No, Newenham was not the usual seven-step plum. Nobody wanted to take it on. The more superstitious among the force might even have said it was bad luck to be posted there. His boss, Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton, supervisor of Section E and Liam's boss both in Glenallen and Newenham, had sent Liam to Newenham for two reasons: one, to tuck him safely out of sight until the fallout from the Denali debacle had deteriorated to a less toxic level, and two, in John's words, “to take the fucking hoodoo off that posting.”

And now here was Trooper Diana Prince, John's latest exorcist, all fresh-faced and newly minted and ready to go out and be a hero. Liam made a mental resolve to go through any doors second. “How'd you get here?”

“I flew.”

“Commercial?”

She shook her head. “I brought in one of the new Cessnas.”

His gaze sharpened. “Floats or wheels?”

“Floats. The gear's coming on Alaska Airlines.”

Shit, Liam thought. No need to call Wy now. A couple of hours alone in a plane in the middle of nowhere promoted personal intercourse. A flight to-where had it been? that murder-suicide in Dot Lake?-was how they had first met. “Good,” he said, tearing himself from that memory as well. He resettled his cap on his head and sternly quelled the rumble of queasiness that always precipitated his reluctant rise to any altitude above sea level. “Let's go.”

“Where?” she said, following him out the door.

“Kulukak.”

“What's there?”

“Bodies.”

TWO

Chinook Air Force Base was forty miles south of Newenham. It was a small base that had no defensible reason for existence after the invention of the ICBM and, later, the fall of the Berlin Wall, other than as a demonstration of the personal power in Congress of the senior senator from Alaska.