Her face was flushed, her eyes wild, and every instinct he had screamed yes. It would be fast and furious, hot and supremely satisfying, it would fulfill every dream he'd had in the last three months, hell, in the last three years. The heat came off her in waves, scorching him. She shoved him down and straddled his body, and it was his turn, eyes closed. “Wy…” He felt her hands tugging at his jeans and heard something halfway between a growl and a groan rip out of his throat.
“Shut up. Just shut up and let me- Jesus, Liam.” Her hand closed around him and she leaned down.
He felt her breath on his skin and nearly came right then. “Wait,” he said. “Wy, wait.”
“What?” She sounded dazed.
He took her upper arms in his hands and sat up, sliding out from under her.
“Liam?”
He climbed to his feet, turning his back to fasten his fly. It wasn't easy, and it didn't help that his blurred vision couldn't seem to find the zipper tab, and when it did, that his fingers couldn't seem to hold on to it.
Behind him he heard the rustle of clothing, and knew she was putting herself back together, too. He took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. When his vision cleared the first thing he saw was his cap lying on the ground where she had thrown it after pulling it off. He swept it up and turned to face her.
The pulse was beating in her throat, hard enough to cause her collar to flutter. She was trembling, and she wouldn't look at him, fussing instead with one of the buttons on her shirt.
It would have been so easy to have taken each other then and there, on the rocks of the riverbank. He remembered in detail the clasp of her warm, wet flesh, the sound of the hitch in her breath, the salt taste of her tears, the smell of her sweat and that elusive, sweet-tart fragrance that was all her own. The way she arched up when she came, the surprise and pleasure in her voice when she cried out. And he remembered what it was like to kiss and touch and talk his way through a night with her, to come into her, to come inside her.
But one night was not what he wanted. One quick rutting on the deserted bank of a river was not what he wanted. Before, he had settled. Now, he wanted more, more than a hasty coupling in the front seat of her truck, or on the side of a deserted airstrip.
She finally finished with her shirt, but she still wouldn't look at him. She turned and took a step toward the plane. He caught her arm and pulled her to a halt.
She didn't try to pull away. He could feel the faint tremor in her body. “Why?” she said, her voice husky. “Why, Liam?”
Liam took a deep breath and expelled it. He pulled off his cap again and ran his hand through his hair, trying to choose the right words. “Because this isn't all I want,” he said at last. “I want it, mind.” He tried to smile. “Pretty hard to hide that.” His smile faded. “But it isn't all I want.”
Her voice was almost inaudible when she spoke. “What if it's all I want?”
He set his teeth and took his time resettling his cap on his head. “I'm a domesticated man, Wy. Okay”-he held up one hand- ”maybe I wasn't always. I had my share of fun. But I liked being married. I liked waking up in the same bed every morning. I liked coming home to the same house every night.” He hesitated. “I loved being a father.”
He met her eyes straight on. “I want it all, Wy. All or nothing. Marriage, kids, starting with Tim, so long as we both shall live. For better or for worse. For richer or for poorer. Till death do us part. I know what the words mean now, Wy. Take it or leave it.”
And then, with as much dignity as a man with an erection straining at the front of his jeans can muster, he turned and limped to the plane.
When they rolled to a halt in Newenham, he said, “You said Prince went out to the dig in your Cub?”
She nodded.
“You can't get a Cessna in there, can you?”
She shook her head.
“Can you scare up another Cub?”
She nodded again.
“Okay, I have to make a few phone calls. I'll meet you back here in about an hour?”
She nodded.
Fine. “Okay, see you then.”
He walked away, cursing himself for ten different kinds of fool.
“Oh come on,” Moses was shouting over the noise of the smoky bar, crowded with fishermen getting an early start on the evening. “There was nothing noble or tragic in that kid's death. This country has the potential to kill me six different ways before I get up every morning, but at least I know what I'm up against.”
He drained his bottle and smacked it down on the counter and fixed the poor unfortunate who had incited his wrath that afternoon with a beady and, Liam noticed for the first time, very ravenlike eye. “This kid gets some half-assed idea, probably from Thoreau, who hasn't gotten half the kicking around he deserved, to wander out into the woods and live off the land. He has no survival skills, no woodcraft and he starves to death.”
“Still-”
“He was on a road, for crissake!” Moses bellowed. “He even had a goddamn abandoned trailer for shelter! All he had to do was step outside and turn right and he could have hitched a ride to the nearest burger!”
Bill brought him another Rainier and he snatched it from her hand and took a long, steady swallow that drained half the bottle. “Frankly,” he said, after a long, loud burp, “I'm grateful he died before he could lower the I.Q. level of the gene pool by procreating. I'm just sorry he left a diary so that yo-yo could write a book about him and inflict it on the reading public.” Moses drained the other half of the bottle with another long swallow that everyone hoped would cool his choler. It didn't. “Make a hero out of him, you want to. In my book, he was just a dumb kid who literally didn't know enough to come in out of the cold.”
