by Stan Jones
“Very crusty,” Active said. “So Victor doesn’t make an offer, he makes a threat. He says he’s going to have Johnny locked up for robbing the museum and then he’ll go out and find Uncle Frosty anyway.”
“At which point—” Hughes said.
“At which point, Johnny is standing there with the harpoon in his hand, and he does what comes naturally.”
Hughes and Active looked at each other in surprise and mutual admiration.
“I’m speechless,” Boxrud said. “Dumbstruck. This is ridiculous.”
Active stifled the impulse to point out the oxymoronic quality of a lawyer’s being at a loss for words. Instead, he said, “It all fits.”
“Like an old pair of mukluks,” Hughes said. “End of story, case closed, it’s a wrap, signed, sealed, and delivered. Your client is nailed, screwed, glued, and stapled. We go into court first thing Monday morning and you plead him guilty, yes?”
Boxrud actually was quiet now, looking thoughtful.
“You’re thinking it’s possible, right?” Hughes’s grin was bigger than ever. “Believable, even. You’re thinking, ‘I’ve got a naluaqmiut client accused of killing an Inupiat elder and I have to take him before an Inupiat jury.’ ”
“I’m thinking I’ll impanel a bunch of sensible old aanas and you guys will get laughed out of court.”
“I’m thinking you’re not so sure.”
“I’m thinking I better talk to my client again.”
“Fine,” Hughes said. “If he’s got something to say, bring him back with you. I’ll call the jail and let them know.”
Hughes made the call, then for twenty-five minutes he and Active talked about hockey, then about weather, then about Hughes’s impending prosecution of an Ebrulik high-school teacher accused of bedding one of her students. Hughes hoped that, as rumored, the pair would marry before the case came to trial, thus saving the justice system much labor and expense.
“With all the trouble the school district has keeping teachers in the village schools, you’d think they’d encourage this sort of thing,” Hughes was saying with a rueful wag of his head when his phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment, and said, “Send them up. We’ll meet them in the small conference room.”
Minutes later, Active and Hughes were facing Gail Boxrud and Johnny Bass over a table in a second-story room with fluorescent lights and a single window overlooking the houses along Beach Street and, beyond that, the ice of Chukchi Bay and the low sun swinging into the southwest sky as the afternoon wore on.
Bass was in handcuffs, a can of chew raising a circular bump in the front pocket of his orange jail coveralls. He had a Styrofoam cup in one hand.
“He didn’t do it,” Boxrud said.
“He did something,” Active said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the amulet.”
Bass started, then looked at Boxrud.
“He didn’t rob the museum or kill Victor Solomon.”
“So what’s he got to say?” Hughes asked.
“Nothing,” Boxrud said. “But if he did have anything to say, it would be that he found Victor dead in the sheefish camp, took a few of his possessions into protective custody, and left.”
Active snorted and Hughes flipped a hand dismissively. “Protective custody,” the prosecutor said. “Please.”
“And he saw somebody out there.”
Hughes’s blue eyes narrowed and he cocked his head and said, “Who?” at the same time as Active.
Boxrud and Bass shook their heads.
“He doesn’t know,” Boxrud said.
“All right,” Hughes said. “Let’s hear the story. If it holds up, he won’t be charged with anything to do with murder. Evidence tampering, maybe, but not murder or accessory to murder.”
Boxrud and Bass bent their heads and whispered. Finally Boxrud looked up. “He’ll plead guilty to misdemeanor theft if you don’t ask for any jail time beyond what he’s already served.”
Hughes nodded. “But if his story doesn’t hold up, everything he’s said can and will be used against him. Etcetera, etcetera. And he stays in jail while we sort this out.”
“I can’t stay in jail.” Bass spat a brown stream into the cup. “I’ve gotta get us some caribou.”
“How long?” Boxrud asked.
Hughes looked at Active.
“A week,” Active said.
Hughes nodded. “If we’re not ready to charge him with murder in a week, we’ll O.R. him on a theft charge.”
“What’s O.R.?” Bass asked.
