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· September 3 ·
CHUKCHI
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“MS. TULIMAQ, THANK you for coming in.” Active said it with a polite smile as he and Kavik entered the Public Safety interrogation room. “You’re just back from Deadhorse, I understand?”
Kim Tulimaq sat calmly on a folding chair and sipped from a bottle of water. “Special three-day training. But, happy to help if you need some more information about Josh McCarran.”
“I appreciate your willingness to cooperate, but that’s not really what I want to talk about.”
“You arrested him for killing Shay, right?”
“I see the Chukchi grapevine is working with its usual efficiency.” Active shook his head. “Mr. McCarran has been released. I expect he’s already back on the Slope.”
Tulimaq’s shoulders tensed, but otherwise she didn’t react.
Active took out his notebook and pen and made a show of flipping through the pages to let Tulimaq stew.
She adjusted her legs, folded her hands on the table, returned them to her lap. “Well?”
Active looked at his notes for a few more seconds.
“I just need to clarify some of the statements you made in our previous interview.” He lifted his gaze from his notes and watched her eyes. “You stated that you picked up your four-wheeler at the airport the day after Shalene left, at four-thirty a.m. Is that correct?”
“Give or take a few minutes, yeah.” She folded her hands on the table again.
“And you were back home at ... ”
“Around five, I guess.”
“Give or take a few minutes?”
“Yeah, five-ish.”
“Did you go anywhere after that?”
“Like I told you, no. I got home about five, and I stayed home the rest of the day.”
Active nodded and scribbled on his pad. “What did you do at home?”
“Mostly stayed in bed.” Tulimaq’s lower lip trembled. “It was a tough day.”
“So your four-wheeler would have been in front of your house the whole day?”
She cocked her head and looked a little cornered. “Yeah. I didn’t go anywhere.”
“Well, that’s odd.” He paused and looked at Kavik, who nodded.
“Really odd,” Kavik said.
“Your boss, Fred Sullivan, dropped by your place later that morning,” Active said. “And he says nobody was home.”
“Fred? What the hell was he doing in Chukchi, and why would he come to my house?”
“He came bearing doughnuts.”
“He brought doughnuts? That’s just creepy.”
“He was looking for Shalene. Did she ever talk about Sullivan as anything more than a supervisor?”
“Are you kidding? He was way too old for her.”
“Sometimes a girl will have daddy issues. Like if Shalene had trouble with her father when she was a kid, you know ... ”
Tulimaq screwed up her face and hissed, “No, I don’t know. And that’s disgusting.”
“Sullivan knocked several times but no one answered.”
“It could have been a little later when I got back with the four-wheeler, closer to six or maybe seven. I forgot before. I went by my aana’s to check on her, maybe talk to her about Shay. Aanas are always good for that, ah?”
“And how was she?”
“Fine. She was asleep in front of the TV. I cleaned her kitchen, put away the dishes, and waited for her to wake up, but she didn’t. So, I let her rest and came home.”
“And you think you got back at seven?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Well, Sullivan was there around nine and he didn’t see any four-wheeler.”
“Oh, yeah, I parked it behind the house so I could unhitch the trailer back there.”
“Actually, it turns out your boss is kind of a snoop. He went looking around out back, peeked in the windows, that kind of thing. And guess what? No four-wheeler there either.”
“Well, he ... he must be wrong. How you gonna believe a perv like that anyway? I left it out back. If he didn’t see it, maybe he had other things on his mind.”
“Maybe you did, too.” Active wrote again on his pad. “You forgot about visiting your aana and you forgot where you parked your four-wheeler.”
Tulimaq stared at her hands in silence.
“Where were you around nine a.m.?”
Tulimaq unfolded her hands, put them back in her lap, scooted her chair closer to the table, then scooted it back, and took another swallow of water.
“Nine? When Fred came by? I never heard anyone knock. I took one of those pills to help me sleep. Like I said, it was a tough day.”
“What was the name of the medication?”
“It was that over-the-counter stuff, Z something. I don’t take it much. It gives me crazy dreams.”
Active had a brief flash of his own midnight replays of the shootout on the bridge, then yanked himself back to the waking world. “Did you have crazy dreams that day?”
