Day Into Night (5 page)

Carl is downslope and takes a minute to reach me.

“What’s up Porter?”

I point. Carl is a hunter. He’ll know.

Carl takes one look and swears.

4

WE'RE USING A THIRD colour of flag now. Blue. I’ve got a lot of company. My sector of the search area has become the busiest corner of the clearcut and I’m bumping elbows with a dozen other searchers and several of Canada’s finest. My newfound celebrity is making me nervous; Rachet is watching me as much as I’m watching the ground. He steers me away from the other searchers, far enough they won’t hear his questions. We pretend we’re searching.

“So what have you been up to?” he asks quietly.

“Funny,” I say. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

“I heard you’ve become an investigator of sorts.”

“The Forest Service calls me in on the occasional wildfire arson.”

“And you’re here to do a little investigating?”

“This isn’t a fire.”

Rachet squats and lifts a branch, peers beneath. “But you’re here.”

“I was in the area.”

“How convenient. Doing what?”

I feel my face flush, my ears getting warm. “I was visiting Carl Mackey.”

“Mr. Mackey ...” Rachet says this like a librarian searching a dusty file cabinet. He’s kneeling, peering into the logging slash but I don’t think he sees anything down there. He’s avoiding eye contact, trying hard to keep this casual. Or at least trying to make it look that way. “Mr. Mackey helped us with the evidence search the last time this happened,” he says. “Interesting, finding you both here again.” He glances up at me to underscore his point, his forehead creased and serious. Then he’s rummaging in the logging slash like he lost his car keys. “Are you and Mr. Mackey both working here now?”

“I’m not with the Forest Service any longer.”

He stands,brushes imaginary dirt off his hands. “You resigned?”

“I had a little issue with wearing the uniform.”

“Of course.” Rachet shakes his head. “This must be difficult for you.”

I ignore the practised sincerity. This is conversation, Rachet style. Half condolence, half cross-examination. I’ve been through it before. Today, I don’t feel like answering questions. I’d rather be on the other side. “Have you made any progress?”

He watches the other searchers. “We’ve got a few leads.”

“Really?” I’d like to believe this. “Like what?”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“So there is something?”

“There’s always something.”

“You really have no idea, do you?”

The look he gives me is not encouraging. “The investigation is ongoing, Mr. Cassel.”

I look around — at the cutblock, the other searchers, the black tangle of metal farther up the hill. With Nina, they didn’t let me help with the evidence search — I was at the crime scene just long enough for a few basic questions. Then it was a long stretch in a small room with bad coffee and Mounties with sweat stains under their arms. At least here, I feel like I’m doing something.

“What about this?” I say. “What happens next?”

Rachet strokes his moustache. “Since there’s a fatality, the Chief Medical Examiner becomes involved. Technicians are on their way from Calgary to collect the human remains. In the lab they’ll do a post mortem, determine the cause of death.”

That’ll be tough — blown to fucking bits. They better bring tweezers.

“As for the rest of this mess —” Rachet gestures with a casual sweep of his arm, “the post blast team will arrive from Ottawa. They’ll document the scatter pattern, collect samples, test for residue.” He sighs, lowers his voice as though talking to himself. “It’s going to take a hell of a long time to analyze this much debris.”

“What about the bomb? Any clue as to what was used?”

“Hard to tell at this point.”

“You think it was a larger version of the same type of bomb?”

Rachet withdraws a handkerchief, wipes sweat from his forehead, carefully folds the soiled handkerchief and tucks it into a back pocket. “What I think,” he says, “is that you’ve been through a lot of uncertainty these last three years. Now you see the same sort of thing and you’re impatient for answers. I don’t blame you, but I don’t have any answers this morning. We’re working on this with all available resources.”

I’ve been dismissed and he moves a few steps ahead, watching the ground, pushing branches carefully aside with the toe of his boot. He’s right — I want answers or, if I can’t get them, some indication they’ve accomplished something these past three years. I need a reason to hope. So I divert from my grid and follow him. It doesn’t take him long to realize I’m not giving up.

“What do you do in winter?” he asks. “When there are no forest fires.”

“My parents moved to Jamaica. I usually spend some time there.”

“Jamaica?” He raises an eyebrow. “What part?”

“The Blue Mountains. They bought a coffee plantation.”

“Must be nice,” he says, glancing upslope. But he won’t bite.

