Hardin eyed Ginny, still about as worth eyeing at age sixty-three as she ever was, then looked at my birthmarked mug and mad scientist glasses.
“All right. I’ve got the file—”
“Hold the file,” I interrupted. “First just tell us what happened as you saw it happening.”
“Okay.” He sighed. “But there isn’t much.” He glanced at a calendar across the room, then began: “August twenty-second. I came in to open up the station at nine A.M. Station hours are nine to four, but an officer isn’t always here. Jill holds the fort.” He gestured toward a young First Nations woman at a desk near the counter.
“Anyway, we found a mobile phone that morning propped on the window ledge by the front door — no explanation, but it wasn’t the first time a lost article’s been left here after hours. Jill put it on a shelf and things got busy and... the next afternoon a transmission came through from Winnipeg on our private system. Some photos had been posted on a Facebook page — this American’s, Tom Kostner — showing what looked like a suicide by hanging, and they — someone, the tech people — had tracked the point of posting to this vicinity, meaning about a hundred meters from where we’re sitting. The dead person appeared to be Kostner himself, and the posting happened about eleven P.M. on the twenty-first.
“I took the transmission out on a back road, so I called in here to Jill and told her to put the lost phone on my desk, just in case.
“Well, when I got back, we went online first of all to look at the posted pictures. Have you seen ’em?”
I shook my head again. “By the time we got involved, the Facebook page was down.”
“Here, then. The file has copies.” He slid a folder at me from across the desk with an expressive thrust, then sat back and folded his arms.
The top photo in the file showed a man’s body suspended by the neck from a tree branch via a heavy cord, the general background being that of a medium dense forest, but with fairly good lighting coming down through the trees. The next showed a much closer view of the man’s upper body and head from a low angle, with the face a death mask of yellow and purple agony. Attached to the man’s shirt in this view was a piece of paper, and the third photo was a close-up of the paper, again from a low angle, but not so low that the message on it wasn’t readable:
I’m sorry, everyone. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Ginny and I examined the pictures together and compared the second one to a photo of Kostner that we’d brought along.
After a moment of silence, she looked up at the Mountie and said, “And the phone?”
“It belonged to Tom Kostner, and the photos were on it. No dating. I asked if there might be a way to find out where the phone was when they were taken — that triangulation business from the towers — and got a negative. If the event took place more than a few miles away from the main highway, though, well — that area’s out of mobile range anyway. Forest, lakes, and bogs, mostly, not enough people to justify extending the towers. Hardly any.
“So... that made finding the body somewhat difficult unless the site was near a traveled road. I hope you can understand the problem. Our manpower’s limited; the wilderness areas... there’re probably two thousand square kilometers of unpopulated forest within fifty kilometers of Grand Fork. We searched the likeliest locales pretty carefully, but nothing’s turned up, and it’s now—” He glanced at the calendar. “I make it seven weeks. Wolves, scavengers, carrion birds, they’ll have picked the bones clean long since. Some hunters just might find what’s left, now that the season’s starting, or trekkers. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”
“Right,” I said. “We understand that part. Did you try to trace Kostner’s movements?”
“We did, a pretty thorough job. He entered Manitoba on August nineteenth coming up through North Dakota, told the border people he was on vacation and was going to be in Canada nine or ten days. He spent that night and the next in a lodge in Arborg and was expected back for two more.”
“And Arborg is where? From here, I mean?”
“It’s... I’d say it’s about a three hundred kilometer drive — south to Ashern and then east over to Lake Winnipeg. We did find the car, his own. It was right here in Grand Fork parked in some shrubbery behind a remote vacant house. Nobody saw it drive in, though, and nobody remembers seeing anyone who resembled Tom Kostner.”
“The phone,” Ginny said as soon as Hardin seemed finished, “I still... that is, you’re saying that Tom Kostner’s own phone was used to photograph him hanging there, but the person who took the photos...” She gave me a look of dubiety before continuing, “Doesn’t that suggest a strong possibility that he had a... or rather, I see two — no, three, at least three possible scenarios. Either someone accompanied him and, in essence, assisted him; or someone came across his body hanging from the tree and found the cell phone on the ground; or... someone murdered him and manufactured the appearance of suicide. Were there fingerprints on the phone?”
Hardin sat still for a few seconds, looking uncomfortable before responding, “Right now we don’t even have a body, Mrs. Carr, but, believe me, everything in the investigation so far points to a simple explanation. Tom Kostner came to Manitoba alone, he stayed alone, he drove his car to Grand Fork alone with the intention of doing what he did — committing suicide privately somewhere out in the woods, and he left a note saying as much. We do have verification from the U.S. that he was a loner with no close family or friends, just a son and daughter he hardly ever saw. In the trunk of his car I personally found the wrapping for a hundred feet of nylon cord, a brand not sold in Canada.
“As for the phone, the simplest explanation seems the best there too. Someone came on the scene by accident. It was August, when amongst the other tourists we get a fair number of wilderness trekkers doing their vacations. Or it could have been someone more local doing something they shouldn’t have — trapping or hunting out of season. It still goes on. Or they may have robbed the corpse.
“One thing certain is that this person wanted to report the situation without getting involved. He — or she — found the phone. If you look at that wide angle picture closely you can just make out a backpack on the ground, and it may have come from there. The person took the pictures, we know that, probably played around with the phone and found the owner’s identity and links to the Facebook page, and left it outside for us to find. There were no fingerprints on the phone but mine and Jill’s, which says a lot.”
Ginny gave me a quick, dissatisfied glance but stayed silent, and all I said was, “Well, now maybe you can see why we wanted to talk face to face.”
“In a way. But it’s been an expensive conversation.”
“That’s our worry, not yours.”
I thanked him for his help and asked for copies of the photos and the name of the lodge in Arborg where Kostner had stayed, and he was, so he claimed, happy to help.
He was even happier — no doubt in my mind — to see us off the premises, and you couldn’t blame him. No cop anywhere likes to have his failures dragged out into the light to be second-guessed by strangers, especially, as in this case, when he’s done a thorough job and come up short.
We got cold sandwiches and chips in a convenience store/gas station for a late lunch and sat at a picnic table under some pines to eat, even though the temperature was only low fifties, the wind blew in gusts, and the sky was overcast.
“Well,” I said, after a couple of minutes of silent munching, “What do you think?”
“About the food? This is one of the worst sandwiches I’ve ever eaten. About the case? I’m thinking the same thing you are, I presume: What’s wrong with this picture?”