Come Find Me in the Midnight Sun, page 1
Come Find Me in the Midnight Sun
Synopsis
It’s just another day on the job for state trooper Louisa Linebach. Hundreds of young men go missing from Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula every year, so when Lee Stanton and Branden Halifax both disappear within days of each other, Louisa doesn’t think much of it. One appears to be a simple suicide, but the other defies all explanation, with the victim’s footprints literally vanishing along an abandoned mountain runway.
As Louisa and her partner investigate, they encounter alien conspiracy theories, a town where all the inhabitants live in one building, and signs of a drug trade that’s inextricably mingled with the tourist industry around Seward. Their investigation is further complicated by a police chief who’s unwilling to let his friend be investigated and Louisa’s feelings for Anna Fenway, the local medical examiner.
When a body is identified and buried, Louisa thinks the case is coming to a close. She’s wrong.
Come Find Me in the Midnight Sun
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Come Find Me in the Midnight Sun
© 2023 By Bailey Bridgewater. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-63679-565-2
This Electronic Original Is Published By
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: November 2023
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Anissa McIntyre and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design by Tammy Seidick
eBook Design by Toni Whitaker
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the team at Chulitna Wilderness Lodge in Lake Clark, Alaska. It was during a writing residency there that I read Alex Tizon’s amazing article “In the Land of Missing Persons,” which inspired this novel. Thank you also to my beta readers and to Anissa at Bold Strokes. I could not have asked for a better editor. All writers should be so lucky as to find a gem on the first try.
For Natasha, who’s been pulling for this book from the first draft.
Prologue
June 2009: Seward, Alaska
Some people say it was luck. Somehow my eye caught the familiar shape, dark against the base of charred spruce trunks. The gray ash settled all the way to the tree line of Mount Alice where the fire ran against hard shale and burnt itself out. Luck isn’t what I call it.
The blackened skull was fragile. When I tapped it tentatively with my gloved finger, the bone at the back of the skull began to cave inward.
“Careful. It looks like the molars are still there. We can use them for ID.” The tech grunted and lifted the thing roughly, then dropped it to the bottom of a large plastic sack. He was supposed to have been off this weekend, not to have been called to investigate the fire’s cause. Not to recover remains where there should have been none.
If I hadn’t been there, maybe he would have never noticed it. Or maybe he would have, and he would have let it be. A family would have gone on believing they’d buried their son, and a mother could have gone on hoping that one day the man she loved would return home—just walk through the door after five years, happy to be home. In early fall, the snow would have covered the skull and it would have collapsed under that weight, the teeth caught in the summer melt, flowing down to one of the waterfalls, into the fjord, out to sea. Maybe it would have been better that way.
Over two thousand people go missing in Alaska every year, most of them from the Kenai Peninsula. They go into the wild to try to survive. They go to commit suicide. They crash their cars and try to walk home, confident the land they love won’t harm them. They wander the wrong trail, fall into a ravine, freeze, starve, collapse into an ice bridge, slide through a crack in a glacier—and they’re gone. The animals find the remains, and the snow covers what the animals can’t digest. Eventually most of them find their way to the ocean. Probably. There are no explanations and no clues. They leave families that don’t know whether to hope or to grieve.
For Alaskans, it’s an unspoken agreement. You move here, you work here, you raise your children here knowing that at any moment, the ground may shake, a tsunami may carry you away, an avalanche may bury you. It is the nature of the land. Which isn’t to say we three hundred or so state troopers don’t try with the missing persons cases. We do. But each trooper covers an area the size of smaller states, and we start a search knowing that ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the person couldn’t make it more than a couple days anyway. Perhaps they wander home in a day, in a decade, after a lifetime—but often they don’t. After a short time, another case presents and we quietly stop looking, especially in winter.
But then, every once in a long while, a fire, a strange item in a pile of bear scat, a piece of fabric in a stream, brings someone home.
Chapter One
October 2004: Anchorage, Alaska
The missing persons call comes in from Seward. Their troopers are occupied with a string of burglaries on a cruise ship that Carnival must want solved ASAP so the boat can leave approximately on schedule. Pretty much all of us troopers resent the cruise lines, but we do their bidding since no one can argue with the money they bring to the state. Especially not the politicians who keep their eyes on the force. So, with their officers deployed to the ship, Seward needs help for this less dire case.
There aren’t divisions of labor in Alaskan policing like there are in the Lower 48, where the forces are infinitely bigger. If you’re an Alaska State Trooper, you work homicide, you work missing persons, you work kidnapping, you speak with the shopkeepers mad about hoodlums on their street corners, you give tourists directions, you make notes about where the bears and moose are today. Don’t get me wrong, there are things I like about it. I like the introverted shopkeepers and fishermen and the schoolkids who insist their buddy put that candy bar in their jacket as a joke. I like trudging up snow-covered mountains to post signs warning hikers about moose, though everyone else claims to hate that job. Some days my job feels meaningful. But other times, even working in such a massive state, the job feels claustrophobic. With so few of us upholding the law, it can feel as if all eyes are on us, even off-duty.
