Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

He caught himself. There was a word for that, anthropomorphizing, the assigning of human feelings to plants, animals and inanimate objects. Like giving your car a name and begging it not to stall out at a red light in February. Like telling the Chugach Mountains they looked beautiful all dressed up in alpenglow. Like talking back to a raven.

Newenham wasn't just hard on his uniforms, it was hard on his sanity. There was a reason the inhabitants referred to it as Disneyham, strictly among themselves, of course.

He turned and sat at the table, Prince on his right with a lined pad and a pencil, Frank Petla across from him. Frank was sucking on a Dr Pepper. “Can't you guys get me a cigarette, man? I mean, one lousy smoke?”

“Secondary smoke, it's a killer, Frank,” Liam said, and started the handheld recorder. He gave the date, the time, said who was in the room and then set the recorder to one side. Frank Petla looked at it with the eyes of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. “You've waived your right to an attorney, Frank, is that right?”

Frank nodded.

“Say so for the recorder, please.”

“Yeah.”

“You're sure about this? Yesterday afternoon you said you wanted a lawyer.”

“I'm sure. Don't need no damn lawyer.”

“All right. You want to tell us what happened out at the dig yesterday?”

What had happened out at the dig yesterday was that Frank Petla, a completely innocent man, had been out for a peaceful ride on his four-wheeler on a sunny summer day, when he had accidentally driven his four-wheeler into this hole in the ground. In the hole in the ground were a bunch of things that Frank, a completely innocent man and an Alaska Native, instantly recognized as family heirlooms. He had collected them in a bag, as any completely innocent man, Alaska Native and traditional tribal member would do, to return them to their rightful owners, his village elders.

“That's what you were going to do, Frank?” Liam said. “ Return them to your village?”

Frank had been, and he was indignant at the suggestion that he might have been going to sell them. He strenuously denied ever having been to the dig prior to yesterday, and when commanded to look at Prince and try to remember the last time he, Frank, had seen her, hazarded a guess that it might have been last October at AFN. “Didn't we dance at the Snow Ball?” He hadn't hit anybody, he hadn't shot anybody and he most certainly hadn't stabbed anybody with anything, least of all with something that he, a completely innocent man, an Alaska Native, a traditional tribal member and a signatory to the AFN Sobriety Movement, recognized as a storyknife. “It's a girl thing, that storyknife,” he said confidentially, as if it were a secret. “Only girls could play with them. They would take it down to the river-bank and draw pictures in the mud and tell stories to their brothers and sisters.”

He was silent for a moment. Liam, watching him, saw a shadow pass over his face. “My sister storyknifed.” He said a word in Yupik that sounded like ‘yawning ruin.’ “That's Yupik for storyknife, did you know that?”

“No,” Liam said. “I didn't know that.”

“She was beautiful, my sister,” Frank Petla said, no bombast or bluster or wounded innocence now. “She had the longest hair that she would braid with beads. When she danced, she would toss it around like a cape. All the boys loved her.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” Frank said, still in that quiet voice. “She drank too much, and she died.”

There was a brief silence. In a gentle, unthreatening voice, Liam said, “Where were you this weekend, Frank?”

It was a while before Frank came back from wherever he'd gone. “This weekend?”

“The two days before yesterday,” Prince said, and subsided when Liam touched her arm.

“Don Nelson was killed sometime between Friday night and Saturday night. If you didn't stab him,” Liam said, the voice of sweet reason, “you obviously weren't at the dig. So where were you?”

Frank stared at him in stupefied silence for a good minute and a half. “I don't… Fishing?”

“Fishing where?”

“On my boat.”

“You have a boat?”

“Yes. TheSarah P.”

“Is it down at the harbor?” Frank nodded. “What's the slip number?” Frank told him. “Where were you fishing, Frank?”

Frank thought. “On the river. Drifting. Off a creek.”

The Nushagak River was hundreds of miles long, with on average one creek per ten feet. “Which creek?”

“I dunno.” Frank looked helpless.

“Was anyone fishing with you?”

“No.”

“Did you see any other boats?”

“No.” Frank's eyes slid sideways.

Aha, Liam thought. “Was this creek open to fishing, Frank?”

Frank was indignant. “Of course! They could take my boat if I got caught fishing in a closed area!”

They certainly could, Liam thought. He could ask Charlene which areas on the Nushagak had been open to fishing on Monday, but there might be an easier way. “Who did you deliver to, Frank?”

“A fish buyer,” Frank said promptly. “He was buying off the dock.”

“Did you get a fish ticket?”

Frank shook his head. “He bought with cash.”

They left him in the interview room for a moment.

“Convenient how no one can confirm his story,” Prince said, eyes bright. She smelled a conviction.

“Yeah, but he was drunk as a skunk when he ran into you.”

“So?”

“So, how did he pay for his booze?”

“He bummed some off a friend, I don't know. Why do we care?”

We don't, Liam thought, but Charlene will.

When they went back in, they found Frank trying to squeeze through the bars on the window. His head was too big, and he'd gotten stuck. They extricated him and returned him to his cell.

Walter Larsgaard was up next, and he was in the mood to talk. He sat down, folded his arms and waited until Liam started the recorder. He declined representation and said simply, “I killed them. I killed them all.”

“You killed David Malone, Molly Malone, Jonathan Malone, Michael Malone, Kerry Malone, Jason Knudson and Wayne Cullen?”

“Yes?”

“How did you kill them?”

He'd killed them, he said in a monotone, with a rifle, a thirtyoughtsix.

“Where is that rifle now, Walter?”

“Over the side.”

“And then what?”

“And then I set the boat on fire.”

“What with?”

“Gasoline.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I keep a spare tank on my dory.”

“Where is that tank now?”

“Still on my dory. I knew you could trace the rifle, but no sense in wasting a good gas tank.”

“What did you do with the gas?”

“Splashed it around. Lit a match.”

“Where did you splash it around first?”

“The galley.”

“On the bodies?”

“Yes.”

“You'd already killed them, why burn them?”

“I was hoping to get away with it.”

“Cover up your crime?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you just sink her?”

“I tried. I pulled the plugs.”

Liam looked at the still, remote face across from him. Larsgaard had his hands linked behind his head, had leaned back so that his chair was balanced on its rear legs. “Why did you do it, Walter?”

There was a pause. “She broke it off.” He said the words slowly and carefully, as if it were an effort to get them out.

“Who? Molly?”

“Yes.”

“You were seeing her?”

“Yes.”

“Sleeping with her?”

“Yes?”

“At the Bay View Inn?”

Larsgaard met his eyes briefly. “So you already know about it, do you?” He shook his head. “There are no secrets in small towns. I told her and told her, I…”