|
|
· August 26 ·
DEADHORSE, PRUDHOE BAY
––––––––
ACTIVE HAD VISITED the closest thing to a town in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields a few times before. What always impressed him was how ruthlessly industrial it all looked: a grid of roads built on gravel dikes to protect the permafrost beneath, with boxy steel buildings and hulking production facilities squatting on rectangular gravel pads. Here and there, wind-whipped flags of yellow flame danced above black smokestacks.
And north of the oilfields, the sprawling blue expanse of the Beaufort Sea heaved ice-free and lazy despite the looming Arctic autumn. The tundra here was already more umber than green.
The Navajo touched down on the gravel runway with a crunch, but no bounce, and rolled to a stop at the corrugated steel terminal. Active thanked Cowboy, who unloaded his other passengers and taxied toward a set of fuel pumps to top off his tanks for the trip back to Chukchi.
Behind the terminal, a dozen or so gray and white caribou grazed on the shores of a small tundra lake, the males already sporting antlers with the approach of the fall rut.
Which was another strange thing about the oilfields. The original inhabitants didn’t seem to take much notice of their human and mechanical neighbors. Active had never been to the Slope without seeing at least a few caribou. And once he had seen a herd of several thousand crossing the Sagavanirktok River just east of Deadhorse and heading toward the Canadian border.
He hitched a ride in the rotting yellow Suburban that picked up his co-passengers, the safety inspectors. The driver took them along one of the wide gravel dikes in a cloud of grit and dust kicked up by a large truck a hundred yards ahead.
Deadhorse was the hub of the oilfields, the only place at Prudhoe where you could rent a hotel room or buy supplies off the shelf or catch a plane out. No oil was produced in Deadhorse, but it was where most of the companies working on the Slope had their offices and residential facilities. The oil wells themselves sprawled for miles to the east and west.
North Slope Environmental Services was in one of the Slope’s standard metal boxes, a long, low one with a teal roof. Like all heated buildings on the Slope, it was set on steel pilings to prevent the permafrost beneath from thawing out and swallowing it up. A red placard on the door announced that alcohol and drugs were prohibited.
Next to the headquarters was a three-story modular complex that looked like a stack of mobile homes. It was also on pilings and was identified by a sign as the NES Man Camp. This, he assumed, would be employee housing for some of the rotating corps of Slopers who kept the oil flowing at Prudhoe.
A friendly young Inupiat woman at the front desk issued him a visitor badge and ushered him to the office of the operations manager. A sign on his desk identified him as Fred Sullivan. He was tall, ruddy, balding, and a little uneasy, Active thought, at the sight of a cop across the desk.
Active introduced himself and passed over a business card.
“Pleasure, Chief Active.” Sullivan stood and put out his hand. “How can we help you?”
Behind Sullivan, the wall was spread with photos of employees getting awards or posing at job sites.
“I have some questions about one of your employees,” Active said. “A woman - -”
A scrabbling noise came from behind the desk as Sullivan sat down. Frantic yips and yaps followed.
Active craned his neck and spotted the corner of a small kennel poking out from behind the desk. A small black nose pressed against the wire mesh in front.
“That your assistant there?”
Sullivan looked down at the kennel. “Yep, that’s Chiquita. She goes wherever I go. I used to leave her in Anchorage when I came up here. But the wife doesn’t care for her and I missed her.” He put a finger through the mesh. Chiquita licked it. “Isn’t that right, baby? Daddy missed his little Quita, didn’t he?”
“A Chihuahua, right? Doesn’t seem like much of an Alaska dog,” Active said.
“Nah, she’ll never make the Iditarod, but we understand each other.” Sullivan pulled a stick of jerky from a drawer and pushed it through the mesh.
“That’ll keep her busy for a while,” he said. “You say you’ve got some questions about one of our employees?”
“Shalene Harvey.”
