Free Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero by James Abel

today.”
    He had a habit of referring to himself in the third person, had mortgaged himself to the hilt, for more funding, and I wondered how the wife and six kids handled this back in Arkansas. He was a tireless worker, and his hut was filled with books on diamonds, studies, reports from South Africa, treatises from Sierra Leone, maps from Arkansas. I thought him a homespun genius; a bit nutty, but interesting. Karen and I wished him well.
    “I never understood suicide, Joe,” he said, passing up the booze, boiling water for rose tea, his drink of choice.
    “No?”
    “How bad can things get for someone to kill himself? I mean, killing someone else, I get it, you get crazy. You have hate. But kill
yourself
? Never.”
    “Maybe he didn’t kill himself,” I said.
    “Are you kidding? His finger was still in the trigger guard, right? And the dislocated arm, hell, pulled from the shoulder. Can’t fake that! I took him along once as a guard. He was always quiet. I think that guy had secrets.”
    You don’t know the half of it,
I thought.
    I said, “Is there anything that happened today that this whole town isn’t aware of?”
    Calvin DeRochers blew on his tea. I watched the ripples dance across the golden surface, and his greenish eyes came up slowly, met mine and stayed there, keen, smart, probing.
    “You tell me,” he said.
    •   •   •
    I TRIED TO CALL EDDIE. HE DIDN’T ANSWER.
    Calvin’s rent-a-pilot, Jens Erik Holte, arrived, a boisterous summer presence in Barrow and Norwegian American who spent his winters in Mexico. Then Mikael the weasel. Then the three-person visiting meteorology team from Boulder. And then three more crowded in: Alan McDougal, who ran logistics on the base; his wife, Candida, an anthropologist; and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Deirdre, a serious, attractive girl and casual friend of Kelley’s. Deirdre sat mute in a corner, then broke into sobs.
    I tried to cheer her up, which got her talking a little, wiping her nose with a bunched-up tissue. I asked, “Do you happen to know anything about Kelley keeping a diary?”
    “Just that she had one. I never saw it.”
    “Was it on her computer? Was it a book?”
    “I don’t know.” She blurted out, looking around, making sure all the other adults were in conversation, “Ask . . .
ask her boyfriend
!”
    “Kelley had a boyfriend? She was only on base for a few days at a time. How did she manage to—”
    “People always say they can talk to you, Colonel. Kelley said you and Karen, you can keep a secret. Help me. I feel awful. I don’t know what to do.”
    I knelt on one knee to be at face level with her. It was something that Iñupiat adults did with children, and with the very old. They did not talk down to them. They always looked them right in the eye.
    “Deirdre, this will stay between you and me.”
    The girl looked guilty, miserable. She
wanted
to talk. “She said she trusted you and Karen.” The pressure in her face was palpable, awful. “She said . . . she . . . You
promise not to tell
?”
    “Yes. I promise.”
    “She made me swear not to tell also. He works at the Heritage Center. Leon Kavik. He’s older. Eighteen. She used to sneak away to see him. I wish her parents
had
known! They’d have sent her home!”
    Her hands were twisting, and her eyes pleaded for understanding. I said, touching her shoulder, resting my hand there, “What happened wasn’t your fault, Deirdre.”
    If we’d been alone she would have cried out, but her agony came out in a whisper. “It was! She’d lie and tell her parents she was at our hut, but she was with him! She lied! And I lied, too! Oh, God!”
    Everyone stared at me when she ran out of the room and into a bedroom, crying. I shrugged. I did not want to get her in trouble, but we were going to have to talk more. I wanted to see that boyfriend, and talk to Merlin again, first thing in the morning—and not just about the bodies.
    You hid things about your