Stone Cross

by Marc Cameron

  “Guesses,” Cutter said. He and Lola flanked the judge, but if anyone was out there with a rifle, that would offer precious little protection. “But only guesses.”

  Vitus stopped when he reached the wooden steps in front of the lodge, using his chin to gesture to the right. “Rolf’s around the side. I was gonna check to see if he was still alive, but . . .” He swallowed hard. “Well, you’ll see.”

  Cutter sniffed the air, catching the odor of wood smoke. “Judge, if you don’t mind waiting inside for a few minutes.”

  “I’m not comfortable—”

  “You’re in charge here, Officer Jasper.” Cutter ignored Markham’s protests. He looked past the VPSO at the gray apparition of tree line to the east. “Where do you want us? The fewer people we have around the scene the better.”

  “You and your partner come help me,” Jasper said. “If everyone else would please hang back until we take some photos . . .”

  Markham licked his lips, looked like he might say something. Instead, he turned and clomped angrily up the steps toward the lodge door.

  Cutter gave Lola a subtle nod, then glanced at Birdie. “Deputy Teariki will go inside first and do a quick check of things.”

  Markham turned. “To make certain we don’t mess up the crime scene?”

  “No, sir,” Cutter said matter-of-factly. “To make certain someone doesn’t shoot you in the face.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Every two weeks since her husband had died, no matter what else was going on in her life, Mim Cutter sat down with the kids’ teachers for a face-to-face meeting. Looking after their well-being, or trying to at least, was the only way for her to stay relatively sane. She wanted to do something for Arliss too, but that was proving more difficult—so far, anyway.

  She’d gotten off early from the hospital and spent the last half hour at Rabbit Creek Elementary visiting with Mrs. Herbert, the twins’ second grade teacher. The boys had taken the bus to piano lessons after school—something they had fought tooth and nail until Arliss, wonderful Arliss, had nonchalantly mentioned that Grumpy Man-Rule twenty-two said that a man should know how to play at least two songs on the piano and two songs on the guitar. Mim smiled at the thought. Sneaky man, that Grumpy. Mim often wondered, whenever Ethan would bring up one of Grumpy’s man-rules, if the old man invented them as each problem raised its head, or if he actually had a list he’d been keeping for most of his adult life. She supposed it didn’t matter. They were good rules, and made good men.

  He’d raised Ethan and Arliss after their dad had died and their mom had run off. Arliss had been around the same age the twins were now. Ethan was a little older, but not old enough to understand why a mother would abandon her children. Grumpy’s ways—and his rules for manhood—had been just what a couple of traumatized boys needed. Mim had never told her kids that little factoid about their grandmother. She didn’t want them to know that moms did things like run off. Their situation was sucky enough as it was.

  The meeting at Rabbit Creek Elementary had gone as she’d expected. Soft smiles and straight talk from Mrs. Herbert. A casual observer might suspect that Michael was having the roughest time since his father’s death. He was the quieter of the two, but, according to the teacher, it was outspoken Matthew who was struggling the most with his emotions. He was, Mrs. Herbert said, a fixer—a person who saw a problem and wanted to solve it right then. Matt missed his daddy, but he understood death, as much as any seven-year-old could. He was adjusting to the loss. The real problem with Matt was that he saw his mom was sad. He couldn’t abide the thought of not being able to cheer her up. A fixer. That reminded Mim of someone else she knew.

  She left the elementary school feeling responsible, as usual, for all the things that made her children unhappy. It was a vicious cycle. It depressed her that they were upset. Her depression upset them all the more. And now she had to go pick up Constance the she wolf. Mim needed to talk to her teachers too, but not today. Thirty minutes of hearing what a crappy mom she’d become was plenty, thank you very much, no matter how veiled the terms. Besides, Constance blew a gasket every time she thought about Mim getting into her business at the school. No, today it was a simple pickup since she was in the area—and a sullen ride to get the twins at their lessons.

