Winter on the Hook Fleet

• Chapter 1 The Freeze Sets In
• Chapter 2 Dead Weight in the Hold
• Chapter 3 The Marshal's Badge
• Chapter 4 Rotting Silver
• Chapter 5 The Cannery Boss
• Chapter 6 Blood on the Ice
• Chapter 7 Whispers in the Galley
• Chapter 8 The Missing Logbook
• Chapter 9 Ghosts of the Yukon
• Chapter 10 A Cold Alibi
• Chapter 11 The Hook Tender's Secret
• Chapter 12 Frostbite and Fever
• Chapter 13 The Second Body
• Chapter 14 Mutiny in the Forecastle
• Chapter 15 Lanterns in the Fog
• Chapter 16 The Smuggler's Manifest
• Chapter 17 Trapped Beneath the Hull
• Chapter 18 Ashes in the Stove
• Chapter 19 The Last Ration
• Chapter 20 A Shot in the Whiteout
• Chapter 21 The Captain's Confession
• Chapter 22 Cracks in the Pack Ice
• Chapter 23 The True Culprit
• Chapter 24 Showdown on the Stern
• Chapter 25 Breaking Free
• Chapter 26 Thaw

The Bering Sea did not freeze all at once, though to the men aboard the Kodiak Queen it felt like someone had slammed a cellar door on the world.

It started on a Tuesday with a greasy slick of slush that hissed against the wooden hull like wet sand. By Wednesday noon, the slush had knitted itself into flat, dinner-plate discs of pancake ice that clattered together in the swell. By Thursday twilight, the wind swung around from the north, dropped thirty degrees in an hour, and locked the whole bay into a single, groaning sheet of gray iron.

Deputy Marshal Caleb Vance stood on the leeward rail, his sheepskin collar turned up past his ears, and watched the last patch of open water vanish. It was a narrow black vein about the width of a wagon road, and as he watched, the pack ice pinched it shut with a sound like a rifle shot.

"Well," Caleb said to the empty deck, "that tears it."

Behind him, the wheelhouse door rattled open, and Captain Gus Lindqvist stepped out, carrying a tin mug of coffee that had stopped steaming before it cleared the threshold. Gus was a broad-shouldered Norwegian with a beard the color of wet hemp and a temperament that suggested he had been personally insulted by the barometer.

"It'll break," Gus said, though he didn't sound like he believed it. He spat over the rail. The spit froze before it hit the ice, bouncing once like a pebble. "Tide's due to turn at midnight. A good six-foot drop will crack this shelf right down the middle."

"Uh-huh," Caleb said. He had spent six years working the territorial circuit out of Juneau, and he had learned two things about sea captains: they never admitted they were lost, and they never admitted they were stuck. "And if it doesn't?"

Gus took a slow sip of his coffee, wincing as the hot tin bit his lip. "Then we sit tight until the wind shifts south. We've got coal in the bunkers and salt beef in the barrels. Nobody's starving."

"Nobody's going anywhere, either," Caleb pointed out. "I've got a prisoner transfer waiting in Seward and a judge in Fairbanks who thinks I'm already three days late."

"Tell the judge to take it up with the Almighty," Gus grunted. "I'm a fisherman, Marshal, not a miracle worker."

Caleb didn't argue. There was no point arguing with a man who had stayed two weeks past the end of the October silver run because the fish were still biting. Greed was a simpler thing to understand than weather, and twice as stubborn. Gus had four boats under his flag—the Kodiak Queen, a stubby, seventy-foot cannery tender with a steam boiler that leaked; two smaller hook-and-line trollers, the Sitka Rose and the Bering Star; and a flat-bottomed barge loaded down with empty tin cans and rock salt. Together, they made up the last of the autumn hook fleet, lingering in the lee of Cape Constantine long after the big steamships had fled south for Seattle.

Now, all four vessels sat wedged in the cove like flies in amber.

From the Sitka Rose, moored fifty yards off the Queen's port bow, a lantern bobbed along the deck. Someone was shouting, their voice thin and brittle in the sub-zero air. A moment later, a figure in a heavy oilskin coat climbed down the rope ladder onto the ice, testing it with a cautious boot before trudging across the frozen gap toward the tender.

