“Teddy-” Kvichak said.
“No,” Engebretsen said with unaccustomed firmness. “Let’s just tell them the truth, Johnny. One more time. Either they’ll believe us or they won’t-”
“They won’t. Cops never know the truth when they hear it.”
“Either they’ll believe us or they won’t,” Engebretsen repeated, his voice wavering a little. “Either way, I’m talking.”
“Shit.” Kvichak folded his arms and glowered. “I ain’t having nothing to do with it.”
“Fine,” Engebretsen said. “I’ll tell.”
Prince looked at Liam with undisguised admiration.
They’d heard the shot from their camp on the bluff, Engebretsen said. “It was our last day, you know, we’d limited out on everything, we butchered everything out, put it in game sacks, we were just waiting on Wy.” He glanced sideways at Kvichak. “So we opened the beer.”
“How long was it before you heard the shots?” Prince said.
“Man, I don’t know,” Engebretsen said. “We opened the beer early. I think I was on my third. I mean, we just didn’t need to be sober anymore, so we weren’t trying to be. Hell, we’d been drinking most of the night, if it comes to that. I don’t know, nine o’clock, maybe? Maybe earlier.”
Liam looked at Kvichak. Kvichak held his eyes for a long moment. “Oh hell,” he said, slumping. “It was about eight-thirty, and before you say anything, yeah, we were already half in the bag.”
“It was the first shots we’d heard that didn’t come from our guns, you know?” Engebretsen said. “We hadn’t even heard any planes, and the nearest cabin is that crotchety old Italian at Warehouse Mountain, and that’s twenty miles away. Then we remembered that mining claim on Nenevok, and we thought maybe they were in trouble? Like one of them fired a warning shot for help, you know?”
“Tell me something, Teddy,” Prince said, gazing at the earnest face sitting across from her. “Did you ever meet the miner on Nenevok?”
Engebretsen flushed and glanced at Kvichak, who folded his arms across his chest again. “Not really. Well, kind of.”
“Which? Not really, or kind of?”
“Crissake,” Kvichak said. “Wy dropped off supplies at Nenevok when she was bringing us into the bluff.”
“And you met Mark Hanover, the miner.”
Again the two men exchanged a glance. “Didn’t meet the miner, he didn’t come to the plane,” Kvichak said finally. “The wife was there, though.”
Prince gave a thoughtful nod, and glanced at Liam to see a muscle working in his jaw like a nervous tic. “The wife,” she said. “Rebecca Hanover.”
Engebretsen, forgetting for the moment where he was and who was listening, gave a long, blissful sigh. “Oh yeahhhh.”
“Hear tell she was pretty,” Prince observed in a neutral voice.
Engebretsen gave her an incredulous look. “Pretty! She wasn’t just pretty. She was-she was-” He struggled for suitable words. “She was flat fucking drop-dead gorgeous,” he said finally, with a touch of awe. “I never seen nobody so pretty outside of a movie. And built, wow!” A low, reverent whistle accompanied the words.
It is a maxim of the law enforcement profession that jails aren’t filled with smart people. Nevertheless, this might be just about the dumbest person on the face of the earth sitting across from her now. “So, on that last morning of your hunt, you got tanked, you heard shots, you thought fired from the direction of the mine on Nenevok Creek, you remembered meeting a gorgeous woman there, and you decided to investigate.”
“I told you,” Kvichak said, more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you, Teddy, I told you they’d never believe nothing we said.”
“No,” Engebretsen said, becoming frightened again. “I mean yes. I mean, we hiked over, took us, hell, took us forever, and we were sober as judges by the time we got there.”
“Uh-huh,” Prince said. “When you got to the mine, what did you find?”
Engebretsen leaned forward. “There was a man, facedown in the creek.”
“You pulled him out.”
“Well, yeah, we didn’t know if he was dead or not. I got my feet wet. Ten days I kept them dry, and the last day I have to go get them wet.”
“So, Mark Hanover was dead when you found him.”
Kvichak slammed his hands down flat on the table. In the ensuing silence, he leaned forward and he met Liam’s eyes with a flat, unwinking stare. “Yes. Mark Hanover or whoever he was was dead when we got there. We heard the shot right after we got up. It took us two hours plus to get from the bluff to the Nenevok. We found his body in the creek. We pulled him out to see if he was dead. He was. We yelled for his wife. She didn’t come out of the woods. I yelled for help on the cell phone.”
“And then Johnny made us leave,” Engebretsen said. “He said you’d nail us for doing it.” He paused, and added defiantly, “And he was right.”
There was a brief silence. For a moment, for just a moment, Prince allowed herself to be impressed by their sincerity.
Liam stood up. “Interview terminated, two-thirty p.m.” He turned off the recorder and looked at Kvichak. “Crime Lab says yours was the gun, John.”
Kvichak stared back. “The Crime Lab is wrong.”
“Wasn’t a bad bluff,” Prince said on the way back to the post. “I would have believed him, but the lab doesn’t lie.” She thought of Nick, and had to erase the grin that came out of nowhere.
“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg?”
Prince was thrown off track. “I beg your pardon?”
“Have you ever been forced to bushwhack your way across muskeg,” Liam repeated. “I have. It’s slow going.”
She digested this. “Come on. They’ve got it all, means, motive, opportunity. They’ve even got a history of pulling this kind of stuff, going back years.”
“They’ve never killed anybody before.”
“They shot at two people last year,” she retorted.
“They didn’t hit anybody, though,” he said thoughtfully. “You notice? Just the canoe. You see that drawing Corcoran did, showing where the bullet holes were? One amidships, directly between the two thwarts where the two people were sitting. The second in the stern. Both just at the waterline.”
“So?”
“So, they both limited out this year.”
She pulled into the space in front of the post and turned to stare at him. “And?”
“And I’d like to know how good they are with those rifles.”
He called Charlene Taylor. “Johnny and Teddy?” she said. “They’re hell on the moose and the caribou, but I can’t see them killing anybody.”
“Do you know what kind of shots they are?”
“First class,” she said promptly. Charlene was Liam’s alter ego in Newenham, the fish and game side of the troopers. It was her unenviable lot to enforce, or try to enforce, the state fish and game laws, which she did by four-wheeler, Zodiac and Cessna 206. Wet your line too early, shoot your bear too late, take the rack on your moose and leave the meat, and Charlene was there, a smile on her face and a summons in her hand. “I’ve checked out their camp a time or two, up on the bluff. Always go for a head or a shoulder shot, and they always get it, too. Probably has something to do with needing the meat to feed their families. Trophy hunters’ll go for the gut every time.”
Liam heard the disgust in her voice but refused to be sidetracked. “You ever have to haul them in, Teddy or John?”
“I probably could have, a time or two,” she admitted. “Maybe even should have. But I didn’t. They don’t take more than their families can eat in a winter, and if they hold over the hunting season by a couple of hours, I’m not going to notice.”
“Thanks, Charlene.”
He hung up the phone. Prince had her arms folded and was staring at him. “Please tell me you don’t think they’re telling the truth.”