by Marc Cameron
His feet were enclosed in the waterproof material and would eventually go into a pair of rock boots, essentially black high-top sneakers. He stretched the silicon rubber seals over his head and wrists, but left the neoprene hood off until just before he actually got into the water.
Benjamin stuck his head around the corner of the Tahoe. “I forgot to tell you. I have an external catheter for you here if you want it.”
Cutter pulled the zipper up across his chest. “Not sure I like the sound of that.”
The trooper laughed. “It’s like an extra strong condom that connects to the P-valve inside your thigh. “You can’t piss in a dry suit like you can in a neoprene.” He gave a conspiratorial nod. “Not that you would ever pee in your wet suit . . . Believe me, it’s worth rolling the suit back down to put this thing on so you can just let it flow when we’re at depth.” He handed Cutter a piece of tan rubber that looked like one of the thumb covers accountants wore when they worked with reams of paper.
“How does it stay on?”
“Glue,” the trooper said.
Cutter grimaced. “Adventures in diving,” he said, but rolled down the suit anyway.
* * *
Cutter’s first experience scuba diving was when he was thirteen years old. He’d logged hundreds of dives since in Florida, but his only dry suit time had been with his second wife, diving for abalone in California. His wife at the time had absolutely hated it, and he’d spent most of the afternoon swimming through the kelp forests, praying a shark would eat him so he wouldn’t have to surface and deal with the fuming woman.
Sam Benjamin looked to be a more than capable diver. The gear was neat and well-kept, allowing Cutter to feel streamlined. Grumpy had many rules for general character and behavior, but he piled on to the Do It Right cave diver’s mantra of never diving with a “stroke”—basically anyone who looked like they didn’t know what they were doing. It sounded glib, but there was something to be said about a diver who dove with gear that was in place and squared away. A lot could go wrong sixty feet down, and you couldn’t just pop back to the surface if it did.
Trooper Benjamin had quizzed the addled boys who’d discovered the body, and then studied tides and nautical charts to make an educated guess of where to begin the search. If they were dealing with a serial killer, the bay might very well be a graveyard of discarded bodies, but that only made a systematic search all the more important.
Cutter checked the pressure in his tank and shrugged on the buoyancy control vest. He walked to the water’s edge where he donned black jet fins over the rock boots.
The divers held on to the sides of an aluminum skiff while Officer Simeon towed them out to the dive site. He dropped a five-gallon plastic bucket filled with concrete over the side, playing out a length of heavy line, and clipping the surface end to a bright orange buoy when the bucket hit bottom. Fontaine waited on the bank, looking envious. Cutter was sure he’d have a request for dive school on his desk the moment she got back into the office. He gave her an okay sign, making an O with his thumb and forefinger, and then turned to give the trooper a nod. The waves had a little chop, but the cove was protected and it was nothing the boat couldn’t handle. The divers oriented themselves with the bank and the orange buoy, checked their watches, and took one last look at their air pressure before pressing the valve on their BCs to descend into the darkness.
The two men kicked downward, trailing strings of silver bubbles through shafts of muted green light. Cutter listened to the on and off click of his regulator as he took slow, even breaths. He pinched his nose every few feet, feeling his ears clear with a telltale squeal as the pressure built at depth. He followed Benjamin down to the submerged five-gallon bucket that lay at sixty feet. Broad blades of kelp rose up here and there, waving in the tidal current—but the bottom was otherwise barren of plant life. The beam of Cutter’s dive light passed over a halibut the size and thickness of a trash can lid gliding across the bottom hunting for food. He was accustomed to flounder. Both fish had eyes that migrated around to one side of a flat body, but this halibut looked like a flounder on steroids.
The trooper clipped a yellow line to a ring on the lip of the bucket, then swam away a distance of approximately twenty meters. Taking the line in his left hand, he played the wrist-mounted light back and forth with his right. Cutter held the trooper’s tank strap with his left hand and played his own light back and forth with his right. Both accomplished divers, they propelled themselves forward with gentle kicks, a scant three feet off the bottom—searching without stirring up a cloud of sediment.
