  “We’ll follow that up immediately. Maybe there aren’t many like it in this place.”

  “I’ve got one,” Sullivan shouts out to the group. The men laugh.

  “The murder most likely took place,” Delgado continues, “between two in the afternoon, when Gates met the victim at Shannon Wilkey’s place, and six in the evening.”

  That seems plausible to me. Another possibility is that the killer didn’t want to miss supper and cause a stir unnecessarily. Supper in the south of Labrador is at five or five thirty. We can work with that until the medical examiner confirms the time of death.

  “What about the boot prints?” I ask.

  Silence. I think I know why. Probably any traces of those have been trampled flat by now by our people, the paramedics from Port Brendan, and the team from Happy Valley-Goose Bay.

  “I thought you’d be able to tell us something about that, Gates. After all, you took the pictures.” There’s a mean smirk on Sullivan’s lips.

  “I’m putting the pictures on all the computers,” Closs says. I gave them to him earlier.

  Sullivan deflects at once.

  “We’ll go out again right now and take the Mini-CrimeScope with us.”

  I think there are better forensic light sources than the Mini-CrimeScope, but at least this station has a reliable instrument for making traces of blood visible under fluorescent light. We’ll definitely find some on the wood of the walls in the dark Viking house.

  It could all be much worse. Just a year ago there wasn’t any cell phone reception in Port Brendan, Wendy told me. The government didn’t reach an agreement with the phone company until very recently.
Hurray for modern technology! It cost over a million dollars. The small villages and settlements are expensive for the provincial government. Damn expensive for the inhabitants who live in them, too. Groceries cost more, and if you order online you pay a hefty surcharge for long-distance shipping. Cars rust out more quickly; frost riddles the streets with potholes; asphalt crumbles. Ice and waves wreck the wooden docks in the port. Maybe I’ll become a wreck here as well. But I don’t want to stay long enough for that to happen.

  Closs takes charge again. “Now get out there before it gets dark.”

  Sullivan and Delgado trot off.

  The sergeant turns to Fred. “What did you get out of Shannon Wilkey?”

  Fred summarizes our conversation for him.

  “And the dog’s head? What did you find out?”

  This time Fred says nothing, and I’ve no choice but to answer for him.

  “Shannon found out that the dog was Kris Bakie’s, but she claims to know nothing about a blue garbage bag on the ice. She says she was painting in her studio the whole time, listening to music through her earbuds, and so she says she didn’t observe or hear anything.”

  “We didn’t see any studio; we’ll have to go back and look for one,” Fred adds.

  “I think it’s peculiar that Shannon seems to have had no idea about the contents of the garbage bag, although it’s all been circulating on Facebook. I had the impression that it really made her nervous when we told her about it.”

  Maybe nervous isn’t the right word. Alarmed, rather. But this isn’t the place or time for such subtleties. I inform Closs about the rest of the conversation and how at the end Shannon clammed up.

  “Let’s wait until she’s recovered from the shock,” the boss advises. “Until now, Labrador was a wildly romantic idyll for this woman; now she’s here in winter for the first time and, to make matters worse, somebody she knows has been killed.”

  “She claimed to know Bakie only vaguely.”

  Closs picks up his notebook. “You and Fred stay with the dog’s head and the ax. They could very well have something to do with Bakie’s murder.”

  “Or with Lorna Taylor’s killing.”

  Lorna is dear to my heart because I don’t want her to be forgotten in all the turmoil.

  Closs is already at the door.

  “Gather evidence for that, Gates. Then I’ll gladly agree with you. I’m going to take a look at your photos of the land around the Viking house. I’ll bet there are a couple of interesting imprints to be found in the snow.”

  Fred clears his throat and adds something else of importance. “Shannon has a telescope on a tripod in her living room. It’s aimed at Ann Smith’s house.”

  21

  Gerald fills his coffee mug and stretches his legs in the hallway. One more hour, then the firearm safety course the provincial government requires will be over. Many people at the tables have joked about the course’s title: “Gun Safety.” He knows; he’s taught it for years. The same worn-out gripes every time. Most of them think they took in their knowledge of firearms with their mother’s milk. Just because they began shooting when they were kids. He, too, went duck hunting with his father as a little boy. When he was seven, he got a shotgun for Christmas. His father was not a passionate hunter, and his son took after him. But his mother wanted birds for the traditional Sunday dinner. No noon meal on Sunday was complete without the dark meat of murres, seabirds he thought looked like miniature, flying penguins. Sometimes the men also brought ducks home, or a gull, although gulls were protected and were not supposed to be hunted. His father never admitted to others that hunting was no fun for him, and so Gerald feels the same way. Hunting is considered masculine. Although women go deer-stalking, too. Just last year he applied for a hunting license for moose. The meat gets him and his elderly parents through the winter. It’s tasty and lean, and his parents will also use it for sausage.

