the coast north of Stink’s place. Unfortunately the guy wasn’t paying much attention, because it was before the murder was discovered, but he thinks it was going north. They’re sending a party out at first light tomorrow to check on that boat you reported up near Windy Point.”
Chris tried to think through the increasing fog of alcohol. “But if it was him, why would he go ashore in the middle of nowhere? Why not keep going all the way to St. Anthony?”
Willington shrugged. “Well, the one thing the fisherman did notice was that the boat was going pretty fast. Faster than Stink’s boat likes, he said. Anyway, at least it’s a lead. Right now they’ll take any lead they can get. They have no idea what direction Cousins has gone or where he might be heading. It’s hard to even know where to initiate the search. And it’s a hell of a lot of territory to search, all rugged, mountainous terrain. You could hide in a cove and not be seen by a boat passing fifty feet offshore. Hell, you could hide in the tuckamore and not be seen from twenty feet!” He leaned forward, his expression sobering. “If he doesn’t want to be found, we may never find him.”
Chris’s thoughts drifted to Amanda. She too was groping in the dark, without the communications and manpower of the RCMP, and nothing but her own stubborn grit to drive her on. How long would it take before she gave up and came back?
“Which brings me to my second piece of intel,” Willington was saying, his round face creasing in a grin. “What are the chances? You tie an anchor around a guy and you dump him overboard 250 kilometres from shore. What are the chances of that body ever being found?”
“Pure luck,” Chris agreed.
“Shit luck for the guy who threw him overboard. That body the shrimpers towed ashore? Preliminary post-mortem results show he likely died of hypothermia, but he was also near starvation. Six feet tall, but weighed little more than a hundred pounds when he died.”
Chris cast his mind back to that night on the wharf in St. Anthony. Had it really been only four days ago? The poor man had been dressed in a thin jacket and even thinner shoes, providing poor protection against the chilly winds of the North Atlantic. And now it appeared that not only had he been inadequately clothed on the ship, but also inadequately fed. A stranger far from home, frozen and starving.
“Okay, but someone tied an anchor to the man’s body, so it’s more than just natural death. What is the medical examiner thinking? Just a cover-up?”
Willington shrugged. “I don’t think they’re ruling out criminal negligence causing death.”
“But someone’s hiding something! They went to some lengths to prevent the body from being found, and at the very least, the victim wasn’t provided the bare necessities of life by the captain of the ship.” Sensing his patience and his temper fraying, Chris took a cautious sip of his beer. He’d had little to eat that day and a second beer wasn’t really what he needed before dinner. Facts and theories tumbled through his mind, trying to connect. A boat carrying fugitives, possibly foreign, had been spotted not far south of St. Anthony, and that boat had later been found by some village boys hidden onshore even farther south. The fugitives had vanished without a trace. Neither the coast guard nor the local villagers had seen any sign of them.
“Have Border Services or the RCMP got anywhere identifying the ship that the dead man was travelling on?” he asked.
“If he went into the water where he was found — a big if, given ocean currents — then he was inside Canadian waters. And if we connect him to the men in the lifeboat —”
“I think we should. Absolutely. At least as a working hypothesis. How many boats were carrying foreign nationals?”
“Well, that’s the problem, there weren’t any foreign vessels in that area in that time frame.”
“That we know of.”
Willington gave his loud, boisterous laugh. “What? You’re suggesting there’s something we don’t know?”
“Foreign trawlers sneak in all the time, no matter what the official line is.”
“I’m shocked. But anyway, it might not be a trawler at all. The Feds are looking at smuggling operations, possibly involving foreign ships heading for the St. Lawrence. Because there’s one last piece of intel …” Willington leaned forward, wiggling his eyebrows and clearly relishing the suspense. “The dead man had a piece of paper in his pocket. Forensics is still trying to decipher it all, but it appears to be a name and phone number with a 315 area code. That’s Saint Lawrence County in upstate New York. Not much there except big empty spaces, but its main claim to fame? It borders the St. Lawrence River.”
He watched as Chris drew his own conclusions. The St. Lawrence River formed a thousand kilometres of undefended, sparsely populated border between Canada and the United States. With its many islands and hidden coves, it had a long, colourful history as a smuggling route between the two countries for everything from guns and bootleg liquor to illegal refugees, who often paid thousands of dollars to crooks and conmen in their search for a better life.
Northern Newfoundland was a long way off course, but if the boat had originated in northern Europe and had travelled through the North Sea, it’s possible it was headed across to the Strait of Belle Isle and down to the St. Lawrence.
“So the hunt is now ramped up for those fugitives from the lifeboat,” Willington was saying. “They might provide some information on the smuggling theory as well as the man’s death.”
“If they were desperate to escape detection, they might even have been involved in his death,” Chris said, his thoughts turning dark. There are a lot of desperate people on the run in the wilderness around here, he thought. I hope to hell Amanda is not smack in the middle of it all.
Amanda stood on the side of the hill, looking around her. More grey, endless trees and ravines. Even the sky was a grim, gunmetal grey. The adrenaline of earlier had long since faded from her system, leaving her shaky and more tired than ever. Where was the goddamn sun? Would it hurt to give her a little glimpse, so she’d have a clue as to her direction.
She studied the pattern of moss and lichen on the trees — another basic orienteering technique — but it seemed to be everywhere, clinging to the trunks and branches like a grey shroud. Perhaps if she were a native Newfoundlander, she would be more adept at reading the land, but her knowledge of the lush jungles of Africa and Asia were no use to her here.
She listened for sounds of surf, and thought she detected a distant whisper, but it evaporated in the wind. For good measure, she shouted Tyler’s name and cupped her ear for a response. No response. Only Kaylee, who bounded over to drop a stick at her feet.
In spite of herself, Amanda laughed. “Okay, princess, we need to get some food into our bodies, and then you’re going to put that nose of yours to something more useful than finding sticks.”
She struck out toward what looked like a clearing, pausing to pick berries and to turn over rocks and rotten logs along the way. Her years overseas had taught her not to be squeamish. Frogs, snakes, snails, and bugs were excellent sources of protein, the latter preferably deep fried to a nice crunch. In Asia they showed up on elegant restaurant menus as well as morning market stalls. Bugs would not be her first choice for breakfast, but when starvation loomed, they would do in a pinch.
The clearing turned out to be a small lake — Newfoundlanders would call it a pond, as if every body of water were measured against the enormity of the sea. She and Kaylee both drank from a small
