“I'm sorry, sir, I overnighted in Lake Clark on the way down from Anchorage and left pretty early this morning. I guess I was tired when I got in.”

“How'd you get in the door?”

“Mamie at dispatch has a key. Sir.”

“Hold the sirs, I'm a trooper just like you,” Liam said.

Maybe now. She didn't say the words out loud, but they hovered in the air regardless. She knew his history, all right.

Just as well. Better she should know the story going in, how Liam had been busted down from sergeant to trooper because five people had frozen to death in Denali Park on his watch. He hadn't been the trooper who had made the decision not to check out the call, but the two troopers who had worked directly under his supervision had, and someone's head had to roll to satisfy the community's not altogether unjustified cries for blood. So Liam had been broken in rank and transferred in disgrace to Newenham, a town of two thousand on the southwestern edge of the Alaskan coast. The next landmass over was Siberia, and Liam was well aware of the inference to be drawn.

It had taken thirty-six hours for that family to die, and for the troopers not to respond to repeated calls reporting their disappearance. It had not been the Alaska State Troopers' finest hour, and Liam felt very much on probation in his new posting. It didn't help that the dead were Natives, and that a large portion of the population of Newenham and its environs was also Native.

All this Trooper Diana Prince would know, and probably more. It seemed to Liam as if the last two years of his life had been lived largely on the front pages of every daily newspaper in the state; the automobile accident, Jenny's coma, Charlie's death, the trial, the drunk driver's second arrest by none other than the surviving member of the family, Liam himself. The deaths in Denali were the nadir of three horrible years, all of which made for fine reading in the Sunday papers, oh yes indeed.