Frozen Sun Read online

  Neil, meantime, appeared to have abandoned long ago the battle to disguise his nerdiness. His lank brown hair was combed, but just that—combed. Not brushed or blown, just combed. No adhesive tape holding the glasses together, but the frames were thick and black. No acne to speak of, but a world-class Adam’s apple that bobbed in agitation every time Christie looked his way. No plastic sheath to protect the shirt pocket, but Active did count three pens standing at attention.

  Active pitied Neil and his lost cause, wondering how he had gotten himself teamed with Christie. Probably hacked the company scheduling software to make sure Christie never left Redmond without him, if he was the real thing.

  Active smiled, closed his eyes, and tried to drift off as Christie chirped away, now moving from the overview of Peer Instruction Training to an introduction to the Windows operating system for those who had used only Macintosh before.

  Active had used both extensively, so he was in agony as Christie said, “The biggest difference from the Mac is this little task bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen whenever…,” agony so intense he found himself unable to go to sleep.

  He sat up, dug into his briefcase, and pulled out the photo-finisher’s envelope Jason Palmer had given him back in Chukchi. He flipped through the pictures, found the two he wanted, and placed them on the shiny folder Christie had passed out.

  As Christie burbled on, he peered through the dim light at the two bookends of Grace Palmer’s life in Chukchi. On the left, Grace on her sixth birthday, mouth open in joy at the gift held by someone off-camera, soul open to joy in general. On the right, the stone-eyed beauty, soul open to nothing.

  Class ended a little after six, Christie snapping her binder shut and heading for the door the moment she had said, “Thanks, you guys have been great, see you tomorrow at eight,” obviously trying to get out of the room while Neil was still turning off the projector and shutting down the computer, before he could ask if she wanted to grab some dinner, maybe see a movie.

  The late finish meant Active didn’t have much time for dinner himself if he was to make his seven o’clock meeting with Dennis Johnson at Anchorage police headquarters. Fast food, obviously, but not a cheeseburger or taco from one of the plastic and neon grease pits along Northern Lights Boulevard or East Fifth Avenue if he could avoid it. He galloped down the hotel’s jade staircase and into the Neon and drove to the west end of Fifth Avenue, then south on the mysteriously named Minnesota Bypass to a Carrs supermarket and rushed inside.

  The last time he had been in Anchorage, the deli section had offered—yes, it was still there, the bin of crushed ice covered with plastic foam trays of sushi. He grabbed one with eight pieces, a combination tray with eel, octopus, crab and tuna, got himself a Diet Pepsi at the do-it-yourself soda fountain, sat down at a table where somebody had abandoned a copy of that day’s Anchorage Daily News, and began to eat.

  It was his first sushi since being posted to Chukchi nearly two years ago and his first thought was how good the first piece tasted, this cool, meatless, fatless dish the Japanese had dreamed up. His second thought was, it tasted familiar, and he realized that except for the rice stuffing, the sushi tasted like some of the Inupiat dishes Martha was always trying to get him to sample up in Chukchi if he wanted to be a real Eskimo.

  Well, the Japanese and the Inupiat were both Asian and they both lived on cold northern seas. So it wasn’t surprising they both ended up liking raw fish, he thought as he flipped open his peer instruction folder to review what he had been unable to absorb during the day, stupefied as he was by the PowerPoint slides. There, one peeking out of each pocket, were the two pictures of Grace Palmer. He put them in his shirt, face-to-face to protect the images, and began to scan Christie’s handouts as he wolfed down the other seven pieces of sushi.

  The clock on the dash of the Neon showed 7:02 when he nosed up to the curb at police department headquarters on the east edge of Midtown. The headquarters was on the edge of a big park, and so was surrounded by birch, aspen, and cottonwood, all leafing out in the spring shower that pattered down as he locked the car.

  He dashed inside, paused in the foyer to shake the rain from his clothes and hair, then asked for Dennis Johnson at the window at the rear of the lobby. Active was out of uniform and he saw the watch officer’s caution flags go up at the sight of this casually dressed civilian, a Native to boot, even if he didn’t look or smell particularly drunk, here after hours and asking to see a cop.