Chief Quint calls me to his office. The other officers all seem to look away from me at once. They generally pretend not to notice me. At least that’s how it seems. I am a woman, and a brown woman—biracial. I’ve been here six months, and the jury is still deliberating whether I make the cut as an Alaska State Trooper. When the chief hired me, he was straightforward about that.
“It’s my duty to let you know right off the bat that you’re the only woman at this station now.” He looked at the door as he spoke, as if five or six women might stroll in also looking for jobs. “Shouldn’t be a problem at all, but if any of your fellow officers is anything less than accommodating, please come see me. There aren’t enough for us to have officers who can’t play ball for the same team.”
I must have raised an eyebrow or scowled—my facial expressions always say more than I ever mean to—because he chuckled in a way that would have qualified him for a mall Santa position. “Oh, don’t worry, they’re a good group. A little old fashioned maybe. People around here tend to be, you know. They talk a big game sometimes, but you get out there on a case, and it’s all equal. You’ve gotta be tough to handle a place like this.” He waved a hand at the view of Anchorage’s streets. “You show them you are, and they won’t give you no trouble.” He looked me straight in the eye and smiled. “I’d put money on you being just fine.”
He’s just as blunt with me now. “Linebach, we’ve gotten called to a case in Seward. Male, late twenties, been gone a few days. Mom has reported him missing. She’s not exactly forthcoming with information. I’m thinking maybe she’ll relate to you a little more.”
I concentrate on not rolling my eyes. If he’s assuming I have some magical feminine touch that makes difficult people want to talk to me, he’s much mistaken. I’ve never been good at small talk, and my tendency to get straight to the point is often perceived as rude. Even by me.
Still, I don’t say anything because I’m glad he thought of me first, even if it is because I’m the only female trooper in Anchorage. Besides, I like Chief Quint. He was the first person to make me feel welcome here.
I call the mother of the missing man immediately, a brand-new notebook the only thing to indicate my excitement. Through the gravel of her low voice, she explains the situation.
The missing person is Lee Stanton. He didn’t show for the usual Sunday dinner at his mom’s house, four miles up the road from his trailer, halfway up the Chugach Mountains outside Seward.
“Did you drive to his house?” She sighs into t he receiver, but her voice remains steady when she speaks. She may be a heavy smoker; her sentences are periodically interrupted by coughs that sound wet and cavernous.
“Yeah, I drove to his place. That’s the thing. I can see him missing dinner. Happens sometimes. He gets caught up playing one of his games or goes hunting and loses track of time. But…his things was boxed up. Most everything. Boxes with no lids. All them boxes had a Post-it Note on it with somebody’s name written on it. Ma, or Pa, or Johnny—that’s his cousin’s boy—or Aunt Sue, my sister over in Primrose. That’s not like him. Why’d he be giving his stuff away?” My first thought isn’t a good one.
“Has he mentioned moving?” Her laugh turns into a phlegmy cough that lasts a full twenty seconds.
“Move? Where the hell’d he move to?” She laughs again but controls it. “No—no, he wouldn’t move away. We’ve always lived here, same house even, until he moved out after high school. Don’t know where he’d go otherwise. Anyway, his job is here.”
“What does he do?”
“Fixes snow machines at a shop near town. Just him and a few other guys, they’re the regulars.”
“Has he been missing work?”
“Yeah, his boss says he’s no-showed the last four days.” Not a good sign. Still, if he’s a suicide, a body shouldn’t be too hard to recover. He probably wouldn’t go hide himself. What would be the point?
“Any guesses as to where he might be?”
She exhales a long breath—or cigarette smoke. “Well, no, sweetheart, if I knew where he might be, I suppose I wouldn’t have called you, now would I?”
I grit my teeth and try to remember fear doesn’t always bring out the best in people. “All right. Can you give me the address of his place? I’ll get over there this afternoon. Your address too if you would.”
It’s a nearly three-hour ride to the location, more if the road is blocked for a planned avalanche. I’m taking the Tank, a spacious but beat-up blue boat of an SUV we keep for long runs like this when we anticipate dealing with snow, which is pretty much always. The Tank’s owner committed suicide and no relatives claimed the vehicle. Abandoned property becomes the force’s property. It’s a bear to drive and has several annoying quirks, but it’s a better choice than my sedan.
I keep a go bag in my locker because troopers get called to so many far-flung locations, but this is my first opportunity to use it. Per my mental checklist, I have all I need: my gear, my notebook, a destination, and a case. I’m headed out. The chief yells for me before I can get to the door.
