Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

by Mike Doogan

  He put the phone down, thought for a moment, picked it back up and dialed.

  “Lieutenant Littlefield, please,” he said, then waited some more. “Larry? Nik Kane.” He paused, then laughed. “Yeah, it has been a long time. Longer for some than for others, though.” Pause. “No, Larry, prison isn’t as bad as you hear. It’s worse.” Pause. “I appreciate that, Larry. Anyway, I need some information. Anything you can get by running a name for me. First name’s Feather, like ‘feather pillow.’ Last name’s Boyette: B-O-Y-E-T-T-E.” Pause. “Nope, I don’t know that she has a record here or anywhere. So this could be a complete wild-goose chase.” Pause. “Sure, ask the chief for his okay if you want. I’m on an errand for him.” Pause. “Okay, let me give you my cell number.” He rattled off the numbers. “I’m running around a lot right now, so you can leave whatever you find out on voice mail if you don’t get me.” Pause. “Yeah, I know, Larry. I’ll be in touch and we can get together. Regards to Carol.” Pause. “Oh, I hadn’t heard. Regards to Heather, then. Bye.”

  Kane hung up the phone and sat thinking. Littlefield had followed him up through the ranks, been his partner on the detective squad at the time he’d been sent off to prison, and he’d never heard from the guy once. Now, on the phone, he sounded like someone talking to a bill collector. That attitude told him plenty.

  “You can’t go home again, pal,” he said aloud. He took out a pen, signed the retirement forms everywhere there was an X, and sealed them in the return envelope. He might not know what he would do next, but he wasn’t returning to the police department.

  Kane tried reading Montaigne but couldn’t concentrate. He forced himself to keep at it, but finally found himself reading the same paragraph for a third time. He put the book down and turned on the television. He watched part of a basketball game in which all the players could make spectacular dunks but couldn’t hit a free throw. He turned it off, looked at his watch, and went down to get his laundry out of the dryer. Back up in his apartment, he hung what needed hanging and folded what needed folding. Then he looked at his watch. Time to go do something else I don’t want to do, he thought. He consulted a telephone book and dialed a number.

  “Charlie Simms’s room, please,” he said. After a wait, he said, “Nobody by that name? Thanks.” He looked in the phone book and dialed another number, again asking for Simms’s room. A pause. “He’s in ICU? What happened?” Another pause. “Yeah, I know the rules about giving out patient information. Thanks.”

  He put the phone down, put on his coat, picked up the envelope, and went out. He drove to the post office and dropped the envelope in a drive-up box, then drove over to see what was up with Charlie Simms.

  Providence Hospital was a big pile of building wings near the university. The place was always under construction, adding new facilities and equipment that fueled the increasing costs of health care. It’d been years since Kane had been in the place, so he had to wander around for a while before he found the intensive care unit.

  Sitting outside it was Charlie Simms’s wife—what was her name?—June, a short, stout woman with graying hair and glasses. She and Laurie had been friends in a casual sort of way. Next to her sat a small, trim old guy Kane recognized as a retired cop. His name was Burke, and he’d been Charlie’s partner back in the day. Kane walked over and sat down next to him.

  “Hello, Burkey,” he said. “June. How’s Charlie?”

  “Not good,” Burke said. “What are you doing here, Nik? I thought you’d still be in prison, but then I heard you’re back running errands for Jeffords.”

  Burke had taken an early out, Kane remembered, after getting crossways with the chief somehow. Nobody who got crossways with the chief lasted long. I’m a case in point, Kane thought.

  “Nope,” he said, “I’m doing a private job. The force doesn’t want me back. You must have heard.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did,” Burke said. “That’s what loyalty gets you. I told Charlie more than once that carrying Jeffords’s water would turn out to be trouble.”

  “Now, Liam, that’s enough,” June Simms said. “The chief was always good to Charlie, whatever your experience might have been.”

  “That’s a good thing to say,” Burke said, “in front of Jeffords’s old brownnoser.”

  June gasped.

  “That’s enough, Burke,” Kane said, dropping a hand onto Burke’s forearm and squeezing. “Why don’t you take a walk now, and come back when you feel like not being a jackass.”

  Burke pulled his arm loose, got to his feet, and walked away.

  “I don’t know why Charlie puts up with that man,” June said. “He’s so full of hate.”

  “They’re old partners, June,” Kane said, “and loyalty was always important to Charlie.”

  The two of them sat for a while in silence, which Kane finally broke.

  “Can you tell me what happened, June?” he said. “When we put Charlie on the helicopter, he seemed to not be in any danger.”

  “They don’t know exactly what happened, Nik. They had him in a room here for observation. Standard practice with head trauma, they said. I was sitting next to his bed and we were talking—Charlie was actually talking about retiring, if you can believe it—when he suddenly stopped making sense. I rang for the nurse and by the time she arrived he was in convulsions.”

  Her voice had been filling with tears as she spoke, and when she got to this point she broke down. Kane took a handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her and waited for her to regain her composure.