“About those remains —”

“Yes,” he says. “You’ve got a sharp eye. Keep up the good work.”

Then he’s walking uphill, picking his way over logging slash. I move farther downslope where there’s little chance of finding human remains, stop at the low end of the cutblock close to the standing timber. From here I have a good view of the scene. Men move slowly across the green slope, their heads bowed like an army of tourists searching for lost contact lenses. Yellow, red and blue flags sprout like timid saplings — the blue flags in a cluster close to the charred hulk of the feller-buncher. My eye follows the brown scar of the road to the treeline, then down the side of the cutblock. Someone else is standing at the bottom of the slope, watching the proceedings.

It’s Al Brotsky, the company man who discovered this mess, and I wonder what he saw earlier this morning. I drift in his direction, pretending to search, and stop a tree length away, one boot up on a stump in the classic outdoorsman pose. Out west, you gotta give a guy plenty of room and I wait for Brotsky to take notice. He doesn’t.

I clear my throat. “You finding much?”

He turns, looks at me. He looks tired and dejected.

“Hard to see anything,” I offer.

“Yeah,” he says. “Lots of slash.”

He looks at me a moment longer, then turns his attention up-slope. He’s the only searcher wearing the standard cutblock safety gear — orange hardhat and reflective vest. A few minutes pass and I feel as welcome as a door-to-door bible thumper on a Friday night. But he has something I want and so I gotta get his attention.

“That must have been one hell of a bomb.”

No response. I’m about ready to find more lively company, a tree perhaps, when Brotsky turns, gives me a Clint Eastwood look. He clearly doesn’t feel like talking but I close the distance, introduce myself and suffer through an unnecessarily painful handshake.

“So this was your logging show?”

“Yeah,” he says, looking upslope again. A pale scar extends downward like a fish hook from the corner of his mouth, stretching as he frowns. He takes off his hardhat, rubs a hand over short, greying hair, plops his lid back on and tugs down the brim. “We were just about done for the season,” he says, shaking his head. “And then this.”

“I know,” I tell him. “I’ve seen this before. Up north.”

He looks at me closer. “You with the cops?”

“Not exactly.”

“Search and Rescue?”

“Something like that.”

He nods, considering, then grins. “Insurance?”

Something I’ve never been mistaken for but I nod. Seems harmless enough.

“That’s quite a knife,” he says. “For an insurance salesman.”

Back when I had the time and initiative, I used to make knives. I’m wearing one of the better ones: an eight-inch blade with an antler handle, in a beaded sheath. In the city it would probably get me arrested but out here it’s a great ice breaker.

“Our bowie knife policy,” I tell him.

“Sure.” The fish hook scar stretches in the other direction. “Mind if I have a look?”

I pull it out. Brotsky hefts the knife, tests its sharpness by shaving off a few bristly arm hairs.

“Kind of unusual,” he says. “Distinctive.”

“Made it from an old buggy spring,” I tell him. “Good steel.”

“Sits in the hand real nice.” He doesn’t want to let go of it. “What do you charge?”

“I’m not selling,” I tell him. “Maybe, someday —”

Reluctantly, he hands back the knife. He’s friendlier now, although I doubt he still thinks I’m an insurance rep. I test out our deepened relationship by asking him if he has any idea who was killed. “I’d hate to guess,” he says with a pained look. “Until we know for sure.”

“Who’s truck is that, up there?”

He rubs his chin, hesitant. “A guy by the name of Ronald Hess.”

“Was he on your crew?”

“He was the buncher operator. That was his machine.”

There’s a heavy silence — the implication unavoidable. Brotsky sets a leg against a stump and looks upslope. Rachet and his crew are clustered around something, squatting like a group of tired hikers. They stand and one of the men begins to string yellow ribbon — more human remains. I look at Brotsky in profile. His jaw is clenched.

“Why would Hess have been the only one here?”

Brotsky shrugs, watching the Mounties. “Came in early I guess.”

“It happened during shift change, right?”

Brotsky nods.

“What exactly do you guys do at shift change?”

“We shut down, check the machines for loose hoses, stuff like that.”

“What about a mechanic? Anybody come in for routine servicing?”

Brotsky gives me a troubled look, like he should be able to recognize me. Without an official capacity beyond a drone with a spare pair of eyes, I’m not sure how far to push this. But he doesn’t seem to mind talking about it now. “The last operator didn’t notice anything unusual and his machine wasn’t due for service for a while.”

