So Sure Of Death

by Dana Stabenow

“Yes, you smug bastard, I am still here.” A pause. Almost pleadingly, his boss said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Liam put down his pen and sat back again. “I was thinking that a guy who maybe killed one person, who actually did shoot another and assault a third-one of our own, I might add-I was thinking this guy was going to get clean away if I didn't do something, and do it fast.”

  A brief pause. “You're sure this guy did it?”

  “The shooting and the assault, yes. I don't have his confession on the stabbing yet, but he was there, he had the murder weapon, he was fleeing the scene. And he was drunk. He looks pretty good to me.”

  Another pause, while they both thought about what booze did in the Alaskan Bush to keep up the rates of child abuse, rape and murder every month. “There wasn't any other way to apprehend him?”

  “No.” There might have been, but Liam had been the trooper on the spot, and it had been his decision to make. He wasn't going to back away from it.

  Another pause. “All right.” A long sigh. “But, Jesus, Liam.”

  Liam grinned at the calendar on the opposite wall. “Well, John, you know how I hate to fly.”

  “Fine,” Barton said, “then just don't get on them in the first place. You don't have to jump out of them in midair.”

  He didn't say and Liam didn't mention that if you were a trooper in the Bush, you flew.

  Their minds must have been following the same track, because Barton said, “You ever think about learning to fly, Liam?”

  “No,” Liam said for the second time that day.

  “All right, all right,” Barton said, “never mind, it was just a suggestion. Who was this guy and what'd he do?”

  Liam told him. Barton grunted. “Nice he returned to the scene of the crime.”

  “You know what they say,” Liam said blandly. “That is your standard deviant sociopath's customary behavior.”

  Barton made a rude suggestion as to what Liam could do with “they say.” “What about this boat thing?”

  Liam's smile faded. He fished out the picture of the Malones in Hawaii. It was a little waterlogged but Molly's impact was undiminished. “Seven dead; father, mother, two kids, father's brother and two deckhands. Or so I gather, from talking with the locals and going through the father's business records. We'll have to wait for the M.E.'s ID to be sure.”

  “Why?”

  “There'd been a fire.”

  “They die of smoke inhalation?”

  Liam didn't hesitate. “I don't think so.”

  Barton's voice sharpened. “Why not?”

  Liam paused, putting things in order in his mind before he said the words out loud. He hated repeating himself, and he knew Barton hated listening to people repeat themselves. “Let me run it down for you. At approximately nine this morning, a couple of fishers spotted theMarybethia,drifting. At first they didn't think anything of it, but then they noticed she didn't have her nets out. When she got closer, they could see what looked like soot and scorch marks and nobody on deck. So they pulled their gear and took a look. Seven bodies and a boat that looked like it had been on fire. The fire was out by the time they got there. So they took her in tow, only she was down so much in the water they took another look around.”

  Liam could hear the rat-a-tat of a pencil hitting Barton's desk. “And found what?”

  “Do you know about drain plugs?”

  Barton's chair creaked. “Yeah, the plugs in the stern. Usually rubber or plastic? You pull them when you pull the boat out of the water, to drain it. Also allows for snowmelt to drain when you've got it in dry dock over the winter.”

  “Right. Well, someone pulled those plugs.”

  Dead silence. “You don't say.”

  “I do say. And not while they were in dry dock.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Very.”

  “What else?”

  “They towed theMarybethiato Kulukak, a little village on Kulukak Bay.”

  The chair creaked and there was the sound of footsteps. “Where?”

  “About forty-some miles east of Togiak.”

  The sound of a finger tracing a map, mumbled curses. John had trouble distinguishing latitude from longitude. “Okay, got it.”

  “Then they called me. I flew out with Prince-thanks for telling me she was coming, by the way-and boarded her.” Liam took a deep breath and said evenly, “It was a charnel house, John. All bodies burned beyond recognition. You could tell there'd been five adults and two kids by the difference in size, but that was about it.” He didn't mention the smell. He was doing his best to forget it.

