In the Barren Ground (39 page)

About an hour into the badlands, the going got steeper and navigating the sleds over uneven terrain grew increasingly challenging. Damien came to another sudden halt, and once more his hand shot high into the air. Tana tensed as she came up behind him.

“Her sled! Over there!” he yelled. “She’s abandoned it. Taken off on snowshoes up that incline. See?” He panned his handheld hunting spotlight up a steep ridge ahead of them. The imprints of large snowshoes were clearly visible, tracking at a diagonal across the slope and up toward a ridge.

Tana stared at the tracks. Why had MacAllistair done this? She wanted them up there on foot for some reason?

“Boulder garden,” Wayne said, panning his own light across the ridge. “I reckon it’s up top of that ridge.”

“What do you want to do?” Damien said.

Tana considered options, and none of them felt good. “If Crash was right, Mindy is up there, and she’s the bait. I think Heather will be waiting.”

“Maybe we best split up,” Wayne said. “The garden can’t be too wide, and if she’s waiting, my guess is she’s on the opposite side.”

“So how come
she
can make it across a boulder garden without her legs slipping between the rocks and breaking?” Tana said.

“Look at the size of her snowshoe prints,” Wayne said. “They’re those massive old gut shoes that she’s using. Like boats on the feet. There’s enough snow now, and if she knows a generally safe route across the boulders, those shoes are going to stop her going into cracks if she makes a small mistake. The snowshoes we brought are way smaller—technical things. Nothing like the good old traditional shit.”

“Okay,” Tana said. “But if we can see her tracks, we can also see where the safe route across the boulder garden lies.”

“But she’ll be at the end of her tracks. Waiting.”

“I think Wayne is right,” Damien said, still studying the slope with his spotlight. “I think Wayne should go up the slope on the far right. And I’ll go along the bottom of the incline to the left, then up. We both come up at the far ends, and try to circle around behind her, take her by surprise. Wait for our all-clear whistle before coming up and following her tracks into the garden, because once you guys are out in the open, you’ll be sitting ducks.”

It was a gamble, but the best they had. They all strapped on snowshoes, and readied weapons and lengths of rope for self-rescue in case anyone fell deep between giant, slick boulders. Tana, Caleb, and Jamie watched as Wayne and Damien moved like shadows across the base of the incline in opposite directions, and then disappeared into snow and darkness.

Almost an hour passed, and the cold settled deep into Tana’s bones. Worry knifed in with it—something had gone wrong. They were taking far too long. Mindy wasn’t going to survive this. Suddenly a crack split the air.

They all jumped. Another. Then another. Gun battle.

They began to start frantically up the ridge, sliding at least a foot backward in soft powdery drifts for every few feet they climbed forward. They neared the crest and crouched, waiting.

All had fallen silent.

They waited some more.

Nothing. No whistle.

Then suddenly it came. A long, shrill blast.

“Go!” she said. And they clambered over the top. Breathing hard, Tana surveyed the scene. The boulder garden was a sea of smooth mounds of snow. She could see MacAllistair’s trail across it almost instantly. Panning her spotlight along the trail, she hit on a shape lying in the middle of the expanse.

“Mindy,” she said, peering through the driving flakes. “Trussed up in canvas like Crash was.” She turned to Caleb and Jamie. “You guys wait here. I’ll go slowly across, and test the route. If it’s a trick, then only one of us breaks a leg. If I give the all-clear whistle, you come. If I go down between the rocks, you play it safe and see if you can throw me a rope from a secure position.”

“Got it,” said Caleb.

Tana started into the boulder terrain, tentatively testing each step with her snowshoes before transferring weight. Each time she felt a slip, she’d reposition her snowshoe and test again. It took several painstaking minutes to reach the canvas bag lying in the snow, and when she did, she wondered where Damien and Wayne were, why there’d been no sign of them by now. Nerves jangled.

She crouched down beside the bag. “Mindy?” Tana rolled the bag over, and Mindy’s exposed head flopped back. Quickly, Tana removed her glove and placed her fingers against Mindy’s neck. Her skin was ice cold. Tana could feel no pulse. A wave of emotion slammed through her. “Mindy, please, please.” She moved her fingers to a different position, just to be certain she wasn’t missing a faint pump of blood under skin, and that’s when she saw the shadow. Coming fast. The fog and falling flakes created a curtain so dense that the shape was already almost upon her.

Tana panned her spotlight fast around to face it.
MacAllistair
.

Dropping her spotlight Tana reached for the rifle on her back, but she didn’t have time to put stock to shoulder before the woman was right on her, face ghost white, her mouth open, as she brandished a clawlike tool high in the air. In her other hand was a sharpened birch stake. With a scream she swiped the claw down on Tana.

