In the Barren Ground Page 16

  “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.

  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 laun
ched, 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.