So Sure Of Death

SIX

Summertime in the Bush smelled like Off. Well, Off and salmon. Wy smelled of both, but she smelled most strongly of herself, a scent somewhere between lilac and lemon peel, half sweet, half tart, part seduction, part challenge. Liam strapped himself into the shotgun seat of the Cessna and concentrated on that smell. It was easier than thinking about hanging his ass out over a two-thousand-foot precipice for the next hour.

Liam hated to fly. He was, in fact, terrified every time he got into a plane, Super Cub or 737, single or twin, floats or wheels. It simply wasn't natural to trust your existence to two wings and the lifting properties of something as ephemeral as air. You couldn't evenseeair, as he had pointed out to Wy on innumerable occasions when she had tried to alleviate his fear with a technical explanation of the theory of aerodynamics. After a while she'd given up, and Liam continued to sweat his way through more hours in the air than many private pilots. That he had the courage to force himself into the air in spite of his fear was a tribute to his strength of character, not anything his father had ever acknowledged, but then his father, the jet jockey, had never managed to mask his disappointment that his son had not followed him into the Air Force and the elite ranks of zoomies.

However, it didn't matter what Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell thought, because Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell was safely assigned to flight training at a naval base in Florida, over a thousand miles away, about as far as you could get and still be in America, hooray. Liam, a grown man, an Alaska state trooper for eleven years, the holder of a B.A. in criminal justice and an M.S. in counseling psychiatry, the investigating officer on the Houston serial killings and the Cyndi Gordon murder, both high-profile cases resulting in convictions celebrated in headlines as far away as Boston and the latter now an illustration in the textbook of a dozen police academies nationwide, this man had no need of paternal approval.

In the meantime, he stared straight ahead through the windshield, eyes fixed on the distant horizon, and concentrated on slow, deep breaths. His concentration was not what it should have been, given that he was sitting next to Wy, the closest he'd been to her in three months. Her hands were strong and capable on the yoke, her feet quick and deft on the rudders. Her dark blond hair was bound into a loose French braid, her jeans and plaid shirt clean and neat. A blue billed cap advertising Chevron fuel topped the ensemble. A headset with a voice-activated microphone was strapped on over the cap, and sunglasses in gold aviator frames hid her eyes. The ultimate in Bush chic.

She reached up and unhooked a second headset. “Put it on.”

He put it on.

She taxied to the end of the runway and turned, adjusted the flaps, pushed in the throttle, pulled back on the yoke and they were airborne. Liam helped her, holding 68 Kilo up in the air by white-knuckled hands wrapped around the edge of his seat.

Not by word or deed did Wy betray how very awkward she must be feeling. A fair man, Liam figured she had to be at least as uncomfortable and tongue-tied as he was. “Your new trooper sent me out to pick you up,” she had said briefly when she climbed out of the plane.

“Why didn't she come herself?”

“You've got yourself another murder.”

“What!”

She nodded, holding the door for him, all business. “I'm supposed to get you back ASAP.”

“Who? And where?”

“Don Nelson. He's been working for Professor McLynn at that archaeological dig on the Snake River.”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah, an old Yupik village site or something. Some archaeologist has been digging up things there, right? About ten miles west of the base?”

She nodded, still brisk, waiting for him to get the hell on the plane.

“Who found-what was his name? Nelson?”

There was a brief hesitation. “I'm on contract to the state to support McLynn's project. We flew out this morning. That's when we found him.”

“Son of a bitch,” was all he could think of to say.

Her eyes met his for the first time, with the merest trace of perceptible humor. “My sentiments exactly.”

He had turned to Ekwok, standing pretty much at attention at Liam's elbow. “I left the boat taped off. I'd appreciate it if you'd make sure that no one goes on board.”

Ekwok glowed. “You mean I'm your deputy? Like John Wayne and Dean Martin?”

“Close enough,” Liam said.

