Polar Bear Dawn

by Lyle Nicholson

  Flat was the word Mueller thought of—flat and white with pipelines everywhere. Welcome to the Arctic, Mueller thought. He had never dreamed of coming to the Arctic in all the years he had lived in Anchorage. The barren lands, as the Arctic was often called, had no appeal to him and now here he was, sixty-two years old, a drying-out detective in rehab in one of the earth’s coldest places. Lucky me.

  The plane dropped on the runway with a sudden bang, as if the pilot had missed the part about soft landings in flight school, the reverse thrusters came on, and moments later they were taxiing on the snow- covered runway past a mass of snow banks to the terminal.

  Mueller peered out his frost-covered window to see a Quonset-hut- style building that said “DEADHORSE TERMINAL.” Beneath the lettering was a smaller “Prudhoe Bay, Alaska” sign. Large buses pulled up alongside the plane, and the passengers got ready to leave. After pulling on their heavy parkas and mitts, they made for the door. The pilot had already announced a temperature of minus forty-five Fahrenheit with a ten-mile-an-hour wind.

  Mueller followed Franklin down the steep metal stairs that had been brought up to the plane door. Everyone walked carefully down the stairs—cold temperatures turn steel into ice, making the descent dangerous.

  As Mueller came to the bottom of the stairs, he could feel his chest tighten; his breathing became shallower from the frigid air. Cold grabbed his lungs and wouldn’t let go. It was like someone was sitting on his chest. He followed the rest of the men and women as they made their way to either the buses or the terminal.

  Inside the terminal, he could breathe again. He inhaled warm air like it was a luxury. His lungs exhaled the cold, and he quickly took another breath to warm them up. He blinked a few times to let his eyes warm up and focus.

  Walking towards Mueller with a grin was someone vaguely familiar, someone out of his past, from his days before multiple rehabs. He realized it was the grown-up Troy Mercury in an Arctic Oil Company Security parka.

  When Mueller was sure he wasn’t seeing a ghost, he finally said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Of all the punk kids I busted back in Anchorage, look who grew up.” Mueller almost embraced him but grabbed his hand in a firm handshake instead.

  Troy flashed a smile. “Hell yeah, Detective Mueller, I decided to straighten up and fly right after all those shit kicking’s you gave me in Anchorage.”

  Franklin was standing beside Mueller looking faintly amused. “You gentlemen want to clue me in?”

  Mueller looked over at Franklin, and with a blushing smile, he said, “Sorry Joanne, this is Troy Mercury. He was a street punk in Anchorage some fifteen years ago, and I busted his ass numerous times. Not sure about the shit kicking’s, but I did tell him just before he turned eighteen that the next time I busted him, he would do adult time. So what happened, Troy? You actually listened to me.”

  Troy smiled at Franklin. “Hey, the talk he gave me was just enough to scare the shit out of me, and I moved down to Seattle with my aunt, finished high school, and then took criminal justice in university.”

  “Criminal justice—did you graduate?” Mueller blurted out in surprise.

  “Hell yeah, graduated with honors at Washington State,” Troy replied. He guided Mueller and Franklin out of the sea of workers and over towards the baggage pickup area, which was a set of rollers that received luggage from a small door to the outside.

  “And you never joined the force. Why is that?” Mueller asked. Muller grabbed his duffel and then helped Franklin with her large CSI bag.

  “Attitude, Detective, they all said I had the aptitude but not the attitude. I couldn’t do enough ‘Yes, Sirs’ at the end of every sentence, so ten years ago I signed on up here. The pay is double what I’d get on the force, and I got a wife and kids I get to hang with every two weeks for a week. I kinda got to like this . . . know what I mean?” Troy smiled again at Mueller and Franklin, took one of the bags from Franklin, and ushered them towards the terminal exit.

  Mueller placed his hand on Troy’s shoulder as they walked. “You know, that does sound about your style, but I’m glad you turned out all right.” Mueller really meant it, as too many didn’t make it off the streets.