"That's Miller," Gus said, squinting through the gloom. "Looks like he's got his dander up."

Caleb watched the man approach. Even in the dim light of the deck lamps, he could see that Miller was moving with the stiff, jerky stride of a man who had been arguing with somebody and lost. When he reached the Queen's boarding ladder, he didn't wait for an invitation; he hauled himself up, his boots thudding heavily on the frosted planks, and marched straight for the wheelhouse.

"She's pinching, Gus," Miller said without preamble. His breath came out in ragged white plumes. He was the skipper of the Sitka Rose, a wiry man from Astoria with a perpetually red nose and eyes that watered in the cold. "The ice is piling up against my sternpost. If the tide drops like you say, she's going to twist my rudder right off the pintles."

"Set out the ice poles," Gus said calmly. "Keep her clear of the pressure ridge."

"We've been out there with poles since four o'clock! The ice is six inches thick and growing. You can't push back a glacier with a spruce stick, Gus. We need to fire up the Queen's boiler, get a head of steam, and ram a channel out to the point before it sets solid."

Gus shook his head. "Boiler's cold. Take six hours to get enough steam to turn the screw, and by then the tide'll be dead low. You'd just ground us on the mudflats."

"Better the mudflats than getting stove in!" Miller's voice cracked. He looked past Gus at Caleb, as if noticing the deputy marshal for the first time. "You're the law, ain't you? Tell him he's got to try."

Caleb tucked his hands deeper into his sheepskin pockets. "I'm a deputy marshal, Mr. Miller, not a harbor pilot. Though I'd be lying if I said I was keen on spending November in a tin can."

"See?" Miller jabbed a mittened finger toward Caleb. "Even the law knows we're cooked."

"You're not cooked," Gus snapped, his patience finally fraying. "You're just scared of a little frost. Get back to your boat, double up your mooring lines to the barge, and tell your boys to break out the extra blankets. We'll look at it in the morning."

Miller stood there for a long second, his jaw working beneath his scarf. For a moment, Caleb thought the man might swing at the captain, and he shifted his weight slightly, ready to step between them. Instead, Miller spat onto the deck—another frozen pebble—and turned back toward the ladder.

"Your funeral, Gus," he muttered, and disappeared over the side.

Caleb watched him cross the ice back to the Sitka Rose. The wind was picking up now, moaning through the rigging like a stray dog. Snow had started to fall, not the big, lazy flakes of a mild winter, but tiny, sharp pellets that stung the face like birdshot.

"Friendly bunch," Caleb remarked.

"Fishermen," Gus said, as if that explained everything. "They're happy when the holds are full and miserable when they're empty. Right now, they're half-full and freezing their tails off. Come on, Marshal. Let's get below before we turn into statues."

The Kodiak Queen's galley was the warmest place on the ship, which wasn't saying much. A cast-iron range sat bolted to the floorboards in the center of the room, its belly glowing a dull cherry red through the damper slots. The air inside smelled of coal smoke, boiled cabbage, wet wool, and the faint, unmistakable tang of fish guts that never quite washed out of the timber.

Half a dozen men were already crowded around the long mess table, hunched over tin plates and chipped mugs. They looked up when Gus and Caleb came in, their eyes lingering on the brass star pinned to Caleb's vest beneath his open coat.

It wasn't a friendly look. A marshal on a fishing boat was like a priest at a card game—nobody necessarily had anything to hide, but nobody liked having him watch their hands.

"Evening, boys," Caleb said, taking an empty bench near the stove. He peeled off his gloves and held his stiff fingers toward the iron.

Nobody answered. A big man with a scarred chin and forearms like knotted rope—the hook tender, if Caleb remembered the crew list right—grunted and went back to sopping up gravy with a heel of bread. Across from him, a younger fellow with a neat, clerkish mustache was hunched over a leather-bound ledger, his pencil scratching furiously in the lamplight.

That was Arthur Pendelton, the company bookkeeper sent up from the Seattle office to tally the late-season catch. He looked about as suited to the Bering Sea as a parlor piano.

"Cook," Gus barked toward the tiny pantry. "Give the marshal a plate. And bring some of that coffee that doesn't taste like bilge water."

A thin, sour-faced man in a grease-stained apron poked his head out. "There's only one pot, Captain. You don't like it, you can melt snow."

