ACTIVE STUDIED THE application on his blotter, then arched an eyebrow at Lucy Brophy, who sat before his desk with a steno pad on her belly.
“Jeremy Generous? Your cousin.”
“He might be. It’s hard to keep track around here.”
“He might be.”
Lucy arched both eyebrows in the Eskimo yes. “He’ll do real good job, and my maternity leave is only three months anyway.”
“If he’s so good, why would he take a three-month job?”
Lucy gave him a look of pity. “Arii, naluaqmiiyaaq. This job will end the same time commercial fishing start, remember? That’s what he like to do, hunt and fish, but he like to work sometimes, too.”
Active pondered. Jeremy’s references were good, including a year as dispatcher when the department was still run by the city. And Lucy was right, the job should be over well before the Chukchi Bay chum salmon run, in plenty of time for Jeremy to get his gear ready for the season. “If he messes up, you’ll straighten him out?”
“My Aana Pauline will. She’s his aana, too. And I can come in sometimes if you need me here.”
“All right,” Active said. “Call him and set up an interview.”
“When you want to talk to him?”
“How about three this afternoon?”
“I’ll call him.” Lucy trundled out as he tapped Jeremy’s appointment into the calendar.
He filed away the applications for temporary office manager and with dread pulled over the other stack of paper on his desk and the jump drive that lay atop it. This, Lucy had informed him, was his briefing on the borough finance system, as prepared by the Anchorage accounting firm that had installed the system and somehow ran it remotely.
His assignment, she had said, was to go over the executive summary in the printout, then review the PowerPoint presentation on the jump drive. Then she’d come in and explain how, with Sonny’s help, they got around the naluaqmiut in Anchorage to make the thing work in Chukchi, where the exception always ruled.
He pushed the flash drive into a port on his computer and started it up. Ninety-six slides! Who did a ninety-six slide PowerPoint?
He was up to slide eighteen, in the section on depreciation, when the line from Lucy’s office lit up.
Thank God. Anything was better than PowerPoint.
“There’s a gentleman from the Alaska Bureau of Investigation here to see you. OK to send him up?”
Active looked at the clock on his wall as he tapped open the calendar on his phone. “The ABI? What about? Did I forget an appointment?”
“Not unless you made it without telling me.”
“Of course not. Send him up. What’s his name?”
WHERE DID HE know the guy from? Active tried to pull it up as he shook hands with Trooper Stuart Stewart and ushered him to a chair. Stewart was forty-ish and Native, maybe Yup’ik, with a jet-black flat top, but after a couple of sentences of pleasantries, Active gave up.
“Have we met? You look awfully familiar.”
“Maybe from the Trooper TV show?”
“Ah,” Active said. “The famous Trooper Stuart Stewart. Two-Stu, is that what they called you?”
Stewart nodded with a grin. “The same. That was back when I was on patrol in Mat-Su. Meth cookers, Bible-thumpers, baby-bangers, wife-beaters—happy hunting ground for a rookie cop, I have to say. Now that I’m an investigator, it seems like a dream.”
“Well, you made us all look good. Nice work.”
“You’re probably wondering what brings the ABI to town,” Stewart said.
“Absolutely. And how can we help? Chukchi Public Safety about to be famous, too?”
“You’re already kind of famous, thanks to your camping trip with the governor.”
Active grimaced. “But not in a good way. Craziest episode of my entire law enforcement career.”
Stewart nodded. “That’s kind of what brings me to town. I gather you’re interested in being director of the Troopers?”
“God, no. I told the governor that a dozen times. Apparently I didn’t get through.”
Stewart grinned and nodded and pulled out a note pad, then a recorder. “OK if I tape this?”
With an effort, Active maintained. Not thirty seconds since Helen Mercer had entered the conversation and already he could feel it sliding out from under him. “Tape away.” He waved at the recorder. “But why? I already said I don’t want the job.”
“That’s not it,” Stewart said. “Not exactly. Apparently there was a tangential matter that turned up during the due-diligence review the governor requested and now that matter has landed on my boss’s desk. And he’s dropped it on mine. We both know where shit rolls, right?”
Stewart passed over a card. Active studied it. Stewart was not only with the ABI. He was part of the Cold Case Unit. “We’ve got a cold case here in Chukchi? I just took over this job, but I don’t remember anything major still being open.”
