Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Leonard Needham. Liam had googled him. The list of hits went on for fourteen pages, with some stunt nerds doing—or trying to—YouTube recreations of some of his more famous stunts. The one where he’d jumped from a moving car into a moving plane and then parachuted out of the plane onto the top of a moving semi was among Liam’s least favorites.

  He shook his head. Someone who had had his ten best stunts written up in Popular Mechanics with color commentary by a physicist and a mechanical engineer was not likely to orchestrate something as clumsy as murder by blunt instrument and cliff. Further, Needham had advised his nephew to fess up about vacating the right of way. A straight arrow, or wanting to appear like one. Needham wasn’t entirely out of the running, either, but he got a square on the outer edge of the grid.

  The Kinnisons and the Reeses both got squares on the outer edge. A cursory troll through state databases showed him that Cynthia Reese was a realtor and her husband owned the go-to local marine supply store. Greg Kinnison was a physical therapist and his wife Grace a dentist. Their only stake here was the ability to brag about being friends with Gabe McGuire. Although they probably wouldn’t object to gating the community, either.

  What the hell was it with people who, so long as they had theirs, were no longer willing to share? By law beaches in Alaska were public up to the high water mark but it meant nothing to the general population if there was no access to them. Like Alaska’s national parks and wildlife refuges. You could drive into Denali, you could even drive to the Gates of the Arctic, but Wood-Tikchik and too many others required air transportation, which was never cheap and so out of the reach of most citizens.

  Domenica Garland. She was one of McGuire’s nearest neighbors, so opportunity. If Brillo was right, and he usually was, anyone had means. Motive? Plenty, in this case, ranging from the professional to the personal. Personally, she and Berglund had been fuck buddies. She acted like it didn’t matter that it had ended but who the hell knew with women? Professionally, she wanted to drill for oil in the Bay, and Berglund was about to begin a study that might not stop the drilling but it wouldn’t hurry it along, either, especially if Berglund managed to get an entity as high profile as UNESCO involved. Erik had been a good-looking guy and Liam could see her sleeping with him as an exercise in vanity, but killing him over what had appeared to Liam to be a pretty pitiful collection of artifacts seemed extreme, especially in a state with a legislature which regarded the resource extraction industry as a cash cow. God knows the industry had bought enough members of that body their seats. Liam didn’t think Garland regarded Erik Berglund as even the mildest threat to her job or her plans to drill for oil and gas in the Bay. Still, she had more motive than most, so she went into a square next to Erik.

  Jeff and Marcy Ninkasi, friendly with everyone, sold beer to everyone, and still would if UNESCO declared the entire lower Kenai a World Heritage Site or RPetCo turned the Bay into the next North Slope. Didn’t live in the neighborhood so no stake in the right of way controversy. Outer edge.

  Hilary Houten. Rival archeologist. Liam had seen the dislike between the two of them at Backdraft and the Chamber and heard of it at the party. Houten had forty years on Berglund and Berglund had at least a hundred pounds on Houten. Brillo said Berglund had been struck hard on the side of the head and that the rest of his injuries might have come afterward. Liam couldn’t imagine a scenario involving a physical confrontation between the two, certainly not one that ended with Berglund dead. But professional jealousy was a powerful motivator. He put Houten’s name on a square next to Berglund’s.

  Aiden Donohoe and wife Shirley. Classic Alaska Boomer. Dismissive of Berglund’s alleged discoveries. Didn’t live in the neighborhood but would undoubtedly want to cater to Blewestown’s most famous citizen. If Blue Jay Jefferson had just donated fifty large to the Chamber to spur development along, what fantastic sum could be hoped for from Gabe McGuire? That would be worth at least one phone call to the borough in support of vacating the right of way. Wouldn’t hurt Donohoe’s feelings any to see Berglund and his touchy-feely notions of preserving the Bay for all posterity dead and gone, but he wouldn’t at all like a murder tarnishing the rep of his perfect little community by the sea, either. Outer edge, with Shirley, who ran a local beauty salon.

