Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (293 page)

“Wait a minute. They?”

“Yes, the original claim was filed by Gaetan and Guy Lasalle, both of Whitehorse.”

“When?”

“June 1943. If there’s anything more recent than that, it might be in another box. But I can look for you, when I get the time.”

“You’re a peach. Thanks. One last question: is there any record of that claim changing hands? Being sold or traded?”

“Not under this claim number. It’s a very thin file, not much activity on it at all. Nothing after 1944 in here anyway. But of course, it was rubies, so they would have been laughed out of the bar in Yellowknife if they’d tried to sell it.”

“What’s so funny about rubies?”

“Rubies up there? In their dreams. More likely rose quartz, or red beryl if they were lucky. A bushman with a prospecting kit couldn’t tell the difference, but any geologist would know there are no rubies up there.”

Chris thanked her, checked his watch, and on a whim ran the name Lasalle through CPC, the national police database. There were dozens of Lasalles, although a quick scan revealed that most were from Quebec. Refining the search further, he found none with birthdates in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Not that he was surprised. If he were still alive, Guy Lasalle would be committing crimes from his wheelchair by now.

There were, however, two hits on a Scott Lasalle from Vancouver. One was a conviction for driving while impaired, registered late last year, and the other a guilty plea for assault on February 23 of this year.

The first offence had taken place in Vancouver, but the recent assault had occurred in Whitehorse, around the time of his visit to the archives in Yellowknife. Was there a connection? Details were scarce on the database. Just the location of the incident, which was a bar in Whitehorse, the time, which was 12:30 a.m., and the name of the victim, another man who was probably just as guilty as Lasalle: Victor Whitehead.

Chris put in a call to the Whitehorse RCMP, hoping for more details. The duty sergeant didn’t recall the incident until he heard the victim’s name.

“Oh, right. I took that call myself. It was a typical bar fight. Two guys sitting at a table and they started to argue.”

“About what?”

“The bartender said it was about someone cheating someone. A woman, if you ask me. This Lasalle guy’d had quite a bit to drink by then, and the other man stood up to go. The bartender remembers him warning ‘Stay down south where you belong,’ and Lasalle took a pitcher of beer to his head. Knocked the guy down, there was blood all over his fancy suit. Nothing serious once it was all checked out and he didn’t want to press charges, but by then we’d caught the call and so we wrote it up.”

“And Scott Lasalle pleaded guilty?”

“Yeah. He probably could have got off if he’d fought it, because Whitehead didn’t want to pursue it, but I remember Lasalle was in a hurry to go back down south and he didn’t want to be stuck in Whitehorse any longer than he had to. Plus once he’d sobered up, he felt bad. He obviously hadn’t meant to hurt the guy, it was a spur of the moment thing. If you know Vic Whitehead, it’s not hard to imagine. So he pleaded to assault. Judge gave him a conditional discharge so he wouldn’t have a record if he kept his nose clean.”

“So just two strangers, had a run-in in a bar?”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say they were strangers. I think the bartender said they were cousins?”

Chris was startled. Cousins? “This Victor Whitehead, is he from Whitehorse?”

“Lived here all his life. Native. He works for the territorial government, really big on northern development opportunities. You either love him or you hate him.”

After thanking him, Chris hung up and scribbled in his notebook, trying to fit the pieces together. He had a feeling he was on the brink of something important. An old mining claim, a fight between cousins, one of whom was a big proponent of northern development. That was code for mining, oil and gas, or some other massive industrial project that promised jobs and prosperity at the expense of the land.

Rubies were a recipe for trouble.

Prince Edward Island, July 17

Sue Peters woke to the hushed tones of Bob’s voice, but when she opened her eyes their little cabin was empty. Through the window, bathed in the morning sun, she could see his tall, lean frame folded into a wooden deck chair. His cellphone was glued to his ear and his notepad was propped on the arm of the chair.

It was a small deck, weathered grey and black from the sun and salt, just large enough for two sagging deck chairs and a small table of equal vintage. The owner of the string of seaside cottages had brightened them with pink and yellow cushions featuring crabs and starfish and added a matching umbrella, which Bob had not opened. He was wearing a fleece sweater and had abandoned his flip-flops in favour of sneakers. On this breezy seaside morning he needed all the warmth he could get.

