At the Scene of the Crime

by Dana Stabenow

  “The bed clothes were in disarray and under the musty odor I imagined I smelled the thick musk of their love-making, but I forced myself to search the sheets, and was soon rewarded with the sight of a dark hair. I was just pointing it out to the sheriff when Tongren came in, smiling grimly. ‘Found this in the rack by the chair. He was here that night, all right.’ In his hand he held a copy of Mine Journal, bearing a label addressed to Ralph Parker. The company mailroom had stamped it in: October sixteenth, nineteen fifty-four.

  “The sheriff was gaping at it when Tongren completed the picture. ‘The bastard must have brought it with him. Then, like Doc says, they had another fight over telling the missus, he killed her, then panicked and forgot the magazine in his hurry to get out.’

  “‘Jesus.’ The sheriff stood, scratching his head. I pressed the case home: ‘That’ll be Parker’s hair we just found. Get one from him, it’ll match.’ Spotting a bottle on the dresser, I pulled out a handkerchief and picked it up. ‘Wildroot. His hair tonic. And if his prints aren’t on it, I’ll be very surprised. ’

  “Tongren and I looked at the sheriff while he decided what to do. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘Ralph Parker’s Taconite’s man. If I’m wrong . . .’ Finally, he sighed. ‘Okay, we’ll pick him up.’”

  “I gave them two hours, then went to the jail. I admit it, I wanted to see him behind bars, wanted to revel in the fear, the humiliation, the wreckage of his ugly, sordid life. But when I walked in the sheriff shot me a look of pure malice. He didn’t mince words: ‘He has an alibi. An absolutely ironclad alibi.’

  “‘That can’t be. Who—?’

  “‘His wife.’ Tongren looked at me unhappily. ‘She puts him at home from a little after eight. She was with him every minute. They had a late dinner in front of the TV, then went to bed. Parker don’t work, Doc.’

  “‘But . . .’ I was completely at a loss, so certain had I been that the evidence convicted Parker. ‘Where was he until eight?’

  “The Sheriff spoke through clenched teeth. ‘He says he stopped at a bar for a drink on the way home, but he’s a bad liar. We know where he really was, but what the fuck difference does it make, eh? You’re the smart guy, fixed the time of death no earlier than ten, you tell me why it matters what he was doing at eight.’

  “‘There has to be something wrong. I—’

  “‘Yeah, there’s something wrong,’ the sheriff growled. ‘You. Got a hard-on for Parker ’cause you was sweet on the girl, and she was putting out for him. Thought you was a fairy, way I read things.’

  “I ignored his taunt. ‘Since you read her diary, you saw the last entry. They had a fight. They must have had another, and he killed her. It’s obvious. ’ I felt it all slipping away.

  “‘What’s obvious is the guy I got back in holding, Indian we caught breaking into a liquor store, got a list of assaults on his sheet a mile long. Figure he saw her at the reservation, figured she’d be an easy mark, and followed her home. And you know what? I got a feeling we’ll have a full confession by morning.’ He smiled a big, ugly smile.

  “I forced myself to remain calm. ‘His wife’s lying, Sheriff, covering for him. Did you tell her he was having an affair with Miss Birney?’

  “The grin faded, replaced by something even uglier. ‘No, I did not. Man’s getting some on the side, don’t make him a killer, and how a man and his old lady make their marriage work, what they notice and what they don’t, that’s their business. I don’t say Parker’s some model husband, but he’s a good man, plenty well liked around here, and it ain’t for me to go wrecking his marriage. Or you, either, hear?’

  “I rested my hands on the desk and put my face in his. ‘Did you show her the diary?’

  “He looked at me with bland disdain. ‘What diary?’

  “I think Tongren sensed I was going to go for the sheriff, because I suddenly found myself being escorted, none too gently, out the door. There was no resisting the big Swede, but I tried to reason with him. ‘He can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist!’

