White Sky, Black Ice

by Stan Jones

  "Have any luck?"

  "Any luck?"

  "With the caribou? Did you get any?"

  "Of course not. Like I said, I was only scouting," Jermain said. "I'm well aware of the law against hunting the same day you're airborne."

  Active wrote "airborne" in his notebook and smiled. "Too bad. My buddies in fish and game would love to have another 185 in their fleet. They tell me it's the number one choice of poachers. Not to mention game cops."

  "My insurance doesn't cover impoundments, Nathan," Jermain said. "So I'm a careful man."

  "Yeah, you said that."

  "I'm a busy man too. How can I help you? I gather you think somebody might be bumping off our employees?"

  Active pulled his Pearlcorder from a coat pocket and laid it on the desk between himself and Jermain. "OK if I start this?"

  A muscle in Jermain's jaw twitched slightly, but he nodded. Active clicked the Record and Play buttons.

  "What can you tell me about George Clinton and Aaron Stone?"

  "Not much," Jermain said, eyes on the tape recorder. "Aaron had been with us a couple years, since before the mine actually opened. He was a mechanic. Self-taught, but better at fixing things in cold weather than anybody else we've got. I can have somebody copy his personnel file and send it over, if you want." He wrote something on his desk blotter.

  "Was he having trouble at work?"

  "Not that I know of. He finished his two weeks Monday and headed back to town on his snowmachine. That was the last thing anybody at the mine knew until we heard on the radio he was dead."

  "And George Clinton?"

  "Him I barely knew," Jermain said. "We only hired him about six months ago. Tom Werner called me one day, said George was a cousin of his, and asked me to get him a job. I called my personnel director and told her to find something for him, and she put him on as a janitor."

  "Was he having problems at the mine?"

  "None that I heard about but we can pull his file, too." Jermain wrote on the blotter again. "Like I said, I didn't know George Clinton at all. I'm not sure we ever even spoke."

  "You never spoke to him?" Active asked.

  "Not that I can recall, no," Jermain said. "Though I guess it's possible."

  "It's possible?"

  "Of course," Jermain said. "I have a million conversations, but I don't remember them all. Do you?"

  "Do you think he could have come here at some point to talk to you about some problem he could have been having at work?"

  "I guess he could have," Jermain said. "But nothing like that jogs my memory right at the moment."

  "It's just that his father told me he might have come here to talk to you on Monday," Active said. "About some problem at work. That wouldn't be your recollection?"

  Jermain cleared his throat, pulled an appointment book from a drawer, and flipped through the pages. He stopped at one and bent over it for a moment, tapping a pencil on his desk blotter.

  The salt-and-pepper hair was thinning on top, Active noticed. He looked out the south window, out the west window, and at the wolf head on the wall.

  He looked at Jermain's Chief Engineer nameplate and back at his bald spot. "So that wouldn't be your recollection," he said again. "That George Clinton came here Monday? To talk to you about some problem at the Gray Wolf?"

  "No, he's not in my schedule here." Jermain looked up from the page and pushed the book across the desk.

  Active studied it. Nothing on the Monday page looked like an appointment with George Clinton.

  "So I'm sure I didn't meet with him Monday." Jermain closed the book. "What problem was he supposed to have talked to me about anyway?"

  "If he never talked to you, I guess it doesn't matter." Active stared at Jermain and Jermain stared at his blotter. "Does it?"

  "I guess not," the engineer said. "I was just wondering."

  Active wrote "I guess not" in his notebook and pretended to study it thoughtfully. He counted to thirty, to let Jermain stew a little. "Did you happen to pass through the Katy Creek area when you were out in your plane not shooting caribou?" he asked finally. "Tuesday would be about when Aaron Stone died. Perhaps you noticed something."

  Jermain took a few seconds to answer. "Ah, no, I went southeast. Down toward the Dog River and the Kuchiliuk Hills."

  Active flipped to a new page in his notebook, looked out the south window, studied the tip of his pen with a frown, pulled a fresh one out of an inside coat pocket.

