White Heat (32 page)

    Out
of interest she flipped through the remainder of the files in the cabinet,
until she reached a file marked 'SI, personal'. She pulled out the file and
found a sheaf of bank statements in Simeonie Inukpuk's name. Following the list
of transactions with her finger, she lighted on nothing more interesting than a
few sums relating to a womens-wear emporium in Ottawa. The mayor often flew in
to the capital to attend local government meetings. Either he had a mistress
down there or a transvestite habit. Neither of which was of any interest to
Edie.

    The
next page seemed to be from a different account, and listed a number of regular
deposits of CA$5,000 each from a numbered account, made in favour of the
Autisaq Children's Foundation. Very touching, or it would be, if Edie could
conjure a single thing it had ever done for the children of Autisaq.

    The
door to the mayor's office was locked, so she took out her Leatherman. The
locks in the prefabs were all of a kind. In common with most folk in Autisaq,
she'd removed most of hers, so she knew exactly how they worked.

    Swinging
open the pick attachment, she slid it into the keyhole and felt for the lock,
which gave way very quickly She went round to the back of the desk and switched
on the computer. While it was booting up, she looked about, not sure what she
was hoping to find. The screen glowed then resolved into the screensaver: an
image of an iceberg. Computers weren't her thing but she'd had to learn the
basics for her teaching. She went into Explorer and clicked on History, running
her eye down the list until, unexpectedly, the words Zemmer Energy came into
view. Edie took a loud breath. Of course Zemmer wasn't a pizza joint. It was an
energy company with something to hide and Felix Wagner, Andy Taylor and now,
she realized, Simeonie Inukpuk, were all familiar with it.

    She
clicked on the URL and immediately a pop-up window appeared requesting a
password. She was about to tap in some possible combinations when Bonehead
started barking. Racing to the door, she remembered that she hadn't turned off
the computer, lunged forward, grabbed the cable and pulled. Then, closing the
door quietly behind her, she made her way back along the corridor. Seeing her,
Bonehead began whining and coughing, straining against his leash.

    From
the steps of the Town Hall she saw what it was that had set him off.
Immediately in front of her, not five metres away, stood a polar bear, a young
male. For a minute or two Edie and the bear watched one another, then the
animal turned and trotted away.

    Dawn
found Edie bumping up and down on rough, ice- ridden breakers in her skiff, on
her way to Martie's cabin. If anyone could help her find out more about the
green plane, she figured, it would be her aunt.

    She
found Martie asleep on top of a pile of skins, an empty bottle of Mist beside
her. As well as the stench of alcohol there was something else, a smoky, slightly
sour aroma. Edie went to the primus to mug up but Martie didn't wake when the
kettle started singing.

    A
handful of cold water thrown in the direction of the sleeping platform had the
effect Edie was looking for; pretty soon a face appeared above the skins,
squinted across for as long as it took to establish who was fixing tea, then
disappeared back under the covers.

    Ah,
Little Bear, it's you.' A muffled sound. A hand appeared, rubbing her head.
'What the hell you doing this time of day or night or whatever it is, you crazy
creature?'

    Edie
poured the tea. She'd left in too much of a hurry, hadn't dressed right and
felt stupid. The trip had frozen her bones. By the time she was stirring in the
sugar, Martie had already noticed her niece's shivers and was holding both arms
out and waving her over.

    'Don't
let yourself get so cold.' She pressed her fingers into Edie's face to gauge
her temperature then took hold of her, transferring some of her still sleep-soaked
body warmth. Edie sucked on her mug of tea until the lump in her throat went
away.

    'Martie,
I need something.'

    Martie
said: 'I feel like shit.' She began rubbing at her skin, which was mottled and
sprinkled with small lesions.

    'You
ill?'

    Martie
followed Edie's gaze. 'Oh, these?' She wafted a hand at a raw patch on her
lower arm then slid her arms back under the caribou skin. 'Uh nuh, just
allergies.' She put on a smile. 'Now, what do you need?'

    Edie
drew out the paper on which she'd written details of the plane and read them
out. 'You know this plane?'

    Martie
gazed at the numbers until her double vision cleared, then shook her head.
'Nope, but the registration's out of Greenland, that any help. What you wanna
know for?'

    'The
flight log said the plane came in from the south, from Iqaluit. Any way to know
that for sure?'

    Martie
gave a little hum to indicate she was concentrating. 'What direction was the
wind that day?'

    Edie
reconstructed the scene in her mind, working out where the wind was blowing in
from and in which direction the plane landed.

    'Either
the person who wrote the log doesn't know the difference between the four
compass points or someone was lying. That plane is registered in Greenland and
came in from Greenland.' A pause while Martie finished her tea. 'Should I be
feeling better yet, because I can't help noticing that I don't.'

    'Martie,
you ever heard of the Autisaq Children's Foundation?'

    Martie
went back under the covers. 'Is it connected to the Auntie Martie Needs to
Sleep Foundation?'

    By
the time Edie got back home, there seemed no point in going back to bed. She
went to the fridge, found a bowl of seal-blood soup, smelled it to check it was
fresh, then set it in the microwave to heat. She took a deep breath and held
the bowl to her lips. The liquid was thick with granules of congealed, cooked
blood. She was conscious of being hungry, though she couldn't feel it in her
belly, but the smell made her faintly nauseous. Pinching her nose, she raised
her head to open her throat and poured it down. Thoughts flurried about in her
mind but the only idea that really settled was the notion that Joe had been
murdered. Who'd done it and why remained a puzzle, but she was pretty sure that
Welatok's meteorite lay at the heart of it. If Mike Nungaq's theory was right,
then the meteorite was a necessary route map to the Craig Island astrobleme.
Wagner, Taylor and now it seemed most likely the Russians had all come in
search of it.

