Lucy Brophy crashed into Nathan Active as he passed her office on the second floor of the Chukchi Public Safety building.

She pulled back and told him, “You’ve got visitors, been waiting twenty minutes.” She checked her watch and stuffed a pair of long socks into a bulky purse slung over her shoulder.

His office manager and one-time girlfriend seemed a little jumpy. She had, he recalled, an appointment of undisclosed purpose this morning. She had said only that she would be gone for several hours.

He had thought of asking what was up, but decided against it. For one thing, it might be something he was better off not knowing as chief of the Chukchi Region Public Safety Department. For another, he’d probably find out anyway. Public safety was an echo chamber.

He nodded toward his office, which was next to hers. An elderly Inupiat couple was visible through the window in the door.

“What do they want?”

“Wouldn’t talk to me. They said, ‘We’ll talk to that nice naluaqmiiyaaq cop.’ Arii, so rude. I told them I wasn’t sure when you were coming back, but they could wait if they wanted to.” She tossed her head. “How’s the baby?”

“Another ear infection. The clinic put him on amoxicillin and he’s safe in the arms of his doting aana until I get off. And Grace will be back from Anchorage tonight.”

Lucy cut her eyes at the visitors and dodged around him. “Good luck. See you after lunch.” She disappeared down the hall toward the stairwell.

Active walked into his office. The elders sat on orange plastic chairs pulled up to his desk. The woman was perfectly still with a sweet, empty smile, and a vacant gaze fixed on the wall behind his desk. She had silver hair in a bun and a soft, round body. An LED flashlight hung around her neck on a shoelace. Her hands were hidden in the kangaroo pouch of a flowered green atiqluk.

Her escort was stout, with coke-bottle glasses and the walnut-brown, weather-polished skin of an old-time Inupiat hunter who’d spent his life in the sun and wind. He had a silver mustache and goatee, and wore an Inupiat Pride ball cap with finger marks on the bill. He rose as Active entered.

He looked familiar, but it took Active a few moments to pull up the connection. They had crossed paths at a fund-raiser for the Isignaq 400 sled dog race, that was it. The man had run dogs himself in a younger day if Active remembered correctly. His name was - -

“Oscar, right?” Active put out his hand. “Oscar Leokuk? Good to see you.”

“Ah-hah, Oscar.” They exchanged the customary Chukchi single-pump handshake, then Oscar lowered himself back into his chair and put his hand on the woman’s arm. “And this my wife, Tommie.”

She shifted the sweet smile and empty gaze to Active and he caught a whiff of potent body odor.

“She lost her brain few years ago,” Oscar said. “Don’t talk no more. I gotta do it for her.”

Active nodded to the woman and sat down behind his desk. Dementia would explain the smell, he supposed. Perhaps she wouldn’t bathe or let anyone else do it for her. Or perhaps it was incontinence. Or both.

He stretched out his right leg to ease the burning that had been his constant companion since a bullet had ripped into his thigh the previous fall.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Leokuk.”

She gave no sign of hearing. The full, round face was smooth except for creases at the corners of her brown eyes and her smile.

Her silver bun was tidy, he noticed, and her clothes were unwrinkled and looked reasonably fresh. None of which seemed to go with hygiene problems and the smell now filling his office.

“It looks like you’re taking pretty good care of her,” he said to Oscar.

Tommie began rocking from the waist, forward and back, forward and back.

“Yeah, she get along okay at home,” Oscar said. “She still do her beads, her sewing sometimes, try work her jigsaw puzzle of Jesus in the manger. Our granddaughter come over and cook for us so she don’t burn herself.”

Active tried to think how to work Oscar around to the reason for the visit but decided to hold off. The quickest way to get an Inupiat elder to the point was usually to wait him out.

“So she’s in good hands.”

“Most times.” Oscar studied the floor with an embarrassed look. “Except she’ll go out sometimes when we don’t know, walk around all night, maybe bring back a souvenir.”

“A souvenir? What kind of souvenir?”

“Something she find on the road, on the beach. A button, a bottle, one time false teeth.” Oscar chuckled.

Active smiled, nodded, and waited.

“Never bother nobody,” Oscar went on. “Never get in no trouble. But last night...” Oscar’s voice trailed off and he looked at the floor again.

Finally, maybe, some progress. “Did somebody hurt her? Is that why you’re here?” Active opened his notebook.

“Nothing like that, but she find some trouble, all right.”

Had Tommie taken a “souvenir” valuable enough to qualify as theft from a vehicle or even someone’s house? He pictured himself cuffing Tommie Leokuk, fingerprinting her, and locking her up in the Chukchi jail.

“I’m sure we can straighten it out,” he said. “What kind of trouble did she find, exactly?”

“Maybe you’ll figure out what kind.”

Oscar looked at the floor, then Active, then the floor again.

“Just tell me what she found, okay?”

“She gonna show you.” He pulled Tommie’s clenched fist out of the pouch of her atiqluk and pushed it toward Active.

Oscar murmured a few words of Inupiaq in Tommie’s ear, and the gnarled brown fingers slowly uncurled to reveal a piece of human jawbone.

Active recoiled, recovered, and studied it as he pulled on blue nitrile gloves from a desk drawer. Shreds of gum tissue clung to the jawbone and a single molar was still in place. The molar had a silver filling, and the jawbone stank. Like a rotten fish on a beach.

Active lifted the thing from Tommie’s palm. She looked at him and said something that sounded like “Kikituq?” Then the empty eyes turned bright and she giggled like a little girl.

Active held the jawbone up, turned it, examined it from end to end, and dropped it into an evidence bag.

“Where did you - -” He stopped and turned to Oscar. “Where did she find this?”

Oscar shrugged. “No clue.”

