Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “We’re sure they will respond all the way out here?”

  “The fire department always responds everywhere, sir,” she said, the reproof clear in her tone.

  “Thank you, Ms. Petroff.”

  Instead of hanging up in her usual efficient fashion, she said hesitantly, “Did I understand you to say that you were at the archeological dig up East Bay Road, sir?”

  “You did.”

  “And the deceased?”

  “We don’t comment on ongoing investigations, Ms. Petroff.”

  A brief silence. “I see. Thank you, sir. I will so inform the fire department.” Click.

  He stared at his phone. In the entirety of his acquaintance with Ms. Petroff, all one and a half days of it, that was the first time she had requested clarification on any point at issue. Don’t go soft on me now, Ms. Petroff, he thought, and called Wy. “Got a job for you, not a fun one.”

  “Do tell.”

  He was momentarily distracted by the husky quality of her voice but called himself sternly to order and to duty. “I’ve got a body that needs transporting to Anchorage. The ME’s office will meet you at Merrill to take it off your hands.”

  “Height and weight?”

  He had never loved her more. “Six foot plus, a hundred and sixty pounds or thereabouts. Maybe less, skinny guy.”

  “I’ll head for the airport and start prepping the Cessna.”

  “Need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “Those hand bones from yesterday night. I want you to take those to Brillo, too.”

  “Sure. Where are they?”

  “In my truck.” He looked at Jo, who wasn’t even pretending not to listen. “Jo will bring them to you.”

  “Now just a damn minute—”

  “Of course,” Wy said.

  “Thanks, babe. Usual rates. I’ll clear it through the office.”

  “Always a pleasure doing business with the state, Sergeant Campbell.” She paused, and then said delicately, “Someone you know?”

  “Unfortunately. One of two possible friends I’ve met since I got here. The archeologist.”

  “Oh.” A sigh. “He sounded like a good guy. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Later, babe.”

  “Tell Jo I’ll meet her at the airport, and give her the gate code.”

  “Wilco.” He clicked off and looked up to see Jo giving him a baleful stare. “You’re all I’ve got, Jo. Please.”

  “And it gets me out of your crime scene.”

  He didn’t deny it. “There is that.”

  She grumbled but she went. He spent the next twenty minutes photographing, measuring, and making notes of the scene with apps on his phone, hoping that Steve Jobs wasn’t going to let him down. When the Blewestown volunteer fire department showed up they galloped down the trail like sherpas. It looked like the entire department had responded, a cross section of locals ranging in age from twenty to sixty, including a muscular, no-nonsense woman who introduced herself as Fire Chief Fiona Rafferty. “Campbell,” she said. “Liam Campbell?”

  “Yes.”

  “The shootout in the Newenham airport.”

  He repressed a sigh. “Yes.”

  “Not anyone’s finest hour.”

  “No.”

  “But not your fault, either.”

  He almost smiled. “Thanks.”

  Rafferty and her men went to work. They knew what they were doing and had Berglund’s body on a stretcher up the hill very nearly at double time. “Mountain goat DNA” was evidently one of the job requirements.

  Liam pulled the chief to one side. “I need some help, Chief.”

  “Name it, Sergeant.”

  A refreshing relief from Chief Armstrong’s determined indifference, and Liam was relieved. “A couple of kids were in this cave yesterday.”

  “They found the body?”

  “No. Well, not this one.”

  Chief Rafferty had thick, expressive eyebrows and at this point they raised the brim of her ball cap by a quarter of an inch. “‘This one?’”

  “They were exploring and they found what they said was a crack that led to a cave behind this one. Evidently it is wide enough for one of them to get stuck in it and while he was stuck he found a skeleton. When they unstuck him he managed to grab the bones of one of the skeleton’s hands.”

  Her eyebrows lowered to a level denoting extreme skepticism. “Sergeant Campbell—”

  “I know, Chief. I’ve got the bones he recovered on the way to Anchorage to see if they are actually human bones. But could you take a look at the crack and see if there is some way to reach the rest of the skeleton?”

