by Dave Daren
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Chapter 1
Darkness greeted me as I opened my office door and closed it behind me. I shrugged off my jacket and draped it across the armrest of the brown, leather couch just to my right. I couldn’t actually see the sofa, but I didn’t need light to know the layout of my office. I spent so much time there that navigating it was like second nature to me.
In the center of the room was a round coffee table with small porcelain statues of polar bears and sea lions that had been gifts from my mom and sister, and they had been carefully laid out to capture the morning sunlight as soon as I opened the blackout curtains. On the other side of the room, across from the couch, stood the great mahogany desk my father gifted me when I’d completed my law degree.
But those gifts paled in comparison to the painting of an empty beach hanging on the wall opposite of the door. My mother had painted the scene and handed it to me as a housewarming gift when I’d moved north. Since my office was my second home and the place where I spent most of my awake time, it made sense to hang it up there. On my left was a bookshelf that held more pictures and sculptures than law books, and next to that was a water cooler and a table pushed against the wall.
The table held the second most important item in my office, the coffee maker. It was the first thing I tended to every morning after I’d removed my jacket, and I made my way there despite the near total darkness. I measured out the coffee, added water from the cooler, and then let the machine do its magic.
While the coffee maker perked away, I walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows behind my desk and dragged the dark, heavy curtains out of the way. Sunlight streamed into the room and lit up the carefully organized space. The quick movement of the curtains blew a couple of documents across my desk, and I made a sound of disapproval in response. I scooped the papers back into a proper stack and then positioned them on the corner of my desk.
The stack still wasn’t in the exact correct spot, but I resisted the urge to adjust the papers again and turned my attention back to the windows. I took a deep breath and soaked in the view of my adopted home. Past the surrounding buildings and the traffic clogged streets, I could see the bright blue waters of the Cook Inlet. The waters looked calm today, though I knew that was deceptive. Like every place in Alaska, danger was never far away.
Alaska was a land of endless snow, endless night time, and endless trouble. At least, that had been my impression of the state when I moved here years ago fresh out of law school. It was an idea born out of stories of the Great North, and one I’d willingly bought into in my desire to live a life unlike any I’d known before. I smiled at the memory as I noted the current lack of snow outside my window.
It was early in the morning, but the city breathed with life with rumbling car engines and shuffling pedestrians. Everyone wanted to take advantage of the ‘warm’ summer weather and dazzling sunshine out of fear it would all disappear at a moment’s notice. The summer months always seemed to pass by in the blink of an eye, and these twenty hours of summer daylight could seem like a distant dream in the face of twenty hours of winter night time.
But Alaska offered a kind of lifestyle drastically different from the one I had led in California, and every day I was grateful for it. Just when I thought I had seen all Alaska had to offer, an opportunity appeared to knock me flat on my ass and leave me searching for answers.
The sound of the coffee pot filling up cut through the noise of the city to interrupt my thoughts. I picked up my coffee mug and looked inside to see if it was clean. I was pleased to find that I had remembered to scrub it out before I’d left the office the night before and moved over to fill it with coffee and creamer. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the room, and I took a deep breath as the scent rolled over me.
Mug in hand, I returned to the windows before I took a sip of the beverage and enjoyed the warmth that spread across my chest. For a moment, I stood in near silence as I watched a pair of bald eagles glide past the windows, and then the silence was broken by the ringing of my office phone.
Just as I knew my way around the office without looking, I could locate my phone without even a glance in its direction. I reached out behind, punched the speaker button, and then the extension button.
“Law office,” I announced as I leaned against the back of my office chair.
“Uh, is this Reese Brooks?” a man asked.
I expected a woman’s voice to come out of the speakers since today was the first day for my new paralegal. I figured she needed help finding my office as many of my previous paralegals had on their first days as well, so the man’s voice was quite a surprise.
His voice sounded strained, and I knew from experience that this was a potential client. I had a few regular clients that I helped out from time to time, but most were people who called me when they were in deep trouble. As in already sitting in a jail cell and charged with some kind of trouble. And they all tended to sound exactly like the man on the other end of the phone. I finally turned to look at the phone.
“That’s me,” I answered. “And who’s this?”
“I’m Austin Morris,” the man replied. “I need your help.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Morris?” I asked.
He paused for a couple of seconds and left me to listen to his heavy breathing. I could hear a familiar beeping in the background but couldn’t put my finger on what it was. What beeped in a police station? An ankle bracelet? And why was he taking so long to tell me what he needed? It was obvious he’d called my office for legal help, and I was ready to offer my services to him. All I needed to know was what kind of case I was taking on this time around. Experience had taught me that a client who needed a moment to explain their situation had something to hide, and one of the worst things a client could do was not be upfront with their lawyer. I started to say this to Morris, but he chose to finally speak.