The climb to two thousand feet took maybe ten minutes, followed by the comparative bliss of level flight. The fog dissipated as soon as they were out of Kulukak Bay, and the sun chased cumulus clouds around the horizon. Liam's stomach took another five minutes to settle, at which time Wy's scent came back with a vengeance, teasing his nostrils, reminding him of the last time he'd seen her, and before, the last time he'd slept with her, that rough, hurried coupling in the front seat of her truck, the memory of which alone had been enough to let him live on hope for the last three months. It wasn't going to stay enough for much longer.

Maybe it was being in the air, maybe it was being in the air with her, but he found his body reacting to that memory. He shifted his legs, hoping she wouldn't notice, and then saw her wipe her palms down the legs of her jeans, changing hands on the yoke in a manner too studied to remain unobserved. A rush of heat suffused his body and pooled in his groin. “Wy,” he said.

“We'll be there in forty-five minutes, relax,” she said.

He looked at the back of that obdurate head, and a wonderfully welcome burst of anger washed away every other feeling he had, including fear of flying. He grabbed her braid and pulled her head around. “Set her down,” he said.

“What?”

“Set her down!” he roared, and shoved the yoke forward with his right hand.

The Cessna took a nosedive.

“You son of a bitch!” She grabbed the yoke. “All right, you want down, you get down!”

The Cessna went into a shallow spiral, down, down, down, and Liam felt all the blood rise from his groin to pool just beneath the top of his skull. His lungs stopped working at fifteen hundred feet, his heart at a thousand, his sphincter muscle at five hundred. The needle on the altitude gauge backed off until the number one, one hundred feet, and Liam risked a look out his window to see the gear about to skim the tops of trees, growing ever larger in his terror-stricken eyes. “Wy!”

Her face was tight but she said coolly enough, “You're paying the freight. You wanted down, you get down,” and in the next second the trees ended and a gravel runway appeared. The Cessna set down on a surface that was more root than rock and bounced to a lurching halt. Wy slammed her headset into its cradle and baled out to march up and down, swearing at him, swearing at herself, swearing at the strip, just generally laying a pretty good curse on life, the universe and everything.

Liam waited for his heart and lungs to resume normal function and his stomach to settle, and climbed out on shaky legs.

Wy wheeled around and poked him in the chest with a furious finger. “Of all the goddamn dumb things for you to do, that took the cake! You want to land, we can land, but I'll do it! You want to talk, we can talk, but on my terms! Don't you pull something like that in one of my planes ever again, do you hear?”

“I hear,” Liam said, a bit light-headed and very glad to be back on terra firma. The strip, made of gravel and sand, seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, with no reason for its existence, a not unheard of occurrence in the Bush. The rustle of the black cottonwood and the balsam poplar in the gentle breeze, the tumble of water down a creek, the distant cry of an eagle were all that broke the silence. “What is this place?”

“Some oil company built it to drill a test well for natural gas,” she said curtly, still steaming.

“Was there any?”

“No.”

“Wy,” he said.

Her head snapped up, but whatever she'd been about to say died on her lips when she met his eyes.

“I think three months is enough,” he said. “You were angry. So was I. We said some things we shouldn't have. It hasn't changed how I feel about you.” His smile was brief and painful. “ Sometimes I wish it had. Sometimes I think you're more trouble than you're worth, Chouinard.”

“You should talk,” she replied automatically, but her hackles went down. She pulled off her cap and shook back her braid. There was a downed tree to one side of the runway and she walked over to sit on it.

He walked over to sit next to her, carefully maintaining a discreet distance. He wanted her right down to his fingernails, but the words were important, and came first. Before him, he thought with a inward grin, and almost laughed out loud.

“What?” she said, eyes on the cap she was pulling through her fingers. “What was so all-fired important you had to nearly wreck my plane to tell me?”

All impulse to laugh faded, and he sorted through what he'd been planning to say for three months, if not quite in this fashion or in this setting.

“You live awhile,” he said slowly, feeling his way. He wanted to get this right. He wasn't as confident as he used to be of his ability to do that, not anymore. There were a lot of things he wasn't as sure of as he used to be. “You live awhile,” he repeated, “and you gain some knowledge, and you hope a little wisdom, and you build this picture of yourself. You have sense, and integrity. You know what you will do, and what you won't. You draw a line, a line you know you won't cross, because you're a better person than that.”

