Tundra Kill

by Stan Jones

  “Fuck you very much for that helpful analysis, captain. If I may proceed?”

  Carnaby grinned and fell silent.

  Procopio was up to the little finger of her left hand as she ticked off the next one. “Four, she offered to use her influence to terminate the children’s services and murder investigations of Grace, and the police standards investigation of Nathan. That’s definitely official misconduct, times three.”

  Procopio switched hands. “And, five, the rape charge, if she files it, might be considered false swearing, if the recording makes her look ridiculous enough.”

  “What a woman,” Long said.

  “And, six, now what?” Active said. “I’d like to see the phone records from the morning in question. Can we get a warrant or will Stein think it’s a fishing expedition like McConnell said in court the other day?”

  “Fishing expedition’s ass,” Procopio said. “Give me a copy of the DNA tests, I’ll take that into court along with an affidavit saying we had nothing to do with the leak and don’t know how it happened. Then, after Judge Stein’s head explodes and he finishes gluing it back together, I’ll play the recording for him, he’ll ask if you got a picture of her naked, damn his eyes, and, then, yeah, we’ll get a warrant for the phone records. The landline records will be pretty quick, and the cells, too, if they’re from Chukchi Telephone Co-Op. Longer if they have some other provider.”

  “Hers is from Chukchi Telephone, all right,” Active said. “His, I’ve never called or had a call from.”

  “If Chukchi Telephone’s got it, they’ll give it to us. If not, we can figure out his number from her records and go after his calls, too.”

  Active scratched his chin. “I’m assuming I don’t have enough yet to arrest Brad?”

  “Not quite. If we’re going after these people, we can’t afford any loose ends.

  “Then I think he oughta hear this recording. Agreed?”

  All parties nodded.

  “But what if she gets to him first?” Carnaby asked.

  “And tells him what?” Procopio asked. “‘I just hung Pete Wise’s murder on you and the cops are on their way’?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  Tuesday, April 22

  CLIMBING INTO COWBOY Decker’s Cessna was like a visit to a planet where things were simple and concrete. The smells of avgas, oil, and upholstery, the groan that built to a steady rumble as Cowboy cranked the engine, the squawk of the radio in the headset as he talked to the FAA across the field.

  “How ya been, Nathan?” Cowboy asked over the headset as the plane moved out of the Lienhofer tiedowns. “Haven’t hardly talked to you since our little adventure on the Isignaq.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Active said.

  “Grace believe you about those scratches on the governor’s neck?”

  “I think so.”

  “Long as she does, I do. Smart woman.”

  “Very,” Active said.

  “So what’s this trip about?”

  “Police business. Very hush-hush.”

  “Want me to wait?”

  Active pondered. The first half hour of ground time for the Lienhofer Cessna was free, but after that it was half the air-time rate. And his department budget was always in a bind. On the other hand, if Cowboy left, it would cost another round trip to call him back. Plus, it was possible Active would have the governor’s husband in shackles while he awaited Cowboy’s return, no doubt in some highly visible location.

  “Give me the free half hour,” he said. “Then take off if I don’t show up or send somebody out to talk to you.”

  “We taking a prisoner with us? That’s extra.”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  Cowboy turned east to taxi down the runway for takeoff. The stiff west wind left over from yesterday rocked the wings and battered the Cessna’s control surfaces.

  “Breezy day,” Active said.

  The pilot shrugged. “Twenty-knot winds, gusting thirty. No problemo.”

  “How about at the mine?”

  “Little worse than here. Two-thousand-foot ceiling, ten-mile visibility, wind about thirty, gusting forty, which could be a problem if it wasn’t blowing straight down the runway, which it is. Some turbulence close to the mountains. Another beautiful day in paradise.”

  Halfway down the runway, Decker pivoted the plane to point west and pushed in the throttle. The engine roared, the Cessna rolled, then a gust caught them and they were airborne. “Feel her kind of relax there?” Cowboy asked. “She’s more at home up here.”

