COWBOY FLEW SOUTH ALONG One-Way Creek, the overloaded Super Cub laboring to gain altitude. When they could see over the ridge west of the lake, Active spotted a small band of caribou grazing on a sunny hillside, apparently in no hurry to get to the Isignaq River and cross to the wintering grounds on the south side. He touched Grace’s shoulder and pointed, and she shifted on his lap to watch the little herd until it passed out of sight behind them. It looked like the same band they had seen on the ridge before they found No-Way.
When they reached the Isignaq, Cowboy swung west, following the big brown river as it meandered toward the coast. The tundra crawled past, the wind-ruffled lakes glinting gunmetal blue under the autumn sky. At the upwind end of each lake, a crescent of calm water, like a shard of mirror, nestled in the lee of the tundra bank. At the opposite end, the wind piled up a moustache of white foam along the shore.
A family of swans—two adults and a cygnet—patrolled one of the lakes. They were ice-white in the cold, hard light. There was something anxious in the scene, as if the parents, feeling the earth tilt away from the sun, could not impress upon their child strongly enough the urgency of starting south ahead of winter.
As the Super Cub neared the sea, the sky gathered itself into an overcast, the lakes dulled to feathered slate, and rain streaked the windshield. Cowboy dropped down to an altitude of a few hundred feet and worked his way through the scud until they reached the shore of Isignaq Inlet. Over a couple of miles of gray chop, they could just see the Burton Peninsula, a long fat finger of rolling tundra with the village of Chukchi at its tip.
Cowboy crossed the water to the peninsula and swung northwest toward the village. Active spotted the smoldering Rec Center soon after they passed over Nimiuk Creek, which trickled into the inlet a few miles southeast of town. A tendril of white smoke spiraled up, then vanished on the west wind.
Active heard Grace speaking to Cowboy but couldn’t make out what she was saying. Then she removed the intercom headset and passed it to Active. He slipped the big foam cups over his ears and heard the rasp of the pilot’s voice finishing a question: “. . . a look?”
“Say again?” Active said, using the phrase Cowboy used when he couldn’t make out something coming over the radio.
“I said, you want to make a pass over the Rec Center and take a look?”
“Good idea,” Active said. Then he thought of another bit of pilot-ese he’d heard when Cowboy talked to the FAA, and added, “That’s affirmative.”
They crossed the lagoon to the spit on which Chukchi lay and sailed above the village’s meandering streets and wooden houses, gleaming wetly in the gray light. Soon the ruins themselves passed under the wing. Cowboy rolled the plane into a tight circle, and Active studied what was left of the Rec Center.
Two scorched walls still stood at the northwest corner of the debris field, swaying in the wind as a city fire crew with a yellow truck hosed down the remaining hot spots. The roof and the other walls had fallen in, leaving a rectangle of smoldering black debris where once had stood a gymnasium that doubled as a bingo parlor to help pay the bills, a couple of exercise rooms where Active had worked out three nights a week, a racquetball court, showers, lockers, saunas, and two small offices.
Cowboy eased out of the turn, swung into the traffic pattern for the airport, and put the little floatplane down on the lagoon, just south of the big asphalt east– west runway that marked the southern limit of the village.
After a brief discussion, it was decided that Cowboy would drop Active off at the scene, then take Grace to the home of Martha Active Johnson, Active’s birth mother, to check on her and her family, as well as on Grace’s adopted daughter Nita, who had been farmed out to Martha while Active and Grace went camping at One-Way Lake. There was always the infinitesimal possibility that one of them might, for some reason, have been at the Rec Center the previous night.
A few minutes later, Active stepped out of Cowboy’s van and leaned back in to kiss Grace, whose hand had tightened into a clawlike clamp around his as they approached the site of the fire. Now her face was masklike, nearly frozen. “You all right?” he asked.
“I will be,” she said. “Let’s just go, Cowboy.” The pilot shot a mystified glance at Active and slipped the van into gear. Active watched as they pulled out of sight in the drizzle that was slanting out of the silt-colored sky. He filed Grace’s reaction away at the top of his get-to-as-soon-as-possible list.
