ACTIVE WAS AT HIS desk at eight the next morning, on the phone to the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan, Oregon. After navigating a tortuous voice mail system and undergoing several interrogations as to who he was and what he wanted, finally he was connected to a businesslike female voice that identified itself as belonging to Correctional Treatment Specialist Lana Bickford.
“Jae Hyo Lee? Yes, I was his case manager,” she said. “We let him out a few weeks ago. Didn’t you guys call about him a couple days ago?”
“Right, that would have been Officer Alan Long. He’s also working this case.”
“And what is it you guys want with Mr. Lee? Let’s see, I think his file is still on my desk here somewhere.” There was a thunk as she laid the phone down, then a rustle of papers.
“Here we go,” she said at length. “I have my notes now. He’s an arson suspect, Officer Long said?”
“A person of interest,” Active said. “For now, we just want to question him.”
“Well, all right. Lessee—uh-huh, he’s the one was in for poaching bear gallbladders. We don’t get many of those. Although they’re usually Koreans when we do. Anyway, what can I tell you about him?”
Active sketched out what they needed to know— anything available about Jae Hyo Lee’s visitors, mail, and phone calls.
Bickford blew out a long breath. “Some of this I can help with, some of it I can’t be much use to you. Letters, we read anything coming in or going out, but we don’t keep any record unless we find something fishy, and there’s nothing like that in Mr. Lee’s file.”
Active, scribbling notes on a legal pad, nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Uh-huh.”
“Phone logs . . . ah, here we are. Looks like he called a Ruth Marie Silver about every two weeks the whole time he was here. And he called a Kyung Kim a couple of times.”
“Uh-huh. That’s his girlfriend and his uncle. Can you give me the dates?”
Active copied as Bickford read off the last few. Lee’s last two calls had been to Ruthie Silver and to his uncle, a few days before he got out of prison. Arranging his homecoming, no doubt.
“Any visitors?”
There was a long pause, with the sound of paper crackling in the background.
“Oh, yeah, here we go. Looks like he only had one visitor the whole time he was here.”
“Close-knit family, eh?”
“I don’t think it was a family member. A fellow from up your way looks like, Chukchi, right? He was logged in as, geez, this handwriting. Some of our correctional officers—a Thomas Gaines?”
“Thomas Gaines? I never heard of any—” Active stopped in mid-sentence. “The handwriting is bad?”
“Like a doctor’s.”
He could hardly bring himself to ask. “Any chance that’s Gage instead of Gaines? Thomas Gage?”
“There I go again,” she said. “I had a hard time reading it when the other guy called last week.”
“Officer Long? I thought he only called day before yesterday.”
“No, somebody else called before that. Now, what—uh-huh, here it is. Your police chief up there, a Jim Silber?”
“Silver? You told Jim Silver that Tom Gage visited Jae Hyo Lee?”
“I DIDN’T want to know this,” Carnaby said after Active broke the news a few minutes later.
“Me either,” Active said.
Carnaby ticked points off on his fingers.
“So Tom Gage goes to see Jae Hyo Lee in prison— when?”
“About two and a half months ago.”
“Then three weeks ago, Jae gets out of prison.”
Active nodded.
“And last week Jim Silver finds out about Gage’s visit?”
Active nodded again. “I guess he was checking on Jae like his daughter asked.”
“And three days ago the Rec Center burns down and Silver and Gage both die?”
“Thus killing the only visitor Jae had, the entire time he was in Sheridan,” Active said. “And the cop who called to check up on him.”
Just then the phone rang. Carnaby picked up and listened for a few seconds. “Yes, Senator. I know. We all feel the same way. But these things take. . . . Well, thank you, but we have all the resources we need for now.” Carnaby paused, listening, and rolled his eyes at Active. “Yes, I’ll certainly keep you posted.”