  “They took him right into surgery,” she said, “and he was on the table for four hours. The surgeon came out and told me, he told me . . .”

  She started crying again, then shook her head angrily.

  “This is no way for an old cop’s wife to be behaving,” she said. “Charlie would be embarrassed.”

  She shook her head again, dried her eyes, blew her nose, took a deep breath, and continued.

  “Anyway, the surgeon said he’d been bleeding in his brain and then something burst. He told me what it was, but I don’t remember. They’ve got him heavily sedated now to help him recover. They’re not sure what shape his brain is in, and they can’t make any tests until they take him off the sedatives. So all I can do is sit here and wait.”

  “Are you okay?” Kane asked. “Do you need anything done? Do you have family coming?”

  June Simms smiled, just a slip of a smile that changed quickly into quivering lips. She took another deep breath.

  “I’m as good as I can be under the circumstances. Our daughter is flying up from Arizona to sit with me. She’ll be here tomorrow. And Liam Burke has been very nice.”

  “I’ll tell them what happened over at APD,” Kane said. “I’m sure they’d want to help.”

  “Thank you,” June said.

  They quit talking again, and Kane sat listening to the sounds of the hospital: the bong of bells, muted announcements, the voices of hospital personnel as they passed.

  “I should be in there with him,” June said. “They said I could sit in there. But I just needed a break from seeing him like that.”

  Kane didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, she began again.

  “Our marriage wasn’t always smooth, you know. Charlie had an eye for the ladies and liked to take a drink. He was a real handful when we were younger. But things have smoothed out now. He cut back on his drinking—doctor’s orders—and I told him that the next time he went out alleycatting would be his last, that I’d leave him. He could tell I meant it, I guess. Besides, how many women can a man who’s more than sixty need? I was looking forward to the rest of our lives together. He was going to work this job another couple of years, then retire. We were going to move to Arizona to be near our daughter. Now, I don’t know if we’ll have any future together at all.”

  Kane couldn’t think of a thing to say to that. He put his hand over hers, and the two of them sat quietly. Finally, he stirred.

  “I should
go let the police department know,” he said. “Are you sure there’s nothing more I can do for you?”

  June shook her head. Kane got to his feet.

  “Wait,” she said. “I can’t see you for the first time in so long and talk only about my troubles. How is Laurie?”

  “She’s fine,” Kane said.

  “And how are the two of you doing back together?” she asked.

  “Aw, June,” Kane said with a wistful smile, “now we’d just be talking about my troubles.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

  Down the hallway, Burke, who had been leaning against a wall, straightened up and started walking toward them.

  “June,” Kane said, “when Charlie stopped making sense, did he say anything at all that you could understand?”

  “Not really,” she said. “He said something about pictures, I think, about getting some pictures back. When I asked him what pictures he was talking about, he sat straight up in bed, looked at me, and shouted, ‘No!’ That’s when I hit the call button and started yelling for a nurse.”

  “Thanks. You can be sure we’ll catch whoever did this.”

  “I appreciate that, Nik, but what good is that going to do me? If Charlie never comes back, I’m going to have to grow old alone. Catching whoever did this won’t change that.”

  She began to cry again. Burke sat down next to her, put his arm around her shoulders and gave Kane a dirty look. Kane turned and walked away.

  The hospital reminded him of prison in some ways. Maybe it was the smell or the metallic taste of the air, or that the rooms were never really warm or cold. Maybe it was the lighting or the garbled intercom announcements. Whatever it is, he thought, I guess all big institutions have things in common. And that proves?

  Kane didn’t know what that proved. Or much of anything else for that matter. He supposed all it proved was that he’d been a prisoner for a long time and, in some ways, was still a prisoner.

  With that, he found an exit sign, followed the arrows, and escaped into the clean, cold evening air.

  16

  Ye have compassed this mountain long enough: turn you northward.

  DEUTERONOMY 2:3

  KANE STOOD AT THE BACK OF THE CHURCH, LISTENING to the old priest recite the opening prayer in a thin, quavering voice. He tried to recall the last time he’d been to Mass. His mother’s funeral? Probably. A long time ago, anyway.

  The church was a long rectangle with the altar at the front, a choir loft at the back, and rows of pews, divided by a center aisle, in between. The ceiling was high to accommodate the choir loft, and the side walls were pierced at regular intervals by stained-glass windows of abstract pattern. The altar had been turned around since Kane’s youth, so that the priest faced the congregation instead of away from it, and had been stripped of its ornate tabernacle and raiment. His mother would have said the altar looked absolutely Lutheran.

  These were just some of the changes. The Mass was said all in English now, audience participation was encouraged, and there were even women helping out on the altar. That last change would have sent his father off sputtering after the service in search of the nearest drink. But then, what wouldn’t?

  Maybe the biggest change was in the congregation. This was the main Sunday-morning Mass, and the church was full, but most of the worshippers were Kane’s age or older, not the same multigenerational sprawl Kane remembered. Few young people or families seemed to be attending Mass these days.

