In the Barren Ground (32 page)

She crouched down, her flak vest once again pinching her stomach. “Shit,” she whispered. “See here?” She pointed where her beam lit up a ragged mark through the lugs of a left boot print. “It’s the same pattern.”

Crash crouched down beside her. “There’s another one there. Also the left foot. Same tear mark in the sole.”

Hurriedly, she snapped more photos, using her glove as a comparative measure because she didn’t have her forensic ruler with her.

“They’re not Novak’s,” Crash said, pushing back up to his feet, staring at the prints. “Novak was wearing mukluks, like Eddie always wears, and he has some seriously big feet—bigger than a twelve, I’d venture.”

“So, you don’t think these prints could be Eddie’s?”

He shook his head. “Unless things have changed, Eddie is convinced all modern footwear is bad for you. He has this harebrained notion that the reason he’s pigeon-toed is because his mother forced him to wear regular shoes as a kid. He told me ages ago that as soon as he could, he started making his own mukluks, and has worn them since.”

“That means Novak does get another visitor out here. But who?”

“Same person who brings him cigarettes, maybe.”

“Who do you know who smokes Marlboro?” she said.

“Several of the crew at WestMin do. Viktor Baroshkov—I’ve seen his pack on the counter of the bar at the Red Moose. A couple of Damien’s friends from Wolverine Falls. It’s one of the three most common brands in North America. But just because Novak smokes that brand doesn’t mean he smokes it all the time, or that the person who brought him the cigarettes does, too. They might not even smoke at all.”

“What do they want from him, then, coming out here? It can’t be friendship—the guy’s cracked.”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing up as wind suddenly gusted through the shed. “We should get going, Tana. It looks like we’ll need to find a safe place to hunker down tonight if this storm gets any worse, and I sure as hell don’t want to stay here.”

CHAPTER 37

Tana cradled her steaming mug in both hands and sipped her soup. It had been made from a packet on a small gas burner using melted snow, and she and Crash snuggled in thermal gear and sleeping bags in a tiny orange dome of a tent as the wind plucked and tugged and pushed at them from the darkness outside, and snow continued to pile in drifts. A small battery-powered lantern swung from the apex of the tent dome, casting an intimate halo of yellow light.

They’d managed to set up camp before the full brunt of the storm had hit, pitching their tent on a level area in the lee of a rise. Their snowmobiles were parked behind the tent and fast becoming buried in snow.

“Do you think it could be Novak who’s been doing this?” Tana said, taking another tentative sip. Her lips were so cold that even the lukewarm soup scalded them.

Crash considered her question for a moment, and she watched the shadows on his face. She liked looking at his face. His eyes were beautiful, and the lines around them told stories. She wondered about the things he’d seen and done, and her heart squeezed.

“He’s psychotic—clearly he’s lost touch with reality,” Crash said. “Plus he’s mobile with his dogs.”

“A dog sled wouldn’t have gotten up over the cliff behind which Apodaca and Sanjit were killed.”

“He could have left it and hiked over on foot. According to your notes from the scene, Heather said Selena had mentioned seeing a man in fur. Elliot wears furs.”

She sipped again, listening to the wind, thinking of the endless, barren land all the way up to the arctic. “There wasn’t enough snow for a sled yet when Apodaca and Sanjit were attacked.”

“So maybe he hiked the whole way. It would have taken a long time, but he could have been camping out there already, hunting, perhaps even watching the kids working day after day, planning.”

“What about the red chopper?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Coincidence?”

“I’m not feeling big on coincidence with this. And trapper Eddie? He’s always out there.”

“I don’t see him for this. And the boot print is not his—I’d stake a lot on that. There’s also a possibility that the print has nothing to do with the actual murder.”

“What about Crow TwoDove, and his taxidermy tools? He’s accustomed to taking out hearts and guts. Could he have stepped over some line and started working on humans, copying from the book?”

“Crow can’t read,” Crash said.

“He doesn’t need to read. This cannibal beast thing is a local myth, an old story that any local could have heard told around a fire.”

“Yeah, but someone actually
wrote
down those lines from the book, and copied the drawing. This definitely ties into that book, and someone who can read.”

“True.” Tana’s mind went to the author, Henry Spatt, and the other names she’d listed on her whiteboard.

“I need to go out to WestMin again,” she said. “I need to interview the rest of the winter crew at the camp, check their boots, their histories. If Harry Blundt and Markus Van Bleek were already staking this area and mapping out a mine four years ago, they would have had teammates, and those same mates could be at the camp now. They’d potentially have had opportunity in all cases.”

“Would be a lengthy expedition out there on snowmobile,” Crash said. “Might have to wait for a break in the weather so that I can fly you in.”

She met his eyes. He held her gaze. And something surged between them—a bond, tangible. Plus something darker, a little more sly. It made Tana feel scared. Vulnerable. And in the whisper and tick and rush of the wind, she heard her gran’s voice.

Vulnerability isn’t good or bad, Tana. It’s not a dark emotion, nor a light one. It’s not a weakness. It’s the birthplace of all feelings. If you run away from it, if you fear it, and shut it out, you will be shutting out all that gives purpose and meaning to life . . .

She couldn’t go there. She could
not
rely on anyone but herself right now—she had to do this motherhood thing, her job, on her own. She had to prove she could. She’d made far too many mistakes with sex, and men. She needed to separate that out from what was important now, get on track. And Crash was so wrong. He had heavy issues he was still trying to resolve. He lived like Jim—on the edge, daring the universe to take him, maybe even
wanting
to be taken. She couldn’t bear caring, and losing, again. It would just kill her. She inhaled deeply.

