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· August 22 ·
CHUKCHI
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ACTIVE BENT OVER THE office printer and collected pages as the machine spewed out Georgeanne’s report on Tommie Leokuk’s souvenirs. He gave it a quick scan.
“Huh.”
Kavik came in and dropped into a chair across the desk. “What you got there?”
“Georgeanne’s report.”
“And?”
“Not a lot here.”
“Gender?”
“Undetermined.”
“Race? Age?”
“Undetermined and undetermined,” Active said.
“That can’t be all.”
“It is, but that’s only what’s on the record. If I know our Georgeanne, she’ll give us the good stuff by phone even if she can’t put it in writing yet.”
He dialed her on the speaker phone and she picked up on the second ring. “Medical examiner.”
“We want - -”
“Let me guess,” Georgeanne said. “You got my report and - -”
“And now we want the good stuff,” Active said.
“This is not official, you understand.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you realize I only had a piece of a jaw bone and a partial lower rib to work with.”
“Of course.” Active opened his notebook.
“First, I would say that the similarity of scale of the parts probably means one body—but that’s a pretty big ‘probably.’ The size of the bones, especially the jaw, suggest an adult female. They’re not still developing like with a child, and male bones are generally bigger than female ones, particularly where they connect to a larger part, like the jaw to the skull. But a pelvic bone is the best indicator of gender. I don’t suppose you’ve got one of those for me?”
“I wish,” Active said. “What about the tooth? Any help there?”
“A tooth can help identify a body but only if there’s something to match it up with, like dental records.”
“There’s no - -”
“National database like with fingerprints or DNA? Nope. A tooth by itself, you’re outta luck.”
“How about age?”
“The shape of the rib end points to a young or middle-aged individual,” Georgeanne said. “Our ribs become ragged as we age, less flat on the ends. Twenty-five to forty would be a ball park, but, again it’s pretty squishy.”
“And race?”
“That’s found in the distance between the eyes, the shape of the sockets, the opening for the nose, the shape of the brow. So, no skull, no race. Your old lady didn’t find one of those either, I’m assuming?”
“No such luck. Can you tell how long she’s been dead?”
“Judging by the recession of the tooth, the loss of surrounding teeth, two months, maybe three. Plus or minus.”
“Anything else?”
“The DNA people are working their magic, but that takes a while. We did find some soil particles and we’re having those analyzed. Might give a clue as to where the parts were found, indoors, outdoors, that kind of thing. Also, there are some tooth marks on both bones from scavengers and one end of that rib was chewed completely off.”
“Dogs, you think? Or foxes maybe?”
“The teeth marks are pretty small teeth. Rats or mice, more likely. Whatever you got up there.”
“We’ve got voles and shrews,” Kavik said. “And ground squirrels.”
“And there you are,” Georgeanne said. “That’s where the end of your rib went.”
She paused.
Active rolled his eyes at Kavik. Georgeanne loved nothing better than a little strip tease when she had something big to reveal.
“However,” she said.
“However?”
“Wait for it, Nathan. Wait for it.”
“Pretty please with sugar on it?”
“Okay, okay.” There was a grin in her voice. “Your rib shows another kind of mark that is pretty darned interesting, if I do say so myself.”
“Georgeanne!”
“It’s a nick from a sharp instrument. Most likely a knife.”
Beside Active, Kavik breathed, “No shit.”
“So it is a homicide,” Active said.
“Another huge ‘probably,’ but yeah, it’s unlikely this death was natural or accidental. I’m thinking somebody slipped a knife between her ribs and stabbed her in the heart. Somebody who knew what they were doing.”
“Which would be anybody who ever cut up a caribou or moose,” Active said.
“Or a seal or a walrus or a bear,” Kavik said.
“Which would only be about ninety percent of everybody in Chukchi,” Active said.
“You’re welcome, guys,” Georgeanne said.
They rang off, and Active studied his notes on what little they knew and theorized about the body Tommie was visiting. He looked at Kavik.
“We haven’t opened any missing person cases in Chukchi in the last couple of months, right?”
“Not a one,” Kavik said.
“Let’s check with our public safety officers out in the villages, the borough cops on the North Slope, and the Troopers in Nome, see if they’ve had any reports, queries, rumors, anything, about a missing female in that time frame. Somebody’s gotta be wondering why they haven’t heard from her.”
“I’m on it.” Kavik started out the door. “I’ll go down to Dispatch and canvass our village guys.”
Active’s phone rang again. Maybe something had slipped Georgeanne’s mind?
No, it was Oscar Leokuk on the line.
“Uh-huh,” Active said as Oscar spoke. Then, “Sure, come on over.”
Kavik, who had paused in the doorway at the sound of the phone, raised his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry. “Well?”
“Tommie picked up another souvenir last night.”
An hour later, the Leokuks were seated across the desk from Active, just as on the their two previous visits. He smelled what Tommie had found even before she drew it from her atiqluk—a sickening sweet, musty smell like rotten meat overlaid with perfume.
It got a lot stronger when she dropped a shriveled, gray-brown finger onto his desk and said, “Kikituq?” with her vacant smile.
