Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (308 page)

“Look, one step at a time. Things are about wrapped up here. Elliott and I will start out first thing tomorrow morning to join you.”

“That’s good. The cabin’s at the base of a steep mountain, you can’t miss it, but we’ve left you markers too. But before you leave I want you to ask Hunter Kerry if the kids had a hunting rifle among their gear.”

“There’s no hunting in the park.”

“I know, but …” Green explained about the bullet holes in the cabin. “They look recent but I can’t tell how recent. And if one of these guys is carrying a firearm, I want to know …” His voice trailed off as an odd-looking orange object caught his eye through the trees down near the cabin. He pulled out his binoculars and trained them on the spot. Slowly a food barrel came into view, suspended about ten feet in the air between two trees. Hastily he wrapped up the conversation, gave Sullivan the cabin’s coordinates, and hung up.

For a moment he remained where he was, crouched down behind a boulder. When they’d reached the cabin, they’d been so excited by the discovery that they had not done a search of the area. An amateur oversight. The cabin was cradled in a small valley, fronting on a creek and backed by a steep slope that rose to the tall peak behind. On either side, willow and spruce fringed the water’s edge. Now he scanned the area through binoculars carefully for more packs and gear. If they had left some of their food behind in a cache, that suggested that they were coming back. Or perhaps that they weren’t far away, despite the empty cabin.

He was about to return to the cabin to report his discovery when his binoculars caught a flash of light farther along the slope. He swung back, focusing as he tried to distinguish the faint, dark smudge hunkered down in the brush, partially hidden behind a tree.

It was a person, with their binoculars trained on him.

Chapter Twenty

 F
or an instant both men froze. Then the stranger dropped his binoculars and ducked back behind the tree.

“Hey!” Green took chase, tripping and slithering down the hillside as the figure disappeared through the trees. “Wait!” he shouted between gasps. “I won’t hurt you!”

The stranger didn’t even break his stride as he ploughed through the woods diagonally toward the creek. Green kept shouting, more to alert Jethro than to stop the man. Up ahead he only caught occasional glimpses of the man’s grey camouflage jacket.

The man was younger and more agile than Green, and soon even those glimpses ceased. Green stopped, cursing his weakness as he dragged air into his lungs. Cursing his twenty years behind the desk, his love of smoked meat and cheese bagels, his aversion to all things fitness.

Finally he straightened up. All was not lost. Running full tilt through the woods, the man would have left a trail that probably even he could follow. He had just turned back toward the cabin in search of Jethro when a frenzied barking broke the silence of the forest. He froze. The echo ricocheted around the hills, but the barking seemed to come from the direction the man had fled. Excited, Green turned and hurried through the dense brush. Roots twisted his ankles and sharp branches left welts on his hands, but he ignored them all.

Soon he burst through the dense willow onto the stony creek’s edge, where he spotted Jethro kneeling in the icy mountain stream. Pinned beneath him and thrashing with fury was the man in the camouflage jacket. The man had easily four inches and fifty pounds over Jethro, but he was no match. When he spotted Green, he went limp and held up his hands in surrender. Jethro hauled him, dripping and shivering, to his feet.

Green scrutinized him in silence. He looked younger than Green had first thought, with a tangle of blond hair, a lean, muscular body, and the deep tan of an outdoorsman. He carried a small day pouch around his waist and binoculars around his neck, but no other gear. Sullen defiance blazed in his eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” Green demanded.

“Who the hell are you!”

“I’m Inspector Michael Green of the Ottawa Police, and this is —”

The defiance vanished. “Hannah’s father. Thank God!”

Green’s eyes narrowed. “Are you …?”

“Pete Carlyle.” Pete splashed through the water toward him. “Am I glad to see you!”

Jethro grunted. “You sure didn’t act like it. I caught him trying to escape up the creek.”

“I didn’t know who you were. I thought you were Scott!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Green said. “Where are Scott and Hannah?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. They …” Pete’s teeth chattered and he swayed sideways.

Green grabbed his arm. “They what!”

Jethro took his other arm. “Let’s get him inside. He needs to get out of these wet clothes. That water comes straight off the glaciers.”

