For a moment Liam was completely at a loss. Not only did he not know Mrs. Berg, he’d never actually managed to speak to Cliff face-to-face. Come to that, he’d only ever talked to Roger Raymo on the phone. He’d been in Newenham since the previous May, almost six months. In that time he had managed to miss connecting with the two remaining local law-enforcement officers who, besides Mamie and her night-shift counterpart down at the lockup, constituted what was left of the Newenham Police Department. And now, when he needed them most, they’d run out on him to better-paying jobs in Anchorage and Outside. It was difficult not to feel ill-used.
He rallied. “Who did Jim Earl hire to replace them?” Silence. “Mamie?”
“Nobody yet,” she said.
“But he’s got someone in mind.”
“He doesn’t consult with me about who he’s going to hire and fire, Liam,” Mamie said testily.
“He’s not going to hire anybody, is he,” Liam said with a sudden flash of inspiration. “What, the troopers are supposed to do it all, in town and out of it?”
She hung up without answering.
He wondered if her irritation was because she wanted one of the officer jobs. He hoped she got it, but Jim Earl was the cheapest bastard who ever lived, and if it were legally possible not to fill those officers’ positions he wouldn’t, not so long as the complaints on response time didn’t pick up. They were going into winter, after two bad fishing seasons. Everyone was broke, and with the stocks of just about any creature in the Bering Sea with fins and claws so far down as to be in the toilet, people were scared. A lot of people, when they got scared, got drunk. When they got drunk, they got into trouble.
When they got into trouble, the cops got into it.
Only now there weren’t any cops. Just him and Prince.
Everything inside the Newenham city limits was, ostensibly, the province of the now nonexistent NPD. Everything outside of it, from Anchorage to Togiak and including every unincorporated town and village between, was within the province of the Alaska state troopers. So it wasn’t like they didn’t already have enough to do.
He saw Diana Prince give him a curious look and realized his knuckles were white on the handset of the phone. He sat down and replaced it with elaborate care.
He knew he was emotionally too close to the Lydia Tompkins murder. He’d fallen hard for her when she’d marched into the post, carrying her artillery in with her in two double-bagged brown paper grocery bags. She was so proud to have apprehended Harvey in the act of breaking into her car, so pleased with her own initiative. And the great legs hadn’t hurt. He couldn’t help but adore her, her character, her spirit, her courage.
And he couldn’t help but hate her killer with every part and fiber of his being. He wanted to find him and break him in half. And after that he wanted to hurt him.
He almost wished he hadn’t met her. He wished like hell he hadn’t had to respond to the scene of her murder. If she’d lived closer to town, and had there been any cops in that town, the troopers wouldn’t have responded to the call reporting her death. Everyone on River Road was outside the municipal boundaries of Newenham. The upside was they didn’t have to pay municipal taxes. The downside was they couldn’t vote in municipal elections. When Jim Earl scored a federal grant large enough to build a new city hall, he made sure that the second floor was made of apartments, of which he made equally sure the largest was rented to him before the last doorknob was installed. The apartment was his legal address, but the house on the bluff was where he lived. It was a polite fiction everyone was willing to maintain, since nobody else wanted to be mayor.
“Sir?”
“What?” He looked at Prince.
“I’ve entered all of the Tompkins family interviews.”
“Did you talk to the kids?”
“Daisy and Rose? No. Betsy wouldn’t let me. She said to come out to the house tomorrow, maybe then.”
“Any of the others have kids?”
“No. Just Betsy.”
“I would have bet my last dime Lydia Tompkins was grandmother to nineteen.” He looked at the chair she had been sitting in the night before, and the rage was back like a hammer blow. “Son of abitch.”
“Sir?”
“Nothing.” He mastered his anger and reached for the phone again. “Joe Gould, please. Joe, it’s Liam Campbell.”
“I don’t do autopsies.”
“I know that,” Liam snapped. “I’m just asking. You’ll get the body on the first plane out tomorrow morning? I want the medical examiner to get a look at her right away.”
“He’s not going to tell you anything I haven’t. She fought with someone in her kitchen. She got hit, she hit back, she got hit harder.”
“What with?”
“Fists only, it looks like to me. I think she fell back and hit her head on the counter. There is a sharp, straight wound on the back of the skull, and there was blood and hair on the edge of the kitchen counter.”
Liam hung up.
“I brought her calendar and her most recent bank and credit card statements from the house,” Prince said. She indicated a pile on the deck in front of her.
“Good.” He was only half listening, having logged on to his own computer to review her witness reports.
“I called Elmendorf Air Force Base,” Prince said. “Talked to the PRO and gave him those partial numbers you brought back.”
Partial numbers. Oh. Right. The plane in the glacier. “What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know of any recent crash, but that he would check the records from World War Two.”
“Good. Does he want the arm?”
“I didn’t offer it. He did ask for prints. I told him we’d already sent them to the crime lab, but that the skin on the fingertips was pretty deteriorated.” She hesitated. “I didn’t tell him about the coin, either.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“I want to keep it in evidence for a while. At least until we identify the body.”
“What makes you think we will?”
“The crew roster. There are bound to be records that match up with the tail number. The crew have been missing in action for over forty years. Their families will be glad to know what happened to them. Might even find enough to bury.”
“What’s that have to do with the coin?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want it part of the official record yet. Just in case…”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case somebody on that plane was doing something they shouldn’t have. Their families will be glad to know what happened, but-”
“Just maybe not all of what happened?” Liam said.
Prince shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well,” Liam said, saving the report and exiting the program, “I don’t see that it can do any harm.”
He dismissed Prince, who protested not too much, as she had an appointment to look at a house for sale on the Icky Road. Normally housing was tight in rural Alaska, given the high costs of transporting building materials and the fact that less than one percent of the land in Alaska was privately owned. The times weren’t normal. Two lousy salmon seasons and a severely curtailed snow crab season the previous winter, and every other house had a For Sale sign in the window, the owner hoping against hope for a rich tourist to drive by in his SUV rental and fall in love with the place. Naturally, it was just his luck that the housing market opened up after Liam had spent his first summer in Newenham sleeping, sequentially, in his office chair, then on a gradually sinking boat, and now sharing Wy’s twin bed, which was approximately fourteen inches too short for him.
ANCSA hadn’t helped the housing situation either, or at least not in Newenham. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972, in exchange for a right of way through aboriginal lands down the center of the state upon which to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline, had paid Alaska Natives a billion dollars and 44 million acres of land. Once the land selection process had been wrestled through, with, of course, the requisite amount of billable hours by as many lawyers as was humanly possible, lands were deeded to the twelve Native regions. The regions, in turn, had parceled out acres to their shareholders. In Newenham, this land was located mostly on the road to Ik’ikika on One Lake, all forty miles of it and for a good long ways off to either side. The individual shareholder did what any sensible person would do: Once they acquired title, they built on it and moved out of town, as a result like the folks on the River Road escaping local taxation and representation both. The people left living in town were, perforce, mostly white.