Village of the Ghost Bears (12 page)

She ate silently for a few moments. “You tell your
ataata
yet?”

Active shook his head. “Not yet. I will. He talking to you these days?”

She squinted the Inupiat no and said nothing.

Exactly why Jacob Active didn’t speak to his daughter wasn’t clear to anyone, except perhaps Jacob, who never explained anything. According to Martha, the silence had started after the stroke that had deprived him of most of his English but left his Inupiaq intact. But the root cause, she believed, was the fact that Leroy Johnson was white. Jacob Active’s contempt for
naluaqmiuts
like Leroy was unshakable. Martha thought the stroke had also deprived Jacob of what little ability to mask his feelings he had ever possessed.

“
Arii
,” Martha said. “My father doesn’t talk to me, and now my son is leaving.”

“I said we’ll visit back and forth.”

Martha’s expression brightened, but not by much. Active decided to change the subject, and perhaps get a little work done as well. “What are people saying about the fire?”

She brightened a little more. Seeking her advice usually had that effect.

“They’re real mad to think someone around here would do that.”

“Like I said, we’re still not sure how it started.”

“They think, if Jim Silver was alive, he would figure it out. But they aren’t so sure about that Alan Long. So I tell them, my son Nathan will catch ’im.”

“Who do they think it was?”

“Nobody knows. We never had anything like this in Chukchi before.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

ACTIVE WAS AT HIS desk at eight the next morning, on the phone to the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan, Oregon. After navigating a tortuous voice mail system and undergoing several interrogations as to who he was and what he wanted, finally he was connected to a businesslike female voice that identified itself as belonging to Correctional Treatment Specialist Lana Bickford.

“Jae Hyo Lee? Yes, I was his case manager,” she said. “We let him out a few weeks ago. Didn’t you guys call about him a couple days ago?”

“Right, that would have been Officer Alan Long. He’s also working this case.”

“And what is it you guys want with Mr. Lee? Let’s see, I think his file is still on my desk here somewhere.” There was a thunk as she laid the phone down, then a rustle of papers.

“Here we go,” she said at length. “I have my notes now. He’s an arson suspect, Officer Long said?”

“A person of interest,” Active said. “For now, we just want to question him.”

“Well, all right. Lessee—uh-huh, he’s the one was in for poaching bear gallbladders. We don’t get many of those. Although they’re usually Koreans when we do. Anyway, what can I tell you about him?”

Active sketched out what they needed to know— anything available about Jae Hyo Lee’s visitors, mail, and phone calls.

Bickford blew out a long breath. “Some of this I can help with, some of it I can’t be much use to you. Letters, we read anything coming in or going out, but we don’t keep any record unless we find something fishy, and there’s nothing like that in Mr. Lee’s file.”

Active, scribbling notes on a legal pad, nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Uh-huh.”

“Phone logs . . . ah, here we are. Looks like he called a Ruth Marie Silver about every two weeks the whole time he was here. And he called a Kyung Kim a couple of times.”

“Uh-huh. That’s his girlfriend and his uncle. Can you give me the dates?”

Active copied as Bickford read off the last few. Lee’s last two calls had been to Ruthie Silver and to his uncle, a few days before he got out of prison. Arranging his homecoming, no doubt.

“Any visitors?”

There was a long pause, with the sound of paper crackling in the background.

“Oh, yeah, here we go. Looks like he only had one visitor the whole time he was here.”

“Close-knit family, eh?”

“I don’t think it was a family member. A fellow from up your way looks like, Chukchi, right? He was logged in as, geez, this handwriting. Some of our correctional officers—a Thomas Gaines?”

“Thomas Gaines? I never heard of any—” Active stopped in mid-sentence. “The handwriting is bad?”

“Like a doctor’s.”

He could hardly bring himself to ask. “Any chance that’s Gage instead of Gaines? Thomas Gage?”

“There I go again,” she said. “I had a hard time reading it when the other guy called last week.”

“Officer Long? I thought he only called day before yesterday.”

“No, somebody else called before that. Now, what—uh-huh, here it is. Your police chief up there, a Jim Silber?”

“Silver? You told Jim Silver that Tom Gage visited Jae Hyo Lee?”

