Fire and Ice Read online

  FIRE AND ICE

  Dana Stabenow

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Fire and Ice

  Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell, demoted and reassigned to the remote Bush town of Newenham, literally steps off the plane into a murder scene. Dealing with death is never simple, but when the woman leaning over the body proves to be Liam’s old flame, it’s evident that his new job is about to become much more complicated.

  From Newenham’s cast of eccentric – and sometimes hair-trigger – residents, to the intricate ballet of fishing boats rushing against time to net their limit, Stabenow captures the contagious spirit of melancholy madness that pervades America’s last frontier. Of course, small town tensions tend to simmer just beneath the surface, and murder, once done, has a tendency to happen again…

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Fire and Ice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Excerpt: So Sure of Death

  Acknowledgments

  About Dana Stabenow

  The Liam Campbell Series

  About the Kate Shugak Series

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  for my aunt

  Patricia Perry Carlson

  Liam looks a little like Mel Gibson

  just for her

  Introduction

  I was on book tour with, I think it was, Breakup, the seventh Kate Shugak novel, when my editor at Putnam called to tell me that she was leaving for a job at another publishing house.

  This is massive trauma for any author, and so I responded in time-honored authorial fashion: I sobbed loudly at her over the phone, and then I left my hotel room and found the priciest restaurant within walking distance, where I ate and drank everything on the menu from soup to nuts, at Putnam’s expense. I remember with particular fondness a pear-potato bisque finished with a white wine from France. I wish I still had the receipt, because I think it amounted to about $120 on my expense account for that book tour. And that was just lunch, for one day. Take that, Putnam, for not hanging on to my editor for me.

  A few months later, my ex-editor called from Dutton, her new house. “Write that book about Chopper Jim for me,” she said. Chopper Jim Chopin being the sexy Alaska state trooper character in the Kate Shugak series.

  Now, an author doesn’t get a call like that every day, or even once in a lifetime. I was predictably over the moon. I called my agent to share this glorious news. “Dana,” he said, with a distressing lack of enthusiasm, “Chopper Jim is a character in another series on contract to another publisher. You can’t spin him off as a character in a different series at a different house. You would be in violation of your contract, and maybe even of your own copyright.”

  Massive trauma again. I called my ex-editor back, not quite sobbing this time, to relay the bad news.

  There was a brief pause. “Then write another trooper,” she said.

  Thus was Liam Campbell born. I hope you like him as much I do.

  One

  Liam boarded first and watched the rest of the passengers troop down the aisle. It was a full load, a disparate group that he had already typed and cross-matched with their potential for future crime.

  There was the Alaskan Old Fart, short, dark, a grin one part mean to two parts pure evil, who had poacher written all over him. There was the tall man with a shock of white hair and his green-eyed daughter, who would both of them have helped the Old Fart skin out whatever he took whenever he took it, but only so much as they could use in a winter. There was the Moccasin Man, tall, loping, clad in fatigues and beaded buckskin moccasins with matching belt pouch that Liam instantly pegged for growing wholesale quantities of marijuana in his back bedroom, and the Hell’s Angel, Moccasin Man’s sidekick, barrel-shaped beer belly, black leather boots with a shine on them to match the one reflected by his shaved, bullet-shaped scalp with a meth lab in his spare room. The Flirt, on the other hand, should have been arrested for incitement to riot the second after she’d stepped out in public that morning: she wore a red silk shirt with no bra beneath it and a long skirt that accentuated the deliberate sway of her very nice ass. Moccasin Man had demonstrated an immediate and obvious admiration for that sway, and had been granted the privilege of escorting the Flirt to her seat.

  The rest of the manifest wasn’t as interesting. There was the Bush couple, a nondescript husband and wife who looked like card-carrying members of the proletariat who took their seats and melted into the bulkhead. They were followed by a family of five, white father, Yupik mother, and three small children, one still nursing, a tall, spare, grizzled man who had looked long and hard at Liam and who had almost spoken to him in the terminal but then appeared to think better of it, a plump woman who just missed being grandmotherly by two streaks of ice blue eye shadow and a slash of maroon lipstick, and the airline’s station manager for King Salmon, who curled up in the front-right-hand seat and promptly went to sleep, snoring loudly enough to be heard over the engines.

  Liam envied him deeply. He himself was occupied with holding the fourteen-seat Fairchild Metroliner up in the air by the edge of his seat as they rose smoothly over Knik Arm and banked south down Cook Inlet. It was half past three o’clock on the afternoon of May 1. Breakup was late, temperatures still dropping to or below freezing at nights, stubborn ice ruts refusing to melt from the roads, snow clinging obstinately to the Chugach Mountains. It wasn’t the only reason Liam was glad to be leaving Anchorage behind, but it would do, and it was almost enough for him to forget that he was ten thousand feet up in the air.

  Almost.

