Village of the Ghost Bears (21 page)

Behind Cave, Alan Long lifted his eyebrows.

“With an eye shot out,” Active said.

“Exactly,” Cave said. “Officer Long tells me you’ve seen it too.”

Active nodded.

“Anyway, they say it proves Dood McAllister killed Budzie Kivalina at Driftwood. They look like a couple of drunks that just staggered out of the Board of Trade bar in Nome, they smell like it, too, and I’ve got no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.” Cave paused, the look of unease touching his face again, but staying this time. “Then they dig into the duffel bag again—out comes a hunk of Visqueen for a tent, a couple sleeping bags, a camp stove, and some Mountain House freeze-dry.”

Active sucked a breath through his teeth. “Camping gear?”

Cave nodded.

“You didn’t find any camping gear in McAllister’s plane?”

“McAllister said they didn’t have much with ’em, and what they had must have washed out in the crash.”

“But you didn’t see any when you flew down the river searching for Budzie’s body?”

Cave shook his head, looking testier than ever.

“And that didn’t seem odd, for a bush pilot not to have—”

“We were looking for a woman, dead or alive, Trooper Active, not a bunch of damned Visqueen and sleeping bags. It was a fucking rescue mission. I mean, McAllister’s got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of Cessna folded up out there in the Utukok like origami, and he’s about yea far from hypothermia himself.” Cave held up a thumb and forefinger in a pinching motion to illustrate the dimensions of “yea.”

Active nodded. “Sorry, I’ve, ah, we’re—”

“Forget it,” Cave said.

“So what did Pingo and Tom have to say?”

“Yeah,” Cave said wearily. “Pingo and Tom, Jesus. I sit them down and get them some coffee and they tell me their story. Pingo, he’s obviously crazy, as you know. And this Gage, he isn’t much better by this point. It turns out he’s been drunk pretty much continuously since the Kivalina woman died.”

“What about the—how did they—”

Cave waved a hand. “Their story is, Gage comes to Chukchi, takes to the life, and starts going up to Cape Goodwin, where he and the Kivalina woman fall in love. But she’s hooked up with McAllister, so she knows she’s got to have it out with him. Gage offers to go with her, but Budzie figures it would be safer to do it alone. So off they go to hunting camp, her and McAllister, and she’s going to break it to him up there. He’s always more relaxed out in the country, she says.”

Active nodded.

“Next thing anybody knows, Budzie turns up dead in McAllister’s plane at Driftwood. Gage hits the bottle, and Pingo is over on the Canadian border fighting wildfires with the Bureau of Land Management. You’ve heard of the Goodwin Hotshots?”

Active shook his head, hoping the detour would be short.

“It’s this crack firefighting team they’ve got there. It’s how the village guys make money in the summer, and Pingo’s one of the Hotshots. Don’t ask me how he got in, crazy as he is. Anyway, he comes home from firefighting, and Gage tells him his sister was killed in a plane crash up at Driftwood with Dood McAllister and that McAllister got out without a scratch. Then they both get drunk and pass out, and, while Pingo’s unconscious, Budzie comes to him in a dream and says there wasn’t any crash and he’s gotta go find this dog of hers.”

“Dad-Dad?”

“That’s it,” Cave said.

“Apparently that dog never left her side,” Active said.

“I gather,” Cave agreed. “Anyway, Pingo wakes up out of his dream, gets Gage on his feet, starts pouring coffee into him, and says they’ve got to go to Driftwood and find Dad-Dad, and off they go in Gage’s Super Cub. Next thing you know, they’re in my office.”

Cave shook his head at the recollection. “God, you should have smelled them. And that damned dog’s head.”

“How did they find it?”

“They land at Driftwood, and Pingo starts to thinking he can smell Dad-Dad and he wanders off through the brush and, sure enough, he turns up the dog’s carcass.”

“The whole thing? Not just the head?”

Cave shook his head. “Dad-Dad was big, one of those Mackenzie River huskies, supposedly. Maybe a hundred and ten, a hundred and fifteen pounds, according to Pingo. Too big for the Super Cub with the two of them and a couple cans of avgas and their gear in it, anyway, so they cut off the head to bring in and show me how the eye was shot out.”

“McAllister didn’t mention the dog when you rescued him that day?”

Cave shook his head.

“And what about the camping gear? How’d they find that after you—”

Cave sighed. “I told you. We were looking for a plane-crash victim, not camping gear.”