“Own Recognizance,” Boxrud said. “It means you get to go home if you promise to come back when they want you.”
“Let’s hear it,” Hughes said.
Bass spat into the cup again and looked at Boxrud, who said, “Go ahead, it’s OK.”
“Yeah, I was out there that night,” Bass said. “But I wasn’t planning to rob Victor. I was coming down the trail from the Katonak toward where he had his camp and I saw there was lights, so I decided to drop in and see how was he doing.”
“Lights?” Active said.
“Uh-huh,” Bass said. “His tent was glowing like they do when there’s a gas lantern burning inside, and there was a snowgo parked beside it with its light on, like it was running. I was still pretty far away but I could see that much.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh. But when I turned off the main trail and headed toward Victor’s camp, that snowgo started moving and headed back up toward the Katonak, kind of parallel to the trail in the direction I had come from, and then the light went out. I didn’t think too much about it right then, but I guess whoever it was, he turned off his light when he saw me coming and stayed off the trail so as to get out of there without me being able to follow him.”
“He headed toward the Katonak?” Active asked. “Not back toward Chukchi?”
Bass nodded. “That’s what it looked like to me.”
“But you didn’t recognize him?”
“Well, no. I couldn’t hardly see him.”
“Wasn’t there a full moon that night?”
Bass thought this over. “ ’Bout three-quarters, I’d say, and it was pretty clear, I remember. Hadn’t got all hazy yet like it did the next day.”
“So what kind of snowmachine was it?” Active asked. “What was the driver wearing?”
Bass shrugged. “Couldn’t tell much by moonlight.”
“Could it have been Calvin Maiyumerak?”
Bass thought it over, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think maybe he was old.”
“Old? Why?”
“I don’t know. Somethin’ about how he carried himself, I guess.”
“So you went on into the camp as this old guy drove off on his snowmachine?”
“Uh-huh. Victor was lying down there in his sheefish hole to where you couldn’t hardly see him. Just that harpoon shaft sticking out above the ice and his feet up on the edge of the hole, that was about all you could see till you got right up on him.”
Hughes looked disgusted. “Did you try to help him or did you just get right to work looting his camp?”
Bass looked offended. “’Course I tried to help him. I went down in the hole there, felt of his neck for a pulse, put my ear up to his nose see if he was breathing, but there was nothing. He was dead.”
“It’s hard to be sure sometimes,” Active said.
Bass shook his head. “I’ve seen lots of dead things, and Victor Solomon was one of ’em.”
“So you decided to rob his camp?”
“Well, I knew old Victor fairly good and he didn’t have no family around to speak of. I didn’t think he’d mind me using his stuff long as he didn’t need it no more. So I took a couple things. I figured you cops would think whoever killed him took ’em.”
“What things?” Hughes asked.
“Lessee. A jerry jug of snowmachine gas. His camp stove. And there was a can of Red Man on his cot there in the tent, so I took that. Matter of fact, this is it r
ight here.” He patted the round lump in his overall pocket.
Hughes exhaled noisily and shook his head. “Let’s have it.”
Bass looked at Boxrud, who nodded. “They want to check it for fingerprints.”
Bass handed over the chewing tobacco, and Active put it in a baggie.
“What else?”
“Lessee, I think I took three of his sheefish, maybe four.”
“But you left a bunch behind,” Active said. “Nine, I think it was.”
Bass nodded. “Well, I already had some I caught myself. Four was all I needed.”
Active shook his head. “What else?”
Bass pondered, then spat again. Active noticed that he was able to do it without opening his jaws because of the gap in his teeth.
“I reckon that was it,” Bass said. “Camp stove, Red Man, sheefish, uh-huh. That was it.”
Now it was Boxrud who looked disgusted. “Johnny, the amulet.”
Bass bared brown teeth in a grin. “Oh, yeah, the amulet. Shit.”
“The amulet,” Active said with a nod.