  “Your name?” She was frowning and her voice was cold and robotic.

  “Nathan Active. I have an appointment.”

  “That’s the guy Dennis told us about,” said a voice from out of sight to one side. “See there?” An arm appeared and pointed at something on the desk in front of the dispatcher.

  Her frown melted into a smile. “Sure, Dennis will be right out,” she said.

  While he waited, Active studied the Wall of Death, a gallery of photographs of Anchorage police officers killed in the line of duty. He had seen this wall before, and a similar one at Trooper headquarters in Juneau, and he was wondering again if the pictures were a good idea when Dennis Johnson boomed out a loud, “Hey, Nathan!” from behind him. He turned and shook Dennis’s hand, punched him in the shoulder.

  Then Active waved at the Wall of Death. “You really think these guys are a suitable role model for impressionable young officers like ourselves?”

  Dennis glanced at the wall and grimaced. “You gonna start that again?”

  “These guys messed up, right? Otherwise they wouldn’t be up there, right? I’m just saying, is all.”

  “Will you shut up? What if one of the other guys hears you?”

  Active shrugged. “I just think they should put up shots of all the guys who made it through to retirement and now they’re running fish charters down in Homer or doing security consulting on the pipeline. Give us pups something to shoot for.”

  “You oughta see some of the older guys out here looking at this sometimes,” Dennis said. “These are people they knew, they get all misted up …”

  “Yeah, there’s nothing a real cop likes more than a good cry,” Active said.

  “Christ, still the same old smartass.” Dennis motioned him toward the door that led to the offices where the work of the Anchorage Police Department got done. “I thought maybe a couple years up there in that deep freeze would straighten you out.”

  “Guess not,” Active said. “Chukchi is my home town, after all.”

  The watch officer buzzed the door open and Dennis led them into a long hallway, offices opening out to either side. “Home town, huh? I thought you wanted out of there as fast as possible.”

  “I do,” Active said. “Of course I do. It’s just a figure of speech.”

  “Sure you do.” Dennis was grinning broadly. “I’m just saying, is all.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, right. What is it?”

  “It’s just that anybody who would disrespect the Wall”—Dennis jerked a thumb back the way they had come—”has the makings of a serious Bush rat. You’re going feral, is what I think.”

  “Oh, fuck you.” Active realized he sounded more like he meant it than he had intended, but couldn’t think of a way to ease the moment.

  “You get the files?” he asked after a few seconds of strained silence.

  “Right here.” Dennis opened a door into an interview room: No windows except for a mirror on the back wall that was presumably a window from the other side, three metal chairs, a fluorescent fixture on the ceiling giving off a harsh institutional light that made it feel like three a.m., and a beat-up wooden table with a stack of file folders on it.

  Dennis thumped the folders. “This is everything I could find so far. Some of it’s our paper files, some of it’s stuff that’s only on computer now, so I made printouts for you.”

  “Nothing from your guys on Four Street, huh?”

  “Nada. I had the foot cops
show people her picture, ask around over the weekend.”

  “And?”

  “You know how it is. Couple people thought they remembered seeing her, couldn’t remember when except it was way back, couldn’t remember if they heard anything about her lately.” Dennis shrugged. “Four Street.”

  “And you checked for a death certificate?

  Dennis nodded. “Nada again. If she died, either she didn’t do it in Alaska or she was a Jane Doe.”

  Active hefted the stack of paper. “That’s a lot of work. Thanks.”

  Dennis shrugged. “It was nothing.”

  “You don’t have to baby-sit me. I can let myself out when I’m done.”

  “What if you want to make copies?”

  “I’ll find a copier and make them.”

  “You’ll need an account code.”

  “So give me yours.”

  “We’re not supposed to give’em out. Department policy.”

  Active turned in his chair for a better look. Dennis wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You interested?”