“It’s the murder of Jason Palmer.”
“Jason Palmer.”
Stewart nodded.
“I remember it, of course. It was pretty famous at the time. But it’s been closed for quite a while.”
“Well, it’s been reopened and the Office of Special Prosecutions has passed it on to us. I took a quick pass through the files at your court house yesterday afternoon and this morning. Fascinating stuff.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For you especially, I’d guess.”
Active nodded. “I was in the Troopers at the time, as the files probably show. It was a city case, so we didn’t have much of a role.”
“I was just about to get to that. I don’t think we need to go through the whole thing in detail, but let me just make sure I captured the high points.”
“OK, but why is it being reopened?”
“There seem have been a few holes in the original investigation.” Stewart waved a hand, as if to dismiss a small matter. “I gather your predecessor when this was still the city police department could be a little casual about procedure?”
“Jim Silver was a really good man,” Active said. “He died in an arson fire and we should show respect.”
“Of course,” Stewart said. “I meant no offense.” Active raised his eyebrows, then realized he didn’t know if Yup’iks did that for ‘yes.’
“No problem,” he said.
Stewart paused for a decent interval.
“So the Jason Palmer case starts when he asks you to track down his daughter, Grace, who’s been missing, or at least out of contact with the family, for something like ten years. He tells you Grace’s mother is dying and wants to see her daughter one last time.”
Active’s direct line rang. He shot a glance at the caller ID and snagged the phone, holding up a just-a-moment forefinger to Stewart.
“Hey, Theresa, can I—what, that soon? OK, can I get back to you in a few? Sure, thanks.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Prosecutor’s office. We’ve got a hearing tomorrow.”
Stewart nodded.
“As I was saying, Jason Palmer asks you to track down his daughter so her dying mother can see her one last time. “You tell him it’s not a Trooper matter and you’ll pass it along to the Anchorage Police Department, but he shouldn’t expect much after so long.”
Active nodded and tried to focus on what Stewart was saying. But the Jason Palmer case reopened yesterday and a hearing scheduled for tomorrow on the Pete Wise files?
“But in fact,” Stewart continued, “you do go look for her and you do find her, all on your own time and at your own expense. All the way down in Dutch Harbor. Why would you do that?”
“Her father showed me her picture, a big mural on the wall at Chukchi High from when she was Miss North World.” Active deliberated for a long time. “And I fell in love with her.”
“From a picture.”
Active nodded again.
“You want that on the record?”
Active didn’t speak.
“This the picture here?” Stewart pointed at the eight-by-ten of the Miss North World portrait amid the clutter on Active’s desk.
“They took the big one in the high school down last year when they remodeled.”
Stewart picked it up for a closer look. “I guess I see what you mean. She look like this now?”
“Pretty much. Better maybe. Less haunted.”
“It’s sure not how she looked in the mug shots at the court house.”
“She’d been on Four Street a while when those were taken.”
“Ah,” Stewart said. “I guess I didn’t get that deep into the files over there. Anyway, I’ll be seeing for myself in a bit. She’s next on my interview list, followed by her daughter. Nita?”
“Nita’s her cousin, actually,” Active said. “Grace adopted her after the death of her mother, Grace’s aunt.” Then it dawned on him. “You want to talk to Nita?”
“Sure,” Stewart said. “That’s what I was saying about the previous investigation. The girl was in the house at the time of Mr. Palmer’s death, but it’s not clear she was ever considered as a suspect or even interviewed in depth. We have to cover all the bases.” Again he waved the dismissive hand.
Active sat in silence, stomach knotted, as Stewart looked at his notebook.
“But, to get back to your piece of this. You go to Dutch Harbor and find Ms. Palmer and bring her back to Chukchi to be reunited with her parents?”
“Partly true.” Active took a breath and went on, trying to limit how much his voice shook. “I had to go to Anchorage on Trooper business, so I nosed around a little after hours with the help of a buddy on the Anchorage force. I found out she’d been a Four Street drunk for several years.”
Stewart winced.
“Yeah, you should have seen her mug shots from that era, when she was busted for disorderly conduct and assaulting cops. They…well, they were even worse than the ones taken here when she was arrested after Jason Palmer’s murder. And they got worse as time went on. Like a time-lapse movie of a face slowly…dissolving.”
