Northern Lights: A Due South Novel

Chapter 24: The Man That Did Fit In

Elizabeth rarely texted her father, but when she did, her messages were blunt, practical, and correctly punctuated. When Fraser woke at 6 a.m., he received three of Elizabeth's messages in quick succession.

We are stuck on the smuggler's plane.

We stowed away.

Meet us at the airstrip.

He sent a quick Understood, but she did not reply. This should not have worried him. Even when stowed away with smugglers, Elizabeth would always follow the captain's directions to place her phone in airplane mode. Still, he had that same gnawing feeling he got whenever she ran into danger. From watching her climb her first tree to her first high-speed chase, he never settled when she was at risk. He suspected he'd inflicted the same feeling on his friends and colleagues. A bitter part of him, one he struggled to repress, wondered if his father had ever felt this way.

Fraser had already planned to return to Bear Falls that morning. He accelerated his departure, leaving Whitehorse before the sun climbed over the eastern horizon. As he drove, his service pistol was on his hip and his father's hunting rifle in a case on the back seat. Although the weapon was practically an antique, he knew its weight and recoil better than any of the modern high-powered long guns in the RCMP's arsenal. Fraser had carried the rifle through peak and valley. He had used it to hunt the caribou that had sustained him and Ray Kowalski on the trail. He had even trained Elizabeth to shoot it when she barely reached his shoulder. It had served him in blizzards and rainstorms. Battle called for a trusted weapon.

Kowalski was feeding the sled dogs when Fraser arrived, his boots dark from the melting snow. Standing beneath the whispering pines, Fraser shared Elizabeth and Jon's audacious plan.

"I had a breakthrough, too." Kowalski grinned.

When they entered the cabin, Kowalski pointed him to the unused bunk. On the fading flannel duvet rested two large plastic bags. The first, a Ziploc, held a familiar can of bear spray. The other, a clear recycling bag, held a pair of men's boots.

"Is that your bear spray?"

"Indeed," Fraser said as he picked up the bag. "I thought I might be short a can."

"How'd the killer get it? Was he here?" Kowalski looked around the one-room cabin as though the killer might leap from behind the couch.

"Possibly. But the lock wasn't broken. Nothing was damaged. Constable Black had a key. She could have come here before she went to the cliff."

"She came looking for you," Kowalski said. "Because she was in trouble."

Ray's words struck his heart. Fraser closed his eyes and squeezed the polished wood bed frame. If only he had been here that night. In fact, he had planned to be here, as he often did on weekends when Elizabeth wasn't in Whitehorse. But it had snowed that afternoon, beginning just as his last meeting ended and not stopping until dinnertime. He'd waited until morning rather than brave an unploughed highway in the dark. If he'd driven that night, Tamara would have found an ally instead of a cold, empty cabin, where the only weapons were a knife, an axe, and a few cans of bear spray.

Of course, he also could have driven into a ditch.

"But if she was here, why didn't she leave you some clue? A note?"

The bed rattled as Fraser pushed off it. "Maybe she didn't have time. Maybe she didn't think she'd need it."

"Or the killer broke in and took it," Kowalski said.

Fraser moved to the room's centre. As he turned in a circle, he took in the cracks in the log walls and the floor. The gaps in the woodpile. The darkness between the mattresses and the bunk beds. The framed family pictures, each of which offered a hiding space between the matte and the backing. His cabin held dozens of hiding spots, especially for something small.