  And speaking of Blue Jay Jefferson. Another quintessential Alaskan old fart, like Moses Alakuyak, yet not at all like that obstreperous old timer. For one thing Jefferson was white and Moses had been Yupiq, and although Moses would have repudiated the notion in incendiary language a gulf of privilege would have separated the two. According to Ms. Petroff, Blue Jay Jefferson was a boomer, a charter member of the Spit and Argue Club, a former state legislator, chair of (pick one) the Alcohol Beverage Control board, the Alaska Industrial Development and Economic Authority, and the state Republican Party. In his day he’d been a lobbyist for every oil company who’d punched a hole anywhere in the state. He’d been set to run for governor until he came out against the PFD and it was too much to ask Alaskans to vote for someone who wanted to sideline their gravy train. Boomers like Jefferson and Donohoe regarded any economic activity as good economic activity. Pissed at Berglund for holding that up, but again, another creaky old guy who barely had enough strength to stand up on his own two legs. Outer edge.

  Alexei and Kimberley Petroff went right into separate boxes next to Berglund before Liam even thought about it, based on nothing but his interview with them the day before. There was something there, he just didn’t know what. Yet.

  He raised his head and looked at the door that led to the outer office. Ms. Petroff was obeying his orders to leave him strictly alone this morning. No. Nope. Not. The sins of the father and all that. Absolutely no reason to add her name to the grid.

  Allison Levy, Jake Hansen, and Paula Pederson, along with Hansen’s wife, Lily, went on the outer edge. The first three were members of the Blewestown City Council. The Hansens ran a halibut charter during the summer and fished commercially during the winter. Allison Levy ran a bed-and-breakfast and Paula Pederson grew peonies in commercial quantities and FedExed them to brides all over the South 48. So far as Liam could tell the four of them were there to round out the group of local movers and shakers slash neighbors, all of whom, if McGuire stroked them enough, might help him block off the road to the beach. He reached all of them by phone. All of them told the same story, bed before midnight.

  He tossed down his pencil with an exasperated sigh and sat back in his chair to look at the map of Blewestown and environs that Ms. Petroff had produced in record time. If it didn’t fill quite all of the wall it covered a decent portion of it. The bar scale showed 1 inch : 1 mile. He got up and went over to stand in front of it. He found Heavenly Drive and traced it with his forefinger to Augustine Lane, their street, and drew a small red heart, a smile pulling up the corner of his mouth.

  He found Baranov Avenue and penciled an X next to the junk yard. He’d looked up the owner in the borough’s parcel viewer and run them through the state records. The guy had been inside for everything from disturbing the peace to felony distribution, but the state hadn’t managed to keep him there for more than a year at a time.

  And the place didn’t feel like the headquarters of the drug organization Barton alleged to exist. A professional dealer would know not to draw attention his or her way, and certainly not by stockpiling junk all over their property. A professional dealer would find a house on a busy but respectable street where the traffic in and out wouldn’t draw attention. No, this guy was an individual entrepreneur.

  He called Chief Rafferty and suggested she take in the sights along Baranov Avenue. She said she’d be delighted.

  He looked back at the map. The rocky outcropping that formed what Erik Berglund had believed to be a rough natural dock was barely a smudge. He drew a shovel to mark the spot.

  He went back to his desk and sat down with his hands behind his head, staring at the map. It had contour lines on land and depth contours on water. The dark
er the green on land, the higher the elevation, and the darker the blue at sea, the deeper the water. The coves, bays and inlets on the south side of the Bay were lapis lazuli, while the north side of the Bay, the Blewestown side, was such a pale blue as to be almost gray where it was nearest to shore. It was all sand, all the way down from Wolverine River at the head of the bay to the Spit, around Cook’s Point and north all the way up to Turnagain. There was coal in the bluff that fronted the beach that had been mined for steamship fuel back in the day, and offshore platforms producing oil and natural gas lined the western side of Cook Inlet. Liam was no expert but it followed that sooner or later RPetCo or someone else would start punching holes in the Bay to see what was there. Where there was promise of a valuable resource in quantity, someone always did. It was the history of Alaska, beginning with the Russians and the sea otters.

