A Cold Day for Murder

by Leigh Mayberry

  Carrying the package out into the weather, Meghan didn’t bother closing the door behind her, letting the wind push at the door until Shelley had to leave the safety of the desk to close and lock it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Ammattauq Native Trader Store was a little less traditional now than it probably was a hundred years ago. There were two stores in Kinguyakkii. Meghan did her shopping at a typical grocery and general merchandise store. There was an art to ordering fresh fruit, meats, and dairy in rural Alaska and expecting the product to arrive before the shelf life terminated or the meat spoiled. So far, she’d been lucky, and the store managers at the franchise market were savvy about maintaining customers by keeping fresh food stocked on the shelves. Even in Kinguyakkii, it was impossible to compete with online ordering. It took a little longer to get orders, but the post office was usually busier than any other business in town.

  Eric Kennedy managed the store. He had a knack for remembering everyone he saw by name. He was a lifelong Alaskan and had a lot of respect for the traditional values that were lost on most everyone else in the southern states; and in Alaska, they were all southern states.

  “What can I do for you tonight, Chief Sheppard?” He wore a blue apron while he stocked the shelves. His paunch stuck out like he was a pregnant man about to be famous for an impossible condition. The shop was filled with mostly camping equipment, fishing supplies, and non-perishable foods in cans. He sold condensed milk by the case because some people liked to drink it like a can of soda. The stack of three-gallon tubs of vegetable shortening was an essential ingredient for some classic tundra recipes. Sugar was sold in ten pound and twenty-five pound bags, not meager five pound bags. When people were snowed in for a month, it was good to have food supplies that kept up the calories when they had to wait a few weeks to dig out of the drifts or get back to town.

  The trader store was an extension of the Native Alaskan cultural and hosted by the North Slope Borough. Trappers brought animal hides, sides of caribou, seal oil, seal and whale steaks. They traded the items over the counter with Eric as a mediator to make sure everyone received their fair market share. It wasn’t a job for the squeamish and certainly something Meghan could do because it was challenging to think about the environment when Native Alaskans wanted to continue to live off the land. They had every right, and she respected it. Eric made sure the product was safe, and the North Slope Borough kept detailed records for fish and game state regulators.

  “I wanted to check on Nancy.”

  Eric wiped his hands. He’d been filleting halibut steaks. He put the knife in the sink behind the glass cooler counter and washed his hands. While he dried them on the apron, he motioned for Meghan to follow him through the backroom doors.

  The walk-in freezer wasn’t part of the original building. It was once a trailer for a refrigeration truck. When the additions for the trading store happened, they added onto the store by building around the cooler trailer. It ran off town electric, but if the power went out, it had backup generators.

  She tried ignoring the stacks of muktuk on the shelves, hard to get more traditional Alaskan than frozen whale skin and blubber.

  “She’s safe and sound.” Eric stood back, allowing Meghan to give the body a quick look. They had wrapped her in the sheets from the bed with bungee straps not too tight around the body to keep the sheets against her and secure her legs and arms for transport. Meghan put on medical gloves before she did anything else.

  She rolled back the sheet away from Nancy’s face and neck. She got closer. There was purplish bruising that showed up more around Nancy’s throat.

  “What’s that?” he asked, looking at the kit Meghan brought with her, “Looks expensive.”

  “It is.” Meghan squatted next to the steel table in the cooler and opened the FBI latent fingerprint kit she’d ordered and had express shipped to her from Quantico. The other prints Meghan took at the apartment were good; she didn’t need to print them again. But she wanted the genuine kit to use to attempt fingerprints from Nancy’s face and neck.

  Eric stood by, quietly watching Meghan work. She was delicate and deliberate with dusting and collecting. When she got what she wanted from Nancy, Meghan put away the collection equipment.

  “Do you have a tissue or paper towel?” she asked.

