A Cold Day for Murder

by Leigh Mayberry

  “That sounds like a lot of work.” Lester moved back to the front counter. He settled in the chair. This time he put his boots on the shelf. With the front door locked, no one was going to notice him, even if he happened to doze a little.

  “I’m going to head out for a while.” She’d dressed in a knit cap and a coat that wasn’t her oversized winter gear. Meghan put on gloves and wore her favorite pair of bunny boots. The boots were designed for arctic conditions with an extreme cold vapor barrier separating feet from the environment. The boots were expensive, but Meghan wanted to keep her toes from frostbite. While it was only 38 F° not cold enough to freeze toes, it was nice to have warm feet when she spent so much time on them. “Don’t let anyone in that doesn’t belong here.

  “No problem, Chief.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The real estate company that managed Mountain Manor had a satellite office in Kinguyakkii. The sign on the door said someone would return to the office in fifteen minutes, but Meghan heard a male voice through the door. The first floor of the Chena Hotel on Shore Drive leased rooms for businesses. Sometimes people wanted to know what they were getting into before they built another building in town. The hotel catered to visitors who wanted to see what real Alaska was like, visit friends or family from Anchorage or the lower-forty-eight, or set up shop and test the cold waters.

  Blue Sky Realty office was close to the fire exit. Meghan rapped on the door. The voice stopped talking. When no one came to the door, Meghan doubled-down on the knocking, this time with more authority.

  The door opened to an unshaven face that looked around at Meghan from the edge of the door.

  “I’m Chief Sheppard,” she started. Her foot was already past the threshold where the door couldn’t close. “Can I come in a minute?”

  “Sure, sorry,” he said. “I stepped out for lunch, forgot to take the sign off the door.” He pulled the plastic clock off the nail on the outer door and tossed it to a nearby table. There was no bed in the room, only a desk, and a flat screen TV that showed a muted basketball game.

  “I’m Nickolas Hodge. What can I do for you, Chief Sheppard?”

  She shook hands with him before he sat down at the table. There was a shadow of Native Alaskan in him, the raven hair, and the athletic build. Rural Alaska was all about basketball, and either Hodge devoted a significant portion of the furnishings to division basketball teams with the overabundant sports paraphernalia or the real estate company invested in a team.

  “I checked on a few things around town. I’m sure you heard what happened.”

  He nodded. Hodge sat down at his messy desk. He kept watching the television behind Meghan as she took a seat facing the desk.

  “I’m curious if you’ve had any problems with tenants not making their rent.”

  He gave Meghan a look as if she’d presented him with a big shit sandwich and expected him to take a bite. “You’re serious?”

  “I am. Is there something wrong?”

  “Well, it’s just every time I want to get the police involved with tenants who don’t pay their rent, my bosses tell me to leave it alone. They send these guys’ certified letters, threaten to garnish wages and threaten eviction. But they never follow through.”

  “When you mean ‘these guys’ are you talking about anyone specifically?” she asked. Hodge had a bitter tone about his job, and it was her guess on whether or not that had to do with him living voluntarily or involuntarily in Kinguyakkii.

  “I mean the tenants who don’t pay rent.”

  “I take it there are a few.”

  Hodge laughed without humor. “Try about a third of the tenants in the building.” He got up from the desk, went to a filing cabinet, and went through files. From various files, he pulled red copy paper. He made a stack of documents. Once collected, Hodge grabbed the papers and dropped them in front of Meghan on the desk. She made no move to look at them or pick up the papers. He pointed at the stack. “We got thirty units in that building. I’ve got about fifteen of those tenants who are behind on their rent. About five of those haven’t paid rent all winter.”

  He dropped in the chair again, glanced to the score on the TV. “Now I get hounded by my bosses when these guys don’t pay. They yell at me to take care of it. But they tie my hands. They tell me I got to do it civilly. That I can’t call you to go and knock on their door, to get them to do something,” he said, shoving the stack of papers on the desk. “My bosses come down on me, hold these telephone conferences from Seattle trying to help me get a handle on the morons who don’t want to pay their rent.”

