Fire and ice (17 page)

DeCreft reminded Liam of someone, but he couldn't remember who, so he put the picture down. He knew it would do no good, but he couldn't stop himself from saying, "You could press charges against Wolfe, Ms. Nanalook." He held out the Kleenex.

She blew her nose ferociously. "I've got to get to work--it's after four o'clock. Bill'll skin me if I'm late."

"You could press charges," he repeated. "I'm a witness, at least after the fact."

"He'd kill me," she whispered.

"No he wouldn't." Liam's voice rose slightly, as if volume alone could banish her demons. "I wouldn't let him."

"You don't know him," she said. "You couldn't stop him."

"I can take you to the hospital, where you can be examined, pictures taken, evidence gathered. And then I will arrest him. He won't be able to hurt you again."

She shook her head, slowly at first and then faster, her hair tumbling wildly around her face. He didn't make the mistake of offering any gesture of physical sympathy; he had interviewed rape victims before. "You don't know him," she repeated.

"By God," Liam said, realization breaking over him. "This isn't the first time, is it?"

"You don't know him," she said for the third time. She looked exhausted. "He'd kill me."

Liam tried his only remaining shot. "Ms. Nanalook, you know if you don't press charges against him, he'll come back."

A shudder ran over her. She wouldn't look up, glorious golden hair still hiding her face.

"I know." She squeezed the Kleenex into a tight little ball. "They always do."

Liam left the house in a simmering rage and slammed the door to the Blazer hard. It didn't relieve his feelings, and it didn't do the Blazer door any good.

Sighing, he started the engine and shifted into reverse. A white station wagon came barreling down the game trail that passed for a driveway to DeCreft's cabin and nearly rear-ended him. He stamped on the brakes, slapping his head into the headrest on the rebound.

The station wagon went around him, clipping a slender birch in the process, and slid to a halt in front of the cabin. Without wasting a glance on the Blazer, Rebecca Gilbert shot out of the driver's seat and ran through the front door of the house without knocking.

Liam stared at the house for a moment, but it didn't yield up any secrets. He sighed. So what else was new. He was a stranger in a strange land.

The white station wagon, a little Ford Escort, was idling in park. Liam got out to turn off the ignition and close the driver's side door, and then he went on his way.

EIGHT

The phone was ringing as he walked into the office. "About goddamn time," a voice barked at him.

Liam sat down. "Hello, John."

"Where the hell have you been? I've been calling all day. Don't you have someone to answer the friggin' phone down there?"

"Not in the office," Liam said. "I guess the dispatcher takes all the calls."

"Goddammit," Barton said, "how the hell am I supposed to practice goddamn law and order if I can't even talk to my goddamn officers?"

It was a rhetorical question, and Liam didn't bother trying to answer.

Barton went on. Barton always went on. "What's this I hear about you stepping off the plane into the middle of a murder?"

Liam sighed, leaned back to prop his feet on the desk, and rubbed his eyes. "Don't tell me, let me guess. Corcoran."

"Hell yes, Corcoran," Barton said, adding with awful sarcasm, "and a good thing, too, since my own officer on the scene can't be bothered to phone in a report."

"Lay off, John," Liam said. "I haven't been here two days, I got no handover from Corcoran, I don't know the territory or the locals, and already I've responded to two shootings and a possible murder. Not to mention which I don't have a place to sleep and I can't find anyone to press my uniform."

Barton was outraged. "You're out of uniform?"

Liam had to laugh, but under his breath and out of John Barton's hearing.

Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Alaska State Troopers. An air force brat like Liam, his family had moved all over the world during his childhood, ending eventually at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage in 1957, when his father, under pressure from his mother, retired to sell and service Xerox copy machines. He attended Seattle University with the goal of joining the Jesuit brotherhood, elected a philosophy class in which a Washington state trooper came to lecture on the ethics of criminal justice, and on that day gave up the priesthood forever. Upon graduation he returned home to be promptly accepted into that year's trooper academy class. They'd done away with the height requirement by then, which was a good thing since he topped out at five feet four. Barton was gorillian of build, all of it muscle, and Churchillian of jaw, all of it stubborn, but for all that amazingly good at not trampling over the authority of village elders. He rose high and fast in the department.

He was now the outpost supervisor for Section E, which included Liam's previous post of Glenallen as well as his new one, Newenham. He was Liam's boss, and had been for seven years. He had spotted Liam's potential early on, had mentored his swift rise through the ranks, and had marked Liam as someone who would always make him look good. It was tacitly understood by both men that this would always be in a subordinate capacity, and if Liam had his own ideas about that he was smart enough to keep them to himself.

Barton had also orchestrated Liam's recent and rapid fall from grace, and his transfer to Newenham.

"So what have you been doing?" Barton said, voice rich with sarcasm.

Liam thought. "Well," he said, "I had my first tai chi lesson." He had to hold the phone away from his ear when Barton, predictably, erupted again. Liam waited patiently, smiling to himself. When he thought about it later, he was amazed that he still remembered how.

When he got a chance, he told Barton of the scene he had stepped into at the airport.

At the end of it Barton grunted. "Ninety people milling around and nobody sees a thing. Bullshit. What about the pilot?"

"Out getting lunch."

"Check the alibi?"

"Yes."

"Well, shit." Barton always preferred the easy answers, and on every case but this one so did Liam. "Who didn't like him?"

"No one, apparently, but then no one seemed to know him all that well. No wants or warrants, no record of him having been tanked for anything so much as a parking ticket. Good reputation with the local magistrate."

John interrupted him. "That Bill Billington?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"No reason." But Barton chuckled, a full, rich, knowledgeable sound.

