In the Barren Ground (17 page)

Heather glanced up as Crash returned to the barn after seeing Tana Larsson off the property. Energy—dark, electric—rolled off him in waves. She’d never seen the crazy dude like this before, without an easy smile, a twinkle in his eyes.

“What did she want with you?” she said, wiping the grease off her hands with a rag.

“To follow up on what you told her—asked if the AeroStar that you saw was mine.”

She cocked her head.

“Jesus, I said it wasn’t
me
out there, MacAllistair.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t tell her that it was
yours
. I just described the chopper. Said it could have been anyone’s.”

He started packing up his tools in simmering silence.

“Hey, I don’t give a damn whether it was you out there, or not.”

He slammed his toolbox shut, not responding.

“Why is it even such a big goddamn issue anyway? It’s not like she’s hunting some criminal—just information.”

He looked up, held her eyes.

“She’s not, right?” Heather cursed, looked away, then back. “What? She thinks it’s a homicide now? What in the fuck for?”

He came to his feet, and hefted up his toolbox. “That clutch should work fine now.” He started for the door where he’d propped his rifle.

“Great,” she said. “Another crazy-ass lunatic cop in development. I don’t know why you let her get up your nose like that.”

He said nothing, grabbed his gun, stepped outside.

Heather hurried after him. “Hey.” She touched his arm, stopping him. “Thanks for doing this. The clutch.”

“Sure.”

“I mean it, thanks.”

He held her gaze, then looked down at her hand on his jacket. She withdrew it. Rejection sparked through her, along with hurt. No, not just hurt—it rankled. She hadn’t thought it would, not coming from him. She didn’t think she’d care if he showed overt interest in another woman, and while he came off angry as a bull, she could tell there was something far deeper and more complicated simmering between him and that Constable Larsson.

“What are you not telling me, Crash?” she said softly. “Why are you letting her get to you like this? What else did that cop woman say?”

“Nothing that’s your business.”

He left her standing there as he made for his truck parked around the side. Slamming his door, he fired his engine. Heather watched him drive off, her brain churning over the ripples of change the new RCMP officer had brought to town.

CHAPTER 21

Tana opened the file box. A dank, musky scent rose from the papers inside, pervading her nostrils, branching down into her lungs, as if something dead and cold and awful was entering her body. She found the coroner’s report on Regan Amelia Novak’s death, dusted it off, coughed, and seated herself at her desk.

Rosalie was in the kitchenette, making cocoa. “Can you put some more wood on, crank up the heat?” Tana said, opening the file.

“Are you sure? It’s really hot in here.” Rosalie said, plugging in the kettle and reaching for the tin of cocoa. “Maybe you’re coming down with a chill or something.”

Maybe she was, after her frigid night in the wilderness, general lack of sleep, hot-cold hormone flushes, having the stuffing knocked out of her during the fight at the Red Moose. TwoDove nearly shooting her brains out this morning.

O’Halloran’s comments . . .

You know girls like Mindy, and you know them very, very well, don’t you, Tana? Because I think you’ve been there. You were a girl just like Mindy . . .

Tana shut her eyes as self-recrimination knifed through her. She’d misread, or rather, not anticipated the situation with Crow TwoDove. On the back of her self-chastisement came raw anger. At Cutter and Keelan for having turned blind eyes toward this remote, fly-in aboriginal community for so long that it had culminated in a situation that had left her alone, a rookie, to police the town. Because if she’d had a partner—someone who would have known and briefed her on Crow’s state of mind and his history and relationship with the RCMP—she’d never have gone onto his land solo like that.

She wouldn’t have put her baby in danger.

What ate her from the inside out, though, was the fact that it was O’Halloran who’d saved her ass. And she despised how easily he saw inside her. He saw her shame. Her lack of self-worth. He knew her for what she really was. But what was
he
? What gave him such acute profiling powers? What in hell gave him such self confidence in his assessment?

A confidence that crossed the line into rude.

Crow can shoot you for all I care, but you’re being an ass about your kid . . .

She swore out loud. Rosalie, and Max and Toyon all cast a wary eye in her direction.

“You okay?” Rosalie said.

“Peachy.” She started to read the Chief Coroner’s Office report on the death of Regan Amelia Novak, age fifteen. Only daughter of Sergeant Elliot Novak and Mary Louise Novak.

Four years ago, Twin Rivers RCMP station commander Sergeant Elliot Novak booked off the first weekend in November to take his daughter, Regan, ice fishing and camping. There’d been an early and severe cold snap in late October, and good fishing was to be found on a lake about five miles northwest of the Sleevo Creek tributary that fed into the Wolverine. About six inches of snow covered the ground. Temperatures were in the minus six to ten range, light snow in the forecast. A more serious front was predicted to hit later, but not until after their trip was due to be over.

Some time during the early morning hours of November 4, Regan vacated the tent in which she’d been sleeping with her father.

According to the report, Novak noticed his daughter was missing when he woke around 8:30 a.m. and saw that her sleeping bag was empty. Her boots and jacket were gone, and the tent flap was unzipped. He thought Regan had gone to the bathroom.

But when Novak exited the tent, he saw no fresh tracks leading from the tent. The brunt of the storm was moving in earlier than anticipated, and several inches of new snow had fallen during the early morning hours. This snow had filled in what appeared to be an older depression of Regan’s prints, leading away from the tent toward the river. From the amount of snow in his daughter’s tracks, Novak deduced that she had left their tent several hours earlier, on her own volition, probably to go to the bathroom, but for some reason, she’d not returned. That was when he began to worry. He called out for her, and quickly began to search the immediate area.

