Village of the Ghost Bears Read online

  As the secretary got up to watch, they obediently turned away and Active brought a roll of package twine out from behind him. He looped a piece around the inside knob of Carnaby’s door, pulled the twine past the edge of the door and closed it. Then he took the eighteen-inch ruler he’d found in the cabinet and lashed it in position so that one end was braced against the door frame, and the other against the middle of Carnaby’s door.

  “All right,” he yelled through the door. “See if you can get out without breaking anything.”

  The two men in the office pressed against the window in the upper half of the door, craning their necks in a futile effort to see what Active had done. They gave up and Barnes reached for the doorknob. He pulled, producing only a slight bend in the ruler. He pulled harder, then jerked, and the ruler snapped. The two halves fell to the floor.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Thanks,” Evelyn O’Brien said, as she picked up the broken ruler.

  Barnes pulled the twine off the doorknob and dangled it in front of him. “So he uses a piece of wood—maybe a chunk of two-by-four—as a brace on the outside of the door like Nathan did with the ruler. It burns up in the fire, and there’s nothing left but this.” He picked up the wire in its baggie and held it beside the string. “Shit, it could be.”

  “Or not.” Carnaby shook his head. “Those guys in that room were bush Alaskans. At least half of them had to have a Leatherman on their belt, and the rest had knives. No way they couldn’t have gotten through that wire.”

  “You ever been in a burning building, Captain?” Barnes asked. Carnaby shook his head. “I thought not. Well, in a fire like this one, you got about ninety seconds from the moment you smell smoke before the room is so hot you can’t breathe and so full of smoke you can’t see. All you can think about is smashing your way out.”

  Barnes fell silent. “More likely arson than not,” he said eventually. “That’s my opinion, and that’s what my report’ll say.”

  “Let me see that.” Active took the bag containing the wire from Barnes. “Look how tight it’s twisted together to close the loop.”

  “So he used pliers from the furnace room,” Barnes said.

  “No, it’s too neat. Like a machine did it. And wouldn’t you expect more damage from the heat? It looks almost untouched except for the soot on it.”

  Barnes shrugged. “I’ll send it to the crime lab, see what they come up with. You guys have any luck today?”

  “Eh,” Active said with a shrug of his own.

  “Maybe,” Carnaby said. “Nathan here might have turned up a jealous ex-boyfriend.”

  Barnes’s eyes widened in inquiry, and Active recounted the saga of Buck Eastlake, Augie Sundown, Rachel Akootchuk, and the miluks.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a guy went nuts over a pretty face,” Barnes said. Then he grinned. “Or a nice set of miluks. Never heard ’em called that before. It’s a good name.”

  He looked at Active, serious again. “You get a moment, let me know what you make of this Eastlake guy after you go up there. Maybe I can help you get a fix on him. Especially if he shows any sign of a burn injury.”

  “Sure,” Active said, mildly annoyed that Barnes would tell him for the second time to be on the lookout for scorched suspects.

  “You’re done here?” Carnaby asked.

  Barnes nodded. “I think so. I’m on the noon plane tomorrow. I’ll spend a couple more hours over there in the morning, but unless I turn up something new, probable arson is what you’re going to get. I’ll e-mail you my report from Fairbanks. The crime lab will send their report to both of us.”

  He shook their hands. “It’s up to you guys now,” he said. “If it’s not your Buck Eastlake, find out who our arsonist was after, and you’ll find out who he is.”

  After Barnes left, they needed to talk about something else to ease themselves out of that locker room with the burnt bodies piled up at the door. So they chatted about Active’s shot at the job in Anchorage. Carnaby spoke highly of the salmon fishing on the Kenai River to the south of Anchorage and the moose hunting in the Talkeetna Mountains to the north, neither of which interested Active very much. Carnaby also mentioned that he thought somebody at the Anchorage post was organizing a Trooper hockey team for the Anchorage City League, which interested Active a great deal.

  Finally, they locked the office and headed for the stairs, but before they got there Alan Long emerged from the well and waved a manila envelope.

  “I knew there was something,” he shouted. “The chief must have been psychic. Couldn’t be more than a couple weeks ago he asked me to check if this guy was out.”

