Village of the Ghost Bears by Stan Jones

Author:Stan Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2009-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

ACTIVE WAS still more or less deaf and blind as he walked back to Carnaby’s office a few minutes later. He banged a knee on a corner of Evelyn O’Brien’s desk and failed to respond in kind when she snarled at him as he rubbed the spot before limping on.

“What?” Carnaby said after a look at Active’s face.

“Well, we found Jae Hyo Lee.”

“What?” Long said. “They picked him up? Where? Did he confess?”

“Oh, shit.” Carnaby met Active’s eyes, then looked away in pain. “No!”

Active nodded.

“What?” Long said.

Carnaby cleared his throat. “Alan, I think Nathan is trying to tell us that the guy in One-Way Lake was Jae Hyo Lee.” He looked at Active, eyebrows raised in the white expression of inquiry.

Active nodded again, Long’s mouth shut with an audible pop, and a depressed silence settled over the room.

“Let’s hear it,” Carnaby said finally.

Active sketched Park’s findings on the cause of death and explained that a thumbprint had identified No-Way from One-Way Lake as Jae Hyo Lee from Cape Goodwin, thereby depriving them of their only suspect in the Rec Center fire.

“Only the one thumbprint? Any room for doubt there?” Carnaby asked, not sounding very hopeful. “What about the other possibles?”

Active shook his head. “One of them is in custody in Reno, one’s a female bank embezzler on parole in Chicago, one’s a sixty-year-old Russian pimp from Brooklyn— admittedly between jail stretches at the moment—and the other’s a black kid from Omaha.”

They pondered the implications.

“But if Jae. . . .” Long said at one point, but was unable to proceed farther.

“And then who. . . .” Carnaby mumbled a little later, then sank back into the silence.

Finally Carnaby sighed. “So, when did he die?”

“According to Park, he was in the water a couple weeks, plus or minus a couple days,” Active said.

Carnaby looked at the calendar on his desk blotter, and, with a pencil, tapped his way backward through it. “In other words, he was in that lake within a week of getting out of Sheridan.”

Active nodded. “Plus or minus.”

“And he died of a broken neck? Not drowning?”

Active nodded again.

Carnaby toyed with the pencil a moment, then began ticking the sequence off on his fingers. “Let’s see. He gets a visit in prison from Tom Gage, he gets out of the system a couple months later, then turns up in One-Way Lake with a broken neck a few days after that. And by the time you stumble across him up there, Nathan, Tom Gage is dead too, as is Jim Silver. Anybody want to bet Jae Hyo Lee dived off that cliff by accident?”

“He didn’t necessarily break his neck coming down the cliff,” Active said.

“No?”

Active shook his head. “I asked Park if he was sure Jae broke his neck in the fall. He said, ‘All I know for sure is, he wasn’t breathing when he hit the water.’”

“You think he was dead before he fell, then?”

“You think we can rule anything out in this case?”

Carnaby grimaced. “You’re right. But there’s a

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