  Footsteps, creak of chair, thump as feet went on the desk, rata-tat of pencil. “So what makes you think this was anything more than a boat fire?”

  “First, the plugs.”

  “Yeah, but that happens, sometimes even to the most experienced fisherman. You hear about it all the time. Like the float planes on Lake Hood. Every other fall or so, somebody leaves taking off the floats until it's too late and the floats freeze in the ice. Or in the spring somebody forgets to take off the skis and put on the floats and the lake melts and their plane sinks. It happens. That all you got?”

  “No. At least one of the adults was shot in the head.”

  Creak of chair, thump of feet on the floor as Barton sat straight up. “Are you sure about that?” he said sharply.

  “As sure as I can be without confirmation by autopsy. There is a wound in the left temple of one of the adult males that looks exactly like the entry wound of what I'd say was a nine-millimeter bullet.”

  “Was there an exit wound?”

  “I think so, but it's hard to tell for sure. The fire messed that side of him up pretty good.”

  The pencil tapping resumed. Barton couldn't sit still at gunpoint. “You want me to fly an arson investigator out there?”

  “The sooner the better. I had to leave the boat moored in the Kulukak small boat harbor. I've got one of the tribal council members watching it, but the Malones lived in Kulukak.”

  Liam didn't have to say anything more. “I'll call the fire marshal tonight. He owes me a few. I'll have someone on the way first light tomorrow. When's the earliest flight into Newenham?”

  “Nine, I think.”

  “Okay, probably leaves Anchorage around six-thirty, seven. I'll have somebody on it.”

  “Thanks.”

  A pause. “Which came first, pulling the plugs or the fire?”

  “Maybe he killed them and pulled the plugs to sink the evidence. Maybe she wouldn't go down and he set her on fire to cover up the evidence. I don't know, John. It's all just speculation at this point. Forensics will tell us more.”

  “Did you find a gun on board?”

  “Yes. A rifle, a thirty-ought-six. Couldn't tell if it had been fired. I sent it in with the bodies.”

  “I'll call Bob down at the crime lab, make sure he gets right on it. Could be a murder-suicide thing, you know.”

  “Could be.”

  “But you don't think so.”

  “No.”

  Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat. “How many people fishing in that area yesterday?”

  “I don't know for sure. There was a tender taking on fish in Kulukak. The processor they work for operates out of Newenham. I'm going over to their office to talk to the superintendent.”

  “You must have some kind of estimate on the number of boats in the area.”

  Liam sighed. “The locals told me upwards of fifty.” Silence.

  “What the hell, John,” Liam said wryly, “if it was easy, everybody'd be doing it.”

  “You need help?”

  “Not yet. I may. I'll let you know.”

  “Prince working out all right?”

  “She calls me sir.”

  Barton grunted. “Good. She's working for you.”

  It was Liam's turn to be quiet.

  “Oh hell.” Barton blew out a breath. “You're back up to corporal.”

  Liam waited,
trying to sort this out. “I haven't been a trooper for four months.”

  “Corcoran put the hoodoo on Newenham,” Barton said bluntly. Corcoran had been the trooper sergeant in charge previously assigned to Newenham. “No one wants to transfer there. Somebody needs to be boss. You've got the time in. You have management experience. You're it.”

  “That's why I got a probationer,” Liam said. “She's too new to know the difference.”

  “That's why,” Barton said. “She'll be okay with a little seasoning. If it's any comfort to you, she scored in the top three percent of her class.”

  “It isn't.”

  “I don't blame you,” Barton said, and in an eerie echo of Liam's own first impression, “Just be careful how you go through any doors.”

  “I plan on it. In the meantime,” Liam added, “you better make sure the media doesn't get hold of my promotion. They yelled loud enough when you didn't fire me.”

  Barton hung up. Liam replaced the phone in its cradle and folded his hands on the desk, studying them with a frown.