Then he turned and surveyed the wreckage of the Chukchi Community Recreation Center. It had been a wooden structure with aluminum siding, and scraps of the stuff still clung to the two standing walls, flapping and rattling in the wind. The interior was a rubble of burnt, fallen timbers and exercise machines covered with a black paste of congealed ashes. Even with the wind hurrying the smoke away, the air smelled of wet ash and something like a barbecue. Active tried not to think about it.
An ambulance manned by two paramedics was parked nearby, as was the blue, black, and white Trooper Suburban. A dozen or so people watched from the edge of the street, some of them crying and clinging to each other. Between the civilians and the ruins, yellow crime-scene tape surrounded a cluster of four-wheelers. Near the four-wheeler corral he saw his boss, Captain Patrick Carnaby, talking to two other men and studying the ruins.
Active recognized one of the men as Alan Long, an officer with the Chukchi Police Department. The other, a stranger in a Trooper uniform, was leaning on a shovel.
Carnaby turned, spotted Active, and waved him over. “Nathan, this is Fire Marshal Ronald Barnes from Fairbanks.”
The name, Active did recognize. Barnes was famed as the best arson investigator the Troopers had, a man who lived fire, loved fire, ate, slept, and breathed fire, understood fire like Heisenberg understood uncertainty.
Barnes undraped himself from the shovel, stuck out his hand, and said, in a Western drawl, “Pleasure, Nathan. Call me Ronnie.”
That drawl. Montana? Was that where Barnes was from? Active shook the hand and nodded. Barnes certainly didn’t look like a legendary arson investigator. Active had imagined someone resembling Carnaby, chief of the Chukchi detachment. Carnaby was tall, broad-shouldered, and gray at the temples, and he wore a bristling salt-and-pepper moustache—the walking embodiment of duly constituted state authority. A Cop with a capital C.
But Ronnie Barnes was wiry and sandy-haired, five-eight or five-nine, with pale blue eyes, a drooping handlebar moustache, and shoulders that seemed to droop a little too. He didn’t look like the embodiment of anything, unless it was white trash.
That was it. Ronnie Barnes looked like somebody who’d be swearing at the camera on Cops as he was hauled out of a trailer park in the Montana pines, clad only in jeans, tattoos, and handcuffs while a pregnant girlfriend watched from the stoop and pressed a bloody Kleenex to her nose.
Active and Alan Long, the city cop, exchanged nods. Long, an Inupiaq like Active, was round-faced and bucktoothed, a former Army MP. Normally, he was annoyingly enthusiastic, but not today. Today he was grimy and red-eyed, like Cowboy Decker, and smelled of smoke.
“Sorry to hear about Jim,” Active said. “He was, he was. . . .”
“Yeah,” Long said. “I know.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Barnes jabbed the dirt with his shovel a couple of times. Carnaby turned away and cleared his throat. After a decent interval, Barnes said, “I was just telling Alan, we need to get the names of the people standing around here.”
Long scanned the gaggle of spectators. “I know them all,” he said. “I’ll make a list.” He pulled out a notebook and began writing.
Barnes nodded. “Your true pyromaniac has a sexual disorder. He’ll come watch the fire to get his rocks off. You see somebody in the crowd with his hands in his pockets, masturbating, that’s him.”
Active, recognizing this as something he’d learned in a course on fire investigation at the Trooper Academy, ran his eyes quickly over the crowd. Most had their hands in their pockets, all right, men and women alike. But in the pockets of their coats, not their pants. And a few were bobbing up and down, but that was just what you did if you stood in the west wind in Chukchi for very long.
Barnes followed Active’s gaze and shrugged. “I know, I don’t think he’s here either. But if it was arson, he was probably here last night, when it was really rolling.” He looked at Long. “Was anybody taking names then, Alan?”
Long’s chipmunk cheeks sagged.
Barnes patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Was there a cat?”
“A cat?” Long said.
“Or maybe a dog?”
“A cat,” Active said. “But how did you know?”
Barnes shrugged. “Just a hunch. Most big public facilities have one or the other. Did it get out?”
Long shook his head. “Who cares? We’ve got more important things—”
“If it did, whoever took care of it probably set your fire,” Barnes explained in a patient tone. “Usually, the arsonist will make sure his pets get out.”
“I didn’t see any cat come out,” Long said.