Kavik stared from his chair beside the Leokuks.
“Something bad happen to somebody,” Oscar said from beside his wife. “Tommie never do nothing wrong. She’s just an old aana, lost her brain.”
“Don’t worry, Oscar,” Active said. “She’s not in any trouble.”
He pulled on a nitrile glove and rolled the finger over. It had been cut off at the knuckle, with little sign of damage to the exposed bones. The ligaments looked to have been severed with near-surgical precision.
He understood Oscar’s alarm at Tommie’s latest discovery. The fact that the finger still looked like part of a hand made it seem more human than the bare bones she had found before. It seemed to say, “Not long ago, I was alive. Like you.”
Active deposited the finger in an evidence bag and dropped it out of sight in a desk drawer. Oscar seemed to relax.
“Do you know where she got it?”
Oscar squinted the Inupiat no and said, “Same like always, she wander off, come home, it’s in her atiqluk. No clue.”
“And did she get herself home this time, or did someone bring her?”
“Nope, no ride, come home all by herself again.”
“Well, thank you for coming in.” Active rose and extended his hand to the old man. “We’ll let you know if we need anything else.”
Oscar nodded. “We come back if she find any more.”
Active ushered them out, slid behind his desk again, and retrieved the finger from its drawer.
“Maybe Georgeanne can get a print,” Kavik said.
“Hopefully. In the meantime, let’s see if we can figure out where Tommie found it.”
Active logged onto the pretrial services website and pulled up the satellite map for Tommie’s ankle monitor. Kavik came around the desk to watch over his shoulder.
In a few moments, they were looking at the trail of red drop-pins showing Tommie’s journey through the streets of Chukchi the night before.
Active traced the route with the tip of a pen. “She starts at home on Caribou Way, turns right on Temple, then south along Third.”
“Standard route so far,” Kavik said.
“But look at this—instead of turning back at the airport like when I followed her, she skirts the perimeter and keeps moving south. Here she is down on the beach at the west end of the runway, now by the weather station, and next thing you know, she’s way down in Tent City.”
Active zoomed in on a cluster of drop-pins near the south end of the summer camping area and started counting.
“Bingo!” he said. “There’s nineteen pins here. And no place else has more than a couple.”
“And the monitor reports its location once a minute, so she spent nineteen minutes on that spot,” Kavik said.
Active clicked to hide the pins and studied the terrain where Tommie had spent the nineteen minutes. The blurry satellite photograph showed only an ill-defined rectangle ten to fifteen feet on a side.
“Whattaya think? A tent platform?”
“Maybe,” Kavik said. “Or one of those shacks people used to build down there?”
“Mitt Zachares told me her folks used to have a site in Tent City. Maybe Tommie’s been going home.”
“We roll?” Kavik asked.
Active stayed in place, eyes on the screen. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He clicked the drop-pins back on and stared at the cluster around and in the mysterious rectangle. “If that is a house - -”
“And we go in without a warrant, then whatever we find - -” He stopped at the sight of Active’s raised hand.
“Might be inadmissible in court. Time to poke the bear.” Active punched Theresa Procopio’s button on his desk phone.
“What now?” she growled.
“Good morning, Madam Prosecutor!” Active looked out his office window at the gray drizzle and the state and national flags standing at full horizontal salute in the west wind that rolled in from Chukchi Bay. “It’s another beautiful day in paradise!”
“Not till I’ve had a lot more coffee. What do you want?”
“To make your life more interesting and your work more rewarding, of course.”
“Yeah, right. Just give it to me.”
“I need a search warrant for an area within a fifty-foot radius of - -” He right-clicked one of the drop-pins in the rectangle and read off the latitude and longitude.
An extended period of silence ensued. Then, “What?”
He said it again.
“What is that?”
“It’s the map coordinates of a spot in Tent City. No address, just the latitude and longitude is all we’ve got.”
Procopio sighed. “All right, give ’em to me again.”
He repeated the numbers. Her keyboard clattered in the background and she read the numbers back.
“And what is it I’m supposed to tell Judge Stein you’re going to find inside this magic circle?”
“A decaying human corpse that was in all probability murdered.”
Another silence.
“Seriously.”
“Yep.”
“So what exactly is on this spot?”
“Actually, um, we, um...”
“Nathan.”
“Actually, we haven’t been down there yet.”
“Come on, I’ll be laughed out of court. You want a warrant, you gotta have some basis for thinking there’s a corpse on the spot.”
“And indeed we do,” Active said. “Just listen to this.”
He described the process that had led from Oscar and Tommie’s visits to his office with the jawbone and rib, to the rolling stakeouts on her midnight rambles, to the decision to put the monitor on her, to this morning’s visit from Oscar and Tommie with the severed finger, and now the bouquet of drop-pins where Tommie had spent nineteen minutes the previous night.
There was another period of extended silence, then, “Well, I’ll be damned,” then more clatter from the prosecutor’s keyboard.
“We should at least get credit for originality when I pitch this,” Procopio said. “I never heard of anything like it before.”
“Neither did we,” Active said. “That’s why we called you. If it was a normal case, we’d write the warrant up ourselves, same as usual.”
