Nothing Gold Can Stay

SIXTEEN

Newenham, September 5

Liam started the recorder and gave the date and the time. “Present are myself, Corporal Liam Campbell of the Alaska State Troopers, Trooper Diana Prince, and suspects John Kvichak and Teddy Engebretsen.”

The wind howled outside and the window shuddered in its frame, leaking cold air into the tiny gray room. The four of them sat crowded around the single rectangular table. It was dark outside due to the low overcast, and light flickered from the single fluorescent tube overhead, the second tube having burned out long ago. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and fear, an odor part ammonia, part fresh sweat. The lies told behind the door echoed off the hard surfaces of the wall and the ceiling, muttering dully beneath the scratching of the branches against the glass.I didn’t do it, officer. I only had one beer. I never hit her, she’s a lying bitch. Nobody told me my license was suspended, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The door was open; I just went in to make sure everything was all right. I was just borrowing that truck. I loved that girl like she was my own daughter. I could never hurt him, he was my best friend. I was over at my mom’s, at the bar, down on my boat, on the river, out hunting, in Anchorage, Outside.

The room, with all its odors and echoes, had a pronounced effect on the people who were questioned there. Once Liam had come upon Mamie Hagemeister, the police station clerk, prepared to clean the interview room. He had himself removed mop and bucket from her hands and poured the hot soapy water in the nearest toilet. If he had his way, the room would never be cleaned, the walls never repainted, the ill-fitting window never replaced. The light fixture would always be kept to one bulb, and that bulb ready to give out at any moment. The chairs would never acquire cushions, the table would forever retain its scarred and unlovely surface.

“Kvichak has asked for a lawyer,” Prince said tentatively, as if referring to a subject in questionable taste.

“Yes, he has,” Liam said cordially, “and we’ll see that he gets one. Just as soon as Anchorage can rustle one up.”

“What happened to Brian Keogh?”

“Our judicial district’s most recent public defender? Came in on the plane before yours? That Brian Keogh?”

“That would be the one,” Prince acknowledged. “What happened to him?”

“He quit. Said he couldn’t face another winter in the Bush. He was posted in Kotzebue before here,” he added, in answer to Prince’s interrogatory lift of eyebrow. “Says he’s had enough ice not in a glass. He was offered a job as house counsel for some international import firm and he snapped it up. So Newenham is once more without a public defender.” Liam’s voice did not indicate massive sorrow at this turn of events. “And with this storm coming on, it’ll probably be a while before we get a temp.”

The two troopers sat across the table from Engebretsen and Kvichak now, Prince erect and all business, Liam sitting back with his long legs sprawled at an angle, looking out the window as if he weren’t even listening, in fact as if he were about to doze off. In the three hours since starting that tape, he had yet to say one word.

“I’m thirsty,” Engebretsen said. “Come on, gimme something to drink.”

“In a minute,” Prince said, the crease in her blue uniform sleeve as crisp as it had been when she walked in, her tie as impeccably knotted. Her black curls formed a tight cap against her skull, her blue eyes were hard and merciless, her mouth held in a stern, uncompromising line. She looked like a cop from the bone out, and she sounded like one, too. “Let’s go over it one more time. You say-”

“Shit, man,” Kvichak said, exploding onto his feet. His chair slammed against the wall and turned over. Engebretsen jumped and looked as if he were about to burst into tears.

Prince rose to face him, eye to eye. Liam didn’t move, didn’t turn from the window. “We’ve told you the goddamn story about six different times this morning, how many times you want us to tell it?”

“Until you get it right.”

“Shit! You want us to say we killed that man! Well, we didn’t, and nothing you can say or do is going to make us say we did! I want a lawyer!” He leaned across the table and shouted directly at Liam. “I want a goddamn lawyer!”

Liam didn’t turn his head. Prince stared without changing expression. “Sit down.” The two words were uttered in a soft, unthreatening voice, but they were a command. Kvichak picked up his chair, slammed it down on the floor and sat down hard. It must have hurt his tailbone, but it didn’t affect his glare.

Prince sat opposite him and looked down at her notepad. “Now. You were hunting, you say.”