  They crawled across the white landscape just below the cloud layer. Active watched the wind-driven snow stream off the pressure ridges in the ice on Chukchi Bay, then ghost over the tundra and scrub spruce as they crossed into the Katonak Flats. There was nothing to do and not much to say, so he leaned against the Cessna’s door for a nap.

  He awoke when his head jolted against the door frame. Turbulence never seemed to bother Cowboy, presumably because he knew when it was dangerous to the Cessna and when it wasn’t. But Active didn’t, and something in the back of his mind always told him the next jolt would rip off the wings. He tightened his harness.

  “Here we go.” Cowboy pointed through the snow haze blowing off the ridges.

  Active picked up the web of roads surrounding the mine, then the diagonal slash of the runway, then the central complex a mile past that.

  From the air, the scene looked so sterile that, except for the snow on the ground, it might have been a moon colony. The treeless mountain bowl, the huge, blocky industrial buildings with pickups, SUVs, earth movers, ore haulers, and snowmobiles scattered around, a dirt-walled tailings lake iced over in the cold. And the scar of the mine itself, surrounding everything in tiers that marched up the sides of the bowl like terraced farmland in China or India, except that the crop here was dollars.

  “Can you get security on the radio?” Active asked through the headset. “I called ahead and a guy named Danny Kavik is supposed to meet me at the airport.”

  “Hang on.” Cowboy switched frequencies, identified himself, and got Gray Wolf security to come up. “Yeah, I’ve got Nathan Active from Chukchi Public Safety here. He’s supposed to meet Danny Kavik?”

  “Roger that,” security said. “He’s on his way.”

  Cowboy throttled back and lowered his wing flaps a little to set up for landing. Cowboy, Active knew, could grease a plane on smoother than anybody. Sometimes, a Cowboy Decker landing was so soft Active wouldn’t awaken from a mid-air nap until the pilot reached the tiedowns and cut his engine. Not today. Today, the approach was like driving a pickup down a staircase. Active tried to tighten his harness again, but there was no more give.

  The plane finally banged into the runway and bounced, bounced again, then touched down a third time and stuck. Cowboy taxied to the Gray Wolf tiedowns and they waited for Danny Kavik as the Cessna rocked in the gusts.

  Finally Active spotted a Suburban painted in the official Gray Wolf colors of blue, white, and green barreling down the side of the runway. The driver stopped in front of the plane. Active zipped up, pulled on his gloves, and pushed his door open against the wind, then fought to hold it open with his shoulder as he climbed to the ground. He raced to the Suburban, grabbed the handle and wrenched the door open, then squeezed into the cab.

  The driver put out a hand. “Danny Kavik.”

  Kavik was a lean, young Inupiaq in a uniform and buzz-cut and the look of a man either born or determined to be a cop.

  Active gave the hand a single pump. “Danny.”

  “We got it set up like you wanted,” Kavik said as he started for the central complex. “We told him you were coming in to update him on a new development in the Pete Wise case. His shift’s over in a few minutes, so we didn’t even have to pull him off duty.”

  “Any idea if he’s talked to his wife since lunch?”

  Kavik thought it over, then shook his head. “His crew’s been on shift all day, wiring up some new housi
ng modules. Personal calls are against the rules, unless it’s an emergency.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Still got my application?”

  “I do,” Active said. “Still no openings, but you’re on the short list for the next one that comes up.”

  “Thanks. I need to get back to Chukchi if I can. My mom’s pretty sick and she needs help riding herd on the other kids.”

  “You bet. And I need more local people on my force. Nothing against the Anchorage and Mat-Su guys that sign up for the two-on and two-off, but some actual community policing would be nice.”

  Kavik pulled in at an office with a “Gray Wolf Security” sign outside and turned off the Suburban. “We got a conference room in here you can use. Somebody’s gonna bring Brad over in a few minutes.”

  Kavik showed Active in, waved at a uniformed woman at a radio console, and led him to the conference room.

  “You want coffee or something?”

  “Sure,” Active said. “And bring some for Brad, too.”

