TWENTY MINUTES LAT E R , A tiny van with an inadequate heater dropped them in the hard-frozen gravel parking lot in front of the Barrow jail, a new-looking two-story building with yellow-brown walls and a blue roof, all made of shiny metal.
“Look,” Long said. “No stilts.”
As in Chukchi, most buildings in Barrow perched on the shoulder-high pilings necessary to keep the permafrost from melting and swallowing anything that stood on it. The jail was one of the few structures they’d seen in Barrow that sat right on the ground.
“I guess they must have found a spot with no permafrost,” Active said. This was rare in the Arctic, but not unheard-of.
“Either that or they don’t care,” Long said. “They got so much money up here, they can just build a new one if it sinks.” The Prudhoe Bay oil fields lay within the taxing jurisdiction of the North Slope Borough, with the result that the borough’s residents enjoyed a remarkable freedom from material want. Oil money brought houses, airports, hospitals, clinics, cops, bureaucracies, and schools on a scale unimaginable elsewhere in the bush.
It was certainly unimaginable in the Chukchi region, where the only taxable property of any consequence was the Gray Wolf mine, and even that was minuscule compared to the golden goose at Prudhoe. Still, the Aurora Borough had been formed to take advantage of the opportunity to tax the Gray Wolf, and things were improving with the flow of jobs and revenue from the huge copper mine in the Brooks Range north of Chukchi. Now Chukchi and the other villages in the region were about to be absorbed into the borough. One day soon, the Chukchi police force would be dissolved, and Alan Long and the other city cops would find themselves employed by the borough’s public safety department. Jim Silver had been tapped to organize the new agency as his last project before retirement.
Active paid the Filipino cabby, and they picked up their bags and walked into a lobby decorated with Eskimo masks made from dried caribou hide. Active recognized the masks as coming from Caribou Creek, an Eskimo village high in the Brooks Range, anomalously distant from salt water, seals, walrus, whales, and the other customary marine mainstays of Inupiat life. The village was known primarily for the caribou hunting in the nearby tundra valleys and high lakes of the Brooks Range. That, and caribou masks.
Active dropped his bags, checked his cell phone for service, found three bars, and dialed the Troopers in Chukchi. Evelyn O’Brien answered and put him through to Carnaby, who told him that Charlie Hughes, the District Attorney, had gotten an arrest warrant for Pingo Kivalina. They could fly him back to Chukchi, unless he managed to talk himself out of suspicion in the interview.
Two jailers showed them into an interview room like every other one Active had ever seen: a table of blond wood, four chairs with shiny metal frames and black vinyl seats, one door, a trashcan, and a one-way mirror.
One of the jailers was a middle-aged Inupiat woman with a name tag identifying her as Mabel. The other was a younger white man named Ray, chubby and weak-chinned with a moustache that failed to lend authority or character to his round face.
Mabel told them to wait in the interrogation room while they fetched Pingo Kivalina, but Active asked to be put in the observation room to watch Pingo a few minutes before confronting him.
Mabel nodded, led them next door, and reminded them to keep the lights off. Then the two jailers left to get Kivalina.
Active and Long looked at each other in the dim light of the observation room.
Long grimaced. “This could be it, huh?”
“Could be,” Active said, fighting down the urge to pace or drop to the floor for a few pushups.
Finally the jailers returned with an Inupiaq in short-sleeved orange jail coveralls. Mabel put him in a chair facing the one-way mirror, and the two cops finally got a look at Pingo Kivalina.
He had stringy black hair down to the middle of his back and an oval face with a long, heavy jaw under a wide mouth that appeared to grin reflexively when left to its own devices. His skin was black along the cheekbones, the mark of a hunter who had been repeatedly frostbitten while snowmachining in the cold. His left arm looked sunburned around the elbow, which glistened with some kind of ointment.
Kivalina surveyed the room after the jailers left, then got up and walked over to the trashcan and looked in. He came to the mirror, peered into it, and waved. Active couldn’t tell if Kivalina was waving at himself or at the people he assumed were behind the mirror.
The jailers let themselves into the observation room.
“Think he’s your guy?” asked the one named Ray.