CHAPTER 46

Tana rolled onto her side as MacAllistair’s weapon came down. The tips of the claws tore through the fabric of her snow pants at her hip. Rage, raw survival instinct, exploded through Tana’s body as she tried to scramble backward, but her snowshoes hooked her up, and her arm slipped down a crack between boulders. Her face hit rock as she went down. Pain sparked along her cheekbone. Pulling her arm free, Tana grappled in the snow for her gun. But MacAllistair heaved her tool up into the air, and sliced it down again with another banshee-like scream. Tana rolled again, and the blow struck snow, going through to rock with a clang. Tana’s rifle clattered down between boulders. MacAllistair was caught off balance by the fact her blow had missed its mark, and she stumbled over her giant snowshoes, dropping her wooden stake as she flailed to keep her balance.

Heart jackhammering, sweat running down her brow, Tana pulled her sidearm from its holster. Lying on her back, she aimed, trying to curl her thickly gloved finger around the trigger, but MacAllistair swung the bear-claw tool across the front of her body, hitting Tana’s Smith & Wesson and sending it flying into snow.

Your baby, think of your baby . . . you’re not going to let this woman kill your innocent child . . .

Tana writhed toward the fallen birch stake. It was about five feet long. She grasped it and rolled away again as the bear claw was swung at her again. The tips of the claws caught her upper arm, raking through her jacket and flesh.

She swung the birch stake at MacAllistair’s legs, smashing it across her shins. The blow made MacAllistair stumble backward in her clumsy snowshoes, bringing her to the ground. Tana tried to scuttle backward and get to her feet, but the pointed rear end of her right snowshoe jammed fast between rocks. She was trapped, vulnerable on her back. MacAllistair was back on her feet, stumbling toward her, swinging her claw up like a baseball bat. Tana rammed the flat end of the birch stake against the rock next to her waist. She put her arm around it, clamping the base of the stake tightly against her body using her elbow. She fisted her hand around the stake pressing her forearm against the length of it. As MacAllistair lunged forward, Tana kicked at MacAllistair’s snowshoes with her free foot. Their snowshoes connected in a clashing tangle, pitching MacAllistair forward over Tana.

Tana brought the stake into position just as her assailant came down on top of her. The tip plunged deep into the woman’s belly bringing her to a juddering halt. Tana grunted with the impact. For a moment Heather MacAllistair hung there on the end of the stake, her eyes wide, staring into Tana’s. Then blood began to drip from her lips, and the stake cracked, buckling in two with the weight impaled upon it. MacAllistair slumped onto Tana, a dead weight, thumping the air out her lungs.

For a second Tana couldn’t breathe. Her mind screamed as she tried to absorb what had just happened. She felt the wetness of blood leaking onto her.

She’d driven a stake into the heart of a monster.

Struggling to push the weight of the dead body off her, her snowshoe still wedged between rock, Tana reached for the whistle around her neck. It took her a moment to gather enough breath, to stop her hands from shaking enough, to put the whistle between her lips, and issue three loud blasts.

CHAPTER 47

The chopper materialized from dense cloud and falling snow, a shimmering silver knight in shining armor. It was a big military beast equipped like an ambulance inside with paramedics on standby as it came in to land on the small Twin Rivers airstrip. A blizzard roared in the downdraft as trees bowed, and pinecones and bits of debris hurtled across the strip.

Tana stood by the waiting gurneys, shielding her eyes against the maelstrom of debris and wind. She held Crash’s hand. It was warm, and his grip firm. Chief Dupp Peters had managed to get a brief emergency message out in the dark hours of the morning while her hunting party was limping its way back toward town.

Damien and Wayne had both been hurt in the gun battle with MacAllistair. Wayne was still unconscious, in a coma. Damien had taken a bullet in the shoulder, and he’d broken a femur while tumbling down a sheer ravine at the back end of the boulder garden, losing his whistle on the way down. MacAllistair had found the whistle on Wayne’s unconscious body, and blown it, guessing she was making some kind of a signal.

MacAllistair had no ammunition left after the gunfight with Wayne and Damien, and she’d come at Tana with her last resources. Jamie and Caleb had managed to get across the boulder garden, reaching Tana only after MacAllistair was already dead.

Mindy had not made it. Her body waited in a bag, and Tana’s heart was low.

They’d managed to bundle the injured together on the snowmobiles, but they’d had to drag the wrapped bodies of Mindy and MacAllistair behind them, and it had been an unsettling experience. Tana had decided against leaving MacAllistair in situ for the crime scene investigators because she was concerned animals might destroy evidence. Snow had also been falling heavily. Instead, she’d done her best to quickly photograph the scene before wrapping MacAllistair’s body in a survival blanket from one of the first aid kits, and securing her to the back of a machine with rope.

