by Stan Jones
They had already snagged the snowgo—one of the skis, Active gathered—with a grappling hook when he pulled up. By the time he walked over to stand beside Long at the hole, they had a hook on the other ski and were horsing the machine up to the edge.
“Maybe I could help,” came a voice from behind them.
Active turned to see Anthony Childers.
“You sure can help,” said Gabe Reeder, the fire chief. He had a big belly, hair that was mostly gray, a big beard that was still red except for a brown streak from tobacco juice down the middle, and an air of immense competence about all things practical. Like most whites who settled in Chukchi, he was married to an Inupiaq. “You go over by the light there and make sure it doesn’t go out, OK?”
A look of alarm and suspicion spread over Anthony’s face. “But I still get the night in jail, right?”
“Yes, Anthony, if this is the right snowgo, you still get your night in jail.”
Anthony grinned and headed for his snowgo. Gabe shook his head. “Good kid, but…”
“Yeah, not the smoothest rock in the river.” Active watched Anthony walk away. His involvement in the case looked weirder and weirder. First, anyone who took undue interest in a criminal investigation automatically topped the list of suspects. And, second, how likely was it that anybody could spot a snowgo under the water unless he already knew it was there?
But, then, why would Anthony lead them to the abandoned snowgo in the brush near the cemetery? Was he capable of dragging such a red herring across the trail? Anthony was a Chukchi kid, so he would know about the perennial open spot near the mouth of the Katonak and figure it was a good place to look. And Anthony did act like all he wanted out of the matter was two nights in jail. Plus, he had been on a snowgo when he led them to his first find and looked to be sitting on the same one tonight as he watched the proceedings. Could he have stolen the snowgo now under water, hit Pete Wise with it, brought out it here to ditch, walked back to town, and then led them on this wild goose chase on his own snowgo to find it again? Had he cooked it up with an accomplice? Why?
Active’s head hurt to think about it, so he filed it away with a mental note to interview Anthony the next day.
Unless Anthony suddenly disappeared, say upcountry on a caribou hunt. Active walked over to Anthony at his station by the emergency light.
“I’m pretty sure this is the snowgo, so I think you got your night in jail, Anthony,” Active said. “How about we start tonight?”
Anthony beamed. “Arigaa!”
Active raised his eyebrows in assent. “In fact, we can even handcuff you to a sled right now if you want.”
“Really? Maybe you could take a picture for my Facebook.”
With an inward “Aha!” Active realized now what Anthony’s motive for the nights in jail must be: to share with the hive mind of the Internet one slightly less humdrum moment in a humdrum existence. Anthony Childers wanted to be famous.
They marched over to Active’s dog sled and Anthony was cuffed and photographed.
Active sat down beside him. “So how did you find that snowgo, Anthony? That’s pretty amazing.”
“I can do soul travel like them old angatquqs so I just fly around till I find it. You know I always try help.”
“I do know that. But even with the soul travel, it’s still pretty amazing. How did you know where to fly to?”
Anthony chewed his lip for a moment. Finally he grinned.
“Everybody know about this hole in the ice the current always make in the spring. Everybody except naluaqmiiyaaq, maybe?”
Active pulled out his handcuff key. “If it’s that easy, maybe you don’t deserve those nights in jail after all.”
“Arii, I jokes,” Anthony said. “You’re learning not to be a naluaqmiiyaaq so much, all right.”
“Uh-huh.” Active got up and returned to the patch of open water.
Just as Active wondered how Gabe’s crew would get a five- or six-hundred pound snowgo up and over the edge of the hole, one of the men went to a flat cargo sled parked several yards back and dragged over a wooden ladder.
Soon the ladder was levered out over the edge, rungs up, then angled down to form a ramp. A pair of snowgos was roped to the sunken machine’s skis and the tow began. The machine hit the ladder and caught on the rungs. The ladder tried to climb over the edge on its rails but broke through thin ice for a few yards. Then the ladder hit solid ice, skidded out of the hole on its rails, and whomped down flat with the snowgo on top, dripping seawater.