Active studied the eight-by-ten on his desk, while Stewart waited another decent interval.
“From Anchorage,” Active said at last, “the trail led to Dutch Harbor and I followed it and found she’d somehow pulled herself together and straightened out. She was working a slime line down there. But she wouldn’t come back to Chukchi.”
“Why not?”
“I think it’s all in the court record that developed later,” Active said. “But she told me her father had raped her from an early age and had raped her sister until he got her pregnant and she committed suicide. Grace finally had to get away.”
Stewart penned something into his notebook. “If that was true, why would he ask you to bring her home?”
Active shrugged. “I don’t know. Neither did she. She thought maybe he had some crazy idea he could win her back. Or she’d forgive and forget because of her mother being sick. Or something. What she said was, ‘Evil is opaque.’”
Stewart nodded. “She was right about that.”
Stewart flipped back in his notebook and checked something. “But she did come back to Chukchi, obviously. Why was that?”
“It was something I told her while I was down there.”
“And that was?”
“I told her Nita was living with Grace’s parents in Chukchi after the death of her mother in the plane crash. Grace couldn’t stand the thought of Jason doing to Nita what he had done to her and her sister. She fell back onto Four Street for a while, then she came home.”
“And Mr. Palmer ended up dead.”
“Grace showed up at my office one day and said ‘The son of a bitch is dead’ and dropped a pistol on my desk. The murder weapon, it was determined to be.”
“Whew,” Stewart said. “Quite a story.”
“That was just the start. There was a lot of evidence, fingerprints, gunshot residue, all pointing straight at Grace. But the defense—mostly Grace, I think—kept stalling. The state prosecutor couldn’t get an actual confession and a plea, but neither could he get the case in front of a jury.”
“I saw that in the record,” Stewart said. “The pretrial stuff dragged on and on.”
Active nodded. “Grace’s PD once described it as a nightmare case with a nightmare defendant.”
“And you—”
“Stayed out of it. It was a city case, not a Trooper case. Plus, this woman I loved appeared to be a killer. I couldn’t process it.”
“And then one day…”
“Yeah.” Active shook his head at the memory. “And then one day.”
“Grace’s mother, pretty much terminal with the cancer by this point, comes in and testifies she’s the one killed her husband.”
“They still weren’t at trial,” Active said. “So they had a hearing and got her on videotape, complete with cross-examination. That way if she died they could use it later.”
“Which they never did, as far as I can tell?”
“Uh-uh.” Active shook his head. “They let Grace out and put the mother under house arrest. There was a sealed indictment against her, but it stayed sealed until she died and that was the end of it.”
“And then you and Grace formed a domestic partner relationship, she adopted Nita, and here you are.”
Active was silent.
Stewart studied his notebook and made a brief entry.
“So I watched that tape,” he said. “Quite a story the mother told. Grace comes back from Dutch Harbor, tries again to convince her of what her husband did to Grace and her sister and is gonna do to Nita if he’s not stopped. The mother gets mad like always and sends Grace away, only this time something tells her it’s true. She catches her husband with the little girl, not really doing anything to her yet, but she realizes he will if he’s not stopped, so she shoots him after Nita goes out. Grace comes back to the house, finds out what happened, and rigs the evidence to point at herself instead of her mother. Scrubs the residue off her mother’s hands, wipes the gun down for fingerprints, then fires it into a wooden post in the basement to put her own fingerprints on it and get residue on her own hands. They tell the little girl Mr. Palmer shot himself by accident while cleaning the gun, and Ms. Palmer turns herself in to you. And then she stalls till it’s time to bring her mother into court and make the magic videotape. Amazing, wouldn’t you say?”
“Amazing Grace was what they called her on Four Street,” Active said.
“Chief Active?” Stewart said after another decent interval.
“Sorry, guess I got a little cobwebby there.”
“I was just saying, the whole matter of the tape was pretty ama—pretty remarkable, eh?”
“It was remarkable,” Active said. “But this is Chukchi. I’ve learned not to rule anything out.”
“Especially when it’s someone you love.”
Active shrugged. What was there to say?
“Let’s suppose it wasn’t someone you love. Can you put your cop hat on for me?”
