Nothing Gold Can Stay

TWENTY-TWO

Newenham, September 16

Liam came in at ten that evening. “She found it,” he said flatly, and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Would you like to sleep in the camper tonight?” she said suddenly.

His nose startled out ofThe Lost Wagon, Tim looked up from where he was curled on the couch and said, “What?”

“Sleep in the camper tonight,” she said. “That’s an order.”

He looked toward the bathroom, and when he spoke she could have wept at the effort it took him to make the joke. “What’s it worth to you?”

“A smack upside the head,” she said, grabbing for him.

He hot-footed it out of reach, not quite smiling but nearly there. He loved sleeping in the trailer, having his own little self-contained house around him.

She eased the bathroom door open and slipped inside. Liam was outlined behind the curtain, hands propped on the wall on either side of the shower head, head bent beneath the stream of steaming water. She stripped and stepped into the tub behind him.

He jumped when he felt her hands on him, but he was instantly responsive. He tried to turn, tried to reach for her, and she wouldn’t let him. It was part seduction, part subjugation and part the staking of a claim. He recognized it for what it was and the sum of all its parts, and he let her have her way with him.

She made him a late supper of cold moose roast sandwiches and Corona, and then they made love again on the living room couch, a fire in the fireplace and the curtains open to the river and sky. “My turn,” he murmured.

“Do your worst,” she whispered, lying back.

“God,” he said later, “the worst day fucking is better than the best day fishing.”

She shoved him off the couch and he landed smack on his bare ass, yelping and laughing. She hung over the side, looking at him. “Can you talk about it now?”

“Yeah.” The laughter faded. He climbed back up on the couch and snuggled next to her. Her hair was a wild tangle that tickled his nose, and her elbow was jabbing uncomfortably into his chest. He cupped a palm around her breast and trailed a finger down her spine. Her thigh was between his and pressed up against him, his was pressed against her. Marking their spots. He could live with the elbow and the tickly hair.

“We were about to pack it in for the day, but she insisted we stay out as long as there was light to see by. She spotted it up this canyon, nearly a ravine, totally overgrown. We couldn’t have made it in a plane.”

“No strip?”

“No strip. He liked his privacy, the sick little bastard. Search and Rescue had to set the chopper down nearly a mile out. We hiked in, and it wasn’t easy. I don’t know how she got away.”

“She told us. Windex.”

A faint laugh rumbled up out of his chest. “Right. Your all-purpose cleaner and killer deterrent.”

She trailed a fingertip down the crack of his behind, and he twitched, distracted, as she had meant him to be.

“Guy’s a master builder, I’ll say that for him. Everything hand-hewn, fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. And literally invisible from the air. You couldn’t even see the smoke rising from the chimney.”

“Fine, he can bid on the addition to Spring Creek. That ought to be a lifetime guarantee of work.”

“If he doesn’t get off by reason of insanity.”

“He couldn’t. They wouldn’t!”

He said nothing.

After a moment, she said, “Were there twelve graves, like she said?”

His chest rose and fell on a sigh. “Yes. There wasn’t time to dig them up this afternoon. We logged the location on the GPS. We’ll go back tomorrow with shovels and body bags.”

He rolled over, pinning her to the back of the sofa, nudging her legs apart to slide smoothly home. Something between a gasp and a moan caught in the back of her throat, and he smiled at her. “Why is it we’re screwing around on this couch when there is a perfectly good bed in your bedroom?”

“You tell me,” she whispered back, and pushed back, rolling so that she was on top. She rode him, she rode him hard, so that his only thought, at least for those precious few minutes, was of her and only of her, and when he came she was watching, waiting for it, and she whispered, “I love you, Liam,” and followed him over.

The next day Liam returned to the perfect little cabin in the perfect little canyon. They disinterred the bodies, one beneath each of the wooden markers. There were no years carved into the markers, only the name and the line of verse, repeated twelve times, barely legible on the earlier markers, crisp and clean around the edges on the more recent ones.

They found a small arsenal in a concealed locker in the crawl space beneath the cabin, one that appeared to have been acquired along with the victims. The BAR Hairy Man (the killer was resisting all attempts at identification) was carrying at Old Man had been registered three years before in Cheryl Montgomery’s name. A twenty-two pistol was eventually proved to have been the weapon that killed Opal Nunapitchuk; later another of the victims’ parents identified it as having belonged to the victim’s grandmother, who had given it to her granddaughter on her twenty-first birthday. There was a Winchester Field Model 16339 shotgun, and Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak were released into the relieved arms of their families.

