|
|
· August 30 ·
ANCHORAGE
––––––––
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO come all this way.” Fred Sullivan spoke from the doorway of the middle unit in a row of brown two-story condos. “We could have handled it by phone and you could have returned my photo by mail.”
Active stood on the small porch under an arching branch of mountain ash heavy with red berries. The late-summer air was crisp and dry. A vee of southbound Canada geese arrowed overhead, their honks mixing with the traffic noise of midtown Anchorage. In Alaska, he reflected, winter was never really gone, just waiting over the northern horizon.
Down the street a garbage truck whirred and banged as it emptied a dumpster into its bed. Active handed Sullivan the Cinco de Mayo picture in a manila envelope. The Chihuahua he had seen on the Slope materialized between its owner’s legs in a frenzy of yapping.
“Thanks for taking time for a few more questions.” Active had to shout to make himself heard over the racket from the dog.
“Sure,” Sullivan said. “Whatever I can do to help.” He scooped up the Chihuahua with a hand under its belly. The dog continued to bark and added a snarl now that it was closer to Active’s face. “Don’t mind my Quita. Little dog with a big attitude, you know what I mean?”
He scratched Quita behind the ears. She stopped barking and licked his arm.
“You probably have to be when you weigh five pounds and live among Slopers in work boots,” Active said.
Sullivan grinned. “Come on in, I’ll put her in the bathroom. We’ll have the place to ourselves. The wife’s at bingo.”
Active drew a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket as Sullivan waved him to the sofa and left with the dog.
The living room was Spartan, with pale walls that couldn’t decide whether to be pink or orange and little sign of a woman’s touch. Sullivan returned, dog-free, and squeezed himself into a chair a too small for his bulk.
Heavy, silky drapes were drawn back to let in a stream of late afternoon sun. Ivory carvings of walruses, seals, and seabirds were strewn across shelves and tables. A wedding photo was propped against a lamp on an end table. Sullivan posed with a short, chubby blonde woman, both fifteen years or so younger. He wore a suit, she a knee-length dress with a spray of flowers in her hair. There was no sign of children.
Active’s gaze stopped on the wall across from the front window. Knives of various designs and sizes—hunting knives, daggers, even a sword in a gold and maroon scabbard—were displayed on silver brackets, blades glinting in the slanting sunlight.
Active pointed. “That’s quite a collection.”
“The sword I inherited from my father,” Sullivan said. “He used to tell people it was from the Spanish-American War. Fact, fiction, who knows, but it’s a good story. I’ve added the others over the years. I guess I have a thing about knives.”
“A thing?”
“They’re fascinating because they’re both tools and weapons. And what else can do something as simple as slicing an apple and as serious as heart surgery?”
“Uh-huh. You ever use any of them?”
“Nope, those are strictly collectibles. The wife’s not crazy about ’em, but they do make a great conversation piece.”
Frantic whining and scratching erupted from the bathroom. Sullivan glanced at the door. “You said you had more questions?”
“Just a few,” Active said. “You visit Chukchi much?”
Sullivan smiled stiffly and straightened a little. “No, no reason to, really.”
“Did you have a reason in May?”
“May? Hm.” Sullivan massaged his chin and made a show of trying to remember. “Not that I recall. May, you said?”
Active masked a smile. The thing about people who didn’t lie much was, they weren’t very good at it. Which you needed to be if you wanted to get something past a cop, because cops got lied to all the time. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, not too long after that photo was taken.” Active nodded at the Cinco de Mayo photo he had laid out on the coffee table while Sullivan was sequestering Chiquita.
“No, I don’t think so, no. But of course that was several months ago, so, you know ...”
“Maybe this will help.” Active took out his phone and tapped the screen. He hit “send” and a swoosh sounded. “Check your e-mail.”
Sullivan frowned, reached for his phone and scrolled down the screen. “Uh, I don’t see any message. Probably have to give it a moment.”
“I sent it to your personal address.”
“Personal address?” Sullivan looked a little stunned. “But how did you - -”
“I’m a cop is how. You want to see if it’s there?”
Sullivan frowned and checked his phone again. Beads of sweat glistened along his hairline. “Yeah, here it is.”
“So ‘RomeoRick.’ That’s you.”
“Okay, So, you got my personal e-mail address somehow.” Sullivan sounded irritated now. “What’s this?”
“As you can see, the charge receipt from the Aurora Market attached to that e-mail shows you were in Chukchi on May sixteenth.
Sullivan stared at his phone and shifted in the chair. “Well, obviously, there’s been some kind of mistake. I would have been off at the end of the month. I spend my time off here in Anchorage, as you can see.”
“Any reason you would stop in Chukchi before coming to Anchorage?”