  “If it’s that narrow how the hell would anyone get through it to die on the other side in the first place?” But she followed him, grumbling, and then retreated immediately to radio up the hill for one of her remaining cohort to bring down a couple of battery-powered standing lamps. “Need ’em for night fights sometimes,” she said at his glance.

  His phone dinged and he pulled it out to see that Wy had texted him.

  Taking off. Jo’s coming with. Penis Extender parked at the tie-down, keys behind the visor.

  He replied with a heart emoji and didn’t care who saw it.

  The lamps improved the view immeasurably, and for the first time Liam realized how big the cave was, the stygian darkness having swallowed so much of it before. Interested in spite of herself, Chief Rafferty joined him in his search, and even then the two of them working together, scrutinizing the rock surface with minute attention, almost missed it. It wasn’t really a crack so much as a vertical separation of the cave’s surface, one piece on top of another with a very narrow space between. “Kind of like a slip fault,” Chief Rafferty said.

  Liam didn’t speak geology and was willing to take her word for it. He could well believe that Erik had never found the crack in spite of the time he’d spent on the dig and was even more astonished that Kevin and Logan had. Never underestimate the curiosity and determination of a ten-year-old kid. He could understand why they hadn’t noticed Erik’s body, too. They’d stumbled through the cave and fetched up against the back wall.

  He hoped with all his heart that Brillo would find that Erik had died before they entered the cave.

  They wrangled one of the lights over to the crack and leaned it against the rock wall, angling it as best they could to shine in between the two layers of rock. The separation wasn’t even four inches in places, and try as he might he couldn’t press his face flat enough against the rock to see to the other side. He stepped back, frustrated. “How did that kid get his head in that crack?”

  “Wait,” Rafferty said, and pulled out what looked like a dental mirror on a telescoping rod. She saw his look and shrugged and assumed a very bad British accent. “Rafferty. Jane Rafferty.”

  He laughed. He liked Chief Rafferty.

  “Bought it off my dental hygienist. Useful for checking tight spaces.” She got down on her knees and pressed her bulk up against the rock wall. She extended the mirror’s handle out to its full length and poked it very slowly and very carefully through the crack. “Don’t want to break it off.”

  “Don’t want it to get stuck, either.” Or her, he thought.

  The cave seemed to be getting colder and the passing seconds stretched into minutes and maybe hours as Rafferty poked around with the mirror, working it like a surgeon doing a sextuple bypass, giving up only the occasional grunt.

  Finally she sat back on her heels, collapsing the mirror. She stared at the crack, although without her hand actually inside it it faded again almost into invisibility. “Huh.”

  “Is there a skeleton?” Liam said. His toes were numb.

  “Yes.” She got to her feet.

  “Could you tell if it was human or animal?”

  “Oh, I think human. Let’s go outside where it’s warmer.”

  Even with a cloudy sky it felt infinitely warmer outside the cave. “Why human?”

  “It’s a h
uman skull, Sergeant. I used to work arson investigation and I’ve seen a few. It’s human, all right.”

  Liam drew in a breath and let it out on a long, expressive exhale. “Well, shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to get it out of there.”

  To her credit and his everlasting gratitude she didn’t say, “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

  The chief checked in with her people and they were to a man willing to play, probably because it meant that much more time away from their day jobs.

  From a frankly unbelievable selection of tools, in the end they defaulted to a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and brute force. It didn’t take as long as he expected before he was peering into a roughly round hole sharply edged with jagged rock. Rafferty moved the lamps so the light fell full onto the scene within.

  “Fuck,” one of the men said. “He’s, like, totally mashed.”

  “Pulverized,” another said.

  “Pulped,” said a third.

  Not quite any of those things but not far off, Liam thought. With an inner sigh he got out his phone and opened the camera app to take more photos.

  “Something’s been chewing on him.”

  “What could get in there?”

