“What?” Larsgaard's eyes snapped back into focus, staring up at Liam, startled out of whatever inner hiding place he'd run to.
“Last night did you tell Evan Gray that you didn't kill Molly Malone, that you loved her, that you could never have killed her?”
Liam watched the color drain from Larsgaard's face, and tried like hell to read the expression there. The closest he could come to was fear, which made no sense. Why would Larsgaard be afraid? Of what? He'd already confessed to seven murders, he would only ever see the sun again from behind a barbed-wire electric fence; what could he possibly fear now?
There was a brisk knock on the door, and Liam cursed under his breath. “It's open!”
Prince opened the door and gave an apologetic cough. “Sorry, sir, but it's almost ten o'clock. We need to get in the air if we're going to get back in time for the arraignment this afternoon.”
“You're going back to Kulukak?” The words forced themselves from Larsgaard's throat.
They looked at him, curious. “Yes,” Liam said.
“Why? What for?” He saw their expression and with the same visible effort at control Liam had seen before he pulled himself together. “I said I did it. You've got the bodies. You don't need to go back there for anything.”
Liam stared at him. “I'm beginning to think I do, Walter.”
“I don't understand,” Prince said as she followed him the door. “We've got a suspect in custody, we've got his confession, he had means, motive and opportunity, we've even got a witness. What else are you digging for?”
The phone rang, saving him from trying to come up with an answer. “Brillo Pad. About time. What have you got?”
“It's Brilleaux,” the voice said, made husky by the three-packaday and two-martini lunch habits he refused to quit no matter how much his wife and his doctor nagged him. “Bril-LEAUX, how many times do I have to tell you?” He coughed heavily, and Liam involuntarily held the phone away from his ear.
“This isn't official, okay?”
“Okay.”
“They were shot about two hours before they were burned. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Seawater fucks up all the time-to-decay stats, and the water's been colder than normal down there this year.”
“Who says?”
“Jesus, the weather fairy, who do you think? I called Jim over to the National Weather Service. Oh, and one other thing.”
“What?”
“Molly Malone was pregnant.”
Dr. Hans Brilleaux, having delivered his message and having no further use for the telephone in his hand, hung up.
Liam put down the phone and looked at Prince. “Molly Malone was pregnant.”
She stared at him. “With whose baby, I wonder?”
“So do I. Tell me something, Prince, if you shot seven people and you wanted to cover it up, would you wait two hours before you tried?”
He could tell Prince was making an effort to maintain her professional calm. “I wouldn't shoot seven people, sir,” she said carefully. “Do you-sir, you don't think he didn't do it, do you?”
“No, I think he did it, all right, but he's not telling us the truth about why or how, and I don't want this case to unravel in court.”
“It couldn't,” she said, shocked.
“I have two words for you,” he said. “O. J. Simpson.” One word and two letters, actually, but what the hell.
“But-”
“Prince, we're not talking burden of proof or rule of law or even simple logic, here. We're talking juries, twelve individual people, each with their own boatload of biases and prejudices, and each as susceptible to the suggestions of the defense as they are to the evidence we hand off to the prosecutor. More so, if the judge comes down hard on reasonable doubt during instruction. I don't like leaving juries with any wriggle room.” He grabbed his cap and headed for the door. “I want all the evidence there is to get before we turn this case over to the D.A. We need a signed statement from Chad Donohoe, too, and I don't think he's going to leave in the middle of fishing season to come into town and give us one.”
He paused, one hand on the open door. “Besides, Larsgaard doesn't want us to go back to Kulukak. I want to know why.”
“I need a ride,” Jo said.
Steam was rising from their coffee cups as they sat around the kitchen table, watching the sun rise up over the mouth of the Nushagak and the Bay beyond. The kitchen of Wy's house was flooded in golden light, and Wy didn't have any flights scheduled to anywhere until that afternoon. She put her feet up on a chair and said lazily, “You buying?”
“The paper is.”
“Where to?”
Jo added half and half to her coffee and stirred in another teaspoon of sugar. “I came out here on a story.”
“I know, you told me, but you wouldn't tell me what it was.”
“Yeah. The guy who contacted me about it didn't want me to spread it around.”
“Who was it?”
“Don Nelson.”
Wy sat up with a bump. “The guy killed out at the dig?”
“Yeah.”
“You know I found him? Well, me and McLynn.”
“Yeah. I mean, not right away, I went in to say hi to Bill last night and she told me. Saw you at dinner, by the way.” Jo's green eyes watched her over the rim of her mug.
“Oh,” Wy said. She could feel the color rising up into her cheeks. “Yeah, well. We had dinner.”
“So I saw.”
“It was just… it was dinner, okay? His father was there, the new trooper, it was just dinner. The ingestion of food in return for a caloric warming of cell tissue.”
“Uh-huh. With a little footsie on the side.”
Wy drank coffee. “I went to see him at the post afterward.”
“Did you?”
Wy glared. “Oh, stop being so fucking smug, Dunaway.”
“Then stop being so fucking evasive, Chouinard. Jesus, you're worse than Bill Clinton when it comes to talking about your sex life. It's true what they say, denial is not just a river in Egypt.”
“It's not sex.”
“Not yet.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
Jo's smile was wide and salacious. “I want to, I want to.”
Wy fiddled with the sugar spoon, raising spoonsful of sugar and letting it fall back into the bowl. “Maybe you weren't wrong, some of those things you said the other night.”
For once, Jo maintained a prudent silence.
“I told Liam what you said. Some of it, anyway.”
“What'd he say?”
“Not much.” Wy let the spoon fall. “He just wants me, Jo. Just flat out wants me, all of me, marriage, kids, for better or worse, so long as we both shall live, until death us do part, everything, the whole nine yards.”
“Kids?”
Their eyes met. “I haven't told him.”
“You'll have to.”
“Not yet,” Wy said, a plea in her voice.
“I'm not your mother, Wy, or your conscience.” Jo drained her mug. “I don't have to be, you've got enough conscience for any ten people I know. You want to be happy with him for a little while before you lower the next boom, okay, I get that. But not telling him now means you don't trust him enough to understand and accept. He won't like that. And it is a lousy way to start any relationship, let alone this one.” She stood up. “In the meantime, I want to take a look at that archaeological dig-what did you call it?”
“Tulukaruk.”
“Everything around here starts or ends with ak,or both,” Jo said, grumbling. “Tulukaruk, Kulukak, Manokotak, Stoyahuk, Koliganek, Egegik. Anyway, I want to see the place with thek's where Nelson died.”
“What did he write to you about?”
Jo hesitated. “He said he'd found something that would make a great story. It had to do with a government cover-up.”
“Government?” Their eyes met. They both knew what kind of government institution was closest to Tulukaruk.
Wy was silent until they got to the airport. As they were strapping into the Cub, she said, “When did Nelson first contact you?”