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· August 29 ·
CHUKCHI
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“I’LL BE DAMNED.” ACTIVE studied the Cinco de Mayo photo that Kavik had taken to Aurora Market. “Just when you think a case can’t get any crazier. The clerk is absolutely sure?”
“No doubt about it,” Kavik said. “She said, and I quote, ‘I remember him, all right. He was carrying one of them little dogs, the kind look like a rat with big ears.’”
“Fred Sullivan.” Active shook his head and looked closer at the tall man at the left end of the back row in the photo. “Does she remember if he bought anything?”
“Got a picture of the charge receipt, believe it or not.” Kavik pulled it up on his phone. “Caribou jerky, two bottles of water, and one box of assorted doughnuts. Oh—and Binaca.”
“Binaca? You can buy Binaca in Chukchi?”
“Modern times, Boss.”
“But no knife or trash bags.”
Kavik squinted the Inupiat no. “What do you think he was doing in town?”
“If he was here to see Shalene, that would be a good reason not to mention it when I talked to him.”
“Him and Shalene? I don’t see it.”
Active called up the e-mail he had received the day before from Molly and scanned the list of names. Only two Richards and one Ricky were still employed by North Slope Environmental, none of whom worked at the same location and on the same shift as Shalene had. But what was he missing? “Rick isn’t short for anything else but Richard, right?”
“Yeah, but wha - -”
“Oh, hell,” Active said. “Fred. Fred-uh-Rick, right? Let’s just see how many of those North Slope Environmental has on the payroll.”
He typed up an e-mail and sent it to Molly. “Did the clerk recognize anyone else in the photo?”
“The Banks brothers, but from church, not the store. And Kim and Shalene from seeing them around town or in the store. The file photo of McCarran didn’t ring any bells.”
“What was the date on that receipt?”
Kavik checked his phone again. “May sixteenth.”
“Huh. The day after Shalene either left for Anchorage with McCarran or stayed in Chukchi with Kim,” Active said. “And/or was killed, since we don’t know the exact date of her death.”
“Sullivan could have been in town for some reason unrelated to Shalene.”
“Yeah, like what?”
His phone pinged and an e-mail came up. He read it and said, “I think we have our RomeoRick.”
Kavik raised his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry.
“Molly says they’ve only got one Frederick. Call up the DMV records for our Mr. Sullivan and get his home address, would you?”
“On it,” Kavik said as Active’s phone screen lit up with another message, this time from Theresa Procopio.
“Got it,” Kavik said a minute later. “He lives in Anchorage.”
“At least I’m racking up the frequent-flyer miles.”
“When you going?”
“I’ll figure that out later.” He showed Kavik the message from Procopio. “Right now, we have a great big beautiful search warrant for Kim Tulimaq’s place.”
When Active and Kavik drove up to the turquoise house a few minutes later, Kim Tulimaq was laying a sheet of plywood across the two sawhorses in the yard. It was the standard Chukchi rig for cleaning fish and carving up game without making a mess inside.
A five-gallon plastic bucket of chum salmon sat on the ground beside Tulimaq’s Xtratuf boots. She scowled as Active handed her a printout of the search warrant and explained the reason for the visit.
“Got nothing to hide.” She pulled a chum onto the plywood and slit the belly from anus to gills with a single quick, sure stroke.
The plywood was clean and dry except for where the fish guts spilled out. “New cutting board?” Active asked. “I don’t think I saw it the last time I was here.”
Tulimaq didn’t look up as she finished filleting the fish, grabbed another out of the bucket, gutted it, and hacked off the head. “I keep it out back. It can get kind of messy.”
“It doesn’t look messy. Most of the ones I see around town are covered with fish guts and blood,” Active said.
“Not mine. I like things clean.”
Alan Long’s Tahoe pulled up.
“Can you please put down the knife and step aside?” Active said. “Officer Kavik needs to get some photos and I’m going to need for you to hand over your phone to Officer Long here, and to stay with him while we conduct the search.” He waved at Long as he climbed out of his vehicle. “And we’re going to confiscate all the knives on the premises.”
“For what?”
“To test for human blood.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
Denial or challenge? Active wondered. Did she mean that she had nothing to do with Shalene’s murder, or that she had covered her tracks too well for anything to be found?
He squatted beside the four-wheeler and examined every inch of it. Mud was caked on the wheels, but the worn seat and body were free of anything more interesting than dust.
When Active went inside, Kavik had already pulled items from the drawers and cupboard. It was the usual stuff: cheap dishes and mugs, mismatched silverware, bags of flour and sugar, a can of Crisco, bags of coffee beans, household cleaners, and two gallons of bleach.
