So Sure Of Death

THIRTEEN

Back at the post, Liam assembled two piles of evidence. One pile consisted of Nelson's notebook, the pencil drawings he'd made of the scene of Nelson's death, the notes he'd made after talking to Frank Petla, Wy, Prince and McLynn. The other pile consisted of the notes he'd taken at Kulukak, the picture of the Malone family sailing in Hawaii, the notes of the conversations with the Kulukak elders, Bill, Tanya and Ballard, the tender summary, the two rolls of film he'd taken of theMarybethia.The film would have to go into Anchorage by pouch tomorrow morning for development into trial exhibits. He wouldn't need to see the photographs. The scene was etched on the gray matter of his mind for life.

It was after eight o'clock in the evening. The day was three hours away from sunset. He thought about going over to Wy's. He had this need to see her, to breathe her air, to feel her flesh beneath his hands. It was growing stronger with every day, and half the time when he started going somewhere in the Blazer he'd find himself on the road to her house.

He picked up the local paper and turned to the classifieds. There was an actual house for sale, south of town on the road to Chinook, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a five-acre lot. Neither price nor location was listed. He dialed the number.

The phone rang once. The voice that answered was male and brusque. “Yeah?”

“Hi, my name's Liam Campbell. I was calling about the ad in the paper. The house for sale?”

“What's your driver's license number?”

Liam blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“What, you don't understand English? I asked you what your driver's license number was. And I don't got all day.”

Liam found himself fishing out his wallet. He read the number off, and waited.

“Huh. You born here?”

“Germany.”

“Huh. Army brat, I suppose.”

“Air Force, actually,” Liam said, struggling not to sound apologetic. “We moved to Anchorage that year.”

“Huh.” The syllable was disparaging.

Liam maintained a hopeful silence. Although it was heresy to admit in Alaska, he kind of liked Anchorage, but he wasn't going to say so if liking Anchorage was going to make the man on the other end of the line deem him an unsuitable candidate to purchase the house.

“Well, you can come over and look at it, but I ain't making no promises. Somebody comes along with a lower number, I give them first consideration.”

“Right,” Liam said. “Makes perfect sense. I understand completely.” He paused. “Okay. No, I don't. Mind telling me why?”

“I guess you really don't understand English, do you? The lower your driver's license number, the longer you been in the state. The longer you been in the state, the more likely you are to stay. If you look like a stayer, you get the house. If you don't, forget it. When you coming over?”

“How about tomorrow morning?” Liam said meekly.

“Can't, I'll be out fishing. Next Monday. Nine a.m. And don't be late.”

“Wait! I need directions!”

There was a grunt, and then directions, grudgingly given.

“And what's your name? Sir? Sir?”

The dial tone was his reply. He replaced the receiver, wondered what was going to happen on Monday, remembered waking up on theDawn Pthis morning and decided that if the house had working plumbing and a good roof, he would take it, no matter what kind of price had been hung on it.

There was one other house listed for sale in the paper, in Manokotak, forty miles west by air, which, according to the ad, needed a lot of work, was ineligible for financing and was available for rent for fifteen hundred a month with an additional month's rent for a security deposit, but only until the owner found a buyer. If it had running hot and cold, Liam might have been interested.

On the other hand, there were three boats for sale, two thirtytwo-foot drifters and a fifty-four-foot seiner. One drifter was going for fifty thousand or best offer, one for two hundred thousand if you bought the permit, too, and the seiner for eighty, although the electronics needed replacing.

He folded the paper and put it down. Bristol Bay was looking at a fifty percent bankruptcy rate for fishermen these days, what with the vanishing salmon runs and the rise of farmed salmon everywhere but Alaska, where farmed salmon was out-lawed. A lot of people were making career-changing decisions, including sons and daughters whose families had made their livings on the Bay since back before engines were legal and all the Bay drifters operated under sail. It was anybody's guess what would happen next.

It didn't mean the availability of real estate was going up, or its price coming down, though.

His stomach growled. One of Bill's burgers sounded about right, but Bill's Bar and Grill was a public place. You never knew who you might run into there. He decided he was more in the mood for the deli takeout at the NC market, and a cozy evening at home with a couple of fingers of Glenmorangie and a good book.

Even if that home was slowly sinking into the boat harbor, one inexorable inch at a time.