Carnaby hung up. “Our own Senator Darryl Beaver, wanting to know how we’re doing with the investigation. And letting me know in the kindest possible way that it’ll be very difficult for him to defend the line item for the Chukchi detachment if this thing is still hanging fire when the legislature convenes in Juneau.”
“Hanging fire? He said that?”
Carnaby grimaced. “Uh-huh. Oh, and the mayor also called this morning, by the way, and he says there’s a celebration-of-life memorial service thing tonight at the high school. And Roger Kennelly from Kay-Chuck called for an update. And Lena Sundown, and—” The captain stopped and shook his head. “Jesus. Jae Hyo Lee and Tom Gage. What the hell is this about?”
“Maybe Gage and Lee were in it together, and Gage isn’t really dead: he just left his four-wheeler in front of the Rec Center to throw us off.”
“But why? Was he in the gallbladder thing with Jae? And if he’s not dead and he did help Jae set the fire, where is he?” Carnaby thought for a moment, then answered his own question. “With Jae, obviously, in this infamous boat he’s running around in. And now what? They’re sailing off somewhere to start a new life together? Shit.”
“Yeah,” Active said. “So maybe instead—”
“Maybe he was working with Jae, all right,” Carnaby said with a look of inspiration. “But he really did get trapped and die in his own fire. Didn’t Ronnie Barnes say that happens sometimes?”
“Yeah,” Active said, “but why would he park his four-wheeler out front? Wouldn’t he come up on foot, sneak into the furnace room from the back, and do the whole thing with the ‘T’ fitting and the wire on the door?”
Carnaby shook his head. “None of it makes a damned bit of sense.”
“Wait a minute,” Active said. “What if Tom Gage was the Feds’ source in the gallbladder bust? And then Jae finds out about it and burns down the Rec Center to get even.”
Carnaby was silent, turning this over in his mind. “Yeah, it holds together a little better than anything else we’ve come up with. He did tell Ruthie he found out it wasn’t Jim who turned him in, right?”
Active nodded.
“But it still doesn’t explain Gage’s trip down to the prison to see Jae. Or why an aviation instructor would be involved with a Korean gallbladder smuggler.”
Active sighed. “Nah, it doesn’t.”
Carnaby picked up the phone. “Let me get Alan in here. He’s supposed to be talking to the Feds today to see if they’ll tell us their source in the gallbladder thing.”
A few minutes later, Long was seated beside Active at Carnaby’s desk, asking them what was up.
“Tom Gage visited Jae in Sheridan?” he said after hearing what they had learned. “Jesus.”
Carnaby outlined their theory that Gage had been the federal source in the gallbladder case, then looked hopefully at Long.
“It’s a little complicated,” Long said. “They won’t tell me outright who the source was, but they did agree to look at our list of fatalities and I.D. him if he’s on it. Plus they’ll call in the FBI to help catch Jae if it looks like he killed their source. So I faxed them our list.”
Carnaby and Active exchanged uneasy glances. The FBI commanded vast resources and was good at many things, but working rural Alaska was not one of them, according to Trooper lore. Carnaby looked at Long again. “And? Was it Gage?”
“They haven’t called back yet.”
“Let’s give ’em a try,” Carnaby said, pushing the phone across the desk to Long.
Long pulled a notebook from his pocket, found the number, and dialed. “Alan Long for Tony Ehrlich,” he said after a moment. “Yes, I’ll hold.”
The moment dragged on. Long put his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Tony was my handler in the gallbladder case.”
Active shifted in his chair and doodled on the legal pad.
“Yeah, Tony,” Long said finally. “You get my fax? Uh-huh, and. . . .”
Fifteen seconds passed in silence.
“You sure?” Long asked. “None of them? How about Tom Gage specifically? It turns out he visited Jae Hyo Lee in Sheridan a couple months ago.”
More silence.
“Really? Well, thanks.” Long hung up and looked at them, shaking his head. “They never heard of Tom Gage till they got our list.”
They looked at each other gloomily. “I’m out of ideas,” Carnaby said at length.
