by Wood, Ted
"I'd be interested to know what your twisted mind will come up with," Sallinon said. "It's going to be amusing."
Gallagher straightened up, tall and amiable, the way he must have looked at the grade school, lecturing the kids on how to cross the street. "Happy to oblige," he said. "You can laugh your way right into the goddamn pen."
He turned away and I followed him, but before reaching the door I stopped and asked the question Gallagher had overlooked. "If you didn't sell him that bearskin, where would he have got it?"
It worked. The relief of an apparently innocent question loosened him up at once. "The only man in town who sells skins, aside from me, is Jack Misquadis."
"Thanks," I told him and followed Gallagher out, past the clank of the cowbell.
15
By now it was three in the afternoon. The sun was still high but the air was colder and the northwest wind had picked up, whipping the dead leaves on the street into tight little spirals. I shuddered. Indian summer was over. It would be cold in the bush the next day. I could dress for it, but I still had to hope we didn't get a sudden cold snap that locked the lake surface tight in inch-thick ice, too thin to walk on, too thick to let us use the canoe. But there's no sense in borrowing trouble so I put the worry out of my mind. I would check the weather forecast before we let the chopper go. If it looked bad we wouldn't start on the island, we'd start on the mainland where we could portage back to the river, which wouldn't freeze up for another month.
There wasn't any more to do right away. All our irons had been put into the fire. Now it was just a question of waiting for something to heat up. When we got back to the station I went in with Gallagher to check if anybody had answered his calls to the pay phones. Nobody had, so I took Sam and left. I was hungry, but figured I'd be eating dinner fairly soon so I made do with a coffee at the bus station, then drove back to the motel.
Alice wasn't painting today. She was on edge and wouldn't talk about it. I've been married and I recognized the signs. She was upset and I was the cause. It's not smart to labor the point when that happens. Either you ignore it or you suffer. I was fond enough of her that I wished our mood of the last few nights would last, but if it didn't, I wasn't going to play games. So instead I suggested taking her out to dinner for a change.
This time she didn't object and so, quite early, I drove her back up the highway to the place I'd intended visiting that first night and we ate steak and drank the house red wine and acted like a couple who have been married for fifteen years.
While we were eating I noticed a young couple with a boy of about three sitting very quietly, ordering modestly, and eating in silence. The man had a haunted look to him that piqued my policeman's curiosity. He looked ill at ease, as if he'd just done something illegal and wasn't used to the idea yet.
I found out the truth when they brought him his bill. He couldn't pay. It began as a murmur that grew to a rumble as the waitress went for the manager. Then the manager came out of the kitchen, red faced, either from the heat back there or from the problem. I soon heard what it was. The young guy was flat. He had come up to Olympia hoping to get a job only there weren't any. Now he was making his way back to Montreal. He was Quebecois and frightened, explaining that his wife and kid hadn't eaten since the day before.
As the boss began to rant I stood up and went over, greeting the young guy in French. "Hi, long time no see. Remember me? I met you in Trois Rivieres last year."
He looked at me with his mouth gaping. I could see that the woman was crying silently and the kid was sucking his thumb, wondering what was going on. The manager said, "You know this guy?"
"Of course," I told him, in English now. "He is my good friend Henri Barbusse." I took the unpaid bill out of the manager's hand. "He's my guest, I guess he didn't see me at the other table. We were supposed to meet here."
The manager was relieved. "Oh well, in that case," he began, then trailed off. I smiled and made a little ushering motion and he left and the other patrons turned back to their pepper steaks and fries. Reverting to French, I asked the young man how he was traveling. It seemed he was in a Honda. That was good. He would get a few miles out of a cheap tankful of gas. Trying not to be ostentatious, I slipped out a twenty and stuck it in his shirt pocket. "See the welfare people in the Soo, they'll get you home," I told him, winked, patted the little boy on the head, and went back to the table.
Alice said to me, "I speak pretty good French myself, you know. Do you really know him?"
"I do now," I told her, and went back to eating.
