Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery by Scott Young Page A

had suggested was unprecedented. The old barren land trapper in Inuvik who’d declared in favor of dogteams over snowmobiles on the grounds that he couldn’t skin and eat a snowmobile had been making a fairly limited assessment of the disaster plans he might consider if the need arose.
    I reran those few seconds frozen in time, the shots that killed Morton. “The guy was no trapper. Hell, I know trappers, how they smell, how they take half a day to decide to blow their nose. He was a killer, a guy with a plan. Now, what kind of a plan
could
a guy have to make sure that he got away fast and safe?”
    â€œYou tell me,” the corporal said.
    I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I’d had the idea first the day before in Ted Huff’s office and hadn’t mentioned it, and still didn’t want it to sound like the solution until I’d thought about it more.
    But the corporal was reading my mind. “Out with it,” he said. “When you get an idea you do everything but throw your arms in the air like a goddamn hockey player and do a little dance.”
    â€œAnd here I thought I was pretty inscrutable,” I said.
    â€œOut with it.”
    I’d been hoping that he wouldn’t insist, because even while I’d been talking the idea had been developing some more.
    Suppose the Komatik Air flight now listed as missing, but which had taken off with no stated destination, had been supposed to land somewhere not far from here and wait for a murderer arriving by snowmobile. Of course, that would mean the murderer was absolutely part of the drug gang on the run.
    I said, “This guy would have had to have a lot of help, even on the basis of what we know of him. He knew he’d been seen, so no alibi would stand up for sure.”
    â€œYeah, go on.”
    â€œSo he’d have to have a deal where he’d get to a lake somewhere or someplace along the river, fast, and be picked up.”
    â€œNo goddamn plane is gonna land and take off in the dark!”
    â€œIt doesn’t have to be dark,” I said. “A plane could have been out there waiting for—hell, twenty-four hours. There’s hundreds of lakes and ponds. Maybe thousands.”
    The possibilities didn’t really have to be spelled out. Charlie got the Komatik Air connection, or possible connection, right away, the one plane we knew of that had been down this way a day before the murder and maybe wasn’t missing at all, just misplaced.
    â€œShit,” Charlie said. “That’s too far-fetched.”
    â€œYou got a better idea?”
    â€œNo.” After a while he said rather respectfully, I thought, “So tell me more, oh shaman.”
    â€œWe ask the rescue people to go on with what they’re doing, as soon as they can fly, except to keep in mind that maybe these guys don’t want to be found. That would explain the lack of radio signals. Along the same line of thinking, if they landed on purpose rather than crashed, they might have camouflaged the aircraft with trees, snow, sheets, whatever, to make it less visible from the air.”
    â€œJesus,” Charlie said. “And I could be missing all this if I hadn’t resigned from the choir.”
    â€œThat’s not all,” I said. “Just in case the bunch from Inuvik isn’t in on it at all, maybe we should ask up and down the river if there’s any pilot who is, or was, supposed to meet somebody at a certain spot.”
    With most trappers carrying two-way radios these days such pickups are common for a wide variety of reasons, from death in the family to a suddenly unbearable case of hemorrhoids to which the owner wished to bid farewell.
    â€œThat makes sense,” Charlie said. “Let’s get on it.”
    He put the van in gear and started back down the road. By then it was near ten and there was a pre-dawn lightening of the landscape, a greying of the snow-filled overcast.
    We