Village of the Ghost Bears (16 page)

“Right,” Active said. “Our secretary said you had an I.D. for us, but we’re thinking there must be a mixup. We did send a body down, but it was only a couple days ago.”

“Yeah,” Park said. “The guy from the lake, right?”

“You worked him already?”

“Sure. We had an opening, so I slipped him in. Happens sometimes.”

“And?”

“The I.D. is a little complicated, so I’ll do the cause of death first. That part was easy.”

“Okay.”

“Broken neck, to put it in plain English. Kind of a rotational thing, like his head was twisted. Did he take a fall or something?”

“That’s how it looked,” Active said. “His rifle and some other stuff were scattered down the face of a cliff, like he lost his footing higher up the slope and basically cartwheeled down into the water. Whatever he hit or got caught on that made him lose the rifle, it ripped the sling out of the stock.”

“Sounds right,” Park said. “That could have done it.”

“So he didn’t drown in the lake?”

“Nope, no water in his lungs. Which is why he floated around in the lake for the fish to eat his face. Pike, I’m guessing?”

“That’s what we think,” Active said. “They’re thick in those lakes along the Isignaq. But who was he?”

“That’s the hard part,” Park said. “The fish ate most of the flesh off his hands along with his face, and there was some decomposition as well, but we did get a reasonably good impression off his right thumb.”

“And?”

“I ran it through the system, and it came back with five possible names. I can give ’em all to you if you want, but only one of them is even from Alaska, much less your area up there, so I figure he’s gotta be your guy.”

“Gotta be,” Active agreed. “Go ahead.”

“He’s a long-lost cousin of mine,” Park said.

“Eh?”

“I mean, he’s Korean too.”

Ah, Active was thinking, that would explain the slight accent. His brain skidded to a halt as Park said the name, then began to list the other four possibilities.

ACTIVE WAS still more or less deaf and blind as he walked back to Carnaby’s office a few minutes later. He banged a knee on a corner of Evelyn O’Brien’s desk and failed to respond in kind when she snarled at him as he rubbed the spot before limping on.

“What?” Carnaby said after a look at Active’s face.

“Well, we found Jae Hyo Lee.”

“What?” Long said. “They picked him up? Where? Did he confess?”

“Oh, shit.” Carnaby met Active’s eyes, then looked away in pain. “No!”

Active nodded.

“What?” Long said.

Carnaby cleared his throat. “Alan, I think Nathan is trying to tell us that the guy in One-Way Lake was Jae Hyo Lee.” He looked at Active, eyebrows raised in the white expression of inquiry.

Active nodded again, Long’s mouth shut with an audible pop, and a depressed silence settled over the room.

“Let’s hear it,” Carnaby said finally.

Active sketched Park’s findings on the cause of death and explained that a thumbprint had identified No-Way from One-Way Lake as Jae Hyo Lee from Cape Goodwin, thereby depriving them of their only suspect in the Rec Center fire.

“Only the one thumbprint? Any room for doubt there?” Carnaby asked, not sounding very hopeful. “What about the other possibles?”

Active shook his head. “One of them is in custody in Reno, one’s a female bank embezzler on parole in Chicago, one’s a sixty-year-old Russian pimp from Brooklyn— admittedly between jail stretches at the moment—and the other’s a black kid from Omaha.”

They pondered the implications.

“But if Jae. . . .” Long said at one point, but was unable to proceed farther.

“And then who. . . .” Carnaby mumbled a little later, then sank back into the silence.

Finally Carnaby sighed. “So, when did he die?”

“According to Park, he was in the water a couple weeks, plus or minus a couple days,” Active said.

Carnaby looked at the calendar on his desk blotter, and, with a pencil, tapped his way backward through it. “In other words, he was in that lake within a week of getting out of Sheridan.”

Active nodded. “Plus or minus.”

“And he died of a broken neck? Not drowning?”

Active nodded again.

Carnaby toyed with the pencil a moment, then began ticking the sequence off on his fingers. “Let’s see. He gets a visit in prison from Tom Gage, he gets out of the system a couple months later, then turns up in One-Way Lake with a broken neck a few days after that. And by the time you stumble across him up there, Nathan, Tom Gage is dead too, as is Jim Silver. Anybody want to bet Jae Hyo Lee dived off that cliff by accident?”

“He didn’t necessarily break his neck coming down the cliff,” Active said.

“No?”

Active shook his head. “I asked Park if he was sure Jae broke his neck in the fall. He said, ‘All I know for sure is, he wasn’t breathing when he hit the water.’”

“You think he was dead before he fell, then?”

“You think we can rule anything out in this case?”

Carnaby grimaced. “You’re right. But there’s a hell of a cliff there, right? If he was already dead, how would anybody get him up that slope from the lake?”

Active thought it over. “I don’t think anybody could. But they might have brought him in along the face of the slope somehow and let him go. Maybe they came through the mountains by four-wheeler?”

“Could be,” Long said. “Those guys up there all use ’em to hunt.”

“Cowboy spot anything like that when he went back in to get the body?” Carnaby asked.

Active shook his head. “He said it was hard to read. Four-wheeler trails all over, like Alan says, but nothing special around the lake. No camp or anything.”

“What about somebody flying him in? Any way to land a plane up in those hills above the lake, maybe haul him down to the edge of the cliff and let him go?”

Active visualized the country around One-Way Lake and tried to imagine setting a plane down among the crags above it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think even Cowboy could get in up there.”