“I’ll look for it when I go through the building,” said Barnes.
Active thought about the Rec Center cat. A light yellow calico. Who had he heard calling the cat? Who had he seen opening a can of tuna and setting it on the office floor?
“Well, we ought to get to work,” Carnaby said.
“Damn right,” Long said. “Jim Silver was the best boss I ever had. As chief, I can tell you that everything the city has is at your disposal.”
“Chief?” Active asked, eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Acting chief,” Carnaby said. “Alan talked the mayor into appointing him this morning when we got the news about Jim. But it’s only until the new borough assumes public-safety powers and hires a real chief. Right, Alan?”
Long gave a stiff little nod.
“And the mayor asked us Troopers to take the lead in this investigation. Right, Alan?”
Long looked even more crestfallen. “Absolutely, Captain.”
“Okay,” Active said. Then he looked from Barnes to Carnaby. “So we think it was arson?”
Barnes scraped at the gravel with his shovel. “Doesn’t do to start with a big load of preconceptions, but most structure fires are.”
Active had heard this in his fire-investigation course too. “How long till you can get in?”
Barnes shrugged and studied the ruins. “Couple hours, maybe. They’re going to keep the hoses on it a while, then I guess the state’s sending over a dozer from airport maintenance to take down these last two walls?” He looked at Carnaby.
Carnaby nodded. “It’s on the way.”
Active looked at Barnes. “What do we do till then?”
Barnes looked at the gawkers again. “Not we. It’s you guys, mostly.”
“But you’re the expert, right?” Long asked.
“Arson investigation is twenty-five percent physical evidence and seventy-five percent interviews,” Barnes said. “And in a village . . . trust me, it’s better if you guys handle the interviews and I handle the shovel.” He jabbed it into the dirt for emphasis. “People don’t want to talk to a stranger at a time like this.”
“You’re it?” Active asked. “I thought you guys traveled in teams.”
“Hah,” Barnes said. “Do the words ‘Republican governor plus Republican legislature’ mean anything to you? You’re lucky there was enough travel budget to send me.”
“What about the Feds? With this many fatalities, doesn’t the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms usually come in?”
“Hah,” Barnes said again. “Maybe if we told ’em al Qaeda did it. These days, it’s no terrorism, no Feds, except for maybe a little consult over the phone if I need it. Basically, I’m it.”
“Cowboy said we’ve got two survivors here and one at the burn unit in Anchorage?”
Carnaby cleared his throat. “Two here and none in Anchorage, as of about forty-five minutes ago.”
Active shook his head. “Can the two here—who are they, anyway?”
Carnaby looked at his notebook. “Jack Stocker and Enos Rexford. Couple of teenagers.” Active recognized the surnames as belonging to Chukchi families, but he didn’t know either boy.
“Can they talk?”
“They can and did,” Carnaby said. “Alan interviewed them this morning.”
“And?”
“They weren’t much help,” Long said. “They were playing one-on-one in the gym when smoke started pouring in and they heard Cammie Frankson screaming for help.”
Cammie Frankson was a senior at Chukchi High who worked nights at the Rec Center. Active remembered a plump face, bright eyes, optimism, and a red MP3 player dangling between her breasts like her heart had popped out. “So Cammie’s not one of the survivors?”
Long shook his head. “They took her to Anchorage, but. . . .”
“I think she wanted to be a nurse,” Active said. “She was going to the university next year.” The memory came to him now, and he grimaced. “And she took care of the cat. Its name was Pingilak. It means ‘ghost’ in Inupiaq.”
“Uh-huh,” Barnes said in a tone that indicated he was being patient about the detour, but hoped it would end now.
“The last Jack and Enos saw, she was running toward the locker rooms,” Long said. “They tried to go after her, but the fire was too much for them. They got out through the rear door of the gym. They’re not burned much, but they breathed in a lot of smoke.”
“And Cammie?”
Carnaby spoke. “The fire department found her on the front steps there”—he pointed at what was left of the wooden stairs—“about halfway out the door. Unconscious and pretty much burned all over. Hair gone, most of her clothes.”
Barnes spoke up. “Anybody else come into the hospital with a burn last night?”
