A Cold Day for Murder

by Leigh Mayberry

  “Where is Brian now?” Meghan reached into her parka, removed the leather-bound notebook she received from Mark before their divorce, before he got bored with their marriage, and started cheating on Meghan with the courtesy clerk in their neighborhood grocery store, three miles from the home they purchased together in New York. Meghan kept the notebook because it was more reliable than Mark in the long run.

  “Him and Cheryl are in Nancy’s apartment.”

  A rookie move, keeping suspects at the scene of the crime, but she kept her observation buttoned up tight. Once in the stairwell, Meghan felt they had a little more privacy. “Did Brian say how he found Nancy?”

  “She was in her bedroom.”

  Meghan nodded. She’d meant to take the stairs two at a time. Only her winter boots were too heavy, and exercise for her since taking over the position happened about as often as she saw a butterfly. It was once, in July, a few years ago.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “Naw, Lester said to keep out.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He thought it was best to leave it for you to sort out.”

  They reached the second floor, and Meghan was out of breath, thighs burning. Oliver managed to get ahead of her. He had about a hundred pounds on her. She’d be damned, if he wasn’t stopping, neither was she.

  “When we get into the apartment, I want you to take Cheryl and Brian downstairs. Keep them together, and with you at all times. Don’t let them so much as make a phone call until we get this sorted out.”

  “You know what happened to Nancy?” Oliver asked.

  By the time they reached the third landing, he held open the door for her. Oliver had a round hairless face. Like most Inuit men, he had a thick mop of coal black hair on the top of his head with no middle-aged balding as it happened to men without the precious nectar of Native Alaskan blood flowing through their veins, with little to no facial hair. Oliver was missing a pinkie on his left hand. A harbor seal took it when he was seal hunting with his father years ago, a story he liked to tell the children whenever they visited the school during career days.

  The renters on the third floor moved as directed back into their apartments before she made an appearance. At the far end of the hall, closest to the exit door where they should have come upstairs, Nancy McCormick’s apartment door stood open. Lester and Brian stood in the hallway. Brian was looking worried, Lester was leaning against the doorjamb with a countenance of indifference.

  Lester had a mustache he’d cultivated since his senior year of high school and wore it with pride. He gave a curt nod to Meghan as she approached. Once she got a look inside, she saw Cheryl Snyder sitting in one of the three chairs at a small round wooden table. She had a box of facial tissue in front of her, several wadded tissues on the tabletop, and as Meghan cringed without showing it, hands all over everything, contaminating the scene.

  “Brian, Cheryl,” Meghan started. She’d trained at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. She had field and classroom training that taught Meghan how to be tactful without being belligerent with potential suspects. “Lester is going to escort you both downstairs. Oliver is going with you.”

  Meghan had her hand on Cheryl’s back, physical contact to direct her out of the chair, and out of the apartment. Once the couple was in the hallway, Meghan closed the door. She stood with her back to the front door, scanning the immediate area for signs of a struggle. The counters in the kitchenette were spotless. She heard the dishwasher chugging. Cheryl wanted to collect the wadded facial tissue she’d left on the table, but Meghan wanted her to leave the rubbish.

  Suddenly it occurred to Meghan she was in charge of something that she’d trained for and secretly wanted to tackle ever since she saw female cops on a television show when she was a little girl. While it was terrible to think it took a murder to solve a homicide, Meghan knew she had nothing to do with Nancy McCormick’s death. And if circumstances around the woman’s demise had anything to do with something nefarious, Meghan was in the right place and had arrived at the right time to put justice on the trail.

  The apartment was small, quaint, and quiet, aside from the chugging of the dishwasher and the hum of the refrigerator.

  She reached into the inner pocket of her parka before shedding the outer layer. Like most interior buildings in Alaska, the room temperature was set around 75°F to 80°F all year long. She’d climbed three flights of stairs, was a little out of breath, a lot out of shape, and as she slipped on the medical gloves, Meghan felt she needed to get to the bedroom before anything else happened that she couldn’t anticipate.