Active shrugged and looked at Pingo Kivalina again, wondering why the face seemed vaguely familiar. Had he been in one of the pictures at Tom Gage’s place?
“What do you think?” Active asked the jailers.
“There’s no telling,” Ray said. “He’s totally gooned out as far as I can see. Keeps channeling his dead sister and telling her about this wolverine that’s trying to kill him. My guess is, he’ll confess to Nine-Eleven if you push him hard enough.”
Active had watched Mabel as Ray spoke. She had a pleasant face, somewhat lean and angular; bright sharp eyes; and gray-streaked black hair worn in a braid at the back of her neck. Just now, she also wore the Eskimo mask.
“Thanks, Ray,” Active said. “I guess we can take it from here.”
Mabel headed for the door with Ray, but Active touched her arm.
“Maybe you could stay.”
“Ah?”
“Do you speak Inupiaq?”
She lifted her eyebrows.
“How’s Pingo’s English?”
“You sure you don’t need me?” Ray interrupted.
“No, I just think we may need a translator with Pingo.”
Ray nodded with a relieved look and pushed out the door.
Mabel was smiling. “He always watch Howard Stern on cable this time of day,” she said after the door had closed. “He like it when that Howard get those silly girls to take off their tops.”
Active marveled for a moment at the New York shock jock’s reach. But anywhere was everywhere these days, as long as there was electricity for a satellite dish.
“Will we need a translator with Pingo?”
Mabel turned and studied the man in the mirrored room. “I don’t think so. His English is pretty good, all right.”
“It feels strange to call you Mabel,” Active said, “but I didn’t get your last name before.”
“It’s Oktollik,” she said. “Mrs. Mabel Oktollik.”
“Oktollik? Isn’t that a Cape Goodwin name?” Long asked. “Are you from there?”
“My husband’s family was,” she said. “But they move to Fairbanks when he’s little boy, so I only been there a few times, when we visit his relatives.”
Active nodded at the one-way mirror. “You ever know that guy when you were in Cape Goodwin?”
“Pingo? I think I must have seen him at the village, all right, but I don’t remember if we ever talk or anything. I don’t think so. Did he set that fire in Chukchi?”
“We don’t know yet. You think he did?”
She glanced at Pingo, who was now slumped in his chair at the end of the table, arms crossed, chin on his chest. He looked to be asleep. “It’s hard to tell what somebody can do,” she said. “Somebody that’s nice can do bad things, or someone bad can be nice sometimes.”
“Is he crazy, like Ray says?”
“He sound crazy, all right, talking about that wolverine kill his sister and now it’s after him. But at the same time, I dunno. Seem like he believe what he’s saying, but crazy people are like that, ah?”
“That’s right,” Long said. “It’s the difference between a crazy person and a liar. The crazy person believes it.”
For a moment, Active thought Mabel was about to turn the Eskimo mask on Long, but she just lifted her eyebrows.
“A wolverine, huh?” Active asked.
“Ah-hah. Qavvik, he call it.”
Active lifted his eyebrows. “And the sister? What’s her name?”
“Budzie, I think. He’s kind of hard to understand sometimes. He was pretty drunk when we got him, but he’s sober now. Hung over too.”
Active looked at Kivalina, then back at Mabel Oktollik. “Well, if his English is okay, you don’t have to stay, unless you want to.”
She shook her head. “No, I should get back to work. When you’re done, call us to take you out.” She pointed at a phone on a table by the door. Its one lighted button was the room’s only illumination, other than what came through the mirror from the interrogation room. “Extension two-three-two.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Oktollik. We will.”
She left, and Active turned to Long. “Any thoughts?”
“Apparently he’s not too crazy to remember his sister’s name. Otherwise. . . .” Long threw up his hands.
Active peered through the glass. “I want to talk to him alone.”
“What? I—”
“I need you to stay here and observe, watch his body language, listen for voice changes, that kind of thing, all right?”
Long gave a grudging nod, and Active walked into the interrogation room.
“Pingo Kivalina,” he said as he closed the door. “I’m Trooper Nathan Active.”
A shoulder twitched. Kivalina’s eyes opened.
