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· September 2 ·
CHUKCHI
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ACTIVE GRABBED THE edge of the wobbly qanichaq door of the old Atoyuk shack and wiggled it on its lone surviving hinge as he waited for Kavik. The rusted metal screeched.
Kavik came into view on the overgrown path from the beach and picked his way around the ropes that still cordoned off the site.
“What’s up, Chief? I thought we were going to interview McCarran. What are we doing here?”
“The family attorney showed up this morning from Anchorage, and now Josh isn’t talking. So, we’re trying to come up with something else to connect the dots to him. ” Active banged his palm against the door. “And this is the only dot we can be sure of.”
“Chief?”
“We know this is where Shalene ended up. What we don’t know is how she got here. McCarran was down here by his own admission, but there’s no evidence she was with him.”
“So we can’t hold him?”
“Not for long. The best we can do is tie him to the blade found in the campfire and sweat him with that. But our twenty-four hours is about up, then we gotta cut him loose.”
Active looked out toward the beach. Two clusters of a half a dozen or so people walked along the shore carrying bright yellow bags.
Kavik followed Active’s gaze. “What’s that about?”
“Beach Cleanup Day. Nita and some of her friends are participating. There’s a big bonfire tonight to top it off.”
“Oh, yeah,” Kavik said. “It was on Kay-Chuck.”
Active’s eyes drifted to the campfire pit where they had dug up the knife blade. He pulled out his notebook, found the page he wanted, and ran a thumb down it.
“According to Shalene’s text to Kim at 12:27 she was at the airport with McCarran. So why would she be down here?”
“Huh.” Kavik looked up the beach toward the airport. “She and McCarran had a lot of time before the flight to Anchorage. They came here to pass the time, talk, have sex, whatever.”
“She had her backpack along because it had her wallet, makeup, headphones, the stuff she planned to carry on the plane. But why the knife? Why wouldn’t she put it in her checked luggage? She knew she couldn’t get it through security.”
Kavik frowned as if he wanted to say, why didn’t I think of that? “Maybe she forgot?”
“Or ... well, hell. What if she was planning to use it on him?”
Kavik’s eyes widened. “Why not just stay with Kim and let him go to Anchorage?”
“Because she would still have to deal with him at work,” Active said. “This way he would be totally out of the picture. In any case, there’s a confrontation, but she’s the one who ends up dead. He hides the body, walks up the beach to where he ran into the kids, tosses her backpack with the murder weapon, and heads to the airport to leave it all behind.”
“That’s crazy. Why wouldn’t he claim self-defense?”
“Because it is so crazy. Maybe too crazy for him to think anyone would believe him. Big guy, little girl. And he’s got that juvenile record, and that violence at work.”
Kavik frowned and thought it over. “Huh.”
“He’s had a night in jail to think things over. Maybe he’ll talk if we dangle a reduced charge.”
Kavik nodded. Then his eyes dropped to the empty spot on Active’s belt. “Hey, where’s your Glock?”
“Back at the office.” Active stepped ahead of Kavik as though that was all there was to be said.
“But, what if - - ”
“I’ll use the AR-15 in the console.”
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“CHIEF ACTIVE, I’M CURIOUS as to why we’re here.” Josh McCarran’s attorney, Alex Fortune, extracted a flannel cloth from his pocket, pulled off his gold-framed glasses, and polished the lenses. “Even your prosecutor, Ms. Procopio, agrees that knife is not enough to hold my client longer than twenty-four hours, and your twenty-four hours is about up. Maybe you’ve decided to release him early?”
Fortune and McCarran sat in the windowless interrogation room at the Public Safety Building across the table from Active and Kavik. Fortune was utterly hairless—not just bald, but devoid of mustache, beard, eyebrows or eyelashes. He wore a silver-gray three-piece suit and radiated money shine like a new Mercedes.
McCarran wore a blue inmate jumpsuit and looked like he needed a shower and a hairbrush after his night in Active’s jail. A piece of lint, or maybe breakfast, was caught in his beard.
“We’re here, Mr. Fortune,” Active said as he opened his notebook, “because we want to give Mr. McCarran the opportunity to be more forthcoming about the death of Shalene Harvey.”
Fortune’s upper lip curled into a wry smile. “Mr. McCarran has told you all he knows. You don’t have the evidence to support a murder charge. We both know that knife won’t cut it.” He smiled a little. “If you’ll pardon my pun.”
Active didn’t smile back. “Mr. McCarran’s story changes faster than our weather up here. What I want from him is the truth about how Shalene died.”