The other two raised their eyebrows in agreement.
“Tom Gage is about all we’ve got,” Carnaby finally said. “Full-court press here. Alan, you get over to the DA’s office and tell Charlie Hughes we need a search warrant for Gage’s place, and—”
“Why?” Long interrupted. “If he’s dead, why don’t we just break the lock and go in?”
“He’s not dead till the coroner says so,” Carnaby said with a glare. “And who knows how long that’ll take? Besides which, what if he does turn up alive? Then whatever we find in there becomes useless to us because we didn’t have a warrant. Nope, Gage had recent contact with our suspect, and that makes him a suspect or at least a material witness, so a search warrant it is. Dead or alive. Okay, Alan?”
Subdued, Long nodded.
“Nathan, you talk to the Tech Center. See what they know about Gage’s background. But most important, find out how to get hold of his ex-wife.”
ACTIVE LOPED down the stairs of the Public Safety Building and climbed into the Trooper Suburban. He was headed up Third Street, toward the Tech Center at the north end of town, when he remembered he had a lunch date with Grace. With a sigh, he swung into the parking lot of the Bible Missionary Church, looped around a pair of four-wheelers, pulled back onto Third Street, and headed south toward GeoNord’s Chukchi headquarters.
Grace had started as an administrative assistant in the human resources department of the company that ran the Gray Wolf mine, mainly as something to do while she decided how long to stay in Chukchi after the deaths of her parents. But with her intellect and organizing abilities, she was soon functioning as office manager. And then the head of the department—a white man from Anchorage—had begun spending more time at the Chukchi dump shooting ravens and foxes than at his desk solving GeoNord’s personnel problems. Concluding he had endured more seven-month Arctic winters than he could handle, the company had sent him back to Anchorage, and Grace Palmer had become the new director of human resources.
The GeoNord elevator was out of service, as usual, so Active clumped up the two flights of stairs to her office, which, like Grace, smelled delicately of lavender. She was in the middle of a phone call but waved him in past the receptionist. “Hold on just a second,” she said into the phone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Got the mine on the line. Is it lunchtime already?”
“Not quite. But I have to go up to the Tech Center and I don’t know if I’ll have time after.”
She raised her eyebrows, told the mine she’d call back later, and stood up, stretching and twisting her neck.
“Long morning?”
She raised her eyebrows again: yes. “And you? Any progress on the fire?”
He shrugged. “You know. You put one foot in front of the other and hope you eventually get somewhere.”
He helped her into her coat, and they made their way downstairs. “Mind if we hit the Pizza Palace?” he said once they were in the Suburban.
She rolled her eyes. “Again? Do you ever not work?”
“We have to eat somewhere,” he said. The Pizza Palace was one of Kyung Kim’s properties, and it was common knowledge that one of his cooks was selling liquor on the side. The knowledge just wasn’t common enough for the Troopers or the city cops to make an arrest yet. “You never know when somebody—”
“We both know he’s not going to sell any liquor out the back door with a Trooper in the dining room.”
“Exactly. So if somebody comes in, spots my uniform, and takes off without ordering anything, what’s that tell you?”
She sighed. “Have it your way, Dudley Do-Right. Would this mean we’ll be parking a discreet distance from the premises, yet again?”
“If they see this Suburban at the Pizza Palace, they won’t come in, will they?”
“One can only hope.” She grinned and punched his shoulder.
He parked in a slot at the state court building, which sat diagonally across the intersection of Caribou and Second from the restaurant.
Grace gestured at the big building perched on stilts to keep it from melting its way down into the permafrost. “This is why, isn’t it?” she said. “You Troopers just can’t stand the thought of somebody bootlegging in plain sight of the courthouse.”
“Should I be able to stand it?”
She hooked an elbow through his, and they angled across the intersection and pushed through the kunnichuk and into the dining room of the Pizza Palace. They found a booth and examined Kyung Kim’s schizophrenic menu. The left-hand page was burgers and pizza, in keeping with the name of the place. The right-hand page offered a long list of Chinese dishes that were, as Active knew from experience, remarkably good.