  They walked past the two coke machines that were the terminal’s refreshment center and past the forming line of oil workers shuffling their duffel bags to check in for the return flight to Anchorage. Mueller could see in their faces their exhaustion and their longing to get home.

  A set of double doors lead them to the outside and the small parking lot that was full of pickup trucks belching exhaust fumes mixed with the freezing air. Clouds of ice fog rose into the air as Troy lead them to his crew cab truck that read ARCTIC OIL SECURITY. The truck was a black 4x4 with lights, a winch, and a front crash bar. Franklin threw her bag into the back seat and jumped in after it, and Mueller, who would have let Franklin take the front, threw his bag in the back seat as well and got in the front.

  Troy drove the truck slowly out of the parking lot, peering through the ice fog made by the trucks in front of him, and then followed tail lights down the road. “Detective Mueller, is this your first time up here?” Troy asked as he glanced over at Mueller.

  Mueller unzipped his parka, settled back in his seat, and replied, “Yeah, never been further than Fairbanks for some hunting until now.”

  “Well,” Troy laughed, “let me give you the quick tour; right now we’re passing the Prudhoe Bay Hotel, one of the two hotels up here. I’ve never stayed there, but a room with a bed is about $175.00 a night and I think that comes with some meals—so not bad,” he said with a smirk. Troy pointed in the direction of some Atco trailers stuck together and raised on stilts. Snow was piled to just below the small windows, and pickup trucks lined the front of the trailers.

  “Now over to our right, we’ll be passing one of the largest oil field service camps in North America. You’ve got Halliburton, Schlumberger, and all the big guys up here to do service, and they all have their own camps.” Troy motioned to the expanse as they slowly passed by. The camps appeared and disappeared in the ice fog as they moved slowly down the road. Snow banks lined both sides of the road, and tall posts with reflector lights shone back to indicate where the road was. Troy kept watching the reflector lights to see where he was.

  Franklin, who was not interested in sightseeing, mostly because she’d, been there before, spoke up from the back. “Troy, what’s the status of the crime scene?” She was leaning forward, her chin almost touching the front seat between Mueller and Troy.

  “Well, it’s partially intact,” Troy said as he took his eyes only slightly off the road to answer.

  “Partially.. .what’s partial about it?” Joanne inched further forward in her seat, straining against the confines of her seat belt.

  “Well, the female is intact; however, we had to move the male, and—”

  “Moved! You moved one of the bodies!” Joanne’s words exploded out of her, and had the seat belt not held her in place, she might have launched forward into the front seat.

  Troy spoke slowly; he knew he was in deep shit. “Ms. Franklin, it was minus forty-five below this morning with a major wind chill. We also had a polar bear with an active interest in the body, and if we hadn’t moved it, it would have frozen stiff, and so would’ve the men guarding it. We made a decision at 0800 hours to move the body to the medical room; however, the safety officer at Arctic Oil took a complete set of pictures.” Troy turned his head only slightly to address Joanne as a large oil rig service truck pulled into the road ahead of them. The twenty-ton, five-axle truck with double smoke stacks belched enough ice fog to obliterate the road. Troy slowed the truck to a crawl.

  Mueller looked over at Troy, sensing his discomfort. “What’s your take on these deaths? The word I got is a murder-suicide. Did the scene look like that?” Mueller wanted to get a perspective before he saw the scene. Everyone saw different things when they viewed a crime, and he was interested in Troy’s perspective.

  Troy could not
take his eyes off the Arctic road, which was just starting to reappear out of the fog. “You know, Detective, I would have bought that original argument myself, until I saw the blood on the door frame Marc Lafontaine supposedly went out of. Now perhaps the crime scene investigator will find different, but both the chief of security and I think he got help out the door.”

  “So, you have a killer still in your camp,” Mueller said. He shifted again in his seat. The truck’s heater was making him too warm.

  “Yeah, that about sums it up, and we had a CCTV outage during the time of the killings, which makes one of our security staff a possible accomplice.”

  “You have someone in mind to interview on that?”

