In the Barren Ground Read online

  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.

  It also killed her that she’d not been able to save Mindy.

  Not saving Mindy was the ultimate failure. She’d become a cop to save young women like Mindy.

  Saturday, December 1. Day length: 5:35:58 hours.

  “What are they like?” Marcie said as she handed Tana her takeout sandwich and cup of soup to go. “The new station commander and the new constable?”

  “They seem nice enough.”

  Corporal Mark Saggart had been posted to Twin Rivers on a two-year contract to run the station, and Constable James Weston was now Tana’s new partner. It was good to finally have a team. She felt she’d get on with these guys. There were also still detectives in town, going through the old wolf mauling cases in minute detail. Tana had been brought into the investigation herself, after being preliminarily cleared following extensive interviews with the RCMP’s internal division over her handling of events, and over Jankoski’s and Mindy’s deaths.

  There would still be an inquest, and half the town was being questioned in preparation for that, but the picture emerging from Chief Peters, his band council, and his constituents, was that given the lack of police personnel in town, and the fact that an ERT request had been turned down by Sergeant Leon Keelan, they’d taken it upon themselves to hunt down Heather MacAllistair, who’d kidnapped one of their own, and who had killed Crow TwoDove and also taken Crash. According to them, Tana had done her best to mitigate things in the only way available to her while civilian lives were at stake and the clock was ticking.

  “Why did they send two cops?” Marcie asked.

  Because after Addy had done an ultrasound, and after Tana had learned she was going to have a baby girl, she’d finally put in for maternity leave. They’d need a spare hand on deck when she took a few months off. Tana had told a few people in town about her baby now, and she bet Marcie knew exactly why they needed extra staff—gossip moved like wind through trees in a small place like Twin Rivers. Alexa Peters had already offered to babysit. Alexa had been excited by the idea of potentially opening a small day-care center next year. She was already looking after her grandson, Tootoo, she’d said, so why not a few more?

  “They figured Twin Rivers needed more attention,” Tana said with a smile, holding Marcie’s eyes. And Marcie grinned broadly. Yeah, she knew about the baby, thought Tana as she left the diner.

  She made for the station liking the fact she had a new crew, liking the fact that it had been hinted at that once Corporal Saggart’s contract was over, she could potentially be in line to run this department. It gave her a fierce new goal—to keep building on what she’d started here, to keep forging closer relationships with this community, to keep growing her policing skills. Her thoughts turned to Crash once more as she crunched through the frosted snow.

  He’d called yesterday from the Yellowknife airport, saying he’d finally been released from the hospital and that he felt fine, and he was on his way to New York. He was taking his files and he was going to meet with his contact in the FBI. The Interpol guy from Frankfurt would be flying into New York for their meeting as well. Crash was also going to visit Grace and Leah. He didn’t say much more than that. His flight had been about to leave.

  But his absence was loud in her heart. She missed him as much as she missed Jim. And yeah, it ate at her that he was seeing Leah and Grace. She also knew it was right for him to do so. For Leah and Grace, too. Part of his healing process.

  She guessed she’d see down the road how things played out now for Garth Cutter, Alan Sturmann-Taylor, Markus Van Bleek, and Harry Blundt.

  Her dogs were waiting for her on the police station deck. They wiggled and wagged their tails as they saw her ap
proach.

  “Hey, guys,” she said, ruffling the thick fur at their necks. “Good thing the new cops love dogs, eh?” She opened the door. Warmth and smiles greeted her, and her pooches followed her in.

  CHAPTER 48

  Late February. Day length: 9:32:16 hours.

  “Here sweetie, it’s okay, come on.” Tana crouched awkwardly on her haunches in her puffy down jacket and snow pants, trying to coax the skinny old husky out from under the deck of her little cabin with some raw meat. It was a frigid February afternoon, the sun making its pale and low arc across the northern sky, casting long shadows and putting sparkle into all that was frozen.

  Crow TwoDove’s old dog ventured cautiously out from under the deck in a crouch. It came toward Tana’s outreached hand, tail between its legs. The emaciated animal had been seen along the outskirts of town several weeks after it had apparently been set free by Heather MacAllistair. And several days ago Tana realized the dog had been hanging around her cabin, perhaps attracted by the scent of the food she’d been feeding her own dogs on her porch. She’d moved back into the little log cabin by the river when Saggart had arrived, and she was incredibly happy here, with her view over the waters of the Wolverine, and the forest and sky beyond its banks. She’d sit sometimes at night, swathed in warm gear, her dogs at her side, just watching the northern lights play across that great, wide open sky. And although the nights were still long, the earth had started its tilt toward summer.

  “The curtains are opening again,” Marcie had said. “Soon it will be light again—and it will all be right.”

  The dog took the meat from Tana’s hand. She was surprisingly gentle, full of scars. Tana gave her another piece from the container she had with her. “What’s going on in your head, sweetie?” she said as the dog chewed and wagged her tail ever so slightly. “Bet you don’t miss being tied up, eh? But it must be hard out there all on your own.” Tana stilled, besieged suddenly by a sensation that she was being watched. The dog scuttled off into the leafless, frosted scrub. Slowly, Tana looked over her shoulder. Her heart kicked.