  "You didn't go north at all?"

  "No, I didn't. Check with the FAA. They should still have my flight plan on file."

  Active wrote'TAA" on the new page. "How about Tuesday night, Wednesday morning?"

  Jermain frowned, looking confused. "No, I got back around dark. So I wasn't in the Katy Creek area Tuesday night, either. Or Wednesday morning."

  "I'm not talking about Aaron Stone. I'm talking about George Clinton. That's when he died."

  The muscle in Jermain's jaw twitched again. He was obviously worried, Nathan thought. Maybe he had something to hide. Or maybe he didn't know what was going on either and was afraid that he would be fired if the problem turned out to be at the Gray Wolf.

  "Are you suggesting I killed him?" Jermain asked.

  "Of course not." Active doodled in his notebook, letting the silence work. A pattern of intertwined vines sprouted on the page. When it began to appear they would spell "Lucy," he stopped doodling and stared at the engineer.

  Jermain fidgeted with his pencil and stared back. Finally he said, "Well, what's your point then?"

  "I was just wondering if you might have been in the Dreamland that night and seen something. Obviously, if we had an actual witness to George's suicide, that would pretty much lay things to rest."

  "I didn't go anywhere that night," Jermain said. "I was here till about eight, then I went back to my room at the Arctic Inn, watched some TV, and went to bed."

  Active wrote "Arctic Inn" in his notebook. "Anything else you'd like to tell me, Mr. Jermain?"

  "No, I've told you all I know," he said. "I'd like to talk some more, but I've got a mine to run. Are we about done?"

  "We're done." Active clicked off the tape recorder and put it back in his pocket. "Go ahead and send me those personnel files, if you would."

  Jermain nodded wordlessly.

  They shook hands and Active left the office. As he crossed the lobby, a button on the phone at the vacant receptionist's desk lit up. He reached for the phone, then hesitated, staring at the tiny pinprick of light.

  Without a wiretap order, anything he heard would be inadmissible. But at least he'd hear it with his own ears, whatever it was. He picked up the receiver and unscrewed the mouthpiece, then lifted out the round, waferlike microphone and pushed the lighted button.

  "... get up here as fast as you can," Jermain's voice said. "A state trooper was just here."

  "What did he want?" said a second voice.

  "Damned if I know," Jermain said. "He practically accused me of poaching caribou, then he asked me if I killed George Clinton and Aaron Stone. He was all over the map."

  "You didn't tell him anything, did you?"

  "I told him I was out looking for caribou when Stone died and asleep when Clinton died. I said he could have their personnel files."

  The other man was silent, which Jermain seemed to take as an accusation."Well, I had to do something. I didn't want to make him any more suspicious than he already is."

  "OK, but I am advising you not to talk to him again," the second voice said. "Does Tom Werner know about this visit yet?"

  "I don't think so. He's up at the mine. How soon can you get here?"

  "Hang on, let me check my schedule," the second voice said. "Let's see... I've got a hearing tomorrow afternoon, I can get out tomorrow night. That should put me in Chukchi Sunday morning at the latest. You'll be okay till then if you stay away from that trooper."

  "I don't know. I'll try."

  "Just tell him the company is referring in
quiries to me if he tries to contact you again."

  Active hung up the receptionist's phone and waited until the lighted button went dark. Then he reassembled the mouthpiece and let himself out of the GeoNord offices.

  He stood on the steps and thought about the conversation he had just heard. Jermain apparently had a lawyer on tap. Why? The chief engineer was a balding white executive worried his mine would be blamed for a couple of Native suicides. He could even be another trigger-happy caribou poacher. But could he be a murderer?

  Active's eyes were tearing in the same cold west wind that had raked George Clinton's funeral. He wiped them with the back of a glove, got into the Suburban, and bounced south, across the west end of the runway to the FAA Flight Service Station. Inside, a woman was on duty at a console of microphones, instruments, indicator lights, and switches.

  A speaker on the console spat a burst of static, then a raspy voice said, "Chukchi radio, six-three alpha, twelve north for landing."

