Nothing Gold Can Stay

ELEVEN

Newenham, September 3

“Far as I know, they slept the night through,” Mamie said. “I wasn’t surprised, since they both smelled like they fell off the back of a beer truck when you hauled them in last night. And if you don’t mind, it’s about my bedtime now.”

“Why did you switch to the night shift?” Prince asked.

“It’s almost time for school to start. This way I’ll be awake in the morning to see the kids off.”

Mamie Hagemeister was a short, very well-fleshed woman with bad skin and short, thin, fine brown hair that stood on end from its own self-generated static electricity. With her round, protuberant brown eyes, she looked like a long-haired koala plugged into a wall socket. She was also the single mother of five children ranging in age from three to ten, which explained her constantly harried air.

She was the officer in charge of the local jail, one of the four officers belonging to the perpetually short-handed local police department Liam had met. “Any chance of seeing Raymo or Berg today?”

She paused for a precious moment in her headlong flight. “I don’t think so. Roger’s still in Anchorage at that damn trial, and I just dispatched Cliff down to the harbor.”

“What’s happening at the harbor?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Somebody called and said Jeff Saltz was cutting his boat in half with a chain saw.”

She said it nonchalantly, like cutting boats in half with chain saws was an everyday occurrence in the Newenham small-boat harbor. “I asked the guy,” Mamie said, impatient to be gone, “I said to him, is he carving up anything besides his boat? Like a person? Guy said no. I said to the guy, then why do you need the cops?”

“Why did he?”

“The guy with the chain saw’s boat was tied to the boat belonging to the guy who called. Anyway, I told Cliff and Cliff went down to see what he could do.”

“Mamie?” A voice came up the corridor.

“You hush up, Lorne, I’m trying to get off shift here.” She jerked her chin in the voice’s direction. “Lorne Rapp. Roger brought him in at three-thirty for beating up on his family. Drunk and disorderly, and he tried, I say he tried, to assault an officer.”

“I trust he didn’t get away with it,” Liam murmured.

Mamie gave the trooper an indignant look. “Not on my shift he didn’t. He’s got a lump on his head the size of Gibraltar to remind him not to if he ever gets the yen again. The nerve!”

Any woman who could single-handedly raise five children and still string words together in a coherent sentence commanded Liam’s respect and admiration, and he held the door for Mamie on her way out.

“We want to talk to Engebretsen and Kvichak,” he told Nick Potts, a skinny young man who barely looked old enough to vote. Nick was working day shift. Nick didn’t look like he could punch his way out of a paper bag, let alone keep order among the Newenham criminal element. He knew this, and compensated by trying to grow a mustache, which after two months still looked like something applied with a number 2 pencil. “You want the interview room?”

“Please,” Liam said. Prince smiled at the young man, who blushed hotly and dropped his keys.

The interview room was a narrow rectangle with one barred window, a table and four chairs. Liam and Prince sat on one side, Teddy and John on the other.

Teddy and John still smelled faintly of beer, but after a night in jail they were stone-cold sober. John was tight-lipped and angry, Teddy terrified. “You never charged us with anything,” John said. “You never even told us why you were locking us up.”

“Legally, I’ve got twenty-four hours to charge you with anything,” Liam said soothingly, “and as for telling you why I was locking you up, I was afraid if I left you at home you’d get drunker and I wouldn’t be able to talk to you at all.”

“We didn’t do anything,” Teddy said.

“Shut up, Teddy,” John said.

“But we didn’t do anything,” Teddy repeated.

“Let them tell us all about it,” John said. “Don’t you say a word unless I say so. Cops always twist everything you say to make it fit how they want. Don’t say a word, okay?” He glared at Liam and Prince.

Prince waited long enough to see that Liam was giving her the lead, and opened the folder in front of her.

“You’ve got a history with us, gentlemen.”

Teddy shifted in his chair. John stilled him with a glance.

“Most of it regarding the Nuklunek Bluff, which you seem to regard as your personal, private property.”

John snorted. “Ain’t no such thing as private property out here.”

As if she hadn’t heard him, Prince said, “You’ve been questioned regarding several incidents involving campers and hunters in the area, resulting in, at minimum, destruction of private property and, at most, the threat of bodily harm.”