The other three looked at him, then Long pointed at the ruins. “They’re all still in there, as far as we know.”
Barnes gazed again at the little crowd of onlookers. “Starting a big fire is tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. A lot of times, the arsonist will get burned himself if he uses gasoline or some other accelerant. So we always check the emergency rooms the morning after.”
“Would you take care of that, Alan?” Carnaby asked.
Long nodded, called Dispatch on the Bluetooth cell-phone headset he’d taken to wearing lately, and gave the instructions. He signed off and said, “Someone’s on the way.”
“Any chance you’ve had a string of arsons or unexplained fires recently?” Barnes asked.
The three cops thought for a moment, then shook their heads in unison.
Barnes grimaced slightly and looked at Long. “Any of your firefighters get here before anybody else was on scene, maybe forgot his turnouts?”
“Eh?” Long asked.
“Firefighters love fire,” Barnes said. “Sometimes one of them will get to loving it a little too much and start one when things are slow.”
Long reflected for a moment, then shook his head. “When I got here, there were four guys on it. All in turnouts. But I’ll ask the fire chief if he noticed anything.”
Barnes nodded. “Probably nothing there. But you gotta touch the bases.”
The west wind subsided for a moment, and the smell of barbecue and wet ash got stronger. Active turned away from the ruins. “Cowboy said we have eight dead here, not counting Cammie. If they’re all still in there, how do we know?”
Carnaby pointed at the ATVs in their circle of yellow tape. “It’s an estimate. We initially had five four-wheelers, meaning at least five people right there, plus Chief Silver is six, plus Cammie is seven at least. But some of the four-wheelers might have had two people on them. And there could have been some walk-ins.”
“We may never know for sure,” Barnes said. “Sometimes in a fire this hot they’re so burned up or melted together, you can’t get an exact body count.”
“Wait a minute,” Active said. “Jim Silver never drove a four-wheeler. How do we know he was inside?”
“His city Bronco was parked out front, but we moved it already,” Long said. “We checked with his wife, and. . . .” He shook his head.
“How’s Jenny taking it?”
“I heard she’s going up to Cape Goodwin.” Long shrugged. “Her mother and sister live up there, one of her and Chief Silver’s daughters too. I think their son is coming up from Anchorage.”
Active waved at the four-wheelers. “Maybe a couple of these belong to Jack and Enos.”
Carnaby shook his head. “Nope, they were on Jack’s Honda, and they drove it to the emergency room. That’s how we got the alarm. The ER called 9–1–1.”
“How about Cammie? Did one of these belong to her?”
“No telling till we talk to her family,” Carnaby said.
Active studied the ATVs. “So how do we find out who owns these? They don’t have plates.”
The captain grimaced. “Nobody registers an ATV around here. We’ll just have to wait for people, family members, to realize somebody never got home last night and come check. We put out the word on Kay-Chuck.”
Active glanced at the ATVs in the circle. “There’s only three machines now. The other two have already been claimed?”
Long nodded, flipped open his notebook and showed Active a page with six names on it. Cammie Frankson, Jim Silver, and the two survivors in the hospital were at the top. Below them were Augie Sundown and Rachel Akootchuk, who, Long reported, had been identified when their four-wheelers were claimed.
“Augie Sundown?” Active said. “Ouch.”
Long nodded again. “That family.”
“First Edgar and now Augie,” Active murmured.
Augie Sundown was—had been, Active corrected himself—the hottest thing ever to come out of high-school basketball in bush Alaska, where the game was a religion, played under street lights or moonlight or the northern lights on iron-hard frozen snow with gloves for protection when it couldn’t be played inside.
Augie, known as “Mr. Outside” for his ability to score from beyond the three-point line, had played four incendiary seasons for the Chukchi Malamutes, then gone off to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to play for the Nanooks. There he was a starting point guard by the end of his first season, despite the fact that he stood just under five feet, eight inches. He had come home for the summer to teach at a basketball camp sponsored by the city and apparently had ended up at the Rec Center at exactly the wrong moment.
“Edgar?” Barnes said. “Who’s Edgar?”
“Augie’s father,” Active said.
