Liam left the house in a simmering rage and slammed the door to the Blazer hard. It didn’t relieve his feelings, and it didn’t do the Blazer door any good.
Sighing, he started the engine and shifted into reverse. A white station wagon came barreling down the game trail that passed for a driveway to DeCreft’s cabin and nearly rear-ended him. He stamped on the brakes, slapping his head into the headrest on the rebound.
The station wagon went around him, clipping a slender birch in the process, and slid to a halt in front of the cabin. Without wasting a glance on the Blazer, Rebecca Gilbert shot out of the driver’s seat and ran through the front door of the house without knocking.
Liam stared at the house for a moment, but it didn’t yield up any secrets. He sighed. So what else was new. He was a stranger in a strange land.
The white station wagon, a little Ford Escort, was idling in park. Liam got out to turn off the ignition and close the driver’s side door, and then he went on his way.
Eight
The phone was ringing as he walked into the office. “About goddamn time,” a voice barked at him.
Liam sat down. “Hello, John.”
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling all day. Don’t you have someone to answer the friggin’ phone down there?”
“Not in the office,” Liam said. “I guess the dispatcher takes all the calls.”
“Goddammit,” Barton said, “how the hell am I supposed to practice goddamn law and order if I can’t even talk to my goddamn officers?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Liam didn’t bother trying to answer.
Barton went on. Barton always went on. “What’s this I hear about you stepping off the plane into the middle of a murder?”
Liam sighed, leaned back to prop his feet on the desk, and rubbed his eyes. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Corcoran.”
“Hell yes, Corcoran,” Barton said, adding with awful sarcasm, “and a good thing, too, since my own officer on the scene can’t be bothered to phone in a report.”
“Lay off, John,” Liam said. “I haven’t been here two days, I got no handover from Corcoran, I don’t know the territory or the locals, and already I’ve responded to two shootings and a possible murder. Not to mention which I don’t have a place to sleep and I can’t find anyone to press my uniform.”
Barton was outraged. “You’re out of uniform?”
Liam had to laugh, but under his breath and out of John Barton’s hearing.
Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Alaska State Troopers. An air force brat like Liam, his family had moved all over the world during his childhood, ending eventually at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage in 1957, when his father, under pressure from his mother, retired to sell and service Xerox copy machines. He attended Seattle University with the goal of joining the Jesuit brotherhood, elected a philosophy class in which a Washington state trooper came to lecture on the ethics of criminal justice, and on that day gave up the priesthood forever. Upon graduation he returned home to be promptly accepted into that year’s trooper academy class. They’d done away with the height requirement by then, which was a good thing since he topped out at five feet four. Barton was gorillian of build, all of it muscle, and Churchillian of jaw, all of it stubborn, but for all that amazingly good at not trampling over the authority of village elders. He rose high and fast in the department.
He was now the outpost supervisor for Section E, which included Liam’s previous post of Glenallen as well as his new one, Newenham. He was Liam’s boss, and had been for seven years. He had spotted Liam’s potential early on, had mentored his swift rise through the ranks, and had marked Liam as someone who would always make him look good. It was tacitly understood by both men that this would always be in a subordinate capacity, and if Liam had his own ideas about that he was smart enough to keep them to himself.
Barton had also orchestrated Liam’s recent and rapid fall from grace, and his transfer to Newenham.
“So what have you been doing?” Barton said, voice rich with sarcasm.
Liam thought. “Well,” he said, “I had my first tai chi lesson.” He had to hold the phone away from his ear when Barton, predictably, erupted again. Liam waited patiently, smiling to himself. When he thought about it later, he was amazed that he still remembered how.
When he got a chance, he told Barton of the scene he had stepped into at the airport.
At the end of it Barton grunted. “Ninety people milling around and nobody sees a thing. Bullshit. What about the pilot?”
“Out getting lunch.”
“Check the alibi?”
Yes.
“Well, shit.” Barton always preferred the easy answers, and on every case but this one so did Liam. “Who didn’t like him?”
