Читать книгу Meg Harris Mysteries 6-Book Bundle - R.J. Harlick - Страница 60

Eric tramped up the stairs, followed by the bulk of Police Chief Decontie, the pencil-stick height of Corporal Whiteduck and another, much younger policeman I knew only by the name of Luke. They were three of the eight member force of the Migiskan First Nation Police Department, or the MPD , as most people called them. The blizzard had dwindled to a few floating flakes.

“John-Joe’s here,” I said from the open door. Eric’s eyes clamped onto mine. “You okay?” Behind him, the three policemen reached for their guns. “You won’t need those,” I said. Then I heard the metallic clink of a rifle behind my back. I turned slowly around. John-Joe stood in front of the bed as if guarding Chantal’s body, his rifle pointed directly at me.

For several agonizing seconds I stood frozen, wanting to believe he wouldn’t shoot, yet not entirely convinced. Then I felt a bolstering tingle from Eric’s rock. “Put it down, John Joe. You’ll only make things worse.”

He stared back at me, his eyes filled with fear. Behind me, boots thudded on the outside stairs. I heard the soft click of a gun being armed.

“Stay back,” I cried out to the men and walked slowly forward. “Please, John-Joe, put the rifle down.”

He backed up closer to the bed. “No choice,” he whispered. “No one is gonna believe me.”

“I do,” I said. “I’ll do all I can to prove your innocence.”

His lips quivered. His hands gripped the rifle tighter. I felt the tension sharpen in the muffled silence of the shack.

“Getting yourself killed won’t help Chantal. The only way is by helping the police find her killer.”

The sound of snow sliding off the roof filled the room. I waited. I didn’t know what more to say.

Finally, he nodded. “Okay,” he said looking into my eyes. “You believe me. I’m gonna believe you.” And he slowly bent down and placed his rifle on the floor beside where my jacket had fallen, then straightened with the determination of his decision.

“Move away from the gun, very slowly,” shouted Chief Decontie from behind me. John-Joe stepped towards me. “No! Towards the wall,” he yelled, while Corporal Whiteduck shoved me out of the way.

Decontie slammed John-Joe spread-eagle against the wall, searched him and, finding a bulge under his jacket, brushed it aside. Clamped to John-Joe’s belt was a leather sheath. A bone hilt proclaimed the knife’s presence. Removing a tissue from his pocket, Decontie pulled out the knife and held it to the light. All action stopped as we stared at the knife. The blade was stained. He slipped it into the plastic bag Corporal Whiteduck held out.

The police chief frisked John-Joe again. When satisfied nothing else was concealed, he jerked John-Joe’s arms around his back and snapped on handcuffs. After reading him his rights, he charged John-Joe with the murder of Chantal. With such obvious evidence, what else could he do? Even I was beginning to wonder if I’d made a mistake in believing him innocent.

Luke stood guard over the prisoner, while Chief Decontie checked out Chantal’s body and gave the room a once-over. He grunted at the sight of the bag of marijuana on the floor but left it where it lay. Then he instructed Corporal Whiteduck to begin taking photos.

Turning towards Eric, the police chief said, “Patrolman Smith and I have to take J.J. back to the detachment, so I’d appreciate it if you could stay here with Corporal Whiteduck until forensics and the coroner arrive. I’m also going to need a statement from you both. So while you’re waiting, Sam can take them down. “

“No problem,” Eric said as Luke marched John-Joe to the door.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I cried out, scrambling for my jacket. “Put this on him. He’s sick.”

Patrolman Smith glanced at Decontie, who reluctantly gave his approval.

Once garbed in my jacket, John-Joe offered his thanks, then looked me in the eye. “You promise?”

“I promise,” I replied, despite beginning to have second thoughts. He was, after all, innocent until proven guilty.

Despite Eric’s grim expression, he voiced his support. “We’ll get the best lawyer we can find.”

At that moment, a column of snowmobiles drove up and stopped behind Decontie’s. Several men garbed in official looking snowmobile outfits and a man in a civilian one jumped off and trudged through the deep snow towards us. As they got closer, I recognized the badges of Quebec’s provincial police, the Sûreté du Québec, or SQ as they are generally called.

As if answering the question in my mind, Decontie said with barely concealed anger in his voice, “The SQ take over from here. They have the forensics mandate, our small force doesn’t.” Then almost as an aside, he muttered under his breath, “Especially when it comes to the murder of whites.” I watched the line of men approach. Something vaguely familiar about the first officer alerted me, when, at the top of the stairs, he removed his helmet, I groaned at the sight of the arrogant sneer of Sergeant LaFramboise. Playing on the English translation of his name, I’d taken to calling him Rotten Raspberry.

Our paths had crossed once before, after another tragic killing. Although the murderer had been eventually discovered, it had been with minimal help from Rotten Raspberry. He’d read what he’d wanted to read in the evidence and had come up with a verdict that had served only to create discord amongst the Migiskan.

