Village of the Ghost Bears (23 page)

“I think Sergeant Cave may have a point,” Long said. “There’s more evidence against Pingo than Dood McAllister.”

“Unless Carnaby finds the wire-twister at McAllister’s place and—”

“Of course he’s going to have a wire-twister,” Long said, with unusual heat. “He needs it to work on his planes.”

“—and it matches the wire from the locker-room door at the Rec Center.” Active stared at Long. “Or the wallet has McAllister’s fingerprints on it.” Long lowered his eyes.

Active pulled out his cell phone, got Carnaby on the line, and briefed him on the interview with Pingo Kivalina and on what Johnnell Cave had told them about the Driftwood crash. Then Active asked the Trooper captain to get the necessary warrants from the Chukchi District Attorney.

“I don’t see any problem with the search warrants,” Carnaby said. “But I don’t know about the other. You think we’ve got enough here to arrest McAllister?”

Active took him through the evidence again.

“Okay,” Carnaby said. “I’ll see what I can do. What’s your next step up there?”

“If you guys don’t find McAllister at home when you get there with the warrant tonight, we’ll fly down to his camp on the Katonak and arrest him tomorrow.”

“This guy Cave sending somebody along for backup?” Carnaby asked.

Active hesitated.

“Nathan?”

Active felt Long and Cave watching him.

“You there?” Carnaby said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” Active said finally. “No, Cave doesn’t plan to send anybody along.”

“No?”

“He doesn’t like McAllister for the Rec Center fire. He likes Pingo Kivalina.”

Cave perked up at this, and watched intently as Active awaited Carnaby’s response.

“Pingo, huh?” Carnaby said. Then he was silent for a time, presumably turning this over in his head. “Makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it?”

“I think it depends on what you find at McAllister’s place,” Active said.

Cave shot him a told-you-so look.

Carnaby sighed. “All right, I’ll see if anybody from the Trooper detachment in Barrow can go along. Your cell phone work up there?”

“I’m on it now,” Active said.

“Yeah, I’ll call you when we’re done at McAllister’s.”

Active closed the phone and checked his watch. A little after six. He looked at Cave. “Jose’s still open? And the Roscoe?”

Jose’s Midnight Sun was a legend in the Arctic, a full-blown Tex-Mex restaurant on the tundra: two big dining rooms and a coffee shop, limitless quantities of refried beans and enchiladas suizas, all presided over by a septuagenarian blonde named Jean Hoyt who had come to the Arctic in the early days of oil exploration and somehow missed too many planes out.

The equally legendary Roscoe Arms, as Active knew from his previous visit to Barrow, was the only hotel in town cheap enough to be covered by the state per-diem allowance. It was a ramshackle assemblage of Atco construction trailers that afforded guests all the space and comfort of a jail cell, with bath and showers down the hall and signs everywhere warning against walking around town alone because of prowling polar bears.

“Absolutely,” Cave said with a grin. “I’ll drop you at Jose’s, and you can grab a cab from there to the Roscoe.”

Two and a half hours later, Active and Long were ensconced at the Roscoe, sharing an Atco to stretch their per-diem. Long snored on one bunk, while, on the other, an envious Active read a two-year-old
Time
magazine and waited for his stomach to forgive him for the plate of tortilla chips and steaming goop he had dumped into it at Jose’s. He was on his way down the hall for the second time since check-in when his cell phone went off.

“That you?” Carnaby’s voice said.

“Yep. How’d it go at McAllister’s?”

“It didn’t, as far as he was concerned. Nobody home, but he has a neighbor girl watching the house. She said he’s at his camp on the Katonak.”

“And otherwise?”

“So-so. We did find a safety-wire twister, which we’re sending down to the crime lab tomorrow along with the dog’s head and wallet we found at Gage’s place.”

“Not a bad evening’s work, boss. So we’ll fly down—”

“Yes, you can go down to his camp tomorrow, but all you got is a search warrant, which I’m faxing to Cave’s machine as we speak. The DA wouldn’t go for an arrest warrant yet.”

Active eased open the door to the rest room and stepped in. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, and he’ll do something a little off, and we can—”

“Nathan?”

“Yeah?”

“Think about what you’re doing.”

“What?”

“Any time you’re with Cowboy, you push too hard if there’s a crook involved. Remember when you jumped out of his Super Cub?”

“I didn’t jump. I stepped. Cowboy was hovering in a high wind.”

“Whatever you did, you ended up with a dislocated shoulder, so listen to what I’m saying: you two play to each other’s pathology. And for backup, don’t forget, all you got is Alan Long.”

