CHAPTER ONE AMY
“And when did you find the body”—Officer Neworth paused for a moment before adding—“parts? When did you find the body parts?”
It was a hand and a foot, to be exact. Or at least Amy thought there was a foot. She hadn’t bothered to look inside the boot, but since Officer Neworth said “parts” instead of “part,” she assumed there must have been a foot—a bloated, sawed-off, purple-blotched piece of flesh that would have made her dry heave at the sight.
“Yesterday, around eleven a.m.,” she said. She was pretty sure she had mentioned this detail at least six times that very day. She‘d thought getting pulled out of algebra class would be fun, but now she was having second thoughts.
The boot, she remembered, looked fairly new. It was covered with mud and grime, but the treads weren’t that worn and the laces hadn’t frayed yet. She hadn’t told any of this to Officer Neworth, though. Up until then, she’d tried to say as little as possible, sticking to answers like “Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know.”
Amy Lin stared at Officer Neworth and his receded-to-an-island hairline and decided that he was not someone who could be trusted. For one thing, he was wearing a gold watch. Any man who wears a gold watch is a little shady. Second, anyone who asks you the same question over and over expecting a different answer does not trust you, and therefore you should not trust them. And last of all, Neworth was from Anchorage, and Point Mettier people tended to keep their mouths shut around any of the “otters.” “Otters” is what the kids called people outside Point Mettier because it kind of sounded like the word “others.”
“So, tell me again, who were you with?” he asked.
Amy sighed internally and gave him a glare. Did she look like a caged parrot that would keep repeating the same thing over and over again?
Officer Neworth shifted in his seat and adjusted his leather duty belt, which sagged with the weight of lethal equipment—a baton, cuffs, a magazine pouch, a flashlight, a Taser, pepper spray, and, of course, a Glock pistol. But despite all his protective gear, Neworth looked uncomfortable under the glare of a seventeen-year-old who was barely five foot two. He finally turned his eyes away and looked down at his notepad. “Celine Hoffler and Marco Salonga?”
“Yes,” Amy finally answered as if his question was somehow offensive.
“And what were you doing at the cove?”
“Just getting out.” Amy wasn’t about to tell him the real reason they went to the cove, which was to smoke pot. Even though marijuana was legal in Alaska, they were still minors.
—
IT WAS A Sunday, and there was a break in the rain, so they had all bundled up in their neoprenes, parkas, and ski caps and decided to paddle their kayaks out to Hidden Cove. On sunny days in summer, Sanders Glacier across the inlet would look brilliant against the sky, with blue and white ice caps like a giant slushy spilled onto a mountain valley. Tourists would come in flocks during the high season to Point Mettier. Even though, Amy knew, the real pronunciation of “Mettier” was probably the French way, rhyming with “get away,” everyone butchered the name and said it in a way that sounded like “dirtier.” The otters always wanted to see the glaciers in the sound and paid top dollar for cruise ships and yachts to take them up close. Amy wasn’t sure why. She’d been up to a few of the glaciers, including Sanders, and had come to the conclusion that they were prettier from afar. On that Sunday in October, though, there had been dense clouds hanging low over the cove and Sanders just looked like a looming gray monster behind the mist.
Since tourist season was over and the thrum of motorboats and Sea-Doos was gone, it was pretty quiet on the water. Just the dwop dwop sound of their paddles dipping in and out, and the kittiwakes screeching overhead. Once they got to the beach, they loitered around, passed a joint, not really talking or doing anything specific. Celine hopped on a fallen log and balanced across the length of it like a high-wire act. Her sandy blond hair floated behind her in the wind, the way you see in the movies. Amy had always been envious of Celine’s hair, because hers was just a dull black. She wanted to dye it platinum blue, except that her mother would probably kill her—literally. Marco was skipping rocks, or maybe he was throwing them at birds; she couldn’t remember exactly.
Amy started combing the beach for mementos to add to her collection: fish skeletons and coins, jewelry, and other odds and ends left behind by careless tourists. It was about this time that she noticed something on the south side of the cove—just a little shimmer, like a Morse code of light—and headed over toward it to investigate.
It was sunshine reflecting off the rubber toe of a hiking boot. She didn’t realize then that it was anything more than a boot. Kind of a shame, she thought, that someone had lost a perfectly good boot. But when she bent down on the gravelly shore to take a closer look, something else caught her eye. Something she had almost stepped on.