  Chapter Four

  Nancy McCormick was a popular woman in town. She grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and moved to Kinguyakkii with Cheryl as adolescents when their father took a job at Caribou Mine on the North Slope. The native corporation founded the lead and zinc mine and managed by the Northwest Arctic Borough. Handled in-state meant freelance companies had to contract with the locals and received fewer profits than typical trade agreements in the lower-forty-eight when companies raped the lands, harvested every last drop of natural goodness and paid the owners pennies on the dollar.

  The McCormicks were well-to-do in Kinguyakkii, Nancy and Cheryl’s father was a hands-on foreman at the mine who rose to VP of operations. He walked on a few people over the years before succumbing to lead poisoning from improper handling. Nancy was fourteen when she and Cheryl and their mother settled in the village while their father, Brad McCormick, left them for months at a time to manage the world’s largest producer of zinc from the densest concentration of zinc reserves on the planet.

  They had style and clout, and money until Brad died eight years ago, and then it all went south physically and emotionally. Cheryl and Nancy’s mother beat feet out of the Town of Northern Lights before the body had cooled to tundra temperatures. She took the life insurance policy and vacated to Arizona to set up house in Mesa with Nancy tagging along. Cheryl had met Brian by the time their father died and opted to stay, eke out a living in town and start a life with her boyfriend, Brian.

  One of the benefits of living in a small town, Meghan reasoned as she monitored the bedroom from the doorway, personal histories from neighbors was bound to rub off after a spell.

  ***

  Nancy lay in bed. Meghan had seen dead bodies before, not as many as some agents, few enough to feel that ticking in the back of her skull that warned her primal nerve that the woman lying in the queen-sized bed with the pretty floral duvet and feather pillows was dead not sleeping.

  The room was reasonably orderly, in the way that a woman maintained it when they weren’t expecting guests, or expecting a guest who didn’t mind or care if there were clothes on the floor, the closet door was open, and Nancy hadn’t finished putting away the folded clothes from the laundry basket on the small kitchen chair she had moved to her bedroom at some point.

  The small prefabricated dresser to the right drew Meghan’s attention. When she felt there wasn’t any valuable evidence on the floor, she took delicate and deliberate steps toward the five-drawer dresser. On the surface was a collection of female trinkets. A large department store vanilla candle, three-quarters burned. Meghan picked it up with her gloved hand to look inside. The layer of dust over the wax told her the wick hadn’t been lit recently. There was an ashtray on the dresser.

  Mountain Manor was supposed to be smoke-free. By the heaps of cigarette butts all over the ground outside the complex suggested most renters followed the rules. Nancy didn’t seem to care for the regulation. There was a scarf, wool hat, jewelry, a glove, and the ashtray with at least three different cigarette ends inside the bowl.

  Meghan took the eight steps it took to reach the bedside from the dresser. The nightstand was cluttered, make-up, nail polish tubes, and the drawer was partially open. Meghan used one finger wedged inside to pull the drawer open enough to peer inside, revealing nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Hello, Nancy,” Meghan whispered to the w
oman lying in bed. Her face was exposed. Lester was right. A bluish and gray hue coated Nancy’s skin. “My name’s Meghan. Do you remember me? I used to come into the diner sometimes.”

  Meghan looked at the thin carpet under the bed. There was a multitude of fibers, some debris from lack of vacuuming regularly. There were no bottles of alcohol present. That was a good sign, possibly. It meant whatever happened between Nancy and the person who took the woman’s life, wasn’t fueled by bootlegged booze.

  Kinguyakkii was a ‘dry village.’ In Alaska, there were three types of villages in the ‘bush.’ Many of the Alaskan communities were governed by elders who had seen the worst of subjugation. Between the Russian Orthodox explorers before the United States purchased the land, and the American settlers who ventured into Alaska seeking gold, in the same order as classifying the lower-forty-eight Native Americans. Native Alaskans had to endure the worst treatment for the sake of civilization. White settlers brought education and the whip, and a lot of booze with them.