He surveyed the bar in search of someone to disagree. Prudently, no one did so. Not only an elder, not only a shaman, not only a government-certified, Grade-A Alaskan Old Fart, Moses was a man it was unwise to cross when he got himself on the outside of a few beers. From the level of belligerence Liam could read in his attitude, it was evident that Moses had started drinking early this morning.
The shaman turned and caught sight of Liam. “Our man in Newenham! You didn't do form this morning.”
Liam looked and felt guilty. “I'll do it tonight, Sifu.”
“No, you won't, you'll be visiting with your dad.”
Liam froze in midstride. “Excuse me?”
“Your dad, he's here, he wants to see you,” Moses said. He surveyed Liam with eyes as shrewd as they were bloodshot. “You can run away to Newenham, but you're still in the world, boy. Didn't you know?”
Liam looked at Bill, who had her arms crossed on the bar. “Say it isn't so.”
Bill nodded.
Liam realized he still had one foot in the air, and put it down. “My father is in town?”
“What, celibacy starting to affect your hearing now?” Moses roared. Heads swiveled in their direction from all around the bar, and Bill couldn't hide a grin.
“Let me get this straight,” Liam said with determined deliberation. “My father, Air Force Colonel Charles B. Campbell, is in Newenham?”
A loud snort was all he got from Moses. “Afraid so, Liam,” Bill said, trying for sympathetic and missing by a mile. The jukebox shifted CDs and Jimmy Buffett started singing about flying the shuttle somewhere over China, which was where Liam wished he was right now. It was a measure of his dismay that he could contemplate a trip on board anything with wings as an escape.
He pulled at a collar grown suddenly too tight. “Did he say where he was staying?”
“He said he'd be out at the base,” Bill said. “BOQ.”
“Thank you for passing on the message,” Liam said, taking refuge in professional dignity. Establishing his air of authority, that's what he was doing. “I need to talk to you for a minute, Bill. It's business. Can we go into your office?”
Bill's gaze sharpened. “Sure.”
He followed her through the kitchen, where a thickset
Yupik woman in stained whites slapped thick patties of beef on a smoking grill and hounded a thin young man who looked enough like her to be her son to simultaneously take out the garbage, slice more onions, open more buns and wash more dishes. “Hey, Dottie,” Bill said. “Keep 'em coming, we got a hungry crowd out there.”
“And while you're at it, get some more hamburger out of the freezer!” Dottie said.
Bill's office was a cramped room next to the back door, with a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The phone was ringing as they walked in. Bill pulled the jack out of the wall and the ringing stopped. She sat in the chair behind the desk and waved Liam into the other. “What's up?”
Liam told her about his morning, from the time Jimmy Barnes had given him the message until his landing half an hour ago at Newenham airport. He told her everything, with the exception of the impromptu stop on the deserted airstrip, because there were some things even the Newenham magistrate in all her judicial authority didn't need to know.
Bill listened, leaning back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head, a remote look on her face, breasts doing nice things to the front of her T-shirt. The woman was sixty if she was a day, and proof positive if anybody needed it that sex appeal did not end with menopause. When he was done, she said, “David and Molly Malone, and David's brother, Jonathan, and their kids, and their deckhands.” She met his eyes. “Must have been tough to take.”
Those endless moments breathing fetid air and wrestling charred flesh into body bags rolled back over him in an instant. “Tough enough,” he said, his voice clipped.
She understood and accepted his refusal of sympathy. “And you're sure it's murder.”
“One of the men was shot,” Liam said flatly.
“You could tell that even though the bodies were burned?”
“I'm figuring the bodies were burned to hide that fact, and that the M.E. will find that they'd all been shot.”
“The fire didn't do the job, though.”
“No. That's when I figure whoever did it pulled the plugs on the boat.”
“Hoping she'd sink.”
“Yes. The bodies are on their way to Anchorage.”
Bill took a deep breath and her breasts strained the words on her T-shirt all out of alignment. Liam looked over her head and thought of other things. For a woman who professed to be older and longer in Newenham than anyone else, Bill packed a punch as powerful as Molly Malone's picture. The stopover with Wy wasn't helping him maintain the fabled Trooper Campbell cool, either. “Did you know the Malones?”
Bill shook her head. “Not well. Oh, I cashed a couple of checks for David after bank hours. None of them bounced.”
“What was his reputation?”
She considered. “I remember one time Harry Hart said Malone reneged on paying for a skiff Harry built for him. But I don't believe a tenth of what Harry says.”
“Any romantic interests outside his marriage?”
“Not that I know of.”
Not much to go on, but he'd started other cases with less. “Anything else?”
She grinned, displaying the merest hint of dimples and a set of white, even teeth. “Well, one time his daughter was in town on a school trip and her and a couple of her friends got all lipsticked up and tried to pass for drinking age. I ran them out, of course. I don't think I ever met the boy.”
“How about Molly?”
“She never came in here. Never saw her anywhere else.” She paused. “Heard plenty, though.”
“What was said? And who said it?” Pretty much everyone came into Bill's place sooner or later. In her position as magistrate, she was on a first-name basis with every offender against the public peace, repeat or first-timer. In her self-styled role as the Elder of Newenham, she'd been in the area long enough to know where all the bodies were buried. Liam was no fool; in the past three months, Bill had become his central data bank.
