Liam frowned at the figures she’d scribbled. “Healthy. I’d call that filthy rich, myself.” He picked up the phone and dialed a number in Anchorage.

It rang five times before Jim picked it up. “Yeah.”

“Jim, it’s Liam.”

“Like I didn’t know.” There was a protesting female murmur in the background. “Sorry, honey. I’ll take this in the other room; I have a feeling I’m going to have to get on the computer.”

“Thanks, Jim.”

“Fuck you, Campbell. What do you want?”

“I need everything you can dig up on the Tompkins family in Newenham.” He gave Jim the names. “I’m particularly interested in their financial affairs. If they owe any money, if there is any money coming in. Like that.”

“Gee,” Jim said without enthusiasm. “Is that all?”

“And I need it in thirty minutes.” Liam hung up on the resulting explosion and looked at Diana. “Go down to the school. See if they’ve still got records for who was enrolled in high school in 1941. Make it for four years either way. Since the students are in their seventies, there probably won’t be any surviving teachers, but ask anyway.”

“Gone.” She went.

Liam looked at Jo. “I meant to ask you. Where’s Gary?”

She smiled. “I sent him home first thing this morning.”

He leaned back and gave her a long, considering look, which she met with equanimity. “Did you, now.”

“I did. That was a mean, rotten thing to do to you, Liam, and I’m sorry.”

He cocked his head. “Once more, with feeling.”

She laughed. “Look, Wy’s the best friend I ever had. For a few months, she was even my sister-in-law. Friends watch out for their own.”

He couldn’t resist. “Like the air force.”

“Even better than. The thing is, I got this idea you might be bad for her. You were, the first time around.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“No?”

“No. For Wy, the first time around I was a fucking disaster.”

“Thank you for not making me say that,” she said primly, and grinned.

“So I’m not a disaster this time?”

She met his eyes head-on. “No. Understand me, Liam, I can get along with the devil himself, if the devil is dating my best friend. Nothing gets in the way of the friendship, not for me. Loyalty is what I do best.”

“It’s my favorite thing about you.”

She looked surprised, and suspicious, and maybe even a little flattered. “Wy’s family. Wy loves you. That makes you family, too.”

“A cop and a reporter,” he said. “It’ll never last.”

She laughed again. “That’s what they said about Chuck and Di.”

The phone rang. “Okay, you prick,” Jim said, “get a pencil.” He dictated rapidly, without checking to see if Liam was keeping up. “That do you?”

“That does me just fine.”

“Dunaway there?”

Liam was surprised. “How did you know?”

“I know everything. Put her on.”

Liam handed Jo the phone. “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

She took it. “Dunaway.” She listened for a moment. Liam watched as her face flushed a deep, dark red. “None of your goddamn business,” she said, and slammed the phone down. Liam got his fingers out of the way just in time.

“What was all that about?”

“None of your goddamn business either,” she snarled. “Just so you know, Campbell, that family business doesn’t extend to your friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and refrained from any comments about younger men because it seemed safer. He made a mental note to call Jim back at his earliest opportunity.

“What do we do now?” she said, seeming to master her rage.

“I don’t know aboutwe, ” he said. “I’m going out to the base.”

“Can I come?”

“No.”

The base officer quarters was of a piece with the rest of Chinook Air Force Base, freshly painted and tidy, the sidewalks neatly shoveled and the storm windows fastened down. He found Charles in the same room he had stayed in that summer. The colonel was surprised to see him and, Liam thought, somewhat wary. “Come on in,” he said.

Liam closed the door behind him. “What’s with the crash site, Dad? What do you expect to find?”

“I expect to find the bodies of three men who died serving their country in time of war,” Charles said.

“One of whom fathered the man currently nominated for the air force spot on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Charles looked startled and then rallied. “Who he happens to be related to doesn’t lessen his sacrifice.”

“No,” Liam admitted. “But there’s something else.” He was suddenly sick of the dance they always did. “Ah, hell, Dad. Wild Bill Hickok died in 1876.”

Charles was taken aback. “I- What?”

“The coin we found with the arm was minted in 1921.”

“Oh,” Charles said blankly. A sudden and unexpected grin spread across his face. “I never was a very good liar.”

Liam sat down without invitation in the room’s only chair. “Unless you’re doing something illegal by recovering that plane and the bodies of the crew, and I can’t see how you are, I don’t care why. I just don’t like being bullshitted. I can keep my mouth shut.” After last summer, Charles had to know that was the absolute truth. “Tell me enough so that I’ll want to and I’ll go away. Or I’ll buy you a beer, or take you caribou hunting, or whatever you want.”

They stared at each other in silence. It was hard to tell which of them had been more surprised by Liam’s words.

Finally Charles said, “You’d really take me caribou hunting?”

“Sure.” Liam shrugged. “I’ve never been, but there’s a hell of a herd northwest of here, the Mulchatna herd. Hundreds of thousands of them, the Fish and Game’s practically begging people to go shoot some so they won’t eat themselves out of house and home and wind up starving to death.”

The years of armed truce weren’t easy to shake. “I don’t know, Liam, you might shoot me and bury the body, once you got me out there.”

Liam got to his feet, disgusted.

Charles rose, too. “Don’t go, Liam. It was a joke. A bad joke, I admit, but it was a joke. Sit down.” He hesitated. “Please.”

Liam couldn’t remember his father ever having used that word with him before. He sat down again, partly because he wasn’t sure his legs would carry him to the door.

Charles reached for a plain buff file markedRestricted Access in big red letters and held it up. “The official investigation into the crash.”

“What happened?”

“It was too clear.”

“What?”

Charles smiled. “I know, doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? But it was. Unlimited ceiling, fifty-mile visibility. It was too damn clear, and too cold, and the aurora was out in full force, hanging right down to the ground, if you can believe the eyewitnesses. All the colors they come in and all over the sky. There was no distress call from the crew, no indication that anything was wrong.”

“What were they doing so low? And weren’t they a little off course?”

Charles’ laugh was short and unamused. “A little. Their flight plan was for Krasnoyarsk. Instead, they were on a heading for Dutch Harbor. Either their instrumentation was off or they were, or they were just blinded by the lights. A couple on the ground saw the fireball when they impacted, and then a plume high up on the mountain. They called a pilot who was living in Newenham at the time, some Scots name…” He thumbed through the file.

“DeCreft?” Liam said. “Bob DeCreft?”

Charles looked up. “That’s right. How did you know?”

“One of the original Bush pilots. He’d lived here a long time. Go on.”

“DeCreft was in the air within the hour. Said in his interview that he followed a creek up so he wouldn’t get fuddled-his word-by the lights. Said he saw the impact site at the eleven-thousand-foot level, and then where the remains of the plane had fallen three thousand feet onto a glacier and into a crevasse.”

Liam was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand, Dad. Why are you so hot to pull this particular wreck out? Everything Wy said was true; it’ll be difficult and damn dangerous. Not to mention which the weather around these parts is not at its most reliable at this time of year. Your people could be getting themselves into some serious trouble.”