Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“Well, tell Anna we’d be happy to have her come visit,” Wy said, trying not to purr. “Will you require one room or two?”

“Mom!”

“Hey, just being a good hostess.” She dropped the teasing note. “Can’t wait to see you, kid. I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll text when we leave.”

“Okay.” She clicked off and beamed at Liam. “He’s coming and he’s bringing a girl with him.”

“I heard. I’m glad the guest bedrooms are on the other side of the house.”

“Liam!”

They taxied up to the tie-down in Blewestown twenty minutes later. Liam’s phone rang as he got out (Britney Spears and “I’m a Slave 4 U”). It was Hans Brilleaux, the medical examiner, in Anchorage. He was just glad it wasn’t Barton. “Hey, Brillo,” he said.

“WHAT KIND OF CRAZY FUCKING ASSHOLE DOES THIS, CAMPBELL?”

Liam yanked the phone away from his ear. “Jesus, Brillo. Dial it down, wouldya? I’ve only got two eardrums and Barton’s already taken out one.”

There was a heavy exhale. When Brillo spoke again he had dialed it down but Liam could hear the hard edge of rage as plain as if Brillo was in his face like the wire-haired terrier he was, teeth bared and sharp enough to draw blood. “I want to know what kind of sick, sorry, sadist does this kind of thing. And then I want you to shoot them.”

“What kind of thing? Is this about Erik Berglund?”

A silence, where Liam got the impression that Brillo was working at containing his anger and not succeeding very well. “No,” he said very precisely. “It is not about Erik Berglund. It’s about the skeleton you dropped on me along with Erik Berglund.

“All of his long bones are broken in multiple places, humerus, ulna, radius, femur, tib/fib. The feet were broken at the joints. The spine half a dozen times. And the skull… Jesus, Liam. It’s like someone tried to pulverize it.”

“His?” Liam said.

“It’s a boy. I’d say about ten years old.”

“How long has the body been there?”

“Thirty years, give or take.”

“Jesus.”

He thought about the cave behind the cave and the limited access between them. And then he realized what must have happened. Someone had deliberately broken the bones of the body of the ten-year-old boy into pieces small enough to fit through the crack, which was so narrow no one would ever find it, or if they did, think to look for anything inside it.

Except maybe another ten-year-old kid. It was why the bones were so close to the crack, he realized. The killer couldn’t shove them in any farther because the crack was so narrow. He hadn’t been able to get his arm in past his bicep. “Brillo, can you tell if the injuries were pre- or post-mortem?”

“I’m pretty sure the fracture on the left side of the skull was the killing blow. If he wasn’t dead he would have been unconscious or comatose when the rest of his body was broken into bits and pieces. Do you know who did it, Liam?”

“Not yet.”

“Find him.”

This wasn’t professional, Brillo’s rage, it was personal. Child killings brought out the vengeful god in everyone. “What about Erik Berglund?”

He heard keys clicking. “Oddly enough, Berglund’s injuries were similar if not as extensive. There was a blow to the left side of his head, and his left elbow and clavicle are cracked. He’s also got a hell of a lot of cuts and bruises, and his hands are all torn up. Was there blood at the scene?”

“Not a lot, no.”

“Could he have fallen after he was struck?”

Liam thought of that sidewinder of a trail leading to the dig. Erik could have been struck at the signpost. “Yes.” And then fallen all the way down it, and at the bottom crawled to the tent and into the cave. And he had then tried to make a call on his dead phone.

He remembered the wear and tear on Erik’s clothes. Liam hadn’t looked closely at the trail but he had looked. It had rained on Tuesday and the body hadn’t been found until Wednesday. The rain must have washed away any blood. “Time of death?”

“How cold is it in that cave?”

“Say fifty degrees or thereabouts.”

Brillo grunted. “Then I’d say somewhere between Monday night and Tuesday morning.”

What Liam had estimated. “Okay. Thanks, Brillo.”

“Find that fucker, Campbell.”

“I will.”

Liam clicked off and thought bleakly of the new scenario laying itself out before him. If Erik had been attacked at the top of the trail and not the bottom, then anyone of any size or age could have done it without negotiating that killer trail. His pool of potential suspects had grown to include anyone in the general area of the Lower Peninsula on Monday night.

Great.

Eighteen

Friday, September 6

THE NEXT MORNING LIAM WENT STRAIGHT to the post, told his administrative aide that he wasn’t in to anyone who called, and locked himself in his office.

He took a ruler, a pencil, and a blank piece of paper and created a grid. In the central square he wrote “Erik Berglund.” He got out his phone and opened the Notes app and began filling in the squares around Berglund.

Gabe McGuire. Lived almost on top of Erik’s dig. By his own admission had a beef with Berglund over the right of way, but Liam was no scalp hunter and with the best will in the world he couldn’t put McGuire in the frame. He had more to lose than all of the other suspects put together. He had motive and he sure had opportunity, though, so McGuire went in a square next to Erik.

Leonard Needham. Liam had googled him. The list of hits went on for fourteen pages, with some stunt nerds doing—or trying to—YouTube recreations of some of his more famous stunts. The one where he’d jumped from a moving car into a moving plane and then parachuted out of the plane onto the top of a moving semi was among Liam’s least favorites.

He shook his head. Someone who had had his ten best stunts written up in Popular Mechanics with color commentary by a physicist and a mechanical engineer was not likely to orchestrate something as clumsy as murder by blunt instrument and cliff. Further, Needham had advised his nephew to fess up about vacating the right of way. A straight arrow, or wanting to appear like one. Needham wasn’t entirely out of the running, either, but he got a square on the outer edge of the grid.

The Kinnisons and the Reeses both got squares on the outer edge. A cursory troll through state databases showed him that Cynthia Reese was a realtor and her husband owned the go-to local marine supply store. Greg Kinnison was a physical therapist and his wife Grace a dentist. Their only stake here was the ability to brag about being friends with Gabe McGuire. Although they probably wouldn’t object to gating the community, either.

What the hell was it with people who, so long as they had theirs, were no longer willing to share? By law beaches in Alaska were public up to the high water mark but it meant nothing to the general population if there was no access to them. Like Alaska’s national parks and wildlife refuges. You could drive into Denali, you could even drive to the Gates of the Arctic, but Wood-Tikchik and too many others required air transportation, which was never cheap and so out of the reach of most citizens.

Domenica Garland. She was one of McGuire’s nearest neighbors, so opportunity. If Brillo was right, and he usually was, anyone had means. Motive? Plenty, in this case, ranging from the professional to the personal. Personally, she and Berglund had been fuck buddies. She acted like it didn’t matter that it had ended but who the hell knew with women? Professionally, she wanted to drill for oil in the Bay, and Berglund was about to begin a study that might not stop the drilling but it wouldn’t hurry it along, either, especially if Berglund managed to get an entity as high profile as UNESCO involved. Erik had been a good-looking guy and Liam could see her sleeping with him as an exercise in vanity, but killing him over what had appeared to Liam to be a pretty pitiful collection of artifacts seemed extreme, especially in a state with a legislature which regarded the resource extraction industry as a cash cow. God knows the industry had bought enough members of that body their seats. Liam didn’t think Garland regarded Erik Berglund as even the mildest threat to her job or her plans to drill for oil and gas in the Bay. Still, she had more motive than most, so she went into a square next to Erik.