They agreed on the snow pea shrimp, and he went to the counter to order, peering at the back of the cook working over the griddle. Was it Tae Ahn, the bootlegging suspect, or not?
An Inupiat girl whom Active knew only as Googie came to the counter to take his order. “Is that Tae back there?” he asked.
“Tae’s off today,” Googie said. “You want something?”
“We’ll split an order of snow pea shrimp,” Active said. “When Tae comes in, tell him that Trooper Active said ‘hello,’ ah?”
“Ee,” the girl said, raising her eyebrows without a hint of expression. Active wondered if she was in cahoots with Ahn or maybe a customer. Or maybe just oblivious. Active filled two cups with coffee, put four packets of creamer in his shirt pocket, and returned to the booth.
“Not if you’re going to be you,” Grace said as he slid onto the bench across from her. A smile played at the corners of her lips.
He tried unsuccessfully to remember what they had been talking about before he went to order. “Not if I’m going to be me what?”
The smile took over her lips completely and the fox- eyes sparkled in their quicksilver way. “That makes absolutely no sense, you know.”
“But something tells me you understood it perfectly.”
She raised her eyebrows, still smiling. “You shouldn’t be able to stand the thought of Tae Anh selling liquor in sight of the courthouse. Not if you’re going to be you.”
“Ah.”
“Which I hope you are.”
“Are what?”
“Going to be you.”
“Totally,” he said. “I promise to be me twenty-four/seven.” They dumped the creamer into their coffees. “Look, I need to talk to my Ataata Jacob about, um. . . .”
Her smile vanished. “About going to Anchorage?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“And you need a translator.”
He raised his eyebrows again.
She was silent for a moment. “Can you find someone else?”
“He likes you.”
“How about Lucy? She’s good at it.”
Active flinched inwardly. Lucy Brophy, nee Lucy Generous, was his ex-girlfriend. Her journey toward that status had begun the moment he had seen the mural-sized photograph of Grace Palmer in her Miss North World days on the wall at Chukchi High. The problem was, it had taken both of them some time to grasp the enormity of his obsession with Grace Palmer, though Lucy had figured it out first. The breakup had been slow and agonizing, though it hadn’t ended as badly as it might have, all things considered. They were still . . . not friends, exactly. Amicable ex-lovers described it best, he supposed. Lucy was now married to Dan Brophy, a fourth-grade teacher at Chukchi’s elementary school and—
“Isn’t she due soon?” Grace asked.
Active had greeted Lucy at the dispatch station in the Public Safety Building just that morning. He tried to visualize how big her stomach was. “Couple months, I think.”
“You haven’t answered my question. Still too touchy there?”
This was the way with women. No woman would ever ask a question about a man’s old girlfriend that was merely about what it appeared to be about. He thought it over and decided to be honest, which he tried to make a firm policy with Grace.
“When I see Lucy looking so happy. . . .”
She waited a decent interval. “Yes?”
He studied his coffee, thinking, then decided to start over. “When I see that sunny normalcy of hers, I do sometimes think of the life I’ll never live with her. It’s like—”
“Would you rather be living it?”
He looked up in shock at the suggestion, then realized that was exactly how his rambling must have sounded to Grace. “You kidding? No, no way. This thing that we have—” He stopped, searching for the words.
“Yes?”
“I think it’s like your sexual orientation. Or being right-handed or your eye color, you know?”
She frowned. “Not exactly.”
“I mean, there’s no choice about it. Once I saw that picture of you at the high school and your father asked me to find you, that was it. That other life—”
“With Lucy?”
“Uh-huh. That other life, it’s off to the side of all this”—he gestured around the Pizza Palace, but knew that she knew he meant to take in the entirety of things—“to the side of this life I have now. It’s like an abandoned river channel in the tundra. It’s over there and its day is past, and you’re here, and this is now.
