Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

He got Bill out of bed at eight-thirty, and heard an irritated Moses complaining in the background. Everybody got some last night but him, but the thought did not depress him as much as it might have.

“Dick Ford?” she said. “Nice guy. Good fisherman, too, but he's such a soft touch that he never hangs on to any money. A four-wheeler? I don't know, Liam, he's never driven it into the bar.”

He called Dick Ford's phone number. No answer. He saddled up the Blazer and galloped purposefully down to the harbor, pulling up in front of the office door for Seafood North. Tanya paled when he walked in the door, and then looked relieved when he said, “Is Dick Ford a fisherman of yours?”

“Yes.”

“What's the name of his boat, and do you know its slip number?”

Of course she did. She even accompanied him out to the dock to point out the boat. “Right there, theSelina Noel,slip number one-eighty-seven. Pretty name, isn't it?”

“Thanks.” He waited until she had turned to go and said, “Oh, one more thing.”

Her back was almost as nice as Wy's, slender, straight and at the moment vibrating with tension. “Yes?” she said, looking over her shoulder and narrowing her eyes against the still-rising sun.

“You were meeting David Malone at the Bay View Inn, weren't you, Tanya.” He made it a statement, rather than a question.

For a moment, one very brief moment, her shoulders slumped. She turned to face him fully, looking naked and defenseless in the bright morning light. “Yes.”

“Once every couple of weeks for the past three months.”

“And last summer. Yes.”

She offered no apologies and no explanations, and he admired her for it. “You don't have to worry, I'm not going to tell anyone, and if Alta Peterson down at the hotel hasn't by now, she won't be, either. The fact that you were having an affair with David Malone had nothing to do with his or his family's death, and it doesn't matter to the investigation.”

“It matters to me,” she whispered.

She looked very young and very defenseless, and he had a sudden vivid memory of Wy's face the day she'd walked away from him in Anchorage. Pain, loss, guilt, shame, more than he could put a name to, all of it reflected in the young face before him now. “Move on,” he said.

“I can't,” she said.

“You can't do anything else,” he said, and went down the gangway, leaving her standing on the end of the dock, staring out at the Bay.

Dick Ford wasn't on board theSelina Noel.Well, shit. Well, then, how about Max Bayless? He knew what Prince would say, that he was tracking down useless leads, that they already had a confession in one case and an alibi with holes big enough to drive a truck through in the other. He should be in the office, doing paperwork, wrapping things up.

Instead he went to the only other bar in town, the Breeze Inn, which sat on the exact opposite edge of town from Bill's Bar and Grill. It was half the size of the other bar and twice as noisy, mostly because there was a television hanging from every corner of the room and two over the bar, all of them on at once. The bartender was a fat man with three strands of black hair stretched carefully across his otherwise bare scalp. He didn't say much. He shook his head when Liam asked him if he'd seen Max Bayless. He shook his head again when Liam asked him if he knew Max Bayless. The two guys nursing Bloody Marys while they watched ESPN didn't know Max Bayless and hadn't met him lately, either. Nobody'd seen Max Bayless, not Tanya, not Bill, not anyone; Max Bayless was the original invisible man.

He went back to the office and dialed Wiley Jim's number. It rang eleven times before Jim picked up. “I don't know who this is and I don't care, if you want to live you'll let me go back to sleep.”

“One more name, Jim,” Liam said. “I'll fix your next ticket.”

Jim drove a white Desert Rat Porsche convertible around Anchorage, even in winter, at no known and certainly no legal speed limit. A feminine complaint could be heard in the background but it didn't grate as much on Liam as it had the night before, and he grinned at the opposite wall. “Max Bayless. Come on, Wiley, I know you never turn that computer off. Just stagger into the office and type in the letters. M-A-X-”

“I got it, I got it,” Jim said, “and fuck you.”

“Thanks, Jim, I knew I could count on you.”

He waited. Five minutes later Jim said, “He's in jail. Cook Inlet Pre-Trial.”

“What for?”

“Selling cocaine.”

“Where was he arrested?”

“Anchorage. Wait a minute.” Click, click, click. “Fourth Avenue, the Hub, if you can believe it.”

“How long's he been in custody?”

“Eleven days. Can I go back to bed now?”

“With my blessing.”

“One ticket?”

“One.”

“Oughtta be three.”

“One,” Liam said firmly. “Say goodnight, Jim.”

So, Dick Ford owned the four-wheeler Frank Petla had been riding on, and was presently nowhere to be found. Max Bayless had threatened to kill David Malone, but he'd been in jail too long to have actually done it, and it was a year-old threat, anyway.

The phone rang and he snatched it up. “Brillo Pad, is that you, you old bastard, what took you so long?”

“You watch your mouth, mister, or I'll come over there and wash it out with soap,” Mamie Hagemeister said primly.

Liam sat up. “I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else. Mamie?”

“Yes.”

“There's nothing wrong with the prisoners, is there?”

“No, but one of them wants to talk to you.”

“Which one, Petla or Larsgaard?”

“Neither. Mr. Gray has asked me to ask you to stop by when you have a moment.”

“Gray? Who-oh. What does he want?”

“He says he has some information for you.” She gave a discreet cough, and added in an even primmer voice, “There was some mention of a deal.”

“It wasn't even half a lid,” Moccasin Man said.

“Tough luck. Unless you've got a medical prescription to smoke dope, possession is still illegal in Alaska, and punishable upon conviction by time in jail.”

“That's such crap.”

“Hey, you're preaching to the choir,” Liam said, spreading his hands. “If I had my way, all drugs would be legalized and taxed. If I had my way, we'd buy all the coke, opium, heroin and crack there is and pile it up on street corners, free for anybody who wanted it. Next morning I'd go around with a front-end loader and haul the bodies off to the dump, a gain not only to the state but to the gene pool. Not to mention which it'd cut down on my overtime something considerable.” Liam leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “But I don't have my way. It's still illegal to be in possession of marijuana in the state of Alaska, which substance you were caught with by a sworn officer of the law.” Liam leaned forward and flipped open the file in front of him. “Officer Roger Raymo, in fact, on Saturday night. Seems he saw your truck pulled off the side of the road about halfway to Icky.”

“The dope wasn't mine.”

Liam smiled and closed the file.

“It wasn't, goddamn it,” Gray muttered. “It was hers.”

“Who is ‘her’?”

“May Hitchcock. The broad who was with me.”

Liam opened up the file again and perused it slowly, to Gray's increasing impatience. “She had it on her. She must have dropped it on the floor and kicked it under the seat when that dick Raymo pulled up behind us in his dickmobile.”

Liam clicked his tongue. “Now, now, Evan, you're not going to get anywhere with me by bad-mouthing a fellow officer. So, you say the dope was May's. She buy it from you in the first place?”

Gray met his eyes full on and lied like… well, like a trooper. “No.”