Death by Exposure (3 page)

“How much farther?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper, as if she didn't want the walls of ice to know they were there.

“Beats me,” Ben answered. “All I know is that we have to keep going until we find the toboggan. If we go home without it, Mom will know and we'll be dead.”

They continued along the crevasse. Under their feet was ice, but also the unmistakable sound of water, dripping from above and probably running below the ice, as well. Julia wondered how thick that ice was and, more important, how deep the water was beneath.

The crevasse seemed to twist like a pretzel, and they could never see very far ahead. Julia stopped glancing up. It just made things worse. She fixed her eyes on her brother's back. As long as he was in front, she was
okay...okay...okay.
With each step she repeated the word, thinking that it couldn't be much farther and soon they'd be able to turn around and-

“There it is!” Ben yelled.

“Keep your voice down!” Julia rasped, reaching forward and smacking her brother on the back of the head.

“Hey, what's the-”

She smacked him again. “Be quiet. You don't want to disturb the ice.”

He grinned. “Do you think there's evil spirits in the ice and we might wake them up if I speak too loud?”

“No,” she whispered, “but I do think there's such a thing as an avalanche and they get triggered by loud sounds made by jerks.”

Ben's smirk froze in place and then faded as he tilted his head and peered at the ice towering over them.

“C'mon, let's get the toboggan and go,” Julia said.

Ben nodded and continued on. The toboggan was up ahead, lying on its side. He reached down, turned it over, and examined it. “No damage that I can see.”

“Good. Now let's get out of here and—” A look of terror flashed across Julia's face.

“What's wrong?” Ben demanded.

Her mouth moved, but no words came out. She raised a hand and pointed. Ben turned and then saw it. Two legs—human ones-stuck out of the ice...

The police chief got up from the desk and strolled out of his office. “I've got to go downstairs and speak to the coroner.”

“I hate going down there,” his secretary said. “That morgue gives me the creeps every time I walk in.”

“Any time I can
walk in
it isn't too bad. I'm more worried about when they'll be
carrying me
in.”

“Very funny,” she muttered.

He grinned. “I'll be back in a while, so hold my calls.”

“I've been holding your cals for two days. There must have been about a hundred of them. I wish those people would just leave me alone and wait until you issue a report.”

“They're only trying to do their jobs,” the chief said.

“What they're doing is stopping me from doing
my
job,” she complained. “I hope you're not expecting those reports on the new bylaws to be finished on time.”

“Do the best you can. I'll be back soon.”

Carrying a briefcase in one hand, the chief left the office, walked along a short hallway, and entered a stairwell. He descended four flights of stairs until he reached the sub-basement. Fluorescent lights burned overhead, but the corridor was dim and the air heavy. As he moved, the soles of his heavy shoes echoed off the walls. The door at the end of the hall had a sign that said
MORGUE.
He went in.

“Hello!” he called out in a rich baritone.

“I'm back here!” shouted a voice from behind the door to the autopsy room. “Come on back!”

The chief's stomach suddenly lurched. He didn't mind being in the morgue or around bodies. What he didn't like was seeing bodies being cut up when the coroner was trying to determine the cause of death. The chief certainly wasn't going to tell anybody, but he was pretty squeamish around that sort of stuff.

Under his chin was a faded, crescent-shaped scar, the last trace of an injury he suffered when he was seventeen and in grade twelve. He'd been in biology class and, along with everybody else, was dissecting a cat. At the time he didn't think it would be a problem. He was a big guy. Even at that age he was 1.9 metres and weighed almost 100 kilograms. Not only was he big, but he was tough-a starter on the county-championship-winning football team. And the dissection wasn't a problem...at least until he sank his scalpel into the cat's gut. As a whiff of something bad rose to his nostrils, he fainted dead away, smashing his chin on the counter on the way down. Even now he didn't like to think about the incident.

Slowly, cautiously, he swung his head into the autopsy room. The coroner was wearing a white lab coat and had his back to the door. In front of him was the metal table that held the body.

“Um.. .I can come back later if you're not finished,” the chief offered.

“No, that's okay,” the coroner said. “I'm almost done.” He turned and began to pull off his latex gloves. The coroner was as little as the chief was big. His grey, thinning hair, flying in a thousand different directions, and the lines that etched his face made him look every day of his seventy-two years. The coroner removed both gloves, balled them up, and tossed them into a garbage can in the corner. “I've got to wash up and then I'll come right out.”

The chief felt a surge of relief, nodded, and retreated perhaps a little too rapidly from the autopsy room. As the door closed behind him, he heard running water. He took a seat and the coroner quickly followed, drying his hands on a clean white towel as he emerged.

“So,” the coroner said, “how are those kids doing?”

“The kids who found the body?”

“Yeah.”

“Better now that they told somebody about it,” the chief said. “Can you imagine finding a body and being more worried about what your mother will say about being where you shouldn't be than about reporting it?”

“I can understand that.”

“You can?”

“Sure, if I'd been a kid and went against what my mother told me to do, I wouldn't have said anything because then there would have been two bodies-the one I found and mine. She would've killed me!”

The chief laughed.

“The important thing is that they finally did report it,” the coroner added.

“Three days later, and only because the girl was having trouble sleeping,” the chief said, shaking his head.