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "For a hard-hearted policeman you're an absolute pushover, you know that?"
I shrugged. Playing Samaritan is something I'd rather do in private. I've been broke and hungry myself and it wouldn't have made me feel much better to see somebody buying himself limelight on my behalf. But there had been no other way. "I just finished a little moonlighting in Toronto," I told her. "They paid me a fat bonus, and I've been in his place enough times to sympathize."
She grinned at me as the young family got up and left, the woman waving, the man not looking up. "I've done what you did a few times since the gold rush started, although not too many really broke people make it down to my place from the highway. But you're not supposed to. You don't keep a restaurant." Then she laughed. "You're a disgrace to the uniform," she said, and we both laughed. It broke her mood. We chatted easily all evening, but as we were coming back through the darkness to Olympia she opened up, quietly but insistently. She didn't want me heading out to chase down whoever had shot Jim Prudhomme. He was dead, twice over. Her husband was dead. I was alive. She wanted things to stay that way.
I thought for a while that she wasn't going to invite me back to her place and was prepared to say good night and leave her, but at the last minute she said, "You might as well come in," and I did and lit the stove and drank cognac with her for an hour, listening to Mozart and to her as she leveled with me. The gist of her message was simple. She didn't want me mixed up in any rough stuff.
I was flattered, but she didn't change my mind. She wouldn't have, even if we had been a permanent pair instead of a couple of new friends taking the measure of what we felt about one another. I wasn't any closer to her than that—not yet, anyway. And so, in the end, I stayed the night in the kind of sweet sadness I'd known twice before, on R and R from Viet Nam when you know the bubble is going to burst and another day will find you back on the airplane, leaving her to whatever kind of life she leads while you're out in the boonies, trying to extend your own life, one day at a time, in the face of deadly opposition.
Before I left her at seven in the morning, when the daylight grew around us as we lay in the big bed, I made her promise me that she would stay at the motel while I was in the bush. We hadn't been disturbed in the night but that didn't mean that Tettlinger had given up. It meant that she was safe while I was around, but I was heading out, so I dug my heels in and insisted and she agreed, grudgingly.
"You realize you're depriving me of a night's rent on one of the rooms up there," she said, managing a brave smile.
"If that's all that's stopping you, I'll rent the room," I promised. "A few bucks doesn't matter. What matters is your being somewhere safe. I'm going to be on a hike in the bush, nothing more complicated than that, but if I don't know you're among people, I'm going to worry."
And so she kissed me and promised and I left to head up the highway to the motel where Kinsella kept his bird.
I got there at a little after eight. Kinsella was out, doing his walk-around of the aircraft, checking everything, being watched by the same beefy copper Gallagher had brought with him to the hospital. He was in uniform, including a parka that would have been fine if he'd planned on standing around, but looked too warm for canoeing and the other work we might have to do. He also had bush boots, brown instead of black, with inch-and-a-half soles that brought him eye to eye with me.
Gallagher must have given him my p
edigree since the day before. He stopped chomping and nodded. "Morning, Chief, coming with us?"
"We both are," I said, and gestured to Sam.
The young cop looked down at him and then up at me, grinning. "Needs a walk, does he?"
"He's trained," I said shortly. "By the way, his name's Sam, mine is Reid Bennett."
We shook hands and he said, "Yeah, Mike Onyschuk."
Kinsella turned and waved. "All set?"
I nodded. "Yeah. I just have to get my stuff out of the trunk." I turned away and opened the trunk of my car. In it I had the Murphy's Harbour Police Department rifle. It was a Remington .308, just iron sights but accurate to a hair at four hundred meters. I also had my survival gear, a backpack with some cans of food, a bag of rice and a billy and a pan. It's not fancy, but I could last a week with it where we were going. And I had a sleeping bag.
I lugged it back alongside the chopper and Onyschuk looked at it and dropped his lower jaw in a one-second gesture of respect. "You were ready for this?"
"Ready enough, I guess. There's nothing fancy in the bag, but we can manage a few days."
