Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  A propane lantern hung from a hook and she took it down and pumped it up and lit it with matches she found in an ashtray on the table. With the gloom dispelled more details revealed themselves. The cabin might be old but it was clean and neat, with none of the funky smell that came with age in so many of its brethren. There were two sets of shelves, Blazo boxes three high each, one for clothes and one for books. There was a five-gallon water jug on the floor under the counter and a small metal tub on top with toiletries neatly arranged around it. A rectangular mirror in a plastic frame hung on the wall. The shelves below held a selection of canned and dry goods, heavy on the Spam, and a flat of bottled water. There was a saucepan, a frying pan, a moka pot, and a two-burner Coleman stove. On a single shelf nailed to the wall above sat two plates, three bowls, and a collection of public radio mugs. A rusting coffee can held cutlery and utensils. A small wooden box with a lid that locked held a bag of ground coffee and packets of raw sugar and creamer.

  There was a nightstand next to the bed. On it was a headlamp and a stack of books, including a fat textbook on fossils in east Africa by Maeve Leakey, a tattered paperback copy of The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, the first three novels of the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher, Willie Hensley’s autobiography, and a slim volume titled Mapping the Americas by Shari M. Huhndorf, subtitled “The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture.” It was published by Cornell University Press and looked dense but interesting.

  She put the book down and looked around the cabin again. She thought she would have liked Erik Berglund, too, and she was suddenly angry that the pleasure of his acquaintance had been stolen from her, and that the community of Alaska had been robbed of the contributions that he might have made to it, and that the world of archeology would now never benefit from his discoveries. Murder was the rankest form of crime, the outright theft of a human life and all that that life had to offer to family, friends, and the world.

  There was a step and she turned to see Liam in the doorway, red-faced, sweating, and breathing hard. “They do not pay me enough to ever again walk up that hill.”

  “Did you manage to hide the Penis Extender?”

  He nodded. “Backstay does go farther west, but you can’t see it because the trees have almost overgrown it. I backed in. You can’t even see it’s there.” He looked down, saw the flat of bottled water, and grabbed one. Twisting off the cap he tilted his head back and flatfooted it. Still breathing hard he put the cap back on and looked around for the garbage. It was in a small pail with a tight lid.

  “You liked this guy,” she said.

  He considered while he got his breathing under control. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. He was a good guy, smart, funny, interesting, really into his job. He had that ability to reduce words of six syllables into words of two syllables so that non-experts could understand what the hell he was saying. I don’t know if he’d found what he said he had but he was excited about it and was sure he could prove it. I’ve always like people with a cause.” He looked around the cabin. “Did you find anything?”

  “He was a reader. And he wasn’t a slob, in spite of living rough. I’ve seen a lot worse.”

  He went to the table and looked through the scant stack of paper there. “He only had one Visa card in his wallet, along with his driver’s license and an ATM card.” He let the paperwork fall with a sigh. “Ads. He must have picked them up at the store. Did you see a checkbook?”

  She shook her head. “He could have paid for everything through his bank online and elected not to receive paper statements. There are probably computers and Wi-Fi at the library.”

  “What’s this?” He pulled something from the back of one of the chairs.

  “What’s what?” She came to stand next to him.

  It was a bright scarf made of lightweight cotton, at one end a vivid pink which by the other end had graduated to a pale peach. “Pretty,” he said. “And for sure it didn’t belong to Erik.”

  They both heard it at the same time. “What does Ms. Petroff drive?”

  “An old Ford Jeep.” He listened. “Sounds like it’s in pretty good shape. Turn down the lamp.” He replaced the scarf on the back of the chair. She hung the lamp back up on the hook. “Let’s wait around the back of the cabin.”

  They did so, listening to the engine of the car grind ever closer, until it topped the rise and the driver killed the engine, which rattled and popped and shook and dieseled for a good minute afterward. Wy, pressed against Liam, heard his heart beating in one ear and the sound of a car door opening and closing in the other. Light footsteps, then the creaking of the cabin door as it opened. Liam pulled away from her and went around the cabin on soundless feet. Wy followed as quietly as she could.

  He went in the cabin first and surprised Ms. Petroff in the act of lighting the gas lantern. “Oh!” she said, and knocked the lantern off the table. Liam caught it before it hit the floor. Ms. Petroff made an abortive attempt to reach the door, and only subsided when she saw Wy standing there.

  “Sit down, Ms. Petroff,” Liam said, taking her firmly by one arm and guiding her to a chair at the table. Wy came in and closed the door behind her, and Liam finished lighting the lamp. He turned it up all the way, filling the little room with a warm radiance. He hung it from the hook and they both turned to look at the girl.

  She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. The scarf was looped around her neck. “You lied to me, Ms. Petroff,” Liam said, his voice implacable. “I asked you where Erik Berglund’s cabin was and you said you didn’t know.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath, and dropped her hands, revealing a tear-stained face. She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “Why?”

  She swallowed. “I didn’t want you to know I knew.”

  “Because I’d have questions you don’t want to answer.”

  She closed her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you have a relationship with Erik Berglund, Ms. Petroff?”