“I DIDN’T want to know this,” Carnaby said after Active broke the news a few minutes later.

“Me either,” Active said.

Carnaby ticked points off on his fingers.

“So Tom Gage goes to see Jae Hyo Lee in prison— when?”

“About two and a half months ago.”

“Then three weeks ago, Jae gets out of prison.”

Active nodded.

“And last week Jim Silver finds out about Gage’s visit?”

Active nodded again. “I guess he was checking on Jae like his daughter asked.”

“And three days ago the Rec Center burns down and Silver and Gage both die?”

“Thus killing the only visitor Jae had, the entire time he was in Sheridan,” Active said. “And the cop who called to check up on him.”

Just then the phone rang. Carnaby picked up and listened for a few seconds. “Yes, Senator. I know. We all feel the same way. But these things take. . . . Well, thank you, but we have all the resources we need for now.” Carnaby paused, listening, and rolled his eyes at Active. “Yes, I’ll certainly keep you posted.”

Carnaby hung up. “Our own Senator Darryl Beaver, wanting to know how we’re doing with the investigation. And letting me know in the kindest possible way that it’ll be very difficult for him to defend the line item for the Chukchi detachment if this thing is still hanging fire when the legislature convenes in Juneau.”

“Hanging
fire
? He said that?”

Carnaby grimaced. “Uh-huh. Oh, and the mayor also called this morning, by the way, and he says there’s a celebration-of-life memorial service thing tonight at the high school. And Roger Kennelly from Kay-Chuck called for an update. And Lena Sundown, and—” The captain stopped and shook his head. “Jesus. Jae Hyo Lee and Tom Gage. What the hell is this about?”

“Maybe Gage and Lee were in it together, and Gage isn’t really dead: he just left his four-wheeler in front of the Rec Center to throw us off.”

“But why? Was he in the gallbladder thing with Jae? And if he’s not dead and he did help Jae set the fire, where is he?” Carnaby thought for a moment, then answered his own question. “With Jae, obviously, in this infamous boat he’s running around in. And now what? They’re sailing off somewhere to start a new life together? Shit.”

“Yeah,” Active said. “So maybe instead—”

“Maybe he was working with Jae, all right,” Carnaby said with a look of inspiration. “But he really did get trapped and die in his own fire. Didn’t Ronnie Barnes say that happens sometimes?”

“Yeah,” Active said, “but why would he park his four-wheeler out front? Wouldn’t he come up on foot, sneak into the furnace room from the back, and do the whole thing with the ‘T’ fitting and the wire on the door?”

Carnaby shook his head. “None of it makes a damned bit of sense.”

“Wait a minute,” Active said. “What if Tom Gage was the Feds’ source in the gallbladder bust? And then Jae finds out about it and burns down the Rec Center to get even.”

Carnaby was silent, turning this over in his mind. “Yeah, it holds together a little better than anything else we’ve come up with. He did tell Ruthie he found out it wasn’t Jim who turned him in, right?”

Active nodded.

“But it still doesn’t explain Gage’s trip down to the prison to see Jae. Or why an aviation instructor would be involved with a Korean gallbladder smuggler.”

Active sighed. “Nah, it doesn’t.”

Carnaby picked up the phone. “Let me get Alan in here. He’s supposed to be talking to the Feds today to see if they’ll tell us their source in the gallbladder thing.”

A few minutes later, Long was seated beside Active at Carnaby’s desk, asking them what was up.

“Tom Gage visited Jae in Sheridan?” he said after hearing what they had learned. “Jesus.”

Carnaby outlined their theory that Gage had been the federal source in the gallbladder case, then looked hopefully at Long.

“It’s a little complicated,” Long said. “They won’t tell me outright who the source was, but they did agree to look at our list of fatalities and I.D. him if he’s on it. Plus they’ll call in the FBI to help catch Jae if it looks like he killed their source. So I faxed them our list.”

Carnaby and Active exchanged uneasy glances. The FBI commanded vast resources and was good at many things, but working rural Alaska was not one of them, according to Trooper lore. Carnaby looked at Long again. “And? Was it Gage?”

“They haven’t called back yet.”