  “Tongren stopped in the doorway and let me go. ’Fraid he can.’ Seeing my look, he added, ‘Sheriff means well. Spreading that around wouldn’t do Miss Birney or anyone else any good. Listen, I was there, and Mrs. Parker, she’s telling the truth. Parker was with her. I’m not saying he didn’t stop by the girl’s on the way home, but he wasn’t who killed her, not at ten o’clock. He was home then, for certain. Now, don’t make trouble, okay?’”

  Stork sat, staring into the gloom. The room was almost dark, and the hall outside had grown quiet. Finally, the reporter could stand the silence no longer. “But what happened. Wasn’t the crime solved?”

  He was so slow to answer that she feared he hadn’t heard, but then, ever so slowly, he turned to face her. “Oh, yes, it was solved. Ralph Parker went to the electric chair. Back then we still believed in the death penalty for murder.”

  “But . . .” She felt she must have missed something, and she was a careful reporter who didn’t like to miss things. “I thought he had an alibi.”

  “Mrs. Parker recanted. Went in that evening and said he hadn’t gotten home until almost midnight.”

  “Oh.” Ms. Bruce’s mind raced. “What did Parker say?”

  “Oh, he denied it to the end, that’s why he got the chair. But the fact that he’d lied before, said he’d been at a bar when we could prove he’d been at her place, and that he claimed he’d been at home when he hadn’t, the neighbor’s testimony about a man leaving, and Mrs. Parker explaining she’d lied because she was afraid he’d kill her if she didn’t—it didn’t take the jury long.”

  She felt nauseous and wanted to get out, but her reportorial instincts were strong and she had a sudden intuition. “You put the magazine and hair cream in the apartment, didn’t you? That was too convenient.”

  He looked at her with something like admiration. “Sometimes Occam’s Razor needs a little help. I knew he was guilty, but the sheriff needed a road map.”

  Ms. Bruce gathered up her things, eager to find a drink, but there was one thing that puzzled her, and as she reached the door she turned back. “But why had Mrs. Parker lied for him in the first place?”

  He didn’t answer at first, just cocked his head and looked at her. She was turning the knob when he said, in the quiet, confident, courtroom voice she remembered, “She didn’t. She lied for me.”

  Ms. Bruce felt her knees give and grasped the doorjam. “What . . . what do you mean?”

  “He had been home by eight.”

  “But how did you get her . . . Why would she . . .”

  “I persuaded her that her husband had been planning to leave her. Oddly enough, that affected her as his affairs and fists never had.”

  Stork shook his head. “You know, she wouldn’t divorce him, even after he was convicted and was awaiting execution. She wanted next of kin privileges in the front row of the execution chamber. She sat next to me.”

  “But then, who . . .”

  He turned his hands palms up. “My estimate of the time of death must have been off, don’t you think? He killed her before he went home. As I said, it’s not an exact science.” Seeing the look on her face he added, “We all make mistakes, you know.”

  After she left, he realized he hadn’t consulted the file at all. It had been so many years. He switched on his desk light and opened the folder. All it held were some notes, and a scrap of yellowed paper. The handwriting on the scrap was faded, but he knew it by heart, and just wanted to touch the lines she had written, those many years before. All that was left, after he’d torn her letter to shreds and thrown it in her face, after he’d done the monstrous thing that couldn’t be undone, after he’d gathered the shreds and flushed them away, all but this one, pinned under her poor, broken body.

  . . . so when we meet again,

  I will be Mrs. Ralph Parker,

  but still your friend.

  Affectionately, Maddie.

  No one but he, and she and Mrs. P
arker had ever seen it, or ever would.

  ON THE EVIDENCE A LIAM CAMPBELL SHORT STORY

  BY DANA STABENOW

  WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON

  IT WAS TWELVE BELOW ZERO, the high for the day, and if Millie Godden hadn’t chosen to go into labor with a breech delivery during a first birth, it wouldn’t have been Larry Bartman’s first choice to be in the air that January afternoon. But when Millie Godden’s frantic husband had raised dispatch on the marine band, Larry’s name had been first on the Civil Air Patrol volunteer list.