  He needed to find Erik’s cabin. It was reasonable to expect that it was somewhere out East Bay Road because that’s where the dig was and who liked a long commute? Except Judge DeWinter. He had emptied Erik’s pockets and found keys only to Erik’s truck. From what he had heard so far about dry cabins it might not have a lock. Or even a door.

  On impulse, he picked up his cell, opened his contacts, and tapped on one. The contact picked up after the first ring. “How you doing, Dumbledore?” he said.

  “Fuck off, Campbell.”

  Something inside him relaxed at the sound of that deep, assured voice. “Hey, Jim. Where are you?”

  “In the Park. At home.” There was a woman’s voice in the background. “It’s Liam.”

  “Is that Kate? Tell her I said hey.”

  “Liam says hey. Kate says hey back, and are you calling from Newenham?”

  “From Blewestown, actually. On Chungasqak Bay.”

  Liam heard what he assumed was coffee pouring, followed by a slurp. “Never been there, but I hear it’s scenic.”

  “It is that.”

  “You and Wy there on vacation?”

  “No. They opened a post here and Barton asked me to take it on.”

  “Huh. I thought he was pretty happy with you in Newenham.”

  Liam sighed. “I think he’s trying to move me closer to Anchorage.”

  “He did.” Jim’s voice had a smile in it. “Was a time you’d have been happy about that.”

  “That was then, this is now. I made it back up to sergeant, that’s good enough. I don’t want to deal with the politics. Hey, you get that school of yours up and running?”

  “It’s up, I don’t know how well it’s running.”

  “Pretty cool, though.”

  “If I can make it go how I want to, yeah.”

  “I hear Kate finally took down Erland Bannister.”

  “Well, he died on her before she could put him back in jail, but yeah. We’re all good here, Liam. Why are you in Blewestown?”

  “Barton says the drug trade has moved into the lower Kenai hard, manufacturing and distribution. He wants me to clean it up, like we did in the Valley.”

  “He wants to ride you into headquarters on a wave of trophy shots.”

  “I think so.”

  A brief silence. “And?”

  Liam shook his head. “And I haven’t been here a week and the local PD chief schooled me on exactly and precisely where I’m allowed to serve and protect, and the local judge warned me off using excessive force. Plus I got a dead archeologist, murdered last Monday night or thereabouts, and the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, also murdered, that Brillo says has been lying where I found it for thirty plus years.”

  A brief silence. “Anything else?”

  “The whole place feels off. I think it’s partly because Blewestown is the whitest town I’ve ever been in in Alaska. Everybody’s white here, Jim. Except for my administrative aide. Whom Barton hired before I even got here, FYI.”

  “Yeah, she’s probably spying on you for him.”

  “Be my guess. The only other Natives I’ve met are her parents who, I’m overjoyed to relate, are involved in my murder case, and I had to get Wy to fly me across the Bay to meet them. Newenham was majority Yupiq. It looked like Alaska. This place looks like, I don’t know. Idaho. You know. If Idaho wasn’t landlocked.”

  “How is Wy?”

  “Fine. She sold her air taxi in Newenham. She’s figuring out what she wants to do next.”

  “She keep both planes?” A pilot’s question.

  “Yeah. She meant to sell the Cub but when it came right down to it she couldn’t.”

  “Don’t blame her. Got a place to live?” Jim had thoroughly enjoyed the story of Liam’s Progress through Newenham housing.

  “Yeah, a nice one. Local guy built it for his wife and two kids. Kids are gone and he opened a brewpub in town and moved in over the shop. For sale by owner, saved us a ton of money. Got a hell of a view. I can’t get too close to the edge of the yard because we’re right on the bluff that backs up the town and it is seriously all downhill from there.”

  Another slurp. “How far away are you from retirement?”

  “Two years.”

  “You can always pull the plug. I haven’t looked back.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Liam said. “The thing is, I don’t know what the hell else I’d do if I did. All I know is I don’t want to live in Anchorage, and I sure as hell don’t want any job that involves interacting with the goddamn legislature.”

