• Saturday, August 27 •
District Attorney’s office, Chukchi
“There’s no point bringing charges if I can’t sell it at trial.” District Attorney Theresa Procopio tossed the Monique Rogers file across her desk with such force that it nearly slid onto Active’s lap. “For this you dragged me in on a weekend? A weather balloon and a dark-colored Jeep? That’s it?”
“So far,” Active said. “We’re still working it.”
A four-wheeler backfired as it sputtered past Procopio’s first-floor office window in the building that housed the court system and the Alaska Department of Law. Like most other big buildings in the Arctic, it perched on wooden pilings to avoid melting the permafrost underneath and being swallowed up in the resulting mud. The shriveled blossoms of dead flowers nodded in the wind from a window box.
Procopio rattled her nails on the desktop and arched an eyebrow beneath her curly brown mane.
The nails were candy-apple red, Active noticed, a marked departure from Procopio’s normal disdain for ornamentation. And she seemed a little trimmer lately. Had she shed a few of the pounds that had accumulated since her arrival in Chukchi several years back? There was even a trace of the fresh-faced public defender who had begun her village legal career in a most un-village suit jacket and skirt. Could there be a man in Theresa Procopio’s life after all this time?
Or a woman? Active realized he still didn’t know.
“Details?” The nails clattered on the desk again.
He pulled himself back to the Two-Five-Mike case, as he had come to think of it.
“We went over her Jeep with a fine-tooth comb this morning. Not a trace of blood or anything else of interest. Turns out it’s a rental from Tundra. She took it in on Thursday for a scheduled service, which came with a wash, and she also had them detail it, which she had to pay for herself.”
“Detailed? In Chukchi? Seriously?” Procopio pulled back the file and looked at her notes. “And Thursday was, what, two days after the murder? So she wanted to get rid of something?”
Active sighed. “Or she likes a really clean car. The kid at Tundra said she always has it washed and detailed once a month, which he had never even heard of till she explained it to him. And her room at the Shore Inn is probably the cleanest place in Chukchi. Not a spoon in the sink, clothes fresh from the washer. Like an operating room in there, you could eat off the floor.”
“How about her computer and phone?”
Active shook his head. “They weren’t password-protected, but we’ve struck out so far.”
“No texts to or from Apok the day of the murder?”
Active shook his head. “Or any other day. No communication between them at all, as far as we can tell. A lot of texts back and forth with her cousin Dora about Lienhofer and the great and small of male genitalia.”
“You guys would be surprised what we talk about when you’re not around.”
Active shrugged. “Not if your wife makes you watch enough chick flicks.”
“But seriously, no mention of our murder victims in those texts? By name or implication?”
“No. The Lienhofer stuff is mostly about the owner, Delilah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the B-word used so many times in a single sentence.”
“Millennials using sentences? When did that start?”
Active smiled. Procopio didn’t.
“Danny Kavik is still going through the emails on her laptop,” he said. “But we’re not optimistic. Turns out it’s synced with her phone, which we already went through. So we don’t expect much unless we get lucky with her internet search history.”
“Let’s make sure we nail down what little we do have,” Procopio said. “I want to know about every Jeep Wrangler in town.”
Active nodded. “Alan Long is working that.”
“You search the weather station yet?”
“We’re on it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Local law enforcement can’t just walk into a federal facility and confiscate property without permission. The weather bureau will give it to us, but, you know, it’s a bureaucracy. The paperwork was supposed to be faxed over this morning. We’ve made a couple phone calls, it’ll probably take a couple more. The usual.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Let the feds muck this up after they already concluded a double murder was an aviation accident? I’ll make a call, the fax will be waiting when you get back to your office.”
“Really? You know a guy?”
“I might.” A smile softened the district attorney’s all-business facade. Was there perhaps even a slight flutter of the eyelashes? “This FBI agent in Anchorage.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shut up.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. The unruly curls immediately flopped forward again. “A woman has needs.”
The backfiring four-wheeler chugged past the window again, this time in the opposite direction.
“Now, if we could focus here?” Procopio straightened up, all business again. “Our case against Monique is weak on the Kavoonah-Brenner homicides. And if we’re going with eliminating a witness as her motive for killing Apok, we need more on the first crime to make the second one stick. You’re thinking love gone wrong was behind it all?”
“Oldest motive in the book. But, yeah, we’ve got some blanks to fill in, and we’re getting close to the twenty-four-hour mark—”
“When you have to release her if I can’t bring charges.” Procopio glanced at the clock. “Four hours and counting.” Her fingernails rattled on the desk again.
Danny Kavik gazed up at the domed ceiling of the weather station garage like a kid at a planetarium. A Nikon DSLR hung from a strap around his neck. “You could almost fit an airplane in here.”
