by Stan Jones
Active grimaced. “No hope of a surprise visit, I guess. We might as well take the snowmachines in.” He pulled the Smith & Wesson from its holster and dropped it into the pocket of his parka.
Long had a rifle slung across his back. He unslung it and checked the action, then laid it across the seat of his Ski-Doo and sat on it. He noticed Active staring. “It’s how we do when we’re caribou hunting,” Long said. “Best place for a rifle if you have to get to it quick.”
Active felt himself tightening, his armpits heating up under his parka.
“Look,” he told Long. “We don’t push this. We’ve got a murder suspect who presumably knows we’re coming, probably a bunch of kids and their mother in there, maybe some in-laws— this has hostage crisis written all over it. First sign of trouble, we cool it and you go back to town for reinforcements, yes?”
“Unless we’re being fired on,” Long said.
Active nodded. “We defend ourselves, but we still back off if we can’t talk Bass into surrendering.”
They started the machines and followed the trail up the Katonak until a line of snowmachine tracks arced off to the left toward the smoke of Johnny Bass’s camp. They gunned their engines, shot up the riverbank, and in another hundred yards found themselves in the middle of Bass’s dog yard. On all sides, huskies erupted from their oil drums, shipping crates, and doghouses and set up the cacophony Active had expected, lunging at the two strangers till their chains jerked them up short.
Active backed off his throttle and motioned Long to come abreast as they eased slowly along the path through the dog yard toward what must be the Bass house. At first, it appeared to be a sprawling tent made from blue tarps, a metal stovepipe at the back sending up the feather of gray they had seen from the river. Two boys and a husky pup were building a snow fort when Active and Long came up, but they hustled inside when they spotted the two cops.
The tundra in front was littered with red, white, and blue Chevron fuel cans, an undetermined number of plastic jerry jugs, four round white propane tanks clustered in the snow, plastic cars and sleds and guns left out by Bass’s kids, a cord or two of spruce firewood stacked against the wall of the blue-tarp house, an immense heap of beer cans, a Johnson outboard engine mostly buried in snow, and two snowmachines: one dead, up to its handlebars in snow with two rusted Chevron cans standing on the seat, the other an old red Polaris. A well-beaten path led to an outhouse squatting a few yards into the spruces.
Active and Long headed for the flap where the two boys had disappeared into the tent. Before they reached it, an Inupiat woman came out dressed in sweatpants and an old parka, a baby of a year or so perched on her right hip and sucking on what appeared to be a bottle of orange soda pop. The woman’s hair was stringy and greasy, and approximately a third of her teeth were gone. She was about forty pounds overweight, had a bruise along her left cheekbone, and looked to be about forty years old, but it was hard to be sure. Maybe she was a used-up thirty. It seemed likely that marriage to Johnny Bass would accelerate the aging process in a woman.
She looked at the two men in their uniforms and frowned. “That Johnny never do it,” she said, bathing them in beer breath.
“How do you know why we’re here?” Active asked.
“I don’t know anything,” the woman said. “But whatever you’re here about, Johnny never do it. He never do nothing.”
“Then he can tell us himself. Will you ask him to come out?”
“He’s not here. He’s go out to check his snares with Billy and Gene.”
Active peered around the camp. It could be true. The only dogsled in sight was mostly buried in snow and had no hitch on the front. It was hard to imagine life in camp without a functioning dogsled, so maybe Bass really was away. “You mind if we come in and look around, then?”
She frowned again. “I don’t think Johnny would like it. You come back tomorrow, he’ll be back then, all right.”
Alan Long spoke up. “Well, if he never do nothing, then he won’t mind if we come in, ah?” He pushed toward her and she stepped back a pace.
Active looked at Long, surprised by the mocking Village English. He looked back at the woman, who seemed a little frightened now. She shrugged, turned, and disappeared inside.
