by Jack Lively
The man said, “Driver’s license.” He held up a finger and disappeared into the office. Which was a great excuse for him to harvest the initial offerings of the coffee machine, quietly dripping away in the background. After the man had collected the resuscitating hot beverage into a waiting cup, he found his way to the filing cabinet. A minute later he came out with a photocopied driver’s license. The man held it in front of us with his left hand, with his right he sucked down the coffee.
Massachusetts driver’s license featuring one George Abrams, a couple of years younger than the photo that his mother showed me.
The boat man said, “This isn’t the guy who brought the boat back. What’s the deal, they running drugs?”
Ellie said, “No.”
I said, “You didn’t ask why a different guy was returning the boat?”
“The boat came back, that was a relief. Like, one more hassle taken out of my goddamned life.” He was remembering. “Guy who brought her back was apologetic. Paid the fee, plus the penalty, plus an extra hundred for the hassle.”
I said, “What did he look like?”
The man jutted his chin at me. “Like you. A mid-thirties male who looked like he could complete fifty pull-ups and a hundred push-ups in under five minutes. Unlike me, who needs coffee just to start up the old neurons. Are we done here, fellas? I got shit to do.”
I looked at Ellie. She shrugged. I said, “I guess that’s it.”
We walked up to the road.
Ellie said, “Not looking good for George Abrams.”
When we came to Ellie’s truck I leaned against it and looked out to the ocean. I said, “George Abrams takes a boat out, it comes back a couple of weeks later without him. Chapman told me that Abrams had a portable research kit in a pelican case. No mention of that coming back.”
Ellie said, “Triangulation. George Abrams rents the boat. His mother comes up and is followed by a bunch of guys who are working for Mister Lawrence. He disappears, she is killed.”
“Assumed to be working for Mister Lawrence.”
“Mister Lawrence owns the property up past the fire tower, plus Bell Island, an abandoned military research facility.”
I said, “Deduction. George Abrams took the boat out there to Bell Island with his pelican case full of research gear. Then he disappeared.”
Ellie said, “Boat comes back with someone else, who’s happy to pay the late fee, no questions asked. Avoid the escalation.”
I looked at her hard. “Conclusion. Not looking good for George Abrams.”
The horn behind the Eagle Cove cannery blows at eight o’clock in the morning, heralding a new day. Fish to be caught, fish to be processed. Packed into cans. Stacked up in room-sized ovens. Superheated in rows and stacks, like miniature coffins. Forklifted out to cool. There are two kinds of people who listen for that horn, the cannery workers asleep in their dormitory beds, and the fishermen asleep in their narrow berths.
The salmon season might have been closed, but work continued at Eagle Cove, at least for the next couple of weeks. Catching up on a successful salmon season. Prepping for the winter. Maybe switching over from salmon to crab, or halibut, or whatever else was next up for harvest. Which meant that breakfast rolls were still happening for the time being. Which was as good a reason as any to get out of a bunk. Ellie and I came through the cannery floor at nine. I was rolling the bike, retrieved from the place I’d left it the night before.
We found Guilfoyle sitting on a railway sleeper, looking out over the water. He held a hot breakfast roll in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Over by the oil dock, a bald eagle perched on a post looking for something to kill or scavenge.
Guilfoyle watched us coming over. I leaned the bike against the sleeper and made the introductions. “Guilfoyle, Ellie. Ellie, Guilfoyle.” They shook hands. I said, “Sorry I couldn’t get the bike back last night.”
Guilfoyle was finishing up a bite of his breakfast roll. The cannery people have a counter with a window where a guy can get one for himself. Just walk on up and put out the hand. Someone will put a freshly baked hot package in it. A package of cheese, egg, and sausage with ketchup and hot sauce included inside some kind of dough.
Ellie saw me looking at Guilfoyle’s roll. She was shocked. “You’re still hungry?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” Looked at her. “Not you?”
“No, not me.”
I said, “Give me a second.”
