by Dave Daren
Now we knew that Yura had made plans with Vann to be on his boat, but I was desperate to know when murder had crossed her mind. None of the messages between them suggested there was trouble in paradise, but it was hard to believe an iPhone would be the bearer of the cracks within their relationship. Conversations like those, or perhaps ‘arguments’ was the better word, would likely have taken place in person.
Or maybe they had never occurred. If things were rocky between them, why would they still go out for a romantic get together on the Chukchi Sea? Had it been Vann’s means of making amends?
There still wasn’t a clear motive for the murder, though, and none of the messages disproved that Morris wasn’t part of the plan. Yet it was hard to believe he would be at this point, since there didn’t seem to be any ties between the two men.
I scrolled through the remaining messages quickly in the hopes that maybe one argument between Yura and Vann had occurred digitally, but I gave up on the notion once I realized I was scrolling through messages from two months ago. Was Yura the kind of woman to hold onto a grudge for over a month? I thought of her explosive anger at the dock when she had realized no one was returning with Vann’s keys for his jet ski, but then I remembered her years-long feud with Tash.
I stopped at the sight of another picture sent by Vann. This one was of a necklace with a silver chain. The pendant that hung from the chain was a silver anchor with a gold chain wrapped around it and a blue gemstone in its center.
It had to be the nautical necklace he had bought for Yura, though I couldn’t remember ever seeing her wear it. I stared at the picture for a moment longer just so I could be sure I’d recognize it again before I moved on to the next messages.
Finally, I reached the end of the conversation history, or rather its start. It wasn’t really the beginning of the conversation between the two, but five months was as far back as the phone would show. Any messages sent prior were long gone.
“I can’t believe it,” Cassandra whispered. “But why would she kill him?”
Rather than answer her question, I moved on to the next person with a long conversation history. Unsurprisingly, it was Ronan, and I encountered the same issue I’d had with Yura’s texts. Most of the messages were short and to the point because most of their communications were probably done face to face.
The last conversation between Vann and Ronan had been four days ago, and it was centered around a reference to an unnamed movie. I couldn’t understand what they had typed, and I realized I was probably looking at an inside joke. I scrolled through the rest of the messages and was disappointed to discover nothing of interest, so I moved on to the next conversation.
“What?” Cassandra whispered at the sight of something.
I immediately checked to see whose name was at the top, and I held my breath when I saw it was another heart emoji. This one was red. I looked over at Casandra, and she looked ready to burst with excitement. There was unbridled glee on her face, and I could only imagine the joy a lover of secrets would feel from seeing something like this. Unless Vann had used a red heart to indicate his mother on his phone, this was a text history with another lover, someone other than Yura.
Just to be safe, I backed out of the conversation, much to Casandra’s disappointment, and returned to the home screen. I then navigated to the contact list and scrolled straight to the M’s, where I immediately found a contact labeled as ‘Mom.’ As soon as I saw it, I returned to the conversation history with the red heart emoji and began to scroll through.
The last time Vann and this red heart emoji had texted each other was on the day of his death. The secret lover had sent a message around two in the afternoon asking if Vann was coming over that night, and Vann had declined with a message saying he was busy. Obviously, he had declined because of his plans with Yura, but I was certain this one sentence response wasn’t a good enough answer. I expected questions from his lover about his plans, but to my surprise, his lover had only replied with a simple ‘Okay.’
I wondered if this other lover was aware that the deceased captain had been in a relationship with Yura. The likely answer was no since no one in town was supposed to know about the relationship, and I suddenly understood why Vann had wanted to keep his time with Yura a secret. I had no doubt he’d made the same excuses to this second woman, and that made me wonder if Vann had other women he’d strung along as well.
I considered briefly if Yura had confronted this second lover, and if the two had made plans to get revenge against Vann. There was no evidence to suggest a fourth person had been on the boat, but this lover didn’t necessarily have to be on the boat to be an accomplice, and it would explain why no woman had come forward as his other romantic partner. There was also a chance that Yura had threatened the woman into silence, and after watching the fisherwoman in action, that seemed like a strong possibility.
I pushed the thoughts aside for the moment, though, and began scrolling through the other messages. I was once again presented with brief messages, but these conversations seemed even briefer than the ones with Ronan and Yura.
I sighed as I accepted that texting was a rare form of communication for Vann and his close circle. As with Yura, most of these messages consisted of the secret lover wanting to see Vann and Vann replying he was on his way. Unlike with Yura, however, there were instances where the lover invited Vann over to her house. The longest conversation between the two was about a whale they had spotted while on the Vintage Vann. Apparently, this lover had also been invited on boat dates with Vann.
Finally, I had Yura’s motive. She must have gained access to Vann’s phone and then saw the messages with the other woman. Seeing how he had used the same password for all of his accounts, it wouldn’t have been a difficult task for Yura to unlock his phone. After all, Yura and Vann had known each other for years, and she was a member of his crew. Surely she had picked up his password during that time.
I was near the end of the text history when I stopped on a conversation.
“Just went to your house,” the mystery woman had sent. “Are you with your mistress again?”