  Mim headed east on De Armoun Road. Winter was right around the corner, but for the time being, it was still fall in Anchorage, with chilly temperatures, miles of golden birch, and buckets of cold rain. With any luck, she’d be home before rush hour. She was lucky. She’d made it across the city from the hospital before evening traffic got bad. The poor unfortunates who commuted on the one and only highway out to the valley had it rough. A single accident with a moose—and there were a couple hundred of those every year—could stop traffic for hours. One of the many quirky things about living and working in Anchor-town. There weren’t too many places on earth where you had to worry about dodging moose on your way home from work, or watching out for bears at city parks.

  Anchorage lay nestled between the Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm of the Cook Inlet, a larger arm off the Gulf of Alaska, and the Pacific Ocean. The Chugach Mountains towered above the city to the east. Ethan had taken the family to pick blueberries off the Glen Alps trailhead when they’d first moved to Anchorage. He’d looked for bears the entire time. The boys had found some poop, and a lot of berries, but no bears. It was a wild place up there above the city.

  Home to glaciers and icefields year-round, many of the Chugach Mountains remained snowcapped all summer. Now, they were completely white, and had been since a few days after termination dust—the first mountain snow of the season—had fallen in mid-September. Mim had heard a story of a guy hiking on Flattop Mountain—not far from the berry-picking spot—who’d broken both legs. He’d sat there, alone and unable to move, looking down at all the traffic on the Seward Highway just a couple thousand feet below. It was one of those stories that ended differently depending on who told it. Sometimes the guy was rescued; sometimes other hikers found his bones in the spring. The mountains looked even more deadly now that Ethan was gone, and Mim was inclined to believe the hiker ended up as bear poop.

  Arliss talked about taking the family berry-picking this year. Luckily, he’d been too busy.

  Mim hung a left on Elmore, through a manicured neighborhood of big, cedar-sided homes with spacious lots and gobs of plump blue spruce. She and Ethan had talked about moving here. She stayed on Elmore at the roundabout, then took the next left into South High School parking, steeling herself to face Constance. Maybe she was trying too hard. Maybe she needed to just relax and let time do its job, healing all wounds—or beating the shit out of her—whichever came first.

  Constance waited in the lee of the front entry, out of the wind. Other students were waiting too, chatting in groups of three or four. Mim groaned when she saw her daughter. As per usual, the she wolf ran alone. Odd, that she wasn’t wearing her backpack. Instead of going around the van to get in, Constance approached Mim’s door. That was weird. She usually wanted nothing but to go home and go to her room.

  Mim rolled down her window.

  “What’s up?” she said, catching her breath in the chilly air. The sweet odor of birch in the fall would have made her smile had she not been so terribly sad.

  “Mr. Gee said I can make some extra money tutoring some kids in math.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Right now,” Constance said.

  Hands on the steering wheel, Mim rolled her wrist so she could look at her watch. She didn’t like last-minute changes, but anything that signified a thaw in Constance was more than welcome. “Okay,” she said. “How long do you think?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Constance said. “I’ll catch a ride.”

  “With a friend?” Mim asked, sounding snarkier than she wanted to.

  Constance wagged her head. “Yes, with a friend.”

  “Okay,” Mim said again. “No later than seven—and call when you’re on the way home.”<
br />
  “Of course,” Constance said, as if she was clearly old enough not to be reminded of stupid details.

  Mim rolled up her window, fighting the urge to play detective and dig deeper. She told herself this was good. This was progress. Still, she wished Arliss were here. He’d go all marshal-y and follow her or something. If Constance was meeting a boy, Arliss would do his job as an uncle and give the kid chronic diarrhea with a stone-cold glare from those blue eyes of his.

  Mim turned left on De Armoun again to go pick up the boys, when her cell phone rang. At first she thought it might be Constance, changing her mind and wanting a ride home. She did that lately. But the caller ID was blocked. Mim tapped the hands-free button.

  “Ms. Cutter?” the voice said. “Jill Phillips here.”

  Mim took a second to make the connections.