  “You can always say no.”

  “You’ve met John Barton, right?”

  A laugh. “Yeah. Still. You’re a grown ass man, Liam. Figure out what you want and make your own damn decisions.”

  If only I knew what that was, Liam thought after he’d said goodbye and hung up.

  Nineteen

  Friday, September 6

  WY SPENT THE MORNING UNPACKING, and then made a trip to the grocery store. There were two in Blewestown and neither of them was AC, a nice change from Newenham, where, like almost everywhere else in Alaska that was not on the road system, the Alaska Commercial Company had a lock on the sale of groceries.

  It amused her to stand in line and eavesdrop. The cashiers seemed to know all the customers, the customers appeared to be all local all the time, and they were united in their joy at the end of tourist season and the beginning of the school year. She was picking up the local vernacular, too. For starters, almost none of the locals called Blewestown “Blewestown”. It was the Bay, or Baytown, or B-town, or, sometimes, Chungasqak. This last was employed with the emphasis that Alaskans in general used in calling Denali Denali and never McKinley, an Outsider who’d never even been to the state. She resolved to look up the meaning of “chungasqak” as soon as she got home, and Kapilat, Engaqutaq, and Chuwawet while she was at it. There was no one here to discourage her from learning the local Native language, so why not?

  In even more thrilling news, there was also an honest-to-god bookstore—she parked in front and peered into the windows to be sure—and she took careful note of their hours. The last time she’d lived in a town with a bookstore she’d been in college.

  When she got home she did another round of form on the deck just because she could. The deck here had fewer nail pops and warped boards and so was less prone to trip her up during Fair Ladies Work at Shuttle. She showered and dressed, and thought about going down to Blue Sky Air and introducing herself. She felt strangely reluctant to do so, and wondered at herself.

  Maybe it was that she’d never had a vacation before. Her adoptive parents had been very strict about earning one’s way in life and she’d been brought up to work. In college she’d always had full time jobs between semesters, and after she’d started Nushugak Air she was determined never to turn down a job. Summers were naturally her busiest season, what with flying fishermen and processor workers back and forth, the occasional flightseeing charter, and that one year she herring spotted for that asshole Cecil Wolfe. But fall kept her hopping, too, hauling hunters into and out of their camps and lodges. Winter, although the dark reduc
ed flying hours, still saw an increase in local travel, school trips, shopping trips, basketball games, any distraction to hold off cabin fever. It was great for business, especially since in her Cub she could get into and out of the most rudimentary strips. It made hers the go-to flight service for a lot of folks between Newenham and Togiak, which was what she’d been aiming for, and helped her pay off both aircraft in record time, another goal. Wy hated owing money.

  And regular customers could be very unforgiving. If you missed a pickup or a drop-off, it didn’t matter if you had a perfectly valid excuse, like a hundred year storm blowing in off the Bering, or someone else pranging their plane at the Newenham airport and halting all air traffic for hours. If someone in Port of Call missed their Alaska Airlines flight in Newenham because you didn’t pick them up on time, you could kiss that customer and all their future revenue goodbye.

  Put it all together and owning and operating an air taxi made the prospect of time off a joke. This was a new experience for her and she didn’t know quite what to do with herself.

  Fortuitously, at just that moment the phone rang. It was Liz at Sunset Heights. “Sybilla wanted me to call to make sure you were coming to lunch today. Noon.”

  “I thought that was tea on Sunday.” Wy could almost hear Liz shrug. “Tell her I’ll be there.”

  It was an hour until noon and she decided to drive down to the airport and check on her aircraft. Both were snug at their tie-downs, and she took the time to give them a critical once-over. After the trip from Newenham the Cub was coming up on its annual inspection. The Cessna had another six months to go. It was time to replace the headsets and both could use new paint.

  She saw someone working on the engine of a red and silver Beaver in front of a large empty hangar and walked over to introduce herself. She’d had her fill of shoveling snow off two sets of wings, and if she could find someone to paint her planes she’d need a place out of the weather for the paint to cure.