It was the last week of their honeymoon before they both reported back to duty Monday morning. Sue squinted at her watch. Barely seven o’clock. She wrapped the duvet around her naked body and went out to join him, sinking into the second deck chair with a murmured “good morning.”

He cast her a quick smile before returning to his conversation. Listening to his side of it, she deduced that he was talking to the inspector again, who was asking them to track down more background information on Scott Lasalle. She was surprised. Unless the inspector was back east, he was up and at it awfully early. Five a.m. Mountain Time.

She and Bob had already spent much of yesterday trying to trace Scott’s extended family and friends, with little to show for it. Scott’s family was the very definition of estranged. There were several branches of the Lasalle family, which had originated in New Brunswick. Some had remained there, but during the great depression of the 1930s the two youngest brothers in an impoverished family of fourteen had migrated west and north. Bob and Sue had tracked down an old uncle, still living in New Brunswick, who remembered the stories of two brothers who had packed up all their belongings into a bundle and jumped a freight train west. Family legend had it that they had heard of gold lying for the taking in the creeks of the Mackenzie Mountains. Having no other skills, they apparently scraped out a living trapping in the winter and fishing in the summer, but despite their early boasting, very few dollars ever made their way back to New Brunswick.

Up until the Second World War the family heard sporadic stories about the brutally cold winters in a land teeming with furs and fish. There was money to be made if one could survive the harsh conditions. All correspondence ceased at some point during the war, and the family assumed the young men had perished. The uncle was surprised and pleased to learn that at least one of the brothers had survived long enough to produce a son and grandson who were successful on the west coast.

Sue could see the intensity and excitement on Bob’s face as he relayed all this to the inspector. To quell her curiosity, she went inside to dress and pour a coffee before returning just as he was hanging up. He swung on her with dancing eyes.

“It’s a treasure hunt!” he exclaimed. “Not gold, but rubies.” He told her about the inspector’s inquiries and his flight up to the Nahanni headwaters the evening before.

She was incredulous. “The inspector is going to canoe the Nahanni?”

Bob chuckled. “I don’t think he’s slept a wink up there in that tent, listening for wolves and bears. That satellite call will cost him a fortune. I told him about the brothers, so he wants us to dig up what we can about the old RCMP investigation into their disappearance.” He grimaced. “Nearly seventy years ago, way up there in the north? God knows where that case file is.”

“I suppose we start with their headquarters in Yellowknife. When it opens.” She smiled as she eased herself out of her chair. Circling behind him, she slipped her hands across his shoulders. “That gives us three hours, Gibbsie. Whatever will we do?”

He half turned to her. “He also wants us to track down other heirs, and whether there’s been any recent interest in the mining claim. That depends exactly where the old claim is.”

She slid her hand down his chest and under his belt. “Morning is so delicious.”

“Because if it’s inside the new park boundaries —”

She sank into his lap and silenced him with a kiss. It was a full hour before he picked up the thread of his sentence again. He was balancing on one foot, pulling on his jeans.

“If the claim is inside the new park boundary, it’s worthless, but if it’s outside, even one kilometre outside, then it could be worth billions. The inspector has given me the coordinates, so it should be easy to determine. Rubies. Imagine!”

“Mmm,” she said languidly. She was still lying in bed, the sheets a sweaty tangle beneath her. “Nothing is sexier than rubies. Blood red. Fire red. The stone of passion and death.”

Within hours Bob had the answer to the question, but it did not advance their knowledge much. The coordinates Green had given him traced through a rough rectangle of land in the Selwyn Mountains around the Little Nahanni River. The land was partly within the park boundary, partly beyond, in an area criss-crossed with old mining roads and defunct exploration camps.

It seemed lots of prospectors and geologists had dreamed of riches in the Selwyn mountain range but none had ever found a viable motherlode.

