The Glacier Gallows

by Stephen Legault

  He would have to call Brian Marriott’s widow. They had only met once, and that was in the bad old days when he and Brian were bitter rivals. He had heard through the grapevine that Brian and his wife had separated during the last year, though Brian had only alluded to it. Cole thought she might like to hear from someone who had been with Brian before he died.

  At 5:00 PM Cole stood outside the Waterton Lakes National Park warden office. His brother looked tired when Cole saw him, but Walter immediately smiled and the two men shook hands. “How are you, Cole?”

  “Well, I seem to be a suspect in a murder investigation. I just spent the last day being raked over the coals by the FBI and the RCMP, and I don’t even have a change of underwear. But other than that, I’m okay. You?”

  “Well, I have a change of underwear, so I guess I’m top shelf. Let’s head to the ranch. We can get you some new skivvies in Claresholm and Mom will cook up half a cow.”

  “Is there beer in the fridge?”

  “There’s a six-pack in the cooler behind the seat.” Walter pointed to his Ford F-150. “None for the driver until we’re on gravel, though.”

  “Thank God you’re driving, then.”

  It was 7:00 PM when they reached the slow rise that started west of Claresholm, Alberta, known as the Porcupine Hills. They followed Highway 520 west, both men cradling cans of Big Rock between their legs. Slowly the earth tilted upward, the open prairie giving way to meadows and groves of aspens. They turned off the main gravel road and soon the Blackwater Ranch appeared, tucked into a dell below one of the more steeply pitched of the ancient hills. In the past, Cole had always felt that the ranch’s pastoral beauty came at a cost. Now Cole checked himself. The terrible knot that had lived in his stomach for two decades and had tightened into a fist after the tragic events surrounding his father’s suicide did not reappear. He felt a wave of relief.

  “It’s getting better.” Cole sipped his beer.

  “What is?”

  “Coming home. I don’t feel like I’ll explode whenever I think of him.”

  “Then you’ve finally started to beat the old man.”

  “I just hope everybody else can see it, Walt.”

  “We can, Cole. We can.”

  Their mother greeted them at the back door. Cole stood on the stoop and let her muss his curls, then bent and embraced her. “How was your hike?” She beamed at him.

  “We should talk after supper,” said Cole. He kissed her on the cheek and went to his old room. The bed was turned down, and Cole opened the window farther. The room smelled like horses and hay. He showered and changed into a pair of jeans and a Cinch shirt he’d bought at the Super Save in town.

  “You look like a cowboy,” said Walter when they sat down on the front porch while their mother prepared dinner.

  “Got an old pair of boots around here somewhere?” Cole asked.

  “What are you going to tell Mom?”

  “I don’t know.” Cole tipped another can of beer back.

  “Might as well tell her everything. She’ll hear about it from the folks at her Wednesday bridge club anyway.”

  “Those old biddies have Internet, don’t they?”

  “Half of them have iPhones.”

  “Alright,” Cole said, standing up.

  HE HAD THREE phone calls to make after dinner. Though he wanted to talk with Sarah and Nancy, he called Brian Marriott’s widow first. “It’s Cole Blackwater calling,” he said when a young man answered the phone. “May I speak with your mother, please?”

  “Hold on.”

  A moment passed before she picked up the phone. “Hello?” She sounded exhausted.

  “It’s Cole Blackwater calling, Jane. You might recall—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I just wanted to call and pass on my condolences.” There was a long silence. “Jane, are you still there?”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me.”

  “Well, I—”

  “The RCMP has been by. Three times. They keep asking about your relationship with Brian.”

  “Jane, I don’t know what happened to Brian.”

  “They keep asking if anybody else had reason to want Brian dead.”

  “I had nothing to do with—”

  The phone line went dead.

