Chuck had to hand it to the man. Andy Foulsham was a human tornado. His campaign manager could spin Jesus Christ off his crucifix.
‘Shippon’s got a solid record on development and he was making some noise about it in an interview yesterday. Anyone you can think of who could endorse us development-wise who’s not in Anchorage, I’d give them a call.’
Chuck thought of Tommy Schofield down in Homer, then decided it was probably best not to connect himself to the guy in public.
‘We need to go in harder on Shippon’s economic record. The economic stats for Anchorage are looking much brighter than the all-state figures, we can play on that. Cuts in state budgets are going to hit Juneau harder than Anchorage anyway. They’ve already started. Unemployment’s rising higher statewide than in Anchorage and voters aren’t gonna like the predictions about the size of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend this year. All the polls suggest that a critical slice of the Alaska public remains undecided, so we just gotta help them make up their minds.’
‘Fund a media campaign?’
Foulsham tipped him a ‘you got it’ finger.
‘Which means money.’
Another finger.
Of course it meant money. Chuck felt his mouth go dry. Didn’t it always mean money? And therein lay the problem.
A couple of weeks back Foulsham had averted what might have turned out to be a major scandal when the owner of Alaska’s largest automobile franchise and one of the campaign’s most generous sponsors had discovered one of the Hillingberg campaign team snorting coke while getting a blowjob from a hooker in the washroom at the end of a $5000-plate dinner. Foulsham had persuaded the guy to retire on health grounds before anything got out. He’d called in every favour he possibly could to keep the thing out of the media and he’d succeeded. A couple of outlets had noted the retirement, but that was it. What Andy Foulsham hadn’t been able to do was keep the owner of the car dealership on board. A week after the incident, the donor had quietly dammed the flow of funds and walked away.
What Chuck needed now was a money wonk to fill his place. But finding such a person at the last minute was no easy matter. He didn’t have the range of contacts Shippon commanded and so far his powers of patronage had been confined to Anchorage. It was no good making promises to guys who weren’t sure you had the power to deliver. In the medium term that just weakened you.
Marsha appeared, flushed and in her running gear. She greeted Chuck, then said ‘Hey’ to Foulsham, who acknowledged her with a nod. The two pretended to get on, but dig down a little deeper and you could see that their relationship was at best uneasy.
‘You find my husband some funds, yet? We need those TV ads.’
‘We were just talking about that,’ Chuck said, in a tone designed to re-establish just who was in command here. Marsha’s eyes narrowed but she kept quiet. If Andy Foulsham had dared, he would have smirked. You could see the smirk hovering there, somewhere in his eyes. It served Chuck to promote the tension so long as it continued to bubble below the surface.
‘I just think we need to be more proactive here,’ Marsha said.
Chuck held up a hand to stop her.
‘We know what you think, hon.’
Marsha shot her husband a beady look. She hated him using the word ‘hon’, which he only ever did in public, said it was ‘passive aggressive’, whatever that meant. Right now he didn’t care. She’d already made it plain that she wanted him to get on the phone directly to some of the bigger players in the state, ask them outright for funding. But he’d already contacted everyone who owed him anything and then some. He’d been in touch with old school friends, neighbourhood kids he’d grown up with and who had made good, his business contacts, fishing and hunting buddies, but the problem he came up against over and over again was that, by and large, his contacts were fewer and poorer than Shippon’s, who only had to hold one of his governor’s picnics to have every rich goon and his social-climbing wife in the state writing out a cheque. Chuck wasn’t even very good at the schmooze. Something often seemed to go wrong; he asked for too much or too little, he was too grateful or not grateful enough or he offered sweeteners that ended up insulting people.
‘I made a list,’ Marsha said. ‘Some new approaches.’
Andy Foulsham shot Chuck a regretful look, which said, I’m as pissed as you are that she’s right but it doesn’t change the fact that she is right. The election was in three weeks. If he was going to win the governorship, he needed to step up.
