Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

Prince chuckled. “That'll teach 'em, all right.” She winced and put a hand to her head.

“I'm surprised to see one here, though,” Wy said. “I thought storyknifing was a custom practiced only on the Delta. North of the Kuskokwim Mountains, anyway.”

McLynn came forward and nipped the storyknife out of her hands. “Yes, well, that's all very well, but it is an important part of my research and my paper-”

“That's the knife we saw sticking out of Nelson's mouth when we found the body,” Prince said.

“I thought it might be,” Liam said, and took the knife from McLynn. He looked at Frank.

“I didn't do it!” Frank said frantically. “I found the sack! It was laying on the ground!”

“Right next to the rifle, I bet,” Liam said.

Frank didn't even hear him. “I didn't take nothing! I didn't shoot anybody! I didn't kill nobody! I didn't do anything! I want a lawyer!”

There were six people, one of them dead, and two 2-seater planes, not to mention a pilot with a bump on her head. “Can you fly?” Liam asked Prince.

She managed a nod, although it looked painful.

“No shit, now, Prince,” he said sternly. “Are you fit to fly?”

“Yeah, no shit,” Wy said, the owner of the plane Prince was about to strap on.

“I can fly,” Prince said shortly.

Wy surveyed her with a narrow stare. Prince met it without flinching. “All right,” Wy said at last. She really had no other option, not if she wanted the Cub back at its tiedown that evening, and she knew it. She had an early flight the next morning, too, into a strip like this one that the Cessna was too heavy for, and she wasn't sure how many times the dentist from Anchorage was going to let her borrow the other Cub. “What about you?” she said, staring fixedly at a point somewhere above Liam's right shoulder. “We're flying full. How do you get back?”

The afternoon sun glinted off the rooftops of the Air Force base, ten miles to the east, and Liam, unwillingly, was put forcibly in mind of Moses' announcement of Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell's arrival in Newenham, and his request to see his only son and heir. It was a reunion Liam would just as soon take place in private. “You take McLynn back. Prince will take the suspect and the body.” To Prince he said, “Take Frank here to the local lockup. Get Wy to show you where. Take the body to Alaska Airlines. Get it out to Anchorage on the next jet. I'll call the M.E.” Which crusty old bastard would have a few pithy things to say on the subject of filling up his morgue. “I'll take the four-wheeler over to the base and hitch a ride in from there.”

“Oh.” Wy hesitated. He was surprised to see a flush rise into her cheeks. “I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you,” she said lamely. “Your father-”

“You've seen him?” The words snapped out before he could stop them.

She nodded. “At Bill's, when I took Prince to find Professor McLynn. He was looking for you.”

“I heard.”

“Oh,” she said again. “He told me to tell you he was here, because you didn't like surprises.”

“He was right.” About that, if about nothing else.

Wy opened her mouth, looked at Prince and McLynn, and closed it again. “Come on, Professor,” she told McLynn. “Let's get back to town.”

“I need to stay here,” he said obstinately. “Somebody has to guard the dig.”

Liam sighed, and said, gently but firmly, “You need that shoulder looked at, sir, and as I said before, this is now a crime scene. I have to take some pictures, draw some sketches, do an inventory. You can come back tomorrow.”

“You're not staying here overnight, are you?” McLynn demanded. Liam shook his head. “Who's to stop some other cretin”-a pointing finger accused Frank Petla, who cringed away from it-“from coming in and trashing the place? I have weeks of work invested here, Officer, and months, hell, years of research! I have a paper to finish for delivery before the American Archeological Society that will open up an entirely new line of inquiry into the migratory patterns of the indigenous-”

Liam said in a mild voice, “Your work will have to wait at least a day, sir. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.”

Something in that mild tone convinced McLynn to shut up, but he glared impartially at everyone as he was assisted into the back seat of the borrowed Cub. With less care, Liam and Prince jammed Frank Petla into the back of Wy's Cub. Nelson's body had been bagged and stowed beneath Frank's seat. Frank looked down at the plastic-covered head lying beneath his feet and whimpered a little. Everyone ignored him.

Five minutes later Wy was in the air. She banked and made a wide circle around the bluff, watching Prince take off and dropping in directly behind her, her nose on Prince's six like a sheep dog herding one of its flock back to the barn.

Liam fetched camera and sketch pad from his crime scene kit. He wasn't going to knock himself out; he had a prime suspect in the bag, not to mention two superb witnesses to two additional assaults, one a distinguished scholar Liam assumed was a highly respected member of his field, no matter how much the pompous little fart annoyed him personally, and the other, glory of glories, an Alaska state trooper. Juries had a fondness for hard evidence, though, and he set about collecting some for those twelve good and true men and women.

He started in the service tent. One of the tables had been knocked completely over, a second leaned up against a third. Possibly where Prince had fallen when Petla hit her. She could have crawled outside afterward.

He righted the table. Scattered on the floor he found several items Petla had missed. There was a seal-oil lamp fashioned from a hollow stone. A tiny ivory otter, cracked and yellow with age and grimed with dirt, had rolled beneath one of the cots. Caught in the fold of fabric between tent wall and tent floor, he found a single walrus tusk, broken off halfway up its ivory length, which must have given the bull one hell of a toothache. It looked suspiciously white, and suspiciously like it was fresh off the walrus. It reminded him of the walrus head on Larsgaard's kitchen wall.Asveq.

There were walrus in the bay, hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, hauling out in the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 provided for their complete and total protection from any and all human predation, until such time as they could be harvested in concert with an “optimum sustainable population keeping in mind the carrying capacity of the habitat.” When a walrus got tangled up in a net chasing the same school of reds a fisherman was after, the fisherman in question generally decided that the habitat was carrying its full load of walrus and wouldn't miss one. A lot of walrus washed up on the Bay's beaches, dead of lead poisoning. Most of them had no heads, a little-known-little-known in scientific circles, that is-side effect of lead poisoning.

The Yupik, of course, had been harvesting walrus for the last ten thousand years, eating the flesh, making clothes and snowshoes and sled runners and water bottles and boat hulls from the skin and carving the tusks into masks and dolls and totems of animal figures, like the otter Liam had found.

And storyknives.

Liam was a little hazy on the rules of engagement regarding walrus tusks. Only Alaska Natives could take them, he thought, but they could be sold to non-Natives. Could they be sold simply as a tusk, or a pair of tusks, or did they have to be made into something? He couldn't remember. Charlene Taylor, the fish and game trooper for the district, would know. He'd ask her sometime.

He set the fragment of tusk on the table. Next to one of the cots a Blazo box did duty as nightstand, bookshelf and clothes drawer. One of the books stacked on it was a companion publication to a cultural exhibit, published five years before by the University of Alaska Department of Anthropology. The prologue thanked McLynn for contributing. He leafed through it, stopping when he came to a chapter headed “Aboriginal Life in South-western Alaska.”