“Okay, get them to Newenham and on the next available flight to Anchorage. Call the M.E.'s office-the number's on the Rolodex on my desk-and tell them they are on their way. Tell Brillo Pad we need results as fast as he can get them to us.”
“Brillo Pad?”
“Dr. Hans Brilleaux, the M.E.”
“Brillo Pad?”
“Have you ever seen his hair?”
“I've never met the man.”
“Wait until you do. Anyway, tell him I said to giddyap.”
“And then?”
“If nothing has blown up back at the post, come get me. If you can't”-he took a deep breath- “call Wy Chouinard at Nushagak Air Taxi and tell her to come get me. We've got a contract with them.”
She nodded, and looked perilously close to saluting. “Get a move on,” he said, before she could.
She stuffed her notebook back in her pocket, picked up her jacket and hat and marched off, passing Mike Ekwok on her way. She slowed and half turned, catching Liam's eye. He shook his head and waved her on. He waited until Ekwok reached the side of the boat. “Mr. Ekwok,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
“Trooper,” Ekwok said, equally grave. He looked up at the raven, still perched on his light pole, his deep black feathers outlined against torn wisps of white mist. Liam wondered when Sam Spade was going to wander in out of the fog.
The Cessna's engine coughed into life and taxied out of the harbor. Liam heard the engine roar and watched it rise into the air and disappear into the fog. All was quiet again. There was nothing quite like the hush of an Alaskan Bush community. An occasional airplane, a truck with no roads on which to get above third gear, a boat engine turning over, seagulls squawking, ravens talking, and the rest was silence. Except for the odd rifle shot, and Liam saw again the round depression in the blackened temple of one of the bodies on board the plane speeding toward Newenham.
“Mr. Campbell,” Ekwok said, “I know-”
“Could you hang on just a second, Mr. Ekwok?” Liam said. He turned to look toward theMary J,moored to the third slip over from theMarybethia,and beckoned. Larry, legs dangling in the hold as he spliced an eye into the end of a line, nodded acknowledgment. “Dad! I'm going next door for a minute.” There was a muffled assent from inside theMary J's cabin and for a moment Liam saw Darrell's face pressed whitely against the porthole. TheMary Jwas a white, thirty-two-foot Bristol Bay gillnetter with a hot pink trim line, fancy lettering in matching pink spelling out her name on both sides of the bow and across the stern. Her home port, Newenham, was listed on the stern, too, also in pink. Darrell's wife had insisted on the trim being that particular shade of pink, right before she kicked Darrell out and took up with a seiner from Togiak.
Larry, Darrell and Mary's only son, was a taller, fitter edition of his father, with more hair and a nose less bulbous in shape and less red in color. Like his father, Larry did his share of drinking, in tandem with lifelong friend Kelly “Mac” McCormick, but Mac had gotten out of the hospital just in time to go to jail for shooting up the Newenham Post Office, which charge he had not contested in exchange for a shortened sentence. Fortunately, he hadn't put holes into anything except a couple of windows, and also fortunately, at the time of his sentencing the postmaster was in the middle of resigning and had no time to testify against him. Mac would be out in six months, and in the meantime, his incarceration did Larry's liver no harm.
“Larry,” Liam said, nodding. The people in Liam's world were divided into those he had arrested and those he hadn't. The former he addressed by their first names, the latter by their surnames. Sometimes the former worked their way back up to being mistered. More often they did not.
Larry Jacobson was still on probation, and he knew it. “Trooper Campbell,” he said formally. “Are we done here? There's an opener in Togiak tomorrow and we need to take on fuel.”
“Sure,” Liam said. “I'll be in touch if I have any more questions. Anything else you can think of to tell me? Anything you saw, no matter how trivial, could be important.”
Larry shrugged. Liam was glad to see that while maintaining his decorous manner Larry was neither defensive nor hostile; he'd apparently come to terms with the events of the previous May, and with Liam's part in them, and had moved on. “Not much else to tell. We saw her drifting and went after her. There'd been a fire, we saw that right off. The plugs had been pulled, and she was about half down in the water. If the drains hadn't plugged up with fish guts she probably would have gone right down to the bottom. Lucky.”
Liam could have thought of other adjectives to describe the fortunes of the crew of theMarybethia,but he held his peace.
“Anyway, the bilge turned over first thing. After that, we took her in tow and brought her into Kulukak. No luck this period, anyway,” he added parenthetically, leaving Liam to understand that if theMary Jhad been fortunate enough to fish her limit, they would have been well on their way to the cannery, and theMarybethiaabandoned to her fate.
“Did you go inside?”
“No. I got as far as opening the door. I could see the bodies from where I stood. I didn't want anything to do with them.” He shifted a wad of chaw from one cheek to the other and spat over the side. “Death at sea is bad luck.”
Violent death is bad luck anywhere, Liam thought. “You see any other boats in the area?”
Larry shook his head again. “Not by then; most everybody had headed back in after the closing. It's a little run thereabouts anyway, we don't usually fish it, but this time Dad had a wild hair there might be some late reds hanging off the point. Wasn't, though.” He seemed more resigned to their bad luck than bitter about it.
“Go ahead, then. And good fishing.”
“Thanks. Dad's smelling an early run of silvers. Price is always higher on the first run.” He strode back to his boat. Darrell, who had been watching from the deck, started the engine, and Larry had just enough time to release the bow and stern lines and jump on board before the gillnetter pulled away from the slip and increased to a slow, no-wake speed.
As they pulled alongside, Larry cut power and let theMary Jdrift. “There was a skiff last night,” he called. “About ten o'clock, coming out from the village, going toward the head of the bay. One person in it. Dad saw him.”
“Did he recognize him?”
Larry consulted with Darrell, and shook his head.
“Did he recognize the skiff?”
More consultation. “Big New England dory, Dad says. Guy was standing up, rowing forward.” Larry shrugged. “Dad says that's all.”
“Okay, Larry,” Liam said. “Thanks,” he added, and meant it. Eliciting information was hard enough. Volunteers were always welcome. Always supposing the dory wasn't a figment of an alcohol-induced imagination, always a possibility with Jacobsonpère et fils.
TheMary Jheaded straight for the mouth of the harbor, a narrow channel between two arms of steeply piled rock. She made the entrance and picked up speed. Soon all he could see was the masthead.
“Mr. Campbell.”
Liam started and turned to Ekwok. “I'm very sorry to have kept you waiting, sir. What was it you wanted to say?”
“I know who did this,” Ekwok said, with a jerk of his head toward theMarybethia.“I know who killed them.”
The white Blazer with the shield on the door was parked right in front of the post, and any hope Wy had had of just leaving a note (Liam, Dig gofer stabbed, body at X longitude, Y latitude, Wy) died aborning. She raised her chin, climbed the steps, opened the door and halted in her tracks.
There was a trooper on the phone behind the desk, but it wasn't the trooper she was expecting.
“Thank you,” the trooper said. “We'll be waiting for your call.” She hung up the phone and looked at Wy. “Yes?”