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She was weak and he was strong. It was his duty to protect her, it was her duty to submit. Where he led, she would follow. Their roles had been laid down by God and the Church many years ago.
At last, at last, Elaine had come back to him.
ELEVEN
Newenham, September 3
“Far as I know, they slept the night through,” Mamie said. “I wasn’t surprised, since they both smelled like they fell off the back of a beer truck when you hauled them in last night. And if you don’t mind, it’s about my bedtime now.”
“Why did you switch to the night shift?” Prince asked.
“It’s almost time for school to start. This way I’ll be awake in the morning to see the kids off.”
Mamie Hagemeister was a short, very well-fleshed woman with bad skin and short, thin, fine brown hair that stood on end from its own self-generated static electricity. With her round, protuberant brown eyes, she looked like a long-haired koala plugged into a wall socket. She was also the single mother of five children ranging in age from three to ten, which explained her constantly harried air.
She was the officer in charge of the local jail, one of the four officers belonging to the perpetually short-handed local police department Liam had met. “Any chance of seeing Raymo or Berg today?”
She paused for a precious moment in her headlong flight. “I don’t think so. Roger’s still in Anchorage at that damn trial, and I just dispatched Cliff down to the harbor.”
“What’s happening at the harbor?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Somebody called and said Jeff Saltz was cutting his boat in half with a chain saw.”
She said it nonchalantly, like cutting boats in half with chain saws was an everyday occurrence in the Newenham small-boat harbor. “I asked the guy,” Mamie said, impatient to be gone, “I said to him, is he carving up anything besides his boat? Like a person? Guy said no. I said to the guy, then why do you need the cops?”
“Why did he?”
“The guy with the chain saw’s boat was tied to the boat belonging to the guy who called. Anyway, I told Cliff and Cliff went down to see what he could do.”
“Mamie?” A voice came up the corridor.
“You hush up, Lorne, I’m trying to get off shift here.” She jerked her chin in the voice’s direction. “Lorne Rapp. Roger brought him in at three-thirty for beating up on his family. Drunk and disorderly, and he tried, I say he tried, to assault an officer.”
“I trust he didn’t get away with it,” Liam murmured.
Mamie gave the trooper an indignant look. “Not on my shift he didn’t. He’s got a lump on his head the size of Gibraltar to remind him not to if he ever gets the yen again. The nerve!”
Any woman who could single-handedly raise five children and still string words together in a coherent sentence commanded Liam’s respect and admiration, and he held the door for Mamie on her way out.
“We want to talk to Engebretsen and Kvichak,” he told Nick Potts, a ski
“Please,” Liam said. Prince smiled at the young man, who blushed hotly and dropped his keys.
The interview room was a narrow rectangle with one barred window, a table and four chairs. Liam and Prince sat on one side, Teddy and John on the other.
Teddy and John still smelled faintly of beer, but after a night in jail they were stone-cold sober. John was tight-lipped and angry, Teddy terrified. “You never charged us with anything,” John said. “You never even told us why you were locking us up.”
“Legally, I’ve got twenty-four hours to charge you with anything,” Liam said soothingly, “and as for telling you why I was locking you up, I was afraid if I left you at home you’d get drunker and I wouldn’t be able to talk to you at all.”
“We didn’t do anything,” Teddy said.
“Shut up, Teddy,” John said.
“But we didn’t do anything,” Teddy repeated.
“Let them tell us all about it,” John said. “Don’t you say a word unless I say so. Cops always twist everything you say to make it fit how they want. Don’t say a word, okay?” He glared at Liam and Prince.
Prince waited long enough to see that Liam was giving her the lead, and opened the folder in front of her.
“You’ve got a history with us, gentlemen.”
Teddy shifted in his chair. John stilled him with a glance.
“Most of it regarding the Nuklunek Bluff, which you seem to regard as your personal, private property.”
John snorted. “Ain’t no such thing as private property out here.”
As if she hadn’t heard him, Prince said, “You’ve been questioned regarding several incidents involving campers and hunters in the area, resulting in, at minimum, destruction of private property and, at most, the threat of bodily harm.”
“Yeah, well, shit happens in the Bush. If you don’t know how to handle yourself, stay the hell out.”
Prince closed the file and folded her hands on top of it. She looked at John, ignoring Teddy. “You hunt the Nuklunek Bluff every year, don’t you, John?”
“What of it?”
“Why there, in particular?”
“Because we always get our moose there, why else?”
“Did pretty well this year, too, according to Wy Chouinard. She said you packed out three planeloads of meat.” Prince smiled suddenly, a wide, warm smile. It was infectious; John, thrown off balance, nearly smiled back. “Good news for the family.”
“Yeah, well. Fishing hasn’t been all that great, last couple of years. People gotta eat.”
Prince nodded sympathetically. “So you were out there, what, ten days?”
“Yeah, we-what the hell is this? You’ve talked to Wy, you’ve probably seen her log, you probably know perfectly well how long we were out there.”
Prince’s smile vanished. “It’s important to confirm what we already know, John. So, while you were out there, did you run across anyone else? Any other hunters?”
“No,” he said.
Teddy squirmed.
“Did you hear or see anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything you thought was odd?”
“No, why should we?”
Prince frowned down at the file. “Do you have a cell phone, John?”
A brief pause. “Why?”
Prince pulled out an evidence bag, the cell phone sealed inside clearly visible. She put it on the table, in the exact center so that it was the focus of four pairs of eyes. John’s were fierce, Teddy’s alarmed, Prince’s inquiring, Liam’s uninterested. “Because we found this in your backpack when we searched your house.”
“Oh.” Nonplussed for a moment, John fired up immediately. “What business you got going through my house?”
“We had a warrant, John,” Prince said, almost apologetically. “We had probable cause.”
Teddy whimpered. John nudged him in the ribs with an ungentle elbow. “What’s probable cause?”
Prince’s smile vanished. Like any cop, she didn’t care for the jailhouse lawyer. “Probable cause, John, is when we’ve got a couple of yo-yos hunting ten miles from where we find a man who caught a load of buckshot in the chest. Probable cause is when both yo-yos have a long record of harassing other visitors to the area. Probable cause is when both these yo-yos are packing rifles to hunt moose and caribou, and shotguns to hunt ptarmigan. Probable cause is when we find the dead guy was killed with a shotgun.” Prince sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “Probable cause is when we respond to a call for help from someone who isn’t there when we arrive, a Mayday that was picked up by Alaska Airlines and which call, we are reliably informed, was routed through the local cell phone signal repeater with an ID number that traces back to your phone.”