An hour later, he'd settled back with a porcelain mug half full of single-malt scotch and a copy ofPillar of Fireby Taylor Branch, a historian who managed to combine scholarship with a talent for writing. Liam liked reading history, and it wasn't often he came across the two skills in the same package. He piled pillows in back of his head and paged through the preface to chapter one. He always read prefaces and prologues and introductions after he'd read the book. Partly he was impatient to get on with the story, partly he didn't want anything in the book spoiled for him, partly he didn't care how many people the author wanted to thank and partly he just wanted to get on with it.

He got on with it, and the scotch was down by half when he reached page 26 and first mention of Eugene T. “Bull” Connor, police commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, whose actions in the late fifties and early sixties were still being lived down by police departments all over the nation. Liam had seen videotapes of the Birmingham police using fire hoses and German shepherds to quell demonstrators, most of them black, most of them nonviolent. They hadn't needed quelling, but then that hadn't been the point. Liam thought of Rodney King and wondered when America was going to get it right.

The boat shifted suddenly and he almost rolled out of bed. The rest of his scotch got away from him, which put him in no good mood to answer the knock on the hatch. “Who the hell is it?” he barked.

The door opened, and Trooper Diana Prince ducked her head inside. Her uniform was still immaculate, although she did look tired. Curious, as well. She took in the cramped quarters, the minuscule galley, consisting of two gas burners and a sink the size of a teacup, the marine toilet tucked into an alcove, and with a heroic effort managed not to wrinkle her nose at the dank smell. “Sir.”

Liam, dressed for bed in T-shirt and jockey briefs, sat abruptly upright and smacked the same part of his forehead against the same section of bulkhead that he had that morning. “Shit! Son of a bitch! Goddamn it to hell!”

He held his head and swung his legs over the side. “Damn, damn, damn.” He stood up, feet squishing in the damp carpet.

“I'm sorry, sir. Are you all right?”

He felt her hand on his arm, and yanked it free. “I'm fine,” he said, retreated a step. His heel came down on a church key previously secreted beneath the lip of his bunk. “Ouch!” He hopped into the air, clutching his foot, and whacked his head on the bulk-head again.

“Sir, let me-”

“No!” he roared. “Don't help me, for crissake please don't help me!” Vision blurred, he pawed for his pants, draped over the opposite bunk. Helpfully, she put them into his hands. “Go outside and wait, goddamn it,” he growled, and heard the hatch slide open behind him.

“Oh hello,” he heard her say, and whirled around on one leg to meet the startled gazes of Jo Dunaway and Tim Gosuk.

His pants legs developed a reluctance to fit over his legs heretofore unknown in their history as his pants. He drew himself up, necessarily stooping some because of the level of the ceiling, and said with awful politeness, “Could you please wait outside while I get some clothes on? Thank you.” Without waiting for an answer, he hopped forward on one foot, herding Prince in front of him, and slid the hatch shut in their faces.

A minute later, a scowl on his face that dared any one of them to comment on the prior scene, he reopened the hatch. Very gruff and businesslike, he said to Prince, “Did you have something to report, Trooper?”

“Yes, sir, I did, but it can wait,” Prince said from a brace that looked as rigid as the expression on her face.

It couldn't have waited until morning, when he wouldn't be caught with his pants down by Wy's best friend and son? To Jo he said with unbending courtesy, “What can I do for you?”

One thing about Jo, she wasn't afraid to come right to the point. “I heard about the killings on theMarybethia.”

“How?” Liam waved a hand in his own reply. “Never mind. Doesn't matter. Is this on the record?” She nodded. “All right, get out your recorder.” She produced a tiny black Sony. Click. “My name is Trooper-” Remembering, he corrected himself. “My name is Corporal Liam Campbell, of the Alaska State Troopers, assigned to the Newenham post.” He caught Prince's quick, surprised glance at this sudden elevation in rank. Jo's steady eyes didn't waver, but she caught it, too, and he cursed himself for the slip. “My associate is Trooper Diana Prince. This morning we responded to a call from Kulukak, which reported a fishing boat named theMarybethia,adrift in Kulukak Bay. It was reported to have been on fire. We went to Kulukak, where the boat was towed. All crew members, seven in number, were dead. We are not releasing the names of the victims pending notification of next of kin. Investigation into the incident is continuing.”

Jo waited until it was obvious he was going to say no more and shut off the recorder. “That it?”

“That's it for now.”

“Did the fire kill them or not?”

“Cause of death will be determined at time of autopsy.”

She pointed the recorder at him. “If you won't say cause, I'm thinking maybe they died from something other than the fire.”

He said nothing, arms folded, face expressionless.

She looked at Prince. “Anything to add?”

