Hungry Ghosts (6 page)

13

The same youngster who stowed Charlie
Pike's baggage clambered into the pilot's seat. It made Pike uncomfortable knowing that the tiny plane would be flown by someone not much older than his battered luggage. But he was uncomfortable flying at the best of times. His father's clan—the Pikes—came from the water, not the air. Pike was Wolf Clan by his Mohawk mother. Wolves weren't supposed to fly either.

Pike had forgotten just how small the northern bush planes were. When he sat down, the top of his head brushed the ceiling, and he wasn't all that tall. He could see all the way through to the cockpit and out the front windshield to the overcast sky. There was no security door to separate the pilot and his co-pilot from the passengers. The co-pilot handed out packages of small white foam earplugs; once they got going, he explained, the engines would be noisy.

They'd land in White Harbour around six o'clock Eastern
Standard Time, five o'clock in the north. But even gaining an hour, it would be dark in Manomin Bay when Pike got there, and there were no streetlights where he was going. White Harbour was at least a half hour from the airport, and the Manomin Bay First Nation was another half hour's drive, forty-five minutes if the roads were bad.

As the small plane gained altitude, Pike looked out the narrow window beside his cramped seat. He watched a solitary Canada goose glide below them, its wings extended. It was a good thing it wasn't flying in front of them, he thought. A goose could easily take down a plane this size. Caught in the engine, it could sink a jet. Pike wondered if the bird had lost its flock, if that was why it hadn't migrated. He liked the fact that it was escorting them. The old man would consider that a good omen.

The old man wasn't Pike's real grandfather—Pike's Ojibway grandfather was dead—but Pike called him
mishomis
as a term of respect. The old man was Ojibway too, and homeless. He was dying of hepatitis but refused to go to a shelter. Most often Pike found him wrapped in thick blankets near the police station, where he shot up in the mornings. The heroin helped him deal with the pain. Pike hoped he'd be all right while he was away. O'Malley had promised to look out for him.

It was the old man who told Pike that humans had descended from animals, that each clan was a link back to creation. He told Pike stories about Nanabush, the trickster—or, as he called him, Nanabozho—and others, like Muskrat and Crow. He exchanged stories and Anishnabe legends with Pike for coffee, a sandwich, a bowl of hot soup.

Pike pulled a beaded cuff from his pocket. It was a wide bracelet woven of black, white, yellow, and red beads.

“Keep this, son,” the old man said softly and pressed the bracelet into Pike's hands. “It's all I have left.”

“
Miigwetch
,” said Pike, accepting the gift and the responsibility that accompanied it, as the old man knew he would.

Before he left for the airport, he tracked the old man down and told him where he was going. The old man leaned back on the park bench and pulled his blankets around him. Pike knew he was tired, that even talking these days was an effort. His breath froze, suspended in the air.

“Your people are
Ginoozheg
.
Fish Clan. Mine are
Anaandeg,
on my mother's side. We have big families.” He laughed and patted Pike's hand. “Go back to your people, that's where you belong. Don't worry about me. It's not my time to cross the river.”

As Pike stood to leave, the old man reached out and gripped his hand. “Our people think Nanabozho is a trickster. They don't like to talk about the bad things he did. Once, he tricked his daughters into marrying him. When people found out, he was so ashamed that he crawled into the mouth of a fish.” The old man looked at Pike, his face creased with concern. “Some people think Nanabozho is still hiding in the water.”

Charlie Pike balanced his file on his knees and reread the preliminary conclusions of the Highway Strangler Task Force. Formally, it was the Coordinated Joint Operations Task Force for Dead and Missing Aboriginal Women.

O'Malley sometimes called it the Highway “Straggler” Task Force, because it got so little done. Pike winced when he overheard one of the other members joke it was too bad it wasn't the Task Force for Dead Indian Madams, in which case they could call it TEDIUM. Pike didn't find it funny, not the joke or the attitude behind it.