“Yeah, well, shit happens in the Bush. If you don’t know how to handle yourself, stay the hell out.”

Prince closed the file and folded her hands on top of it. She looked at John, ignoring Teddy. “You hunt the Nuklunek Bluff every year, don’t you, John?”

“What of it?”

“Why there, in particular?”

“Because we always get our moose there, why else?”

“Did pretty well this year, too, according to Wy Chouinard. She said you packed out three planeloads of meat.” Prince smiled suddenly, a wide, warm smile. It was infectious; John, thrown off balance, nearly smiled back. “Good news for the family.”

“Yeah, well. Fishing hasn’t been all that great, last couple of years. People gotta eat.”

Prince nodded sympathetically. “So you were out there, what, ten days?”

“Yeah, we-what the hell is this? You’ve talked to Wy, you’ve probably seen her log, you probably know perfectly well how long we were out there.”

Prince’s smile vanished. “It’s important to confirm what we already know, John. So, while you were out there, did you run across anyone else? Any other hunters?”

“No,” he said.

Teddy squirmed.

“Did you hear or see anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything you thought was odd?”

“No, why should we?”

Prince frowned down at the file. “Do you have a cell phone, John?”

A brief pause. “Why?”

Prince pulled out an evidence bag, the cell phone sealed inside clearly visible. She put it on the table, in the exact center so that it was the focus of four pairs of eyes. John’s were fierce, Teddy’s alarmed, Prince’s inquiring, Liam’s uninterested. “Because we found this in your backpack when we searched your house.”

“Oh.” Nonplussed for a moment, John fired up immediately. “What business you got going through my house?”

“We had a warrant, John,” Prince said, almost apologetically. “We had probable cause.”

Teddy whimpered. John nudged him in the ribs with an ungentle elbow. “What’s probable cause?”

Prince’s smile vanished. Like any cop, she didn’t care for the jailhouse lawyer. “Probable cause, John, is when we’ve got a couple of yo-yos hunting ten miles from where we find a man who caught a load of buckshot in the chest. Probable cause is when both yo-yos have a long record of harassing other visitors to the area. Probable cause is when both these yo-yos are packing rifles to hunt moose and caribou, and shotguns to hunt ptarmigan. Probable cause is when we find the dead guy was killed with a shotgun.” Prince sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “Probable cause is when we respond to a call for help from someone who isn’t there when we arrive, a Mayday that was picked up by Alaska Airlines and which call, we are reliably informed, was routed through the local cell phone signal repeater with an ID number that traces back to your phone.”

Not bad, Liam thought, not bad at all. We’ll make a trooper out of you yet, little lady. He had to suppress a grin at Prince’s likely reaction should she ever be made privy to that thought.

Teddy broke first, as Liam had told Prince he would. Normally they would have interrogated the two men separately, but Liam was worried about Rebecca Hanover, and he wanted to break the two men as quickly as possible. “We hit them both at once with everything we’ve got. John will bluster, Teddy will buckle.”

Teddy buckled. “We didn’t do it,” he said, as tears began to leak down his cheeks. “We didn’t shoot that man.”

“What man?”

“The man in the creek.”

“Teddy-” John said, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“We heard shots-” Teddy said, tears flowing faster.

“One shot,” John said, and flushed.

“-and John said we should go look. We knew Gregg Saltz’d sold his mine to some guy from Anchorage. We even sneaked over to take a look when we first flew in, but they weren’t doing nothing except wash dirt. Nice-looking wife, though,” he said wistfully. Prince handed him a Kleenex and he blew his nose with a comprehensive blast.

There was a short silence. Prince looked at John. “Goddamn it,” he said more in sorrow than in anger. “I love you, man, but you just can’t keep your mouth shut.”

“I’m sorry,” a miserable Teddy told him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Prince.

“What are you sorry for, Teddy?” Prince said.

He stared at her with wide eyes. John said hotly, “He’s not sorry for killing that guy.” Everyone looked at him and he flushed again. “That’s not what I meant. We didn’t shoot that guy. We heard a shot and we went to go see, that’s all! We found the body, and I knew what the cops would think. We made the call on my phone and got the hell out of there, that’s all.”

“About what time was this?”

“Hell, I don’t know. We were done hunting, kind of relaxing until Wy got there.”