The attached line wrapped around the bucket as they swam, decreasing the scope of their search by a few feet on each complete revolution. It was slow but efficient and the trooper’s light played across a galvanized anchor less than fifteen minutes into the dive. Benjamin filled a cylindrical orange tube with air from his regulator and deployed this surface-marker buoy on a spool of line to mark the spot.
Another twenty minutes yielded nothing else and the trooper called an end to the dive, pointing upward with his thumb. Trooper Benjamin retrieved the anchor and both men kicked to the surface water.
Cutter pushed a button to inflate his buoyancy control vest, and then slipped the mask down so it hung around his neck. A mask on top of the head looked good in the movies, but was a sign of distress that accomplished divers avoided. They’d been at sixty feet long enough to require a rest interval before going down again in order to off-gas the buildup of nitrogen in their blood.
“A short break?” Cutter asked as they worked together to lift the anchor over the side of Officer Simeon’s boat.
The trooper wiped a hand across his face. “If there’s another body down there,” he said, “it’s not near this one. I say we focus on Millie and see what we can learn from what we have.”
The men opted to swim to shore on the surface rather than try to wallow up the flimsy boarding ladder Simeon hung over the side of the skiff. Cutter removed his black jet fins at the water’s edge and carried them up the gravel where Fontaine stood waiting with Trooper Allen.
“This diver thing is a good look on you, boss,” Fontaine said, giving him an up and down once-over. “Can you believe my ancestors are from the South Pacific Islands and I don’t know how to dive?”
Simeon dragged the skiff up on the beach. Jedi-braid saw him and began to beat his head against the side window of the patrol car. Simeon ignored him.
“Hey, Will,” the trooper yelled as he sloshed up from the water, fin straps over his forearm.
“Afternoon, Sam.” A slender man standing beside the state trooper’s pickup gave a little wave, his hand covered in a latex glove. He wore faded jeans and a buffalo plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to midforearm. A blue Seattle Seahawks ball cap was pushed back to reveal straw-colored hair. Millie Burkett lay on the tailgate of the pickup in two body bags, one inside the other so that no evidence was lost. The bags were partially unzipped to reveal her head and shoulders.
“The medical examiner already got here from Ketchikan?” Cutter said.
“Don’t laugh,” Benjamin said. “But that’s my dentist.”
Cutter looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “Your dentist?”
“Yep.” The trooper gave a long sigh. “Don’t tell Sergeant Yates. He’d crap angry little bricks if he found out what I do on a daily basis just to get the job done. We do what we have to out here. ABI investigators won’t even try to make it out of Ketchikan today with this storm blowing in off the Pacific.”
“But journalists did,” Fontaine said.
“I know, right?” Trooper Allen said. “News won’t keep. Dead bodies will still be dead tomorrow.”
“Anyway,” Benjamin said. “Doc Gelman’s got enough medical training he can take a cursory look. It helps me move forward without screwing anything up. I’ll be able to put the body in a silver bullet and send her back to Anchorage for a full autopsy and they’ll be none the wiser.”
A silver bullet was the aluminum coffin used to transport bodies on aircraft, and a mainstay in rural Alaska. Cutter had seen far too many during his time in Afghanistan.
“Sam,” Dr. Gelman said, leaning over Millie Burkett’s head to snap close-up photos with his cell phone. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Trooper Benjamin motioned Cutter and Fontaine to follow, but a commotion behind the crime-scene tape drew their attention away from Gelman’s discovery at the body.
The crowd of onlookers parted as someone shoved to the rear of the trooper pickup.
“Is that her? Is that my baby girl?”
“Gerald Burkett,” Fontaine said under her breath.
Trooper Benjamin groaned and gave her a sideways glance. “I was hoping we could avoid this.”
The trooper stepped forward, meeting Burkett just as he reached the fluttering yellow tape. “I need you to stay back,” he said.
Burkett’s eyes were bloodshot and swollen. The smell of alcohol and body odor blew in ahead of him on the breeze. “I got the right to see her,” he bellowed.
“No, Gerald, you don’t,” Benjamin said, keeping his voice low and consoling. “Not yet. This is awful. I get that. But you have to stay back there and take care of Lin.”