It was a severed hand, half-buried in the sand. Or at least it looked like a hand, but it was green and almost translucent, the way glow-in-the-dark stickers look when the light is on. She could see the lines of the joints on the fingers, but the entire hand was swollen and greasy-looking. It felt as if a whole minute went by while she just stood there, staring. In reality, it was probably more like ten seconds before she finally blinked and found her voice.
“Guys,” was all she could muster. The others immediately stopped what they were doing and came to see what she was pointing at. Celine was the one who actually screamed—a high-pitched, earsplitting almost wail of a cry that echoed across the valley and sent shivers down Amy’s spine.
—
“AND WHAT DID you do after you found the parts?” Officer Neworth interrupted her thoughts and continued with his interrogation. At least it felt like an interrogation to Amy, even though it was just a witness account.
Amy wanted to reply, “What do you think we did? Hang them up for Halloween decorations?” But instead she said, “We went back to the Dave-Co and told Officer Barkowski.”
“The Dave-Co?”
Amy sighed. “The building we’re sitting in now. The Davidson Condos.” The condos were supposed to have been named after some general who served in World War II, but she had heard a rumor that the buildings were actually named after Randolph Davidson, a famous Alaskan con man who set up a fake telegraph office through which he took money for sending blips and beeps that never went anywhere except into a wall.
Neworth laughed at the name. “Is that what you call it? So, how long have you lived here . . . in the Dave-Co?”
Amy knew this question had nothing to do with the body parts. “Fourteen years,” she replied.
“Holy cow,” he said with a kind of pity in his voice.
People from Anchorage tended to look at Point Mettier kids as charity cases. “It’s always shittier in Point Mettier,” they would say. It wasn’t just about subzero temperatures and eight months of practical winter. The thing that really made otters believe residents of Point Mettier were batshit crazy was the fact that they all lived in one building . . . in the Dave-Co.
There were 205 full-time residents in Point Mettier. The Dave-Co had a post office, a church, an infirmary, and a general store that also acted as a gift shop, selling the same touristy tchotchkes since the nineties—Sanders Glacier mugs and cork coasters with pictures of moose, bears, or kittiwakes. The school was just an underground tunnel away.
Back when the city was a military outpost, the Walcott Building next door had a bowling alley, an auditorium, a movie theater, and even an indoor pool, but that building was practically destroyed in the big earthquake of 1964, and now it was just an abandoned skeleton of itself. The Dave-Co, on the other hand, didn’t have any of those cool amenities, not even a barbershop or salon where people could get a decent haircut.
For a seventeen-year-old, it was boring as hell. It was more of a prison than a home, really. If it weren’t for the Internet, Amy thought, she would have killed herself over the lack of stimuli.
Most families who came to live in Point Mettier left after a year or two. Nobody was actually from there and nobody liked to stick it out for too long. Celine had come about two years ago from Minnesota. Marco Salonga’s family had come from the Philippines. Amy and her mother had probably come from the farthest end of the earth, but they belonged to the longtimers club because Amy had been only three when they arrived. She didn’t know any other kids who had lived in Point Mettier that long. Even Spence Blackmon and his younger brother, Troy, didn’t arrive with their mom until much later, when Spence was ten and Troy must have been six.
People had all sorts of reasons for moving to the city. Some said they fell in love with the scenery or that they liked the isolation or that they liked living in a close community. Amy didn’t believe any of their stories, though. She knew the only real reason people moved out there was because they were running from somebody or something. Why else would you live in a backwater hole of a place where everyone lived in one building and your eyelashes could actually freeze? In fact, Amy had only just found out the real reason why Ma had moved the two of them out there to run a restaurant serving stuff even she knew was barely passable as Chinese food. Again, though, she wasn’t about to spill any of this info to Officer Neworth.
—
THERE WERE JUST two police officers in Point Mettier: Chief Sipley and Officer Barkowski. Amy had watched enough television to know that the police station she was sitting in now was just a tiny locker room compared with what other cities had. There were the main reception area with tiny squeezed-in desks, the “interrogation room” closet they were sitting in, and a one-cell jail. Whenever there was a suspected “major crime,” like when a tourist tried to kill her husband by stabbing him repeatedly with a dinner knife at one of the restaurants on the pier one summer, Anchorage police were called in, which was why Officer Neworth was there, questioning her about the body parts.
