by Muriel Gray
The murder on the Redhorn reserve could be nothing or something. But he was anxious to know, and by the time they viewed the squat gray town of Stoke beneath them, he was bursting with impatience.
Daniel had been quiet throughout the journey, the pair of them sitting like eavesdroppers as the police radio occasionally spat out other people’s conversations. When he spoke, they had been silent for at least three quarters of an hour.
“You ever police a reservation, sir?”
Craig was hauled back from the pit of his thoughts.
“Nope. Ten years in Vancouver, two in Banff, eight in Silver.”
It was Craig’s turn to be defensive now. “Why do you ask? Does it make me a bad cop ‘cause I didn’t spend twenty years chasing illicit whiskey stills and locking up wife-beaters?”
Daniel didn’t smile. “Guess not. It’s just a different kind of police work, that’s all.”
“And you’re saying this because…?”
Daniel made a dismissive movement with his shoulders. “Sometimes what white cops think is abnormal on a reservation is pretty normal for the Indians who live there.”
“Like wife-beating and child abuse.”
Daniel shrugged again, inscrutable.
“Bullshit. Violence and abuse isn’t normal anywhere, Hawk. I don’t give a damn if it’s an Indian, a Caucasian or a fucking Martian. Anyone who jumps the bones of their five-year-old needs locking up till they rot.”
“Sure. But they don’t see it that way.”
“Big deal. Who cares how they see it? They have to learn to stop doing it.”
Constable Hawk sighed and shifted in his seat. “Yeah, but that attitude’s not going to help you if you have to get them to cooperate.” Craig snorted and put his hands up in mock surrender. “No. No, you’re right. ‘Hey, it’s OK to beat your woman into a pile of bloody mush if you just tell me everything you know about this corpse.’ Is that what you want me to say? Is it?”
Daniel shook his head as if Craig was a lost cause. “Listen, I’m no social worker. I just know a lot about these people since I am one of these people.”
“No, you’re not, Constable Hawk. You’re a Kinchuinick Indian, but you’re not a filthy piece of scum who fucks kids and hits women. Try to separate the two. Native Canadians don’t have exclusive rights to those crimes. Whites do it too.”
Daniel looked impassive. “And a lot more besides.”
“Yeah. A lot more besides. But our behavior doesn’t excuse theirs. We’re all human. We’re all trying to be better at it.”
They were arriving in town and Daniel gratefully peeled off from the traffic and headed for the Stoke Detachment. It was a low, modern building in the center of town, the compound piled high with snow that wasn’t going anywhere until spring. Daniel pulled up to the line of Crown Vics abandoned outside and stepped on the foot brake.
“You want me to wait here, sir?”
“No, Constable. I want you to come with me.”
Hawk reached for his hat and put it on while Craig studied his face.
“You don’t want to see this stuff again, do you?”
“Part of the job, I guess.”
They left the car and walked up the concrete ramp to the door. Part of the job, yes. But Constable Hawk could have lived without it.
“That’s it, Craig.”
The file, a thin one, slapped onto the table.
Sergeant Cochrane rested his hand on the metal back of Craig’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the pastel green cardboard cover.
“Thanks, Bob. Any chance of a coffee?”
“Sure. Dan, you know where it is. How about it?”
Daniel Hawk took the hint gratefully and left the interview room. Bob Cochrane sat down on the other chair as Craig flicked open the file.
Hawk was right. Not similar. Identical.
The photos and the autopsy report told the same story. The corpse, found in a buckskin sack, had been slit up the spine, the organs removed, the heart stuffed up the anus, the penis in the mouth. Twenty years had concealed a lot of detail, but miraculously the body was mummified and still sufficiently intact to tell a tale. A man. They thought about fortyish and possibly, though not definitely, Indian. Interviews with almost every family on the reserve and surprise, surprise, nobody knew anything.
