The Bone Seeker (4 page)

She let herself into the snow porch without knocking, as was the custom, and slid off her shoes. There were voices in the room next door, seemingly oblivious. She took a breath and walked in.

The family had gathered to wait for news. All except Charlie were sitting in the front room. Alice Salliaq was on the couch. Edie had got to know her well enough to pass the time of day with. She was a soft-spoken, self-effacing and delicate woman in her mid-forties, the perfect foil to her gruff, firebrand older husband, and it would be easy to imagine she lived in his shadow were you to miss the quietly determined cast of her eyes. Beside her sat Lizzie, Martha's elder sister. Edie had seen her at the store with her mother. The siblings were physically alike, taller and plumper than their mother, with high cheekbones and generous, uneven mouths, but the difference in their characters made them seem less so. Though she had never really spoken with the girl, Lizzie had struck Edie as a kind of pale imitation of her younger sister, a moon to Martha's sun, more conventional, less ambitious, the kind who would marry early, have babies and lead a life that was essentially the same as her mother's. Alice's elder brother, Markoosie Pitoq, sat in a chair beside the sofa. He was leaning forward, his hand on a mug on the coffee table, but his head shot up when he heard her come in.

She greeted them.

‘Take a seat,' Alice said. Edie moved towards a chair but in that instant the inner door swung open and a
qalunaat
woman with an
immaculately groomed head of chestnut hair swept into the room. She glanced about without seeming to notice Edie.

‘Where's Charlie?' the woman said. Her English was heavily accented but she spoke with the kind of unquestioning confidence Edie more usually associated with missionaries, though from her clothing and air of glamour it was clear that she wasn't one of these. Edie had seen her around the community, often heading towards the town hall building, once or twice in an oddly customized ATV on the track to Camp Nanook, then again coming out of the hotel. For a moment she thought that the
qalunaat
woman might already have heard the terrible news and was about to blurt it, but a glance at her face reassured her. A relief. The Salliaqs should hear about the death of their daughter in Inuktitut.

With the thin authority of a man who had unilaterally declared himself in charge, Markoosie reported that his brother was still checking out the area around the bird cliffs.

Finally clocking Edie, the woman held out a hand and introduced herself as Sonia Gutierrez, the lawyer working with Charlie Salliaq on the decontamination of the old radar station at Glacier Ridge ‘and family friend'. Edie noticed Alice frown slightly when she said this. If Gutierrez
was
a family friend, she was no pal of Alice's.

‘You have news?' Gutierrez asked.

Silence fell, everyone waiting for Edie to speak. She looked between the faces gazing expectantly at her. A little crack opened up in her heart, knowing that what she was about to say would break theirs.

It was now a couple of hours since Derek and Luc had carried Martha Salliaq's body up the steps of the nursing station and into Kuujuaq's tiny morgue, and news of the discovery was spreading fast. Someone had seen the body bag being unloaded from the gurney and before long the settlement was alive with gossip. Already people were saying crazy things, speculating that Martha had been taken by evil spirits or that she had been sacrificed or that the
unataqti
had used her in some kind of hazing ritual then dumped her body when they were done.

Sonia Gutierrez had gone directly to the nursing station to speak to Derek while Edie stayed behind in the Salliaqs' house, locking the doors and closing the blinds in a bid at damage control. The family didn't need to hear that stuff. A handful of friends and neighbours had made their way over to commiserate or offer help but Edie had sent them away with promises to keep what they thought they knew to themselves. Charlie Salliaq was still making a tour of outlying camps and didn't yet know his daughter had been found. One of his cousins had been dispatched to break the dismal news and escort him back to Kuujuaq. Until then the less that was said, the better.

Once Gutierrez rang with news that Charlie had been located and was making his way back to the settlement, it was felt best to bring Alice and Lizzie to the nursing station to await his arrival there. Since neither woman was in any fit state to formally identify Martha's remains that task would fall to Charlie as soon as he arrived. Derek was with Markoosie at the radio studio, launching an appeal for information, but he'd be along too as soon as he could.

Edie thought about Charlie Salliaq hurrying back across the tundra to identify the body of his murdered daughter and of the medical examiner down in Iqaluit gathering her things for the flight north. She'd seen enough of murder now to know that each act of killing was unique, an unrepeatable encounter between victim and killer. The only resemblance one murder had to another was the cascade of process and procedure each inevitably initiated: the grim rubric of morgues prepared, medical examiners and pathologists alerted, forensics teams dispatched, investigators and attorneys briefed, forms filled. But however much you reduced each event to a series of knowable processes, nothing could ever make sense of it. The boundaries of murder were unlimited. Like some far distant universe, every individual act of killing was dark and vast and unknowable.

In the station office Luc was preparing some of the initial paperwork. Edie stepped inside the room and closed the door to protect the Salliaqs from overhearing. She wanted to know whether Gutierrez had said anything to him about who she thought might be responsible, but he said not.

‘What about Alice and Lizzie?' He'd been on his own with them, briefly.

