Same went for Blue Jay.

Liam sat back and tossed down the pencil. He scrubbed his hands through his hair and swiveled to look out the window behind his desk. The view was somewhat obscured by the inevitable alders and ragged black spruce but there was enough room that he could see a slice of the Bay and the mountains beyond.

He wondered if he’d made a mistake in accepting the Blewestown post. In Newenham he would have been out on a call already and catching up on three more from the day before. Of course he had been for a long time almost the only law enforcement officer within three hundred or more miles, so there was that. And he had been getting tired of the sameness of the job, the constant domestic violence calls, the drunk and disorderlies, the reported break-ins by tweakers looking for anything to sell so they could buy their next fix. Everybody remembered the murders because murder was high profile, the stuff of crime fiction and Hollywood blockbusters, but it was the daily grind of seeing his fellow citizens at their worst that wore him down. That wore them all down.

One of the first things Wy had asked him when they met—it was one of the first things everyone asked—was why he had become a trooper. “For the uniform,” he had said, which was what he always said. It was flippant and flirty and non-responsive. It was also in some small part true. He’d grown up idolizing the Alaska State Troopers because they just looked so damn cool in their Smokey hats. He looked at his button-down flannel and jeans. His first official day on the job in Blewestown and he wasn’t wearing one. There were three clean, pressed, perfectly tailored uniforms hanging in the closet at home. What did that say?

He wondered just how quick Barton was imagining he could slide Liam into a job at HQ in Anchorage. Back in the day it had been the height of Liam’s ambition to ascend the ladder to Barton’s job, boss of the whole damn shooting match. There had been a time when he’d kept a secret list of all the improvements he would make to the agency if he were in charge. Jenny, his first wife, had been enthusiastically in support of his ambitions and aided and abetted them with formal dinners featuring movers and shakers, luncheons with their spouses, and letters of support to legislators who ran on law-and-order platforms. She’d named Charlie after Liam’s father and made sure to mention Charlie’s grandfather and namesake, Air Force Colonel Charles Bradley Campbell, to every soldier and airman she met who was stationed at JBER. She had been the perfect partner for that Liam.

This Liam, not so much. He wondered if Jim was right and he should pull the plug, or at least start planning for it. State troopers were well paid and the time he had served in the Bush would amp up his pension admirably, and he was pretty sure Wy still had the first dime she’d ever made. They wouldn’t be rich but they would be comfortable. He could learn how to hunt and fish, fill the freezer every year. Maybe travel some. He hadn’t been out of the country since college.