“I’m being charged with a murder I didn’t commit,” he said at last, and there was a painful sadness in his voice.
I knew he probably wore the same expression of disbelief I had seen on the faces of some of my other clients. He had just realized that the people around him truly believed he was capable of committing the worst crime imaginable.
But I felt my own interest perk up at the mention of a murder case. It was ghoulish to admit it, but murder cases were often the most interesting ones. True, most were little more than a fight that spiraled out of control. But every so often, one would come along that wasn’t as simple as two guys punching each other in the bar.
Something told me that Morris was about to hand me one of those cases.
“Mr. Morris, where are you calling from?”
“Up north in Barrow,” he replied. “Well, we’re Utqiagvik now.”
“Utqiagvik?” I repeated in surprise as I pulled my cell phone from my pocket to look up the flight time from Anchorage to Utqiagvik.
I’d heard of Utqiagvik, though I’d never had the chance to travel that far north. It was one of the few inhabited places that experienced twenty-four hours of daylight during the entire summer. What I couldn’t understand was why my office number was floating around in the frozen tundra. There were law firms much closer to the town who routinely handled
just about everything that happened there.
“How’d you get my number?” I asked him.
“I looked it up.” He said it without interest like I had asked him about the weather.
This confused me further since as far as I knew, I wasn’t exactly a local celebrity, and surely he would want someone closer to home.
“I read about a case you handled a couple of years ago in the news,” he continued. “You helped your client prove their innocence without ever having to step foot into a courthouse. I’m kinda hoping you can do the same thing for me.”
And now it made sense. I’d had similar calls from potential clients who had hoped I could prove their innocence as well. A few had even been innocent, and I had worked hard to clear their names. The real question I had to answer was whether Morris was one of those few, and the only way I could know that for sure was to meet with the man face to face. It looked like I was in for a two-hour flight north, and I tried to remember if I’d had the good sense to repack my to-go bag after my last impromptu flight.
“Mr. Morris, I can be there in a few hours,” I told him.
“Oh, really?” he said in surprise. “But I haven’t told you everything yet.”
“Well, answer me this,” I said as I moved away from the window. “Are you innocent?”
“Yes,” he declared without hesitation.
I smiled at his change in attitude. Now was not the time for self-pity, and I wanted him to believe in his case as much as I did.
“Then that’s all I need to know,” I told him.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Brooks,” he sighed in relief. “Truly.”
“Thank me when you’re no longer a suspect,” I replied. “For now, tell me about yourself. Who is Austin Morris?”
I quickly drank the rest of my coffee while Austin gathered his thoughts. I placed the empty mug on my desk, swung my chair around, and then sat down with one ankle resting on the other knee. I leaned back in my chair in my favorite thinking position as I waited for my new client to begin.
“Well,” he huffed, and it sounded like he might have scratched his chin. “I’m a fisherman here in Utqiagvik. Best damn fisherman you’ll ever meet, I bet.”
He laughed at this, but his laughter was cut short as though he suddenly remembered why we were even talking to each other. He cleared his throat, and I could almost picture him shaking his head.
“Uh, I run a small fishing crew with a man named Luke Marniq and a woman named Marleen Tash,” he continued. “I’ve been working with them for quite a while now.”
“So a good crew,” I commented.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Sometimes we pick up others, for a day or two, but Luke and Marleen are my regulars.”
“Are you married?” I asked.
“I am,” he said happily. “My wife’s name is Diana.”
“I’m guessing she doesn’t go out on the boat with you,” I chuckled.
“She doesn’t,” he replied with a chuckle of his own. “Though she knows everything about the business. She runs the financial side of things. She calculates our costs and divides the pay when we come back from a fishing trip.”
I traced my finger over an old, circular scar on the bridge of my nose as I thought over the information he shared. The police obviously felt that Brooks had a motive, but I knew from experience that the same was often true for those closest to the suspect. I added the names of Austin’s wife and shipmates to my own mental list of people of interest, though I wouldn’t mention that to my client just yet.
I stopped tracing my scar to open a nearby drawer containing my small, black journal. I flipped to a fresh, blank page and wrote down the names of his wife and crew. Each name was written at the top of a new page and then their relationship to Mr. Morris was written underneath. My previous paralegals always laughed at this habit of mine when I had a perfectly functioning smartphone with a notepad app at my disposal. I was never able to show them the light of committing pen to paper rather than finger to screen.
“Any kids?” I asked.
Mr. Morris sighed, but it sounded more like he was blowing out air than expressing something negative. I got the impression this was a question he and Diana faced a lot.
“We thought about it,” he said. “But fishing is both expensive and time-consuming, so it just didn’t feel right to get kids involved.”
