So Sure Of Death

SEVENTEEN

“Doctors are lousy pilots,” Wy said. “Pisspoor, actually. They don't listen worth shit. You can't tell them anything, they're used to doing the telling. Guy says he's a doctor, he's not driving my plane and I ain't riding in his.”

Tim committed this to memory, and handed her a socket wrench.

“Thanks.” Wy tightened down the nut, wiped her hands on the legs of her overalls and closed the cowling before descending the stepladder perched at the nose of the Cub.

“How about troopers?” Tim said.

Wy looked at him, and he grinned. “Yeah, okay, smarty,” she said, “it was fine, she didn't hurt our baby any.”

“She better not've.” Tim sounded cocky and threatening and very proprietary as he put the wrench back in the red upright toolbox.

Wy eyed his back for a moment. “You want to learn?”

He looked around. “Learn what?”

She hooked a thumb at the plane. “You want to learn to fly?”

He stood straight up, the toolbox drawer left open. “Learn to fly?” His voice scaled up and ended on a squeak of disbelief.

“Yeah.”

He stared from her to the plane and back again. He looked dazzled. “You'd teach me?”

“Yeah.”

“To fly?”

She grinned. “Hey. It's what I do.”

A warm wave of color washed up over his face. “You're just kidding,” he said gruffly. “Aren't you? I'm too young. Aren't I?”

“Younger than me when I started,” she agreed. “But then I started awful late. I was practically an old lady.”

“How old?” he demanded.

“Sixteen.”

“Do you mean it?” he said again.

He threw the question down like a gauntlet, a challenge to her to take it up. Promises had been made to him before, many promises over the twelve long years of his young life, promises made and promises broken. “Yes,” she said soberly. “I mean it.”

He still didn't quite believe her, she could see it in his eyes. “Next Sunday morning,” she said, turning back to the plane. “I don't have anything booked until four that afternoon. We'll take the Cessna up. She's got dual controls.” She thought about mentioning ground school, and left it for later. If she could get him hooked on flying, he wouldn't have a choice.

After a moment or two, she heard him wheel the toolbox back into the shed.

There was a shed just like it in back of every one of the light planes drawn up at the edge of the tarmac at Newenham General Airport, but theirs was the only one currently in use. The open door revealed shelves packed with tools and parts, as well as camping and fishing gear. A fifty-five-gallon Chevron fuel drum, cut in half, sat in one corner, filled to the brim with Japanese fishing floats made of green glass. Wy picked them up whenever she made a beach landing and sold them to tourists for as much as the traffic would bear.

“Wy?”

“Yeah?” Wy was in the shed, smearing Goop on her hands, trying and failing to get the oil that invariably migrated beneath her fingernails.

The possibility of slipping the surly bonds of earth had faded from his face. “You remember the Malones?”

Her hands stilled, and she looked over her shoulder. Tim had one hand on the Cub's right strut, watching an Alaska Airlines 737 bank left out over the river in preparation for landing. “You mean the people who were killed on the boat in Kulukak?”

“Yeah.”

Wy reached for a rag and went out to stand next to him. “I didn't know them, Tim. I don't think I ever met them. I don't think I ever flew them anywhere.”

The 737 lined up on final.

“I knew the boy. Mike.”

“Did you?”

“He played basketball.”

“What position?”

“Guard.”

“Like you.”

“Yeah. I had to guard him last time the Kulukak team was in town. Our last game of the season.”

“When was that, March?”

“Yeah.”

Wy thought back, in her mind trying to distinguish one adolescent from another on a court that seemed remarkably full of them. “Number twenty-two, right? Hands like catcher's mitts, arms that stretched from here to Icky, and a good sport?”

“Yeah.”

Mike Malone had guarded Tim like Tim was Bastogne and Mike was the entire 501st Airborne. “You played really well against him.”

Tim's shoulders rose in a faint shrug. “Have to, against a guy like that.”

“Did you meet his sister, too?”

“Yeah. He introduced me once.” A pause. “She was a cheerleader, traveled with the team.”

“Pretty?”

“Yeah.”

The 737 touched down just inside the markers in a runway paint job, the engines roaring immediately into reverse so they wouldn't miss the first taxiway. Hot dog, Wy thought. Definitely the sound of someone not flying their own plane.

“Liam says they're dead.” He looked at her.

Wy finished with the rag and turned to pitch it, accurately, in the wastebasket just inside the door of the shed. “Yeah.” She turned back. “When did you talk to Liam?”

