Spoils of the dead Read online

  SPOILS

  OF THE

  DEAD

  DANA

  STABENOW

  “For those who like series, mysteries, rich, idiosyncratic settings, engaging characters, strong women and hot sex on occasion, let me recommend Dana Stabenow.”

  Diana Gabaldon

  “A darkly compelling view of life in the Alaskan Bush, well laced with lots of gallows humor. Her characters are very believable, the story lines are always suspenseful, and every now and then she lets a truly vile villain be eaten by a grizzly. Who could ask for more?”

  Sharon Penman

  “Cleverly conceived and crisply written thrillers that provide a provocative glimpse of life as it is lived, and justice as it is served, on America’s last frontier.”

  San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Stabenow is blessed with a rich prose style and a fine eye for detail. An outstanding series.”

  Washington Post

  “Excellent… No one writes more vividly about the hardships and rewards of living in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness and the hardy but frequently flawed characters who choose to call it home. This is a richly rewarding regional series that continues to grow in power as it grows in length.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “A dynamite combination of atmosphere, action, and character.”

  Booklist

  “Full of historical mystery, stolen icons, burglaries, beatings, and general mayhem… The plot bursts with color and characters… If you have in mind a long trip anywhere, including Alaska, this is the book to put in your backpack.”

  Washington Times

  “One of the strongest voices in crime fiction.”

  Seattle Times

  The Kate Shugak series

  A Cold Day for Murder

  A Fatal Thaw

  Dead in the Water

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Play with Fire

  Blood Will Tell

  Breakup

  Killing Grounds

  Hunter’s Moon

  Midnight Come Again

  The Singing of the Dead

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  A Grave Denied

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Night Too Dark

  Though Not Dead

  Restless in the Grave

  Bad Blood

  Less Than a Treason

  No Fixed Line

  The Liam Campbell series

  Fire and Ice

  So Sure of Death

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  Better to Rest

  Spoils of the Dead

  *

  Silk and Song

  Death of an Eye

  DANA

  STABENOW

  SPOILS

  OF THE

  DEAD

  A LIAM CAMPBELL NOVEL

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in 2021 by Head of Zeus, Ltd

  Copyright © Dana Stabenow, 2021

  The moral right of Dana Stabenow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN (HB): 9781788549158

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788549165

  ISBN (E): 9781788549141

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  For Gerry Ryan, my Irish dad

  1933–2019

  He would have fallen head over heels for Sybilla

  Map

  But I recognized death

  With sorrow and dread,

  And I hated and hate

  The spoils of the dead.

  —Robert Frost

  Contents

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Liam Campbell Investigations

  Kate Shugak Investigations

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  One

  Thirty years ago, July

  “COME ON, ERIK!” JOSH’S SNEAKERS disappeared over a mussel-encrusted rock ridge left exposed by the low tide. His voice echoed behind him. “We have to get there and back again before the tide turns!”

  Like Erik didn’t know that. He pulled himself up the ridge, puffing, and saw Josh’s tracks in the dark sand, the strides long, the toes dug in. He was running.

  Bastard. Erik savored the forbidden word in his mind and even thought about saying it out loud. No one was around to hear, or wash out his mouth with soap, or spank him, or send him to bed without his supper. Which his mother lost no opportunity to do because she thought he was too fat.

  Instead, with a heavy sigh, he hoisted himself up over the ridge of rocks covered in barnacles, mussels, and kelp, and slid down the other side to land in the damp black sand on his backside. The edge of a mussel shell had caught his finger. The wound was was bleeding sluggishly, dripping down from his hand. He knew better than to say anything, but he heard Josh laughing, and looked up to see the other boy vanish around the next ridge of rock, his excited voice lingering after him. “Wait till you see, Erik! It is the coolest thing ever!”

  It was low tide on an already broad, gently sloping beach that was half sand and half mud, with a narrow section of tumbled gravel between sand and goose grass. The beach stretched down to a glassy calm of sun-washed blue. This side of the bay was backed by two bluffs, one at water’s edge and another miles inland. Both were made of glacial silt that had spent epochs washing down Cook Inlet to pack down and pile up, interrupted by seams of black coal. On the other side of the Bay the bright teeth of the mountains gnawed at the lighter blue of the sky. Behind them the summer sun was setting somewhere behind Redoubt, turning the sky toward the pale twilight that passed for night during summer in Alaska. The tide was about to turn and the mud bloomed with a thousand spurts of water, the razor clams digging in beneath the incoming edge of the water. The salt air stung his nostrils and Erik drank it in with every labored breath, watching the shadows lengthen and the light fade. Even at the age of ten he understood that he lived in a beautiful place, and was grateful for it.

  “Erik!”

  Josh’s scream jerked him around in a circle and yanked him into motion up the beach without volition or thought.

  “Erik! Help!”

