Meanwhile, back at the post, the door opened and a woman walked in. She was short, with the thick-waisted build of the Bay Yupik. Her eyes were dark and narrow, her expression wary. She was dressed in shabby slacks and a windbreaker, wore no makeup, and her long black hair was clean and neatly combed.
Prince strode forward, every inch the trooper. “Yes, ma’am? How may we help you?”
The woman pulled a piece of paper from her windbreaker pocket. “I have this court order,” she said. “From Anchorage.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Prince said, and took the paper.
“Natalie Gosuk,” the woman replied, and Liam stopped lounging back in his chair and sat up straight. “That paper says I get to see my son.”
Prince finished reading the order. “Yes, it does,” she said, and passed it off to Liam.
He scanned it briefly. Judge Renee Legere had signed the order. It was legal, all right. He folded the order and handed it back to Natalie Gosuk, taking his first real look at the woman. She wasn’t saying much, letting the court order speak for her. She kept her eyes lowered, but the curve of her mouth was set and resentful.
Four times she’d been accused of assaulting a minor child, and Judge Legere had allowed visitation anyway. It was so easy in Anchorage, looking at the perp across a room, a perp cleaned up and sobered up and scared into something approaching civil behavior, it was so easy to judge them human and worthy of the rights of other humans, of second, third, fourth, fifth chances, and besides, the jails were all full. So what if she smacked her kid around a little? She was rehabilitated, look at her standing there next to her lawyer, all neat and tidy and vowing repentance and an ache in her heart for the son lost to her.
Out here, where the human rubber met the road, there was a different view. Here one lived next to the victims, broken, bleeding, bloodied, terrified, most of them so intimidated they couldn’t even be brought to testify.
Since it didn’t look like he was going to say anything, Prince stepped in. “Was there a problem with the order, Ms. Gosuk?”
“She won’t let me see him.”
“Who won’t?”
“The woman my son lives with. She won’t let me in the door of the house. I want you to make her let me in.”
Prince looked at Liam. When he said nothing, she asked the woman, “Have you shown her this document?”
Natalie Gosuk hesitated. “Not yet.”
“Show it to her,” Prince advised. “If she won’t let you see the boy, come to us.”
“This paper says she has to,” Natalie Gosuk insisted.
“Yes,” Prince said. “It does. Limited, supervised visitation. It means you can see him but you can’t take him out of the house and you can’t see him alone.”
The woman’s eyes shifted. “They told me.”
“Call us if you have any trouble.”
The door closed behind her with a soft sigh. Prince looked at Liam. “Domestic disputes,” she said with loathing. “God, how I hate them. Give me an old-fashioned ax murder any day.” He remained silent. “Whose kid was she talking about, do you know? Who’s the ‘she’ in ‘she won’t let me see him’?”
Liam looked at Prince. “Go on down to the jail and give Art and Dave a talking-to and turn them loose.”
“We could leave them where they are until their twenty-four is up.” Suspects had to be released after twenty-four hours if no arrest warrant had been sworn out against them.
He pointed a finger at her. “Better.” He stood and reached for his hat. “I’ve got a few errands to run. I’ll take lunch and then come back and relieve you for yours.” He paused at the door and grinned at her. “Monthly report’s due today.” She groaned, and he added, “Hey, I’m the corporal, you’re the trooper. Low man does the paperwork.”
The answering smile on her face faded as soon as the door closed behind him, and Prince was left to wonder what had produced the lines of strain around her boss’s eyes, lines that hadn’t been there when he first walked in the door.
THREE
Nuklunek Bluff, September 1
John Kvichak and Teddy Engebretsen had been sworn companions since kindergarten. They’d studied grammar together beneath the beady eye of Mrs. Johnson in the fourth grade, stood shoulder to shoulder against the bully boys in the seventh grade, they’d lusted after the same girls in high school and they’d graduated together attired beneath their caps and gowns in the same jeans and gray sweatshirts, ready to party as soon as the diplomas were given out and the caps tossed into the air. They fished salmon together, hunted caribou and moose together, trapped beaver together. When they reached legal age, they drank together. It was said in Newenham, their hometown, that they would never marry because they could never find a woman capable of putting up with both of them, and although the saying began as a joke, there was probably some truth to it.
They owned a drift netter together now, theIsabella Rose, named for both of their mothers. Isabella, Teddy’s mom, won the coin toss for whose name came first. Rose, John’s mom, took it well, frying up a panful of bread and bringing it down to the christening. Of course, it was all charred to a crisp. Isabella laughed and laughed, and made John and Teddy eat up every bite.
Each fall, after the fishing season was over and theIsabella Rose was hosed down and put into dry dock for the winter, John and Teddy would go hunting together in the Wood River Mountains. They concentrated on moose and caribou, but took time out on occasion to bring out the shotguns and go for geese, ptarmigan and spruce hens.
Neither one of them was a pilot, so they chartered Wy Chouinard to fly them into their preferred hunting area, the long, level plateau between the broad plain that sloped down into the Nushagak River in the east and the Wood River Mountains in the west, where a small but fecund herd of caribou fattened on lichen, where the occasional moose wandered up the narrow chasms and canyons. Birdlife was plentiful, and one year Teddy even brought down a brown bear with a beautiful coat, which now hung in a place of honor on his mother’s living room wall.
So long as they stayed sober they were responsible hunters, harvesting what they killed, packing out the meat, taking no more than they could eat in a winter, in no way giving Newenham’s fish and game trooper Charlene Taylor cause to arrest them for violating the wanton waste law.
They had, however, come to feel somewhat proprietary about the bluff: the Kvichak-Engebretsen Private Hunting Preserve. Hikers and campers, thinking they were well within the boundaries of the Wood River-Tikchik State Park, had occasionally run across John and Teddy’s path and been apprised of their error. Once a couple had returned from a hike up Kanuktik Ridge to find their tent slashed and all their belongings scattered in the creek. “Could have been a bear,” Charlene told Liam. Two others had had their canoe shot out from under them on Three Lake. “Probably not a bear,” Liam told Charlene. A group of Great White Hunters in the tender care of Dagfinn Grant had been in hot pursuit of a bull moose sporting what looked like a record rack when suddenly gunshots fired from an unknown source had spooked the bull, who was last seen heading across the Middle Fork at a clip that would put a four-wheeler to shame.
Charlene had been waiting for John and Teddy at the airport that time, alongside a steaming Finn Grant, mustache crawling down either side of his mouth like Fu Manchu’s. “Gosh,” Teddy said, eyes wide, “I didn’t hear anything. Did you hear anything, John?”
John shook his head. “Nope.”
Teddy turned to Grant. “Sorry we can’t help, Finn. I think it’s just awful the way some people go around popping off guns in the woods, don’t you? Somebody could get hurt out there.”