  Meghan cleared her throat. Hodge grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the coat hanging on the chair. Disregarding the ‘no smoking’ policy the hotel had, he lit a cigarette in front of the town cop with no regard for following the rules.

  “I don’t see how I’m supposed to collect money from them when my company isn’t willing to file charges against the tenants.”

  “Is there anyone who was recently behind and suddenly made a payment, between Saturday and today?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, pressing the cigarette between his lips, Hodge dug through the various stacks of paper on his desk, if there was a filing system Meghan didn’t see it. Hodge found what he wanted and handed it to Meghan. “This guy lives on the third floor of the apartment building. He paid two months back rent on Monday morning. He paid in cash.”

  Meghan suppressed, raising her eyebrows when the buzzer went off in her head. “What about Nancy McCormick?” she asked. “She ever fall behind on her rent?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I’d have to look. I know she was never thirty-days or sixty-days past due. I got one family that’s one hundred fifty days past due. Can you do anything about them?”

  “The real estate company has to go through the legal channels, take the tenant to small claims court. You know how it is here, you can’t just evict someone when its winter in Alaska.”

  “Yeah, I know—I know, but it’s always winter in Kinguyakkii. Nothing like a little bad press toward the real estate company,” he added. Hodge snuffed out the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the desk. He immediately lit a second cigarette. “I even went and talked to the mayor of this town. He was no help at all.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Hell no,” he said venomously. “I’m from Palmer. This kind of thing happened in Palmer and the police would throw out people into the streets. I can’t wait to get out of here.” The last part came out as if a verbalized thought and wasn’t meant for Meghan. She chose to ignore it.

  Meghan said nothing about Hodge’s smoking, choking her air supply or his attitude toward locals. She didn’t know if the rules were different in Palmer than Kinguyakkii, but the court wasn’t interested in people freezing to death in the bush.

  Hodge pointed the glowing end of the cigarette at Meghan. “Any chance of me getting Nancy’s apartment rented? I got people on the waiting lists that have a clear background and credit checks if I can get into her apartment that would be great.”

  Meghan stood up. She needed fresh air since it dissipated in the office. Hodge watched the game a little more. “Tell you what I can do. First, we’re in the middle of an active police investigation, so the apartment isn’t available any time soon. But why don’t you print off a list of tenants who are behind on their rent? Include the tenant who made the back rent recently.”

  Hodge stood, scooped the red copy papers he’d pulled initially from the tenant files and tried to hand them to Meghan. She shook her head.

  “I’d like fresh copies.”

  “It’ll take time, and I gotta print them off.” There was a hint of annoyance in his voice as if he wanted the police to help but wasn’t willing to put in the effort to accommodate her.

  “That’s fine. I’ll wait.” She moved away from the front of the desk and looked at the rest of the office. The basketball jerseys on the wall, the bookshelf had trophies and other memorabili
a. “You play?”

  “I did in college. I screwed up my knee. Lost my scholarship,” Nickolas spoke as he worked on the laptop. The printer whirred to life began spitting fresh late notices.

  “You went to college in Alaska?”

  “I started in Alaska. My second term I transferred to Seattle. I ended up in Arizona after I hurt my knee. I got my real estate license there, but you know how hard it is to sell a house?”

  “No idea.” She’d made her way along the available wall, looking at high school pictures, trophies with Nickolas Hodge’s name on the placards.

  “Nancy came back from Arizona three years ago.”

  “I was living in Phoenix. I think Nancy was from Mesa. I saw that on her application.” He smiled and added, “feels like a small world sometimes. You travel three thousand miles and run into someone from your home state.

  “You ran into her in Arizona. You ever get to know her?” There was abuzz in her head — crosses between talking to people that were suspects, and the general public. Aged law enforcement officers, LEOs eventually spoke to everyone the same, the defaulted to the negative side of interviews. It wasn’t that older cops thought everyone was suspect; they merely realized that everyone was suspicious of something; it was the level of the crime that mattered after a while.