Tana’s gaze shot back up to the top of the page.
The early morning hours of November 4 . . .

Her conversation with Big Indian sifted into her mind:

“You said there was another one.”

“Following year. Also just at the start of the snows—first week of November. Dakota Smithers. She was only fourteen years old . . . part of the culture camp that the Twin Rivers School used to hold every year out at Porcupine Lake, to help the kids stay in touch with their indigenous roots. She and some others went out with their dogsleds one afternoon. Dakota got separated from the group when fog rolled in . . .

“November,” she said out loud. “Early November.”

Rosalie, pouring cream into her mug of cocoa, looked up and said. “What?”

“Regan Novak, Dakota Smithers, Selena Apodaca, and Raj Sanjit were all mauled to death in the first week of November.”

Rosalie took a sip from her mug, leaving a chocolaty-cream mustache on her upper lip. She set the mug down. “November is a hungry time for wolves and bears,” she said, pouring boiling water into a second cup. She stirred in the cocoa as she poured. “Often a lot of animal activity just before the first really big winter snows. It’s like they can smell the storms coming and need to fatten up. And the animals do come closer to town as the cold closes in. Ask Charlie. He’ll tell you. Especially the bears. They need to bulk up to full hibernation weight before that snow hits really bad, or they could die over winter. Or the cubs they have in the winter dens wouldn’t make it to spring.”

Outside a shutter started to bang. Tana looked out the window. Wind was mounting, lifting a fine layer of snow and whirling it in clouds down the street. It was growing darker, too, black clouds boiling in low.

“First of the storms coming,” Rosalie said with a nod to the window as she brought a mug of cocoa over. She set it on Tana’s desk.

“Where’s Porcupine Lake?” Tana said.

“About ten miles south of town. Pretty place, especially in the summer. Nice trout. Traditional fishing place.”

“And that’s where they used to hold the school culture camp?”

“Each winter. But they stopped after Dakota died. Wasn’t an appetite for it any more. Maybe that will change with more time,” Rosalie said.

Tana reached for the mug, took a sip, and resumed reading.

According to the report, Novak claimed he had not heard any unusual sounds during the night, apart from an eerie howling in the wind. He explained that sometimes if wind blew in a certain direction, at a certain velocity, through a nearby rocky outcrop, it made that noise—like a human moaning. He also stated that he noticed no drag marks, or scuffles around the tent, no blood, only the depression of snow that led to the river. Novak took his loaded rifle and spare ammunition, and followed the trail up the riverbank. About fifty meters upriver, he noticed what he thought was a second set of snowed-in tracks. That’s where snow began to appear “scuffed up” and became tinged with pink, but he said it was difficult to read what might have happened there, because this section of the riverbank was littered with small rocks and stones. He believed the pink to be blood. From there the trail left the river and made a direct line to the woods.

Sergeant Novak became convinced that he was following one set of human prints, and deeper indentations, which he figured were drag marks, possibly made by his daughter’s feet.

Novak admitted that he was not a tracker, nor hunter, and he was not experienced in reading spoor. But he insisted it was not animal tracks with the drag marks, but rather a second set of footprints.

Novak followed the tracks to the forest fringe. It began to snow heavily at that point.

Tana reached for her mug, turned the page. Sipped.

At the edge of the forest, Novak came across Regan’s flashlight sticking out of the snow. He found this troubling. It was dark under the treed canopy, even during the day. She’d have needed her flashlight, and would have been using it if she’d gone into the forest on her own volition. He entered the woods, and immediately saw signs of a violent scuffle, copious quantities of blood. He noted a piece of a branch in the snow, about the length of a baseball bat, or club. It was heavy, sticky with blood that contained long strands of blonde hair, like his daughter’s.

He testified that the area resembled a large animal kill site.

Novak screamed for his daughter. But he said at that point he knew she was dead. “I just knew.”

Tana inhaled deeply.

Novak had made these statements from his hospital bed in Yellowknife. He’d made them to Corporal Bo Hague, who’d been brought in to handle the investigation, and to temporarily fill in as the Twin Rivers station commander while Novak recuperated.

She scanned through Hague’s notebook pages, which were also in the file box. Tana noted that Hague had asked Novak if he’d had any alcohol to drink before going to sleep in the tent that night.

Novak claimed to have had some brandy, but not much. He said he needed it to sleep. Tana chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. Perhaps this is why he’d heard nothing—had Elliot Novak been sleeping the sleep of a drunk?

She returned to the coroner’s report.

Novak stated that he’d found his daughter’s body a short way deeper into the trees, being pulled at by three gray wolves. There were wolf tracks all around. He shot the animals, but there was little left of his daughter. Her body had been badly scavenged—eviscerated. Entrails had been dragged over the snow. Organs eaten. Clothes ripped off. Her head had been torn from her body. Part of her face had been chewed and her eyes ripped out.

A chill trickled down Tana’s spine as she thought of Selena Apodaca’s decapitated head. The similarities.

Novak did not clearly remember the sequence of events from that point on. He also appeared to have lost all sense of time, because he couldn’t say how long he’d sat in the snow with his daughter’s remains.

A trapper running his lines on a dogsled found Novak a day later, cradling his daughter’s hollowed-out, headless corpse. According to the trapper, Novak was howling like an animal. It was this inhuman, yet not quite animal sound that had drawn the trapper deeper into the woods to investigate.

The trapper’s name was Cameron O’Halloran.

Tana froze. Her gaze shot up.

“It was Crash O’Halloran who found Elliot Novak and his daughter?”

“Yes,” said Rosalie.