In the Barren Ground

by Loreth Anne White

  “What happened with Crash, honey?” Heather said.

  “Don’t know. Just not staying with him anymore.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You can’t go sleeping in that shed again.”

  “Nowhere else.” She sobbed, and it was stupid, because Crash was like forty or something and she was almost fifteen, and he’d never feel for her the way she felt for him.

  “I’m taking you to my place,” Heather said gently. “You can stay there as long as you need to, okay?”

  Mindy nodded, wiping her eyes.

  Heather put her truck in gear. “Buckle up.” As she drove, she kept casting Mindy glances. “So what did happen with Crash? Why’re you leaving?”

  Mindy looked out the window.

  “Hey, you can tell me.”

  “He’s a liar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “And he’s trying to get into that new cop’s pants. Should have seen him touching her on the way to his workshop. They were inside there, like forever. Door closed.”

  “Tana Larsson?”

  Mindy nodded.

  “His name probably isn’t even Crash anyway.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s his nickname. Cameron is his name.”

  “It’s a lie. All of it. I thought he was badass. But he was a cop.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, and he had a wife, and a daughter. I heard them talking. He was an undercover cop before he came here. Some shit to do with diamonds, and he’s helping Tana with something, because after they were in the shed they went off on his snowmobile, and she wasn’t wearing her uniform jacket. She was wearing one of his.”

  Heather frowned. “Are you sure? A cop?”

  “I heard them under the bedroom window. I swear on my life. Fucking men. All liars.”

  Heather drove in silence for a while. “Mindy, are you sure you’re not making this up, to get at him or something, because of Constable Larsson?”

  “No.”

  Another few beats of silence, then she said, “Well, you shouldn’t go off with men like Markus Van Bleek. Men like him use women. I’ve seen him bring young women into the camp.” She shot her a glance. “You’re worth more, okay? You don’t want to go down that road.”

  Mindy looked out the window into the snowy dusk. She wanted to feel smug, because now Heather wouldn’t trust Crash, either. But all she felt was like trash. What else could she feel? It’s what she was. There’d be no way out of this shithole for her now. The words she’d had with Tana crawled into her brain.

  “Mindy, if you ever need to talk—”

  “I sure wouldn’t talk to you.”

  “Look, I’ve been where you are. I know—”

  Mindy blinked back tears.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Oh, this is heaven,” Tana said, taking another bite into a slice of piping hot takeout pizza from the diner. Crash grinned as he watched her eat. Seeing her happy made him feel good.

  Her cheeks were pinked by the warmth of food after their day out in the cold, and her eyes smiled. Gorgeous, lucid, dark-brown eyes. Like rich chocolate. It was the first time he’d seen her really smile.

  They were seated at the table in the station interview room looking up at her whiteboard of autopsy photographs and head shots. In front of them on the table were spread more photos and the coroner’s reports. He remembered life like this—working major crimes. Long nights. Eating while brainstorming the crime. The strange kind of camaraderie detectives could feel. He could get used to this again.

  Her dogs lay at their feet. They’d been fed and walked, and although subdued, showed signs of getting better. Rosalie had taken good care of them. She’d left a note for Tana, saying that Jamie and Caleb had come by the station with Chief Dupp Peters.

  They’d wanted to confess about the bones. Jamie had learned from Marcie where some of the old burial sites were, and he and Selena and Caleb had gone out to plunder the sites for remains. Apparently they thought it was worth the sacrilege to get Selena to take the bones out to the north end of Ice Lake where the anthropological study team would find them the following spring. Their naive goal was to halt mine development. Jamie felt that Selena’s death was retribution from the spirits for having sinned by meddling with remains of the forefathers. Furious at Caleb for having pushed him into robbing the grave sites with him, Jamie had gone for Caleb at the Red Moose.

  Chief Dupp Peters had told Rosalie the boys wanted to set the record straight with the RCMP, and that the band council would handle it. There would be a sweat lodge for the boys, a spirit quest of sorts to ask forgiveness, and a roundhouse gathering to discuss remediation. The community would need to get those bones back from the coroner’s office so that they could be reburied with proper ceremony.