"Just pour it, Dutch," Gus said, dropping onto a stool.

Caleb accepted the tin plate—salt pork, boiled potatoes, and something that might have been turnip—and ate without complaining. He had eaten worse in jailhouses from Ketchikan to Nome. Around him, the conversation slowly resumed, though it stayed low, pitched beneath the rattle of the wind against the portholes.

"Heard the Bering Star lost her anchor chain," one of the deckhands said, a kid who couldn't have been more than nineteen.

"Didn't lose it," the scarred hook tender said without looking up. "Snapped. Cold makes the iron brittle. Same thing'll happen to the Queen's rudder if we don't chop the ice away from the stern."

"We'll chop it at dawn," Gus said firmly. "Right now, I want every man who isn't on watch to get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

The crew didn't look convinced, and neither was Caleb. He finished his pork, washed it down with coffee that could have stripped paint off a barn door, and leaned back against the bulkhead.

He hadn't meant to be here. Three weeks ago, he had boarded the Kodiak Queen at a cannery dock in Naknek, expecting a routine three-day run down the peninsula to catch a southbound steamer. He had a simple job: deliver a subpoena to a cannery foreman who had witnessed a knife fight in July, then head home to Juneau before the real winter hit.

Instead, the foreman had vanished into the interior, Gus had decided to chase one last school of silvers into the teeth of an Arctic front, and now the ocean had turned to concrete.

"You figure we're stuck for good, Marshal?"

Caleb looked across the table. It was Pendelton, the bookkeeper. He had closed his ledger and was rubbing his spectacles with the hem of his wool sweater. His hands were trembling slightly, though whether from the cold or nerves, Caleb couldn't tell.

"I'm no seaman, Mr. Pendelton," Caleb said. "Captain says the tide might crack it."

"The captain also said we'd be in Dutch Harbor by Tuesday," Pendelton replied, lowering his voice so Gus, who was talking to the cook, wouldn't hear. "I've been checking the manifests. We've got forty tons of iced salmon in the hold of this ship alone, and another thirty on the Rose and the Star. If we don't get to the cannery—"

"It's cold enough to keep it frozen," Caleb said.

"Frozen salmon isn't the same as canned salmon, Marshal. The company pays by the pound, and if it sits in the brine too long, or if the ice shifts and crushes the boxes, it's worthless. Worse than worthless. The men don't get their share if the catch spoils."

Caleb glanced around the table. The kid was listening now, and so was the hook tender. The quiet resentment in the room suddenly had a sharper edge to it. These men weren't working for wages; they were working on lay—a percentage of the catch. If the fish rotted or got ruined, they had spent two miserable months in the freezing rain for nothing.

"Let's worry about tomorrow when it gets here," Caleb said evenly. "Panicking never melted an inch of ice."

Pendelton nodded, though he didn't look comforted. He tucked his ledger under his arm and stood up, squeezing past the bench. "I'm turning in. If the boat starts to list, somebody wake me."

One by one, the others drifted off toward the forecastle, leaving only Caleb, Gus, and the cook, who was busy scraping pots with a wooden paddle.

"You've got a cheerful crew, Captain," Caleb said, lighting his pipe with a match struck against the stove.

Gus rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "They're good men when the sun's out. You put twenty-five men on four small boats in the dark, with nothing to do but listen to the hull groan, and they start jumping at shadows."

"Is that all it is? Shadows?"

Gus looked at him sharply. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," Caleb said, blowing a stream of blue smoke toward the ceiling. "Just that I've spent enough time in mining camps and timber towns to know what happens when men get trapped together with money on the line. Somebody usually decides somebody else is to blame."

"I'm the captain," Gus said. "If they want to blame someone, they can blame me. Now, if you're done playing prophet, Marshal, your bunk's the upper one in the chartroom. It's warmer than the forecastle."

Caleb thanked him and took his leave. The chartroom was just aft of the wheelhouse, a cramped space barely large enough for a folding table, a rack of rolled-up maps, and two narrow bunks built into the wall. It smelled of old paper and cedar.

He didn't undress. He just pulled off his boots, wrapped himself in two scratchy wool blankets, and lay there listening to the ship.

