• Monday, August 22 •
Weather Station, Chukchi
The white globe separated from the outstretched arm of the figure in the purple anorak and drifted upward.
“A weather balloon.” Cowboy slapped the break room window. “Of course. I’ve seen them launched over there a hundred times. It just didn’t register when we pulled them out of Two-Five-Mike up on that ridge.”
Two minutes later, Active stopped the Tahoe at a low green building near the north end of the gravel strip with its line of tiny Pipers and Cessnas tied down along the side. He looked up as he stepped out of the Chevy. The weather balloon was a mere speck now in the pale blue sky.
He bounded up the building’s four wooden steps. A sign on the wall read, national weather service, chukchi, alaska, bldg. 101. Hinges creaked as he pushed into a rush of warm air.
“Be with you in a minute.” Monique sat at a counter facing three computer monitors, with her back and her halo of curls to the door. Light poured in through big, half-shaded windows behind the counter. Tiny yellow tundra flowers peeked from a Diet Pepsi can on the sill. Next to it stood a framed photo obscured by the glare off the picture glass.
“Coffee’s over there.” A slender arm pointed at the wall to her left. She leaned into the screen and tapped the keyboard.
Active’s eyes roamed the map-covered walls, the collection of printers and modems spread out on the counter, papers with columns of numbers push-pinned to bulletin boards, and a half-dozen clipboards racked in the slots of a metal desk organizer. Beside the counter, the purple anorak was draped across the front paws of a four-foot-high black bear chainsawed from a log.
He found a clean black coffee mug with pink polka dots next to the half-full coffee pot and poured himself a cup, then took a sip. “Not bad for government coffee,” he said.
“My coffee.” She swiveled around to face him. “One hundred percent Arabica from Tanzania. I get it from Amazon once a month.” Her smile gleamed in her dark-honey face.
He smiled back. “Monique, right?”
“Monique Rogers,” she said with a hint of puzzled frown. “Do I—oh yeah, you were at Lienhofer’s with that pilot earlier.”
He extended his hand. “Nathan Active, Chief of Public Safety for the borough.”
She gave his hand a quick squeeze and waved him into an office chair on wheels. “How can I help you?” The computer screen behind her glowed with charts and colored bars and circles. “You’re a cop? Some kind of security situation going on?”
“No, nothing like that.” Active leaned back and rested the mug on his knee. “I saw the weather balloon go up and got curious about how all that works.”
Monique relaxed and her smile returned.
“You the only one who does it?” he asked.
“That’s me. Twice a day—three p.m., three a.m.”
He leaned around her to look at the monitors. “So what does that balloon tell you?”
She swiveled and picked up a small, white box with an antenna and a couple of other appendages poking out. “This is a radiosonde. I tie it on with a string, send up the balloon, and it tells us temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and wind direction as the balloon goes up. We use the data to make our forecasts.”
She waved at the equipment on the counter like a game show hostess. “I check here to see if it’s transmitting. That lasts maybe an hour and a half before the balloon explodes about a hundred thousand feet up, and the radiosonde falls back to earth.”
She pointed at a glowing green bullseye crossed with a squiggle on the computer screen.
Active rolled in closer.
“This wiggly line here is the trajectory of the balloon I just launched. It’s tracking northeast about thirty degrees, around ten thousand feet up now.”
Active nodded with feigned comprehension. “I see. So, you work twelve hours a day?”
She added a laugh to the smile. “I work a split shift. I take care of the data, take off, then come back in for the second launch. I’m two weeks on, two off, except in July when my alternate was on vacation for a month. Then I was a one-woman show.”
“How do you fill up the balloons?”
“I’ll show you.” She stood up, grabbed the anorak off the chainsawed bear, and led him outside. They walked past a purple Jeep Wrangler parked beside the office to a turquoise, two-story building with a double garage door that faced the gravel strip. Monique pulled out a key ring and let them in through a side door.
In the center of the cavernous room was a big metal table. At one end stood a cylindrical tank with nozzles and gauges on top. “Is that helium?”
“Hydrogen,” Monique said. “It’s cheaper.”