“This morning. I went over to the post. When you left to take the mail to Manokotak.”

Bless the U.S. Postal Service, Wy thought automatically. A mail contract was the difference between red and black on the bottom line to a Bush air taxi. “Oh.”

“You didn't say I couldn't.”

“No,” she agreed. Did he ask about me? she wanted to say, but managed to refrain from anything that sophomoric.

“So they're dead,” he repeated.

“Yeah.” Her hand settled on his shoulder and squeezed, as the 737 popped its hatch and let down its rear air stair.

“It's-it's-itstinks,” he said, and his eyes when he raised them were dark and wounded.

“It stinks to high heaven,” Wy agreed. “Tim. Did you ever meet the rest of Mike's family? His mom? His dad?”

Tim shook his head. “No. Just Mike.” He hesitated.

“What?”

He colored, and looked at his shoes. “One time, it was like the first time we played the Wolverines, I remember Mike got benched for fighting.”

“What about?”

His color deepened and he wouldn't look up. “Somebody'd said something about his mother.”

“What?”

He said gruffly, “Said she slept around on Mike's dad. Called her a whore. So Mike beat him up, and the coach benched him.” He added wistfully, “That was the only time all year we beat them.”

“Who said that? Who did Mike beat up?”

“Arne. Arne Swensen. He plays guard, too. He's a senior this year, so he'll probably start even if he doesn't deserve to.” He looked up. “That stinks, too.”

Wy smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah.”

He pulled back and anxiously patted his glossy black locks back into their previous perfect order. The last person off the 737 was a big, bulky man wearing a parka and mukluks. In July. “Tourist,” he said.

“And how.”

“Mom?”

He'd called her Mom from the first day she brought him home from the hospital, a direct and determined repudiation of his birth mother. Now that he felt more secure, he used Mom and Wy interchangeably. She did notice that when he was particularly bothered about something, he usually called her Mom. She steeled herself. “What?”

He fidgeted. “They weren't-they didn't-Kerry and Mike… nobody, well, hurt them, did they?”

It only took Wy a second to understand. Tim had grown up among a succession of people who had regarded his body as their personal punching bag. “No,” Wy said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Wy said. “I'm sure.”

She wasn't, of course, she knew nothing about the condition in which the bodies had been found, but she was willing to lie herself blue in the face before she contributed one more scene to Tim's recurring nightmares. Imagining how Mike, a boy he'd admired, and Kerry, a girl he might have had a secret crush on, had been tortured before being killed was not going to lessen their frequency or ease their intensity.

The 737 started loading passengers for the return trip to Anchorage. First on board was a skinny little blond kid in a blue nylon jacket, jeans and sneakers, clutching a silver briefcase almost as big as he was. He looked purposeful, on a mission. Wy wondered what was in the suitcase.

A shout distracted her attention, and she looked around to see Professor Desmond X. McLynn bearing down on them. “I'm outta here,” Tim muttered, and he grabbed his bike and shot off. Wy didn't blame him.

“What can I do for you, Mr. McLynn?” Wy said as the professor came trotting up.

“Do? You can fly me out to my dig, is what you can do. Where have you been all day? I was here at nine o'clock and you were gone! You've contracted to be my air support for the summer, and then you disappear when I need to fly! Give me one good reason why I shouldn't hire another pilot!”

Wy, one of the more reliable pilots on the Bay, bit back an invitationfor Professor Desmond X. McLynn to do just that, didn't say that she'd contracted to fly him in and out once a week, not twice, and plastered a smile on her face. “I do have other contracts to fulfill besides yours, Professor McLynn, but”-she overrode his protest-“I'm here now. We can be in the air in ten minutes.”

McLynn blustered for a few moments before giving in. They were in the air in the promised ten minutes. It was their fastest flight to the dig yet. “Are we back on a normal schedule?” Wy said, when she had him and his gear on the ground.

“What? Yes, yes, pick me up Friday evening.”

“Certainly, sir,” Wy said to his retreating back. She was in the air before he reached the work tent. She left his gear where it was.

Some jobs didn't pay enough. Some jobs wouldn't pay enough if you were making a thousand dollars an hour. Still, a job was a job, a paycheck was a paycheck and a lawyer's fee was most definitely a lawyer's fee. Wy brought the Cub around and headed back to Newenham.

