Nine of the twelve women were identified. Three of them had been pregnant at the time of their death. “Didn’t want to share,” Prince said when this was discovered.
After three weeks the story died down, only to spring back to life when the killer was identified. It hadn’t been easy. His cabin was on national park land. He’d had no permit and had built it on his own, so they hadn’t been able to identify him through a title or bank paperwork. He had no friends, no family stepped forward, he didn’t get mail, so it was something of a coup when a clerk in the Anchorage Police Department, after slogging doggedly through a mountain of retired paperwork, found a dusty file fallen behind a filing cabinet with the name Clayton Gheen on it. The clerk ran the fingerprints in the file, and came up with a match.
Clayton Gheen had a record going back to the time he was thirteen years old, mostly B &E and petty theft. There had also been two incidences of assault in the fourth degree. Neither girl had come forward to testify, and he’d walked on both charges.
“Abuse in his background?” Liam asked Prince as she was scanning the report, faxed from the Fairbanks post.
She shook her head. “If his father beat on him, it was never reported.”
“And his mother just took off.”
She nodded. “Doesn’t automatically make him a serial killer, though.”
Liam thought of his own mother, walking out when he was six months old. “No. What does?”
Prince looked up, surprised at the question, because Liam Campbell wasn’t in the habit of asking questions which couldn’t be answered. “When we have the answer to that, we’ll put in for a raise.”
“Works for me.”
But he thought about it, off and on, for a long time afterward. He had distributed the contents of the pitiful little trophy chest Rebecca had found to the grieving families. One pair of the earrings, a ring and the crystal choker remained unclaimed, as did three of the bodies. Lost souls, lost to their families, lost to themselves, lost to him.
In 1975 Gheen had gone to work for BP in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, working construction, and had moved to Anchorage. His record was blank after that until 1979, when he’d been arrested for aggravated assault. This woman had testified, and he had been due in court in Anchorage for sentencing in May of that year. He never showed. A bench warrant was issued for his arrest, but he’d never been found to be served.
Gheen was interviewed on Channel 11, where the pretty anchor punctuated every phrase with a nod and began every sentence with “Now.” She asked him why he did it, her brows puckered with pretended puzzlement, her attention divided between Gheen and the camera lens. He stared at her bovinely. She spoke the names, rendered like the tolling of a bell, Merla Dixon in 1983, Sarah Berton in 1985, Paulette Gustafson in 1986, Kristen Anderson in 1986, Ruby Nunapitchuk in 1991, Brandi Whitaker in 1992, Stella Silverthorne in 1994, Christine Stepanoff in 1996, Cheryl Montgomery in 1997. Rebecca Hanover. The three unidentified bodies the medical examiner would only say might have been buried in, respectively, 1982, 1983 and 1988.
Won’t you tell us, the little anchor asked prettily, who the other three women were? What were their names?
“Elaine,” Gheen had said, and smiled.
Gheen’s public defender had orchestrated the television interview. He went into court the following week and petitioned for a change of venue, arguing that his client could not get a fair trial in Newenham. Or anywhere else anybody watched television, Liam thought, a hard place to find, even in Alaska, in this age of satellite television. It sounded as if Gheen’s P.D. would go for an insanity defense, but thanks to one of the few smart laws the Alaska legislature managed to pass in spite of themselves in recent years, Gheen could plead insanity all he wanted. He’d serve time in the Alaska Psychiatric Institute until his doctors declared him cured, from which time he would be incarcerated for fifteen life sentences, to be served consecutively. If district attorney, judge and jury did their job, that is.
Liam knew sincere regret that Bill Billington couldn’t sit on a felony case. Almost twenty years-that they knew of-almost twenty years Gheen had been kidnapping and killing women. He fit no known profile, other than that he was white and male. He’d started his killing later in life than most serial killers, but that was only so far as they knew. He’d kept trophies. He hadn’t stuck to victims of his own race, there hadn’t been any apparent acceleration of murder toward the end, he’d kept his victims alive, some, it seemed, for years.
Liam had interrogated Gheen once before shipping him to Anchorage. “What went wrong?” he’d asked Gheen. “Why did you have to kill them? They run away? They get pregnant and you couldn’t stand the thought of sharing? You hit them too hard, too often, and they up and die on you?”
Gheen had looked back at him, very calm, very still within his handcuffs and manacles and leg chains. His gaze was open and disinterested.
“Who was Elaine?” Liam said. “You buried her twelve times, she must mean something to you. Who was she?”
At that Gheen smiled, the same smile he would give the little anchor on Channel 11. “Elaine was my wife.” His eyes went dreamy. “Elaine the fair, Elaine the beautiful, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat.”
“She left you,” Liam said.
Gheen smiled again.
“She never left me,” he said.
Bill was back behind the bar, serving beer to Moses, who was also back and as cranky as ever. He’d been waiting on Wy’s deck the morning after he got out of the hospital, and as far as Liam could tell, stifling an inner groan, it would take more than a bullet to slow him down. Liam, Wy and Tim went through the form five times that morning. Moses didn’t even break a sweat. Liam lived for the day when he could say the same.
Amelia was buried in the Newenham cemetery, Darren Gearhart sobbing his heart out at the gravesite. Liam had to restrain Bill from assaulting him.
A few brief words from Bill had told Wy about Tim and Amelia. Wy asked him about her when they got back home that afternoon. “I liked her,” Tim said, and made it clear that that was all he was going to say.
He at least had found a measure of closure by bearing witness to the disappearance of Christine Stepanoff. The remains beneath one of the wooden markers had matched dental records in Newenham. “She was really nice,” he told Wy.
It was the first time he’d spoken of anyone from the tiny village where he had survived his childhood.
“She probably saved my life,” he added.
The next time Wy flew into Ualik, she spent an extra hour on the ground while she knocked on doors. Two weeks later she gave Tim a package. “What is it?” he said.
“Open it.”
He did, and found a brass frame enclosing the picture of a girl with narrow, tilted brown eyes, a long fall of straight brown hair and a laughing face. “Christine,” he said, his voice a bare breath of sound.
“Her grandmother still lives in Ualik. She loaned me the negative. I just got it back from Anchorage today.”
He gripped the frame tightly in both hands, his head bowed, his shoulders shaking. He said something she couldn’t make out. “What?”
He raised his head and her heart turned over at the sight of his ravaged face. “Oh Tim, I’m so sorry, I-”
He barreled into her headfirst, the picture thudding into her spine when he threw his arms around her. “She looks like Amelia,” he whispered.
She held him without words, grateful she could do that much, angry that she could not do more. Hot tears soaked into her shirt.