The ground the body had been buried in was unusual in two ways. First, in its extreme dryness—it was almost pure sand, in fact. A geologist would recognize it as the million-year-old, raised dry remains of the Horn River bed, whose modern course now ran peacefully only a quarter of a mile away. That had been the factor that left the poor bastard looking like Tutankhamen. Even Craig knew that extremely wet or arid land leaves bodies even hundreds of years old whole enough to shake hands with. This corpse’s skin was stretched tight like parchment with barely an inch tainted by decay or infestation, leaving the grisly evidence of what had happened to it well preserved. The other unusual factor was that the ground was sacred. That was interesting to Craig. There had been big trouble from some of the elders when the chief had chosen that ground as the site of the rodeo center. It had been in the local rag.
He was one irritated chief, though, when the white workers dug up that body. Apparently he’d offered them money to keep quiet and bury it again. The Mounties at Stoke thought about prosecuting the old fart for that little indiscretion. Then they thought again. It didn’t do to go upsetting the chief of the local tribe. Not with the government breathing down your neck. Keep them happy, keep them poor, keep them drunk, keep them quiet. The unwritten constitution of Canada.
So the file was opened and closed. With no reported missing persons on the national computer who even remotely fitted the vital statistics of the corpse, and no one in Redhorn with anything to say at all, the file was stacked away as an unsolved.
This was bothering Craig a lot. The use of the organs was the worst part. Methodical. Repulsive and methodical. Two murders within twenty years and, more important, within one hundred miles of each other, and the same bizarre, nauseating outrage. It had to be the same person. And it looked as if Joe might have died for being half-Indian. Only problem with that was why the Indian-hating killer would wait twenty years to strike again. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of Native Canadians to tempt him. Why now? Why Joe?
Bob Cochrane interrupted Craig’s nightmarish thoughts. “You think there’s a connection?”
“Of course.”
Cochrane leaned back on his chair, swinging on the two back legs. “Heck of a long time ago. You’d think if it was a serial killer, he’d have killed again before now.”
“Maybe he has. But not here. Can we run this on the computer?”
Cochrane leaned forward, his chair coming back to earth with a thump. “Craig, I know how you feel, but you know you’re not supposed to be doing this.”
“I haven’t been told who’s going to be the investigating officer from Edmonton yet.”
“But you will. Leave it for him. You were too close to Joe.”
Craig looked across at Bob Cochrane. He had known Joe too. Yet it would be deemed suitable for Cochrane to investigate and not Craig just because they were in different detachments. It was stupid.
“So what would you do, Bob? Just leave it if you thought you had a lead?”
“Yeah. I think you should. You don’t want your wrists slapped. This isn’t much of a lead anyhow.”
Craig laughed in a hollow, sarcastic way. “You think an identical murder only a hundred miles away, albeit twenty years ago, is no lead?”
“We came up with nothing last time.”
“So we have a chance to nail the bastard this time. Joe’s body wasn’t lying there for twenty years. It’s fresh in the morgue, Bob.”
Daniel came back in with three coffees and a sad little plate of cookies.
“Don’t like to hurry you, sir, but the pass’ll be pretty much blocked when the plows stop.”
Craig snatched a cookie from the offer
ed plate while still looking angrily at Cochrane. “Can I take this file, Bob?”
“You know you can’t, Craig. It’s here for when the investigating officer needs it.”
Craig kicked back his chair and shut the file. “OK, thanks, Bob. We’ll get back to you.” He looked across at Daniel Hawk, holding the cookie plate as if he were a mother at a child’s birthday party. “Through the proper channels, of course.”
He made to leave, and then hesitated. “Incidentally, how long from the discovery of the body until they stopped investigating?”
Bob Cochrane swung back on the chair again. “Two, maybe three months. Like I said, there was nothing to find out.”
Craig looked across at Daniel Hawk, then back at Cochrane.
“They closed it because it was just an Indian, didn’t they?”
“No. Like the file says, they can’t be sure it was an Indian.”
“The file says the body was wrapped in a stitched buckskin sack. Is that an Indian burial, Hawk?”
