At the Scene of the Crime (34 page)

“They were going for their weapons,” Wy said.

“They got off some shots,” Johnny said.

Liam stepped outside to play the light from the flash over the front of the tent. “Bullet holes in the front of the tent about four feet off the ground,” he said, and stepped back inside to run the light across the back of the tent. “Bullets holes on the back wall about a foot off the ground.”

In the rapidly waning light they examined the snow machine tracks around the camp. Liam’s feet were slowly going numb when he pointed at one track. “Last one in and out.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Evinrude.”

Liam squinted at the horizon, a deep plum fading to black. “Headed east?”

Johnny nodded. “Ambler, be my guess.”

“How far?”

“Around seventy-five miles, but there’ll be cabins along the way. Someone will have seen or heard something.”

Liam, who by now could no longer feel his nose, couldn’t imagine why anyone would stick theirs out before spring, but then this wasn’t his part of the country.

A wolf howled. Another one answered, sounding closer. “We’d better get the bodies out of here.”

They hauled them down the river to a long straight stretch and loaded them into the Skywagon Wy had acquired in Kotz. It took a while to get into the air, and they were almost to Kotz before the interior of the plane warmed up. Luckily, it wasn’t enough time for the bodies to thaw out.

 

Johnny Nageak’s wife Bertha served them caribou liver and onions, after which Liam and Wy retired to the town’s lone hotel. The room was shabby but clean, and the bed had a rut down the middle of it that suited them both.

“Again?” she said drowsily sometime in the night, coming awake to the
slow stroke of his hands. “Something about Kotzebue that turns you on?”

He didn’t answer, concentrating on drowning out the memory of that awkward stack of frozen bodies in the back of the plane in the seductive taste of her flesh.

 

The next morning Liam sent the bodies to Anchorage for forensic autopsy on the 7 a.m. jet. At noon, Brill, the medical examiner, called to give it as his opinion that all three men had died of multiple gunshot wounds. He asked Liam if he’d recovered any of the bullets, and Liam replied that he’d be recovering same just as soon as the ground thawed out in the spring. “Ah yes, the joys of crime scene investigation in the Arctic,” Brill said cheerfully, and hung up.

Liam, Johnny, and Wy returned to the camp. They picked up Kurt Fraad’s tracks heading south and used the two snow machines to follow them to where he’d been rescued. “Pretty much supports his story,” Liam said.

“But why the hell would he walk out?” Johnny said. “Both the snogoes started on the first try.”

“He said he didn’t know how to drive one.” He met Johnny’s eyes. “I know, sounds lame to me, too, but I’ve heard dumber from cheechakoes, and so have you.” He looked at Wy. “Any thoughts?”

She was frowning. “I don’t know. Something . . .” Her voice trailed away. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

Johnny, whose manners were too good to let him query Liam as to why he was asking his girlfriend what she thought, very carefully did not hear this conversation.

They went north again and picked up the tracks of the Evinrude and followed them upriver to a snug log cabin on the mouth of the Fish River.

They left the machines on the river and stopped as soon as they came in sight of the door. “Hello the house!” Liam shouted. He had to shout pretty loud to be heard over the dogs howling out back.

The door was already open. “Hello backatcha!” a voice came down the bank. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Johnny Nageak, Tom,” Johnny said, “along with a couple of troopers.” He looked at Wy. “No offense.”

She grinned. “None taken.”

“You here about the shooting?” the voice said.

“Yeah. We’re following some tracks. Talk to you a minute?”

“Come on up.”

The cabin was home to Tom Burnside, a white man from Ohio, his wife Rhonda, an Inupiaq from Kiana, and their two daughters, Susie and Billie Jo, who peeped out at the visitors from behind their mother, fists clenched in her kuspuk. “Yeah,” Burnside said in response to their question, “I heard that Evinrude pass by about nine o’clock that night.”

“They didn’t stop?”

Burnside shook his head. He was a big man with a full head of black hair and a big black beard, both neatly trimmed, deliberate of speech and movement. His wife was a tiny slip of a thing with snapping black eyes. She nodded at Johnny and gave Liam a discreet but distinctly appreciative once-over. She looked at Wy and her eyes widened. She said something in Inupiaq.

