Village of the Ghost Bears (6 page)

He watched for a few moments as Augie ran the team and the game, showing off the uncanny dribbling skills and the quick jump shot that seemed to come out of nowhere and had earned him the nickname Mr. Outside. Except he wasn’t really showing off. He looked like a creature at home in its environment, doing what came naturally without much conscious thought. Like a seal in an open lead or a polar bear loping across an ice pan.

Active felt a touch on his arm and turned to see Lena behind him. She motioned for him to follow and led him down a short hall and into a bedroom.

At least, it had once been a bedroom.

“I call it the Augie Sundown museum,” Lena said with a sad little chuckle. “He always tease me about it, but I think he like it.”

Active gazed around the little room. Trophies, medals, plaques, and photographs filled a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. A scrapbook stuffed with newspaper clippings lay open on a table near the door.

“He always like basketball, even when he’s little,” Lena said. “We used to watch that NBA together on Saturdays. And he make me put up a toy basket out there in the living room when he’s maybe seven years old. Every time he practice his jump shot, this old house shake and it turn on the furnace.” She chuckled again, not quite as sadly. “Sure used to get hot whenever he play.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said.

“Me and Augie, we take care of each other. After my son Edgar split up with Augie’s mom, Augie stay here because Edgar don’t have no woman around and Augie’s mom, she go to Nome.”

“That was where she was from?”

“No, they got bars in Nome. That’s why she go. She’s still down there, what I hear, but Augie never see her in a long time.” She paused. “I don’t know if she even heard about our Rec Center fire yet.”

“I’ll have the Troopers in Nome contact her,” Active said.

“I hope you catch that Buck Eastlake,” Lena said. “Augie, he was a real good boy. He make some of these other boys around here think an Eskimo can do something, all right. Everybody like him, everybody but that Buck.”

Active went out through the living room, where the
aanas
were still watching Augie on Lena Sundown’s TV, and to the Suburban. He drove north up Third Street in a fall rain, cold and steady and wind-driven, the kind of rain that seemed like it would go on until it turned to snow and winter set in.

For lack of a better idea, he started at Rachel Akootchuk’s red cabin, which was as vacant as the oil drums in the yard, then drove around the neighborhood looking for someone to ask where Buck Eastlake’s uncle might live. But that turned out to be unnecessary, as the second house he passed bore a sign with “Sayers Eastlake” cut into the wood with a router.

A teenage girl answered his knock, a cordless phone pressed to her chest. When she saw his uniform, she put the phone to her mouth. “I’ll call you back. There’s a State Trooper here. What? I don’t know what he wants.
Arii
, I said I’ll call you back!”

She clicked the phone off, and he introduced himself. She said “Hi,” but didn’t offer her own name, so he plunged ahead. “I’m looking for Buck Eastlake, or Sayers?”

“They both went caribou hunting,” she said. “At my dad’s camp up by Katonak village.”

“When did they leave?”

“Dad left three days ago, maybe. Buck, he only left last night. He had to work yesterday, so he couldn’t go before.”

“Buck left last night? What time?”

She chewed on the stubby antenna of the cordless. “Maybe about seven or eight?”

“By boat?”

She lifted her eyebrows, yes, then frowned in uncertainty. “How else would he go up there? Why you asking about my cousin?”

“He took a boat up there at night?” The Katonak River drained hundreds of thousands of square miles of prime caribou country in the Brooks Range north and east of Chukchi. Katonak village lay about fifty miles upstream from the river’s mouth on Chukchi Bay. “That’s a long trip in the dark.”

The girl lifted her eyebrows again. “That Buck is always on the river if he’s not working or playing basketball. He could do it at night, especially if the weather’s good and there’s a moon.”

Active tried to remember. The weather had been clear in Chukchi the previous afternoon when he and Grace had crammed themselves into Cowboy’s Super Cub for the trip to One-Way Lake. But had there been a moon last night? He tried to visualize the scene at One-Way Lake as evening came on. Yes, he was sure of it, a full moon gliding up from the southeast as the sun dropped behind the ridge and draped their camp in shadow.