Prince, face wooden, said, “No, ma'am.”

“Look at that,” Jo said to Tim. “If you're going to be a reporter-”

“Over my dead body,” Liam said involuntarily.

Tim looked at Liam, at first startled, and then gratified. No one, before Wy, had ever taken enough of an interest in him to be proprietary about his future.

“-then you need to be able to recognize that expression. It's called stonewalling.” To Liam, Jo said, “I'll be in touch.”

“I'll be around,” he said blandly, regaining his composure. “Now if you'll excuse us, I have some business to discuss with my associate.”

He saw them to the deck. Tim hopped to the slip, followed by Jo. She paused, looking up at Liam. “Nice legs, by the way,” she said, and winked at him before following Tim down the slip to the ramp.

He waited until they were mounting the ramp and safely out of earshot before returning to the cabin. He wouldn't put it past Jo to sneak back and eavesdrop. “You want some coffee?” he said to Prince.

“I could use some,” she admitted.

Water boiled rapidly on one of the gas burners, and he poured it through a two-cup cone filter. She picked up the package of coffee. “Tsunami Blend? Never heard of it.” She sniffed. “Smells good. Dark roast?”

Nowadays everyone was a coffee snob. “Yeah. Captain's Roast. I order it direct from-”

“Homer, yeah, I've been. In fact, I completed my FTO program there.”

“Is that right? Who were your field training officers?”

“Portlock, Wosnesinski and Doroshin.”

Liam grimaced. “Talk about dropping you in at the deep end.”

“They were all right,” she said stoutly, although the undercurrent of surprise that this should be so was unmistakable to Liam's trained ear. “Tough, but fair.” She hesitated, and said with a burst of candor, the first totally nonprofessional expression he'd heard from her, “I don't mind saying I was a little nervous going in. At the academy I heard a story about a recruit washing out on report writing because of a personality clash with his FTO.”

“I heard that same story,” Liam said, turning, mugs in hand. “That's why a recruit has to satisfy three separate officers that he or she is a ready and worthy candidate. That way, if one of the officers has bad chemistry with the recruit, the other two can cancel him-or her-out.”

There wasn't enough room for both sets of long legs beneath the tiny galley table, so he sat on the bunk and sipped his coffee.

She shifted her feet out of his way, looking at the imprints her shoes left behind in the carpet. “Uh, sir-you do know that the floor is wet in here?”

“It's Liam in private, Diana, and yes, I do know the floor is wet in here. This boat is sinking.”

She blinked at him. “Sinking?” Her voice faltered. “As in, below the surface of the harbor?”

“Slowly.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Never mind that. What brings you down here at this time of night?”

Recalled to duty, she sat up straight and made a praiseworthy attempt to forget that the boat she was sitting in was sinking, however slowly. “I flew back out to Kulukak this evening.”

He went very still. “I thought I told you to get some rest.”

“I wanted to canvass the villagers for information on the Malones, and pick up what information I could on Monday's fishing period.”

“I see.” Liam sipped his coffee and waited for his irritation to subside. Well, what the hell, she'd already done the deed, he might as well let her tell him what she'd learned. Her air of suppressed excitement clearly indicated that she had discovered something. He lowered the mug and said in a deliberate understated tone, “What did you find out?”

She made a wry mouth. “Well, first off I found that none of the villagers wanted to talk about it.”

“I'm not surprised.” Her brow furrowed, and he explained. “Most of them were born there, have lived there all their lives. Their first loyalty will be to their neighbors.”

“Yes, but-”

“Second, most of them are still pissed at our boss for fighting the Venetie sovereignty case all the way to the Supreme Court.”

“John Barton went to court?”

“Our boss the governor.”

“Oh.” She nodded, still not quite understanding. “I've never paid much attention to politics.”

“I'm tempted to say that now would be a good time to start, but I don't know. Maybe the more ignorant you are, the better.” He sipped his coffee. “You vote?”

She was insulted. “Of course I vote.”

“How do you choose, if you don't pay much attention to politics?”

She hesitated. “Well, actually, I call my father and ask him how he's going to vote.”

“You let him tell you how?”

“No,” she said, and reached to her collar to loosen her tie. “No, then I vote the exact opposite.”

He looked up. She was dead serious. “Oh.” Liam decided they didn't know each other well enough for him to pursue that line of inquiry. He wondered how many times he and his father had canceled each other's votes out. He wondered if everyone had a love-hate relationship with his or her father. He wondered how he was going to get through dinner the next evening.