‘We need to talk to developers, show them we’re really on their side. Reassure them that we’re going to be easing up on planning, cracking down on all those tree-hugging hippies who want to give this great state of ours back to the bears.’
This was a new thing for her, the pro-development cause, at least in its present, radical incarnation and, like any new convert, she liked to bang the drum as loud and as often as she thought she could get away with. These days, as far as Marsha was concerned, the sooner you ring-fenced a few parks and paved the rest of Alaska over the better. If the tree-huggers were so fond of trees, why didn’t they take themselves off to Brazil or somewhere, stir up trouble there.
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ he said, trying to sound emollient, but it was too late. He could see she felt that no one was really listening to her and if there was one thing Marsha couldn’t tolerate it was to be ignored. She wouldn’t attack Chuck in public, but she’d think nothing about going after Foulsham.
‘We’re exposed here. The dead boy. You understand the potential of that story to blow up in our faces, right?’ There had been complaints about the Old Believers before. Chuck had never taken them seriously and, in retrospect, that had been a mistake.
‘I got my team working on making that story go away,’ Andy said.
So Foulsham had decided to stand up for himself, Chuck thought.
‘Sure you do,’ Marsha’s voice was one small beat off full-scale sarcasm. ‘I guess that’s why the kid’s name and the name of his mother were in the Courier yesterday morning.’
Chuck felt himself stiffen internally. He agreed with Andy that the story wasn’t really going anywhere. So far as he could see, his wife was just trying to use it to stir things up.
‘Marsh,’ he said, softly. It was the name he called her when they were young, before everything went to shit. ‘Let’s not overreact here. It was a small paragraph right at the back of the paper. If anyone really cared there’d be press outside right now.’
‘All the same, someone in the APD leaked the Old Believer connection. No one should have given that to the press at this stage.’
‘We don’t know that. Any cub reporter on his first day on the job could have found the body was on Old Believer land. Like Andy said, we’re working on reining the story in.’
She cut him a savage look. ‘You’re underestimating this.’
He returned the look in kind. Sometimes she needed reminding just who had the power here, which one of them was running for governor. ‘I already put in a call to Mac.’ That much was true at least. He didn’t mention that the APD chief hadn’t yet returned from his fish camp. Mackenzie’s wife said her husband intended to go direct to his office from the airstrip, but she’d have him call the mayor the moment he landed.
Marsha opened her mouth as if to speak, then, thinking better of it, tutted and shook her head and said she was going off to take a shower. Chuck’s office cell phone buzzed. It was Mackenzie.
‘What can I do for you, Mr Mayor?’
Andy got up and began to walk towards the door. Chuck caught his eye and he swung right around and went back to his stool at the breakfast bar.
‘I’m gonna put you on speakerphone. Andy’s here.’
Mackenzie and Foulsham greeted one another briefly, then Chuck took over once more.
‘We’re kinda concerned about the level of information that’s getting out to the public on the dead boy case. Especially on the Old Believer stuff. You know how people
love all that talk about satanists. We got a leaker we need to worry about?’
‘No one inside, boss, that I guarantee you.’
‘Apart from going ice fishing, what are you doing to shut the story down?’
‘We’ve got the mother in the nut-shed under a fake name. There’s the witness, some native from Buttsville, North Pole, knows no one within a thousand miles of Anchorage. She just got here for the Iditarod. Maybe she said something. I doubt it, though. I’ll have Detective Truro keep an eye on her. He says she’s kinda strange.’
Bob Truro. Chuck recalled the skinny-assed, pimple-faced Jesus freak he knew from Born Again summer camp. It wasn’t his faith Chuck took exception to so much as his fanaticism. Back then Truro was just the kind of guy to think that people like the Old Believers should be run out of town on principle. Maybe he hadn’t changed.
‘Truro have issues with those Believer guys?’
‘The Russians?’ Mackenzie picked up on the insinuation. ‘Nah. I mean, he don’t like them much – who does? – but as to whether he would have set them up? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. The guy’s as straight as a moose’s dick. The suspect, Peter Galloway, is a lone wolf. Anyway, we’re close to being able to make an arrest.’