“Or plan how to bring one down.” Active pulled a rubbery white roll off a shelf in the tall metal cabinet, carried it to the table in the middle of the room, and unfurled it next to the spread-out balloon that he and Cowboy had retrieved from the tank in the right wing of Two-Five-Mike.
“Same size, same color,” Kavik said. He circled the table with his Nikon.
“It feels a little different, though.” Active ran a fingertip over the latex of the weather-service balloon. “Not quite as smooth as ours.”
“Ours was in a gas tank for, like, six weeks,” Kavik said.
“Good point. But I still wonder if there was some variation between different batches, different suppliers, that kind of thing. I’m gonna check a few of the others. You search the office, ah?”
“On it.” Kavik headed for the side door. “Anything specific we’re looking for?”
“Any sign of communication between Monique and Jesse—phone number, address on a scrap of paper, anything to show they were in touch. Be sure to check the trash can and the phone messages.”
Active began pulling rolled-up balloons out of the cabinet. Eight of the deflated spheres were spread and stacked on the table when Kavik returned with a half-full trash bag.
“How’s it going, Chief?”
Active shook his head. “Slow and inconclusive. You?”
“Not much. Voicemails on her phone go back only two days, one from her supervisor and three from the IT guy in Fairbanks. Work stuff mostly, except the IT guy seems a little friendly. He calls her ‘Brown Sugar.’”
“Whoa.”
“A braver man than I,” Kavik said as he emptied the trash bag onto the table. Two pairs of brightly colored running shoes, five bottles of vitamins and diet supplements, three protein bars, a carton of vanilla soy milk, and a bottle of something labeled “black cohosh.” Kavik picked it up and studied the label.
“Black cohosh?” Active said.
“Supposed to control PMS, apparently.”
“I’d say she’s wasting her money.”
“And other symptoms of hormonal imbalance,” Kavik went on. “Like hot flashes.”
“Huh,” Active said. “Which I suppose could explain why she was wearing the anorak and then drinking that cold Diet Pepsi when we talked to her the morning Jesse was killed.”
Kavik nodded. “Rather than having just come back from killing him. Which means we have even less reason to hold her.”
Kavik’s cell phone pinged. “Ah. It’s the vehicle information from Long.” Kavik tapped the phone a couple of times, then scrolled down and pinch-zoomed. “Arii, as both my aanas would say.”
“Not good?”
“Turns out, there are three Jeep Wranglers in Chukchi. One is white, so we can scratch it. Of the other two, one is purple, one is dark blue.”
“Purple is Monique, obviously. And the blue one?
Kavik shook his head. “Denise Sheldon.”
“Arii is right. She already told us she was there that morning.”
“Maybe we should talk to her again?”
“Her and Apok, a crime of passion might make sense. But a premeditated killing? You saw how she was with that kid. I can’t see her taking Corey to a murder and leaving him in the car while she does it.”
Active’s cell phone chimed and the caller ID for the Anchorage crime lab came up. He showed Kavik and put the phone on speaker.
“What do you have for me, Kalani?” he asked Georgeanne’s assistant.
“Hey, Chief. First time I ever analyzed a balloon as evidence.” The deep rumble of the Hawaiian’s voice rattled Active’s phone.
“Can you tell where it came from?”
“Sorry, yeah. I put a black light on it, and there’s a row of triangles along the neck you can’t see in regular light that identify the manufacturer. Outfit in Wisconsin called Rugged-Line. But they distribute to retailers all over the country and on the internet. No way to tell where yours was bought.”
“But it is a weather balloon.”
“Nope. Same size, but this type of balloon is mostly used by hobbyists. It’s neoprene.”
“Not latex?” Active asked with a sinking feeling.
“Nope, definitely not latex. The weather people use latex balloons because they’re more flexible, they can stand up to more wind. But you gonna put one in a fuel tank, neoprene is mo’ bettah.” Active remembered from past conversations that Kalani’s Hawaiian pidgin came out when he had a big discovery to divulge.
“Why’s that?”
“Neoprene is used to make fuel lines ’cause it’s impervious to the stuff. But latex, you put that in gasoline, it’s gonna dissolve on you like toilet papuh.”
Active tapped out of the call and stared at the balloons spread out on the table.
“If it’s not a weather balloon, we have no connection between the murder weapon and Monique,” Active said.
“She could have gotten hold of a neoprene balloon,” Kavik said with an utter lack of conviction.
“So could anyone else in Chukchi.”
They continued to study the balloons in silence. Active rubbed the balloon from Two-Five-Mike, then one of Monique’s balloons.
Kavik followed suit. “We gotta cut her loose, don’t we?”
“We do,” Active said. “But she’s not totally off the hook.”
“Right. She did have a motive to bring down that plane. And she did have a connection to the person who had access to the fuel tank the night before it went down.”
“It all comes back to Jesse Apok.”