“You got me all wrong,” Calvin mumbled. Meghan saw how he bristled at the observation. He took a few steps back from her. When he turned away, Meghan called to him.
More people began to pull into the parking lot at the apartment complex. Since there were no designated lines for parking, only a flat gravel surface, void of grass, most the area around Mountain Manor was designated parking.
“Listen, Calvin. You want to do me a favor?”
He looked innocent. He had short salt and pepper hair, a week’s worth of beard on his chin that matched the flavor on his head. He didn’t wear a hat for the morning, and he looked as if, like Meghan, he slept in the clothes he wore to the scene.
“Can I rent your camera?”
Instinctively, his hands went to the excellent digital camera hanging from the strap at his neck. It had a 200mm lens on it, and there was a camera bag on his shoulder. Meghan approached him. She’d found two full boxes of wooden matches and a roll of clear packing tape and carried them with her. Calvin was a few inches taller than Meghan, a height she liked in men. Not too tall she’d have to stand on tiptoes to kiss him.
The idea dropped out of her head when she coughed with embarrassment at the thought. “I just really want to buy your memory card in the camera. The department doesn’t have a budget for a digital camera—”
“That’s fine,” he said, relinquishing the camera without an argument. “Consider it a professional courtesy.” He handed Meghan the camera. “And for your record, Brian and I go way back. I’ve known him for years. I know Cheryl, and I know—knew Nancy.” He turned from her and wandered back to where Nancy’s family waited, grieving in the truck.
Meghan needed to focus. Before she left the truck, Meghan fished around inside her purse on the passenger seat of the police truck and removed the makeup brush she had but never found the time to use. She shook away the idea that she’d underestimated Calvin, put the camera strap around her neck, and went back into the building. Oliver followed his boss into the apartment complex.
Chapter Six
Since the small kitchen table had been compromised by Brian and Cheryl when they arrived, Meghan used the place as a point of her operation. She put down her collection of items, including the digital camera. Then she searched the cupboards in the kitchenette until she found what she wanted. Oliver stood with his back to the door, watching Meghan work.
She’d removed the parka earlier upon arrival, now Meghan took off the hooded sweatshirt she wore underneath the winter outerwear. One thing Meghan learned from day one in Alaska, the only way to keep warm was all about the layers of clothing.
“What are you doing, Chief?”
Meghan sat at the table. She had the entire ingredient list and a mixing bowl. “You ever watch those cop shows on TV?”
“Yeah, you mean the British ones where old people or town priests solved crimes?”
“No, I’m talking about the American shows where pretty people wear designer clothes, drive expensive cars, and have places to work where there are architectural dreams and next to no lighting?”
“Oh yeah,” Oliver said and laughed.
Meghan winked at him. “If this was a TV show, this is where they’d start the stylized editing, nifty camera work, and have the popular music playing for a montage.”
She picked up the digital camera and handed it to Oliver carefully. “You know how to use this?”
“Sure.”
“Please be careful with it. I want you to take pictures of everything, everything in the kitchen, here at the table, in the living room, bathroom, all around except the bedroom. I’ll photograph the bedroom.”
“Okay, I can do that. What are you making?”
Meghan began lighting the stick matches and dropping them into the glass mixing bowl as they burned to the stub ends.
“We don’t have a fingerprint kit. You can make homemade fingerprint powder with carbon from the wooden matches, mixed with this,” she said and held up the box of corn starch. “Put these two ingredients together, mix well, and we have fingerprint powder.” She glanced to Oliver’s bare hands. “Make sure you don’t touch anything. Just take pictures.”
***
Over the next hour, while Oliver took pictures, Meghan began dusting surfaces with the makeshift fingerprint powder. It had a grainy consistency and a few times she had to dig out splinters of wood. After the fifth dusting and collecting the print with the strips of packing tape, Meghan had a system that worked. Each place she took prints, she labeled with a marker found in a junk drawer in the kitchen.