Chuck leaned in. Opposite him, Andy Foulsham gave a little grin of relief.
‘How close?’
‘We’re hoping to move on it before we have to apply for an extension to hold him. We knew he was living at the Believer compound near Homer about a year ago but we got a tip-off that he had a connection to the mother of the dead kid. He was teaching literacy down there. He left around about the time the mother would have gotten pregnant. We’re trying to establish whether he had sex with the girl, whether he might be the father of the dead boy. Plus we got that witness who found the body, she saw Galloway snowmachining in the area not long before and she’s prepared to say so in court.’
‘Hold on a second, Mac.’
Chuck gestured to Foulsham to leave the room and switched his cell phone back to normal. He waited for a minute after the door clicked shut then said softly.
‘Wait five then call me on the private number.’
He put the phone down, walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to his private study. He flipped the safe combination and took out a cell phone, which almost immediately began vibrating.
‘Hey.’ Mac’s voice. The one thing Chuck couldn’t stand about the guy was this perkiness, but it was precisely this perfectly executed smokescreen of cheerful amiability which gave Chuck confidence in him. The two men went all the way back to the same summer camp at which they’d both met Bob Truro. They’d bonded over a shared ambition, an interest in keeping fit and a deep-seated resentment of their respective parents. At the time they had both still believed that Jesus would sort out their problems but, as it turned out, their problems had outlasted their faith. At the U of Alaska they’d belonged to different sets, Chuck to the politicos, Mac to the outdoor nuts, but enough remained between the two young men to ensure they kept in touch. Twenty years later what they had wasn’t a friendship exactly, but a confederacy of minds and tastes.
‘I need a guarantee the dead kid’s got nothing to do with us.’ He’d already asked this, but he wanted to be absolutely sure.
‘Like I said before, boss, we make the arrest, the whole thing’s gonna go quiet,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Guaranteed.’
9
When Detective Bob Truro answered the phone he sounded slightly out of breath, as though he’d rushed to get the call. Edie had taken the precaution of calling from a booth downtown. The number, she knew, would show up on Truro’s screen and this particular caller didn’t want herself identified.
‘Maggie Inukpuk.’ Edie flexed her jaw to perfect the voice she’d been practising for the last ten minutes. ‘I’m from the Ellesmere Island Police Detachment, here in Anchorage on some police business.’
‘From where?’ Truro said impatiently.
‘Ellesmere. Up in Nunavut, Canada?’
‘Oh.’ Truro coughed, rapidly losing interest. ‘So how can I help you, Maggie?’
‘I believe you’ve been questioning TaniaLee Littlefish about her son.’
‘We’re not treating Ms Littlefish as a suspect at this time,’ Truro said. Edie watched the cents on her phone card ticking down. The detective wasn’t about to give anything away.
‘I realize that.’ Edie cleared her throat. ‘Thing is, detective, we’d be glad to ask her a few questions.’
Truro said nothing.
‘We’re dealing with a case,’ Edie went on. ‘Cousin of Ms Littlefish. Petty insurance fraud, no big deal, we just need to clarify a couple of facts. A quick phone conversation would do fine.’
‘I hate to disappoint, Officer…’ searching for the name, failing to find it, ‘but TaniaLee Littlefish is a dry river right now. We got her in a secure psych facility in the city under another name. At least until the case is cleared up. For her own protection.’ The detective wanted to get off the phone.
‘I see.’ Edie made to sound breezy. ‘Well, like I said, it’s nothing urgent.’ She didn’t want Truro thinking there might be some connections he needed to pursue. ‘Thank you for your time, detective.’