“Yeah, sorry,” Vann had replied. “She’s been very clingy lately.”
“It’s fine,” the woman had written. “Just don’t forget who you belong to.”
I frowned. The language here bothered me. Why would Vann’s second lover refer to Yura as a mistress? Wasn’t she the mistress in this scenario? For the first time, I considered whether I had these hearts flipped. Maybe Yura was the red heart, and Vann’s other lover was the pink one.
I shook my head at this as I remembered that Yura herself had confirmed she had received a nautical necklace from Vann as a gift. What this conversation revealed, then, was that this mystery woman had viewed herself as Vann’s true love, and Yura had been encroaching on that love.
If that were true, then my previous question had been answered. Yura hadn’t been aware of Vann’s unfaithfulness, but this other woman had been. She probably suspected that Yura had killed Vann, but didn’t come forward with this information because Yura got to her first. If she had been threatened to remain silent, then it was crucial she was identified and made to testify in case Yura’s plan to escape was successful.
When I’d read through all of the texts, I closed out of the messaging app, which elicited a grunt of complaint from Cassandra. I ignored her and brought up the call history instead, since it was obvious Vann wasn’t a big texter.
What Vann lacked in text messages was made up in phone calls, just as I’d suspected. He had made frequent, lengthy phone calls to people in his contacts, and I sighed at the amount of information lost in those unmonitored conversations. Interestingly, the two people he had contacted the most were the pink and red hearts. Similar to his text habits, though, he had called Yura more often than he did his secret lover. There wasn’t any particular pattern I could discern in his calling habits other than that he was a frequent late night into early morning caller.
My c
oncentration on the phone was disrupted by the crackling coming from the walkie-talkie on Pingayak’s shoulder. He gripped the device and leaned his head to hear the voice coming through.
“Are you done looking?” Cassandra asked as she pointed at the iPhone.
As soon as I nodded, she started tapping away on the touchscreen. She went straight to the photos app and began scrolling through the pictures stored on the device.
I’d expected her to return to the text messages after she’d protested when I’d moved on before she was done reading, but instead she scrolled through endless selfies of Vann. I certainly could see the ego thing Tash had mentioned before as image after image of Vann’s face went by. The sea of selfies was sporadically interrupted by pictures of Vann with Ronan, Yura, or some other unnamed friend or family member, and the rarity of these pictures made them all the more interesting.
“Wow,” Cassandra breathed. “You weren’t kidding when you said it’d take a lot of strength to drown this guy. Look at those muscles!”
She chuckled as she continued scrolling through the photos, until she stumbled across a candid picture of Yura. The fisherwoman was naked and laying on a bed I knew wasn’t Vann’s. Maybe hers? She was covered with a thin, red blanket that concealed her breasts and then snaked down between her legs. Only the skin of her arms, sides of her abdomen, and legs were exposed. She looked directly at the camera with a suggestive gaze.
“This is what I’m looking for,” Cassandra said as she tapped on the picture to enlarge it.
“Naughty pictures of Yura?” I asked with a smirk.
“No, not specifically of Yura,” she answered as she rolled her eyes at me. “I mean pictures of our mystery woman. I’m trying to see if Vann might have taken a picture of her, or if he at least saved a selfie she had sent him to his phone.”
“Good thinking,” I complimented.
Cassandra clicked out of the seductive photo and continued her search through the rest. More pictures of Yura popped up, but none of them were on the same level of intimacy as the first one. One picture showed her on the deck of the Vintage Vann with a fishing rod in her hands. Another depicted her wearing an oversized shirt as she stood in the doorway of a dimly-lit room.
Vann was featured in group photos that involved several women, but nothing suggested any intimacy between him and these women. Some of them had to be family members due to the striking resemblance they shared with Vann, but even those who looked like potential candidates for the second lover didn’t offer any evidence of a relationship beyond basic friendship.
Cassandra finally reached the bottom of the gallery and sighed in defeat. There wasn’t a candid photo identifying Vann’s other romantic partner, and so the search for her identity continued. Cassandra clicked on the mail app and began scouring through his inbox. Much to her delight, she discovered that Van had been the type to leave all his read emails in his inbox rather than deleting them. For every email sent to a female name, the young paralegal opened it and read its contents.
“I doubt he sent her an email, not when he could just text her instead,” she admitted to me. “But leave no stone unturned.”
“Just admit it,” I said. “You like snooping through his emails.”
She gave me a sly glance, smiled, and then opened her mouth to respond.
“Yura might have been located,” Pingayak interrupted.
Our heads snapped up, and Cassandra and I stared at the older officer in surprise.
“The pilot spotted a red and white speedboat far off in the Arctic Ocean,” the officer continued. “It’s currently not moving, but the pilot said he can see someone in the boat.”
“Has he landed?” I asked as I leaned forward.
Pingayak shook his head. “He can’t land,” he sighed. “He’s not operating a seaplane. Our only seaplane is in repairs after a malfunction last week. Right now, he’s circling overhead. Officer Ansong and Officer Jackson are getting into a boat to go after her as we speak.”
