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There was a rustle of branches overhead, a soft croak. Liam didn't look up. “Did you know the rest of his family?”
A trace of color rose up from Tim's neck. “I met his sister,” he said gruffly.
“Kerry?”
He nodded, his head turned away. The tip of his left ear was pink. “She was a cheerleader.”
“Pretty?”
Tim nodded again. “Is it true? The whole family is dead?”
“Yes.”
Liam's deep, slow voice was its own soporific. Tim's shoulders shuddered with a long sigh and he sat up straight again. “Kerry, too?”
“Kerry, too.”
“Damn it,” Tim said. “GodDAMN it.”
Liam dared to place one hand at the back of Tim's neck and squeeze. To his relief, Tim did not jerk away. “I'm sorry, Tim.”
“Me, too,” Tim said. “Me, too.” He swiveled around. “Mom says they were murdered, that somebody killed them. You go
“Yes.”
Again, the deep voice was soothing in its certainty.
Another long, shuddering sigh. “Okay, then.” Tim stood up, thin shoulders squared, jaw up in a gesture that looked unca
“All right,” Liam said obediently. He wanted to say, How's your mom? but stopped himself in time. It would have been like ninth grade all over again, in love with Mary Kallenberg and trying to discover if she liked him through his best friend, Cal, and her best friend, Melissa.
The raven sitting on the swaying spruce bow beat his wings and gave a raucous croak. Liam's head jerked up. The raven met his eye and croaked again.
“He's around here a lot, isn't he?” Tim said, looking at the raven as he straddled his bike. “I thought they roosted way out of town.”
“I just wish they did,” Liam said. He looked hard at the raven. It didn't do any good. He looked like every raven Liam had seen since coming to the Bay; big, black, beaky and beady-eyed. You had to perform surgery to tell a female from a male, and you had to catch one and stare down its gullet to tell how old it was. They all looked alike, those damn ravens, which was why he kept thinking he saw the same one over and over again.
He climbed into the Blazer and peeled out of the lot.
SIXTEEN
They landed in Kulukak and taxied the float plane to the dock. The place was still shrouded in what seemed to be its perpetual cloak of mist. No one was there to greet them, but then Liam hadn't called to say they were coming. He had confirmed with Charlene that there was no fishing period scheduled for that day, and so had a faint hope of finding the people he needed to talk to actually in the village. Of course they could be in Togiak buying parts, or on their way to Newenham to get laid, or, for that matter, headed for Dutch to refit for crab fishing.
Liam was an American to the very marrow of his bones-he supported the Constitution, he defended the Bill of Rights and he worked conscientiously to uphold his oath of office-but the distances involved in police work in Bush Alaska were so great that he sometimes secretly longed for the days of the Star Chamber, when you could toss anyone you liked for a crime into a dungeon until you were ready to talk to them. They might be a little rat-bitten when you pulled them out again, but at least they'd be immediately to hand.
They had a third party in the plane with them, an arson investigator from Anchorage who had stepped off the jet that morning with all the air of Stanley heading out into the heart of Africa. He was a short, thin boy with an eager face and a lot of straight, yellow hair shaved at the sides and long enough on top to flop into his eyes. He looked as if he ought to be in Tim's class, but he had the proper credentials, so Liam managed-barely-to refrain from demanding he show his driver's license for proof of age.
The boy, Mark Sandowski by name, redeemed himself by opening the large aluminum suitcase he had brought with him and going immediately to work on theMarybethiawith various implements and liquids. “We're headed uptown to talk to some people,” Liam called through the open hatch. Sandowski, nose an inch from a charred piece of deck, didn't even look up, and Liam's estimation of him rose another notch.
“Who first?” Prince said, heading up the gangplank.
Liam consulted his mental list. “Chad Donohoe, deckhand on theSnohomish Belle,said he saw a man answering to the description of Walter Larsgaard in a skiff heading away from the direction of theMarybethiaat approximately three a.m. on the morning in question, is that correct?”
“That is correct, sir.”
“Okay, let's go ask Larsgaard where he was that night.”
She was trying hard not to look eager. “It wasn't a positive ID,” she reminded him, and herself, warning them both against hoping for too much. “Donohoe isn't a local man, he's from Washington State.”
“You said.” He held back a grin. He remembered his own rookie days, when every interview was an adventure, every interviewee under suspicion. “Let's go talk to Larsgaard anyway.”
Five minutes later they were at Larsgaard's house. They knocked. There was no answer. They knocked again. Another minute passed before the door opened and Walter Larsgaard's father's face peered through the crack. He didn't look pleased to see them. “What you want?” he growled.
“We'd like to talk to your son, Mr. Larsgaard,” Liam said. “Is he here?”
“No.”
“Could you tell us where he is?”
The old man said something in Yupik that sounded less than complimentary, and the door shut in their faces.
Prince, predictably, wanted to kick it in. “No,” Liam said, “we have no probable cause. What's the name of Larsgaard's boat?”
Tight-lipped, Prince consulted her notes. “TheBay Rover.”
“Fine. Let's check it out.”
They marched back down to the boat harbor, where they ran into Mike Ekwok, who pointed out theBay Roverwithout hesitation, a trim little sternpicker about thirty-two feet in length, painted white with blue trim. There was a man at the deck controls, and as they watched, a plume of smoke came from the stack. The rumble of an engine was heard a moment later. “Son of a bitch,” Liam said, and hit the gangplank at a run.
“What's the matter?” he heard Ekwok cry over the sound of Prince's footsteps pounding behind him.
Liam almost overshot the other side of the float at the bottom of the gangplank, caught his balance just before he went head-first into the harbor and continued on toward Larsgaard's boat. He was close enough to see Larsgaard look over his shoulder, a drawn expression on his face, just before the fisherman cast off the stern line. TheBay Roverwas twelve feet from the slip when Liam skidded to a halt, too far to jump. “Goddamn it!” Liam roared.
“Come on!” Prince yelled, and he turned to see her pounding back to the Cessna. He followed, and by the time he got there she had already cast off and had the prop rotating. The engine caught with a roar. “Get on the float!” she yelled, pointing, and without thinking he stepped to the right float just as it moved away from the slip.
“What the hell are we doing?” he yelled over the noise of the engine.
“If I can beat him to the harbor mouth, we can box him in! If not, I can bring us alongside and you can jump onto the deck!”
Liam clung to the strut with both hands, the sound of the Cessna's engine roaring in his ears, the wind from the prop tugging at his hair, his boots slipping on the wet surface of the floats. He wanted to ask Prince if she was out of her fucking mind, but he was too scared that the physical activity involved in forming the words would jar him off the float. The leading edge of the wings ripped apart the wall of wet, clammy mist, forming droplets of water on the metal surface that with the force of the air coalesced into rain against which he had to narrow his eyes. He could barely see Mike Ekwok ru