“I could hear them fine, but they were talking Eskimo,” Kurt said. “They sounded mad, though.”
Liam wondered if the new arrival had been drinking. “Was there alcohol in camp?” he said.
Kurt looked shocked. “Oh no, nothing like that. I don’t think any of those guys drank. At least they didn’t in front of me.”
Liam nodded and motioned Kurt to continue.
The next day the four men went hunting for caribou. Or three of them did.
“I fell off the snogo,” Kurt said. He didn’t look at his father. “I had to follow on foot. By the time I caught up to them, they had already shot twelve caribou. I helped butcher them out, and we made camp for the night. They fried up some caribou heart. First time I ever ate something like that. It was really good, I was surprised.”
“How far did you have to walk?”
“I don’t know. Miles. It took hours for me to catch up.”
“Not much fun, postholing through the snow on a cold winter day,” Liam said in a neutral voice, and waited for a reaction.
Kurt shrugged. “They were hunting for food for their families. I understood.”
“Still. One of them could have swung around and picked you up.”
Kurt looked Liam in the eye and said firmly, “It was my own fault, Sergeant Campbell. I’m not used to riding on a snogo and I had on the wrong gloves and my hands were so cold I couldn’t hang on. And they told me they were in a hurry, that the caribou herd could move on and it would take that much longer to find them. And we only had food for five days.”
Liam nodded, keeping his expression interested and cordial, acutely aware of the solid bulk of parental wrath simmering away at Kurt’s side. “You butchered out the caribou, you set up camp, you had dinner. What happened next?”
“I hit the rack,” Kurt said. His smile was rueful. “It had been a long day for me, and I was tired.” His smile faded, and his face took on a strained look. “The guy on the snogo came back.”
“The same one who had been there the night before?”
“Yes.”
He recognized the sound of the snow machine because it was running very roughly. Again there was conversation in raised voices. This time Kurt got up to look.
The new guy was another Eskimo. He was wearing a dark green parka with fur trim around the hood. He had on a dark blue headband with the word “Alaska” written in white across it. He had a beard. His snow machine looked old, the black seat worn through in spots, the maker’s name chipped and rusted off to the point of illegibility.
Kurt got cold so he crawled back in his sleeping bag. The voices outside the tent got louder. The snow machine with the bad engine started up again and moved away. Noah Evans and Ray Nageak came into the tent and started to get into their sleeping bags.
“That’s when we heard the shots,” Kurt said. “We could hear Ben’s voice shouting ‘No, no!’ And then we couldn’t hear him anymore.”
Noah and Ray grabbed for their clothes, and then the bullets started hitting the tent. Noah went down first, then Ray. “They were in the middle of the tent, and I was in my bag on the side. I think that’s the only reason I didn’t get hit. Noah’s knife was on his belt, and I used it to cut a way out of the back of the tent and ran and hid behind a tree. I looked back and I could see the guy shooting.” He swallowed hard. “And then he stopped.”
The killer got back on his snow machine and headed out in the direction of what Kurt thought was Kiana.
It was a vivid and detailed description. Kurt’s voice shook a little when he gave it, and his face was pale and strained. This guy was either telling the truth or he was the best liar Liam had ever met, and he’d met some pretty good ones in his years on the force.
Kurt sat back with a shaky sigh. “I went back to the tent to get my clothes. And then I just started walking.”
“Why didn’t you take one of the snow machines?”
Kurt flushed again. “I don’t know how to drive one,” he said, shooting his father an anxious look. “And I was scared the guy would come back. I wanted to get out of there before he came back. I just—I don’t know, I guess I just panicked, and ran.”
Johnny looked at Liam when he came out of the room. “Feelings are running pretty high, Liam. We need to get both of them out of town.”
They were in the school cafeteria, commandeered for them by the town mayor. Two doors into hallways leading to classrooms were monitored by grim-faced adults, around which peeked curious faces. Wy was sitting at one of the tables, nursing a cup of coffee. “I’m good to go,” she said.
