Fire and ice by Dana Stabenow Page A

was drizzling. An older man, unshaven and wearing salt-stained clothes, was talking to her through the open driver's-side door. Wy caught sight of Liam over the man's shoulder as he pulled up next to her. By the time Liam had gotten out the older man was walking away, a pronounced limp in his gait. "Who was that?" Liam said.
    She shrugged. "Just another fisherman. Wanted to know what happened."
    She couldn't quite meet his eyes, and he regarded her for a speculative moment.
    Gary Gruber was still there, too, shivering beneath the eaves of the terminal and gnawing at what might have been a candy bar. People came and went, planes taxied to and fro, and barely a glance was spared for the mound beneath the blue tarp, which seemed to have shrunk since Liam last saw it. It looked very lonely lying next to the little red and white Super Cub, which looked more than a little forlorn itself.
    The ambulance was under the command of a single emergency medical technician, a slim, intense young man who introduced himself as Joe Gould. He knelt to inspect DeCreft's body. "Not much to be done here," he observed. "Okay to take the body to the morgue?"
    "We've got a morgue?" Liam said.
    "We've even got a hospital," Gould said with a cool smile.
    "Hold on a second," Liam said, and went to search the Blazer for an evidence kit. It was in a case behind the backseat, and, typically, Corcoran had left no film in the camera inside and no spare rolls in the case. Liam found a yellow legal pad and a pencil he had to sharpen with a pocketknife, andwiththe evenly spaced halogen floodlights around the airport casting long, faint shadows in the dim light drew a rough sketch of the scene, pacing out the distances between terminal, plane, and body before helping Gould zip DeCreft into a body bag and load it into the ambulance. "Have we got a pathologist, too?" Liam asked Gould.
    "Not forensic," Gould said, "but cause of death is obvious, and time of death was witnessed, so--"
    "It was?" Liam said. "Who by?"
    Gould had thin, self-sacrificial features that would not have looked out of place beneath a tonsure, belied by a pair of satanic eyebrows and a sly smile. "Somebody was yelling about it on the radio. The dispatcher picked it up, and passed it on to me."
    "When was this?"
    "Right about the time it happened, I guess. Ask the dispatcher."
    "And you rushed right on over to help out," Liam observed.
    The EMT slammed the doors of the ambulance and paused to give Liam a level, considering stare. "Guy walked into a propeller," Gould said. "The initial report from the scene, as conveyed to me by the dispatcher, indicated that the victim was dead before he hit the ground." He had been leaning on the ambulance. He straightened now. "I was delivering a breech baby in Icky at the time." He went around the ambulance, climbed into the cab, and drove off.
    "Icky?" Liam said to the air. As in the Icky road?
    Nobody answered him, so he fetched a flashlight and a garbage bag from the Blazer and went to inventory the contents of the Super Cub.
    There were a handful of candy wrappers, two maps of Bristol Bay, five small green glass balls Liam recognized as Japanese fishing floats, a walrus tusk broken off near the root, a survival kit, two firestarter logs, two parkas, two pairs of boots, a liter-sized plastic Pepsi bottle half full of yellow liquid, a clam gun, a bucket, three mismatched gloves, and three handheld radios, which to Liam seemed a bit redundant. He put everything into the garbage bag and tied the neck into a firm overhand knot, then set it to one side on the tarmac.
    He stuck his head back inside the airplane to make sure he hadn't missed anything. He reexamined the control panel. To his deliberately uneducated eye, it sported the usual array of dials, knobs, bells, and whistles. He pointed. "What's that?"
    Next to him he felt Wy start, and smiled grimly to himself. Good. She should know by now that he was still as acutely aware of her presence as she was of