“None of the Barrow Troopers are available?”

Carnaby swore in disgust. “Apparently the detachment there is down three positions because nobody wants to work in Barrow, if you can imagine. And the other two are over in Prudhoe Bay wrapping up a drug bust. So you walk into McAllister’s camp and politely show him the search warrant and politely search the place and get the hell out. Right?”

“And we’ll arrest him if he gives us any trouble.”

“Nathan!”

Active closed the cell phone and opened the door of the one stall that didn’t have an Out of Order sign on it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THEY GATHERED AT SIX the next morning in Cave’s office at the North Slope Borough Department of Public Safety. The building perched above the tundra on the usual stilts and had a snow-blasted plywood exterior of faded blue, set off by fire-engine-red doors.

Cowboy Decker and Cave were there already when Active and Long showed up fresh from their night at the Roscoe. Cowboy wore an uneasy frown.

“Apparently you got yourself a situation here,” Cave said with an air of malicious satisfaction as he passed around cups and poured coffee. He nodded toward Cowboy.

Active and Long looked at the pilot.

“McAllister may know we’re coming,” Cowboy said with a sheepish look.

“How could that be?” Active asked, feeling like he already knew the general outline of it.

“After we landed yesterday, I called Delilah to let her know we’d be bringing Pingo Kivalina back with us,” Cowboy said. “Then, after you called and briefed me last night about the search warrant and all, I called her again to say we’d be coming back by way of McAllister’s camp.”

“And?”

Cowboy paused and sighed. “She told me McAllister was there to pick up a client and get some gas when I called the first time, and he overheard her say Pingo’s name. He asked her what the deal was after I hung up.”

“And Delilah told him?”

“Well, you know how women are,” Cowboy said. “Can’t keep a secret.”

“Women, huh? How about bush pilots?”

“It was a prisoner transport,” Cowboy said in an offended tone. “I had to let the boss know. What was I supposed to do?”

“It’s probably on Kay-Chuck by now,” Long said.

Active shut his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Did McAllister say anything?”

“He told Delilah he heard Pingo was killed at the Rec Center.”

“We never released anything about him being in the fire,” Long said heatedly. “We never even heard of Pingo till we called the health aide in Cape Goodwin, and he was already here in Barrow by then.”

“Exactly,” Active said. “But if McAllister set the fire—”

“Then he would know Pingo was there that night,” Long finished.

Active lifted his eyebrows, yes. “McAllister tell Delilah where he was going?” he asked Cowboy. “Carnaby told me just now he heard McAllister was up on the Katonak.”

Cowboy nodded. “Loaded up the client and blasted off for his camp, according to Delilah.”

“At night? Is that doable? It was nearly dark when we landed here.”

“It’s doable if you want to bad enough and you know the strip,” Cowboy said with a shrug. “His 185’s got landing lights, of course, and whoever he left in camp probably went down with a four-wheeler and parked at the end of the runway for reference when he buzzed the place.”

“Well, I don’t see that this changes anything,” Active said after some thought. He swung his gaze around the room. “If he’s figured out we’re coming, it’s all the more reason to get there before he runs.”

“Your call,” Cave said in a tone of malicious satisfaction. “He’s got hunters in camp, maybe a cook, and an assistant guide. You could end up with a big fucking hostage crisis a million miles from nowhere.”

Active chewed his lip and thought it over. “We can’t just leave him out there, and if he’s going to take hostages, he’s already done it. I still say we’ve got no choice.”

He turned to the pilot. “Cowboy, you been in there?”

Cowboy nodded. “I’ve hauled clients in and out for him a couple times.” He walked to the map on Cave’s wall and swept a hand over the fantastic corrugations of the Brooks Range, which ran like a dragon’s back across the top of Alaska.

He stopped with an index finger on the point at the state’s northern tip. “Here we are at Barrow, and south of us we got the Keating Mountains, with Driftwood along here, halfway between.” He touched the spot, then swept his hand south. “Down here below the Keatings is the Katonak River valley, and south of that you cross the Laird Mountains into the Isignaq River valley, where Nathan found his dead Korean at One-Way Lake.”

He looked up and everybody nodded again.

“All right,” Cowboy said, moving his hand back up the map a little. “McAllister’s camp is here, in these foothills north of the Katonak.” He tapped the spot. “Kind of midway between the Driftwood strip and One-Way Lake.”

Active stepped up and studied the map. Even though he had known all of this in a general way, the whole thing came into focus as Cowboy sketched it out visually.

