The Shaman's Knife (31 page)

“‘Cocaine,' he said. ‘Get back here fast.' Then he went out, but instead of leaving fast I stood there almost crazy, wondering what the hell I'd got into.”

“How long before you went out, then?”

“Just a minute or two. I looked at the fifty he'd given me and one side had some blood on it. I didn't want any money with blood on it so in the money he'd given me I found two twenties and a ten for myself that were clean. Then I put the fifty he'd given me with seventy more, with only the clean side of the fifty Davidee had given me showing, and I went and I found the dealer and I bought a cocaine packet for a hundred and twenty and took it back in to the can with Davidee right behind me. He took it right away, sniffing it off the side of his hand, and then he practically ran out of there.

“Left the rec hall, too, you mean?”

“I heard his snowmobile go. I was back out with the others for a while before the police came and lined everybody up and checked for bloodstains. If they had been able to check the dealer's pocket they would have found some, I'd given all the bloodstained stuff to him.”

“But he'd already left when the police arrived? He wasn't in the pictures Bouvier took.”

“He'd gone by then. I looked for him the next day but he'd flown out on the first morning flight. Guys like that know when to disappear. I was wishing by then I could have gone with him. Then when one of the cashiers at the Co-op found she had a fifty with blood on it, and Nelson was in an uproar, I knew the dealer must have bought something there on his way out of town.”

He stopped talking for nearly a minute, dropped his head, stared at the floor. The fear hadn't left him. “I haven't felt safe since that night,” he said. “Every time I saw Davidee again it all came back that if I talk, I'm dead.” Apprehensively, he asked, “How bad is he hurt?”

I explained as much as I knew: that he'd been stabbed and practically collapsed across the seat of his snowmobile.

“That knife would go through me and come out the other side,” Andy said, and shuddered. “I knew all along he'd have it hidden somewhere, either carrying it hidden, or hiding it where it wouldn't be found in a search. I don't know where. I hope he's dead, I'll sleep better.

“Oh”—this was an afterthought—“two days after the murders, that Sunday, he showed up with a note. I don't know where he'd been. He told me to pin it up on the notice board at the rec hall when nobody was around. I read it fast, something about the shaman causing the murders. I knew that was crazy, but he'd told me to pin it up and I did.

“That's all I know,” he said. He looked deathly tired.

I had no more questions. I had what I wanted.

I wrote out quickly the main elements of his story. With Leah's account, backing up the presence of her footprints in the house, and Maisie's story about being there when she heard Leah and Dennissie upstairs, it should be all the evidence I'd ever need.

I read it to him.

He nodded. “Okay, sign it,” I said, and he did.

This document, labeled exhibit something or other, I forget exactly, and backed up by the tape, later appeared in my overall report in a section headed: “Andy Arqviq's Story.”

I asked if he wanted to come with me to the nursing station. He said no, he would go home now.

“No,” I said. “You'll stay here. I don't want to lose you again. I'm going to lock you in. There's the cot over there. Don't answer the phone or the door. I'll be back when I can and we'll go back to Barker's house for the night. But right now, can you sleep?”

“I think so,” he said, and, looking like a small ghost, fell asleep in his chair. I lifted him onto the cot. I've lifted much younger kids who weighed more. I unzipped one of the detachment's sleeping bags and laid it over him like a blanket. He didn't move.

I thought about maybe disturbing him if I used the phone, but then decided no way and dialed Maxine at her townhouse in Inuvik. I was thinking of her moving to answer it from wherever she was: reaching from bed or from her hassock in front of the TV, or more likely just reaching out a wet arm from the bath. This was her bath time, I'd learned from sometimes letting the phone ring ten times before I'd just about give up and then she'd answer. For her forty-fifth birthday I'd given her an extension phone with a thirty-foot cord that she could carry with her into the bath.

“Maxine here.”

“This is the RCMP on our new view-a-phone. You don't look very decent to me.”

Her chuckle always made me feel good. “For you I don't have to be decent.”