They followed her in. Once inside, Active saw the place wasn’t really a tent. It was dirt-floored like a tent, carpeted intermittently with discarded snowmachine treads, wooden cargo pallets, and scraps of lumber. But the walls and ceiling were of plywood and studs, with pink insulation tacked and taped on. Presumably the blue tarps that covered the place were there to keep out the wind, rain, and snow, in lieu of more traditional coverings like shingles and siding.
They were in the kitchen, lit by watery light from a window in the back. A camp lantern, unlit, hung over a rickety dining table near a wood-fired cookstove. A six-pack of Budweiser stood on the table, one can pulled out of the plastic collar and opened.
The woman hovered nervously by the stove, brushing the stringy hair from her eyes and bouncing the baby on her hip. The baby itself regarded them with huge black eyes as it sucked on its bottle of pop, working on a set of teeth to match its mother’s blackened stumps. Active realized he and Long had never gotten Mrs. Bass’s first name, or introduced themselves. But now didn’t seem the time for it.
Active looked around the dwelling. The other rooms, if they could be called that, were set off by flaps of dirty tent canvas or the all-purpose blue tarp. “We’re going to look around, now,” he told the woman. She nodded uncertainly.
He and Long took it room by room. One room turned out to be a metal shipping van somehow incorporated into the Bass warren. Inside, under a hissing camp lantern, were two boys, one reading a Superman comic, one asleep or feigning sleep in a dirty blue sleeping bag at the foot of a small bookcase loaded with boxes of Pokémon cards.
Shrieks could be heard issuing from another room. They looked in and found three little girls, stair-stepping upward in age from about three, Active guessed, fighting over Barbies. “Arii, you break off her head,” one was saying as he stepped in They froze and glanced sideways with quick black frightened eyes at the two strangers, then looked back at their blonde-haired dolls, and were still frozen when the searchers moved on.
There was no sign of an adult male in any of the rooms. Active whispered to Long to go and chat with Mrs. Bass. Then he went back into the room with the two boys and squatted beside the sleeping bag. The husky pup they’d seen out front was curled up on the bag. It thumped its tail and smiled, dog-fashion. The boy with the comic smiled too, but uncertainly. He was five or six, Active thought.
“I’m Nathan,” Active said, putting out his hand.
The boy shook the hand. “I’m Junior, and this is Siksrik here.” He rubbed the husky’s head.
Active fished around in his head for the meaning of siksrik. Finally it came to him. “He’s like a ground squirrel? He digs holes all the time?”
Junior beamed and lifted his eyebrows.
“And who’s this over here?” Active pointed at the sleeping bag.
“That’s Lemuel.”
“I thought so.” Active poked at the figure in the sleeping bag. It didn’t stir, so Active knew the sleep was fake. He poked it again. “Lemuel. You left something at Harriman’s.” Active pulled the amulet from his parka and crackled the plastic of the baggie.
There was no answer from the bag. Active pulled back the flap to reveal a pair of narrow, stubborn black eyes staring back at him. “I never leave nothing there,” Lemuel Bass said. “I never go there.” He looked everywhere but at the amulet and Active’s eyes, then finally gave in and stared at the amulet.
“Never? Not even in the summer when you were living in Tent City?”
“Maybe couple times.”
“You know that old naluaqmiu that runs it? Mr. Harriman?”
“Little bit maybe.”
“He knows you pretty well. He says you come in for Pokémon a lot.”
“Not that much.”
“He wouldn’t lie, would he?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, he said you were in there this morning and you traded him this amulet for some Pokémon cards you wanted, but you left before he could give them to you.” Active pulled the Pokémon cards with the dinosaur on the wrapper out of his pocket and showed them to Lemuel. The boy’s eyes grew huge and he twitched as if he were about to snatch the cards into his sleeping bag.
“I brought them to you, all right, but I guess if that wasn’t you at Harriman’s, I’ll have to take them back.” Active returned the cards to his pocket. A soft “Arii, that’s Larvitar!” escaped the bag.
“Maybe I was in there,” Lemuel said. “That could be my cards, all right.” A dirty brown hand emerged from the bag at the end of a skinny brown arm.
Active pulled the cards out again. “But I have to ask you something before I can give them to you.”
