“Excuse me. I understand there’s a new police station in town.”

“Well, not that new. It’s up past the post office on Heath Street. You want me to call you a cab?”

If Leni hadn’t been so nervous, she would have laughed at the idea of catching a cab in Homer. “Uh. Yes. Please. That would be great.”

Waiting for the cab, Leni stood in the small aviation office, staring in awe at the entire wall filled with four-color brochures advertising adventures for tourists: the Great Alaska Adventure Lodge in Sterling and Walker Cove Adventure Lodge in Kaneq; fly-out lodges in the Brooks Range, river guides who hired out for the day, hunting trips in Fairbanks. Alaska had apparently become the tourist mecca Tom Walker had imagined it could be. Leni knew that cruise ships pulled into Seward every week in the summer, off-loading thousands of people.

Moments after the cab arrived, she and MJ were at the police station, a long, low-slung, flat-roofed building set on a corner.

Inside, the station was brightly lit, freshly painted. Leni fought with her rolling suitcase, muscling it up over the doorsill. The only person in the place was a uniformed woman sitting at a desk. Leni moved resolutely forward, clutching MJ’s hand so tightly he squirmed and whined, tried to wrench free.

“Hello,” she said to the woman at the desk. “I’d like to speak to the police chief.”

“Why?”

“It’s about a … killing.”

“Of a human?”

Only in Alaska would that question ever be asked. “I have information on a crime.”

“Follow me.”

The uniformed woman led Leni past an empty jail cell to a closed door with a placard that read: CHIEF CURT WARD.

The woman knocked hard. Twice. At a muffled, “Come in,” she opened the door. “Chief, this young woman says she has information on a crime.”

The chief of police stood slowly. Leni remembered him from the search for Geneva Walker. His hair was trimmed into a tall crew cut. A bushy red mustache stood out against the auburn stubble that had obviously grown since he shaved this morning. He looked like a once-gung-ho high school hockey player turned small-town cop.

“Lenora Allbright,” Leni said in introduction. “My dad was Ernt Allbright. We used to live in Kaneq.”

“Holy shit. We thought you were dead. Search and Rescue went out for days looking for you and your mom. What was it, six, seven, years ago? Why didn’t you contact the police?”