  Active and Carnaby looked at each other. They exchanged eye rolls, and Carnaby unlocked his office again. Once they were seated around the captain’s desk, Long dumped out the contents of the envelope.

  The two Troopers flipped quickly through the pile: paperwork from a federal Fish and Wildlife case and mug shots of an Asian named Jae Hyo Lee. The perp looked vaguely familiar, Active thought, but, then, all Koreans still looked pretty much alike to him. After he’d known more of them for a while, he supposed, their features would come to seem as individual as those of whites or the Inupiat. But, for now, Lee just looked . . . Korean.

  “You didn’t check then?” Carnaby asked.

  Long’s face fell. “Well, I got busy, and the chief didn’t necessarily say it was a priority. Plus—well, anyway, I found it on his desk. Maybe he decided to do it himself.”

  Carnaby waved a weary hand. “Why did he want to check on this—” He studied the name, shook his head, and continued. “—on this Mr. Lee?”

  “That’s my point,” Long said. “It’s what I was coming to tell you. Jae Hyo Lee went to prison for trafficking in bear gallbladders, and he blamed me and Jim. Jim figured there might be trouble when he got out.”

  Carnaby was rubbing his chin. “Do I remember this case?”

  “I think it was right around the time you got assigned here,” Long said. “And before you came, Nathan.”

  “Must be,” Active said. “It’s all new to me.”

  “Wait a minute, I think I remember it,” Carnaby said. “The Feds didn’t say anything till they made the case and arrested the guy. Then I got a courtesy call from an agent in Anchorage.”

  “Sounds right,” Long said. “You know how the Feds are.”

  Carnaby nodded. “So the guy is out now?”

  Long bobbed his head vigorously. “Yep, he was released from the federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon, about three weeks ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

  “You checked?” Carnaby asked.

  Another nod. “I called the prison and caught his case officer on her way out the door. She said Lee was due to check in with his parole officer in Anchorage two weeks ago, so I called the guy at home, and he hasn’t heard a peep from Mr. Lee yet.”

  “Maybe he slipped back into Korea,” Carnaby said. “I would, if Alaska didn’t work out for me.”

  “I don’t think so.” Long shifted in his chair and began straightening the papers from the Jae Hyo Lee file.

  “Why not?” Active asked.

  “This is not going to put

  “This is not going to put the chief in too good of a light,” Long said.

  Carnaby sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right, Alan. Back up, start over, and tell it all, in chronological order. The bear gallbladders, Jae Hyo Lee, why he’d blame you and Jim, and how any of it puts the chief in a bad light.”

  Long chewed his lip for a moment. “Also, it’s kind of a Cape Goodwin deal.”

  “Oh, no,” Active said.

  “Oh, God,” Carnaby said. “Cape Goodwin. What’s the saying? Famous for twins and schizophrenia—”

  “And polar bears,” Active finished. The village of Cape Goodwin, poor, tiny, and afflicted with a terminal case of beach erosion, lay sixty miles up the coast from Chukchi, just north of the landmark for which
it was named. In a few years, the village was to be moved inland because of its disappearing beach, if the money could be found. If not, Cape Goodwin would presumably disappear also.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” Long said. “I got an uncle up there, an aunt, some cousins. I go whaling with them sometimes. They’re pretty normal.”

  “Sorry, Alan,” Carnaby said. “I was just repeating what I’d heard.”

  “I know a lot of people say it,” Long said.

  “But polar bears—wasn’t there a deal up there a few years go?” Carnaby asked. “I remember there was a big writeup about it in the Anchorage Daily News. Some guy’s walking down the street with his pregnant wife, and a polar bear jumps them, right there in the middle of the village?”

  Long raised his eyebrows. “That was Ossie Barton. I knew him for a couple years when his parents sent him down here for high school. He was a good guy.”

  The story was a new one to Active. “So, what happened? He shoot the bear?”

  Long shook his head. “He didn’t have his rifle along, so he tells his wife to run and he pulls out a pocket knife and takes on the bear with that. She gets to a house, screaming for help, and the guy inside grabs his rifle and comes out and shoots the bear, but it’s already too late for Ossie. At least he got the bear, though. He worked it over good enough with his knife that it had nearly bled to death by the time they shot it.”