“I’ll try.”
“Would you believe that story? “ Stewart said. “The mother is dying, she’s got nothing to lose, so why wouldn’t she lie to save her daughter? Mine would for me. And if the mother really did do it and Ms. Palmer really was innocent, why would she rig the evidence and run interference to protect her mother and take the risk it’d get away from her and she’d get convicted herself?”
Active chewed his lip. “Because she knew no Chukchi jury would convict her when that tape of her mother was played in court. Especially if the jury was full of women. Half of them have been where Grace was and the other half have a daughter or sister who has. Grace had to know she was pretty safe.”
“Geez,” Stewart said with a hint of admiration. “It’s kinda like one of those corn mazes, huh? No wonder it never got to trial.”
Active tented his fingers. “The mother’s story’s is either true, or it was a flawless piece of stagecraft by Grace. As I recall the evidence, when Grace was arrested, one bullet from the gun was found in Jason Palmer’s heart, and an empty casing was found in the gun.”
“Along with four live rounds.”
“Uh-huh. The prosecutor initially concluded an empty cylinder was kept under the hammer for safety reasons, leaving five cylinders with live rounds till the one was fired at Jason Palmer.”
“But what about the round that was found in the post downstairs after the mother came forward?”
“According to Grace, there were actually were six live rounds kept in the gun. When she fired that second one into the post, she drove a nail into the bullet hole and hung an old snowgo suit on it in case the house was searched. It was, but they didn’t find anything in the basement. Once Grace and her mother told them about the post, they went back and dug out the bullet.”
Stewart studied his notes and smiled a little. “And the casing? Did they find the casing from that basement shot?”
Active cleared his throat. “They did. In a cup on my desk. That pencil cup, as a matter of fact.” He pointed. “Apparently she dropped it in at the same time she was dropping the pistol on my desk. I guess I was a little distracted.”
“I guess you were.” Stewart still wore his little grin. “Musta been kinda embarrassing.”
“More than kinda. She has a flair for the dramatic.”
“But, seriously,” Stewart said. “It sounds like Ms. Palmer at a minimum confessed to evidence tampering and obstruction of justice. Know why that never went anywhere?”
Active shrugged. “I don’t. But I have the impression the whole mess was so embarrassing for the prosecutor and the Chukchi police they just wanted it to go away. They had the mother’s confession all tied up with a bow and why would they look that gift horse in the mouth? By that time, I think they were scared of Grace. She’s frighteningly smart.”
“Uh-huh. And your prosecutor then was—”
“Guy named Charlie Hughes. Got his fill of Chukchi not long after that and bailed for someplace warmer. Albuquerque, Amarillo? Something with an A.”
Stewart made a note of it. “And your prosecutor now—”
“Is Theresa Procopio. At the time, she was the PD who defended Grace in the case. I’m sure she’ll make Charlie’s files available to you, but I imagine attorney-client privilege would prevent her from talking about the case in any detail.”
“I’m sure,” Stewart said. “Small world out here, eh?”
Active nodded. “Very small. Probably where you come from, too?”
“Aniak. And, yes, small world there, too.” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Let’s see, don’t we have three possibilities here?”
Active waited, knowing.
“One, Ms. Palmer’s mother killed her husband to protect Nita. Two, Ms. Palmer killed him for the same reason. And, three, Nita did it, for, well, for obvious reasons. Assuming Ms. Palmer’s story of child abuse is true. In which case it could be argued to be self-defense in Nita’s case, I guess, but that would be up to the grand jury.”
“There is a fourth possibility,” Active said.
Stewart looked at his notes, then at Active. “Yeah?”
“Maybe it’s time the women of this family were left in peace.”
Stewart raised his eyebrows. “Have you told me everything you can recall that would be relevant to our investigation?”
This, Active knew, was a cop trap. If the investigators found out later he’d omitted something material, sometimes even something trivial, they’d be back and back heavy. The next round would start with ‘You said you told us everything’ and go downhill from there.
His mind raced back through Grace Palmer’s story. What had he left out and how would he explain it? He finally decided there was nothing and shook his head. “That’s the case as I recall it. Talk to Lucy on the way out and she’ll dig out the old city police files for you.”
Stewart collected his things, shook hands and left.