There was a knock at the door and Officer Barkowski poked his head in. “You almost done, Officer Neworth? Or have you just discovered that Amy Lin is a maniacal serial killer?” He gave Amy a friendly wink, and she smiled, despite herself. Officer Barkowski had started working in Point Mettier a year ago. He was always talking to the kids, pretending like he was one of them, making friendly conversation. Amy knew that it was an act, but at least he spoke to them like adults instead of uneducated third-world charity cases. Overall, Amy thought he was one of the good guys, but that didn’t mean she was going to let him in on any secrets. Chief Sipley, on the other hand, had been in Point Mettier longer than anybody. She wasn’t sure exactly what his story was. He looked kind of like a bald and drunken Santa Claus on the outside, but even though he appeared jolly, Amy knew that on the inside, he was the kind of guy who was much smarter than he let on and was always calculating something.
“Chief Sipley just radioed from the cove and says everything’s been bagged and cleared out there,” Barkowski reported.
Officer Neworth closed his notepad as if he had just been idling away his time, waiting for this cue. “I think we’re done here.”
Barkowski eyed the pad like he was just itching to take a look. “We hear there’s been a lot of these cases popping up on the coast. Is that true?”
“Yeah, we’ve heard there’ve been a few in Canada and Washington as well,” Neworth admitted. “This is the third set in Alaska in a year.”
“Any leads?”
“No.” Officer Neworth stood up from his chair. “There’s speculation that they might have been suicide jumpers, or people who accidentally fell off ships.”
“Jesus, that’s sad.”
Officer Neworth nodded. “The plastic in the boots makes them float up and carries them to shore. We don’t get too many hands, though, so it was a bit unusual.” He chewed on that for a moment. “Well, we don’t have all the answers, and I doubt we ever will. But since we can’t identify the bodies or prove any foul play, we can’t exactly investigate them as crimes.”
Officer Barkowski peeked over at Amy. “School’s still in session, if you’re done questioning Ms. Lin.”
“Oh, right.” Officer Neworth suddenly remembered the third person in the room. “You can go now, Amy. Thanks for your cooperation.”
Amy got up slowly and a sense of relief washed over her. She exited the office into the maize-colored concrete hallway and felt like she had just cheated a lie detector test. Well, perhaps she hadn’t really lied. She had just omitted a few facts about who was there. In the end, did it really matter if there were three or four witnesses, especially now that she knew it probably wasn’t even a murder, just some depressed tourist who maybe jumped off a cruise ship?
CHAPTER TWO CARA
The windshield wipers of the Chevy Suburban flapped in double time, trying to cut through the vaporous shroud of fog that had cloaked Sanders Glacier Road. The radio repeated its announcement that “a severe early-winter weather system” was headed toward Point Mettier, but Cara planned to be in and out before it hit, just long enough to see if there was a case to reopen.
It wasn’t the detached foot that caught her attention. She could buy the running theory of suicide victims, and buoyant shoes causing feet to detach from their decaying bodies. But that didn’t explain how a hand washed up next to it, and that was why she was compelled like a moth to a flame on a sojourn to the sequestered town.
The not-unpleasant drive took her along a scenic highway that rimmed Cook Inlet—a finger path of water off the Gulf of Alaska pointing toward the majestic Kenai Mountains. For a moment, she even felt a sense of freedom on the road, with glimpses of civilization-devoid vistas that lulled her out of heavy thoughts. But then she remembered the task at hand and the possibility of a foul murder, and she sobered back up.
She finally reached a sentinel tollbooth from which was monitored what came in and out of the Point Mettier Tunnel. A Native with a reflective neon green jacket and a Seahawks baseball cap ventured to stick his head out of his heated box. He looked to be in his fifties, his forehead weathered with worry lines, his hair slivered with gray, and settled brown eyes peering over reading glasses.
“Little late for the season,” he said. “Most places have closed up shop ’til spring.”
“Not a tourist,” Cara responded. She pulled out her badge from her jacket and flashed it just long enough for him to get a glance.
“Investigating the body parts?”
She nodded.
“Wasn’t there just a team from Anchorage here the other day?”
“I’m the follow-up team,” Cara responded.
The tollbooth operator scrutinized her for a beat. “Hold on.” He pulled his head back in and Cara heard him get on the phone to say, “We’ve got a Smokey coming in.”
Cara tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, wondering who needed to know this on the other end.
The operator finally stuck his head out again. “Tunnel will switch to eastbound in five. Just wait in Lane One ’til the light turns green.” Then he waved her through.