  “At least we’ve made progress on the old bones side of the investigation,” Tana said, reaching for a second slice dripping with cheese. Crash liked the way she said “we.” He liked it more than he should.

  She chomped another bite into her pizza and closed her eyes as she chewed. “Preferable to moose stew any day,” she said around her mouthful.

  “I make good venison.” He didn’t know why he said that. It just came out.

  She stilled chewing, met his eyes. Something swelled between them—a question about where things would go from here, once they’d gotten to the bottom of this case, whether there would be a dinner of venison made by Crash. She swallowed, and quickly returned her attention to the whiteboard.

  “So, what do we have? Let’s hash this out. There’s no concrete evidence that this was not an act of nature. However, we have three separate apparent wolf-bear attacks that show undeniable similarities in the pattern of advanced predation and organ loss on the female victims, right?” She reached for her glass of juice, sipped, looking at the whiteboard, avoiding his eyes.

  “Yeah.” Crash swallowed his pizza, and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “And we have the inukshuks in all three cases, the same symmetrical gouges in all three attacks, fish blood and vanilla for sure in two of the incidents. We have remote locations with Twin Rivers as an epicenter, and the attacks all occurred at the same time of month—first week of November—each time on the cusp of a severe snowstorm that hampered search efforts, allowing animals time to scavenge the bodies. One death occurred four years ago, one three years ago, and one this year.”

  “Plus there’s the possibility that the geologist from Kelowna who went missing in the Nehako Valley last November, and whose body was found the following spring, could be linked. Damn,” she said. “We need Internet. I need to access missing persons files. There could be more incidents out there with the same pattern. I mean, if there is a monster out there doing this, he could be getting around in a chopper. Which means he could travel for miles. And nobody just gets up one day and starts with something this violent and depraved. These killings required planning. Whoever did this does not want to get caught, and went to great lengths to ensure animals covered his tracks and other evidence. Surely he must have escalated slowly, over time? He could have been doing this somewhere else before he arrived here.”

  “That would be my guess,” Crash said, picking up a photo of the Baffin-Arctic boot print with a rip in the tread pattern. He’d voluntarily shown Tana the soles of his own shoes before they’d sat down to eat pizza, and there was no anomaly in his lugs. Besides, he wore a men’s eleven. This print, judging by her forensic ruler positioned next to another print in the same photo, was about a men’s nine. If they could match this, they’d have a solid suspect.

  “And there’s obviously some cultural, wilderness, or mythological significance around the motive, given the clawlike gouges, and the possibility that animals are being purposefully brought in with lure, plus the inukshuks.” He got up, and read again the words of the poem he’d seen in the horror novel.

  “I need to get out to Tchliko Lodge,” she said.

  “We.” He held h
er gaze, reminding her. “We do this together, Tana, until you can get your satcom system connected again, until you get backup. Because if the dog poisonings and the eyeball warning and the sabotage are connected with this”—he tapped the whiteboard—“whoever might have killed these four could be targeting you directly now because you’re nosing into their business. And you’re vulnerable right now, stuck out here alone in the thick of a series of rolling snowstorms.”

  She swallowed. “Fine,” she said quietly. “We go to the lodge. Tomorrow. We talk to Henry Spatt, find out more about this novel of his. I want a copy.”

  “We’ll have to travel on snowmobile. There’s no flying until the weather lets up again.”

  She regarded him in silence for several beats. “What about Sturmann-Taylor and what you’re trying to do at the lodge—if you show up with a cop?”

  Crash knew what she was asking. She wanted to know if helping her was going to blow everything he’d been trying to do here for the last five-plus years. And yeah, maybe it would. But he couldn’t not do this now. It was like she’d been put in his path to save him from himself, trip him up en route to his own destruction. He didn’t know yet if he was sorry, or grateful, but if he could keep her and that unborn baby safe until this was over, then maybe the universe could forgive him for getting Lara and his own baby killed.

  Maybe there was such a thing as a second chance.

  “Let me worry about that,” he said.

  “Tell me about finding Novak with his daughter’s body,” she said.