“How could a person check that?”

“Each machine has a service log in the cab.”

I glance upslope. There’s a service log that’ll never be checked.

There’s a lull in the conversation. I’m in no hurry to find more fractions of Ronny Hess. Neither is Brotsky. We linger at the low end of the cutblock, watch the action — a few parked vehicles, a black lump of metal and a scatter of men wandering apparently at random. My eye keeps drifting toward a cluster of little blue flags. From here, they look like a patch of blueberries. It occurs to me that whoever planted the bombs must have been pretty familiar with the operation. To blow up three pieces of equipment several miles apart in the space of a half-hour takes some planning. You’d have to spend a few days watching the operation to establish a pattern to the shift changes. Or you’d have to work here.

“Any of your guys have a grudge against Hess?”

I’m hoping the Lorax slipped up and can somehow be traced. But Brotsky gives me a strange look. “A grudge?” He pulls a tin of chewing tobacco from a back pocket, takes his time working a lump of black goo under his lower lip. “We’ve got a good bunch here,” he says, his lip bulging. “If somebody’d had a problem that serious, I think I would have known about it.”

“What about Hess? Was he easy to get along with?”

Brotsky looks thoughtful, working up a eulogy. “He was a new guy. Didn’t really know him. Good worker though — could really handle a machine. Real asset to the operation.”

“How long did he work here?”

“Couple of months.” Brotsky spits a glob of oily sludge, glances uphill toward the epicentre of the blast. “Fuckin’ environmentalists,” he says bitterly. “Bad enough they harass you and drag you into court, but now when you go to work you gotta worry that some nutcase is going to pop you off.” He spits again, uses his boot to rub the mess into the end grain of a tree stump. “It’s getting so a guy can barely do his job out here anymore.”

I think of Nina. “I know what you mean.”

“I don’t understand those people,” he says. “Bunch of hypocrites —”

He rambles on for a few minutes: the typical hatred for meddling environmentalists.

“You notice anything suspicious when you arrived?”

“Other than my damn equipment was blown up?”

“You pass any unfamiliar vehicles on the way in?”

“It was dark.”

“Any headlights?”

He thinks for a minute. “Not that I recall.”

He’s tiring of my questions and begins to search, kicking branches, walking with a slight limp like he’s got a bad hip. We work our way along the timbered edge of the cutblock, past fluorescent blazes on the trees. I keep within a dozen yards of him.

“How many people have access to this area?”

“Everybody,” he snorts. “This place is too close to the city.”

I’m about to ask if they ever run security out here but he veers off, walking just fast enough that it’s clear he has other business. The game is over, score inconclusive. I head upslope, past an area filled with blue flags, newly cordoned off, careful not to look too hard, and meet Fredricks on his way down.

“Head back to the trucks,” he says. “We’re moving out.”

I turn to ask him why we’re leaving with so much left to do but he’s too far past already, striding across the slash, nearly stumbling in his rush to carry out this vital assignment. Carl comes up beside me. “Miller time,” he says.

Men are heading back to the trucks, trudging slowly uphill. Rachet and his crew are nowhere to be seen, probably on the road hidden by the swell of the slope. Looking at a nearby yellow flag, I feel a mild sort of panic. I came here on impulse, drawn by forces I couldn’t resist, and now I know why — I want to help catch the bastard. But I have to leave now and there’s so much to do, so much they’ll never tell me. I squat next to the yellow flag. Nestled among the moss and pine needles is a short, concave piece of black metal about three inches long. Part of the machine — they’ll never miss it; they have hundreds, thousands of other pieces.

“Have you got an empty sandwich bag?” I say to Carl, standing behind me.

This late in the day Carl’s sandwich bags are always empty. He rummages in a pocket, hands me a lump of plastic which unfolds on its own like a clear flower in my hand. I turn the bag inside-out, use it as a glove to pick up the small chunk of metal.

“Porter, you’re not supposed to do that.”

Carl’s voice is an abrasive whisper. He leans closer, breathing in my ear like an excited dog as I fold plastic over the specimen, seal it in the baggie. To his obvious horror, I slip the baggie and its heavy contents into my jacket pocket, pull the pin with the yellow flag out of the ground and add it to my bundle. No one seems to have noticed. Carl follows me up the slope, whispering fiercely.