Edgar Sundown had vanished with his brother-in-law Cecil Harris during a seal hunt on the spring sea ice the previous year. The official search had gone on for thirteen days, nonstop, before the Troopers called it off, though volunteers had continued to patrol the ice in skiffs and bush planes till the last floe had melted and the Chukchi Sea rolled unencumbered from Point Hope in the north to the Bering Strait in the south.
“Wow,” Barnes said after hearing the story from Long and Active. “Living in Fairbanks, I sure as hell knew who Augie Sundown was, but I never heard about his father and the uncle. You never found anything?”
“Not a trace.” Active said. “They had two snow machines with dogsleds, a kayak—but we never so much as picked up a jerry jug off the beach.”
“Two older guys, out in the country all their lives, the right gear—everybody kept thinking they could handle anything; they must be camped on the ice somewhere out there, waiting for the weather to lift or somebody to come by, but. . . .” Long fell silent and shook his head.
“Anyway, this was right before Augie graduated,” Active said.
“With honors,” Long added.
“It’s like he had Role Model coded into his DNA,” Active said.
“First kid from Chukchi ever to get a full-ride sports scholarship anywhere,” Long said. “And then Edgar disappears.”
“Everybody wondered if Augie would crash,” Active said. “Just hang around town, shoot hoops in the city league—”
“Get drunk,” Long interjected.
“He didn’t, obviously,” Barnes said.
“Not Augie,” Long said.
“He’s gonna leave a hell of a hole in the Nanooks lineup.” Barnes didn’t seem to notice the outraged stares produced by this remark as he took Long’s notebook with the list of victims.
“You guys know anybody who’s mad at any of these people? You got a police chief here, some other teenagers besides Augie, sounds like. How about it, Alan, anybody ever threaten your boss? Either of these girls have a bad breakup with a mean boyfriend lately?” He looked at the three officers.
Carnaby sighed. “Yeah, I guess we’ve got some interviewing to do.”
“How about we all meet again around five, see where we are?” Barnes suggested. “Your office, Captain?”
Carnaby nodded. “We Troopers can take the interviews with Augie Sundown’s family and Rachel Akootchuk’s. Alan, do you need to stay here with the ATVs, or can you work some of this?”
“The paramedics can watch the four-wheelers.” Long gestured at the ambulance. “They’ll radio in the names as people come by and claim them.”
“Okay, then how about you check around Public Safety, see if anybody was madder than usual at Jim? Talk to the other cops, the dispatchers, jailers, that kind of thing.”
“Sure,” Long said. “And I’ll work back through the files and see if anybody he put away got back on the street recently.”
“Good idea,” Carnaby said, not sounding very optimistic.
“It’s a moon shot, but you never know.” Long trotted off to the ambulance and huddled with the paramedics.
“I think I’ll get something to eat,” Barnes said. “Anybody around here serve steak and eggs?” Carnaby directed him to the Korean hamburger joint near the state court building, and Barnes set off on foot.
Active turned to Carnaby. “He seems pretty calm about it all.”
“Barnes? Guys like him are like that.”
“Like what? Cold-blooded, you mean? Abnormally detached?”
Carnaby shook his head. “It’s not that simple. It’s just— well, I never met an investigator worth a shit who was motivated by anything other than ego.”
“Ego?”
“Ego. Not pity for the victims, not revenge, not a passion for justice. Intellectual vanity, pure and simple.”
Active swiveled to watch Barnes’s departing back. “It doesn’t seem natural, though.”
“You’re like that yourself, you know.”
“Me?”
“Let me ask you this: when a case isn’t going right, do you get madder at the bad guy for what he did, or at yourself for not being able to figure it out?”
Active thought for a moment, then shrugged in acknowledgment.
“So,” Carnaby said. “You want to talk to Augie’s family, or Rachel’s?”
“Augie’s, I guess,” Active said.
Carnaby nodded. “I heard he was staying with his grandmother. Green house up on Second Avenue, kind of behind the tank farm. Dead Cat in the yard.”
Active gave Carnaby a blank look.
“As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know,
“As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know, yellow, treads, a blade?”
“Ah, right, the dead Caterpillar,” Active said. “I do know the place.”
“I’ll send Dickie Nelson to talk to Rachel’s family, then. Why don’t you take the Suburban and drop me at headquarters? You can swing by Grace’s place to get out of your camp clothes and clean up before you get started, if you want.”