When they had the bodies loaded and were ascending once again into the air, Liam looked his last on the cabin, now engulfed in flames. He glanced at the woman sitting beside him, who had insisted on accompanying them that day. He had protested, but Wy had said, “She earned it, Liam. Let her go.”

Rebecca had started the fire herself, on the floor in the middle of the cabin with a Firestarter log and a match. The wood, seasoned over thirty years, spread fast and burned hot, reaching up with greedy fingers to engulf first the walls and then the roof. He supposed he should have stopped her doing it, but he hadn’t, and it was beginning to rain anyway, a gentle pattering on the bracken. A heavy gray layer of clouds building between the surrounding peaks promised more on the way.

None of them, in fact, had tried to stop her. They stood behind her, almost at attention, an honor guard, watching the flames lick across the floor, catch at the walls, crawl to the ceiling.

“Are you all right?” he said to her as the helicopter hovered over the canyon.

She looked at him. “I want to go home now.”

“You heard the lady,” he said over his headset.

The helicopter put its nose down and skidded across the sky toward Newenham.

Once during the flight he saw her looking out the window. “Easier than covering the same distance on foot,” he said.

She looked at him, but she said nothing.

He put her on the jet to town that afternoon, foiling Jo’s attempt to talk to her. “She’s been through enough, Jo. Leave her alone.”

“I will,” Jo said, “but the jackals will be waiting at the gate in Anchorage.”

They were; Liam and Wy watched it on television that evening, pictures of Rebecca Hanover shoving her way through a crowd of people with cameras and lights.WOMAN ESCAPES SERIAL KILLER BY TREK THROUGH BUSH, screamed the next day’s headlines, and subsequent issues were given over to the stories of all the victims, including baby pictures, high school pictures, prom pictures and wedding pictures. Grieving parents and spouses were interviewed; Lyle Montgomery was photographed walking up to the door of Rebecca’s friend Nina’s house. He was the only person unknown to her who was permitted inside. He stayed half an hour and came out again, walking swiftly to his car, getting in and driving off at once, refusing to speak or even to look at the people calling his name. Still, the camera showed the tears rolling down his cheeks quite clearly.

The door remained locked thereafter, the shades drawn. Nina Stewart was photographed carrying groceries inside and the trash to the curb.Hard Copy snatched the bag one step ahead of the garbage truck Tuesday morning and had the extreme bad taste to open it on camera that evening, thus proving to an avidly watching public that Rebecca Hanover had been spared the additional trauma of pregnancy, if not the humiliation of having the news trumpeted on sixty-four channels. The next time someone pointed a camera at Nina, she flipped them off. That was aired, too, with a small blurred circle covering the offending digit.

The medical examiner’s reports started coming in, and the circus moved to the second act. Most of the victims had had their necks snapped, and when Liam thought of those strong, hairy fingers closing around his own throat he wasn’t surprised. “A quick death, anyway,” he said to Prince.

“I’m sure that was a comfort to the victims,” she said dispassionately. She wasn’t much interested. She’d had her fifteen minutes of fame when Liam told her to take the interview with Maria Downey. The camera loved her, and shortly thereafter Liam’s boss, Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton, called and offered her a job as the department spokesman. She had turned him down, saying only, “I’m not done racking up the cleared cases in Newenham yet. I’m not ready to spend my days talking to the press.”

Much was made of how this serial killer had spread his victims out over the years. Lieutenant Barton was interviewed on Channel 2 News, and he managed to restrain his natural talent for profanity long enough to point out that Alaska’s only other serial killer had been in action for fifteen years. Alaska was big enough to hide a serial killer’s activities for a long time. The next day, the spokesman for the Alaska state troopers went on the air to apologize for Barton’s remarks, and to say that he had not intended to extend an invitation to serial killers to set up shop in the Alaskan Bush. “Nope,” said Prince, “not my kind of job.”

Nine of the twelve women were identified. Three of them had been pregnant at the time of their death. “Didn’t want to share,” Prince said when this was discovered.