“No one, apparently, but then no one seemed to know him all that well. No wants or warrants, no record of him having been tanked for anything so much as a parking ticket. Good reputation with the local magistrate.”
John interrupted him. “That Bill Billington?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“No reason.” But Barton chuckled, a full, rich, knowledgeable sound.
Uh-huh, Liam thought, and said, “I called the bank, he had two thousand and change in a checking account, no big withdrawals recently. No mortgage on his house; I guess he paid cash. He owned a pickup and a Super Cub, both free and clear, too.”
“I’ll run a check on him from here, see if we come up with anything.”
“Thanks.”
Barton cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was gruffer. “Thought you’d like to know. The wife and I visited with Jenny this weekend. Her folks were there, and they said to say hi when I talked to you.”
“Tell them I’ll call when I get a phone, and I’ll be up when I can,” Liam said, and couldn’t stop himself from adding, “Any change?”
“No, Liam,” Barton said steadily. “She’s just sleeping, like she always does. Curled up on her side like a baby in a crib.” Liam heard the creak of a chair shifting. “How are you and Wy getting along?”
Liam took the phone away from his ear again, this time to stare at it incredulously. It refused to yield up any secrets on its own, and he put it back to his ear cautiously. “What did you say?”
Barton was impatient. “I said, Campbell, how are things between you and the girlfriend?”
Liam said slowly, “You knew about Wy and me?”
“Jesus Christ, Liam, this is the goddamn Alaskan Bush. Everybody knew about it.”
“You son of a bitch,” Liam said, perhaps not the most felicitous manner in which to address one’s boss. “You knew she was here?”
“Yes, I did, you bullheaded bastard,” Barton bellowed, “and, yes, I posted you to Newenham because of it!”
Liam was speechless.
Barton waited for a moment before continuing in a calmer voice. “Face it, Liam. You were one big, walking, talking open wound. Goddammit, we could practically track you by the fresh blood you left behind. Somebody had to do something.”
“You could have told me” was all Liam could find to say. “You could have let me decide for myself what I wanted.”
“Yeah, we could have,” Barton said evenly, “if we wanted to wait another five years for you to make up your friggin’ mind. I wasn’t in the mood.” Barton sighed. “Look, friend. You’re in about the worst possible place there is for a man to be. You lost your son. I don’t want to even think about what that could do to someone. You got a wife in a coma, with no hope of recovery.” Barton was good with blunt. “It might take her years, but she’s dying. You know it, I know it, her parents know it. We all know it. You looked like crawling in next to her and going with. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it. So I put you in the only place I could think of where there was someone who might do you some good.”
“Did you think the demotion was going to help, too?”
“Aw shit,” Ba
rton said. “Answer me this, Liam. When you fuck up, who do you think gets it up the ass?”
“I didn’t fuck up,” Liam said distinctly.
“No, you didn’t, but the people who worked for you did, and you weren’t watching them.”
Liam said nothing, and John Dillinger Barton got uncharacteristically defensive. “Don’t talk to me about personal problems. You got them up the wazoo, agreed, in spades. But a cop can’t turn his job on and off like a switch. You knew that coming in. We all know it coming in.” The chair creaked again. Barton was a fidgeter, constantly in motion—shifting in his chair, shuffling the papers on his desk, doodling with his pencil, waxing Machiavellian with his brain. “You done your box thing yet on this DeCreft murder?”
“I don’t know that it is murder.”
“You said the wire was cut.”
“It was.”
“Think that happened accidentally?”
“Maybe. Maybe somebody was reaching under there trying to cut something else.”
“Yes,” Barton said, “that’s what I figure a pilot good enough to spot herring is gonna do, go poking around underneath the control panel of a plane he’s gonna be flying in with a sharp pair of nippers. Or letting some yo-yo mechanic do the same thing. Uh-huh. Gotta hand it to you, Campbell, you got that situation piped.” He added, as an afterthought, “Who is the pilot, anyway?”