He glanced at her. She was staring hard at the opposite side of the runway.

“And then something happens, something you never expected, something you never imagined, and you find yourself doing something you never thought you'd do. You cross that uncrossable line, and that picture you had of yourself shatters. If you ever want to be sane again, you have to pick up the pieces and try to put the picture back together. But now it's flawed, cracked, out of focus. It'll never be the same.”

He stopped, unable for a moment to go on.

“I know.” Her voice was soft. “I know everything that you're saying. I know because I went through the same thing. But there is more to it than that.”

He turned to look at her. “What?”

“I could have lived with the loss of my integrity, Liam,” she said. “I could even have lived with the loss of your love. But I missed my friend.”

He closed his eyes briefly.

“My integrity was gone, that picture of myself was gone, my lover was gone. And my friend was gone. We were friends first, Liam. I knew you were married. I knew about Charlie. Left to myself, I wouldn't have pushed it beyond friendship, not ever, no matter how much I was attracted to you. I don't do that! I've never done that, ever.”

“And I did,” he said, his voice wooden.

“Yes,” she said. “You did. But I let you. I'm not blaming it all on you. We did it together. That's part of it, too. I'm not a homewrecker.” She paused, and added painfully, “And then I was one.”

There was silence for a few moments. Liam could think of nothing to say.

A raven croaked somewhere off in the treetops. Liam looked up, but couldn't see him.

“I've got a puritan streak a mile wide, Liam. No matter how much I hated the waste of what we could have given each other, of what we could have been, of what together we could have given others, there was a little voice inside that said we did the right thing. You belonged with Jenny and Charlie, and I had no business, no right to try to tempt you away from them.” She faced Liam squarely. “You said the words, Liam. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, so long as you both shall live. Till death do you part.” She shook her head. “Nobody ever thinks about what those words really mean when they say them.”

“Maybe not nobody,” Liam said. “But damn few.”

She nodded. “Damn few,” she echoed.

“And not me.”

“No,” she said softly.

There was a short silence as they listened to the creek chuckle beyond the trees. “Jenny's dead,” Liam said.

“I know. Moses told me. I'm sorry.” She turned to meet his eyes. “I mean that, Liam. From everything you told me, I think Jenny and I could have been friends.” She swallowed, and added in a painful whisper, “And I know you loved her. Maybe not like… Well. I know you loved her. Loved them.”

“Yes.” He thought of little baby Charlie, all cherub cheeks and lion's roar, and grieved again.

There was another silence. “What now?” Liam said at last.

She didn't look at him. “You'll notice I've never said those words. So long as you both shall live.”

“I've noticed,” he said, a little grimly. “And I have, and I didn't keep them.”

“That's not where I was headed, Liam,” she said, a little impatiently. “God, let's just set aside the blame for one minute, okay? We both made mistakes, big, fat, juicy ones, all right?” She turned to look at him, eyes level and serious. The sun sidled out from behind a cloud and turned her hair into a gleaming helmet of dark gold. “You asked me to marry you, remember?”

“I remember.”

“You had no right to, and I had no right to listen. But you asked.”

“You didn't answer.”

“No. I didn't.”

“Why?”

“Because however much I loved you, I wasn't sure I could say those words and mean them,” she said simply.

It hurt, more than he would have expected it to. It took him a moment to form a reply. “And now?”

“And now?” She turned away from him. “I don't know, Liam.”

His heart seemed to stop beating. “Don't you love me enough?”

Moments crept by. “I don't know,” she said at last. “I want you, you know that.”

“I know that. It's not enough.”

“No.”

He was angry suddenly. “Goddamn it, Wy. I've waited long enough. I want an answer.”

“I'm not ready to give you one,” she said levelly.

“Fine.” He got to his feet and dusted off his pants. “Let me know when you are. I may or may not be around. No promises.”

“Liam-”

“No.” He cut off her words with a chopping motion, and fixed her with a piercing stare. “Just so you know, I'm not looking for one meal. I'm in the market for a lifetime supply of grub.”