Diana set her mug down, pulled out a notebook and returned to the subject at hand. “Since I couldn't get much from the villagers, I went down to the harbor and went from boat to boat.” She paused expectantly.

“And?” Liam said obediently.

“And I found a few fishermen who weren't local who knew the family. The Malones have lived in Kulukak for fifty years. David Malone's grandfather served in the Aleutians during World War II, and took demobilization in Anchorage after he sent for his family. In 1948, they moved to Kulukak.”

“Wonder how he got to Kulukak.”

She flipped back a page. “One of the people I talked to-darn it, where is that?-here, a Sam Deener told me that Malone Senior, was looking for a place to get away from it all and raise his family in peace and safety.”

His son had found neither, following in his father's footsteps, Liam thought.

Unconscious of irony, Diana plowed on. “He and his wife, Mae, had one son, David. David went away to school, took a fisheries management degree from the University of Oregon and brought Molly home when he graduated. They've lived there ever since. Every five years or so, David buys-bought-a bigger and better boat. They've been adding on to the house at about the same rate.”

“Mmm.” Liam drank coffee and thought. “How many other white people are there in Kulukak? Year-round residents, I mean?”

She looked puzzled. “I never thought to ask.”

“The answer might be interesting.” She still looked puzzled, and he relented enough to explain. “A lot of these smaller villages don't tolerate outsiders coming in.”

She looked back down at her notebook. “I didn't get a feel for anything like that.”

“You wouldn't; you're white, too. There's a lot they won't tell you, or me, for that matter. Not only are we cops, we're white cops.”

He could see by her expression that she understood. “They covered that pretty thoroughly in the course on community relations.”

“They did in my time, too.” And to give the academy credit, the emphasis laid on the responsibility of troopers posted to the Bush to keep everybody's peace, regardless of race, was thorough and decidedly firm. The present colonel was Native, too, which by itself was enough to raise everyone's consciousness a notch.

But, in the end, the troopers worked for the state of Alaska. They enforced laws passed by the Alaskan legislature. Going into a Bush village, Liam never forgot he was white and an employee of the state, and that of the two, the latter would get him into more trouble than both together. Prince would have an added disadvantage; she was a woman.

“Why doesn't Kulukak have a vipso?” Prince asked. “It's big enough, they could use a local cop.”

Liam sighed. The Village Police and Safety Officer Program took rural applicants into the trooper academy in Sitka, trained them in police procedures and then sent them back to keep the peace in their villages. An excellent idea, but it had its drawbacks, one of which was that in any small Bush village, the chances of any local applicant's being related in some way to the rest of the village was very high. “They had one,” he said. “About four years ago. Or so I hear tell, as I have been making some calls of my own. He was young, bright, good at his job. Then he quit.”

“Just like that?”

“Not quite. He got caught in the sack with a woman of the village. Name of Patty.” He met Prince's eyes, and added ruefully, “Patty Larsgaard. When he left town, she went with him.”

“Oh,” she said. Comprehension dawned. “Oh, I see. Wife?” He nodded. “Young Walter or Old Walter?”

“Young.”

“Oh.” She thought. “That's interesting.”

“How so?”

She hesitated. “Nobody actually said anything…”

“Yeah, but?”

“Well, I get the feeling there was something going on between Larsgaard and Molly Malone.”

Liam remembered Larsgaard's hesitation in speaking of Molly Malone. “I got that feeling, too, when we were all up at the Malones' house.”

“Shall I interrogate him on it?”

“We both will. We're flying back in tomorrow morning.”

“Eight, right?”

“Ten,” he said firmly, and repressed a chuckle at her expression. “I've got some phone calls to make. The M.E. might have some preliminary findings, and I want to talk to him before we leave.” He drained his mug. “That all you got?”

“I haven't been able to track down Max Bayless yet.”

“I've got someone working on that for me. Anything else?” She hesitated. “Well…”

“What?” He stretched, yawning. “I'm bushed. It's been a long day. Time to hit the rack.”

Her triumphant smile stopped him. “I found a witness, sir. A deckhand on a boat that broke down in Kulukak toward the end of Monday's period.”

That caught him in midstretch. “You're kidding.”

“No. Chad Donohoe, from-”

His tone was deceptively mild. “And you didn't think this was information important enough to tell me first?”