A wooden boat in pack ice doesn't sit quiet. All night long, the Kodiak Queen talked to him. The hull creaked as the tide dropped, a slow, agonizing sound like a tree bending in a gale. Outside, the ice groaned and popped, shifting against the planks with heavy, rhythmic thuds that vibrated right through the mattress.

Once, around three in the morning, Caleb woke to a sharp crack that sounded like a cannon shot right beneath his pillow. He sat up, his hand automatically dropping to the Colt .45 holstered on the peg beside his bunk.

He listened. No shouting. No running feet on the deck. Just the steady shriek of the north wind and the endless, grinding pressure of the frozen sea.

He lay back down, pulling the blankets up to his chin, and stared at the dark ceiling. Somewhere out there in the whiteout, three other boats were taking the same beating. And if Gus was wrong about the tide—if the ice didn't break by morning—they weren't going to be worried about getting home for Thanksgiving.

They were going to be worried about surviving until spring.

Morning didn't bring sunlight; it brought a pale, pewter-colored glare that leaked through the frost-rimmed portholes at nine o'clock and made the cold look even worse.

Caleb pulled on his boots, splashed his face with ice water from the basin, and went out on deck.

The world had changed overnight. The cove was no longer water; it was a jagged plain of white and gray, ridged where the tide had heaved the ice upward into miniature mountain ranges. The Kodiak Queen sat tilted slightly to starboard, gripped tight in a vise of frozen brine.

Off the bow, the Sitka Rose and the Bering Star looked like toy boats dropped in a snowbank. Their rigging was coated in hoarfrost, turning every rope into a thick white cable.

Gus was already on the foredeck, bundled in a fur-lined parka, shouting orders to four men who were hacking at the ice around the anchor chain with long-handled axes and iron bars.

"How's it look?" Caleb asked, stepping up beside him.

Gus didn't look over. "Bad. Tide dropped five feet, and the ice just followed it down. We're locked in solid."

"So what's the play?"

"We wait for the midday high," Gus said, though his voice lacked the bluster of the night before. "If the swell underneath doesn't crack it, we'll have to start hauling the coal from the barge over the ice and bank the fires. Conserve what we've got."

Caleb looked out toward the horizon. Beyond the mouth of the cove, where the open Bering Sea should have been, there was nothing but more ice, stretching flat and unbroken as far as the eye could see. No steamships. No smoke. Just white.

"We're not getting out of here, are we, Gus?"

The old Norwegian finally turned to look at him, his blue eyes rimmed with red from the wind. "Not today, Marshal. Maybe not this month."

A shout went up from the Sitka Rose. Both men turned to see Miller waving his arms from the troller's rail, pointing toward the stern of the cannery barge.

"What's he yelling about?" Caleb asked.

Gus squinted. "Can't hear him over the wind. Come on."

They climbed down the Queen's ladder, their boots crunching on the rough surface of the pack ice. Walking on it was like walking on broken glass covered in flour; the wind had scoured some patches slick as marble and piled snowdrifts three feet deep in others.

By the time they reached the Sitka Rose, Miller had climbed down to meet them, his face pale beneath his beard.

"It's the Bering Star," Miller said, breathing hard. "I sent two of my boys over at first light to borrow some lamp oil. Nobody answered their hail."

"They're probably still asleep," Gus said. "Lazy bastards."

"No," Miller said, shaking his head. "The galley door's wide open, Gus. And their stove's stone cold. No smoke from the stack since midnight."

Caleb felt a familiar prickle at the back of his neck—the same feeling he got right before a door got kicked in. "How far is the Star?"

"Hundred yards past the barge," Miller said, pointing into the blowing snow. "You can barely see her masts."

"Let's go," Caleb said.

They trudged past the silent bulk of the cannery barge, the wind tearing at their coats. The cold was a physical weight now, pressing against Caleb's chest with every breath. As they cleared the stern of the barge, the Bering Star loomed out of the white haze.

She was a smaller vessel, fifty feet of weathered cedar, sitting slightly down by the head. Just as Miller had said, the chimney pipe above her galley was bare—no plume of gray smoke, no sign of life.

"Ahoy the Star!" Gus cupped his hands and shouted. "Larsen! Get your tail out here!"

Nothing answered him but the rattle of a loose halyard slapping against the mast.