Three minutes later, I was walking back with a breakfast roll of my own, hot and heavy in my right hand. A nutritious bundle of grease, protein, and carbohydrates. My motto is ‘get it while you can’. A cup of coffee was balanced in my left hand. Black, no sugar. Guilfoyle was finishing his roll, the last corner disappearing into his beard. Ellie was talking. When I came up on them, they both turned to me.
I said, “So where were we?”
Guilfoyle said, “We’re at the part where you ask me to take you out to Bell Island. You’ve moved from fisherman to private detective with a single shave.”
I said, “It’s an old Navy research base. Just want to take a look at it.” I jerked a thumb at Ellie. “She tell you about the missing kid?”
Guilfoyle said, “Yes. She did. Naval Surface Warfare Center is what they called it officially, the base out on Bell Island. The research was secret, but not the existence of that base. A lot of stories flung around about that. I’d be happy to take a look, just for my own curiosity. I’m assuming this is connected to the murders over at Beaver Falls everyone is talking about.”
I nodded. “It is.” Ellie shot me a look, I looked away and sat down on the sleeper next to Guilfoyle.
He said, “I heard a boat got scuttled out in the passage last night.”
“That right?”
“Apparently so.”
Ellie looked at me again. I hadn’t told her about the zodiac. I played it poker-faced. “They going to dive for it?”
He said, “Doubt it.”
I blew on my breakfast roll; it was very hot. “They’d need a damn good reason to bring in a dive team, what is it, seventy meters? For the time it would take to figure out what happened. Engine go down?”
“Yup.”
I said, “Well there you go. No chance of getting that working again, if the valves were open.”
Guilfoyle said, “More like eighty-five meters in that part of the channel.”
The sausage roll was exceptionally good. I finished off the last corner and washed it down with the end of the coffee. I stood up. “So let’s do it.”
Guilfoyle stayed seated. “Not right this minute, Keeler.”
I said, “What’s the problem?”
He said, “Bilge is getting pumped out this morning. Probably take until after lunch, knowing those guys. Let’s say three thirty or four to be safe.”
I looked at Ellie. She shrugged, said, “So, we’ll come back.”
We walked over to where the Sea Foam was docked alongside the other remaining boats in the fleet. I hauled the bike over the side and then fixed it back behind the smokestack. Guilfoyle had disappeared into the boat somewhere.
Ten minutes later, we were sitting in her truck. The keys were in Ellie’s hand. The engine was still warm, windows were open, and I had an elbow up on the edge. Gulls were flying over the woods on Ellie’s side. On my side the low cannery buildings stretched out below, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.
Ellie said, “What are you thinking, Keeler?”
I said, “Thinking about those two guys who were following Jane Abrams’ crew yesterday.”
She said, “Deckart and Willets.”
“Maybe I should go pay them a visit, maybe break their heads if they don’t talk to me nicely. What do you think?”
Ellie looked at me from behind the steering wheel. “Sounds exciting, but we need to do the boring stuff, Keeler. It always needs to be done.”
I said, “I can feel it coming. A room, a chair, a desk. Computers and telephones. Bad posture.
Bad skin. The modern world. What did you have in mind?”
She said, “The basics. Who, how, when, what, where. Four of the five W's give or take an H.”
“Detective stuff.”
Ellie said, “I need to make a call about the laptop you picked up. It would be a good idea to get some information on the missing kid, George. Then we should do background on the murder victims. I know that you’re an army guy, Keeler, but there is a place in this world for the pencil-necked office dweeb making calls and typing out emails and messages.”
I said, “Air Force actually. What do you think Detective Smithson is doing, right now?”
“My guess? Background on the victims. Other than that, he’s waiting on forensics maybe.” Ellie was looking over across the water to a paper factory nestled into the armpit of Eagle cove. She laughed to herself. “The question to ask of course is: what is Smithson not doing.” The factory stack was spewing white smoke. She said, “Smithson cut his teeth as a State Trooper up around Fairbanks. Came down to Port Morris ten years ago. He’s above board, but not very imaginative. I reckon he might help.”