He blinked and peered about in evident confusion for a few seconds, then spotted Active by the door. His face went blank, and he screamed “Arii!” as he jumped up and knocked over the chair. Active braced himself, hoping that Long was on his way from the observation room to help.
But Kivalina didn’t come at Active. He spun and slammed blindly into the mirror, leaving a smear of mucus and blood on the glass as he slid to the floor. The crotch of his coveralls darkened and the smell of warm urine filled the room. He twisted to look at Active and screamed again. “Arii! He come with you?”
The door opened, and Active sensed Long behind him.
“This is Officer Long,” Active said. “Yes, he’s with me.”
“Hiya, Pingo,” Long said. “How ya been?”
Kivalina stared over Active’s shoulder at Long with no sign of recognition, then refocused on Active. “No, not him. That qavvik—he come with you?”
“There’s no one else,” Active said. “Just Officer Long.”
“You never come with that qavvik?”
Apparently, Kivalina was crazy, perhaps crazy enough to have set the Rec Center fire. If he wanted to talk about a wolverine, perhaps that was the best way to get him going.
“What qavvik?” Active asked. “The one that killed your sister?”
Kivalina lifted his eyebrows.
“And now it’s trying to kill you?”
Kivalina lifted his eyebrows again. “He try burn me up in that Rec Center.”
“The wolverine set the Rec Center on fire?”
“Ah-hah.”
“And that’s how you burned your arm?”
Kivalina rubbed the red skin around his elbow. “Ah-hah.”
“And that’s how Tom Gage got burned?”
“Ah-hah, he got burned too, all right, except he never get out.”
“And you were staying with him in Chukchi?”
Another eyebrow-raise.
“Some people are thinking maybe you’re the qavvik that burned up the Rec Center and killed Tom Gage.”
“Somebody say that?”
“What if they did?”
“They’re lying. I never
“They’re lying. I never do it. I’m not no qavvik.”
“The qavvik’s not around, so you don’t have to be afraid. Now tell me about when the Rec Center burned and you got out.”
Kivalina struggled shakily to his feet and leaned against the mirror, blood dripping from his nose. He glanced at his crotch. “Look like I piss myself. How that happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
Active shook his head and looked at Long, who rolled his eyes. Active turned back to Kivalina. “You sit at the table there, and Officer Long will get you some dry clothes.”
Active turned to Long, who raised his eyebrows and slipped out the door. Active took a seat at the table. Kivalina righted his chair and seated himself across from Active, then jumped up as if it was no fun sitting in the sodden coveralls. He sat down again on the edge of the chair.
“Look,” Active said. “We were talking about that fire in Chukchi.”
“Ah-hah.”
“You can have a lawyer here when we talk if you want.”
“Yeah, they tell me that when I’m arrested, all right.”
“Or you don’t have to talk at all if you don’t want to.”
Pingo looked puzzled. “Why I don’t want to?”
Active shook his head and plowed through the rest of the Miranda warning, one element at a time. When he was finished, he wasn’t sure Kivalina had understood any of it, but it would have to do.
“All right.” Active cleared his throat. “You said the qavvik burned the Rec Center?”
“I say that?”
Active lifted his eyebrows.
“Well, it’s true. He try burn me up, all right.”
“And who is this qavvik?”
“You know him already.”
“I know him? How do you know that?”
Kivalina looked away.
“Can you tell me his name?”
Kivalina squinted in refusal. “I can’t say it.”
“Why not?”
“Too scare.”
“Why would he want to burn the Rec Center?”
“He can do that if we try kill him, ah?”
“You and your sister tried to kill him? That’s why he killed her and why he’s trying to kill you?”
“My sister try kill him? She never tell me that.”
Active frowned and rubbed his chin. Pingo Kivalina had the attention span of a flea. How to keep him on track? If there was a track.
“How you know my sister?” Kivalina asked. “I never remember you being around Budzie. You got the great weather in you?”
Active sighed and climbed on for the ride. “The great weather?”