Liam was silent.
“No,” Barton said. “Shit, no.”
Liam sighed. “Yeah, John. It’s Wy.”
“Aw fuck,” Barton said heavily. “Goddammit anyway.” He was silent for a moment. “She a suspect?”
“No,” Liam said immediately.
Barton was silent again, his silence more eloquent than most people’s conversation. “Okay, you’re there, I’m not. But I’m running a report on her anyway; I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, you do the box thing, you hear?”
“All right, all right, I’ll do the box thing,” Liam said irritably, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“Good.” Barton hung up.
The “box thing” was something Liam did early on in every investigation in which he participated. Sometimes, redrawn and relettered and blown up, it found its way into court as Prosecution Exhibit A. It had been a while, but he thought he still remembered how. He took a deep breath and got a clean sheet of paper out of the printer. By fortune good or ill, in the middle drawer of the desk he found the writing implement of his choice, a Pentel Quicker Clicker, with spare leads and erasers. No hope for procrastination there, either, so he began.
The first square was drawn in the center of the page and labeled Bob DeCreft. He looked at it for a while, ruminating. A second square was added, with a dotted line connecting it to the first, and labeled Wyanet Chouinard. A third square connected to them both, labeled Cecil Wolfe.
A fourth square, Laura Nanalook. Another line connected Laura Nanalook with Cecil Wolfe.
He thought about that for a while, and to Laura’s square added a lightly drawn fifth square, labeled Rebecca Gilbert, with a question mark after her name.
There. He sat back and surveyed the neat boxes and their straight little connecting lines, what he knew of Bob DeCreft’s life reduced to connect-the-dots.
Bob DeCreft, sixty-five years old, a member in good standing of the community, according to Bill. A sixty-five-year-old man shacking up with a, what, twenty-year-old girl, a staggeringly beautiful twenty-year-old girl. Sex and money, those were the two main motivations for murder in Liam’s experience, and one look around Bob DeCreft’s house had told him DeCreft didn’t live large.
Take sex, then. Maybe Laura Nanalook wanted out of the relationship with DeCreft and sabotaged the plane herself. She had said she’d been working when DeCreft was killed. He’d have to confirm that with Bill.
Maybe she had a lover, and he cut the wire.
Maybe someone else wanted the girl, and so killed DeCreft to get him out of the way? Somebody, say, like Wolfe?
Liam contemplated that possibility with satisfaction, and traced the line around Wolfe’s box until it stood out in bold relief from the others. It was not going to hurt his feelings at all if he had to arrest Cecil Wolfe for murder. He only hoped Wolfe would resist arrest.
Although, much as he hated to admit it, it was more Wolfe’s style to rape Laura Nanalook occasionally behind Bob DeCreft’s back, so he could enjoy that knowledge when he met Bob DeCreft face-to-face. He would need DeCreft alive to do that, and to spot herring for him.
He needed to find out who Wy’s mechanic was. If she was doing her own A&Ps, she still had to have a certified mechanic to sign off on them. Probably somebody local, because Wy was a smart woman who’d know it would pay to keep her business local.
One thing was certain: the killer had to be someone who knew something about aviation. Not much, Liam realized ruefully, because if Wy could explain magnetos to him and make him understand how they functioned in five minutes, anyone could.
Knowing how a thing worked gave you the power to make it not work. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
And then there was Rebecca Gilbert. Liam had seen her twice now, once at the post office this morning and once this afternoon. In all, he’d seen about three different women inside the same body: the hovering helpmate, the hysterical mourner, and—what? What had she been doing, roaring up to DeCreft’s place that way, slamming inside without so much as a knock at the door? If she and her husband—who had seemed less than distraught at the news of DeCreft’s death—if she and her husband had been friends of Bob DeCreft, then they might have been friends of Laura Nanalook as well. Or maybe the two women were friends. They weren’t much of an age, but then it wasn’t all that big a town, and there probably wasn’t that much choice. Although, given the disparity in age between Nanalook and DeCreft, the couple must have come in for some disapproval on the part of the community. Not to mention jealousy. The entire below-thirty male population of Newenham had probably gone into mourning when Laura and Bob took up housekeeping, and for all Liam knew Bob DeCreft was the over-sixty female’s dream man.
