A Murder In Kenai

The first red salmon slapped against the aluminum cooler before Hank Poole saw the body.

A woman in hip waders shouted and dropped her dipnet. The mesh collapsed over the gravel, silver fish twisting inside it. Around her, the Kenai beach kept moving - coolers dragged through wet stones, children crying, men cursing at the river, hundreds of boots grinding the shoreline into mud beneath the long, pale light of early summer.

Then the woman screamed again.

Hank turned from the access road and saw what the tide had delivered.

It lay half in the shallows, half on the black gravel, clothed in a torn brown jacket and one rubber boot. The head was gone. Not hidden beneath the water. Gone.

For one second, the beach continued as if nothing had changed. A net rose. A fish thrashed. Someone laughed near the driftwood racks.

Then the nearest people saw what Hank was looking at.

“Back up,” he said.

Nobody moved.

Hank pushed through the crowd, shoulder-first. A man holding a salmon stepped into his path.

“Sheriff, what the hell - ”

“Back up.”

The man looked past him. His face emptied.

Hank reached the waterline and stopped six feet from the body. The outgoing tide tugged at the jacket. Dark water slipped beneath the torso and ran back toward the river in thin, red-brown ribbons.

The body had been in the water long enough to swell. The hands were pale and puckered. One sleeve had torn open at the elbow. Around the neck was a ragged wound, black in the center and bright along the edges where the tide washed it clean.

Hank had seen dead men before. He had seen drowned men, frozen men, men opened by machinery and animals. This was different. The absence at the top of the body seemed to pull every eye toward it.

“Everybody off the beach,” Hank said.

A woman behind him began praying. A child asked where the man’s head was.

“Move!” Hank barked.

That worked on some of them. Others raised phones.

Hank spun toward the access road. “Put those away.”

A young man in a soaked rain shell kept his phone lifted. “This is public property.”

Hank crossed the gravel in three strides and slapped the phone from his hand. It struck a cooler and landed in the mud.

The young man stared at him. “You can’t do that.”

“I just did.”

“You assaulted me.”

“Then stand there and explain it to me while I put you in the truck.”

The young man looked at the patrol truck parked above the beach. His mouth tightened, but he bent and picked up the phone.

Hank pointed at the road. “Go.”

The young man went. Not fast. People rarely left quickly when there was death in front of them. They drifted away in clumps, whispering, looking back over their shoulders. The beach did not empty. It tightened.

Dipnetters crowded the access path. Their nets lay abandoned in the gravel, handles crossing like broken spears. Fish flopped in coolers and on tarps. A woman dragged two children toward the parking lot while an old man in a wool cap stood staring at the body with a salmon still clutched in one hand.

Hank walked back to the corpse and took out his radio.

“Dispatch, this is Poole. I need the beach access closed. Send every available deputy. Keep civilians off the shoreline. I’ve got a deceased person.”

He looked at the body.

“Possible homicide.”

The radio crackled. “Copy, Sheriff. Do you need medical?”

“Send them.”

He lowered the radio and saw a man stepping toward the water.

“Stop.”

The man wore chest waders and a camouflage cap. He held a dipnet in one hand and pointed with the other.

“I know that jacket,” he said.

Hank moved between him and the body. “You know it from where?”

“Could be nobody. I’m just saying - ”

“Say it from behind the tape when I get it up.”

“There ain’t any tape.”

“There will be.”

The man looked around at the crowd. “This is my beach too.”

“Not today.”

The man’s jaw worked. He glanced at the body again, then retreated a step.

That was the problem with Kenai. Everybody knew everybody’s truck, boat, dog, wife, brother, drinking habit, and unpaid tab. A body could not wash ashore without dragging half the town’s memory behind it.

A siren sounded from the road.

Hank turned. One of his deputies came down the access slope with a roll of yellow tape and a face gone gray. He had to stop twice to keep from slipping on the wet gravel.

“Get the tape around the whole access,” Hank said. “No one crosses it. Not for fish, not for phones, not for anything.”

The deputy nodded. “What happened?”

“Nothing you need to know yet.”

The deputy looked past him.

Hank caught his arm. “Tape.”

The deputy swallowed and moved.

A woman in a red jacket shoved through the crowd. “My husband’s down there.”

“Name?”

“Tom. He went out before dawn. He’s got a blue Ford and a - ”

“Name.”

She gave it. Hank wrote it on the back of his hand.

“He’s not the body,” Hank said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what I’m looking at.”

The woman’s face crumpled. She pushed toward the tape.

Hank caught her by the shoulders. “You stay here.”

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