Lin Burkett, tall and slender like her daughter, grabbed her husband by the shoulder. “Let ’em do their job.” She teetered on her feet, nearly falling in the process. She’d been drinking as well. But who could blame her?
Gerald Burkett stood at the crime-scene tape and seethed. He leaned against the side of the pickup for support. His wife, in turn, leaned on him, still clutching the sleeve of his oil-stained hoodie. Cutter and Benjamin returned to the body while Fontaine and Simeon waited with the Burketts, attempting the impossible in trying to console the grieving parents.
Still in his dry suit, Cutter opened the zipper across his chest, venting some of the heat that had built up as soon as he’d exited the water. Even in the cool air of an approaching storm he was already sweating heavily inside the airtight suit. He thought about stepping around the Tahoe and changing clothes—even if only to retrieve his pistols—but decided that could wait until he saw what the dentist had found so interesting.
He happened to glance up, past the crowd, to see a lone man standing in the shadows at the edge of the tree line. Concentrating in an effort to keep from staring, Cutter’s hand dropped reflexively to his side, searching for the gun that was still in the truck. His cuffs were already in use on the reporter. Watching the man with the corner of his eye, he gave the trooper a tap on the elbow.
“Don’t look up,” he said, “but I just got an eyeball on Hayden Starnes.”
CHAPTER 30
ARLISS CUTTER HAD CHASED ENOUGH OUTLAWS OVER THE COURSE of his career to learn that human beings were particularly attuned to the white space around another person’s eye. It was the reason lecherous guys wore sunglasses in the gym. Even from hundreds of feet away it was a simple matter to tell if you were the object of another person’s focus. If that person happened to be a six-foot-three deputy US marshal, the impulse to flee kicked in pretty quickly.
And flee Hayden Starnes did. With any pretense of surprise blown, Cutter pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers to find his quarry was no longer in sight. He didn’t slow down though, yelling as he ran, ordering Starnes to stop. He had no real notion that the tactic would actually stop the fugitive in his tracks. In fact, the contrary was true. Cutter wanted him to speed up, to expend his energy and run without thinking.
Cutter darted left when he reached the trees, following a gouge in the mossy earth where Starnes had turned to get away, scrambling over a decaying log as big around as an oil drum. Cutter vaulted over the log, tearing a gash in the thousand-dollar dry suit, and jumping headlong into the shadowy tangle of roots and shrubs and decay. The lightweight rock shoes offered surprisingly good traction, but the dry suit was suffocating. Cutter could feel his body temperature rising with each bounding step. Thankfully, he had a longer stride than Starnes and, though he didn’t have a visual, felt certain he was closing the gap. There was a better than average chance that Starnes had some kind of weapon. Cutter had no idea how far behind him Fontaine and the others were, but heard the crash of brush and the telltale wheeze of other runners, so he was confident they were back there somewhere.
Cutter identified himself as a US marshal again, shouting for Starnes to stop. Grumpy had taught him that most human beings would generally take the same route between two points. “Similar flow” he called it. Some trackers knew it as taking the “natural line of drift.” Whatever you called it, the phenomenon became more pronounced when a quarry was given no time to think. Cutter could probably have run through the woods with his eyes shut and ended up within feet of where Hayden Starnes ran out of steam. But that wouldn’t keep him from getting shot if Starnes was armed.
Cutter pulled up when he reached a clearing, skidding to a stop on the decaying forest floor. The palpable scent of fear hung heavy in the air. That was good. It meant Starnes wasn’t thinking clearly.
Cutter opened the zipper across his chest another few inches, then reached inside to do the same on the zipper of the quilted undergarment. Still too hot, he tugged at the latex collar that fit tight around his neck, pulling at the seal until it opened like a Ziploc bag, and tore it from the rest of the suit. Moist, superheated air bellowed out through the larger opening.
A branch snapped in the stillness to his left, sending Cutter running again, ducking under and around widow-maker logs that leaned like enormous deadfall traps against living trees. A chunk of moss, kicked loose by a passing foot, caught his attention as he rounded a granite boulder the size of a small car.