  Within minutes they were out of the low-lying clouds clustered over the Anchorage bowl, and mountains Denali and Foraker loomed up on the right. Foraker looked like a square, stolid Norman keep, and Denali like a home for gods. Susitna and Spurr were beneath them, the Sleeping Lady undisturbed beneath her lingering white winter blanket, Spurr worn down to three or four lesser peaks by an average of one eruption per decade. Redoubt, a once perfect cone blown to a shark’s tooth, barely registered through the window before the plane banked right and southwest. Liam swallowed hard.

  Now it was the Alaska Range, an entire horizon filled with sharp, unfriendly peaks, and no place that he could see to land safely. But there was for a miracle little turbulence, and the smooth ride and the drone of the engines eventually dulled him into an unexpected, uneasy doze, where his subconscious, that sly, slick bastard, was lurking, loitering with intent, just waiting to raise his viperous head and hiss a reminder that Liam had yet to call his soul his own. A jumbled mass of images fast-forwarded in front of him: laughing, loving Jenny with the light brown hair, his father’s implacable eyes, Charlie’s gap-toothed grin. Alfred and Rose, faces dull with grief and despair. That old black Ford sedan stuck on the Denali Highway, the bodies huddled together in the backseat for a warmth that failed them in the end. The disappointment and determination on John Barton’s face. Dyson groveling on his knees, begging for his life.

  She was there, too, of course, the brown-eyed, blond-haired witch. Onc
e again she turned and walked away, down the street, around a corner, and out of his life, and once again the grief of parting jerked him up in his seat with a jolt, heart pounding, palms sweaty, the loss as sharply felt as if he had suffered it yesterday. They were descending, and the clouds had closed back in and brought turbulence with them. Liam looked out the window, where a thin line of frost was forming on the leading edge of the wing, and he welcomed the distraction the terror of the sight brought him.

  He watched the line of frost attentively, until they came out of the clouds at seven thousand feet and it vanished and the Nushagak River and Bristol Bay came into view. To Liam it looked like the approach to heaven, an image enhanced by the golden rim of sunshine shining through the gap between the clouds and the vast expanse of gray water that took up the whole southern horizon.

  Ten minutes later they were on the ground, at the end of a paved runway six thousand feet in length; plenty long enough for 737s loaded with herring roe and salmon, the reason for the city of Newenham’s existence, the raison d’être of Bristol Bay, and, at least indirectly, the cause of Liam’s new posting.

  Congratulations, he thought. You’re a trooper. Again. He’d removed his sergeant’s insignia from his uniform before he’d left Glenallen, and had it cleaned twice to fade the marks where it had been. With luck, no one would know. His uniform was packed in a bag stored in the hold. All the pictures on the news had been of him in his uniform; he wanted to avoid recognition for as long as possible.

  The Metroliner turned off onto the taxiway. In a voice that carried to the back of the cabin, the pilot said, “What the hell!” and they screeched to a halt, the engines roaring a protest. Everyone was thrown forward against their seat belts, and some who had unbuckled too soon found their faces right against the backs of the seats in front of them. By the time Liam got his heart restarted, the pilot had shut down both engines and the copilot had the door open and the steps let down. Liam unbuckled his belt with shaky hands and was on the ground right behind him.

  The Newenham airport was ten miles south of Newenham proper, forty miles short of Chinook Air Force Base. It was of recent construction, not five years old, and replaced the previous airstrip, which, if it had held true to old-time Bush construction, would have run either parallel to or right down Main Street, where people could step out their front doors and onto a plane. Nowadays they built Bush airstrips ten to fifty miles away from the town, forcing everyone to buy cars to get back and forth.

  A series of prefabricated corrugated steel buildings of various sizes marched unevenly down one side of the runway, opposite a wide gravel area dotted with tie-downs. A third of the tie-downs were occupied by small planes of every age and make, some big, some small, most with two wings and a propeller, some with four wings, some with two propellers, some with wings made of fabric stretched over aluminum tubing, some built of aluminum from the inside out. Most of them looked neat and ready to fly and some looked like they would drop right out of the sky, providing they got up into the air in the first place.

  They all looked alike to Liam. They were planes. He didn’t need to know any more, thank you.

  The buildings consisted of a terminal and hangars, offices for air taxis and a Standard Oil office with a tank farm looming up in back of it, and a couple of aviation parts stores and a tiny little log house that would have looked like a cache without the stilts that bore a sign proclaiming it YE OLDE GIFTE SHOPPE.

  Small planes buzzed overhead on takeoff and landing. There was another small plane pulled around in front of the Standard Oil pumps, a red one with a pair of wings that looked larger than its fuselage and white identification letters down the side ending in 78 ZULU. Liam’s heart gave an involuntary thump, and then his eyes dropped to the ground in front of the aircraft.

  “Oh my God!” the near-miss grandmother said from the top of the Metroliner’s stairs.

  A body lay on the ground, a bright red circle spreading rapidly from beneath its head, or where its head used to be. The propeller of the little plane was stained the same bright red.

  Two

  For a moment, no one could move, except for the square-jawed young copilot as he heaved up his breakfast. The people on the ground, the people in the plane, the people staring in horrified fascination out of the terminal’s windows all stood in frozen silence.

