Stabenow, Dana - Liam Campbell 02 - So Sure Of Death

by So Sure Of Death(lit)

  “You've seen him? The words snapped out before he could stop them.

  She nodded. “At Bill's, when I took Prince to find Professor McLynn. He was looking for you.

  “I heard.

  “Oh, she said again. “He told me to tell you he was here, because you didn't like surprises.

  “He was right. About that, if about nothing else.

  Wy opened her mouth, looked at Prince and McLynn, and closed it again. “Come on, Professor, she told McLynn. “Let's get back to town.

  “I need to stay here, he said obstinately. “Somebody has to guard the dig.

  Liam sighed, and said, gently but firmly, “You need that shoulder looked at, sir, and as I said before, this is now a crime scene. I have to take some pictures, draw some sketches, do an inventory. You can come back tomorrow.

  “You're not staying here overnight, are you? McLynn demanded. Liam shook his head. “Who's to stop some other cretina pointing finger accused Frank Petla, who cringed away from it“from coming in and trashing the place? I have weeks of work invested here, Officer, and months, hell, years of research! I have a paper to finish for delivery before the American Archeological Society that will open up an entirely new line of inquiry into the migratory patterns of the indigenous

  Liam said in a mild voice, “Your work will have to wait at least a day, sir. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

  Something in that mild tone convinced McLynn to shut up, but he glared impartially at everyone as he was assisted into the back seat of the borrowed Cub. With less care, Liam and Prince jammed Frank Petla into the back of Wy's Cub. Nelson's body had been bagged and stowed beneath Frank's seat. Frank looked down at the plastic-covered head lying beneath his feet and whimpered a little. Everyone ignored him.

  Five minutes later Wy was in the air. She banked and made a wide circle around the bluff, watching Prince take off and dropping in directly behind her, her nose on Prince's six like a sheep dog herding one of its flock back to the barn.

  Liam fetched camera and sketch pad from his crime scene kit. He wasn't going to knock himself out; he had a prime suspect in the bag, not to mention two superb witnesses to two additional assaults, one a distinguished scholar Liam assumed was a highly respected member of his field, no matter how much the pompous little fart annoyed him personally, and the other, glory of glories, an Alaska state trooper. Juries had a fondness for hard evidence, though, and he set about collecting some for those twelve good and true men and women.

  He started in the service tent. One of the tables had been knocked completely over, a second leaned up against a third. Possibly where Prince had fallen when Petla hit her. She could have crawled outside afterward.

  He righted the table. Scattered on the floor he found several items Petla had missed. There was a seal-oil lamp fashioned from a hollow stone. A tiny ivory otter, cracked and yellow with age and grimed with dirt, had rolled beneath one of the cots. Caught in the fold of fabric between tent wall and tent floor, he found a single walrus tusk, broken off halfway up its ivory length, which must have given the bull one hell of a toothache. It looked suspiciously white, and suspiciously like it was fresh off the walrus. It reminded him of the walrus head on Larsgaard's kitchen wall.Asveq.

  There were walrus in the bay, hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, hauling out in the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 provided for their complete and total protection from any and all human predation, until such time as they could be harvested in concert with an “optimum sustainable population keeping in mind the carrying capacity of the habitat. When a walrus got tangled up in a net chasing the same school of reds a fisherman was after, the fisherman in question generally decided that the habitat was carrying its full load of walrus and wouldn't miss one. A lot of walrus washed up on the Bay's beaches, dead of lead poisoning. Most of them had no heads, a little-knownlittle-known in scientific circles, that isside effect of lead poisoning.

  The Yupik, of course, had been harvesting walrus for the last ten thousand years, eating the flesh, making clothes and snowshoes and sled runners and water bottles and boat hulls from the skin and carving the tusks into masks and dolls and totems of animal figures, like the otter Liam had found.

  And storyknives.

