“THESE PEOPLE,” procopio said as Active clicked off the digital recorder with Brad Mercer’s interview.
“Indeed.”
The prosecutor rattled her nails on her desk and knit her brows as she studied her notes on the recording.
He took a hit of the coffee she’d served him on arrival. It was awful, scorched from too long in the pot. “So what do we have here, counselor?”
“The makings of a pretty good erotic romance, maybe. Let’s see, we got a love triangle and a love child, a gorgeous governor baring her all for a hunky young cop. Yep, you write it, I’ll be your agent, it’ll be the next 50 Shades of Grey.”
“That’s all? But they incriminated each other and one of them—”
“Yeah, one of them surely killed Pete Wise, by accident if not intentionally,” Procopio said. “You got a feel for who and how?”
“On the how, I’m guessing accident. Too stupid a way to commit murder, even for these people, starting with the problem of dumping the snowgo. As for who, I go back and forth. Helen hates being crossed, but she’s probably too calculating to expose herself like this. Which leaves Brad. He did admit fighting with Pete in the past, and he might be enough of a knuckle-head to screw up like this and panic.”
“But even if we could get around the spousal immunity problem, it could still go nowhere. If one testified, they both would, and they’d just cancel each other out.”
Active nodded. “It’s a hall of mirrors.”
“Any luck with the search warrant for the phone records?”
“Oh, majorly. I think Stein’s getting as sick of these people as we are. In fact, Chukchi Telephone is supposed to email them over any time now.” She looked at the clock on the wall behind Active. “Let me check.” She turned in her chair and clicked her email open. “Here we go, come look.”
Active moved around the desk and peered over her shoulder.
“Hmm,” they said together two minutes later.
“Lot of calls that morning,” Procopio said. “First one was to the Mercer landline at 5:43, a series of calls between the cells after that till, what, almost half past six.”
“Hmm.” Active pointed. “That call to the land line at 5:43? That’s her cell. I recognize the number.”
“So that had to be her calling from the ice.”
“Yup. Print that for me?”
“Think we can get a search warrant on Pete’s house now, see if she spent the night in his bed?”
“With the phone records and the recording from Brad, plus the other stuff I already filed? Puh-leeze. Maybe even by quitting time today, and your guys can tear through the place like wolverines in rut. I’ll get on it now.” She opened the word processor on her computer and began typing.
“So, then—a warrant also for hair samples from her?”
Procopio paused at the keyboard. “Of course. One follows the other.”
“Head and pubic?”
“Of course pubic. Unless she’s got a Brazilian.”
“She, ah, does not. At least not as of this morning.”
“We’ll also go for a DNA sample,” Procopio said.
“DNA?”
“Yeah, it’s in saliva.”
“Right, sure. Her saliva might be—”
Procopio nodded. “Almost anywhere on Pete’s body, depending on how lucky he got. Plus, her DNA might be on the sheets if she’s a squirter.”
“What?”
“It’s in female ejaculate.”
“Seriously? That’s a real thing?”
“You don’t know about that?” Procopio said. “Poor Grace.”
“Shut up. But it’s real and it contains DNA?”
“Yep. CSI 101.”
“So now I know.”
“She can probably drag the search of her person out in court for a while, by the way. She’ll have to be served with a warrant, go to a lab or maybe the hospital here or in Juneau, or you’ll have to get a crime technician in to see her. So, brace yourself for another fight.”
“First step is to get the warrant, right?”
Procopio nodded.
“What about interviewing Pudu?”
“They’ll fight that like hell, too,” Procopio said. “Probably drag it out even more. I’ll set the wheels in motion if you like, but maybe the search warrants first?”
“Yeah, let’s at least see what the search at Pete’s house turns up. Ditto for questioning Helen’s parents, I suppose. The kids spent the night in question with them, so they aren’t likely to know where Helen slept. And even if they did, why would they tell us? They can go to the bottom of the list, too.”
Procopio resumed typing as Active pocketed the phone-record printout, pulled on his parka and tapped a contact on his cell. “And you?”
“I’m off to atone for my sins.”
“You pissed Grace off again, huh?”
SHE ANSWERED as he reached the stairs.
“Suka? Look, I’m sorry for the way I behaved today. I, er, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since I saw… since you…and, ah, well, I was wondering if your offer is still open. I’d like to come over and apologize properly.”
There was a long silence at the other end. He crossed mental fingers, hoping her husband hadn’t called about the interview at the mine. Maybe he was still on shift. Maybe he was too furious. Maybe he was getting his own lawyer.
“After what you did? I’m not sure I ever want to see you again.”