Engebretsen, so verbal during the arrest and at the beginning of the interview, had withdrawn into silence and the occasional whimper. Kvichak was a one-man monument to fury; he spat out sentences as if they were being fed into the breech of an automatic rifle. “Yeah. We were hunting. We were hunting up on Nuk Bluff, like we do every September of our lives, like we have every single year since we could hold a rifle by ourselves. We were up there for ten days, we limited out in caribou, moose, geese, spruce hens and ptarmigan. We gutted and skinned and packed everything back to camp, so we didn’t violate no wanton waste law. We didn’t shoot the day Chouinard flew us in, so we didn’t violate the fly-and-shoot-same-day rule.” Again, he spoke directly to Liam. “We didn’t see nobody and we didn’t hear nobody, and we sure as hell didn’t kill nobody.”

Liam didn’t stir.

“You can’t always say you haven’t seen anybody, can you, John?”

Engebretsen gave a low moan.

“Sometimes we do,” John said truculently. “What of it?”

“Sometimes you see them, and sometimes you talk to them, and sometimes you do more than that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Prince consulted a file. “September 12, 1998, Todd and Sharon Koch of Anchorage were paddling a canoe from the Two Lake campsite to the Four Lake Ranger Station when two men matching your descriptions appeared on the beach and started shooting at them.”

Engebretsen whimpered.

“Got nothing to do with us,” Kvichak growled. “We were home by the twelfth.”

“So your sister Barbara said,” Prince agreed. “And your brother-in-law Rob, and your nieces Karen, Sarah and Patricia, and your nephews John, Patrick and Tom. I’m sure your mother would have said so, too, only she was in the hospital in Anchorage on the twelfth.”

“You can’t prove a goddamn thing.”

“You’re right,” Prince said, nodding. “We can’t, and we couldn’t. Same way we couldn’t when a bunch of hikers up Utah Canyon got their camp trashed.”

Engebretsen drew in a long, shaky breath. Kvichak shot him a warning glance. “Yeah, Corcoran asked us about that, but we were on the other side of the bluff from Utah.”

“Of course you were,” Prince said.

“I wanna go to the bathroom,” Engebretsen said.

“In a minute,” Prince said.

Engebretsen plucked up his courage. “You’re always saying ‘in a minute.’ How come not now?”

She smiled at him, a thin-lipped, humorless stretch of the lips. “Because we’re not done talking, Teddy.”

He slumped back in his chair.

“For crissake,” Kvichak said angrily, “let the poor bastard go to the john, why dontcha?”

She turned the smile on him. “In a minute.”

“Fuck you!”

Liam turned his head and said, “John, your Winchester shotgun was the one used to kill Mark Hanover. Crime Lab called, and they say there’s no doubt.”

Kvichak stared at him, his face white and shocked, whether at the sound of Liam’s first words in three hours or at the words themselves.

Liam rose to his feet. “Let’s get some lunch,” he said to Prince, and led the way out of the interview room. Prince had to hustle to get behind him before the door closed.

They stood in the hallway. “Shh,” Liam said with one upraised finger.

An outburst of shouting came from behind the door, and Liam smiled.

“Sir, I-”

“They were thirsty, they were hungry, they did need to pee. Now they’re scared. Let’s let them be scared for a while.”

Prince chewed her lip. “How much longer can we hold them without charging them?”

“Another twelve hours.”

“The local magistrate would pick now to head up the creek.”

“All to our advantage. If Bill were here, she’d probably sign off on a warrant, but she’d let them out on bail.” He saw Prince’s look. “Hey, John Kvichak’s brother-in-law’s the biggest bum unhung. John’s the sole support of his sister’s family and his mother. Teddy Engebretsen’s dad is eighty-two, and he lives with Teddy. Neither one of them is a flight risk. Besides, where would they go?”

“Anywhere in the Bush?”

“It’s coming on winter, they’d either starve or freeze.”

They went to Eagle and cruised the deli counter, Liam settling on deep-fried chicken and Prince on a ham and cheese sandwich. They journeyed back to the post, ate their lunch without haste, called the Anchorage D.A. with information about a sex offender recently paroled, which parole he had immediately broken, big surprise.

At fifteen past one, they presented themselves back at the jail. At sixteen past one, they walked into the interview room. Engebretsen looked up and said, “I want to talk.”

“Teddy-” Kvichak said.

“No,” Engebretsen said with unaccustomed firmness. “Let’s just tell them the truth, Johnny. One more time. Either they’ll believe us or they won’t-”

“They won’t. Cops never know the truth when they hear it.”

“Either they’ll believe us or they won’t,” Engebretsen repeated, his voice wavering a little. “Either way, I’m talking.”

“Shit.” Kvichak folded his arms and glowered. “I ain’t having nothing to do with it.”

“Fine,” Engebretsen said. “I’ll tell.”