“Eh bien, another murder and we meet again, madame.” Sergeant LaFramboise’s needle eyes stared down at me from the height of his pointed nose.

Without waiting for my response, he turned to Chief Decontie. “We take the suspect.” He grabbed John-Joe’s arm and propelled him down the stairs. John-Joe landed face first in a snowdrift, where he lay with his hands clamped behind his back.

“Relève-toi,” LaFramboise yelled at John-Joe.

John-Joe struggled to get up, but without the use of his hands, he only managed to dig his head deeper into the snow.

Eric reached down to help him. LaFramboise thrust Eric aside, who started to lash back at him, but abruptly stopped. A charge of assaulting a police officer would only exacerbate the situation.

But Decontie, a fellow police officer, had freer rein. Saying “The boy needs air,” he brushed past his counterpart and pulled John-Joe up onto his feet. Coughing and sputtering, John-Joe shook his head to remove the snow from his face.

“I’m only handing the suspect over to you because I have to,” Decontie said. “But, if he is in any way injured or treated unfairly, I will make damn sure you lose your badge.”

LaFramboise shrugged his shoulders as if to say “so what.” Motioning one of his men to guard the prisoner, he headed back up the stairs to the hut. Chief Decontie told his patrolman to stick with John-Joe then followed on the heels of his adversary.

I started to follow, but Eric held me back. “Not much more we can do here,” he said. The telltale scar beneath his eye glowed white with suppressed anger. Turning to John-Joe, he continued, “We can do more good by finding you a lawyer. Don’t say anything until we get you one, okay? And don’t do anything stupid.”

John-Joe started to say something, but the SQ cop quickly shut him up.

I followed Eric to his skidoo. The snow had pretty much stopped. In fact, the sun was attempting to brighten the last of this abysmal day.

“That was a brave thing you did back there,” Eric said as he straddled his machine. “It probably saved John-Joe’s life.”

“You should be thanking your grandfather’s healing stone.” I held out the greenish stone, which still seemed to project a life of its own.

“No, that was you,” he replied, putting the stone back in his pouch. “The stone only helps us to express what is inside.”

Because Eric’s snowmobile was parked at the front of the line of eight machines, he had to go forward past John-Joe’s shack to the bordering beaver swamp in order to loop back around them. As we drove past a lone pine standing at the edge of the swamp, I suddenly remembered.

“Stop,” I shouted to Eric.

I jumped off and ran over to the tree where I’d seen the snowshoes. There was no sign of them now.

“What happened to your snowshoes?” I called out to John Joe, where he stood secured to a tree, under the eyes of the two cops, one set watchful, the other scornful. I had assumed the snowshoes belonged to him, but his answering confusion told me otherwise, which could mean only one thing.

“Someone else was here,” I said to Eric. And while I searched the surrounding snowy area, I told him about the snowshoes with the red strap.

“You sure you saw them?” he said.

“Yes, look at the track.” I pointed out a line of indentations, more recent than the barely discernable snowshoe tracks Eric and I had followed into John-Joe’s shack. These partially filled tracks skirted along the frozen edge of the swamp to the dam itself, where they disappeared up and over the top.

I scanned the narrow expanse of the valley to see if I could catch sight of a vanishing figure. The wind whipped the new snow into eddies that slammed against the opposite cliff wall. Short of scaling the steep incline, there seemed to be no easy exit other than the way we’d come.

“Did you see anyone on your way in?” I asked Eric.

He shook his head. “They’ve got to belong to John-Joe.”

I called out to the young man to ask again if he’d worn snowshoes. He shouted back, “No.”

“Which direction did you come from?”

John-Joe started to answer, but was stopped by the SQ guard. John-Joe, however, managed to tell us by nodding his head towards a line of deeper indentations, more boot-like, that emerged from a cleft in the valley wall behind the hunting camp. They abutted the flatter and broader snowshoe track at a right angle.

“Okay, so someone else was here. Would explain the tracks we saw earlier.” Eric said.

“So he must’ve been here when we arrived. Yikes, he was here while I was alone.” I gasped as the enormity hit me. “But I don’t remember seeing any snowshoes. Do you?”

“No, but this tree is a little off to one side. We probably just didn’t notice.” Eric paused. “And there has to be a damn good reason why he never made his presence known. He’s got to be involved.”

“Maybe, despite John-Joe having a knife, this guy’s the one who actually murdered Chantal?” An icy shiver ran down my spine. “If that’s the case, then he could’ve killed me too, while I was alone.”

Eric ran his fingers through his thick mane. “I never should’ve left you.”

“But it was my choice.” I searched his eyes, looking for any hint of loving concern, but he’d shut that part away from me. I glanced away. “I wonder where the guy hid out.”

