"Fine," Wy said promptly, and the grip she fastened on the boy's arm had more the look of military police than maternal concern about it. But then Wy hadn't been a mother long, Liam reflected as the door closed behind them.
It swung open again almost immediately. "Liam? Thanks. Thanks a lot. You don't know what this means; you don't know what-"
"I'm going to know, though, aren't I, Wy?" Liam said.
He threw the question down between them like a gauntlet, and left it lying there for her to pick up or not, as she chose.
Five minutes later the door opened and Gary Gruber stuck his head in. "Trooper Campbell?" He sidled inside and stood hesitantly in the still-open doorway, jaw champing at a bubble gum cud.
"Mr. Gruber, come on in." Liam waved the thin man to a chair. "Thanks for coming down."
Gary Gruber perched himself gingerly at the very edge of his seat. "You said you wanted a statement."
"Yeah, wait a minute while I get the computer fired up. Took me ten minutes to find the On button this morning. Computers. Sheesh." He grinned at Gruber. "I'm getting acclimatized to the twentieth century just in time for the twenty-first."
Gruber returned a weak smile and shifted the omnipresent pink wad from one cheek to the other. Could have been worse, Liam thought, could have been chewing tobacco. "I don't know what I can add to what I told you yesterday. It's like I said, I didn't really see much of anything."
"Tell me what you did see, then," Liam said as the screen filled with the proper form.
He'd been in his office, Gruber told him, when he heard a scream from the lobby in the front of the building. He'd rushed to see what was going on, and there was Bob DeCreft, stretched out in front of 78 Zulu.
"Not a pretty sight," Liam said sympathetically.
A slight shudder passed over Gary Gruber's thin frame, and he swallowed spasmodically. "No," he agreed, shifting his gum again.
"In fact, not much to tell you it was Bob DeCreft," Liam observed. "Tell me, how did you know it was him?"
Gruber stopped in mid-chew. "What?"
"Well, I was there, too, and there wasn't much left of his face. How did you know that the man lying on the ground in front of that Cub was Bob DeCreft?"
Gruber floundered for a moment. "Well, I-well, I just assumed it was him."
"Why?" Liam asked in an interested voice.
"Well, I-well, I-" Gruber had a flash of inspiration. "Everybody knew he was spotting for Wy. Who else could it have been? Nobody's gonna go messing around with somebody else's plane, not without their permission. Good way to get shot, out here," he added, gaining confidence. "Had to be Bob, since it wasn't Wy."
"And since it was 78 Zulu," Liam prompted.
"Well, yeah."
"So 78 Zulu is known as belonging to Wy Chouinard."
"Well, sure. She's in and out the airport all the time. Everybody knows Wy."
Liam printed out Gruber's statement; Gruber signed it and sidled out in the same vaguely furtive manner with which he had entered.
Liam rifled through the various statements he'd taken at the airport the day before. Nobody saw nobody doing nothing, he reflected sadly. At a conservative estimate, culled from Gruber's statement, at the time of Bill DeCreft's death there had been at least ten small planes in the act of landing or taking off, one DC-3 freighter off-loading a hold full of lumber, a 737 on a short final, and three small craft inbound. There were fourteen people in the terminal waiting to board the Metroliner Liam had flown in on, another thirty waiting either to pick up the inbound passengers on the Metroliner or to board the 737, and who knew how many mechanics and fuelers and wand wavers and baggage men and support personnel standing around with their fingers up their noses, not to mention whoever ran Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe.
And nobody saw nothing. He sighed.
He called the hospital. The doctor he reached there sounded impatient and irritable. "Cause of death? For Christ's sake, officer. The man walked into the rotating propeller of a small plane. What do you want, an exact description of what that does to the human head?"
Liam said no, thank you very much all the same, and set the phone down gently in its receiver. He called the bank, forgetting it was Saturday, and had to track down his quarry at home. Fortunately the banker was hooked into her database by computer. "Gosh," she said in thrilled accents, "we've never had a depositer murdered before!"
Liam thanked her and hung up, and looked at the amount he'd written down on the yellow pad. Two thousand one hundred and seventy-three dollars and sixty-eight cents. The bank held no outstanding notes in Bob DeCreft's name. There had been no recent withdrawals of any substantial size, just the usual bill payments for heat, light, gas, groceries.
He turned on his computer, called up the modem, and tapped out a sequence that got him into the Department of Motor Vehicles. Bob DeCreft had had one vehicle registered in his name, a 1981 Ford four-wheel-drive pickup. No lien holder was listed, and he'd been up to date on his tags. No emissions test necessary, since he'd lived in the Bush.
The Division of Revenue listed one airplane in Bob DeCreft's name, a Piper Super Cub the state had valued at $35,000. DeCreft was current on the personal property taxes for the Cub, too. He'd had the usual collection of king salmon tags, duck hunting stamps, and moose hunting permits. He'd had his permanent fund dividend check direct-deposited to his bank account every October, and he'd been deemed eligible to receive the dividend every year since the first one was issued in 1981.
Liam disconnected the modem and got up from the computer. It was more than time to change into his uniform, but when he unpacked it, it was so hopelessly crumpled that it was unwearable. He rummaged around for a phone book and searched for a dry cleaner. There wasn't one listed in the entire town of Newenham.
"Well, hell." He closed the book and sat back to run his newest acquaintances through his mind. He knew firsthand Wy didn't own an iron. If you couldn't wash and wear it Wy didn't buy it. Moses seemed an unlikely candidate, about as unlikely as Bill. Maybe Jim Earl. He consulted the phone book again, and dialed the number for Newenham, City of. "An iron?" Jim Earl bellowed. "Jesus Christ, son, what in the ever-loving hell would I want with one of them things?" Liam thanked him and set the phone down in its receiver as gently as before. He looked at the uniform shirt and pants draped across the chair. He didn't even have a shower he could steam them in.
Which reminded him-he didn't have a place to live, either.
He found a copy of the Newenham News on the table holding up the coffeepot, not too far out of date, and turned to the real estate section. There was exactly one house for sale, none for rent, and no apartments for rent listed.
Looked like another night in the chair.
Since he couldn't yet don his uniform, and since the prospects for house-hunting looked slim, the only fallback was work.
He called up the report summaries on the computer and scrolled through the past month. As was usual in police work, the same names kept popping up over and over-a lot of Gumlickpuks, Macks, and Haines. In the past two weeks there were nineteen citations for herring fishing during a closed period, seven for fishing with unmarked gear, and one for sportfishing in a closed creek. These reports were signed by a Trooper C. Taylor, from which Liam deduced Trooper Taylor was his opposite number on the Fish and Wildlife Protection side of the Alaska Department of Public Safety. On his side, Corcoran had charged one man with felony third-degree assault, one man with felony second-degree burglary, and one man with importation of alcohol to a local option area, otherwise known as bootlegging, always a problem in dry Bush communities. One man had been charged with thirddegree criminal mischief and resisting arrest, which must have given Corcoran a thrill. There was the usual assortment of domestic violence, disorderly conduct, and DWI charges, and one of second-degree sexual abuse of a minor.