“I’m sure some of those lakes were formed by meteors,” he’d told me at one of our Monday night sausage grill outs. “Meteors did it in the Yukon, and the same shower could have easily hit here. Hell, man, you know what diamonds are? They’re scabs on a sore. The meteor slams in. Then Mama Earth repairs herself and that kimberlite pipe is the bandage, and the scab shows up ten million years later as a Tiffany necklace. Uh-huh! They laughed at Chuck Fipke in ninety-one when he drove out to Lac de Gras, Northwest Territories. They laugh at DeRochers today.”
He had a habit of referring to himself in the third person, had mortgaged himself to the hilt, for more funding, and I wondered how the wife and six kids handled this back in Arkansas. He was a tireless worker, and his hut was filled with books on diamonds, studies, reports from South Africa, treatises from Sierra Leone, maps from Arkansas. I thought him a homespun genius; a bit nutty, but interesting. Karen and I wished him well.
“I never understood suicide, Joe,” he said, passing up the booze, boiling water for rose tea, his drink of choice.
“No?”
“How bad can things get for someone to kill himself? I mean, killing someone else, I get it, you get crazy. You have hate. But kill yourself? Never.”
“Maybe he didn’t kill himself,” I said.
“Are you kidding? His finger was still in the trigger guard, right? And the dislocated arm, hell, pulled from the shoulder. Can’t fake that! I took him along once as a guard. He was always quiet. I think that guy had secrets.”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought.
I said, “Is there anything that happened today that this whole town isn’t aware of?”
Calvin DeRochers blew on his tea. I watched the ripples dance across the golden surface, and his greenish eyes came up slowly, met mine and stayed there, keen, smart, probing.
“You tell me,” he said.
I tried to call Eddie. He didn’t answer.
Calvin’s rent-a-pilot, Jens Erik Holte, arrived, a boisterous summer presence in Barrow and Norwegian American who spent his winters in Mexico. Then Mikael the weasel. Then the three-person visiting meteorology team from Boulder. And then three more crowded in: Alan McDougal, who ran logistics on the base; his wife, Candida, an anthropologist; and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Deirdre, a serious, attractive girl and casual friend of Kelley’s. Deirdre sat mute in a corner, then broke into sobs.
I tried to cheer her up, which got her talking a little, wiping her nose with a bunched-up tissue. I asked, “Do you happen to know anything about Kelley keeping a diary?”
“Just that she had one. I never saw it.”
“Was it on her computer? Was it a book?”
“I don’t know.” She blurted out, looking around, making sure all the other adults were in conversation, “Ask… ask her boyfriend!”
“Kelley had a boyfriend? She was only on base for a few days at a time. How did she manage to—”
“People always say they can talk to you, Colonel. Kelley said you and Karen, you can keep a secret. Help me. I feel awful. I don’t know what to do.”
I knelt on one knee to be at face level with her. It was something that Iñupiat adults did with children, and with the very old. They did not talk down to them. They always looked them right in the eye.
“Deirdre, this will stay between you and me.”
The girl looked guilty, miserable. She wanted to talk. “She said she trusted you and Karen.” The pressure in her face was palpable, awful. “She said… she… You promise not to tell?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“She made me swear not to tell also. He works at the Heritage Center. Leon Kavik. He’s older. Eighteen. She used to sneak away to see him. I wish her parents had known! They’d have sent her home!”
Her hands were twisting, and her eyes pleaded for understanding. I said, touching her shoulder, resting my hand there, “What happened wasn’t your fault, Deirdre.”
If we’d been alone she would have cried out, but her agony came out in a whisper. “It was! She’d lie and tell her parents she was at our hut, but she was with him! She lied! And I lied, too! Oh, God!”
Everyone stared at me when she ran out of the room and into a bedroom, crying. I shrugged. I did not want to get her in trouble, but we were going to have to talk more. I wanted to see that boyfriend, and talk to Merlin again, first thing in the morning — and not just about the bodies.
You hid things about your cousin, Merlin.
Why shouldn’t he have his secrets? Everyone else did around here.
Report from Barrow
Received by encrypted satellite transmission.
I attended a small wake at Dr. Rush’s Quonset hut tonight, where many campus residents were present. So far, no one understands what has happened, what is at stake. But the police emergency operator who spread the initial story has been fired, so it will now be slightly more difficult to gain access to the department.
The bodies have been brought to the hospital, where they are in an isolated area in the morgue. There have been no other cases so far, not in town, but that could, of course, change and if it does, there will be widespread panic. I may need a way to get out, fast.
So far, the Eskimo Qaqulik is being blamed for the deaths. With luck, that will be the official finding.
Plus side: I planted microphones in the Quonset hut during the evening — one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen area off the living room — that should pick up conversation in either place. I’m receiving talk in the hut loud and clear.
Both Marine doctors and the submarine engineer Karen Vleska may need to be killed.
FIVE
Merlin Toovik was making whale bombs when I interrupted him at eight the next morning after I heard from Valley Girl. He was at a wooden worktable in his small, cramped, detached garage, wearing a lightweight Seattle Seahawks jacket and jeans in thirty-five degree weather, concentrating and staring down at a foot-long copper-shaped missile lying on a coffee-stained blotter, tilted open at the tiny warhead area on top. I knew better than to interrupt while he poured black explosive powder from a spigoted plastic bottle into the finned missile.
When he was screwing the cap back, I said, “You didn’t tell me everything, Merlin. Why not?”
“Found out about the FBI, huh?” He laid the missile aside and opened the cap of a second one.
“Merlin, not just that. He worked for you?”
The police chief looked up, visibly impressed, the muscles on his shoulders and arms straining against the fabric of the jacket. “How’d you find that out?” he asked, starting on a second missile.
I’d found out because “North Slope Police Department” was written on the dead man’s federal income tax form, but I did not say that. I said, “Merlin, what was one of your detectives doing pretending to work for the Harmons? Yesterday you chewed me out for keeping things from you.”
“Technically, no lie. He did work for them.”
“I put my neck on the line for you.”
“Look, I can’t make a mistake on these bombs, Joe, or a few more relatives will be killed when we fire one and it doesn’t work, or blows too soon. Give me a minute. Then we’ll have coffee in the house and I’ll explain.”
I folded my arms and watched, fascinated by the process despite my irritation, as he loaded two more whale bombs. Whaling captains were the most-respected men in the community. They ran crews of a dozen men, mostly relatives, and went out twice a year to harvest the big bowheads migrating past Barrow, using motorboats in fall, and paddling twenty-foot-long sealskin boats in spring, launched directly off the shore bound ice.