SEVENTEEN

He couldn’t believe she’d talked him back into the plane.

He couldn’t believe the plane had actually made it back into the air. He couldn’t believe it had actually managed to stay in the air over the river to Newenham. Most of all, he couldn’t believe it had brought them safely back to earth, rolling out down the length of the one runway the Mad Trapper Memorial Airport boasted with the engine vibrating like a three-legged washing machine.

He especially couldn’t believe it when she kicked an abrupt right rudder and they swung off the runway before they’d reached what he would have considered a safe taxi speed. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I don’t want anyone to see us. I got enough problems without filling out forms in quintuplicate for the goddamn FAA.”

He bit his tongue as they narrowly missed a Beaver tied down at the end of a row of small planes, swung in behind it and taxied briskly down to Wy’s shed.

When she killed the engine he sat there for a moment, staring at the sign nailed to the top of the shed.NUSHUGAK AIR TAXI SERVICE, and Wy’s phone number, beneath which new paint added in smaller letters,WWW.NUAIRTAXI.COM. He felt he’d never really looked at it before, noticed the brightness of the colors, even in the dark, the inventiveness in the arrangement of the words, the sheer artistry in the lettering.

In fact the whole night felt pretty damn good to him. He stretched out his legs and touched the rudder pedals. “What do these do again?”

“They push the rudder back and forth. Liam, don’t-”

“And what does the rudder do, exactly?”

“The force of the wind against the rudder pushes the plane in the direction you want it to go,” she said, dumbing it down for her audience.

“You’re so cute when you’re playing teacher.” He grabbed Wy and kissed her, hard. Since she was halfway out of her harness, this proved awkward, but doable.

“Whew!” she said, emerging. “What was that for?”

“General principles,” he said, and grabbed her again.

She squirmed. “We’ve got a perfectly good bed at home.”

“It’s a twin.”

“It’s a bed.”

“I’ve always wanted to lay you in a plane.”

“Don’t con me, Campbell; the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do in a plane is get out of it.”

He was fumbling at the buttons on her shirt. “We’re on the ground. Against all odds, against any realistic expectation, we were shot out of the sky and we made it home alive and in one piece. Gimme.”

She giggled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her giggle, if ever. They were always so everlastingly serious about everything. “I wanna have some fun,” he said. “I want you to have some fun. Come on, Wy.” There wasn’t a lot of room and the damn yoke kept getting in the way. He finally found the lever that pushed the seat back. It gave suddenly and his seat slid back with a bang. She was half-on and half-off his lap, half-dressed and half-not, and she was laughing so hard that she was no help at all.

“Shit.” He rested his forehead on hers. “What am I going to do with this?”

“No point in wasting it,” she said. In some fashion best known to pilots she managed to eel backward down into the rudder well, and he forgot the world.

“Oh, yeah,” he said lazily, a little later. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll do. I owe you.”

She snickered, buttoning her shirt up cockeyed. “You’ll pay, Campbell. Oh, yeah, you’ll pay. Come on, let’s get out of this bucket and go home.”

“I’ve got to check in,” he said.

“Why?” She almost wailed it.

He stepped from the Cessna and snatched her up into a comprehensive embrace. “Because it’s what I do. Come on.”

They drove to the post in the Blazer, and if the state of Alaska had been peering in the windows it would have been shocked at the behavior going on in the front seat of this vehicle, purchased and maintained for the purpose of enforcing the law and apprehending the violators thereof. Once Liam pulled off and for a few breathless moments Wy feared that they were going to do something Liam could arrest them for. A little farther down the road he drove into the ditch, churned through the snow, uprooted a birch and a couple of alders, and skidded back up on the road. “Keep your hands to yourself next time,” he said severely.

The post, not surprisingly, was empty, since it was nearly four o’clock. “Five minutes,” Liam said, giving Wy a brief, fierce kiss.

Inside, he found Prince’s notes in the computer and scrolled through them. The stuff on Karen was interesting. Mad about something in the will, was she? Something Betsy and Jerry and Stan Jr. got that she wanted? Something even loser Jerry noticed she wanted? Badly enough to confront one of them for it? Bad enough to start a fight over it, and lose?

And no visible means of support and a paid-up mortgage, or what looked like one. Although the Visa bill was odd.

The most likely scenario was that the person who had killed Lydia had killed Karen. Lydia had died of a blow to the head suffered in a struggle that could likely have begun without murderous intent, according to Brillo Pad. Lydia’s death could have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder.

Karen’s death was murder, though. He thought again of her body’s outline on the kitchen floor. A murder that had been made to look as if it had been done by someone caught in the act of robbing the house. Thereby suggesting a stranger. Which, ergo, suggested no such thing.

He sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the printer. He penciled a square in the center and labeled itLydia. He penciled another square just below it, labeled itKaren and connected the two with a line. He made three other squares and labeled themBetsy, Stan Jr. andJerry, and connected them to Lydia and to Karen.

In the upper right-hand corner he made another square and labeled itthe boyfriend and connected it to Lydia.

The boyfriend hadn’t come forward. Could be scared. Could be guilty. Could be nonexistent; witnesses had been wrong before, and Sharon hadn’t seen the boyfriend, only his flowers. Or flowers Lydia said had come from him. Had Prince tracked down those flowers yet? He found a note in the file. She’d called Alaska Airlines Goldstreak; they hadn’t gotten back to her.

He made another box and labeled itblackmailer? and connected it to Karen. Karen lived a pretty high and free lifestyle, according to just about everyone. So far as he could tell, he was the only functional male in the bay who hadn’t slept with her. Ripe for blackmail. Look at that Visa bill, at total odds with the paid-up mortgage and bills. If she had money, and it wasn’t going to pay her Visa bill, where was it going? Except then there was the bank account, a very healthy ten grand. And why would her blackmailer kill her, thereby killing his cash cow? And it wasn’t like she tried to hide what she did, and she didn’t have anyone to hide it from, no husband, no children, and her family didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Odd, that. Lydia was Yupik, at least part, and the Yupik had some of the strongest cultural ties to family that Liam had ever seen. The Three Musketeers could take lessons; it really was all for one and one for all on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River delta. Still, there were dysfunctional families of every race, color and creed. And the Tompkinses weren’t dysfunctional, exactly, just not that close. It wasn’t a sin, it wasn’t all that unusual, and it certainly wasn’t a crime.

He looked at Lydia’s chair, and remembered what Clarence had said over the chessboard.That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.

He tried to imagine a teenage Clarence, and failed. He tried to imagine a teenage Lydia, and was more successful. Stan Tompkins Sr. must have been one hell of a guy to come out ahead of the bunch chasing Lydia. She was seventy-four when she had died, which meant she would have been a teenager during World War II. He doodled some numbers. She would have been born in 1926. A kindergartner in 1931, sweet sixteen in 1941, able to vote in 1946.