He relaxed a little. The feline throatiness was back in her voice. “I don’t blame you, but—”
“Oh, all right. But it’s going to take a lot of apologizing. Do I need to cancel my flight? Will you be staying the night?”
“Only part of it. I don’t want Grace to know.”
A few minutes later, he parked in front of the Mercer house on Beach Street, just south of the start of the seawall. Like everything about the governor, it made a statement and a loud one. Not only was it two stories, it was also cedar-fronted with a glass wall by the door and had an unequal-pitch roof, the only one he had seen on a Chukchi house.
He parked the Chevy in front and walked through the kunnichuk. The inner door was unlatched and swung open a crack at his knock. He took a deep breath and stepped in. “Suka?”
She came to the door and took his hand. “Nathan, good to see you again. I hope.”
This time, she was at least dressed—painted-on jeans, a scarlet satin top, a necklace with a tiny jade seal pendant. Except not fully dressed. She was braless once more, it appeared, and her feet were bare again. “Likewise,” he said. “And, I do apologize for before.”
She stepped back a little, studied the red stripes on his face, then touched his cheek. “Wow, I did that? I should apologize to you. ”
“No, I had it coming. Really. I cleaned up at the office. It’s good now.”
“Well, let me get something for it. And I’m having some chardonnay—join me?” She waved at the jade coffee table, set with a bottle of white wine and two glasses, one empty, one half full.
“You do recall we’re a dry village, right?”
“Wanna bust me?” She grinned, filled the other glass, and disappeared down a hall. In a moment she was back with band-aids and ointment. She squirted some on her fingertips and massaged it into his cheek.
“You have nice hands,” he said. “And a soft touch.”
“Just wait.”
She finished and eyed her work, then the band-aids. “Well, these are pointless. You’d look like a chainsaw accident if I put on enough to cover the damage.”
He shrugged. “No complaints. But don’t you need a uniform to practice nursing?”
She giggled. “Don’t have one or I’d model it for you. Just let me put this away and then we can discuss why you’re here.” She padded off to the bathroom and returned to perch on the sofa. She tucked her feet under her, threw an arm along the backrest behind him, and gazed into his eyes. Hers were wolfish again, but this time like she was circling a caribou carcass and trying to sniff out the trap. “So,” she said. “That apology.”
He touched her knee, put on his flustered face, and pulled back his hand. “Well, um, I, ah…”
“Oh, Nathan, you’re adorable. No wonder Grace likes you so much. Look, you haven’t touched your wine.” She handed him the glass. “Relax, I won’t bite. Unless you want me to.”
“Maybe some music to set the mood?” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I think you’ll like the playlist I put together. It starts with ‘At Last.’ ” He winked.
“How romantic! I love that in a man.”
“Will this plug into your sound system?”
She nodded at an expensive-looking setup on smoked glass shelves under a huge wide-screen TV. “Oh, posilutely. It plays everything. Music, radio, TV, DVDs, flash drives, those little memory cards, I don’t know what-all. Brad set it up. A guy thing, you know?”
He walked to the system and set his phone in a dock under a corner of the TV. He squatted in front and found a remote with a vast array of buttons. But one did say “On” and another said “Aux. He pressed them in order and the system lit up. Then he started the playback and turned to watch as Mercer heard not Etta James but “I just got out of the shower.”
At first she looked puzzled, then she figured it out and her cheeks blazed. “Goddammit, you recorded me? Turn that thing off!”
He paused the playback.
“That’s illegal, I’m calling the attorney general right—”
“It is legal, trust me. Cops do it all the time.”
“Well, get the hell out. Fuck you and fuck your recording. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Really? I thought maybe you’d like to refresh your recollection before you hear Brad’s version of events?”
“You recorded Brad, too?”
“I did.”
“Are you recording me now?”
He shook his head. “Nope. This is just us. My phone’s hooked up to the system and this”—he pulled out the digital recorder—“is turned off. He showed her and she reached for it. “Sorry, I can’t let you touch it, it’s got Brad’s interview on it. But you can see the display is dark.”
“How do I know you’re not wearing a wire? Is that what they call it?”
“They do, and you don’t know, but I’m not. Care to frisk me?” He grinned, like they were still in the opening round of this match.
“Fuck you.”
“Then you’ll have to take my word for it.”
“I suppose cops can lie, too?”
“We can. But, again, I’m not. Let’s play the recordings, then have a talk.”
She folded into herself on the sofa, arms around her shoulders. She she looked half the size she had before. She drained her wine glass, then his, and waved at the entertainment center. “Go on.”
