Village of the Ghost Bears (4 page)

“Would you take care of that, Alan?” Carnaby asked.

Long nodded, called Dispatch on the Bluetooth cell-phone headset he’d taken to wearing lately, and gave the instructions. He signed off and said, “Someone’s on the way.”

“Any chance you’ve had a string of arsons or unexplained fires recently?” Barnes asked.

The three cops thought for a moment, then shook their heads in unison.

Barnes grimaced slightly and looked at Long. “Any of your firefighters get here before anybody else was on scene, maybe forgot his turnouts?”

“Eh?” Long asked.

“Firefighters love fire,” Barnes said. “Sometimes one of them will get to loving it a little too much and start one when things are slow.”

Long reflected for a moment, then shook his head. “When I got here, there were four guys on it. All in turnouts. But I’ll ask the fire chief if he noticed anything.”

Barnes nodded. “Probably nothing there. But you gotta touch the bases.”

The west wind subsided for a moment, and the smell of barbecue and wet ash got stronger. Active turned away from the ruins. “Cowboy said we have eight dead here, not counting Cammie. If they’re all still in there, how do we know?”

Carnaby pointed at the ATVs in their circle of yellow tape. “It’s an estimate. We initially had five four-wheelers, meaning at least five people right there, plus Chief Silver is six, plus Cammie is seven at least. But some of the four-wheelers might have had two people on them. And there could have been some walk-ins.”

“We may never know for sure,” Barnes said. “Sometimes in a fire this hot they’re so burned up or melted together, you can’t get an exact body count.”

“Wait a minute,” Active said. “Jim Silver never drove a four-wheeler. How do we know he was inside?”

“His city Bronco was parked out front, but we moved it already,” Long said. “We checked with his wife, and. . . .” He shook his head.

“How’s Jenny taking it?”

“I heard she’s going up to Cape Goodwin.” Long shrugged. “Her mother and sister live up there, one of her and Chief Silver’s daughters too. I think their son is coming up from Anchorage.”

Active waved at the four-wheelers. “Maybe a couple of these belong to Jack and Enos.”

Carnaby shook his head. “Nope, they were on Jack’s Honda, and they drove it to the emergency room. That’s how we got the alarm. The ER called 9–1–1.”

“How about Cammie? Did one of these belong to her?”

“No telling till we talk to her family,” Carnaby said.

Active studied the ATVs. “So how do we find out who owns these? They don’t have plates.”

The captain grimaced. “Nobody registers an ATV around here. We’ll just have to wait for people, family members, to realize somebody never got home last night and come check. We put out the word on Kay-Chuck.”

Active glanced at the ATVs in the circle. “There’s only three machines now. The other two have already been claimed?”

Long nodded, flipped open his notebook and showed Active a page with six names on it. Cammie Frankson, Jim Silver, and the two survivors in the hospital were at the top. Below them were Augie Sundown and Rachel Akootchuk, who, Long reported, had been identified when their four-wheelers were claimed.

“Augie Sundown?” Active said. “Ouch.”

Long nodded again. “That family.”

“First Edgar and now Augie,” Active murmured.

Augie Sundown was—had been, Active corrected himself—the hottest thing ever to come out of high-school basketball in bush Alaska, where the game was a religion, played under street lights or moonlight or the northern lights on iron-hard frozen snow with gloves for protection when it couldn’t be played inside.

Augie, known as “Mr. Outside” for his ability to score from beyond the three-point line, had played four incendiary seasons for the Chukchi Malamutes, then gone off to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to play for the Nanooks. There he was a starting point guard by the end of his first season, despite the fact that he stood just under five feet, eight inches. He had come home for the summer to teach at a basketball camp sponsored by the city and apparently had ended up at the Rec Center at exactly the wrong moment.

“Edgar?” Barnes said. “Who’s Edgar?”

“Augie’s father,” Active said.

Edgar Sundown had vanished with his brother-in-law Cecil Harris during a seal hunt on the spring sea ice the previous year. The official search had gone on for thirteen days, nonstop, before the Troopers called it off, though volunteers had continued to patrol the ice in skiffs and bush planes till the last floe had melted and the Chukchi Sea rolled unencumbered from Point Hope in the north to the Bering Strait in the south.

“Wow,” Barnes said after hearing the story from Long and Active. “Living in Fairbanks, I sure as hell knew who Augie Sundown was, but I never heard about his father and the uncle. You never found anything?”