“His camp’s on what they call Lucky Creek,” Cowboy continued. He still had his finger on the spot, but the scale was too small to show much detail. “It’s in a big, broad valley that drains into the Katonak. Strip’s about twelve hundred feet long, reindeer moss with chert gravel mixed in. About a hundred yards upstream from that, he’s got the lodge, a couple cabins, a john, and a meat cache. It’s in a fairly thick stand of willows along the creekbed.”

“So how do you do it?” Cave looked skeptical as ever. “You go roaring in there and land on his runway, maybe he’s waiting with a sheep rifle and a three-by-nine scope, and he picks you off as you come out of the aircraft. You can’t risk a flyover, so you’ll be going in blind.”

Cowboy spoke up. “You know, he’s got a radio there. We could call him when we get within range.”

“What if the radio’s off?” Cave said. “Or he tells you to go screw yourselves?”

Cowboy studied the map. “We might be able to make a flyover without getting shot. There’s a little side canyon that opens on the creek just above his camp. We could circle around behind the ridge and drop down through the canyon, then blast out of it at full throttle and come screaming along the creek, right above the willows.” Cowboy considered it for a moment, then nodded with a satisfied look. “He wouldn’t even know we were in the neighborhood till we were overhead. Nobody can aim and shoot that fast unless they’re up on the roof waiting for you.”

Cave shook his head. “What if he is?”

“If we see somebody up there when we come out of the canyon, I’ll peel off and head across the valley, and Nathan will think of a new plan.”

“Why not park down the creek and hike up?” Cave asked. “That’s what our procedures call for in a case like this.”

“When we can do a flyover?” Cowboy snorted. “You want us to hike through a couple miles of niggerheads?”

A shocked silence filled the room. Long cleared his throat and said, “Cowboy.”

Cave threw up his hands and swiveled his chair to look out his office window. “Jesus,” he said. “First I got all these village kids calling me
taaqsipak
, and now this half-assed captain of the clouds comes around talking about niggerheads.”

Cowboy’s jaw took on a stubborn set. “I didn’t mean anything by it. That’s just what they’re called.”

Active vaulted into the breach. “Not any more, Cowboy. Remember the fight over, um, that creek down by Fairbanks?”

The name of the stream in question had, in fact, been Niggerhead Creek, but Active wasn’t about to repeat it in front of Johnnell Cave. The term referred to the infuriating hummocks of grass, interspersed with icy water, that made traversing the tundra a nightmare until winter froze the puddles and filled the hollows with snow.

“What creek?” Cowboy asked.

“Well, there was this creek that had that name on the aviation charts, and there was a big ruckus—”

“And then what did they name it?”

Active struggled to remember. The
Anchorage Daily
News
had covered the controversy in some detail, but what was the creek’s new name? “Actually, I think they just erased it,” he said at last.

Cowboy looked incredulous. “They erased a creek?”

“The name, yeah.”

“There’s a creek on the map with no name?” Cowboy looked accusingly at Cave. “You happy now?”

“As a pig in shit,” Cave said. “Don’t I look happy?”

Active, now regretting his effort at pacification, tried to think how to get the conversation back on track. “I doubt we’ll need to hike through anything, Cowboy. Let’s do a flyover and see what we see.”

Cowboy growled his assent with a gratified look. Cave shook his head and looked aggrieved but did offer them a ride to the airport.

“We taking Pingo?” Cowboy asked.

The others looked at him. “Why should we?” Active said.

“You might need him,” Cowboy said in his bush-pilot growl.

“What for?” Active asked.

“He’ll just be in the way if you get into it with McAllister,” Cave said. “We can hold on to him for you.”

“I dunno,” Cowboy said. “Didn’t I hear he used to assistant-guide for McAllister?”

Active nodded. “And?”

“Then he oughta know that country around McAllister’s camp pretty good. Might come in handy if you end up having to track the guy.”

“He’s scared to death of McAllister,” Active said. “He wet his pants yesterday because he thought I had brought McAllister to the jail with me.”

Cowboy shrugged. “Still and all.”

Active considered. However the thing with McAllister played out, it was a fact that Kivalina wouldn’t stay in the Barrow jail long on the bootlegging charge. It would be safer to stash him in the Chukchi jail than to trust the North Slope Borough to hold him indefinitely in Barrow on the Chukchi warrant, Johnnell Cave’s offer notwithstanding. The ancient tradition of the bureaucratic foul-up was more deeply entrenched in the Alaskan bush than any other place Active knew of.