“Budzie always say that what she’s looking for, a man with the great weather inside him.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“She have this song she always sing.” Kivalina’s face softened and looked suddenly feminine. When he sang, his voice was a woman’s, and Active found the hair prickling on the back of his neck:
The great sea
has sent me adrift,
it moves me
like a weed in the great river,
Earth and the great weather
move me,
have carried me away
and move my inward parts with joy.
Kivalina was silent for a time, then was a man when he spoke again. “You move her inward parts with joy? That what she mean by a man with the great weather inside him. She always look for that man.”
“I never knew your sister.”
“Nobody really know her but me. We’re twins, ah?”
Active lifted his eyebrows. “I heard that.”
“But our aaka never know she got two of us in there. After Budzie come out, she think she’s all done, then I pop out too. Like a pingo, what she always tell people. So everybody always call me Pingo.” Kivalina smiled, and his face took on a distant look.
“Tell me more about your sister.”
“Ah-hah,” Kivalina said. “When we’re little, we have our own language. Nobody else can’t talk it, only us. You know what our aaka call it?”
Active shook his head.
“Twinupiaq, ah-hee-hee.”
Kivalina paused, waiting for Active’s response. Active smiled dutifully and, he hoped, encouragingly.
“You ever have a twin, Mr.—what your name again?”
“Active. Nathan Active.”
“You ever have a twin, Mr. Nathan?”
Active was about to correct Kivalina, then decided against it. “No, I only have a half-brother.”
“When we’re little kids in Cape Goodwin, that’s when we talk it, Twinupiaq.”
Active nodded, trying to think of a way to snap Kivalina back to the present again. “Are you sure it was the qavvik that killed Budzie? I heard she died in a plane crash.”
“Hah!” Kivalina snorted. “It was that qavvik, all right. She tell me.”
“She told you? How could she do that if she was dead?”
“I hear Dad-Dad barking while I’m asleep, then I dream I’m awake and she’s there and she say, ‘We never katak in that plane.’ Then I know that qavvik kill her, all right. That’s why we go up there.”
“Dad-Dad? Your father was bark—who’s Dad-Dad?”
“That’s our dog. Budzie’s and mine. Dad-Dad is dead, too.”
“Ah. So your sister came around with your dog?”
“Ah-hah, she come around while I’m dreaming, say, ‘We never katak in that plane.’ Then I know that qavvik kill her, all right. Her and Dad-Dad. That’s why we go up there.”
“You went up there?”
Kivalina lifted his eyebrows yes.
“You went up to where the qavvik killed her?”
Kivalina lifted his eyebrows again. “Ah-hah, that place they call Driftwood, where they never katak in that qavvik’s plane.”
Driftwood? It took Active a moment to remember. Driftwood was the oil-company airstrip Cowboy had identified as their best hope in the event of an engine failure in the Brooks Range. But why would Pingo Kivalina go where his sister had died? And how?
“You went to—” Active paused at the sound of the door opening behind him. Alan Long stepped in with a pair of the orange jail coveralls under his arm.
“Here ya go, Pingo.” Long dropped the coveralls onto the table in front of Kivalina.
Kivalina put a hand on the jailwear and looked at the two officers. “I have to do it with you guys in here?”
“We’ll give you some privacy.” Active motioned for Long to follow him out of the room.
Through the mirror, they watched as Kivalina peeled off the coveralls with the stain at the crotch and tossed them into a corner. He looked down at his boxers, then stripped them off, exposing the scrawniest butt Active had ever seen.
“Look at that,” Long said. “A real Eskimo, all right.”
Active looked. “What?”
“He’s got the blue spot. See, right there over his left cheek?”
Now Active saw it. A kidney-shaped patch the color of a faded ink stain in the small of Kivalina’s back. “That makes him a real Eskimo?”
Long raised his eyebrows. “The doctors call ’em Mongolian spots. We call ’em Eskimo spots. I have one in the same place. Don’t you?”
“Not there,” Active said after a moment’s reflection. “But I’ve got a blue birthmark under one arm. That count?”
Long raised his eyebrows again. “It does if it’s blue, I think.”
Kivalina had pulled on the fresh coveralls and was now attempting to sit back down at the table. But he overturned his chair and had to set it upright.
“What do you think?” Long asked. “Crazy?”