  The woman at the console pulled a boom microphone to her lips and said, "Roger, six-three alpha," followed by some aviation jargon Active didn't understand.

  Though a glass door, he saw the station chief, a Nome Inupiaq named Ben Akoochuk, hunched over a manual typewriter in a tiny office next to the control room. He spotted Active and came out, hand extended.

  "In theory, I can't show you anybody's flight plan without a search warrant," he said when Active asked if Jermain's Cessna had been out of its tie-downs on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

  Active frowned.

  Akoochuk smiled. "But, in practice, I could let you look at it and then you could come back with a search warrant if you think you need it." He led Active into the little office, then rummaged in a file drawer and came up with a cardboard slip an inch high and six inches wide. "You ever see one of these?"

  Active shook his head.

  "Well, it's a flight strip. The controllers, like Donna out there, write down their radio contacts with the pilots on them. Jermain's plane was only out once in the past week, on Tuesday, and this is the strip from that flight."

  Active leaned over Akoochuk's shoulder and looked at the strip. It was full of numbers and symbols that looked like shorthand. "What does it say?"

  "It says he filed a flight plan about eleven o'clock Tuesday morning." Akoochuk pointed to the first line on the strip. "He told us he was going down by the Dog River and the Kuchiliuk Hills and he would be back by seven P.M. He actually got back about five, according to this."

  "He was out six hours? Can his plane carry that much gas?"

  "Not without a belly tank, which Jermain doesn't have," Akoochuk said. "But that doesn't mean anything. He could have landed out in the country for a while."

  "Can a Cessna 185 haul a snowmachine?"

  "Sure, if it's not a real big one and you take out everything but the pilot's seat. In fact, Jermain's got one. Look."

  Akoochuk handed Active a pair of binoculars and pointed at a sleek blue-and-silver plane tied down thirty yards from the FAA station. Active raised the binoculars to his eyes and saw a set of handlebars just visible through a rear window of the plane.

  "I guess if he can't land where he wants to, he puts her down as close as he can and takes the snowgo the rest of the way," Akoochuk said.

  Active looked back at the flight strip. "If I understand this right, you heard from him when he was leaving and then again when he got back and wanted to land. What about in between? Did he call you from the Dog or the Kuchiliuk Hills?"

  "Nope. See here? We never heard from him till he was twelve miles south of the airport, inbound." Akoochuk pointed to a line on the strip.

  "So is there any way to know where he really was all day?"

  "Not really," Akoochuk said. "Once they get out of sight of the airport, they can turn off their radios and pretend to be Charles Lindbergh if they want to. Jermain could have flown to Kotzebue and had a couple of shots at the Ponderosa, for all I know."

  "Don't pilots have to report in regularly or something?"

  "Only the airlines. With these little guys, it's all voluntary. They don't even have to file flight plans if they don't want to." Akoochuk put the flight strip back in its folder. "How come you're so interested in Jermain, anyway? He been shooting caribou the same day he was airborne?"

  "Unofficially, I can tell you, could be."

  "How about officially?"

  "Officially? Officially we troopers never discuss an investigation. If there is an investigation."

  Active returned to the trooper office, called the Gray Wolf, identified himself to the operator, and asked to speak with Tom Werner.

  "I'll page him," the operator said. She put Active on hold and he listened to a feed of an Anchorage country-and-western station for perhaps five minutes. Then the receptionist came back on.

  "You're still blinking," she said. "Mr. Werner didn't pick up?"

  "Not yet."

  "He must have his pager turned off. Can I take a message?"

  "Tell him I'm coming up to the Gray Wolf tomorrow and I'd like to talk with him."

  "OK," the receptionist said. "Can I tell him what it's about?"

  "No, just that I'd like to speak with him. If he wants to call me back tonight, the Chukchi police dispatchers can find me."

  "OK," she said, and hung up.

  Next he called Cowboy Decker to set up a charter to the Gray Wolf for the following morning. Decker said he was busy and the shuttle was going up anyway and would be cheaper. Active called Lienhofer's and made a reservation.