“I've got news. You got a pencil and paper there in the bath?”

After a few seconds, she said, “Fire away.”

“I think I'm just about finished here,” I said. “But Erika Hall is beavering around and I thought I should tell you. You remember Davidee Ayulaq from here? That rape case?”

She did.

“Tonight at a dance he got stabbed and he'll be charged tomorrow, two murders, one manslaughter. I'm just going to the nursing station now to find out what shape he's in. Can't give you the name of the guy who stabbed him until we decide what to do about it, but the main thing is that to all intents and purposes the case is closed except for the wrap-up.”

“Can I quote you as saying that?”

I thought about it. “Yes. I've gotta go now. What do you pay your stringers?”

She laughed. “For you, guess.”

“If you call me tomorrow I should have it all.”

Trying to recall the time I spent getting to the nursing station after I had locked the detachment door, I am reminded of . . . what is it? Anyway, a line: Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing.

The nursing station was only four or five hundred yards away. I walked all over Sanirarsipaaq to get there. I had a strange reluctance to go and actually find out what was happening with Davidee.

On that near-midnight walk I thought of how Leah's story fitted so closely into Andy's: she running out as soon as the fight between Davidee and Dennissie started; Andy's background story about Davidee trying to pay Dennissie to set her up for him in what would have been another rape; the blood on Andy's shoes as he earned his fee for recovering for Davidee the knife he had stolen in the first place; the blood on some of the money, including the fifty that Davidee had used to pay Andy, and that Andy had used for the cocaine, the fifty that had turned up at the Co-op. Davidee must have started taking Dennissie's money and then taken only part of it, for whatever reason.

What else? More thoughts: The fee hall guys who'd been laughing at Davidee, maybe starting his murderous rage. Andy could identify them as backup witnesses to what Davidee had in mind for Leah that night. Then there was Andy himself as an example of what could happen to an orphan kid left to do what he thought he had to, to stay alive. The drug dealing in the can at the rec hall could be an investigation of its own, leading to a later arrest. Maybe. You can never be sure.

But what I really wrestled with was Davidee. The fury that I'd had originally, personally wanting to get whoever ran down my mother and eventually caused her death, had been largely forgotten in the nuts and bolts of trying to put the case together. Now my anger was back, full strength. Three people had died because of him. Leah mourned Dennissie, many friends and relatives mourned him and Thelma, and I mourned my mother and always would.

“I was wondering if you were coming.” Bouvier said, outside the nursing station. “It's been a madhouse around here.”

“What kind of shape's he in?”

“Alive, so far.”

I walked up the wheelchair ramp and inside. Davidee was lying face down on a stretcher with the gyrfalcon handle of the shaman's knife still sticking out of his back through his layers of clothing. His anorak's sleeves had been cut off and there were two intravenous needles in him, traces of red foam on his lips.

“Hi, Matteesie,” the nurse said, looking up. She was just standing by, as if to watch and do anything that suddenly needed doing. I could see the sweat on her uniform under her arms and bloodstains down the front. A little blood showed around the hilt of the knife where it stuck through Davidee's clothing. His father and mother sat in one corner of the room. Not Debbie. I had an idea that she'd have been torn, in a way, about leaving her parents on their own, but more concerned about what was happening to Byron. Erika was taking notes, sitting unobtrusively against one wall.

Bouvier entered behind me. “What about Byron?” I asked.

“Lewissie picked him up. He found Byron just walking with his father. His father was right there, you know, when it happened, He walked up here and went straight to Byron, who was still sitting outside on the snowmobile when I got here, his head down, I'd guess in shock. Tell the truth I didn't notice when he and his dad left, but then asked Lewissie to watch for him, we probably had to charge him. He and his father had just gone for a walk, and to talk. They were walking back along the road from the airstrip when Lewissie found them and sent a message with Paulessie to say he'd go home with them. They're at Byron's home. Debbie and Julie are there, too.”

