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· September 5 ·
CHUKCHI
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THE PHOTOS LUCY HAD printed off of Kim Tulimaq’s Facebook page covered nearly every inch of Active’s desk. For more than an hour, he had been staring at them, shuffling, and staring again. Something about Kalani’s call wouldn’t let him stop.
But what was he looking for? Nothing new jumped out at him. The same smiling faces, two people in love, a young couple going places, sharing time, sharing space, having fun. Nothing in them said, “One of you will soon be stabbed through the heart, cut up like a caribou, and left to rot in a falling-down shack.”
He pushed the photos aside. Better to tie up the loose ends on a case where that was actually possible.
He called Theresa Procopio, let her know that Kinnuk had finally come through on their cold case, and requested an arrest warrant for Roger Aiken for the murder of Annie Ramoth.
Then he gave Carnaby a ring and asked him to pick up the suspect because the Public Safety force was too busy at the moment.
“Sure, we can go over and arrest him,” Carnaby said. “But seriously. Kinnuk actually came through? Our Kinnuk Landon? How the hell did you pull that off?”
“I told him he was a good man. Repeatedly.”
A knock sounded at the door as Active rang off. Kavik poked his head in.
“Yeah, Danny, whatta we got?”
Kavik dropped into a chair. “Nothing new, I guess, unless Kalani pulls off a miracle with our suitcase.”
“Or comes up with something new on those rings, but how likely is ...”
Active stared at the center photo in the pile on his desk. Kim and Shalene smiled back, hands out, side by side, showing the matching scrollwork rings.
“What?” Kavik said.
“The rings.”
“What about ’em?”
“Dammit!” Active snatched the photo and held it out to Kavik. “Look at this! Their fingers are different sizes. Shalene’s are much bigger.”
Kavik peered, nodded, and frowned. “And?”
“And we recovered two rings at the body site. The plain silver ring, the larger one, is the one that McCarran gave Shalene. The other one, the one with the scrollwork, is two sizes smaller, according to Kalani. It’s also one of the rings in this photo.”
“Right,” Kavik said. “Kim and Shalene exchanged rings. They’re the same.”
“Except they’re not. They’re not even close to the same size. So the one from the body site can’t be Shalene’s. It’s much too small to fit on her finger.”
“And since they had matching rings, if it’s not Shalene’s - -”
“Then it has to be Kim’s,” Active said.
“And the only way Kim’s ring could be at the body site is - -”
“- - is if she hid the body there!”
Kim Tulimaq’s turquoise house was quiet when Active and Kavik pulled up in the Tahoe ten minutes later. Afternoon sunlight glinted off the front window. The curtains were drawn. No smoke spiraled from the stovepipe, no four-wheeler was parked in front.
Active stepped into the qanichaq and took stock. The gun and stacked plastic buckets he’d seen on his first visit were gone.
He gave the inner door a three-rap civilian knock, then waited out a ten count. Nothing. He escalated to the seven fast hammer blows of his cop knock. Still nothing.
“Kim Tulimaq!” he shouted in his command voice. “Chief Active, Chukchi Public Safety. We have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Shalene Harvey.”
More nothing.
He tried the door. It was locked.
Kavik came into the qanichaq from a quick check of the rear of the house. “No four-wheeler, but the kitchen door’s unlocked.”
They circled to the back and Active eased into the kitchen, Kavik a pace behind him.
“Kim Tulimaq,” he said again. “It’s Chief Active.” The dead, still air was silent.
The counters were devoid of even a single crumb, the stove scrubbed free of grease splatters, the stainless-steel sink polished and shiny. Striped dish towels hung in a neat row from the handle of the oven door. Active detected a faint odor of bleach.
Computer printouts of photos were scattered across the kitchen table. Active recognized them as the pictures from the mirror in the extra bedroom. He motioned for Kavik to check the rest of the house and studied the photo in the center of the table. Kim and Shalene posed with big grins and blue-purple juice running down their chins. Between them they held a Mason jar of blueberries. The handle of a wooden spoon stuck out of it.
“All clear,” Kavik called from the living room.
“Berry picking and hunting,” Active said. “That’s what her aana said she does to get her head together. At her camp on the Katonak. I think there was a photo of it on her Facebook. And I’m guessing Millie gave Kim a call after I talked to her and tipped her off, probably without meaning to. We need to get up there.”
“Cowboy Decker?”
“He flies hunters and fishermen out into the country all the time. I’ll bet he’ll know where that camp is if he sees that photo.”
“I’ll call Lucy and have her send it to his phone.”
“Good idea.” Active pulled out his own phone and showed Kavik the pilot’s number. Kavik put in the call to Lucy as Active tapped Cowboy’s contact.
The call went to voicemail. “I need you, buddy,” he told the recording. “We need to get up to the Katonak as soon as possible. Call me.”
“Photo’s on its way,” Kavik said. “We heading to Lienhofer’s now?”
“First let’s check the bay for Kim’s four-wheeler.”
A half-hour later, they found Cowboy in the Lienhofer break room, scrawling in his pilot’s logbook, brow furrowed in concentration.
He looked up with a surprised expression when Active cleared his throat.
“Nathan? What are you doing here?”
“You haven’t checked your phone lately, I’m assuming?”
The pilot patted his pockets, then turned up his palms. “Crap, I must have left it in the john. Hang on a minute.”