Then I noticed another set of depressions leading to an outhouse at the edge of a birch grove. “I think I’ve found his hiding place.”

As Eric called out for one of the SQ policemen to check it out, I started walking towards the weathered wooden structure. Its door was firmly closed. I reached it at the same time as the cop. He shoved me aside, pulled out his gun and shouted in French for the guy to come out.

Eric grabbed my arm and jerked me backwards, almost making me fall into a snow drift. “Christ, what are you doing, Meg? You could get killed.”

I rubbed my wrenched shoulder. “If you don’t mind, I can look after myself. I don’t need you to push me around. Besides, there’s no way the guy is still hanging around here.” I turned my back to him but stayed where he’d pushed me, a safe distance from the outhouse.

We waited in icy silence. By the time the cop decided to open the door, my anger had dissipated, and I was chastising myself for rushing in without thinking. I snuck a quick glance at Eric, intending to offer an apology, but the set line of his lips dissuaded me. I turned back to the scene at the outhouse.

As expected, the open door revealed an empty privy. After a cursory once-over, the cop gave us the classic “crazy in the head” motion with his hand and returned to the hut.

Eric walked back to the snowshoe tracks. “You stay here. I’m going to see where these go.”

He retrieved the high-tech aluminum snowshoes strapped onto the back of his skidoo, headed up to the beaver dam and started walking across the solid, metre-wide structure made from the most stable materials the beavers can find, branches and mud.

“Sacrebleu!” Sergeant LaFramboise shouted in my ear. He pointed to Eric. “Qu’est-ce qu’il fait?”

I told him of our suspicions.

“Stop, monsieur,” he yelled at Eric. “This is a matter for the police.”

But Eric ignored him and continued walking along the top of the dam. When he reached the other side, he headed towards the cliff wall.

“Probably a better tracker than any of your men,” the Migiskan police chief said, coming to stand beside the SQ sergeant. “But to keep you happy, I’ll go with him.” And strapping on his own snowshoes, Decontie took off after Eric, who’d turned left at the base of the wall and now disappeared from view.

Perhaps LaFramboise did have a spot of human kindness in him after all, for he told me to wait in the shelter of the shack as long as I didn’t get in the way of his men.

“What about John-Joe?” I asked, looking over to where the young man stood shivering in his wet clothes, with his bare hands handcuffed to the tree. “He’s got a bad cold. Let him wait in the shack too.”

LaFramboise sneered. “Bah, he is made for such weather.”

“Much like Québécois, eh?” I shot back, no longer able to contain my anger. “I’ll wait outside with John-Joe.”

I walked over with the spare pair of mitts I carried in my backpack, but was stopped short by his SQ guard, who snatched them from my hand and tossed them to John-Joe, who of course couldn’t catch them.

“Put them on him,” I said, “or I’ll have you cited for mistreating a prisoner.”

The SQ cop glared at me, while the MPD cop picked them off the snow and shoved them onto the prisoner’s trembling hands. John-Joe flashed me one of his infamous Tom Cruise smiles, which was immediately erased by another bout of coughing.

Eric and Chief Decontie returned within a half hour, but not along the route they’d taken. They came back via the main trail to John-Joe’s hunting camp.

“Snowshoe track, all right,” Eric said. “Found a couple of clear ones made from a bear paw style of snowshoe.”

“Exactly like the pair I saw. Where’d he go?”

“Afraid we lost him,” Chief Decontie replied. “Track took us to the new ski marathon trail, where it got wiped out by snowmobile tracks and fresh snow.”

“Could he have had a skidoo waiting?” I asked. I tried to remember if I’d seen one on that stretch as we’d whisked by on our way here, but only had the image of snow and trees.

“Possible, but too hard to tell.”

“So, now that you have another suspect, does this mean you can let John-Joe go?” I asked.

Joining us, Sergeant LaFramboise interjected, “Impossible, madame. Perhaps this man is here when you arrive, but there is no evidence to tell us he is here when this young Québécoise is killed. Non, madame, there are only two persons here, Mademoiselle Chantal and the Indian. And he has the knife that analysis will prove he kills her.”

“He has a name,” Eric said, no longer bothering to conceal his anger. “It is John-Joe MacGregor.”

This last interaction finally rammed home to me the difficult task that would be facing us in proving John-Joe’s innocence. Not only would we have to disprove the overwhelming evidence against the ill-fated young man, but we’d also have to overcome the contaminating bias of Sergeant LaFramboise.

We could do nothing more for John-Joe, so Eric and I headed back to Three Deer Point determined to find him a good lawyer.

As we approached an intersection of two snowmobile trails, one to the Fishing Camp, the other to the Migiskan Village, I suddenly remembered something. “We forgot to give our statements to Corporal Whiteduck.” I yelled into Eric’s ear.

With a nod, he swerved the skidoo onto the trail to village.