“Hey, you’ll need a partner on this.” I’m sure my face shows how unpleasant I find the idea. I always worked cases alone in DCS. I have major anxiety and extremely obsessive thought patterns. They help me do my job, but they’re a little much for most people to understand, so I just work solo when I can. It suits me fine since I’m not one for talking much, anyway. This forced partnership with almost every case assignment is the aspect of this job I hate the most so far. I’ve never addressed the whole room before. It’s usually just me talking to Chief Quint or whichever trooper I’m grudgingly working with on a particular case.
“Anyone want to come with me? Missing person. Road trip.” The other officers stay perfectly still, side-eying one another. None of them will volunteer. The chief will have to assign someone. The others will make commiserating comments to the lucky guy as they punch him on the arm in solidarity. “Bad luck, brother. Hope she doesn’t nag you to death.” or “Watch out—you know how women drive.” The usual.
In the end, it’s Officer Michael Harper who’s voluntold. He’s younger than me, and I’m not quite thirty. He could be a lead actor in one of those childhood buddy movies, all blond hair, blue eyes, and round and pink at the cheeks. He’s nice enough when he says anything, which has been about twice to me in the time I’ve known him.
When Chief Quint suggests to Harper he may want a break from Anchorage, Harper just nods and retrieves a granola bar and a small container of Nutella from his desk drawer before he heads to his locker. I wonder how he intends to eat the Nutella, since there are no utensils in sight. He crashes into my desk as he swings his bag over his shoulder on the way to the door. He touches the desk as if he’s apologizing, then looks around as if to check whether anyone noticed. We’re the only people standing, so odds are everyone did.
I look away. Other people being awkward makes me feel awkward.
I hate that about myself.
I am in a hurry to get out of the station.
“Let’s go.” I grab the keys to the Tank and make deliberate eye contact with Harper to make it clear I’m driving. He smiles and nods. We load up, and after a few miles, it becomes obvious the Tank is having one of its good days. It works out its grinding and settles into a smooth and barely perceptible rumble. I pat the dashboard, feeling an odd fondness for the cranky vehicle, which sometimes runs so loud you can’t hear yourself think. Unfortunately, Harper takes the relative silence as an opportunity to talk.
“Gotta be honest with you. I am really glad the chief put me on this one.” I glance at him as he elaborates. “I don’t get a lot of missing persons. I’m the chief’s go-to for drug cases. Which, you know…” He shrugs. We both know drug cases are the vast majority of Anchorage crime. Even petty robberies usually end up being related to drugs. Harper clears his throat.
“I noticed you get a lot of the kid cases. That’s because you’re from DCS, right?”
“Yes, probably.”
He whistles. “That’s a job I couldn’t do. No way. Kids, man. They get me right in the heart.” He smacks his chest.
They can have that effect on me too. Children bring up a lot of complicated feelings since my time in DCS.
“Sounds like we’ve got an interesting case. What details did the caller give?” He flips open a notepad, though I’m not sure how successful notetaking will be right now. The Tank may be less vocal than usual, but it’s never a smooth ride. On Highway 1, I recount the conversation with Mrs. Stanton about her missing son. Harper stops writing as he draws the obvious conclusion. “Suicide?”
“Yes. Probably.”
“Easy-peasy.”
“Wouldn’t go that far.” I talk as if I’m the veteran when my most significant experience with missing persons was with DCS.
“If he’s a suicide, why didn’t he just kill himself in his trailer? Guessing he had a gun.”
“Right. Probably not so easy-peasy. Don’t assume anything, and don’t talk about him in the past tense in front of his mom.”
“Right. So, what do we do when we get to his place?”
I fumble. I don’t know.
“Take pictures?” I put the authority back in my voice. “Look for a weapon, anything like that, and without disturbing too much, I’d say. Take a walk around the trailer. If he was just out to commit suicide, I doubt he’d make a big effort to go far.”
“If we don’t find him right away, how long do we look?”
I can’t even pretend to know the answer. “I think we focus on trying to find him today, yes?”
“Good plan.” Harper opens the granola bar, and then the whole car smells like hazelnut. He dunks the bar into the jar. Ingenious. I watch a few crumbs fall from his mouth before I refocus on the drive.
* * *
The scenery is amazing. It reminds me of the long drive to Anchorage six months ago.
Seattle had been my home for almost twenty-nine years, but I had to get away. My partner had just broken up with me. My mom had died after being sick for ages. I had no family and a job I gave way too many shits about to remain healthy. I packed a few possessions, loaded the car, and left.
I hopped around Washington and Oregon for a while and worked as a security guard for a few months in Eugene. I asked around to see if I could get into legitimate law enforcement, but it was rent-a-cop or bust. The towns had colleges with kids studying criminology, so the police departments had their pick of the litter. A woman with no training from the Department of Child Services didn’t stand a chance. The men I talked to scoffed, smirked, and checked out my chest while they suggested I try a job that wasn’t so tough. Finally, a woman in Corvallis pointed me in the direction of Anchorage.
