by Jack Lively
At least Ellie had manners. “Do you want something, Keeler?”
I shook my head. “I’m okay, thanks.”
Smithson handed over a cup and a pastry to Ellie.
He saw me watching and stopped drinking coffee. “What?”
“You didn’t answer my question?”
“What question?”
“I said, so. Which meant, so what have you done about the situation at hand?”
He said, “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
I said, “You don’t like me or something. Maybe it’s a trust issue.”
“I trust you just as far as I can throw you.” He looked at Ellie. “And no disrespect. Like I said, your choice, not mine.”
I said, “Just help me out with one thing, so that I understand. Who was it tipped you off that I was the perpetrator out at Beaver Falls?”
“Like I said, I don’t comment on ongoing investigations.” I saw Smithson’s eye crawling down my shirt to the hem, where shirt meets jeans. I looked down. Ellie’s badge was poking out from under, bronze and official-looking in the weak Alaskan light. He looked back up at me, face turning red.
Ellie said, “He’s deputized, Jim, relax.”
She was looking at me sternly. Smithson said, “He’s what?”
“Deputized. I’ve made him a deputy for the term of this investigation.”
Smithson shook his head at her. “What is this, the Wild West?”
Ellie looked around, at the hills above town, a forest that extended a thousand of miles before it returned to some form of human civilization. She said, “Well, yes, Jim.”
He snorted and sipped his coffee. When he came up for air he spoke. “Okay. So you want to know who called in. Answer is, I don’t know. I didn’t take the call. It was logged in at the switchboard and the caller left no name.”
I stepped in. “And then you show up at the Edna Bay Apartments. Same tip off?”
He shrugged. “Same answer. Didn’t take the call. Dispatch sent it out over the radio.”
I looked over at Ellie. She shrugged. I thought about the Edna Bay Apartments. Besides Amber Chapmen, there was the neighbor and the guy who’d walked by with the six-pack in a convenience store bag. Bald head, pointy ears.
The detective said, “So are we done here or what?”
I said, “One second.”
Smithson was already turning to go. He swung to a halt on the ball of one foot. “What?”
There was no reason to make an enemy. Smithson could be useful.
I said, “We got off to a bad start detective. No harm, no foul. I don’t think you’ve done anything particularly wrong, and I’m sorry if I caused you any offence.”
Ellie raised her eyebrows and looked at the policeman. He looked at me.
“Okay.”
Smithson extended a hand and I took it.
I said, “I’d like to get up to speed on your conversation.” I lifted my shirt to show the badge. “As a deputized member of the Chilkat Tribal Authority’s police force.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. She looked at the detective. He nodded. She said, “So I got with Jim about the victim, Jane Abrams. Guess what.”
I said, “Abrams doesn’t exist.”
She elbowed Smithson. “Told you he’s smart.” Then she turned to me. “You found the same thing on the internet. She ain’t there. But all you got was the negative, the woman doesn’t exist. But Jim got a positive, her real name, which is not Jane Abrams. Port Morris PD identified the vic as one Valerie Zarembina of Maryland, from the outside.”
I said, “What’s the outside?”
Smithson said, “What locals call the lower forty-eight states, the outside.”
I said, “Zarembina. Isn’t that something related to ice hockey?”
He said, “That’s a zamboni, Keeler. The machine that cleans the ice on a hockey rink.”
I said, “Identified how?”
Ellie said, “Prints came back from the FBI.”
We locked eyes and I nodded at her. “Okay.”
Smithson said, “I have to go.” He looked at Ellie. “You need more help, you let me know, Ellie.”
I looked at Ellie. “You tell him about the boat rental?”
“Yeah. Told him about the boat.” She looked at Smithson.
He said, “It’s tangential, but I’m having someone follow that up. Ellie gave me the paper.”
I said, “Tangential.”