  “No, see her around sometimes. See her here a lot. You know, small town. See her at least once a month when she dropped off rent.” The late noticed printed out. Hodge gathered them, tamped the edges of the paper on the desk and handed them to Meghan. “You get the guy who killed her yet?”

  This time she couldn’t stop her eyebrows from darting upward. “The guy?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah. I mean come on, a hot chick like Nancy must have been a guy that killed her.”

  “Okay.” She lifted the papers. “Did you include the guy who paid yesterday?”

  “Yeah, his late noticed was still from last month. Can you get these people to pay? I would appreciate that.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Hodge finished the second cigarette. He snubbed out the smoldering tip in the ashtray and went around the desk as Meghan went for the door. He had that look in his eye that told Meghan what to expect next. Nickolas Hodge was the type-A personality kind of guy who, as Cheryl suggested of Nancy, ‘peaked in high school.’ He was handsome in a compelling way, a former ballplayer, tall enough to have to look up when he was still a few feet away from her. He was a few years younger than Meghan, around Nancy’s age. “So, you married, Chief?”

  Once upon a time, it was rumored Alaska’s ratio of men to women was a hundred to one. Closer figures put the ratio at five to one; but a guy like Hodge, a man who wasn’t afraid to complain about tenants, make inflammatory statements about tenants in a racial context, he’d hit on anyone, like a freshwater eel in Alaska; they were always around, you just didn’t want to hook one.

  It took everything she had to hold back, laughing out loud. He was too confident, too sure of himself. Here she was in the middle of a murder investigation, Hodge wanted to investigate Meghan’s bedroom.

  “I’m in a relationship,” she said lightly. It was true if that relationship had to do with her career. She opened the door and stepped into the hallway, retreating from the layer of blue cigarette smoke. “Thanks for the notices. I’ll be in touch.”

  Hodge took the message as an encouraging sign. Reaching into the pocket of his slacks, he removed a silver case and opened it. The business card was expensive. The kind A-list realtors used to impress their clients. “My cell phone is on there. Give me a call.”

  “Thank you,” she said, collecting the card and heading toward the lobby. She didn’t have to look back to know Hodge was watching her ass as she walked away.

  Meghan got into the Suburban, dropped the stack of papers on the passenger seat, tossed the business card in the center column, and started the car. She pressed her sleeve to her nose, and then pulled at her hair, pressed it to her nose. The clothes and her clean hair both smelled like cigarettes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no such thing as garden variety controversy with Duane. While gardens weren’t hard to maintain in Alaska, they grew very well during the summer months, most often below the polar circle, Duane usually planted negativity and allowed it to flourish. If it wasn’t receipts and invoices for printer cartridges and photo paper, there was something else planted and bubbled to the surface. Granted, Meghan knew before it happened that he’d fume over the latest surprise.

  “You know there’s no smoking in company vehicles.” It was as if the announcement had merit. She knew the mayor smoked, even smoked in his pickup truck. That truck had a town decal on the doors. Somehow, hypocrisy was biased.

  She’d once found an apple wedged under the rear seat of the Suburban. It was ancient and shriveled. Not only did it look a little like Mother Theresa it miraculously managed to sprout a shoot from the area that sunlight scratched through the window and shone against the back seat. Obliged to do something noble after feeling guilty about removing it from the balanced interior, Meghan buried it in the ground.

  Kinguyakkii once had a designated forest of one tree, a cultivated dogwood that needed tending and care because the environment was too inhospitable for it to grow without nurturing. A few years before Meghan arrived, a disgruntled employee of the North Slope Borough Council cut it down with a hatchet in a final fit of frustration against the Council Members who wouldn’t vote in favor of planting more trees and allocating funds for someone to maintain the single tree forest.