“Besides,” he continued, after some thought, “there was an imbalance in the relationship. She was more into me than I was her. I was afraid I was just using her for sex.”
“Nathan, don’t ever get arrested. You wouldn’t last ten seconds under interrogation.”
An image of Lucy naked and astride him—her favorite position—suddenly came into his mind, and he found himself at once embarrassed and aroused. “Well, yeah. But I, I mean, ah, we, ah, she—”
Grace patted his wrist. “It’s all right, Nathan. I have it on good authority she enjoyed it as much as you did. Probably more. Normal girls do.”
“You talked to her? Women talk about that stuff?”
Her fox-eyed smile was back. “Women talk about everything. Constantly.”
“Jesus. That’s terrifying.”
She lifted her eyebrows, then fell silent, swirling a spoon in her coffee. “Sunny normalcy, huh? Is that what you need? Because I doubt I’m capable of it. I think you know that.”
“What I need is you. Period.”
She was silent again.
“How’d I do?” he asked finally.
“Not so bad, Trooper.”
Something in the street caught her eye, and she frowned. “Is that Alan Long in Jim Silver’s Bronco?”
Active glanced out and nodded, trying to place the girl in the passenger seat next to Long. “I didn’t tell you? The mayor made Alan acting chief.”
“No.”
“Indeed.”
“And is that Queenie Buckland with him?”
“So it is,” Active said. “I couldn’t recall at first. Isn’t she supposed to be Calvin Maiyumerak’s girlfriend?”
“She was the last I heard. But Calvin’s only got that old Yamaha four-wheeler.”
“Ah. You’re thinking she. . . .”
Grace’s face lit up in a huge grin. “Yep, I think she’s upgraded. All the way up to a Bronco, complete with a cop who has a Bluetooth headset and wears a great big gun on his belt.”
Active shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”
“Some girls,” Grace said.
Googie deposited two bowls of white rice on their table. Active dribbled some soy sauce on his. “About my grandfather. I don’t want to crowd you. I can probably get one of the aanas at the Senior Center to translate.”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll do it. Call me when you’re done at the Tech Center. I’ll take my four-wheeler and meet you at the Senior Center.”
“Thanks,” he said.
She nodded silently. They unwrapped their chopsticks and put away a few bites of rice. She paused and looked into the bowl. “The Anchorage thing has to be faced.”
“It does,” he said as Googie brought the shrimp. “Is it too much?”
“I don’t know yet.”
THE ARCTIC Technical Center lay on Beach Street at the north end of town, just past the high school. It was a rambling complex of two-story wheat and slate-blue cubes on stilts. There, residents of Chukchi and surrounding villages learned how to tune up cars, set up computer networks, rebuild snowmachines, and fix or fly airplanes.
Active steered the Trooper Suburban into a visitor slot near the main entrance, between two four-wheelers.
Inside, a receptionist directed him to the office of a Gilbert Cividanes, head of the aviation program. Cividanes was in his mid-forties, Active guessed, balding, running to fat, but well-dressed and well-groomed for Chukchi, almost professional-looking in a blue sport shirt open at the neck and jeans pressed to a crease. How had a Hispanic yuppie ended up in Eskimo country? The only other Hispanic Active knew of in Chukchi was Hector Martinez, the Honda dealer, but he was no yuppie. Martinez wore cowboy boots and a Stetson, except in the dead of winter, and ate muktuk the year round.
“You’re sure it was Tom?” Cividanes asked after Active had identified himself and explained his mission. “I heard they hadn’t identified all the bodies from the fire yet.”
“Not a hundred percent sure,” Active said. “But what are the odds? His four-wheeler was out front, and he hasn’t shown up for work, right?”
Cividanes sighed. “I suppose. We better start looking for a new aviation mechanics instructor, I guess.”
Active raised his eyebrows in the white expression of surprise and disapproval.