“It’s an old way. It’s pretty unique to the Kinchuinicks. Usually used for someone important. They use pine boxes now like everyone else.”
“And the investigating officers at the time knew that?”
“Sure, they knew it. I worked on this case, remember?”
Craig grunted and looked back at Cochrane.
“Doesn’t mean it was an Indian. We got no proof of that.”
“Get real, Bob.”
Bob looked at Daniel with some embarrassment. Both Craig and Daniel saw that it was true.
The two men left the room, bracing themselves for a fight through the snow back to their homes on the other side of Wolf Mountain, and for the storm that they felt brewing between those green cardboard sheets.
17
She was always waiting at the window and Katie always pretended to hide behind the big Engelmann spruce in Mrs. Chaney’s front yard. Katie peeped from behind the trunk and saw Jess laughing behind the glass, while Mrs. Chaney approached from behind with her tiny coat as though it were a net in which to snare her.
Jess was all dressed and ready with her mittens on when Katie stomped the snow off her boots in the lobby of the big old house, its floorboards thumping to running feet, and the high rooms booming with the shouts and shrieks of the other children still waiting to be picked up.
“Here she is, Mrs. Hunt.”
Katie swept her daughter into her arms. “Thanks again, Mrs. Chaney. Have you been good, sweetheart? Have you had a nice day, huh? OK. I’ll just pay you now if I can, Mrs. Chaney. I think we owe you for last week too.”
“No, your husband settled up last Friday, thank you. Just this week is due. Shall I?”
She held her arms out for Katie’s wriggling child, so that her customer could get to the cash in her pocketbook. Katie handed over the beaming Jess and dug around for her dollars.
“I believe this blizzard is one of the worst I can recall.”
Katie was still fumbling.
“You’re right, Mrs. Chaney. It’s a stinker. But you have to admit the snow’s real pretty.”
Mrs. Chaney wished to admit no such thing. “Claimed a life a few nights ago, I hear.”
Katie looked up. “Oh?”
“Joe Reader. You know. Estelle Reader’s husband.”
“My God. What happened?”
Katie was horrified. She knew Estelle Reader to nod to in the supermarket, no more, but she was genuinely shocked to think of her being widowed so young.
“Few nights ago, Tuesday it was, his pickup went over the cliffs at the top of Wolf Mountain.”
“My God,” repeated Katie.
“That’s the blizzard for you. For all his conceit, man hasn’t a chance against the forces of nature, you know, Mrs. Hunt. We have to learn to respect it.”
Katie handed over eighty dollars in twenties and scooped Jess back into her arms. Jess, however, had other plans. She’d spotted a small frightened-looking child in the doorway and struggled to be let down to go and greet him. Katie released her.
“You know, that was the night that Sam was in Stoke. He got stuck on account of that storm. Thank God he stayed put or… well…” She trailed off, shrugging, and watching her daughter trying to hug the small boy behind Mrs. Chaney’s bulk.
Her attention was focused on Jess now, and she used it to change the subject. She didn’t want to discuss poor Joe Reader with this woman anymore. “Hey. Is this a new man in Jess’s life?”
Elsie Chaney looked down at the two children. “That’s the Belling boy. You know.”
Katie didn’t know, but she knew she would be told. “No. I don’t believe I do. He looks a bit lost.”
“The son of that man. You know.”
Katie still didn’t know.
Mrs. Chaney sighed. “Put away. For abuse.” She mouthed the words as if they were too foul to be spoken aloud.
Katie’s heart dropped down a rib or two in sympathy.
“Oh. The poor darling.”
She leaned toward Katie.
“Welfare pays his bills here. The mother can barely cope. Heartbreaking, though, to know it’ll all happen again.”
“You’re kidding. You mean they’re letting the guy see the boy again?”
Elsie Chaney looked at Katie as if she were one of her children. “No, no. He won’t be back. I mean when the boy grows up he’ll repeat the sins of the father.”
