Helix: Plague of Ghouls (32 page)

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. A bra.”

“Doesn’t imply that the deceased is female,” Two-Trees said. “I hope the body matches a head.”

“God, me too.” Buckle drew up his collar against the rising October wind. “I was supposed to be with family tonight.”

“A late Thanksgiving?” Two-Trees asked.

“I missed it the first time because of Body Number One. Hell of a Thanksgiving feast
that
crowd’s been enjoying, eh? Wonder if it tastes like chicken.”

“I hear it tastes more like pork.” Two-Trees’ phone binged, telling him he had a text message.

Buckle peered over Two-Trees’ shoulder. “Any luck with your cadaver dog?”

“Still en route,” Two-Trees said, quickly putting away his phone. “Actually, that was him.”

“Oh yeah?” Buckle asked. “Talented little puppy.”

“Yeah, car troubles. I know he was coming down by way of Sudbury. Maybe he hit bad weather.”

Buckle nodded. “It’s that time of year, eh? Anybody’s guess what we’re going to get this week. Thunderstorms, tornadoes, snow . . . bodies falling from helicopters . . .” He massaged his balding head with pincer-like fingers. “The hell are we doing at our age, Two-Trees?”

Two-Trees didn’t have a quick answer.

“Same deal as before,” the detective sergeant said, recovering his professionalism and terse, quick words. “Foot traffic all over the site.”

“Hey,” Two-Trees broke in. “Did you guys find anything down at the mill?”

Buckle seemed taken aback. “Sorry?”

“The paper mill at Pritchard Park.”

Buckle lifted a thinning eyebrow above the rim of his glasses. “You have a theory?”

“I had a theory,” Two-Trees began. “Seems a hell of a lot easier to carry the head up from Oxley Mill to Pritchard Park, and leave the body behind in the mill, especially if you’re underage and don’t have a car of your own. Better than keeping the head and driving half an hour away to dump the body.”

“Easier going the other way,” Buckle countered. “Park the body here, carry back only the head. Besides, Palmer checked the place out.”

“I saw him there. He been asking about me?”

“He knows you’re assigned to the case as forensic anthropologist, but no, he hasn’t been asking after you.”

Maybe he never did make a connection between me and two counts of arson
.

“And no, Palmer didn’t find anything at the mill,” Buckle said. “Place is flooded after all that rain. It was a toss-up between wading into the water and calling in the divers. Doubt the kids could have been mucking around. Too shallow for swimming, too deep for fun.”

Out of the blue, Two-Trees remembered the illustrations in the
Sister Whitehair
book Michael Crow had borrowed. Crow had left his notes in the gutter of the two-page spread where Sister Whitehair was imploring the Trickster for his help in trapping an angry spirit, which had been drawing people out of their
wiigiwaman
at night, forcing them to dance until they dropped of hunger. He’d always hated that picture, not because Sister Whitehair’s eyes were painted unevenly, nor because the evil spirit looked like some medieval Japanese demon. He hated it because it reminded him of having to squat thoughtfully on a tree stump for five hours straight while all the other Reserve kids came by to laugh at him in his stiff rabbit ears, coyote tail, and enormous black wig, and calling him “Wena-
Bozo!
” and asking if the dog-boy was having problems pooping.

“Something’s been bugging me,” Two-Trees said.

Buckle laughed. “Missing persons, dead people cannibalized, one of the Reid brothers back in his home town . . . What could
possibly
be bugging you?”

“Why send me messages from a personal account?” Two-Trees asked, seriously.

Buckle’s laughter faded.

“I mean, Palmer knows I’m here. He knows my work here’s legitimate. So why the cloak and dagger?” Two-Trees asked.

Buckle turned and adopted much the same posture as Two-Trees, only he crossed his arms and legs while he leaned against the bridge railing. “Things have been going missing,” he said.

“Evidence?”

“And reports,” Buckle said.

“Oh, that’s exciting.”

“I remember you from Pritchard Park,” he went on. “I was the responding constable. I saw the state of that body. And I remember you looking at it like you already knew what to look for and what you were up against. Saw the same expression on your face again the night you came back.”

“Well, I am a forensic anthropologist,” Two-Trees said. “It’s in my job description to—”

“I mean like you’d seen it all before, a hundred times before. Everyone else is either freaking out about psychos or jumping for joy because this might be the case that gets them the career recognition they’ve been dying for. You walk in, and all you want to do is catch the son of a bitch.” He scratched his head and said, “And . . . hell . . .” He dumped all the air out of his lungs. “Michael Crow told me to do it.”

Two-Trees smiled.

“He went to high school with my dad, and after Dad passed, Michael helped me get my first car, my first job, taught me how to shoot even before I went away to Aylmer for police training, whatever. Like a second dad to me, even though I wasn’t full-blooded Anishinaabe, you know?”

Michael Crow wasn’t exactly in line to become chief at Waabishkindibed, but he was a leader of men, and a stern but resourceful father for all the boys on the Reserve.

“Crow was friends with your grandfather, wasn’t he?” Buckle asked.

“Grandson of my grandfather’s sister. What does that make him, a second cousin once removed?”

“Something like that. Hell if I know. Anyhow, he said you . . .” Buckle took a deep breath. “That you knew what really happened at Pritchard Park.” He shook his head. “I saw that body, Doctor. I mean, I remember what my eyes saw. I just don’t know . . .
what
. . . I saw. Does that make sense?”

“Shock,” Two-Trees answered. He took out his phone and texted Bridget.

