White Heat (45 page)

    He
said: 'What you got?'

    'Proof.'

    'Proof
of what?'

    'Murder,
homicide, unlawful killing, I don't know what you call it, but I got proof.'

    He
thought about asking her to elaborate, then decided it was best not to talk
about it over the radio.

    'OK,
Edie, I give in,' he said. 'Weather permitting, I'll be with you by late
afternoon.' Official police tone: 'This better be good.'

    The
flight into Autisaq was, for the Arctic at least, relatively smooth. Derek
preferred it when he could not see the ground below, though today there was
enough moonlight reflecting off the ice to bring into relief just how little
ice there was for a September day and just how many leads criss-crossed the
floe.

    The
plane came in over the mountains, bumping a little across the direction of the
wind. As they drew near the strip, Derek could see that the terminal building
had been festooned in bunting. In the twenty-four hours he'd been away the
place had been transformed into what looked like a celebration of the Great
Leader in some totalitarian flea- pit. Simeonie Inukpuk's face grinned from
every window and announcement board. Even Elijah Nungaq, who was on shift
hauling cargo at the airstrip, was dressed in a Vote Simeonie Inukpuk tee.

    'Am I
going mad or is he supposed to be the opposition?' Pol said, as they made their
way across the landing strip into the terminal building.

    Derek
said: 'Seems to me, we're all going mad, one way or another.'

    The
incumbent mayor was waiting for them just outside the terminal, talking to
Stevie.

    'Heard
you were coming in a day early.' Simeonie clapped Derek on the back and waggled
a finger. 'Spying, eh?'

    The
smell of alcohol and barbecuing meat and the sound of loud music drifted from
the Town Hall. While Derek went inside the police office, Stevie parked the
ATV. Derek's plan was to check on Willa, debrief Stevie on the search for the
old man then take himself off to Edie's house. He lit a cigarette. From the
snow porch, two scantily clad men were clearly visible, clinched together in a bear
hug in the mayor's office in what looked like an Inuit wrestling match. It was
one step beyond weird.

    'Don't
ask me, D,' Stevie said, strolling in. 'I'm just the grunt.'

    Willa
was asleep on the cell cot and Derek saw no reason to wake him. He returned to
the office and instructed Stevie to release him the moment he stirred. To keep
him locked up any longer without formally charging him was against regulations.
The irony of this sudden shot of punctiliousness tickled Derek. He'd spent the
past few months gradually jettisoning the regulations one by one until the
police service was so light it almost never touched the ground. Still, there
were lines in the sand, even for Derek. He couldn't keep the kid without
charging him and he wasn't about to give him a criminal record on some whim of
Edie's.

    Stevie
handed him a steaming mug.

    'How'd
the S&R go?'

    'Black
hole.' Stevie had been to Koperkuj's cabin and found his gun and skiff missing.
Otherwise, nothing. 'Wouldn't be surprised he's just gone AWOL, D. The type, by
all accounts. I guess there's not much to be done but wait. That cabin though,
Jesus Jones, what a state.'

    'What
kind of a state?'

    'A
mess, crap everywhere.'

    'No
sign of burglary?'

    'Nah,
just your basic bachelor stuff.' Stevie thought for a moment, blushed, then
offered his boss a repentant look.

    'Sorry,
D, I didn't mean it like that.'

    Derek
went through to the bunk room to freshen up, intending to take a few moments'
shut-eye before heading down to Edie's, but the instant his head hit the pillow
he found himself back in the pilotless plane. Only this time there were no
warning lights. He woke with a start and immediately detected the presence of
someone in the room.

    'Bad
dream?' Edie was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the door. There was a
hard glitter in her eyes, which made her very beautiful, and Derek surprised
himself with his awkwardness at being disturbed in such intimate circumstances.
He'd never thought of himself as shy.

    'How
long have you been sitting there?'

    'Stevie
let me in.'

    He
swung his legs round so he was sitting up on the bed.

    'Shall
we do this in the office?'

    She
hesitated.

    'I
don't know if Stevie should hear this. The thing is, Derek, we're going to have
to dig up Joe.'

    The
idea was so preposterous he assumed she was joking. Even Edie knew you couldn't
go around exhuming the dead. He let out a short, bitter laugh.

    'You
know how insane that sounds, right?' From the fixed expression on her face
Derek could see that she was beyond the point of caring about the consequences
of her actions.

    'Edie
. . .' He didn't know how to put this delicately.

    '...
you're not, you know, you don't think maybe, the drinking?'

    'My
son was killed, Derek. Besides, I quit.'

    Stepson,
he thought, your
stepson,
but judged it best not to say.

    She
went on, drawing from her pocket what looked like a plastic bag, describing how
she'd come across the sheet of Saran Wrap, how she'd unwrapped and inspected it
and what she'd found. He listened until she'd finished. It was certainly odd,
more than odd, sinister. On the other hand, suicides were notoriously hard for
family members to accept. This crazy idea that something had happened to Joe on
Craig had become a kind of obsession with her. The thought even occurred to him
that she had invented the Saran-Wrap story planted the hairs in it, made the
indentations, the hole through which she claimed Joe might have struggled to
take a final breath, in order to get him on her side. In her present state of
mind, he wouldn't put it past her.

    On
the other hand, what if this so-called evidence was what she said it was? She'd
been right about Samwillie Brown's murder when everyone else had put his death
down to an accident. And there was a great deal they still didn't know about
the deaths of Andy Taylor and Felix Wagner and which Simeonie in particular
didn't seem to want them to find out. Could he afford not to take her
seriously?