He nodded, creasing his heavy jowls. "I got ready m'self," he said. "I got a pack of groceries an' a jug." He thought about that for a moment, remembering I was a visiting chief and added a small joke. "In case of snakebite, eh?"
"Vital," I assured him. "I hope it's Black Velvet, I find that cures me faster than anything else."
We both laughed and Kinsella waved us aboard and shut the door and we were soon up and away. I was in the front seat, Onyschuk and Sam in the back. I asked Kinsella to take us in a sweep of the whole area, to check for campfires.
He did, bringing us in diminishing circles around the lake from a radius of about a mile out. He was a pro and I gave him the thumbs up. "Don't mean a thing if we don't find anybody," he said, and I hooked a thumb back at Sam.
"If there's anybody been close to the lake, Sam'll track them for us."
Kinsella nodded and brought the chopper lower. "How about the same rock as yesterday?" he asked.
"Yeah. We have to start on the island, we can take out over the lake and try the mainland later,"
Kinsella found the sloping rock and settled toward it, moving gently. I glanced back and looked at Onyschuk. He was pale and I figured it must be his first flight. "You get used to it," I told him, and he grinned nervously.
We settled on the rock and I got out first, then Onyschuk, and then Sam, who shook himself and went and lapped the lake water, disturbing the first little fingers of ice that were growing out from the rocks. Meanwhile, we unloaded our gear and paddles from the chopper. We would use the canoe I had found the day before. It was still there, tied to the tree.
Kinsella kept his motor running. "I can't take you to the mainland, I've got another call at nine-thirty," he explained, shouting over the steady whup-whup of the blades.
"Not to worry. Mike's got a radio. We'll get in touch tonight and report progress. If we need you back I'll clear a spot to come down. If it's on the island, I'll report it and you can pick us up here again."
He nodded and shook hands with both of us and got back into the seat. I motioned Onyschuk and Sam out of the way into the trees while the bird took off, throwing up a whirlwind of bitter air filled with dead sticks and dust. When he'd gone I looked at Onyschuk, who was showing signs of sweat already in his thick parka. I had my combat jacket on. It's not warm enough for the dead of winter but you can work in it without overheating. "Okay, I'll get Sam to check if the island is deserted. Then we can head over to the mainland and look for tracks. All right with you?"
He nodded. He had stopped chewing gum now. He had his rifle in his hands and his backpack on. He looked sure of himself for the first time since I'd met him. I guessed that in spite of the wrong choice of coat he knew the bush. Probably he was a hunter. "Whatever you say, Chief."
I nodded and crouched down to Sam, holding his head between my hands, and told him "Seek." It was his general hunting command. He would look for any human on the island and bark when he found anybody, alive or dead.
He put his head to the ground and started circling, wider and wider, leaving us behind in the thick trees. I turned to Onyschuk, who was still holding his rifle. "He'll give tongue if he picks up a scent. Meanwhile, we can dump our stuff here and wait until we hear him. He'll be all over this island in an hour."
Onyschuk was careful. He squirmed out of the straps of his backpack but kept hold of his rifle, a lever-action Winchester, the kind John Wayne made fashionable. "I figure I'll keep the gun," he said.
I nodded. "Me too. That looked like a hunter's shot in Prudhomme's back. If the guy's around we may need firepower." I stopped long enough to load the magazine on the Remington but without putting one up the spout. Then I trailed it in my left hand. It isn't the way I carried my M16 in Viet Nam, but then I didn't have Sam walking point for me.
"I'd like to see the place where you found the body. Can you find it from here?" I asked him, and he nodded.
"It's up the way your dog's heading. Come on with me." He led the way, moving silent as an Indian on his thick boots. I followed, swinging around constantly as the old patrol reflexes came back. It was odd to be doing this in a cold climate instead of the crushing heat of the hills in Nam. But I was glad of the coolness and glad not to be humping my pack, just following a smart dog and a bush-wise cop.
There was no trail. We picked our way through the trees, clambering over deadfalls, ducking under branches, heading southwest down the long axis of the island. Sam was ahead of us, moving silently through the bush, head down, working.
