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· August 16 ·
CHUKCHI
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ACTIVE LOOKED OVER the heads of the sparse crowd in the Arctic Dragon and took an empty table near a window in the back. Grace had made it home from her Anchorage trip the previous night, but so late in the evening they had barely had time to see each other. Now they were meeting for lunch and a catch-up.
A spike-haired Korean waitress brought a high chair and two menus as he surfed the news on his phone and watched the door. Fifteen minutes passed, then Grace arrived with Charlie in a front pack. He waved her over.
“Hey, stranger.” He gave her a kiss on the lips, longer and harder than he normally would in public.
“Well, I missed you, too,” she said with a laugh. She dropped a black and yellow flyer on the table.
He hadn’t thought she could look any more beautiful until Charlie came along. The quicksilver eyes and dark, gleaming hair like raven feathers had mesmerized him from the moment they had first met in Dutch Harbor several years earlier. Since Charlie’s arrival, she would complain that her face was too fat or she was too thick around the middle. Baby weight, she called it.
Not for his money. When he saw her nursing Charlie, rocking and singing to him, stroking his cheek, he marveled at this new incarnation of her loveliness.
Maybe he didn’t tell her that enough? Between baby care, his police work, and her running the Chukchi women’s shelter, not to mention parenting Nita, their teenager, moments alone together were hard to come by. An ordinary lunch date had become something of an occasion.
“Hey, big boy.” He kissed the top of Charlie’s bristly head and lifted him out of the pack and into the high chair. The boy smiled, gurgled, and waved his arms, brown eyes sparkling over chubby cheeks. Grace stuffed a blanket behind him. He was five months old now and almost able to sit up by himself.
“What’s this?” Active picked up the flyer and read the title. “The First Annual Kay-Chuck Beach Cleanup Day?”
“The girls at work want to put together a team. I haven’t decided. Packing Charlie while I pick up trash, I dunno.”
“Maybe Nita and her friends?”
She picked up the flyer and studied the cover. “Maybe. I’ll suggest it. Right now, I’m starved. Did you order for me?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, the fried rice and egg roll combo. Do I know my sweetie or what?”
“You do, indeed.” Grace unzipped her backpack and took out a jar, a tiny spoon, a bib, and a pack of wipes. “And how’s the leg?”
“Mm.”
Grace waited for more, but he couldn’t think of anything.
“Okay.” She uncapped the jar of baby food.
“And what’s on the menu for Sir Charles today?” he offered with what he knew was hollow cheeriness.
“Rice cereal.”
“Yum!” Active said, grateful that she’d accepted his offer to talk about something else, anything else, as long as it wasn’t the leg.
Charlie drooled and banged on the tray of his high chair.
“I had to pry him away from Martha. That’s why we’re late.”
Martha Active Johnson had gone full aana upon Charlie’s arrival in March. Maybe it was because the boy was her first grandchild. But Active suspected it was also part of his mother’s burning hunger for a do-over, her need to make up for what she’d failed to do for him.
She had been a fourteen-year-old wild child when she gave birth to Active and adopted him out to a pair of white school teachers, who promptly left Chukchi and raised him in Anchorage. By the time Active had been, over his vociferous objections, posted to Chukchi for his first assignment with the Alaska State Troopers, Martha had long since calmed down, married well, and produced another son. But it had taken Active years to forgive her for abandoning him, as he saw it, and to bow to the fierce mother love he now accepted as an elemental force of nature.
“Who wouldn’t want to spend a whole day with this guy?” Active said. Charlie’s face was covered with white goo. He blew bubbles with the rice paste Grace managed to push into his mouth.
Their order arrived and Grace dived on it like a starving wolverine.
Active dished the remainder of the fried rice onto his plate and claimed two of the egg rolls while there was still time. “How was the conference? Obviously the food was inadequate.”
“Helpful,” Grace said around a mouthful of fried rice as Active took a turn at coaxing more of the rice paste into Charlie’s mouth. “We talked about identifying creative sources for funding now that social services have lost so much federal money.”
“I thought it was supposed to be about education for abused women and their kids.”
“Which takes money.” Grace wolfed down the last of an egg roll and reached for another. “Like everything. And you? Find any bodies while I was gone?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“Only a jawbone.”
“What! Whose jawbone?”
“We don’t know yet. We’re sending it to the ME in Anchorage.”
“Where did you find it?”
“We didn’t. It was more of a gift.”
He laid out the story of the Leokuks’ visit to Chukchi Public Safety the previous day and the malodorous surprise in the pouch of Tommie’s atiqluk.
“Lucky you,” Grace said. “But don’t tell me any more.” She’d finished off her second egg roll and now stared intently at the two on Active’s plate. “Not while I’m eating.”
Active sighed and transferred one of his egg rolls to her plate.
“Thanks, baby.”
Charlie scrunched up his face and sputtered out the spoonful of cereal Active had just worked into his mouth. He started to squirm and whine, rubbed a rice-smeared hand into the black fuzz on his head. His face contorted, his mouth opened, his cheeks reddened, and he let out a piercing wail that turned heads in the dining room.
“He needs a change and a nap.” Grace shot Active a look as she dabbed at the boy’s gooey hands and face. He continued to howl.
“Sure, I’ll take care of our little Superfund site while you finish your food.” Active waited till she had most of the goo off, then pulled Charlie out of the high chair.
She looked at his plate again. “You gonna finish that?”
He looked longingly at the last egg roll and sighed again. “Yeah, all okay, go ahead.”
A few minutes later, Active’s cell buzzed from the tabletop as he worked a fresher but still fussy Charlie back into the pack on Grace’s chest. He glanced at the caller ID, then Grace.
“Work,” he mouthed as he tapped into the call.