  Crash rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I was working old K’neekap Eddie’s trap lines for him. He was sick that year and wouldn’t come into the clinic. He’d probably have died out there with his dogs, besides, I wanted to get in tune with this whole winter-north thing, get known and accepted among the locals.”

  “Part of the cover.”

  He snorted softly. “In a manner of speaking. I was running Eddie’s dogs downriver that morning, still twilight. Snowing pretty heavily. And I heard this weird, inhuman howling. The dogs went off.” He glanced at the “after” head shot of Elliot Novak that Tana had stuck on her board. “It was pretty brutal. Novak was hunkered in a grove of trees, in the middle of a bloody slaughter scene, cradling what was left of Regan, covered in blood himself. Hypothermic. Moaning like an animal, babbling stuff about wolves and bears getting her in the night. I absorbed what there was of the scene, which was fast becoming covered in snow. Regan’s head had been ripped off. There was an inukshuk at the edge of the clearing, which struck me as vaguely unusual, but nothing hugely out of the ordinary. And I was worried about losing Elliot. So, I wrapped what was left of Regan in my tent fabric, and bundled them both onto my sled. Took a few hours to get into town. Addy stabilized him while a medevac flew in. Investigators only managed to get out to the attack site several days later.”

  She eyed him. “Could he have done it—Novak—hurt his own kid?”

  Crash chewed the inside of his cheek. “Possibly. He might have been going loony a lot earlier than most realized. It could explain a few things.”

  “And these others? Dakota Smithers, Apodaca, Sanjit? He’s still out there. Is he mad enough to have attacked them all?”

  “Hell knows. It’s difficult enough to think of anyone doing something as depraved as this. But it happens.”

  “Can you show me where he is—will you take me there?”

  He eyed her, then nodded his head slowly. “It’s at least a day out on snowmobile. We’d need to overnight in the bush. Are you sure you—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “If we got going at dawn tomorrow, we could hit the lodge first,” he said. “It’s en route. We could either overnight at the lodge, if we get an invite, or carry on from there, and overnight in the wilds, reach Novak’s lair the next morning.”

  “And Jennie Smithers, I want to talk to her, too. Maybe I can set it up to see her first thing tomorrow before we hit the trail. We can prep tonight, be ready before dawn.”

  A soft, hot rush of adrenaline washed through Crash, the feeling of being back on a job. But with it came anxiety. Was he helping, or enabling her? Was he going to get her into deeper water?

  “Are you going to call this in, Tana?”

  “I did,” she snapped, and suddenly pushed back her chair. She grabbed the paper plates, left the room. He heard her angrily tossing the leftovers and plates in the garbage in the kitchen. She returned with more juice.

  “What happened when you called it in?”

  Her eyes flashed hotly to his, irritated that he was pushing. “I told my immediate superior that I’d found significant similarities between the three apparent animal attacks. He suggested we wait for autopsy results, something concrete. I …” She hesitated, then inhaled deeply. “It’s a long story, Crash. I’ve got a bad record with brass.”

  “Want to tell me?”

  “Not particularly. Just that … there’s some personal bad blood. And I figure they’re setting me up to fail here, to see me leave the force for good. Just go away. I’m just another Elliot Novak or Hank Skerritt they’re waiting to see happen. I … I kinda lost it before, you see. I think that’s partly why I got this post. And they’re not going to send a homicide team out here until I can give them some irrefutable evidence that these attacks might in fact be murders. That’s why I must go to the lodge, speak to Spatt, see Novak, talk to Jennie Smithers.” She pointed to the Baffin-Arctic boot print. “I need to find the owner of that boot. And the red AeroStar chopper. Match handwriting to the poem found in Apodaca’s things. I need something.”

  The words he’d overheard ran through his mind.

  … I need to prove I can handle this job first. I need this job.

  He moistened his lips, taking a deeper measure of Tana Larsson, thinking that this woman had more than a little bad baggage. Maybe that’s why she got him, bought into his history.

  “You sleep with one of the bosses, Tana?”

  She blanched. Wind howled. Her mouth tightened. She was fighting herself.