The major crimes team had landed minutes before the medevac chopper. Five detectives were already getting to work at the station. A forensics team was on the way, along with more manpower. There would be an investigation down the road, Tana knew, into how she had handled things, and an inquest into the deaths of Oskar Jankoski, Mindy Koe, and Crow TwoDove. It would be a long process. But right now she was focused on the present.

As the rotors slowed, two paramedics jumped out and came running in a crouch. Tana started to push Crash toward them. Addy did the same with Damien on his trolley. Chief Peters pushed Wayne on his gurney.

Addy had managed to stabilize Crash, treating him for hypothermia, and she’d given him antibiotic shots to stave off infection. She’d sewn up the gaping wounds across his cheek to the best of her ability, and she’d done the same for the injuries on his leg. Infection was the biggest worry now. Damien was going to be okay. He’d lost some blood, and a bullet was still lodged deep in his shoulder, but he was stable. Wayne’s prognosis was questionable—they’d know more after he’d seen a neurosurgeon.

As they loaded Crash into the chopper, he gripped Tana’s hand tighter, pulling her toward him with surprising strength.

“You better be here when I get back,” he said, as loudly as he could manage over the noise of the engine and the rotors. “Because I need a job.”

“What?”

“I need a steady pilot job,” he yelled, even louder. And Tana laughed, tears suddenly streaming from her eyes. She laughed and she cried because the damn rogue still had the strength to yell, and it gave her hope that he really would be coming back.

“I’m your man, Tana. I’m your pilot man. And I’m going to have your back out here.”

She stilled, her eyes locked with his. And a sob choked into her throat, stealing all words. All she could manage was a nod, and she kissed him gently on his dry, cracked, cold lips. His hand squeezed hers, and then they took him away into the chopper with the others.

Shaking with emotion, she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand as she stepped away from the chopper. She joined Addy and the rest of the crowd that had come to see the big medevac bird taking Crash, Damien and Wayne, and Mindy’s body.

Chief Peters came to her side, putting his arm around her as the rotors gained speed and began to roar. Wind tore through their hair as the helicopter lifted. The chief gave her a little squeeze as the craft banked and dissolved into gray cloud and snow.

“You did good, Tana,” said Chief Peters. “We did our best. We all did.”

She nodded, unable to speak. And she knew that while the road ahead was going to be rocky, she had what she’d come for—friendship, a community that had her back, and she had theirs. She’d earned respect. She’d found a tribe.

Marcie came up to her and took both Tana’s hands in hers. “Crash is going to be fine,” she said, her dark-brown eyes earnest. “You will see. He’s a good man, Tana. He flies people safely.”

She nodded, struggling to tamp down another hiccup of emotion.

“Come, Tana.” It was Addy. “We need to check
you
out now. You look spent.”

Tuesday, November 27. Day length: 5:52:53 hours.

Tana stood in the barn dungeon with Dr. Jayne Nelson, a forensic psychologist from a private forensics company based out of Vancouver, BC.

The RCMP investigative team had brought the doc on board when the sheer scope of Heather MacAllistair’s depravity began to emerge, and it became evident that they were dealing with a serial killer who had been operating for years, both in the United States and Canada, as well as Africa and the Middle East, while either on a military tour of duty, or doing contract work. Several more cases of missing persons who were later found deceased and scavenged by animals had since been reopened.

Most of the victims in these cases were female. And the doc was slowly piecing together a psychological picture of a woman who’d lost her mother in childbirth, and who’d been raised by an apparently violent, alcoholic father and an older brother who’d systematically sexually abused and tortured her since early childhood. Until the day her father got snared in one of his own traps. This information was coming to light via interviews with people who’d known MacAllistair’s father and brother.

The doc was in her late thirties, unconventionally attractive, direct, and smart as a whip, and Tana had taken an instant liking to her, lapping up whatever she could about the woman’s field of study and her particular fascination with female aggression.

The basement was cold, and industrial lighting cast corners and crannies into stark relief. The techs had been through here with fine-toothed, scientific combs, and had photographed and documented the hell out of the place before removing the contents and shipping them off to the crime lab. All that remained were the glossy, black-painted walls made of concrete breeze blocks. The “altar” table, and the iron bed at the back of the room. And the white painted scrawl on the wall above the table.

Jayne had asked Tana to come with her to see the place nevertheless, and to walk her through her impressions of that night when she and Jankoski had discovered the dungeon. Jayne was after the “feel” and the “atmosphere” that Tana had experienced, and she stood there now, her breath clouding in the cold as she stared up at the white scrawl.

In the Barrens of the soul, Monsters we breed . . . retribution our creed.

“It’s from the book,” Tana said.

“And the book was lying here?” Jayne said, placing her gloved hand flat on the table.

“It made me think of a bible,” Tana said. “The way it was positioned with the candles on either side, and the empty jar in the middle.”

“Possibly waiting for Mindy’s heart.”

