A Dark Lure (22 page)

Suddenly the fish leaped out of the water, all sparkling silver, twisting its body in the air and flipping its tail, spraying droplets. Tori gasped. The fish slapped down on the water, and the line started to zing again—everything she’d pulled in spooling back out into the water. Her eyes started to burn with the adrenaline now thumping through her body.

“Let it run, Tori, let it run!” her dad barked.

“I’m doing it, Dad!”

“Good job, Tori,” Olivia said. “As soon as you feel it going slack, pull it in again, keep the tension on.”

She nodded, eyes riveted to the water. She felt the line go slack and rapidly drew a handful of line in.

“If you hold the line with your fingers of your right hand, keeping it taut, you can reel in the slack.”

She did. Her arms were shaking with excitement. Suddenly she saw the silvery fish in the green water. Her heart kicked. The fish saw the boat and tried to dive again. Tori let it go. When her line went slack, she reeled again, until once more she glimpsed the silvery creature.

“It’s getting tired,” Olivia said. “I think you can start bringing it in.”

Tori reeled. The fish flopped feebly toward the boat, pulled by the hook in its mouth.

Olivia reached for the net as Tori brought the trout up alongside the hull.

“Don’t forget to keep that rod tip up.” Olivia crouched down and gently scooped the net under the fish. “Reel in some more
. . .
that’s it.”

Tori got onto her knees and carefully leaned over the side of the boat while still keeping the rod tip high and the line taut.

The fish looked up at her with a terrified eye. Its pink mouth was gasping. Her chest tightened. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might bust out of her ribs.

Her first fish on a fly.

It was truly beautiful. So shiny and silvery with a rainbow blush down its side. Tori could see the tiny lure in its glistening mouth, the hook through the delicate cheek. And as she looked into that fish’s eye, something happened inside Tori. She felt a connection.

“Here,” Olivia said, reaching her hand into the net and cupping it under the fish’s belly. “Hold it like this.”

Her father took the rod from her, and Tori reached into the cold water with her bare hands. Tentatively she grasped hold of the trout.

It was firm, and slippery, and it smelled briny-fresh. In its pink mouth were teensy little razor-sharp teeth.

“It’s above size,” Olivia said. “Would you like to keep it?”

“Keep it?”

“For dinner,” said Olivia. “Or breakfast, or lunch. Nothing like fresh Broken Bar trout. They have really pinky-orange flesh, almost like a salmon. The color comes from all the micro shrimp they eat in this lake.”

Olivia took a Leatherman tool out of her fishing vest pocket as she spoke. She brought it down to the fish. “We’ll just give it a sharp bonk on the back of the head with this, and it’ll die quickly.”

Tori stared in mild shock. It was the first time she’d ever thought about killing her food, really. It was the first time she’d experienced this thrill, this having connected with a secret creature from down deep. This poor creature who’d been foxed by an imitation insect. Very quietly she said, “Can we put this one back?”

“Sure we can.” Olivia returned her Leatherman to her vest pocket. “You remove the hook like this.” She opened the mouth and carefully extracted the hook. “When I tie these lures I press down the barbs so it makes them easy to remove, and there’s less damage to the fish.”

She got something else out of her pocket. It looked like a big eyedropper. She squeezed the rubber bulb at the end and stuck the tube part of it into the fish’s throat, releasing the bulb while Tori continued to hold the trout just under water.

Olivia squeezed the contents of the dropper into the palm of her hand. Water filled her cupped palm. It was full of little black things.

“Chironomids.”

Tori peered at them. Some were still alive, squiggling.

“Now we know what the fish are feeding on right now, so we know which lures to use.” She emptied her hand. “You ready to let her go?”

Tori nodded.

“Hold her like this, move her gently so she can get water going through her gills.”

Gently the sergeant removed the Predator from the fish’s glistening mouth. He crouched down and cradled the fish in the cups of his hands
. . .
with a sudden powerful flick of its tail, it flashed out of his hands and ran upriver into the green current
. . .

And just like that, her own fish flicked its tail, and she saw the silver burrowing deep into the green.

Tori felt tears in her eyes. It made her embarrassed. She didn’t want to look up.

“It’s getting dark,” her father said gently. “Perhaps we should head back in.”

Olivia packed in the rods and started the engine again. She steered them across the lake into the choppy waters. On the opposite shore, in the distance, glowed the warm lights of the lodge.

It wasn’t really dark yet, just that the sun had gone behind the ridge and leached the color out of the landscape.

Silence descended on the occupants of the small boat as they puttered back to the shoreline in the dusk. Tori glanced over her shoulder to where the campsite was located on the west end. There were dots of flickering orange campfires among the dark trees. She could smell wood smoke. The Cariboo night chill was descending. Tori looked up at the sky.

The first star.

Her father was looking too.

They both knew what Mom would have said.

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight—make a wish, guys!

I wish on that star that you could come back, Mom.

But Tori knew now that some wishes were impossible. They could never come true. No matter how hard you wished them.

Her mother was gone.

There would never be a second chance for that.

Cole came out of the bathroom and entered the kitchenette rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He hooked the towel around his neck, poured himself a mug of coffee, and took his mug to the small table in front of a window that overlooked the lake.

Dusk had settled and wind was whipping up small whitecaps, but the water on the far side of the lake in the shadows was still. An angler in a float tube moved slowly back toward the campsite. A small boat was returning across the lake. In it were three people. It looked like Olivia and Burton with that kid. Her guided outing.

Cole paused, thinking of her words back at the barn. She’d read him like a book. A smile tempted his mouth. She had indeed read him—in
his book. Yet while she probed his secrets, she kept her own guarded tight.