“You better get over here, Chief,” said the voice of Danny Kavik. “The Leokuks are back.”
A few minutes later, he found the old couple seated in his office exactly as on the previous day. Tommie with her sweet smile and empty stare, Oscar with the look of a man whose late years were turning out to be more complicated than he’d hoped. Active offered coffee, which Oscar declined for both of them.
Kavik eased in and took a chair beside the Leokuks as Active dropped into the chair behind his desk. He waited to see if Oscar would start the conversation.
Oscar did not. He just cleared his throat and studied his hands.
Active decided it was up to him this time.
“Did Tommie remember something?” he asked.
“Arii, Chief,” Oscar said. “You got another baggie?”
It was then that Active caught the corpse smell again. He flinched, opened his desk drawer, and pulled out nitrile gloves and an evidence bag.
Oscar pulled Tommie’s closed hand from her side, held it out toward Active, and gently pried the fingers open. A piece of bone with traces of flesh clinging to it dropped onto the desk blotter. It was maybe six inches long, and chewed off at one end.
“Kikituq?” Tommie smiled, rocked, and hummed.
Active and Kavik leaned in.
Kavik stared. “That’s a - -”
“It looks like a rib.” Active looked at Oscar. “Do you know where she found it?”
“Someplace she walk last night.”
“And do you know where that was?”
Oscar squinted the Inupiat no and shook his head.
“Did Girlie Kivalina bring her home?”
“Not this time. She come back herself.”
Active nudged the rib with his pen. “Could it be from an animal, a caribou or - -”
“Not no caribou,” Oscar said. “I cut up lotta caribou, all right, and that rib ain’t from no caribou.”
“Not a moose, either,” Kavik said. “Or a bear. Or—”
“Not no seal or walrus.” Oscar pulled his gaze away from the rib and looked at Active. “Inuk.”
“He means it’s from - -” Kavik began.
“I know what inuk means,” Active said. “This rib is from a human being.”
“And still no idea where she got it?” Kavik said.
Oscar squinted the no again.
Active thanked the Leokuks, and Kavik showed them out as he bagged and tagged the rib.
“What now?” Kavik asked when he came back in.
“Off to Georgeanne it goes.”
“To join its fellow body part.”
“Unless they’re from different bodies.”
“How do we figure out where Tommie’s finding these things?” Kavik asked. “Maybe put a phone on her and track her with the Location service?”
“Nah, what are the chances it wouldn’t get lost or broken the first day she had it?”
“Good point,” Kavik said. “Seems like I lose mine at least five times a week, and that’s just in the house.”
Active drummed his fingers on the blotter, studied the rib in its plastic bag, and turned it over in his mind. “I guess we have to follow her every time she leaves home.”
“But how are we even gonna know? It’s not like Oscar’s gonna wake up and call us. And she doesn’t do it every night.”
“And we don’t have the manpower to stake out the house all night.”
“No way,” Kavik said. “But if we could get an alert as soon as she steps - -”
A knock sounded on the door and Lucy poked her head in. “Nathan, could I have a minute?”
“Sure, come in.”
“No, ah, privately? In my office?”
“We’re kind of in the middle of - -”
“Just for a minute?”
Active looked at Kavik, rolled his eyes, and stood up. “Have a brainstorm while I’m gone, okay?”
Active followed Lucy into her office and shut the door. “What’s up?”
“I want you to tell me if I did something stupid.” She hiked her foot up onto her desk, pulled up one pant leg, rolled down the sock, and peeled back the bandage underneath.
Circling her ankle was a fresh tattoo, a graceful band of intertwined blue vines.
“Wait, you can get a tattoo in Chukchi now?”
She raised her eyebrows, yes. “My Uncle Oobie learned in jail.” She looked at him with a plea in her eyes. “What do you think?”
“This was your appointment yesterday?”
She raised her eyebrows again.
“What made you want to do it?”
“It was Dan’s idea. He thought it might be, you know, kind spice things up.”
“On your ankle?”
“Well, the ankle wasn’t exactly where he wanted it, but, I figured it’s my body, so- -” She dropped her eyes with an embarrassed look. “Arii, you think it’s stupid.”
“Actually, I think it’s beautiful.”
Lucy studied the tattoo. “Really? Should I put it on Facebook?”
“I figured you already had.”
He returned to his office, dropped back into his chair and grinned across the desk at Kavik.
“Everything okay with Lucy?” Kavik asked.
“Better than okay. She was actually a big help with this.” He tapped the rib in its plastic bag.
“Lucy? She doesn’t even know about the case.”
Active told Kavik about the tattoo. “So, it’s all about the body parts,” he concluded. “We have a jawbone, we have a rib, Lucy has ankles, and Tommie has ankles.”
Kavik turned up his palms in mystification. “And?”
“And we borrow one of those mini ankle monitors from Pretrial Services,” Active said. “And we put it on Tommie and - -”
“It alerts us when she leaves the house.”
“Bingo.”
“I’ll make the call.” Kavik pulled Active’s desk phone toward him, then stopped. “But wait.”
“What?”
“We gonna follow her every time she leaves the house? She usually comes home with nothing more exciting than a gum wrapper, according to Oscar.”
“No,” Active said. “If somebody makes a run for it, those things log their location every sixty seconds, and you can pull up a map of it on your computer. So all we have to do - -”
“Right,” Kavik said. “We wait till she brings in another body part, then look at the map for that night and go everywhere she did.”
“You got it.” Active reflected for a moment. “But you know what?”
Kavik raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“I think I will follow her the first couple times. I feel like I need to see for myself what she’s doing out there.”
Kavik’s face took on a wary expression. “Will you be needing a, ah, partner for these expeditions?”
Active chuckled. “Relax, I can handle it by myself. It’s been a while since I did a night patrol anyway.”