Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Gabe shook his head. “All I had was a flashlight and not a very big one. That cave is creepy enough during the day. I went straight in and straight out again.”

  “You didn’t smell anything?”

  Gabe’s mouth tightened. “Place smelled like cave and I was focused on getting Kyle unstuck. If I’d noticed anything odd I would have said so, Sergeant.” He emphasized the last word.

  Liam thought about that for a minute. Between Kyle and Logan and Gabe, the cave had been like Grand Central Station that night. Still, as he now knew himself, it was a big space with a lot of obstruction to eyesight and foot traffic. He’d only found Erik Berglund’s body because he’d tripped over the rocky surface. “I’ve already heard he pissed off a lot of people locally. Were any of them here that night?”

  “The Reeses and the Kinnisons were pissed at him for gumming up the works with the right of way. He might have had a thing with Domenica Garland, who is also a neighbor, a couple doors up.”

  Len snorted. When Liam looked at him he said, “Ain’t no male in the room that night Domenica Garland hasn’t had a thing with. She is busy, that girl.”

  “Including the two of you?”

  Len laughed. “I don’t have anything she wanted.”

  “Bullshit,” Gabe said, “you just run faster than the average man.”

  “And you, Gabe?”

  “I have a pretty good turn of speed myself,” Gabe said.

  In spite of himself Liam grinned. “I’ve met the lady. I can relate.” He looked back at the list. “What about the rest of your guests?”

  “Some I’ve met and liked. Some I met and wanted to get to know better for other reasons.”

  “Alexei and Kimberley Petroff?”

  “He’s the chief of the local tribe. I met him when I took the boat over to Kapilat on Memorial Day, and he was on this side for the Labor Day weekend, so…” He shrugged.

  A friendly acquaintance with the chief of the most powerful local tribe would not be a bad thing for any bigwig who moved into the area. Liam mentally commended the actor on his diplomatic instincts.

  “Did any of them get in an argument with Erik that evening?”

  McGuire and Needham exchanged glances. Needham said, “Erik and Hilary Houten were arguing, but they always are. Were.”

  “What about?”

  “Houten telling Erik he was full of shit and that his theories were crap. He was serious about it, I think. Erik seemed mostly to be egging him on.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Jesus fuck, how I hate this,” McGuire said, staring into his mug.

  Len said, “Erik got into a conversation with Kimberley Petroff. It looked pretty intense.”

  “Did anyone else see?” Like her husband?

  Len shook his head. “I don’t think so. They were out in the yard there—” he nodded his head at the window “—and it was getting dark by then.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Blue Jay Jefferson, maybe? But then he’s cranky with everyone. And he’s the one who separated Houten and Erik.”

  “Did you hear any traffic on the road after everyone left?”

  “No. There’s a lot of insulation in the form of shrubbery between the house and the driveway.”

  Gabe shook his head.

  “Could you do me a favor? Could the two of you take some time over this list and give me a sense of who left in what order? Erik left last, okay, but who left first? And how much time between departures?”

  The two men looked at each other and shrugged. “Sure.”

  They put their heads together over the list. After a little argument, they handed it back with numbers in front of all the names.

  Liam stood up. “Thanks for your time.” He folded the piece of paper and tucked it away. “You’ll be around for a while?”

  “This you telling us not to leave town, lawman?” Len said, drawling out the words like he was an extra in a Randolph Scott movie.

  “It kind of is,” Liam said. He pulled on his cap and nodded. “Later, gentlemen.”

  Fourteen

  Wednesday, September 4

  LIAM SAT IN HIS PICKUP FOR FIFTEEN minutes, on the phone with Ms. Petroff. He read down the list for her and she gave him everyone’s addresses and phone numbers. The Reeses and the Kinnisons were nearest but no one was home at either house. Probably everyone was at work and school. Liam left his card in the door jambs of both. He’d call them later.

  After Kinnison and Reese was Domenica Garland, who lived in a Teutonically square house with one steep roof whose peak nearly achieved low earth orbit. It was shingled with large squares of dull black slate. At that angle if one of those suckers slid off it could decapitate Liam with one slice. The trees here all kept a safe distance as if they were thinking the same thing.

  He got out of the truck and was startled by a flock of barn swallows swooping back and forth through the air. It was September, not the height of mosquito season, and he wondered what they were eating.

  He’d never given a damn about birds or bothered to learn their names and habits until a raven had started stalking him in Newenham. He needed to stop jumping every damn time something shook a tail feather at him.

  He walked up a wide path made of more slices of slate, these a rusty gold in color. The slate continued up the broad low steps that led to an enormous wooden door that looked as if it had been looted from a Gothic cathedral. He pressed the ornate wrought iron doorbell, disappointed when he heard only one low, drawn-out “bonnngggg.” By rights there should have been a rope with Quasimodo on the other end of it.

  The door opened and, yes, it was the looker from the Backdraft parking lot. “Yes?” she said.

  “Domenica Garland?”

  “Yes. And you are?”

  “I’m Sergeant Liam Campbell with the Alaska State Troopers, ma’am,” he said, producing his badge, and smiling his very best smile. He was certain she would expect such a smile from every single man she met. “I wonder if you could spare me a few moments.”