He disappeared into the men’s room and came out studying the photo of Tulimaq’s camp on the screen of his phone. “What’s up?”
Active explained the situation and they piled into his Tahoe and headed for the Chukchi airport’s float pond.
“You’re sure she’s up there?” Cowboy said a few minutes later as they walked out to where his Cessna 185 was nosed up to the shore of the float pond. Cowboy always put his Bush workhorse on floats for the summer, then switched back to wheels or skis for the winter.
“Pretty sure,” Active said. “We found her four-wheeler parked by the bay at what looked like a boat tie-down. So we’re thinking she might have gone up to her camp. You know the place, right?”
“Absolutely.”
The pilot took a last deep pull on his Marlboro and flicked it into the water. He climbed onto the left float and walked along the side of the plane to a little door near the tail. He opened it, fished out hip boots, and leaned his rump on a wing strut to pull them on.
“I recognized the place as soon as I saw the photo,” he said as he stepped down off the float. “I flew her and her friend out there to hunt last fall. I can put you down on a little lake about a half mile back on the tundra.”
The pilot jumped into the water and motioned Active and Kavik to help him push the plane off the shore. Once the Cessna was afloat, Active and Kavik splash-stepped out to the nose of the right float, climbed up, and boarded.
Cowboy swung the plane around to point away from the beach, then climbed into the pilot’s seat as Active’s cell erupted and Carnaby’s number came up.
“Hey, Pat, whattaya got?”
“No ‘how are you today?’” Carnaby asked.
“Sorry, we’re kinda rockin’ and rollin’ here.”
“Gotcha. So, yeah, that cold case in Nuliakuk? The man and woman both had their throats cut while they were passed out drunk in bed, judging from the liquor bottles scattered around the house and in the bedroom. Then whoever did it apparently poured stove oil everywhere and set the place on fire. The evidence was pretty skimpy since the house was basically reduced to ashes and they originally thought the fire was accidental. It wasn’t till they did the autopsies that they realized they had a double murder on their hands and started a real investigation.”
“They have any suspects?” Active asked.
“Well, there was this belligerent neighbor that the guy got into it with over some kind of fight between their dogs, and the woman had a sketchy ex-boyfriend. But both of ’em had alibis and they never found the murder weapon. No one else lived in the house except your very own Kim Tulimaq.”
“Was she a suspect? Did they test her clothing or hands for stove oil or - -?”
“She was barely fourteen, Nathan,” Carnaby said. “I know this job makes you hard, but - - anyway, her clothes and hair were singed. She was terrified, half naked, and near dead from the cold when they found her. She had cuts on her fingers and palms, fairly deep ones.”
“Defensive wounds.”
“To all appearances. So they never looked at her as anything but a victim.”
“What did she say when she was interviewed?”
“Nothing, apparently. Too traumatized to talk. She got farmed out to her grandmother.”
The propeller jerked once, twice, and a third time, then the engine coughed to life as Active buckled himself into the copilot seat. “Gotta go,” he told Carnaby. “Thanks, I owe you one.”
“Way more than one,” Carnaby said. “But I won’t hold my breath I ever get paid.”
The Cessna roared down the float pond, lifted off, rolled right, and climbed out over the choppy gray waters of Chukchi Bay.
A few miles ahead, the Katonak River fanned out in a vein-work of meandering channels as it finished its journey down from the Brooks Range and emptied into Chukchi Bay.
Far upstream, white-crested ridges incandesced in the afternoon sun slanting under the overcast. The weather for the past few days had mostly been mild, more summer than fall. But soon enough, Active knew, the snow on the ridges would spread down the valleys, and one day the first blizzard of the season would howl in from the east and bury Chukchi in long-tailed white drifts.
“There it is,” Cowboy said a few minutes later through Active’s headset.
Active looked out over the left float at a tin-roofed cabin of turquoise plywood that squatted in the woods a few yards back from the bank of the Katonak. An Alaska flag flapped above the door, and a silver aluminum skiff with a big white outboard on the back was pulled up to the water’s edge below the cabin.
A thread of smoke curled out of a stovepipe in a corner of the roof before it disappeared into the grayness of the sky. An unidentifiable heap of gear lay near a spent campfire, but there was no sign of Kim Tulimaq.
“I’d put you down in the river there if I could,” Cowboy said. “But it’s real shallow and rocky along through here, so it’ll have to be the lake I was telling you about. Call me on the sat phone when you’re ready to come out.”
He dipped the wing, circled back, and dropped the Cessna onto a small lake, barely more than a pond, a half mile from the cabin. The floats threw up rainbows of spray as the sun drifted toward the horizon.
Cowboy nosed the Cessna up to the shore and shut down. Active and Kavik climbed out, walked to the noses of the floats, jumped down, shoved the plane back into the water and started through the scrub spruce toward the turquoise cabin.
Behind them, the Cessna coughed back to life and roared off the lake as Cowboy headed back to Chukchi. An Arctic fox, still in summer gray, peered from an alder thicket, sniffed the air twice with what struck Active as disdain, and trotted away.
In another ten minutes, Active and Kavik were easing up to Tulimaq’s camp. Kavik’s hand was on his holstered Glock, Active had slipped the AR-15 off his shoulder and brought it around to waist level, muzzle pointed down forty-five degrees. If Tulimaq hadn’t heard Cowboy’s arrival, she would almost certainly have heard his takeoff, and it was a given that she was armed.