  “Chief,” she said. “Thanks for returning my call.”

  “No problem,” Phillips said. “What can I do for you?”

  Mim pulled onto a patch of gravel at 140th. Her heart was beating far too fast to drive and talk about something of this magnitude. She threw the van in park and then settled deeper into her seat.

  “Arliss speaks highly of you,” she said. “He says you’re the best boss he’s ever even heard of.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Phillips said, wary, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “He doesn’t know I’m calling.”

  “I gathered that,” Phillips said.

  “Chief . . . should I call you Chief?”

  “Jill is better.”

  “Okay, Jill,” Mim said. “Please call me Mim. I’m talking to you because Arliss trusts you. And if he trusts you, then I trust you.”

  “Do you need me to have him call you when he phones in?” Phillips said. “He doesn’t have cell reception where he’s at now, but he has a satellite phone.”

  “No,” Mim said. “Please no. The last thing I want to do is bother him at work. I want to talk to you. I’m calling because . . . Well, I’m worried about him. I need to know if there’s anything I can do for him. He seems so . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Ready to explode?”

  “Yes!” Mim said, exhaling with relief that the chief understood. “Exactly. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “You’re not,” Phillips said. “I’m worried about him too. The problem is, I’m his boss, and his new boss at that. He’s not likely to confide much in me. Not until we know each other a little better. I know he thinks the world of you and your family, though. He would never have left Florida otherwise.”

  “He loves the kids,” Mim said. She knew how Arliss felt about her in the past—or she’d figured it out, shortly after she and Ethan were married. But he’d been married four times since then.

  “Has something happened?”

  “Not at all,” Mim said. “To be honest, he’s been this way for years. It’s nothing new. I’m just able to see it more clearly now.” She closed her eyes, pausing for a moment to screw up her courage. Jill Phillips seemed to know it was time for her to be quiet and listen. A rare trait in a boss, or any human being for that matter.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Mim said at length. “But, can you tell me what happened to him in Afghanistan?”

  Silence.

  “I’m overstepping,” Mim said. “Asking you to betray a confidence.”

  “No,” Phillips said. “It’s not that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. And honestly, it’s more your business than it is mine. You’re his family. The U.S. Army doesn’t provide that kind of information when someone gets out. There are no specifics in his record other than the fact that he was awarded a Silver Star.”

  “I knew about that,” Mim said. “He doesn’t talk about it, but I knew.”

  “There’s a citation with it,” Phillips said. “But it’s vague. They do that if the action has to do with something classified.”

  “My husband thought it was some other event that was bothering him,” Mim said. “Not related to the stuff that led to him getting the Silver Star. Their grandfather, the man who raised them, he thought so too.”

  “Grumpy?”

  Mim smiled. “Yes. I got the impression Grumpy found out something about what happened from one of the guys in Arliss’s unit, but Grumpy passed away before he could tell Ethan.”

  Mim started to mention her conversation with Arliss at the Dome, but that seemed a violation of trust. It was a stupid notion. She was asking the chief to tell her Arliss’s secrets. She should be willing to do the same thing in order to help him. Phillips spoke before Mim had to.

  “Listen,” the chief said, sighing as if she’d reached a major conclusion. “I’ve been going back and forth for the better part of three months about contacting one of Arliss’s old US Army Ranger buddies—a guy named David Carnahan. He’s a physician in Virginia now. For all I know, he’s the same one who Grumpy got his information from.”

  Mim’s hands gripped the steering wheel. She rocked back and forth in her seat. “You have his phone number?”

  “I do,” Phillips said. “But I have to tell you, there’s a danger here you need to keep in mind. People who serve together can be awfully protective. There’s a better than average chance Dr. Carnahan won’t tell you anything, but will call Arliss and let him know you’re digging around.”

  “I . . .”

  “You worried I might do the same thing?”

  “I kinda did,” Mim said.

  “I might have,” Phillips said. “Had you been a flake.”

  “Dr. Carnahan’s number?”