“I didn’t mean to seem callous,” Cividanes said in an apologetic tone. “It’s just that I didn’t know him very well. None of us did.”
“How long did he work here?”
Cividanes furrowed his brow and glanced at some papers on his desk. “Seems like . . . yeah, he started a couple of years ago. His marriage broke up about a year later and I don’t think he was handling it very well.”
“No?”
“I suspected he was drinking pretty hard. You know, Monday-morning flu every few weeks, looked haggard most of the time. Bags under his eyes, kind of pasty-faced. Always smelled like gasoline and wood smoke or something. Of course, he liked to get out into the country, too—had his own plane, boat, snowmachine, so maybe. . . .”
“So maybe he just didn’t have time for details? Or sleep?”
Cividanes shrugged.
“He have any kids you know of?”
Cividanes scratched his temple and nodded. “Seems like the beneficiaries on his life insurance were kids.”
“It wouldn’t be the ex, I gather.”
“No, I shouldn’t think,” Cividanes said. “You want me to look it up?”
“It’s not important,” Active said. “I’ll talk to the wife. You’ve got the contact information I called about?” He pulled out his notebook, but Cividanes waved him off and handed him a sheet of paper.
“I printed it out for you.”
“Thanks.” Active rose and shook Cividanes’s hand, then walked out studying the paper. The ex-wife’s name was Donna and she lived in Vancouver, Washington. There were phone numbers for home and work.
ACTIVE PULLED the Suburban into the parking lot of the Chukchi Senior Center. Like nearly every other building in town, it boasted T1–11 plywood siding and a shingle roof. A gaggle of four-wheelers was parked in front, along with a pickup and a green van with a dire case of body rot.
The center was a wheel with three spokes and no rim. Each spoke was a wing where the residents had their bedrooms. The cafeteria, TV room, and administrative offices filled the hub.
Grace met him at the door, and they found Jacob Active in his wheelchair in the TV room, watching, or appearing to watch, Animal Planet. With most of his English lost to the stroke, perhaps he could only watch shows where the words didn’t matter.
Jacob Active had creased brown skin stretched tight over his cheekbones and a shock of white hair that stood straight out from his head like dandelion fuzz. He wore a hearing aid in his left ear. The lobe was missing, taken by frostbite on the trail long ago. The right side of his face still drooped a little from the stroke, though not as much as when Active had first come to Chukchi.
Active knelt beside the wheelchair and spoke into the hearing aid. “Hello, Ataata.”
The old man turned, blank-faced for a moment, then smiled, mostly on the left. His mouth had the caved-in look that meant he had forgotten to put in his dentures.
Grace spoke to him in Inupiaq. Active could follow it enough to understand that she was telling him his grandson had come to talk to him. Jacob said, “Arigaa,” and lifted his spiky white eyebrows.
Active took the handles of the wheelchair, and they rolled to the cafeteria. He went to fetch tea while Jacob and Grace chatted with a pair of aides taking a break at the next table.
“He already heard you’re leaving,” Grace said as Active set three mugs of tea on the table. “He thought you wouldn’t say goodbye.”
“Tell him I’ll come back to visit all the time.”
Grace delivered the message, and Jacob responded in his reedy old-man’s voice, then chuckled.
Grace smiled. “He says maybe you’ll bring him some new teeth from Anchorage. The ones they gave him here don’t fit.”
Active grinned back and raised his eyebrows.
Jacob spoke again, and Grace translated. “He says, when are you leaving?”
“Tell him around Christmas, maybe right after.”
Grace stared at him a moment, then turned back to the old man and spoke a few syllables.
Jacob responded with another question. Active caught enough to understand that his grandfather was asking if Grace would move to Anchorage also.
Grace’s back stiffened as she answered Jacob in a low voice, too low for Active to make out.
Jacob looked at Active, back at Grace, then reached out and touched her hair. The old man spoke again.
“What did he say?”
Grace squinted a no and shook her head.