  In another life, John Dillinger Barton might have lived up to the promise of his first two names, but fortunately for the citizens of the state of Alaska he had been seduced early on into the practice of law enforcement, and rose high and fast through the ranks. At one time, there was nothing that Liam wanted so much as to move as high and as fast, even aspiring to as lofty a goal as colonel in charge of the entire organization.

  And now, here it was for the second time, against all odds, against all expectations: preferment. Congratulations, he thought. You're a corporal. Again.

  He waited for the surge of pleasure the news had brought the last time. It didn't come, and what was even more odd, he didn't miss it. The affair with Wy and the deaths of his wife and son and of those five people in Denali National Park had changed his perspective. He was still ambitious, but his ambition had been tempered by events. Being a trooper was important, but it wasn't everything.

  Right now, today, he had a job he was good at, that he enjoyed, that contributed to the well-being of the community. He had at least the hope of a relationship with a woman he had thought lost to him three years before. He'd made a friend in Bill. He'd been more or less adopted by Moses. He was getting to know the people in his district, from the tiniest village upriver to the most isolated coastal community. He'd even begun to recognize a Yupik word here and there; thegatchahe had heard Halstensen use today in the Malones' living room. It was a word with a heavy accent on the second syllable and appeared to be used for exclamatory purposes, as when, coming out of AC, an old Yupik woman had slipped and spilled her groceries. “Gatcha!” she had said, clearly annoyed. He tested it out now, trying to imitate the sounds, putting thegin the back of his throat and loading it down.

  There was a squawk from outside that sounded unnaturally close to a human chuckle. He got up and looked out the window, and a black and beady eye met his with an inquisitive cock of its head.

  Even the goddamn ravens seemed to have stamped him with their croaky seal of approval.

  He was putting down roots.

  Not a man accustomed to introspection, Liam looked inside himself and for the first time in a long time did not despise what he saw.

  It was a start.

  ELEVEN

  Seafood North was a big square building painted a solid sea green. Their logo was a stylized fish head with a diamond-shaped patch of roe behind it, white on blue. It looked as if it had been generated by a computer: neat lines, perfect circles and no artistic value whatsoever. Liam thought of Nelson's remark about Yupik style, and wondered what the logo would have looked like if the company had asked a local to design it.

  They were canning, Liam could tell by the thunks of the chink that echoed from within the building, chopping off the salmon heads before passing the bodies down the line to the butchers, who cleaned and gutted them before passing them down to the canners, who stuffed the raw fish into cans before the cans passed through the lidders and then into the pressure cookers.

  Prior to his arrival in Newenham, what Liam had known about the science of salmon processing could have been writ large on the back of his badge, but over the past three months he had been at some pains to become familiar with his new posting, and that included the economic force which drove it. As any good beat cop could tell you, when you lived where you worked, when you knew all the players on a first-name basis, you were halfway to the solution of any crime practically before it had been committed.

  The office was located in the right-hand corner of the building that fronted the road leading down to the docks. He opened the door and went in.

  A young woman sat behind a counter, filling out a form. “Just a minute, please.”

  A counter stood between Liam and the girl's desk. Behind her were the doors to what looked like two offices, both closed. The walls were lined with the cheap, quarter-inch dark wood paneling that had been the last, chic word in interior decorating in the fifties and sixties, before people had come to their senses and started Sheetrocking. In Alaska the paneling was particularly egregious because of the long hours of darkness during the winter, when you needed all the light in a room that you could get.

  The paneling in this room was pockmarked with nail holes and patched with duct tape and maps. There were maps of the Bay area, fishing district by fishing district, the Ugashik, the Egegik, the Naknek, the Kvichak, the Nushagak, the Togiak. There were three different maps of Alaska, one geographical, one political and one divided into the twelve Native regions. There was a map of the North Pacific, with lines drawn between Seattle, Anchorage and Tokyo. There were a scattering of maps that upon closer inspection proved to be published by the Alaska Geographic Society, and variously depicted the Wrangell-St. Elias International Mountain Wilderness, the Aleutian Peninsula, prehistoric Alaska, the Kuskokwim River and Alaska's Native People, Their Villages and Languages.