  Many of the oldest of the Alaska Natives still remembered how it was, usually more whip than education, while the alcohol flowed. By the time most of the Native Americans were run off the lands to the south, Alaskans were still an unruly people according to the government. Statehood happened at the beginning of 1959. There was an earlier generation in-state that saw the worst. Alcohol was a big part of the problem. Many of the interior and northern villages, places inaccessible by land or sea banned alcoholic beverages. Airlines did the rest. It was illegal to transport alcohol through the air without the permits.

  While a Borough Council managed the town, the members were descendants of men and women tortured for the sake of fur trading, gold, and sovereignties of a people who lived in one place for thousands of years. Blood quantum went a long way in Alaska, Meghan knew alcohol-fueled problems and indigenous people were wise to its lethal power and continued to vote it out of the Town of Northern Lights.

  “You’re still a beautiful woman,” Meghan said. She bent close, used an LED flashlight she carried in her jacket pocket at all times. It was standard equipment in a place where it was dark months out of the year. Even Nancy’s bedroom, with the lights on, still held deep shadows that needed cutting with the flashlight.

  “What was that?” Lester stood at the bedroom door.

  Meghan stood up straight, pocketed the flashlight. Rather than explain to Lester that she sometimes had a habit of talking to the dead because, well, Meghan thought since she was about to get intimately involved in their lives, dig in the dirt and find out why and how they died, it would be a good idea to get past the greetings.

  “Do we have a medical examiner in town, Lester?” It was one of the many questions she still hadn’t asked because most of the time she had to wait until something happened before the right item came along.

  “We got Eric.” The quip described a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘who.’

  It wasn’t meant to be a loaded question, but sometimes Lester assumed when someone spoke with him, they already knew the outcome. “Remind me again who Eric is?” Meghan rubbed her forehead with her wrist.

  “He’s the manager at the trader store.”

  “Is he a licensed medical doctor?” While it wasn’t impossible to think a doctor worked at an Alaska Native trading company, it was best to second guess. She’d seen some exciting things since moving to the largest state in the Union. Anything, and everything was possible.

  “Well, he gets called by the clinic to help take bodies out of their homes if someone dies.”

  “So, he’s a coroner.” Meghan nodded.

  Lester shrugged. “If you say so,” it came out not as an insult, more like an added layer of what made up a man like Eric.

  “Give him a call, see if he can come over. We’ll need him later.”

  “Sure thing, Chief.”

  Suddenly Oliver came into view. He was a few years younger than Lester; he looked a little pale peaking over the man’s shoulder into the room.

  “Who’s watching to make sure no one is coming upstairs?” she asked her only two officers.

  They needed more help, but the city’s budget was managed by a miser who scrutinized and questioned all expenditures by the town police. Fuel for the chief of police Chevy Suburban wasn’t part of the budget, so Meghan filled the gas tank sparingly. Fuel in the village was as precious as gold or silver, priced anywhere between three to five times more per gallon than any of the cities on the road system. More officers weren’t part of the annual financial plan, and neither was fuel for a gas-guzzling rusty beast.

  Oliver pointed back the way he came. “I locked the door.”

  “Okay.”

  Meghan stepped away from the bed, retracing the steps she took to reach the body. “Lester, you touch Nancy with your bare hand?”

  “I saw her from the doorway,” he explained. “I knew she was dead, but, yeah, I checked for a pulse at her wrist.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “I screamed too,” he added with a shrug.

  “To see if she woke up?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Okay.”

  “Get the camera and start taking pictures everywhere—what are you doing?”

  Oliver and Lester both had out their smartphones. A flash went off on Oliver’s phone before he stopped taking pictures.

  “You can’t take pictures with your phones, gentlemen. Go get the camera at the police station.”

  “We have a camera?” Oliver asked.

  “Don’t we?”

  “Never needed one,” Lester said. He held up his smartphone. “I take pictures with my phone for DV calls.”