McCarran leaned forward. His brows gathered in an angry frown. “I already told you I didn’t kill - -”
Fortune gripped his client’s forearm. “Josh, your job is to keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.”
McCarran crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.
Active kept his eyes on McCarran. “Maybe you didn’t mean to kill her. Is that how it was, Josh?”
McCarran remained silent.
“Was it her idea to go down to Tent City and hang out before your flight?”
McCarran’s jaw tightened. “No. I didn’t see her again after she went to Kim’s. Not at Tent City, not anywhere.”
Fortune gripped McCarran’s arm again, harder this time. “Josh.”
McCarran jerked his arm away.
Active ignored Fortune. “Maybe once she got to the airport, she wasn’t so sure she had made the right decision. She suggested you take a walk, have a little talk. But she figured what she had to say might not go over so well. You’ve been known to get physical before. So, she took protection. Her knife.”
“None of that happened. She never came back to the airport. I went to Tent City by myself.”
“Or maybe she never planned to talk at all. She knew the town, she knew Tent City was an out-of-the way place where no one would be around to see the two of you. There was only one way to make sure she could go back to Kim and be safe from you coming after her.”
“Coming after her? I told you I left on my own after I went up to Kim’s and she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“That was silly of her, wasn’t it, thinking a big, strong guy like you wasn’t going to defend himself if a woman came at him with a knife?” Active paused. “Did she put those cuts on your knuckles?”
McCarran closed his arms across his chest, and closed his face as well.
“So. You struggled over the knife and somehow she got stabbed. You panicked, you cut her up, and you hid the body. Then you tried to cover it up by texting yourself from Shalene’s phone that she was going back to Kim so we’d go after Kim if the body was ever found.”
McCarran didn’t speak.
“You can’t get around hiding evidence, Josh, but manslaughter beats murder one.” Active shot a glance at Fortune and continued. “This is your chance to get ahead of this. If it was an accident, or if it was self-defense, you need to tell me that now.”
McCarran locked eyes with Active and stared for several seconds. “I beat my hands up on Kim’s door,” he said through gritted teeth. “I took the backpack off the four-wheeler in front of Kim’s house. I didn’t even know about the knife until those kids dumped it out. She never came to the airport. I went for a walk by myself. I didn’t see her again. I didn’t kill her.”
Fortune stood up. “My client has nothing else to say, Chief Active. You don’t have the evidence to support your charges and we’re done here.”
Fortune paused. His look said he was waiting to see if Active had any more ammunition.
Active nodded.
Fortune turned to McCarran. “Let’s go, Josh.”
McCarran rose with a bewildered expression, like, was it really this easy? He and Fortune walked out.
“Well,” Kavik said after the door closed behind them. “We put out the bait, but the fish didn’t bite. You really think it was self-defense?”
“Anything’s possible. I figured it was worth a shot to try and push McCarran hard enough that he’d at least admit to Shalene being in Tent City with him. But maybe we’re fishing in the wrong creek.”
“Kim Tulimaq?”
Active took out his notebook and flipped through it to his first interview with her. “Here it is. She said she went to the airport at four-thirty or five the next morning to get the four-wheeler and was back at her place half an hour later. And she said she didn’t go anywhere the rest of the day. Wanted some down time after the shock of Shalene leaving her, she said.”
“Whereas McCarran says Shalene never came out to the airport at all.”
Active flipped through his notebook again. “Fortunately, Fred Sullivan’s crush on Shalene might help us out.”
“Sullivan? Oh, yeah.”
“Right. Romeo Rick was knocking on Kim Tulimaq’s door with a Chihuahua and a box of doughnuts that same morning around nine.”
“Uh-huh,” Kavik said. “I tracked down the taxi driver and she confirmed he was dropped off at that time and then picked up a few minutes later to go back to the airport.”
“And Sullivan says Kim wasn’t home. And her four-wheeler was nowhere to be seen.”
“You think she was out taking care of business, like covering up a murder?”
“It’s possible. Let’s bring her in for an interview tomorrow,” Active said. “And let’s get Isaac Suyuk, that kid from the beach, in here, too.”
“And his three pals?”
“We’ll leave them alone, for now. Isaac seems like the one most worth questioning, as long as he keeps talking.”
“Roger,” Kavik said.
“Oh, and speaking of Sullivan,” Active said. “He was where he said he was, and apparently had no more contact with Shalene, so we’re done with him, right?”
“I’d say so, but ...”
“But you’d like to bust him for those emails.”
“Guy like that, Shalene probably wasn’t the only one.”
