CHAPTER 61

“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.”