  When she faced Duane towering over her, peering at her as if still trying desperately to intimidate her or possibly set her on fire with an evil look, he had an agenda that went well beyond her, Meghan knew that.

  His brother-in-law wanted to be the Chief of Police. Only Meghan ran without competing and had a zero-end game without trying. North Slope Borough Council members hired her because she had applied for the job, mostly. The fact that she has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, a Master’s in Sociology, and a minor in Public Safety Administration put her as top and only candidate for the position. The fact she was a retired Special Agent for the FBI was just gravy. Duane’s brother had criminal associates in Seattle, worked as an attorney in a less than a reputable law firm, had something to do with less intellectually challenged members of the Council to pass on him, in favor of Meghan.

  “I don’t smoke, Duane.” She breezed through the gateway separating police from civilians. Lester stood like a lonely tree in a forgotten forest in front of the small door and hadn’t let Duane pass. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

  “I got a receipt for a special-order package, an Express Mail from Quantico, Virginia.”

  Meghan shrugged out of her jacket, turned to Duane still hovering on the civilian side of the counter. “Where’s my package?” she demanded.

  Duane made a face that was caught between annoyed and irritable bowel. “We don’t get Express Mail in Kinguyakkii, do you know why?” It was rhetorical, and Meghan sighed because she knew he’d— “Because the United State Post Office sends a special carrier out with the package. You know we have to pay for the fuel charges.”

  “Oh please, we live in the United States, Duane, it can’t be that—oh, right.” He presented the cost of shipping the package. The bill was almost as much as the order. “Well, okay. But we needed it.”

  “You’re not getting it.” It was a finality that wasn’t open for debate. Duane turned and left the office. The exit door hung open for a while after he stepped down to the gravel and started marching across space between the police station and Town Hall. The wind caught the door and slammed it. Lester gave Meghan a look of satisfaction and sat down again.

  Too heated up to grab the jacket, Meghan went through the little gateway and out the door. She closed it behind her instead of letting it slam. The chilly northern breeze pushed at her hair, coated her face and hands, the exposed skin with icy fingers.
Meghan hurried to Town Hall.

  She went through the front door. Unlike the police station, leftover contractor trailers, Kinguyakkii Town Hall was a real business. Built with aesthetic charm, the aluminum roof kept snow from building up, the ivory façade was just enough of color to pick out the building within snowdrifts during the winter. Inside was a plush waiting room with leather sofas, a walnut coffee table, and current subscriptions to hunting and fishing magazines. Town Hall never received enough visitors for anyone other than Duane to read the magazines.

  Shelley Bass was Duane’s office administrator. She looked up from the face of her smartphone, and the pleasant smile evaporated as soon as she saw Meghan glaring at her. “Mr. Warren is leaving for the evening, Meghan. He said not to disturb him.”

  Meghan looked beyond the perfect raven hair, the salon nails, and expensive eye shadow. Shelley would be pretty if she didn’t have such a miserable demeanor. She was perfect for Duane.

  Meghan was about to storm back to Duane’s office down the small corridor with soft LED lighting and commissioned Alaskan landscape paintings on the walls. Then she saw what she wanted, why she’d followed Duane across the property.

  “You can’t touch that.” Shelley swiveled in the high-back black leather chair at her cherry wood desk. She didn’t get up.

  Meghan grabbed the Express Mailbox. She saw the handwriting on the receipt. Carrying it back to Shelley’s desk, Meghan kept her temper.

  “You should know, Shelley, that I am, like it or not, the Chief of Police. Now I know you work for Duane, but I work for the North Slope Borough Council, and while technically Duane is my boss, only in the very loosest sense of the word, I am not governed by him. Or you.” Meghan made sure she tilted the package, so the paperwork affixed to the top showed at Shelley. “Did you know it’s a federal offense to sign another person’s name to a piece of mail? You misspelled my name. It’s already here, you didn’t refuse the package, and since you signed for it, it now belongs to me.” She gave Shelley her best smile. “Thank you.”