He walked up the steps and opened the door.
There was someone sleeping in his chair. Shades of Goldilocks, although this Goldilocks was older and a brunette. The chair was tipped back and her feet were crossed on his desk. She was in uniform, dark blue pants with gold stripes down the side seams, long-sleeved lighter blue shirt with dark blue pocket flaps, dark blue tie. If he was not mistaken, the uniform of his own service.
He stepped inside and let the door shut, loudly. The woman sat up with a jerk, took Liam in with one glance and popped to attention. “Trooper Diana Prince, reporting for duty, sir.”
She was almost as tall as Liam was, at least six-one, and that before her boot heels. With her boot heels she looked him straight in the eye. Everything else was height-weight proportionate, in spades. Her eyes were a clear gray and thickly lashed, her black curls were cropped short and her pale skin looked susceptible to sunburn. There was a set of suitcases stacked near the door, maroon leather, bulging at the sides.
“I'm sorry, sir, I overnighted in Lake Clark on the way down from Anchorage and left pretty early this morning. I guess I was tired when I got in.”
“How'd you get in the door?”
“Mamie at dispatch has a key. Sir.”
“Hold the sirs, I'm a trooper just like you,” Liam said.
Maybe now. She didn't say the words out loud, but they hovered in the air regardless. She knew his history, all right.
Just as well. Better she should know the story going in, how Liam had been busted down from sergeant to trooper because five people had frozen to death in Denali Park on his watch. He hadn't been the trooper who had made the decision not to check out the call, but the two troopers who had worked directly under his supervision had, and someone's head had to roll to satisfy the community's not altogether unjustified cries for blood. So Liam had been broken in rank and transferred in disgrace to Newenham, a town of two thousand on the southwestern edge of the Alaskan coast. The next landmass over was Siberia, and Liam was well aware of the inference to be drawn.
It had taken thirty-six hours for that family to die, and for the troopers not to respond to repeated calls reporting their disappearance. It had not been the Alaska State Troopers' finest hour, and Liam felt very much on probation in his new posting. It didn't help that the dead were Natives, and that a large portion of the population of Newenham and its environs was also Native.
All this Trooper Diana Prince would know, and probably more. It seemed to Liam as if the last two years of his life had been lived largely on the front pages of every daily newspaper in the state; the automobile accident, Jenny's coma, Charlie's death, the trial, the drunk driver's second arrest by none other than the surviving member of the family, Liam himself. The deaths in Denali were the nadir of three horrible years, all of which made for fine reading in the Sunday papers, oh yes indeed.
He pulled himself together. “John Barton brief you on the post?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It's Liam. Call me Trooper Campbell in front of civilians.”
“All right, s- Liam. I'm Diana.”
She smiled, and it was a revelation, a broad, thousand-watt beam that lit her eyes and transformed her face into that of a little girl's-enthusiastic, energetic, optimistic, all illusions intact and trumpeting a touching allegiance to truth, justice and the American way. She probably still believed in honor. She was undoubtedly willing to lay down her life for duty. “When did you graduate from the academy?” Liam said.
“Last year,” Diana Prince said promptly.
How the hell did you get a seven-step posting? Liam wondered, and knew without having to ask. Newenham was a Bush posting, which meant troopers assigned to it received a seven-step pay increase in recognition of the fact that they were living and working in the back of beyond. Because of the high pay, and because retirement was calculated on the last years you worked, these posts were competed for fiercely by troopers with enough seniority to make it stick.
Newenham was an exception. The previous first sergeant assigned to the post had publicly screwed up a very high profile case, and then capped his activities in the area by impregnating the trooper also assigned there. He should have been removed from his posting immediately; that he was not was due to favoritism within the good-old-boy trooper hierarchy. Corcoran had lasted ten years in Newenham, to the outrage of the community and the detriment of the troopers. By the time he left, the sour smell of the posting was evident as far away as Juneau.
At minimum staffing, a post this size should have had a first sergeant and two troopers assigned to it. In the three months since Liam's arrival, Liam had been it.
No, Newenham was not the usual seven-step plum. Nobody wanted to take it on. The more superstitious among the force might even have said it was bad luck to be posted there. His boss, Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton, supervisor of Section E and Liam's boss both in Glenallen and Newenham, had sent Liam to Newenham for two reasons: one, to tuck him safely out of sight until the fallout from the Denali debacle had deteriorated to a less toxic level, and two, in John's words, “to take the fucking hoodoo off that posting.”
And now here was Trooper Diana Prince, John's latest exorcist, all fresh-faced and newly minted and ready to go out and be a hero. Liam made a mental resolve to go through any doors second. “How'd you get here?”
“I flew.”
“Commercial?”
She shook her head. “I brought in one of the new Cessnas.”
His gaze sharpened. “Floats or wheels?”
“Floats. The gear's coming on Alaska Airlines.”
Shit, Liam thought. No need to call Wy now. A couple of hours alone in a plane in the middle of nowhere promoted personal intercourse. A flight to-where had it been? that murder-suicide in Dot Lake?-was how they had first met. “Good,” he said, tearing himself from that memory as well. He resettled his cap on his head and sternly quelled the rumble of queasiness that always precipitated his reluctant rise to any altitude above sea level. “Let's go.”
“Where?” she said, following him out the door.
“Kulukak.”
“What's there?”
“Bodies.”
Chinook Air Force Base was forty miles south of Newenham. It was a small base that had no defensible reason for existence after the invention of the ICBM and, later, the fall of the Berlin Wall, other than as a demonstration of the personal power in Congress of the senior senator from Alaska. The senior senator had outlasted just about everyone else in that august body with the exception of Strom Thurmond, and so by a process of attrition had in the fullness of time procured for himself the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was a position uniquely qualified to throw pork in Alaska's direction and this the senior senator did with an enthusiasm unequaled since Huey Long brought home the bacon for Louisiana. It made the senior senator immensely popular with his constituents and guaranteed his reelection until such time as he chose to retire, or until he killed himself surfing in Hawaii, which was his main hobby, after politics. His tan looked great on television, too.
The archaeological dig sat ten miles west of the base, from which the sound of F-15s doing touch-and-goes was faint but audible, an intrusion of modern noise into a prehistoric ruin. Evidence had been found at Tulukaruk of human habitation going back two thousand years. The old ones had known what they were doing, Wy thought as she circled for a landing; the settlement had been built on a confluence of two rivers and three streams, all prime salmon waters. The rivers were the Snake and the Weary, the streams the Kayaktak, the Amakayak and the Aluyak, or King Salmon Stream, Humpy Stream and Dog Stream, the kinds of salmon that ran up each stream and accounted for the settlement being built there in the first place.