The narrow one-way artery burrowing through the mountain switched directions every half hour. During tourist season, there would have been a line of cars waiting to go through, but it was early November, so her navy blue SUV was the sole vehicle headed in.
When the red-striped traffic arm lifted, Cara drove into what looked like an A-frame ski chalet embedded in the rock, but once she was inside, it felt more like a mining cave, with naked lights strung on a wire above, and craggy walls weeping with moisture. The voice on the radio reduced to a static hiss, and underneath, the tires on the railroad tracks made a steady kachunk kachunksound. Or perhaps it was the sound of her heart beating louder. The darkness stretched on and she wondered for a moment whether she was actually driving through a tunnel or falling into an abyss.
Cara had never been good in closed spaces, but she had learned to tamp down her claustrophobia and no one was the wiser. After a two-and-a-half-mile stretch, pale, grayish light finally streamed through the windshield, and the truck emerged as if breaching the surface of water. She exhaled and was able to breathe normally again.
She drove through a harbor filled with docked fishing boats and recreational yachts. Some had already been winterized, sitting dormant on the asphalt like a disarrayed pod of beached whales. There was a smattering of empty cafés, bars, and restaurants lining the bay. A woman was posting a closed until may sign on one of them. Her pickup truck in front looked like it was already loaded up for whatever her off-season destination was. Nearby stores were already dark. Clearly, this was a town going into hibernation.
Moments later, Cara saw on the horizon a behemoth of a building, wider than its height, casting a shadow over the town. She knew this must be the infamous Davidson Condos.
So, this is it, she thought, driving up to the asphalt lot in front. This is where the entire town shutters away for the winter . . . at least those who are willing to stay.
—
ONCE INSIDE THE building, Cara wandered the hallways of the ground floor until she found a green door with the words “Police, Point Mettier, Alaska” stickered on. She wondered about the impermanence of the sticker, as if law and order were only a temporary facade here.
She knocked but entered without waiting for an answer. Inside, there were two people, who glanced up from their gray metal desks. Cara assumed the elder man to be Chief Sipley. He got up and had to scoot his wide frame around his desk. Sixties, Cara guessed, given his brown-fading-into-white beard and bald crown.
The other officer, she fathomed, must be in his late twenties or early thirties. He was tall and fit with a kind of awkward, Mayberry-like charm. He nearly stumbled out of his chair as he also got up to greet her. His dark, almost black hair made her wonder if he was a mutt like her: a mix of Anglo, Native, and Italian.
Cara addressed the elder first. “Chief Sipley? I’m Detective Cara Kennedy.”
He put his large hand out for a shake. “Lost the bet to come here, didn’t you?” Cara left his jest unanswered, but he was undeterred. “Well, let me tell you, Detective Kennedy, there’s pluses and minuses to living here. The minus being that at the end of the season, the whole town clears out and it’s just the two hundred of us. The plus being that the whole town clears out and it’s just the two hundred of us.” He laughed at his own joke. It was a deep, wheezy, congestive laugh. Then he turned to his younger cohort, who had kept silent. “J.B., say hello to the detective. But don’t get too close. There’s a ring on that finger.”
Cara subconsciously moved her hands behind her back.
“Joe Barkowski,” the young man said. “J.B.’s less of a mouthful.”
She nodded to him and his face flushed red for no good reason.
“So, any local missing persons reported that might connect to the body?” Cara asked, pulling out her notepad.
“Straight to business, huh? No batting about,” Chief Sipley said rather pointedly.
“Sorry, I’m not good with the niceties.”
Chief gave another raspy laugh. “Well, you’d fit right in here, then. And no, he’s still a John Doe.”
“Definitely not from Point Mettier,” J.B. chimed in. “And no one who stayed at the inn appears to be missing.”
“I thought APD had this all wrapped up. Probably just another suicide jumper, didn’t they say, J.B.? Like those other body parts they’ve been finding.” Despite his casual demeanor, Cara sensed that Chief Sipley was covertly assessing her.
J.B., on the other hand, didn’t seem quite convinced about it either. “Pretty odd, though, to find those extremities washing up like that.”
“Is there a reason why they’re sending you back here? They’ve already bagged the evidence. Nothing criminal is what they made it seem like.” Sipley set himself back behind his desk.
“We want to take a closer look at this one,” Cara said in as matter-of-fact a tone as she could manage, and she didn’t elaborate. She didn’t want to waste any time on chitchat, so she added, rather impatiently, “Can you take me to where the floaters were found?”
Chief Sipley turned to J. ...
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