A Very Tranquil Murder

Chapter 19

A hiking trail led off of a small parking lot where Jovenal turned in and parked the truck. The lot had been plowed in a slapdash manner, probably by someone who belonged to the local hiking club and had a snow blade attached to the front of his pickup. Jovenal flashed his badge as he climbed out of the truck and the hiker began gabbling at him in rapid Québecois, his German shepherd lunging on hind legs against the leash. By the way he kept repeating 'mon chien, mon chien' I gathered it was the dog that had found the corpse.

Snow-covered branches scraped against my ski jacket as I followed the men into the woods. The hiker moved lightly on modern, aluminum-framed snowshoes. Jovenal and I trudged behind, our boots sinking into the foot-thick layer of fresh snow, sometimes breaking through the crust of ice from the previous night's freezing rain and foundering in the granular snowbase beneath.

We hadn't gone far when the trail made a sharp turn and the terrain to the right dipped, forming a rocky hollow half-sheltered by pine trees. The dog went ballistic, yelping and straining at the leash. A freshly-broken trail zig-zagged down the embankment to a place where the snow had been dug up and flung aside. Staring at us from that hole in the snow, like a photograph from an exhibition of doomed Arctic explorers, was the blue, frozen, wide-eyed face of a man, with a black tuque pulled down to his frost-encrusted eyebrows.

"Stay back," Jovenal commanded.

Everyone except the dog obeyed him. The German shepherd barked madly in the direction of the corpse, hackles raised, tail thrashing, throwing its entire body weight against the leash. The hiker hung on to the leash with one hand and wrapped his other arm around a tree, an anchor to prevent the dog from dragging him down the embankment. He shouted a string of commands interspersed with French-Canadian curses that clashed against the dog's yelps in an indecipherable argument between man and beast.

Meanwhile, Jovenal eased himself down the slope, hanging on to the overhead tree branches as he followed the freshly-broken trail through the snow. Reaching the corpse, he bent over to inspect it. The snow fell through the pine trees, pristine and incongruous. At last Jovenal climbed the slope and rejoined us.

"Let's go back to the truck," he said.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sharing the rear seat of the pickup with the agitated hind-quarters of the German shepherd. The front part of the dog was hanging out of the half-open window, barking at the squad of emergency vehicles pulling into the parking lot. Ambulance. Police car. Fire truck. Red emergency lights strobed the grayscale landscape of snow and trees. Men and women in heavy black jackets overlaid with fluorescent emergency vests trooped out of the vehicles, toting the equipment of their trades: Ropes and carabiners. A stretcher. A camera. They disappeared down the trail as the flashing lights continued to bathe the woods in the colour of distress.

In the front seat of the truck, Jovenal was taking the hiker's statement. The French language rolled off the police officer's tongue in round syllables like sea-smoothed pebbles; the hiker's dialect was sharp and fast, like handfuls of gravel thrown against a window. I strained to follow the conversation through the lashings of the dog's greasy tail against my face.

I gathered the hiker and his dog were alone that morning on the trail. It was a popular hike in the summer, but not in the winter-time, when treacherous snow hid the steep, rocky sections. The trail formed a loop, and the hiker had started at the other end from where the three of us had gone in. He'd allowed his dog to rove off-leash: it liked to circle through the woods, chasing squirrels and snuffling in the snow. The hiker had almost completed the loop when he heard his dog's frenzied barking from somewhere in the woods ahead. As he hurried down the trail toward the sound, he wondered if the shepherd had cornered a wild animal: a porcupine, or a raccoon. Coming around a bend, he saw the snow flying up from an indentation on the side of the trail, his dog head and torso deep in a drift. He called, but the dog wouldn't come. It was the type of dog (he said in an agitated tangent) that was attracted to the scent of dead things.

After working his way down the slope, he managed to haul the dog off of its prize. He was horrified to see the face of a man staring out at him from the snow.

At first he thought the victim must have been a hiker who had stumbled off the trail, broken a leg and been unable to haul himself up the incline, died of blood loss or shock or hypothermia. He'd stood there in the deep drift, staring at the face, trying to match it with the faces of anyone he knew. A lot of the people who used the trail were regulars, especially in the winter after the tourists and fairweather hikers had disappeared. He thought surely he'd recognize the face of someone he'd passed often on the trail. But his memory came up empty. This man was a stranger.

He felt distressed, as though he could have saved the man if only he'd hiked the loop the other way around, if only he'd come across him sooner. But of course that was illogical: the fact that he was buried in snow indicated that he'd lain there at least overnight, if not longer. Overcoming his horror, he reached down to push back the man's tuque, to get a better look at his face. It was then that he saw the bullet-hole: a round puncture in the tight weave of the knitted cap, singed at the edges and encrusted with something that stained the black wool even blacker. The stranger had been shot through the forehead.

Unequipped with a cell phone, the hiker had run to the road to flag down someone for help. That was all he knew.

Had he seen anything strange or unusual? — Jovenal asked. Perhaps an item dropped in the parking lot, or by the side of the trail?

The hiker thought for a moment. No, there wasn't anything — but he could put a call-out on his Facebook group to see if anyone else had noticed something. The group called themselves Les Randonneurs des Laurentides.

While Jovenal finished his interview in the front seat, I pulled up Les Randonneurs des Laurentides on my phone. It was a closed group, reserved for 'local nature lovers.' I sent a message, asking to join. I figured I loved nature as much as anyone else; besides, who could refuse a local B&B owner who wanted to offer her guests and authentic outdoor experience?