  Kavik left. Active shrugged out of his parka, checked the recording on his phone and put it on the table. Then he pulled his digital recorder out of his briefcase, started it, and put it into the front pocket of his uniform shirt. Finally he put two pens and a legal pad on the table in front of him.

  Kay-Chuck played from somewhere nearby, but not loud enough to interfere with the recording. Two women passed in the hall outside, discussing a boss who was either cute or creepy, Active couldn’t quite make it out. Kavik returned with a thermos of coffee, two cups, and Brad Mercer.

  “Mr. Mercer.” Active stood and put out his hand.

  Mercer looked wary, but took it. “Chief.”

  Active sat. Mercer didn’t look ready to sit, but couldn’t seem to think of an alternative. He took a chair across the table. Kavik eased out and let the door shut behind him without a sound.

  “Coffee?”

  Mercer waved it off. “They said there’s news on the Pete Wise case?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, your wife—”

  Mercer looked even warier now.

  Active tapped his phone. “Look, why don’t I play something for you before we talk? It’ll make more sense. Your wife flew into Chukchi today, did you know that?”

  “She what?”

  “Uh-huh. And she asked me to meet her at your house, which I did. And she came to the door in a scarlet robe with a towel on her head.”

  “The satin one?”

  Active raised his eyebrows.

  “I got her that in Vegas!”

  Active put his phone on speaker and started the playback from where he’d cued it, when Helen Mercer had said, “I just got out of the shower.”

  Active let it run to the the point where he left the house, climbed into his Chevy and called in to Dispatch. He looked at Mercer, who sat in silence for perhaps thirty seconds.

  “She said I killed Pete Wise?”

  “You heard it.”

  “The lying bitch!” Mercer slammed a hand down on the table. “Goddamit, if somebody killed him it was her. Everything she said about that morning is true, except the names are reversed. She was the one called me from out on the ice, then I was the one went and got her. That bitch, I should have figured something was screwy when I saw she took my snowgo. I had to take hers. It’s purple. Purple!”

  “What would she be doing out there that time of morning?”

  “She spent the night with Pete so he’d drop his lawsuit. But when they woke up, he told her ‘thanks for the quiyuk’ and said he wasn’t gonna drop it. So she got pissed and took a ride to cool off. That’s what she said.”

  “Wait. You knew they were together that night? And you went along with it?”

  “Sure, Pete and me was nuliagatagiik.”

  “Nuliaga…I don’t know that word.”

  “It’s what the old-timers used to call it when a woman would have two husbands and they were friends. She was pregnant when I married her, and neither Pete nor me knew for sure which one of us—”

  Active struggled to keep his mask on. “You shared her? And you both knew? And neither one minded?”

  Mercer nodded. “Right up till Pete got killed. That’s what I’m saying, we were nuliagatagiik. A few people still do it around here even if they don’t talk about it any more. Pete and I were close to the same age, good buddies in high school, played basketball together, which is when it started, hunted and fished together, I taught him to mush. But when she got started in politics, she told Pete and me to stop buddying around so it wouldn’t attract so much attention, so we did.

  “What about her?”

  “No way was she gonna stop. Even though Helen’s not Eskimo, she took to it like she was. Just a woman who needs more than one man and a lot of quiyuk. And Pete could light her on fire even better than me. Whenever she was in town, she’d try to slip over to his place and spend some time. That’s why he lived alone and never had a girlfriend, even on the side, as far as I know. He couldn’t see past her. I still don’t know how the hell they got away with it all this time. I mean, this is Chukchi. Everybody knows your business.”

  “I still—but you guys were both OK with this?”

  “Not at first. At first we beat each other up. Lots of times. Finally we all three figured out one of us would kill the other one if we didn’t become nuliagatagiik, so we did.”

  “That’s what the old 911 call was about?”

  Mercer raised his eyebrows. “Me and Pete got into it again and she made the call. Then she told us to stop our bullshit or she’d cut us both off. So we promised we would and she canceled the call. After that, we was nuliagatagiik.”