Sullivan’s eyebrows twitched. “Shalene? Great young gal, good worker until she wasn’t. Rotated out in May, never came back. Didn’t call, didn’t e-mail, nothing, just didn’t show, ghosting I guess the kids call it these days. We waited a month, but finally we had to terminate her. She get herself in some kind of trouble?”
“So to speak. She’s dead, Mr. Sullivan. Someone killed her and dumped her in an abandoned house in Chukchi.”
Sullivan jerked back in his chair. “Dead? Jesus Christ. That’s terrible. I never would have thought...I mean, what? How?”
Active retrieved his pen and notebook from his pocket. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. How did she get along with her coworkers here?”
“Great security officer. Cooperative, always a pleasure to work with. The different departments don’t have much contact with each other during their shifts, but we all get together every morning for a safety meeting. Everyone liked her.”
“No issues with anybody?”
Sullivan rubbed his jaw. “Well, yeah, there was this one guy, Larry Hayden, a heavy equipment operator. She complained about him giving her a hard time when she first came on the job about a year and a half ago. She accused him of saying inappropriate sexual things to her. She came to my office crying a couple of times.”
“What did you do?”
“I talked to Larry. He denied it. It was a he-said-she-said, so there was nothing we could do. Until that time he got into it with Josh McCarran, one of our mechanic apprentices. Larry had backed Shalene into a corner and he put his hands on her.”
“Put his hands on her how?”
“Squeezed her boobs and went ‘Honk-honk!’ Josh saw what was going on and rushed in to help her. He laid Larry out. I had grounds to fire ’em both, but the other guys backed up Shalene and Josh.”
“What happened to Larry?”
“He lost some pay and got a final warning in his file, which means his ass is mine if he does anything like that again. Josh just got a warning, which I thought even that was too much because I personally felt like he was totally justified in what he did. When Larry came back, we sent him to sexual-harassment training and changed his rotation so he was never on shift at the same time as Shalene and Josh.”
“And this was when?”
“Hmm, April, I think. Let’s see, Shalene made a written statement, I can get that for you.” Sullivan picked up his phone and punched a button. “Molly, can you pull Shalene Harvey’s file for me?”
A couple of minutes later a thirty-ish and moderately pregnant Inupiat woman came in and laid the file on Sullivan’s desk. He leafed through it for a few seconds.
“Yeah, here we are, April seventeenth was the dustup between Larry and Josh. We sent Larry home early on April twenty-fifth. He wasn’t due to leave until May fourteenth, the last day that Shalene worked, so he lost three weeks pay out of it.”
“Do you have a photo of Shalene there?”
“Yes, here’s her employee ID photo.” Sullivan handed the picture to Active.
The image of a jawless skull discarded in the dirt faded from his mind as a young woman’s face gazed back at him. Hazel eyes above a sunny, open smile that was a little crooked on the right, dazzling white teeth, waves of golden-brown hair falling over her shoulders. She looked closer to eighteen than twenty-five. He marveled, not for the first time, at how normal murder victims usually looked, how capable of happiness, in photos like this. So, for that matter, did their killers, often as not.
Active copied the picture onto his phone and handed it back to Sullivan. “Can I get a copy of that file? And the files for McCarran and Hayden.”
“Of course.”
“When was Shalene due back on shift?”
“Toward the end of May as I recall. That would be in her payroll records. I can call that up here...” He tapped on his keyboard. “Yeah. May twenty-eighth.”
“You said you mailed her a termination notice. To what address?”
Sullivan flipped through the employee file again. “We sent it to Nome. Her home address, as far as we knew.”
“Did her final paycheck go there, too?”
“Probably direct - -” He scanned the pages at the front of the file. “Yeah, she was on direct deposit with Wells Fargo.”
“Any idea why she’d take her R&R in Chukchi?”
“She was visiting someone there, maybe? We have a few employees from that area, but I can’t say how many exactly. You know, people come and go.”