The task force's mandate was to review cold files, closed files, and unsolved cases to see if there were links between the victims' deaths. But so far they'd only managed to cobble together a report
on four that looked related. Five, if the latest body fit the profile. There were too many different police forces involved to reach consensus on much of anything. Pike wondered how many victims there really were. Aboriginal women had been disappearing his entire life.

Part of the problem was that few police forces had initially responded seriously to complaints from worried families that their daughters, mothers, and sisters were missing.

“These women are transients,” one police spokesman said to the media. “Sex trade workers don't stay in one place for long. They move away, change their names, cut their family ties. We don't have any reason to think these women are dead. They'll turn up.”

But most didn't. There were over fifty posters of missing Aboriginal women on the bulletin board in the corridor of the Rideau Regional Police Force Homicide section, more than five hundred across all of Canada that Pike knew of.

Things changed in 2002, after pig farmer Willy Pickton was charged with killing twenty-six women in British Columbia, mostly prostitutes. He told an undercover officer that he'd planned to kill fifty but got caught at forty-nine.

As public outrage mounted, police forces finally started talking about coordinating their investigations. But it was difficult. Murderers didn't stay within provincial boundaries; criminals roamed. In Ontario and Manitoba, the missing and murdered women not only fell under different jurisdictions, but in different sections of the various police forces involved. Pike found himself liaising with investigators in Unsolved Homicides, Criminal Investigations, Major Crimes, and Missing Persons, as well as with the OPP and RCMP.

It took more than five years before the various authorities could even agree on the structure of a Manitoba-Ontario Joint Operations Force. When they did, O'Malley argued it should at least have “one
bejesus Indian” on it. Pike thought that the fact that
he
was the token Indian was pretty funny.

When he became police chief, O'Malley insisted that Pike apply. He said he didn't care about Charlie's past. “That's all behind you now, lad. Old history.”

But it isn't, thought Pike. Not if he's making me go back.

14

Blue lights twinkled in the dawn
like a string of Christmas lights. A dead body attracted swarms of bored policemen almost as quickly as it summoned flies.

At least twenty white
fianas
lined the sides of the highway. The Peugeots had been tourist rental cars before the government appropriated them to the Cuban National Revolutionary Police in the late nineties. A half dozen
caballitos
leaned sideways on rusted kickstands.

Inspector Ramirez pulled his car onto the shoulder. He and Espinoza got out, slamming the doors hard to secure them. The dead woman teetered behind the two men as they walked towards the roped-off area. She hobbled a little in the dirt, her high heels catching in the ruts.

Just inside the trees, Ramirez observed several plastic numbers stuck upright in the forest floor. Each one indicated that Hector Apiro and his technicians had found something of interest, not to mention a supply of plastic markers.

Apiro kneeled on the ground beside the body, which rested on a tarp. Ramirez and Espinoza approached the small pathologist. The ghost followed close behind. She peeked over Espinoza's shoulder and covered her eyes with her fingers.

Ramirez leaned over the rope to look at the corpse. He winced at the exposed bones, the holes that had once been eyes, a nose. The clothing was badly stained by heat and rain.

“Good morning, Ricardo,” said Apiro. He stood up to greet them, brushing the dirt from his pants. “It looks like she was asphyxiated, but it isn't always possible to identify the exact cause of death in such cases. I should know more after the autopsy. I'm assuming that this case is the priority now and not the man who washed up on the beach?”

“Yes,” said Ramirez. “We have no reports of missing foreigners.” Until they did, or until Hector Apiro decided the man had been murdered, the dead man was technically outside the jurisdiction of Major Crimes.

Looking at the woman's ruined body, Ramirez was glad Francesca was out of town. His workload had just increased exponentially. He glanced up, half expecting to see the full moon glow in the morning sky.

“Was she raped, Dr. Apiro?” asked Espinoza.

The Cuban Penal Code had recharacterized sexual assault as “lascivious abuse.” But outside the courtroom, the police called it what it was. “
Llamar al pan, pan y al vino, vino
,” was the saying. Bread is bread and wine is wine. Rape was rape.