“Yeah, I guess a shower wouldn’t hurt,” Active said. “It’s starting to look like a long day.”
“Lots of ’em, probably,” Carnaby said.
“Oh, hell.” Active frowned in irritation. “We forgot about No-Way.”
“What?” Carnaby said. “Who?”
“No-Way,” Active said, and told Carnaby about the dead hunter at One-Way Lake.
“Who was he?” Carnaby asked.
Active shrugged. “There wasn’t any I.D. on him, no initials on his clothes or gear.”
“Inupiaq or white?” Carnaby asked.
“Inupiaq,” Active said. “From one of the villages up the Isignaq, I’d guess.”
“Well, the lack of I.D.’s not that surprising, then,” Carnaby said. “Your average village guy tends to figure the Fish and Game Troopers are out to bust an Eskimo the minute they get an excuse, so he doesn’t carry any. That way, it’s more hassle for the Fish and Game cops, more forms to fill out. Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.”
“Not worth the paperwork?”
Carnaby nodded.
“Yeah, but hunting without a license?” Active asked, annoyed as usual by how people not from Chukchi always seemed to know more than he did about how things worked on his alleged home turf. “That’s a fairly serious bust.”
“Oh, most of ’em get their licenses,” Carnaby said. “They just don’t carry them. Makes it even more annoying for Fish and Game.”
“So how do we figure out who this guy was?”
Carnaby brushed his moustache with his fingers and thought it over. “Sorta like with the four-wheelers over there, maybe? Put a message on Kay-Chuck that someone was found dead on One-Way Lake and if anybody doesn’t come back from hunting, people should report it to their Village Public Safety Officer or the Troopers. Then maybe they can identify him by his stuff.”
“If we can get him out of there,” Active said.
“Yeah, okay,” Carnaby said. “After you drop me off, run by Lienhofer’s and see when Cowboy can go back up there and bring him in. Then you can get cleaned up and go see Augie’s grandmother. By the time you’re done, the paramedics should have some more names for us.”
Active nodded, and they climbed into the Suburban and rumbled down Third Avenue toward the Chukchi Public Safety Building.
A few minutes later, Active pulled up at the Lienhofer offices and hangar on the north side of the airport. He went inside and tensed up when he saw that the only occupant was Delilah Lienhofer, who owned fifty percent of the business and one hundred percent of the worst disposition that Active had ever encountered in a member of the human species, or any other.
Her husband, Sam, owned the other half of the business; but Sam, according to Cowboy, had become a full-time drunk as the Chukchi winters rolled by and nowadays did far less than half the work of keeping Lienhofer’s going, though he spent far more than half the money. Sam’s high overhead was due to the fact that Chukchi had voted itself dry a couple of years earlier. Now drinking meant doing business with bootleggers, which meant prices four or five times what they had been when Chukchi was wet.
Delilah, once as much of a drinker as her husband, had dried out about the time Chukchi did, though no one knew if that was because of the new law or because she figured out the business was in a nosedive and needed at least one sober principal if it was to stay aloft. Now she was that most toxic of personalities: the drunk who had reformed without the benefit of AA or any other program and lived with a mate who hadn’t.
All of which, Active agreed in theory, provided ample justification for her evil temper. But this insight was no comfort if you were the person facing it.
Which he assuredly was at this particular moment. “Can you tell me where Cowboy is?” he asked.
“The fuck you want him for now?” Delilah said from her desk behind the counter. She was a squarish, strong-looking woman with collar-length gray-brown hair. Her only concession to vanity was a carefully maintained set of long red fingernails. Now she was leaning forward in her chair, hands gripping the armrests, as if preparing to leap over the counter and use them to rip out Active’s jugular. “He wakes up, he’s gotta go up to the Gray Wolf mine and pick up a load of GeoNord executives from Anchorage.”
“He’s asleep?”
“Back there in the hangar,” she said. “But don’t bother him. Like I said—”
“It’s just a quick run up to—”
“No, I said! No more nickel-and-dime Super Cub shit for the Troopers today. This trip to the Gray Wolf is in the twin, and that airplane not only costs a lot more than a Super Cub, but GeoNord pays its bills with a lot less paperwork and no damn whining about the state budget.”
