Fire And Ice

"Yes," Barton said, "that's what I figure a pilot good enough to spot herring is go

Liam was silent.

"No," Barton said. "Shit, no."

Liam sighed. "Yeah, John. It's Wy."

"Aw fuck," Barton said heavily. "Goddammit anyway." He was silent for a moment. "She a suspect?"

"No," Liam said immediately.

Barton was silent again, his silence more eloquent than most people's conversation. "Okay, you're there, I'm not. But I'm ru

"All right, all right, I'll do the box thing," Liam said irritably, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

"Good." Barton hung up.

The "box thing" was something Liam did early on in every investigation in which he participated. Sometimes, redrawn and relettered and blown up, it found its way into court as Prosecution Exhibit A. It had been a while, but he thought he still remembered how. He took a deep breath and got a clean sheet of paper out of the printer. By fortune good or ill, in the middle drawer of the desk he found the writing implement of his choice, a Pentel Quicker Clicker, with spare leads and erasers. No hope for procrastination there, either, so he began.

The first square was drawn in the center of the page and labeled Bob DeCreft. He looked at it for a while, ruminating. A second square was added, with a dotted line co

A fourth square, Laura Nanalook. Another line co

He thought about that for a while, and to Laura's square added a lightly drawn fifth square, labeled Rebecca Gilbert, with a question mark after her name.

There. He sat back and surveyed the neat boxes and their straight little co

Bob DeCreft, sixty-five years old, a member in good standing of the community, according to Bill. A sixty-five-year-old man shacking up with a, what, twenty-year-old girl, a staggeringly beautiful twenty-year-old girl. Sex and money, those were the two main motivations for murder in Liam's experience, and one look around Bob DeCreft's house had told him DeCreft didn't live large.

Take sex, then. Maybe Laura Nanalook wanted out of the relationship with DeCreft and sabotaged the plane herself. She had said she'd been working when DeCreft was killed. He'd have to confirm that with Bill.

Maybe she had a lover, and he cut the wire.

Maybe someone else wanted the girl, and so killed DeCreft to get him out of the way? Somebody, say, like Wolfe?

Liam contemplated that possibility with satisfaction, and traced the line around Wolfe's box until it stood out in bold relief from the others. It was not going to hurt his feelings at all if he had to arrest Cecil Wolfe for murder. He only hoped Wolfe would resist arrest.

Although, much as he hated to admit it, it was more Wolfe's style to rape Laura Nanalook occasionally behind Bob DeCreft's back, so he could enjoy that knowledge when he met Bob DeCreft face-to-face. He would need DeCreft alive to do that, and to spot herring for him.

He needed to find out who Wy's mechanic was. If she was doing her own AandPeople's, she still had to have a certified mechanic to sign off on them. Probably somebody local, because Wy was a smart woman who'd know it would pay to keep her business local.

One thing was certain: the killer had to be someone who knew something about aviation. Not much, Liam realized ruefully, because if Wy could explain magnetos to him and make him understand how they functioned in five minutes, anyone could.

Knowing how a thing worked gave you the power to make it not work. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And then there was Rebecca Gilbert. Liam had seen her twice now, once at the post office this morning and once this afternoon. In all, he'd seen about three different women inside the same body: the hovering helpmate, the hysterical mourner, and-what? What had she been doing, roaring up to DeCreft's place that way, slamming inside without so much as a knock at the door? If she and her husband-who had seemed less than distraught at the news of DeCreft's death-if she and her husband had been friends of Bob DeCreft, then they might have been friends of Laura Nanalook as well. Or maybe the two women were friends. They weren't much of an age, but then it wasn't all that big a town, and there probably wasn't that much choice. Although, given the disparity in age between Nanalook and DeCreft, the couple must have come in for some disapproval on the part of the community. Not to mention jealousy. The entire below-thirty male population of Newenham had probably gone into mourning when Laura and Bob took up housekeeping, and for all Liam knew Bob DeCreft was the over-sixty female's dream man.

If he could get Rebecca Gilbert away from her husband for five minutes, he might learn something of interest.

He reached up to touch the lump beneath his hair, shrunken and less tender now. He looked back at the box marked Cecil Wolfe and thought of Kirk Mulder, Wolfe's first mate, then traced the dotted line back to Wy. He added another box and labeled it Jacobson, the gimpy fisherman Liam had seen at the airport talking to Wy, the same gimpy drunk he had hauled down to his boat, as lightly penciled as Rebecca Gilbert's square and with another question mark beside it.

He thought back to his conversation with Barton, to Barton's visit with his wife. Je

"I didn't know, Je

As always, thoughts of Je

Charlie would fall asleep in his arms, lulled by the sound of his father's deep voice, in the process his body temperature seeming to rise ten degrees and his body weight to increase ten pounds. Liam would put him to bed and hang over the edge of the crib, watching his little chest rise and fall. For the first few months he'd been terrified at how quietly Charlie slept, and had on more than one occasion gone into the boy's room in the middle of the night, just to make sure his small miracle was still breathing.