Prince looked at Liam with undisguised admiration.

They’d heard the shot from their camp on the bluff, Engebretsen said. “It was our last day, you know, we’d limited out on everything, we butchered everything out, put it in game sacks, we were just waiting on Wy.” He glanced sideways at Kvichak. “So we opened the beer.”

“How long was it before you heard the shots?” Prince said.

“Man, I don’t know,” Engebretsen said. “We opened the beer early. I think I was on my third. I mean, we just didn’t need to be sober anymore, so we weren’t trying to be. Hell, we’d been drinking most of the night, if it comes to that. I don’t know, nine o’clock, maybe? Maybe earlier.”

Liam looked at Kvichak. Kvichak held his eyes for a long moment. “Oh hell,” he said, slumping. “It was about eight-thirty, and before you say anything, yeah, we were already half in the bag.”

“It was the first shots we’d heard that didn’t come from our guns, you know?” Engebretsen said. “We hadn’t even heard any planes, and the nearest cabin is that crotchety old Italian at Warehouse Mountain, and that’s twenty miles away. Then we remembered that mining claim on Nenevok, and we thought maybe they were in trouble? Like one of them fired a warning shot for help, you know?”

“Tell me something, Teddy,” Prince said, gazing at the earnest face sitting across from her. “Did you ever meet the miner on Nenevok?”

Engebretsen flushed and glanced at Kvichak, who folded his arms across his chest again. “Not really. Well, kind of.”

“Which? Not really, or kind of?”

“Crissake,” Kvichak said. “Wy dropped off supplies at Nenevok when she was bringing us into the bluff.”

“And you met Mark Hanover, the miner.”

Again the two men exchanged a glance. “Didn’t meet the miner, he didn’t come to the plane,” Kvichak said finally. “The wife was there, though.”

Prince gave a thoughtful nod, and glanced at Liam to see a muscle working in his jaw like a nervous tic. “The wife,” she said. “Rebecca Hanover.”

Engebretsen, forgetting for the moment where he was and who was listening, gave a long, blissful sigh. “Oh yeahhhh.”

“Hear tell she was pretty,” Prince observed in a neutral voice.

Engebretsen gave her an incredulous look. “Pretty! She wasn’t just pretty. She was-she was-” He struggled for suitable words. “She was flat fucking drop-dead gorgeous,” he said finally, with a touch of awe. “I never seen nobody so pretty outside of a movie. And built, wow!” A low, reverent whistle accompanied the words.

It is a maxim of the law enforcement profession that jails aren’t filled with smart people. Nevertheless, this might be just about the dumbest person on the face of the earth sitting across from her now. “So, on that last morning of your hunt, you got tanked, you heard shots, you thought fired from the direction of the mine on Nenevok Creek, you remembered meeting a gorgeous woman there, and you decided to investigate.”

“I told you,” Kvichak said, more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you, Teddy, I told you they’d never believe nothing we said.”

“No,” Engebretsen said, becoming frightened again. “I mean yes. I mean, we hiked over, took us, hell, took us forever, and we were sober as judges by the time we got there.”

“Uh-huh,” Prince said. “When you got to the mine, what did you find?”

Engebretsen leaned forward. “There was a man, facedown in the creek.”

“You pulled him out.”

“Well, yeah, we didn’t know if he was dead or not. I got my feet wet. Ten days I kept them dry, and the last day I have to go get them wet.”

“So, Mark Hanover was dead when you found him.”

Kvichak slammed his hands down flat on the table. In the ensuing silence, he leaned forward and he met Liam’s eyes with a flat, unwinking stare. “Yes. Mark Hanover or whoever he was was dead when we got there. We heard the shot right after we got up. It took us two hours plus to get from the bluff to the Nenevok. We found his body in the creek. We pulled him out to see if he was dead. He was. We yelled for his wife. She didn’t come out of the woods. I yelled for help on the cell phone.”

“And then Johnny made us leave,” Engebretsen said. “He said you’d nail us for doing it.” He paused, and added defiantly, “And he was right.”

There was a brief silence. For a moment, for just a moment, Prince allowed herself to be impressed by their sincerity.

Liam stood up. “Interview terminated, two-thirty p.m.” He turned off the recorder and looked at Kvichak. “Crime Lab says yours was the gun, John.”

Kvichak stared back. “The Crime Lab is wrong.”

“Wasn’t a bad bluff,” Prince said on the way back to the post. “I would have believed him, but the lab doesn’t lie.” She thought of Nick, and had to erase the grin that came out of nowhere.