“No, not shock,” Buckle said. “Being the first on scene where a car has been run over by a train? That brings on shock. Getting hit in the elbow by buckshot? That brings on shock. This was something else. Like . . . like some buried Neanderthal part of me knew exactly what I was looking at, and from his antediluvian perspective it was as real as fire or mammoths or sabre-tooth tigers, but my
Homo sapiens sapiens
superego said it was impossible.”

“And that dissonance tells you that you should contact me through unofficial email inboxes?”

“No, missing and redacted files tells me that I shouldn’t trust our own internal networks, and that someone on the inside is covering up the truth,” Buckle said. “And if someone’s abetting a murderer—or several—and if more bodies keep turning up, I’ve got to wonder what the hell difference I’m going to make.
That
was the look I saw on your face at Pritchard Park. Like,
Why am I doing this again
, and
What the hell difference can a guy like me make?
”

Bridget replied:

Two-Trees put his phone in his pocket.

“Push too hard,” Buckle added, “and I might be the next course on the menu.”

“Oh, I doubt that. You’re too damned skinny. You’d be the toothpick they need after they finish chowing down on
my
lard ass.”

Buckle laughed. “Any luck?” he asked, after a moment of quiet thought.

“Busted timing chain,” Two-Trees said. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it tonight.”

“Shit. So what now?”

Two-Trees shrugged. “If someone’s hacking OPP files, you’ve got a hell of a bigger problem here than cannibals. You need to get CSIS in on this.”

Buckle sucked his teeth. “Not what I meant, my friend, and you know it.”

Two-Trees opened his arms and walked backward toward his truck. “Don’t know what else to tell you. I’m just a forensic anthropologist.”

“Bullshit, Doctor,” Buckle said, without meeting Two-Trees’ gaze. “You’re more than that. There’s more going on here that you’re not telling me. I need a friend here.”

“You need CSIS. Find out where your files are leaking to.”

“I need someone who knows what happened at Pritchard Park. I need someone who can give me insight on a certain missing girl, whose father and uncle were both involved there. I need someone who’s seen all this before.”

Two-Trees could see his own breath in the autumn wind.

“I don’t care who’s redacting what. I’ll turn a blind eye. I just want these murders to stop, honest to God. Did you set fire to the crime scene? At Pritchard Park?”

“It wasn’t me,” Two-Trees replied, honestly. It had been Bridget and a pair of human agents. “What, you think
I’m
the one redacting reports?”

“Destroying reports is one thing,” Buckle said, “but torching a crime scene? While it was still under police watch?”

After Pritchard Park, Jay had hacked into OPP files and deleted key bits of information from Palmer’s reports, such as how a torn shirt had been recovered from the scene, and how the medical examiner had found traces of human saliva all over it. About how a bloody branch recovered from the scene had bite marks consistent with those of a large dog, but only human saliva had been found there. And how John Reid’s bungalow basement carpet was rife with an unusual amount of human hair.

And now Jay was MIA.

“That tells me someone was both desperate and resourceful.”

“And you think that someone was me?” Two-Trees said.

“I’m asking you, flat out, what you had to do with Pritchard Park,” Buckle said. “I’m asking you why, not six hours after you arrived on scene, that scene caught fire, despite the lakeside being saturated with rainwater. I’m asking you why, eighteen hours after you arrived, I’m hauled into the staff sergeant’s office and raked over the coals for missing reports I
swore
I’d filed that same afternoon. I’m asking you why, not an hour after you identified the remains, you disappeared off the planet, never to be seen or heard from again until six years later, when you miraculously arrive in time to identify not one but
three
partially digested human cadavers.”

Two-Trees pushed away from the bridge and started walking.

“Why did Crow tell me to trust you?” Buckle asked.

“You ever find out where the other Reid brother went?” Two-Trees asked from a few steps away. Buckle looked up. “Any of
those
files redacted?”

Buckle shrugged.

“Maybe you want to go back and check again,” Two-Trees suggested.

FOSTER CHECKED ISMAEL’S
temperature. “I wish you’d kept track of your baseline readings,” she grouched.

“Gil has everything you need,” he said.

“Well, thank God we’ve got one rational mind in our corner.” She took the large cup of vodka from Bridget and stirred it with the glass thermometer. “Here.” She gave the thermometer to Bridget next. Bridget didn’t balk or complain, though she glared as if she’d rather throttle Foster than trust her.

Ishmael’s stomach made noises. He was tired of eating. He curled in on himself, wishing the intestinal discomfort would just go away.

“You think that’s going to be enough to sanitize it?” the Padre asked.

Foster looked into the cup. “It’s the best I’ve got at the moment.”

The sun was going down. They had to operate by the light of the truck dashboard and by the glow of the open laptop.

“Ah, screw it,” Foster said. “After all the fluid swapping we’ve been doing anyhow . . .” She tossed her head back and drank a very large shot of contaminated vodka. She hissed and shuddered. “That was stupid of me.” She stuck her tongue out and gagged. “Show me your arm.”

“No skin samples,” Ishmael insisted.

“Shut it.” Foster turned Ishmael’s scarred arm this way and that, prodding the tight, hot skin. “This is getting worse,” she said. “Why is your scar getting deeper?”

Bridget’s phone rang. She answered it without taking the thermometer out of her mouth. “Yaw,” she answered. “Uh uh. Ngo chlange,” she said. Foster retrieved the thermometer from Bridget’s mouth and checked the reading. She seemed mildly curious. “No, we’re all well off-cycle. I mean, we could try
shooting
him and see if that triggers a change. No one would report a gun shot out here.”

They were, after all, in the middle of a field where gunfire wouldn’t be out of place. Bears could get aggressive at that time of year.