  “I don’t know. Rats, I guess?”

  “Do we even have rats in Baytown?”

  “Maybe Rodents of Unusual Size?”

  “Gary!”

  “Jesus, dude, put a lid on it.”

  “Ever the class act, Feldman.”

  A brief silence, while everyone looked everywhere but at Liam and the chief.

  “Cockroaches then,” a subdued voice said. “Or bats, maybe?”

  Everyone involuntarily looked up at the cave’s ceiling.

  “I’ve seen year-old bear kill with less damage.”

  “Chief, could I trouble you for another body bag?”

  “Certainly, Sergeant. Garvey, would you do the honors?”

  “Sure, Chief.”

  Liam stepped carefully through the hole, and wasted only a few blasphemous moments freeing a shoelace from a snag.

  “Ought to get you some boots with Velcro fastenings, Sergeant. Easy on, easy off, and they don’t catch on anything.”

  Liam crouched over the skeleton, taking more photos from every angle. He had a one-yard tape measure attached to his key chain. He ran it out next to the skeleton and took more photos. If this was a crime scene, the photos were the only crime scene evidence he would have.

  Other than the skeleton itself. It was, as the firefighters had said, in ruins, all of the bones broken more than once and the skull broken in on both sides. Had the body been dismembered? He crouched down for a closer look. The hip, knee and elbow joints looked as if they might still have been intact when they were—What? Fell? Placed?—in the cave. They still fit together, or they would until he tried to pick them up.

  He looked up, ignoring the faces peering in at him. The bones were just this side of the common wall between the two caves. He got down on one knee and took more photos.

  He got to his feet again. The skeleton was pitiably small, about the size of the two boys who had discovered it. He didn’t know how long these bones had been here but it was a given that someone had missed the person it had been, and it would be his job to find that someone or their relatives. If this proved to be a child, he might be dealing with parents, and certainly siblings. There was nothing worse in law enforcement life.

  “Here’s the bag, Sergeant.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  They watched in silence as he collected the bones and placed them in the bag and zipped it up. He cradled it in his arms and stood up. The bag weighed next to nothing. Chief Rafferty and her crew fell back as he stepped through the hole and formed a sort of guard of honor behind him as he toiled up the trail. At the top he laid the bag down gently in the backseat of one of their vehicles, and they drove in solemn procession back into town. Rafferty gave him a ride out to the airport to pick up his truck and he transferred the remains into the bed.

  “Chief?”

  “Sergeant?”

  “Could you ask your people to keep this on the down low?”

  She looked at him. “Those bones have been there a long time, Sergeant.”

  “Still.”

  She sighed and nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “Thanks. By any chance, do you know where Erik Berglund lived?”

  “Not a clue,” she said.

  They exchanged somber nods and she left him standing there, staring at the bag. It looked almost empty.

  His phone dinged.

  Delivery complete. Departing in five.

  He looked from the screen back to the body bag.

  Can you do a quick turnaround?

  A beat.

  You have another body you need transporting?

  Well, she’d always been pretty quick.

  The rest of the skeleton. The local fire chief and her crew helped me get it out.

  You’re sure it’s human then.

  Unfortunately. I think it’s a kid.

  Be there in an hour, home again before dinnertime.

  This time he responded with a gif that had Jim Carrey as The Mask with his heart beating up out of his chest—he’d been saving it up—and she returned a winky face with a kiss.

  He found a food cart out on the Spit with excellent fish tacos, although a handmade sign warned him they were closing as soon as they’d emptied out the freezer. “We don’t serve freezer-burnt fish,” the proprietor informed him, “so we don’t close until everything we bought this year is sold.”

  In that case he went back for seconds. Satisfied in both body and spirit he pulled through the gate at the airport at the exact moment Wy landed. She taxied to the tie-down, killed the engine, and stepped down from the cabin and into his arms. She felt good there. She felt necessary.