“Cross your fingers. I’ll hustle this over to the court myself and call you when I get a ruling.”
“And we’re heading for Tent City - -”
“Don’t touch a goddamn thing unless it’s outside in plain sight! Not if you want me to prosecute this case!”
Active cleared his throat. “As I was saying, we’re heading for Tent City, where we will secure the perimeter with crime-scene tape and stand by. You’ve got my cell number, right?”
“Duh.”
A few minutes later, Active pulled the Tahoe to the shoulder of Loop Road when the map app on his phone showed he was abreast of the spot where Tommie had spent the nineteen minutes.
The brush was thick here, and the Tahoe’s windows were spattered with rain. No structure was visible. He showed his phone to Kavik and pointed into the murk.
“What do you think, thirty yards maybe?”
Kavik looked at the map, then at the tangle of willows and alders between the road and the beach. “One way to find out, I guess.”
They climbed out, pulled up the hoods of their anoraks, and thrashed through the dripping, wind-whipped brush until, suddenly, they were in a small clearing a few yards back from the beach.
In the middle of the clearing, an ancient wooden shack with a tin stovepipe reared up like a shipwreck from a sea of brush and tundra grass. The walls were mostly intact, but a section of roof had caved in. A row of hollow-eyed caribou skulls with towering antlers stared down from an eave. A sheet of plywood was nailed over one window; another was open to the elements except for a piece of tattered screen flapping in the wind.
“Not a bad place to hide a body,” Kavik said. He began circling the structure with his Nikon, clicking away.
“Just don’t touch - -” Active’s phone chimed and Procopio’s ID came up on the screen.
He tapped the phone into speaker mode. “What did the judge say?”
“He said, and I quote, ‘You had me at jawbone.’ So you got your warrant, Nathan. Search away.”
“Thanks, Prosecutor!”
He exchanged a thumbs-up with Kavik and they circled the structure to the doorway. It looked west, down an overgrown pathway to the beach. The door of the tiny qanichaq hung aslant on one hinge. Active pushed it open, and they found the main door into the house was missing.
They surveyed the interior in the half-light from the hole in the roof and the one window. A bare wooden table with a dented enamel coffeepot on it, an old woodstove shot full of holes, a forty-year old calendar open to April hanging on a wall, shelves still holding a few rusted cans of vegetables and chili con carne, and half an old Sears catalog.
Kavik picked up the catalog, flipped through a few pages, and dropped it on the table. Active pulled out his flashlight and began checking the floor. He found what he was looking for in the darkest corner of the room, under the good section of roof and away from the open window.
“Danny,” he said.
Kavik came over and Active pointed his flashlight at the trap door with its rope handle.
“Looks like an old ice cellar,” Active said.
“Yeah,” Kavik said. “The legendary Eskimo deep-freeze.”
Active swung the door up and leaned it against a wall. The cellar was just over waist deep, five weathered wood steps down from the house proper, and floored with loose boards on gravel, with frozen soil under that. Active took the steps, stopped at the bottom, squatted on his haunches and played his flashlight around the cellar. Kavik followed with his own flashlight and squatted beside him.
The cellar was empty except for a few rusty cans and other detritus on the floor, plus a couple of long-rotted gunny sacks hanging from nails on the log wall.
That, and a jumble of scrap lumber and driftwood in one corner with the corner of a black trash bag just protruding from underneath. Goosebumps prickled on Active’s arms as he recognized the smell laced in with the dank scent of earth, water, and mold.
They hunch-walked over to the pile, heads down to keep from banging into the rotted floor joists overhead. Active tossed a couple of boards aside and jumped as something tiny and dark scurried across his foot and vanished into a crevice in the wall.
He told Kavik to start shooting with his camera and pulled driftwood and lumber aside until the trash bag was fully exposed. It had been chewed open down the middle by scavengers. He spread it open as Kavik clicked away, his flash strobing in the dark cellar like a fluorescent light with a bad tube.
Inside the bag lay a scattering of white bones and the remnants of a hand with most of the flesh chewed off.
“The critters have been busy,” Active said.
“Like Georgeanne figured.”
Active pitched aside the rest of the debris and they stared at three more trash bags in the flashlight beam. One was also tattered by scavengers, two were still zip-tied and intact. The smell built up in waves until they had to back off a few steps to gulp clean air through the trap-doorway. Kavik dry heaved a couple of times, then buried his nose in the crook of an elbow. “What the hell?”
Active took a deep breath and started on the bags. The one opened by scavengers contained an armless torso, mostly bones now, with maggots still at work on the remaining scraps of flesh. In the other two were severed arms, legs, and feet, discolored and swollen but apparently undisturbed.
“So where’s the head?” Active walked his flashlight beam around the cellar. Then, from a corner, he caught the dull gleam of dirty, weathered bone. He bent lower for a closer look, then lifted a skull with the missing lower jaw and a few scraps of brown hair.
Active gazed into the hollow eye sockets as Kavik snapped photo after photo. “At last.”
“But who is she?” Kavik said. “And how did she end up here?”