Right now, today, he had a job he was good at, that he enjoyed, that contributed to the well-being of the community. He had at least the hope of a relationship with a woman he had thought lost to him three years before. He'd made a friend in Bill. He'd been more or less adopted by Moses. He was getting to know the people in his district, from the tiniest village upriver to the most isolated coastal community. He'd even begun to recognize a Yupik word here and there; thegatchahe had heard Halstensen use today in the Malones' living room. It was a word with a heavy accent on the second syllable and appeared to be used for exclamatory purposes, as when, coming out of AC, an old Yupik woman had slipped and spilled her groceries. “Gatcha!” she had said, clearly annoyed. He tested it out now, trying to imitate the sounds, putting thegin the back of his throat and loading it down.
There was a squawk from outside that sounded unnaturally close to a human chuckle. He got up and looked out the window, and a black and beady eye met his with an inquisitive cock of its head.
Even the goddamn ravens seemed to have stamped him with their croaky seal of approval.
He was putting down roots.
Not a man accustomed to introspection, Liam looked inside himself and for the first time in a long time did not despise what he saw.
It was a start.
ELEVEN
Seafood North was a big square building painted a solid sea green. Their logo was a stylized fish head with a diamond-shaped patch of roe behind it, white on blue. It looked as if it had been generated by a computer: neat lines, perfect circles and no artistic value whatsoever. Liam thought of Nelson's remark about Yupik style, and wondered what the logo would have looked like if the company had asked a local to design it.
They were canning, Liam could tell by the thunks of the chink that echoed from within the building, chopping off the salmon heads before passing the bodies down the line to the butchers, who cleaned and gutted them before passing them down to the canners, who stuffed the raw fish into cans before the cans passed through the lidders and then into the pressure cookers.
Prior to his arrival in Newenham, what Liam had known about the science of salmon processing could have been writ large on the back of his badge, but over the past three months he had been at some pains to become familiar with his new posting, and that included the economic force which drove it. As any good beat cop could tell you, when you lived where you worked, when you knew all the players on a first-name basis, you were halfway to the solution of any crime practically before it had been committed.
The office was located in the right-hand corner of the building that fronted the road leading down to the docks. He opened the door and went in.
A young woman sat behind a counter, filling out a form. “Just a minute, please.”
A counter stood between Liam and the girl's desk. Behind her were the doors to what looked like two offices, both closed. The walls were lined with the cheap, quarter-inch dark wood paneling that had been the last, chic word in interior decorating in the fifties and sixties, before people had come to their senses and started Sheetrocking. In Alaska the paneling was particularly egregious because of the long hours of darkness during the winter, when you needed all the light in a room that you could get.
The paneling in this room was pockmarked with nail holes and patched with duct tape and maps. There were maps of the Bay area, fishing district by fishing district, the Ugashik, the Egegik, the Naknek, the Kvichak, the Nushagak, the Togiak. There were three different maps of Alaska, one geographical, one political and one divided into the twelve Native regions. There was a map of the North Pacific, with lines drawn between Seattle, Anchorage and Tokyo. There were a scattering of maps that upon closer inspection proved to be published by the Alaska Geographic Society, and variously depicted the Wrangell-St. Elias International Mountain Wilderness, the Aleutian Peninsula, prehistoric Alaska, the Kuskokwim River and Alaska's Native People, Their Villages and Languages.
He stepped to take a closer look at this last one, searching for Tulukaruk, but the only village listed on the thumb was Manokotak. It was a long way from Bristol Bay to the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta, too; he hadn't realized quite how far until now. There was a mountain range in between the two, the Ahkluns, that began where the Kuskokwim Mountains left off. Probably one of the reasons there were trees in the Bay and not on the Delta. Like the trees in Kulukak, he thought, although the fog had obscured most of them. He wondered how the old ones had made it over those dividing mountains to settle in the Bay. Probably paddled around. With their storyknives.
The rustle of paper made him turn. The girl was neatening a stack of yellow forms. The lighting was rectangular and fluorescent, with two of four tubes burned out. The only natural light was from the window in the door. The place felt like a cave. The girl at the desk still hadn't looked up. He cleared his throat. “All right,” she said sharply. She looked up and saw the uniform. “Oh.”
“Hi.” Liam removed his cap. “My name is Liam Campbell. Alaska State Troopers.”
She got to her feet. “Tanya Bernard.” Her hand was warm and a little sweaty, her handshake firm and businesslike.
He smiled. “Hi, Tanya. Is the superintendent in?”
She blinked under the influence of that smile, and looked down at her feet, as if surprised to find herself on them. She pulled herself together. “Certainly. I'll tell him you're here.”
She got halfway to the office door on the left-hand side and stopped. “Did you have an appointment?”
Liam shook his head. “No.” With a faint air of apology, he admitted, “I'm afraid there has been an incident with one of your fishing boats.”
“Which one?”
Liam saw no reason not to tell her; the Bush telegraph being what it was, the news would be all over the state before midnight. “TheMarybethia.”
She paled. “Dave Malone's boat?”
“Yes.”
“Is he all right?” She recollected herself. “Molly? The kids?”
“I'm afraid not,” he said regretfully, watching with interest as more color washed from her face. “I really can't say any more, Tanya.” She remained still, staring at him, and he said gently, “Your boss?”
She recollected herself with a start. “Oh. Right. Just a moment.”
She walked back to the office on not quite steady feet. Interesting. She tapped on the door. “Mr. Ballard?” She waited a moment, then opened the door just wide enough to stick her head in.
It was wide enough for Liam to see the feet propped on the desk, and certainly wide enough to hear the crash when the chair tipped over. There were some oaths. Tanya, with a discretion worthy of a personal assistant of many years' experience, slipped inside and closed the door behind her.
A few moments later the door opened, revealing a tall, bald man with a solid beer belly, wearing a rumpled navy blue sports coat over a brown plaid cotton shirt and khaki pants. “Yes?” He stifled a yawn and looked mildly puzzled. “Er, you're a trooper?”
“Yes,” Liam said. “I need to talk to you about one of your fishermen. Could we go into your office?”
He went in as Tanya went out. “I'd appreciate it if you would stick around until I can talk to you,” he told her.
She met his eyes with perfect composure, armor firmly in place. “Certainly.”
Five minutes later the superintendent's bewilderment had given way to sick comprehension. “All dead?”
Liam nodded. “All.”
“But… how?”
Liam had already told him once, but typically news this bad had to be repeated, and often more than once, to be fully assimilated. “It appears they died of smoke inhalation during a boat fire,” he said, which was perfectly true, so far as it went. Someone had certainly gone to great lengths to make it seem so. Anticipating the next question, he added, “In Alaska, violent death, even by misadventure, must be thoroughly investigated. Which is why I'm here, Mr. Ballard.”