“I want to be on that boat,” I declared as I stood up and pulled on my coat.
The fast movement caused a twinge of pain to shoot from my shoulder, and I glanced at Cassandra as I considered asking for another dose of Tylenol. I decided against it when I realized her purse wasn’t on her.
“It’s too late for that,” Pingayak said in response to my request. “But Officer Waska owns a boat, and I already went ahead and told him to get his boat ready. He’s waiting for you at the dock across the street.”
“Thanks,” I said as I moved toward the door.
“Wait, I’m coming, too,” Cassandra announced as she got up.
“You should keep looking for the identity of our mystery woman,” I told her as I nodded toward the smartphone.
She shook her head in protest as she pushed the phone back toward Pingayak.
“No, you need me,” she pleaded. “If Yura’s trying to escape, I might be able to talk her out of it. We won’t need to look through the phone if we catch her. She can just tell us who Vann was cheating on her with.”
“She’s right,” the officer agreed. “Besides, we already have someone trying to pinpoint the identity of the other woman.”
“Okay, then,” I said with a nod. “Let’s get going.”
I exited the conference room and rushed down the hallway while Cassandra trailed along behind me. In the lobby, I discovered that my paralegal’s coat and purse had been left abandoned on one of the metal chairs. I was astonished by her carelessness until I realized that if there was ever a place to leave your items unattended, it was a police station.
Her confidence in her items being left untampered probably stemmed from the fact that she was on friendly terms with the officers, and she assumed they wouldn’t let anyone touch her stuff. I couldn’t help but smile at the irony as I picked up her bag, opened it, and rifled through it until I found the bottle of Tylenol.
By the time I had the bottle open, Cassandra was by my side and pulling on her coat. I threw two pills into my mouth, forced them down, and then handed the Tylenol to my paralegal. I caught sight of her horrified gaze as I turned toward the entrance, but I shrugged and smiled.
“You could have choked,” she said as we darted outside. “And how could you do that without a glass of water? They taste disgusting.”
“I’m used to it,” I said as we ran across the street.
I spotted Waska at the entrance of the dock, and I waved to catch his attention.
His face lit up at the sight of us crossing the beach, or rather his face lit up at the sight of Cassandra. He waited until we were less than a foot from his position before he turned away and walked halfway down the dock. He stopped at a speedboat with a sleek, black hull and vibrant red seats. The officer looked at the watercraft with pride before turning back to flash me and Cassandra a grin. He gestured for us to hop aboard before doing so himself.
“With this bad boy, we’ll catch Yura in no time,” Waska promised as he fired up the motor.
Without hesitation, I hopped into the motorboat and settled into the seat next to Waska. I looked back at Cassandra and found her eyeing the vehicle warily. I beckoned for her to hurry up, and she sucked in a deep breath, held it as she carefully climbed onto the boat, and then released it audibly once she was in a seat.
“It’s not too late to head back to the police station,” I said as I pointed toward the road.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she insisted and wrapped her arms around her torso.
Waska released the lines, pulled up the anchor, and then gunned the boat away from the coastline. He angled our course toward the Arctic Ocean, and then pulled his walkie-talkie toward his ear. He asked someone on the other end of that device for the coordinates of Yura’s boat, but I wasn’t able to hear the response over the sound of the motor, crashing waves, and wind blowing in my ears. He, however, could hear the speaker, and when he was done listening to the walkie-talkie, he manually entered a marked point on his GPS. The screen updat
ed to reflect this new destination, and Waska made a disgruntled face.
I looked back and watched the city of Utqiagvik become indistinguishable from the coastline of Alaska. The docks and Vann’s cordoned off boat soon became specks on the horizon, and even that faded away. I turned my gaze to Cassandra as the land vanished from view, and I saw that she was staring at her lap as though her thighs were suddenly the most fascinating things in the world while she gripped the edge of her seat as though her life depended on it.
“Do you know how to swim?” I yelled over the sound of the motor.
“Yeah,” she responded. “It’s not drowning I fear. Well, that’s not true. Everyone’s afraid of drowning, or at least they should be. I’m just not a fan of large bodies of water. There are so many things down there.”
As if on cue, a fin cut through the surface of the water not far from our boat. The creature didn’t come out of the water, but I guessed it was likely a whale. If anything, I was more interested in whether it was headed for our vehicle than what it was. The fin emerged again but now further away, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I glanced behind me to check on Cassandra and saw that she still had her head down. I figured she had nothing to worry about when it came to large sea creatures if her eyes remained glued to her legs.
The further out on the water we traveled, the more concerned Waska appeared. I opened my mouth to ask him what the issue was when he suddenly slowed the speedboat down, and I had the answer to my question. In front of us was a minefield of misshapen ice chunks, and I tried not to shudder at the sight.
“What the hell is Yura thinking driving a small speedboat out here?” Waska asked as he navigated around the ice.
Freedom, I thought to myself. Yura was risking death to ensure she didn’t spend her life in prison, and I wondered if it was worth it. A risk of death, in her eyes, was far better than a guaranteed life behind bars.