  “Christ,” Active said.

  “Uh-huh,” Long said. “So they do a necropsy, and the polar bear is real skinny and there’s almost nothing in his stomach. It was like he couldn’t hunt like a regular polar bear, so he started coming into the village, taking garbage and dogs and what-not like they do, and then he made the mistake of taking on Ossie.”

  They were all silent for a moment. “At least there’s Ossie Junior,” Long said. “She’s a legend up there because of what her father did to make sure she’d be born. Little Nanuq, they call her.”

  “Her? Ossie Junior is a she?” Active asked.

  “People are pretty traditional in Cape Goodwin,” Long said, raising his eyebrows. “They still think that when somebody dies, the soul will come back in the next baby that’s born, so they give it the dead person’s name. That’s why you’ll hear the old aanas up there call some kid ‘my little husband’ or ‘my little mother.’ They think the person has come back.”

  Carnaby pinched the bridge of his nose again. “How’d we get on this?”

  “You’re the one that asked,” Active said.

  Carnaby shook his head, then bicycled his hands at Long in a move-it-along motion. “And this relates to Jae Hyo Lee how?”

  “All right, all right,” Long said. “I’m getting to it. Jae came up here eight or ten years ago to work for Kyung Kim.” He paused and looked at Carnaby and Active questioningly.

  The two men nodded. Kyung Kim owned the Arctic Dragon restaurant and every other restaurant in Chukchi, as far as Active knew, plus the town’s only janitorial service. Active thought he’d also heard Kim owned the Arctic Arms eightplex, one of the few apartment buildings not run by the Chukchi Region Housing Authority. Kim was probably the biggest private businessman in town. Most of his employees were allegedly relatives, though not necessarily present in the United States legally. Not long after Active’s arrival in Chukchi, immigration agents had swooped down on the Dragon and carried off most of Kim’s kitchen help.

  “Jae is another one of Kyung’s cousins or nephews or something,” Long continued. “Most of them stay a couple years, then move on. Too cold for them, I guess.”

  He grinned at Carnaby and Active. Neither grinned back. Carnaby rolled his eyes and made the move-it-along motion again.

  “Okay, okay,” Long said. “Jae didn’t leave. He got into the life. Hunting, fishing, trapping. A lot of your Koreans are totally psycho about fishing, but they don’t hunt much and I never heard of one running a trapline before. But Jae did it all. And those Koreans, you know how they don’t mix much, with us or with the whites, how they keep to themselves? Jae wasn’t like that either. Next thing you know, he’s taken up with a local girl and moved out of those trailers that Kyung puts his help in, and they’ve got their own place on the beach down south of the airport, living in somebody’s fish camp. A little cabin there, a couple of wall tents, not bad if you like that life. But that’s where the problem started.”

  There was a loud squeak as Carnaby shifted in his seat. Active scraped his own chair back and stood up to give his sitting muscles some relief.

  “What problem?” Carnaby asked.

  “With Chief Silver,” Long said. “Jae’s girlfriend was the chief’s oldest daughter. Ruthie.”

  “Ah,” Carnaby said.

  Long raised his eyebrows and went on. “The chief was kind of prejudiced against Koreans, because of how they keep to themselves, you know? If there’s any kind of crime involving a Korean, you can never get any of them to say anything, and the chief hated that. Plus, he just didn’t want Ruthie living the village life. His idea was, she’d go to college and end up in Anchorage being a lawyer or something or maybe come back here and work for Chukchi Region or the Gray Wolf mine. But some girls, you know, the first thing they’ll do is the last thing their father wants?”

  “Tell me about it,” Carnaby said, with feeling.

  “Uh-huh,” Long said. “Well, there Ruthie was. Living in a fish camp and the chief going crazy thinking he’ll have a half-Korean grandkid before he knows it. So he goes down there and gets into it with Jae and ends up flat on his back in the snow, because Jae is tough and he has a hell of a temper too. So then the chief starts leaning on Jae for any little thing he can find—speeding tickets on his snow-machine, littering, uncontained trash, I don’t know what all. Made his life miserable, anyway. So you can probably guess what happened?”