Active chewed his lip and studied their suspect, who had slid down in the chair and was leaning his head back, in apparent preparation for a nap. “Evidently.”
“There’s a lot of schizophrenia in Cape Goodwin,” Long said. “You know, they say it’s famous for—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Active said. “Everybody knows. And maybe they’re right, at least in Pingo’s case. He keeps talking about this qavvik who’s to blame for everything. The qavvik killed his sister. The qavvik killed their dog. The qavvik set the Rec Center on fire. Pingo even tried to kill the qavvik, he says.”
“You think the qavvik is Pingo’s other self?”
Active shrugged. “It seems to fit. Pingo did get burned in the fire. Maybe that’s how he tried to kill the qavvik.”
Long shuddered as he looked at Kivalina through the mirror. “And got all of those other people instead.”
Active was silent for a long time. “Maybe we can punch through it somehow, maybe talk to the qavvik himself.”
“How?”
“Maybe Budzie’s our lever.”
“The sister?”
Active nodded. “She seems to have been a kind of mother figure to him. Every thread eventually leads back to her.”
Long rubbed his chin and lifted his eyebrows. “You’re right. But how do we use her? She died what, over a year ago?”
Kivalina was tapping his long, dirty fingernails on the tabletop and looking around the room. He seemed suddenly more alert, less hung over, the nap forgotten.
“You ever hear the exact name of the spot where she was killed?”
Long thought for a moment, then squinted the negative. “Doesn’t seem like it, no.”
“Pingo says it was at Driftwood.”
“That old strip on the Utukok?”
“Uh-huh. Pingo says a wolverine killed his sister at Driftwood,” Active said. “Not a crash, but a wolverine. And then he went up there. Pingo and somebody else.” And then he went up there. Pingo and somebody “He say who the somebody else was?”
Active shook his head.
Long shrugged. “Driftwood, huh? Could be, I guess. Guys with airplanes go up there sometimes to hunt caribou. The herds come through there on their way south in late summer, early fall. But how would Budzie—”
“Tom Gage!”
“Sure,” Long said. “He was a pilot and—”
“Shit, maybe he’s the qavvik Pingo keeps raving about. There’s a crash, Budzie dies, Pingo blames Gage, and here we are.”
Long frowned. “But why would Pingo go up there afterward?”
“Maybe he just had to see the spot,” Active said. “Touch it. Take a memento back. Maybe talk to her. She and the dog apparently came to him in a dream and she told him there was no crash. Maybe he wanted to camp out up there, see if she’d put in a personal appearance.”
They turned and studied Kivalina, who had risen and was pacing the room.
“If you’re Pingo Kivalina, it probably makes perfect sense to barbecue eight or ten people alive to get the guy who killed your twin sister,” Active said. “And he was staying with Gage—”
“He told you that?”
Active nodded. “So he could have taken a wire twister.”
“Sounds right,” Long said. “But how do we get through to him?”
They studied Kivalina some more. “Look,” Active said at last, “you go to North Slope Public Safety; talk to the investigator on the crash; go through their files. We need everything they have. Especially pictures. The more graphic the better.”
“And what are you going to do?”
Active chewed his lip again. He needed the details of Budzie’s crash before confronting Kivalina again, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave him on his own for very long. He was still pacing and had begun shaking a finger in the air, as if lecturing an invisible audience. Was he rehearsing his story before trying it on Active? Or was he about to go over the cliff completely?
“I guess I should try to keep him talking,” Active said. “Just get back as soon as you can.”
Long nodded and started for the door of the observation room.
“Oh,” Active said. “And take those, would you?” He pointed through the glass at the soiled coveralls piled in the corner of the interrogation room.
“Arii!” Long said. But he walked into the room with Active and left with the malodorous apparel.
Kivalina, who had halted the lecture when they came in, was now huddled in a corner, his eyes skittering around the room.
“Come back to the table,” Active said. “Come on. No one will hurt you.”
Kivalina walked over and perched on the edge of the chair opposite Active, coiled like a spring.
Active sighed inwardly and tried to think how to get him talking again. But not about the crash, not now. Now they needed a neutral subject.