Uh-huh, Liam thought, and said, "I called the bank, he had two thousand and change in a checking account, no big withdrawals recently. No mortgage on his house; I guess he paid cash. He owned a pickup and a Super Cub, both free and clear, too."

"I'll run a check on him from here, see if we come up with anything."

"Thanks."

Barton cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his voice was gruffer. "Thought you'd like to know. The wife and I visited with Jenny this weekend. Her folks were there, and they said to say hi when I talked to you."

"Tell them I'll call when I get a phone, and I'll be up when I can," Liam said, and couldn't stop himself from adding, "Any change?"

"No, Liam," Barton said steadily. "She's just sleeping, like she always does. Curled up on her side like a baby in a crib." Liam heard the creak of a chair shifting. "How are you and Wy getting along?"

Liam took the phone away from his ear again, this time to stare at it incredulously. It refused to yield up any secrets on its own, and he put it back to his ear cautiously. "What did you say?"

Barton was impatient. "I said, Campbell, how are things between you and the girlfriend?"

Liam said slowly, "You knew about Wy and me?"

"Jesus Christ, Liam, this is the goddamn Alaskan Bush. Everybody knew about it."

"You son of a bitch," Liam said, perhaps not the most felicitous manner in which to address one's boss. "You knew she was here?"

"Yes, I did, you bullheaded bastard," Barton bellowed, "and, yes, I posted you to Newenham because of it!"

Liam was speechless.

Barton waited for a moment before continuing in a calmer voice. "Face it, Liam. You were one big, walking, talking open wound. Goddammit, we could practically track you by the fresh blood you left behind. Somebody had to do something."

"You could have told me" was all Liam could find to say. "You could have let me decide for myself what I wanted."

"Yeah, we could have," Barton said evenly, "if we wanted to wait another five years for you to make up your friggin' mind. I wasn't in the mood." Barton sighed. "Look, friend. You're in about the worst possible place there is for a man to be. You lost your son. I don't want to even think about what that could do to someone. You got a wife in a coma, with no hope of recovery." Barton was good with blunt. "It might take her years, but she's dying. You know it, I know it, her parents know it. We all know it. You looked like crawling in next to her and going with. I wasn't going to let that happen if I could help it. So I put you in the only place I could think of where there was someone who might do you some good."

"Did you think the demotion was going to help, too?"

"Aw shit," Barton said. "Answer me this, Liam. When you fuck up, who do you think gets it up the ass?"

"I didn't fuck up," Liam said distinctly.

"No, you didn't, but the people who worked for you did, and you weren't watching them."

Liam said nothing, and John Dillinger Barton got uncharacteristically defensive. "Don't talk to me about personal problems. You got them up the wazoo, agreed, in spades. But a cop can't turn his job on and off like a switch. You knew that coming in. We all know it coming in." The chair creaked again. Barton was a fidgeter, constantly in motion--shifting in his chair, shuffling the papers on his desk, doodling with his pencil, waxing Machiavellian with his brain. "You done your box thing yet on this DeCreft murder?"

"I don't know that it is murder."

"You said the wire was cut."

"It was."

"Think that happened accidentally?"

"Maybe. Maybe somebody was reaching under there trying to cut something else."

"Yes," Barton said, "that's what I figure a pilot good enough to spot herring is gonna do, go poking around underneath the control panel of a plane he's gonna be flying in with a sharp pair of nippers. Or letting some yo-yo mechanic do the same thing. Uh-huh. Gotta hand it to you, Campbell, you got that situation piped." He added, as an afterthought, "Who is the pilot, anyway?"

Liam was silent.

"No," Barton said. "Shit, no."

Liam sighed. "Yeah, John. It's Wy."

"Aw fuck," Barton said heavily. "Goddammit anyway." He was silent for a moment. "She a suspect?"

"No," Liam said immediately.

Barton was silent again, his silence more eloquent than most people's conversation. "Okay, you're there, I'm not. But I'm running a report on her anyway; I'll get back to you. In the meantime, you do the box thing, you hear?"

"All right, all right, I'll do the box thing," Liam said irritably, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

"Good." Barton hung up.

The "box thing" was something Liam did early on in every investigation in which he participated. Sometimes, redrawn and relettered and blown up, it found its way into court as Prosecution Exhibit A. It had been a while, but he thought he still remembered how. He took a deep breath and got a clean sheet of paper out of the printer. By fortune good or ill, in the middle drawer of the desk he found the writing implement of his choice, a Pentel Quicker Clicker, with spare leads and erasers. No hope for procrastination there, either, so he began.

The first square was drawn in the center of the page and labeled Bob DeCreft. He looked at it for a while, ruminating. A second square was added, with a dotted line connecting it to the first, and labeled Wyanet Chouinard. A third square connected to them both, labeled Cecil Wolfe.

A fourth square, Laura Nanalook. Another line connected Laura Nanalook with Cecil Wolfe.

He thought about that for a while, and to Laura's square added a lightly drawn fifth square, labeled Rebecca Gilbert, with a question mark after her name.

There. He sat back and surveyed the neat boxes and their straight little connecting lines, what he knew of Bob DeCreft's life reduced to connect-the-dots.

Bob DeCreft, sixty-five years old, a member in good standing of the community, according to Bill. A sixty-five-year-old man shacking up with a, what, twenty-year-old girl, a staggeringly beautiful twenty-year-old girl. Sex and money, those were the two main motivations for murder in Liam's experience, and one look around Bob DeCreft's house had told him DeCreft didn't live large.

Take sex, then. Maybe Laura Nanalook wanted out of the relationship with DeCreft and sabotaged the plane herself. She had said she'd been working when DeCreft was killed. He'd have to confirm that with Bill.