In the Barren Ground (18 page)

CHAPTER 22

Tana’s pulse raced as her mind looped back to what O’Halloran had told her at the barn about TwoDove and the Dakota Smithers case. But not once had he mentioned he himself was also intimately acquainted with the Regan Novak case.
Why?

Mistrust snaked into her.

He’d been around town in both cases. It could also have been his chopper on the other side of the cliff where Apodaca and Sanjit were killed. This was starting to look weird.

“Were you here, Rosalie, when O’Halloran brought Novak and his daughter’s body back into Twin Rivers?”

“Yes. Crash wrapped that poor girl’s remains up in his tent, and brought her and her dad into town on his dogsled.”

“Did you see them when they came in?”

Rosalie nodded as she fiddled to reset the answering machine. Tana glanced at the clock on the wall. It was late afternoon already. Darkness had fallen outside.

“How were they?”

“What do you mean?”

“How were they behaving? What did they look like?”

“Elliot was badly hypothermic. His mind had gone—he was blathering nonsense about monsters in the forest. He looked terrible. Frostbitten nose, lips, ears. Fingers like blackened talons. You couldn’t recognize him as the same man who went out there.”

“And O’Halloran? How did he appear?”

“Crash? Like he always is. Can never tell with Crash.”

A dark feeling about him filled her.

“So he just happened to be out there in the wilderness, right where Regan was attacked?”

“Nearby. He was helping K’neekap Eddie with his dogs and trap lines. Eddie was sick that season, couldn’t get out to check what had been snared in his traps. Crash ran the lines for him that winter.”

“Out of the goodness of his heart, I suppose.”

She glanced up. “Well, yes. Elliot was lucky. Without Crash out there, he would have died, too.”

“How long has he—Crash—been here in Twin Rivers?”

Rosalie pursed her lips. “That winter was his second, I think, when he ran the trap line for old Eddie.”

“And he’s been in town ever since?”

“On and off. The following summer, I think, he went to fly contract for some mining outfit up near Nunavut, but he came back the next fall. That’s when he brought his own plane, that de Havilland Beaver, and started flying supply runs. His first big local contract was for Alan Sturmann-Taylor at Tchliko Lodge. Sturmann-Taylor had bought the lodge the year before Crash arrived, and had started doing big renovations. He needed all sorts of things all the time. Then Crash began some flights for Harry Blundt’s crew.” Rosalie stopped to listen to a voice mail. She jotted down a number, and said. “Elliot came back, too, you know. As soon as he was able.”

“Back here, to the station, to work?”

“Yes. Corporal Bo Hague only filled in for a while. But it was not a good thing that Elliot returned to work. He became increasingly obsessed by what had happened to his daughter. Although the autopsy couldn’t show without a doubt
how
she died it was clear that wolves and bears ate her body. But which animal—or what—killed her, nobody could tell for sure. Elliot, he got to thinking it was some person who’d murdered Regan and left her out there.”

“Because of the tracks? Because he saw what he thought were human prints with bloodied drag marks?”

Rosalie nodded. “But those tracks—it was only Elliot’s word. By the time the other cop and a coroner got out there, there’d been heavy snow, then freezing rain. They couldn’t find the tracks.”

“What about O’Halloran, did he see the tracks when he found Novak?”

“Crash’s priority was to get Elliot back to Twin Rivers for medical attention. Bundled him and Regan’s body up. And came right in.” She paused, her face changing, eyes going distant at some memory. She shook her head. “It was like guilt drove Elliot’s obsession to find and blame someone.”

“Guilt?”

She nodded. “Like with Jankoski, he’d started drinking a bit.”

“So, you think he was inebriated that night, sleeping like a drunk while his daughter was attacked?”

“That kid had to have screamed, Tana,
something
. Maybe if Elliot had been sober, he’d have woken, and been able to help her.”

Tana stared at Rosalie.

“I think that’s why Elliot’s wife left in the end. She blamed him, too.”

“So, when did Buccholz arrive to take over?”

“The next winter, after Dakota Smithers was mauled. That’s when Elliot had started to go really crazy, drinking very heavily. Having blackouts. Not remembering where he’d been, and for how long. So they had to let him go. They brought Buccholz in. But Elliot kept coming around to the station, pestering him on the Dakota case. And then he broke in.”

“And that’s when these files ended up in that crawl space?”

“Yup.”

Tana muttered a curse. They were all nuts. This place was nuts. And this wolf stuff was downright weird. What were the odds of all three attacks occurring the first week in November, different animals—same pattern of predation? She definitely needed to talk to Charlie.