The hand froze in midair. “Like what?”
“Like where did you get the amulet?”
“I think I find it somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I dunno. I think I forget.”
Active slipped the cards back into his parka and rose to his feet. There was another soft “Arii!” from the bag.
“Dad give it to me.”
“Your father? When?”
“Yesterday maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Yesterday in the afternoon when he wake up.”
“He slept till after noon?”
“Uh-huh. He’s out late that night.”
“What was he doing?”
“He never tell me. But he say he find this amulet and I can have it if I never tell nobody about it.” Lemuel started to snuffle. “Now he’s going to be mad, maybe he’ll burn my Pokémon like he always say.”
“I’ll ask him not to.” Active handed the cards to the boy and left the room.
Alan Long and Mrs. Bass were talking about how the winter had been a little colder than usual, and whether that meant breakup would be late this year. “I sure hope it’s not late,” the woman was saying. “I like to move in to Tent City soon as we can, all right, go to bingo all time.”
Active showed her the amulet. “Mrs. Bass, where did your husband get this?”
She bent and peered at the amulet with what looked like genuine, first-impression curiosity. “I dunno. I never see it before. How did you get it if it’s Johnny’s?”
“Lemuel tried to trade it at Harriman’s this morning.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but stopped and looked in the direction of the Katonak as the dog yard erupted. Over the uproar, they could just pick out the sound of a snowmachine climbing the bank from the river.
“That’s Johnny,” she said with an air of relief. “You should ask him about it yourself.”
*Bureau of Indian Affairs
CHAPTER NINE
ACTIVE AND LONG STEPPED out the door as a white man with a huge potbelly and a bushy black beard shut down a snowmachine in front of the cabin. Johnny Bass, like his wife, seemed to be about forty, and had very few teeth in front. He had an ugly mullet haircut—short on the top and sides, long in the back—that was maybe a month overdue for a touch-up.
Two boys in their early teens rolled out of the sled behind him and stood staring at the two uniformed strangers, as did Johnny Bass. A rifle in a scabbard was lashed to a rail of the sled, but neither boy was near it, and Bass was in front of the snowmachine.
Bass glanced at his wife, hovering in the doorway, then his eyes swung between Active and Long and finally settled on Active. “Can I help you, officers?”
“Why don’t you send the boys and Mrs. Bass inside and we can talk out here a little bit,” Active said.
Bass shot a glance over his shoulder. “Billy, Gene, you take the rabbits on in so your mom can clean ’em. Lena, you keep everybody in the house for a while.”
One of the boys grabbed a bulging gunnysack from the sled and disappeared into the cabin with his mother and brother.
Active and Long introduced themselves, then Active showed Bass the amulet. “Would you mind telling us where you got this?”
Bass peered at the charm, and shook his head. “It’s not mine. I never seen it before.”
Active gave a small, calibrated sigh and stared at Bass, waiting.
“Sorry I can’t help you.” Bass shrugged.
“Your son says you gave it to him yesterday afternoon. Would he lie about that?”
“I nev—wait a minute, let me take another look.” Bass made a show of inspecting the amulet, then slapped himself on the side of the head with a mittened hand. “I musta been out ’n the cold too long. Come to think of it, I did give it to Lemuel. It’s an old heirloom from my wife’s family. She gave it to me when we first got married. Supposed to keep me safe on the trail, I guess, and it’s worked pretty good all these years. So I just kinda decided it was time to pass it on to Lemuel.”
Active shook his head. “Your wife told us she never saw it before. Would she lie about that?”
“Well, I thought it was her give it to me. I was dating a lot of those pretty Chukchi girls before I got married. Maybe it was one of them.”
Long had eased around behind Bass during the conversation. Now he crowded up against Bass’s shoulder and spoke loudly into his ear, almost shouting. “You’re rapidly testing positive for bullshit here, Johnny.”
Bass jumped and Active glanced at Long with a sneaking sense of admiration. Had he gotten the line from some video or cop show, or could it possibly be an original?