Caleb didn't wait for Gus. He climbed the wooden ladder nailed to the Star's hull, his boots slipping on the rime ice, and swung himself over the rail onto the deck.

The deck was empty. A half-empty crate of salt herring sat near the hatch, frozen solid. The galley door stood ajar, banging gently against its jamb in the wind.

Caleb drew his Colt, keeping it low by his thigh, and pushed the door open with his boot.

The galley was an icebox. A tin pot sat on the cold stove, its contents—oatmeal, by the look of it—frozen into a gray lump. Two mugs sat on the table. Everything was neat, almost too neat, except for a dark smear on the floorboards near the companionway leading down to the hold.

Caleb knelt, touching the smear with the tip of a gloved finger. It was hard as wax.

"Gus," he called out, his voice flat. "Get up here. Tell Miller to stay on the ice."

Gus's heavy footsteps thudded on the deck a moment later. He poked his head into the galley, saw Caleb kneeling by the companionway, and froze.

"What is it?"

"Blood," Caleb said, standing up and holstering his gun. "And a lot of it. Looks like somebody dragged something heavy down into the fish hold."

He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small brass flashlight, and clicked it on. The beam cut through the gloom of the narrow stairs, glinting off the frost-covered rungs.

"Stay behind me," Caleb said, and started down into the dark.

The companionway ladder was slick with rime ice, and Caleb had to hook his elbows through the rungs to keep from pitching headfirst into the dark. Behind him, Gus Lindqvist’s heavy boots scraped against the wood, his breathing loud and ragged in the narrow shaft.

At the bottom, the air was dead still and colder than the deck above, if such a thing were possible. It smelled of old cedar, salt brine, and the faint, sweetish rot of fish that had been sitting too long in wooden boxes. Overriding it all was the sharp, metallic tang of spilled blood, though the freeze had mostly locked the scent away.

Caleb played the beam of his brass flashlight across the hold. The Bering Star wasn't built for comfort; she was a working troller, fifty feet of stout planking designed to haul as much silver salmon as her bilge could float. A low aisle ran down the center, flanked on both sides by waist-high stacks of wooden fish crates packed with crushed ice.

The dark smear from the galley ended at the base of the ladder, turning into a broad, scuffed track through the frost on the floorboards. Something heavy had been hauled straight down the middle aisle toward the stern.

"Larsen?" Gus called out, his voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. He stayed near the ladder, one hand gripping the timber upright. "Pete, you down here?"

"He's not going to answer you, Gus," Caleb said.

He followed the drag marks, his boots crunching softly on spilled ice crystals. Ten feet aft, the aisle narrowed where the hull curved inward toward the sternpost. A stack of crates had been pulled out from the wall, leaving a gap just wide enough for a man's shoulders.

Caleb angled the flashlight into the gap.

Pete Larsen lay wedged between the fish boxes and the ribs of the hull, half-buried under a shifted pile of crushed ice. He was a compact man in his fifties, wearing a thick gray wool sweater, canvas trousers, and rubber deck boots. His face was turned toward the planking, his skin the color of tallow, his eyes half-open and glazed with frost.

Caleb knelt beside him, careful not to step in the frozen splatters on the floor. He reached out with a gloved hand and touched the side of Larsen's neck. It was like touching a fence post in January.

"Dead," Caleb said. "Has been for hours."

Gus took two slow steps forward, peering over Caleb's shoulder. When the flashlight beam caught the back of Larsen's head, the big Norwegian let out a low, rattling breath and crossed himself.

"God in heaven," Gus muttered. "What hit him?"

"Something heavy and blunt," Caleb said, leaning closer. The thinning gray hair at the crown of Larsen's skull was matted with a thick, black crust of frozen blood. There was a distinct depression in the bone, roughly the size of a silver dollar. "Didn't happen down here, either. Look at the way his sweater's bunched up around his armpits. Somebody grabbed him by the heels and dragged him down the stairs."

"Why?" Gus asked. "Why drag him into the hold?"

"To buy time," Caleb said. "If you leave a body in the galley, the first man who looks through the porthole sees it. You shove him down here behind the fish boxes, maybe nobody checks until noon. Or maybe whoever did it didn't want to look at him while they finished their business."

