Inger Wolfe - The Taken

“Where’s the yellow?”

“Off your window. About eleven o’clock.”

“I want a spot on it.”

Wingate began to rise slowly, but the pallor of his face convinced Calberson to take over. He armed the spot and turned it in the direction Hazel had been looking. It was at the shoreline where it appeared as if a tributary of the lake ran off into a swampy background. Quinn, holding the helicopter in place, was leaning out his window, squinting. The helicopter seemed to lean over as well and Wingate and Childress both grabbed the edges of their seats. He looked over at her in what he hoped would be a moment of grand commiseration, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“What are you seeing, Detective Inspector?”

“Four shapes, two large, maybe the size of a cocker spaniel, and two small. All yellowy.”

“Too warm to be body parts,” Quinn said. “Any movement?”

“Yes,” she said, hesitating. “One of the bigger ones actually seems to be moving. It is. Moving away from the shoreline.”

Tate held his hand out for the glasses and looked through them, then passed them back. “Beavers,” he said. “That’s a dam down there.”

She looked through the binoculars again and the shapes resolved into animals, two adults and two kits. The secret life of the lake. Quinn passed overtop and then turned steeply, aiming thirty degrees above his previous tack. Through the sights, Hazel saw a miasma of blue and black shapes; nothing that suggested life at all.

In this manner, with the six of them packed tightly inside, Quinn swept back and forth over Inlet Lake, suturing one shoreline to the other in lines of thrown light. The helicopter shook, jolted, slid sideways in the air, dropped suddenly, and generally shook them like a bartender making cocktails. For all this, they saw nothing. On his last pass, Quinn pulled the nose of the helicopter up and powered over the trees, pointing them in the direction of Lake MacKenzie. The sudden heave upwards made them feel like their stomachs had flattened out against their spines. It was well past eleven o’clock and the dark was full and thick with rain and they were all cold. Finally, at midnight, Wingate thrust his face out of the open door, gripping a cold steel reinforcing bar behind him, and vomited into the forest below. When he sat down, Constable Childress passed him a small white pill.

“What is it?” he asked.

Hazel leaned over and looked. She laughed. “Ativan. How fitting.”

He chewed it, grimacing.

By two in the morning, they’d covered MacKenzie and Rye, and they were heading for Pickamore Lake. If anything, the rain had intensified; the sound of it in the dark made it seem a huge presence, an omniscient force conveying them through its violent mind. Even Calberson looked green, and he spent half his working life under water. When they’d criss-crossed Lake MacKenzie, Hazel had already begun to go blind to the thermal translation of the world beneath them, and she passed the glasses to Wingate, now becalmed by Childress’s white pill. He pressed his face to the eyepiece and said wow quietly under his breath. Rye came up a blank under his inspection, and they doubled back to the southwest to get to Pickamore, the largest of the four lakes in the radius. Quinn had to refuel at a twenty-four-hour depot outside of Mandeville. When he put down, Hazel pinned Wingate with a look. “You’re not getting out, you know.”

“You’re a horrible lady.”

She grinned curiously at him. “You’re stoned.”

“Is this how she felt? Brenda Cameron?”

“She had at least three times the dosage you took. And her belly was full of alcohol, too. So, no. But can you imagine?”

“I couldn’t kill myself in this state. I’d screw it up.”

“You could do anything if you were desperate enough.”

He wiped the back of his neck. “We’re never going to find this guy. Alive.”

“We’ll see.” She signalled to Childress. The shared horror of the evening had softened her somewhat. “Call your people again.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“See if anyone’s there. Leave a message or page someone. I want your people on line in case we find Eldwin. If he’s alive, he’s going to be in rough-enough shape – I don’t want to have to presume he’s also a murderer. I’d like to know.”

“Okay, okay,” said Childress, and she started dialling.

Quinn detached the refuelling hose and clambered back up into the cockpit. “My guess is we see daylight in two and a half hours, and right about then, the rain stops too.”

“Two and a half hours might be all this guy has left. Let’s get back up there.”

Childress was shouting into the phone, but Hazel couldn’t make out what she was saying. She hoped there was someone on the other end. The constable hung up and pocketed the cell. She lifted the headset’s mic to her mouth. “There’s one guy there, not attached to our case. But he’s going to nose around and see what might be ready. He’s going to call me back.”

“Thank you,” said Hazel. Childress just nodded.

Quinn passed high over the town of Mandeville. The ’copter dipped down over the treelines and burst out over Pickamore Lake. Wingate pressed the binoculars to his face again as they began their sweep. At 4 a.m., at about four hundred metres off the northern shoreline, he saw a shape outlined in dark violet: unmistakably a canoe. There was a form in it. The middle of the form glowed pale orange and then began to fade to light purple at its extremities. He lowered the thermal binoculars to his lap and pulled the mic up over his mouth. “There he is,” he called, pointing toward the rain-wreathed island. “That’s him.”

There was a faint glow coming from the east, a pinkish light that seemed to drive the rain away and limn the early morning darkness with a phosphorescent edge. Quinn was descending toward the lake surface, creating an undulating target of waves beneath them. From within fifteen metres, they could see the form of a man in the canoe, wound in white cloth like a mummy, only his face exposed to the elements. The rainwater had filled the boat to his chin. The bloody sides of his head and the bloom of pink where the stump of his wrist was bound up in cloth confirmed for them that they had found their man. Eldwin’s eyes were closed and he had not reacted to the sound of the helicopter or their voices calling to him. Calberson suited up and pulled on a mask, but went in without a tank: it would be a simple-enough operation. He hit the water like an arrow and surfaced right away, making strong strokes for the canoe. At the same time, Tate was harnessing the rescue basket and lowering it down with the aid of an on-board winch.

Calberson reached the side of the canoe and put an arm in, feeling along Eldwin’s torso with two fingers. He pressed his fingers in hard under the man’s chin, then signalled the helicopter to slide the basket over. It drifted over the surface of Pickamore Lake toward him. The four other officers were crowded on one side looking over, no longer feeling any fear at all. Quinn had to bank back slightly to his right to keep the craft level. “Is he alive?” shouted Hazel, but Calberson couldn’t hear her over the massive drone of the rotors. He dragged the basket toward him, gripping the hook and pulling it down. He detached it from the rope and affixed it to the metal loop at the front of the canoe and then swam to the stern and with his hands on either side of it, he lofted himself up and in. Ripples moved crossways through the concentric waves made by the blades. Eldwin had not reacted to the sudden weight of another body on top of him, and Hazel looked away. A dead guilty man was considerably better than a dead innocent one, but no call had arrived and she dreaded now knowing the outcome.