  Liam was a little hazy on the rules of engagement regarding walrus tusks. Only Alaska Natives could take them, he thought, but they could be sold to non-Natives. Could they be sold simply as a tusk, or a pair of tusks, or did they have to be made into something? He couldn't remember. Charlene Taylor, the fish and game trooper for the district, would know. He'd ask her sometime.

  He set the fragment of tusk on the table. Next to one of the cots a Blazo box did duty as nightstand, bookshelf and clothes drawer. One of the books stacked on it was a companion publication to a cultural exhibit, published five years before by the University of Alaska Department of Anthropology. The prologue thanked McLynn for contributing. He leafed through it, stopping when he came to a chapter headed “Aboriginal Life in South-western Alaska.

  There were illustrations of various artifacts, including bent-wood visors, seal-gut tunics, wooden breastplates, spirit masks wonderfully carved and decorated with beads, feathers and shells, and ivory figurines representing salmon, otters, seals, whales. It was illustrative of a rich and varied culture, and deeply interesting to Liam, who as a resident of southwest Alaska for less than three months was a stranger in the strangest land he had ever visited.

  He turned the page and halted. The caption read, “Storyknife, and the illustration showed something eerily similar to the ivory knife that had been used to murder Don Nelson. The one in the book was more slender in form, more graceful in curve, with a narrower blade and a softer point, but still the two were recognizable as serving the same purpose. Liam's eyes dropped to the text. The knife in the book, unlike the murder weapon, had been carved of ivory, although the text indicated that they could be carved of bone, wood or antler as well. Tradition held that storyknives were made by uncles for nieces. There wasn't all that much to be known about storyknives, he gathered, as it was a custom that had died out about the same time contact had been made with the first Russian explorers. The curse of a culture with no written language.

  He closed the book and looked at the map of Alaska stuck to the near wall of the tent with duct tape. Bristol Bay was south and east of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, but not so far and not so thin of rivers that the Delta Yupik couldn't have wandered into the Bay. They must have come, and brought their storyknives with them. The method of Don Nelson's murder was all Liam needed for proof.

  He opened the book again and saw the owner's name inside the cover. Don Nelson, a street address, Seattle. If found, return postage guaranteed. He closed the book again. If he wasn't mistaken in his Seattle geography, that address was north of the University of Washington. Nelson, who looked young enough to be a graduate student, might have been enrolled at U-Dub. Maybe a call would put Liam in touch with his next of kin.

  Not a task he was looking forward to, that he ever looked forward to, the part of the job that any law enforcement officer dreaded. He put the book back and bumped the Blazo box in the process. A small spiral notebook with a bright blue cover dropped from the folds of a white Gap Beefy T-shirt, size medium. He opened it and read a few entries in a big, looping hand.

  June 28

  Found an otter charm, probably off a visor. Man, did the old folks know how to carve! There is more art in an Aleut visor than there is in a '57 Chevy. Says a lot about a people when they could make something so necessary and so functional so beautiful as well.

  July 1

  A family from Icky came down the river today in skiffs. Looked like they were going fishing. Said they were descendants of the people who lived on this bluff. Lynny pissed off the father when he said this was now Park Service land and they were trespassing. Daughter sure was pretty. Tried to talk to her but Mom wasn't having any. Maybe I'll look her up, if Lynny ever
gives me any time off. Hasn't happened yet.

  July 6

  Uncovered a storyknife today. Made of bone, old enough for the carving to be worn smooth. Lynny's all torqued because it's too far east.

  July 9

  There's a dump site of some kind a mile east from camp. Lynny's not interested in anything but what we can find here. Which means what he can find to support his thesis. Academics.

  The one-word condemnation made Liam smile. He'd been to graduate school himself. The truth was that Nelson, if he was a graduate student, would eventually have evolved into an academic himself, scrambling to defend his own thesis from the attacks of competitors. The fight for an original thesis was bellicose and bloody, especially since the advent of offset printing. If you wanted tenure, you had to publish. If you wanted to publish, you needed a thesis topic sexy enough to satisfy your committee and attract a publisher. Liam had suffered through his share of required texts, and his opinion was that academic writers who could get through a hundred thousand words without once using the phrase “As we shall see were deserving of the Nobel Prize in literature, not to mention the grateful adulation of advanced students everywhere. But then, not everyone could be Barbara Tuchman. Liam was still mad at her for dying.