Apiro shook his large head. “We may never know. We use a stain to look for spermatozoa, but the acid phosphate test is only presumptive. Semen degrades quickly even without all this heat; the maximum detection time is only about fourteen hours. The prostate specific antigen test is far more accurate. If we had one.” Due to the heightened embargo, the shortage of equipment and forensic supplies was even worse than usual.

“The good news,” said Apiro, “is that her histology card was in her purse. Not all that helpful now, is it? A bit late for organ donation. Patrol ran the name for me. Antifona Conejo. Well-known to the police, as you would say.”

“Prostitution?” asked Ramirez.

“I'm afraid so.”

All Cubans were legally required to carry biomedical information under the “voluntary” organ donation program. Looking at what was left of the body, Ramirez had to agree with Apiro. This woman was long past being a contributor.

Apiro handed Ramirez a plastic exhibit bag with the victim's card in it. Ramirez pulled out his cell phone and called the police switchboard. He asked to be patched through to Natasha Delgado, the only female detective on his squad. Reading from the histology card, he gave Delgado the woman's date of birth and her address.

“Pull all the files we have on her, Natasha, will you? Have Patrol take you over to her address to inform the family of her death. Make sure to ask when they last saw her and who she was with. But approach it delicately. They may not know what she did for a living.”

“There was a cigarette butt near the remains with smudges of what appears to be red lipstick,” said Apiro. “A Chinese brand. Shuang Xi. It means Double Happiness. There was a purse beside the body too. It had the usual items in it. Lipstick and a powder compact. A package of condoms. A thin wooden stick. I'm not sure what she used it for. Perhaps for manicures. I would guess she was mulata, from her complexion and hair.”

Ramirez wondered how Apiro could determine the colour of her skin. The woman's head was almost black from bloating. The scarf around her neck was tied so tightly it had cut into the flesh, or what was left of it. A cloud of flies buzzed around the corpse. Apiro waved them away.

Ramirez looked at the ghost again. Her complexion seemed darker than that of a mulata, but it was difficult to see her properly in the shadows cast by the morning sun. The flowers on the blue mahoe trees were already changing from primrose to orange. By evening they'd be red, almost the same shade as the ghost's lipstick.

Prostitutes were usually black. Maria Vasquez, the woman Apiro lived with, was an exception. With her streaked blonde hair and pale complexion, she could pass for white. But she was hardly typical.

“And then there is this.” The pathologist carefully untied the scarf and dangled it from his gloved hand. “Another stocking.”

Ramirez looked more carefully at the ghost peering over Espinoza's shoulder. What he had first thought was a black scarf tied in a bow around her neck was a sheer nylon stocking. “Prima Verrier's killer tied a stocking around her throat too,” he explained to Espinoza.

“There is another similarity, Ricardo,” said Apiro. “These small round impressions in the dirt.”

Ramirez stepped closer to the cordoned-off area. He squatted to look at the marks beside the plastic numbers. They were evenly spaced, about five feet apart.

Espinoza crouched beside him. “What are they?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” said Ramirez. “What do you think, Hector?”

Apiro shrugged. “At first, I thought they might be from the victim's shoes, but the heel on her shoes is wider.”

“There were marks like this at the first crime scene,” said Ramirez.

“Prima,” said Espinoza, raising his eyebrows. “That's ironic, isn't it, if this turns out to be the second victim?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Ramirez, nodding slowly.
Prima
, in Latin, meant “the first.”

“Is that what he used to choke her with, the nylon?”

“No.” Ramirez shook his head. “He used his hands.”

Ramirez glanced at the
jinetera
again. Her hand went to the stocking around her neck. She straightened the bow. “She was a beautiful woman, Señora Verrier. But not so pretty after a month in the bush, I can tell you that.”

The dead
jinetera
shivered. She rubbed her arms as if she were cold.