Her smile slipped. “Well…”

He met her eyes. His face didn't change expression but hers did. “Next time? Just run it down in order of importance. Especially at this time of night.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, subdued. She flipped to the appropriate page in her notebook. “Chad Donohoe, from Mount Vernon, Washington State. He was deckhanding on board theSnohomish Belleand she broke down just as the period was ending, about five-thirty. The skipper-Anders Ringstad-had to call in an order to Newenham-Reardon Marine-and have it flown into Kulukak late that night, about ten o'clock.” She added parenthetically, “That strip must be rated for after-dark operations. I'll have to check. Of course, if you're not flying passengers, the rules aren't as stringent. Anyway, Ringstad sent Donohoe to Kulukak in the skiff. Where they were fishing is about an hour from the village by skiff. He should have been back by midnight, twelve-thirty at the latest.

“But…” Prince looked at Liam over the top of her notebook. “It seems that Donohoe has a girlfriend in Kulukak. Among other places.”

“Aha.”

“So it was about three a.m. when he got back to theSnohomish Belle.”

Liam cut to the chase. “What did he see?”

“He says it was real foggy out, first of all. Worse than it was this morning.”

Liam groaned. “Oh great.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought, and it was right down on the water, too, he couldn't see but fifty feet off the beam-what's a beam?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Anyway, he couldn't see fifty feet off the beam in either direction. But he says a New England dory-what's a dory?”

“A skiff. A big skiff.”

“Oh. Donohoe saw this New England dory pass real close off to starboard-that's right-about ten minutes before he got back to theBelle.Almost sideswiped him, he said, it was that close. He never would have seen it otherwise. He could hear the engine, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Sound carries in a fog.”

Liam thought of the various noises he had heard in and around Kulukak that morning, the rifle shots, the boat engines turning over, the landing plane. “Yes, it does. Did he see the person driving the skiff?”

“He saw a man, he said. He didn't know who he was.” Prince looked up, triumph in her eyes. “But his description sounds a lot like Walter Larsgaard.”

Liam thought about that for a few moments. Prince waited, her expression indicating a willingness to leap into the Cessna and fly down to Kulukak this minute to make an arrest.

Liam wasn't so sure. He'd seen Molly's picture; all right, maybe she did have a face-and a body-that would launch a thousand dories, maybe even one that might get her husband killed.

But her children? Her brother-in-law? Her husband's deckhands? Herself, ostensibly the object of her lover's affections?

He shook his head. Prince looked disappointed and Liam said, “Just thinking to myself. Here's a little piece of information for you. A fisher named Darrell Jacobson saw a New England dory leave Kulukak harbor at about ten p.m.”

“Who was driving it?” she said eagerly.

“He didn't know, he's not from Kulukak, but Jacobson was headed for Togiak, so we can pull him in for an identification if need we need him.” He could almost hear Prince's tail thumping the floor and held up a hand, palm out. “Look, we've got a couple of pieces of information, and we'll use them when we need to, but let's not jump the gun. Larsgaard fishes where he lives, I think he's his father's sole support, and he's tribal chair besides. He's not going anywhere. We'll brace him tomorrow, ask him what he was doing out on the Kulukak at that time of night. If it was him, maybe we can surprise an answer out of him.” He stood up and put his mug in the sink. “Now I'm hitting the rack, and I suggest you do the same.”

Prince handed her mug over without protest. “Sir-”

“It's Liam,” he reminded her, taking the mug.

“Is it okay if I bunk here for the night, Liam?”

“No.” He wasn't aware that he'd barked the word until he saw her flinch.

She nodded at the bunk opposite. “You've got the room, and as you know, I haven't had time to-”

“No. Well, I mean… well, I mean, no.”

“But-”

“I mean, no, you can't sleep here. I-it isn't a good idea. I don't-I can't-”

“But Liam-”

He realized, first, that he was babbling, and, second, that his forehead was beaded with sweat. He whipped around and slid the hatch back. “Goodnight, trooper.”

She sighed. “Goodnight, Liam.”

“Maybe you better call me sir after all.”

“All right,” she said, submissive. “Goodnight, sir.”

He gave her a sharp look. Submissive didn't seem quite in character for Trooper Diana Prince.

“Goodnight,” he said, and stood stiffly as she slid past him and up the stairs to the deck. Her hair nearly brushed his nose. It smelled good, some kind of fruity scent. He didn't want to be smelling her hair. He slid the hatch smartly closed behind her, and waited as the boat tilted and righted itself again as she stepped to the slip.

Some sound came to him a few moments later, which might have been that of muffled laughter, but it might also have been the sound of water lapping against the pilings. He went back to bed without trying to figure out which.