“Where were you night before last, Mr. Bass?” Active asked.
“I ain’t answering no more questions,” Bass said. “I want a lawyer.”
“Then you’re coming with us,” Active said.
Long stepped behind Bass and handcuffed him as Active began the litany: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. . . .”
AT FIRST glance, Gail Boxrud looked as out of place in Chukchi as a palm tree or beach umbrella would have. Light gray eyes, fair skin, square, businesslike face, sandy hair done up in braids like a Swiss milkmaid.
Once you got away from the face, though, the public defender started to fit in. Red plaid shirt, Carhartt jeans, Sorels, a Carhartt jacket, a beaver hat with earflaps.
Just now, Boxrud was suffering a classic attack of public defender apoplexy in the office of Charlie Hughes, Chukchi’s district attorney.
“Murder?” Boxrud said. “Don’t be ridiculous! So he’s out on the trail and he finds the amulet from your museum burglary. So what? That doesn’t tie him to Victor Solomon’s death.”
Hughes smiled, his blue eyes twinkling in what Active suspected was appreciation of Boxrud’s performance. On the other hand, Hughes’s eyes always twinkled.
“Is that Johnny’s story now?” Hughes turned to Active. “What is this, Nathan, version four, version five, what?
“In that ballpark,” Active said.
“Counselor, it is a fact,” the district attorney said, “that your client has been lying to us from the moment he opened his mouth. It’s also a fact that the harpoon used to kill Victor Solomon was taken in the same burglary with the amulet. I’d say he’s tied to the murder. Nathan?”
Active nodded with a grin matching that of Hughes. He grinned partly so that their side would present a unified front to Boxrud, and partly because he was happy to be working the case from a nice warm office for a change, not out on the ice in the wind.
“So your theory is, Johnny robs the museum, waits a day, then goes out on the ice and stabs Victor with the harpoon, leaves it there, then goes home and gives Lemuel the amulet as, what, some kind of trophy?” Boxrud snorted. “Talk about your criminal mastermind.”
“Well, counselor, let me bottom-line this for you. Long story short, this is the kind of case where, at the end of the day, we have to step up to the plate and think outside
the box,” Hughes said with another of his grins. “Which Nathan here has been doing a lot of. Nathan?”
Active stared at the prosecutor, momentarily stupefied by the chain of clichés. Where had Hughes come up with it, and what, in fact, was their theory of the case? “To start with, we know Johnny’s a thief—”
“He’s never been convicted!”
“Not here,” Hughes interrupted. “But he did serve time for burglarizing a pawn shop in Grants Pass. We checked.”
“I know, I saw the file,” Boxrud said. “But that was Grants Pass and he was just trying to get his welding outfit back. This is Chukchi.”
Active nodded. “It’s a good story, anyway. But he is in fact a thief. So he burglarizes the museum, and, and . . .”
“And what?”
“Well, he knew how important Uncle Frosty was to Victor’s plans for the museum, so maybe he figured he could sell Uncle Frosty back to Victor.”
“You’re saying he kidnapped a mummy and held him for ransom.”
Active thought it over. It was starting to make sense now. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Boxrud shook her head. “Go ahead, I’m taking notes for my book on stupid Alaska cop tricks.”
Hughes chuckled and Active pressed on. “So he takes Uncle Frosty from the museum.” He paused, groping for the next chapter in the saga.
Hughes stepped in to fill the gap. “But he can’t just—”
“Right,” Active said. “He can’t just haul Uncle Frosty up to Victor’s front door and say, ‘Make me an offer.’ ”
“No way,” Hughes said.
“So he goes and hides him somewhere on the tundra,” Active said. “Maybe somewhere around that camp of his. Then he takes the harpoon and the amulet over to Victor Solomon’s sheefish camp to prove he’s got Uncle Frosty.”
“Right!” Hughes said. “And then—”
“And then he says, ‘Make me an offer,’ ” Active said.
“But Victor—” Hughes said.
“Victor’s not buying,” Active said.
“He was a crusty old bastard, from everything I hear,” Hughes said.