I was suddenly thinking about Ellie. Whatever I might have imagined a Chief of Police, Chilkat Tribal Authority to be like, it was not her. I said, “I’m guessing your background in law enforcement didn’t begin here in Alaska, or in the Chilkat Tribal Territories. You’re lower forty-eight.”
She chuckled. “Certainly not here. You going to take a guess?”
I looked at her and chewed it over in my mind. What was I looking at? I ignored the exterior to some extent. Good-looking woman, so what? Outdoorsy type, could have been something she picked up later in life. There was a wariness about her, disguised by her outward appearance. Some wounds that she had recovered from, but the scars showed through. My assessment was a competent type of person, decent, and inherently suspicious.
I said, “Big city cop. Something didn’t work out. You came out here. Chilkat tribal authority, not by being born here, but because you were able to claim the blood ties. Some kind of an escape.”
Ellie had a twinkle in her eye. “Can you keep on going, or is that all you’ve got?”
I said, “You are in your forties. Got a kid, probably away in college or something. No husband. So, I’m guessing divorced, maybe collateral damage from your old job. You haven’t been up here for that long. Maybe five years max. So, twenty-some odd years on the big city force. Fifteen shy of retirement. Five years in uniform, then some kind of anti-crime unit. Someone saw the potential in you. You used that to go up to Robbery Investigation and get your detective shield halfway through. But that’s when it ended. Some kind of a problem happened. Could have been anything. Stopped cold. Game over.”
Ellie smiled grimly. “Well done, and thanks for the flattery. Bob’s not in college, he’s a smokejumper with the National Park Service. Stationed down at Yellowstone. Far as my career goes, I put eighteen years in. Ended at the Homicide table but got caught up in something.”
I said, “I’ve got experience in government bureaucracy. Back east or out west? Your accent isn’t strong either way.”
“Philly.”
I looked out the window. The gulls were flying over the truck and out to sea now. “You said four of the five W's. Why not the fifth?”
Ellie said, “The fifth W is why. We don’t give a shit about why. Cops looking for motive is bullshit. Cops look for convictions, which come from confessions, witnesses, and evidence. Motive gives you nothing. It’s a narrative that plays for the movies, the press, and the public. Civilians want to know why, because they need to feel that bad things happen for a reason. Truth is, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes shit just happens.”
We locked eyes. Hers were clear and glossy, confident and activated. They didn’t show me a cynic, or a bitter person. They showed me a realistic and practical woman. A professional, stopped cold at the top of her game. She was someone who I could learn from.
I said, “You’ve been wasting your talents on this bullshit for five years, Ellie. Now it’s time to make up for that.”
“Yes.”
“You know there’s something not right up here. We’re going to take them down.”
She said, “Game on, brother.”
Twenty-One
The Chilkat Tribal Authority was an office in a functional cement block across the street from the Port Morris town hall, itself a functional building with a grassy landscaped square out front.
We did the two-floor walk-up, then a pale tiled corridor lit by fluorescent tubes built into the white drop ceiling. The office was one of two on that floor. The other being a pair of shuttered double glass doors marked ‘North Pacific Travel Industry Risk Assessment’.
Forty steps after that, we arrived. ‘Chilkat Tribal Authority’ was printed in gold letters on glass doors. Very official-looking. Inside was a waiting area. Sofas around a low coffee table offering magazines promising features on tribal life. Leaflets featuring the issues and problems of tribal life were fanned out for the taking. There were several photographs on the wall, well-spaced and neatly hung. There was a receptionist, big and young and wearing black-framed glasses. He was reading a paperback.
Ellie said, “Hi Dave.”
Dave looked up and said, “Hey Ellie.” He swiveled his eyes to me. Then Ellie was taking me through, past the reception desk, too far for Dave’s eyes to follow without serious risk to his neck. The offices were clean and white and carpeted in beige. There was a big photocopier in the corridor. It looked immovable and set to do all kinds of mysterious things besides copying. There was an office on the left after the photocopier. Door open, two women inside sitting at facing desks. They looked up simultaneously as we passed.