  When the phone rang he’d been curled up on his warm, wide couch, submitting happily to an enthusiastic and comprehensive ravishment by Alice Sampson, a pert young barista of nineteen, to whom Larry had given some thought to proposing. In this small town on stilts twenty-five miles north of the Arctic Circle the ratio of men to women was such that if you missed your turn you lost your place in line and were out of luck until summer when the park ranger interns showed up. Even then, if you did get lucky, three months later your luck went south again.

  Still, Kotzebue was why God invented bush pilots, and there was nowhere else Larry was going to rack up the hours he needed to gain his commercial pilot’s license as fast as he would here. This quick turnaround to Kiana would add another hour, hour and a half to an already impressive total.

  And Alice had promised to wait for him.

  They slipped over the edge of the mainland, leaving the frozen expanse of Kotzebue Sound behind them. Black spruce marched through snow up to their ears up across the Kobuk River Delta and right up the sides of the Baird Mountains on the northern horizon. A movement caught Larry’s eye and he looked down to see a timber wolf as it melted into the edge of the trees. A moment later he saw what had caught the wolf ’s attention, a cow moose with a calf, curled up together in a small clearing, conserving energy through the cold snap.

  Howie Callahan nudged Larry with his elbow. “Hey,” he said over his headset, and pointed down at the white surface of the Kobuk River. “What’s that?”

  Larry put the right wing down and the plane went into a wide, descending circle with the moving object on the river’s surface below in its center.

  “It’s a man,” Callahan said. “What’s he doing on foot way the hell out here?”

  Below them the man raised his face in their direction and waved his hands over his head.

  “Must have been thrown by his snowgo,” Larry said. He brought the plane around again, a slow, smooth glide ten feet off the deck, neck craned to check the surface of the river. He didn’t spot anything to worry him, no open leads and a mostly smooth surface after Monday’s snowfall, and came around a third time, setting down gently, the airplane rolling out to a graceful stop.

  Larry opened his door and said, “You need a ride?”

  The man started toward them, stumbled, got up, and came forward in a shambling run. As he got closer, they could see his eyes, wide, reddened, a little wild in a face that was burned red by sun and wind and cold. “They’re all dead!” he yelled. “They’re all dead, I’m the only one left!”

  THURSDAY MORNING

  The phone rang right next to Liam’s ear. He snatched it up before it could ring again. “It’s supposed to be my day off.”

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Prince replied amiably, ignoring the snarl in her superior officer’s voice.

  Next to him, Wy muttered and burrowed beneath the covers. Corporal Prince was not so lacking in a sense of self-preservation that she either chuckled evilly over his irritation or commented on the company he was keeping. “You’ve got an urgent call from Kotzebue, sir. I thought you’d want to take it.”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny Nageak.”

  Johnny Nageak had been a village public safety officer in training when Liam had taught a semester at the trooper academy. “What’s he want?” he said, with marginally less truculence.

  “He says he’s got a situation he needs help with.”

  Liam gave up trying to scrub his brain awake through his scalp. “What’s the Kotz trooper post say?”

  “They’re shorthanded.”

  Liam snorted. “Who isn’t.”

  “Yes, sir, but they’ve got an attempted murder of a schoolteacher in Kivalina, and a bootlegger in Buckland, and—”

  “Save it, I get the picture. What’s Johnny’s deal?”

  “There’s been a shooting. Four men down, one survivor the only eyewitness.” Prince paused. “One of the dead men is named Nageak, sir. He didn’t say, but I’m guessing that’s why Officer Nageak wants you up there pronto. I’ve taken the liberty of booking you a seat on the first flight out.”

  “Hold on a minute,” he said, and switched on the light. “Wy.”

  She rolled over and glared at him through a tangle of bronze curls. “What.”

  “I have to go to Kotzebue. How far is it?”

  “About five hundred miles.”

  “Can we get there in your Cessna?”

  She laughed.

  “There’s a murder scene out of Kotz I have to get to immediately.”

  She stopped laughing and threw off the covers to swing her feet to the floor. Over her shoulder she said, “I’ll call around, see what I can find. This time of year everybody’s grounded except for Alaska Airlines.”

