“No,” he said.
Teddy squirmed.
“Did you hear or see anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary? Anything you thought was odd?”
“No, why should we?”
Prince frowned down at the file. “Do you have a cell phone, John?”
A brief pause. “Why?”
Prince pulled out an evidence bag, the cell phone sealed inside clearly visible. She put it on the table, in the exact center so that it was the focus of four pairs of eyes. John’s were fierce, Teddy’s alarmed, Prince’s inquiring, Liam’s uninterested. “Because we found this in your backpack when we searched your house.”
“Oh.” Nonplussed for a moment, John fired up immediately. “What business you got going through my house?”
“We had a warrant, John,” Prince said, almost apologetically. “We had probable cause.”
Teddy whimpered. John nudged him in the ribs with an ungentle elbow. “What’s probable cause?”
Prince’s smile vanished. Like any cop, she didn’t care for the jailhouse lawyer. “Probable cause, John, is when we’ve got a couple of yo-yos hunting ten miles from where we find a man who caught a load of buckshot in the chest. Probable cause is when both yo-yos have a long record of harassing other visitors to the area. Probable cause is when both these yo-yos are packing rifles to hunt moose and caribou, and shotguns to hunt ptarmigan. Probable cause is when we find the dead guy was killed with a shotgun.” Prince sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “Probable cause is when we respond to a call for help from someone who isn’t there when we arrive, a Mayday that was picked up by Alaska Airlines and which call, we are reliably informed, was routed through the local cell phone signal repeater with an ID number that traces back to your phone.”
Not bad, Liam thought, not bad at all. We’ll make a trooper out of you yet, little lady. He had to suppress a grin at Prince’s likely reaction should she ever be made privy to that thought.
Teddy broke first, as Liam had told Prince he would. Normally they would have interrogated the two men separately, but Liam was worried about Rebecca Hanover, and he wanted to break the two men as quickly as possible. “We hit them both at once with everything we’ve got. John will bluster, Teddy will buckle.”
Teddy buckled. “We didn’t do it,” he said, as tears began to leak down his cheeks. “We didn’t shoot that man.”
“What man?”
“The man in the creek.”
“Teddy-” John said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“We heard shots-” Teddy said, tears flowing faster.
“One shot,” John said, and flushed.
“-and John said we should go look. We knew Gregg Saltz’d sold his mine to some guy from Anchorage. We even sneaked over to take a look when we first flew in, but they weren’t doing nothing except wash dirt. Nice-looking wife, though,” he said wistfully. Prince handed him a Kleenex and he blew his nose with a comprehensive blast.
There was a short silence. Prince looked at John. “Goddamn it,” he said more in sorrow than in anger. “I love you, man, but you just can’t keep your mouth shut.”
“I’m sorry,” a miserable Teddy told him. “I’m sorry,” he said to Prince.
“What are you sorry for, Teddy?” Prince said.
He stared at her with wide eyes. John said hotly, “He’s not sorry for killing that guy.” Everyone looked at him and he flushed again. “That’s not what I meant. We didn’t shoot that guy. We heard a shot and we went to go see, that’s all! We found the body, and I knew what the cops would think. We made the call on my phone and got the hell out of there, that’s all.”
“About what time was this?”
“Hell, I don’t know. We were done hunting, kind of relaxing until Wy got there.”
Translation: They’d opened the beer.
Patiently, Prince led John and Teddy through their last day at hunting camp in hopes of creating a timeline. It wasn’t easy since neither man wore a watch. They’d risen at sunrise, heard the shot “a little later,” done a forced march of a little over nine miles in “maybe an hour, maybe two,” found the body, known they were in trouble, yelled for help and been back at camp in time to be picked up by Wy.
“About how long from the time you heard the shots to the time you arrived at the mine?” Prince said.
John and Teddy exchanged glances and shrugged. “Maybe two hours. Maybe more.”
“And you found the body in the creek?”
“Yeah.” Teddy paled. “He was dead.”
“How could you tell?”
He stared at her. “He was facedown in the creek, man. His chest was blown away. His heart wasn’t beating.”
“How could you tell that his chest was blown away if he was facedown in the creek?”
“We turned him over,” Teddy said, and John groaned.
“You moved the body,” Prince said.
“Yeah.” Teddy looked from Prince to John, and appealed to Liam. “I mean, he was facedown in the creek. We couldn’t leave him like that.”
Prince penciled a note.
Liam spoke for the first time, his deep voice slow and authoritative, and both men jumped. “Where was the woman? The wife of the dead man? Rebecca Hanover?”
“We didn’t see her,” Teddy said. “Is that her name? Rebecca? That’s kind of pretty.”
“She wasn’t anywhere around,” John said. “We yelled for her, but she didn’t show.”
“Did you look in the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look around the grounds?”
“Man, we just wanted out of there. We made sure the guy was dead, we looked for her, we yelled for her, we made the call, we left. That’s it.”
Prince was all but wagging her tail when they walked into the post. “I got the shotguns on the first flight into Anchorage. I called the Crime Lab to be expecting them. I’m betting the shot pattern from Teddy’s shotgun matches the one the M.E. finds on Hanover’s chest.”
“Teddy, huh?” Liam said. “Why Teddy?”
“Because he’s the nervous one,” she said promptly. “I can see him popping off without thinking. Plus, he had an eye on the wife.”
“Yeah,” Liam said, “but why’d they make the call?”
Prince stared. “What?”
“Why did they make the call?” Liam repeated. “If they killed him, why call for help? Why draw attention to their crime?”
After an uncertain moment, she suggested, “Maybe the shooting sobered them up. Maybe they figured if they called for help, we wouldn’t be liking them for the shooting.”
“Maybe,” Liam said equably. “But in that case, where’s the wife?”
“They’ve got the weapons,” Prince said, unconvinced. “They’ve got a history of doing this kind of thing.”
“They’ve got a history of harassment and destruction of private property,” Liam corrected her, “not to mention chasing off Dagfinn Grant’s customers’ moose. They’ve never shot anyone.”
“Teddy Engebretsen shot out the jukebox at Bill’s in May,” Prince said.
“Shooting a jukebox is one thing,” Liam said. “Shooting a person is another thing entirely.”
“They were drunk,” Prince reminded him.
“Yeah,” Liam said, a little grimly. “They were that.”
Prince went off to interview the Kvichak and Engebretsen families, to see if Teddy or John had confessed to anything in the four hours between their return and their arrest. Liam called the house to see if Wy was home. After five rings Jim picked up, out of breath. Liam grinned out the window. The morning fog would have burned off by ten, and the sun, he well knew, would be beating down on the deck in front of Wy’s living room. “Having a nice morning?” he inquired solicitously.
“Up yours, Campbell,” Jim said. In the background Liam could hear Bridget chuckling.
“Wy there?”
“No. I’m hanging up now.”
“Hold on. You said you had something to tell me.”
A brief pause. “Yeah, but not right now.”
“Okay,” Liam said. There was something in the tone of Jim’s voice that warned him he wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was. “It sounds like it can keep.”