Something was nagging at him, though. He was trying to tease it out of his memory when Carnaby sighed again.

“Look,” the captain said. “Could a guy want to go hunting that bad? So bad, it’s the first thing he does out of prison? Is it possible Jae just wanted to get away for a while, spend some time alone out in the country? He’s rusty and maybe out of shape from prison, and the terrain gets ahead of him? Could it be that simple?”

The other two shrugged.

“Whatever,” Long said. “But if Jae didn’t start the Rec Center fire, we don’t have anybody but Buck Eastlake.”

“Yeah,” Carnaby said. “But let’s not let go of Jae quite yet. First let’s have another talk with Uncle Kyung.”

“Sounds right,” Active said.

“I could,” Long said. “He wasn’t much help the first time around, but—”

“I’ll go,” Active said. He tried to think of something more to say, but decided there was no way to soften it: he didn’t want Alan Long questioning Kyung Kim or conducting any other important interview in the case.

“What!” Long had stood to pull on his coat. Now he dropped back into his chair and laid his hands on Carnaby’s desk, palms up. “Captain, I already talked to him. I know how to read him and—”

“You can go,” Carnaby said. “But let Nathan do the talking. You keep quiet and observe the subject’s demeanor, then report your findings to Nathan afterward.”

Long clearly wasn’t happy, but all he said was “Yes, sir.” Carnaby’s shower of officialese had probably been too much for him. He rose again and left the office.

Active stood and pulled on his own coat, looking at Carnaby. “Observe the subject’s demeanor?”

Carnaby shrugged, appearing rather pleased with himself. “Worked, didn’t it?”

ACTIVE PULLED up in front of the Arctic Dragon and shut off the Suburban. He looked over at Long, who held up a hand.

“Don’t say it. You ask the questions. I listen.”

Active nodded. “And Uncle Kyung answers, hopefully.”

“Hopefully.” Long swung open his door and climbed down from the SUV.

Kyung Kim was at the counter, a dozen or so receipts spread out before him, when they stepped into the restaurant. Kim was Korean, and so were the cook at work in the kitchen and the waitress watching CNN on a wall-mounted TV from a table near the counter. But the wall décor at the Arctic Dragon ran to medieval tapestries replete with knights, maidens, and unicorns. And the menu had become more American and less Chinese even in the relatively short time Active had been in Chukchi. Today, at any rate, the place smelled of frying fat, like any other diner in America. The Arctic Dragon, it appeared, was assimilating.

Kim spotted them, nodded brusquely, and said something in Korean to the waitress. She hurried over and pointed to a booth by a window looking out on Beach Street. “Table for two?”

“That’s okay,” Active said and slid around her to the counter.

Kim didn’t look much like an uncle. He was too young, Active thought, then decided he probably didn’t know enough Koreans to judge the man’s age. Kim was short and slight, but, even so, his head looked too small for his body. And the back of his skull was flat, as if he’d slept on a board all his life.

“Can I help you?” he said, snapping a rubber band around the receipts. “I already talked to this officer on the phone.” He cut his eyes over Active’s shoulder, toward Long.

“Maybe we could go in your office.” Active jerked his head toward a tiny cubicle near the counter. It contained a desk with a calculator and computer on it and one chair that he could see.

“My office is very small,” Kim said. “Maybe better over there.” He pointed at the same booth the waitress had indicated.

“Your office will be fine.” Active put out his arm as though pointing. In reality, it was to leave Kim nowhere else to go.

Kim gave a small shrug of resignation and walked into the cubicle. He took the chair and watched them squeeze in and close the door. His face was a mask now. It reminded Active of the look an Inupiaq got when crowded by anyone official, especially a
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official. The Eskimo mask, Active called it.

Long and Active loomed over Kim in his chair. With the three of them inside, the little office began to heat up.

“We found your nephew,” Active said after a lengthy silence.

Kim’s mask remained impassive.

“That was him we pulled out of One-Way Lake a few days ago. You heard about it on Kay-Chuck?”

“The radio said he was Eskimo.”

“We thought he was, because the fish ate his face.” Still no flicker of expression from Kim. “But we got a fingerprint off his thumb, and we made a match in our computer. It’s Jae Hyo Lee.”

“And you are sure?”

Active nodded. He thought a small sigh escaped Kim.

“How did he die?”

“What was he doing up at that lake? Why didn’t he come here when he got out of prison? Or go up to Cape Goodwin to see his girlfriend?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. Can you tell me how he died?”

“His neck was broken.”

“Ah, yes, I think the radio said he fell from a cliff.”

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

Kim paused. Active sensed he was calculating whether the two officers were likely to know about the call from Jae Hyo Lee shortly before his release from prison.

“He called from Oregon to tell me he was getting out,” he said finally. “He said he might see me here, or he might go on to Cape Goodwin if the plane schedule was right.”

“And did he see you here?”

“No. I didn’t hear from him.”

“Nothing at all? Weren’t you worried?”

“I thought he went to Cape Goodwin and he must have better things to do than call his uncle after being in prison so long.” Kim gave a small, experimental smile, then resumed the mask when neither Long nor Active returned it.

“Did you know Tom Gage?”

“Not much. I heard his name on the radio after the fire, though.”

“Uh-huh. Did you know he visited your nephew in prison a few months ago?”

Active thought he sensed Kim calculating again, but the expression, if it could be called that, flickered off his face before Active could be sure.