A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 18

This is the third year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Today’s story: Unsolved Double Homicide Has Alaska Island on Edge:

Law officers are reassuring residents of Kodiak Island in Alaska that they are not in immediate danger after the fatal shooting of two workers at a Coast Guard communications station, but the lack of reports of any arrests have left people on edge.

Wendy Cavender, a bartender at the B & B bar in Kodiak, a city about eight miles from the Coast Guard base, said residents were getting jumpy because they had few details about what had happened.

“I just think they need to release all the information they have, so people don’t get crazy and paranoid, which might lead to violence,” Ms. Cavender said. “All anybody knows is that there is a shooter and that person might still be at large.”

On Friday the Coast Guard identified the victims as Richard Belisle and Petty Officer First Class James Hopkins. Mr. Belisle, 51, lived in Kodiak and was a retired Coast Guard chief petty officer working at the base as a civilian employee. Petty Officer Hopkins, 41, was an electronics technician from Vergennes, Vt.

Another Coast Guard member found the victims on Thursday morning shortly after the two would have arrived for work at the station, which monitors radio traffic from ships and planes.

F.B.I. agents flew to Kodiak Island from Anchorage, about 250 miles away, and were treating the case as a double homicide.

“There is someone loose who murdered two people,” said an F.B.I. spokesman, Eric Gonzalez, but he said there was no indication other people on the island were in any immediate danger.

He said Friday night that no arrests had been made.

Okay, so there was the 2002 movie Insomnia: “Two Los Angeles homicide detectives are dispatched to Alaska where the sun doesn’t set to investigate the methodical murder of a local teen.”

But this is different.

We are talking about an island. A remote island. A very remote island:

That looks like this:

Where people do this:

Amidst animals like this:

In other words, a mystery rife with possibilities in an area which a writer could with relative ease shut off the characters from the outside world.

That would mean… the killer… or killers… could be anybody… or anything on the island.

Thriller? Yes. Horror? Sure. Sci Fi Thriller? Why the hell not.

It’s “The Cabin in the Woods” meets “Northern Exposure.”

What would you do with this story idea?

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