“Yes.” Her eyes filled and she brushed away tears. “I dreamed Shay and I were together at Serpentine Hot Springs. Down by Shishmaref? We went there on vacation in March. Those were happy times.”
Happy times. The words hit Active with a jolt. “Right. Like with the photos in your bedroom.”
Tulimaq smiled uncomfortably. “I should have put them away, but ...”
“Did you and Shalene take a lot of trips together?”
“A couple, I guess.”
“That photo of the two of you with your luggage, you look like you’re off to somewhere exciting.”
She smiled and looked down at the table like she was lost in the memory.
“Shalene must have been the flashy one, right?”
Tulimaq looked up and frowned. “What? Why?”
“That bright green suitcase with the little purple bear hanging from the handle. In the photo?”
“Oh, yeah, that was totally Shay.”
“Did she take that suitcase when she went off with Josh McCarran?”
“Yes, I saw her pack it and load it on the four-wheeler.”
“Do you have any idea how it ended up on the beach?”
It was a bluff, but how would she know?
She didn’t.
“You found a suitcase like that on the beach?” She shrugged. “A lot of people have green suitcases.”
“Not with a purple Teddy bear on the handle.” He watched for Kim’s reaction. Maybe she flinched, just slightly. Maybe not. Mainly, she just looked thoughtful.
“But once we get the blood inside tested and matched to her DNA ...”
“But, that’s not foolproof, right? If the suitcase was on the beach all this time or maybe even in the ocean - - you can’t get DNA from something like that, right?”
“You’d be surprised what the crime lab can do, so we’ll see. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“What question was that again?”
“If she was at the airport with Josh like you said, how did her suitcase end up on the beach?”
Tulimaq closed her eyes for a moment with the same thoughtful expression. She opened them but didn’t speak.
“You know what I think?” Active said. “I think Shalene never made it to the airport. She never left your house alive, but her suitcase did because you had to get rid of it.”
“She WAS at the airport with him! I showed you her text where she said that. And she left here with that green suitcase.”
“Why wouldn’t she check it at the airport?”
“I don’t know. Wait, Josh texted her that the plane was delayed, remember? Probably they went for a ride to Tent City while they were waiting and that’s when he killed her, before she ever had a chance to check her baggage. Then he ditched her stuff where he thought no one would find it.”
“So Josh abandoned the suitcase on the beach? Or threw it in the sea and it washed up on the beach?”
“Who knows what he did, but that makes the most sense.”
“Except we know Josh was on the plane to Anchorage at 4:45 p.m. This was the middle of May, when the sun doesn’t set till after midnight. Do you really think a strange white man with a bushy beard would take a chance on being seen in daylight on the beach getting rid of a bright green suitcase if he killed somebody? See, what makes more sense to me is, if Josh was the killer, he’d check that suitcase before getting on the plane. Then he’d dispose of it in Anchorage, and no one would be the wiser.”
“Killers do stupid things, right, they’re crazy? That’s how they get caught.”
He had to admit she had a point. If Josh had killed Shalene, it was unpremeditated, something done in the heat of the moment. He had been violent in the past, but he wasn’t an experienced killer. He had never gone that far. And if he was in a time crunch to make his flight and escape Chukchi for Anchorage, he could have decided to cross his fingers and take a chance on the suitcase.
Whereas Kim would have had plenty of time to plan how to get rid of the evidence, and she seemed to have an answer for every question he threw at her.
Was he dealing with a sloppy killer or a meticulous one?
He closed his notebook and met Tulimaq’s eyes. “Sometimes killers get caught because they try too hard to outsmart the cops.”
Tulimaq held his gaze without blinking.
He thanked her for her cooperation and asked Kavik to see her out. Moments later, he was back with Isaac Suyuk.
Active pulled Kavik aside and spoke low so Isaac wouldn’t hear. “I’m not sure how he’ll do with two cops in the room.”
“I can watch through the one-way mirror,” Kavik said.
“Sounds good. And pull our prints of the employee ID photos of Josh and Shalene from their files. I’ll signal when I want you to bring them in.”
“Right.”
“And call Public Works and find out where they put the trash they collected on the beach yesterday.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A neon green suitcase with a purple Teddy bear on the handle.”