Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

Luke stared at her.

“She got it on the front page of the News for five days running,” Jim said.

Jo looked at him, surprised.

“Let’s have another toddy,” he said.

Newenham, September 5

Liam started the recorder and gave the date and the time. “Present are myself, Corporal Liam Campbell of the Alaska State Troopers, Trooper Diana Prince, and suspects John Kvichak and Teddy Engebretsen.”

The wind howled outside and the window shuddered in its frame, leaking cold air into the tiny gray room. The four of them sat crowded around the single rectangular table. It was dark outside due to the low overcast, and light flickered from the single fluorescent tube overhead, the second tube having burned out long ago. The room smelled of stale cigarette smoke and fear, an odor part ammonia, part fresh sweat. The lies told behind the door echoed off the hard surfaces of the wall and the ceiling, muttering dully beneath the scratching of the branches against the glass. I didn’t do it, officer. I only had one beer. I never hit her, she’s a lying bitch. Nobody told me my license was suspended, I don’t know what you’re talking about. The door was open; I just went in to make sure everything was all right. I was just borrowing that truck. I loved that girl like she was my own daughter. I could never hurt him, he was my best friend. I was over at my mom’s, at the bar, down on my boat, on the river, out hunting, in Anchorage, Outside.

The room, with all its odors and echoes, had a pronounced effect on the people who were questioned there. Once Liam had come upon Mamie Hagemeister, the police station clerk, prepared to clean the interview room. He had himself removed mop and bucket from her hands and poured the hot soapy water in the nearest toilet. If he had his way, the room would never be cleaned, the walls never repainted, the ill-fitting window never replaced. The light fixture would always be kept to one bulb, and that bulb ready to give out at any moment. The chairs would never acquire cushions, the table would forever retain its scarred and unlovely surface.

“Kvichak has asked for a lawyer,” Prince said tentatively, as if referring to a subject in questionable taste.

“Yes, he has,” Liam said cordially, “and we’ll see that he gets one. Just as soon as Anchorage can rustle one up.”

“What happened to Brian Keogh?”

“Our judicial district’s most recent public defender? Came in on the plane before yours? That Brian Keogh?”

“That would be the one,” Prince acknowledged. “What happened to him?”

“He quit. Said he couldn’t face another winter in the Bush. He was posted in Kotzebue before here,” he added, in answer to Prince’s interrogatory lift of eyebrow. “Says he’s had enough ice not in a glass. He was offered a job as house counsel for some international import firm and he snapped it up. So Newenham is once more without a public defender.” Liam’s voice did not indicate massive sorrow at this turn of events. “And with this storm coming on, it’ll probably be a while before we get a temp.”

The two troopers sat across the table from Engebretsen and Kvichak now, Prince erect and all business, Liam sitting back with his long legs sprawled at an angle, looking out the window as if he weren’t even listening, in fact as if he were about to doze off. In the three hours since starting that tape, he had yet to say one word.

“I’m thirsty,” Engebretsen said. “Come on, gimme something to drink.”

“In a minute,” Prince said, the crease in her blue uniform sleeve as crisp as it had been when she walked in, her tie as impeccably knotted. Her black curls formed a tight cap against her skull, her blue eyes were hard and merciless, her mouth held in a stern, uncompromising line. She looked like a cop from the bone out, and she sounded like one, too. “Let’s go over it one more time. You say-”

“Shit, man,” Kvichak said, exploding onto his feet. His chair slammed against the wall and turned over. Engebretsen jumped and looked as if he were about to burst into tears.

Prince rose to face him, eye to eye. Liam didn’t move, didn’t turn from the window. “We’ve told you the goddamn story about six different times this morning, how many times you want us to tell it?”

“Until you get it right.”

“Shit! You want us to say we killed that man! Well, we didn’t, and nothing you can say or do is going to make us say we did! I want a lawyer!” He leaned across the table and shouted directly at Liam. “I want a goddamn lawyer!”

Liam didn’t turn his head. Prince stared without changing expression. “Sit down.” The two words were uttered in a soft, unthreatening voice, but they were a command. Kvichak picked up his chair, slammed it down on the floor and sat down hard. It must have hurt his tailbone, but it didn’t affect his glare.

Prince sat opposite him and looked down at her notepad. “Now. You were hunting, you say.”

Engebretsen, so verbal during the arrest and at the beginning of the interview, had withdrawn into silence and the occasional whimper. Kvichak was a one-man monument to fury; he spat out sentences as if they were being fed into the breech of an automatic rifle. “Yeah. We were hunting. We were hunting up on Nuk Bluff, like we do every September of our lives, like we have every single year since we could hold a rifle by ourselves. We were up there for ten days, we limited out in caribou, moose, geese, spruce hens and ptarmigan. We gutted and skinned and packed everything back to camp, so we didn’t violate no wanton waste law. We didn’t shoot the day Chouinard flew us in, so we didn’t violate the fly-and-shoot-same-day rule.” Again, he spoke directly to Liam. “We didn’t see nobody and we didn’t hear nobody, and we sure as hell didn’t kill nobody.”

Liam didn’t stir.

“You can’t always say you haven’t seen anybody, can you, John?”

Engebretsen gave a low moan.

“Sometimes we do,” John said truculently. “What of it?”

“Sometimes you see them, and sometimes you talk to them, and sometimes you do more than that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Prince consulted a file. “September 12, 1998, Todd and Sharon Koch of Anchorage were paddling a canoe from the Two Lake campsite to the Four Lake Ranger Station when two men matching your descriptions appeared on the beach and started shooting at them.”

Engebretsen whimpered.

“Got nothing to do with us,” Kvichak growled. “We were home by the twelfth.”

“So your sister Barbara said,” Prince agreed. “And your brother-in-law Rob, and your nieces Karen, Sarah and Patricia, and your nephews John, Patrick and Tom. I’m sure your mother would have said so, too, only she was in the hospital in Anchorage on the twelfth.”

“You can’t prove a goddamn thing.”

“You’re right,” Prince said, nodding. “We can’t, and we couldn’t. Same way we couldn’t when a bunch of hikers up Utah Canyon got their camp trashed.”

Engebretsen drew in a long, shaky breath. Kvichak shot him a warning glance. “Yeah, Corcoran asked us about that, but we were on the other side of the bluff from Utah.”

“Of course you were,” Prince said.

“I wanna go to the bathroom,” Engebretsen said.

“In a minute,” Prince said.

Engebretsen plucked up his courage. “You’re always saying ‘in a minute.’ How come not now?”

She smiled at him, a thin-lipped, humorless stretch of the lips. “Because we’re not done talking, Teddy.”

He slumped back in his chair.

“For crissake,” Kvichak said angrily, “let the poor bastard go to the john, why dontcha?”