Smithson sighed. “Keeler, you’re impatient. I have limited manpower and I take orders from the chief. It takes time to properly investigate. We do it by the book, starting with the forensic evidence taken at Beaver Falls, the identification, and the known associations. From there we expand the investigation." He drank from his coffee cup. Wiped a shirt sleeve across his mouth. “Think about it from my point of view for a second. Ellie came up with this story about a mother and her son. Jane and George Abrams. I hear her out.” He turned to Ellie. “Right, Ellie?”
Ellie nodded. “Right.”
Smithson continued, earnest now, like he meant it. “What am I supposed to think? The mother, the son. That’s bullshit right? The vic comes back as Valerie Zarembina. So, I look at you, I look at Ellie. I don’t see the answer to my problems. The answer to my problems is the procedure. One step at a time. Police work. Working the scene, getting the book together. You see what I’m saying?”
I did.
But Smithson wasn’t done. “Right now, we’re at the first stage. It hasn’t even been what, twenty-four hours? You and Ellie are taking it from a different angle, which is the tribal authority’s prerogative. You’re starting at a different place.” He shrugged. “If we meet in the middle, I’ll catch you there.”
Smithson raised his coffee cup and walked away.
Ellie and I crossed the lawn to her building and neither of us spoke until after we had entered the offices and gone past Dave. Dave only barely looked up from his book. I followed Ellie along the corridor and into her office. Then I closed the door.
Ellie sat at her desk wiping her hands on a napkin. I walked over and leaned past her. Put a hand on the cruise ship brochure and slid it in front of her. “Back page, crew list.”
She opened up the leaflet and studied it, found the relevant page and scanned. A few moments later she looked up at me and made eye contact. “Your man, Walter M. Deckart. Deputy Head of Security. Oh my. I wonder what the M stands for. You know who owns that boat?”
I said, “I just came from the Emerald Allure. Had a little talk with Mister Walter M. Deckart. Boat’s partly owned by Mister Lawrence. And here’s the kicker: Mister Lawrence isn’t a person, it’s a company.”
Ellie raised her eyebrows. “I’m guessing that Mister Deckart didn’t exactly volunteer the information you extracted.”
“No, there was significant pressure applied.”
“No shit. Thank you for not mentioning the visit in front of Smithson. I’m not sure how that would have gone down.”
“I thought it would be best to keep it on a need-to-know basis.”
“Indeed, so who’s the little hairless bald guy everyone sees around town?”
I said, “Apparently he’s an actor.”
Ellie covered her mouth, suppressing a surprised smile. “Gosh.”
She stood up and walked to the white board. I unclipped the bronze police badge from my belt and slapped it on her desk. Ellie was writing the words ‘Valerie Zarembina’ next to the J. Abrams circle. She turned at the sound.
I said, “You really deputizing me?”
“No. There’s no such thing anymore.”
“But you’re not angry that I took the badge.”
“No. I think it’s entrepreneurial, and that’s what this country’s all about.” She turned back to the whiteboard. “The other thing we got from Smithson. Zarembina is an employee of the United States Federal Government, Department of Energy.” She wrote ‘Energy Department’ on the board, and drew a line from Zarembina to it. The
n she linked the Mr. L circle and the Deckart circle with the words ‘Emerald Allure’. She stood back and looked at the board. “They didn’t say what Valerie Zarembina’s job was at Energy.”
I lowered myself into Ellie’s desk chair and agitated the mouse, which had the effect of bringing the computer back to life again. I jabbed ‘Valerie Zarembina, energy’ into the keyboard with two stiff fingers. Then I punched the return key. A blink of an eye later the results populated the screen. Not too many women named Valerie Zarembina, just one. The photograph was correct. She was different. For one thing, she was alive, but also younger and smiling against a neutral gray background. Behind her right shoulder the stars and stripes were perfectly furled on a flag stand. I clicked deeper. No job title, no office number, no phone number, or any other contact details. Just the name, Valerie Zarembina, on a white web page with US Department of Energy logos above and links at the side to other sections and areas and features of the official web site.
Ellie said, “What does that mean?”
“Maybe she doesn’t work there anymore.”