Active was silent, his eyebrows raised in the Western expression of inquiry.

“Instead of searching downstream, they go up, and they find the stuff stashed in the brush.”

There was silence all around the room for a long time.

Finally, Cave sighed again. “So I ask Pingo and Tom, what do they think happened? How did the plane end up in the river and Budzie dead without McAllister getting himself killed too, or at least banged up? Gage laughs and says it would be easy if Budzie was already dead or unconscious. Just strap her into the passenger seat, crank up the engine, and set the throttle to a fast taxiing speed, then get out and grab the tail and steer the plane over the bank. It hits the water, the current takes it and rolls it up, and McAllister’s home free. Then McAllister dunks himself in the river and waits to see if anybody hears the Emergency Locator Transmitter in the Cessna, probably figuring if nobody shows up he’ll dig out the camping gear from where he hid it, douse it in the river for realism, then set up his Visqueen tent and hang tight till someone comes along.”

“And what about the dog?” Active asked. “How—”

“Uh-huh,” Cave said. “They figure McAllister is in the process of beating Budzie to death because she’s dumping him for Tom Gage and Dad-Dad comes to her defense. So McAllister shoots Dad-Dad, but he only wings the dog, and it crawls off and dies out in the brush where Kivalina finds the carcass a couple weeks later.”

Active looked through the glass at Pingo Kivalina, who had put his head down on his arms and was evidently asleep at the table. “Dood McAllister, huh?”

“You thinking he set your fire?”

“Pingo says somebody burned down the Rec Center to get him and Gage.”

“Except Pingo got away,” Cave said.

“Yep,” Active said.

“Well, other than Pingo, what have you got that points to McAllister?”

Active felt depressed as he sketched the arson investigation for Cave.

“So the wire from the locker-room door is about the most concrete thing you’ve got?” Cave said after hearing him out. “And Pingo’s roommate Tom Gage being a pilot and an aviation mechanic?”

Active nodded. “But McAllister’s a pilot too, so maybe he’s got one of those safety-wire twisters, and maybe it’ll match the marks on the wire. If we can find it.”

Cave grimaced in sympathy. “But so far Pingo is all you’ve got that says it was McAllister?”

“He’s too scared to name him. He just calls him the
qavvik
.”

Cave gave Active an odd look. “You don’t know? That’s what the people in Cape Goodwin call McAllister, according to Pingo and Tom. The wolverine. It fits too. You ever meet him?”

“He gave me a plane ride a few days ago,” Active said.

“Plane ride, huh?” Cave stared at him, grinning a little. “And you didn’t suspect a thing? Imagine that.”

“We were just getting started,” Active protested. “And we had no—Yeah, all right, point taken.”

Cave nodded, as if accepting an apology, before continuing. “You notice how McAllister’s always kind of grumbling to himself under his breath? That’s supposedly—”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what a wolverine does,” said Alan Long from behind them. Active turned. He had forgotten Long was present.

“Always whining and snarling as it goes along the trail,” Long said. “The old-timers think it’s talking to the devil. Some of them think the
qavvik is
the devil.”

“And he’s got a hell of a temper,” Cave added.

“McAllister?” Active said, thinking of the guide smashing the case of Solare on the tarmac at Chukchi.

“The
qavvik
,” Long said.

“Ah.” Active turned back to Cave. “You talk to McAllister again?”

“Yeah,” Cave said. “I paw through what Pingo and Tom have brought in, supposedly from Driftwood. Dog’s head with its eye shot out, no collar, no tags. Bunch of camping gear with no I.D. on it. I get that sinking feeling, you know? It’s a pretty big pile, but it doesn’t add up to much.”

Active nodded.

“But at the same time I got two guys sitting across the desk from me that obviously loved that woman to pieces, each in his own way, and they obviously believe every word of what they’re telling me. One of ’em’s a well-known wacko and the other one appears to be headed that way himself, he’s so unhinged by her death. For a minute there, I almost envy them.”

“Envy? Why?”

Cave shrugged. “Having something in their lives that gave them that kind of passion. That’s rare, you know?”

Active looked away, uncomfortable.

“But maybe you got that in your life. I sure as hell don’t, in Barrow.”

“A seven-count,” Active said.

“A what?”