After three weeks the story died down, only to spring back to life when the killer was identified. It hadn’t been easy. His cabin was on national park land. He’d had no permit and had built it on his own, so they hadn’t been able to identify him through a title or bank paperwork. He had no friends, no family stepped forward, he didn’t get mail, so it was something of a coup when a clerk in the Anchorage Police Department, after slogging doggedly through a mountain of retired paperwork, found a dusty file fallen behind a filing cabinet with the name Clayton Gheen on it. The clerk ran the fingerprints in the file, and came up with a match.

Clayton Gheen had a record going back to the time he was thirteen years old, mostly B &E and petty theft. There had also been two incidences of assault in the fourth degree. Neither girl had come forward to testify, and he’d walked on both charges.

“Abuse in his background?” Liam asked Prince as she was scanning the report, faxed from the Fairbanks post.

She shook her head. “If his father beat on him, it was never reported.”

“And his mother just took off.”

She nodded. “Doesn’t automatically make him a serial killer, though.”

Liam thought of his own mother, walking out when he was six months old. “No. What does?”

Prince looked up, surprised at the question, because Liam Campbell wasn’t in the habit of asking questions which couldn’t be answered. “When we have the answer to that, we’ll put in for a raise.”

“Works for me.”

But he thought about it, off and on, for a long time afterward. He had distributed the contents of the pitiful little trophy chest Rebecca had found to the grieving families. One pair of the earrings, a ring and the crystal choker remained unclaimed, as did three of the bodies. Lost souls, lost to their families, lost to themselves, lost to him.

In 1975 Gheen had gone to work for BP in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, working construction, and had moved to Anchorage. His record was blank after that until 1979, when he’d been arrested for aggravated assault. This woman had testified, and he had been due in court in Anchorage for sentencing in May of that year. He never showed. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest, but he’d never been found to be served.

Gheen was interviewed on Channel 11, where the pretty anchor punctuated every phrase with a nod and began every sentence with “Now.” She asked him why he did it, her brows puckered with pretended puzzlement, her attention divided between Gheen and the camera lens. He stared at her bovinely. She spoke the names, rendered like the tolling of a bell, Merla Dixon in 1983, Sarah Berton in 1985, Paulette Gustafson in 1986, Kristen Anderson in 1986, Ruby Nunapitchuk in 1991, Brandi Whitaker in 1992, Stella Silverthorne in 1994, Christine Stepanoff in 1996, Cheryl Montgomery in 1997. Rebecca Hanover. The three unidentified bodies the medical examiner would only say might have been buried in, respectively, 1982, 1983 and 1988.

Won’t you tell us, the little anchor asked prettily, who the other three women were? What were their names?

“Elaine,” Gheen had said, and smiled.

Gheen’s public defender had orchestrated the television interview. He went into court the following week and petitioned for a change of venue, arguing that his client could not get a fair trial in Newenham. Or anywhere else anybody watched television, Liam thought, a hard place to find, even in Alaska, in this age of satellite television. It sounded as if Gheen’s P.D. would go for an insanity defense, but thanks to one of the few smart laws the Alaska legislature managed to pass in spite of themselves in recent years, Gheen could plead insanity all he wanted. He’d serve time in the Alaska Psychiatric Institute until his doctors declared him cured, from which time he would be incarcerated for fifteen life sentences, to be served consecutively. If district attorney, judge and jury did their job, that is.

Liam knew sincere regret that Bill Billington couldn’t sit on a felony case. Almost twenty years-that they knew of-almost twenty years Gheen had been kidnapping and killing women. He fit no known profile, other than that he was white and male. He’d started his killing later in life than most serial killers, but that was only so far as they knew. He’d kept trophies. He hadn’t stuck to victims of his own race, there hadn’t been any apparent acceleration of murder toward the end, he’d kept his victims alive, some, it seemed, for years.

Liam had interrogated Gheen once before shipping him to Anchorage. “What went wrong?” he’d asked Gheen. “Why did you have to kill them? They run away? They get pregnant and you couldn’t stand the thought of sharing? You hit them too hard, too often, and they up and die on you?”

Gheen had looked back at him, very calm, very still within his handcuffs and manacles and leg chains. His gaze was open and disinterested.

“Who was Elaine?” Liam said. “You buried her twelve times, she must mean something to you. Who was she?”