Sullivan slapped his forehead with the heel of his palm. Active had to mask another smile.
“Oh, yeah,” Sullivan said. “That must have been the time I missed my flight on Alaska and I was gonna be stuck in Deadhorse an extra day. But a pilot buddy of mine was in town. He was headed to Nome so he offered to drop me off in Chukchi and I caught Alaska from there to Anchorage that night. I forgot all about it.”
“Was Shalene on that flight?”
“No, I think she left the day before.”
“Did you happen to see her while you were in Chukchi?”
“I only went there to make the connection to Anchorage. Why would I see Shalene?”
“It seems you were kind of interested in her.”
“Interested? She was my employee so of course I was interested in her well-being, like I am with any employee.”
“So it was her well-being you were thinking of when you sent her those personal e-mails?”
Sullivan shifted in the chair again. “Personal? What e-mails? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Active laid his notebook and pen aside and leaned in on Sullivan as he read from his phone: “‘Shalene, you looked good in those tight black pants this morning. Did you wear those for me?’”
He paused.
Sullivan didn’t speak.
“And then there’s a smiley face,” Active went on. “And then this: ‘makes me wonder what you had on underneath,’ followed by three question marks.”
Sullivan’s face turned a mottled red and he looked like a little boy caught stealing candy.
“Does that jog your memory? I can go on. There’s lots more.”
“I didn’t mean any harm, it was just words,” Sullivan stammered. “You know, something to break the monotony up there. I’m not even sure she got them. She never responded.”
“Is that why you went to Chukchi? To get a response?”
“No.” Sullivan’s fists were balled up on his knees.
“Maybe you figured when you were both away from the job, things might be different, might get a little more personal?”
“No!” Sullivan was almost shouting now. “I’m a married man.”
“The thing is, Fred, you were in Chukchi around the time we believe Shalene was killed.”
“So what?”
“So there’s a picture coming together here is what. You send her sexually explicit e-mails, she’s not interested. But you can’t leave it at that, you show up in Chukchi and she turns up dead. You can see how that looks, right?”
“You’re twisting things around. I didn’t send her anymore e-mails after the middle of May.” He pointed at a Dell laptop on an end table. “They’re all on there, see for yourself. I realized it was a stupid thing to do.”
“Because you knew she was dead?”
“What?” His face deepened to red-purple and he slapped the table so hard Active’s pen bounced onto the rug. “I didn’t know she was dead until you came to my office and told me. You’ve got it all wrong.”
Active retrieved his pen and made a show of finding the right page in his notebook. “Then this would be the time to tell me exactly what you did in Chukchi.”
Chiquita resumed her frantic yipping from the bathroom.
“Damn dog!” Sullivan shouted. “Chiquita! Shut the fuck up!”
The yipping got louder and higher. Sullivan wiped his forehead. “All right, all right. You have to understand, I didn’t go to Chukchi to see Shalene. I knew she had flown down there the day before, and once I arrived, yes, I was thinking about her. I stopped by the market to kill time and I just kept thinking, hell, why not go see her. It was nothing but a stupid impulse, okay? It sounds ridiculous now, but I thought I’d drop by, we could talk, see how we got along, see if there was a chance.”
“A chance for what?”
“Shalene was a really nice girl. I thought we might get closer. Look, I know it sounds bad. But I’m not one of those dirty old men, I’m not like that. I’m - -”
“A married man?”
Sullivan bit his lip with a cornered look.
“Did you do more than think about meeting Shalene?”
“Yeah, okay, I knew she stayed with Kim Tulimaq. I took a taxi. The driver knew the house, small town, you know. I thought I’d bring some doughnuts to brighten up her morning, say I happened to be in town, which was true, and we’d take it from there. I guess it wasn’t much of a plan.”
“You went to Kim’s house?”
“Yes. I knocked several times, but there was nobody home.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t remember exactly. It was still morning but not real early. Nine, ten, maybe?”
“How do you know no one was home? Maybe they were asleep. Was Kim’s four-wheeler parked out front?”
Sullivan paused for a moment, worked his tongue against the inside of his cheek. “No, there was a snowmachine under a cover by the house but no four-wheeler.”
“Could it have been around back?”
“No, it wasn’t, I checked there, too.”
“Really?”
“Just a walk-around to see it there were any signs of life.”
“And maybe look in the windows, too?”
“Well, a quick look, but I didn’t see anything. It was dark in there.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I kind of, well ...”
“You were going to tell me exactly what you did in Chukchi.”
“Okay. I got a little nosy.”
“Nosy how?”
“I took Chiquita with me and knocked on the door to the arctic entry again. I waited a couple minutes but no one answered. I tried knocking harder and the door pushed open a little. Then the inner door did, too, like it wasn’t shut tight and the pressure from the outer door made it give. It just happened. I didn’t break in.”