“Not a trace.” Active said. “They had two snow machines with dogsleds, a kayak—but we never so much as picked up a jerry jug off the beach.”

“Two older guys, out in the country all their lives, the right gear—everybody kept thinking they could handle anything; they must be camped on the ice somewhere out there, waiting for the weather to lift or somebody to come by, but. . . .” Long fell silent and shook his head.

“Anyway, this was right before Augie graduated,” Active said.

“With honors,” Long added.

“It’s like he had Role Model coded into his DNA,” Active said.

“First kid from Chukchi ever to get a full-ride sports scholarship anywhere,” Long said. “And then Edgar disappears.”

“Everybody wondered if Augie would crash,” Active said. “Just hang around town, shoot hoops in the city league—”

“Get drunk,” Long interjected.

“He didn’t, obviously,” Barnes said.

“Not Augie,” Long said.

“He’s gonna leave a hell of a hole in the Nanooks lineup.” Barnes didn’t seem to notice the outraged stares produced by this remark as he took Long’s notebook with the list of victims.

“You guys know anybody who’s mad at any of these people? You got a police chief here, some other teenagers besides Augie, sounds like. How about it, Alan, anybody ever threaten your boss? Either of these girls have a bad breakup with a mean boyfriend lately?” He looked at the three officers.

Carnaby sighed. “Yeah, I guess we’ve got some interviewing to do.”

“How about we all meet again around five, see where we are?” Barnes suggested. “Your office, Captain?”

Carnaby nodded. “We Troopers can take the interviews with Augie Sundown’s family and Rachel Akootchuk’s. Alan, do you need to stay here with the ATVs, or can you work some of this?”

“The paramedics can watch the four-wheelers.” Long gestured at the ambulance. “They’ll radio in the names as people come by and claim them.”

“Okay, then how about you check around Public Safety, see if anybody was madder than usual at Jim? Talk to the other cops, the dispatchers, jailers, that kind of thing.”

“Sure,” Long said. “And I’ll work back through the files and see if anybody he put away got back on the street recently.”

“Good idea,” Carnaby said, not sounding very optimistic.

“It’s a moon shot, but you never know.” Long trotted off to the ambulance and huddled with the paramedics.

“I think I’ll get something to eat,” Barnes said. “Anybody around here serve steak and eggs?” Carnaby directed him to the Korean hamburger joint near the state court building, and Barnes set off on foot.

Active turned to Carnaby. “He seems pretty calm about it all.”

“Barnes? Guys like him are like that.”

“Like what? Cold-blooded, you mean? Abnormally detached?”

Carnaby shook his head. “It’s not that simple. It’s just— well, I never met an investigator worth a shit who was motivated by anything other than ego.”

“Ego?”

“Ego. Not pity for the victims, not revenge, not a passion for justice. Intellectual vanity, pure and simple.”

Active swiveled to watch Barnes’s departing back. “It doesn’t seem natural, though.”

“You’re like that yourself, you know.”

“
Me
?”

“Let me ask you this: when a case isn’t going right, do you get madder at the bad guy for what he did, or at yourself for not being able to figure it out?”

Active thought for a moment, then shrugged in acknowledgment.

“So,” Carnaby said. “You want to talk to Augie’s family, or Rachel’s?”

“Augie’s, I guess,” Active said.

Carnaby nodded. “I heard he was staying with his grandmother. Green house up on Second Avenue, kind of behind the tank farm. Dead Cat in the yard.”

Active gave Carnaby a blank look.

“As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know,

“As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know, yellow, treads, a blade?”

“Ah, right, the dead Caterpillar,” Active said. “I do know the place.”

“I’ll send Dickie Nelson to talk to Rachel’s family, then. Why don’t you take the Suburban and drop me at headquarters? You can swing by Grace’s place to get out of your camp clothes and clean up before you get started, if you want.”

“Yeah, I guess a shower wouldn’t hurt,” Active said. “It’s starting to look like a long day.”

“Lots of ’em, probably,” Carnaby said.

“Oh, hell.” Active frowned in irritation. “We forgot about No-Way.”

“What?” Carnaby said. “Who?”

“No-Way,” Active said, and told Carnaby about the dead hunter at One-Way Lake.

“Who was he?” Carnaby asked.

