by Stan Jones
“He says he didn’t do it.”
“And what does the evidence say?”
Silver grimaced in disgust. “Very damn little. Almost nothing, in fact. Somebody broke the padlock on the loading-dock door, probably with a crowbar, went inside, and snapped the bands off the crate, pried it open, grabbed Uncle Frosty, and took off. Probably in a snowmachine and dogsled, but the snow around that door is so hard-packed he barely left a trace.”
“Calvin got an alibi?”
Silver scratched his scalp at the hairline, a habit of his. “His grandmother says they watched TV together last night and went to bed around eleven or twelve. He was still asleep when she brought him his morning coffee around nine.”
“Hmm. Kind of iffy.”
Silver nodded. “Dolly could be fudging to protect her grandbaby, like any self-respecting aana. Or Calvin could have gone out while she was asleep, stolen Uncle Frosty, hid him on the tundra somewhere, and snuck back into the house without her knowing. She’s pretty deaf when she takes out her hearing aid.”
“So what now?”
“So nothing, unless somebody turns up who saw him do it. Or Calvin has an attack of conscience and confesses.”
Active grinned in sympathy. “Uh-huh.”
Silver sighed heavily. “Fucking Calvin.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING, THE cell-phone call had come in on the 911 line from Darvin Reed. And Active, instead of coasting peacefully through Friday into the weekend, now found himself on the sea ice beside a dead man in a sheefishing camp. The identification of the murder weapon made it clear that the museum burglary hadn’t been just the final act in an unusually entertaining piece of Chukchi street theater after all. But Calvin Maiyumerak?
Silver said it again: “Fucking Calvin.” His words came out in puffs of steam that rode away on the wind as he handed the harpoon to Active.
“You think Calvin did this?” Active gestured toward Victor Solomon’s body, still lying in the snow pit surrounding his sheefish hole. “That clown?”
“You know how that clown makes his living?”
Active shook his head.
“Among other things, he’s a dog trapper.”
“What?”
“We used to have a terrible problem here with loose dogs, always mauling little kids and chasing the aanas around and stealing meat. It finally got so bad the city council ordered my officers to start shooting them on sight. But Roger Kennelly put it out on public radio and All Things Considered picked it up. Then one of those animal-rights groups from Outside got hold of it and that was the end of our dog-control program, or so we thought. Next thing you know, Calvin moves down from Ebrulik. Pretty soon the loose-dog problem is going away, Dolly’s turning out wolf ruffs and mittens right and left, and everybody’s happy.”
“Calvin shoots them? Doesn’t that spook people a little bit?”
“No, he doesn’t shoot them,” Silver said. “Exactly how he does catch them is a bit of a mystery. He doesn’t put out traps, otherwise he’d catch more kids than dogs. Some people say he carries rotten meat around in his pockets to attract them, then breaks their necks with his bare hands.”
Active winced, then had a thought. “What about the carcasses?”
“Kobuk takes care of them.”
“Kobuk? Who—oh, that dog he was talking about at the museum?”
Silver nodded. “That’s the word, anyhow. I doubt even a monster like Kobuk could eat more than a dog or two a week but of course most of the huskies around here are your compact little trail dogs. You never know.”
“You ever check up on it?”
“God, no, why would I? The council’s happy, I’m happy, and what the animal-rights people don’t know won’t hurt me.”
Active turned the harpoon in his hands and examined the scratch marks. “Wait a minute, didn’t you say there was an owl’s face on the amulet? Isn’t that what this is?”
He turned the marks up for Silver’s inspection. Two circles with a vertical stroke, slightly curved, beneath: . “Two eyes, with a beak in between?”
“Could be,” Silver said. “The Smithsonian called it a property mark, but it does look like an owl, all right.”
“A property mark?”
“Yeah. Like a brand. The old-time Eskimos used to scratch out some kind of symbol on their harpoons before they learned to write. That way, if a weapon got stuck in a seal or a whale and turned up later, everybody would know who it belonged to. The whaling captains still do it today.”