So Buck Eastlake could have left Chukchi and navigated up the river by moonlight. He could have been fifteen or twenty miles away when the Rec Center went up in flames a little after ten. Or he could have parked the boat somewhere past the last houses at the north end of Chukchi spit and hiked back to the Rec Center to get even with Augie Sundown and Rachel Akootchuk before setting off for caribou country.

“Where’s your father’s camp? Upstream or downstream from Katonak village? And which side of the river?”

The girl shrank a little at this barrage of questions. “Why you want my cousin?”

“We have to tell him Rachel Akootchuk was killed in the fire last night.” It wasn’t a complete lie, Active told himself. Just a half-truth.

The girl put her hand over her mouth. “Rachel’s dead?”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“That’s sad, even if she was a tramp with that chest of hers. I always told my cousin she’s no good and he should just let that Augie Sundown have her. But it’s still sad she burned up.”

Active felt an extra pang of sympathy for Rachel Akootchuk. Not only was she dead, but it appeared that, when she was alive, her
miluks
had earned her the undying enmity of every female she ever met.

“Very sad,” he said in his gentlest voice. “Now can you tell me how to get to your father’s camp?”

The girl closed her eyes for a moment, and he wondered if she was about to realize her cousin was a suspect and shut down on him. But, no, she opened her eyes and explained that her father’s camp was on the north bank of the river, second or third bend above Katonak village. It was easy to spot, she said, because the cabin was up on a bluff and painted yellow, like their house, and there was a dead snowmachine in the yard. And there should be two boats pulled up to the riverbank.

Active thanked her, returned to the Suburban, and radioed Dispatch for the name and address of his next interview.

HE GOT to the five o’clock meeting a little early so he could report on the plan to retrieve No-Way the following morning. He dropped into an orange plastic chair in front of the boss’s desk.

“It’ll have to do, I guess,” Carnaby said distractedly after Active had outlined the arrangements. “I just hope Cowboy gets to the guy before something else does. A family will never quite get to closure on a deal like this unless the remains are recovered and they can give him a proper burial.”

“Anybody upriver been reported late from a hunting trip yet?”

Carnaby shook his head. “Not a peep. Kinda odd, huh?”

Active shrugged. “It’s the Arctic. Everything takes two weeks longer.”

“Tell me about it,” Carnaby said. “What’s he look like, anyway?”

Active was momentarily speechless. “Like I said, the pike—”

Carnaby waved him off. “I mean otherwise.”

Active recited the same statistics he’d given Cowboy Decker, then filled in details about No-Way’s clothing and rifle. “He seemed kind of light-skinned for a full-blooded Inupiaq,” Active added as an afterthought. “Lighter than me, certainly. Maybe a half-breed or a quarter white?” As he spoke, he heard people in the outer office and Dickie Nelson asking Evelyn O’Brien, the Trooper secretary, for Carnaby.

Carnaby grunted. “Hard to guess, if he was in the water with the pike for a while. Anybody’d look like a ghost, probably.” He rose to wave Nelson and Alan Long into the office.

Long took the other plastic chair near Carnaby’s desk, turned it around, and sat with his arms draped over the backrest. Dickie Nelson was left with the choice of standing or taking the ancient green leather couch. He opted for standing—or leaning, actually—against a four-drawer file cabinet. They all knew the perils of the green couch: it tended to swallow its occupants, effectively excluding them from any conversation.

“How about we get going here?” Carnaby said. “Where’s Ronnie, anyway?”

“Still finishing up at the Rec Center,” Nelson said. “He said he’ll see you by six at the latest.”

“All right, so what have you three got?”

“As I think everybody knows,” Long said, “all of the four-wheelers have been claimed except one.”

“What do you make of that?” Carnaby asked.

“I don’t know,” Long said. “Maybe—”

Carnaby waved a big hand and said, “Never mind, let’s go over the interviews first.”