After a ten-minute hike through bush that would have put most men off guard, concentrating on their comfort and economy of effort rather than security, Onyschuk turned and pointed ahead, not speaking. He was moving well, sweating in his parka but still silent. He paused until I caught up with him, stopping one last time to check behind us.
"This is the place," he said, and pointed again through the trees down onto a moss-covered rock that lay like a beached whale rolling up from the flat ground. I stood next to him and checked it carefully. I could see nobody out there or in the fringe of trees around. Then Sam came into view, loping easily over the rock and down out of sight again on the far side. That meant it was all clear, so I motioned to Onyschuk and we walked out of the trees.
"We found the body down here." He indicated the base of the rock on the north side. A tangle of blueberry bushes hung onto the thin overburden like the sparse hair on an old man's scalp. "He was facedown, about here."
He walked forward again, stopping to check a couple of reference points with his eye. "Yeah, we were just about on a line between those two trees, the dead pine and the poplar." He stamped the back of his heel onto the edge of the rock. "About there."
I'm not sure what I had expected to find, but the ground had been gone over well. All I got was the satisfaction of having been there myself. Onyschuk grinned. "Yeah, the chief made us go over an' over it. The only thing we found was a tin can, rusted to rat shit, coulda been there thirty years." He thought about it a moment and added, "It was like it had been swept."
"Was there any blood on the rock?" I was crouched, checking the gray crust of lichen that had been underneath the body if his reconstruction of the scene was accurate.
"Nah." He shook his head. "But these weren't bleeding kind of injuries. His face was more like somebody had worked it over with a Carborundum wheel. The flesh was worn away. The blood vessels get all sealed up by that kind of wound."
I nodded, not answering. Another theory could be that the wounds had been inflicted after death. There wouldn't have been much bleeding in that case. I wondered how carefully the doctor had examined the body. Not well enough, I guessed, happy to be able to record the death as a bear attack, the hell with any details that messed up his theory: unshed blood or mysterious absence of face or fingerprints. I wondered how he would feel when he got the news of our discovery.
&n
bsp; "You figure the damage could've been made by rubbing the face and hands on a rock?" I asked him.
"Sure looked like teeth marks to me. Individual grooves, like a little kid makes if he scrapes his teeth over an ice cream or something like that, only bigger, same size as bear's teeth." He thought about it for a moment and added, "No doubt about it, the head was gnawed, nothing else for it. The doctor was right."
So that was that. I gave up on the headwork and set to exploring the whole area. It was about a quarter acre in extent. Except for a couple of straggly pines with twisted limbs, the rock was bare.
I took one last long look around, stooping to the ground, not sure what I was after. And then I realized. "Did the chopper land here when you came to the island?"
"No." Onyschuk was confident. "No. The chief wouldn't let it. He kept it the far side of the rock, in case it disturbed anything before we'd finished the examination of the body." He looked at me curiously. "What makes you ask, anyway?"
"I was just checking this section, right here where the body was. It's as if it's been vacuumed. Look at it."
He crouched with me, checking as I had done. I pointed out the evidence. "See, there's nothing here small enough to blow away. Nothing but a few dead leaves, and they could have fallen anytime. All the sticks and bits of brush, they've all been swept away."
Onyschuk whistled. "A chopper'd do that. They must've landed here in a chopper, Prudhomme and the guy whose body we found. Only it's not right. His regular pickup rendezvous was supposed to be three miles away, on the river." He thought about it for a minute. "Of course, they landed here quite a bit last year, when they were drilling the test hole further on, about a hundred meters south of here on the water-line. I doubt any of them ever came up this far, even."
"Yes. They probably did, but a lot of debris would have built up again with a whole fall and winter in between then and now."
We stood up, thinking through the possibilities. There weren't many. Prudhomme had come into the bush with a canoe and a week's supplies. He had been lifted in and the initial search had been all around the rendezvous. Then the canoe had been sighted on this lake and the search switched here.