Active shrugged. “There wasn’t any I.D. on him, no initials on his clothes or gear.”

“Inupiaq or white?” Carnaby asked.

“Inupiaq,” Active said. “From one of the villages up the Isignaq, I’d guess.”

“Well, the lack of I.D.’s not that surprising, then,” Carnaby said. “Your average village guy tends to figure the Fish and Game Troopers are out to bust an Eskimo the minute they get an excuse, so he doesn’t carry any. That way, it’s more hassle for the Fish and Game cops, more forms to fill out. Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.”

“Not worth the paperwork?”

Carnaby nodded.

“Yeah, but hunting without a license?” Active asked, annoyed as usual by how people not from Chukchi always seemed to know more than he did about how things worked on his alleged home turf. “That’s a fairly serious bust.”

“Oh, most of ’em get their licenses,” Carnaby said. “They just don’t carry them. Makes it even more annoying for Fish and Game.”

“So how do we figure out who this guy was?”

Carnaby brushed his moustache with his fingers and thought it over. “Sorta like with the four-wheelers over there, maybe? Put a message on Kay-Chuck that someone was found dead on One-Way Lake and if anybody doesn’t come back from hunting, people should report it to their Village Public Safety Officer or the Troopers. Then maybe they can identify him by his stuff.”

“If we can get him out of there,” Active said.

“Yeah, okay,” Carnaby said. “After you drop me off, run by Lienhofer’s and see when Cowboy can go back up there and bring him in. Then you can get cleaned up and go see Augie’s grandmother. By the time you’re done, the paramedics should have some more names for us.”

Active nodded, and they climbed into the Suburban and rumbled down Third Avenue toward the Chukchi Public Safety Building.

A few minutes later, Active pulled up at the Lienhofer offices and hangar on the north side of the airport. He went inside and tensed up when he saw that the only occupant was Delilah Lienhofer, who owned fifty percent of the business and one hundred percent of the worst disposition that Active had ever encountered in a member of the human species, or any other.

Her husband, Sam, owned the other half of the business; but Sam, according to Cowboy, had become a full-time drunk as the Chukchi winters rolled by and nowadays did far less than half the work of keeping Lienhofer’s going, though he spent far more than half the money. Sam’s high overhead was due to the fact that Chukchi had voted itself dry a couple of years earlier. Now drinking meant doing business with bootleggers, which meant prices four or five times what they had been when Chukchi was wet.

Delilah, once as much of a drinker as her husband, had dried out about the time Chukchi did, though no one knew if that was because of the new law or because she figured out the business was in a nosedive and needed at least one sober principal if it was to stay aloft. Now she was that most toxic of personalities: the drunk who had reformed without the benefit of AA or any other program and lived with a mate who hadn’t.

All of which, Active agreed in theory, provided ample justification for her evil temper. But this insight was no comfort if you were the person facing it.

Which he assuredly was at this particular moment. “Can you tell me where Cowboy is?” he asked.

“The fuck you want him for now?” Delilah said from her desk behind the counter. She was a squarish, strong-looking woman with collar-length gray-brown hair. Her only concession to vanity was a carefully maintained set of long red fingernails. Now she was leaning forward in her chair, hands gripping the armrests, as if preparing to leap over the counter and use them to rip out Active’s jugular. “He wakes up, he’s gotta go up to the Gray Wolf mine and pick up a load of GeoNord executives from Anchorage.”

“He’s asleep?”

“Back there in the hangar,” she said. “But don’t bother him. Like I said—”

“It’s just a quick run up to—”

“No, I said! No more nickel-and-dime Super Cub shit for the Troopers today. This trip to the Gray Wolf is in the twin, and that airplane not only costs a lot more than a Super Cub, but GeoNord pays its bills with a lot less paperwork and no damn whining about the state budget.”

Cowboy poked his head in from the hangar. “Hey, Nathan,” he said.

“Get back in there and shave and brush your teeth and wash that soot off your face,” Delilah said. “You’re not going anywhere but the Gray Wolf today. And find one of our jackets with the epaulets.”

“We’ve got to get that guy out of One-Way Lake,” Active told the pilot. “If you could just. . . .”

“Sorry, man, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” Cowboy said. “He’s not going anywhere, right?”

Active frowned. “I still don’t like leaving him up there. This time of year, everything’s on the move and hungry. Bears, wolves, foxes, ravens. Wolverines too.”