Luc shook his head. ‘Not to me. I think they're still in shock.'

‘There are some wild theories going around.' Gutierrez had outlined a few of them on the phone.

‘You can't be surprised by that. You know how murder usually goes up here. Two people who've lived side by side all their lives get into a fight about sex or money. Usually sex. Nine times out of ten there's alcohol involved and the perpetrator fesses up within an hour or two,' Luc said. ‘This is something new. Premeditated, the body dumped, the positioning of the knife, the way the hair was cut. Stuff like this just doesn't happen here.'

‘Except it just did,' Edie said. They let this sit. ‘I guess everything in the Arctic's changing. Why should murder be any different?'

Luc gave his neck a stretch and rolled his shoulders. ‘I think I liked it better the old way.'

When Edie went back into the waiting area she found Alice Salliaq where she'd left her, rubbing her fingers together in an unconscious and almost certainly futile bid for comfort. Beside her, Lizzie stared into the middle distance, her face blank, then, without warning, she let out a strangled sob.

•   •   •

At the same time, in the radio station, Markoosie was wishing his audience a peaceful night. He flicked a few switches and took the show off air. He looked drawn and tired.

Derek, who had been leaning against a shelving unit trying to stay silent, gave a little cough.

‘Anything to report?'

Markoosie took off his headphones and hung them on a hook on the desk. ‘You heard the last quarter hour. The rest of it was pretty much the same. A ton of calls, but no one who'd seen Martha since she left my house Saturday lunchtime,' he said, pressing a finger into the corner of an eye to wipe a tear. ‘A
lot
of bad feeling against Camp Nanook. You get that?'

‘The timing sure looks bad,' Derek said. He thought about the local girls he'd seen hanging around with soldiers. How glamorous those young men must seem to them, with their cash, their well-travelled sophistication, their stories from the front line.

‘Looks pretty perfect to me. One week the
unataqti
move in, the next my niece is dead.'

‘That's kind of what I meant,' Derek said.

Markoosie reached beneath him and switched off a power socket. ‘Folk seem pretty clear in their own minds that this is the work of some
unataqti
.'

Derek shook his head. ‘It's too soon to say.' He rubbed his jawline with his hand. ‘Take me through the last time you saw her again.'

‘Like I said, she came over Saturday morning to pick up some schoolbook she'd left.'

‘You remember the title?'

Markoosie began to tidy the papers on his desk. ‘I'm not a big reader.
She wanted to know if me and Toolik – that's my father, Martha's grandfather – were all fixed for lunch. She often cooked for us when Alice and Charlie were out of town. She was brought up good that way.'

‘Were you? Fixed for lunch?'

‘We weren't hungry.' He popped the papers into a plastic bag at his feet. ‘After that she left.'

‘She didn't say where she was going?'

‘Only that she was expected at the family summer camp.'

‘If anyone does call in with any information, no matter how small, you'll let me know, won't you?'

Markoosie nodded. ‘She was my
hanaji
, you know, little Martha. It was me who named her.' He signalled to Derek to turn off a couple of power switches on his left. ‘When she was little I made her an amulet from walrus ivory and green stone and my own hair. It was supposed to keep her safe.'

No jewellery had been found on the body, though it was possible that it had fallen into the mud at the bottom of the pool.

‘Could you sketch it for me?'

Markoosie reached over the desk for a scrap of paper and drew a sketch of a bangle with two small round beads and three larger elaborately carved pieces of ivory.

‘She wear that all the time?'

‘Pretty much. For all the good it did her.'

•   •   •

Back at the police detachment Derek punched in Todd Ransom's home number in Iqaluit. Ransom had come over from Yellowknife to head up a new forensics unit based out of the Nunavut capital. The growing problem of northern crime had been met by an uncoordinated, piecemeal response from central government. As much as Derek welcomed the new forensics unit it was frustrating that there remained only one investigative officer whose job it was to coordinate cases across the whole of the Canadian Arctic, a region not much smaller than India. The new unit was supposed to be a joint facility, shared between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Arctic division and the various native
police forces in the region. In practice, Derek wondered whether the Mounties would always get priority over smaller, native forces like the Ellesmere Island Police.

Derek had met Ransom once on a trip to Iqaluit, and found him energetic, if a little too cocksure. He'd been impressed by the man's efforts to learn Inuktitut, which most
qalunaat
living and working in the north didn't bother to do, but until now they'd had no reason to work together. It was late to call, but Ransom would be used to antisocial hours.

A woman picked up the phone. Derek apologized for the lateness of the call and asked to speak with Todd. There was a pause, then a man's voice on the line.

‘
Ainngai, qanuitpin?
' Hi, how are you? Todd's accent was almost impenetrable, but Derek appreciated the effort.

‘
Qaniunngittnga
.' I'm fine. ‘Listen, Todd,' Derek continued in English, a relief to them both. ‘We got a situation up here.' He outlined what had happened. ‘I've already had to bypass procedures . . .'