“Where are the balloons?”
Monique walked to a tall metal cabinet and opened one of the double doors. “In here.”
Four deep shelves were stacked with dozens of wrinkled, white cocoons. “That’s a lot of balloons.”
“About two hundred of these little guys. The weather service ships them up in bulk.” She tapped an invoice on a clipboard that hung on the inside of the cabinet door. “Latex balloon, 100 count,” was typed near the top of the pink sheet of paper. “I go through a lot of ’em. Two a day, every day.”
Active leaned into the cabinet for a closer look. “Do you count them every day?”
“No need, I go by the date of the last shipment on the invoice, so I’ll know when to reorder.”
“So, if a couple disappeared, you wouldn’t necessarily know?”
She shot him a puzzled look. “Disappeared? How? I keep the building locked. Last thing we need is having some drunk stumble in and get into the hydrogen, right?”
“You’re the only one with a key?”
“The only one on site. My supervisor has a key, but he flies in from Fairbanks maybe three times a year.” The puzzled frown came back. “Is this an investigation? Should I call my supervisor? If you’re looking for information, he’s probably who you should be talking to.”
“No need. Really, I’m just curious how things work.” Active walked over to the metal table. “Is this where you fill up the balloons?”
“Yes.” Her face softened, and she seemed to relax a bit. “Would you like to see one?”
“Sure.”
She pulled a balloon from the cabinet, unfolded it, and laid it out on the table.
It stretched about thirty inches from the mouth to the top and about twenty inches across the middle, Active estimated. Just like the balloons from Two-Five-Mike.
“Doesn’t look like it’s very scientific, does it?” she said. “It takes about six minutes to inflate, but I can’t do it now because I don’t have another launch for about eleven hours. I have to be exact so the data is transmitted at the right time. Hundreds of weather balloons all around the world go up at the same time every day.”
Active ran his hand over the cool, rubbery surface. Not bulky, easy to manipulate, easy to stuff down the neck of a fuel tank. “How big does it get when you inflate it?”
“About six feet in diameter. It expands to about forty feet in the atmosphere, then it explodes.”
“How do you get it outside?”
“Very carefully. First, I tie on the radiosonde and tether the balloon to the table here.” She pointed at an iron loop at the end of the table. She walked to the garage door and pushed a button. The door groaned upward. “Then I untether the balloon and run like hell to get clear of the building before the wind catches it.”
Monique took off in a sprint and Active chased after her. She stopped a hundred feet out on the gravel apron. The wind whipped her hair into a chocolate cloud. “I check my watch.” She raised her left wrist as she spoke, then lifted her right arm and face to the sky. “And I let it fly.”
Active’s eyes followed the imaginary balloon.
“So, Chief Active, have I satisfied your curiosity?”
“Pretty much, but I’d like another cup of that coffee, if you don’t mind.”
Back inside, Active sipped from the pink-and-black mug as Monique checked off items on a clipboard. “How long have you had this job?”
“Almost nine months. My contract is up September twenty-third. I finish this rotation Friday, then I’m off for my two, then one more stretch and I’m done. It’s a long way from being a TV weather girl in California, but I wanted to try something different.”
“Mission accomplished, I’d say. How do you like Chukchi?”
“Believe it or not, I lived up here with my folks when I was a baby. This is my mom’s village. She met my dad when she lived in Fairbanks and he was stationed at the Army base there. And my cousin Dora still lives up here. So Chukchi’s home. Or home-ish, anyway.”
“Spend much time at Lienhofer’s?”
“No. Actually, I was never up there before today, and that was only because Dora just got hired there and I was checking in with her. Basically, I just do my work, hop in my Jeep, go home, listen to my music, and chill.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life for a single gal.”
“A drama-free break on the edge of nowhere can be a good thing sometimes.”
Active shielded the photo on the sill behind her to cut the glare and took a close look. A small, white dog, ears cocked. He tipped his head toward the image. “Cute little guy there. That brown patch around the one eye makes him look like he’s winking.”
“Too cute for his own good, all right. He totally works it.”
“What kind of dog is that?”
