The motorcycle fishtailed as it came to a stop in front of us. The rider got off and walked over to us. He shook his hands. With no gloves, they must have been colder than hell. When he got to the truck, I rolled down my window. He took his helmet off.
“You always drive that fast?” he said. He had long dark hair, dark eyes, and the wide cheekbones of a full-blooded Indian. He looked in past me at Vinnie.
“You must be Guy Berard,” I said.
If he was surprised, it didn’t show. “You’re McKnight and LeBlanc. I’ve been trying to catch up to you ever since you left the police station.”
“How’d you know we were there?”
“I saw you guys on the road,” he said. “Where that van was. I saw the police take you away.”
“Yeah? And how did you know who we were?”
He gave me a slight smile. “My mother told me all about you.”
“You were at home, weren’t you,” I said. “How come you were hiding from us?”
“Can we go talk about this somewhere? I’m freezing my ass off.”
“What do you know about the men on the hunting trip?” Vinnie said.
Guy looked past me again. The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. “You’re the brother.”
“Yes,” Vinnie said.
“We need to talk,” he said. “Follow me.”
“Why should we?” Vinnie said. I was surprised at the hard edge in his voice. “If you know something about my brother, just tell me now.”
The wind came up again. It kicked up a riot of snowflakes. Guy buried his hands in his armpits.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “And then you can decide if you want to hear the rest. I was there at the lodge on Saturday.”
“We already figured that out,” Vinnie said. “That’s the day Tom’s group flew back from the lake.”
“Did you talk to them?” I said.
“No, not that day,” Guy said. “They were already gone.”
“Okay, so what’s the big deal?” Vinnie said.
“I don’t think they came back that day at all,” he said.
“What are you saying?” I could feel Vinnie sliding over on the seat.
“I’m saying I think they either came back on a different day,” he said. “Or else they never flew out to that lake in the first place.”
Chapter Ten
We followed Guy back to the reserve. I got a little anxious driving by the crime scene again. There were five OPP cars parked up and down the road, along with three cars from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A thin yellow tape was stretched from tree to tree, forming a loose circle around Albright’s Suburban. Some of the officers on the scene looked up at us as we passed, but nobody stopped us.
Just for the hell of it, I turned my cell phone back on. Our new friend from Detroit had called three more times just in the past few minutes, and left one message. I tried calling in to hear it, but the signal faded out almost immediately. I left the phone on the seat and got out of the truck.
“Same guy?” Vinnie said.
“Apparently.”
“Shouldn’t we call him back? He might know something.”
“It sounds more like he wants us to tell him what’s going on. But yeah, I suppose we should. As soon as we head south a little bit, we’ll pick up a signal again.”
Guy parked his motorcycle behind his house and came back around to lead us through the front door. His mother nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw us.
“It’s okay,” Guy said. “I stopped them on the road. I decided I needed to talk to them.”
She nodded her head, but kept staring at us with wide eyes. Guy sat down next to her on the couch and slid over to give Vinnie room. I sat on the chair next to the television. The air in the room was hot and stale.
“So why are you talking to us now?” I said. “Earlier today, you were hiding from us.”
“A lot’s happened since then,” he said. “They found that Suburban in the woods, for one thing. Then the police came by looking for me. Just to ask me some questions, they said.” His mother closed her eyes as he said that. “They must have got my name from the lodge. And with me living here on the reserve, I mean, you can imagine what they were thinking. I know they’ll ask me if I had ever met Tom before, or if I had talked to him at the lodge.”
“Did you?” Vinnie said. “You said they were already gone when you got there on Saturday.”
“It was the Saturday before, when they first got there. I had just come back with a group that day, and I was still hanging around when they pulled up. Mr. Gannon had told me they didn’t want a guide. So when I saw Tom, I said to myself, no wonder, these jokers brought their own guide. I was a little upset. Then I heard these guys carrying on, and I wasn’t upset anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were just a bad bunch, you know? The white guys, I mean.” He slipped me a quick look. “Not Tom. He was cool about it. These guys were all hitting on Mrs. St. Jean and making all these jokes about shooting anything that moved. I mean, you hear that kind of stuff a lot, but these guys-There was something about them, like they weren’t just kidding around. I was pretty sure Tom was at least part Indian, so I went up to him and asked him what the deal was on these guys. He said they were all a little drunk already. I guess it was quite a trip getting up there. I asked him if he was up for spending a whole week with these guys, and he said he’d deal with it.”
“Had Tom been drinking?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Okay. So what happened then? They loaded up the plane and flew out?”
“I don’t know. I left. I had just been out in the woods for a week. So I wanted to get home and take a shower.”
“So you never actually saw them fly out in the plane.”
“No,” he said. “I just assumed they did. The next time I was at the lodge was this past Saturday, the day they were supposed to come back. By the time I got there, they were already gone. The plane was back on the dock, and their Suburban wasn’t there anymore.”
“So what makes you think they never flew out there?”
“It’s just a bunch of things, you know? I never really put it together in my head until today, when they were asking me all those questions. When I got to the lodge on Saturday, it was like nobody had been there at all. The butcher shed was clean, the dock was clean. It was just… weird.”
“Gannon said they didn’t get a moose,” Vinnie said. “So of course the shed’s gonna be clean.”
“Yeah, well, I asked him about that. And that’s what he told me. He flew them back that morning. No moose. No nothing. They got in their van and left. But it was just-I don’t know, the way he said it. It just gave me a funny feeling. And then when the other group got there, I was busy helping them get their stuff together, while Mr. Gannon fired up the Otter. That’s his plane-it’s an old DHC-3 Otter. Sometimes it takes a while to get warmed up, you know. Anyway, I’m helping out these guys and I can’t help noticing, he’s cranking and cranking that thing until it finally starts. If he had just been out that morning, the engine would have still been warm.”
“Are you gonna tell the police this?” I said.
He raised his hands. “I’m gonna tell them I’ve got this funny feeling Mr. Gannon never actually flew out on Saturday to pick them up? And that everybody at the lodge is lying to them? How do you think that’s gonna go over? They’re already asking questions about me, like they’re thinking maybe me and Tom had something to do with this.”
His mother closed her eyes again. She put her hand to her face and took a deep breath. “Guy, mon coeur,” she said.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It’s gonna be okay.”
“It’s not good,” she said. “For any of us. It’s the last thing this place needs right now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just from my old days as a cop, I gotta tell ya. The odds of getting four people to all tell you the same lie
…”
“Did you talk to all four of them?”