Leaving Bob to fight RCMP red tape in Yellowknife, Sue took on the task of hunting down the offspring of Guy Lasalle and his brother. In the year since she’d been back on light duties at the police force, she had spent most of her time parked behind a computer and had learned a secret or two about the machines. Bob had taught her the rest. She loved piecing together the jigsaw of people’s lives from the tidbits on the Internet. What she couldn’t find online, she uncovered by phone.

By the time she called it quits for the day, her patience exhausted and the ocean surf beckoning, Sue had determined that the two brothers had built a cabin in the remote Nahanni above Virginia Falls and traded furs and supplies at the trading post in Nahanni Butte, a tiny First Nations village at the mouth of the river. In June 1944 a young Dene woman in the village gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Isabelle Lasalle. As far as Sue could determine, the Dene woman died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty in 1952. Her orphan daughter, Isabelle, was taken in by the nuns and placed in a residential school in Yellowknife, where she remained until her graduation from high school in 1962.

Halfway through her reading of residential school names and statistics, Sue paused to lay her head down on her arms. Within those cold lists lay the story of Canada’s greatest shame. Of children torn from their communities and from the culture that gave meaning to their lives. The Canadian government’s ill-conceived plan to educate and assimilate thousands of Aboriginal peoples into white, Western, “progressive” society had backfired horribly. No one had thought about the psychological scars of losing one’s family and culture, the message of inferiority, the simple terror and bewilderment of little children far from home. No one had thought about the flawed purveyors of so-called enlightenment. The pedophiles, the sadists, the righteous adjudicators of the saved and the damned.

Had Isabelle Lasalle been one of those casualties?

Sue wondered if she had been one of the thousands of survivors who appeared to seek compensation and healing from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. An odd title for a government commission designed to identify and compensate the victims. There should be no reconciliation, she thought, only apology and restitution.

When Isabelle’s name cropped up as a youth worker and as a winner in her age class in a recent Yukon Challenge bicycle marathon, Sue felt an unreasonable relief. The woman had not sunk into depression, alcoholism, and early death. Maybe she may have been one of the lucky ones.

Sue couldn’t find any online records of marriages, births, or death concerning Isabelle Lasalle, so she resorted to the phone. Since it was by then late afternoon in their idyllic Prince Edward Island honeymoon cabin, Whitehorse City Hall was sure to be open.

At first the clerk on the phone wouldn’t provide any details. Confidentiality, privacy protection, all kinds of stone walls. Sue identified herself as a police officer, leaving vague the jurisdiction, and explained about her efforts to track down relatives of a young man missing in Nahanni Park.

The clerk sucked in her breath. “Not Victor!”

“Who’s Victor?”

“Her son. I don’t think Isabelle has any other relatives.”

“I believe the missing man is probably her nephew.”

“No nephews, I’m sure. Isabelle’s alone in the world except for Vic. Her mother died years ago. Oh! Unless you mean the kids she fostered.”

Sue chatted a few minutes about the foster children Isabelle had cared for. Eight in all, all Dene First Nations. This was how the woman at City Hall had come to know her, through her community work.

Sue expressed her admiration for Isabelle’s warmth and determination, and then casually slipped in her next question. “Do you know anything about Isabelle’s father? Did she ever talk about him?”

“Never mentioned him. She was … I don’t suppose she would mind me mentioning it. She was a res school kid. Orphaned early on.”

“What about her son’s father?”

“Never married him. Good thing, too, he was no good for her.”

“Still, I wonder if he knows the nephew who’s missing. What’s his name?”

“Whitehead. I don’t know his first name. He used to work for one of those big game hunting outfits in Yellowknife.”

“Do you know when and where her son was born?” Sue held her breath, expecting the clerk to balk and demand to know just how that was relevant. “Just so I can figure out if there is a connection or if I’ve got it all wrong.”

There was a pause. The woman’s voice was doubtful. “I … I guess I could look it up.”

“Only if you …” Sue trailed off. She waited, doodling on the sheet on which she was tracing the family tree. She still had a question mark beside the name of Isabelle’s father, but it had to be one of the Lasalle brothers. She wasn’t sure how this ancient history could be relevant to the present search for Scott, but her job was to fill in all the blanks. Maybe someone somewhere had reconnected with Scott, or knew something about the mining claim.