“It's pretty disturbing to find a body. Besides, it isn't like three extra days was going to make much difference with this one.”

“He's been in that ice a long time, eh?” The chief stroked his chin. “I was pretty shocked to see you on television last night.”

“You weren't the only one. I practically spit out a mouthful of coffee when it popped onto the screen.”

“Why were you surprised? You knew you'd been interviewed.”

“I was interviewed by a lot of people, including that CBC crew. I just didn't expect it to come up as a news flash in the second intermission of
Hockey Night in Canada,
that's all.”

“Can you tell me a better place to air a story about an
iceman
than during a hockey game?” the chief asked with a chuckle.

“Very funny. I guess the only thing that surprised me more than the news flash was what a big deal this whole thing has become here in town. Did you know that half the rooms at the hotel are filled with newspaper, television, and radio people?”

The chief nodded. “I saw a couple of those big news trucks parked on the street in front of the hotel. Those are really something with the big satellite dishes and wires and lights and aerials. Pretty darn impressive. And all here because of our iceman.”

“Still, how can it be breaking news when the guy's been dead for at least fifty years?”

The chief whistled. “Fifty years? You think he was in the ice that long?”

“That's my guess.”

“ Your
guess? I thought you were a man of science.”

“It's a hard one to tell for sure. Ice preserves things and stops the usual process of decomposition. I made an educated guess.”

“And what exactly did you base that guess on?” the chief asked.

“Mainly the clothing he was wearing.”

“Clothing?”

“His clothes are typical of those worn in the early and mid-1950s.”

“How do you know that?”

“I'm seventy-two. I used to wear clothes like that. I wasn't always this old. Believe me, I was once a pretty stylish cat.”

“I believe you, though I wouldn't include that as part of your official report.”

The coroner winked. “Want a coffee?”

“Um...I don't know.”

“Tim Hortons-only the best down here. Just brewed it up.”

“Yeah, that would be good.”

The coroner ambled over to a counter, poured out two cups, and handed one to the chief.

“Thanks,” the chief said as he took a sip. “Best coffee there is.”

“Want some Timbits?” the coroner asked, motioning to the box on the counter beside the coffeepot.

The chief held up his hands. “I'll pass. I don't know how you can eat anything when you're down here.”

“If I didn't eat when I was here, I'd have starved to death a long time ago.” The coroner reached into the box, pulled out a Timbit, and popped it into his mouth. “I just try to avoid the ones filled with jelly.”

The chief shuddered, and his stomach did a somersault. “So what else can you tell me about the body, or do I have to wait until the next hockey game?”

“I can tell you the basics. Male, 1.8 metres, weighed around 79 kilograrns, brown hair, brown eyes, left-handed.”

The chief raised an eyebrow. “How do you know he was left-handed?”

“He had a watch on his right wrist. People who are left-handed do that.”

“And have you determined the cause of death?”

“My best guess is exposure.”

“Exposure?”

“He froze to death.”

“So you don't suspect foul play?” the chief asked.

“Can't rule that out. He has injuries to his face and a broken leg.”

“I saw the facial injuries, but I didn't know about the broken leg,” the chief said.

“Left leg, femur. Bad break.”

“The femur...that's the big bone above the knee, right?”

The coroner nodded. “It's a hard one to fracture.”

“How do you think it happened?”

“I think both the facial injuries and the broken leg are consistent with a fall from a great height-like from the top of the crevasse he was found in.”

The chief scratched his head. “But you said he died from exposure, right?”

“Yep. The injuries weren't sufficient to cause death.. .at least directly.”

“Can you explain that?”

“Because of the injuries he wasn't able to climb out of the crevasse. He froze over the next few days. Mind you, someone could've pushed him into the crevasse.”

“What? Now you're saying he
might
have been murdered?”

“Who's to say? It would really help if we knew who he was. Have you had any luck making an identification yet?”

The chief took another gulp of coffee. “None.”

“Not even with the fingerprints I lifted?”

“No match, which just means he was never in jail or in the armed forces.”

“How about that notebook that was found with the body?” the coroner asked.

“It was some sort of journal. No names or phone numbers or identification, and unfortunately most of the ink has been blurred and smeared and can't be read.”

“But you can read some of it?”

“Yeah, mostly a few lines on each page, but nothing that can help us.”

“What about the cameras in the bag you found?” the coroner asked. “Like the clothes, the watch, and a flashlight the man had, they also helped me to establish the age of the body. According to the manufacturers, those models were made before 1960.

“Yeah, the four cameras the guy had in a camera bag were our last best hope,” the chief said.

“They're pretty pricey, aren't they?”

“Top of the line,” the chief confirmed.

“Were you able to do anything with the serial numbers?”

“Nope. Dead end. But it's not what's
on
the cameras that was helpful, but what was
in
one camera that's important.”

“In the camera?”

“The film.”

“The film! What good would fifty-year-old film do?”

“It would produce fifty-year-old pictures,” the chief said.

“Come on, film in a camera trapped under tonnes of snow for five decades or more couldn't possibly- You developed the pictures, didn't you?”

“We didn't have anything to lose trying.” He removed a manila envelope from the briefcase he'd brought down from his office. “Three of the cameras had no film in them.”

“And the fourth?”