Edie put down the phone, felt for the photograph and swung out of the phone booth in search of a taxi rank. She found one down by the market along with a driver who knew the location of the psychiatric facilities in the city. Turned out cab drivers knew as much about nuthouses as they did about bars and brothels. In his day, her driver said, he’d taken dozens of lunatics in and out of various institutions, to say nothing of their families. She’d already concocted the cover story. She’d heard through a family about her distant relation but no one seemed to agree on which psychiatric facility was holding her. The driver didn’t seem phased. He said he knew them all. They could drive around.
At the Anchorage Green Shoots Clinic a broad-beamed woman wearing an elaborate wig recognized TaniaLee’s picture and, blinking at Patricia Gomez’s ID, read off Anchorage Police Department, came to the conclusion Edie was hoping for and said:
‘Sure. You’ll find Terri Lightfoot in the Pinewood unit.’
She told Edie to buzz at the door to the unit then go right on in.
Terri Lightfoot aka TaniaLee Littlefish was sitting in the communal area of the unit leafing through a teen magazine. She was as young as her photograph suggested, certainly not more than fifteen, and brittle as all hell. The girl looked up and gave Edie a long, glazed stare. It was obvious she was heavily medicated. Her movements were about as lively as a dead seal’s.
Edie flashed the ID. ‘Mind if we have a little talk?’
TaniaLee said nothing and went back to her magazine. She wasn’t really reading it, Edie could see, but scoping out the pictures. Her hand was trembling and there was a tangy, metallic smell about her. Edie had noticed that taint before among people whose spirits were disturbed. She’d smelled it once or twice up in Autisaq among women diagnosed with post-natal problems. An imbalance of hormones, the qalunaat doctors said, and maybe it was, but the elders had another explanation. They said that a mother has to voyage into the spirit world to lay claim to the spirit of her unborn baby. Every so often, on her way back to the visible world, a woman loses her way.
‘TaniaLee.’
The girl looked up, but with the same faraway expression on her face.
‘I’m not here to get you into trouble.’
TaniaLee’s eyes narrowed a little and some thought played around her mind but did not reach her lips. Eventually she said: ‘You Yupik?’
‘My people are way up in the north,’ Edie said.
‘Do you work in Safeway?’
‘No, TaniaLee. Why d’you ask?’
The girl ignored the question, flipped over the page in her magazine and pointed to the picture of some movie star.
‘Are you a friend of hers?’
‘Uh nuh. Are you?’
‘Yes,’ she said,
‘I’m friends with everyone, even God.’
‘Sure,’ said Edie. She felt bad playing along with the girl but what was the alternative? ‘Did God take your baby, TaniaLee?’
TaniaLee shook her head.
‘The Believers took my baby. They came and took him away. I couldn’t do anything about it.’ Her voice was completely flat. Either it was the effect of the drugs or she had been coached. Maybe both.
‘Why did they do that, TaniaLee?’ As gently as she could.
‘Because they are Devil worshippers.’ The girl was staring into the middle distance now.
‘TaniaLee, can you talk to me about Lucas?’
She said: ‘Are you my sister?’
‘No. But I understand what you’re going through better than you might think.’ Edie took the girl’s hand. ‘You have family? They visit you here?’
The girl looked at the floor, then turning her face to Edie said: ‘I’m going to have lots of babies.’ Edie smiled encouragingly. ‘The Devil won’t want all of them. Some of them I can keep.’ Her face crumpled. ‘They took him away.’
‘Can you tell me what they looked like, the people who took your baby, can you describe them?’
TaniaLee frowned. ‘I don’t know, Fonseca said.’
‘Fonseca told you the Old Believers had taken your baby?’
‘Yes, it was them, they took him.’
Edie leaned in and picked up the girl’s hands. They were small, the nails bitten to the quick, and trembling.
‘Who’s Fonseca, TaniaLee?’
A faint smile played across the girl’s lips. ‘My husband.’
At that moment a nurse came over. She gave Edie a cold, hard stare.
‘Terri needs to rest now.’
Edie nodded, leaned over and pressed TaniaLee’s hand.
At the locked door the nurse softened, and shot her a collegiate look. Fellow professionals, job to do, not always easy.
The Boy in the Snow Page 6