At the Scene of the Crime (32 page)

“The bed clothes were in disarray and under the musty odor I imagined I smelled the thick musk of their love-making, but I forced myself to search the sheets, and was soon rewarded with the sight of a dark hair. I was just pointing it out to the sheriff when Tongren came in, smiling grimly. ‘Found this in the rack by the chair. He was here that night, all right.’ In his hand he held a copy of
Mine Journal
, bearing a label addressed to Ralph Parker. The company
mailroom had stamped it in: October sixteenth, nineteen fifty-four.

“The sheriff was gaping at it when Tongren completed the picture. ‘The bastard must have brought it with him. Then, like Doc says, they had another fight over telling the missus, he killed her, then panicked and forgot the magazine in his hurry to get out.’

“‘Jesus.’ The sheriff stood, scratching his head. I pressed the case home: ‘That’ll be Parker’s hair we just found. Get one from him, it’ll match.’ Spotting a bottle on the dresser, I pulled out a handkerchief and picked it up. ‘Wildroot. His hair tonic. And if his prints aren’t on it, I’ll be very surprised. ’

“Tongren and I looked at the sheriff while he decided what to do. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘Ralph Parker’s Taconite’s man. If I’m wrong . . .’ Finally, he sighed. ‘Okay, we’ll pick him up.’”

 

“I gave them two hours, then went to the jail. I admit it, I wanted to see him behind bars, wanted to revel in the fear, the humiliation, the wreckage of his ugly, sordid life. But when I walked in the sheriff shot me a look of pure malice. He didn’t mince words: ‘He has an alibi. An absolutely ironclad alibi.’

“‘That can’t be. Who—?’

“‘His wife.’ Tongren looked at me unhappily. ‘She puts him at home from a little after eight. She was with him every minute. They had a late dinner in front of the TV, then went to bed. Parker don’t work, Doc.’

“‘But . . .’ I was completely at a loss, so certain had I been that the evidence convicted Parker. ‘Where was he until eight?’

“The Sheriff spoke through clenched teeth. ‘He says he stopped at a bar for a drink on the way home, but he’s a bad liar. We know where he really was, but what the fuck difference does it make, eh? You’re the smart guy, fixed the time of death no earlier than ten, you tell me why it matters what he was doing at eight.’

“‘There has to be something wrong. I—’

“‘Yeah, there’s something wrong,’ the sheriff growled. ‘You. Got a hard-on
for Parker ’cause you was sweet on the girl, and she was putting out for him. Thought you was a fairy, way I read things.’

“I ignored his taunt. ‘Since you read her diary, you saw the last entry. They had a fight. They must have had another, and he killed her. It’s obvious. ’ I felt it all slipping away.

“‘What’s obvious is the guy I got back in holding, Indian we caught breaking into a liquor store, got a list of assaults on his sheet a mile long. Figure he saw her at the reservation, figured she’d be an easy mark, and followed her home. And you know what? I got a feeling we’ll have a full confession by morning.’ He smiled a big, ugly smile.

“I forced myself to remain calm. ‘His wife’s lying, Sheriff, covering for him. Did you tell her he was having an affair with Miss Birney?’

“The grin faded, replaced by something even uglier. ‘No, I did not. Man’s getting some on the side, don’t make him a killer, and how a man and his old lady make their marriage work, what they notice and what they don’t, that’s their business. I don’t say Parker’s some model husband, but he’s a good man, plenty well liked around here, and it ain’t for me to go wrecking his marriage. Or you, either, hear?’

“I rested my hands on the desk and put my face in his. ‘Did you show her the diary?’

“He looked at me with bland disdain. ‘What diary?’

“I think Tongren sensed I was going to go for the sheriff, because I suddenly found myself being escorted, none too gently, out the door. There was no resisting the big Swede, but I tried to reason with him. ‘He can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist!’

“Tongren stopped in the doorway and let me go. ’Fraid he can.’ Seeing my look, he added, ‘Sheriff means well. Spreading that around wouldn’t do Miss Birney or anyone else any good. Listen, I was there, and Mrs. Parker, she’s telling the truth. Parker was with her. I’m not saying he didn’t stop by the girl’s on the way home, but he wasn’t who killed her, not at ten o’clock. He was home then, for certain. Now, don’t make trouble, okay?’”

Stork sat, staring into the gloom. The room was almost dark, and the hall outside had grown quiet. Finally, the reporter could stand the silence no longer. “But what happened. Wasn’t the crime solved?”

He was so slow to answer that she feared he hadn’t heard, but then, ever so slowly, he turned to face her. “Oh, yes, it was solved. Ralph Parker went to the electric chair. Back then we still believed in the death penalty for murder.”

“But . . .” She felt she must have missed something, and she was a careful reporter who didn’t like to miss things. “I thought he had an alibi.”

“Mrs. Parker recanted. Went in that evening and said he hadn’t gotten home until almost midnight.”

“Oh.” Ms. Bruce’s mind raced. “What did Parker say?”

“Oh, he denied it to the end, that’s why he got the chair. But the fact that he’d lied before, said he’d been at a bar when we could prove he’d been at her place, and that he claimed he’d been at home when he hadn’t, the neighbor’s testimony about a man leaving, and Mrs. Parker explaining she’d lied because she was afraid he’d kill her if she didn’t—it didn’t take the jury long.”

She felt nauseous and wanted to get out, but her reportorial instincts were strong and she had a sudden intuition. “You put the magazine and hair cream in the apartment, didn’t you? That was too convenient.”

He looked at her with something like admiration. “Sometimes Occam’s Razor needs a little help. I knew he was guilty, but the sheriff needed a road map.”

Ms. Bruce gathered up her things, eager to find a drink, but there was one thing that puzzled her, and as she reached the door she turned back. “But why had Mrs. Parker lied for him in the first place?”