  He watched her ass as she walked into the bathroom. She knew he was watching, and she was putting a little extra into it.

  “Sir?” Prince said in his ear.

  “Huh? Oh. Hold off on confirming the seat on the jet,” he said, “Wy’s going to try to rustle something up that might be a little more direct.”

  “I’ll just bet she is,” Prince said, but by then Liam had put down the receiver and joined Wy in the shower.

  THURSDAY EVENING

  Kurt Fraad was white, which surprised Liam when he walked into the interview room.

  He found Fraad’s story almost credible, which surprised him even more.

  But what really knocked him off his balance was finding Kurt’s father sitting next to him.

  He looked at Johnny Nageak. Johnny’s expression gave nothing away, but then he was Inupiaq and they medalled in poker face.

  Liam turned to Karl Fraad. “Sir, could I ask you to step out? I need to speak to Kurt alone.”

  Karl, burly arms folded, massive, low-slung brow furrowed, eyes glaring, sat where he was.

  Liam could force the issue but it would require fuss and bother, not to mention a large amount of physical exertion, and Liam had always preferred guile to brawn. He pulled out a chair. “I wanted to ask you some questions, Kurt.”

  “I already gave my statement to Officer Nageak,” Kurt said. He clasped thin, almost frail hands on the table in front of him, peering out at Liam beneath hair growing untidily over the shelf of a brow he shared with his father. He was nineteen, according to Johnny Nageak, although he looked an undernourished twelve. “I don’t know what more I can tell you.” He dropped his head. “I ran,” he said, his voice muffled. “I ran and hid. That’s the only reason I’m here.” He looked up, his eyes wet. “Maybe if I hadn’t run—”

  “Sometimes,” Liam said, steering Kurt briskly away from the emotional shoal he was headed for all ahead full, “we remember more about events we’ve witnessed when we talk about them a little bit. They kept you in the hospital overnight, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Kurt said in a low voice. “They were really nice to me, too. And I even told them that I ran, I—”

  “Well, Kurt, shock from what you witnessed, followed immediately by exposure—” Liam shook his head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your memory of events was more than a little fuzzy.” He smiled. No women were immune to Liam’s smile, and for that matter very few men. “Could we just go through it? Only once more, I promise.”

  Kurt looked from Liam to his father. “Is it okay, Dad?”

  There was a long pause. Liam kept his face as bland as possible beneath the burning stare. Kurt might be soothed, but Karl wasn’t buying Li
am’s act for a moment. Still, a low growl rumbled up out of Karl’s barrel chest that might have been assent.

  “Good,” Liam said. “Let’s start with why you were in Kiana to begin with.”

  Karl was a construction manager for the Arctic Housing Authority. He lived in Anchorage, but was at present working from Kotzebue, surveying the outlying villages to assess each community’s housing needs. Kurt had come with him, Liam gathered, because he didn’t have much else going on at the time. Delicate inquiry as to Kurt’s present employment came up with a reply of “business consultant,” offered by his father, which was about the best description of someone who’d never held down a real job that Liam had ever heard.

  While Kurt and Karl were in Kiana—the alliteration alone on this case was going to drive Liam insane—the village elders, always happy to see someone who was going to build them more housing, offered to take Kurt on a caribou hunt while Karl was busy in the village. Kurt accepted, Karl agreed, and Kurt left the following day, January 22, on the back of Noah Adams’s snow machine, carrying the new .30-30 Winchester his father had given him for his birthday the week before. At three o’clock that afternoon they arrived at the camp Ray Nageak and Ben Amunson had set up the day before. That evening, Lars Kayuqtuq of Ambler, returning home from a hunting trip of his own, stopped by and stayed for dinner. Afterward, Kayuqtuq continued up the river.

  At about ten o’clock, after Kurt had gone into the tent, he heard another snow machine approach. “It was cold,” Kurt said, shivering at the memory. “There was ice on the inside of the tent. I didn’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. I heard Noah and the other guys talking to a fourth guy whose voice I didn’t recognize.”

  “Could you make out what they were saying?”