They parked the Fraads, pére et fils, at the airport terminal in Kotzebue, notified the troopers in Anchorage that the Fraads were on their way in and told them to make sure they didn’t immediately get on another plane headed even farther south, stopped briefly in Kiana to pick up Johnny Nageak, and flew out to the scene.
It was after 2 p.m. by the time they got there and that flat bright light peculiar to an arctic winter sun was beginning its inevitable slide into a softer lavender twilight. Shadows lengthened on the Kobuk River, a white swath making wide turns through a dark forest of black spruce. It was clear and cold and absolutely still when Johnny touched Wy’s shoulder and pointed. She banked immediately, a turn so smooth it felt painted on the sky. Liam was concentrating so hard on keeping the plane up in the air by the grip he had on his seat that he didn’t realize they had landed until he heard the snow passing beneath the skis with a sibilant hiss. They stopped and Wy pushed in the throttle and the engine died. Liam took a deep and he hoped unobtrusive breath and let it out with a long sigh.
When he got out the cold hit him like a blow. The inside of his nose felt frozen, and he could actually feel the frost forming around his mouth. He pulled the hood of his parka as far forward as it would go. “Stay with the plane,” he told Wy.
“Like hell,” she said.
Liam would have sighed but he was afraid his lungs would freeze on the inhale. “Fine, but don’t step on any evidence.”
The camp was in a clearing about fifty feet off the bend of the river. The tent was Army surplus olive green, a battered twelve-by-twelve with front and back flaps, pitched to face south. A snow machine track that had seen a lot of use ran the fifty yards between the river’s edge and the front flap of the tent. Another, lesser used track led to the back of the tent and into the woods beyond. A single track broke off a few feet up the bank from the river and made a loop around the camp before joining the main trail again.
Two snow machines sat in front of the tent, both with sleds attached. Liam and Johnny took photographs of the tracks surrounding them, thawing out the cameras under their arms between shots, and then Liam straddled the Bearcat and opened the gas cap. Johnny produced a flashlight and they both peered inside.
“Half full,” Johnny said.
Liam nodded and replaced the cap. He pressed the starter and the engine roared to life. He switched it off and looked at Johnny. “How cold was it last night?”
Johnny shrugged. “Forty below? Forty-five?”
The other snow machine, a Ski-Doo Mach Z, took a little more coaxing, but it, too, started eventually.
They went through the sleds, which were loaded with camping and hunting gear, including a Winchester .243 caliber rifle. Liam’s nose was so cold he couldn’t smell if it had been fired recently.
“Liam,” Johnny said, pointing with the flashlight.
In front of the Bearcat, two brass casings gleamed. “Get a photo,” Liam said, and when Johnny was done, picked up the casings. “A thirty-ought-six and a thirty-thirty,” he said, and bagged them.
There was more camping gear and multiple caribou carcasses in various stages of butchering out in the snow around the camp. Johnny found another rifle, a Winchester Model 94 in a case. He held up a box of .30-30 ammunition.
Liam nodded, and turned his flashlight to the tent. He heard Wy’s breath go out in a little sigh.
A man lay on his stomach n
ext to the side of the tent facing the river. He was fully dressed in jeans, boots, and a plaid shirt, but no coat. Both hands were stretched out in front of him, holding a pine bough.
“Ben Amunson,” Johnny said.
Amunson was stiff with cold and death. He’d been shot more than once, but by now it was too dark to count how many times. The snow was stained in a trail that led to the front flap of the tent.
Liam stepped around Amunson’s body, his boots crunching into the top layer of fallen snow, and lifted the tent flap. It caught on something. He pulled, and it came away, revealing an overturned camp stove. Beyond the stove was a second body, also lying face down, also fully clothed.
“Ray Nageak,” Johnny said.
Like Amunson, Nageak’s body showed multiple gunshot wounds. The knife sheath on his belt was empty.
Againt the rear wall of the tent was the third man, on his back, shirt on, hands grasping the waist of his pants, which were halfway up his legs.
“Noah Adams,” Johnny said.
