Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“I don't know. Mary, where is that piece of paper…” Paper rustled in the background, and someone blew his nose. Nelson's voice came back on. “Here it is. Somebody from Anchorage.”

Liam relaxed a little. “Someone from the medical examiner's officer, perhaps?”

“That was it. She told us he was dead, and when we asked how, she gave us your name. How did he die, Mr. Campbell? He was fine when we talked to him last week,” Nelson repeated. He sounded dazed. “He was-he was fine. Was it an accident?”

“I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Nelson, but no, your son did not die in an accident.” He thought of the hilt of the storyknife protruding from Nelson's mouth and added evenly, “There is evidence of foul play.”

“Foul play? Foul play? What the hell does that mean?”

Liam hated the phrase “foul play” himself; it made him think of an Agatha Christie novel. “Mr. Nelson, your son was killed,” he said bluntly. “I'm sorry,” he added.

“Killed?” Liam had expected the rise of anger in Nelson's voice; it always happened, shock, followed by grief, followed by rage. “Who killed him? Who did it?”

Liam looked at the door, which Charlene had closed firmly behind her. “We don't know yet for sure, Mr. Nelson.” He was thinking of Don Nelson's body lying in a sprawl so awkward it could only be death when he added, “But we do have a suspect in custody.”

“Who?”

“A local man,” Liam said circumspectly.

“How was he killed?”

Even more circumspectly, Liam replied, “Your son's body is at the medical examiner's office in Anchorage, Mr. Nelson. I expect cause of death will be pronounced within a few days. I can give you their phone number, if you like, so that you can make arrangements.”

“Make arrangements.” That was almost as bad a euphemism as “foul play.” Much as we do to sanitize it, Liam thought, everything we do to clean it up for public view, death is messy and painful, and will not be called to order. He thought again of Frost's poem.

“All right,” Nelson said, sounding suddenly exhausted. Liam gave him the M.E.'s number. “Thank you.”

Before very long Don Nelson, Senior, was going to want answers.Who, what, where, how and, above all, why? It was Liam's job to provide them. “You're welcome. Mr. Nelson, did your son have a particular friend here in Newenham? A girlfriend, maybe?”

“What? No. At least… he never said.” The tears were coming back. “He would have said, wouldn't he? If he'd met a girl, he would have said. He would have told his mother. He would have. He-”

“So there wasn't anyone?”

“No. Not that we know of. And if it had been serious, we would have known. We were very close.”

“I'm glad,” Liam said, and said it forcefully. “Did Don have any siblings? Any brothers or sisters that he might have talked to since he talked to you?”

“He had a sister, Betsy. She didn't say he'd called when we talked to her this morning.”

“May I have her phone number?”

Liam scribbled it down, and they said their goodbyes, Liam promising to call with any new information. Nelson Senior would call back first, he knew. It would take a day or two for him to filter the information Liam had given him through his grief, but when he did he would be on the phone breathing fire and smoke over the suspect in his son's murder, and if Liam was very unlucky, in less than a week he would be stepping off a plane at Newenham Airport.

The thought brought him to his feet. He donned cap and weapon and headed purposefully for the door. When he opened it, the white, shocked face of Tim Gosuk was on the other side.

“Tim?” Liam said.

“Is it true?” Tim said.

“Is what true?”

“Is it true that Mike Malone is dead?”

“How did you know Michael Malone?”

“I played guard opposite him at regionals last year. Is it true?”

Liam sat down on the top step, and with a gentle hand pulled Tim to sit next to him. “Yes, Tim, it's true.”

Tim sat, staring numbly in front of him. At twelve you are immortal and indestructible. This time next year is an aeon away, and the end of your life shrouded in mists you won't penetrate for another forty years. Death just doesn't happen when you're twelve.

It doesn't happen to your friends, either. “I can't believe it. I heard Mom and Jo talking about a boat burning and the crew all dead. I didn't know it was Mike's boat. He was-he was the greatest guy, Liam. Really nice. If you made a good play, he'd slap you on the back and yell, ‘Way to go!’ Even when you were on the other team. He was a good player, too, always had his hands up, had a great rebound.” Tim swallowed hard. Liam pretended not to notice. “He was just a great guy. I learned more playing against him than I did in a year's worth of practice.”

There was a rustle of branches overhead, a soft croak. Liam didn't look up. “Did you know the rest of his family?”

A trace of color rose up from Tim's neck. “I met his sister,” he said gruffly.

“Kerry?”

He nodded, his head turned away. The tip of his left ear was pink. “She was a cheerleader.”

“Pretty?”

Tim nodded again. “Is it true? The whole family is dead?”

“Yes.”

Liam's deep, slow voice was its own soporific. Tim's shoulders shuddered with a long sigh and he sat up straight again. “Kerry, too?”

“Kerry, too.”

“Damn it,” Tim said. “GodDAMN it.”

Liam dared to place one hand at the back of Tim's neck and squeeze. To his relief, Tim did not jerk away. “I'm sorry, Tim.”

“Me, too,” Tim said. “Me, too.” He swiveled around. “Mom says they were murdered, that somebody killed them. You gonna find out who did it?”

“Yes.”

Again, the deep voice was soothing in its certainty.

Another long, shuddering sigh. “Okay, then.” Tim stood up, thin shoulders squared, jaw up in a gesture that looked uncannily similar to the same gesture Liam had seen a hundred times on Wy's face. “Go get 'em.”

“All right,” Liam said obediently. He wanted to say, How's your mom? but stopped himself in time. It would have been like ninth grade all over again, in love with Mary Kallenberg and trying to discover if she liked him through his best friend, Cal, and her best friend, Melissa.

The raven sitting on the swaying spruce bow beat his wings and gave a raucous croak. Liam's head jerked up. The raven met his eye and croaked again.

“He's around here a lot, isn't he?” Tim said, looking at the raven as he straddled his bike. “I thought they roosted way out of town.”

“I just wish they did,” Liam said. He looked hard at the raven. It didn't do any good. He looked like every raven Liam had seen since coming to the Bay; big, black, beaky and beady-eyed. You had to perform surgery to tell a female from a male, and you had to catch one and stare down its gullet to tell how old it was. They all looked alike, those damn ravens, which was why he kept thinking he saw the same one over and over again.

He climbed into the Blazer and peeled out of the lot.

They landed in Kulukak and taxied the float plane to the dock. The place was still shrouded in what seemed to be its perpetual cloak of mist. No one was there to greet them, but then Liam hadn't called to say they were coming. He had confirmed with Charlene that there was no fishing period scheduled for that day, and so had a faint hope of finding the people he needed to talk to actually in the village. Of course they could be in Togiak buying parts, or on their way to Newenham to get laid, or, for that matter, headed for Dutch to refit for crab fishing.

Liam was an American to the very marrow of his bones-he supported the Constitution, he defended the Bill of Rights and he worked conscientiously to uphold his oath of office-but the distances involved in police work in Bush Alaska were so great that he sometimes secretly longed for the days of the Star Chamber, when you could toss anyone you liked for a crime into a dungeon until you were ready to talk to them. They might be a little rat-bitten when you pulled them out again, but at least they'd be immediately to hand.