Wy shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak Inupiaq.”

“But you’ve got some,” Rhonda said.

“My grandfather is Yupik,” Wy said. “Moses Alakuyak.”

Rhonda looked at Burnside and let loose with a stream of Inupiaq. Burnside replied laboriously in the same tongue and added, “English, Rhonda. We have guests.” But Wy noticed that Burnside never once met her eyes after that.

On their way back down to the river, Liam let Johnny Nageak draw a little ahead. “What was that about?” he said to Wy in a low voice.

“I don’t know,” Wy said woodenly, “I don’t speak Inupiaq.”

He saw her expression and shut up. It wasn’t easy being the granddaughter of someone most of western Alaska knew as the Old Man. A shaman and a drunk, no one but Moses knew which had come first, and only he and Wy and Liam knew that he might have passed on something to Wy that was more than blood and bone.

They continued to follow the Evinrude tracks north, stopping at three more cabins along the way. All reported hearing the snow machine pass by. None could identify the driver.

After they left the last cabin, Wy said, “This is crap, Liam. I’d bet money folks here can tell who’s driving what up and down the river the same way folks in Bristol Bay can tell who’s flying what overhead without looking up.”

“I know,” Liam said, and caught up with Johnny as he prepared to mount his snow machine. “Who was driving the Evinrude?”

Johnny looked up the river. “Be dark soon. We should head for the barn.”

Liam tapped the badge on the front of Johnny’s hat. “That mean anything to you, Johnny?”

A tinge of color crept up into Johnny’s face, and for a change it wasn’t windburn. Liam waited, and was mildly surprised when the other man answered before Liam had lost all the feeling in his fingers and toes.

“Simon Adams owns an Evinrude something like this model,” Johnny said.

“Simon Adams?”

Johnny nodded, and blew on his hands. It was another heartbreaker of a day, sky the color of glass and temperature a murderous forty-two below zero.

“Any relation to Noah Adams?” Liam said.

Johnny nodded again. “His brother.”

Liam struggled with himself. Ray Nageak, and now Simon Adams. What were the odds? “Did they get along?”

Johnny met his yes. “Well, if you’re asking, I’d have to say, not real well, no.”

“I’m asking,” Liam said. “What happened?”

“Noah married Simon’s girl while Simon was doing his National Guard service last year. Didn’t help that Bev was in the family way before Simon left for Iraq.”

“Liam,” Wy said.

“What,” he said, grimly.

“This wasn’t a Inupiaq guy going off on a bunch of other Inupiaq guys. If there was alcohol involved, maybe. Maybe,” she repeated, emphasizing the word. “But even Kurt says there was no drinking in camp, and going berserker on your ass isn’t something these people do without artificially induced inspiration. Besides, what reason did this Simon have to take out the other two guys?”

“Still got to talk to him,” Liam said, looking at Johnny.

Johnny, impassive, swung his leg over the snow machine. “He’ll be in Ambler. We can spend the night in the school there.”

When they got to Ambler, Simon Adams was nowhere to be found.

They found his .30-30, though, leaning up against the wall of his shack, just inside the door.

Liam picked it up. “We find thirty-thirty shells inside the tent?” he said to Johnny, already knowing the answer.

“Liam,” Wy said.

Johnny gave a slow nod, not meeting Liam’s eyes.

“We’ll be taking this with us,” Liam told the elder who had led them to Adams’s place.

“Liam,” Wy said again.

“Not now,” Liam said.

Wy set her teeth and followed him outside.

 

It was too dark to follow the Evinrude’s tracks that afternoon, so they waited until morning. They were easy to find with the shallow morning sun casting long shadows, and it wasn’t two hours before they caught up with Simon Adams.

He hadn’t taken his .30-30 with him because he had his .357 with him instead. Sometime the night before, he’d put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

He’d been sitting in the snow with his back up against a spruce tree, and he’d frozen solid in that position, what was left of his brains splattered
across the outspread branches like Christmas tree flocking. It was hell getting the body into the plane, and torture getting the door closed on it.