  “What’s this about?” she said, not budging.

  “May I come in?” He took a step forward.

  She fell back with a frown and even that looked good on her. He’d never seen hair and eyes that matched before, the black of ebony, of sunless space, of the slate on the roof. Of the inside of Erik’s cave. She played it up, too; every article of clothing was black as well, button-down tucked into jeans, belt, shoes. As in the parking lot on Monday, everything fit her body so creaselessly that he could have speculated about her underwear. But he was better than that.

  She probably wouldn’t know it but the shoes were a dead giveaway that she wasn’t from around here. All Alaskans kicked their shoes off at the door. Christmas at Grandma’s house, the entryway looked like a shoe store.

  The interior of this house looked the farthest thing from a shoe store, and the farthest thing from Grandma’s house for that matter. The windows were floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, and if there was a contest to who had more square feet of glass she would have beaten him and Wy and Gabe McGuire and Jeff’s brewpub all together. The view was of course spectacular because it seemed every view in Blewestown was and because he had the feeling that this woman never settled for less than the best.

  Next to the view, the rest of the house shouldn’t have mattered but it was obvious that it did to the person who had built it. Most of it was covered in stone. There was a sort of navy blue slate on the floor, the countertops were brown speckled granite, the backsplash was white marble, and the fireplace surround was a broad strip of—amethyst? The hearth was a block of rose quartz, and the fireplace mantel and the windowsills were green jade.

  It was Moria. It was the Hall of the Mountain Kings. It was the mine of the Seven Dwarves. “Dig, dig, dig, with a shovel and a pick,” Liam said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What a spectacular room,” he said, smiling again as hard as he could.

  Her eyes narrowed. “I kno
w you, don’t I?”

  “Not formally, no. We, ah, passed in the parking lot of the brewpub on Monday.”

  “Oh. Ah. Yes. What’s up, Sergeant? I don’t begin every day with a visit from the troopers.” She checked her phone. “I don’t have long, I’m afraid. I have a meeting in town in half an hour.”

  She hadn’t asked him to sit and he had a lively enough sense of self-preservation not to allow himself to get too comfortable in this house. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Erik Berglund is dead.”

  She went very still for a moment. “But I just saw him Monday night.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s why I’m here.”

  “But he’s only forty years old.”

  “Yes. His death was not from natural causes.”

  Her eyes widened a fraction but otherwise she gave nothing away. “You mean someone killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  Her disbelief was manifest. “Murder?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Why would anyone bother?”

  The invaluable Ms. Petroff had provided a thumbnail bio. Thirty-eight, unmarried, no children, graduated with a degree in civil engineering, had spent all her working life with RPetCo in Asia and South America, now head of operations in Alaska. Maybe she was just that cold. He made a pretense of consulting the notes app on his phone. “You were one of the guests at Gabe McGuire’s party Monday evening.”

  “So was Erik.”

  “Yes, and preliminary evidence suggests that he died last Monday night or early Tuesday morning. Which makes the guests at the party the last people to see him alive.”

  “Other than the murderer.”

  “Other than the murderer,” he said with a nod. “I understand that you had a personal relationship with Mr. Berglund.”

  “I did.”

  He waited. So did she. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “We were occasional bed partners,” she said. “It was never more serious than that.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “A month, perhaps.”

  “Was it over?”

  She shrugged. “It is now. Obviously.”

  He was a little taken aback and tried not to show it. “Did you quarrel?”

  Her smile was sharp and beautiful, although her dark eyes retained a perceptible wariness. “We had our differences.”

  “Because you’re the head of RPetCo, and because RPetCo wants to drill for oil in Chungasqak Bay, and Erik might have thrown a stumbling block in your way?”

  “Primarily. But Erik posed a very minor threat. The state of Alaska has always looked favorably on resource extraction.”

  Given the amount of money RPetCo donated in local elections, that was a given. “And your fields on the North Slope are drying up.”

  She nodded. “And, as you say, our fields on the North Slope are drying up.”

  “Did the two of you meet here? Or in town?”

  She smirked. “Here. Obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “He was living in a dry cabin. I don’t do dry cabins.”

  Liam glanced at the amethyst hearth. “Obviously.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know where his cabin is?”

  “No.”

  “When did you leave the party Monday night, Ms. Garland?”

  “Domenica, please.” She strolled forward, so far as he could tell solely so he could get a whiff of her perfume. “I arrived at six on the dot and left at ten-thirty, also on the dot. I was the first to leave.”

  “You’re very exact.”

  “I’m a scheduler, Sergeant. I had to be home by eleven because I had a phone call scheduled with London then, which is eight a.m. their time.” She held up her phone. “I keep everything on my calendar, should you require data to back up my word.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.” He tacked on the last two words just to see her reaction. There was none. A very cool customer, Domenica Garland. “I appreciate your time, Ms. Garland. I may need to get back to you with more questions as the case progresses. May I have your phone number?” He held up his phone in his left hand, making sure his wedding ring was clearly visible. It didn’t even register on her peripheral vision.

  “Of course.” They exchanged numbers.

