Ice Lake

ICE LAKE

JOHN FARROW

far my mother, at go

Contents

Cover

Title Page

COCKTAILS FOR THE DEAD

1 A BODY, AFLOAT

2 ROLL CALL

3 EYE TO EYE

4 HEARTLAND

5 A FIST AT THE SKY

6 CLOSE WATCH

7 HOMECOMING

8 DARK IS THE GRAVE

THE INFLUENCE OF DARK MATTER

9 JELLY ROLL

10 THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

11 A BLOOD TRAIL

12 PERILOUS LIAISONS

13 PICKING BONES

14 COMMEMORATION

15 MISSING MATTER

16 DARKLING STAR

BLOODWORK

17 KNOWLEDGE IN A PARTICULAR TIME

PRAISE FOR
CITY OF ICE

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

COCKTAILS
FOR THE DEAD

1
A BODY, AFLOAT

Sunday, February 13, 1999

Ensconced in an ice-fishing hut on the Lake of Two Mountains, northwest of Montreal, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars was gazing through a frosty pane of glass as a red Ski-Doo, paced by a brisk wind, crossed the snowbound lake from the east and veered toward a broad bend in the shore. A child was clinging to the driver’s waist. The two appeared to be headed for the same community of fishing shacks where he was holed up waiting for a stranger to arrive.

Roaring, the machine doffed a squall of snow in its tracks.

Along the perimeter to the ice-village, the Ski-Doo throttled down and followed streets on the snow marked by discarded Christmas pines. The driver was a woman, her body shape now evident in a snug-fitting snowmobile suit. A woman had called him down here. Cinq-Mars kept an eye on this one, but she did not approach his shack, stopping instead beside an orange shanty where her daughter leapfrogged off the seat. The child sprinted about ten steps before her mother called her back. She skidded to a halt. Grasping her helmet and pulling her head out from under it, the girl shook her brown curls and fidgeted while her mother
braved the cold with bare fingers, yanking up the girl’s hood and tying a bow under her bright-red chin. Free at last, the seven-year-old scampered loose to knock on a nearby door.

The woman shut the machine down. She flipped through a key-ring, then snapped open the padlock on her shack, and Émile Cinq-Mars returned to fishing.

Inside her hut, the woman dropped her own and her child’s helmet onto a bunk, then pinned her mittens to a line. Unzipping to the waist, she extracted her arms from the sleeves of the snowmobile suit, the upper portion collapsing behind her like a second skin not wholly sloughed off. She removed her minnow bucket from the stovetop and put it on the floor, then set about striking a fire.

She ignited newspaper, kindling and logs in the cast-iron stove.

Then awaited warmth.

The woman gazed out the window upon winter, at the white, barren lake spotted with Ski-Doos and the colourful spinnakers of ice-sailors, shining under the sun. In her thirties, she was not one to wear makeup on a daytime outing. Her low, abruptly raked forehead, the chiselled cut of her cheekbones, and the thrust of her nose seemed to have been carved as much by life as by birth and genetics. The features suggested a strong constitution and a body accustomed to stressful labour apart from the demands of motherhood. She wore her light-brown hair in a buzzcut with longish tufts at the nape of her neck.

The shack was primitive and small. Plywood over two-by-fours, the windows and doors salvaged from a job site, the hut included the critical necessities—a pot to pee in, another for washing up, a stove for both cooking and warmth, a mattress that, when thawed, cushioned the tumult of bodies and comforted them for
a short rest afterwards. Similar to other huts in the neighbourhood, hers had been coloured with leftover paint others had discarded. While many shacks were rented by the day or the weekend, hers was leased for the entire season, which allowed her to keep cutlery and pans, dry goods that could bear being frozen, extra clothes, blankets and children’s toys on the premises, as well as her own fishing tackle.

To occupy the time she broke the surface ice in her minnow bucket and baited a hook in the cold. She opened the floorboards to reveal her fishing hole. She’d been up to the shack the night before, so the hole hadn’t frozen much—with a heavy steel bar she put a crack in it. She tapped all around the circle to loosen new ice, breaking the block into pieces, a familiar routine. The dark patch at the surface was difficult to discern in the shade. Her eyes were not fully accustomed to the dimmer light of the cabin and the greater dark within the cavity. Only when she tried to push the chunks under the thick ice of the lake did she encounter a problem. Something she could barely see—a sort of floating debris. Finally, she got down on her knees and raised the chunks of ice up, placing them on the surface of the lake below the cabin floor.

In the circle of the fishing hole, pearls of ice clung to a knotted tangle of hair.

A head lay afloat, face down in the lake.

Later she would not be able to explain why she did this, why she had to touch it, as if to be assured that a body remained attached. Only when she was certain did she commence a rapid series of gasps followed by a spectacular array of upper-register screams.

Emile Cinq-Mars was lost in thought while observing miniature, diamond-like crystals wicking higher on his line. All morning long he had ignored his partner, Detective Bill Mathers, often fixing his gaze instead on
a vertex where the ascending beads of ice on his line met the shack’s smoky warmth, a point he could manipulate by bobbing his hand.

