Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

The helicopter put its nose down and skidded across the sky toward Newenham.

Once during the flight he saw her looking out the window. “Easier than covering the same distance on foot,” he said.

She looked at him, but she said nothing.

He put her on the jet to town that afternoon, foiling Jo’s attempt to talk to her. “She’s been through enough, Jo. Leave her alone.”

“I will,” Jo said, “but the jackals will be waiting at the gate in Anchorage.”

They were; Liam and Wy watched it on television that evening, pictures of Rebecca Hanover shoving her way through a crowd of people with cameras and lights.WOMAN ESCAPES SERIAL KILLER BY TREK THROUGH BUSH, screamed the next day’s headlines, and subsequent issues were given over to the stories of all the victims, including baby pictures, high school pictures, prom pictures and wedding pictures. Grieving parents and spouses were interviewed; Lyle Montgomery was photographed walking up to the door of Rebecca’s friend Nina’s house. He was the only person unknown to her who was permitted inside. He stayed half an hour and came out again, walking swiftly to his car, getting in and driving off at once, refusing to speak or even to look at the people calling his name. Still, the camera showed the tears rolling down his cheeks quite clearly.

The door remained locked thereafter, the shades drawn. Nina Stewart was photographed carrying groceries inside and the trash to the curb. Hard Copy snatched the bag one step ahead of the garbage truck Tuesday morning and had the extreme bad taste to open it on camera that evening, thus proving to an avidly watching public that Rebecca Hanover had been spared the additional trauma of pregnancy, if not the humiliation of having the news trumpeted on sixty-four channels. The next time someone pointed a camera at Nina, she flipped them off. That was aired, too, with a small blurred circle covering the offending digit.

The medical examiner’s reports started coming in, and the circus moved to the second act. Most of the victims had had their necks snapped, and when Liam thought of those strong, hairy fingers closing around his own throat he wasn’t surprised. “A quick death, anyway,” he said to Prince.

“I’m sure that was a comfort to the victims,” she said dispassionately. She wasn’t much interested. She’d had her fifteen minutes of fame when Liam told her to take the interview with Maria Downey. The camera loved her, and shortly thereafter Liam’s boss, Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton, called and offered her a job as the department spokesman. She had turned him down, saying only, “I’m not done racking up the cleared cases in Newenham yet. I’m not ready to spend my days talking to the press.”

Much was made of how this serial killer had spread his victims out over the years. Lieutenant Barton was interviewed on Channel 2 News, and he managed to restrain his natural talent for profanity long enough to point out that Alaska’s only other serial killer had been in action for fifteen years. Alaska was big enough to hide a serial killer’s activities for a long time. The next day, the spokesman for the Alaska state troopers went on the air to apologize for Barton’s remarks, and to say that he had not intended to extend an invitation to serial killers to set up shop in the Alaskan Bush. “Nope,” said Prince, “not my kind of job.”

Nine of the twelve women were identified. Three of them had been pregnant at the time of their death. “Didn’t want to share,” Prince said when this was discovered.

After three weeks the story died down, only to spring back to life when the killer was identified. It hadn’t been easy. His cabin was on national park land. He’d had no permit and had built it on his own, so they hadn’t been able to identify him through a title or bank paperwork. He had no friends, no family stepped forward, he didn’t get mail, so it was something of a coup when a clerk in the Anchorage Police Department, after slogging doggedly through a mountain of retired paperwork, found a dusty file fallen behind a filing cabinet with the name Clayton Gheen on it. The clerk ran the fingerprints in the file, and came up with a match.

Clayton Gheen had a record going back to the time he was thirteen years old, mostly B &E and petty theft. There had also been two incidences of assault in the fourth degree. Neither girl had come forward to testify, and he’d walked on both charges.

“Abuse in his background?” Liam asked Prince as she was scanning the report, faxed from the Fairbanks post.

She shook her head. “If his father beat on him, it was never reported.”

“And his mother just took off.”

She nodded. “Doesn’t automatically make him a serial killer, though.”

Liam thought of his own mother, walking out when he was six months old. “No. What does?”

Prince looked up, surprised at the question, because Liam Campbell wasn’t in the habit of asking questions which couldn’t be answered. “When we have the answer to that, we’ll put in for a raise.”

“Works for me.”

But he thought about it, off and on, for a long time afterward. He had distributed the contents of the pitiful little trophy chest Rebecca had found to the grieving families. One pair of the earrings, a ring and the crystal choker remained unclaimed, as did three of the bodies. Lost souls, lost to their families, lost to themselves, lost to him.

In 1975 Gheen had gone to work for BP in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, working construction, and had moved to Anchorage. His record was blank after that until 1979, when he’d been arrested for aggravated assault. This woman had testified, and he had been due in court in Anchorage for sentencing in May of that year. He never showed. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest, but he’d never been found to be served.

Gheen was interviewed on Channel 11, where the pretty anchor punctuated every phrase with a nod and began every sentence with “Now.” She asked him why he did it, her brows puckered with pretended puzzlement, her attention divided between Gheen and the camera lens. He stared at her bovinely. She spoke the names, rendered like the tolling of a bell, Merla Dixon in 1983, Sarah Berton in 1985, Paulette Gustafson in 1986, Kristen Anderson in 1986, Ruby Nunapitchuk in 1991, Brandi Whitaker in 1992, Stella Silverthorne in 1994, Christine Stepanoff in 1996, Cheryl Montgomery in 1997. Rebecca Hanover. The three unidentified bodies the medical examiner would only say might have been buried in, respectively, 1982, 1983 and 1988.

Won’t you tell us, the little anchor asked prettily, who the other three women were? What were their names?

“Elaine,” Gheen had said, and smiled.

Gheen’s public defender had orchestrated the television interview. He went into court the following week and petitioned for a change of venue, arguing that his client could not get a fair trial in Newenham. Or anywhere else anybody watched television, Liam thought, a hard place to find, even in Alaska, in this age of satellite television. It sounded as if Gheen’s P.D. would go for an insanity defense, but thanks to one of the few smart laws the Alaska legislature managed to pass in spite of themselves in recent years, Gheen could plead insanity all he wanted. He’d serve time in the Alaska Psychiatric Institute until his doctors declared him cured, from which time he would be incarcerated for fifteen life sentences, to be served consecutively. If district attorney, judge and jury did their job, that is.

Liam knew sincere regret that Bill Billington couldn’t sit on a felony case. Almost twenty years-that they knew of-almost twenty years Gheen had been kidnapping and killing women. He fit no known profile, other than that he was white and male. He’d started his killing later in life than most serial killers, but that was only so far as they knew. He’d kept trophies. He hadn’t stuck to victims of his own race, there hadn’t been any apparent acceleration of murder toward the end, he’d kept his victims alive, some, it seemed, for years.