If he could get Rebecca Gilbert away from her husband for five minutes, he might learn something of interest.
He reached up to touch the lump beneath his hair, shrunken and less tender now. He looked back at the box marked Cecil Wolfe and thought of Kirk Mulder, Wolfe’s first mate, then traced the dotted line back to Wy. He added another box and labeled it Jacobson, the gimpy fisherman Liam had seen at the airport talking to Wy, the same gimpy drunk he had hauled down to his boat, as lightly penciled as Rebecca Gilbert’s square and with another question mark beside it.
He thought back to his conversation with Barton, to Barton’s visit with his wife. Jenny, laughing, loving Jenny of the light brown hair, in the poet’s words that had become a family joke. Jenny, who loved the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Boston Bruins, who never read a book that wasn’t assigned in class, who was the first person in Glenallen to buy a VCR so she could tape All My Children every day, and who talked back to the television while she was watching as if the characters were in the room with her. He’d bought her season tickets to the University of Alaska Anchorage Sea Wolves hockey games, and she had responded with such fervent gratitude that he’d had a hint, that first winter they were together, of what they’d been missing. Jenny, whom he knew too late had always been more like a sister to him than a wife.
“I didn’t know, Jenny,” he said out loud, for the thousandth time. “I didn’t know that what we had wasn’t the best that there was. We settled, you and I. I didn’t know, until Wy, what was possible.” He waited stoically for the wave of sorrow and guilt to pull him under. It came, as it always did, swamping him with grief and remorse. His hands curled into fists and he shut his eyes against the familiar tears. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Goddamn you for leaving me like this, so I can’t even ask for your forgiveness!”
As always, thoughts of Jenny brought thoughts of Charlie
, too, and again he held his son in his arms. He remembered best reading him to sleep, those evenings when he made it off duty early enough to catch Charlie still awake. He read to him. Good Night, Gorilla and Paper Bag Princess and The Velveteen Rabbit and The Wind in the Willows, and every now and then from Bushcop by Joe Rychetnik, just so the kid would know the kind of business his father was in. He knew Charlie couldn’t understand the words yet, but he wanted him to grow up hearing them anyway.
Charlie would fall asleep in his arms, lulled by the sound of his father’s deep voice, in the process his body temperature seeming to rise ten degrees and his body weight to increase ten pounds. Liam would put him to bed and hang over the edge of the crib, watching his little chest rise and fall. For the first few months he’d been terrified at how quietly Charlie slept, and had on more than one occasion gone into the boy’s room in the middle of the night, just to make sure his small miracle was still breathing.
With a jerk that brought him up out of his chair, Liam came back into himself again and battled for control. Bit by bit, it did come back, leaving him drained and spent.
He checked his watch. Seven o’clock. The sun was streaming in the window, long glissading columns of incandescent light. Somewhere nearby was the one person who could offer him comfort, and maybe even make him dinner. He went out to look for her, leaving his memories littered on the floor of the post.
· · ·
He stopped by Bill’s for directions, if she could be persuaded to give them, and found Moses perched on what Liam was coming to consider his usual stool. The shaman greeted the trooper with his usual respectful welcome, “Ah yes, here comes the man without a clue!” He drained his beer, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt, and added, “Root from below, suspend from above. It won’t give you everything, but it’ll give you something.” He fixed Liam with a piercing if somewhat bleary eye. “Let her go. She’s on her own journey; you’re only slowing her down by hanging on to her with your grief and your guilt.”
With ponderous dignity he descended to the floor and made for the men’s room. He didn’t miss a step when he flipped off Cecil Wolfe, who was presiding over a boothful of boisterous young men. Cecil threw back his head and roared with laughter, which sound brought Moses to an instant halt.
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