  The coffee prompts an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. Not as refreshing as usual. Calista Gates wants to talk to him about the dead dog. She didn’t say so directly, but he can imagine that’s what it is. Under different circumstances, he’d welcome another meeting. A woman like her doesn’t turn up in Port Brendan any old day. Yesterday he’d have had a keen interest in learning more about her, but today he used the course as a pretext to avoid her. He doesn’t yet know how to explain to her why he professed not to know the dog. Of course he knows Kris Bakie’s dog. And he’s certainly not the only one. But he has absolutely no desire to talk about Bakie. The whole village knows Melissa left him for Kris. He told people afterward that their relationship had been strained for a long time. Truth is, it was a total surprise when Melissa suddenly moved out of his beautiful home one day. And it hurt him. He simply didn’t see it coming. Nothing could persuade her to come back to him. He would have taken her back, at least at the beginning. But she’s crazy about Bakie.

  Gerald has never been able to figure it out. He was once sought after in Port Brendan as a man who managed to establish his own construction company. There was a time when women virtually flung themselves at him. Back then, he rarely said no. He regarded himself as God’s gift to women. Then he met Melissa, fell head over heels in love, and they moved in together. He worked a lot—he admits it today—but Melissa profited from it. So he thought. She gave up her job in the school office and let herself be spoiled. Sometimes, when he just wanted to watch TV after a long day’s work, she’d go to the Humpback Bar or go dancing in the Golden Anchor. He didn’t mind—he’s not the jealous type—he was sure of himself. But then he was bested by a successful chef who’d been all over Canada.

  He hears shouting and excited voices coming from the classroom. It sounds like a very lively discussion. He has gone around a corner in the hallway to take a breather. In the past, he would have immediately joined the others to see what was going on. But since separating from Melissa, he’d sort of become a loner. Maybe he should have gotten out of Port Brendan and moved to Alberta or British Columbia like other young men. He’d once worked in Alberta for three years and made good money. But Labrador has him in its clutches. He finds everything he needs is right here. Except a congenial woman. Even so, when he drove down the main street to class this morning, he felt like a caged beast. The snowplow had cut a one-lane tunnel through the masses of snow. The white walls on either side were easily over twenty feet high. He could only go forward but couldn’t turn around.

  Boxed in. That’s how he feels now.

  A man leaves the classroom and tracks him down at the coffee machine. A worker from the fish factory. Volunteer fireman.

  “Have you heard, Gerry?”

  “What?”

  “Kris Bakie’s dead. The RCMP people found his body in the Viking house.”

  “Dead? Are you sure? What was he doing in the Viking house?”

  He has barely asked the question when he realizes his response is the wrong one. He should have asked how Kris died. But the worker keeps talking.

  “They’re saying on Facebook that somebody killed him.”

  Gerald snorts in scorn.

  “You really believe all the hogwash you hear.”

  Only then does he consciously absorb the news. Bakie murdered. Who did it? he’d like to ask, but bites his tongue in time.

  The man is on the point of being insulted because Gerald doesn’t want to find out anything more.

  “So go ask somebody else if you don’t believe me.”

  Gerald tosses his coffee cup into the trash. He has the feeling that he’ll have to pay damn close attention from now on. When he returns to the classroom, all eyes are on him. He anticipates comments like “Hey, Gerry, what do you say about somebody knocking off Bakie?” But nobody dares to say anything; maybe they aren’t sure, either, whether the rumor is true. He gets on with his instructing but has trouble concentrating. After the workshop’s over, he’ll certainly get an earful. Wild speculations.

  It gets worse.

  Calista Gates and Fred van Hei
sen are standing at the door as the participants put on their jackets.

  “May we have a word?” van Heisen asks.

  “Perhaps in there.” Gates gestures toward the classroom behind him.

  He grimaces instinctively.

  “Only if nobody stands outside and listens.”

  They sit down at a table and wait until all the nosy people have gone.

  Van Heisen gets right to the point. “We found Kris Bakie dead in the Viking house today. We suspect his death was violent.”

  So it’s true. He rubs his thumb and forefinger together but stops when he notices himself doing it. “There’s already been chatter about it on Facebook. People are talking about murder. Is it murder?”

  “That’s a possibility. We’re waiting for the medical examiner’s report.”

  “The guy in Happy Valley-Goose Bay?”

  Van Heisen nods.

  Gerald has had a lot to do with the people there as chief of the volunteer fire department. He’s feeling hot.

  “How’d he die?”

  “We can’t say at present. We’re interrogating a list of people. Please tell us where you were between two and six yesterday afternoon.”

  Gerald has the presence of mind to keep calm. Of course they’re going to question him. How could they not?

  “I was at Dr. Perrell’s house. I’ve been putting in a new kitchen for him, and I’m renovating some more. Then I went to my parents’ like I do every day. They’re both frail.”

  “Were you alone at Dr. Perrell’s house?” van Heisen asks.

  “Constable, am I a suspect?”

  “No, we only want to be able to rule people out.”

  Calista Gates doesn’t take her eyes off him. He’s used to having women study him, but not like that. He mustn’t get caught in another lie.

  “I was alone at times, but a workman helped me later on.”

  “How long were you alone?” Van Heisen didn’t stop looking at him, either.

  “From about twelve to two, during lunch. But my pickup was parked in front. People probably saw it.”