  Eric grabbed a clean dish towel and handed it to Meghan. He watched her wipe off the excess powder from the body. “Do you know what Cheryl and Brian are planning for her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to them about it. I wanted to get Nancy to Anchorage for an autopsy. The report I sent to the state troopers seemed to satisfy them enough with my preliminary report. They’re in no hurry to open her up.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “This isn’t the sort of thing that happens around here.”

  “She wasn’t assaulted, and I don’t know if I collected anything usable from her.” Meghan touched Nancy’s hair, brushed it into place.

  “Her hyoid bone’s crushed,” Eric mentioned indifferently.

  “How can you tell?” She looked at Nancy again.

  “Oh, before I brought her to the cooler, I went by the clinic and had her X-rayed for you.”

  Meghan shook her head. She followed Eric out of the cooler and further into the back storeroom. It was tidy and stocked full. He had a friendly office with a collection of equipment that balanced between the store manager and coroner. There was an X-ray light board on the back wall. He found the X-ray slides and put up two of Nancy’s neck. “See here,” he said, pointing to the neck.

  The U-shaped bone in the upper neck was meant to support the human tongue. The hyoid bone was delicate and didn’t take a lot of pressure to crush. The X-ray showed Nancy’s hyoid was more M-shaped than U-shaped. “It tore into the thyroid cartilage here,” he said pointing. “Rarely occurs in fractures, most of the time it breaks during strangulation. What?”

  Meghan was smiling at him. “I am impressed, Eric. You went above and beyond. I didn’t even think to get Nancy X-rayed.”

  “I do what I can, Chief.” He puffed up at the compliment. “I know Brian and Cheryl don’t have a lot of money to have her sent to Anchorage for cremation.”

  “What do you think they’ll want to do?”

  “Well, usually the town gets together, and we’ll dig her grave out there in the cemetery. Kinguyakkii Cemetery was a hodge-podge planting of loved ones in the village. Some people afforded the shipping charges for cremation. Others had to wait for spring and summer to break ground and dig deep enough to put their loved ones in the ground. There was one granite headstone in the cemetery; someone had it shipped from Anchorage in the 1970s. Most of the time, people whittled crosses out of saplings from downriver or carved their one designed headstone from rocks found along the shoreline or somewhere on the tundra. “It won’t be until June or July before the ground’s thawed enough for us to bury Nancy.”

  “Can you keep her that long in here?” she asked delicately. There had to be some regulations about storing food products near corpses. It wasn’t Meghan’s jurisdiction, and she had enough on her plate to worry about.

  “I’ll do what I can for the family.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Everyone knew Nancy. I never dated her.” He held up his left hand, flashing his ring finger.

  “You’re married. I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, you don’t come in here. She’s around sometimes. My wife helps me with some of the village elders who don’t want to speak English. We know they’re coming to town with something special, like carved ivory, jade jewelry, or gold, Linda comes in to greet them. I want to make sure they get a fair trade for their stuff. And I contact the Alaska Native Heritage Center if any of the crafts are antique. I can’t trade most of the stuff that’s too old, but I can put the family in touch with curators.”

  “You deal in antiquities?” Meghan glanced around the backroom. It was a typical storeroom. Near the back, close to th
e rear exit, there was a modern cage that went from floor to ceiling. At the question, Eric motioned for Meghan to take the added step to see inside the locked cage.

  There were hand carved ivory pieces from walrus harvest, bone carvings, chunks of metal and rock — a collection of Alaska artisan masks, skin drums, figurines covered in fur kuspuks. The shelves were filled with a native museum’s dream collection.

  “I hold onto a lot of these for elders. Sometimes the young generations think it’s just something to pass along, make a little money for trade. If I get something from one of the older families, something that I think has been handed down, I’ll make a deal, get Linda involved, and we have a guy that flies out from Anchorage to date the artifacts. If they think it’s something important, Linda gets involved, and we start real negotiations. She speaks Inupiaq, Yup’ik, and a little Athabaskan.” He smiled and shrugged proudly.

  “That’s good to know in case I run into any language barriers.” Meghan thumbed at the large lumps of dirty rocks on the bottom plates of the metal shelves inside the cage. “Are those what I think they are?”