An involuntary laugh escaped her lips. “Liam-”

“No,” he said, furious now, with her amusement and his own inability to put his feelings into words that would be taken seriously. “We've said all there is to say.” He reached down a hand and hauled her to her feet. “Think about this, too, while you're thinking things over.” He kissed her then, roughly, angrily, cupping his hands over her ass and grinding against her. She melted into him and his touch gentled without him realizing it.

That's all it took, all it had ever taken. His hands slid up and there was nothing but the taste of her mouth, nothing but the feel of her breasts against his palms, nothing but the sound of her breath coming in short, hard pants, of the little moans she gave as she strained against him. He felt the earth come up against his back with a solid thump. The material between his hand and her skin was suddenly intolerable and he ripped the front of her shirt open and shoved her bra up and took her nipple into his mouth. He wasn't gentle but she didn't want gentleness, tearing at the front of his jeans and thrusting her hand down the front of his shorts. “Oh,” she said, when he filled her hand. “Liam, please.” She knotted a fist in his hair and pulled his mouth from her breast. She bit his lower lip, and pulled one of his hands down between her legs, pushing up against it. “Liam, please!”

Her face was flushed, her eyes wild, and every instinct he had screamed yes. It would be fast and furious, hot and supremely satisfying, it would fulfill every dream he'd had in the last three months, hell, in the last three years. The heat came off her in waves, scorching him. She shoved him down and straddled his body, and it was his turn, eyes closed. “Wy…” He felt her hands tugging at his jeans and heard something halfway between a growl and a groan rip out of his throat.

“Shut up. Just shut up and let me- Jesus, Liam.” Her hand closed around him and she leaned down.

He felt her breath on his skin and nearly came right then. “Wait,” he said. “Wy, wait.”

“What?” She sounded dazed.

He took her upper arms in his hands and sat up, sliding out from under her.

“Liam?”

He climbed to his feet, turning his back to fasten his fly. It wasn't easy, and it didn't help that his blurred vision couldn't seem to find the zipper tab, and when it did, that his fingers couldn't seem to hold on to it.

Behind him he heard the rustle of clothing, and knew she was putting herself back together, too. He took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. When his vision cleared the first thing he saw was his cap lying on the ground where she had thrown it after pulling it off. He swept it up and turned to face her.

The pulse was beating in her throat, hard enough to cause her collar to flutter. She was trembling, and she wouldn't look at him, fussing instead with one of the buttons on her shirt.

It would have been so easy to have taken each other then and there, on the rocks of the riverbank. He remembered in detail the clasp of her warm, wet flesh, the sound of the hitch in her breath, the salt taste of her tears, the smell of her sweat and that elusive, sweet-tart fragrance that was all her own. The way she arched up when she came, the surprise and pleasure in her voice when she cried out. And he remembered what it was like to kiss and touch and talk his way through a night with her, to come into her, to come inside her.

But one night was not what he wanted. One quick rutting on the deserted bank of a river was not what he wanted. Before, he had settled. Now, he wanted more, more than a hasty coupling in the front seat of her truck, or on the side of a deserted airstrip.

She finally finished with her shirt, but she still wouldn't look at him. She turned and took a step toward the plane. He caught her arm and pulled her to a halt.

She didn't try to pull away. He could feel the faint tremor in her body. “Why?” she said, her voice husky. “Why, Liam?”

Liam took a deep breath and expelled it. He pulled off his cap again and ran his hand through his hair, trying to choose the right words. “Because this isn't all I want,” he said at last. “I want it, mind.” He tried to smile. “Pretty hard to hide that.” His smile faded. “But it isn't all I want.”

Her voice was almost inaudible when she spoke. “What if it's all I want?”

He set his teeth and took his time resettling his cap on his head. “I'm a domesticated man, Wy. Okay”-he held up one hand- ”maybe I wasn't always. I had my share of fun. But I liked being married. I liked waking up in the same bed every morning. I liked coming home to the same house every night.” He hesitated. “I loved being a father.”

He met her eyes straight on. “I want it all, Wy. All or nothing. Marriage, kids, starting with Tim, so long as we both shall live. For better or for worse. For richer or for poorer. Till death do us part. I know what the words mean now, Wy. Take it or leave it.”