Liam went back to the post to find Prince had left a note, saying she'd gone to lunch and that she'd be back in time to sit in on the interrogations. So they were interrogating suspects this afternoon, were they? Liam picked up the phone and dialed his father's number in Florida. It rang five times and he was just about to give up when someone picked up. It was a woman's voice, very young and breathy, which made “Hurlburt Field Strategic Operations School” sound like phone sex. “Hi, I'm Liam Campbell, Colonel Campbell's son,” he said. “Is my father in?”

There was a brief silence, and the voice said brightly, “I'm sorry, Mr. Campbell, but Colonel Campbell has been reassigned.”

Has he indeed? Liam thought. “Could you tell me where?”

“I'm sorry, sir, I'm not allowed to give out that information.”

“Oh.” Liam waited for a moment, letting the silence gather. “I really need to talk to him about some family business-what was your name again? Valerie? That's a pretty name. Are you single, Valerie?”

Valerie giggled. “You're not very subtle, are you, Mr. Campbell?”

“I don't play hard to get,” he purred, shamelessly dropping his voice down into its best lower register, sexy-guy-picking-you-upina-bar accents.

She giggled again, sounding very young. “I don't know…”

“I'm his only son, Valerie, and it really is important that I reach him soon. Kind of a family emergency. Just a phone number. I won't even say I got it from you.”

He hung up a minute or two later. Definitely a threat to national security there, he thought, dialing the number he'd scribbled on his desk calendar. This time he was unlucky; an answering machine picked up. The message on it was illuminating, though.

At three o'clock he was back at the jail. He showed Mamie the warrants Bill had sworn out, and she copied them and filed them away. “There's an interview room in the back,” she told them.

There was: four walls, a barred window, a table and four chairs, so tiny there was barely enough room to inhale. Liam reached through the bars and opened the window. A raven's croak was the first sound he heard, and he craned his head for a look. Nothing. Big black bastard ought to mind his own business.

He caught himself. There was a word for that, anthropomorphizing, the assigning of human feelings to plants, animals and inanimate objects. Like giving your car a name and begging it not to stall out at a red light in February. Like telling the Chugach Mountains they looked beautiful all dressed up in alpenglow. Like talking back to a raven.

Newenham wasn't just hard on his uniforms, it was hard on his sanity. There was a reason the inhabitants referred to it as Disneyham, strictly among themselves, of course.

He turned and sat at the table, Prince on his right with a lined pad and a pencil, Frank Petla across from him. Frank was sucking on a Dr Pepper. “Can't you guys get me a cigarette, man? I mean, one lousy smoke?”

“Secondary smoke, it's a killer, Frank,” Liam said, and started the handheld recorder. He gave the date, the time, said who was in the room and then set the recorder to one side. Frank Petla looked at it with the eyes of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. “You've waived your right to an attorney, Frank, is that right?”

Frank nodded.

“Say so for the recorder, please.”

“Yeah.”

“You're sure about this? Yesterday afternoon you said you wanted a lawyer.”

“I'm sure. Don't need no damn lawyer.”

“All right. You want to tell us what happened out at the dig yesterday?”

What had happened out at the dig yesterday was that Frank Petla, a completely innocent man, had been out for a peaceful ride on his four-wheeler on a sunny summer day, when he had accidentally driven his four-wheeler into this hole in the ground. In the hole in the ground were a bunch of things that Frank, a completely innocent man and an Alaska Native, instantly recognized as family heirlooms. He had collected them in a bag, as any completely innocent man, Alaska Native and traditional tribal member would do, to return them to their rightful owners, his village elders.

“That's what you were going to do, Frank?” Liam said. “ Return them to your village?”

Frank had been, and he was indignant at the suggestion that he might have been going to sell them. He strenuously denied ever having been to the dig prior to yesterday, and when commanded to look at Prince and try to remember the last time he, Frank, had seen her, hazarded a guess that it might have been last October at AFN. “Didn't we dance at the Snow Ball?” He hadn't hit anybody, he hadn't shot anybody and he most certainly hadn't stabbed anybody with anything, least of all with something that he, a completely innocent man, an Alaska Native, a traditional tribal member and a signatory to the AFN Sobriety Movement, recognized as a storyknife. “It's a girl thing, that storyknife,” he said confidentially, as if it were a secret. “Only girls could play with them. They would take it down to the river-bank and draw pictures in the mud and tell stories to their brothers and sisters.”