“Well, as I was rounding up his stuff, I kind of started to feel bad about old Victor lying out there by his sheefish hole. He seemed like a dead thing, but what if he wasn’t? Like you said, Trooper Active, it’s hard to be sure sometimes. So I went on out there to check him again, just in case. I felt of his pulse and there still wasn’t any, I listened for his breathing and there wasn’t any, then I kind of slapped him upside the head, like you would if somebody was asleep or maybe a little groggy. That’s when it fell out.”
“Fell out?”
“Yeah, that’s when the amulet fell out of his mouth.”
“It fell out of his mouth?” Active asked. He felt stupid, echoing Johnny Bass, but he couldn’t help himself.
“CHRIST, WHAT a nut roll,” Hughes said when they were alone again in his office. “What do you make of that business with the amulet?”
“In Victor’s mouth, you mean? It’s weird. Like some kind of ritual or something. What the hell is this about?”
Hughes nodded. “Yeah. And what about the old guy Johnny claims he saw leaving Victor’s camp? Who could that be?”
Active ticked the known candidates off on his fingers. “Calvin Maiyumerak was supposedly with Queenie Buckland that night, and he’s not old.”
“And Sivula?”
“He’s old but he wouldn’t have any reason to be heading up the Katonak that I know of. Supposedly he’s out in whaling camp, which is up the coast, not up the Katonak. And, if he did it, why would he go ask Calvin Maiyumerak about it?” Active paused and sighed. “Guess I’ll be paying Whyborn Sivula a visit tomorrow.”
Hughes nodded.
CHAPTER TEN
SILVER DROPPED HIS PARKA on a chair and walked to the map on his office wall. “It’s too damn early to be up on a Sunday so listen close,” he said. “I don’t want to do this twice.”
Active nodded. “I’m sorry but—”
Silver sighed wearily. “Yeah, I know, cases don’t wait.”
He turned to the map. “Anyway, here we are.” He put a finger on the spot marking the village of Chukchi, then swept it over Chukchi Bay, an expanse of pale blue opening west into the Chukchi Sea.
“You just follow the snowgo trail—it’s marked with spruce saplings—across the bay to this little spit of land here they call Tatuliq. It’s only three miles.” He tapped a tiny appendage dangling from the north shore of the bay. “People go there to hunt beluga and you’ll see a lot of camps—tents, cabins, even a couple of sod huts from the early days. Stay on the beach and go past the camps. The trail’s actually up on an old beach ridge a few yards back from the ocean. Up there, it’s marked with permanent tripods made out of spruce poles—not the saplings they use out on the ice.”
Silver ran his finger up the shoreline north of Tatuliq and looked at Active, eyebrows lifted in inquiry.
Active nodded. He had flown up the coast a few times on cases, but had never paid much attention to the geography. Now he would have to travel it by snowmachine if he wanted to talk to Whyborn Sivula.
“About seven or eight miles past Tatuliq, the shoreline starts to swing west, out to sea, but the main trail goes straight on across the base of the cape—here—and continues north on up the coast. Don’t follow it. You swing west with the coastline and keep that Ladies’ Model of yours pointed right out toward Cape Goodwin.”
Active grinned dourly, but nodded again as Silver touched the triangular peninsula representing the cape.
“After that, you’ll have to wing it,” Silver said. “The whaling camps are somewhere out here”—he gestured vaguely at the sea off the cape—“along the edge of the shorefast ice.”
“Somewhere on the ice? That’s it?”
Silver nodded. “There’ll be a trail but it won’t be marked. Look for a place where a bunch of snowgo tracks veer away from the beach out onto the ice and that should be it.” The police chief grinned. “You’ll know for sure when you hit the pressure ridges.”
Active grimaced. He had seen pressure ridges from two thousand feet up. They looked like frozen surf. A jumble of blue-white slabs, like knife blades on edge, where storms and currents piled the pack ice onto the shoals off Cape Goodwin. What would the ridges be like up close? “You mean they go through that stuff with their whaling gear?”
Silver nodded again. “You want to catch a bowhead, you gotta get out where there’s open leads. And that means getting past the shorefast ice to the edge of the lead. You’ll see places where they’ve hacked through the ridges with axes and chainsaws.”