And then, with as much dignity as a man with an erection straining at the front of his jeans can muster, he turned and limped to the plane.

When they rolled to a halt in Newenham, he said, “You said Prince went out to the dig in your Cub?”

She nodded.

“You can't get a Cessna in there, can you?”

She shook her head.

“Can you scare up another Cub?”

She nodded again.

“Okay, I have to make a few phone calls. I'll meet you back here in about an hour?”

She nodded.

Fine. “Okay, see you then.”

He walked away, cursing himself for ten different kinds of fool.

“Oh come on,” Moses was shouting over the noise of the smoky bar, crowded with fishermen getting an early start on the evening. “There was nothing noble or tragic in that kid's death. This country has the potential to kill me six different ways before I get up every morning, but at least I know what I'm up against.”

He drained his bottle and smacked it down on the counter and fixed the poor unfortunate who had incited his wrath that afternoon with a beady and, Liam noticed for the first time, very ravenlike eye. “This kid gets some half-assed idea, probably from Thoreau, who hasn't gotten half the kicking around he deserved, to wander out into the woods and live off the land. He has no survival skills, no woodcraft and he starves to death.”

“Still-”

“He was on a road, for crissake!” Moses bellowed. “He even had a goddamn abandoned trailer for shelter! All he had to do was step outside and turn right and he could have hitched a ride to the nearest burger!”

Bill brought him another Rainier and he snatched it from her hand and took a long, steady swallow that drained half the bottle. “Frankly,” he said, after a long, loud burp, “I'm grateful he died before he could lower the I.Q. level of the gene pool by procreating. I'm just sorry he left a diary so that yo-yo could write a book about him and inflict it on the reading public.” Moses drained the other half of the bottle with another long swallow that everyone hoped would cool his choler. It didn't. “Make a hero out of him, you want to. In my book, he was just a dumb kid who literally didn't know enough to come in out of the cold.”

He surveyed the bar in search of someone to disagree. Prudently, no one did so. Not only an elder, not only a shaman, not only a government-certified, Grade-A Alaskan Old Fart, Moses was a man it was unwise to cross when he got himself on the outside of a few beers. From the level of belligerence Liam could read in his attitude, it was evident that Moses had started drinking early this morning.

The shaman turned and caught sight of Liam. “Our man in Newenham! You didn't do form this morning.”

Liam looked and felt guilty. “I'll do it tonight, Sifu.”

“No, you won't, you'll be visiting with your dad.”

Liam froze in midstride. “Excuse me?”

“Your dad, he's here, he wants to see you,” Moses said. He surveyed Liam with eyes as shrewd as they were bloodshot. “You can run away to Newenham, but you're still in the world, boy. Didn't you know?”

Liam looked at Bill, who had her arms crossed on the bar. “Say it isn't so.”

Bill nodded.

Liam realized he still had one foot in the air, and put it down. “My father is in town?”

“What, celibacy starting to affect your hearing now?” Moses roared. Heads swiveled in their direction from all around the bar, and Bill couldn't hide a grin.

“Let me get this straight,” Liam said with determined deliberation. “My father, Air Force Colonel Charles B. Campbell, is in Newenham?”

A loud snort was all he got from Moses. “Afraid so, Liam,” Bill said, trying for sympathetic and missing by a mile. The jukebox shifted CDs and Jimmy Buffett started singing about flying the shuttle somewhere over China, which was where Liam wished he was right now. It was a measure of his dismay that he could contemplate a trip on board anything with wings as an escape.

He pulled at a collar grown suddenly too tight. “Did he say where he was staying?”

“He said he'd be out at the base,” Bill said. “BOQ.”

“Thank you for passing on the message,” Liam said, taking refuge in professional dignity. Establishing his air of authority, that's what he was doing. “I need to talk to you for a minute, Bill. It's business. Can we go into your office?”

Bill's gaze sharpened. “Sure.”