Caleb carefully rolled Larsen's shoulder back just enough to check his pockets. He found a tin of Copenhagen snuff, a stub of pencil, a folded tally sheet stained with fish oil, and a heavy brass pocket watch. Caleb popped the lid of the watch. The crystal was intact, and the hands had stopped at quarter past two.

"Could have stopped from the cold," Caleb murmured, snapping it shut and slipping it back into Larsen's pocket. "Or from the fall."

"I don't understand," Gus said, his voice tight. "Pete was a quiet man. Kept to himself. Who'd want to cave his skull in?"

"That's what we're going to find out. Who else was aboard this boat?"

Gus rubbed his beard, his eyes darting around the shadowy hold as if he expected someone to step out from behind the crates. "Two hands. A Swede named Lindholm—big fellow, worked the gaff—and a kid from Ketchikan named Billy. Billy Marsh. They've been with Pete since July."

"Well, they aren't in the galley," Caleb said, standing up and brushing the frost from his knees. "Let's check the forecastle. Stay behind me."

They climbed back up the ladder into the freezing galley. In the pale daylight filtering through the salt-crusted portholes, the room looked even bleaker. Caleb paused by the table, shining his light over the two tin mugs. Both were half-full of coffee, now frozen into solid brown discs. The oatmeal pot on the stove was cold.

"Two mugs," Caleb noted. "Larsen was sitting down with somebody. Either Lindholm, the kid, or a visitor from another boat."

"No," Gus said, shaking his head. "The ice didn't lock up solid enough to walk on until after midnight. Nobody was visiting from the Queen or the Rose in the dark."

"Somebody walked over here at first light," Caleb pointed out. "Miller's boys did."

"That was after dawn. Look at the stove, Marshal. If the fire's been out since midnight, whoever drank that coffee was here before the freeze."

Caleb nodded slowly. It was a good point, though he wasn't ready to rule out a midnight walk across the new ice by someone desperate enough—or angry enough—to risk falling through.

He moved past the stove to the forward bulkhead, where a narrow wooden door led to the forecastle. He tried the latch. It wasn't locked. He pushed it open with his boot, his hand resting on the butt of his Colt, and swept the room with his flashlight.

The forecastle was empty. Four narrow bunks were built into the curve of the bow, two on each side. Two of them were stripped down to the bare ticking mattresses. The other two had blankets rumpled and tossed back, as if the men sleeping in them had gotten up in a hurry.

Caleb stepped inside, his boots thudding hollowly on the floorboards. He checked the sea bags stowed beneath the bunks. One was half-empty, its canvas flap hanging open. A pair of heavy oilskin trousers lay crumpled in the corner, stiff as sheet iron.

"Their coats are gone," Gus said from the doorway. "Lindholm had a big sheepskin, like yours. And the kid wore a red mackinaw. I don't see either of 'em."

"What about boots?"

Gus squinted into the gloom. "Gone too. Looks like they packed up and walked off."

"Walked off where?" Caleb asked. "There's nothing out there but fifty miles of pack ice and a frozen tundra."

"Maybe they went to the Sitka Rose," Gus said, though he didn't sound convinced. "Or maybe they're hiding on the barge."

Caleb didn't answer. He turned and walked back through the galley, stepping out onto the wind-scoured deck of the Bering Star. He checked the wheelhouse next. It was a cramped box of glass and mahogany, barely big enough for the helm and a compass binnacle. Everything was in its place—the logbook lay open on the shelf, weighted down by a brass divider, and the throttle was set to neutral.

Caleb flipped back a page in the logbook. The last entry was dated yesterday afternoon, written in a neat, cramped hand: 4:15 PM. Anchored in lee of Cape Constantine. Ice forming fast. Barometer 29.10 and falling. Miller wants to run for it. Gus says hold.

Below that, nothing.

He stepped back out onto the deck and walked to the starboard rail, looking down at the ice. Miller was standing thirty yards away, stamping his feet and slapping his gloved hands against his ribs to keep warm. When he saw Caleb and Gus emerge from the wheelhouse, he hurried toward the boarding ladder.

"Well?" Miller shouted over the wind. "Where the hell is everybody? Did they freeze to death?"

Caleb climbed down the ladder, his boots hitting the ice with a dull crunch. Gus followed a moment later, looking ten years older than he had an hour ago.