“What really got Elliot in the end,” Rosalie said, “was when Corporal Bo Hague hinted that maybe he’d hurt his own daughter, then left her out there where the wolves could get her and cover things up. And Bo was kind of wondering if maybe Elliot could have hurt Dakota, too.”

The shutter banged louder, temperatures dropping as wind sought ways in through the cracks.

“You mind if I leave early today, Tana?” Rosalie said, glancing out the window. “Snow will be here soon, and I want to check on Diana with her sick baby.”

“Sure. It’s fine. Go.”

Tana returned her attention to the pathologist’s report on Regan Novak while Rosalie fussed about, getting her gear on.

The cause of death was equivocal—it could have been a bear, or wolves. There was clear evidence both animals had fed on her.

Regan likely succumbed to exsanguination—catastrophic blood loss. There was blunt-force trauma to the base of her skull, along with symmetrical tearing, and partial scalping. One carnivore expert said this was consistent with a grizzly attack. A five-hundred- to six-hundred-pound bear could wield phenomenal force. Similar claw marks showed on parts of her body. Four parallel rips.

Like Tana had seen on both Selena and Raj.

“See you tomorrow, Tana,” Rosalie said.

“Yeah. Have a good night,” Tana said without looking up. The door opened with a blast of cold, and then Rosalie was gone.

Tana studied the photos of Regan’s torso closely. The hollowed-out stomach, and chest. No heart. She shivered, and looked up. The fire was still burning fiercely, her dogs lying contentedly in front of it. She got up, checked the windows. They were all tightly closed and locked. She turned the heating thermostat up, making a mental note to get someone in to insulate that crawl space.

Reseating herself at her desk, she pulled out the black-and-whites of Regan’s head. Tana swallowed. The flesh at the neck stump was torn and chewed-looking. Just like Apodaca’s.

The similarities, the power and violence in the violation of these bodies, was both sinister and undeniable. Her brain wanted to go there, but reality, logic, resistance was saying no: it
couldn’t
have been a person who’d done this, and then left the bodies for the scavengers.

Could it?

The implications would be shocking—the kind of thing you might get away with on a weekly TV show that featured a gruesome serial killer case for thirty-five minutes each week, where viewers clicked their television sets on and sat there all ready to just throw disbelief away to the wind, and watch the horror porn. Because, in reality, this sort of thing was rare. Very rare.

Or was this getting to her, was she going places that Elliot Novak went in his mind? Or . . . had Novak actually been onto something?

Could it have been Novak himself?

She needed to find him. She needed to talk to him.

THE HUNGER

Moreau was taciturn at best, prone to bouts of dark solitude should he spend too long a span away from the northern wilds. He could carry, paddle, walk and sing as well as any Voyageur Cromwell did see. The small man would rise early, often around two, or three, setting off without breakfast, eating only a piece of pemmican along the day, but always stopping a few minutes each hour to suck upon his pipe. Not in all the while that Cromwell had traveled the fur route with his man had he seen raw fear in the Voyageur’s eyes. But on this night along the fringe of the Barrens, the territory of the Copper Indians, as Cromwell regarded Moreau, he witnessed the moment the man knew he was prey . . .

The Reader rams a spike down into the page. Frustration fires along the periphery of the Reader’s mind. It’s changed. All changed. The pleasure, the privacy is no longer there. The Hunger is coming again, too soon.

It’s the Mountie. Circling closer, closer. Like a hunting carnivore herself . . .

CHAPTER 23

Tana fed her dogs, stoked up the fire, and returned to the pile of papers on her desk. Outside the wind howled down the street and rattled at the police cabin windows. It had started to snow. She could see the white stuff being plastered against the dark panes.

She opened the report on Dakota Smithers, fourteen years old.

The account matched what she’d been told. Dakota had been attending the Twin Rivers School annual wilderness culture camp at Porcupine Lake over the last days of October into November. The camp was held over the same period each year. On the morning of November 3 she’d participated in a fish smoking demonstration, and a tallow candle-making workshop.

Tana’s heart quickened—November 2, 3, 4—a sequence? Or just close dates because this was usually when the really big winter storms started? She flipped over the page.

After lunch Dakota was part of a group that went out on dogsleds with headlamps. Fog had blown in thick along the river late that afternoon, and it had started to snow. In the darkness and fog, Dakota became separated from the group.

The rest of the group returned to camp, and a small search party was launched, but severe weather and fog hampered efforts. That night the dogs returned with the sled. No Dakota.

She was found two days later, down the riverbank in a ravine. Her body had been severely scavenged by predators.