The tow continued another few yards for safety, then the snowgos shut down and everybody walked over for a look.
“There ya go, Chief,” Gabe said as they watched the rest of the crew hoist the snowgo—a black Arctic Cat—onto the cargo sled and strap it down.
“Nice work,” Active said. “Never saw anybody do that before.”
“We don’t do it much,” Gabe said. “Usually, one goes into salt water, it’s not worth pulling out because it’ll never run right again. We’ll yank one outta fresh water for somebody once in a while, that’s about it.”
“Mm-hm,” Active said, his mind already on the possibility of getting back to sheefish camp that night.
Gabe waved at the snowgo. “Where do you want to put it?”
“Oh, yeah.” The blood returned to Active’s work brain and he realized the snowgo would have to be locked up for the night. It was evidence. “I’ll take it back to public safety. We’ll put it in the garage bay at the jail.”
He walked over and kicked the snowgo on the sled. “What do you make of it?”
“’Bout like my Cat.” Gabe pointed to a machine a few yards off. “Four-five years old maybe.”
“Borrow your light?” Active asked.
Gabe handed it over and Active took a tour around the machine. There was a dent in the aluminum bumper that could be from hitting a man in the legs at high speed, a kind of cracked furrow up the cowl that could be from his body crashing into it, and a vertical split in the windshield that could be the body sliding up it after the impact.
Or not. Most Chukchi snowgos more than a month old had dents and cracks and there was no way to tell by flashlight if these had trapped any blood, flesh or fiber. That would have to be checked back in Chukchi, or perhaps at the crime lab in Anchorage.
So would the machine’s drive track. Judging from the state of Pete Wise’s face, scalp, and severed leg, the track of whatever had run him over was highly likely to hold minute pieces of him.
Active squatted and ran the light over the aluminum drive tunnel beneath the driver’s seat. That’s where the state registration decal would appear if, contrary to Chukchi custom, the owner had bothered to register it. This one hadn’t.
He shook his head and rose. “Anybody recognize it?”
He looked around at Gabe and the rest. Head-shakes, shrugs, the Inupiat squints for “no”.
“My brother-in-law could probably figure it out for you,” Gabe said. “He works for the Cat dealer.”
“You get back to town, call and ask him to meet us at the jail, OK?” Active asked. “And bring whatever invoices they’ve got from three-four-five years ago?”
Gabe grunted assent, flipped up his hood, and pulled on the heavy mittens dangling from lanyards braided from colored yarn. He straddled his own Cat and took off.
Long hitched Anthony’s snowgo behind his machine, then Active hitched his own dogsled with Anthony still cuffed to it behind Anthony’s snowgo, and instructed Long to pull the whole train to the borough jail.
Then Active hitched the cargo sled with the Arctic Cat on it to his own machine and pulled away.
A few minutes later, he passed within a couple of hundred yards of Leroy’s tent. It was almost full dark now, so it was easy to see the glow of the Coleman inside. He resisted the temptation to imagine he saw Grace’s silhouette on the canvas and kept his focus on the lights of Chukchi as they grew on the horizon.
An hour later, he stopped with hi
s load behind the jail and punched in the code to open the big garage door. Soon enough the Cat was safe in the garage and Anthony was happily ensconced in his cell and photographed there with his own phone. They even let him keep the phone, since nothing he could photograph from behind the bars seemed likely to be a threat to security. As they left him, he was trying to upload the photo to Facebook over Chukchi’s snail-like data network and grumbling about the jail’s lack of wi-fi.
Active and Long returned to the garage and went through the machine, checking the storage compartments and flipping up the cowling for any sign of the owner’s identity, without success. Nor did a closer inspection of the damage give any clue about what caused it. Perhaps the driver had cleaned it before dumping it. Or maybe anything left in the cracks in the plastic and the crevices of the track had been washed away by the Katonak.
Active was contemplating turning the machine on its side to examine the drive track when the dispatcher ushered in an Inupiaq of about forty with bristling black hair and black-framed glasses that gave him a studious look. He had a clipboard under his arm with a sheaf of papers attached.