At that Gheen smiled, the same smile he would give the little anchor on Channel 11. “Elaine was my wife.” His eyes went dreamy. “Elaine the fair, Elaine the beautiful, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat.”

“She left you,” Liam said.

Gheen smiled again.

“She never left me,” he said.

Bill was back behind the bar, serving beer to Moses, who was also back and as cranky as ever. He’d been waiting on Wy’s deck the morning after he got out of the hospital, and as far as Liam could tell, stifling an inner groan, it would take more than a bullet to slow him down. Liam, Wy and Tim went through the form five times that morning. Moses didn’t even break a sweat. Liam lived for the day when he could say the same.

Amelia was buried in the Newenham cemetery, Darren Gearhart sobbing his heart out at the gravesite. Liam had to restrain Bill from assaulting him.

A few brief words from Bill had told Wy about Tim and Amelia. Wy asked him about her when they got back home that afternoon. “I liked her,” Tim said, and made it clear that that was all he was going to say.

He at least had found a measure of closure by bearing witness to the disappearance of Christine Stepanoff. The remains beneath one of the wooden markers had matched dental records in Newenham. “She was really nice,” he told Wy.

It was the first time he’d spoken of anyone from the tiny village where he had survived his childhood.

“She probably saved my life,” he added.

The next time Wy flew into Ualik, she spent an extra hour on the ground while she knocked on doors. Two weeks later she gave Tim a package. “What is it?” he said.

“Open it.”

He did, and found a brass frame enclosing the picture of a girl with narrow, tilted brown eyes, a long fall of straight brown hair and a laughing face. “Christine,” he said, his voice a bare breath of sound.

“Her grandmother still lives in Ualik. She loaned me the negative. I just got it back from Anchorage today.”

He gripped the frame tightly in both hands, his head bowed, his shoulders shaking. He said something she couldn’t make out. “What?”

He raised his head and her heart turned over at the sight of his ravaged face. “Oh Tim, I’m so sorry, I-”

He barreled into her headfirst, the picture thudding into her spine when he threw his arms around her. “She looks like Amelia,” he whispered.

She held him without words, grateful she could do that much, angry that she could not do more. Hot tears soaked into her shirt.

After a while he quieted. “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered.

“Hey,” she whispered back. “It’s what I do.”

She looked up and saw Liam standing in the hallway, watching, with something that wasn’t quite a smile on his face. “You always figure out the right thing to do,” he said later, “and then you do it.”

She was taken aback. “You make me sound like Mother Teresa.”

He laughed and hugged her. “Not hardly. Just Wy.”

No one has ever known me that well, she remembered saying to Jo. Well, Jo had replied, what does that tell you?

You always figure out the right thing to do, and then you do it.

Prince had served her the court order the day after they got back from Old Man Creek. She’d run to Bill to get a restraining order in response, but it was only temporary. Natalie would appeal to her pet judge and they’d be right back where they started.

She thought of Moses. She wondered what her life would have been like with him in it sooner. She wondered what her life would have been like if she’d ever seen her birth mother sober. If her adoptive parents hadn’t found her and kept her for themselves.

She thought long and hard of all of those things, she came to a decision and she laid her plans.

The knock came at nine a.m. the next Monday morning. Liam was at the post, Tim was at school. When Wy opened the door, a woman with clear eyes and clean clothes stood on the other side.

Wy took a deep breath. “Hello, Natalie,” she said steadily. “Please come in.”

At nine-fifteen the phone in the trooper post rang. Liam picked up the phone and John Dillinger Barton bellowed, “Congratulations, Sergeant Campbell!”

He sat very still. He was alone in the office, Prince off cruising the road to Icky in hopes of apprehending transgressors. “What did you say?”

“What, suddenly you got wax in your ears?”

This for Barton was almost playful. “Did you call me sergeant?” Liam said.

“I sure as hell did! Grabbing up a serial killer, especially one nobody knew was operating until a couple of weeks ago, and putting away thirteen of fifteen murder cases oughta be worth a piddly little promotion. Even those assholes down in Juneau gotta admit that! When can you get here?”

“What? Where?”

“Here, where the hell do you think? Jesus, Liam, wake up! You been promoted, I can bring you back to Anchorage, you’re back on the fast track, boy! Get on a plane!”