  He flipped to the last page of the journal, which was dated the previous Saturday.

  July 25

  Lynny went to town yesterday, like always. He told me to work on three-C but I poked around the dump site instead. Hate to admit it but I think it's modern. Feeling sick. Couldn't eat. Don't know how I could have picked up a bug out here. Lynny must have brought one back from town.

  Poor Nelson. The sick and the dead, he thought irrepressibly. He chastised himself for the irreverence, and pocketed the journal to read through completely later. Frank Petla had seemed familiar with the village site and the surrounding area; perhaps he'd made a habit of dropping in to see what he could scrounge in the way of marketable artifacts. Perhaps that habit had been witnessed by Don Nelson. Perhaps Nelson had noted it down in his journal. The district prosecutor, a short, bellicose redhead of Irish descent who advocated the return of the death penalty, would like that. The jury would positively love it.

  He picked through the rest of the detritus, not finding much. There were a lot of tools, and six large three-ring binders labeled “Costumes, “Weapons, “Utensils, “Hunting, “Crafts, “ Religion. They were filled with a cramped, deliberate handwriting totally unlike Nelson's sprawling penmanship, by which Liam deduced that they were McLynn's notebooks. They included penciled drawings of various artifacts of such precision and delicacy that Liam reluctantly revised his opinion of McLynn's talents up a notch.

  There wasn't much else. Some clothes that smelled as if they hadn't been washed in weeks, some recreational reading featuring such diverse characters as Emma Woodhouse, Richard Sharpe and Job Napoleon Salk. There was a Walkman with a dozen tapes, including the Beastie Boys, Loreena McKennitt, Fastball and theTitanicsoundtrack. Liam was not impressed, but then under Bill's tutelage he was learning to appreciate Jimmy Buffett. Plowing straight ahead come what may. That's me, Liam thought, the cowboy in the jungle.

  He poked around some more, but there wasn't much else to find. He was reluctant to leave, though, and not just because Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell was waiting for him at the other end. Liam had never been on the site of an archaeological dig before and he admitted to some curiosity. All the neat little squares with all their neat little layers being revealed one at a time. There were half a dozen brushes of various sizes and kinds of bristles lying around; Liam realized that the brushes must be what were used to reveal the next layer down, and marveled at the patience the science required. It was probably enormously taxing physically as well: long hours of crouching over a specific section of dirt, moving the bristles patiently back and forth, back and forth. There was a square sieve made of wire mesh in a wooden frame; they must strain the dirt before they tossed it so they didn't miss any pieces, however tiny. Kind of like casework, Liam thought. Only in casework he was the sieve.

  It was by now late afternoon, and the sun still beat on the outside of the tent, raising the interior temperature to what felt like ninety degrees. Flies buzzed over the patch of dried blood, but they didn't sound very enthusiastic about it. During the excavation process the flaps would probably have to remain closed to keep the bugs out, so there would be little or no circulation. Liam preferred a job that kept him outside much of the time, even if it meant that he must occasionally suffer the slings and arrows not to mention the knives and bulletsof outrageous citizenry. But he'd take fresh air with a bullet over crouching in an old grave in a closed tent any day.

  He went back outside and drew in a breath of that fresh air. It tasted good. It was a beautiful view, too, he thought, without knowing it joining Wy in her admiration of the fall of ground from in front of the bluff to the river below, the scattering of glittering lakes and streams, the distant surface of the bay gleaming blue in the sun. Yes, the old ones had known what they were doing when they built here. A defensible position, an accessible escape route, food, water and a vista that went on forever. He wondered what they had thought about the edge of the ocean where it vanished over the horizon. Did they fear it? Yearn after it? Was it where they ascended to heaven? Was it where they placed their gods' homes?