“Makes sense, I guess,” Active said. “But why would Calvin use this thing to kill Victor Solomon? I can see him harpooning Malcolm Anirak, maybe. But this old guy?”
“Victor Solomon is, or was, chairman of the tribal council. You didn’t know that?”
Active shook his head. “The attorney general has made it clear that we trooper types should steer clear of tribal politics.”
Silver grunted in acknowledgment. “Wish somebody would give us city cops the same order. Anyway, Victor was the one who pushed the council to get Uncle Frosty and put him on display.”
“And Calvin knew that?”
“You bet he did. Victor summoned our guys down to a council meeting last month to throw Calvin out, he was raising so much hell about it. And Victor was all over me to lock Calvin up for stealing Uncle Frosty. Threatened to go to the city council as soon as he got back from sheefishing if I didn’t have Calvin behind bars.”
“I better call in and have him picked up,” Active said. “If he’s still around. You got a radio along? I tried mine already. It won’t reach.”
Silver pulled a walkie-talkie from inside his parka, tried unsuccessfully to raise the dispatcher in Chukchi, and shook his head. “Too far.”
“I got my cell phone,” Darvin Reed said. He pulled it out, flipped it open like a communicator on Star Trek, and brought it over to Active.
Active looked at Silver. “I think all of our guys are in the field, except maybe Carnaby. Maybe your guys could go get Calvin.”
Silver nodded and took the phone. “I wish the city would get me one of these.” He turned his back to the west wind to dial, then worked the phone up into the side of his parka hood to talk.
While the chief told Lucy Generous, the dispatcher, to send two officers to Dolly Maiyumerak’s house to bring Calvin in for questioning, Active looked again at the harpoon in his hand. It needed to be wrapped in something, in case the killer had left a fingerprint, but nothing in the evidence case strapped to the cargo rack at the back of Active’s purple Yamaha was big enough.
“You bring any trash bags?” he asked Vera Jackson. She nodded and brought a roll from the akhio. Active wrapped the harpoon in two trash bags and laid it across the seat of his Yamaha.
“Should we put him in the sled now?” Vera asked.
Active nodded and went to Victor’s shoulders while Vera took his feet. Victor lay on his back in a washtub-sized pit scooped out in the snow around the sheefishing hole in the ice, which Victor would have drilled with the gasoline-powered auger lying in the basket of his dogsled. They heaved together but Victor’s shoulders wouldn’t budge. Vera dropped Victor’s feet and frowned.
“Looks like his parka froze in,” Active said. “There was probably some water around the hole.”
They knelt in the pit and worked the dead man out of his parka, then carried him to the akhio. Vera dropped to her knees to bag the body and strap it to the sled.
Active found an ax in the jockey box at the back of Victor’s sled and used it to chop the parka out of the ice, finally exposing the round, six-inch hole through which Victor had done his sheefishing.
His fishing rig—a boomerang-shaped piece of driftwood, some monofilament line, and a silver jigging lure—still lay on the snow at the edge of the pit. Victor apparently hadn’t been using it at the time of his death, as the line was wrapped around the driftwood and the lure was snagged into it by a barb of its treble hook.
Activ
e knocked as much ice as he could off the parka, then rolled it up, stuffed it into a trash bag, and bungeed it and the harpoon onto the cargo rack of his Yamaha.
“All right if I take him to town now?” Vera asked.
Active nodded. “Put him in the morgue at the hospital till we can get him down to Anchorage for an autopsy.”
Vera lifted her eyebrows, hit the starter on the paramedics’ snowmachine, and drove off, swiveling her head to watch how the akhio was towing.
Silver returned Darvin Reed’s cell phone, and listened as Active interviewed the two sheefishermen. They had found the body about two hours ago, they said, just before Darvin had called in, and the scene had been the same then as it was now. Except for the fact that other civilians had stopped by before Active arrived, leaving footprints and snowmachine tracks everywhere. Active could see no hope of getting a cast or a photograph of any of the killer’s tracks.
Active looked at Silver. “You want to ask these guys anything?”
Silver shook his head.
“All right, you can go,” Active told the sheefishermen.