“All right, let’s take him,” Active said.

Cave sighed, picked up his phone, and soon was instructing the jailers to bring Kivalina to the airport.

“All right, yeah, we’ll meet you there,” he concluded. He stood up, pulled on the parka that had been draped over the back of his chair, and led them out to a Ford Explorer.

Forty-five minutes later, Cowboy’s Cessna lifted off into the blue predawn haze, a few last stars still glinting overhead. They speared through the clear morning air toward the crests of the Brooks Range serrating the southern horizon. The sun flared in the southeast, then climbed into view, shooting long, deep shadows across the tundra beneath them.

Cowboy clicked on the intercom in a spray of static. “You know, there’s one thing I feel bad about.”

“Other than Delilah tipping off McAllister that we’re coming, you mean?”

The pilot grunted in acknowledgment. They were climbing steadily to clear the peaks ahead. Cowboy thumbed a little wheel mounted between the seats, and the nose of the plane lifted slightly. “I knew about Dood’s crash at Driftwood. I just wish I would have told you.”

Active looked at the pilot. Cowboy kept his eyes on the horizon. “Me, too,” Active said.

“You never asked.”

Another if-only. Active sighed and turned his gaze to the terrain ahead. They were still over the Arctic coastal plain, with its stippling of pothole lakes and the weird permafrost pimples for which Pingo Kivalina was named. They looked like volcanoes just emerging from the earth, but they had hearts of ice, not fire.

“You know McAllister very well?” Active asked.

Cowboy was silent for a few moments before answering. “He’s a hell of a pilot. He flew helicopters and Twin Otters for the Air Guard here before he went into guiding full-time. I always wondered how he let it get away from him like that at Driftwood.”

“How about as a man?”

Again, Cowboy thought it over before speaking. “Lot of rage there. I never knew why.”

Active glanced into the rear of the plane to make sure Kivalina wasn’t plugged in to the intercom system. He was without a headset and peering out a side window, shackled to the seat, seemingly oblivious to what went on inside the Cessna.

Active turned to the pilot. “That’s how Pingo described him. He called McAllister a man in rage.”

“Fits.”

“He says his sister liked that in a man,” Active said. “She called it ‘the great weather.’ You understand that about women?”

“Not really,” Cowboy said. “I’ve seen it, but I don’t understand it. Maybe only a woman would.”

“Or Pingo, maybe,” Active said. “Even crazy and hung over, he figured out that Driftwood thing while Cave was getting nowhere. I’m starting to think quite a few of his brain cells still work.”

Alan Long spoke up from the back seat. “Unless Cave was right. Maybe Pingo did burn down the Rec Center. He does admit being there at the time. And hiring Jae Hyo Lee to kill McAllister. And watering McAllister’s gas.”

“Nah,” Active said. “I don’t buy it. I can imagine Pingo burning McAllister’s house down, but not the Rec Center. He wouldn’t have had any reason to think McAllister was there. Plus, he wouldn’t set the Rec Center on fire with all those other people in it.”

“Yeah,” Cowboy said. “Especially Tom Gage.”

“Unless his sister told him to,” Long said.

Active was silent for a time, chewing this point over. With Pingo, questions of good, evil, and motive were sideshows. All that mattered was the disordered world inside his head and the phantasm of Viola Kivalina who visited his sleep.

Finally, Active grunted. “In any case, we have to talk to McAllister. Cowboy, you think he could do all this?” He considered enumerating McAllister’s presumptive body count, but couldn’t bring himself to wade through it again.

“I don’t know how anybody could,” Cowboy said. “But somebody did. So, yeah, of the people I know, if somebody could, I guess it could be Dood.”

In another hour, they began to see over the peaks of the Keating Mountains into the Katonak Valley. Cowboy bent over the chart on his knee, then hunched forward and peered past Active at the white folds off the right wing. “Driftwood’s over that way,” he said. “Thirty, thirty-five miles maybe.”

They crossed the crest and Cowboy dropped the Cessna’s nose slightly, angling right to follow the black braids of a river down a white-floored valley running southwest. He checked his chart again and pointed at a barren, snow-plastered crag looming above them as they followed the river downstream. “Mount Bastille,” he said. “How do you reckon they came up with that?”

Active shrugged, and they continued along the river, the valley opening out as they passed the snowline and the country faded from white to brown. Cowboy rolled left to point the Cessna’s nose at the tip of a long, rumpled ridge descending from the mountains like a crocodile’s tail, then jabbed at the chart on his knee.