“Got a buddy’s who’s a bush pilot. The guy flew him up.”

“What’s happening with Unka?” I asked.

“Stick in the fork. He’s done.”

“Fast?”

“Lost a chunk of one shoulder, but he’ll survive.”

“Is he lucid yet?”

“Oh, yeah. He and Tyne are in a sprint to see who can give it up faster.”

“They’ve turned on each other?”

“The boys are looking to deal. Got to hand it to you, Tempe. You were spot-on. Ruben had nothing to do with the drug hits.”

“What are Fast and Tyne saying?”

“It seems originally, no killings were planned. They were just going to defraud McLeod’s kids out of their mineral rights with the ‘save the caribou’ scam. Snook would donate willingly, and Beck could be induced to do it during one of his drug or alcohol blackouts. The bigger problem was Ruben. Since she wasn’t mentally competent to sign over anything, she had to disappear long enough to be declared dead so her interest would pass to the other two.

“The plan ran off track when this Skipper dude showed up to whine to the review board. He discovered that one of the things Tyne was doing was collecting land claims. He confronted Tyne, and they came to blows. Skipper apparently learned that Beck was one of the people who’d been approached and went to see him. Someone followed, shot him and Beck, then torched the house. Bad crime scene work failed to reveal either a shooting or two vics.”

“But things were back on track.”

Ollie nodded. “Fast and Tyne simply had to wait out the remaining time to have Ruben declared dead, then get the mineral claims from Snook. When Ruben showed up in Yellowknife, they had to make her disappear again. And they were worried about what she could tell you.”

Again the guilt that arises when my inquiries lead to someone being killed. I pushed it aside.

“I still don’t get how they swept that scene so thoroughly.”

“The rain and scavengers did it for them. According to Tyne, after carrying Ruben to his truck, they gathered up what evidence they could see, scattered armfuls of needles, then boogied to turn Ruben into arsenic soup.”

“The morons thought arsenic would speed up decomp.”

“Won’t it?”

“From the Civil War until about 1910, arsenic was the main ingredient in embalming fluids used in North America. The stuff actually preserves tissue by killing the microorganisms that cause putrefaction. It fell out of favor because it’s so toxic. And persistent. Elemental arsenic will never degrade into harmless by-products.”

“Thus the gonzo cleanup at Giant.”

“Exactly. That mine contains over two hundred thousand tons of arsenic trioxide, a dust produced during the gold-roasting process.”

“Bad news.”

“Very. The dust is water-soluble and approximately sixty percent arsenic. The reclamation process involves permanently freezing it in storage chambers.” I’d read that while under medical house arrest.