“Come on. What kind of translator are you?”
A little sigh escaped her. “He said he’d make me go if it was him.”
“Tell him at his age he should have learned that no man can make a woman do anything, unless she wants him to.”
She translated, and the mood lightened a little. They chatted for a few minutes, then Jacob abruptly closed his eyes and fell silent in the middle of a long, meandering story about seal hunting with his father in the old days, when snowmachines hadn’t come along and everybody still used dog teams.
Active looked at Grace in alarm. “You think he’s all right?”
The old man emitted a thunderous snore.
“Arii, that Jacob,” said one of the aides at the next table. Her name tag identified her as Della. “He always do that when it’s nap time.” She stood, pushing back her chair. “Here, let me take him to his room.”
Active and Grace watched her wheel him away, then walked through the Senior Center doors into the fog sweeping across Chukchi on the west wind. His cheeks felt wet, but he couldn’t tell if it was rain or just the fog condensing on everything it touched.
Grace pulled up the hood of her anorak. “See you after work, huh?”
He nodded and bent for a kiss, then watched as she yanked the starter cord on her Honda, swung into the seat, and headed for GeoNord.
“Arii, you gonna make her sad too?”
Active started, recognizing the voice. He turned to see the familiar stooped figure of Pauline Generous, grandmother of Lucy.
“It’s good to see you again,” he parried.
“Ah-hah. I came to play snerts with them old ladies.”
Active sensed a potential distraction and was preparing to ask her to explain the rules of snerts, which was the favorite card game of elderly Inupiat females in Chukchi and the villages in its orbit but appeared to be played nowhere else. Pauline, however, was not to be diverted.
“You gonna make her sad too, like with Lucy?”
“I thought Lucy was happy, with the baby coming and all.”
Pauline glared at him through the huge, thick glasses that gave her eyes an unnerving size and intensity. “Pretty happy. She love that Dan Brophy, all right. But no girl ever really get over the first man she love. I think she miss that other life she never gonna have with you now.”
Active, as usual, was a little spooked by Pauline. She had put it almost exactly the same way he had.
“Well, I’m with Grace.”
Pauline looked at the four-wheeler disappearing down Fourth Street into the mist. “She’s pretty, ah?” She turned back to him.
He raised his eyebrows, unable to think of words to describe the being that was Grace Palmer.
“You think she kill her father?”
“I don’t believe so. I hope not.”
“Sound like he had it coming, all right.”
“People say that.”
“Hmmph. You still talk like a naluaqmiiyaaq. You’ll fit right in at Anchorage.”
“Well, I—”
“She’ll malik you to Anchorage?”
“Yes, I hope she comes with me.”
Pauline was silent, studying him with her eyes narrowed. “What if she don’t? You gonna leave her here by herself?”
“I don’t know.”
THE WORK number in Vancouver rang three times, then a female voice said “Harney Elementary.”
Active identified himself and asked for Donna Gage.
“Hold on,” the voice said. “I think it’s her prep time.”
The phone clicked onto a feed of elevator music, then the voice came back. “Yes, I can put you through to her classroom now.”
Active remembered that Tom Gage’s ex-wife probably hadn’t heard about the fire yet and was trying to figure how to get into it when a new and younger female voice broke into the elevator music.
“Donna Gage,” it said around what sounded like a mouthful of food being chewed.
Active identified himself and said he was calling from Chukchi.
Donna Gage swallowed audibly. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid I have some bad news about your ex-husband, Mrs. Gage.”
“Good,” she said. “The worse the better. He finally crashed his plane and killed himself, I hope?”
“No, actually—”
“Broke through the ice on his snowmachine, then?”
“No, we don’t have any ice yet. It’s still—”
“Open water? He flipped his boat and drowned?”
“Mrs. Gage, somebody burned down our Rec Center three nights ago. It looks like eight people were killed. We think Tom was one of them.”