“I’ll need a list of those employees, anyone who has a Chukchi address on record from January through the present.”
“Not a problem.” Sullivan tapped on his computer and Active heard the swish of an e-mail being sent.
“Is Hayden on the Slope now?”
“Yes. He came back up yesterday. He’s due at work in a couple of hours. You should be able to find him at employee housing in our mancamp. Easy walk, it’s right next door.”
“Saw it on my way in,” Active said.
“Right. Well, if you want to swing by here after, I’ll have those files ready for you.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sullivan, I think we’re done for now.”
Sullivan rubbed the back of his head with a one-more-thing look on his face.
“Anything to add?” Active asked.
“Well, it’s just that, well, the guys up here are kinda rough around the edges. I mean, it’s the oilfields, you know? A woman wants to work on the Slope, she can’t really be a shrinking violet. I’d hate to blow that incident with Larry out of proportion and get him into any more trouble. He kind of paid the price already, you know what I mean?”
“Noted. But we are talking about murder here.”
––––––––
LARRY HAYDEN TURNED out to be lanky and middle-aged and dressed in jeans and a smelly wife-beater undershirt. Just now, he was propping a raised arm on the door jamb and giving Active the eye. Gray-streaked brown hair stood up in spikes like he had just rolled out of bed and white stubble covered his jaw. He worked his tongue against the back of a discolored front tooth.
“What’s this about?”
Active recoiled from the reek of the armpit pretty much in his face. “Shalene Harvey.”
“That bitch? What’d she say about me now?”
“She’s not saying anything. She’s dead.”
“Dead?” Hayden deflated some. “Fuck, what’s that got to do with me?”
Hayden stepped back and Active eased into the room. It stank of body odor and stale microwave popcorn. Rumpled sheets hung off one of the two beds. A pile of clothing lay on the floor.
“I heard you don’t take rejection well. If a young lady like Shalene says ‘no,’ you think that gives you the right to assault her. That jog your memory any?”
“Assault? That wasn’t nothing but a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding that got you an ass whipping, cost you some pay, and put you one step away from being fired,” Active said. “That could make a guy pretty mad.”
“What the fuck, you think I killed her?”
“Were you at work the last half of May?”
A grin spread over Hayden’s face. “I went to Fairbanks for knee surgery on May second, had it done earlier than expected, thanks to a change in schedule. I was recuperating at my sister’s house for six weeks, and I wasn’t cleared to fly for two more weeks. I didn’t get back up here till June twenty-eighth.”
“I’ll follow up on your alibi. I need your sister’s name and contact info.” He handed Hayden a pen and a page from his notebook.
“You know whose alibi you should check? Josh McCarran.”
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause after he hit me with that lucky punch, he and Shalene got real lovey-dovey.” Hayden passed back the pen and paper. “Used to sit together at the safety meetings, they’d get all kissy-face when they passed each other on the site if they thought nobody was looking.”
“But you were?”
Hayden shrugged. “Anyway, when I got back up here after my surgery, I ran into McCarran in the snack bar.”
“I thought they switched your shift so you two wouldn’t be on at the same time.”
“Yeah, they did. But I guess he asked to change shifts after his May R&R, so then we were up here at the same time again. I wondered if it had anything to do with Shalene, so I said, I swear I couldn’t help it, I said, ‘Trouble in paradise, McCarran? Shalene get tired of your little boy dick and move on to something bigger and better?’ He made like he was gonna take another swing at me, so I reminded him that both of our asses would be grass if he did. He stomped off, but he looked ready to explode.”
“Is he up here now?”
“I haven’t seen him. He bunks in another building.”
Active tucked his notebook and pen back in his pocket. “Thank you for the information, Mr. Hayden.”
He gave Hayden a business card and was halfway down the hall, when there was a yell from behind him.
“Hey, Chief! I watch those cop shows, you know. It’s always the husband or the boyfriend, am I right?”