    Why the
astrobleme might be of interest, she didn't know, but Wagner had noted some
connection with salt, which the Quebecois article seemed to confirm, and both
Wagner and Taylor were talking with Zemmer Energy so it made sense to suppose
that the crater marked something of interest to them. She couldn't quite figure
where the diary pages came in, unless they gave some description of the locale;
and whoever was looking for the astrobleme would need the stone to make a match
to others in the area and establish the scatter pattern of the impact. So the
diary and the stone must be inextricably linked. Together they comprised a map
which would allow scientists to bypass years of geological exploration.

    What
little she knew so far pointed to the possibility that the two Russians were
also behind the death of Andy Taylor. It made sense that it was they who'd been
in the green plane Joe saw on the day Taylor disappeared. Maybe he'd reneged on
some kind of deal, or perhaps it was simpler than that: he was near to finding
the astrobleme and they couldn't allow that to happen. If it
was
they
who had killed him, they must have done it from the plane. No one could have
landed in the blizzard conditions Joe had described. In which case, it was
still a puzzle who had butchered and scattered Taylor's remains.

    Exactly
how all this was connected to Joe's death she didn't yet understand, yet she
knew in her bones that it was. She looked about her. The door to Joe's room
continued to dominate the space.

    She
thought about what Sammy had done with Joe's credit card. If she'd still been
drinking, she would have reached for a bottle of Mist, then gone round to his
house and started a fight.

    She
remembered her mental note to check with Robert about Joe's gambling. There was
a puzzle, right there. The nurse had seemed so sure of his suspicions, but she
didn't understand how Joe could have gambled online without a credit card.
Maybe she was missing something. Flinging on her summer parka she stepped out
into the street.

    Robert
was in his office, sorting condoms. A pile of musk-ox wrappers lay to his left,
the others, seal, walrus and Arctic hare to his right. He signalled for Edie to
wait.

    'Some
dumbass screwed up the musk-ox batch so I'm having to waste my time separating
them all out.'

    'I
can suggest an alternative.'

    'You
can?' he said.

    'You
could stop wasting your time and talk to me.'

    Robert
looked up in surprise, sighed, and put down the condoms.

    'Sorry.
What can I do for you?'

    'You've
probably noticed I'm quite stupid.'

    Robert
nodded to signal he was listening, then checked himself and shook his head.

    'What
I can't work out is
how
Joe owed money for online gambling.'

    He shrugged.
'I guess he just got hooked. People do. Get hooked on things, I mean.' He went
back to his condoms. 'Do you mind if I carry on sorting these?'

    'No,
I mean, I don't know how he owed
anything.
To play online you need a
credit card, right?'

    Robert
shrugged again. 'I guess so.'

    She
told him what she knew.

    Robert
stopped his sorting, reached over to the computer and clicked through with the
mouse, then swivelled the monitor around to show Edie the password window with
the username 'Joelnukpuk' on a splashy portal announcing itself as the Gaming
Station.

    'This
is the site.'

    'Put
the password in,' she said.

    Robert
looked taken aback. 'I don't know it.'

    'But
you knew Joe owed money?'

    Robert
swivelled the monitor back.

    'Yeah,
when I first clicked on it the site let me in but when I tried to get back into
it later, it was blocked. Some kind of password-protected time lock, I guess.
It was weird.' He returned to his sorting. 'You're upset, Edie, we all are. You
know - and this is hard to say, I feel really bad I didn't see it coming -
looking back I can see Joe had a heap of reasons to want to end his life.'

    'He
had a heap of reasons to want to hang on to it.'

    She heard
herself telling Robert about the deaths of Wagner and Taylor, how they were
connected. It surprised her to be confiding in him, but there it was. 'I think
Joe somehow got wrapped up in it.' She considered carrying on, confessing her
theory about injectable pills, but caution intervened and told her that as Edie
the woman she was impetuous, impulsive even, but now she needed to be Edie the
hunter.

    Robert
sat back for a moment, thoughts scrolling across his face. Then he got up and
taking her hands said very kindly, 'Edie, are you still hallucinating?'

    'No,'
she lied.

    Later,
in the shower, she opened her mouth, allowed the water to run in then spat it
out again. It was soft, blood-warm and tasted unpleasantly of chlorine. Before
they'd always used water pumped directly from the Autisaq lake up beyond the
glacier. Now it all had to go through some supposed purification process.
Another one of Simeonie's 'modernization' schemes. She turned off the shower
and reached for a towel, then decided against it. In the grip of some
unfamiliar feeling, she padded out naked into the living room. Outside a pale
sun threw sparkles across the sea.

    One
spring, back when she and Sammy were together, and their drinking was
particularly bad, they had taken it upon themselves to go ice fishing up at the
Autisaq lake. The lake had been fished out years before, but back when there
were still char living there, Elijah Nungaq had returned from a fishing
expedition one day claiming to have seen a huge fish, almost as big as a
beluga, lurking in the depths of the lake. A hunting party had gone out
immediately afterwards but the fish had disappeared. All the same, the creature
was spoken about frequently, growing in size and reputation each time, and
groups of fishermen and women would periodically go out to the lake to try to
catch it.