“And they forgot to take her off the web site?”
I said, “United States Department of Energy. Imagine the size of it, how many people work there. How long would it take for HR to trickle that information down, all the way to the guy who updates the web site.”
Ellie whistled. “Years. Decades. Who could know, maybe forever. It’s like those people who die but remain alive on the internet because there’s nobody to take them down. As if you can live forever electronically.”
“Bureaucratic immortality.”
Ellie was chewing on a knuckle. She dropped her hand and said, “Okay. If she wasn’t working at Energy anymore, where was she?”
I said, “There is one way of finding out more, without going through the official channels.”
She said, “Amber Chapman.”
“Correct. I think I saw her on the cruise ship.”
Ellie’s eyes widened and her eyebrows went up a notch. “You think.”
“Yes. In a swimsuit, with a bunch of other women at the pool. I said ‘I think’ because there was no clear view of her. The windows were steamed up.” I looked at Ellie, she was looking at me, forehead creased.
She said, “Weird.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t speak to her, didn’t verify?”
“I was on my way to brace Deckart. I tried to verify after, but not hard enough.”
“Hmmm.”
I said, “Chapman told me that George Abrams was her boyfriend. Before he disappeared. Which means it’s likely that she lied. Which puts things in an even more interesting light.”
Ellie said, “Maybe she didn’t lie. There is a way that she could have been in the dark about Zarembina. George tells Chapman that Zarembina is rich mommy Abrams. But if Chapman was in the dark, this goes deep.”
I said, “There’s another way in which Chapman doesn’t lie. If the George guy disappears, and then Zarembina pops up as mom.” I leaned back and cupped my head in two clasped hands. I had an idea. I sat up. “Valerie Zarembina showed me a photo of George. It matches what I found on the internet. Which means that George Abrams is a legitimate existing human being. We need to check that he’s actually missing, and known to be in Port Morris, Alaska. For all we know George Abrams could be back east in Boston.”
Ellie looked surprised. “Oh god, you’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I brought my hands once again to the keyboard and mouse. I had George Abrams’ MIT profile page open on the computer. I clicked on the name of his PhD supervisor. A new web page appeared with a picture of a guy in his late thirties. There was an office phone number.
I said, “What’s the time difference?”
She drifted over to the desk. “Boston is going to be four hours ahead of us.” Ellie looked at the computer clock. “It's 10:30 a.m., which makes it 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon back east.” She looked down at me sitting in her chair.
I said, “That works.”
Ellie perched on the desk, reached out and swung the phone around to face her. I reeled off the number and she punched the buttons. Dial tone came out of the handset. Ellie punched another button and the dial tone switched to speaker. There was a crackle as the call was answered on the other side. But it was voice mail. The professor was not in his office at the moment. We were invited to leave a message, which Ellie did. She left it vague, identified herself, and asked that the professor call back on her mobile phone.
I typed ‘Amber Chapman’ into the computer. Ellie pulled a chair from the conference table and rolled herself next to me. Amber Chapman was a very popular name. Hundreds of results. Grids of images, each image a woman, or a girl. Older or younger, darker or lighter, thin and thick. The varieties were endless. None of them were the Amber Chapman I was looking for. Which didn’t mean anything, because there were so many of them. I typed in ‘Amber Chapman Physics’, and got her.
It was a photograph in a grid of search results. I clicked the picture and it opened up larger. Amber Chapman perched on the edge of a circular fountain. She was dressed in black. Stylish, with her straw-colored hair up in a complicated-looking braided crown. She wore sunglasses and a pair of white sneakers. Behind her was an imposing building. It looked like a palace. The word ‘baroque’ floated from the inner recesses of my mind. The palace was constructed from some kind of sand-colored material, but the ornate facade was detailed in ochre paint.
One thing for sure, it wasn’t in America. Not Alaska, and not the outside as they called it. I figured the photograph was from Europe.
Ellie said, “That her?” I grunted. She said, “Click in.”
