A Nickel-Plated Souvenir

The client, a woman named Janice, had been perfect. Too perfect. The distressed wife, her voice catching just so, dabbing at dry eyes with a silk handkerchief. She’d told him her husband, a geologist for a mining company, had vanished from their upscale home near the Sleeping Giant. Took his car, left his wallet. She was worried sick. Beaton had seen her type a hundred times. Worried her husband would turn up, more like.

He pulled a small stack of photographs from his coat pocket. They were grainy, taken with a cheap disposable camera. The geologist’s office. Books on mineralogy, survey maps on the wall, a half-empty glass of whisky on the desk. Everything neat. Too neat. A man doesn’t just walk away from a glass of twenty-year-old Macallan.

He shuffled to the next photo. The garage. The husband’s car was gone, as advertised. But there was a dark stain on the concrete floor, near a workbench. Janice had explained it away as an oil leak. Beaton had knelt, touched it. It was tacky, not oily. He hadn't pressed her on it. Not yet. You never show your whole hand.

The bus hit a patch of black ice and swerved, the tires screaming for a second before catching. A few passengers gasped. Beaton didn’t flinch. He just kept looking at the pictures. His job was to find missing people. More often than not, he found dead ones. Sometimes, he found people who just wanted to stay lost. He had a feeling this geologist, a mild-looking man named Robert, was in the first category.

He remembered the smell of Janice’s perfume. Expensive. Lily of the valley. It didn't belong in the damp, pine-scented air of Thunder Bay. It was a city smell. A smell of secrets and expensive lies.

‘He was a quiet man,’ she’d told him, sitting across from him in a living room that looked like a furniture showroom. ‘He kept to himself. His work was his life.’

‘Any friends? Enemies?’ Beaton had asked, his voice flat.

‘Enemies? Robert? Of course not. Everyone loved him.’

That was always a red flag. Nobody is loved by everyone. A man with no enemies is a man with no passions. Or a man with secrets so deep no one can get close enough to hate him.

Beaton had spent a day talking to Robert’s colleagues at the mining company. They described a man who was meticulous, brilliant, but distant. A loner. One of them, a younger geologist, had mentioned Robert was working on a side project. Something personal. He’d been excited about a new claim, somewhere off the grid. ‘Said it was the big one,’ the kid had told him. ‘The one that would let him retire.’

Janice had failed to mention that.

The bus stopped in Kenora for a meal break. Beaton didn't get off. He had a thermos of bitter, lukewarm coffee and a stale sandwich. He preferred the quiet of the empty bus. It let him think. He spread the photos out on the seat beside him. The office. The garage. A picture of Robert and Janice, smiling on a boat. She was beautiful, a cool blonde with a calculating smile. Robert just looked tired.

He picked up the photo of the garage again. The stain. What if it wasn’t oil? What if it wasn’t blood? What if it was something else? Something from Robert’s work. He’d brought samples home, the kid had said. He was testing them himself.

The Glint of Ore

The landscape outside was a study in grey. Grey sky, grey snow, grey trees. It was a world leached of colour, a world of facts without feeling. Like his case. He had the pieces. He was just looking at them in the wrong order.

He thought about Janice's perfectly manicured nails. No dirt. No sign of struggle. He thought about the expensive perfume. It wasn’t just a scent; it was a statement. A declaration of a life her husband’s salary as a geologist probably couldn’t support.

Then it hit him. Not a thunderclap, but a quiet click, like a lock tumbling open. It was the whisky glass. He’d focused on the fact that it was half-full. He should have focused on what was in it.

He remembered leaning over the desk, sniffing the glass. He’d smelled the peat and smoke of the scotch, but there was something else underneath. A faint, metallic, almost bitter scent. He’d dismissed it at the time. An old house smell. A mistake.

It wasn't a mistake. It was the missing piece.

The kid at the mine. He’d said Robert was excited about a new claim. A big one. Beaton pulled out his notebook, flipping through his hurried scrawl. The kid had mentioned a specific mineral Robert was looking for, something rare and incredibly valuable, often found alongside nickel deposits in the region. He'd even spelled out the name for Beaton, who wasn't a rock guy. Arsenopyrite.

A key component of which is arsenic.

The whisky glass. The metallic scent. The neat office. The wife who was too calm. The missing husband. The secret, valuable claim. It all lined up now. She hadn’t hired him to find her husband. She’d hired him as an alibi. A dupe to muddy the waters while she made her move.

The stain in the garage wasn’t oil or blood. It was a slurry of crushed ore samples. Robert had been poisoned, right in his own office. Then driven somewhere and buried. Janice had cleaned up, but she'd missed the faint smell in the glass. She'd missed the tacky residue on the garage floor.

Beaton looked out the window. The bus was still hours from Winnipeg. He was a man in a cheap suit, holding a set of facts that were about to become very dangerous. Janice thought he was a fool who had given up and gone home. She would be making her move on her husband's claim. And she had no idea he had just figured it all out.