  “NANCY, I THINK I’m in trouble.” He sat in his brother’s den. The room had once been his father’s, but Walter had claimed it when he took over the Blackwater Ranch. Much of his father’s memorabilia remained: the mounted elk-head trophy, the old Sharps single-shot rifle that had been his grandfather’s, the licence plates dating back to the 1940s.

  “What do you need?” asked Nancy.

  “I need you. And I think I need a lawyer.”

  “HI, DADDY. I miss you! How was your hike?”

  Cole pressed the phone into the side of his head so hard that it made a red mark. “Sarah, listen, I have to tell you something.”

  NANCY WEBBER CAUGHT the first flight from Vancouver to Calgary the next morning and by noon was at the Blackwater Ranch. Cole hadn’t seen her in two weeks, and when she stepped out of her rental car, he was dumbstruck by how beautiful she was.

  “Hi ya, Curly.” Nancy embraced him.

  “Hi, Nancy.”

  She held on to his thick frame a few moments and then looked at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Better now that you’re here.”

  “Come on, buy a girl a cup of cowboy coffee and tell her what’s going on.”

  “Mom has an espresso maker. She’ll make you a cappuccino.”

  “I like Alberta more and more.”

  They went inside, and Nancy hugged Dorothy Blackwater. Then Walter came in from the barn, and they all had coffee. After they were done, Cole, Nancy, and Walter went outside, walked to the barn, and leaned on a rail fence. They looked up at the eastern slope of the Porcupine Hills.

  “I found Perry Gilbert,” said Nancy.

  “That was fast.” Cole held a blade of timothy between his teeth.

  “Wasn’t hard. And I’m a reporter. I know how to find people. He works for a law firm in Calgary. I’ve got his number. You really think you’re going to need it?”

  “What do you think, Walter?”

  “Us po-dunks in the Park Service have been cut out of this investigation. Maybe they just don’t want me involved. I don’t know one way or another. Talking with this Gilbert fellow couldn’t hurt.”

  “I think they’re coming for me,” said Cole, shaking his head.

  “IT’S GOOD TO hear from you, Cole,” said Perry Gilbert. “What’s it been?”

  “A little over two years,” said Cole.

  “Seems like longer.”

  “Tell me about it. So, you work for a big firm now? What happened to being a public defender?”

  “I discovered money can buy things.” Gilbert laughed.

  “You guys are all the same.”

  “I got tired of being told which cases I had to take. Now I can choose.”

  “Well, I seem to have got myself in a bit of bind, and I wonder if you might choose to help me.”

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Cole explained the matter to the lawyer. He finished and asked, “What do you think?”

  “What a nightmare,” said Gilbert. “The jurisdictional question alone is going to be a complete mess. Who’s lead investigator for the RCMP?”

  “That’s the funny thing. It’s Reimer. Remember her?”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s Inspector Reimer now. She leads the Major Crimes Unit in Southern Alberta. What do you think I should do?”

  “Don’t talk with them again unless you have a lawyer present. If you want, I can help you out. Even give you a little discount for old times’ sake. If they call and ask you to come in, agree, and then call me immediately. Here’s my home number and my Blackberry. Got it, Cole?”

  Cole had written the number down but was silent.

  “Cole? You oka
y?”

  “I don’t know.”

  TWO DAYS PASSED. Cole, Nancy, and Walter rode up into the Porcupine Hills and gazed out over the sweep of fractured country to the west, where the Whaleback Ridge rose and fell like a beached cetacean. Beyond its beveled spine, the Livingstone Range dragged its jagged edge along the bottom of drifting clouds. On Monday, Walter went back to work. In the summer, he rented a room in Waterton to avoid the long drive back and forth each night. On Tuesday, Cole and Nancy had supper with his mother, and he was just beginning to think that he had dodged the bullet when the telephone rang.

  Cole looked at his mother and at Nancy and got up from the table to answer it by the sideboard.

  “Blackwater,” he said.

  “Mr. Blackwater, this is Inspector Reimer from the RCMP.”