“A Jack Russell terrier. Or terrorist, as some people call ’em. They’re lovable, but they’re kind of high-energy.”
“I’ll bet he’s great company.”
Monique glanced backward and smiled. “Used to be. I don’t have him anymore.”
“No?”
“I work weird hours. I thought he’d be better off with someone else, so I found him a new home.”
“Huh. I know a pilot who gave a dog away because of his weird hours, too. You ever make friends with any of the Lienhofer pilots?”
“Don’t know any of them. Except the guy I met today, the one with you. Cowboy, right?”
“Cowboy Decker. Nobody else?”
Her eyes flicked left for a second, which usually meant a witness was cooking up a story. Honest reflection was generally signified by eyes right.
“Well,” she began. “Yes, I did meet that girl pilot one time. The one that died in the plane crash?”
“Evie Kavoonah?”
“Yeah, that’s her. Pretty girl.” She rolled her eyes. “In a plain kind of way.”
“Met her at Lienhofer’s, did you?”
“No. Like I said, I was never there before today. It must’ve been somewhere else around town, I forget where.”
“Uh-huh.” Active waited her out.
Finally, Monique said, “That was terrible, how she died.”
“And her fiancé, too.”
Monique fiddled with the clipboard. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Yeah. What a shame. They probably burned up, right?”
“Killed on impact. Were you working the night before it happened?”
She looked up and seemed to have trouble steadying her gaze. “Yeah, I guess I was. Probably. I mean, I’m normally here from two to four a.m. to do the launch and make sure the data’s transmitting. I don’t know why I wouldn’t have been.”
Active looked at Monique’s lime and turquoise Nike sneakers and another pair, green and purple, at the end of the counter. “You run?”
“Oh, yeah, religiously. Every day. A sound mind in a sound body. My dad drilled that into me. My only vice is Diet Pepsi, one a week max.”
“You ever run out around the airport?”
“Sure. A lot of times in the middle of the night. Especially in summer. It’s so peaceful, that weird gray twilight you get up here. Ghost light, I call it.”
“Up by Lienhofer’s, maybe?”
“Uh-huh, sometimes I’ll loop up to the Lienhofer hangar there, catch my breath, head back.”
“How about the night before Evie took that plane up?”
“Not sure. Probably. That was, what, a couple months ago?”
“About six weeks, actually.”
She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You know, Chief Active, I think you are investigating something. Was that crash maybe not an accident like they said on Kay-Chuck?”
“Any reason to think otherwise?”
“What would I know about it?”
“Sometimes a person will see something that turns out to be important later without realizing it at the time. Like that night, you’re taking your run around the tarmac, there’s a gentle breeze blowing, that warm east wind we get off the tundra in the summer, the moon is out. It’s so peaceful and quiet, that ghost light like you say. But then, maybe there’s somebody around, something going on you didn’t expect to see. Nothing major, but maybe it registers subconsciously.”
“Who? Where?”
“Maybe around the hangar, while you stop to catch your breath? Maybe you hear something? Maybe you go inside the hangar to check it out?”
“No. I told you, I was never in that hangar.”
“Right,” Active said. “Why would you be?”
“Anyway, they must lock it, right? How would I get in?”
“Exactly. How would you?” He braced his hands on his knees, stood up, and returned the mug to its place. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Good luck with your investigation, Chief.”
He glanced at his watch as he stepped out of the weather station. Two hours till Jesse Apok was due on shift at Lienhofer’s. Just enough time to go by E-Z Market for the dog food Nita wanted for Lucky, drop by Martha’s office at the school administration building, and pick up Danny Kavik at Public Safety before swinging by Apok’s place.
He could brief Kavik on the balloons in the 207’s tanks and the long roster of potential suspects on the ride over. It was time for Chukchi Public Safety’s newest officer to graduate from de-escalating fistfights and tracking down stolen snowgos and get his feet wet in a homicide investigation.
Active opened the weather station door, then paused and glanced back at Monique. “That dog. What’s his name?”
“Hercules.”
“Huh. Big name for a little dog.”
“Yep. But he totally owns it.”