“But he’s a key witness if we go to trial on this. How about we wait till we’re done with him, then we rat him out to Molly at North Slope Environmental and let her decide?”
Kavik hooked a double thumbs-up. “Deal.”
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ACTIVE PARKED THE TAHOE and walked toward the leaping flames of a big bonfire that was devouring a tower of cargo pallets and driftwood. As he got closer, he picked up the crowd noises—laughter, talk, the shrieks of children playing tag in the orange and yellow firelight.
He picked out the rhythmic thwack of an Inupiat dance drum and the cadence of an old chant from a group of elders on one side of the fire. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” rolled out of a boom box on the other side. From somewhere, the mournful strains of a harmonica drifted through the other music.
A quartet of kids in dark hoodies skewered hot dogs onto sticks to grill in the flames. A pair of teen-age break dancers, wearing sideways caps and baggy sweats, attracted a circle of clapping, shouting fans. A dozen or so of the older crowd lounged in lawn chairs or on Army blankets and blue tarps on the gravel beach.
Active recognized Isaac on the far perimeter of the crowd. His face was a wavy glow through the heated air coming off the fire. Active caught a whiff of marijuana in the wood smoke and spied Kinnuk Landon sitting on an Igloo ice chest with a joint in one hand and Buster in the other.
Active scanned the crowd for Nita and spotted her running his way, face alight.
“Dad!”
Three teen girls, the same size and shape as Nita, trotted behind her in puffy vests and jeans.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. She gave him an awkward side hug—because of the audience, he assumed—and he nodded to the friends. They smiled shyly. “How did the beach cleanup go?”
“We got second place.” She held her phone out. “Look.”
He swiped through the photos of Nita and her friends posing behind a huge stack of yellow trash bags, a bike with one wheel, a car tire, and a green suitcase with what looked like a stuffed toy hanging from the handle.
“Impressive.” He handed the phone back. “How did the first-place team beat this?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “It was by weight. They didn’t have as many bags, but they found a car battery and an airplane propeller.”
“Are Mom and Charlie here?”
“Yep. They’re on the other side of the fire, close in. We’re going to roast weenies. See you, Dad.” She gave a brief wave, and the four of them bolted away.
He threaded through the loose circle of people closer to the fire and sidestepped as a little girl careened past. His eyes followed her as she sped away, then he caught sight of Danny Kavik through the heat waves undulating above the fire.
And of the woman by his side.
Kavik with a woman? Kavik, whose private life had hitherto been a closed book? Yes, Kavik was definitely with a woman. His arm was around her waist.
“Hey, Danny.” Active closed the few feet between them.
Kavik’s companion wore a gray down vest over jeans, with a bubble-gum pink scarf draped loosely around her neck. Long dark hair cascaded past her shoulders from under a pale blue knit hat. She looked about five-five, half a foot shorter than Kavik.
“Chief.” Kavik moved his arm from around the woman. “This is Lily Franklin.”
“Nathan Active.” He shook her gloved hand.
“Pleasure to meet you.” She had a throaty voice and a smile that exposed perfect teeth, tilted up the corners of her brown eyes, and crinkled the sides of her snub nose.
Active guessed she was around forty, judging by the wings of gray at her temples and the laugh lines around her eyes. Forty, which would be something like ten years older than Kavik.
“Enjoying the gathering?” he asked her.
“Yes. I’d forgotten how the folks here seize on the slightest excuse to celebrate. I’ve been gone for almost thirty years.”
“What brings you back?”
Lily paused for a few seconds. “It was time.”
Active sensed there was some history here, history being brushed aside for now. “When did you two meet?”
She exchanged glances with Kavik.
“Seven, eight months ago,” Kavik said.
“That long.” Active winked at Danny and turned to Lily. “How have I not met you before?”
Kavik studied the ground with a look of embarrassment.
“My graduate work keeps me super busy,” Lily said. “Danny had to drag me out here, even just for a couple of hours.”
“Ah, you’re Danny’s anthropologist friend.”
“Yes, technically still a student, but ...”
“Interesting. Your work, I mean.”
“Oh, absolutely.” She said it with another smile. “Yours too, from what I hear. Danny says you’re working on a case that started with an elder looking for a kikituq?”
Active gazed beyond the couple into the fire. The case. It was never far away. An image of Tommie on the bridge passed like a shadow across his memory. He realized Lily was still talking.
“... like to interview her for my work.”
“Good luck with that,” Kavik said. “She lost her brain is how her husband puts it.”
Active noticed Kavik’s arm was around Lily’s waist again. And his hand was brushing her hip. This was clearly more than friendship and anthropology.