"Stay back from the boat, Miller," Caleb said, holding up a hand. "Nobody goes aboard the Star until I say so."

Miller stopped dead, his red nose twitching in the cold. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Pete Larsen is dead," Caleb said plainly. "Somebody caved his head in and dragged him down into the fish hold."

Miller's mouth fell open. A plume of white breath drifted out, instantly torn away by the wind. "Dead? Pete? You're joking."

"I don't joke about murder, Mr. Miller," Caleb said. "Did your boys come aboard when they came over here this morning?"

"No! I mean, I don't think so," Miller stammered, his eyes darting between Caleb and the silent hull of the Bering Star. "Johnny just climbed up the ladder, looked in the galley window, and saw the stove was cold. He yelled for Pete, nobody answered, so he came right back to the Rose."

"Did he see anyone on the ice? Lindholm? The Marsh kid?"

"Nobody," Miller said, shaking his head vigorously. "It was barely light out, Marshal. Blowing snow like a bastard. You couldn't see fifty feet."

Caleb looked past Miller toward the dark, flat bulk of the cannery barge, sitting moored between the Bering Star and the Kodiak Queen. "We're going to check the barge. Gus, you got a padlock on the Queen?"

"In the bosun's locker," Gus said.

"Send somebody to fetch it. I want the Star's galley door and her hold hatch locked up tight. Nobody touches Larsen until I've had a chance to talk to every man in this fleet."

"You think somebody from my boat did this?" Miller's voice rose an octave, shrill against the whine of the wind. "My boys were in their bunks all night! You can ask 'em!"

"I intend to," Caleb said. "Right now, I'm just trying to figure out where two missing crewmen went in the middle of a blizzard. Let's check the barge."

They trudged across the uneven ice toward the flat-bottomed barge. Walking was treacherous work; the wind had polished the bare patches of frozen seawater into slick, gray glass, and Caleb had to keep his knees bent and his arms out for balance.

The barge was little more than a floating warehouse, a hundred feet of heavy timber piled high with tarpaulin-covered crates of empty tin cans and sacks of coarse rock salt. A small wooden shack sat on the stern, used as a shelter for the watchman when the barge was under tow.

Caleb climbed onto the low deck and tried the shack door. It swung open easily. Inside, there was a rusted potbelly stove, a wooden bench, and a stack of burlap sacks. No one was there. The dust on the floor was undisturbed.

"Nothing," Caleb called down to Gus and Miller. He walked the perimeter of the cargo, peering between the tarps and checking the shadows behind the salt sacks. Just tin, salt, and drifting snow.

When he climbed back down onto the ice, he looked out past the stern of the Bering Star. Beyond the shelter of the cove, the frozen Bering Sea stretched away into a swirling white haze. If Lindholm and the Marsh kid had walked out that way in the dark, they wouldn't have made it half a mile before the wind knocked them down and the snow buried them.

"They didn't go out to sea," Caleb said, turning back toward the Kodiak Queen. "And they aren't on the barge. That leaves two places: your boat, Miller, or Gus's."

"They ain't on the Rose!" Miller snapped, his fear quickly curdling into anger. "I've got six men aboard, and I know every damn one of 'em by their boots. If two strangers climbed over my rail last night, I'd have heard it."

"Maybe they didn't climb over your rail," Caleb said. "Maybe they're hiding in your bilge. Or maybe they're sitting in Gus's forecastle right now, drinking his coffee. Either way, we're going to find out."

They started back toward the Kodiak Queen. As they approached the tender's hull, Caleb noticed a cluster of faces peering down over the rail. The men who had been chopping ice around the anchor chain had stopped working, their axes resting against their shoulders. Even from fifty yards away, Caleb could feel their eyes on him.

News traveled fast on a small boat, even without words. They had seen the three captains—and the marshal—walk out to the Bering Star and come back looking like they'd seen a ghost.

"Gus," Caleb said quietly as they reached the Queen's boarding ladder. "When we get up there, I want you to keep your crew on deck. Don't let anybody go below, and don't let anybody wander off toward the Rose. I'm going to talk to them one at a time."

Gus nodded, his jaw set hard beneath his hemp-colored beard. "You're the law, Marshal. Just tell me what you need."