He came down the steps from the jail into the garage and Long introduced him as Reggie Garfield. Active nodded, remembering now that he already knew Garfield slightly from having visited the Cat dealer before ordering his own Yamaha.
Garfield copied down a number stamped into the side of the metal drive tunnel, then flipped through his papers for a minute or two as Active and Long watched.
“Oh, yeah,” Garfield said. “Now I remember. We sold this one about four years ago.”
“Yeah?” Active pulled out his notebook. “Who to?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Wednesday, April 16
“BRAD MERCER,” THERESA Procopio said.
Active nodded.
“No shit.”
He nodded again.
Procopio rattled her nails on her desk and gazed out her office window. Active looked, too. So much for the golden April weather and oral sex, maybe more, in sheefish camp. Today was pure Chukchi—a hard wind from the west that had come up in the night, snow falling sideways, more being kicked up by the blow.
Procopio was curly-haired, intense, possessed of a law degree from Stanford, and had been around the village for years, much longer than Active. When he’d first crossed trails with her, she’d been a public defender. In fact, she had defended Grace Palmer against charges of murdering her father.
Now she was the a state prosecutor, which Active supposed was a step up. But Chukchi, he thought, had started to get to her. She’d been presentable enough when he had arrived, but now—well, she was getting close to what Cowboy Decker would call a widebody, her horizontal dimension approaching parity with the vertical. Manless—or womanless, as the case might be—and stuck in a town hard enough on couples from outside, much less singles. As far as Active knew, she didn’t do much off duty except volunteer at the senior center and watch talent shows on TV. She was in over her head in every aspect of life except the courtroom. But there, he was just glad they were on the same side.
“Let me see if I got this straight,” she said. “You pull a snowgo out of the water and it was bought by the governor’s husband four years ago. It has damage consistent with the hit-and-run that killed Pete Wise.”
“Or not,” Active said. “Anyway, it’s on its way to the crime lab in Anchorage. Maybe they can tell us. And if there’s any fiber or human remains on it.”
Procopio rattled her nails some more. “He got a rap sheet? I don’t remember him ever winding up in my crosshairs here.”
“Nothing in the crime computer. But Lucy Brophy remembered a 911 call from their house a few years ago, when she was still in Dispatch. She dug out the old logs and actually found it, amazingly enough.”
“And?”
“Dispatch gets the call one night, they hear a lot of yelling and screaming, then the line goes dead. They call back and Helen comes on and says it was just one of the kids goofing around on the phone and she’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Hmm,” Procopio said. “Did Dispatch send somebody over?”
“Not that Lucy could remember. She was referred to as ‘Mayor Mercer’ in the report.”
“Ah. That would explain it. And that’s all?”
“Not quite. She had a bruise and a little cut over one eyebrow when I dropped her off at the airport yesterday.”
“Hmm,” Procopio said.
“Hmm, indeed.”
“She say how it got there?”
“Ubetcha. Said she was pulling luggage off a closet shelf with her cell phone to her ear and the bag got away from her and hit her in the face. Blamed it on innate klutziness, just like with the scratches on her throat after our night in the tent.”
“Plausible,” Procopio said. “Or, Brad Mercer could have beat up the governor of Alaska and killed Pete Wise with a snowgo.”
“Yeah, right.”
Procopio chuckled. “Anything else?”
“That’s it,” Active said. “No arrests, no charges, no nada. The First Mate’s as clean as a hound’s tooth, officially speaking. So what now? We still gotta talk to him, right?”
Procopio nodded. “It was his snowgo under the water and said snowgo’s our best candidate to be the one that hit Wise.”
“Do we, um, need to Mirandize him?”
“You kidding? A, he’s the governor’s husband. B, he’s not in custody. C, somebody could have bought that snowgo from him years ago. D, whoever owns it now, how many snowgos get stolen around here? Wouldn’t surprise me if we find some drunk’s body under the ice at breakup. So, E, no, Brad Mercer is not a suspect and we do not need to Mirandize him.”