He was silent for a moment. Liam, watching him, saw a shadow pass over his face. “My sister storyknifed.” He said a word in Yupik that sounded like ‘yawning ruin.’ “That's Yupik for storyknife, did you know that?”

“No,” Liam said. “I didn't know that.”

“She was beautiful, my sister,” Frank Petla said, no bombast or bluster or wounded innocence now. “She had the longest hair that she would braid with beads. When she danced, she would toss it around like a cape. All the boys loved her.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” Frank said, still in that quiet voice. “She drank too much, and she died.”

There was a brief silence. In a gentle, unthreatening voice, Liam said, “Where were you this weekend, Frank?”

It was a while before Frank came back from wherever he'd gone. “This weekend?”

“The two days before yesterday,” Prince said, and subsided when Liam touched her arm.

“Don Nelson was killed sometime between Friday night and Saturday night. If you didn't stab him,” Liam said, the voice of sweet reason, “you obviously weren't at the dig. So where were you?”

Frank stared at him in stupefied silence for a good minute and a half. “I don't… Fishing?”

“Fishing where?”

“On my boat.”

“You have a boat?”

“Yes. TheSarah P.”

“Is it down at the harbor?” Frank nodded. “What's the slip number?” Frank told him. “Where were you fishing, Frank?”

Frank thought. “On the river. Drifting. Off a creek.”

The Nushagak River was hundreds of miles long, with on average one creek per ten feet. “Which creek?”

“I dunno.” Frank looked helpless.

“Was anyone fishing with you?”

“No.”

“Did you see any other boats?”

“No.” Frank's eyes slid sideways.

Aha, Liam thought. “Was this creek open to fishing, Frank?”

Frank was indignant. “Of course! They could take my boat if I got caught fishing in a closed area!”

They certainly could, Liam thought. He could ask Charlene which areas on the Nushagak had been open to fishing on Monday, but there might be an easier way. “Who did you deliver to, Frank?”

“A fish buyer,” Frank said promptly. “He was buying off the dock.”

“Did you get a fish ticket?”

Frank shook his head. “He bought with cash.”

They left him in the interview room for a moment.

“Convenient how no one can confirm his story,” Prince said, eyes bright. She smelled a conviction.

“Yeah, but he was drunk as a skunk when he ran into you.”

“So?”

“So, how did he pay for his booze?”

“He bummed some off a friend, I don't know. Why do we care?”

We don't, Liam thought, but Charlene will.

When they went back in, they found Frank trying to squeeze through the bars on the window. His head was too big, and he'd gotten stuck. They extricated him and returned him to his cell.

Walter Larsgaard was up next, and he was in the mood to talk. He sat down, folded his arms and waited until Liam started the recorder. He declined representation and said simply, “I killed them. I killed them all.”

“You killed David Malone, Molly Malone, Jonathan Malone, Michael Malone, Kerry Malone, Jason Knudson and Wayne Cullen?”

“Yes?”

“How did you kill them?”

He'd killed them, he said in a monotone, with a rifle, a thirtyoughtsix.

“Where is that rifle now, Walter?”

“Over the side.”

“And then what?”

“And then I set the boat on fire.”

“What with?”

“Gasoline.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I keep a spare tank on my dory.”

“Where is that tank now?”

“Still on my dory. I knew you could trace the rifle, but no sense in wasting a good gas tank.”

“What did you do with the gas?”

“Splashed it around. Lit a match.”

“Where did you splash it around first?”

“The galley.”

“On the bodies?”

“Yes.”

“You'd already killed them, why burn them?”

“I was hoping to get away with it.”

“Cover up your crime?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you just sink her?”

“I tried. I pulled the plugs.”

Liam looked at the still, remote face across from him. Larsgaard had his hands linked behind his head, had leaned back so that his chair was balanced on its rear legs. “Why did you do it, Walter?”

There was a pause. “She broke it off.” He said the words slowly and carefully, as if it were an effort to get them out.

“Who? Molly?”

“Yes.”

“You were seeing her?”

“Yes.”

“Sleeping with her?”

“Yes?”

“At the Bay View Inn?”

Larsgaard met his eyes briefly. “So you already know about it, do you?” He shook his head. “There are no secrets in small towns. I told her and told her, I…”

Liam waited, but Larsgaard didn't finish. “So you shot her because she broke off your relationship.”

“Yes.”

Liam kept his tone mild and inoffensive. “Why did you shoot her husband?”

“He had her. I didn't.”

“Her brother-in-law?”