“We never fish yet,” Darvin said.
“Yeah, we spent all morning here with you,” Willie said.
“So go drill yourselves a hole and fish.”
Darvin pointed behind Active. “What about Victor’s hole? Can we use it if you’re done?”
Willie nodded in support. “Yeah, Victor always knew where the best holes were. Besides, we don’t have an auger and this one’s already drilled.”
Active shook his head. “No, this hole is evidence. You stay away from it.”
“What about them? Are they evidence, too?” Darvin pointed at a stack of frozen sheefish beside Victor’s tent. “Maybe we could take them.”
The fish were big, two or three feet long, Active estimated. He counted—there were nine, looking almost like fireplace logs, except for tails and the glazed eyes staring sightlessly over the ice. They were lightly dusted with snow and it was clear they had been there all night, untouched by the killer or anyone else.
“Victor got no family around here,” Darvin said.
Active glared at Darvin for a moment, then walked over, broke the pile apart, and checked the sheefish for anything resembling evidence. “Yeah, OK, take them.”
Darvin grinned as he and Willie began hauling the sheefish to the dogsleds behind their snowmachines.
Active glanced around the camp, then went into Victor’s tent again. He had searched it soon after arriving. Now as then, nothing in it looked significant. A cot with some caribou hides and a sleeping bag, cooking gear, supplies, a rifle. Nothing disturbed, nothing obvious missing, no sign the place had been ransacked or robbed. He pulled the Nikon from inside his parka and fired off several shots with the flash, then went outside and photographed the sheefishing hole where Victor had fallen.
There wasn’t much to go on. The only sign of himself the killer had left was the harpoon and the hole in Victor Solomon’s chest. Active looked at Silver. “We better get back and talk to Calvin.”
“What about this stuff?” Silver waved at Victor’s camp.
Active frowned in perplexity, then looked at Darvin and Willie, who had divided up the sheefish and wrapped them in the blue tarps that, along with duct tape, made life possible in the Bush. They were now bungeeing the fish into the baskets of their sleds. “Hey, you two. I’m deputizing you. I want you to break up this camp and bring it to me at the troopers’.”
Darvin frowned. “Arii, we never fish yet.”
“All right, tonight, then. You can take it in when you’re done fishing and bring it to me tomorrow at the troopers’. And don’t mess with Victor’s stuff. Just load it up and bring it in.”
“Arii, it’ll take too long to pack. We gotta go make our hole still.” Darvin gazed at Active with an innocent air.
Active looked at the sheefishing hole. With Victor’s body gone, it would freeze over soon. Already the west wind was brushing tendrils of snow into it, smoothing the jagged edges left when he had chopped Victor’s parka out of the ice.
“All right, you can use Victor’s hole.” Active shook his head and tried not to think what his instructors at the trooper academy would say if they knew about the Arctic version of crime-scene management.
“It’s not evidence?”
“Not anymore.” Active swung his leg over the Yamaha and turned the key. Silver followed suit, and they headed for Chukchi.
CHAPTER FIVE
SILER MADE IT TO the village first and was already hurrying out of the Public Safety Building when Active pulled the purple Yamaha up in front.
“No Calvin,” Silver said as Active turned the key and the snowmachine coughed itself into silence. “His grandmother told my guys he’s out hunting caribou.”
“Hmmph.” Active pulled off his sunglasses and stowed them in a shirt pocket. “Since when?”
“Since early this morning.”
“Hmph.”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go talk to her.”
“Yeah.”
Active unlocked the trooper Suburban nosed up to the Public Safety Building, reached in, and started it. While the elderly rig warmed up, he put Uncle Frosty’s harpoon and Victor Solomon’s parka on the floorboards behind the driver’s seat. Then he took off his own parka and tossed it on the front seat. Then he took off the Refrigiwear overalls and tossed them on the backseat. Then he put the parka back on and saw Silver watching the performance.
“You ever notice,” Active asked, “how even the simplest thing gets complicated in the Arctic?”
“Goes with,” Silver said as he climbed in the Suburban’s passenger door. “You’re so busy taking care of the little shit, you never have time to worry about the big shit.”