“And did she say ‘kikituq?’”

“Ah-hah,” Oscar said. “What them naluaqmiuts call a monster, probably. Most times, a dog with a whale head, big sharp teeth tear you apart. Early days ago, them old angatkuqs, they keep a carving of it around their neck, send it out at night to kill their enemies. That kikituq give the angatkuq his power.”

* * *

“That’s it, Chief?” Danny Kavik stared at the jawbone laid out on a sheaf of paper towels on Active’s desk blotter. “Nothing on where it came from? Or whose it was?”

“Nope, nada.”

Active’s deputy chief pointed at the molar with its filling. “At least we know it’s human.”

“Which is all we do know.” Active returned the jawbone to its bag. “Which is why God made medical examiners. Maybe Georgeanne can identify it from dental records. She’s worked miracles before.”

“Or maybe DNA,” Kavik said.

“There was one more thing. Tommie said ‘kikituq?’ when she pulled it out of her atiqluk. That mean anything to you?”

“My Inupiaq’s pretty rusty...some kind of mythical - -”

“It’s a kind of whale-headed dog that the old angatkuqs would - -”

“Oh, yeah,” Kavik said. “The kikituq. A shaman’s power object.”

“Really?”

Kavik looked embarrassed. “Well, that’s what the anthropologists called it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I have a friend who’s doing their graduate thesis on the spiritual beliefs of Arctic indigenous people, and they shared some intel with me.”

“’They?’” Active said.

“All right, ‘she.’ She shared it with me.”

“Ah,” Active said. “And what else might you and this friend be sharing?”

Kavik flipped him off in a friendly way. “Mind your own business, Boss. So Tommie’s saying some monster went out and tore somebody up and she found the body and now she’s bringing in the pieces?”

“It could mean almost anything, I guess,” Active said. “Or nothing. Tommie’s mind’s a blank slate. Maybe she just likes the sound of the word.”

“Why do they let her wander around like that anyway?”

“Apparently she sneaks out while they’re asleep. Oscar said they tried strapping her to the bed and rigging the door so she couldn’t get out, but she got so agitated, they thought she might hurt herself. So, they make do.”

“Like everybody, I suppose.”

Active nodded. “According to Oscar, she’ll get out every few days and eventually wander back again. Or a cabbie will bring her home. Or Oscar will wake up, call his granddaughter, and they’ll go look on his four-wheeler. And he says we’ve picked her up once or twice?”

“Oh, yeah, I think Alan Long did that once. And another patrol officer a couple of times.”

“Well, see where they found her, ah? We can check out those locations.”

“How about searching the area around her house. How far can an old lady walk?”

“Pretty far, it turns out. It seems she’s a tough old gal, like a lot of the old-timers. So we might have to cover all four square miles of Chukchi, and a lot more than that if she got past the airport and was wandering around the fish camps down in Tent City. Or if she got across the Lagoon Bridge and took a stroll on the tundra back there, maybe dug around in the Bluff Cemetery.”

“How’d she get back last night?”

“A cabbie from Louie’s, according to Oscar. She’s on her way - -” Active stopped at the sound of footsteps in the stairwell. “And here she is now, I’m guessing.”

After a minute or two, Active realized that Lucy was still out and no one was outside his office to greet their witness. He opened his door to a stocky figure in jeans, a T-shirt, and a worn black leather jacket. She had a thick hawser of dark hair down her back and wraparound sunglasses in the vee of her zipper in front.

“Chief Active,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”

“Girlie Kivalina,” she responded in a voice like gravel in a gearbox.

He waved her to a seat and introduced Kavik, then settled behind his desk with his notebook out. “I understand you picked up Tommie Leokuk last night. Can you tell us when that was?”

“This morning little bit past two, maybe,” the cabbie answered. “I drop a fare off at the Arctic Inn, then I head home along Third. That’s when I see Tommie coming toward me there by Sundog Park. Is she okay? Aqaa, she sure stink.”

“No, no, she’s fine. It’s just that Oscar’s worried about her wandering around like that and so we’re trying to figure out where she goes.”

Girlie raised her eyebrows in the Inupiat signal of assent.

“Did you ever pick her up before?”

“Sure thing, three times last couple months maybe. I stop, she’ll climb in, never say nothing, just hum to herself and rock back and forth. I take her to their house, wait till she go in, then I leave.”

“So she was walking on Third? Did she come out of a building or a house maybe?”

“No, she’s already on the street when I see her.”

“How about the other times?”

Girlie stopped for a moment to reflect, then ticked the memories off on her fingers. “First time, maybe a block from her house. Then one time by the post office and that other time by the Catholic church. But she never stink like that before.”

Active noted it all down. “Thanks for coming in. If you think of something else, you call me, okay?” He gave her a card and walked her to the door. “And thanks for looking out for Tommie.”

Girlie grinned, exposing a gap two teeth wide in her bottom jaw. “We ladies gotta take care of each other, ah? Especially if it’s an aana.”

She left and Kavik pulled up a satellite map of Chukchi on his laptop. He cursored around for a second, then zoomed in on the area between Sundog Park and the Leokuk home on Caribou Way.

“There must be at least fifty structures between Oscar’s place and where Girlie picked her up,” Kavik said.

“Not to mention a block-long park and the Third Street Cemetery.”

“So how do we find the body?”

“First thing, you take Alan Long and check that cemetery to make sure kids or dogs or something haven’t opened up one of the graves. And the Bluff Cemetery, too, while you’re at it.”

“Got it,” Kavik said.”

“And let’s tell Patrol to keep an eye out for Tommie. If they spot her, they’re to follow her around unless they get a call.” Active tapped the jawbone in its bag. “Meanwhile, we ship this thing off to Georgeanne. And then we wait.”