Pete stumbled as they led him toward the cabin. Green could feel the man’s shivering but his own fear made him impatient. “Where are they?”

Seconds ticked by before Pete shook his head. “Gone.”

Inside, Jethro built a fire with a few quick, expert moves, while Green helped Pete strip off his soggy boots.

“Where are your dry clothes?”

Pete shook his head. His fingers fumbled with his jacket zipper. “They took everything.”

Jethro unrolled his sleeping bag and held it out. “Here, get everything off and wrap yourself in this. We’ll get you warm. Mike, go get some water from the stream.”

“But —”

“For tea. He needs to get warm.”

Green studied Pete closely. It was true that he was shivering and his teeth were chattering, but Green wasn’t convinced. Although chilly out, it was still summer. Pete’s colouring was pink and healthy, and only a few minutes ago he had been running through the woods without difficulty. But he opted to go along with the pretense, if there was one. He needed the young man’s co-operation, and accusing him of lying would not secure that. There was still an aura of stubborn defiance in his mood.

As he filled their pot with water down at the creek, he scanned the surrounding woods carefully. They were silent, undisturbed. Back up in the cabin, Jethro’s fire was blazing and Green set the pot upon the stove. Prying open the food barrel, he rooted inside for tea. Pete was by now wrapped in the sleeping bag with only his head visible.

“I thought I was going to die. I’ve been here for days! No food, no shelter, no clothes. At night the wolves came so close.” He shuddered. “I didn’t know how to get back. Scott had all the maps, so I was trying to wait it out here until someone found me.”

Green held off his questions until he’d made the tea. He poured a cup and held it out to Pete. One hand snaked out from the warmth of the sleeping bag to hold it. Green pulled a chair close to sit in front of him.

“Okay, now what happened? Are Scott and Hannah all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean … there’s something wrong with Scott. He’s lost it. A few days ago …” His voice faltered and his hand shook as he raised the cup to his lips. “Daniel was killed. I don’t know how, I was asleep. I heard this awful screaming outside the tent, and when I got outside Daniel was gone. Scott said it was a grizzly attack, Daniel ran outside but it was dark and he didn’t see the edge.” Pete shut his eyes. A single sob broke from his lips.

Green was unmoved. A much greater panic was howling at the gates. “Why didn’t you go for help?”

“I wanted to! Hannah too! But Scott was obsessed. He’s been obsessed from the beginning with what happened to his grandfather. But after Daniel died, he just lost it. He said we couldn’t help Daniel because it was too dangerous to go look for him, and his grandfather’s cabin was safer because no one knew where it was. He said we could use it as our base.”

“But why didn’t you and Hannah go back for help?”

“Because … because Scott had all the maps, the compass, the emergency supplies. And he said people were after him.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know! That was part of his paranoia! He said years ago his grandfather was murdered, but the killer got away with it because there was no body. He was convinced the brother did it to get the whole claim. He said he had to find proof and stop bad people from getting it now.” Pete shook his head in bewilderment. “I’ve known Scott for a few years now and he’s always been kind of driven. Didn’t let anything stand in
his way if he wanted something. But this … this was crazy talk!”

Green forced himself to stay focused on the questions. “All right, so what happened when you got here?”

“He made us search the whole area for his grandfather’s body and the old mining stakes. So we’d do these trips around the cabin and up the mountain, and when we didn’t find anything, he got more and more paranoid. He said we were sabotaging him because we wanted the mine for ourselves. ‘You’re working for them,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you were so eager to come along on this trip.’ Hannah was scared of him. She even thought … Oh fuck, it seems impossible!”

“What does?”

“She was afraid he’d killed Daniel himself.”

“Why?”

“Because Daniel wanted to turn back. Hannah was having dizzy spells, she was falling down. It got scary on some of those clifftops. Daniel and Scott had a huge fight about her the night he died.”

Green struggled to breathe. Focus. “Is she all right?”

“This is all my fault, but I didn’t know what else to do. One night, I tried to sneak into his pack to get the maps and compass, we figured we’d make a run for it. He caught me and he just went ballistic. He grabbed this rifle — I don’t even know where it came from, I’d never seen it! I tried to hide in the cabin but he shot right through the door! I dove out the back window and hid in the woods. Then he packed up all our gear — except one food cache that he forgot — and he and Hannah took off.”