He watched alarm and fury play across her face as she listened. “Pretty good sound quality, don’t you think?” he said when it was done.
“I said all that?”
“You did. And it’s all in evidence now. Would you like to hear what your husband had to say?”
She gave an exhausted nod and poured more wine. She missed the glass at first, and chardonnay spread across the jade table top. She sipped as he found a cable for his digital recorder, plugged in, and started Brad’s interview.
Once again fury and alarm fought for control of her face. She was silent for a long time after the interview finished and he pocketed the recorder.
“You can’t possibly believe all that,” she said at last. “He’s lying. I never had sex with Pete, I certainly wasn’t sleeping with both of them, and now Brad is trying to frame me for what he did. The lying sonofabitch.”
“Well, there is this.” He pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and handed her the phone records. “You’ll notice the first call the morning Pete died was from your cell to the landline here at the house. That would be you calling from out on the ice after you dumped the snowgo, I presume?”
She studied the printout in silence.
“Forget something when you came back from Pete’s place and borrowed Brad’s snowgo for your little morning drive?”
“This doesn’t prove anything. Brad obviously took my phone with him so it would look like me calling.”
“So you didn’t spend the night in Pete’s bed to get him to call off the custody suit?”
“Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“More interesting all the time, actually. But never mind that. Let’s talk about this.” He handed her the custody petition.
“So? We’ve both seen this before.”
“Right. But what I didn’t notice was the birth dates, not till Brad told me you were having sex with Pete while he was still in high school. Pete was seventeen years old when Pudu was born and you were a teacher, and the coach of his team. Ever hear of our Satch Carlson Law?”
This time, he thought, she paled. But she did keep her game face on.
“I think so, yeah.”
“From your lawyer, perhaps?”
She didn’t speak, but clenched her teeth. A jaw muscle twitched.
“Maybe a refresher won’t hurt. If a teacher sleeps with a student, the age of consent in Alaska rises from sixteen to eighteen. If you do the math here, Pete was only sixteen when he fathered Pudu. And that makes you a child rapist. Welcome to some jail time and the sex offender registry. And goodbye to your political career.”
“This is just more of your bullshit. I told you Pete faked these results. He was not Pudu’s father!”
“With these birth dates, there’s absolutely no doubt the court will order a DNA test for Pudu, and we’ve already got Pete’s at the crime lab.”
“You still won’t have a case. We did have sex, but Pete raped me.”
“And you didn’t report it because…”
“I felt so stupid for letting him into my room that night—he said he needed advice on his jump shot—and I didn’t want to put him in jail and land him on the registry for the rest of his life.”
“Well, your husband’s testimony about your ongoing relationship with Pete might undermine that claim—”
“More bullshit! He can’t testify against me because of spousal privilege.”
“Sure he can, if he wants to. The privilege only protects him from being forced to testify. Your lawyer didn’t tell you that?” He waited. “I can’t wait till a jury hears this. Talk about a paragon of family values.”
She still didn’t speak.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “We’re in the process of—actually, let me make a call.” He tapped the contact on his phone and in a few moments Theresa Procopio was on the line. “Madam Prosecutor. Did we get those warrants—already? well, damned fine work!”
He clicked off and tapped another contact. “Alan? Nathan. We got a warrant on Pete Wise’s place. Head over and secure it till I get there, OK? Dust for fingerprints on anything we can’t ship to the crime lab, otherwise wait for me.”
He clicked off and studied her.
She was, if possible, even smaller now. “A warrant on Pete’s place?”
He nodded. “And another one for samples of your hair and DNA. If there’s so much as a trace of you in that house or on Pete’s body or on his clothing—”
“Women don’t leave DNA,” she said in a feeble voice. “That’s men.”
“Actually, some women do. It depends on how much they enjoy the experience. It’s in female ejaculate, just like with men.”
“Well, I didn’t…I don’t…I mean…” She stopped and gave a half-sob. “That sonofabitch!”
“Pete or Brad? Or both of them, seeing as how they were nuliagatagiik?”
“Fuck you, Nathan.”
He waited, but said no more. “Mm-hmm. But if we do find something that puts you in that house, you know what that means, right?”
“I think it means I should call my lawyer before I say anything else.”
“Sure, you have the right to do that. But it might be worth your while to hear what I have to propose first.”
She closed her eyes and laid her head against the backrest. “Whatever.”
“I’m offering you a deal. One where you get to keep your clothes on, though I’m starting to think you do your best work without them.”
“Drop that shit. It’s not gonna work now.”
