Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of 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.”