  “What can I do for you, Inspector?” Cole turned to catch Nancy’s troubled gaze.

  “Cole, we’d like you to come into Claresholm RCMP in the morning, please.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “You aren’t right now.”

  “Is it a likely outcome of our conversation in the morning?”

  “We need to follow up on some of the information you provided during our last interview.”

  Cole turned away from the table and dropped his voice. “Cut the bullshit, Inspector.”

  “Be here at eleven.”

  “My lawyer and I will see you then.”

  FIFTEEN

  OTTAWA, ONTARIO. MARCH 9.

  “THE ONLY REASON WE’RE HERE, Brian, is because you’ve helped us in the past,” said the Minister of Natural Resources. “My parliamentary secretary seems to think you’ve still got something to offer, but I think you’ve gone round the bend, to be frank.” David Canning sat behind his desk in his Centre Block office. Parliamentary Secretary Rick Turcotte was in a leather club chair next to Brian.

  “I appreciate you seeing me, Minister.”

  “I haven’t forgotten the stunt you pulled at the reception. The YouTube video. Those were private remarks.”

  “As I told you then, Minister, that’s not my style.”

  The minister waved a dismissive hand and looked at his watch. “I have caucus in ten minutes, Brian. It takes me three minutes to walk there. Start talking.”

  “I think the AEG has made a reasonable proposal around tar sands. It gives your government the opportunity to use the tar sands to transition to a new energy future and still reap the rewards of long-term development.”

  “I have to stop you there, Brian.” The minister held up his hand. “Your proposal had a significant flaw that makes it a nonstarter with this government. You want to put a cap on development that is far below what is needed to allow for a reasonable return on investment by the major players.”

  “Two million barrels a day is two hundred million dollars’ worth of oil. Every day. That’s more than seven trillion a year, Minister. How much more return on investment is needed? If you can’t make a reasonable ROI with seven trillion dollars gross a year, times must be pretty tough.”

  “I’m not going to debate this with you,” said Canning. “I’m just telling you that two million barrels is a nonstarter. It’s not enough to feed the market.”

  “You mean it’s not enough to feed China.”

  “This country has energy. China needs energy. This is simple economics. Have you been so hoodwinked by the environmentalists that you’ve forgotten the basic rules of the game?”

  Brian drew a deep breath. “Minister, with all due respect, this has nothing to do with the environmentalists. This is about what’s in our national interest.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s in our national interest. In”—the minister looked at his watch—“four minutes, I have to sit at the table with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Defence and discuss the current state of global geopolitical events. Don’t lecture me on what’s in our national interest!”

  “If that’s the case, Minister, push back. Show some backbone. Don’t let China dictate our domestic energy policy.”

  “This is what I mean,” the minister said, standing. He looked at Turcotte. “This is what I mean. You can’t have a conversation with these people. It’s always about someone else taking control of our energy future. It’s garbage.” He turned back to Brian. “I have caucus, Mr. Marriott.”

  “Minister …” Brian stood up. “Did you meet with Senator Lester Thompson from High Country Energy two months ago?” Canning looked at Turcotte, then back at Brian. “Did you meet with the former chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, who is now chairman of HCE, right before he visited China?”

  The minister smiled. “I have caucus.” He stepped past Brian and went to the door. “Mr. Turcotte, the prime minister doesn’t like his Cabinet to be late when they face the backbenches.”

  Rick Turcotte stood and with a gesture ushered Brian Marriott out of the office. Brian was left standing in the hall as the two men walked away.

  “YOU KNOW THAT someone from the Chinese Embassy was at the minister’s announcement last week,” said Jessica Winters over the phone.

  “How deeply does the Chinese government have its hooks into the tar sands?”

  Winters sighed. “In one eighteen-month period, Chinese national companies invested fifteen billion in existing projects. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. A Chinese petrochemical company is poised to make investments that could double or triple that. They are buying significant interests in half a dozen Canadian companies.”