  “Here you go,” Phillips said, reading off the digits beginning with the 703 area code. “Arliss is fortunate to have you in his corner.”

  “And you too, Jill,” Mim said, writing the number on her hand. “Tell me again what kind of doc Carnahan is. I’m a nurse. I know how to talk to doctors.”

  “A pediatric surgeon,” Phillips said.

  “But he wasn’t a doctor in the army?”

  “No,” Phillips said. “A Ranger. So tread lightly. There’s a good chance that if something terrible happened to Arliss, David Carnahan was smack dab in the middle of it with him.”

  “I’ve gotta do something,” Mim said.

  “I’m that way too,” Phillips said. “A fixer.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Vitus Paul’s tracks stopped in the snow ten feet from the prone body. It was easy to see why.

  Snow lent a peculiar intensity to blood, unmuted by the fog.

  Pooling on the grimy asphalt of a city street or oozing onto the dirt floor of a mud hut, blood is placidly silent and more akin to used motor oil or spilled chocolate syrup than a vital life force. But smeared and sprayed with all the attendant gore against the crystalline white backdrop of snow, it becomes the visual equivalent of a scream.

  Cutter and Ned Jasper approached slowly, the VPSO taking photos, Cutter looking at the ground for tracks and any other evidence that might have been left behind. They were still ten feet from the body when Lola came out to join them.

  “Markham’s good and pissed at you,” she whispered to Cutter.

  “At me?”

  “I guess he’s just pissed.” Lola rubbed her hands together to warm them, staring at Rolf Hagen’s body as she spoke. “And you happen to be in the way.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Cutter said. “I’ll worry about that when I see what we’ve got here.”

  Lola stayed a half step behind, as if she didn’t know where to put her feet. She was young as deputy marshals went, with less than four years on a job that focused primarily on protecting judges and hunting fugitives—not investigating homicides. Certainly, deputies saw more than their fair share of blood and gore—but not nearly as much as a rank-and-file patrol officer working the street. There were shootings, fights, and the occasional stabbing, but frozen bodies were far from the norm. Cold and snow had done a good job of keeping the body intact. It didn’t happen th
at way in the south. Cutter had gone out with Grumpy a couple of times in his Florida Marine Patrol boat. A body in the swamp became unrecognizable in just a few hours. Forensic experts could approximate the time of death by measuring the size of the specific larvae types feeding on the corpse. There were no flies here, not yet anyway.

  A couple of ravens ker-lucked in the nearby trees, hidden by the fog. The birds had found the body at first light, and done what scavengers do. Their drunken tracks staggered around the pink snow like tiny pitchforks. They’d paid special attention to the flesh around a massive head wound.

  Ned Jasper stood frozen in place, staring down at the body. “I hate it when I know them,” he whispered.

  Cutter put a hand on his shoulder. “I understand. How do you say raven in Yup’ik?” Sometimes, thinking of something else for a moment gave the mind time for a needed reset.

  The VPSO looked up at him, surprised by the question.

  Cutter repeated himself. “Raven?”

  “Tulukaruq,” Jasper said, clicking the word from the back of his mouth. The sound was remarkably similar to the bird’s call. “I heard white people call a group of ’em an unkindness.” Jasper looked at the tracks around the head wound, shaking his head a little to clear it. “Unkindness sounds about right.”

  Out of the momentary stupor, he snapped a photo with his phone, then used his thumb and forefinger to zoom in on what was left of the face. “Hard to be sure with that damage to his head, but I’d say that’s Rolf Hagen. He’s got the right kind of beard.”

  Cutter understood all too well what the VPSO was going through. He’d seen a lot of people who’d met their end. Some of them, he’d ended himself—in the army and the Marshals Service. He didn’t try to keep track, at least not consciously, but a record was made. He saw them all, like a fanned deck of playing cards. Some of the faces were partially obscured, but most, he saw all too well.

  Lola took a photo of a blond spot in the logs, chipped away on the otherwise amber wood on the lodge wall above Rolf Hagen’s body.