The Taken

34

The divers arrived fifteen minutes later and they were six. Quinn led them to the helicopter and they clambered in, slipping on the slick rails. Wingate got as close to the pilot as he could. “Is the front better if it’s a rough ride?”

Quinn was starting up the engines. “This ain’t a 737, Detective, it’s like flying a bathtub. Everyone gets the same ride.”

Hazel smiled at him. “Good times!” she said.

“We better find him,” said Wingate.

Quinn passed back headphones with wraparound microphones. “Everyone hear me?” He passed Hazel the thermal binoculars. “A warm, living body is going to be reddish-orange – 37 Celsius is calibrated to show up red, but anything alive in this weather isn’t going to read that hot. A cold, living body is going to be closer to yellow. You start seeing purple or dark blue, then we’re talking rocks, logs, fish, or something that’s going to need putting in a pine box. Okay everyone? Ready for take-off…”

The blades whined into high speed and the tail of the helicopter rose off the ground, followed by its giant, insect-like body. It took to the air with its head lowered, and Wingate grabbed the arm of his seat with white knuckles. He mouthed the words I hate you to Hazel, who nodded once to acknowledge reception. The team of Tate and Calberson sat quietly in their seats and Childress did her best to hide a terror that was clearly at least as profound as Wingate’s.

Quinn broke away toward the northeast; the helicopter tilted to the right and pushed hard through the dark. In the headlight, the rain seemed to be falling up, an endless flow of jewel-like flashings. On the windows, it streaked sideways and flew off in silvery ripples. It didn’t feel like an airplane; there was no impression of moving forward through a resisting space; the helicopter felt like it was being lifted up and side-to-side by means of ropes attached to it. It made Wingate feel like a shoe in a dryer and he had to look down at his knees to keep his stomach.

Quinn’s voice came over the headsets, barely audible over the roar of the machine. “We’re heading to Inlet Lake first. Fifteen miles long, up to two miles wide in places. There’s an inaccessible second and third lake, and I think we should presume with your guy that if he’s out in this that he got to where he is from a shoreline accessible by a local road. We’ll do a quick flyby in any of these lakes with multiple bodies, but lingering in them is going to be a waste of time.”

Through the rain, they saw a black shape lying on the ground, a greater darkness lying at the centre of the night. This was Inlet, so named for the finger-like bays that poked off the main body. Quinn descended to about fifty feet and flew back and forth in diagonals over the water as Hazel clicked on the binocs and pointed her face through the open door at the lake. The beam from the directional – pointed over Hazel’s side – was like a moving pillar of marble in the rain. Its iris spread out over twenty feet from their height, riding choppily over Inlet’s surface. Calberson had clipped her off to a heavy metal ring on the inside of the craft, and she could lean out into the weather and look down through the bright column of rain, which, stirred by the helicopter blades, whipped around her head and body cyclonically. “I see some green and blue, some faint yellow…”

“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.”