  He added a summary of his interview with Jermain to his report and dropped the tape into the folder.

  It was quitting time and Friday to boot, so he drove to the Northern Dragon and ordered Number Twelve, the sinus-clearing Szechuan Beef, from a Korean girl who spoke almost no English. Probably another of the innumerable daughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces of Kyung Kim, the Northern Dragon's proprietor.

  Kim moved a steady stream of Korean immigrants through the restaurant. Active assumed they worked for nearly nothing or perhaps even paid Kim to get a green card and into America. Where they went after their few months in Chukchi, he had no idea, but he assumed it was someplace warmer.

  Active supposed also that there was a high probability that much was illegal about Kim's operation. But the Northern Dragon was a federal problem. He had resolved to enjoy the occasional Number Twelve with a clear conscience until such time as the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided to pay the Northern Dragon another visit and deport most of the staff, as had happened shortly after his arrival in Chukchi.

  When he had finished the Number Twelve, he drove to Pauline Generous's house and turned on his siren for a couple of hoots. No one came out, so he walked through the kuri' nichuk and knocked on the inner door. He waited a couple minutes and knocked again.

  Finally, Lucy answered it. "Oh, hi, Nathan," she said. "Pauline went to the store. She said you could wait. Or if you can't wait she can take a taxi to bingo."

  Lucy was holding a blue bathrobe closed and had a pink towel wrapped around her head. "Don't mind me," she said when she saw him looking. "My water's frozen, so I came over to use Pauline's shower. I just have to dry my hair, then I'm leaving for my accounting class at the community college. You could watch TV. There's pop in the refrigerator."

  "Muktuk and seal oil too, ndauqmiiyaaq," she added. She tossed him a remote control and disappeared into the bathroom.

  He took a Diet Coke from the refrigerator. A hair dryer whined to life as he sat down and clicked on the state satellite channel. A basketball game was on. He half-drowsed as ten very tall millionaires raced up and down the floor of a stadium in Texas.

  Gradually, he realized that the noise of Lucy's hair dryer had become louder. He glanced at the bathroom. The door was open a foot or so.

  Lucy had released her grasp on the bathrobe as she worked on her hair, and it had swung open. He could see a smooth sweep of brown curves from thigh to belly to thr
oat, interrupted once where a small, perfect breast jutted from the blue folds. He knew he should clear his throat or scrape his chair or just get up and leave. But he didn't.

  The cord of the hair dryer tangled in the collar of the bathrobe. Lucy shrugged it off and let it slide to the floor, now baring a lush swell of hip and concave arch of back. She reached forward and adjusted a mirror for a side view of her hair, in the process giving Active a better view.

  His eyes went to her pubic thatch, then back to her breasts, flexing tautly as she ran the brush through her gleaming black hair and followed it with the dryer. He was mesmerized by her areolas, such a deep, intense brown against the lighter brown of her skin that they seemed to glow with their own dark inner light. They were like two eyes staring back into his own.

  Lucy clicked off the dryer. He jumped, and realized that two very real black eyes had been staring into his for some time. She turned from the mirror and faced him and for the first time he saw all of her, straight on.

  "Would you like me to close the door?" she asked.

  He tried to speak, couldn't, and shook his head numbly.

  She walked toward him, hands at her sides, and stopped before him. He put his arms around her hips and buried his face in the triangle of hair. He smelled bath oil, a salt marsh under a hot sun, a cool, moss-grown spring.

  "What if Pauline comes back?" he asked suddenly.

  "She won't," Lucy answered. "She promised."

  "And your class?"

  "I'm already getting an A. I can miss one."

  She led him into Pauline's bedroom and then her boldness deserted her. She scooted under the covers and looked away as he undressed.

  As he sank into her honeyed flesh, he thought again of the jade coils of the Katonak and the laughing raven, and, despairingly, of Aaron Stone and George Clinton smiling sympathetically as they drifted away in the ice floes.

  PAULINE WAS waiting across the street when he left the house. She came over and climbed into an uncomfortable silence in the Suburban.