  “Well, I kind of got into it, you know. That picture…” Dennis shook his head and opened the top folder to show the Miss North World photograph Active had sent down a few days ago. “She’s something, huh?”

  “She was, anyway.”

  “You know, they called her Amazing Grace on Four Street.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” Active pulled his chair into a better position, then saw that Dennis was still standing awkwardly.

  Active turned back to the folders and said over his shoulder, “Come on, sit down, then. I’ll probably need an interpreter for this APD gobbledygook anyway.”

  Active squared up the stack of folders and studied the index tabs. All bore Grace Palmer’s name and a case number. Each number included a two-digit year code, but the numbers were obviously generated by different systems. One kind of case number he recognized as originating from the Alaska Court System’s criminal files; the other had to be case numbers assigned by the Anchorage Police Department before the suspect was turned over to the courts.

  He verified his guess with Dennis, used the year codes to arrange the files in chronological order, and opened the first one.

  “Officers Jarvis and Tedrow responded to a reported obstruction of a highway on East Fifth Avenue in front of Anchorage Radiator Service,” it began.

  Jarvis and Tedrow had, it appeared, located and contacted an intoxicated Native female subject who appeared to be intentionally blocking the outside eastbound lane of East Fifth Avenue, creating a danger to herself and to motorists “engaged in lawful use of said eastbound lane” during an evening rush hour in late January.

  Despite repeated requests from the two officers, the subject had refused to cease and desist and had, in fact, advised Jarvis and Tedrow to “give each other blow jobs in the back seat of their patrol car” after which she had picked up “an unknown object, possibly an ice chunk” from the snow berm by the eastbound lane and thrown it at the two men. That, according to the report, had put Officer Tedrow “in fear of immediate physical harm,” whereupon the subject—subsequently identified as Grace S. Palmer—was subdued, restrained with handcuffs, and charged with obstructing a highway, resisting arrest, and assault. There was a mug shot of Grace Palmer, looking bleary-eyed and belligerent but otherwise pretty much like the Grace Palmer of the mural at Chukchi High.

  The police file ended with a court system case number and a note saying the matter had been referred to the Anchorage district attorney’s office.

  Active found the court system file with the right number on it and flipped it open. It contained a single sheet, a computer printout that made no mention of assault or resisting arrest, reporting that Grace Sikingik Palmer had pleaded guilty to obstructing traffic and been sentenced to thirty days in jail, twenty suspended.

  “Ten days,” said Dennis, who had been reading along over Active’s shoulder. “That’s a lot for a piddly case like this. Usually it’s just a fine, fifty dollars maybe.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  Dennis frowned in concentration, flipped through the first file again. “Well, she would have gotten the other charges dismissed in return for the guilty plea on the traffic charge, that part makes sense. But I don’t know where the judge was coming from with the jail time.” He shook his head.

  “Maybe said subject advised said judge to give said public defender a blow job,” Active suggested. “Behind said bench.”

  Dennis chuckled. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  The next case was dated fourteen months later. Officer Terrence Wilson, working plain-clothes in the Junction Bar, had been approached by a Native female subject who had offered to have oral sex with him for a thousand dollars. He had attempted to take her into custody, she had resisted, he had subdued her, she had been charged with resisting arrest and soliciting prostitution.

  The mug shot showed Grace Palmer with a black eye, a cut and swollen lower lip, and a bottom tooth missing in front. Active studied the uninjured parts of her face. They were bloated, roughened, her looks not gone yet but being sucked out of her by Four Street.

  Active glanced back over Wilson’s summary of the arrest, which was much shorter than Jarvis and Tedrow’s agonizingly detailed account of their encounter with Grace Palmer on East Fifth the preceding year.

  He turned to Dennis Johnson, who seemed mesmerized by the mug shot. “A thousand bucks for a blow job,” Active said. “Isn’t that a little steep for Four Street?”

  “Out of the question. Twenty dollars is more like it. Fifteen if the girl really needs a drink or a fix.”