  Eric saw the hunks of dirty rocks with small breaks in the mud that caught the light and flashed goldenly. “Yeah,” he said with a modest nod. “I get those sometimes. When I do, I set up an account with the owner. They usually get whatever they want in trade, and the gold is like a credit account. Sometimes I have to cash-in one of those.” They walked away from the cage. Meghan glanced at the very simple padlock on the steel cage. She had enough on her plate to worry about the dollar value in the Alaskan art or the few pounds of gold casually lying on the floor in a small trading post store.

  “Most of the time the elders don’t speak English because they don’t want to, you know that.” He was more than met the eye, Meghan suddenly realized. She felt ashamed in thinking people living in rural Alaska were straightforward, narrow-minded people. She realized while they were unfussy, many of her neighbors made decisions to live in an inhospitable environment out of choice, not a necessity. “Linda can strike up a conversation with anyone. She’s great at bartering too. The university uses her language skills sometimes when they need correct pronunciations.”

  “Like when people mispronounce Kinguyakkii.”

  He smiled. “Just like that, you’re close, but not too many people get it right.”

  “I’ll work on it. Thank you for your help, Eric.” She’d underestimated him. Aside from the unorthodox approach to handling the dead, Eric turned out to be an asset instead of a liability.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The name at the top of her list was a neighbor down the hall from Nancy McCormick. According to the late notice list Nickolas printed for Meghan from the Blue Sky Realty tenants, Vincent Atkinson caught up three months back rent in a day. That was a lot of cash all at once. While Cheryl wasn’t confident about the amount of money in the cookie tin, she knew Nancy was frivolous, more than she could afford. There were a lot of online ordered shoes in the dead woman’s closest. The type of shoes no one in Kinguyakkii could wear, except maybe on a Thursday afternoon in mid-August when they got a warm, sunny day.

  Cheryl suspected there might have been between a thousand to fifteen hundred in cash. While that wasn’t enough to pay three months back rent, it was a chunk of money that was stolen during the murder. Meghan was almost sure; money wasn’t the motivating factor for Nancy’s death. The woman was impulsive. Meghan sat in the driver’s seat of the Chevy staring up at the face of the Mountain Manor apartment complex. Most of the windows had drawn shades, some had cardboard over the windows or aluminum foil, trapping heat in and midnight sun out when the sun happened. It was like Christmas decorations in March. Some people just left them up because Christmas came back around again, eventually.

  There were too many people in the complex to question about Nancy’s murder. Meghan knew that immediately. That’s why she wanted to focus on what was inside the apartment, not around it. The money was one way to narrow the search parameters.

  “Hey Boss,” Oliver said when he rolled up to Mountain Manor where Meghan had parked. The building had several stanchions that protected the place from larger vehicles, while snowmobiles and four-wheelers got closer to the building. Oliver pulled up and parked the Polaris close to the Suburban. “What did you need?”

  Meghan wanted backup when she questioned the suspect. Since it was after eight on Tuesday night, and ice fog rolled across the tundra from the bordering tundra fields, pushing into the bay. Kinguyakkii was nestled on a gravel spit of a peninsula that reached into Kinguyakkii Bay. It was a perfect launch point for barges and vessels under a hundred and twenty feet designed for shallow water. The bay wasn’t deep enough for luxury boats, which meant unlike Juneau and Ketchikan, Alaska, tourists had to take flights into the town or crawl along the shoreline. Outside the low protective mountains that protected the harbor, the chop of the Bering Sea wasn’t the ideal water fun people expected when they boarded cruise ships.

  “How well do you know Vincent Atkinson?” she asked, reading his name from the list Hodge gave her.

  Oliver scratched his chin after removing the heavy gloves he used riding the four-wheeler. “His family lives in Kivalina. He’s working at the store there, as far as I know.” Lester went home for the evening, Oliver had the night shift, and Meghan had a few hours off here and there when there wasn’t something pressing, she had to solve, like a murder.