  “Jae and Ruthie didn’t split up, I’m thinking,” Carnaby said.

  “Not a chance,” Long said. “Ruthie’s mom being from Cape Goodwin—”

  “Look out,” Carnaby said.

  Long lifted his eyebrows again. “Exactly. Jae and Ruthie took off up there, and they moved in with Ruthie’s grandmother for a while, till they found some kind of place of their own.”

  “They ever marry?” Carnaby asked.

  Long squinted no and shook his head.

  “I’ll bet the chief loved that,” Active said. He had a vague recollection of hearing about a daughter in Cape Goodwin, but these details were new to him. Silver had never mentioned any of it. Too painful, maybe. Every family had its secrets.

  “He was pissed,” Long said. “But what could he do? The women in his family got together and outsmarted him, and he knew it.”

  “I imagine they thought he’d come around eventually,” Carnaby said.

  “Well, he never did,” Long said.

  “Tough one,” Carnaby said. “All right, let’s see. Jae’s in Cape Goodwin, so are a lot of polar bears, and he’s Korean.”

  “Exactly,” Long said. “It takes money to live, even in Cape Goodwin, and Jae didn’t have much. What he did have was an uncle down here in Chukchi—Kyung Kim— who everybody suspected was dealing in gallbladders.”

  The other two men both said a silent prayer of thanks that the polar bear gallbladder trade was a matter for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, not the Alaska State Troopers. Bear gallbladders supposedly sold for upwards of three thousand dollars in Korea, where they were turned into stomach medicine. Alaska was assumed to be supplying much of the market, but poaching and trafficking cases were notoriously hard to make.

  “So pretty soon Jae is buying gallbladders from the guys up in Cape Goodwin, who are always killing nuisance bears around the village anyway, so why not turn a little cash at the same time? Sweet setup all the way around, other than being illegal.”

  Active and Carnaby nodded.

  “Except things kind of got out of hand,” Long said. “You know that big lead off the Cape that the currents keep open pretty much all winter?�
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  “The Cape Goodwin polynya,” Carnaby said.

  Active had been to a whaling camp on the Cape Goodwin lead during the Victor Solomon case. But he hadn’t known it stayed open all winter, qualifying as a polynya.

  “Of course, having that much open water in the middle of all that ice is a magnet for anything that swims or flies— seal, beluga, ducks, polar bears—so pretty soon the guys from the village are out there at the lead, killing polar bears for their bladders and selling them to Jae. Word filters out, and eventually the Feds get interested.”

  “So, how’d they get him?” Active asked.

  “That’s where I came in.” Long sounded proud. “I was just out of the MPs then, and I was talking to various law-enforcement agencies about jobs when U.S. Fish and Wildlife asked me about a one-shot undercover deal for them. It turned out to be the Cape Goodwin case. I told them sure, as long as I didn’t have to bust any of the local guys. The Feds got hold of some gallbladders, and I sold them to Jae.”

  “It was that easy? He didn’t recognize you?”

  “Nah, we’re different ages, so we never hung out. I didn’t even know about his deal with Ruthie Silver till after the case broke, and the chief finally told me about it when he heard I had been undercover. Anyway, us Eskimos probably all look alike to Koreans, huh?” Long chuckled.

  Nobody else did, and he continued. “Yeah, it was pretty easy. The Feds flew me and a snowmachine up to Nuliakuk one night in January when it was colder than hell and I rode down the beach to Cape Goodwin. I poured some Wild Turkey on my shirt, took a couple of swallows, and found Jae’s house and told him I had two gallbladders for sale. He didn’t want anything to do with me because he didn’t know me, but I acted belligerent— like a village drunk will. Finally Jae told me he’d give me three hundred bucks apiece for the bladders if I’d go away. I made one more sale a month later, and he said he’d feed me to the polar bears if I came back again. I was wired, of course. The U.S. Attorney in Anchorage got an indictment and arrested Jae a couple months after the second buy. I was already on the force here by that time. It took forever to get him to trial—he had a hell of a lawyer, which we never found out how he was paid—but Jae was finally convicted and sent off to the federal prison in Oregon.”