“Mostly men coming in off the grounds, who'd been delivering fish to the cannery or been tied up to the processor at the same time as theMarybethia.They'd come in looking poleaxed and very, very needy. Usually they'd hook up with the first available woman and head for the nearest pair of sheets. She must have packed one hell of a punch, that Molly Malone.”
Liam pulled out the picture of the Malones on the sailboat and handed it over. Bill studied it, lips pursed, and handed it back. “I see. I thought so. One hell of a punch. Must have been even stronger in person.”
“Yeah.” Liam looked again before pocketing the picture again. “Have to wonder if she saved it all for her husband.”
“I didn't hear otherwise, I just heard a lot of wishing she did.” She paused. “You got any idea who killed them?”
Liam shook his head. “Not so far. Something going on with the tribal chief out at Kulukak. I asked a few questions, I'm letting him stew for now.” He sighed. “The boat was adrift, looked like it had been overnight. They'd been fishing, everybody agreed on that because everybody else was out on the water, too. Nobody saw them come home, so it probably happened out there. Could have been any one of fifty fishers. Darrell Jacobson says he saw a skiff leave Kulukak harbor about ten o'clock last night. Didn't recognize who was driving it.”
“Great. What now?”
“I called the Malones' lawyer from the post. Next of kin is David's sister in Anacortes. He's calling her, and he'll call me back. A tender was picking up fish during the period.”
“Which one?”
“TheArctic Wind.”
Bill nodded. “Seafood North. Right here in town.”
“Yeah. I'm going to want to check all theArctic Wind's fish tickets for yesterday's period in Kulukak, get a list of the boats that delivered. If Seafood North is reluctant-”
“Not a problem,” Bill said, waving a dismissive hand. “I'll slap a warrant on Virgil Ballard so fast it'll drop his socks.”
In the absence of a judge, Liam relied on the magistrate to back him up, and truth be told, Bill was more than delighted to oblige. On occasion she had even been known to take the law into her own hands, the most recent incident having been a man apprehended by the local police in the act of beating his wife. Drunk, disorderly and abusive, he'd made the mistake of hitting the arresting officer.
The Newenham Police Department was understaffed, underfunded and underestimated, although Liam could only judge by reputation, as he had yet to meet any of them. The chief of police had resigned six months before under suspicion of embezzlement of public funds; in that same six months two officers had been accepted into the state police academy, leaving the remaining two officers overworked, overburdened and overwhelmed. During the past three months the two of them had either been in the middle of an armed conflict or sleeping under guard of wives armed with shotguns whenever Liam had tried to contact them.
All he knew for sure was that this particular officer had greeted this particular perpetrator's assault with such enthusiasm that the alleged perpetrator had been wheeled into the magistrate's hearing on local EMT Joe Gould's gurney. Bill had greeted his arrival with enthusiasm, deputized Moses to pull the public defender off his fishing boat and empaneled twelve people from the bar who had taken forty-five minutes to find the perp guilty of assault in three different degrees (he'd backhanded his eight-year-old son on the way to his wife). Bill thanked the jury for their service, dismissed them and sentenced the new felon to six months in jail then and there. As a magistrate Bill had no business trying anything but misdemeanors, but that didn't stop her. She didn't hold much with jury trials anyway, deeming them a waste of honest, hardworking citizens' time. “People got to work,” she told Liam indignantly when he tried, delicately, to show her the error of her ways.
Liam hoped mightily that their district was never subject to review by the state Department of Justice, and that they never got a better public defender than the one they had now. Any case arising from judicial misconduct in Bill's court was bound to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
On the other ha
nd, it was a Rehnquist court. Comforted, he said, “Thanks. I appreciate the help.”
“No problem. You heading back over there now?”
Liam shook his head. “I've got another problem out at that village site that this university guy is digging up.”
“I heard. McLynn was in the bar, trying to drink away the memory. Your new trooper came in after him.” Bill raised an eyebrow.
“She's not my new trooper, she's the trooper newly assigned to Newenham.”
The eyebrow stayed up. “Funny, I got the distinct impression she was working for you.”
Liam took a deep breath. “I suppose she was here the same time as my father?”
Bill nodded, smile fading when she saw Liam's expression.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
Bill looked at him for a moment. “He's your father, Liam. He doesn't need a reason to see you.”
Wanna bet? Liam thought. “Okay, I'm headed back to the airport. Wy's flying me into the village site where she and this guy found the body. See what Prince has dug up. So to speak.”
She winced and followed him into the kitchen. “Have you had lunch?”
A loud sizzling sound as raw potatoes hit boiling grease was echoed by the growl of his stomach. Suddenly he realized he'd flown a hundred miles on no breakfast, and that fear of flying burned calories better than the Boston Marathon.
“Wy, either, I suppose.” He didn't have to say a word. “Dottie! Two burgers and fries, one to go, for the trooper!”
Dottie's expression didn't change. “I told you to peel some more potatoes, Paul! Get to it!”
Paul got to it.
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