“Then one day, I was about forty-eight, I guess, I went back to Hong Kong to see my sifu, and he told me if I hadn’t found the answers I was looking for that maybe I was looking for them in the wrong places.” He turned around and linked his hands behind her waist. “He was right. Whatever this is, it belongs here, at home, so I came home.” He grinned at her, only a slightly less lecherous grin than before. “And you were my reward.”

She searched his face with uncharacteristically solemn eyes. “What?” he said.

She adjusted his collar. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I don’t know.” He was silent for a moment. “Yes I do,” he said finally. He jerked his head toward the cabin door. “I was looking at her this evening, wondering how bad hurt she is, wondering if maybe I shouldn’t have taken her by the emergency room before I hauled her out here.” He shifted his shoulders. “I asked the voices.”

“And?”

“And they didn’t say.”

She digested this. “Couldn’t say? Wouldn’t say?”

“I don’t know.” He fidgeted.

“Is this the first time this has happened?”

He thought, and shook his head. “No. But it doesn’t happen all that goddamn often, I can tell you that.”

“You wish they’d leave you alone, and you get nervous when they do.”

He glared at her. “I do not get nervous.”

“And when you get nervous,” she went on inexorably, “you talk too much.”

“Well, excuuuuuuse me,” he said, insulted. “I didn’t know I was boring you.”

She kissed him before he could pull away, putting everything she had into it. His pique was instantly forgotten, his response was immediate and enthusiastic. When they came up for air, breathing hard, he said, “That’s one thing those goddamn voices haven’t interfered with.”

“What?”

“Us.”

She grinned. “Right.” She kissed him again, hands roaming, seeking, finding.

“Gulp,” he said. “Good thing I’m hanging on to something, I’d probably be on my ass about now.”

“That you would, little man.”

They moved to the dock and undressed, savoring the slow shedding of clothes, the slow revelation of flesh, the slow kindling and then culmination of desire. The great thing about being old, Bill thought dreamily, was that you never had to be in a hurry. There was time to linger, time to taste, touch, feel, listen. The hitch in the breath, the murmured laughter, the bittersweet flavor of the drop of sweat that rolled into the hollow of the throat, the quick, shifting arch of the hips, the sly reach of a fingertip, the firm thrust of flesh, and then the well-remembered but always new sensation of falling off the world in a blaze of white-hot glory.

Later they cuddled beneath a sleeping bag Bill fetched from the cabin and watched the moon rise into the sky, taking its time. The flat landscape was drenched with a warm yellow light, and stars began to flicker into being. “Moses?”

“What?” he said, half asleep.

“How’s it going to turn out for them? The kids?”

She felt him come fully awake. “Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t ask me that. You know better.”

She swallowed. “Bad for both of them? Both, Moses?”

He was silent for a moment. “The voices aren’t always right, Bill. Sometimes people actually see the freight train coming and get off the tracks before it hits them.”

She could hear the tension and the near-despair in his voice, and she let it go, but her heart ached for the two kids in the cabin, and for the man in her arms.

Nenevok Creek, September 2

Fifteen minutes after they had received the call from Alaska Airlines one-three-three, Prince put the Cessna down gently on the dirt airstrip between the three hulking mountains and Liam could breathe again. They followed the path and found the body sprawled half in and half out of the creek, facedown.

It was a man, mid-thirties, hit in the chest at point-blank range with a shotgun. Liam pulled him out of the water but there was nothing he could do; the man was cold and rigor had already set in. The body flopped on its back like a starfish. The blue eyes stared blankly at the sky. Liam tried to close them. They wouldn’t.

He yelled for Prince and she came running up the path, weapon drawn. He waved it away. “He’s long gone.”

They stood looking down at the dead man. “Same guy, you think?”

Liam hid an involuntary smile at the hopeful note in her voice. Prince had had a taste of the headlines on their last case. She’d love another one that put her there, and it was axiomatic in the law enforcement community that multiple murders, serial or mass, got all the best press. “Opal wasn’t killed with a shotgun,” he reminded her. “Did you find the cabin?”

“Yeah, come see.”

It was one room, and crowded with the belongings of two people, one obviously female. “Look,” Prince said, pointing at the counter. The remains of a meal sat there, two bowls of a clear broth with vegetables and chunks of chicken floating in it. “There is coffee in the pot,” Prince said.

“Hot or cold?”

“Lukewarm.”

The bed had been made at some point, and then someone had used the bedspread for a nap-or something more. The comforter was half on the floor and the pillows were dented.

A card table had been set up in the corner closest to the stove. Two Coleman lanterns hung from hooks over the table, and light from one of the four windows shone on it. A ray of sunshine picked up a gold sparkle, a glowing purple, and Liam walked over to find heaps of beads in sizes ranging from a cherry tomato to a grain of sand, shapes ranging from round to flat to oblong to square and everything in between, in colors reaching across the spectrum. One squat, cylindrical glass bead had faceted sides that looked blue until you held it up to the light, when it turned green. A flat, rectangular bead with rounded ends was a yellowish green that looked hideous until Liam saw it worked into a woven shape with other beads. A spill of smaller red beads had fallen to the floor in a splatter of glittering iridescence, ending in a half-empty tube, its plastic cap having rolled beneath the dining table. The beads were arranged in trays and dishes and tiny Ziploc bags. There were spools of thread in varying thicknesses, packets of needles, a coil of silver wire. There was even a miniature anvil with a matching hammer.

“A craftsman,” he said. “Did you find any ID?”

She nodded, and held out a driver’s license. Liam looked at the picture and whistled. “We definitely need to cherchez la femme.” He held out a driver’s license in his turn. “Mark Hanover,” he said.

“Rebecca Hanover,” Prince said. “Chances are, he was the miner, she’s the beader.” Prince pointed at the table. “Think our guy surprised them?”

“I don’t know.” Liam stepped outside the door and yelled at the top of his voice. “Rebecca! Rebecca Hanover! It’s safe to come out! I’m Liam Campbell, a state trooper! It’s safe to come out now!”

He called again at five-minute intervals for fifteen minutes, receiving no answer.

The two troopers followed all the trails they could find, one of which ended at another part of the creek in a narrow stretch of small, smooth rocks, many of them quartz. A flash of color caught Liam’s eye, and he stooped to pick up a stalk of fireweed, neatly severed beneath the last blooms. Three feet away he found a paring knife with a black plastic handle. The flowers were wilting now. He looked for footprints but the gravel wasn’t giving up any answers, and the mud on the path had dried hard.

In the meantime, Prince had fetched a body bag from the plane. “There’s a wheelbarrow next to the cabin.”

They loaded Mark Hanover onto the wheelbarrow. Rigor, helped no doubt by the temperature of the creek, kept the body rigid and inflexible. It kept catching on the limbs of bushes and trees on the side of the path and sliding across the edges of the barrow. Prince was swearing under her breath by the time they reached the plane, and it wasn’t easy loading him into the plane either.