Translation: They’d opened the beer.

Patiently, Prince led John and Teddy through their last day at hunting camp in hopes of creating a timeline. It wasn’t easy since neither man wore a watch. They’d risen at sunrise, heard the shot “a little later,” done a forced march of a little over nine miles in “maybe an hour, maybe two,” found the body, known they were in trouble, yelled for help and been back at camp in time to be picked up by Wy.

“About how long from the time you heard the shots to the time you arrived at the mine?” Prince said.

John and Teddy exchanged glances and shrugged. “Maybe two hours. Maybe more.”

“And you found the body in the creek?”

“Yeah.” Teddy paled. “He was dead.”

“How could you tell?”

He stared at her. “He was facedown in the creek, man. His chest was blown away. His heart wasn’t beating.”

“How could you tell that his chest was blown away if he was facedown in the creek?”

“We turned him over,” Teddy said, and John groaned.

“You moved the body,” Prince said.

“Yeah.” Teddy looked from Prince to John, and appealed to Liam. “I mean, he was facedown in the creek. We couldn’t leave him like that.”

Prince penciled a note.

Liam spoke for the first time, his deep voice slow and authoritative, and both men jumped. “Where was the woman? The wife of the dead man? Rebecca Hanover?”

“We didn’t see her,” Teddy said. “Is that her name? Rebecca? That’s kind of pretty.”

“She wasn’t anywhere around,” John said. “We yelled for her, but she didn’t show.”

“Did you look in the cabin?”

“Yes.”

“Did you look around the grounds?”

“Man, we just wanted out of there. We made sure the guy was dead, we looked for her, we yelled for her, we made the call, we left. That’s it.”

Prince was all but wagging her tail when they walked into the post. “I got the shotguns on the first flight into Anchorage. I called the Crime Lab to be expecting them. I’m betting the shot pattern from Teddy’s shotgun matches the one the M.E. finds on Hanover’s chest.”

“Teddy, huh?” Liam said. “Why Teddy?”

“Because he’s the nervous one,” she said promptly. “I can see him popping off without thinking. Plus, he had an eye on the wife.”

“Yeah,” Liam said, “but why’d they make the call?”

Prince stared. “What?”

“Why did they make the call?” Liam repeated. “If they killed him, why call for help? Why draw attention to their crime?”

After an uncertain moment, she suggested, “Maybe the shooting sobered them up. Maybe they figured if they called for help, we wouldn’t be liking them for the shooting.”

“Maybe,” Liam said equably. “But in that case, where’s the wife?”

“They’ve got the weapons,” Prince said, unconvinced. “They’ve got a history of doing this kind of thing.”

“They’ve got a history of harassment and destruction of private property,” Liam corrected her, “not to mention chasing off Dagfinn Grant’s customers’ moose. They’ve never shot anyone.”

“Teddy Engebretsen shot out the jukebox at Bill’s in May,” Prince said.

“Shooting a jukebox is one thing,” Liam said. “Shooting a person is another thing entirely.”

“They were drunk,” Prince reminded him.

“Yeah,” Liam said, a little grimly. “They were that.”

Prince went off to interview the Kvichak and Engebretsen families, to see if Teddy or John had confessed to anything in the four hours between their return and their arrest. Liam called the house to see if Wy was home. After five rings Jim picked up, out of breath. Liam grinned out the window. The morning fog would have burned off by ten, and the sun, he well knew, would be beating down on the deck in front of Wy’s living room. “Having a nice morning?” he inquired solicitously.

“Up yours, Campbell,” Jim said. In the background Liam could hear Bridget chuckling.

“Wy there?”

“No. I’m hanging up now.”

“Hold on. You said you had something to tell me.”

A brief pause. “Yeah, but not right now.”

“Okay,” Liam said. There was something in the tone of Jim’s voice that warned him he wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was. “It sounds like it can keep.”

“Not indefinitely,” Jim said, and hung up.

Liam drove out to the airport, and was lucky enough to see 68 Kilo coming in on final. It was a runway paint job, smooth as silk, and Liam, safely on the ground, could admire the skill and the professionalism and be proud that his woman was so good at her job.