He followed her through the kitchen, where a thickset Yupik woman in stained whites slapped thick patties of beef on a smoking grill and hounded a thin young man who looked enough like her to be her son to simultaneously take out the garbage, slice more onions, open more buns and wash more dishes. “Hey, Dottie,” Bill said. “Keep 'em coming, we got a hungry crowd out there.”

“And while you're at it, get some more hamburger out of the freezer!” Dottie said.

Bill's office was a cramped room next to the back door, with a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The phone was ringing as they walked in. Bill pulled the jack out of the wall and the ringing stopped. She sat in the chair behind the desk and waved Liam into the other. “What's up?”

Liam told her about his morning, from the time Jimmy Barnes had given him the message until his landing half an hour ago at Newenham airport. He told her everything, with the exception of the impromptu stop on the deserted airstrip, because there were some things even the Newenham magistrate in all her judicial authority didn't need to know.

Bill listened, leaning back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head, a remote look on her face, breasts doing nice things to the front of her T-shirt. The woman was sixty if she was a day, and proof positive if anybody needed it that sex appeal did not end with menopause. When he was done, she said, “David and Molly Malone, and David's brother, Jonathan, and their kids, and their deckhands.” She met his eyes. “Must have been tough to take.”

Those endless moments breathing fetid air and wrestling charred flesh into body bags rolled back over him in an instant. “Tough enough,” he said, his voice clipped.

She understood and accepted his refusal of sympathy. “And you're sure it's murder.”

“One of the men was shot,” Liam said flatly.

“You could tell that even though the bodies were burned?”

“I'm figuring the bodies were burned to hide that fact, and that the M.E. will find that they'd all been shot.”

“The fire didn't do the job, though.”

“No. That's when I figure whoever did it pulled the plugs on the boat.”

“Hoping she'd sink.”

“Yes. The bodies are on their way to Anchorage.”

Bill took a deep breath and her breasts strained the words on her T-shirt all out of alignment. Liam looked over her head and thought of other things. For a woman who professed to be older and longer in Newenham than anyone else, Bill packed a punch as powerful as Molly Malone's picture. The stopover with Wy wasn't helping him maintain the fabled Trooper Campbell cool, either. “Did you know the Malones?”

Bill shook her head. “Not well. Oh, I cashed a couple of checks for David after bank hours. None of them bounced.”

“What was his reputation?”

She considered. “I remember one time Harry Hart said Malone reneged on paying for a skiff Harry built for him. But I don't believe a tenth of what Harry says.”

“Any romantic interests outside his marriage?”

“Not that I know of.”

Not much to go on, but he'd started other cases with less. “Anything else?”

She grinned, displaying the merest hint of dimples and a set of white, even teeth. “Well, one time his daughter was in town on a school trip and her and a couple of her friends got all lipsticked up and tried to pass for drinking age. I ran them out, of course. I don't think I ever met the boy.”

“How about Molly?”

“She never came in here. Never saw her anywhere else.” She paused. “Heard plenty, though.”

“What was said? And who said it?” Pretty much everyone came into Bill's place sooner or later. In her position as magistrate, she was on a first-name basis with every offender against the public peace, repeat or first-timer. In her self-styled role as the Elder of Newenham, she'd been in the area long enough to know where all the bodies were buried. Liam was no fool; in the past three months, Bill had become his central data bank.

“Mostly men coming in off the grounds, who'd been delivering fish to the cannery or been tied up to the processor at the same time as theMarybethia.They'd come in looking poleaxed and very, very needy. Usually they'd hook up with the first available woman and head for the nearest pair of sheets. She must have packed one hell of a punch, that Molly Malone.”

Liam pulled out the picture of the Malones on the sailboat and handed it over. Bill studied it, lips pursed, and handed it back. “I see. I thought so. One hell of a punch. Must have been even stronger in person.”

“Yeah.” Liam looked again before pocketing the picture again. “Have to wonder if she saved it all for her husband.”

“I didn't hear otherwise, I just heard a lot of wishing she did.” She paused. “You got any idea who killed them?”