Tana studied the autopsy photos, and the chill deepened into her bones.

Ripped-off head. Evidence of four parallel claw marks on parts of her body and clothes. Concave depression at the base of her skull and partial scalping. Missing internal organs, including heart. Eyes ripped out and part of her face eaten. The pathologist found no evidence of sexual assault, but her pubic and bowel area had been eaten.

On Dakota’s body were trace amounts of fish blood, and . . . vanilla.

Her breathing quickened, tension crackling through her limbs as Dean Kaminsky’s words came to mind.

. . . Rotted blood. Fish, too. Added some vanilla . . .

The coroner’s report suggested the blood and vanilla found on Dakota had come from the fish smoking and candle-making workshops, respectively.

Tana lurched up from her chair and began stuffing all the papers back into the file box. She lugged the box through to the small interview room, clicked on the light. The room contained a table, and a whiteboard that ran the length of the back wall. She dumped the box onto the table and fetched a black marker. She drew four stark parallel lines down the whiteboard, dividing it into five wide columns.

Alerted by her change in energy, her dogs came into the room to see what she was doing. They settled under the table while Tana spread photographs out on the table and sifted through them. She returned to her desk, retrieved the Apodaca-Sanjit scene photos that she’d printed to show Charlie. She also printed out the image of Apodaca and Sanjit that Veronique Garnier had forwarded to her.

At the top of the third column she stuck Regan Novak’s photo. Dakota Smithers’s headshot went at the top of the fourth column, and in the fifth column, she placed the photograph of Selena Apodaca and Raj Sanjit.

She stood back a moment. Three young women. One guy. The bodies of the women all showed remarkable similarities in pattern of predation. The male body had suffered far less indignity. Was there a reason for this?

With her marker, under the image of Smithers, and under the one of Apodaca and Sanjit, she wrote:
Vanilla?

The upcoming autopsies would show if there was indeed evidence of vanilla on the bodies of Apodaca and Sanjit, but Tana had seen traces of blackened sludge on them. It looked the same as the dark contents she’d seen in the jerry cans. And Dean Kaminsky had said the biologists had added vanilla to their lure mix, so she was guessing.

There was no mention of vanilla or any kind of lure in the Regan Novak case, however.

Under Smithers’s photo, Tana wrote:
Stalked?
She did the same under the image of Apodaca where she also pasted the scrap of paper with the hand-printed poem that Veronique had found among Selena’s things.

For, in the Barrens of the soul

monsters take toll . . .

Wind howled under the eaves, and something
thucked
against the wall outside, making Tana jump. Max growled. Tana paused, marker in hand, listening. But no more bumps came in the night, just the sound of the wind.

She stood back and studied the words, frowning. What did they mean? Where had they come from? Why had Selena had this? She turned and carefully sifted again through the images in the Dakota Smithers case, and then she came across one that made her blood run cold.

The team that had finally gone in to investigate the area where Dakota’s body had been found had photographed the surrounding terrain. And at the top of the ravine an inukshuk had been captured on film. Quickly, Tana rummaged through her own printouts, found the one she’d taken of the inukshuk at the Apodaca-Sanjit scene.

Dryness balled in her throat. It was almost identical in its construction, the longer of the two stone arms pointing toward the scene of death. A wayfinder of the north. Tana told herself many inukshuks looked the same—how many different ways could one build a stone man, anyway, with the flat rocks available out here? And these things were everywhere. Her mind went to the inukshuk garden in front of Crow TwoDove’s house.

She pinned up both images. The one in the Smithers column. The other that she’d taken in the Apodaca-Sanjit column.

Then at the top of the first column she wrote:
Persons of Interest.

In that column she wrote:

Cameron “Crash” O’Halloran
—
Owns red AeroStar. Heather MacAllistair saw a red AeroStar near scene around possible time of deaths. Sturmann-Taylor alibi? O’Halloran was in the woods near Regan Novak mauling site—first on scene. In a position to compromise evidence. Where was he when Smithers was killed?

Beneath that she wrote:

Crow TwoDove
—
Investigated for possible stalking and sexual interest in school kids. Lost job. Resentment. Violently anti-cops.

That was one thing about these deaths, Tana thought as she went back to the photos spread out on the table. Violence. Bloody chaos. Power. Raw strength.