  “Thank you. You’ll be in state for the foreseeable future?”

  She smiled but she didn’t call him on it the way Len had. “I will.” She waved a hand at the surrounding house. “This is my home, Sergeant. My permanent residence. I travel all over the state and Outside and overseas as well with my job, but I always come home again.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, touching the brim of his cap. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She smiled into his eyes. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  On the whole, he thought, as he turned the key in the ignition, he preferred flirting with Sybilla Karlsen.

  His phone buzzed with incoming text.

  Just turned the corner at Cook’s Point. Ten minutes out.

  It was after four and he felt he’d put in a hard day’s work. He texted back a thumbs up and headed into town.

  She had brought takeout from Moose’s Tooth in Anchorage. As a bonus, she hadn’t brought Jo back with her. “I think she means to hound Brillo about the autopsy.”

  Excellent news on many different fronts. Brillo was generally impervious to pressure but Jo was her own PSI of power tool. Liam might get results sooner than he’d hoped for. Plus, the best pizza in the world. Plus Wy.

  But after dinner he felt a little restless, unable to concentrate on the book in progress, which was a shame because it was Simon Winchester’s Pacific and like all Winchester’s books informative and challenging and in some unspecifiable way he felt reading them made him a better law enforcement officer. Nevertheless, tonight he couldn’t track. He closed it and said, “Want to go for a ride?”

  Wy, who was reading what looked like a space opera on the other end of the couch, looked up and smiled. “Take a look around your new domain?”

  “Not exactly.”

  They piled into his pickup and wandered around, first downtown, which existed largely between two parallel main streets, Sourdough and Cheechako, with others, all of them named for trees, intersecting them both perpendicularly. “Almost a perfect grid,” Wy said.

  The few restaurants still open were closed for the day, as were the coffee shops. Wy made sure to point out the bookstore, and they took note of the building supply store and the mini-mall that ran from a hardware store on one end to a quilt shop on the other. “We might never need to order anything by mail again,” Wy said.

  “Yeah.” Liam headed back up Alder, crossed Sourdough, and continued up the face of the bluff, which remained paved all the way to the top, but with a steady increase in switchbacks that became more acute the higher they went. “I’m getting seasick,” Wy said.

  The road emerged at the edge of the bluff to intersect with another two-lane road that ran along the edge in either direction. The street sign said Heavenly View Drive, and it wasn’t wrong, which they knew since they lived on it. “Right or left?” They had yet to explore beyond their new house in that direction.

  “Left is home.” Wy pointed up the Bay. “Right.” That way she could admire the view, and he wouldn’t have to endure the occasionally straight drop off the edge of the road. At least not until they drove back this way to get home.

  The road had no shoulders but fortunately very little traffic. Driveways led to everything from log cabins covered in moss to McMansions that looked as if they’d been airlifted in from Orange County. He instructed Wy on the meaning of “dry cabin”. She shuddered. “I lived my first year in Newenham with an outhouse. Don’t ever want to do that again.”

  “Never had to, never want to. Ahah.”

  “Ahah what?”

  He slowed, checked for traffic, and turned left on Baranov Avenue. “Ahah, this is the street Judge DeWinter lives on.”

  The surface was dirt and
the sides were lined with an impenetrable hedge of alders that in places met overhead to form a tunnel. Roads with names like Shelikov and Rezanov appeared and disappeared along with the houses built on them. At one point the road went down one side of a steep if brief canyon, crossed a one-lane steel bridge with no railings over a dry creek bed, and climbed back up the other side. The landscape opened suddenly on what appeared to be a—yes, it was, a junk yard. There were dozens of cars, a black Ford F-150 with its cab smashed almost flat onto the seat, a gray Impreza with a crumpled hood and four flat tires, an old station wagon with wooden doors, and more of the same. The vehicles, if they could still be called that, were parked haphazardly on both sides of the road, leaving barely enough room for him to creep by. More had been dumped on the side of the road and left long enough to sprout fireweed through the broken windows.

  “They better never have a fire at the end of this road,” Wy said.

  Liam thought of Chief Rafferty, and wondered if she’d ever been back here. Maybe she should pay it a visit. Maybe someone should tell her she should.

  A two-story house with a flat roof and plywood siding stood adjacent to the junk yard. There was a soggy-looking couch next to a tire swing hanging from a deck that protruded from the second story, and an American flag over one window. On that deck stood a skinny guy in a MAGA cap taking a leak. He saw them and waved hello with his penis, creating a sparkly arc that showered the pit bull barking ferociously at them from the yard below.

  “Ew,” Wy said.

  Liam slid past, just managing not to scrape the paint from the driver side of his pickup or to do a ditch dive off the other side of the road. The road began to incline and about ten yards down the alders closed in again. There were three more driveways off to either side and in half a mile the road ended at a two-story house with an attached garage and a view across Cook Inlet that included all the volcanoes from Douglas to Spurr.

  “Spectacular,” Wy said. “Is this the judge’s house?”

  “Yeah. Long commute.”

  “Worth it.”

  There was a turnout before the judge’s driveway and Liam pulled around and headed back up the dirt road. The weenie wagger had disappeared, lucky for them.