  He stepped to take a closer look at this last one, searching for Tulukaruk, but the only village listed on the thumb was Manokotak. It was a long way from Bristol Bay to the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, too; he hadn't realized quite how far until now. There was a mountain range in between the two, the Ahkluns, that began where the Kuskokwim Mountains left off. Probably one of the reasons there were trees in the Bay and not on the Delta. Like the trees in Kulukak, he thought, although the fog had obscured most of them. He wondered how the old ones had made it over those dividing mountains to settle in the Bay. Probably paddled around. With their storyknives.

  The rustle of paper made him turn. The girl was neatening a stack of yellow forms. The lighting was rectangular and fluorescent, with two of four tubes burned out. The only natural light was from the window in the door. The place felt like a cave. The girl at the desk still hadn't looked up. He cleared his throat. “All right,” she said sharply. She looked up and saw the uniform. “Oh.”

  “Hi.” Liam removed his cap. “My name is Liam Campbell. Alaska State Troopers.”

  She got to her feet. “Tanya Bernard.” Her hand was warm and a little sweaty, her handshake firm and businesslike.

  He smiled. “Hi, Tanya. Is the superintendent in?”

  She blinked under the influence of that smile, and looked down at her feet, as if surprised to find herself on them. She pulled herself together. “Certainly. I'll tell him you're here.”

  She got halfway to the office door on the left-hand side and stopped. “Did you have an appointment?”

  Liam shook his head. “No.” With a faint air of apology, he admitted, “I'm afraid there has been an incident with one of your fishing boats.”

  “Which one?”

  Liam saw no reason not to tell her; the Bush telegraph being what it was, the news would be all over the state before midnight. “TheMarybethia.”

  She paled. “Dave Malone's boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he all right?” She recollected herself. “Molly? The kids?”

  “I'm afraid not,” he said r
egretfully, watching with interest as more color washed from her face. “I really can't say any more, Tanya.” She remained still, staring at him, and he said gently, “Your boss?”

  She recollected herself with a start. “Oh. Right. Just a moment.”

  She walked back to the office on not quite steady feet. Interesting. She tapped on the door. “Mr. Ballard?” She waited a moment, then opened the door just wide enough to stick her head in.

  It was wide enough for Liam to see the feet propped on the desk, and certainly wide enough to hear the crash when the chair tipped over. There were some oaths. Tanya, with a discretion worthy of a personal assistant of many years' experience, slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

  A few moments later the door opened, revealing a tall, bald man with a solid beer belly, wearing a rumpled navy blue sports coat over a brown plaid cotton shirt and khaki pants. “Yes?” He stifled a yawn and looked mildly puzzled. “Er, you're a trooper?”

  “Yes,” Liam said. “I need to talk to you about one of your fishermen. Could we go into your office?”

  He went in as Tanya went out. “I'd appreciate it if you would stick around until I can talk to you,” he told her.

  She met his eyes with perfect composure, armor firmly in place. “Certainly.”

  Five minutes later the superintendent's bewilderment had given way to sick comprehension. “All dead?”

  Liam nodded. “All.”

  “But… how?”

  Liam had already told him once, but typically news this bad had to be repeated, and often more than once, to be fully assimilated. “It appears they died of smoke inhalation during a boat fire,” he said, which was perfectly true, so far as it went. Someone had certainly gone to great lengths to make it seem so. Anticipating the next question, he added, “In Alaska, violent death, even by misadventure, must be thoroughly investigated. Which is why I'm here, Mr. Ballard.”

  Liam rearranged himself more comfortably in the hard plastic chair. “The bodies have been transported to Anchorage for autopsy. While we wait for the results, I am reconstructing the last known actions of the victims.” He produced his notebook and a pen, and fixed Ballard with a polite, inquiring stare. “It is my understanding that theMarybethiadelivered to Seafood North. Is that correct?”