Caleb climbed the ladder first, swinging his leg over the iced-up rail and dropping onto the deck of the Kodiak Queen. The wind hit him hard here, unobstructed by the barge, stinging his cheeks like a handful of gravel.

The four deckhands by the anchor chain stood huddled together, their faces tucked into their collars. The scarred hook tender was among them, leaning on a long iron pry bar.

"Everything all right out there, Captain?" the hook tender asked, though he was looking straight at Caleb.

Gus climbed over the rail and stood beside Caleb, planting his boots wide. "No," Gus said, his voice booming out over the moan of the rigging. "It's not all right. Pete Larsen is dead. Murdered in his own galley."

A dead silence fell over the foredeck, broken only by the rattle of a frozen halyard. The young deckhand—the nineteen-year-old kid from the night before—dropped his axe. It hit the frosted planks with a sharp clatter.

"Murdered?" the kid whispered. "Who... who'd do that?"

"That's what the marshal's going to find out," Gus said. "Until he does, nobody leaves this boat without my say-so. And nobody goes near the Bering Star. Is that clear?"

The men murmured their assent, glancing nervously at one another. Caleb watched their faces, looking for the telltale twitch of a guilty man, the too-quick glance away, the sudden stiffening of the shoulders. He didn't see it. Mostly, he just saw cold, tired men who were suddenly realizing that being trapped in the ice wasn't the worst thing that could happen to them.

"Dutch!" Gus barked toward the galley door. "Get out here!"

The sour-faced cook poked his head out, a dishrag still clutched in his raw, red hands. "What's all the shouting about?"

"Fetch a padlock and a hasp from the bosun's locker," Caleb said, stepping toward him. "And bring me a lantern. A bright one."

Dutch blinked, looking from Caleb to Gus, then disappeared back inside without a word. A moment later, the wheelhouse door opened, and Arthur Pendelton stepped out, clutching his leather ledger to his chest like a shield. His spectacles were fogged over from the sudden change in temperature, and he squinted blindly toward the group on the foredeck.

"Captain?" Pendelton called out. "What's happened? Someone said there's been an accident on the Star."

"Not an accident, Mr. Pendelton," Caleb said. "A murder. Skipper Larsen was killed last night. His two crewmen are missing."

Pendelton's face went the color of wet chalk. He took off his spectacles with a trembling hand and wiped them on his sleeve. "Killed? Good Lord. Why? We're miles from anywhere. Who would..." He trailed off, his eyes widening as the implication hit him. "The missing men. Lindholm and Marsh. They must have done it and run!"

"Run where?" Caleb asked dryly. "There's nowhere to run to, Mr. Pendelton. Unless they sprouted wings."

Pendelton didn't have an answer for that. He just stood there, shivering in his wool sweater, looking like a man who wished very badly that he had stayed behind a desk in Seattle.

Dutch returned a minute later, carrying a heavy brass padlock and a storm lantern. Caleb took the lantern, handed the padlock to Gus, and nodded toward the Sitka Rose.

"Gus, send two of your men you trust to lock up the Star," Caleb said. "Have them put the lock on the galley door, and tell them not to step a foot inside. Just pull the door shut and snap it."

Gus pointed at the scarred hook tender and one of the older deckhands. "You two. Do like the marshal says. Straight there and straight back."

The two men nodded, took the padlock, and climbed down the ladder onto the ice.

Caleb turned back to the remaining crew, his hand resting lightly on his hip, just above the grip of his Colt. The wind was picking up again, driving fine, dry snow across the deck in stinging sheets.

"All right, boys," Caleb said, raising his voice so they could all hear him over the gale. "Nobody's going anywhere until this ice breaks, which means we're going to be neighbors for a while. We're going to start by finding out where Lindholm and Billy Marsh went, and we're going to do it before dark. Captain, let's get everybody into the galley where it's warm. I want to start asking questions."

Nobody argued. They filed toward the galley door, heads bowed against the wind, leaving Caleb alone on the foredeck for a brief second. He looked out across the white waste toward the Bering Star, sitting dark and silent in the blowing snow.

Somewhere out there, two men had vanished into thin air, and a third was lying frozen in a bed of crushed ice. And Caleb Vance had a sinking feeling that before the thaw came, Pete Larsen wouldn't be the last.