Liam shook his head. “Not so far. Something going on with the tribal chief out at Kulukak. I asked a few questions, I'm letting him stew for now.” He sighed. “The boat was adrift, looked like it had been overnight. They'd been fishing, everybody agreed on that because everybody else was out on the water, too. Nobody saw them come home, so it probably happened out there. Could have been any one of fifty fishers. Darrell Jacobson says he saw a skiff leave Kulukak harbor about ten o'clock last night. Didn't recognize who was driving it.”

“Great. What now?”

“I called the Malones' lawyer from the post. Next of kin is David's sister in Anacortes. He's calling her, and he'll call me back. A tender was picking up fish during the period.”

“Which one?”

“TheArctic Wind.”

Bill nodded. “Seafood North. Right here in town.”

“Yeah. I'm going to want to check all theArctic Wind's fish tickets for yesterday's period in Kulukak, get a list of the boats that delivered. If Seafood North is reluctant-”

“Not a problem,” Bill said, waving a dismissive hand. “I'll slap a warrant on Virgil Ballard so fast it'll drop his socks.”

In the absence of a judge, Liam relied on the magistrate to back him up, and truth be told, Bill was more than delighted to oblige. On occasion she had even been known to take the law into her own hands, the most recent incident having been a man apprehended by the local police in the act of beating his wife. Drunk, disorderly and abusive, he'd made the mistake of hitting the arresting officer.

The Newenham Police Department was understaffed, underfunded and underestimated, although Liam could only judge by reputation, as he had yet to meet any of them. The chief of police had resigned six months before under suspicion of embezzlement of public funds; in that same six months two officers had been accepted into the state police academy, leaving the remaining two officers overworked, overburdened and overwhelmed. During the past three months the two of them had either been in the middle of an armed conflict or sleeping under guard of wives armed with shotguns whenever Liam had tried to contact them.

All he knew for sure was that this particular officer had greeted this particular perpetrator's assault with such enthusiasm that the alleged perpetrator had been wheeled into the magistrate's hearing on local EMT Joe Gould's gurney. Bill had greeted his arrival with enthusiasm, deputized Moses to pull the public defender off his fishing boat and empaneled twelve people from the bar who had taken forty-five minutes to find the perp guilty of assault in three different degrees (he'd backhanded his eight-year-old son on the way to his wife). Bill thanked the jury for their service, dismissed them and sentenced the new felon to six months in jail then and there. As a magistrate Bill had no business trying anything but misdemeanors, but that didn't stop her. She didn't hold much with jury trials anyway, deeming them a waste of honest, hardworking citizens' time. “People got to work,” she told Liam indignantly when he tried, delicately, to show her the error of her ways.

Liam hoped mightily that their district was never subject to review by the state Department of Justice, and that they never got a better public defender than the one they had now. Any case arising from judicial misconduct in Bill's court was bound to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

On the other hand, it was a Rehnquist court. Comforted, he said, “Thanks. I appreciate the help.”

“No problem. You heading back over there now?”

Liam shook his head. “I've got another problem out at that village site that this university guy is digging up.”

“I heard. McLynn was in the bar, trying to drink away the memory. Your new trooper came in after him.” Bill raised an eyebrow.

“She's not my new trooper, she's the trooper newly assigned to Newenham.”

The eyebrow stayed up. “Funny, I got the distinct impression she was working for you.”

Liam took a deep breath. “I suppose she was here the same time as my father?”

Bill nodded, smile fading when she saw Liam's expression.

“Did he say what he wanted?”

Bill looked at him for a moment. “He's your father, Liam. He doesn't need a reason to see you.”

Wanna bet? Liam thought. “Okay, I'm headed back to the airport. Wy's flying me into the village site where she and this guy found the body. See what Prince has dug up. So to speak.”

She winced and followed him into the kitchen. “Have you had lunch?”

A loud sizzling sound as raw potatoes hit boiling grease was echoed by the growl of his stomach. Suddenly he realized he'd flown a hundred miles on no breakfast, and that fear of flying burned calories better than the Boston Marathon.

“Wy, either, I suppose.” He didn't have to say a word. “Dottie! Two burgers and fries, one to go, for the trooper!”

Dottie's expression didn't change. “I told you to peel some more potatoes, Paul! Get to it!”

Paul got to it.