She hit the main areas that seemed relevant. Considering Nancy had company, the person who took her life. The fact there was no forced entry, that none of her neighbors complained about hearing a verbal dispute, meant Nancy knew her killer.
Meghan dusted the surfaces in the kitchen, the refrigerator handle, and the handle to the pantry. She dusted the bathroom. The facet handles, the shower knobs, the toilet handle, and the toilet seat. Meghan fingerprinted the doorknobs in the apartment, the coffee table surface. There was an ashtray with what looked like three different kinds of cigarette butts. Since she wasn’t a smoker, she’d have to check the brands.
By the time she finished fingerprinting the dresser, nightstand, and the closet doorknob, Oliver stood quietly in the doorway.
“You okay?” she asked. There were strips of packing tape in stacks on the floor. Everywhere she made a print set, Meghan labeled and placed them in piles on the floor.
“Yeah,” he replied quietly. “I ain’t never seen a dead person ‘cept my Gram, but I was really young when she died.”
Meghan took the digital camera from Oliver. “It’s not easy, I know. How well did you know Nancy?”
“Oh, you know. From the diner,” he said, suppressing a smile. “I go sometimes, and she was there.”
“She’s a pretty girl.”
“Yeah.” He looked somber. “She was.”
Meghan frowned, glancing around the bedside table. “Did you see her cell phone anywhere?”
“No.”
“I’m going to finish taking pictures in the bedroom. Collect the fingerprint samples. I’ve numbered all of them, so you don’t have to worry about mixing them up.” Meghan rolled her wavy copper hair over her ear as she looked at Oliver. “Listen, this is the time that I need you to be is a sworn police officer. Do you understand? You can’t talk to anyone out there about this. We need to find out everything we can. I’ll call the Alaska State Troopers as soon as I’m done interviewing Cheryl and Brian. We’ll get a list of people to talk to later. Right now, I want to preserve the rest of the evidence. Go downstairs, see if the coroner is here. We’ll move her as soon as I take some pictures and examine her more. You don’t need to stick around for that, okay?”
Meghan touched Oliver’s shoulder.
“Sure, Boss, I’ll take care of it.”
When Oliver collected the fingerprint tapes and left Meghan alone in the apartment, she took the rest of the photographs in the bedroom. After photos of Nancy’s body on the bed with the sheet where it was, Meghan sighed.
“I’m sorry, Nancy,” she whispered respectfully. Carefully, Meghan rolled back the duvet and folded it into squares. She did the same for the bed sheet. “I have to look, you know?”
Nancy wore a simple extra-large T-shirt to bed, and a pair of sweatpants, with socks.
“So, you were either expecting your company to leave when you went to bed. Or you weren’t in the mood last night.” Considering that Nancy still wore sweatpants and socks told Meghan that she likely hadn’t been sexually assaulted before the murder.
She leaned over Nancy. The woman lay on her stomach, faced the dresser and nightstand. There were bruises on her neck. Taking fingerprints from the skin was tricky with regular dust; the homemade powder was out of the question. When Meghan shipped the body back to Anchorage for an autopsy, she didn’t want a pathologist wondering why the corpse smelled like burnt matches and corn starch
.
Once Meghan collected all the photographic evidence she needed, she stood in the bedroom for a few minutes. Silently, she gave the woman a respectful, mourning moment. Before she left the apartment, Meghan double-checked under the bed, in case the killer left a calling card.
Satisfied she hadn’t missed anything; Meghan left the apartment to finish with the witnesses and get ready for the rest of her investigation.
Chapter Seven
It was after four in the afternoon. Meghan had a headache she chalked up to stress and the fact she’d missed out on coffee. Once she collected the memory card from the digital camera, she carefully handed it back to Calvin.
“Thank you.”
“You got me all wrong,” was all he said and left the area where most of the village had turned out to watch the show.
It was getting dark already. She’d burned up the meager daylight inside Nancy’s apartment. Now she had to coordinate the rest of the business.