He thought of his wife, put in a coma by a drunken driver, from which she had never woken. He had enjoyed married life. He liked snuggling beneath the covers every night with the same woman. He liked drinking coffee with her the next morning and talking about what the day would bring. He liked coming home to eat dinner with her, catching up on what had gone right and wrong with the day. He’d liked long, lazy weekends on the couch, reading and watching television and eating popcorn and making love.

There hadn’t been as much of that last as he would have liked, given the responsibilities of his job, but Jenny had never complained. Jennifer. Jenny with the light brown hair. Jenny-fair, their high school French teacher had called her, and fair she had been. He still missed her, would always miss her. They’d been best friends all through middle school and high school, and when they came back from their respective colleges it had seemed as natural as breathing to marry. There had been no highs and no lows in his relationship with Jenny, no uncertainty, no anxiety.

Unlike his relationship with Wy. With Wy, it was either mountaintop or abyss. But then he hadn’t known there were mountains to scale or an abyss to plumb during his marriage to Jenny.

He missed his friend more than he did his wife, and he missed his son more than either of them. He wondered if he should be ashamed of that fact. He wondered if Jenny would understand.

The Cessna stopped ten feet away. Practically before the prop had slowed, the passenger door opened and a man bailed out. “Bailed” was the right word; he managed to miss the step on the strut entirely and hit the ground walking, rapidly, in the opposite direction.

Liam had exited planes in just that manner himself on one or two occasions, and he sympathized. “Rough flight?” he said to Wy as she walked toward him.

She shook her head and smiled. “That was Mr. Frederick Glanville of the Internal Revenue Service. He went out to Kokwok to perform an audit.”

Liam began to grin. “Let me guess. He’d never flown in a small plane before.”

“Nothing smaller than the 737 that got him to Newenham, would be my guess,” Wy said, nodding. “Plus, Stanley Sacaloff was waiting for him on the other end.”

Liam started to laugh. “He was auditing Stanley Sacaloff?”

“That was his plan. He was pretty tight-lipped when I picked him up this morning, so I don’t know how successful the audit was.”

“Pretty successful,” Liam pointed out, “if Stanley let him walk away from it.” He slid a hand around her neck and kissed her. It started out to be a quick greeting and evolved into something more.

She pulled back with a flush in her cheeks. “Remember the uniform,” she said, trying for casual and not succeeding very well.

“The hell with the uniform.”

She stepped out of reach and tried to frown. “Behave. What are you doing out here, anyway?”

His hands dropped and his smile faded. “I need a ride.”

“Sure. Where to?”

“Nenevok Creek.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “Did you talk to John and Teddy this morning?”

“Yes. They said all they did was find the body.”

“They didn’t see Rebecca?”

“They say not.”

“She could have been scared. Running from the real killer. Maybe the same person who killed Opal Nunapitchuk.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I know you’ve known them forever. I know you don’t think they could kill anyone. But Wy, you’ve flown me out to incidents before. You know anyone can do anything, given the right motivation. They were on the scene. They had the weapon. They were drunk. And they have a history of harassing people in the area.”

“But not killing them,” she said quickly, repeating his own argument back to him.

“But not killing them,” he agreed. “Anyway, alive or dead, we’ve got to find the wife. If she’s alive, she’s got to be terrified, maybe lost. I’ve already talked to Search and Rescue out at Chinook Air Force Base. They’ve been quartering the area since dawn.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing, no sign of her, no smoke or flares. No signal of any kind.” He didn’t know how wilderness-savvy Rebecca Hanover was going to be, but even a beader from Anchorage ought to be able to follow a creek downstream. Trouble was, the killer would very probably be right behind her. If he wasn’t locked up in the Newenham jail.

“Any sign she returned to the creek?”

“No smoke from the stack, and she didn’t come out to wave when the plane went over. They told me they made enough noise to make sure she would hear them.”

No more bodies, Wy thought, I don’t want to find any more bodies. “Do you think she’s dead?”

“That would be the most logical assumption,” he admitted.

“But?”

He gave a frustrated shake of his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t like the smell of this. Something about the mine site is itching at me. Something important I saw that didn’t register. I want to go back and find out what it is. Are you available?”

She smiled then, a long, slow, incite-to-riot smile. “I’m always available. I’m just not easy.”

“You’re telling me.”