Restless in the Grave by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online Page A

producer of gold. Maybe they were in town to investigate the possibility of investing in the Suulutaq. Make sense if they wanted a piece of the action going on next door.
    George turned the Otter loose and they lifted up off the end of the newly paved runway, and it was with no little relief that Kate left the newly minted international gold capital of North America behind, at least for a while.
    Watching from the ground, Jim remembered the view of Kate following Liam Campbell into the plane, and wondered how smart he’d been to send her off with a man whom he knew from personal observation was irresistible to the ladies. There had been some brisk competition for the fairer sex between the two of them, that wild time in the Valley.
    His gaze followed the Otter until it was out of sight.

 
     
    Six
     
    MONDAY, JANUARY 18
    Newenham
     
    Newenham was the largest city in southwestern Alaska, the market town for the dozens of tiny, mostly Yupik Native villages surrounding it for hundreds of miles in every direction. Some of them had begun as fish camps, where the Natives went every summer to catch their year’s supply of salmon, either to eat or to sell it for money to buy fuel.
    Other villages got their start as remote canneries back in the day, when Bristol Bay salmon went into a can instead of being flash frozen and shrink-wrapped, and when by law you could fish for them only from a sail-powered boat. Some began as mining camps for gold, platinum, or coal, and some as fuel stops and mail and freight dumps for the Alaska Steamship Company. A few were the result of adventurers looking for a place far enough away from the madding crowd to put down a quiet root and prosper on the 160 acres of land provided for in the Homestead Act.
    Very few were viable in the long term due to a lack of anything remotely approaching a year-round industry. Salmon were being farmed now in Europe, Canada, and South America in quantities and at a price that had severely impacted Alaska’s wild salmon catch, and the nascent ecotourism industry was barely worthy of the name. Especially since that determinedly sole-source provider, Finn Grant, had bought up everyone else in the flightseeing, fly-in fishing, and big game hunting business. With his death, tourism out of Newenham was at a standstill.
    First and foremost, Newenham was the regional market town. In winter on snow machines and four-wheelers, in summer on boats, year-round in airplanes the villagers came to Newenham to buy groceries and supplies, get their eyes checked and their teeth fixed, visit relatives, stand trial, fly to Anchorage to go to the AFN Convention in October or to catch another plane to Hawaii for spring break in March.
    But Newenham wasn’t only their market town, it was also the headquarters for three national parks, four national game preserves, a dozen wildlife refuges state and federal, and an offshore petroleum reserve, access to which had been stymied in a series of court decisions over the fifty years since statehood. It was also the seat of the regional government, state judiciary, and state law enforcement. Although the latter had lately been reduced to a sole-source provider, one Sergeant Liam Campbell.
    Liam yawned and steered his vehicle back over to the right side of the road. He couldn’t remember one single night’s uninterrupted sleep in the past year. This could not go on. It wasn’t the first time he’d said that to himself, but this time, dammit, he meant it. Mayor Jim Earl was going to have to find the wherewithal to hire some city cops, and Major John Dillinger Barton, the Lord High Everything Else of the Alaska State Troopers, was going to have to chisel enough funds out of the state to assign Liam at least one more trooper. Two would be better and three ideal, but he’d take what he could get. If he were closer to retirement, he could really make a statement and threaten to quit over it, but he liked his job and he wasn’t independently