  “It’ll be okay, Liam,” she said, snuggling into his chest. “You’ll find out who they were and restore them to their family. There can’t be anything worse than losing a kid.” She went still. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Stop it. I knew what you meant and you couldn’t be more right anyway.” He put a hand beneath her chin to raise up her face and kissed her. After a moment she relaxed into it, and as always that longing that was never very far off simmer anyway came to its usual instantaneous boil.

  She smiled against his mouth. “Hold that thought, Campbell.”

  “Text me when you’re fifteen minutes out.”

  She saluted and did a quick walk-around to make sure nothing had fallen off the plane in between the time she took off from Anchorage and landed in Blewestown while he loaded the body bag into the plane. She climbed back in the Cessna and he closed the door behind her, watching through the window as she donned the headset and picked up the checklist. He stepped back and after a few moments the engine fired and the prop began to turn. She smiled at him and he stood there watching until she had lifted off again into the sky, as always making it look graceful and effortless.

  Flying always looked so much better from the ground.

  He got in his truck and drove back into town. When he turned onto Alder the first thing he saw was Sybilla Karlsen, making her way down the hill. At least this time she had her clothes on. He sighed, put the truck into park, and got out. “Hello again, Mrs. Karlsen.” He doffed his cap.

  With the erratic memory of someone who has lived a very long time, she knew him at once. “Sergeant Campbell.” She patted her hair. “How nice to see you again. What brings you out on this beautiful day?”

  He refrained from pointing to either the post half a block up the hill from where they were standing or the cloudy sky overhead, and said, “Just taking in the sights, ma’am. Yourself?”

  For the first time she looked a little uncertain. “I was on my way home.”

  He indicated his truck with a sweep of his hand. “May I offer you a lift?”

  She fluttered a little as her cheeks went pink. “Why, how kind,
Sergeant. It’s just up the hill from here.”

  “I remember, ma’am.” He gave her a discreet boost into the passenger seat, whereupon she fluttered some more, and got back into the pickup and put it in gear. When they passed the post she said, “Oh yes, you have that nice young Sally Petroff working for you, don’t you? Such a sweet girl. Pity about the tragedy. I always felt so sorry for Kimberley.”

  Liam stopped at the stop sign at Sourdough, waited for traffic, and proceeded across the intersection. “Tragedy, ma’am?”

  “Young men can be so thoughtless, don’t you agree?”

  “I do,” Liam said. They drew up in front of Sunset Heights, to meet an attendant coming out of the door who looked relieved when she saw Sybilla. “Sybilla, you had us worried.” She smiled at Liam over Sybilla’s head. “Thank you…”

  “Sergeant Liam Campbell, Alaska State Troopers. I met Mrs. Karlsen on the road and offered her a ride.”

  Sybilla fluttered her eyelashes and deepened her dimples. “Indeed, young man, you can give me a ride anytime.”

  The attendant and Liam grinned at each other over her head, and Liam drove back down to the post. Ms. Petroff was at her station, because of course she was. “Good morning, Ms. Petroff.”

  “You gave me to understand that you wouldn’t be into the office again until Monday, sir.”

  It felt like a reprimand. Manfully, Liam shrugged it off. “What do you know of Erik Berglund, Ms. Petroff?”

  There was an almost infinitesimal pause. “The archeologist, sir?”

  He had the baseless feeling that she was buying time. He couldn’t imagine why and dismissed the suspicion. “Yes.”

  She folded her hands on the desk, and then refolded them. “He was born in Kapilat. He lost both his parents when their crabber went down in the Bering. I believe he was eighteen at the time. He went Outside to school, after which he worked overseas for UNESCO at various archeological sites. This year he left UNESCO and returned home to the Bay, where he works at an archeological site he discovered.”

  “You can make a living at that?”

  “It is my understanding that archeologists and their projects subsist mainly on grants. It is why most of them have day jobs as teachers.”

  “Did Berglund?”

  She shook her head. “Not here in Blewestown, although there was talk that he had been offered a position on the Chungasqak Bay Campus.”