“Of course not. What did you do then?”
“I took a little peek inside. All the lights were out. It was real quiet, still. I was holding Chiquita and she never let out a peep. If there was anybody in there, she would have raised a ruckus, for sure. So I backed out the door feeling like the biggest fool that ever lived, thinking why didn’t I call and scope out the situation before going over there? I called the cab again and went back to the airport and stayed there till my flight boarded for Anchorage.”
“You left for Anchorage without seeing Shalene or Kim?”
“Right.”
“Did you leave them the doughnuts?”
“There was a trash bin set out by the road. It must have been trash pickup day. I tossed them in there.”
Active pictured the city’s new plastic rollout bins with the supposedly animal-proof latching tops. They worked about as well as the old ones, because nothing was animal-proof in Chukchi.
“Too bad. Nobody got to enjoy them except maybe the ravens.”
Sullivan grunted and shrugged.
Active turned to a new page of his notebook, then looked up, pen in mid-air. “Let me make sure I have it straight. This was the day after Shalene left the Slope?”
“Yes.”
“So the sixteenth. May sixteenth.”
“Yes.”
“Did you try to contact her after that?”
“I called her from the airport that night when I was leaving Chukchi.”
“And?”
“The call went to voicemail.”
“And your phone records would verify that?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have to take your laptop as evidence, so we can verify what you said about the e-mails.”
Sullivan paused, picked up the computer, held it in mid-air for a moment, then handed it to Active. “Take it, but I don’t see what a few of my e-mails have to do with a murder investigation.”
“Unwelcome advances often play a part in this kind of crime when the victim is a young woman.”
“Advances?” Sullivan’s face reddened again. He leaned forward as if to jump to his feet, then he sagged back into his chair. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it advan - - anyway, it’s more likely this is some random act of violence, right? There’s a lot of drinking and drugs in those Bush villages. Maybe Shalene just happened to cross paths with the wrong person at the wrong time, one of the locals.”
Active tapped his pen against the notebook. “Well, I have to tell you, Fred, this doesn’t look like a crime of chance. It looks personal. We think Shalene knew her killer.”
“You’re not saying it was someone at North Slope Environmental?”
“It’s possible.”
“I hope you don’t seriously think that I - - nobody kills anyone over some stupid e-mails, right?” He forced out a nervous laugh. “Probably some young hothead, that’s who you should be looking for.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“No, I mean I’m not accusing anyone. But ...”
“But what?”
“I’m not saying he did anything to Shalene.”
“Who?”
“Josh McCarran. Before that fight with Larry Hayden, he had a couple of previous altercations over women.”
“What kind of altercations?”
“Some cursing, shoving, there might have been a punch or two thrown. A little territory-marking over a new female on the job, from what I remember. Boys being boys.”
“There was nothing like that in his file.”
“That was before we had the crackdown on...workplace violence is what OSHA calls it. My way of dealing with it was to give them a good talking-to, keep it out of the official record. But by the time Hayden and McCarran got into it, the big bosses had their shorts in a twist, didn’t want the feds coming down on us, and we were totally into this zero-tolerance bullshit. So I had to write the two of them up.”
“Why did you decide to mention this now?”
“For Shalene, of course. Whatever I can do to help.”
Yeah, Active thought, help yourself.
“Right,” he said.
On his way to the airport, he punched up the number for Pat Carnaby, head of the Alaska State Trooper detachment in Chukchi. Carnaby had been one of Active’s instructors at the Trooper academy in Sitka, then his boss after they both ended up in Chukchi, back in the days before Active got the chief’s job at Public Safety. Carnaby had been around so long, had worked in so many different places, he knew everybody worth knowing in Alaska law enforcement.
He was breathing heavily when he answered the phone.
“Pat? You all right?”
“Nathan. Whew. Yeah, I’m at the rec center. Trying to get the gut under control, but right now I feel like the gut’s winning.” Carnaby’s laugh turned into a coughing fit. “Hold on,” he wheezed.
The cough subsided and Active heard water being chugged.
“Ok. Better. What’s up?”
“We’ve got this murder case you might be able to help with.”
“Shalene Harvey, I’m guessing? Found in pieces in Tent City?”
“That’s the one.”
“Sure, whatever you need.”
“Do you still have that source in juvenile records in Anchorage?”
“Oh, please. Who am I checking on?”
“Guy named Joshua McCarran, assault from eight or nine years ago. Female victim.”
“I’ll make a call. Is this guy your suspect?”
“One of three.”
“Feast or famine, right? I don’t know which is worse.”
“Tell me about it.”