“When she comes into a room of people who never saw her before, conversation stops. At first just close to her, then it spreads across the crowd. I finally started counting when it happens. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand. . . . Usually I get to about seven-one-thousand before they start talking again.” Active stopped, suddenly embarrassed. What had possessed him?

Long cleared his throat.

Cave cut his eyes back and forth between them, waiting for more. Finally he continued. “So I get Pingo and Tom to show us on the chart where McAllister’s camp is on the Upper Katonak, and me and a couple of my guys pay him a visit in the helicopter. We go thumping in, set down on this little strip he’s got on a gravel bar by his cabins, and he comes screaming up on a four-wheeler. He’s pissed, says we’re harassing him, we’ll scare off the game, spook his clients, destroy his livelihood, there’s no fucking way we’re coming into camp. So I tell him we might have to fly around the area in the Bell and check for game violations the next couple days, and then he calms down a little bit and we have a talk there on the runway.”

A defeated look came over Cave’s face.

“No go, huh?”

“Nah, he denies the dog was ever with them, says they left it in camp the day of the crash and it disappeared a few days later when Budzie didn’t come back.”

“But what about the dog Pingo and Tom found at Driftwood?”

“McAllister said he had no idea whose it was, but it wasn’t Dad-Dad. Maybe it got away from some of the floaters or hikers that get dropped off there, and then somebody else shot it later because they thought it was a wolf or it was scavenging food from their camp or something. Or maybe Pingo and Gage didn’t even find it at Driftwood and they’re trying to frame him.”

“And the camping gear?”

“Same type of deal. Denied it was his. Either somebody else left it there or Pingo and Gage are lying.” Cave shrugged. “About what I expected.”

“What did McAllister say about Budzie leaving him?”

“Same type of deal again. Claimed she never mentioned it.”

“So that was it? He walked?”

Cave shrugged again. “I worked the case for a while, then took it to the District Attorney. We checked for fingerprints on the camping gear, hired an expert to go over the wreckage of McAllister’s 185, crawled through the autopsy results again . . . and there was just nothing to support what Kivalina and Gage were saying. We finally dropped it.”

“You didn’t even take it to a grand jury.”

“Facts are facts. And we didn’t have many.”

“But what did you think?”

Cave’s face took on a thoughtful look. “I ended up believing McAllister. His argument was, ‘If I wanted to kill my wife, I wouldn’t have to wreck a hundred and eighty thousand dollar airplane to do it. I could just push her off a cliff and say she fell, all right.’”

“I can see what you mean.” Active paused, thinking back through the story. “And when was it you dropped the case?”

“I don’t know, three, four months ago, maybe?”

“And you told Pingo and Tom?”

“You kidding? One or the other of them was on the phone to me every couple days about it. Tom . . . no, Pingo called the day after we made the decision and I told him then.”

Active lined it up in his head. Cave and the Barrow DA had given up on the Budzie Kivalina case, and within a few weeks Tom Gage was visiting Jae Hyo Lee at the federal prison. A few weeks later, Jae was pike bait in One-Way Lake, and a couple of weeks after that, Tom Gage was dead in the Rec Center fire, with Pingo Kivalina a near miss.

He looked at Cave. “Either one of them mention a guy named Jae Hyo Lee? Korean, went to prison on a bear gallbladder case a couple years ago?”

Cave gave this some thought. “I don’t think so. But I believe I remember the case. A federal deal in Cape Goodwin, right?”

Active nodded.

“You think this Korean poacher’s connected to all this too?” Cave gave his head a skeptical shake.

“We don’t know. It’s just that he fell off a cliff and wound up dead in a lake down on the Isignaq not long ago. And Tom Gage visited him in prison pretty soon after you guys dropped the Budzie Kivalina case. And Pingo and Budzie used to sell him gallbladders. And you said Dood McAllister mentioned the possibility of pushing somebody off a cliff.”

Cave was silent for a time. “But why would Dood McAllister want to kill a Korean?” he asked finally.

Active shrugged, unable to think of an answer.

“Sometimes, if it looks like a coincidence, it is,” Cave said.

He and Active studied Pingo, beneath whose chin a puddle of drool was forming on the tabletop.

“Oh, yeah,” Active said. “So Alan told you we found what must be Dad-Dad’s head in Tom Gage’s freezer. They tell you what that was about?”

“Pingo wanted it back when we dropped the case,” Cave said. “He was going to have it mounted.”