He seated himself at the table and powered up his laptop. Her mystery had him hooked, and it struck him—Olivia had reawakened his interest in something outside of finding the next bar or mindless lay. His muse was starting to whisper.

His monitor came to life, but his battery was almost out of juice. He didn’t have much time before he’d have to head up to the house to charge it again.

He typed in the ranch’s wireless code and opened up a search engine. He entered the words:
Birkenhead murder.

He reached for his mug and took a sip as the results populated his screen.

While he’d conducted a cursory search on Olivia West from O’Hare Airport, he was now approaching things from a different angle. Something about that murder on the news had freaked her, and he intended to find out more.

He clicked through the links, reading. But there wasn’t much more than he’d already seen on TV or read in that
Province
article and op-ed piece. It appeared the police had still not identified the victim, a woman in her fifties. Again there were references to the signature killings from Watt Lake over a decade ago.

Cole took another sip, and this time he entered into the search engine the words
Watt Lake murders.

A long list of links came up, most of them to archived news stories. And there were plenty.

He scanned the stories one by one as he sipped his coffee. Over a period of eight years, seven women had gone missing. The first four were sex trade workers, vulnerable women who’d vanished along a highway to the north. It was only in retrospect that a pattern had been identified. The women all disappeared around Thanksgiving, just before a big snowfall. The fifth had been a young married mother whose car had broken down on a remote road north of Watt Lake. Her car had been found abandoned. At the time it had been presumed that she’d tried to walk for help and had gotten lost and perished in the snowstorm that had blown in. The sixth woman was an angler who’d gotten separated from her fishing party. The seventh was a forestry worker who’d disappeared in the woods. And then there was the last victim. The one who’d survived. Sarah Jane Baker, 25, married to Ethan Baker, owner of the local sporting goods store.

Baker had gone missing the afternoon before Thanksgiving on the cusp of a severe early winter storm. Search teams and dogs had yielded nothing. The searches had been hampered by heavy snow and low cloud.

At the time no one truly suspected foul play. The wilderness around Watt Lake was vast and endless. People easily vanished, and did often enough—hunters, mushroom pickers, fishermen, hikers, climbers, snowmobilers. The weather, wild animals, violent rivers, treacherous terrain all presented hazards. No one connected her disappearance with the seven other missing women.

The following spring, on a misty morning, a truck driver came across a wild-haired, mad-eyed young woman stumbling through snow along the remote Ki’ina logging road. She was pregnant and wrapped only in a rancid bearskin and burlap sack. She wore hiking boots and no socks. She carried a rifle, was severely hypothermic, badly cut, bruised, frostbitten, and babbling nonsense. She had a frayed rope secured tightly around her neck. Sarah Baker. Miraculously, she’d survived.

Cole swallowed, slowly setting down his mug.

As Baker recovered in hospital, the horrors of her abduction were slowly revealed. She’d been held prisoner in a shack somewhere in remote wilderness. There had been other women there before her. She’d seen a flayed body of a redhead on a meat hook. Her abductor had carved it up and put meat in his freezer.

The female forestry worker who’d disappeared the preceding fall had been a redhead.

Media swarmed Watt Lake. The story quickly went national, and then global. Homicide investigators came up from E Division in Surrey, taking over the case from the local RCMP unit. Political pressure came to bear on the federal police force.

Five months later—after Sarah Baker had given birth to her child, after a lengthy manhunt—a joint RCMP and tribal police emergency response team finally took down Sebastian George and brought him in.

At least, “Sebastian” was what he said his name was. He was, in effect, a man with no formal ID. His birth had never been registered, and he’d never been entered into any official system. In the eyes of the bureaucracy, he quite simply did not exist.

Forensics identification teams descended on his land, where gradually the scope of the depravation was revealed. The remains of the seven missing women were all found on his property. Two other bodies were found buried farther away. Those of a male and female in their late sixties—his parents, who, it appeared, had lived in squalor in an abode in the woods near the main buildings of the property.

It was pieced together that Sebastian George was the son of a drifter who’d moved up from California in the sixties and decided to go off-grid when she met and took up with Peter George, an aboriginal hunter and trapper born in Bear Claw. They’d built a completely self-sufficient homestead in the remote Bear Claw Valley on First Nations land, and lived off the forest and rivers. They’d given birth to Sebastian, raised the boy entirely off-grid.

It appeared he’d one day repaid them by abusing and killing them.

Shit.
Cole scrubbed his fingers through his damp hair. This was heavy stuff. He’d been on tour in Sierra Leone when all this had broken. George had later been tried, convicted, and then found hanged in his cell just over three years ago.

Cole clicked open a photo of the killer.

A striking man. Gaunt, tall. Wild dark curls the color of ink, amber eyes offset by a dusky complexion. Cole opened another image—that of George’s mother.

It was a photo supplied by her kin in California. Her remains had been formally linked to her California family through DNA. This photo had been taken shortly before Jenny Burch had renamed herself Nightingale and left on a walkabout, never to return. Her family had eventually presumed her dead, and stopped looking.

Cole could see where Sebastian George got his looks. Jenny Burch had been a stunner—angular features, wide amber eyes, and thick, pin-straight hair the blue-black color of a raven’s feathers.

He clicked open a photo of Sebastian George’s father. It showed Peter George as a big, bold-looking man with dusky skin, liquid black eyes, and flared cheekbones.

Scrolling further down the search results, Cole found a page with photos of the eight victims. One after the other he clicked them open until he reached the thumbnail of the last one. The one who got away. He opened the link.