“How much of this do we ask him about? Just the snowgo? Or all of it?”
The prosecutor rattled her nails again. “Let’s stick with the snowgo. Let the old 911 call and the bruise over her eye lie for now unless he says something that leads that way.”
He pulled out his cell phone and found the voice memo app. “We’ll record this, eh?”
“Absolutely,” Procopio said. “You’ll email me a copy?”
“Posilutely. Let’s just do it on speaker and we’re good to go.”
She pushed her phone across the desk to him. “That button right there. Dial 9 for an outside line.”
He pulled out his cell phone. “I’ve done this before, thanks.” He found Mercer’s listing in his contacts and punched in the number on Procopio’s phone, then started the recorder app on his cell.
Maybe they’d get lucky and he could leave a voicemail. But what would he say, exactly? Then she was on the line.
“Nathan! What a pleasure! What’s new in the pearl of the Arctic? How’s sheefishing?”
“Oh, fine, Suka, all good here. Except we’re investigating a fatal snowgo hit-and-run—”
“I heard about that. Too bad, huh? From all I hear, Pete Wise was a solid member of our community and—”
“Yes, and thanks for asking the Troopers to help. But I’m here with Theresa Procopio from the district attorney’s office and we need to talk to your husband. It looks like his snowgo may have been used in the hitand-run and—”
“Brad’s snowgo? You’re kidding. That Cat he bought a few years ago, how long was it?”
“Four years, according to the dealer.”
“Mm-hmm, that sounds about right. But how awful. Let me get him. I’m home with some Taco Bell for lunch, he’s around somewhere. Oh, and hi, Theresa, we’ve met, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Procopio said. “When you toured the state building.”
“Of course, well, thanks for the good work you do for the entire Chukchi region. But you two hang on, OK?”
The line went silent. Active muted his line and looked at Procopio, eyebrows raised. “Well?”
She grimaced.
Active nodded.
After a long wait, the governor’s line came back to life and Active punched his off mute. �
��Hi, this is Brad. Helen says somebody ran over Pete Wise with my snowgo?”
“Our best guess at the moment. We pulled it out of Chukchi Bay last night and the front end is banged up in the right places to match what we found at the death scene. We sent it and Pete’s dogsled and clothes down to the crime lab in Anchorage to see what they can figure out.”
“You say it was in the water? How the hell did you find it?”
“We didn’t. A guy named Anthony Childers did.”
The First Mate snorted. “Anthony? I’d be surprised if he could find his butt with both hands. But how did he find my snowgo?”
“It went in up near the mouth of the Katonak in a spot that opens up early, apparently. Something about the currents thinning out the ice right there?”
“Yeah, there’s places like that around the bay, all right. Whoever took my snowgo would probably know where to dump it if they’re from Chukchi.”
“So Anthony’s your suspect, I suppose?” the governor said.
“Not exactly, no.”
“No?” Was there some frost in her voice now?
“We can’t see why he’d essentially turn himself in if he used Brad’s snowgo for the hit-and-run.”
“Maybe to throw you off the trail? What do you guys call that, a red halibut?”
Active decided against correcting her attempt at cop-speak. “I suppose Anthony could be a criminal mastermind,” he said. “But we think he probably just wants—”
“Oh, yeah,” the governor said. “The night in jail. I heard about that on Kay-Chuck. That still a big draw up there?”
“Big as ever, ma’am,” said Procopio.
“Yet another reason I love my Chukchi,” the governor said. “So who is your suspect, if you can tell me?”
“Actually, we don’t have one yet. Brad’s snowgo is the only lead we’ve got so far. Other than the basics—happened a half-mile east of the airport sometime early yesterday morning. So…”
“Let’s see,” Brad Mercer said. “When was the last time we used it? I did some running around on it a couple days before the race started, all right, then I parked it behind the house under a cover. I don’t think I took it out at all after the race. I was busy getting the dogs squared away, so I used my dog truck, then there was the banquet Monday night and we left for Juneau yesterday morning.”