He needed to find Erik’s cabin. It was reasonable to expect that it was somewhere out East Bay Road because that’s where the dig was and who liked a long commute? Except Judge DeWinter. He had emptied Erik’s pockets and found keys only to Erik’s truck. From what he had heard so far about dry cabins it might not have a lock. Or even a door.

On impulse, he picked up his cell, opened his contacts, and tapped on one. The contact picked up after the first ring. “How you doing, Dumbledore?” he said.

“Fuck off, Campbell.”

Something inside him relaxed at the sound of that deep, assured voice. “Hey, Jim. Where are you?”

“In the Park. At home.” There was a woman’s voice in the background. “It’s Liam.”

“Is that Kate? Tell her I said hey.”

“Liam says hey. Kate says hey back, and are you calling from Newenham?”

“From Blewestown, actually. On Chungasqak Bay.”

Liam heard what he assumed was coffee pouring, followed by a slurp. “Never been there, but I hear it’s scenic.”

“It is that.”

“You and Wy there on vacation?”

“No. They opened a post here and Barton asked me to take it on.”

“Huh. I thought he was pretty happy with you in Newenham.”

Liam sighed. “I think he’s trying to move me closer to Anchorage.”

“He did.” Jim’s voice had a smile in it. “Was a time you’d have been happy about that.”

“That was then, this is now. I made it back up to sergeant, that’s good enough. I don’t want to deal with the politics. Hey, you get that school of yours up and running?”

“It’s up, I don’t know how well it’s running.”

“Pretty cool, though.”

“If I can make it go how I want to, yeah.”

“I hear Kate finally took down Erland Bannister.”

“Well, he died on her before she could put him back in jail, but yeah. We’re all good here, Liam. Why are you in Blewestown?”

“Barton says the drug trade has moved into the lower Kenai hard, manufacturing and distribution. He wants me to clean it up, like we did in the Valley.”

“He wants to ride you into headquarters on a wave of trophy shots.”

“I think so.”

A brief silence. “And?”

Liam shook his head. “And I haven’t been here a week and the local PD chief schooled me on exactly and precisely where I’m allowed to serve and protect, and the local judge warned me off using excessive force. Plus I got a dead archeologist, murdered last Monday night or thereabouts, and the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, also murdered, that Brillo says has been lying where I found it for thirty plus years.”

A brief silence. “Anything else?”

“The whole place feels off. I think it’s partly because Blewestown is the whitest town I’ve ever been in in Alaska. Everybody’s white here, Jim. Except for my administrative aide. Whom Barton hired before I even got here, FYI.”

“Yeah, she’s probably spying on you for him.”