“You get used to it after a while?” Active slid behind the wheel, slammed the door, and turned on the heater. The engine was still too cold to provide any warmth, but the blower did produce a loud squeal.
“Resigned is more like it,” Silver bellowed over the noise. “You should have plugged in the engine heater.” He pointed at a row of electric sockets set along the side of the Public Safety Building.
“The troopers are conserving energy this week,” Active said.
SILVER DIRECTED him to Dolly Maiyumerak’s place, a tiny house with dark green tar paper on the walls and roof. A pony-sized husky emerged from a snow-covered oil drum with one end sawed off, and rumbled deep in his throat as they got out of the Suburban. The limit of his chain was marked by a circular archipelago of yellow stains cobbled with brown droppings on the hard-packed snow.
“That Kobuk?” Active asked.
Silver nodded. “Mackenzie River husky. They’re about half wolf.”
Active looked at the gigantic husky. There were a few bone splinters on the hardpack around his barrel. They could have been anything from chicken to seal to caribou. Or dog. “I can see how feeding him could get to be a problem.”
Silver chuckled and they started for the house. Kobuk’s rumble escalated to a snarl and he lunged toward them, stopping dead just before the chain jerked him up. Up close, Active could see that Kobuk had a lot of silver-gray fur, and yellow wolf eyes.
“Thank God that chain’s not any longer,” Silver shouted over Kobuk’s roar.
They skirted the husky’s circle and went in through the kunnichuk. Active knocked on the inner door.
There was a stir inside, a pause, and then the door creaked open a few inches and an old woman with a cigarette and a hearing aid glared out at them. She swung her gaze from Silver to Active and then back to Silver, to whom she nodded curtly. “I tell them other guys already, Calvin’s not here. You could come back later.”
Active flipped back his parka hood, introduced himself, and put out his hand. The old woman took it with great reluctance, and no pressure. It was like shaking a glove full of loose bones.
“You’re that Eskimo trooper, ah?”
He nodded and lifted his eyeb
rows, hoping the Eskimo yes would get him a few points with Dolly Maiyumerak.
“You’re just like naluaqmiu trooper, that’s what I hear.” The glare deepened.
“Can we come in, Mrs. Maiyumerak?” Active asked. “So we could ask you a few questions?”
“I told you, I already talk to them other guys.”
“It won’t take long. Can we come in?”
The old woman was silent a long time. Then, “You could ask ’em out here.”
Active pulled his hood up. It was cold in the kunnichuk. Their breaths made plumes in the air. “Calvin went hunting this morning, you said?”
The woman lifted her eyebrows.
“And when did he leave?”
“I don’t know, seven-thirty maybe. ‘Mukluk Messenger’ is on Kay-Chuck when he’s leaving, I think.”
“Do you know where he went?”
She shrugged. “Wherever them caribous are, I guess. I tell him we need some meats, he just say he’ll get some caribous. He never say where he go.”
“What about last night? Did you see him last night?”
“Why you ask all these questions? He already tell them other cops he never take that Uncle Frosty.”
Apparently she hadn’t heard about Victor Solomon’s murder. Active glanced at Silver, who gave the tiniest of nods. Active calculated for a moment, then concluded there was little reason to conceal the already too-public details of the murder.
“This isn’t about the burglary. Last night Victor Solomon was killed with a harpoon that was stolen along with Uncle Frosty.”
He watched as Dolly Maiyumerak’s frown vanished, her face locked into a mask of inscrutability, and she gazed silently out the window of the kunnichuk. Active had seen the mask before. It appeared when an Eskimo confronted a naluaqmiu who asked too many questions.
“Mrs. Maiyumerak?”
She took a deep drag on her cigarette, exhaled, took another, swung her gaze to the two men and spoke, her words wreathed in smoke. “My grandson’s home all day yesterday till maybe five or six in the afternoon. Then he’s over to his girlfriend’s till after I go to bed. I guess I hear him come in little bit after midnight maybe, then he get up around six-thirty to go hunting. He never kill Victor Solomon.”