“Let’s give ’em a try,” Carnaby said, pushing the phone across the desk to Long.

Long pulled a notebook from his pocket, found the number, and dialed. “Alan Long for Tony Ehrlich,” he said after a moment. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

The moment dragged on. Long put his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Tony was my handler in the gallbladder case.”

Active shifted in his chair and doodled on the legal pad.

“Yeah, Tony,” Long said finally. “You get my fax? Uh-huh, and. . . .”

Fifteen seconds passed in silence.

“You sure?” Long asked. “None of them? How about Tom Gage specifically? It turns out he visited Jae Hyo Lee in Sheridan a couple months ago.”

More silence.

“Really? Well, thanks.” Long hung up and looked at them, shaking his head. “They never heard of Tom Gage till they got our list.”

They looked at each other gloomily. “I’m out of ideas,” Carnaby said at length.

The other two raised their eyebrows in agreement.

“Tom Gage is about all we’ve got,” Carnaby finally said. “Full-court press here. Alan, you get over to the DA’s office and tell Charlie Hughes we need a search warrant for Gage’s place, and—”

“Why?” Long interrupted. “If he’s dead, why don’t we just break the lock and go in?”

“He’s not dead till the coroner says so,” Carnaby said with a glare. “And who knows how long that’ll take? Besides which, what if he does turn up alive? Then whatever we find in there becomes useless to us because we didn’t have a warrant. Nope, Gage had recent contact with our suspect, and that makes him a suspect or at least a material witness, so a search warrant it is. Dead or alive. Okay, Alan?”

Subdued, Long nodded.

“Nathan, you talk to the Tech Center. See what they know about Gage’s background. But most important, find out how to get hold of his ex-wife.”

ACTIVE LOPED down the stairs of the Public Safety Building and climbed into the Trooper Suburban. He was headed up Third Street, toward the Tech Center at the north end of town, when he remembered he had a lunch date with Grace. With a sigh, he swung into the parking lot of the Bible Missionary Church, looped around a pair of four-wheelers, pulled back onto Third Street, and headed south toward GeoNord’s Chukchi headquarters.

Grace had started as an administrative assistant in the human resources department of the company that ran the Gray Wolf mine, mainly as something to do while she decided how long to stay in Chukchi after the deaths of her parents. But with her intellect and organizing abilities, she was soon functioning as office manager. And then the head of the department—a white man from Anchorage—had begun spending more time at the Chukchi dump shooting ravens and foxes than at his desk solving GeoNord’s personnel problems. Concluding he had endured more seven-month Arctic winters than he could handle, the company had sent him back to Anchorage, and Grace Palmer had become the new director of human resources.

The GeoNord elevator was out of service, as usual, so Active clumped up the two flights of stairs to her office, which, like Grace, smelled delicately of lavender. She was in the middle of a phone call but waved him in past the receptionist. “Hold on just a second,” she said into the phone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Got the mine on the line. Is it lunchtime already?”

“Not quite. But I have to go up to the Tech Center and I don’t know if I’ll have time after.”

She raised her eyebrows, told the mine she’d call back later, and stood up, stretching and twisting her neck.

“Long morning?”

She raised her eyebrows again: yes. “And you? Any progress on the fire?”

He shrugged. “You know. You put one foot in front of the other and hope you eventually get somewhere.”

He helped her into her coat, and they made their way downstairs. “Mind if we hit the Pizza Palace?” he said once they were in the Suburban.

She rolled her eyes. “Again? Do you ever not work?”

“We have to eat somewhere,” he said. The Pizza Palace was one of Kyung Kim’s properties, and it was common knowledge that one of his cooks was selling liquor on the side. The knowledge just wasn’t common enough for the Troopers or the city cops to make an arrest yet. “You never know when somebody—”

“We both know he’s not going to sell any liquor out the back door with a Trooper in the dining room.”

“Exactly. So if somebody comes in, spots my uniform, and takes off without ordering anything, what’s that tell you?”

She sighed. “Have it your way, Dudley Do-Right. Would this mean we’ll be parking a discreet distance from the premises, yet again?”

“If they see this Suburban at the Pizza Palace, they won’t come in, will they?”