  “Well, I want to have face to face with him, and I wanted you as a backup.” They started walking together into the apartment complex. Through the foyer, tenants moved to the side for her and Oliver, nodding in recognition. Other than the oversized winter coat, the rusty blue Suburban, and the Kinguyakkii police patch on her jacket, Meghan was just another sexless person wearing cold weather gear at the tail-end of March when anywhere else in the US snows departed and new life sprang from spring grounds.

  “Looks like ice fog coming,” Oliver commented about the layer of white mist that tinkled when it hit metal as it drifted through town. “Could last a couple of days,” he added. He knew his weather, knew the people in town, and with a body like a solid brick of ice, Meghan was glad to have Oliver around when it came to moving people who didn’t want to be touched or move on their own.

  They made their way upstairs through the stairwell that was closest to Nancy’s apartment. On the third floor, Apartment 3E was taped off with yellow caution tape and duct tape. It wasn’t pretty, but it kept people out of the crime scene.

  Heavy boots plodded down the hall to Apartment 3G where Meghan knocked on the door. She unzipped the outerwear because the hallway was pushing 80°F.

  The television inside the apartment was loud enough to hear the canned laughter from a rerun of a sitcom. The door opened, a short Inuit man with black socks, prescription glasses, and a round belly stood before Meghan and Oliver. She felt better about having to take him down if he made a run for it. She was eye to eye with him.

  “Vincent Atkinson?” she asked, ready to start questioning him.

  “Hey, Vince,” Oliver said. “We’re here because Nancy’s dead and we want to know if you killed her.”

  Meghan felt the breath catch in her throat. While she wanted Oliver to join her for safety sake, and it was good for him to shadow her when she interrogated suspects, he made a preemptive accusation that could have gone awry quickly.

  Instead of running, or maybe shooting both of the police officers, Vincent sniggered. “Eh, what?”

  “Is it okay if we come in?” she asked. It took no time at all to draw a crowd. Already neighbors were poking out their heads, watching Oliver and Meghan harass one of the neighbors in the building.

  Oliver moved into the apartment ahead of Meghan. She made eye contact with the older adult across the hall from Vincent before closing the door behind her. It was a look of ‘you’re next’ that hopefully got through to him to close the door and stay out of the way.

  Inside the apartment, Vincent went back to the small lov
e seat and dropped on worn out cushions that formed to his large rump. There was a bag of cheese puffs in front of him on the coffee table and a two-liter bottle of soda without a glass. Vincent was catching up on binge-watching cable comedy shows and on his way to early diabetes. He switched off the television.

  “So, I’m following up on your neighbor.”

  “Yeah, Nancy,” he said.

  “Well, I’m curious about how you managed to pay three months back rent on Monday.”

  A cheese puff paused just outside the mouth agape as Vincent looked from Meghan to Oliver and back again. Inserting the puff, he talked around it. “What’s that got to do with Nancy dying?”

  “Well, there—ow.” Oliver rubbed his arm where Meghan poked him with her pen from taking notes. She glared at him to keep quiet before addressing Vincent.

  “I got a letter from Blue Sky Realty; they own this building. It says here you were three months behind on your rent until yesterday. I’m curious where all the money came from.”

  Vincent didn’t look insulted; he sighed and shook his head. He stared at the blank screen of the TV. “I had to borrow some money from my gram. I ain’t proud of it. I don’t get enough hours at the store, you know?”

  Meghan took in the rest of his apartment. He didn’t have high standards when it came to clothing or furniture. Even his boots were older. Meghan was reasonably satisfied that even a conscientious murderer wouldn’t use stolen money to pay back rent on an apartment a few doors down from the girl who was murdered. It was a lost cause. She knew the moment Vincent opened the door. Nonetheless, the due process sometimes took a few loose turns before it turned right again.

  ***

  Back outside, Oliver straddled the Polaris after running a glove over the seat to clear the moisture. Meghan needed to get back to the station. Oliver was officially on duty, but over the last few days, between him and Lester, they had logged a lot of hours, and one thing the town never did was pay overtime.