Katie looked open-mouthed at the innocent, blue-eyed mite, now having one of his cardigan buttons sucked by her daughter. “You can’t say a wicked thing like that, Mrs. Chaney. He’s a tiny child, for heaven’s sake.”
Mrs. Chaney was clearly irked by the accusation of being wicked. She straightened up, no longer keeping her tone soft. “Seems you don’t know your social psychology, Mrs. Hunt. The abused always becomes the abuser. Textbook.”
Katie held her gaze for a moment, itching to challenge her. But this was the only nursery school that suited them. She couldn’t blow it. She bit her tongue and went to pick up her daughter.
The little boy backed away as she bent down to Jess. Katie looked into those frightened eyes and wanted to cry.
What had they seen?
“It’s OK, pumpkin. I’m Jess’s mom. Would you like a hug?”
He turned and ran. Jess shrieked in delight again.
Mrs. Chaney looked triumphant. “Same time tomorrow, Mrs. Hunt.”
Katie hesitated, still looking into the empty door frame where the boy had stood. “Yes. Same time.”
Elsie Chaney went back into the cacophony of tiny voices, smoothing her apron as she went.
Katie’s mood was very different now as she walked along the snowy sidewalk with her daughter kicking the snow up and hanging on her hand. Scary thoughts were bouncing around in there. Thoughts about how it could have been Sam’s truck losing control and crashing in the dark.
But it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be. She got rid of that one before they turned into their street. The one she couldn’t shake off was still there when they reached the house. The abused always becomes the abuser. The stupid woman. The stupid, stupid woman.
18
Eric Sindon was sitting back thoughtfully in his canvas-covered office chair at the Silver Ski Company, gazing up at the picture of Don Weaver, its founder. He saw a black-and-white, ten-by-eight photo of a tanned young man on long wooden, hinged binding skis, smiling in front of an almost unrecognizable Beaver Lodge. Eric grimaced as he scanned the picture of the old lodge with its alpine porch and cute carved window boxes. The present-day lodge was more like a bus terminal but it did hot business and what shareholder would want window boxes over profits?
The tree Eric wanted felled real bad was laughing its head off on the other side of the thin partition separating their offices. If he’d known that Don’s daughter, Pasqual, was to come in and run the company after Don died, Eric would have tied his spotted hanky to a stick years ago and headed for another resort. Like a fool he stayed put, trusting in Don’s
judgment and friendship, only to find himself number two yet again, but this time to a privileged, brainless bitch who couldn’t run a shoeshine stand.
The big question was what to do now. He was forty-seven years old and time was almost up. Pasqual had been running the resort for a season and a half and things weren’t going to get any better for Eric.
He remembered Pasqual two decades ago when she was a cute kid, hitching a ride on the back of her Dad’s skis down to the lodge, squealing with delight as she hung on around his broad waist. If he’d known that apple-cheeked kid would one day turn into the hard-faced vixen who overturned every good decision he’d made in this resort, he might have done something about it.
Eric sat upright in the elderly chair. What did he mean by that, he wondered? He felt suddenly uncomfortable.
He swiveled the chair around to face the desk again and shuffled some papers. Next door, Pasqual was shrieking down the phone, not a business contact by the sound of it.
Eric got up and left the room. If there was no business that needed to be done in the front office he would make some up. He had to get away from that farmyard braying or he would do something he might regret.
The administrative block of Silver Ski Company was labyrinthine and depressing, a series of what amounted to no more than concrete sheds growing at random from a central two-story lodge, like barnacles on a shipwreck. Eric stalked through its corridors on his way to the front office, his fists clenching and unclenching in frustration.
When he arrived, only one person was where they were supposed to be. Betsy was on the phone, the new guy Sitconski gone from his desk.
“Where’s the rest of the shit-hot team?” Eric addressed the question to the empty desks.
Betsy gesticulated sternly that she was listening to someone on the line. She cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. “The fun run. They’re all up at Beaver.”
Eric made a small noise of discontent, more because he’d forgotten than that he disapproved of their absence, and sat down heavily in an empty chair.