“I was just about to meet up with Grace. You two want to join us?”
They exchanged glances again.
“We were about to look for Eddie, my son.” Lily waved a hand at the assemblage. “He’s around here somewhere.”
“Oh, you have a little boy?”
“Not that little,” Lily said. “He’s almost a teen-ager. It takes a minor miracle these days to get him to go anywhere with his mom, instead of hunkering down in his room with his Play Station.”
“Tell me about it. I have a teen-age daughter who just gave me three whole minutes of personal interaction. Find us later if you have time, okay?”
“Right,” Kavik said. He nodded to Active, and the couple turned and walked toward the outside of the crowd, away from the fire.
Active found Grace seated on a quilt with her legs out and her upper body wrapped in her down throw against the chill from the water. Charlie’s stocking-capped head peeked out where the throw draped across her chest. He appeared sound asleep.
“Hey, there’s my snuggle buddy.” She smiled up at Active.
He sat down, scooted against her and pecked her on the cheek.
“Looks like you’ve already got one.” He kissed the top of Charlie’s head and inhaled the scents of milk and baby. And of Grace’s lavender perfume.
He put his arm around her and she pressed her cheek against his shoulder.
“I ran into Danny a minute ago.”
“And that is making you grin like that why?”
“He was with his new girlfriend.”
“Danny has a girlfriend. Our Danny.”
Active raised his eyebrows. “Ee.”
“Well, good for him. What’s she like?”
“Nice, smart lady, from what I could tell,” he said. “Lily Franklin, grad student in anthropology. Seems like good people. Oh, and quite attractive.”
“You go, Danny!”
“And apparently something of a cougar, as well. Gotta be forty if she’s a day.”
“Ooh, Danny’s a boy toy now?”
“I don’t judge.”
“Older woman, younger man, that’s the norm in some cultures, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, yeah. It has to do with when sexual desire peaks in each gender. It’s later for us girls.”
He bumped shoulders with her. “So you’re saying I’m on my way down while you’re on your way up?”
“Pretty much. But I’ll probably keep you around, considering your other good qualities.”
“Yoi, lucky me.”
Grace leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Does this Lily have kids?”
“Kid. A boy, a little younger than Nita maybe.”
“Great. If this gets serious, you and Danny can compare notes on raising teen-agers.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ll leave that to you ladyfolk.”
“You would.” Now she bumped his shoulder. “Of course you would. You saw Nita?”
“Yes. And the photos of the awesome second-place team.”
“She was super excited, but she didn’t think you’d make it to the bonfire. I’m happy you could get away from the case for a while.”
Active squeezed her shoulder and gazed out at the light chop splashing onto the beach in the west wind. “It’s like some missing piece is always tapping me on the shoulder and then I try to grab it and ... argh! It bounces away like when you drop a glove in a blizzard.” He shook his head.
“You’ll get there.” She patted his thigh. “You always do.”
Her touch was light, but it still triggered a spasm of pain in the injured thigh. He clenched his jaws, and masked his wince by pretending to adjust his legs.
“Yeah.”
“That didn’t sound very confident. Is something new bothering you?”
He watched the play of orange and yellow and flickers of blue in the flames. “No.”
“No?”
“Okay, one thing is. Those photos Nita showed me of their trash haul.”
“What would those photos have to do with the case?”
“They reminded me of ... I don’t know, like when you see something and it makes you think of something else?”
“Like when I saw a lemon cake in the grocery store today and it reminded me I need to return the cake pan I borrowed from your mother.”
“Close enough.”
“So, what did you see?”
“There was this green suitcase.”
“Oh, yeah,” Grace said. “I took that picture. An old hard-shell suitcase, bright green at some point in its life, but not lately.”
“I’ve seen a suitcase like that, but I can’t remember where.”
Charlie began to cry and root against Grace’s chest.
“Snack time, I guess. Can you hold him for a sec while I get situated?”
Active cradled Charlie as Grace pulled up her sweater and pulled down the throw to cover the exposed breast. She took the baby and tucked him under. Within seconds he was latched on, sucking and grunting.
“You went to Anchorage a few days ago for that interview, right? Maybe you saw a suitcase like that in the airport? Check-in? Baggage claim?”
“Mm, maybe.”
He watched Grace as she gazed down at a Charlie-shaped bulge in the throw, her quicksilver eyes aglow in the firelight.
Let it go, he told himself, the pain in his thigh, the case, Bachner, let it all go, at least for a while. This, right here, should be everything he needed.
So why wasn’t it?