  “What about the cut over her eye the morning Pete was killed?”

  Mercer shrugged. “I dunno. She said she got it when the snowgo went through the ice. Doesn’t make much sense, now that I think about it. Maybe she banged herself up when she hit Pete?”

  Active made notes on his pad to stall for time. “All right, how about we back up and go through that whole day and evening before Pete was killed? Pete comes to your place to make his offer about the suit, or he does it by phone, or what?”

  “No, it was at the conference.”

  “Conference?”

  “Yeah, it was that Monday afternoon before the mushers’ banquet. Pete and us, plus our lawyer, that McConnell guy. We were all on the phone so nobody would see Pete with Helen.”

  “And what happens at the conference?”

  “Pete wants to keep on with this village arrangement we’ve had all these years, just make it official so she won’t take Pudu away from Chukchi permanently—”

  “Village arrangement?”

  “We always let Pudu spend time with Pete.”

  “I thought you didn’t know Pete was the father.”

  Mercer shook his head. “Didn’t know, but figured. So did Pete. Pudu looks a lot more like him than me. Or any other guy around here.”

  Active made notes and kept silent. Why interrupt the flow?

  “But Pudu never knew Pete might be his father,” Mercer went on. “He thought he was just a family friend, some kind of distant cousin, maybe, who’d take him hunting and fishing, coach him in basketball, that kinda stuff.”

  “If it worked all this time, why did Pete want to stir up trouble with his lawsuit?”

  “Helen never did really like them hanging out. She doesn’t want Pudu to go village, is how she puts it, and she was jealous of how much he liked Pete. So Pete was afraid if she got a job in Washington, she’d take Pudu away and he’d never come back. That’s when Pete filed his suit.”

  “Pete thought she could get elected to national office?” Active asked. “Seriously? After what happened the last time she tried it? Not to mention what happened when our last female governor tried the same thing?”

  “No, that’s not her plan. I don’t understand how this political stuff works, I’m just an electrician and a dog musher and a caribou hunter, all right. But I
think she said she was trying to get enough influence going into the convention to horse trade for a big job if the ticket won. Ambassador to Russia, maybe?”

  Nathan marveled for a few moments. Helen Mercer in Moscow? Wining and dining oligarchs and the Russian president? “So you have your conference and Pete won’t agree to anything but a formal custody arrangement because she might take Pudu to Washington?”

  Mercer raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t like the idea either. Pudu’s a Chukchi kid, like Pete and me. He’d go crazy back there, especially if she went to Russia, probably get into all kinds of trouble and stuff. So when Pete wanted to do the DNA test, I said I’d get the sample from Pudu—”

  “You took it?”

  Mercer raised his eyebrows again. “Oh, yeah. And one from myself. Like I was saying before, we both wanted to know if he was Pete’s kid or mine or even somebody else’s, since we didn’t know for sure who all she was sleeping with back then. We figured if the test confirmed it was one of us, Helen would have to back off and let the boy stay here with me and Pete, even if she got her big job.”

  “You weren’t gonna go with her, either?

  “No way. I’d go as crazy as Pudu back there. Not Eskimo country for sure, even worse than Juneau. But I was gonna visit her from time to time between my shifts up here at the mine, at least when there’s no hunting and fishing going on. You know, catch up on the quiyuk. I’m like Pete was. I can’t stay away from her very long, either.”

  Active laid down his pen. “I never heard of anything like this.”

  Mercer’s grimness eased a little and he chuckled. “It’s Chukchi, Nathan. Makes sense if you don’t think about it. Anyway, we have the conference. Pete and Helen both won’t back down. She tells him to go fuck yourself, you’re not getting my kid, no matter what, and she says she’s done with him, they’re not gonna be getting together any more. Pete thinks about that awhile. Then he says, if she’ll keep it up with him, he’ll drop the suit and take his chances on seeing Pudu whenever he’s back here from Washington or wherever.”

  “And Helen went for that.”