  “Oh, yeah. We have two suspects who had access to the CCTV, but the one I particularly would like to get in a room would be Security Officer Cummings, and I would welcome the opportunity to assist you in the interview.” Troy grinned over at Mueller.

  Mueller smiled. “You know, Troy, nothing would make me happier than to do an interview with you in the room. It would be like old times, except we’d be on the same side of the table.”

  They both broke into laughter, and Mueller added, “I understand the camp is also in lockdown, and no one leaves until this investigation is finished, is that right?”

  “Hmm, yeah that’s right, and we have a meeting with the base manager as soon as we arrive. He has some instructions for you, but I can gave you a condensed version if you like,” Troy said, turning to Mueller. The road had cleared and they could make better progress, although they still had another forty-five minutes to the Arctic Oil Camp.

  “What would that be?”

  “Get in, solve the damn case, and let him get back to pumping oil.”

  12

  Detective Mueller’s first impression of the Arctic Oil Camp was that it looked like a basic Motel 6 on stilts. It was three stories high with small windows and a low building that served as the entryway. Once inside, he determined that Motel 6 was a luxury compared to the camp. The room he had been assigned was a narrow bed with drawers underneath, a bookshelf overhead, and a telephone three feet away, a desk and chair, and a set of cupboards beside a narrow doorway that led into the room. The entryway had a door into a shared bathroom, and there were instructions posted on the door to lock the neighbor’s door before use.

  Mueller had been in fishing and hunting camps with more luxuries than this. Troy led Mueller and Franklin to their rooms, with the “luxurious” shared bathroom, they shed their outerwear, dropped their duffel bags, and prepared to meet the base manager.

  Troy had given Mueller a briefing on the base manager, a man in his mid-forties named Patrick Kearns. Kearns was considered somewhat of a tyrant at Arctic Oil Camp. He yelled, he ranted, but he met production quotas, and everyone made a lot of money. He was an asshole, but an asshole that made money.

  Mueller followed Troy down the corridors of the camp towards the administration offices. He could hear Patrick Kearns long before he saw him. A sound like a bullhorn bellowing from deep in a well reached him almost as soon as they reached the administration floor.

  “I—don’t—give—a shit—what—the media—wants—you don’t— give ’em—fuck—all.” Each syllable was pronounced, and set to a staccato rhythm. The air still rang after the speaker had finished.

  Mueller rounded the corner following Troy, with Franklin behind him, and they found the source of the voice. Behind a large desk sat the owner of the name plate that read PATRICK KEARNS, BASE MANAGER. Kearns was a big man with big hands, big shoulders, a big chest, and one of the biggest heads with the smallest ears Mueller had ever seen. He thought for a moment that the reason Kearns bellowed so much was because he couldn’t hear anything with those small ears.

  His desk was piled with papers that showed graphs of drilling rig reports, and the wall behind was a mass of maps showing the Arctic oil field and drilling rig locations and pipelines. Two large-screen computers sat on his desk, and a television screen ran Bloomberg news on the credenza behind him.

  Troy made the introductions, and Kearns jumped up from his desk and threw out his hand. “Patrick Kearns, base manager. How soon will you have this mess cleaned up?” He didn’t offer a chair to either Mueller or Franklin, and Mueller got the message that this meeting would be brief.

  “Well, we have to review the evidence, interview witnesses, and of course examine the victims,” Mueller said, almost stammering. Kearns’s large head had put him off.

  “So, what are we talking about? Late today, tomorrow tops, you’ll have this wrapped up?” Kearns said, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Mueller and Franklin, as if the two were going to compete to reply first.

  “Well, as I said, this is a crime scene, and we must take care to catalog all the evidence. We may have to call up further personnel,” Mueller said. He was not happy that he had won Kearns’s competition.

  “Crime scene? Crime scene? I thought we had a domestic dispute between a brother and a sister. The brother offs the sister in a fit of who- the-hell-knows what and then jumps out the side door and happens to meet with a polar bear and bam he’s done!” Kearns was spitting the words as if he couldn’t get them out fast enough.