A low whooshing sound greeted him the moment he stepped past. He ducked a fraction of a second too late and caught the branch in Hayden Starnes’s hands straight across the chest. It had surely been meant for his face, but Starnes was shorter, and was standing in a hollow, making him shorter still and foiling his aim.
Inside the swing now, Cutter pressed forward rather than attempting to block the blow. He drove Starnes back, pushing him against the trunk of a thick Sitka spruce. Cutter shoved the offending club out of the way and followed up with an openhanded slap against the other man’s ear. He brought his elbow back across, smashing Starnes in the nose. The outlaw slumped, the back of his jacket snagged on the tree. Cutter rained a flurry of blows to his ribs and face. Starnes threw his arms, screaming, blood pouring from his nose. Nearly blind with rage at the thought of Millie Burkett’s lifeless body, Cutter struck the rough bark of the spruce almost as much as he hit Starnes. His knuckles were raw and bloody by the time Fontaine and the trooper ran up and dragged him away.
“Help me!” Starnes screamed. “This crazy son of a bitch is trying to murder me!”
Cutter was gratified to hear the nasal drone from the elbow he’d given the man. He noticed for the first time that Starnes was missing the thumb and forefinger on his right hand. That little bit of information wasn’t in the warrant file. The skin was healed but still pink, leading Cutter to believe the wound was relatively new.
Starnes put on his tough-guy face once he was safely handcuffed and there were enough witnesses present to keep Cutter from jumping on him again. “You all saw him,” he said. “I want to file charges.”
Cutter bent over, wheezing, resting his hands on his knees. He looked up at Starnes. “Come to admire your work?”
“My work?” Starnes said. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means, smartass,” Fontaine said, “that murderers often come back to the scene of the crime to gawk at what they did.”
“These guys are out of their minds,” Starnes said, looking at the trooper. “You know me. I work for FISHWIVES!”
“That’s right,” the trooper said. “You do. When’s the last time you saw Carmen and Greg?”
Starnes looked up, sneering. “What the hell are you talking about? And what did
he mean by admire my work? I don’t even know who it is you pulled out of the water.”
“We’ll see about that, Hayden,” Cutter said.
Starnes deflated at the use of his real name.
A raindrop hit Cutter directly on the top of the head. Another followed, blown through the thick forest canopy on a fierce wind. The storm had finally arrived.
“Come on,” Benjamin said, hooking a thumb back toward the road. “We can sort this out back at the trooper post. I want to make sure and keep Millie’s body out of this rain.”
Starnes’s head snapped around at the name. “Millie?” he said. “Millie Burkett’s the one who’s dead?”
“That’s right, Einstein,” Fontaine said.
“Shit!” Starnes whined. The rain fell harder now, and water dripped off the end of his nose. “With my background . . . nobody’s gonna believe I didn’t have something to do with this. . . .”
“You got that right,” Cutter said, grabbing him by the arm to lead him back the way they’d come.
Starnes was on the verge of weeping by the time they’d gone a dozen steps. “Can we take off these cuffs?”
“Nope,” Cutter said.
“But I can’t hold myself up. I’m liable fall and break something.”
“Fancy that,” Cutter said.
CHAPTER 31
INCESSANT RAIN BATTERED THE ROOF OF THE ALASKA STATE TROOPERS post like a kid beating on a metal trash can.
Trooper Allen had gone to check on a three-vehicle accident north of Klawock—everyday law enforcement duties didn’t stop because there had been a murder. Lola accompanied Officer Simeon and Doctor Gelman to take Millie Burkett’s body to the human-sized cooler in the locked storage room at the back of the trooper post. It would remain there until the weather cleared enough to put the silver bullet on a flight back to Anchorage.
Hayden Starnes had wailed all the way from Wailing Rock Cove, not stopping until Benjamin got him settled in the interview room. Even now, his chest heaved periodically, post tantrum. Trooper Benjamin sat on one side of the metal table with his notebook open. On the other side, Starnes was chained to an eyebolt in the floor and his hands cuffed in front of him. The prisoner slumped in a forlorn posture, wads of TP stuck up both nostrils.