  There was a woman kneeling in front of the body, her back to the runway. Dressed in worn jeans and denim jacket, the only clue to her femininity was the fat braid of golden brown hair that lay along her spine, strands escaping to curl madly all around her head. Liam found himself behind her without any conscious recollection of moving. It took him three tries to say anything, and when he could speak his voice seemed to come from very far away. “Wy.” She refused to look around, but a visible shudder ran over her body, and he was close enough to see the sudden prickling of the skin on the back of her neck. Her head came up like a deer on the scent of danger. “Who is he?”

  She didn’t turn, but then she didn’t have to. Wyanet Chouinard was a brown-eyed blonde, thirty-one years old, five feet five inches tall, with full breasts, a small waist, and lush, full hips that looked better in denim than any figure had a right to. Her voice came out low and husky, but that could have been stress and shock. From what was lying on the ground in front of her, or from what was looming up in back of her? Both, Liam hoped, with a sudden ferocity unknown to him until that moment. It surprised him, and with the surprise came a hot rush of sheer pleasure. He hoped he threatened her. He wanted to strangle her.

  He pulled himself together. First, the job. “It’s Liam, Wy.”

  “I know who it is,” she said without moving.

  “Who is he?” he repeated.

  “Bob.” A long, shuddering sigh. One hand reached out as if to touch the still shoulder closest to her, dropped. “Bob DeCreft.”

  The deceased was male, taller than average with well-defined shoulders and large, scarred hands. He’d dressed that morning in faded Levi’s and a blue plaid Pendleton shirt with both elbows threadbare. He had a black leather knife sheath fastened to his belt, the flap still snapped, and Sorels, the ubiquitous Alaskan Bush boots, on his feet. The hard rubber heels were close to being worn flat. Liam forced himself to look, but it was impossible to see the dead man’s features or the color of his hair. The plane’s propeller had done a thorough job.

  He looked up at it. Both blades stained dark red. A faint cry came from near the plane, and Liam turned his head to see the Flirt being enfolded in Moccasin Man’s comforting and by now distinctly proprietary embrace. He looked back at the crowd, beginning to come to life, muttering and shifting. A breeze had come up off the river, and people were starting to get cold but didn’t feel quite right about leaving. Either that, or were too curious to go. Liam understood both reasons.

  He slipped easily into investigatory mode. “Did anyone see what happened?”

  No one said anything. A few people looked at another man standing to one side, a thin man of medium height in his mid-thirties with dishwater blond hair and a pallid face. He was chewing something steadily, cheek muscles moving without pause, like a cow chewing a cud. “Who are you, sir?”

  The man opened his mouth and almost spit out a large wad of pink gum. His face turned the same color. He sucked the gum back in and said, “Uh, Gary Gruber. I’m the manager.”

  “Of what?”

  “Oh. Uh, of the airport?”

  It didn’t sound as if Gruber were all that certain just what he was managing, but then sudden, violent, proximate death had a way of casting everything in one’s life into question. Liam waited with that outward attention and patience cultivated by an Alaska state trooper, at the same time completely and overwhelmingly conscious of the woman standing at his side.

  After a moment Gruber, apprehensive and flustered, continued. “I make sure the planes are parked in the right spaces, advise about the scheduling, watch for theft, sub for ATC and weather and the fueler when they go o
n break.” His voice trailed off.

  “Did you see the accident?”

  Gruber shook his head violently, chewing hard at his gum, jaw moving like a piston. “No. No no no. I was in the terminal. I only came out when I heard people shouting. And then I saw—” His voice failed him again.

  Liam raised his voice. “Did anyone else see what happened?”

  No one had, or weren’t saying if they had. “Does anyone know how it could have happened?”

  Wy said, “He must have primed the prop by hand.”

  “What?” Liam still couldn’t look at her directly. He looked at Gruber instead.

  Gruber swallowed again, Adam’s apple bobbing in the open throat of his shirt. “I guess she means Bob must have pulled the prop through by hand.”

  Liam looked again at the prop. At his height it was nearly eye-level. Despite the rays of the early evening sun peering through the break in the clouds, a light rain was falling. The blood on the tips was beginning to run, coalescing into fat red drops that fell with audible plops to the mangled flesh of the man beneath. “Huh?”

  “You reach up, grab a blade, and rotate the prop a couple of times.” Wy said.

  “Oh, you mean like—”

  Gruber choked on his wad of gum, and Wy said, “Don’t do that!”

  She grabbed his half-raised hand. Her touch seared right through the surface of his skin. She let go, a brief flush of color in her cheeks. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “I haven’t checked her out since I got back and found Bob. Whatever was wrong with her still is.”

  “Oh.” Liam, feeling suddenly warm, unzipped his jacket and turned his face up to catch a little of the cooling drizzle on his overheated skin. “Why would he do that? What did you call it, pull the prop through by hand? I take it that isn’t standard procedure.” He looked at Gruber because he wasn’t sure what his face would show if he looked at Wy.