Kavik tossed a box of fifty-five-gallon trash bags on the kitchen table. “What do you think?”
“They look like the ones the body was wrapped in, which means they’re exactly like you’d find in every house in town, including mine.”
“And mine,” Kavik said.
Active surveyed the living room. The open area between the back of the sofa and the woodstove was about the only space big enough to butcher a body. A sheet of plywood the size of Kim’s cutting board would fit easily. Georgeanne had said cutting a body up wouldn’t necessarily be all that messy if it had been let lie a few hours for the blood to congeal. Still, the killer could have missed something in the cleanup. Killers usually did.
He knelt and crawled slowly along the edge of the tan-colored living room rug. Under a back leg of the couch, the border of the rug showed a patch of yellow-white, possibly from being bleached by accident while the floor was being cleaned. But so what? Maybe she used bleach on her floor even if she wasn’t cleaning up after a murder. He photographed the spot, then sawed it out of the carpet with his belt knife and sealed it into an evidence bag.
“We might have something here,” Kavik called from the kitchen. Active walked over as he scraped flakes of red-brown residue off the kitchen counter and into an evidence bag. “Blood, maybe?”
“Looks like,” Active said. “Probably too recent to be Shalene’s, but let’s get it tested. She did stay here for a while and she was the cook, according to Kim. So she could have cut herself.”
Kavik held up the bag and studied the flakes. “Or it could be animal blood.”
“Fish, moose, caribou, who knows?” Active said. “Which is why we have the crime lab. Get some photos of that area behind the sofa while I check the bedrooms, okay?”
The house had two bedrooms, one devoted to storage. Cardboard cartons, some labeled, some not, were piled on the double bed with a black snowgo suit, two sleeping bags, and a tanned wolf hide. More boxes shared the closet with a row of serious winter parkas—heavily insulated, with ruffs of wolf fur—hanging from the rod and a stack of blankets on the shelf above.
He called Kavik in and they rifled through the cartons. Books, snowgo parts, rifle cartridges, broken picture frames, an old landline telephone, even some Bibles and stuffed toys that Active surmised must have belonged to the previous tenant. But absolutely nothing of interest in the murder of Shalene Harvey.
In the other bedroom, a queen-sized bed took up most of the space. It was covered with a quilt in shades of green and brown appliquéd with bears and evergreen trees.
Over a small chest of drawers hung an oval mirror with photos stuck between the carved wooden frame and the edge of the glass. Kim and Shalene held up a huge sheefish in a springtime ice camp, they ate blueberry pie, they soaked in a hot spring surrounded by snow-covered trees. They sat on suitcases, one plain black, the other neon green with a miniature purple teddy bear the handle, in front of Chukchi’s Alaska Airlines terminal. They made crazy faces with crossed eyes, flashed peace signs, grinned, and kissed. Glitter letters on the mirror spelled out “HAPPY TIMES.”
Nothing in the room except the photos suggested two lovers once lived there. The drawers were filled with neatly folded jeans, T-shirts, and sweaters, all plain in style and all the same size. Jackets hung in the closet above a row of boots and sneakers. Everything was placed to take up the minimum amount of room. It seemed sad somehow. Shalene, it appeared, was the one who brought sparkle and perhaps a little happy chaos to the relationship.
“Anything interesting?” Active asked Kavik as he returned to the main living area.
Kavik was pushing the refrigerator back into place against the wall, “Not much. I collected a few more knives, but that’s it.”
Active stared at a calendar on the wall beside the fridge. The photo for August showed a cow moose wading across a stream. Weeks were blocked off with pink and yellow highlighter. Active figured the colors represented Tulimaq’s work shifts on the Slope and time off in Chukchi. Some of the dates bore scribbled notes: “3 pm, dentist,” “pick up Ak Air cargo,” and “stove oil delivery.” Active flipped through the past months. Below another moose, this one a bull peering out of a stand of willows, May had only a single notation, for the fifteenth of the month: “Shalene arr—10:05.”
“People still use those, huh?” Kavik said behind him. “I thought everybody put everything on their phones and computers now.”
“It’s not mutually exclusive, I guess. Did you find a laptop?”
“No such luck.”
“Great. What we need is a record of what she was doing on the last days of Shalene’s life.”
“Well, they’re Millennials,” Kavik said. “Millennials can’t brush their teeth without putting it on - -”
“—on social media, duh.” Active shook his head. “And who’s our very own queen of social media?”
“Lucy,” Kavik said. “I’ll get her on it.”