So sure of death (14 page)

Frank looked frightened. He said nothing.

McLynn hesitated.

“That's a storyknife, Wy said from behind Liam.

He'd known she was there and didn't jump, but Prince and McLynn did. “What's a storyknife?

Too interested in the artifact to maintain her attitude of frozen fury, she took the knife and held it up. “I've got one of these. Mine's made of ivory. It's much smaller, though. This is beautiful. Look at the carving on the hilt. And it's old, too. She lowered the knife and looked at Prince. “It's a toy used by young Yupik girls. They take their younger siblings down to the riverbank and carve stories into the sand. Teaching stories, mostly, about kids who disobey their parents and are subsequently killed and eaten by monsters.

Prince chuckled. “That'll teach 'em, all right. She winced and put a hand to her head.

“I'm surprised to see one here, though, Wy said. “I thought storyknifing was a custom practiced only on the Delta. North of the Kuskokwim Mountains, anyway.

McLynn came forward and nipped the storyknife out of her hands. “Yes, well, that's all very well, but it is an important part of my research and my paper

“That's the knife we saw sticking out of Nelson's mouth when we found the body, Prince said.

“I thought it might be, Liam said, and took the knife from McLynn. He looked at Frank.

“I didn't do it! Frank said frantically. “I found the sack! It was laying on the ground!

“Right next to the rifle, I bet, Liam said.

Frank didn't even hear him. “I didn't take nothing! I didn't shoot anybody! I didn't kill nobody! I didn't do anything! I want a lawyer!

There were six people, one of them dead, and two 2-seater planes, not to mention a pilot with a bump on her head. “Can you fly? Liam asked Prince.

She managed a nod, although it looked painful.

“No shit, now, Prince, he said sternly. “Are you fit to fly?

“Yeah, no shit, Wy said, the owner of the plane Prince was about to strap on.

“I can fly, Prince said shortly.

Wy surveyed her with a narrow stare. Prince met it without flinching. “All right, Wy said at last. She really had no other option, not if she wanted the Cub back at its tiedown that evening, and she knew it. She had an early flight the next morning, too, into a strip like this one that the Cessna was too heavy for, and she wasn't sure how many times the dentist from Anchorage was going to let her borrow the other Cub. “What about you? she said, staring fixedly at a point somewhere above Liam's right shoulder. “We're flying full. How do you get back?

The afternoon sun glinted off the rooftops of the Air Force base, ten miles to the east, and Liam, unwillingly, was put forcibly in mind of Moses' announcement of Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell's arrival in Newenham, and his request to see his only son and heir. It was a reunion Liam would just as soon take place in private. “You take McLynn back. Prince will take the suspect and the body. To Prince he said, “Take Frank here to the local lockup. Get Wy to show you where. Take the body to Alaska Airlines. Get it out to Anchorage on the next jet. I'll call the M.E. Which crusty old bastard would have a few pithy things to say on the subject of filling up his morgue. “I'll take the four-wheeler over to the base and hitch a ride in from there.

“Oh. Wy hesitated. He was surprised to see a flush rise into her cheeks. “I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you, she said lamely. “Your father

“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.