Tana shrugged deeper into her jacket, the fur ruff soft and ticklish against her cheeks. “Why do you think that horror novel became such a big deal for her?”

“Perhaps it resonated. It gave her alter ego a point of focus, and it gave Heather a way of further compartmentalizing.” Jayne turned in a slow circle, taking in the rest of the space. “This whole place did. A sort of basement of the soul cut off from her real, everyday life. We all have those—it’s the place of our subconscious, where we push down the dark impulses and fascinations of which we are not proud, and that we want to hide from others. And when we do this, when we can’t find a way to acknowledge and assimilate these parts of ourselves, they can seep out of the psychological cracks in very disturbing ways.” Jayne smiled. “At least that’s the way Carl Jung would have us interpret it. Heather could come down here, where she let out her dark demon alter ego, and when she went back up that ladder and shut that trapdoor, she could pretend to be this other functional human being.”

“But something triggered her, set her off?”

Jayne met Tana’s gaze. “
You
did, I think. You came into town and started looking at those wolf-bear maulings as possible murders, and you started directly threatening Heather’s delicate psychological balancing act, which was already wearing thin. Like any addiction, it’s a one-way slide downhill.” She moved slowly toward the back of the room and looked down at the iron bed.

“There was also possible female jealousy involved. She’d had intimate relations with someone you were, from outside appearances, becoming close to. In her mind you threatened that relationship, too. You forced her to cross her own lines, and once she did that, she began to psychologically implode. Her previously controlled approach to killing began to tilt toward a violent spree, which is not uncommon with serial killers coming to the end of their so-called ‘career.’”

“What about her victims—why predominantly females?”

“That’s something I’m still piecing together as more information comes in. In Regan Novak’s case jealousy might have been a factor as well. Her father had tried to break off his and Heather’s affair to devote more time to Regan and her mother. This could have put Regan squarely in Heather’s sights as a threat to be eliminated. Yet, even after killing his daughter, Heather maintained a twisted relationship with Elliot Novak, visiting him, bringing him things like cigarettes.”

“That’s a weird one.”

Jayne nodded. “Heather’s alter ego probably developed as a survival mechanism over the years, a way of compartmentalizing and dealing with the abuse she suffered as a child. And this alter ego, this vengeful ‘Hunger’ that she wrote about in some of the notes that were found down here, probably came fully into its own when she saw her father killed by wolves while he was trapped, and she derived great pleasure from it—watching him die at the hands of wild animals.”

“You don’t know this for a fact, though,” said Tana.

“No. It’s conjecture. And conjecture is the nature of forensic psychology. My theory is that Heather began to see the animals, the wilderness, as her ally, a retributive form of justice after it had claimed her father, who had been abusing her. She began to identify with the wild animals, eventually adopting a clawlike murder weapon. There is historical precedence to this type of pathology.”

“But why focus on females?”

Jayne shook her head. “Sometimes the abused becomes the abuser—a twisted way of holding on to control, a form of coping.”

Tana inhaled deeply, thinking of the attractive woman she’d first seen at the WestMin camp. You never could tell what was going on inside another when you looked into their eyes. “And the inukshuks?”

“That came from Henry Spatt’s novel. I’m not sure why she was using the book as a blueprint for her kills up here in the north. Again, I suspect a fuller picture will begin to emerge once we link her with evidence to some of the other cases coming to light.” She smiled. “Psychosis is rarely about logic.”

As they emerged from the barn and made their way back to Tana’s truck, Tana said, “And that old newspaper article found among her things, about those two cowboys clubbed to death after leaving a bar in northern Minnesota—was that her, do you think, who clubbed them?”

“That’s the investigative angle right now. That case has been reopened by the FBI team working with the RCMP. Heather was in the bar earlier that same evening, and those two guys cornered her outside, and made unwanted sexual advances. She got away and they returned to drink more. According to reports the men were completely inebriated when they finally left the bar around 2:00 a.m. It appears that it could have been Heather who waited for them in the lot, and beat them to death with a baseball bat. This might have been her first successful experience with a clubbing-type weapon, which she later adapted to the claw tool.”

Tana drove Jayne back to the Broken Pine Motel. It was 3:00 p.m. Shadows were long and dark already. As Jayne got out of the truck, she leaned back into the cab and said, “You should come see me if you get down to Vancouver. I can show you around, introduce you to the rest of our team.”

“I will,” Tana said, forcing a smile. And as Jayne closed the door, an unbidden warm feeling washed through her. She was building friendships. She was finding professional respect. This was momentous in her life. Yet, as she drove back to the station it was a complicated mess of emotions that churned through her. Addy had checked her out—she and the baby were fine, apart from bruises and cuts. Her mental state was another matter. And she missed Crash like a hole in her heart. While she’d spoken with him on the phone, and learned he was going to recuperate physically, she was filled with anxiety and worry for him. And her future with him was a giant, scary question.