  She bit her lip and another tear slid down her cheek. “Yes.”

  “Where were you between Monday night at ten and two a.m. Tuesday morning?”

  Her eyes flew open. “What?”

  “Where were you between—”

  “Stop!” she shouted. It was the first loss of self-possession Liam had observed in her. “Just stop. I didn’t kill Erik. I was nowhere near his dig that night or even that day. My aunt and uncle had a family picnic on the beach and we were out there until after sunset.” She let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Yes, I had a relationship with Erik, but it’s not what you think.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “He—” She twisted her hands together. “He was my father.”

  They stared at her, speechless.

  She’d taken an online genealogy course because she’d thought it would be fun if she constructed a family tree for her parents’ anniversary. When the instructor suggested all the students take a DNA test from 23andMe, she didn’t hesitate. When the results came back, she didn’t believe them, and submitted a second sample, which came back the same.

  Alexei Petroff wasn’t her father.

  What felt even weirder was that she was half white. She had been raised as a full-blooded Sugpiaq. It was how she was down in the tribal register.

  She had confronted her mother, who had confirmed this unwelcome news but wouldn’t tell Sally who her birth father was. Alexei, her mother said, didn’t know.

  Liam thought of the barely repressed rage he’d observed in Alexei and wondered if that was true. Sally Petroff unconsciously confirmed that feeling when she said, “I don’t know if she’s right about that. Dad always treated me a little differently than my brothers. I thought it was because I was a girl and they were boys. Dad’s a really traditional guy and he’s all about the men doing the providing and the women catering to them. He was mad at me when I decided to go away to school.”

  Pissed
at losing all that unpaid domestic help, Wy thought, and was immediately ashamed of herself. A traditional lifestyle was why Alaska Natives had survived millennia in some of the most difficult natural conditions on earth, and there was no call to disrespect the people who still lived by those precepts. Their traditions were responsible for the existence of the Yupiq part of her DNA. She had been raised by white adoptive parents and she had never lived a traditional lifestyle, and while she might have written off her relatives in Ik’iki’ka she knew what she owed the people who came before them.

  Besides, Alexei might have been angry but he hadn’t forbidden his daughter to leave the village. He could have, and he could have made it stick, too.

  “There’s an online database that collates DNA samples. Even if the DNA of the person you’re looking for isn’t in it, sometimes you can trace them through the DNA of a relative of theirs whose is.”

  Erik had a second cousin in the database, and the connection was made.

  “It took me a long time to find him. He was in eastern Africa, working for UNESCO. I wrote to him. The next thing I knew he was here, in Blewestown.”

  “This was in June?”

  She nodded. “He wrote to me that he was here. I told my mother. She was really angry, and she told me if I told Dad that she would never forgive me.” She wiped her face dry with her hands and met Liam’s eyes. “Erik told me Mom never told him about me. He never even knew I existed, that he had a child. He told me he came back to the Bay to meet me, for us to get to know each other. I didn’t transfer down here until a month ago, like I told you, but he would drive to Anchorage once a week and we would meet for a meal or a walk. When I moved back to the Bay, we would meet here and talk. That’s all. That’s really all.”

  “That scarf.”

  She touched it. “Erik brought it back from Africa for me.” Her lip trembled. It would be the only thing she ever received from the hands of her birth father. “I forgot it the last time I was here.”

  “Do you think your mother told Alexei that Erik was your father?”

  “She would never.”

  “Do you think Erik told Alexei he was your father?”

  “No!” This time she was shouting. “No, he didn’t. He promised, and I believed him. Nobody told Dad anything, not Mom, not Erik, not me.” She sniffled, and Wy looked around for Kleenex and settled for a paper towel. Sally mopped her eyes and blew her nose and crumpled the towel between her hands. “We talked about it. Erik didn’t want to meet in secret.” Her lips trembled into a smile. “He was proud of me. Proud that he had a daughter. I think I—” Her voice broke. “I think I could have loved him. If we’d had time, maybe we could have made Dad understand.”

  And now all she had left was a scarf and a dead hero to worship. No substitute for a living, breathing father, even if Sally’s mother had treated him as nothing more than a sperm donor. “When was the last time you saw Erik?”

  “Sunday. I came up in the morning with doughnuts and coffee. He wanted me to come down to the dig. He said he’d used the dig as an excuse, something he could pretend to work at so he could stay here and see me. He said that he’d found something unexpected, something that would refute prior studies and add to the history of the Sugpiaq in the Bay.”

  “Did he tell you anything about his personal finances?” Liam held up a hand. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Ms. Petroff. I’m just trying to find a paper trail to inform my investigation, so I can find out who killed him.” He gestured at the table. “So far as I can tell he didn’t even have a checkbook.”

  She sat down again and took a deep breath. “He didn’t have many possessions. He said when you spent time in places like east Africa, you understood how much we have that we don’t need. Clothes and food and shelter were necessities.” She glanced at the bookshelf and smiled a little. “He said books were a luxury he couldn’t do without. He said once he spent more money on books than everything else combined.”