‘We all have to do what we can with the resources we got,' Ransom said blandly.

‘Still, I'm gonna need Anna right away.' Anna Mackie was the new medical examiner, a Ransom appointee. ‘Plus a forensic unit to run the usual print, fluids and fibre checks at the crime scene, the victim's room, her ATV.' The lab work would have to be completed in Iqaluit or maybe Ottawa.

‘Listen, Todd,' Derek went on, his voice sounding more defensive than he'd intended. ‘We got five hundred soldiers up here. I have no idea how the military is gonna see this, but you can guess the local view.'

‘Sounds like a powder keg,' Ransom responded. ‘But you got a nurse out there, right?'

‘Right. Luc Fabienne. We've had to move the body to the morgue and we're awaiting a formal ID from next of kin. Luc's taking care of the preliminary paperwork, but . . .' He tailed off, conscious, suddenly, of the elephant in the room. ‘Is there a problem?'

There was a pause.

‘Fact is, we're gonna need a little patience here, Derek. Anna's on summer leave until Wednesday. We were supposed to get cover but the guy phoned in sick. They're trying to find someone at short notice but getting anyone to travel north of Winnipeg, well, you know how that is. Ask the nurse to take hair, blood, skin, you know, the usual, label 'em up and stick 'em in the freezer. I'll send someone along soon as I can.'

Derek pulled the phone from his ear and stared at the handset, wondering if Ransom had actually heard anything he'd said. He also didn't like the use of the word ‘we', as in ‘
we
're gonna need a little patience'. In Derek's book it was usually the sound of responsibility shifting.

‘Todd, I'm not sure what I'm hearing here. You want me to go back to the parents and tell them we can't investigate the murder of their daughter because the medical examiner's working on her tan and the cover's got a headache? Help me out here. At least send the forensics guy.'

‘It's a long way, Derek. It's not gonna be possible to justify two trips just now. Budget issues.' Ransom's tone of voice suggested reasonableness in the face of impossible demands.

‘How's about I send Pol down in the detachment plane?' He was trying to be accommodating. Making it easy for Ransom to say yes. But Ransom didn't say yes. What he did say was,

‘Listen, bud, I'm doing my best here. We had a contractor got messed up in a brawl over the weekend and forensics is all tied up with that just now. Anyway, you know as well as I do how native slayings go. Someone got drunk and let rip. The boyfriend or the father. Why don't you make a start and the team can fill in when they get there?'

‘Boyfriend, father.' Derek blew the air out of his nose in frustration. ‘Are you even listening to yourself?'

There was a long exhale and an edgy little cough. ‘Believe me, bud, if I could change this situation, I would. In a heartbeat. But I can't. It's like you guys are always saying,
ajurnamat
.' Too bad. Ransom
produced the word as though it was some kind of trophy. It was the first time Derek heard a
qalunaat
say it. Didn't make it sound any better. He screwed up his face, trying to contain his irritation.

Common sense told him to hold back but the rest of him overruled it. ‘Listen here,
bud
.'

‘All ears, Derek.'

‘Since you're so keen on native expressions, I'm gonna teach you a new one.
Qitiqthlimaqtisi arit
. Repeat it enough and you'll pick it up. It means go fuck yourself.'

•   •   •

The conversation left him shaky with anger and needing a cigarette. He fetched a mug of coffee, pulled out his pack of Lucky Strikes. A year or two ago Ransom would have been right. Whenever there was a murder the killer would almost always turn out to be someone from the same community as the victim, the motive simple and often alcohol-fuelled. Most killings involved a hunting rifle, the remainder a knife. These days, not only was murder becoming more common but the Native Police Association bulletin was full of reports of stabbings, knee-cappings, burns, beheadings and the kind of sexual assault that made your blood freeze. And that wasn't all. Victims and perpetrators were becoming more international and the motives for killing less transparent. The focus of law enforcement had shifted from apprehension to detection. The death of Edie Kiglatuk's stepson, Joe Inukpuk, last year proved the point. What started as an investigation into a suicide turned into a terrifically tangled manhunt. On the surface of things, the body of a young woman found dumped in a lake a few kilometres from a military encampment bore all the hallmarks of a garden variety sex murder, but who was to say that the knifing of Martha Salliaq would turn out to be any less complex?

So far as he knew no one in any of the native police forces had received any extra training or resources to help them cope. He sat back and tried to focus on his next moves. In the absence of any immediate assistance from a forensics team he'd have to work that much harder and smarter. These first hours after the discovery of the body were
vital. First, he'd need to tell Colonel Klinsman at Camp Nanook that he was designating the area around Glacier Ridge a crime scene – at least until the forensics team had been and probably for a good while longer. The scheduled clean-up works would have to be postponed and he guessed he'd have to find some way to fence off the whole area. He'd need to arrange for someone to drain the pool where Martha's body had been discovered in case the murder weapon was lying in the mud at the bottom. While that was being done, he'd focus his efforts on discovering as much as he could about Martha's movements over the weekend, then try to come up with a list of suspects.