    'The
lab results are pretty undeniable,' he said, lamely. 'The kid had enough
Vicodin in his body to fell a walrus.'

    'I
know what it looks like but the body never went for a full post-mortem. I guess
everyone was so sure it was a suicide. Derek, the moment we saw those blister
packs neatly stacked up in the drawer next to his bed, I knew something was
wrong. I just didn't follow through. I wish I had. He'd already taken a Xanax,
he would have been so out of it, anyone could have done anything to him by
then.'

    She
was right. If he'd been following proper procedure he would have insisted on a
full autopsy. He'd made desultory inquiries but there was no pathologist
available to fly up and like everyone else he'd assumed the evidence was pretty
tight and hadn't pushed for any further forensic investigation. There was the
added problem that Joe's parents, like many Inuit, were against any kind of
interference with the body but, really, he probably should have insisted.

    'How'd
they get it into him?'

    'Easy,'
she said. She had it all figured out. 'By injection.

    You
crush up the pills with water, administer the solution and you've got yourself
a suicide.'

    'Then
why use the plastic?'

    'Pills
are unreliable. People throw up, they lapse into comas, they don't die
outright. I don't know. Maybe whoever did this really wanted to be sure Joe
wound up dead.'

    'But
why? All we have on him is a bit of petty dope- dealing and a few gambling
debts.'

    Edie
shook her head. 'Not the gambling debts. We were wrong about that one. To get
an online account you need a credit card, and Joe didn't have one. We were
wrong about a lot of things.'

    'The
question remains.'

    Edie
took a deep breath. 'Here's my thinking. Some of it I know for sure, other
stuff I'm having to guess at.'

    Derek
thought immediately of the Brown case.

    'I
know what you're thinking,' she said. 'But just because I'm paranoid doesn't
mean I'm wrong.'

    He
couldn't help but laugh. The woman had an answer to everything.

    'Felix
Wagner was trying to pin down the exact location of a gas reserve,' she went
on, 'maybe a huge one. He got Bill Fairfax to sell him a fragment of meteorite,
which Sir James Fairfax had traded with my great-great-great-grandfather,
Welatok, along with three pages from the explorer's diary describing where
Welatok had originally found the stone. Fairfax was in some kind of financial
trouble, he needed the money and I guess he didn't know the significance of the
meteor. It was a particularly rare kind, one with a high concentration of
iridium, characteristic of rocks that act as a kind of plug in an astrobleme, a
meteorite crater. You take out the meteor and whoosh, up comes the gas.'

    He
took a good look at her and felt bad for ever thinking of her as an avalanche.
She was a sunburst, a great ray of light.

    'Normally,
you can locate astroblemes very precisely from the magnetic field created by
the fragments of meteorite all around it,' she went on. 'Only up here . . .'

    '. .
. the magnetic field gets screwy,' Derek interjected. 'And the geology of the
region is barely mapped.'

    'Exactly.
So all Wagner had to go on was the stone itself, the diary pages and the
probability of finding salt near the entrance to the gas plug.'

    'Salt?'

    'Halite,
they call it. Rock salt. It's like the grease in the plug, far as I can make
out, kinda keeps it airtight.'

    'How
does all this tie up with Andy Taylor? Or with Joe for that matter?'

    'Wagner
was involved in something called the Arctic Hunters' Club. Taylor told me his
boss was into all that old explorer stuff. Wagner knew Bill Fairfax through the
club. What I'm guessing, when Fairfax got himself into some kind of financial
trouble, Wagner stepped in and offered to buy the stone and the part of the
diary he was interested in, leaving Fairfax free to sell the rest at auction.
Despite all that club stuff, Wagner wasn't an experienced Arctic hand, so he
needed someone to accompany him. Taylor had been in Alaska a while and I guess
Wagner was impressed by him, though I'm still trying to work out how, given
what an asshole he was.'

    'Go
on,' Derek said.

    'The
way I think it happened, Wagner spread himself too thin. He got into bed with
two competing energy conglomerates: Zemmer, an energy corporation out of
Houston, Texas .. .'

    Derek
interrupted. 'The ones involved in that oil spill off the coast of Russia?'

    Edie
ignored the question.

    'And
an outfit called Beloil, owned by an oligarch called

    Belovsky,
who Wagner met through the Arctic Hunters' Club.'

    Two
apparently separate pieces of information snapped together in Derek's head.

    'You
think Beloil could have sprung Zemmer's pump?' He was thinking about the Russians
he'd met in Eureka, how they'd seemed particularly interested in him.

    'Those
Russian guys, the ones in Greenland. What did they look like?'

    Edie's
description didn't fit what he could remember of the two men at Eureka, but
that wasn't to say they weren't working for the same outfit. His thoughts moved
to Misha. Was it too far-fetched to imagine she'd been drafted in to distract
him, after all?

    'Great
way to take out the competition.'

    'But
why would Zemmer try to pin it on Chechen Islamists?'

    'Maybe
that way, they get the US Government pouring troops into oil-rich regions so
they can suck the oil out of them. Mention the words Islamist, someone in
Washington DC adds another few noughts onto the defence budget and no one
complains. In any case, either Zemmer or the Russian guy found out they were
being misled and wanted Wagner taken out and they got some local guy to do it.'