• Monday, August 22 •
Lienhofer Aviation, Chukchi
Cowboy leaned back in a red plastic chair in the Lienhofer break room. “I still can’t get my head around what we found up there.”
“I know,” Active said. “I’ve seen some strange murder weapons—a harpoon, a frying pan, even a frozen sheefish once. But giant water balloons?”
“Where do you even get something like that?
“Internet, I’m guessing. I’ve got somebody on the phone to all the vendors we can Google, but needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to cover it. Meantime, those balloons might as well have come from Neptune. No company name on them, no logo, no nothing. I sent one off to the crime lab in Anchorage. They’ll figure it out. Eventually. Probably. I hope.”
“Only one?”
Active nodded. “I kept the other one to look at myself. For when I have an epiphany. If I have one.”
Cowboy grunted absently. “Who would do that? Who could?”
“Somebody with not only access to your plane, but enough time to get two of those things into the tanks with no one around to interrupt.” Active pulled a small leather-bound notebook from his case and set it on the table. “How would you do it, anyway? You don’t just haul a big rubber bag full of water up on top of a wing and squeeze it down through the filler neck, right?”
“Hm.” Cowboy walked to the big plastic aviation map on the wall and studied it in silence.
Active stood to join him. “I wish we had a less public place for this, but there’s no map like this in my office.”
The pilot nodded and tapped the spot where Two-Five-Mike had come to rest on the ridge above the Hawk River. He circled it with a red dry-erase marker, then put his left hand on Chukchi and his right hand on the circle.
“This is about a hundred and fifty miles,” he said. “Getting there, a 207 would burn something like fourteen gallons of gas. With full tanks, you’ve got sixty-one gallons useable, meaning you gotta displace how much to run out where it did?”
He worked it out with the red marker on the map next to the circle:
61 usbl
-14 burned
47 displ
“So,” he said. “Forty-seven gallons. You’d have to displace forty-seven gallons of fuel with those bladders to leave room for your fourteen gallons in the tanks. They’re gonna look full on a visual check, the gauges will say they are full, so off you go and you run out of gas an hour later. Just like Evie did.”
“Take me through it,” Active said. “What actually happened up there, as best as you can reconstruct it?”
“Okay, let’s see. You start out on the left tank for a half hour, then switch to the right one with this selector lever on the floor between the front seats.”
Halfway between Chukchi and the red circle, Cowboy drew an X. “About here, probably, is where she would have switched tanks.”
Both men studied the X for a moment.
“Then you alternate every half hour,” Cowboy said. “Left, right, left, right. That way, you don’t end up with one wing a lot heavier than the other. Plus, you don’t want to run a tank completely dry in midair if you can avoid it.”
The pilot scratched his head. “Evie apparently took off with about a half hour of gas in each tank. If the left one had run dry before it came time to switch, I’m thinking she would have switched to the right one and turned back to Chukchi to get it figured out, and probably called me on the radio, too.”
“So she must have switched tanks before the left one ran dry?”
“Must have, yeah,” Cowboy said. “Just before, probably.”
“And then—”
“And then she’s on the right tank,” Cowboy said. “Her gauges are telling her it’s full and that the left one is three-quarters full. Everything looks totally copacetic. But a half hour later—”
“She switches back to the left tank, it runs dry, she switches back to the right tank and it runs dry too?”
Cowboy thought it over for a moment. “Something like that. One way or another, she’s over the Brooks Range with a dead engine. Talk about your deafening silence.”
“Been there, have you?”
The pilot grimaced. “More than once. But not like Evie, not when there was nothing under me but clouds and mountains.”
“What do you make of the fact that she didn’t get off a distress call?” Active said as they returned to the table. “She must have had at least a couple minutes before she was into the clouds. She was above them, right?”
Cowboy gave a rueful chuckle. “Probably not, not Evie. She had this thing she called cloud dancing. You’ve been on top, Nathan. You know what it’s like up there in that sunlight.”
“Beautiful. Like crossing the floor of heaven.”
Cowboy nodded. “Cloud canyons everywhere, just like in the song. She’d drop down till she was right above the cloud deck and dance through those canyons—” The pilot’s voice failed him.
Active gave him a moment, then continued. “So her engine quits, she’s right on top of the clouds, so she’s got almost zero time to do anything before she’s in them? Is that it?”
Cowboy cleared his throat with a cough. “Yep. Total A-N-C mode. She’s flying the plane on instruments, she’s trying to restart the engine, she’s looking for the rocks she knows are in those clouds, she’s got Todd looking, and she’s thinking, ‘Fuck, what did I miss?’ She knows nobody on the ground can help her at that point, so why waste time on the radio?”
“Yeah,” Active said. “I guess not.”
“And she knew her emergency beacon would go off if they went in, which it did, and people would start looking as soon as the clouds moved out, which we did.”
He shook his head and fell silent, then cleared his throat again. “Anyway, where were we?”
It took Active a moment to backtrack. “We were figuring out how the guy got those bladders into the tanks.”
Cowboy took a moment to refocus, then got back to his math. “So to get your forty-seven gallons of water, you’d need about twenty-three gallons in each bladder. And that would weigh—”
Cowboy paused, and this time drew numbers in the air instead of on the map.
“Wow, those bladders would weigh around two hundred pounds apiece,” he said. “So, no, you wouldn’t be hauling them up on top of the wings and stuffing them down the filler necks. Definitely not.”
“What then?”
Cowboy rocked his chair back down. “Well, ah—”
“Well?”