“Where?”

Pete shrugged. “Still looking for the mining claim, I guess.”

Green fought the bile rising in his throat. “So Hannah is out there with the wolves and the grizzlies and a crazy man with a gun?”

Pete nodded. His lips trembled but he didn’t speak. Didn’t need to, Green thought. Imagination filled in the silence all too well.

“We’ve got to find them,” Green said. He and Jethro were conferring outside the cabin. Pete had fallen into an exhausted sleep by the fire. Green had already reported in to Sullivan, who was still back at the scene of Daniel’s death. He and Elliott had planned to make their way to the cabin the next morning, but with this new threat they had rethought those plans. Sullivan said he would contact the RCMP to initiate a more official search. Helicopters and surveillance aircraft would be deployed and more officers dropped in to provide backup.

“Good idea,” Green had told him. “But then you and Elliott get down here. Bring any cops and SAR people who are already on the scene. I need all the help I can get, and I can’t wait around for official search parties. He’s got Hannah, Brian.”

Sullivan had conferred with Elliot and they agreed to set off the next morning at first light, which was 4:00 a.m. Green had calculated quickly. Too late, damn it! It meant twelve more hours with Scott on the loose with Hannah. Doing God knows what.

“This guy Pete will be here at the cabin,” he said. “He’s pretty shaken up but he’ll tell you where we’ve gone.”

“Mike, wait!”

Green had hung up. He didn’t have time to waste arguing with Sullivan. He expected enough trouble trying to convince Jethro.

But to his surprise, when he told him Jethro merely nodded and began packing up. It was Pete who panicked. He struggled to throw off the sleeping bag.

“But what about me? You’re just going to leave me?”

“We’ll leave you that sleeping bag and some more food. You’ll be safe until the others get here tomorrow. They should be here by late morning.”

“Can I at least have a gun?”

Green eyed him sceptically. Jethro’s rifle was their only firearm. “Do you know how to use a gun?”

“Yeah. Well, no. But if a grizzly comes at me, or Scott comes back, I’d rather have a chance!”

Green shook his head. Sullivan also had a hunting rifle, but Sullivan was a full day behind. Green needed Jethro’s rifle for the pursuit.

“We’ll leave you our bear banger and some flares,” Jethro said. “If you run into trouble, go up to the open slope behind here and signal. Flares, smoke signals, everything you can think of. Before long, this area is going to be thick with planes. They’ll see you.”

Pete was clearly not convinced. He stood in the doorway scowling as Jethro and Green set off. Jethro had sent Tatso on a long, circular scouting expedition, and she had picked up a trail with little difficulty. It continued to trek southwest up the creek bed toward the valley of the Little Nahanni.

“The trail must be more recent,” Jethro said as he scrutinized a patch of soft loam once they were out of Pete’s sight. “She’s picking up a scent without trouble.” He pointed to a print that even Green could recognize. The checkered grooves of a hiking boot. “But they’re moving fast. See how deep the depression is? The push off at the toe? They’re running.”

“Can you tell who?”

Jethro nodded. “The size of the boot, the weight it carried, I’d say a small woman.”

Fort Simpson, July 24

Constable Christian Tymko had flown back to Fort Simpson from Whitehorse two days earlier. Instead of being assigned to the helicopter recovery team, however, he found himself behind the desk while Sergeant Nihls sent the rookie constable instead. His excuse was that it would be an excellent training exercise for her, but Chris suspected a more petty reason. Chris had been the one to sound the alarm first about the missing trippers, and now that he had been proved right Nihls wanted him as far from the action as possible.

News of the hiker’s death in the Nahanni had been all over town that morning, and rumours of the Lasalle party and its search for the lost mine were rampant. Chris spent more time fielding calls and handling curiosity seekers than he did on his paperwork backlog. All the while he kept a sharp eye on the sky and an impatient ear for the roar of a Twin Otter coming in. Hunter Kerry had not returned to Fort Simpson since leaving Whitehorse. His flight logs revealed trips to Cantung Mine, Flat Lake, and Yellowknife, but made no mention of Victor or Olivia.