  He knew the Church was having all sorts of trouble. Not enough people becoming priests or nuns. Sex-abuse problems with men who had been—in some cases, still were—priests. The split between what the laity thought about a whole range of social issues and what the old men in Rome decreed. Kane just hadn’t realized how much trouble the Church was in. This morning, in this building, the Roman Catholic Church looked like a dying business.

  The priest was moving at a brisk clip. I suppose a church service is like a baseball game these days, Kane thought. If it lasts too long, people get bored and stop coming. But it was a far cry from the incense-filled, two-hour Latin High Masses he’d served in as an altar boy.

  After leaving the hospital, Kane had gone home and called the police chaplain and a few of the people who had served with Simms on the force. When he figured he had enough aid and comfort headed June Simms’s way, he’d repacked for the trip to Rejoice. But he hadn’t felt up to driving right back. More proof that age is creeping up on me, he’d thought. That, and he hadn’t wanted to leave the safety of the four walls of his apartment just then. So he’d ordered in pizza and spent the evening reading, falling asleep with Montaigne on his chest and awakening with a start just in time to shower and dress and drive to the cathedral for Mass.

  He wasn’t really sure why he was there. He felt both restless and tired. He felt like something big was going to happen, but he had no idea what. A big break in the case? A big change in his life? Maybe both? He knew that the only way to find out was to be patient, but he didn’t feel patient. What he really wanted to do was to make a run for it, to escape this steaming wreck he called a life for someplace he could make a fresh start.

  The thought made Kane smile. He’d be the first man in history to run away from Alaska to make a fresh start. He thought about the old gag that was probably still making the rounds in lawyer circles, about getting rich by offering an Alaska Special to newcomers: a bankruptcy, a divorce, and a name change, all for one low price.

  He thought about his reluctance to try to interview Charlie Simms and to return to Rejoice. He’d never had that kind of problem as a cop. He’d always gone straight ahead. At the start, as a uniform, he’d felt the rightness of what he was doing, working to make the city he lived in safer. The department had been rawer then, full of big personalities and wild behavior, and, far down on the chain of command, he’d rarely run up against political restrictions. As he’d gotten older and come to understand the limitations of his job better, he’d still gotten satisfaction from solving puzzles and from working in an organization that, despite its many flaws, tried to uphold standards and protect citizens. As the department had gotten more paperwork driven, and he’d bumped into political constraints more frequently, he’d managed to ignore it all by just paying attention to what he did every day, to trying to solve crimes and put bad guys in jail.

  Then, one day, he’d been the bad guy in jail. Inside the department and out, the wheels had ground him up. Minority groups had called for his head. The newspaper had joined in. Jeffords had decided to do the politically expedient thing. And the machinery inside the department had rolled relentlessly forward, producing the evidence to convict him.

  Being on the wrong side of an investigation had hurt. In an organization like the police department, dominated by male values like stoicism and cynicism, he’d never let himself admit that he loved his job or made himself face the fact that it somehow filled needs that couldn’t be touched by anything or anyone else in his life. Once he was no longer a part of it, though, he’d seen that clearly.

  In prison, without an anchor for his identity, he could feel his drive and certainty slipping away, replaced by the prisoner’s apathy and fear. He began to doubt himself, what he’d done, who he was. And even though he’d been exonerated, was free to go where he pleased and do what he pleased, he was still a prisoner of his fears and doubts.

  He wasn’t a cop anymore, and never would be again. So what was he? A civilian, like the kid trooper said. A civilian whose time in prison and lack of other job skills severely limited his employment opportunities. About all he was suited to was private work. He wasn’t happy about that. The private detectives he’d known as a cop were either sleazy or incompetent, and he had a hard time seeing himself as one of them.

  But he needed to do something. If he didn’t, all that was left was retirement, sitting in some condo someplace warm, collecting his pension, eating cat food, looking at his silly legs sticking out of a pair of shorts, and counting th
e minutes until happy hour. He wasn’t ready for that. He never wanted to be ready for that.

  Maybe he was at Mass to seek help with his weakness, a miracle. God, he thought, I’m a drunk. Cure me. I’m a killer. Save me.

  “The Gospel for today is from Matthew, chapter ten, verses twenty-four to twenty-six,” the priest said. “‘The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? Fear them not, therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.’ ”

  Is that a message to me? Kane thought. Was this, finally, God answering a prayer, if only in the scratchy voice of an old priest? Is God telling me to quit being afraid and just do my job? “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” It might not be a miracle, but it was a coincidence.

  His life was full of uncertainty now. So be it. He’d just have to accept that and go forward. The police force, prison, his marriage, they were all in the past. He was, amazingly, a new man at fifty-five, a new man in reluctant search of a new life.

  17

  It is an honor for a man to cease from strife: but every fool will be meddling.

  PROVERBS 20:3

  MASS ENDED, AND KANE WALKED OUT INTO THE CLEAR chill of winter. He took out his cell phone, saw he had a message, and called for it. Larry Littlefield’s voice told him that there was nothing about anyone named Feather Boyette in any of the criminal databases.