Ellie opened the second door on the right. A big room, with a big table and several chairs gathered around it, a speaker phone gadget in the middle. She had a desk on the other side of the room, butted right up to a wall of windows looking out over the town hall green. There was desk space for two others in a corner area away from the door.
I said, “Where are the other two guys?”
Ellie gave me a sideways glance. “They run charter fishing trips for tourists when they aren’t here, which is often.” She looked around theatrically. “And it looks like they aren’t here. So, they must be fishing. My guess would be up near Sitka.”
Ellie dragged one of the chairs away from the conference table, set it alongside her office chair. She unclipped her badge and threw it on the desk. Then, reached around with her right hand, and unclipped the holster from her left hip. She slid her service weapon onto the desk, a Ruger SR9. We sat elbow to elbow. She depressed the power button on her computer. We watched it start up, like watching grass grow.
Ellie turned to me, I looked at her. I said, “Office work.”
She said, “Yes, Keeler. Three vectors, think of each of them as a circle.” Ellie stood up and walked to a white board hung on the wall. She took a marker and made a red circle. “Circle one, Jane Abrams and her people.” Ellie wrote J. Abrams inside the circle. “Circle two, Deckart and whatever his name is that I keep forgetting.” Ellie wrote, Deckart.
I said, “Willets.”
“Willets.” She drew a third circle. “Mister Lawrence.” Ellie wrote Mr. L in the third circle.
I said, “Mister Lawrence is nothing more than two words out of Deckart’s mouth. Besides that, no link, no nothing. No reality as far as I can make out. No form or substance in my imagination. Like the legend of Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, a Taliban leader, supposedly.”
Ellie shifted in her seat, interested. “He wasn’t a Taliban leader in reality?”
I said, “He was a short guy with one arm who had a beard that grew up past his nose. Like his nose was inside the beard. For the Taliban that was a special sign, like he was anointed. Omar had a good run with the Russians, but by the time we got there he was like the Wizard of Oz, just a little old guy behind a curtain.”
“Words are th
ings, Keeler. Mister and Lawrence are two words that could become important. We don’t know which one of these circles will snowball and produce unexpected results. Like more people and more things involved.”
“Fine, so what, we each take one of your circles and start looking into it?”
Ellie stood up slowly. “I’m going to do some human intelligence work, Keeler. I’ll walk across to the Port Morris Police Department and take Smithson out for coffee. He’s got a thing for apple crullers. We’ll see if he’s made any interesting headway. In the meantime, you could do background on the victims.” She reached over and picked her gun up off the desk. Clipped it back with a practiced gesture.
I said, “I’ve only got one of the names. Jane Abrams. The others I know as Jason and Adam. No last name given. Maybe you could get those from Smithson. You going to tell him you’re running a parallel investigation?”
She said, “I’m just going to buy him coffee. Cop to cop stuff. And it isn’t a parallel investigation. I’ve got a legitimate and professional interest because of the Lawrence link. The property is smack dab in the middle of my jurisdiction and it’s a disputed land situation.”
I said, “George’s boat is a possible hinge between Jane Abrams and Mister Lawrence. If he took the boat out to Bell Island. You should dangle that in front of the detective, see if he bites.”
Ellie said, “I’ll give Jim the boat link. If he goes for it, they might be able to extract navigation data from the GPS. I’ll ask him about the victims, try and get the names of the other two. Hopefully he’ll disclose without making a meal out of it.”
The backpack with the laptop I had taken from George Abrams’ apartment was sitting limp on the conference table. I said, “You were going to make a call about the laptop.”
Ellie waved her mobile phone and left the office.
I got in the desk chair and started typing the words 'Jane Abrams' into the computer. I got back results. Lines of text on the screen, and grids of photos. Pictures of women mostly, a couple of other genders mixed in for good measure. There was an underwear model named Jane Abrams, she looked a little on the young side, and blonde. There was an Australian politician in her seventies, who had written a book on wild dogs and humans called ‘The Way of the Dingo’. She had given interviews on television, so they had her on video. Too old, different continent, wrong eye color.
