"Yes," Barton said, "that's what I figure a pilot good enough to spot herring is gonna do, go poking around underneath the control panel of a plane he's gonna be flying in with a sharp pair of nippers. Or letting some yo-yo mechanic do the same thing. Uh-huh. Gotta hand it to you, Campbell, you got that situation piped." He added, as an afterthought, "Who is the pilot, anyway?"
Liam was silent.
"No," Barton said. "Shit, no."
Liam sighed. "Yeah, John. It's Wy."
"Aw fuck," Barton said heavily. "Goddammit anyway." He was silent for a moment. "She a suspect?"
"No," Liam said immediately.
Barton was silent again, his silence more eloquent than most people's conversation. "Okay, you're there, I'm not. But I'm running a report on her anyway; I'll get back to you. In the meantime, you do the box thing, you hear?"
"All right, all right, I'll do the box thing," Liam said irritably, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
"Good." Barton hung up.
The "box thing" was something Liam did early on in every investigation in which he participated. Sometimes, redrawn and relettered and blown up, it found its way into court as Prosecution Exhibit A. It had been a while, but he thought he still remembered how. He took a deep breath and got a clean sheet of paper out of the printer. By fortune good or ill, in the middle drawer of the desk he found the writing implement of his choice, a Pentel Quicker Clicker, with spare leads and erasers. No hope for procrastination there, either, so he began.
The first square was drawn in the center of the page and labeled Bob DeCreft. He looked at it for a while, ruminating. A second square was added, with a dotted line connecting it to the first, and labeled Wyanet Chouinard. A third square connected to them both, labeled Cecil Wolfe.
A fourth square, Laura Nanalook. Another line connected Laura Nanalook with Cecil Wolfe.
He thought about that for a while, and to Laura's square added a lightly drawn fifth square, labeled Rebecca Gilbert, with a question mark after her name.
There. He sat back and surveyed the neat boxes and their straight little connecting lines, what he knew of Bob DeCreft's life reduced to connect-the-dots.
Bob DeCreft, sixty-five years old, a member in good standing of the community, according to Bill. A sixty-five-year-old man shacking up with a, what, twenty-year-old girl, a staggeringly beautiful twenty-year-old girl. Sex and money, those were the two main motivations for murder in Liam's experience, and one look around Bob DeCreft's house had told him DeCreft didn't live large.
Take sex, then. Maybe Laura Nanalook wanted out of the relationship with DeCreft and sabotaged the plane herself. She had said she'd been working when DeCreft was killed. He'd have to confirm that with Bill.
Maybe she had a lover, and he cut the wire.
Maybe someone else wanted the girl, and so killed DeCreft to get him out of the way? Somebody, say, like Wolfe?
Liam contemplated that possibility with satisfaction, and traced the line around Wolfe's box until it stood out in bold relief from the others. It was not going to hurt his feelings at all if he had to arrest Cecil Wolfe for murder. He only hoped Wolfe would resist arrest.
Although, much as he hated to admit it, it was more Wolfe's style to rape Laura Nanalook occasionally behind Bob DeCreft's back, so he could enjoy that knowledge when he met Bob DeCreft face-to-face. He would need DeCreft alive to do that, and to spot herring for him.
He needed to find out who Wy's mechanic was. If she was doing her own AandPeople's, she still had to have a certified mechanic to sign off on them. Probably somebody local, because Wy was a smart woman who'd know it would pay to keep her business local.
One thing was certain: the killer had to be someone who knew something about aviation. Not much, Liam realized ruefully, because if Wy could explain magnetos to him and make him understand how they functioned in five minutes, anyone could.
Knowing how a thing worked gave you the power to make it not work. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
And then there was Rebecca Gilbert. Liam had seen her twice now, once at the post office this morning and once this afternoon. In all, he'd seen about three different women inside the same body: the hovering helpmate, the hysterical mourner, and-what? What had she been doing, roaring up to DeCreft's place that way, slamming inside without so much as a knock at the door? If she and her husband-who had seemed less than distraught at the news of DeCreft's death-if she and her husband had been friends of Bob DeCreft, then they might have been friends of Laura Nanalook as well. Or maybe the two women were friends. They weren't much of an age, but then it wasn't all that big a town, and there probably wasn't that much choice. Although, given the disparity in age between Nanalook and DeCreft, the couple must have come in for some disapproval on the part of the community. Not to mention jealousy. The entire below-thirty male population of Newenham had probably gone into mourning when Laura and Bob took up housekeeping, and for all Liam knew Bob DeCreft was the over-sixty female's dream man.
If he could get Rebecca Gilbert away from her husband for five minutes, he might learn something of interest.
He reached up to touch the lump beneath his hair, shrunken and less tender now. He looked back at the box marked Cecil Wolfe and thought of Kirk Mulder, Wolfe's first mate, then traced the dotted line back to Wy. He added another box and labeled it Jacobson, the gimpy fisherman Liam had seen at the airport talking to Wy, the same gimpy drunk he had hauled down to his boat, as lightly penciled as Rebecca Gilbert's square and with another question mark beside it.
He thought back to his conversation with Barton, to Barton's visit with his wife. Jenny, laughing, loving Jenny of the light brown hair, in the poet's words that had become a family joke. Jenny, who loved the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Boston Bruins, who never read a book that wasn't assigned in class, who was the first person in Glenallen to buy a VCR so she could tape All My Children every day, and who talked back to the television while she was watching as if the characters were in the room with her. He'd bought her season tickets to the University of Alaska Anchorage Sea Wolves hockey games, and she had responded with such fervent gratitude that he'd had a hint, that first winter they were together, of what they'd been missing. Jenny, whom he knew too late had always been more like a sister to him than a wife.
"I didn't know, Jenny," he said out loud, for the thousandth time. "I didn't know that what we had wasn't the best that there was. We settled, you and I. I didn't know, until Wy, what was possible." He waited stoicly for the wave of sorrow and guilt to pull him under. It came, as it always did, swamping him with grief and remorse. His hands curled into fists and he shut his eyes against the familiar tears. "Goddammit!" he yelled. "Goddamn you for leaving me like this, so I can't even ask for your forgiveness!"
As always, thoughts of Jenny brought thoughts of Charlie, too, and again he held his son in his arms. He remembered best reading him to sleep, those evenings when he made it off duty early enough to catch Charlie still awake. He read to him, Good Night, Gorilla and Paper Bag Princess and The Velveteen Rabbit and The Wind in the Willows, and every now and then from Bushcop by Joe Rychetnik, just so the kid would know the kind of business his father was in. He knew Charlie couldn't understand the words yet, but he wanted him to grow up hearing them anyway.
Charlie would fall asleep in his arms, lulled by the sound of his father's deep voice, in the process his body temperature seeming to rise ten degrees and his body weight to increase ten pounds. Liam would put him to bed and hang over the edge of the crib, watching his little chest rise and fall. For the first few months he'd been terrified at how quietly Charlie slept, and had on more than one occasion gone into the boy's room in the middle of the night, just to make sure his small miracle was still breathing.