“What’s next, Boss?” Oliver addressed her as his superior without malice. It was a term of hierarchy and nothing more. They were police officers before Meghan arrived to take over as chief of police, neither Olive nor Lester wanted the job, content with their roles as peace officers without the added drama that came with the title she bore.
“Can you and Lester help Eric move the body?”
Eric Kennedy, still wearing the work smock he wore at the trader store under the heavy jacket. There was black beaver fur hat on his head, a coveted head cover that was hot in the coldest of temperatures. Meghan stuck to the synthetic headgear and coats. Some of the Inuit people wore seal skin boots, fur-lined kuspuks—traditional hooded overshirts, and fur-lined mittens. Much of the traditional clothing was still heavily sought after in ‘bush’ Alaska. Native Alaskans were handy with needle and thread.
Since Eric ran the local trading post, he got the first choice of pedaled furs when the hunters brought them to town as long as the animals were in season and not protected species.
“Can you transport her to the clinic?” Meghan asked.
“I can,” Eric said. “But why am I taking her to the clinic?”
“We need to keep her in the morgue.”
“There’s not a morgue at the clinic, Chief,” Lester added. “Any time we have to hold a body, Eric takes it back to the store with him.”
Eric grinned. “I cleared out some space in the walk-in cooler. She’ll be fine there.”
Meghan did her best not to shake her head. “Okay. Can you at least lock the cooler?”
“Sure can.”
“Are you transporting her in that?”
Summer was a flash in the midnight sun. Eric knew how to take advantage of most business he had in town. He had the only van in town. It was a white Chevy van with murals of ice cream painted on the sides. For the few weeks, it was warm enough to drive through town, he blared music from the van, and village kids came from every corner of the little town to purchase ice cream cones and popsicle sticks. Nancy was about to be transported to the trading post cooler in the back of an ice cream truck.
“Sure, why not?” Eric didn’t seem bothered by it any more than Lester.
She waved them away and went to where Brian paced in front of the truck. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“Cheryl went back home,” he said. “I thought I should stay.”
“Thank you.” Meghan glanced around the area. People were staring at them — many of the closest groups hushed when she arrived to talk to Brian. “We should head to your house. We can talk there.”
“Okay.”
Before Meghan turned to get to the police truck, she asked, “Do you or Cheryl have Nancy’s cell phone?”
He shook his head.
She took out her smartphone, opened the dialer, and handed it to Brian. “Just type in Nancy’s number, don’t hit ‘dial,’ thanks.”
In the police truck, waiting a few minutes for the engine to warm up, the heater to work, Meghan held her breath and connected the number Brian put into her phone. Instead of going directly to voicemail, the phone rang six times until Nancy’s cheery voice came on and asked the caller to leave a message. The killer took Nancy’s phone. It wasn’t anywhere in the apartment; Meghan was sure of that. It was still on, wherever it was, and made her think that when she called Nancy’s phone, the killer heard it ringing.
Chapter Eight
The Town of Northern Lights had roughly three thousand residents in the immediate area. That was one thousand people for each of the police officers in town. During the winter, when the rivers and Kinguyakkii Bay froze solid, people came to town riding four-wheelers and snowmobiles. That meant more business for Kinguyakkii Police Department.
There were fistfights outside the bingo hall on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes the occasional squabble from a lovers’ triangle. If they were fortunate, when the mood struck, sometimes bootleggers brought a batch of booze into town. That ramped up the fights and added drunk driving to the mix.
They were meant to keep the peace. Since the North Slope Borough Council made the rules, Meghan had to follow them. She took the job as the Chief of Police for the town with the understanding that she was hired to do all the things those police officers did in the lower-forty-eight except she wasn’t issued a firearm. As Village Public Safety Officers, or VPSOs, had the power to arrest, even had handcuffs, but weapons were out of the question.