  “We can’t use phones for pictures here. Do you know anyone in town that has a digital camera?”

  “Sure, Calvin has a nice camera.”

  “Calvin Everett?” she clarified.

  “Yeah, he’s got a real nice camera.”

  “You know he’s a reporter, right?” Meghan asked. “We can’t have a reporter for the Northern Lights Sounder come into a crime scene and take pictures.”

  “I’m sure if you asked him, he’d do it.” Oliver tucked away his phone. Both men stood respectfully outside the bedroom door. “He’s outside.”

  Meghan crossed the room and went into the small hall. News got out, traveled faster than the internet around town. Someone said something, by now everyone in town who had access to anyone else knew what was going on inside Mountain Manor.

  In the kitchen, Meghan took charge and dished out the orders. “Lester, head to the airport. See if anyone flew out of here last night. Talk to each of the charter pilots and the cargo pilots. See if you can get a passenger manifest from them if they had scheduled or unscheduled flights.”

  She turned to Oliver. “I need you to contain this floor. If anyone who doesn’t belong on this floor is here, get them out of here. I don’t want anyone near this apartment. We don’t have a forensic kit?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Oliver, stand outside the door. I’ll be right back.”

  Meghan and Lester moved down the stairwell closest to Nancy’s door. Oliver stood in the hallway. He started talking to the neighbors nearest to Nancy’s apartment the moment Meghan was in the hall. She made a mental note to go over how they needed to handle a situation if something like this happened again. She’d left the FBI and the real world to get anyway from this sort of crisis.

  Now she was at the top of the world, stepping out into the March winds, looking at the gray sky. Snow clung to any part of the ground that didn’t get a touch of sunlight. There was no such thing as spring in Alaska. It went from deep winter to a few weeks of summer and back to winter again. Sometimes summer came and went when Meghan was taking a long hot bath in her rental. It was murder, and while Meghan knew all about how to manage an active case, she felt there were tripwires in the dregs of snow that crunched underfoot.

  Chapter Five

  Calvin Everett was a
n attractive man in his fifties. There was no denying that he had a certain charm about him. The moment he saw Meghan emerge from Mountain Manor, he gave a wave and a smile. She didn’t have anything official to say to him, but necessity and the fact that he managed to keep himself fit when there wasn’t much to do in town except hang out with friends, watch movies, and order pizza from the one pizza delivery place in five hundred miles, made her gravitate toward him.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” Meghan asked. Calvin stood with Brian and Cheryl Snyder. The couple was at their truck, waiting. Cheryl’s eyes were puffy and red. Brian consoled his wife as best he could. Meghan needed to talk to them, but Nancy took precedence.

  “Is it true?” Calvin asked. He had a digital recorder hovering in front of Meghan’s mouth.

  She cleared her throat and moved toward the police rig. The Chevy Suburban was due for retirement. It burned gas, leaked oil. It was twenty years old, and for a town that was only roughly thirty miles square, the Suburban had over 150,000 miles on the odometer. That was a lot of trips around town.

  “I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” she answered.

  Calvin was taken aback by the answer. He stood near as Meghan pulled open the rear hatch on the truck and then let the gate drop. The collecting of detritus in the rear was as many generations old as the truck. She searched through the various cardboard boxes.

  “Is Nancy dead?” he whispered.

  She frowned at him and shook her head. “Can I do my job so you can have all the dirt you want to sling and make my department, or the town look bad?”

  Calvin stopped the recorder. He dropped it into his coat pocket. “You think this is a scoop for me?”

  “Well, the camera around your neck, the digital recorder, the fact you went and spoke to the victim’s family,” she said. “Yeah, I think this is your big scoop.”

  “Listen, I know you’ve been avoiding me since you got here.”

  Meghan didn’t find what she wanted in the back, slammed the rear gate and hatch. She moved to the side of the truck and opened the rear door to search in the boxes on the floorboards. “I get you to want to do a puff piece on me for your devoted readers.”