White Heat (31 page)

    Two
mugs of tea and twelve teaspoons of sugar later she was beginning to feel
almost human.

    Mike
handed her the stone.

    'Turns
out I was right about the meteorite, but, like I said, I'm no expert. There
were a couple of things Jack - my friend - pointed out I hadn't noticed. First,
this piece of space rock has been on Planet Earth a long, long time.' He
pointed to a blackish patch. 'See that there? In fresh meteorites that fusion
crust is all over. The dark brown varnish is rusted iron-nickel like I said
before, but here, see .. .' He pointed to the outer edge of the rock. '. . .
It's smooth, where the outer part vaporized as it fell through the atmosphere.'
He pointed to the edge opposite to the first, which was sharper: 'And it's been
chipped with a tool, suggesting that it was once part of a larger piece. The
tool was non- metallic, probably another piece of meteorite, but you'll see
that both edges have the same dark brown varnish, so if it
was
hammered
off something bigger, it must have been done a while back. Jack reckons maybe
more than a century. He says the oxidation layer is pretty even too.

    He
paused, glancing over at Edie expectantly. She fixed him with a non-committal
sort of smile. Dragging Derek into her fine mess was one thing, but Mike was
another: Mike Nungaq actually had something to lose. Disappointment curdled his
expression as he realized he wasn't going to get any more out of her, but he
took a breath and went on anyway.

    'The
thing I hadn't noticed, inside here . . .' He pointed to the part that had been
drilled out to form a pendant, '. . . are these silvery-white spots, like tiny
ice crystals. Jack had a hunch about those, so he scraped some of the rock off
and tested it. And he turned out to be right. Iridium. A transition metal,
related to platinum but much, much rarer. On earth, iridium is mostly confined
to the core, but it's more common in space rocks. Which is why it's found in
the craters left by meteors. Astroblemes.'

    'Astro
what?'

    Edie
flashed him a look, hoping he would get to the point, whatever it was. She had
no idea what Mike was talking about.

    'You
familiar with the theories about the extinction of dinosaurs?' He finished his
tea, gazed into the bottom of the mug and started up again. 'It was the high
level of iridium in a part of the Yucatan which gave Luis Alvarez and his team
the idea that what did for the dinos sixty-five million years ago was the
impact of a giant meteorite.'

    Edie
coughed politely.

    Seeing
he hadn't got through to her, Mike took another tack.

    'Remember
those geologists who came up for the summer a couple of years back, Quebecois,
I think?'

    Edie
cast her mind back and came up blank. 'Geologists are like rocks, Mike, ask me,
they all look pretty much alike.'

    'I
helped this bunch out some. When they finished the project, they sent me a copy
of their paper. I remembered something in it so I dug it out. What they found
on Craig, Edie, was a small astrobleme. The crater left by a meteor. They just
stumbled on it. They were interested in other stuff, see. The thing about the
astrobleme only appears in the research as a footnote.

    'I
did some rooting around. Normally, beneath the 60th, you can trace astroblemes
from their magnetic effects. That was how iridium was first discovered. Up
here, it's much harder because of the weird magnetic fields.'

    Edie
registered the point. She was beginning to find what Mike was saying of more
interest. The unreliability of compasses north of the 60th parallel was known
even to the earliest of the European explorers, but here, well above the 70th,
you took out a compass it could be pointing anywhere, depending on the local
geomagnetic field.

    'So,
if there was an astrobleme on Ellesmere, or on Craig Island, it would be more
difficult to detect?'

    'From
magnetic data, yes. Unless you just happened to come across it, like those
geologists, the only way to find it, without doing years of complicated
geologic research, would be to start from the fragments of meteor that caused
it, then work backwards. Even then, it would be a tall order. The meteor
usually gets scattered on impact.'

    'Mike,'
Edie interrupted. 'I'm really not all that bright. You're going to have to help
me out here.'

    Mike
rubbed the stone in his hands.

    'What
I'm saying, you looked hard enough on Craig you'd find a perfect match to this.
Find a few dozen, you could map out the scatter pattern and from that locate
your astrobleme. It'd be a helluva job though. I don't have to tell you what
it's like out there. Ten months of the year, the whole place is under three
metres of ice and snow.'

    'But
the Quebecois fellows already found it.'

    'I'd
be willing to bet not many people know that.' Mike slapped his knees and stood
up to go. 'Well, I hope that was worth getting you out of your bed for.'

    As he
reached the door she thought of something and called him back.

    'Just
out of interest, those geologists, the Quebecois? What were they actually
looking for?'

    'Salt,'
he said. 'Garden variety salt.'

    After
he'd gone, she went to the bathroom and grabbed a bottle of Tylenol. Her head
was thundery with new information. She wondered if it would ever be possible to
make sense of it all.

    Fixing
some tea for herself, she went to the sofa, covered herself in a caribou skin,
knocked back a couple of pills and tried to think. All of a sudden, an idea
came into her head. It was as a result of something Willa had said. She picked
up the Tylenol bottle, shook out a pill and crushed it under her sugar spoon.
Then she poured a little hot tea onto the powder. Almost immediately it dissolved,
leaving a puddle of liquid on the table. You can inject pills, why hadn't she
thought of that?