“You plead guilty, or at least no contest, to manslaughter, leaving the scene of an accident, and destruction of evidence—that’s for dumping the snowgo—and you call your dogs off me and my womenfolk.”
She opened her eyes and raised her head from the backrest. “Did you say accident?”
He nodded. “I know it wasn’t. I know you ran Pete down on. I knew it when I the rage in your eyes when you did this.” He touched his damaged cheek. “But Theresa’s not sure we can get a murder verdict, whereas the accident version is a slam dunk. So you’re getting a break here.”
“A break? It’ll ruin me.”
“You didn’t notice I haven’t mentioned the matter of you raping Pete when he was still a minor, or of him fathering Pudu?”
She tilted her head and studied him. “What’s that about?”
“Insurance.”
“Insurance. I figure you’ll be able to talk your way past the manslaughter plea in public, at least to some extent. You’re out for a ride on the tundra on a cold, clear morning, thinking how much you love your Chukchi and how much you’ll miss it in Juneau, and there’s a tragic accident. In a moment of panic, you don’t know what to do, you make a stupid mistake, and now you’ve got a local cop and an overzealous prosecutor on a vendetta and you had no choice other than pleading no contest so it doesn’t drag out forever.” He read her eyes for a moment. “Something like that on your mind, maybe? Anyway, as long as I’ve got the child rape charges and the paternity tests in my pocket, you’ll have to leave Grace, Nita, and me alone. Otherwise, it’ll all go before the grand jury, and on the Internet, too, if I need it to.”
“Why should I believe you’ll stick to your piece of this? I mean, sitting on my allegedly raping Pete Wise?”
“Again, insurance. If I use the child rape now and you wiggle off the hook, I’m out of ammo. With child rape, polyandry, and a love child in reserve, I can go several more rounds if I need to. Think of the birth dates on that custody petition as candles on a great big birthday cake I can light any time.”
She sipped thoughtfully at her wine. “What kind of sentence?”
“Sixty days, which you can serve under house arrest in the governor’s mansion.”
“Can I start it after my trip for the primaries next week?”
He nodded.
“And Theresa’s OK with all of this, including letting the rape issue slide?”
“That part she’s not aware of. When I first got the files, she didn’t even want to look at them because they were sealed. The only thing she has now is the DNA tests on Pete and Pudu, which she used to get the search warrants. And the birth dates aren’t on them.”
“So—”
“So it’s our little secret. Yours and mine.”
“Unless you change your mind.”
He nodded. “Or you do.”
“But she’s in on the rest—the plea and the sentence?”
“I think I can sell it to her.
She thought it over. “It’ll take a while to call off the dogs, as you put it. And if I’ve already pleaded, I may not be able—”
He nodded. “Have your lawyer get a draft plea agreement to us by this time tomorrow, with an offer to show up here and enter it in court on Friday.”
“Friday? That’s only three days.”
“That’s your deadline to make the investigations go away.”
HE CAUGHT UP with Procopio as she was locking her office and pulled her back inside.
“Say what?” she said when he told her of the deal with Helen Mercer.
Active nodded.
“Sixty days is pretty fucking light. You record her this time too?”
He shook his head.
“That would be because…?”
“The circumstances were not such as to, ah, permit another surreptitious recording.”
Procopio’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Do we need to test you for her DNA now? Talk about a conflict of interest.”
“No, nothing like that, I swear. I played the two recordings for her and of course she suspected I was recording her again, so I had to prove I wasn’t.”
The prosecutor whistled. “You played the recordings of her and Brad? What did she do?”
“She buckled and I moved in for the kill and I got the deal. And no damage to my face.”
“Why would she cave? The evidence so far is just conflicting testimony we may not get in and telephone evidence for which she has at least a superficially plausible explanation.”
“Maybe she’s afraid the search will put her in Pete’s house.”
Procopio chewed her lip for a moment, then nodded in acknowledgment. “Make me love that sentence.”
“I think she’ll fight rather than take a longer sentence. Six months, a year, she’d have to leave office. This way, she might conceivably survive. The legislature might try to impeach her, but they’re out of session now and they love her, anyway, and this will be old news when the next session starts.”
“I admit, I’d hate to take her on in front of a jury. She struts out there in that push-up bra, bats her eyes, and tells them she just wanted to talk to Pete one last time and she hit him by accident, God knows what they’ll do. Especially the men, fuck all of ya. Hung jury for sure, if not outright acquittal.”
“What I’m thinking,” Active said. “We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
“Who said that?” Procopio asked.
“Someone wise, I’m sure.”
“He was right. Or she. God damn, I’m tired of this case.”