They found Bev in Kivalina, where she told the village public safety officer that Noah and Simon had fought when Simon came home. Noah had put her on a plane to Kivalina to keep her out of harm’s way. She told them that Simon had been drinking before the fight, and that Noah had tried not to hurt him but that Simon had forced Noah to put him down hard. This had happened in Ambler the previous week, and right after that Noah had headed for Kiana to go hunting with his cousins.

Johnny talked to the Ambler elders and they were persuaded to admit that Simon had been holed up in his shack, drinking up a good portion of the local bootlegger’s inventory, ever since. The day of the massacre, he had left early, last seen heading down river on the Evinrude.

That seemed to be that. When they got back to Kotzebue, there was a message waiting from Brill, who had called to say that by some twist of malign fate all of the wounds in all three bodies were through and through, no bullets or pieces of bullets remaing. “A hell of a mess, though,” Brill said on voice mail. “Looks like somebody used a Cuisinart on these guys, on the inside, anyway.”

 

The next morning Wy and Liam took off at daybreak.

Liam was marginally more comfortable at cruising altitude than he was at takeoff or landing, which explained why he didn’t immediately notice which direction they were headed. “Uh, Wy?”

“What?” Her voice over the headphones was remote.

“Aren’t we going in the wrong direction?”

“No.”

He looked at the control panel and located the compass. “North-northeast? Last time I looked on a map, Newenham was south-southeast of Kotz.”

“I need to check out something. It’ll just take an hour or so.”

Liam thought about this for a minute. “Do we have to land to check it out?” he said, without much hope for a reply in the negative.

“Yes,” she said.

“What I thought,” he said, and focused on the horizon, trying to white out the fact that there was only a thousand feet of nothing but air between his ass and the nearest object with the most gravitational pull.

She set them down gently on the surface of the river in spite of gravity, almost exactly in the tracks of the plane that had rescued Kurt Fraad the week before. She pulled two pairs of snowshoes out of the back of the plane and Liam was so glad to be even temporarily in connection yet again with Mother Earth that he didn’t whine about the fact that it was now forty-five below zero.

Instead, he followed Wy up the river as she backtracked Kurt’s postholing footsteps. It was, among other things, a fine opportunity to watch Wy’s ass in motion, and he became so absorbed in the pastime that he didn’t notice at first when she veered off Kurt’s trail and headed for the side of the river.

“Hey,” he said, waking up to the fact. “What’s going on?”

She kept going until she reached the bank, a high white wall of snow and ice sparkling in the sun. The wall curved inward, topped with bare, spare bones of leafless brush looking as if they’d been gelled in place by a giant hand. Wy, moving as if she knew where she was going, knelt down and crawled beneath the overhang. She brushed at the snow. Liam could hear the sound of her down mitten scraping at the ice. “Wy, what on earth—”

A part of the icy bank fell away, then more, revealing a long, narrow hole in the bank. Wy tugged, and the rifle came free easily.

They stood, staring down at it for a long time.

“A thirty-thirty,” Liam said.

Wy nodded, and pointed at a stain on the stock. “Blood?”

“Yeah,” Liam said, and pointed at another and said, unnecessarily, “and brains.”

They carried it back to the plane in silence and climbed inside. The engine, mercifully, started at first try.

“How did you know it was here?” Liam said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar.

Her mouth twisted. “I’m Moses Alakuyak’s granddaughter,” she said.

 

“I was in my sleeping bag, listening to them talk,” Kurt said. “They were talking in Eskimo. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I was scared. I had to pee so I got up and went outside and one of them grabbed his rifle and started shooting, and I grabbed my rifle and started shooting back.” He began to weep. “It was awful, I was all alone, all the way out there in the middle of nowhere. I just knew I was going to die.”

“All three of them were outside talking?” Liam said.

“Yes,” Kurt said, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Funny how we found two of the men inside the tent,” Liam said.

Kurt looked around, probably for his father, who this time hadn’t been allowed anywhere near the interview room. They were in Anchorage this time too, and Liam had backup. “I don’t know how that happened,” he said, faltering.