The tent was a mess, the stove and cots overturned, pots, dishes, utensils, duffle bags, parkas, mittens, boots scattered wall to wall. The tea kettle sat oddly upright in the center of the debris field, pierced dead center by a bullet hole. Brass winked up at Liam from wherever he turned the flashlight.
“They were going for their weapons,” Wy said.
“They got off some shots,” Johnny said.
Liam stepped outside to play the light from the flash over the front of the tent. “Bullet holes in the front of the tent about four feet off the ground,” he said, and stepped back inside to run the light across the back of the tent. “Bullets holes on the back wall about a foot off the ground.”
In the rapidly waning light they examined the snow machine tracks around the camp. Liam’s feet were slowly going numb when he pointed at one track. “Last one in and out.”
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Evinrude.”
Liam squinted at the horizon, a deep plum fading to black. “Headed east?”
Johnny nodded. “Ambler, be my guess.”
“How far?”
“Around seventy-five miles, but there’ll be cabins along the way. Someone will have seen or heard something.”
Liam, who by now could no longer feel his nose, couldn’t imagine why anyone would stick theirs out before spring, but then this wasn’t his part of the country.
A wolf howled. Another one answered, sounding closer. “We’d better get the bodies out of here.”
They hauled them down the river to a long straight stretch and loaded them into the Skywagon Wy had acquired in Kotz. It took a while to get into the air, and they were almost to Kotz before the interior of the plane warmed up. Luckily, it wasn’t enough time for the bodies to thaw out.
Johnny Nageak’s wife Bertha served them caribou liver and onions, after which Liam and Wy retired to the town’s lone hotel. The room was shabby but clean, and the bed had a rut down the middle of it that suited them both.
“Again?” she said drowsily sometime in the night, coming awake to the slow stroke of his hands. “Something about Kotzebue that turns you on?”
He didn’t answer, concentrating on drowning out the memory of that awkward stack of frozen bodies in the back of the plane in the seductive taste of her flesh.
The next morning Liam sent the bodies to Anchorage for forensic autopsy on the 7 a.m. jet. At noon, Brill, the medical examiner, called to give it as his opinion that all three men had died of multiple gunshot wounds. He asked Liam if he’d recovered any of the bullets, and Liam replied that he’d be recovering same just as soon as the ground thawed out in the spring. “Ah yes, the joys of crime scene investigation in the Arctic,” Brill said cheerfully, and hung up.
Liam, Johnny, and Wy returned to the camp. They picked up Kurt Fraad’s tracks heading south and used the two snow machines to follow them to where he’d been rescued. “Pretty much supports his story,” Liam said.
“But why the hell would he walk out?” Johnny said. “Both the snogoes started on the first try.”
“He said he didn’t know how to drive one.” He met Johnny’s eyes. “I know, sounds lame to me, too, but I’ve heard dumber from cheechakoes, and so have you.” He looked at Wy. “Any thoughts?”
She was frowning. “I don’t know. Something . . .” Her voice trailed away. “I don’t know,” she said finally.
Johnny, whose manners were too good to let him query Liam as to why he was asking his girlfriend what she thought, very carefully did not hear this conversation.
They went north again and picked up the tracks of the Evinrude and followed them upriver to a snug log cabin on the mouth of the Fish River.
They left the machines on the river and stopped as soon as they came in sight of the door. “Hello the house!” Liam shouted. He had to shout pretty loud to be heard over the dogs howling out back.
The door was already open. “Hello backatcha!” a voice came down the bank. “Who’s that?”
“It’s Johnny Nageak, Tom,” Johnny said, “along with a couple of troopers.” He looked at Wy. “No offense.”
She grinned. “None taken.”
“You here about the shooting?” the voice said.
“Yeah. We’re following some tracks. Talk to you a minute?”
“Come on up.”
The cabin was home to Tom Burnside, a white man from Ohio, his wife Rhonda, an Inupiaq from Kiana, and their two daughters, Susie and Billie Jo, who peeped out at the visitors from behind their mother, fists clenched in her kuspuk. “Yeah,” Burnside said in response to their question, “I heard that Evinrude pass by about nine o’clock that night.”
