Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“Jesus, the weather fairy, who do you think? I called Jim over to the National Weather Service. Oh, and one other thing.”

“What?”

“Molly Malone was pregnant.”

Dr. Hans Brilleaux, having delivered his message and having no further use for the telephone in his hand, hung up.

Liam put down the phone and looked at Prince. “Molly Malone was pregnant.”

She stared at him. “With whose baby, I wonder?”

“So do I. Tell me something, Prince, if you shot seven people and you wanted to cover it up, would you wait two hours before you tried?”

He could tell Prince was making an effort to maintain her professional calm. “I wouldn't shoot seven people, sir,” she said carefully. “Do you-sir, you don't think he didn't do it, do you?”

“No, I think he did it, all right, but he's not telling us the truth about why or how, and I don't want this case to unravel in court.”

“It couldn't,” she said, shocked.

“I have two words for you,” he said. “O. J. Simpson.” One word and two letters, actually, but what the hell.

“But-”

“Prince, we're not talking burden of proof or rule of law or even simple logic, here. We're talking juries, twelve individual people, each with their own boatload of biases and prejudices, and each as susceptible to the suggestions of the defense as they are to the evidence we hand off to the prosecutor. More so, if the judge comes down hard on reasonable doubt during instruction. I don't like leaving juries with any wriggle room.” He grabbed his cap and headed for the door. “I want all the evidence there is to get before we turn this case over to the D.A. We need a signed statement from Chad Donohoe, too, and I don't think he's going to leave in the middle of fishing season to come into town and give us one.”

He paused, one hand on the open door. “Besides, Larsgaard doesn't want us to go back to Kulukak. I want to know why.”

“I need a ride,” Jo said.

Steam was rising from their coffee cups as they sat around the kitchen table, watching the sun rise up over the mouth of the Nushagak and the Bay beyond. The kitchen of Wy's house was flooded in golden light, and Wy didn't have any flights scheduled to anywhere until that afternoon. She put her feet up on a chair and said lazily, “You buying?”

“The paper is.”

“Where to?”

Jo added half and half to her coffee and stirred in another teaspoon of sugar. “I came out here on a story.”

“I know, you told me, but you wouldn't tell me what it was.”

“Yeah. The guy who contacted me about it didn't want me to spread it around.”

“Who was it?”

“Don Nelson.”

Wy sat up with a bump. “The guy killed out at the dig?”

“Yeah.”

“You know I found him? Well, me and McLynn.”

“Yeah. I mean, not right away, I went in to say hi to Bill last night and she told me. Saw you at dinner, by the way.” Jo's green eyes watched her over the rim of her mug.

“Oh,” Wy said. She could feel the color rising up into her cheeks. “Yeah, well. We had dinner.”

“So I saw.”

“It was just… it was dinner, okay? His father was there, the new trooper, it was just dinner. The ingestion of food in return for a caloric warming of cell tissue.”

“Uh-huh. With a little footsie on the side.”

Wy drank coffee. “I went to see him at the post afterward.”

“Did you?”

Wy glared. “Oh, stop being so fucking smug, Dunaway.”

“Then stop being so fucking evasive, Chouinard. Jesus, you're worse than Bill Clinton when it comes to talking about your sex life. It's true what they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt.”

“It's not sex.”

“Not yet.”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

Jo's smile was wide and salacious. “I want to, I want to.”

Wy fiddled with the sugar spoon, raising spoonsful of sugar and letting it fall back into the bowl. “Maybe you weren't wrong, some of those things you said the other night.”

For once, Jo maintained a prudent silence.

“I told Liam what you said. Some of it, anyway.”

“What'd he say?”

“Not much.” Wy let the spoon fall. “He just wants me, Jo. Just flat out wants me, all of me, marriage, kids, for better or worse, so long as we both shall live, until death us do part, everything, the whole nine yards.”

“Kids?”

Their eyes met. “I haven't told him.”

“You'll have to.”

“Not yet,” Wy said, a plea in her voice.

“I'm not your mother, Wy, or your conscience.” Jo drained her mug. “I don't have to be, you've got enough conscience for any ten people I know. You want to be happy with him for a little while before you lower the next boom, okay, I get that. But not telling him now means you don't trust him enough to understand and accept. He won't like that. And it is a lousy way to start any relationship, let alone this one.” She stood up. “In the meantime, I want to take a look at that archaeological dig-what did you call it?”

“Tulukaruk.”

“Everything around here starts or ends with ak,or both,” Jo said, grumbling. “Tulukaruk, Kulukak, Manokotak, Stoyahuk, Koliganek, Egegik. Anyway, I want to see the place with thek's where Nelson died.”

“What did he write to you about?”

Jo hesitated. “He said he'd found something that would make a great story. It had to do with a government cover-up.”

“Government?” Their eyes met. They both knew what kind of government institution was closest to Tulukaruk.

Wy was silent until they got to the airport. As they were strapping into the Cub, she said, “When did Nelson first contact you?”

“I got his letter four days ago.”

She pulled the throttle, adjusted the mixture and started the prop. The headsets crackled into life. Wy got clearance to taxi and the Cub rolled off the apron and down the runway. Just before they took off, she looked around at Jo. “Colonel Campbell has been here almost a week.”

“I know,” Jo said.

The flight to Kulukak was uneventful, not so much as a bump of clear-air turbulence to mar the journey. As usual, Kulukak was fogged in and, as usual, not enough to abort an approach and a landing. Liam noticed that Prince didn't take the care that Wy did in a landing; they came down hard, smack, so that the plane shuddered and water washed over the floats. She didn't let up on the throttle, either, taxiing flat out to the float slip and running the plane well up onto the boards.

“Thought you were going to take us right up the gangway and into town,” Liam said, dry mouth forming the words with difficulty.

“Just get her down,” Prince said, switching off the mag and opening the door in the same motion. “Just get her down in one piece, and in good enough shape to get her back in the air again, that's all that's important.”

Liam wondered what the maintenance bills were like for the Cessna, and decided it was something he didn't need to know. That was the difference between flying your own plane and someone else's. Sort of like driving a rental car. A rental car three thousand feet up.

It was the twenty-forth, a Thursday, and judging by the number of boats idle in the harbor, the Fish and Game had not counted enough salmon going up the various rivers and streams. Men were hanging and mending gear, scrubbing down decks, working on engines, readying themselves and their craft for when the Fish and Game renewed their contact lens prescriptions and could see well enough to count fish. It was probably Liam's imagination but it seemed like a silence fell as they approached, and gathered in strength behind them as they passed. Prince put it into words. “I feel like I've got a bull's-eye painted on my back.”