He struggled into sweats that felt clammy against his skin and stamped up to the harbormaster's office, where the public shower was, for a change, empty. He stood a long time under hot water, and felt marginally better when he came out. Shaved and with his uniform on, he felt almost human again. He checked the knot of his tie, smoothed the line of his left lapel and stepped back for a critical survey of as much of him as he could see in the square little mirror hung over the sink.

The uniform was barely three months old, and tailor-made back in Anchorage. He would have hotly denied that he liked what the uniform did for his looks, but he put it on and his shoulders straightened, his spine stiffened and his chin went up. He'd wanted to be an Alaska state trooper from the time one had visited his fifth-grade class at Chugach Elementary, and nothing that had happened to him since, not even the deaths in Denali Park, had changed the feeling of pride he took in donning the uniform. It was fabric, that was all, a mixture of cotton and wool and synthetic fibers, a slack bundle of blue and gold on the hanger; but on him, it was a tacit investment in the might and majesty of the law.

He plucked a piece of lint from the bill of his cap, pulled it on so that the bill was at precisely the right angle over his eyes and emerged onto the dock to come face-to-face with Jimmy Barnes, the Newenham harbormaster.

Most days, Jimmy looked as if he should have been wearing a red suit with big black boots, with a white beard down to his waist. This morning, his usually rosy round cheeks were pale. Liam's hand dropped instinctively to the polished butt of the nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson automatic holstered on his right hip. “What's the matter, Jimmy?”

“I got an emergency call. A boat was found adrift off the coast about halfway between here and Togiak.” He swallowed hard, as if convincing his stomach contents to stay where they were. “Crew of seven. All dead.”