He didn’t answer at first, just cocked his head and looked at her. She was turning the knob when he said, in the quiet, confident, courtroom voice she remembered, “She didn’t. She lied for me.”

Ms. Bruce felt her knees give and grasped the doorjam. “What . . . what do you mean?”

“He
had
been home by eight.”

“But how did you get her . . . Why would she . . .”

“I persuaded her that her husband had been planning to leave her. Oddly enough, that affected her as his affairs and fists never had.”

Stork shook his head. “You know, she wouldn’t divorce him, even after he was convicted and was awaiting execution. She wanted next of kin privileges in the front row of the execution chamber. She sat next to me.”

“But then, who . . .”

He turned his hands palms up. “My estimate of the time of death must have been off, don’t you think? He killed her before he went home. As I said, it’s not an exact science.” Seeing the look on her face he added, “We all make mistakes, you know.”

 

After she left, he realized he hadn’t consulted the file at all. It had been so many years. He switched on his desk light and opened the folder. All it held were some notes, and a scrap of yellowed paper. The handwriting on the scrap was faded, but he knew it by heart, and just wanted to touch the lines she had written, those many years before. All that was left, after he’d torn her letter to shreds and thrown it in her face, after he’d done the monstrous thing that couldn’t be undone, after he’d gathered the shreds and flushed them away, all but this one, pinned under her poor, broken body.

No one but he, and she and Mrs. Parker had ever seen it, or ever would.

IT WAS TWELVE BELOW ZERO,
the high for the day, and if Millie Godden hadn’t chosen to go into labor with a breech delivery during a first birth, it wouldn’t have been Larry Bartman’s first choice to be in the air that January afternoon. But when Millie Godden’s frantic husband had raised dispatch on the marine band, Larry’s name had been first on the Civil Air Patrol volunteer list.

When the phone rang he’d been curled up on his warm, wide couch, submitting happily to an enthusiastic and comprehensive ravishment by Alice Sampson, a pert young barista of nineteen, to whom Larry had given some thought to proposing. In this small town on stilts twenty-five miles north of the Arctic Circle the ratio of men to women was such that if you missed your turn you lost your place in line and were out of luck until summer when the park ranger interns showed up. Even then, if you did get lucky, three months later your luck went south again.

Still, Kotzebue was why God invented bush pilots, and there was nowhere else Larry was going to rack up the hours he needed to gain his commercial pilot’s license as fast as he would here. This quick turnaround to Kiana would add another hour, hour and a half to an already impressive total.

And Alice had promised to wait for him.

They slipped over the edge of the mainland, leaving the frozen expanse of Kotzebue Sound behind them. Black spruce marched through snow up to their ears up across the Kobuk River Delta and right up the sides of the
Baird Mountains on the northern horizon. A movement caught Larry’s eye and he looked down to see a timber wolf as it melted into the edge of the trees. A moment later he saw what had caught the wolf ’s attention, a cow moose with a calf, curled up together in a small clearing, conserving energy through the cold snap.

Howie Callahan nudged Larry with his elbow. “Hey,” he said over his headset, and pointed down at the white surface of the Kobuk River. “What’s that?”

Larry put the right wing down and the plane went into a wide, descending circle with the moving object on the river’s surface below in its center.

“It’s a man,” Callahan said. “What’s he doing on foot way the hell out here?”

Below them the man raised his face in their direction and waved his hands over his head.

“Must have been thrown by his snowgo,” Larry said. He brought the plane around again, a slow, smooth glide ten feet off the deck, neck craned to check the surface of the river. He didn’t spot anything to worry him, no open leads and a mostly smooth surface after Monday’s snowfall, and came around a third time, setting down gently, the airplane rolling out to a graceful stop.

Larry opened his door and said, “You need a ride?”

The man started toward them, stumbled, got up, and came forward in a shambling run. As he got closer, they could see his eyes, wide, reddened, a little wild in a face that was burned red by sun and wind and cold. “They’re all dead!” he yelled. “They’re all dead, I’m the only one left!”

The phone rang right next to Liam’s ear. He snatched it up before it could ring again. “It’s supposed to be my day off.”

“Yes, sir,” Corporal Prince replied amiably, ignoring the snarl in her superior officer’s voice.

Next to him, Wy muttered and burrowed beneath the covers. Corporal
Prince was not so lacking in a sense of self-preservation that she either chuckled evilly over his irritation or commented on the company he was keeping. “You’ve got an urgent call from Kotzebue, sir. I thought you’d want to take it.”

“Who?”

“Johnny Nageak.”

Johnny Nageak had been a village public safety officer in training when Liam had taught a semester at the trooper academy. “What’s he want?” he said, with marginally less truculence.

“He says he’s got a situation he needs help with.”

Liam gave up trying to scrub his brain awake through his scalp. “What’s the Kotz trooper post say?”

“They’re shorthanded.”

Liam snorted. “Who isn’t.”

“Yes, sir, but they’ve got an attempted murder of a schoolteacher in Kivalina, and a bootlegger in Buckland, and—”

“Save it, I get the picture. What’s Johnny’s deal?”

“There’s been a shooting. Four men down, one survivor the only eyewitness.” Prince paused. “One of the dead men is named Nageak, sir. He didn’t say, but I’m guessing that’s why Officer Nageak wants you up there pronto. I’ve taken the liberty of booking you a seat on the first flight out.”

“Hold on a minute,” he said, and switched on the light. “Wy.”

She rolled over and glared at him through a tangle of bronze curls. “What.”

“I have to go to Kotzebue. How far is it?”

“About five hundred miles.”

“Can we get there in your Cessna?”

She laughed.

“There’s a murder scene out of Kotz I have to get to immediately.”