  “I would say an investment of that magnitude buys you a seat at the decision-making table, don’t you think?”

  “It’s not out of the question. It’s certainly an influence on Canada’s export direction away from the United States and toward Asia. There are two barriers, however: first, the pipeline that is supposed to ship the oil to China is held up in hearings, and second, we’re burning tons of natural gas to refine the bitumen that comes out of the ground.”

  “That’s why this whole push to reclassify nuclear as an alternative energy worries me,” said Brian. “The government has made a commitment—reluctantly—to power tar-sands development in part with alternatives. Now it looks like nuclear will be that power source.”

  “It’s not an alternative to anything,” agreed Winters. “What’s your next move?”

  “I need to connect the dots.”

  SIXTEEN

  PORCUPINE HILLS, ALBERTA. JULY 15.

  WALTER DROVE HOME AND TOOK the day off work. He, Cole, and Nancy ate breakfast at the long kitchen table. Cole drank coffee and poked at his eggs and potatoes. His mother brought him more food. “Mom, I’m not really very hungry,” he protested.

  “You need to eat, Cole.”

  He took a bite of eggs and put his fork down. Nancy put her hand on his. “Are you catching flack at work?” Cole asked Walter. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t want you to get fired.”

  “I’ve got fifteen years with the Park Service. You’re my brother. I haven’t always been there for you. I’ll be there for you today.”

  Cole put his coffee down, squeezed Nancy’s hand, and stood up. “Let’s go. I’d rather be early than late.” Cole hugged his mother at the door. With the back of his knuckles, he gently brushed away her tears before she silently turned and went back into the house.

  They took Walter’s Ford and drove the winding road out of the dell of the Blackwater Ranch. The morning was bright; in July, the meadows and hay fields still held a freshness that perfumed the air. A few more weeks and they would fade from green to brown. Cole watched clutches of butterflies dance in the early-morning warmth.

  “Walter,” said Nancy, “do you know anything that might help?”

  Cole watched Walter’s temple pulse and knew his brother was working through something in his head. “Brian was shot from behind,” said Walter. “I did a forensics course while at the National Law Enforcement Training Ce
ntre. He had a massive exit wound in his forehead. It could have been mistaken for trauma from the fall, but the wound opened out, not in. I’ve been around a lot of bodies that have fallen from cliffs and mountains. When a person falls, they try to land on their feet. Normally in these situations you get a lot of damage to the legs, pelvis, and torso but often very little to the head. But if a person is already dead when he goes over the cliff, then gravity takes over and the body ends up landing horizontally. In those cases the body likely rolls some too. Brian ended up on his back. He was shot in the back of the head; the exit wound was in his forehead. The landing could have caused the front of his head to just explode like that; I’ve seen it before in climbing accidents. But the entrance wound was unmistakable: a small hole surrounded by burn marks. Damaged as he was, that was unmistakable.”

  “He was executed.” Cole looked at Walter.

  “I don’t know. All I know is what was found at the scene. I haven’t been on the inside of the investigation since the morning the body was recovered.”

  “They shut you out.” Cole tapped his hand on the dashboard.

  “Yes. It’s pretty standard procedure. You can’t have an officer involved in an investigation that involves his kin.”

  “But you were first on the scene.”

  “And if this case ever goes to trial, I suspect I’ll be asked to testify about what I saw.”

  “I think I’m going to get arrested.” Cole’s hand was balled into a fist on the dashboard.

  “We don’t know that,” said Nancy.

  “I do.”

  “Did you do anything wrong?” Nancy asked carefully.

  “Sure. Lots of things. I’ve used my fists to solve my problems for the last twenty-five years of my life. I’ve made a mess of the only good things that have come into my life—you,” he said, looking at Nancy, “and Sarah. And I took a job working with a guy I didn’t really trust—at least, not at first. Sure, I’ve done lots of things wrong.”