  Erik had never heard Josh’s voice sound like that, a high, thin edge of fear that knifed right through him. />
  “No, don’t—Erik, help, Erik, no don’t please don’t Erik help!”

  There was the sound of a thunk, exactly like a cleaver coming down on a roast when they butchered out their yearly moose, and Josh was cut off in mid scream.

  “I’m coming, Josh! I’m coming!” He tried to run faster but the sand gave way beneath his feet and it was like post-holing through deep snow. He rounded the outcropping of black rock, gasping, his chest heaving, his heart pounding so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear anything else but it. “Josh! Josh! Josh—”

  There was movement to his left from behind the outcropping and as he started to turn his head to see what it was there was another thud and a kind of explosion of white light followed by a feeling of falling down a deep, dark hole, down, down, down…

  And then nothing.

  Two

  Monday, September 2, Labor Day

  LIAM HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY DO-gooders and no-goodniks in one place at one time. There were only thirty-five hundred people in the city proper and most of them appeared to be either parading or driving down Sourdough Street that afternoon. The marching half held signs and the driving half were harassing them by shifting and clutching at just the right moment during their pickup drive-bys to blanket the marchers with black clouds of exhaust.

  Five women who had dyed their hair a matching bubble-gum pink, one hoped temporarily, crossed at the blinking red light where he was stopped. Behind them an older gentleman punched along on his walker like an AT-AT on Hoth, eyes with sclera aged to the yellow of egg yolks glaring at their backs. His white hair, what was left of it, was sprayed down in a combover whose fixity of purpose was being tested by the breeze caused by the passing traffic. He had a prominent, veined nose jutting from the middle of his face, completing his likeness to an old, bald eagle with acid reflux. At first glance Liam took him for a chronic drunk. Later, upon further acquaintance, he discovered that it was simple choler. Blue Jay Jefferson’s factory setting was pissed off.

  The blue Forester on his right pulled out and the left-turning Ford F-150 across the intersection slammed on its brakes. No one knew how to cross at a blinking red light anymore. He was glad he was driving his own vehicle and wearing civilian clothes, otherwise he might have had to Do Something. He signaled, counted to three one one-thousand at a time, turned left in the best Gramps Champ fashion, and proceeded sedately down the hill. An actual stop light here, where he turned left again to cross the causeway that divided the man-made lake from the salt-water marsh, accelerated—barely—up another hill and turned left a third time to follow the road to an abrupt corner. There he turned into a parking lot before the road became a four-mile drive out along a spit of glacial silt that thrust out into Chungasqak Bay.

  The parking lot fronted what had been a fire station, recently remodeled into a brewpub. Liam parked with care, as his Silverado was brand spanking new and he was protective of its navy blue paint, and got out. A flurry of wings caught the corner of his eye and he jerked around. Only a magpie. He tried not to feel relieved.

  The pub was a tall building, with a row of two-story windows on the left displaying rows of shining stainless steel vessels connected by a complicated arrangement of hoses, pipes, and valves. A row of similar windows on the right overlooked the serving side of the brewpub, a wooden bar running the length of the room. Tables and chairs filled up the rest of the space and more windows across the back side of the building overlooked the edge of the bluff, the Spit, and the Bay.

  Double doors painted fire engine red occupied the space between the windows. A large, hand-painted sign above read “Backdraft Brew Pub” with a faint hint of flames behind the font. The door opened outward. The man behind the bar said, “We’re not open for another hour, Andy, I told you—” He looked up. “Oh. Sorry, Liam. I thought you were someone else.”

  “An early drinker?”

  “We’ve got plenty of those who’d like to be. As you are about to discover.”

  He held out his hand. “How are you, Jeff?”

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you that? How are you settling in?”

  Jeff Ninkasi looked to be in his early fifties, with black hair graying at the temples, eyes with an Asian fold that told of his mixed Anglo-Japanese heritage, and a belly that betrayed a love of his own beer. He had lines on his face that betrayed a predisposition for laughter, and the no-bullshit gaze of the professional bartender. You knew just by looking at him that he wasn’t about to let anyone drive drunk from his establishment, nor would he allow a woman who’d had a few too many to leave unaccompanied by a friend.

  One of the good guys, Liam thought. But then he’d had a week to come to that conclusion, and had already decided that the Backdraft Brew Pub would be where he drank in public in his new posting. Lucky for him the brewmeister-slash-bartender had a full liquor license and already stocked a fine line in Scotch, including Glenmorangie. “How’s Marcy?”

  Jeff looked up at the ceiling. “Still rearranging the furniture.” A thump punctuated his comment.

  “I’ve got that table you said you wanted in the back of the pickup.”

  Jeff looked sheepish. “Not sure she wants it now. She’s decided to embrace minimalism in a big way.”

  Liam laughed. “Not a problem. Our house in Newenham was small and we left most of our furniture behind. Be a while before we get your house filled up.”