Below the photograph was a link. I clicked it. The page blanked and then redrew itself from top to bottom, line by line. Ellie leaned in. She said, “It’s a blog. Someone’s journal.”
There were several images besides the one we’d just seen. All of them had been taken in the old town of some European city. Cathedrals and that kind of thing. Old bridges and ornately decorated stone structures that had become tourist locations, like an even more expensive version of Disneyland.
The photographs all had young people in the foreground, posing against the grand backdrops of the old world. Students, I figured. The type of young person who does not go into the military. Then there was a group picture in a restaurant. They were seated around a large oval table with a white tablecloth. The shot had been taken after dinner. Faces were flushed from the beer and wine. Empty glasses littered the surface. Ellie pointed to Amber Chapman on one side. My eyes flicked over the faces and I caught George Abrams on the other side of the table, face slightly averted, concentrating on something off-camera.
I scrolled up and started reading the author’s comments. The city was Tallinn, capital of Estonia. My mind made the jump to the physics conference that had been listed on George Abram’s MIT profile page. I got that up in another computer window. I flicked between the two. Ellie had her chin grasped in her hand. She looked at me. I looked at her.
“Interesting. Maybe they met there.”
Ellie said, “Maybe they did. I bet a lot of scientists meet in academic conferences. Where else would they meet?”
I said, “I don’t know, I guess they meet places that other people meet, like bars and dinner parties and church.”
Ellie looked at me. “You ever meet anyone at church?”
I said nothing.
She said, “What?”
“I’m thinking about Chapman and that boat, the Emerald Allure. I want to know if she gets off the boat, so I can find her. Either that, or I’ll have to go there again. What do you do here, when you need to keep an eye on something?”
Ellie said, “Usually, I get Dave to do it.”
“The guy out front?”
“Yes, that Dave.”
“You deputize him?”
“Don’t need to.”
Which is what happened. Ellie called Dave into the
office. It wasn’t complicated. The Emerald Allure had two ways on or off, both visible from multiple spots on Water Street. Dave listened and agreed. We showed him the photograph of Chapman. He said that he could recognize her even if she was dressed differently. Dave was eager. I was skeptical. I questioned him on technique. Turned out that Dave liked to read detective novels and knew all about stakeouts. He would secure donuts and coffee. He would piss into an empty milk jug. He had a car and a phone, and he had Ellie’s number programmed into the phone. Which was one extra point for phones. Too bad the minuses outweigh the pluses.
Dave was gone two minutes when Ellie’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She was at the computer and had to push back her chair and stand up. Ellie pulled the vibrating thing from the front pocket of her jeans and pressed a button. Which stopped the buzz, but lit up the screen. Ellie looked into it, read something to herself. Her lips moved as she did so.
I said, “Can’t be Dave already.”
She looked up at me. “No. The computer geek. He says he can look at George Abrams’ laptop right now.” She turned to the conference table and hooked the straps of Abrams’ laptop bag. “You want to go?”
Twenty-Five
The computer geek lived in the Chilkat tribal territory with his mother, who lived in a trailer. Which would have been a terrible cliche, if it wasn’t for the mother and the trailer. The mother, because she was a kind of geek herself, and the trailer because it wasn’t a trailer, but the weird result of a marriage between a double wide mobile home and a log cabin with a boulder stuck in the side.
The house looked absurd. The left side consisted of the double wide, and the right side was a log cabin. At the ball of the joint was an enormous boulder where the log cabin and trailer homes collided in a mesh of logs and aluminum siding. An old Toyota Land Cruiser was parked off to the side.
It took a while to get there, and when we did, Ellie switched off the Ford truck and we sat there looking at the place.
I said, “That’s a hell of an oddity.”
She agreed. “We could get Helen together with Mister Lawrence and win all kinds of architectural prizes.” Ellie took the keys out of the ignition and twirled them on a finger. A feather hung from the rear-view mirror. She fisted her keys and popped the latch on the driver’s side door. I did the same on my side and came down off the truck onto gravel and dirt.