“That’s fair,” I murmured, though I found it an odd comment.
I knew the boats were often passed down from generation to generation, and many considered it a necessity to have children in order to keep the business going. But maybe Morris didn’t make enough from fishing to take the risk, as he’d said, which would seem to be counter to his claim that he was the best damn fisherman I’d ever meet.
“Did you inherit your boat?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he replied. “Diana and I aren’t originally from the area. We moved up here about ten years ago when we first got married. Reason why I mention this is because, even though I’ve been here for years, I see now that I’m still an outsider.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I could sense where he was going next.
“Well, it’s just so weird how quick everyone believed I killed Harrison,” he sighed while I quickly wrote down the name Harrison and added ‘deceased’. “I can’t help but think that because he was born and raised here, and I wasn’t, everyone just automatically thinks I’m a bad person. It’s like they won’t listen to reason.”
I tapped the end of my pen against the scar on my nose as I considered his accusation. I knew from personal experience that it was certainly possible, though I’d never seen the locals go so far as to blame the outsider for a murder without at least some evidence.
“That’s quite an accusation, Mr. Morris,” I replied
“Well, it’s just… they won’t…” He stumbled over his words a couple times before giving up. “Never mind. You’ll see what I mean when you get here.”
“Alright,” I replied. “Look, I’m going to head to the airport now, but it’s very important that whatever you do, don’t talk to anyone. Not the police, not the prosecutor, not even your wife. The only thing you say to anyone is that you have an attorney, and you won’t speak without him. Is that clear?”
“Yeah, sure,” he replied. “They read me my rights.”
“I’m deadly serious, Mr. Morris,” I said. “Not a word, or I won’t serve as your attorney.”
There was a long pause as my threat sank in. I heard him draw a couple of deep breaths, and then he finally replied.
“I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” he assured me.
“Good,” I said. “I’m on my way. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Mr. Morris echoed the farewell and then hung up.
I realized I’d unconsciously turned my chair so I was looking at the window, and when I turned back to face my office, I nearly jumped when I saw a young woman sitting on the leather couch.
Her round eyes locked with mine, and she took that cue to stand up and approach my desk. She was short and plump with curves and thighs that could not be contained by the bright, red pantsuit she wore. Nothing about her seemed contained. Her black hair was thick and looked ready to burst out of the tight braid that traveled down her back. Her face seemed unable to contain the smooth, doughy cheeks, large brown eyes, and full red lips. Even the black glasses she wore looked ready to fly off since their winged frames extended beyond her face. She flashed me a youthful smile that added to her beauty, and I decided that the perfect description of her was simply full of life.
“Reese Brooks?” she asked as she stretched her hand toward me.
“That’s me.” I grabbed her hand for the handshake but stopped to look at her fingernails.
Her nails had been painted with a sky+blue background that was overlaid with what looked like tree branches. Her smile grew in reaction to my fascination, and she brought her hands up so that they were side-by-side. She then bent her fingers so that all
eight nails were lined up to reveal that the painted branches joined together to form an image of a tree.
“Cool, isn’t it?” she said with an excited gasp.
“Very,” I answered as I looked up at her face. “You must be Ms. Acosta.”
My eyes widened at the look of disgust that crossed her face when I used her name. She waved her hand in front of me as though swatting away something unpleasant.
“Oh, no, no, no,” she protested. “Do you know who Ms. Acosta is?”
Her frown deepened as she mentioned the name, and when she looked at me, all I could do was shrug.
“Ms. Acosta is a woman standing in a classroom teaching Spanish to kids who won’t ever speak the language once they graduate,” my new paralegal explained. “She wears an ugly outfit that follows the school dress code, and she stands in the hallway between classes looking for anyone who isn’t following every little rule down to the letter. At least, that’s who I imagine when I hear Ms. Acosta.”
“That’s… quite an image,” I replied.
“I come from a family of educators,” she sighed. “Mom’s a college professor, and Dad’s a high school teacher, but that’s not what I want to be. I insist you call me Cassandra. That’s the only name I ever want to be called. You can call me by my last name when I get married.”
I stared at her in wonder as I tried to process the quick, long string of words that came out of her mouth. Her speech had picked up speed with each word, so by the end, it all came out in a tumble that I had to pick apart.
“Um, okay, Cassandra it is, then,” I said as I started to wonder if this would really work out.
“Great! What should I call you?” she asked with another smile.
“Whatever pleases you,” I said. “I had an older paralegal when I first started who insisted on calling me Mr. Brooks even though she was old enough to be my mother. My last paralegal preferred Reese because it reminded her of her favorite candy.”
Her smile widened somehow, and I worried if it went any further her face would be split in two.
“Well, Reese, before we get down to business, how do you feel about intrusive questions?” she asked.