“You mean you can’t tell if he’s dead or alive? That’s Tom, all right.” She laughed unpleasantly. “He never could commit.”
“Ms. Gage—”
“I’m sorry, ah, Trooper Active, was it? You probably don’t want to hear all of this. Or need to. As you may have guessed, our marriage didn’t end well.”
“So I understand. His boss here said he was drinking pretty hard.”
“He was?”
“According to Gilbert Cividanes.”
“Really?”
“That surprises you?”
“Well, I don’t think it was because of me. He was happy as a clam when I told him I was clearing out. Maybe after I left, he realized . . . nah, the prick was glad to be rid of me.” She was silent for a few seconds, then spoke more softly. “I lost him to the Arctic, you know. He took to it like a duck to water, out in that damn plane hunting and fishing all the time, like he had come home to a place he’d never seen. He had this student from Cape Goodwin who invited him up there for whaling and . . . after that, the girls and I hardly ever saw him. He wanted to live like an Eskimo, think like an Eskimo, hunt like an Eskimo. If they had DNA transplants, he would have had himself turned into an Eskimo.”
Active felt a slight chill between his shoulder blades. “Did you say Cape Goodwin?” All the roads in this case seemed to lead there, but they never quite intersected.
“Mm-hmm. He eventually fell in love with a girl from up there but, really, it was the country that seduced him. When he looked at me, it was like he’d run into an old flame but couldn’t quite remember her name. Or what he ever saw in her. So I took my daughters and left.” She paused. “Shit, I’m going to have to tell them.”
Active cleared his throat. “Your husband had a girlfriend in Cape Goodwin?”
“Some little slut he met in whaling camp, I think.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“By that point, I was trying to ignore as many details as I could. I didn’t need them.”
“Anything? A first name?”
“Let me think.” She was silent again. Then, “Buddy . . . Booger . . . Buster . . . Buzzy . . . Beanie, I don’t know. One of those cute little village nicknames.”
“You don’t know her last name?”
Another silence. “Apparently not. I must have heard it, but . . . well, she was killed in a plane crash just after I moved out. I never did like to think about her, and after that I didn’t have to. Although I do admit drinking a toast to the fates that arrange such things when I heard about it.”
“Tom crashed his plane and killed his girlfriend?”
“Actually, I don’t think I ever heard who was flying, just that it was way up on the North Slope somewhere. Don’t I wish it was him, though? Wouldn’t it be sweet if he crashed and killed her?”
Now Active was silent, impressed anew by the damage one human being could do to another without really intending much harm. “Did he ever know a Jae Hyo Lee?”
“Jay who?”
“Jae Hyo Lee. A Korean who lived in Cape Goodwin.” Active described Lee’s arrest for gallbladder trafficking and Tom Gage’s visit to the prison in Oregon.
“Did you say Sheridan?”
“Right. Sheridan, Oregon.”
“So that’s what that was about.”
“What was?”
“Tom came down early this summer to visit the girls,” she said. “He borrowed my car one day, wouldn’t say where he was going, but a few weeks later I started getting these notices about an unpaid parking ticket in Sheridan.”
“Did Tom ever buy or sell polar bear gallbladders that you knew of?”
“Why would he tell me if he did? Isn’t that illegal?”
“So you have no idea why he’d visit Jae Hyo Lee in prison?”
“Absolutely none. I never had much of an idea why Tom did anything, once we hit Chukchi. Any more questions, Trooper Active?”
“Been up here lately?”
She laughed without mirth. “Haven’t been, won’t be, no way, never. Why on earth would I—oh, you think I set your fire to kill my ex? Seriously?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“If only. But when you find whoever did, thank ’em for me, will you?” She was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry I said that, Trooper Active. Maybe if it was only Tom. But seven others? I was mad about the divorce, all right, but not that mad. I can’t imagine that much rage.”
They hung up, and Active studied the five words at the bottom of his notes from the mystifying conversation: Buddy-Booger-Buster-Buzzy-Beanie.