  “How did he pay for them?”

  “When he was working for UNESCO, he said they paid him by wire deposit into his bank. He charged everything to his Visa card or paid with cash out of an ATM, and paid his bills with automated payment processing through his checking account.” She smiled faintly. “No stamps, he said.” Her hand caressed the scarf again, gently, reverently. “I barely got to know him. Just a few months, and now he’s gone.” Her voice broke.

  “What do you know about your father’s brother, Joshua?” Liam said.

  She looked up, blinking away tears. “What?”

  “Your uncle Joshua, your father’s brother. What do you know about him?”

  “I—I—I guess I know what everyone knows. He disappeared when he was ten years old.”

  “Did you know that Erik was with him when he disappeared?”

  “Yes, and I know Erik was attacked at the same time and due to a traumatic brain injury that he was never able to remember what happened that day. Erik told me.”

  “You asked him about it?”

  “Of course. It was one of the first things we talked about.”

  “And you believed him.”

  She drew herself up and Liam saw a resurgence of the Ms. Petroff of old, and, truthfully, was glad of it. “Of course.”

  Liam looked at Wy. Wy shrugged. “Okay, Ms. Petroff. I’ll be talking to your aunt and uncle to confirm your presence at the picnic, but that’s all for now.”

  She raised her chin and met his eyes squarely. “Am I fired, sir?”

  “Did you go through my desk, Ms. Petroff?”

  Her shoulders slumped a little, and then straightened again. “I did, sir. I wanted to see what your thoughts were on Erik’s murder.”

  He stared out the window for a long time with no appreciation for the view. Finally he looked back at her. “I’m a cop, Ms. Petroff. People lie to me all day long every day on the job. I expect the truth from the people I work with. I rely on it. I can’t do my job without it.” He stared at her.

  There was a chin wobble, instantly repressed. “I understand, sir. I’ll clean out my desk in the morning.”

  “You’ll show up for work at eight a.m. and do your job,” he said firmly, “and every day afterward.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me, Ms. Petroff.” He met her eyes with a hard stare. “Don’t let me down again.”

  She stood up and held out her hand. “I won’t, sir.”

  They shook on it. Ms. Petroff got in her Jeep and crept down the hill while Wy and Liam extinguished the lantern and made sure the door was on the latch. Liam had been right; there was no lock.

  They stepped out into the soft fall evening and stood in the middle of the small, cleared area. “Gloriosky,” Wy said.

  Liam, like her, surveying the view, couldn’t disagree. The sun was an hour away from setting but it was setting at their backs, so that the light was crawling up the Kenai Mountains and leaching away into the deepening blue of the sky. Termination dust encroached only on the very peaks so far. The light of a boat approached the head of the Spit, making for the boat harbor and home. If there was a swell on the water’s surface it was hidden by distance.

  “The first time I met Sybilla I took her back to the post,” Liam said.

  “Yes?”

  “She asked Ms. Petroff how her father was. Ms. Petroff said he was fine, and Sybilla said, ‘Such a nice boy, Erik. So polite.’” He looked at Wy. “Sybilla knew Erik was Sally Petroff’s father.”

  “She was a teacher. They always know everything. She said she warned him. I’ll bet it had something to do with not stirring up old trouble.”

  “Yeah, and see how well that turned out,” he said. “I knew she reminded me of someone the first time I saw her. Erik had given me a tour of his dig the day before, and I didn’t put it together. Some detective, me.”

  “You got me off the hook, not once but twice. Your detecting skills are okay by me.”

  He put his arm around Wy and pulled her in, smiling into
her upturned face. “I love you.”

  She smiled back. “I love you, too. And the sooner we’re home the sooner I can demonstrate how much.”

  “Motivation,” he said. “I fear for the springs on my Penis Extender.”

  There was a rustle from the side of the clearing and they looked around to see a lynx with five kittens coalesce out of the undergrowth. They took no notice of Liam and Wy, and the two of them stood very still, watching the dappled cats with their enormous paws pad silently by, to melt into a copse of scrub spruce as if by magic.

  Wy let out her breath in a long sigh. “That was worth moving here all by itself.”

  “I know,” Liam said. “Basically all the wildlife I remember from Newenham is the fish.”

  “And the raven.”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  Hand in hand they started walking toward the steep slide of pitted gravel that passed for a road.

  There was a soft squawk from the top of a tree and Liam stopped so fast his heel skidded in the dirt. “What was that?”

  They looked around but whatever it was made no further noise, and they were left to continue on their way in peace.

  Twenty

  Monday, September 9

  MONDAY MORNING LIAM WALKED INTO the post to find Ms. Petroff at her desk. “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning. All well here?”

  “It’s only one minute after eight, sir.”

  “Ms. Petroff, did you just make a joke?”

  “I might have, sir, but I take no responsibility for how well your ears work.”

  “Less of your sass, Ms. Petroff.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He hung his ball cap on the coatrack and sat behind his desk. The folder holding the square and his scribbled notes on each person of interest were exactly where he’d left them in the drawer on Friday. He pulled it out and spread everything across his desk once more.