“He was there.”

“That why you killed the deckhands? They were there, too?” A shrug.

“And the kids? Michael and Kerry. Teenagers. They had to die because they were there, too?”

“That's about it.”

The muscles in Liam's shoulders were so tight he thought they might pop out of their sleeves. He saw Prince look at him, and willed himself to relax with only moderate success. “When did all this happen?”

“What, the affair?”

“When did you kill them?” Liam said coldly.

“Sunday night.”

“What time?”

For the first time, Larsgaard hesitated. “I don't know. Midnight, maybe one o'clock. It was dark, or almost, so it had to have been late. Hard to tell because of the fog.”

“How did you know where they were?”

“I saw them during the fishing period.”

“The fishing period was over.”

“They'd had some engine trouble. Dave anchored up offshore to work on it, and I figured he'd still be there after the fog rolled in. He was.”

Liam sat back in his chair. “So you fished next to them on Sunday afternoon, saw them anchor up offshore with engine trouble, marked the spot, went back into town, waited until dark, got in your dory, went back to Kulukak Bay, shot Molly Malone because she wanted to end your affair, shot the rest of them because they were there, tried to burn the boat to cover up your crime and when that didn't work tried to sink her.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Liam looked at his watch, said the time for the tape and terminated the interview. They put Larsgaard back in his cell. Frank Petla still wanted a smoke, and Moccasin Man was still playing solitaire.

It was five o'clock, and the sun had just barely begun its descent into the west. “I want a witness that puts Larsgaard and Malone in the Bay View Inn together. I've already talked to the owner, Alta- Alta Peterson. She made the beds when Molly Malone stayed there and Alta knew Molly wasn't sleeping alone, but she never saw who she was sleeping with. Find someone who saw them together.”

“Yes, sir. What about Frank Petla's alibi?”

“I'll work on that.” He thought again about Charlene Taylor. He'd have to ask her what areas of the Nushagak had been open for fishing on Monday. “I'm going to go down to the harbor and look at his boat.”

“If it's there.”

It was there, a tiny little bowpicker barely big enough to sport a one-bunk cabin on the stern, a reel in the bow and an open deck in between. Liam poked his head in the cabin. Except for the empty bottle of Windsor Canadian rolling around on the deck and the rumpled state of the bunk, the little cabin was surprisingly neat. He opened a few cupboards, looked under the miniature sink, tested the two-burner propane stove. The dishes were clean, the clothes folded neatly, the canned goods ordered and stacked. There was a picture in a green wooden frame nailed to the wall over the bunk. It was of a young girl with thick dark hair past her waist, standing next to Frank Petla. They were both looking at the camera, both with big, bright smiles and an Alaska Federation of Natives' Sobriety Movement poster on the wall in back of them. There was another picture, this one in a blue wooden frame, of Frank standing between Charlene Taylor and her husband the D.A., a short, skinny guy with bushy red hair, freckled white skin and a wide, wry grin. All three of them looked real proud of something.

The deck had been hosed down but there was evidence that fish had been there, in the form of scales. Liam wet a forefinger and touched one. It felt dry. No telling how long it had been there. The net was dry on top. Liam managed to wedge a hand in a layer or two and thought he felt dampness, but that probably didn't mean anything, either; rolled on a reel, it would take a long time for a net to dry out. The dampness he thought he felt could have been from a period last week, or one in June, for that matter.

He canvassed a few boats. Most were already out in the Bay, hauling in as much fish as they could find. Bad summer or not, missed forecasts or not, they still had to try. They had mortgages, insurance, grocery bills, college tuition to pay.

They had Windsor Canadian to buy. Liam stood on the slip next to a big seiner and yelled, “Hello theDeirdre F!” There was a thud and a curse and someone stuck his head out the door. “What?”

“Liam Campbell, Alaska state trooper, I'm wondering if you saw theSarah Pcome into the harbor.”

“TheSarah P?” The man squinted, looking as if this were the first time he'd seen daylight in weeks. “I don't even know which boat that is.”

“The little one, right over there.” Liam pointed.

“I don't know, I-wait, what day?”

“Anytime this weekend.”

“I didn't get in until yesterday afternoon. Blew the goddamn drive shaft. And I'd like to get back to it, okay?” he added pointedly.

“Okay.”

Further inquiries proved equally fruitless. Liam plodded on up the gangplank. It was getting close to six o'clock. Time for dinner with Dad. Oh joy.