She found the photo she was searching for—a head shot of Sergeant Elliot Novak looking dark haired, square jawed and handsome in his official red serge and Stetson. She stuck that image up in the
Persons of Interest
column as well. Beside it she placed the photograph that had been taken for the coroner’s report after Novak had been rescued by O’Halloran. The contrast was shocking. In the “after” photo Novak was missing part of his nose, and two wide nasal cavities gaped at the camera. His eyes had sunken into hollows beneath the bone of his brow, his cheeks had been sucked in. Part of his lip was missing, also due to frostbite.

There was a sense of “otherness” about him. As if he’d gone out there into the wild and returned a hollowed-out husk of the human he once was, as if he’d been changed into some kind of cadaverous monster.

Wind gusted again, and hair prickled up the back of Tana’s neck. She didn’t want to fully articulate to herself yet the patterns she was seeing on this board. She felt surreal, as if she’d entered some strange landscape, and to admit what she was thinking would forever suck her down into that world with no avenue for return.

She rubbed her arms, trying to get some warmth back into her body, then she reached again for her marker.

Under Novak’s photos she wrote:
Alcoholic? Blackouts? Memory issues? Mentally unstable? Possibly hurt his own daughter? Where was he when Smithers went missing? Where is he now? Where was he when Apodaca and Sanjit were killed? Could he be the man in fur that Selena Apodaca thought she’d seen from MacAllistair’s chopper on the morning of Friday, November 2?

In the second column, Tana wrote:
First week of November, consecutive dates—significance? Inukshuks—relevant?
In the same column she stuck up the mystery Baffin-Arctic size-nine boot print with the rip in the lug. Just about everyone in the north owned a pair of Baffins. And size nine was common. But that ripped pattern in the tread was unique. Or a temporary anomaly caused by something stuck under the boot.

To the first column she added:
Jamie TwoDove
—
involved with Apodaca. Knows something about bones found with Apodaca’s body? Attacked Caleb Peters in connection with bones?
Tana stuck up several photos of the old, porous bones.

She added a few more names that had piqued her curiosity in connection with the attacks.

Caleb Peters
—
what does he know about old bones? Where was he at times of attacks? Had connection to Apodaca through Jamie TwoDove. Any connection to other victims?

Beneath his name she wrote:
Marcus Van Bleek, Teevak Kino, Big Indian, Harry Blundt. Other mine crew?

Apodaca thought she’d seen a man. He could have been any one of the above given the proximity of the camp to the attack site.

She added the name
Dean Kaminsky
—
Unrequited romantic interest in Selena Apodaca. Jealous? Possible stalker and threats?

But Kaminsky was likely not around three and four years back. Still, she needed to keep an open mind. Apodaca’s stalking might have no relevance at all to the attack on her and Sanjit. Or to the possibly manufactured account of Dakota Smithers being stalked.

And the attacks might just be wolves, or bear. It was entirely possible. And it was believable that most people had been able to accept this outcome . . . until now. Until Selena Apodaca and Raj Sanjit’s case, which was throwing some stark parallels into focus.

She stood back, examining her board.

Irrespective of how all four had actually died, the patterns of wildlife predation on the bodies of Regan Novak, Dakota Smithers, and Selena Apodaca were starkly, hauntingly, undeniably similar. The hollowed-out rib cages. Missing hearts. Ripped-out eyes. Parallel clawlike gouges. The concave depressions at the base of the skulls. Heads torn from bodies. Evisceration.

Jamie’s words slithered back into her consciousness.

. . . They scrape the soul—your heart—right out of your chest. Take your eyes so you can’t see in the afterlife . . .

Tana stepped up to the board and beneath Raj Sanjit’s photo she wrote:
Different predation pattern on male. Left with heart and parts of other organs. Head and eyes intact. Why? Females prime target? Male = collateral damage?

Tana walked to the window, thinking of the two inukshuks, the vanilla—why? To lure scavengers after death, to cover something up? Frost feathered the panes, and snow stuck to the outside surface of the glass. She listened to the moaning wind. She could see it. How the isolation and darkness of this place, the sense of otherworldliness, could allow obsession—madness—to take hold. And she hadn’t even begun to face the winter yet. It was only November.

Early November. When the clocks changed for winter. Her father used to say it was at this time that the veil between seasons—between the living and the spirit world—grew thin, at least according to his childhood Scandinavian tales. It was when the dark things began to creep out of the woods.

Toyon came to his feet and pressed his warm body against her leg. She smiled, bent down, and scratched his furry neck. She glanced at her watch. It was after 9:00 p.m. already, and she was famished.

“Time to get some food, boys,” she said to her dogs as she exited the room. They followed, and she closed the door to the interview room behind her. She reached for her jacket, gloves, hat, and bundled up to face the storm on the way to the diner just down the street. She could use the company she might find there.