Page 62
“I DO,” I SAID, sliding a piece of paper with the coordinates across the counter to her.
The janitor moved about, gathering papers to be shredded and bagged.
Officer Fagan told me to come around to her desk; she called up Google Earth and typed the coordinates in. The app zoomed in on the mountainous heavily forested area Mahoney and I had studied the night before.
The Mountie looked up at me with a frown on her face. “Are you sure? That’s the middle of nowhere, the back of Kianuko Provincial Park.”
“The burst was short, but the FBI cybercrimes expert was positive on the location.”
“Is there even a cell tower in there?” she asked, scrolling around.
“No idea,” I said. “I just know that’s where the transmission came from.”
Fagan shook her head. “Look at it. There’s nothing out there for thirty or forty miles in any direction, and I guarantee you the area is buried at the moment.”
“How can I get in there?”
She shrugged. “Snowmobile or helicopter, but there’s no way they’d let you land one in the provincial park without formal permission, and that is a total hassle to get.”
“Can you zoom out?”
The Mountie did, giving us a higher aerial view of the terrain. I scanned the scene, saw mile after mile of uninterrupted wilderness.
“Can you zoom out farther?” I asked, and she pulled back more.
“What’s this?” I pointed far west of where Bree’s cell had gone off.
“Lumber camp and sawmill. It’s just outside the park boundary. You can get to it, but you’ll have to drive all the way around to Sirdar and you’ll need a strong sled.”
“Snowmobile?”
“That too.”
I kept scanning. Along the north boundary I saw a small square that was shaded gray. “This?”
“Private inholding, including an old cabin and horse barn,” Fagan said. “A woman in Toronto inherited it, but she’s in the process of selling it to the park service.”
“Any other inholdings?”
“Several, all old mining claims,” she said. She brought up five different inholdings, all small, no more than four or five acres, and none with any structures on them until the one farthest south, a remote triangle of property a good fifty miles from the signal.
She zoomed in on the area, revealing the caved-in roof of a metal building. “Used to be an old silver mine. Abandoned in the 1960s. Some outfit out of Edmonton bought the rights and went back in there about ten years ago, hunting for rare earth metals and silver. Test borings never panned out. The project was abandoned.”
“And these?” I asked, tapping on two structures about nine miles apart between the GPS coordinates of Bree’s last phone transmission and the city of Kimberley.
“Those are well inside the park boundaries, old trapper cabins from before the formation of the park. A snowmobile-rental place out of Meacham uses the closer one for day riders to stop and get warm. There’s a woodstove in it.”
“I’ll start there,” I said. “Rent one of those snowmobiles in Meacham.”
The Mountie looked at me skeptically. “You ever driven a snowmobile?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I am going with you to protect the Canadian government’s interests.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s go.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Dr. Cross, I completely understand your eagerness to get out and see if your wife is there. But we’ve got only two hours of daylight left and a storm that’s still puking snow. We won’t even get close before dark. Storm is supposed to end during the night. We’ll go first thing in the morning.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62 (Reading here)
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111