    She
visualized the neat pile of foils left stacked in Joe's drawer. Was it likely that
someone in Joe's position would have been able to think straight enough to pop
one hundred and fifty Vicodin out of their blister packs then stack the packs
back in a tidy little pile? It didn't seem so. And it was even less likely that
someone could have made him swallow those pills if he hadn't wanted to. But
supposing someone had 'cooked 'em up', as Willa called it, and injected Joe as
he lay sedated and sleeping? It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility, was
it?

    The
thought made her sick with horror, but at the same time it made sense. All
along Edie had fought against the notion that Joe had taken his own life. It
was too easy. Yet until now there had been no way round those irrefutable path
lab results. Joe had died of an overdose of Vicodin.

    But
what if the overdose had been administered by someone other than Joe? What if
someone else had stolen into the nursing station and taken the pills then
waited for Joe to be alone to inject him? Closing her eyes, she tried to take
in the enormity of the idea. Her eyes were still shut tight when the door swung
open.

    It
was her ex.

    'Not
now, Sammy.'

    She
wanted to be left alone with her thoughts. 'Edie, I. . .' His voice was whiny,
like a beaten dog's.

    He
was feeling bad about the credit card business and was looking to her for
absolution.

    'Go
away.'

    'Aw,
Edie,' he said, 'don't be like that. You doing this to punish me?'

    'Now
let me think,' she said. Her voice sounded harsh and sarcastic.

    'Is
this because I racked up Joe's card?' The whining evaporated and his voice took
on a tone of righteous indignation. 'Or maybe it's those two men I took to
Craig?' The idea had only just occurred to him, she could see. 'You're not sore
about
that,
Edie? Are you?'

    Edie
finished her tea. She hadn't given the two duck hunters much thought but
remembering them now, she realized just how odd their appearance in Autisaq had
been. At the time, she'd been too drunk to make the connection.

    Sammy
sighed. 'So that
is
it. You want, I'll give you half the fee. Gimme a
break here.'

    She
took a breath and set her mind back, sober as a rock. She wasn't listening to
what Sammy was saying to her now because she was too busy trying to recall
exactly what he'd said to her on the evening of his return from the trip: how
the two hunters had insisted on being taken to Craig and their enthusiasm for
the island's geology once they were there. And wasn't there something else
about that trip? Of course, she remembered now. The plane with its unfamiliar
green livery. Two ideas knitted together in her mind. Hadn't Joe said he'd seen
a green plane? He thought he'd imagined it, but what if he hadn't? She felt the
palms of her hands begin to prickle.

    'Those
fellows, you remember their names?' She was aware that her voice sounded
inquisitorial, but she couldn't help herself.

    Sammy's
mouth fell open. He looked at his feet. 'They said they were Russian hunters.
What do I know about Russian hunters?'

    'Names
maybe?'

    'You
want their
names
? No, Edie, I don't remember their
names.
I
remember their money.'

    She
let out a snort. It was hopeless.
He
was hopeless.

    'Sammy,
don't take this the wrong way, but I'd really like you to go. Preferably right
now.'

    He
left without a protest, for which she was grateful. Once he was gone, she paced
up and down a little. The feeling that she was standing on the edge of
something new and unexplored was dizzying. It made her want a drink so badly
her chest throbbed with it.
I need to sleep,
she thought.
I need to
sleep.

    Without
the discipline of the school routine, and with twenty-four-hour light, her body
clock had pretty much broken down. She'd begun to lose sense of night and day.
She felt light-headed, exhilarated by the possibilities of the truth and at the
same time terrified of how close she might be to discovering it.
Maybe I'm
losing sense of the world,
she thought. And then, remembering the way the
Tylenol had dissolved in the tea, thought, Or
maybe I'm finally beginning to
make
sense of it.

    The
next step, she saw now, was to find out who the Russian hunters were and where
they'd come from. But not before she'd slept. She lay down and closed her eyes
and by the time she rose a few hours later, she had a plan.

    Late
that night, when Autisaq had gone to bed, Edie crept out into bright sunshine,
let Bonehead off his chain, attached him to a leash and made her way to the
Town Hall. Leaving the dog tied up outside, she slid Joe's key into the door
and, creeping in without taking off her outerwear, she made her way to the
mayor's office. Anyone came, she figured Bonehead would give her due warning.

    Within
seconds, she found a file labelled 'Hunting Permits' and pulled it out. The two
men's duck permits were listed by date. R. Raskolnikov and P. Petrovich. No
addresses, just mailbox numbers. There was something vaguely familiar about the
names. Edie tried to recall where she'd come across them before. In the
Arctic Circular
? Then, in a rush, it came to her. For the only time in her
life, she found herself thanking the Canadian government for her ridiculous,
southern-curriculum education. Of course she knew. Raskolnikov and Petrovich
were characters in
Crime and Punishment,
the murderer and the detective
sworn to bring him down. She kicked herself. The clues had been under her nose
all along: the pseudonyms, the green plane, the men's keener interest in
Craig's geology than in its ornithology. The drink had scrambled her so badly
she hadn't been able to put it all together. Joe must have been right. A green
plane
had
come over Craig the day Andy Taylor disappeared. And Edie was
now pretty sure that she knew who'd been in it.

    She
allowed herself a triumphant little air punch, then she went back to the files,
searching for the flight log, and found it, right where it should be. Sheila
Silliq didn't know just what a treasure she really was. On the date in
question, a Twin Otter, registration XOY4325, had landed from direction Iqaluit
at 10.28 a.m., carrying one pilot and two passengers. Edie committed the
details to memory and replaced the flight log.