Death Dealer. Kate Clark Flora
in the quiet neighborhood. Beyond his security lights, the black was absolute. He was in his underwear and without gloves, but pumping adrenaline kept the cold at bay as he moved off the deck to check around the garage and the cars. His gun was up and ready. Checking. Listening. Checking. Something moving triggered those lights and he had reason to believe it could be more than a wandering animal.
The clear night was silent but for the occasional damp plop of snow knocked from a branch by the light wind and the crackle of a few dry leaves that hadn’t fallen yet. Across the neighborhood, an animal gave a single sharp cry and a dog barked in response. Out on the highway, a truck engine roared as it crossed the Miramichi bridge, up-shifting as it labored uphill and headed away toward Moncton. The hair on his neck prickled as he searched the dark shrubbery for a human shadow’s different darkness, then scanned the perimeter of his house for something that didn’t belong by turning his head slightly to let his peripheral vision detect movement. He waited and watched as the cold lifted his skin into goose bumps.
Only a few weeks into the investigation into Maria Tanasichuk’s mysterious disappearance, he wasn’t sleeping much. It was supposed to be a relaxing night. At home for once, instead of on surveillance, and in bed not long after midnight. Able, for a short time, to silence the lists and what-ifs that plagued his mind, the constant second-guessing that hounded any complex investigation. But their suspect was a seasoned hunter. A gun nut. Deft with a bow and arrow. And he was nocturnal—as comfortable moving through the night as any sly and dangerous predator.
Their intelligence was that the suspect had become explosively angry at having the focus of the investigation so relentlessly turned on him, frustrated that his superior intelligence and the framework of lies he had spun had failed to divert the police from their constant concentration on his movements and their pressure on his friends. They had heard that he planned to retaliate against their families. It was information they had to take seriously.
They were trying to watch him so they would know where he was, but continuous surveillance by such a small police department in a quaint, quiet city, especially during the brutal cold of a Canadian winter, was difficult. Doubly hard when he was as likely to be traveling the hundreds of miles of hiking and snowmobile trails on foot or his three-wheel ATV through the surrounding woods as on the city streets.
The detective continued on around the perimeter of his house. Moving. Stopping. Listening. The cold gun in his hands was heavy and he steadied it, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. Hoping that if he did, it wouldn’t be like the scene in his recurring nightmares—his gun jamming instead of firing or dribbling the bullets uselessly onto the ground as the bad guy raises his gun and fires.
Inside the house, his pretty, dark-haired wife and two small sons were sleeping. His boys. He’d be the first to tell you that the days they were born were two of the most important days of his life. He could accept the threat to himself. Personal danger is part of what he took on thirteen years ago when he made his decision to become a police officer. He accepted risk as a given in his life. The threat to his family was something new. It upped the ante and complicated everything.
Almost from the beginning, the investigation into Maria Tanasichuk’s disappearance had been proceeding on two fronts. First, to amass enough evidence to arrest their suspect and take him off the streets in a case where they had no witnesses, weapon, crime scene or even a body, only their certainty, based on experience, that Maria was dead. Second, to find Maria’s body before her killer could move it someplace so deep within the surrounding forests that they’d have no chance of finding it. Before the spring thaw came and the murderer buried it. Before scavenging predators destroyed it. They were desperate to find it so that they had definitive evidence of the crime they were certain had been committed and closure for her suffering family and friends.
Yet a new dimension had been added. Each time the phone rang—and his phone already rang at all hours of the day and night—it might be a new witness or a known witness who had recalled something vital; it might be the news that one of their searches had finally turned up Maria’s body or it might be his wife or Paul’s wife or Dewey’s wife with the desperate message: “He’s here!”
The threat to his wife and his boys was not acceptable.
The detective continued his circuit of the house, eyes watering in the cold wind, moving slowly enough to do a thorough search, even though the last of the bed’s warmth had blown away and the night’s chill was penetrating to his bones. There was nothing out there that he could see or hear, the hunter who had become the hunted.
He watched the motion sensor lights fade out. At last, having done all he could, he went inside. He placed the gun back at the head of the bed, where it would stay at night until their suspect was securely behind bars. Then the detective slid, shivering, back into bed and tried to resume his interrupted sleep.
The Canadian city of Miramichi, in northeast New Brunswick, Canada, hasn’t been a city very long. It was cobbled together in 1995 by combining the towns of Newcastle and Chatham, which lay on opposite banks of the Miramichi River, with the smaller towns of Douglastown, Loggieville, Nelson, Chatham Head, Nordin, Moorefield and Douglasfield. Although they have been one city for several years, each of the towns still retains its own character, its own downtown and its own stories, including a long-standing rivalry between Newcastle and Chatham that started in the “fighting election of 1843” and resulted in skirmishes between rival factions in the streets. Although Miramichi is small in population, it is the third largest city in the province of New Brunswick.
It’s a hardscrabble area where many people still make their living off the land and it was hit hard by the closure of the region’s two large paper mills, which resulted in an employment migration where many of the men traveled to western Canada for work, leaving their families behind. The population is a mixture of Acadian, Scottish and Irish and nearly two-thirds of the area’s residents are Catholic. Although the region is legally bilingual, almost 90 percent of the population is English-speaking. The area has an aging population and old-fashioned values. It is still the kind of a place where children roam freely between houses and people invite you home for dinner and serve homemade pickles. If you’re lucky, at the meal you’ll also get fresh-caught Miramichi salmon.
The Miramichi, or the ’Chi, as some residents call it, is a world-famous salmon fishing river, with a long tradition of families coming to fishing camps along the river every summer, often renewing their connection with the same river guide or family of river guides for generations. Although there are often significant economic disparities between these visitors and the local residents, the river exerts its sway on everyone.
As its many branches come together, the beautiful river widens as it winds its way through the city and makes its final approach to the ocean. The area’s residents are passionate about their river and their region. Locals don’t so much speak of being from a particular town as they speak of their region, of being “on the Miramichi,” “in the Miramichi” or just “on the river.” The geography and character of the area gets into people’s blood and holds them there, making it hard to leave and drawing those who grew up there back when they do.
In the middle of the river, just southwest of the town, is Beaubears