“Never handled anything like this before,” the nurse said to me. “Hope I never do again.” Her fair hair was mixed with gray. She was stocky and strong-looking. A badge clipped to the front of her white uniform read: Elizabeth Homfray-Davies, Registered Nurse.

“Have you kept notes?” I asked.

She tapped a pad beside her.

“Could I read them?”

“Maybe I'd better read them to you,” she said. “Or you ask what you want to know. Funny, this is something we're taught to do, have notes we can consult if we have to give evidence in court, but it's the first time it's ever been necessary for me. Yet, anyway.”

She had an English accent. I'd been going to talk to her about the night my mother was hurt, but never got around to it. If this case got to court, which it almost certainly would when Byron was tried, she would have to give details of her training, experience, any degrees she held, where she had served, and so on. I'd been through that with doctors testifying, never with a nurse.

“Okay, will you read what you've got?”

“It's pretty formal,” she said. “I thought I'd better make it that way, like we're told to do.”

I can stand formality better than I can sloppiness. “Formal's fine,” I said. “I'll take notes. Now, tell me off the top.”

She began in her precise English voice, sometimes consulting her notes. “Yes, well, here it is, then. I had a phone call about eleven o'clock from Lewissie Ullayoroluk. All he said was that an emergency was coming in right away. I'm all alone here, my backup is in Florida, so I couldn't go to the dance and was in bed here reading. I was just into my clothes when I heard a snowmobile coming and went out and saw Byron driving the snowmobile and Davidee lying across the seat on his abdomen . . .”

“Nobody else with them?” Dumb question, I knew immediately, unless some Olympic sprinter was around who I didn't know about.

“Nobody else right then,” she said, “but soon, I assure you! People by the dozens began arriving, the younger ones running. I had to tell them for God's sake to get out of the way and let me do what I could, but there was still a crowd around me when I was trying to see what we had here.”

“Did he say anything?”

She shook her head decisively. “Never, so far. He was breathing, but only just. Of course I could see why, that knife.” She jerked her head at the knife sticking out of his back. “I got help from some of the young men, Tommy was one of them, to help me with a stretcher, and we wheeled him up the ramp and in here just the way he is now, knife and all. He's hardly changed since he got here. You can see yourself, blue around his mouth, frothy blood drooling out from his nose and mouth.”

“Any sign of consciousness at all since?”

“Not a stir out of him.”

“So what happened after you got him inside? Now I guess I need any technical stuff.”

“I examined him. His pupils were dilated. There was very little reaction to my light testing, no response to verbal command. I tried mild pain stimuli, jabbing a small needle shallowly into his hand. He didn't react. When I checked him with a stethoscope his heart rate was very faint and rapid, so much so that I could not count it. Also, the air entry into his lungs was very poor, very shallow, probably meaning badly damaged lungs. The knife is in the middle of his back just below the shoulder blades, I think that's where, just a little to the right side from the midline, anyway, wouldn't be able to be certain without undressing him.”

“Did you try for any advice, like call a hospital or doctor?”

“I tried to get a call through to the doctor on call in Churchill, but couldn't get her, left a call, she was on the line to some other nursing station, so I went ahead doing what I had been doing. While Tommy kept trying Churchill for me, I cleared his airway, put an airway in, and sent a message out to get two of my local health-aides in to help.

“They were on their way anyway, they were at the party and saw some of this happening.” She waved a hand at Jane Ullayoroluk and an Inuit women I knew by sight. “They've been a big help. Then I tried to start intravenous infusion. That was very difficult but on the third try I got a very small needle in. When the doctor in Churchill called me back her advice was don't remove the knife but try to start two intravenous infusion lines running at the maximum and to keep the airway open. She said she would call for a medivac flight right away.”

I sighed. Medivac several days ago for my mother, and now medivac for the guy who knocked her down.

“But you got the intravenous going all right.”

A brisk nod. “It took me quite a while. I haven't got the time exactly when I did start it.”