  “We don’t know if those are the facts right now,” Franklin said. She immediately wished she had said it with her inner voice.

  “But, I’m telling you the facts.” Kearns was smiling now. Big teeth sprung up in his big head. It was more a grimace than a smile.

  “We’ll start our investigation and let you know what we find.” Franklin reached out her hand, hoping for a quick handshake and a sign that their conversation was over. She wanted to be out of there, and to see what the dead bodies had to tell her. As far as she was concerned, the living were talking nonsense.

  Kearns was not letting them go that easily. He ignored Franklin’s offered handshake and began waving his big hands, making circles and gestures as if he were painting a picture.

  “Look,” he said, his hands forming a bracket for the words, “this is simple.” He pointed to the desk, hoping they would see the evidence. “We have an argument, a family spat, two people died, and we get back to work.” He placed his hands on his desk as if he had made the final platform for his argument.

  “I also want to remind you that we are losing seventy-five thousand barrels a day in oil production. My people are in stand down and lockdown. Do you know how much money we’re losing?” He looked back and forth between Mueller and Franklin for the answer. It was obvious neither of them had a clue—and didn’t know it was a test.

  “We are losing over seven million dollars a day!” Kearns yelled the words, as if the very thought of the loss would be unfathomable to them. And, well, it was.

  Franklin had long realized that when dealing with people of supposed authority, whom she oft times considered the village idiots, it was best to smile, agree, and walk away and then do what she wanted to do. She smiled at Kearns. "Absolutely, we will have this wrapped up in no time.”

  Kearns’s face broke into a happy smile. “Wonderful, that’s what I wanted to hear.” He pumped all of their hands in crushing handshakes and dismissed them from his office by getting back on his phone. Troy led Franklin and Mueller out of the office, and they couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  “Nice shine job,” Muller muttered to Franklin when he caught up to her in the hall.

  “Sometime you have to blow a little smoke up their asses,” Franklin said.

  “Well, that was one major asshole,” Mueller said.

  “Unfortunately I have seen bigger,” Franklin sighed in reply.

  They ended the conversation as they caught up to Troy. After a few minutes’ walk down several hallways, they ended up at the first victim. Constance Lafontaine’s body lay in her room, where Troy and Chuck had found her that morning. Franklin opened her crime scene bag, put on her gloves, and began investigating the body.

  She could see that Constance Lafontaine had been an at
tractive and physically active lady in her mid-twenties. She was about five feet, ten inches tall, with broad shoulders and nicely muscled biceps and triceps. This girl had been to the gym. She lifted her hands and found no cracked nails, no bruises or scratches that would show a struggle. Franklin found it odd that a physically capable person would submit to strangulation. The marks from the cord or belt around her throat were still there, large welts turning black.

  Franklin always found death by strangulation messy because it took time to cut off the victim’s air supply. Victims would usually exhibit signs of resistance—bloodied hands or cracked fingernails. Here there was nothing. It was as if Constance had lain there, quietly, while someone had cut off her air supply and her brain shut down, followed by her heart and lungs.

  The answer to the puzzle was on the victim’s head—two large bruises, one on each side of her head, just above her ears. Someone had given her a two-fisted knockout blow. The brain would have gone into shock, and the victim would have been unconscious while the life was strangled out of her.

  Franklin had seen these types of blows before, but usually in kung fu or karate tournaments. If her brother had in fact killed her, then he had done it quickly. She looked over Constance’s face. It was calm, and the iPod music plugs were still in her ears. She might have been sleeping. No argument, no struggle, just eliminated quickly off the planet.

  She examined Constance’s hands again and found the fingertips odd. They were covered in a plastic—a rubbery plastic that moved as she touched it. Odd as hell, she thought as she bagged the hands in plastic bags, wrapped them in rubber bands, and made a note in her journal. Taking her flashlight and magnifying glass out of her CSI case, she checked the contusions on the victim’s temples.

  “Well gentlemen, someone likes their coffee,” she said as she turned to Mueller and Troy.

  “Why’s that?” Mueller asked, staring over Franklin’s shoulder at the body.