Both city cops, one significantly older than the other, had spent most of the morning slumped inside the ice-fishing hut over an opening sawed between their boots. A wood fire that should have kept them warm crackled in an iron stove. On one side was a bench sufficiently long for a man as tall as Cinq-Mars to stretch out on. The one opposite, on which Bill Mathers sat, had been cut short to accommodate the door. A thin line of smoke leaked through a joint in the stovepipe and every ten minutes or so one man or the other opened the door to circulate fresh air, inadvertently releasing the cabin’s heat and keeping them both well chilled.

Mathers sat with his shoulders hunched as though he’d never been warm in his lifetime. He had no clue why he was there. Cinq-Mars had not told him, and he couldn’t believe it was only to fish. In the finest of seasons he cared little for fishing, and to be baiting hooks in the dead of winter under the onslaught of a twenty-knot nor’wester rattling the rough-hewn, plywood hut, out on a frozen lake he believed might crack apart and immerse them, combined what he perceived as an exercise in futility—fishing—with a regimen of discomfort—fishing in February—that bordered on misery. He was waiting for his partner to reveal himself, but his patience was ebbing quickly.

Before he’d made up his mind to confront Cinq-Mars, he was distracted by a frantic shriek outside. Glad for the interruption, he was first to the door to investigate the racket.

“Emile,” he said, not liking what he saw.

“What’s that caterwaul?”

Out on the frozen lake, a woman was wailing and calling for the cops. She’d fallen to the ice on her hands and knees, having fled a shack in too big a hurry to pull
up the top portion of her snowsuit. Helped by an equally frantic neighbour, she struggled to her feet again, shouting for the police.

Oddly, she was half crawling and sliding in their direction, as if she knew where cops might be found.

“Looks like we’re on the job,” Mathers commented dryly.

“Not exactly our jurisdiction,” Cinq-Mars pointed out, but he was rising to have a look for himself and retrieving his line.

“Beats fishing,” Mathers said.

Both men took the time to don their winter garb before venturing onto the ice. Others were running over to check on the fuss, and Cinq-Mars and Mathers walked across and showed their gold shields to bully their way through the gathering throng. At the sight of their badges, the stricken woman perked up considerably. In French, “This way! Come quickly, I’ll show you! There’s a dead guy in there! He’s dead!” Whatever horror she had viewed was supplanted now by a need to impress upon the authorities the depth of her distress.

The cops walked quickly behind her.

Bill Mathers entered first. He crouched down on the cabin floor. “Emile.”

Cinq-Mars peered over his partner’s shoulder. The circular ice-hole was partially filled with water. A few inches below the surface floated the back of a human head, the long hair beaded with ice, the face plunged into the frigid lake. Mathers pulled the victim up by the hair, raising him a few inches. The condition of the neck was the only evidence Cinq-Mars required—shock-white, the skin bulging where ice had frozen and expanded within the corpse, causing lumps. “Make sure,” he instructed.

On the floor, a hooked minnow flapped, obviously just baited by the woman. Cinq-Mars took a folding
knife from his pocket and, over the ice, gave the little fish a quick deep cut across the throat.

Mathers pulled the head as far out of the water as he could. He had to reach down, as the surface was about two feet thick, and kneel way over to get a look at the face. Swollen, white, and bloated with ice. The eyes frozen. Ice bulged from the mouth and points glistened within his nostrils where they caught sunlight refracted through the smudge on a side window. A man’s face, which Mathers returned to the water, the death confirmed.

“Secure it somehow.”

Cinq-Mars needed to create a barrier around the shack. The curious were bumping in behind him. He was helping the woman pull on her snowsuit and instructing a neighbour to take her inside somewhere else when her daughter came running up and promptly stuck to her mother’s leg. The bond seemed habitual, the woman scarcely noticing the bulky appendage. Cinq-Mars ordered others out of the shack and away from the door, which didn’t stop them from gathering at the windows and peering inside.

Offered the use of three cellphones, he accepted one from a tall, plump man, then asked a second favour of him. “Would you mind keeping people away from the hut? It won’t be easy.”

The man checked out the gathering, considering whether the task was worth the hassle. He chuckled and shook his head. “I can try,” he agreed.

“Thanks.” Cinq-Mars returned inside, where Detective Mathers splashed his fingers in the water. “What’ve we got?”

Mathers had looped strands of high-test fishing line through buttonholes on the dead man’s jacket and shirt and tied the free ends to the feet of the cast-iron stove. “He didn’t fall through here. He’s not coming out this hole either unless we open it up.” The head pretty
much blocked the entire cavity. His shoulders would never pull through.

“There can’t be that many places to fall in. He could’ve drifted for miles, poor bugger. Probably he went through on a snowmobile, out where the current’s fast and the ice is thinner. That’s awfully surprising, though, in this weather.”

“Would you care to consider the facts first, Emile?” Mathers vigorously rubbed his freezing wet hands.

“Such as?”

“Your theory doesn’t explain the bullet hole.”

He looked at him then, and the younger detective nodded that he was serious. He pointed to the back of his own neck. “In here, out the front. Low down. Here.” Mathers indicated the soft spot at the base of his throat.

Cinq-Mars punched a number into the phone.

“SQ?” As Montreal Urban Community cops they were off their island, away from their professional turf. On major crimes in which a coroner became involved,
La Sûreté du Québec,
the police force for the province, would be granted jurisdiction over any small-town department.