She had pepper spray. Lester and Oliver had pepper spray and handcuffs. They’d been certified to use the small canisters, but mostly the deterrents were for show and dare because Oliver sometimes sprayed caribou steaks with his pepper spray on the barbeque grill before he ate them.
When people from outlining villages came to town, most of them were armed. Everyone carried a gun in the wild. The environment was harsh and dangerous. Sometimes the occasional polar bear wandered into town. It was one of the very few animals on the planet that actively hunted, killed, and ate people. Polar bears weren’t picky about their food.
Meghan had to do it all without a gun and only had the occasional sharp sarcasm to wield when she came face to face with danger. People fought; it was human nature. Meghan accepted the job as chief because the town had its share of bumps but never murder. There was one unsolved homicide on the books, and that was years before she arrived.
***
Brian and Cheryl lived in a small two-bedroom house on Bison Street. It was five houses down from the house Meghan rented. She knew the couple from the diner, one of the three places in town to eat. Other than the pizza place, there was a Chinese restaurant operated by a pleasant Latino couple, Miguel and Leticia Rodriguez, who managed to incorporate a collection of traditional Mexican dishes. Midnight Sun Café was a greasy diner, bacon and eggs in the morning, French fries and steaks in the night. Meghan ruled out competition between the restaurants as a motive because each of the businesses balanced their menus not out to do or interfere with other restaurateurs.
They had a ten-year-old child who had lost his aunt and didn’t understand what was going on when Meghan visited the house. The Snyders sent the little boy to his room to play video games while they had a conversation with the police chief.
“Coffee?” Brian offered.
“Oh, God, yes, please.” Greedily, Meghan accepted the steaming cup. Cheryl put a collection of flavored creamer and sugar on the dinner table, done in a way that was practiced without thought. “That’s so good,” she said after the first sip. “Thank you.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Cheryl sat across from Meghan. Brian stood behind her, hand on her shoulder.
Meghan tried not to think about him not sitting beside his wife, tried not working out that he stood in the way that kept him from facing his wife, and his left hand tucked into his pants pocket as if the wedding band was a problem. She didn’t want to think about that. It was the sort of observation that got her into trouble sometimes as an FBI agent.
“Tell me a little about the las
t time you saw Nancy.”
The breath caught in Cheryl’s throat; Brian answered for the two of them. “She left work early Saturday. Normally she closes.”
“Did she have a date?”
“Nancy didn’t believe in dating,” Cheryl said with some venom on the words. Rather than squeeze out more details, Meghan waited. Sometimes people worked out they said things that could be considered suspicious and gave follow-up details to clarify the statement. “After her divorce, Nancy wanted to live her life on her own terms.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Brian added. “She came back here broke and never managed her money very well.”
“I noticed an aluminum Christmas cookie tin on the refrigerator,” Meghan pointed out. “It was empty.”
Cheryl nodded. “Nancy kept her tips from waitressing in that container.”
“I dusted it for fingerprints. I want to collect your fingerprints too before I leave. So that I can eliminate them from the apartment.”
“I thought the Alaska State Troopers are going to handle the investigation.” There was a worried look passing over his face, or perhaps Meghan was just too tired to read clearly. She glimpsed Brian rubbing his fingertips on his pants.
“They will, likely. For now, I want to get the preliminary interviews done so we don’t have to bother you again.” She turned the coffee mug in her hands. “Do you know who Nancy was seeing?”
Brian shook his head, looking away from Meghan. Cheryl pursed her lips. “She was very popular. I think Nancy peaked in high school.” It wasn’t animosity; their sibling relationship was a mystery to anyone looking in on them. Like most sisters, they had a dialogue between them that outsiders might consider rude or cruel.
While Meghan felt it was a little bitter to talk about her sister negatively, grieving was a fickle thing, no two people grieved the same way, and there were so many levels, anger and jealousy happened sometimes, and Meghan didn’t want to read too much into it.
A Cold Day for Murder Page 3