“Well, as I said, four of the five ATVs have been claimed,” Long said. “And I think all the families have been interviewed.” He looked at Active and Nelson for confirmation. Both nodded.

“Anything?” Carnaby asked.

“A possible,” Active said as the other two shook their heads.

“All right,” Carnaby said. “One at a time, then.”

Each of the three reported on the interviews he had conducted over the course of the day, as more and more of the ATVs had been claimed and the paramedics had radioed the names of the claimants to Dispatch at the Chukchi Public Safety Building.

In addition to Lena Sundown and the girl cousin of Buck Eastlake, Active had also talked to a superintendent for the construction company rehabilitating Chukchi’s decrepit elementary school. Two of the men on the job—a carpenter named Charles Hodge and an electrician named Roy Marks—had borrowed a company four-wheeler to go to the Rec Center for a sauna. Both had been in Chukchi less than a week, and the superintendent was pretty sure they hadn’t had enough contact with the locals to get anybody mad enough to want to kill them.

Dickie Nelson had talked to the family of Rachel Akootchuk, who said she had gone to the Rec Center with Augie Sundown to watch him shoot hoops. Nobody at her house could imagine anyone wanting her dead. The name Buck Eastlake hadn’t come up.

The owner of another of the four-wheelers found in front of the Rec Center had been identified as Lula Benson, who managed the bingo operation there. Her husband, a sixty-ish Inupiaq named Benjamin Benson, couldn’t think why anyone would want to kill her, either.

Alan Long reported on his day’s work, including the fact that one of the four-wheelers had indeed belonged to Cammie Frankson.

“So,” Carnaby said when the round-robin was over, “we’ve got seven fatalities so far, counting Cammie and Chief Silver.”

“Plus whoever was on the unidentified four-wheeler,” Nelson said.

“In all probability,” Carnaby agreed. “Plus maybe a walk-in or two. How does that square with what the paramedics took out of there?”

“They didn’t yet,” Long said. “Barnes hasn’t released the bodies.”

Carnaby frowned for a moment and finger-brushed his moustache. “What do we do about that last four-wheeler?”

“I finished early,” Active said, “so I went by the Rec Center and checked it out. Like Alan said, there was no I.D. on it, but it is a fairly new Honda, so I towed it over to the dealer’s. They’re going to see what they can figure out. Check serial numbers and so on against whatever they’ve got in their records.”

“Cop time or village time?” Carnaby asked, not sounding very hopeful.

“They promised to have it done tomorrow,” Active said.

“What else?” Carnaby said, looked around the three of them. “Dickie, what’s left on your list?”

“Nothing, far as I know,” Nelson said. “I’m ready for the next phase, whatever it is.”

“Go ahead and knock on doors around the Rec Center, then,” Carnaby said. “Maybe one of the neighbors saw something.”

Nelson nodded and left.

Active pulled at his lower lip. “Did Jim go to the Rec Center much? I don’t remember him ever mentioning it.” He visualized the Chief’s paunch-bellied middle-aged figure. “Or looking like it.”

“Excellent point,” Carnaby said. “I don’t think he did hit the gym very often. What about it, Alan? You know if he ever went?”

Long wrinkled his nose and squinted: an Inupiat no.

“Maybe you should ask around the city force,” Active said. “See if anybody knows why he was over there last night.”

“You bet.” Long scraped his chair back and stood up.

“And weren’t you going to check on whether anybody who Jim had put away hit the streets recently?” Carnaby asked.

“I didn’t get—” Alan Long shut up at Carnaby’s look, then rushed to fill the resulting vacuum. “I’m on it, Captain. Cop time.” He pulled on his coat and scooted out the door.

“He’s on it,” Active said.

“Silver used to call Alan his alpha pup,” Carnaby said. Then he ruminated in silence and Active wondered if he was being dismissed too. Finally the captain shook his head. “He asked me to recommend him for Jim’s job.”

Active grinned. “Alpha pup, huh? You gonna do it?”

Carnaby frowned. “He might grow into it. People do that, you know.”

“Or not.”