“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg?”

Prince was thrown off track. “I beg your pardon?”

“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg,” Liam repeated. “I have. It’s slow going.”

She digested this. “Come on. They’ve got it all, means, motive, opportunity. They’ve even got a history of pulling this kind of stuff, going back years.”

“They’ve never killed anybody before.”

“They shot at two people last year,” she retorted.

“They didn’t hit anybody, though,” he said thoughtfully. “You notice? Just the canoe. You see that drawing Corcoran did, showing where the bullet holes were? One amidships, directly between the two thwarts where the two people were sitting. The second in the stern. Both just at the waterline.”

“So?”

“So, they both limited out this year.”

She pulled into the space in front of the post and turned to stare at him. “And?”

“And I’d like to know how good they are with those rifles.”

He called Charlene Taylor. “Johnny and Teddy?” she said. “They’re hell on the moose and the caribou, but I can’t see them killing anybody.”

“Do you know what kind of shots they are?”

“First class,” she said promptly. Charlene was Liam’s alter ego in Newenham, the fish and game side of the troopers. It was her unenviable lot to enforce, or try to enforce, the state fish and game laws, which she did by four-wheeler, Zodiac and Cessna 206. Wet your line too early, shoot your bear too late, take the rack on your moose and leave the meat, and Charlene was there, a smile on her face and a summons in her hand. “I’ve checked out their camp a time or two, up on the bluff. Always go for a head or a shoulder shot, and they always get it, too. Probably has something to do with needing the meat to feed their families. Trophy hunters’ll go for the gut every time.”

Liam heard the disgust in her voice but refused to be sidetracked. “You ever have to haul them in, Teddy or John?”

“I probably could have, a time or two,” she admitted. “Maybe even should have. But I didn’t. They don’t take more than their families can eat in a winter, and if they hold over the hunting season by a couple of hours, I’m not going to notice.”

“Thanks, Charlene.”

He hung up the phone. Prince had her arms folded and was staring at him. “Please tell me you don’t think they’re telling the truth.”

He put his cap back on. By way of answering, he said, “Let’s check out Teddy’s hunting boots.”

Teddy’s dad suffered from Alzheimer’s. One of John Kvichak’s nieces, a tall, cool, blond drink of water named Karen, was staying with him while Teddy, she informed Liam in icy tones, was in jail. She examined Liam and Prince from behind oversize glasses that somehow lent an extra air of contempt to her expression, and produced Teddy’s boots.

They were leather, and laced up over the ankles. They were also damp right through.

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Prince said.

“No,” Liam said. “Let’s go back to the office and make some calls to Anchorage.”

They reached Rebecca Hanover’s best friend, Nina Stewart, on their fourth call. She was upset and yelling by the end of the call, but what she unconsciously let slip along the way about the Hanovers’ summer on Nenevok Creek had even Prince raising an eyebrow afterward. “Well,” she said.

“Well,” Liam said.

“A reluctant miner.”

“Her husband was the miner,” Liam said. “Seems Becky wasn’t all that thrilled at the prospect of moiling for gold.”

“Can’t argue with her there,” Prince said. “You ever panned gold?” Liam shook his head. “My folks took me out to the Crow Creek mine when I was a kid. I was soaked to the skin with mud up to my eyebrows by the time I was done. Never did find any gold.”

Liam grunted.

“If I was dainty little Rebecca Hanover, used to a comfy suburban lifestyle, shopping at Nordie’s and dining at Sack’s, all supported by my husband’s North Slope engineering job, I might be a bit peeved if he quit that job, sold my home and moved me out into the Bush.”

“She had a job, too,” Liam said mildly.

“Uh-huh. Do you think she did it?”

“We’ll have to find her to answer that question.”

“The boys still look good to me.”

“They look pretty good to me, too,” Liam admitted.

Prince looked out the window. It wasn’t even six o’clock and the sky was black. “If it’s her, and she’s on the run, at least she’s not getting away easy.”

“More than that,” Liam said. At her inquiring look he added, “This storm is keeping the magistrate up the creek. Plus, if our boys do insist on a lawyer, it’ll take a public defender with a stronger stomach than I’ve got to put his ass in the air until it blows out or through.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we’ve got time. Time to hang on to the boys while we wait for Rebecca Hanover to show up.”

Prince was skeptical. “You think she will?”

“If she isn’t dead already, yes.”

“The Bush is a big place.”

“Yeah, but it’s amazing how often people wander out of it. Let’s go talk to the boys again.”