“I guess there’s no other way.”
“Tough people,” Silver said. “Anyway, once you get into the pressure ridges, there won’t be much doubt about the trail. Generally speaking, at any given spot, there’s only one way to go. Sometimes not even that.” He grinned. “Sure your Ladies’ Model is up to this, naluaqmiiyaaq? I could send one of my guys along as a guide.”
Active shook his head and showed no flicker of response at being needled again about the purple Yamaha. “I’ll be fine.”
“Ah-hah.” Silver paused, as if expecting more from Active. Finally he shook his head. “At least if we have to launch a Search and Rescue on you, the Ladies’ Model will be easy to spot.”
“So what happens when I get out to the ice edge?”
Silver shrugged. “Good question. When you get close, various trails will start to veer off to the different camps. Just pick one, and when you get to the camp, ask them how to find Whyborn Sivula’s camp.”
“Jesus,” Active said. “There must be a better way.”
Silver shrugged again. “Sure. Charter a helicopter, come booming into camp, scare off the whales, blow the tents around, piss everybody off. Yeah, that’ll work. Cheap, too.”
Active lifted his eyebrows in assent. “You know Whyborn much?”
“A little,” Silver said. “Why?”
“I was thinking I might take the harpoon shaft and the amulet along, see how he reacts.”
Silver’s eyes opened wide. “Take your evidence out on the ice? You kidding?”
Active shrugged. “I’m going to send them to the state lab in Anchorage, but Carnaby already went over them for fingerprints and found nada, and I’ve got a ton of pictures.”
“Carnaby struck out?”
Active nodded.
“Not surprising, I guess,” Silver said. “Your guy probably would have been wearing gloves the whole time. From the cold, even if he wasn’t thinking about fingerprints.”
Active nodded again.
Silver looked at the map again. “One more thing you ought to know before you go, there’s certain protocols on the ice.”
“Protocols?”
“For one thing, don’t take your snowmachine into camp. Too noisy, might scare the whales. You see a bunch of snowmachines parked back behind a pressure ridge, that’s where you leave yours.”
Active nodded.
�
��For another thing, if you got a red parka, don’t wear it. A whale sees it, he’ll think it’s the blood of one of his own and bolt for Siberia.”
“That it?”
“Well, yeah, except for the polar bears,” Silver said. “They like to come in and hang around the whaling camps, see what they can scavenge. But just stay away from them and they won’t bother you, usually. They’re kind of an off-white yellowish color, so they’re pretty hard to see against the snow and ice, but normally their eyes and nose show up pretty good if they get close. Two little black dots over a bigger one, you can’t miss it.”
Active nodded again, not sure if he was being ribbed. “Anything else? Do I need a visa to get out there?”
Silver smiled. “I know, I know. But, fact is, it’s just not safe out there on the ice. Get a little too much wind from the west, or maybe a kink in the current, and the next thing you know the lead’s closing and the pack’s moving in and your camp’s about to become a pressure ridge. Or you get a wind from the northeast, and all of a sudden the shorefast ice isn’t fast anymore. Your whaling camp is on a floe headed for Siberia and liable to break up any minute.”
He stopped and scratched his scalp. “My wife’s father and kid brother got caught like that a few years ago. The kid, he got wet when the ice broke up under their camp during the night. You know how parents are. The old man took off his parka and put it over the boy. By the time it got light enough the next morning to come after them in the umiaq, he was already dead of hypothermia.”
“The kid survived?”
“Barely,” Silver said. “Anyway, watch yourself out there and don’t be a smart-ass. It’s serious business.”
Active nodded and pulled his parka off Silver’s office sofa, where he’d dropped it when they came in.
“Sure you don’t want somebody along?”
Active shook his head. “No, really. I’ll be careful. I’m looking forward to it.”
Silver stared at him for a moment. “Look, take my dogsled. I’ll throw in a tent, a sleeping bag, a stove, some other odds and ends. That way, if you get off the trail or maybe the weather comes up, you can hunker down behind a pressure ridge in some semblance of comfort till things straighten out. You got a rifle?”