  He turned and looked at the dig, the two tents, walls flapping in the afternoon breeze. The prospect seemed somehow forlorn, almost lonely, and a fragment of verse from his favorite poet came to his mind, describing another forsaken graveyard nobody

  an class="textStyle2"gt;visited. So sure of death was this place, too, from which living men shrank, as if denying a place of death denied your own. Liam knew better.

  So did Don Nelson, now.

  NINE

  A mile from the dig he found the dump Nelson had referred to in his journal and, glad to delay the inevitable, stopped the fourwheeler. It was a mound of dirt fifty feet across, and some of it had been there long enough for the grass to sprout. There was even some Alaska cotton, white tufted blooms waving in the breeze, and some dwarf fireweed, although those two hardy plants would probably sprout before the lava cooled off after a volcanic eruption. Over the other, fresher dirt, there were marks of some tracked vehicle, a small bulldozer maybe, or a backhoe. Liam walked all the way around the mound, and found a hole dug in the far side, away from the dig. He wondered if Don Nelson had been digging there. He kicked at the sides of the hole, and the clods came away easily, not yet hardened into place by the passage of time. He didn't see anything but dirt and more dirt, so he climbed back on the four-wheeler.

  It took over an hour to get to the Air Force base, and by the end of the journey Liam was heartily sick of trying to keep the four-wheeler upright. There was nothing intrinsically unstable in the designhandlebars, a seat and a freight rack equally balanced over four wheelsbut for some reason it threw his balance off. The only time he'd been on the direct path to the base was when he'd been crossing it, and he'd had to get out and push his way through the mud three times, which didn't improve his frame of mind. The knowledge that he was going to face his father for the first time in over three years with a stained uniform and muddy footgear soured his mood even further.

  He knew enough to go around the runway, not across it, but they were waiting for him anyway, a Jeep with a couple of M.P.'s in white helmets sitting in front, identical quizzical expressions on their very young faces. Military men always wore the same mustaches: a thin fringe of hair that never quite seemed to fill in. Theirs were brown and blond, and only served to make them look even younger and more government-issue than they already were.

  Liam said who he was and what he wanted, and the driver slammed the Jeep in gear and made a wide, flamboyant circle around Liam to lead the way. Liam fell in behind, the fourwheeler marginally more stable now that he was on pavement.

  He'd been born on an Air Force base in Germany, and he'd spent most of his formative years on Elmen
dorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Here were the same regulation buildings lined up at the same regulation angles, the bunkhouses for the enlisted men, the shops and hangars lining the runways, the command and administrative offices, always the biggest buildings on any base. Everything was made of the same material, too, siding and shingles covered with regulation gray paint, all purchased in bulk by the Department of Defense from the lowest bidder, who was usually one of the larger contributors to reelection campaigns of members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Squares of regulation-height grass fronted the living quarters and the administration building, and someone had taken the time to comb the banks of the Nushagak River for regulation-size rocks, paint them a regulation white and line them up around the regulated squares of lawn. The benevolent old sun bathed everything in deceptively mellow light, miles of gleaming black tarmac, the runnels of the corrugated tin roofs, the surface of the great river and the Bay beyond.

  That selfsame sun positively glittered off the metal wings of the aircraft parked on both sides of the strip, outlining the silver fuselage of the jets, the camouflage patterns of the Hercs and the bright orange paint jobs of the AirSea Rescue units with almost painful clarity. Heavy equipment was lined up like soldiers next to a garage, a tractor with a big silver blade, a road grader with an even bigger blade, a dump truck, a front-end loader, a back-hoe and some others Liam didn't recognize. He'd bet the Air Force base's taxiways were clear of snow before the runway in Newenham was.

  Liam followed the Jeep along a regulation route and pulled in next to them in front of the regulation Base Officers' Quarters, which naturally had the largest lawn, the nicest view and was the farthest away from those noisy runways. The M.P.'s got out, straightened their regulation uniforms and trod the regulation steps. The second waited for him, regulation door held open.