"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.
Liam had never understood the necessity of varying the degrees of sexual abuse with which an alleged suspect could be charged in assaulting a minor. Either someone old enough to know better forced sexual attention on someone too young to resist, or they didn't. The law was you didn't screw babies, and so far as Liam was concerned babies were babies until they were of legal age. He made a mental note of the perp's name for follow-up.
He ran out of reports, turned off the computer, and fetched the garbage bag holding the inventory of 78 Zulu. Clearing his desk, he began laying items out in rows.
There were the wrappings from a strawberry PopTart, a Snickers bar, and a package of MandMore's. A tiny wad of paper turned out to be a mangled Bazooka bubble gum wrapper, and after a moment's thought Liam identified the white square of thin cardboard as being part of the packaging of a Reese's peanut butter cup. It appeared that junk food went hand in hand with herring spotting. Liam could relate; it went hand in hand with stakeouts, too.
There were the two maps of Bristol Bay, one old and generously patched with Scotch tape, one comparatively new. There were the six Japanese glass floats, the broken walrus tusk, the survival kit, the two firestarter logs, the two parkas, the two pairs of Sorels, the Pepsi bottle full of pee, the clam shovel, the empty bucket, the three gloves, and the two handheld radios.
He didn't know much about radios. Again, he had recourse to the phone book, and was shortly dialing an 800 number for Sparky's Pilot Shop. He was mildly surprised and pleased when instead of being shunted into phone mail someone actually picked up.
"Sparky's Pilot Shop."
"Hi, this is Officer Liam Campbell of the Alaska State Troopers, calling from Newenham, Alaska. I'd like to talk to someone about radios."
"What kind of radios?"
Liam picked up one of the radios lying in front of him and examined it. "Battery-operated handheld radios. Uh, like walkie-talkies, you know?"
"What brand?"
"One says it's a King, the other says it's an Icom."
Amused, the voice said, "One moment, please."
Neither music nor Muzak was played at him while he waited, which made Liam think even better of Sparky's Pilot Shop.
Another voice, raspy and irascible, barked, "What?"
Liam went through his spiel.
"Whaddya wanta know?"
"Ah, um, well, first of all, do you know what kind of radios are used for herring spotting?"
"Scrambled marine VHF."
"Uh-huh. And I suppose the receiving radio would have a descrambler to translate incoming messages."
"You suppose correctly. What else you want, I'm busy."
Liam remembered the radio bolted to the dash. "Are spotters' radios usually handhelds?"