“They didn’t stop?”
Burnside shook his head. He was a big man with a full head of black hair and a big black beard, both neatly trimmed, deliberate of speech and movement. His wife was a tiny slip of a thing with snapping black eyes. She nodded at Johnny and gave Liam a discreet but distinctly appreciative once-over. She looked at Wy and her eyes widened. She said something in Inupiaq.
Wy shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak Inupiaq.”
“But you’ve got some,” Rhonda said.
“My grandfather is Yupik,” Wy said. “Moses Alakuyak.”
Rhonda looked at Burnside and let loose with a stream of Inupiaq. Burnside replied laboriously in the same tongue and added, “English, Rhonda. We have guests.” But Wy noticed that Burnside never once met her eyes after that.
On their way back down to the river, Liam let Johnny Nageak draw a little ahead. “What was that about?” he said to Wy in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” Wy said woodenly, “I don’t speak Inupiaq.”
He saw her expression and shut up. It wasn’t easy being the granddaughter of someone most of western Alaska knew as the Old Man. A shaman and a drunk, no one but Moses knew which had come first, and only he and Wy and Liam knew that he might have passed on something to Wy that was more than blood and bone.
They continued to follow the Evinrude tracks north, stopping at three more cabins along the way. All reported hearing the snow machine pass by. None could identify the driver.
After they left the last cabin, Wy said, “This is crap, Liam. I’d bet money folks here can tell who’s driving what up and down the river the same way folks in Bristol Bay can tell who’s flying what overhead without looking up.”
“I know,” Liam said, and caught up with Johnny as he prepared to mount his snow machine. “Who was driving the Evinrude?”
Johnny looked up the river. “Be dark soon. We should head for the barn.”
Liam tapped the badge on the front of Johnny’s hat. “That mean anything to you, Johnny?”
A tinge of color crept up into Johnny’s face, and for a change it wasn’t windburn. Liam waited, and was mildly surprised when the other man answered before Liam had lost all the feeling in his fingers and toes.
“Simon Adams owns an Evinrude something like this model,” Johnny said.
“Simon Adams?”
Johnny nodded, and blew on his hands. It was another heartbreaker of a day, sky the color of glass and temperature a murderous forty-two below zero.
“Any relation to Noah Adams?” Liam said.
Johnny nodded again. “His brother.”
Liam struggled with himself. Ray Nageak, and now Simon Adams. What were the odds? “Did they get along?”
Johnny met his yes. “Well, if you’re asking, I’d have to say, not real well, no.”
“I’m asking,” Liam said. “What happened?”
“Noah married Simon’s girl while Simon was doing his National Guard service last year. Didn’t help that Bev was in the family way before Simon left for Iraq.”
“Liam,” Wy said.
“What,” he said, grimly.
“This wasn’t a Inupiaq guy going off on a bunch of other Inupiaq guys. If there was alcohol involved, maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, emphasizing the word. “But even Kurt says there was no drinking in camp, and going berserker on your ass isn’t something these people do without artificially induced inspiration. Besides, what reason did this Simon have to take out the other two guys?”
“Still got to talk to him,” Liam said, looking at Johnny.
Johnny, impassive, swung his leg over the snow machine. “He’ll be in Ambler. We can spend the night in the school there.”
When they got to Ambler, Simon Adams was nowhere to be found.
They found his .30-30, though, leaning up against the wall of his shack, just inside the door.
Liam picked it up. “We find thirty-thirty shells inside the tent?” he said to Johnny, already knowing the answer.
“Liam,” Wy said.
Johnny gave a slow nod, not meeting Liam’s eyes.
“We’ll be taking this with us,” Liam told the elder who had led them to Adams’s place.
“Liam,” Wy said again.
“Not now,” Liam said.
Wy set her teeth and followed him outside.
It was too dark to follow the Evinrude’s tracks that afternoon, so they waited until morning. They were easy to find with the shallow morning sun casting long shadows, and it wasn’t two hours before they caught up with Simon Adams.
At the Scene of the Crime Page 26