“It’s hard to see anyone for this, you know?” she said. “Doing this depraved, incredibly raw, and violent thing, and still living, functioning normally among a community. Must take so much energy to hide it. To plan it, clean up. Look normal.”

“Normal is relative, Tana.”

He was right. She’d thought Jim was normal. You never really knew what hid behind the eyes of others.

Crash took her mug, and unzipped the vestibule. He emptied out the dregs and cleaned the mugs with snow, stashed them back in the pack. “You should get some sleep if you can. The worst of this weather should let up by morning, and if the forecast holds, there’ll be a slight lull before the next big one rolls in. We should manage to reach Twin Rivers before that socks us in again.”

Tana pulled her wool hat down over her ears and cuddled into her sleeping bag. Crash did the same, and they pressed together in the small tent. He reached up and clicked off the lantern. Their orange globe went out and the dark wilderness seemed suddenly, impossibly vast. Just them together with a skein of orange fabric between them and the universe out there. Tana’s mind went to the shredded bits of orange tent she’d seen at the Apodaca-Sanjit massacre. She thought of Crash wrapping Regan Novak’s remains into his tent fabric four years ago, and she shivered.

“Cold?” he said in the dark.

“I’m fine.”

“You going to call this in now, Tana?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t have answers, but I have enough questions to force Yellowknife to send in a homicide team. I have Spatt’s book, and it’s clearly a blueprint for murder. Someone out here is stalking and hunting humans, using Spatt’s words as a map, and to instill fear before he strikes. Maybe it’s Spatt himself. We need forensics out here, fingerprints taken, DNA analysis, a fast track on those autopsy results. I’ll get it now.”

“Will you deal with Cutter?”

Tana heard the layers in his question.

“No,” she said quietly. “Sergeant Leon Keelan. But I don’t care who I deal with . . . I have enough evidence now. I’ll go through central dispatch, make sure other people hear about this—the coroner’s office, pathologists, Apodaca’s and Sanjit’s parents. It’ll embarrass Cutter and Keelan into fast action, if nothing else. They won’t be able to ignore this, or me. Not this time.”

He fell silent, and she wondered if he was sleeping. She listened for a while to the storm and the cold crept in, right into her bones. Her body gave an involuntary shudder, and Crash put his arm over her.

“Come closer,” he whispered, his breath warm against her neck. Her body went ramrod rigid. Her heart began to stutter.

“Don’t fight it. Survival value. Body warmth.”

Reluctantly, she tried to relax into his arms as he spooned her.

“What about you?” she whispered. “What are you going to do about Cutter, Sturmann-Taylor?”

She heard him inhale deeply.

“You still want to kill him?”

“No, Tana. Not any more.”

Relief rushed through her. “What changed?’

“You,” he whispered.

Fear rose again, tension twisting in her stomach, her mouth going dry. She wanted his touch, his mouth to press firmly against her neck. She ached for his body, warm and naked in her arms. To feel him between her legs. Her eyes burned. And on the back of it all came another worry—Cutter and Sturmann-Taylor, Van Bleek, what they could do to her and her baby in this wild and isolated place, and no one would know.

“So what are you going to do, then?” she whispered.

“FBI,” he said. “Interpol. I’m going to take everything I’ve gathered over the years to one of the old guys who was on the joint ops task force. Give it to him, let them look at Sturmann-Taylor and Cutter from the outside. Combined with the intel accumulated by the task force over those four years, plus the information I’ve gathered about Sturmann-Taylor, the lodge, the people he flies in, Cutter’s role—it should show them where to look. I think they’ll find the rest of the pieces now.”

Wind blew, and snow brushed and rustled against the tent fabric.

“So, thank you, Tana,” he whispered, resting his lips ever so slightly against the skin under her hair at the nape of her neck, the weight of his arm over her body heavy and warm. Heat washed into her belly and her nipples tightened with an exquisite ache. “I think it was destiny,” he said, and she heard the old smile in his voice. “That brought you to me, and gave me the missing pieces. Maybe, finally all those years will have been worthwhile.”

He was talking about more than just his UC operation. He was talking about the personal losses he’d incurred through it, the choices he’d made years ago to stick with the job while losing his family. He was talking about Lara and his dead baby, and how he felt he hadn’t protected her from having her brains blown out all over him. She swallowed and held dead still for fear of arousing him, or herself, further, and eventually she heard Crash’s breathing deepen and grow more rhythmic as he fell asleep.

Only then did she allow her muscles to fully relax. But just as she was drifting off, she gasped.

He came awake instantly.

“What is it?”

She felt it again, a rolling motion in her tummy, a little punch from the inside. Emotion filled her eyes.

“My baby. It moved. Here, feel it.” She opened her sleeping bag and guided his hand under her thermal underwear. His palm was rough and warm on the tight skin of her stomach. Her baby rolled over again, kicked. A little thump.

“Did you feel it?”

He made no reply. She rolled over and turned her face toward his, and she saw the gleam of wetness on his cheeks. “Yes,” he whispered, voice thick. “Yes, I felt it.”

He kept his hand there on her tummy, and they lay like that for a long while, just connecting with the precious little human life in her womb. And Tana no longer felt alone. This was real, this little creature growing determinedly inside her. This man holding her.

“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?” he said.

“No,” she said softly. She hadn’t wanted to find out. She’d been hoping for a boy, because in her experience girls had it tough. But right now, she didn’t care. It was hers. Her baby. And for just this nanosecond in time, she thought it might all work out okay.

A little tribe, Gran, I’m building my own little tribe . . .

Tana finally drifted slowly toward sleep with Crash holding her like that, his hand on her belly, warm against the storm. To be held like this, not judged, not used, no pressure for sex . . . to feel no shame at all in this rugged man’s arms, to feel the raw bond of friendship . . . the feeling was indescribably profound. And intimate.