The pilot slapped his forehead. “Duh. You roll up the bladder into kind of a tube, you stick it down through the filler neck into the tank, with just the mouth sticking out. Then you put in a hose and turn on the water till you’ve got what you need. Tie off the mouth with one of those plastic zip ties, push it down into the tank, and you’re good to go.”
“Don’t you force fuel out and end up spilling it all over?”
“Huh.” The pilot fell silent again. He pulled at his lip and took a pack of Marlboros out of his bomber jacket, tapped them on his knee, and put them away. “Not necessarily. For these short trips out to the villages and back, we usually leave with about half tanks so we can carry more of a load. When we park for the night, we’re generally down to maybe quarter tanks.”
“Which is—”
“About seven gallons per tank in a 207.”
“Ah,” Active said.
Cowboy nodded. “About what you’d want before you started filling up your bladders. So, yeah. You just put in water till the tank’s full.”
“Huh. When we were wrestling with the bladders up there—did it feel like there was twenty-three gallons of water in them?”
Cowboy shrugged. “Maybe. You’ve still got the one, right? Let’s go down in the hangar and fill it up and see.”
“It’s back at my office,” Active said. “But, yeah, later, definitely.” He scrawled a reminder in his notebook.
“So, our guy,” Active went on. “He had to know a lot about the Cessna 207, fuel consumption, airspeed, all of that, if he wanted to put it down where we found it, right? Are we talking about somebody here, a pilot maybe?”
Cowboy pondered for a few seconds, then shrugged.
“Not necessarily. All he really needed to know was, if he displaced a bunch of fuel with his bladders then Evie would run dry somewhere out in the country. With a little luck, somewhere she couldn’t put the plane down and walk away.”
“If you call that luck,” Active said. “So let’s talk it through. Where was your plane the night before Evie took off for Fairbanks?”
“In the hangar. Normally I keep it outside in the summer. But I pulled it inside that afternoon to change the oil.”
“Who has a key to the building?”
“Anyone who works for Lienhofer’s. Or ever did, probably.”
Active sighed. “So other than all present and former Lienhofer employees, nobody else could have gotten into the hangar that night?”
“Ah, not exactly.” Cowboy paused. “The lock on that rear door’s been busted for I don’t know how long. It’s not like it’s a fucking priority.”
Active grimaced and continued. “So everyone in town had access to that hangar that night? Basically, we have about three thousand suspects?”
Cowboy shrugged. “I guess. If you count aanas and babies.”
“Let’s concentrate on the people who are normally on the premises. How many is that?”
“Sam and Delilah, the owners, of course, but they wouldn’t be suspects.”
“Everyone is till they’re not. And?”
“We’ve got two pilots besides Sam and me—Sherman Stone and Pete Boskofsky. And of course Evie was one of our pilots, but . . .” He shook his head and caught a breath. “Then there’s the night ramper, Jesse Apok, and the day ramper, Leon Fox. There’s a janitor that comes in three, four days a week, Paul Noyakuk. And there’s a new part-time girl, Dora, who does office stuff and works the ticket counter.
“So that’s nine people?”
Cowboy ticked them off on his fingers and shook his head. “No, eight. Eight suspects.”
Active looked at the names in his notebook and decided to get it over with. “Nine, actually.”
“I miss somebody?”
“Everyone’s a suspect until they’re not. Anyone with motive or opportunity. Anyone who knows details about how the crime was committed. You said, ‘We’ve got two pilots besides Sam and me.’”
“Uh-huh,” Cowboy said, his voice hesitant, his expression showing he was starting to get it.
“I have to ask you questions just like I would anybody else,” Active said.
“You gonna read me my rights? You wanna cuff me?”
“No, of course not. And the Miranda warning is only for people actually in custody. But I do have to ask—”
“I loved those kids like they were my own.”
“I know you did. But you were maybe the last person to see them alive.”
“Fuck you, Nathan.”
“You wanted a police investigation. This is a police investigation.”
“Well, I don’t have to goddamn like it.”
Active’s cell phone chimed. He glanced at the screen, saw Grace’s image, and sent the call to voicemail.
“Me neither, partner. One of the hardest things about being a cop. But look at it this way. I’m trying to eliminate suspects, too.”
Cowboy nodded with a resentful look and stared past Active’s left ear.
“We good here?” Active asked. “Or, are we going to waste time fighting over this?”
“Fuck you, Nathan. You know I’m gonna answer your questions.”
“Thanks. Professionally and personally.”
Cowboy nodded with a tight grin that almost looked sincere.
Active’s phone pinged. “Hang on,” he told Cowboy as he tapped to pull up a text from Grace.
Okay to tell Martha about the baby now, it read. Not good if she hears it through the grapevine.
Not good was right, Active reflected as he closed the message. But Grace had previously wanted to wait about letting his birth mother know. Now she was ready, which he took as further evidence she had made up her mind.
Plenty of raw feelings had been dug up over the years between him and Martha Active Johnson. A wild village fourteen-year-old when he was born, she had adopted him out to two white teachers at Chukchi High who’d moved to Anchorage and raised him there. The wounds had healed some over the last few years, but things were still a little touchy and, he supposed, always would be. If she got word of her first grandchild from the river of gossip that coursed constantly through the village, well, that would be another scar they didn’t need. He would have to—
Static sprayed from a circular speaker in the ceiling over the table. Then Staying Alive blasted down.
“What the hell is that?”
“Delilah’s experiment with piped-in music!” Cowboy yelled as the Bee Gees keened on. “The system only works every couple days, and then it just goes off at random like that.”
“Can we turn it off?”
“No!” Cowboy shouted. “Just give it a couple of minutes! It’ll go off by its—”
The music died.