Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

She turned the smile on him. “In a minute.”

“Fuck you!”

Liam turned his head and said, “John, your Winchester shotgun was the one used to kill Mark Hanover. Crime Lab called, and they say there’s no doubt.”

Kvichak stared at him, his face white and shocked, whether at the sound of Liam’s first words in three hours or at the words themselves.

Liam rose to his feet. “Let’s get some lunch,” he said to Prince, and led the way out of the interview room. Prince had to hustle to get behind him before the door closed.

They stood in the hallway. “Shh,” Liam said with one upraised finger.

An outburst of shouting came from behind the door, and Liam smiled.

“Sir, I-”

“They were thirsty, they were hungry, they did need to pee. Now they’re scared. Let’s let them be scared for a while.”

Prince chewed her lip. “How much longer can we hold them without charging them?”

“Another twelve hours.”

“The local magistrate would pick now to head up the creek.”

“All to our advantage. If Bill were here, she’d probably sign off on a warrant, but she’d let them out on bail.” He saw Prince’s look. “Hey, John Kvichak’s brother-in-law’s the biggest bum unhung. John’s the sole support of his sister’s family and his mother. Teddy Engebretsen’s dad is eighty-two, and he lives with Teddy. Neither one of them is a flight risk. Besides, where would they go?”

“Anywhere in the Bush?”

“It’s coming on winter, they’d either starve or freeze.”

They went to Eagle and cruised the deli counter, Liam settling on deep-fried chicken and Prince on a ham and cheese sandwich. They journeyed back to the post, ate their lunch without haste, called the Anchorage D.A. with information about a sex offender recently paroled, which parole he had immediately broken, big surprise.

At fifteen past one, they presented themselves back at the jail. At sixteen past one, they walked into the interview room. Engebretsen looked up and said, “I want to talk.”

“Teddy-” Kvichak said.

“No,” Engebretsen said with unaccustomed firmness. “Let’s just tell them the truth, Johnny. One more time. Either they’ll believe us or they won’t-”

“They won’t. Cops never know the truth when they hear it.”

“Either they’ll believe us or they won’t,” Engebretsen repeated, his voice wavering a little. “Either way, I’m talking.”

“Shit.” Kvichak folded his arms and glowered. “I ain’t having nothing to do with it.”

“Fine,” Engebretsen said. “I’ll tell.”

Prince looked at Liam with undisguised admiration.

They’d heard the shot from their camp on the bluff, Engebretsen said. “It was our last day, you know, we’d limited out on everything, we butchered everything out, put it in game sacks, we were just waiting on Wy.” He glanced sideways at Kvichak. “So we opened the beer.”

“How long was it before you heard the shots?” Prince said.

“Man, I don’t know,” Engebretsen said. “We opened the beer early. I think I was on my third. I mean, we just didn’t need to be sober anymore, so we weren’t trying to be. Hell, we’d been drinking most of the night, if it comes to that. I don’t know, nine o’clock, maybe? Maybe earlier.”

Liam looked at Kvichak. Kvichak held his eyes for a long moment. “Oh hell,” he said, slumping. “It was about eight-thirty, and before you say anything, yeah, we were already half in the bag.”

“It was the first shots we’d heard that didn’t come from our guns, you know?” Engebretsen said. “We hadn’t even heard any planes, and the nearest cabin is that crotchety old Italian at Warehouse Mountain, and that’s twenty miles away. Then we remembered that mining claim on Nenevok, and we thought maybe they were in trouble? Like one of them fired a warning shot for help, you know?”

“Tell me something, Teddy,” Prince said, gazing at the earnest face sitting across from her. “Did you ever meet the miner on Nenevok?”

Engebretsen flushed and glanced at Kvichak, who folded his arms across his chest again. “Not really. Well, kind of.”

“Which? Not really, or kind of?”

“Crissake,” Kvichak said. “Wy dropped off supplies at Nenevok when she was bringing us into the bluff.”

“And you met Mark Hanover, the miner.”

Again the two men exchanged a glance. “Didn’t meet the miner, he didn’t come to the plane,” Kvichak said finally. “The wife was there, though.”

Prince gave a thoughtful nod, and glanced at Liam to see a muscle working in his jaw like a nervous tic. “The wife,” she said. “Rebecca Hanover.”

Engebretsen, forgetting for the moment where he was and who was listening, gave a long, blissful sigh. “Oh yeahhhh.”

“Hear tell she was pretty,” Prince observed in a neutral voice.

Engebretsen gave her an incredulous look. “Pretty! She wasn’t just pretty. She was-she was-” He struggled for suitable words. “She was flat fucking drop-dead gorgeous,” he said finally, with a touch of awe. “I never seen nobody so pretty outside of a movie. And built, wow!” A low, reverent whistle accompanied the words.

It is a maxim of the law enforcement profession that jails aren’t filled with smart people. Nevertheless, this might be just about the dumbest person on the face of the earth sitting across from her now. “So, on that last morning of your hunt, you got tanked, you heard shots, you thought fired from the direction of the mine on Nenevok Creek, you remembered meeting a gorgeous woman there, and you decided to investigate.”

“I told you,” Kvichak said, more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you, Teddy, I told you they’d never believe nothing we said.”

“No,” Engebretsen said, becoming frightened again. “I mean yes. I mean, we hiked over, took us, hell, took us forever, and we were sober as judges by the time we got there.”

“Uh-huh,” Prince said. “When you got to the mine, what did you find?”

Engebretsen leaned forward. “There was a man, facedown in the creek.”

“You pulled him out.”

“Well, yeah, we didn’t know if he was dead or not. I got my feet wet. Ten days I kept them dry, and the last day I have to go get them wet.”

“So, Mark Hanover was dead when you found him.”

Kvichak slammed his hands down flat on the table. In the ensuing silence, he leaned forward and he met Liam’s eyes with a flat, unwinking stare. “Yes. Mark Hanover or whoever he was was dead when we got there. We heard the shot right after we got up. It took us two hours plus to get from the bluff to the Nenevok. We found his body in the creek. We pulled him out to see if he was dead. He was. We yelled for his wife. She didn’t come out of the woods. I yelled for help on the cell phone.”

“And then Johnny made us leave,” Engebretsen said. “He said you’d nail us for doing it.” He paused, and added defiantly, “And he was right.”

There was a brief silence. For a moment, for just a moment, Prince allowed herself to be impressed by their sincerity.

Liam stood up. “Interview terminated, two-thirty p.m.” He turned off the recorder and looked at Kvichak. “Crime Lab says yours was the gun, John.”

Kvichak stared back. “The Crime Lab is wrong.”

“Wasn’t a bad bluff,” Prince said on the way back to the post. “I would have believed him, but the lab doesn’t lie.” She thought of Nick, and had to erase the grin that came out of nowhere.

“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg?”

Prince was thrown off track. “I beg your pardon?”

“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg,” Liam repeated. “I have. It’s slow going.”