  “Your house now.” Jeff produced a manila envelope from the space beneath the cash drawer of the cash register.

  Liam opened it. Inside was the deed and the two-page mortgage agreement the two of them had worked out. “Looks good,” he said, and pulled a folded check from his shirt pocket. “First month’s payment.”

  Jeff stuck it in his hip pocket without looking at it. “Thanks. Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “Plain drip or espresso?”

  “Plain drip’s fine.” A steaming mug appeared beneath his nose and Jeff went back to drying and stacking glasses.

  The coffee was good, hot and strong and tasting like coffee and only coffee. Nowadays too much of the brew tasted burned or, horrors, was flavored with chocolate raspberry or salted caramel. He shuddered.

  Jeff noticed. “What? Do you need me to brew up a fresh pot?”

  “No, it’s fine. Perfect.” Liam took another swig. “You don’t flavor your beer, do you?”

  Jeff looked appalled. “Christ no.”

  “Because I was loading up on supplies at Safeway yesterday and they had a grapefruit-flavored beer on sale.”

  “Probably the only way they could get anyone to buy it.”

  “I know, right? Lime in a Corona is one thing, but…” Reassured, Liam drank more coffee. “There was a parade as I was coming down Sourdough Street.”

  Jeff rolled his eyes. “Yeah, get used to it, you’ll see at least one march every month at this point. And a corresponding parade in opposition.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The left marches with signs. The right parades with flags.”

  “What are they demonstrating for?”

  “Oh hell, take your pick. Today’s Labor Day, so probably unions. Traditional, okay, but tomorrow it might be the Tea Party, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, hashtag MeToo, save the sea otters or the whales or what the fuck ever. This is the wokest town in the state.” He brightened. “But marching is thirsty work evidently, because most of both sides show up here afterward.”

  “Silver lining.”

  “Yeah.” Jeff racked a tray of glasses and started on another.

  The door opened. “Hey, Jeff.”

  “Hey, Erik. We aren’t open yet.”

  “I know, but I was hoping you could sell me a growler of Cockloft without sending the ABC board into convulsions.”

  “That I can do. Wait one.”

  A man about Liam’s age, tall and rangy with thick, wheat-blond hair and sea-blue eyes leaned against the bar. He nodded at Liam. “Hey. Erik Berglund.”

  Liam n
odded back. “Liam Campbell.”

  “Archeologist.” Berglund volunteered the information like he expected a fanfare of trumpets in response.

  Liam was interested, though. “Oh yeah? Here on the Bay? What have you found?”

  “Save yourself, don’t get him started,” Jeff said, reappearing with a brown ceramic jug that would have been more at home at an Appalachian hootenanny.

  Erik grinned, unabashed, and handed over his card. “Harpoon heads, arrowheads, axe heads, fish hooks, a bone drill, frames for dip nets, stone oil lamps, and what I think are the pieces of a snare.”

  “A snare for what?”

  “Fur-bearing animals, I think.” Erik shrugged. “I’ll know more once I manage to figure out how it goes together.”

  “How far back do they date?”

  Jeff groaned, handing Erik his card and receipt. “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to take back that question.”

  “I will make you eat those words, Ninkasi.”

  “Will you make Domenica Garland eat them, too? Because you’ll have to.”

  Erik winked at Jeff. “She’s already given it her best shot. She didn’t leave happy.”

  “Oh, man, you turned that down? Hell, I’d tap that!” Jeff cast a nervous look at the ceiling. “I mean, I would if I wasn’t married.”

  “Uh-huh.” Erik tucked the jug under one arm. “Also, not what I said.” He grinned when Jeff’s eyebrows flew up. “Come see my dig… Liam, right? I’m up the Bay twenty miles, on the Bay side of the road. It’s a steep climb down but I promise it will be worth your time. Thanks, Jeff. Later.” He was out the door with a backwards wave.

  “Oh, shit,” Jeff said.

  “What?” Liam turned to see Erik pause briefly before another figure, also a man. “What’s wrong?”

  Jeff came out from behind the bar fast and hit the door before it had closed fully behind Berglund, Liam right behind him. By the time he caught up with Jeff, a third person had pulled up in what looked like Lincoln’s ne plus ultra version of a Navigator, black in color. The woman that slid down from the driver’s seat was a looker, medium/medium, but with her weight distributed in a manner that would have made Rubens weep. Her waist-length hair was nearly the same color as her vehicle and she wore jeans and T-shirt to match her vehicle and so tight that you could eyeball her pulse through the cloth. As much-married as Liam was he was also a man and it was difficult to drag his eyes up to her face. When he did manage it his gaze was caught and held by a pair of large, dark, widely spaced eyes whose initial Disney-princess look was belied by an intelligence so sharp it might draw blood. How much was up to her, and if you got in her way.