Cowboy poked his head in from the hangar. “Hey, Nathan,” he said.
“Get back in there and shave and brush your teeth and wash that soot off your face,” Delilah said. “You’re not going anywhere but the Gray Wolf today. And find one of our jackets with the epaulets.”
“We’ve got to get that guy out of One-Way Lake,” Active told the pilot. “If you could just. . . .”
“Sorry, man, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” Cowboy said. “He’s not going anywhere, right?”
Active frowned. “I still don’t like leaving him up there. This time of year, everything’s on the move and hungry. Bears, wolves, foxes, ravens. Wolverines too.”
Cowboy gave him a what-can-I-do? shrug. “One more day won’t hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Active said. “What about somebody else? Didn’t you say there were a couple guys that can get in there?”
“Usually there is, but right now there’s only me.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know Dood McAllister?”
The name sounded familiar. He must have heard it around town—maybe on the Mukluk Messenger service on KCHK. Sooner or later, everybody’s name appeared in one of Kay-Chuck’s Mukluk messages, anything from a birthday wish, to an arrival or departure time for a snowmachine trip between villages, to a request to pick up or send something at the airport, to a funeral or birth announcement. But Active couldn’t recall ever having met the man. He shook his head.
“He flies for us sometimes when he’s between clients in his guiding operation. Unfortunately, right now his Super Cub’s parked out on the Katonak Flats with busted floats. His engine quit on him a couple days ago, and he couldn’t make it to anything wet, so he had to put her down on the tundra.”
“He wasn’t hurt?” Active didn’t remember anything about a crash. Usually the Troopers were notified.
Cowboy shook his head. “Dood’s rolled up a plane or two, like anybody, but, well, like they say, you don’t fly a Super Cub: you wear it. He kept her right side up, but he did tear up one of his floats. Apparently he found the only pile of rocks in the Flats.”
Cowboy chewed his lip for a moment, then rambled on, almost to himself. “He’s got a Cessna 185 on wheels, and I guess maybe you could set down on that ridge above the lake, but then you’d have to horse the body all the way up there—nah, I think we’re out of luck till tomorrow.”
“Couldn’t he take your Super Cub?”
Cowboy’s face took on a pained and incredulous expression. Active raised his hands in supplication. Apparently he had proposed an unimaginable breach of the bush-pilot code. The Arctic had a way of making simple things complex, and this was another example. “Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow it is.”
“You coming?” Cowboy asked. “Kind of a job, dragging a corpse up the creek and then wrestling it onto a float by yourself.” He paused. “Creepy, too.”
“I doubt I can make it,” Active said. “We’re all on the Rec Center fire.”
“How’s that going? Your expert from Fairbanks come up with anything yet?”
Active shook his head. “He’s just getting started. The site is still pretty hot.”
“Sure.” Cowboy rubbed his chin absently. “How big is the guy at One-Way, anyhow?”
“Average size Inupiaq,” Active said. “About five-eight, five-nine. One-fifty, one-sixty, maybe.”
Cowboy grunted. “I guess I can handle him by myself.
But you owe me. This is when bush piloting gets to be un-fun.”
“Nothing around here’s going to be fun for a while, Cowboy.”
The pilot looked at his toes for a few seconds. “How’s Grace? She seemed a little—”
“Yeah, freaked out.”
Cowboy nodded. “In the van, yeah.”
“I don’t know what that’s about. It’s new to me.”
Cowboy nodded again, and Active sighed, then forced his mind back to business. They agreed that Active would arrange to have No-Way flown to Anchorage on Alaska Airlines’ evening jet the next day. That would give Cowboy time for the round trip to One-Way Lake, even if the Arctic threw him a curve or two before the trip was done, as was highly likely.
Active signed the paperwork for the charter, then set off for the house Grace Palmer had inherited from her murdered father. It was a relief to be able to forget about No-Way for a while. If the Anchorage crime lab was as backed up as usual, it would be at least a couple of weeks before they heard anything. And by then, someone from one of the villages up the Isignaq River might have reported a friend or relative missing. With a little luck, Active would be able to scratch the dead hunter off the Trooper to-do list with almost no work.