  She sat again suddenly, dropped her face into her hands, and scrubbed her skin hard. “I slept with a lot of men, Crash.” She looked up slowly, and swallowed. Her eyes glistened, and his heart crunched. “I have made so many bad mistakes.”

  “Whose baby is it?”

  “Someone high up at head office. He’s an asshole, and he’s tight with my immediate superior.” She paused. “I was drunk.” She got up fast again, paced, stopped. “See, here’s the thing, I can try and justify it every which way, but I’m a shit person—”

  “Tana—”

  She held up her hand. “No. Don’t. It’s just a fact.”

  “You came here to start over, to prove yourself?”

  “Yeah, and like you said, sometimes there’s nowhere else to go, so you go do something that puts one foot in front of the other in the hope that one morning the light will shine again. And”—she shrugged—“Twin Rivers seemed like the end of the world, a last little fly-in town on the fringe of civilization, far enough away to hide from past mistakes and start over.” She gave a half laugh. “And you know what? It really is the middle of nowhere.”

  He wanted to touch. Hold. Comfort.

  “How did you become a cop?” he said.

  “How? That’s an odd way of putting it. You think it’s surprising? That I was some half-breed not good enough for—”

  “Don’t. Don’t you dare go putting words into my mouth.”

  She sank back onto her chair, and he could see her debating whether to open up to him, or how far. “So here’s the deal,” she said quietly. “Maybe I was too fucked up to become a cop. I had an … interesting childhood, like Mindy. So kudos to you, Sergeant O’Halloran, on your mean profiling skills. You could sniff me out a mile away. A good beat cop picked me up off the streets when I was eighteen. I was a mess, and it was a turning point. He believed in second chances. Because of him, I became a cop, okay? He was just a nice guy. Maybe like you
picked Mindy up. He sobered me up, got me into some programs, and I came around. I started volunteering at the food bank, and at the women’s center. I got to see girls, women, like me, struggling, and sometimes they just needed a strong helping hand. And compassion. I went back to school, and I decided I wanted to be exactly like that beat cop who turned my life around. I wanted to join the RCMP. I figured if I could help other kids, women like me one day, that was a good enough reason to live. It gave me a way of rationalizing my past. I applied. I was finally accepted. I went down to Depot Division. Did the basic training. And I got posted to Yellowknife as a rookie. That’s when I met this guy, Jim Sheridan. He was a paramedic, flew the runs up north to Nunavut, remote parts of the Northwest Territories. He lived for adrenaline, the rush of being on call. And he saw bad stuff on a regular basis. But he was a happy guy, and he loved me, and he was good for me. We moved in together, and—” Her voice hitched. She looked away, struggling to hold it together.

  “And life was good … for nearly two years. He bought me a small diamond, and we were going to get married. And then one day, after work, I came home, ditched my uniform, and told Jim I was going for groceries. When I returned, it was quiet. Too quiet. That kind of silence that screams something is wrong … He’d taken my Smith & Wesson—I’d neglected to lock it in the safe—and blown his brains out in our bathroom.”

  Silence, just the sound of the wind ripping away at the plastic Crash had taped over the broken pane in the adjacent office. Under the table Max groaned, and rolled onto his side.

  “And you slid off the rails?” he said, quietly.

  “Big time. Hit the bottle, and … slept with men, serially, until …” She blew out a huge breath.

  “Until the baby.”

  She nodded. And she looked small and vulnerable suddenly.

  “He—the father—told me to get rid of it, that I was shameful, would ruin his name, destroy his wife and older kids, his family. His career. And I almost did get rid of it. I came so close. I made the appointment, had the ultrasound and counseling. Was given a time to come in. And I did. But in that waiting room, when I was about to dissolve that misoprostol medication in my cheek before going into surgery, the nurse reminded me that once I’d taken it, there could be no turning back. So I sat there awhile, just kind of frozen. And on the wall in front of me there was a poster. A group of firefighters, cops, civil workers, men and women both, standing in the snow holding placards that said: ‘You are not alone. You are of the north. You are strong. You will not be broken.’” She cleared her throat, and Crash could see she was struggling.