  Active found the court file on the prostitution case, and opened it. Again a single sheet, reporting only that the case had been dismissed in the interest of justice.

  “What about the arresting officer, this Terrence Wilson?”

  Dennis frowned, shook his head. “Don’t think I know him at all.” He flipped to the first page of the file and pointed to the date of the incident at the Junction. “See, that was a couple years before I started with the department. Maybe Wilson left before I got hired.”

  “Maybe,” Active said.

  “But our girl does seem to have some issues about oral sex, huh?”

  “I guess.” Active opened the next file, noted idly that the date would have been around the same time Roy Palmer had spotted his sister coming out of the Junction with two soldiers looking forward to an evening of amazement. Active wondered briefly if soldiers could afford thousand-dollar blow jobs, decided not, dismissed the train of thought, and began to read the file.

  This time there were no ambiguities, no dismissals in the interest of justice or anything else.

  An intoxicated Native female subject had been apprehended at three o’clock on a summer morning smashing the windows of a Fourth Avenue dive called the Sunrise. Further investigation had revealed that the windows of every bar between the Junction and the Sunrise had been similarly smashed, presumably with the same two-by-four the subject was wielding when contacted by officers Lucas and Tedrow. Tedrow again. No wonder the prose sounded familiar.

  Subject, who identified herself as Amazing Grace but was known to Officer Tedrow as Grace S. Palmer, had readily admitted smashing all the windows, had stated it was the bars’ fault for closing “too fucking early,” and had advised the two officers to go into the alley behind the Sunrise and give each other blow jobs if they didn’t like it.

  Whereupon Officers Lucas and Tedrow had placed the subject under arrest, during which action she had dropped the two-by-four on Officer Lucas’ foot, possibly injuring two of his toes. However, upon subject’s claiming the dropping was accidental and apologizing to Officer Lucas, it was decided to charge her with criminal mischief for the windows only, the two-by-four incident being noted only in the event a subsequent disability claim by Officer Lucas should be necessary.

  The mug shot showed a face that was pure Four Street. Red, bloated, the fine Miss North World features d
isappearing as if they were sinking into a bowl of fat, the lower tooth still missing. Active winced and closed the file and glanced up to see Dennis covering the Miss North World photograph with the corner of a file folder. Active looked at him questioningly and Dennis said, “I don’t want to see this any more. You need coffee?”

  Active nodded and opened the court file on the window-smashing incident as Dennis went out the door of the interview room. Ninety days in jail, sixty suspended, restitution totaling nine thousand dollars to be paid to assorted bar owners along Fourth Avenue, Grace S. Palmer’s Alaska Oil Dividends, if any, to be paid into the restitution account until the bar owners had been made whole.

  He opened the last file—it was a police file, he noticed, without a corresponding file from the court system—just as Dennis came back with the coffee in two Styrofoam cups.

  Once again, fate had thrown Amazing Grace and Officer Tedrow together. This time, Tedrow was partnered with a female officer, one Teri Amundsen, causing Active to attend closely to see what sexual advice Grace Palmer might have for two officers of opposite gender.

  Tedrow’s prose, while turgid, had been at least intelligible in the other files, but Active could barely follow the thread of events the winter night Tedrow had once again contacted his favorite intoxicated Native female subject, this time at Aurora Bingo on Northern Lights Boulevard.

  It appeared subject had repeatedly been thrown out of, and finally banned from, Aurora Bingo for memorizing too many cards. On the night in question, she had “infiltrated” the premises despite the ban, and had been detected by Aurora bingo runner Edward Noyuk. In the ensuing altercation, Noyuk had been jabbed in the eye with something called a dauber, where upon Officers Amundsen and Tedrow had been dispatched to the scene.

  Upon arrival, they had found the subject being detained in a back office by an Aurora Bingo security guard and Edward Noyuk, whose right eye appeared to be bruised and/or bleeding. Noyuk said he would not press charges if the officers would remove the subject, whom Noyuk identified as Amazing Grace but who was known to Officer Tedrow as Grace S. Palmer.