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on whether anybody who Jim had put away hit the streets recently?” Carnaby asked.
    “I didn’t get—” Alan Long shut up at Carnaby’s look, then rushed to fill the resulting vacuum. “I’m on it, Captain. Cop time.” He pulled on his coat and scooted out the door.
    “He’s on it,” Active said.
    “Silver used to call Alan his alpha pup,” Carnaby said. Then he ruminated in silence and Active wondered if he was being dismissed too. Finally the captain shook his head. “He asked me to recommend him for Jim’s job.”
    Active grinned. “Alpha pup, huh? You gonna do it?”
    Carnaby frowned. “He might grow into it. People do that, you know.”
    “Or not.”
    “Or not,” Carnaby agreed, with a burdened look. He was silent again. Finally he said, “Christ, I hope Barnes comes up with something.”
    Active raised his eyebrows in agreement. “Like maybe a short in the wiring at the Rec Center?”
    “Something like that. Accidental origin would be nice,” Carnaby said. “You think?”
    “I don’t think anything yet, but my gut says not.”
    “Mine, too,” Carnaby said. “Dammit. Seven, eight people, whatever we end up with. How much do you like this Buck Eastlake? Worth flying up there to talk to him?”
    “Probably, unless something better comes along,” Active said. “It is kind of shaky, though. Couple kids bump chests over a girl with big miluks for what, two, two and a half years, then all of a sudden it turns into mass murder by arson?”
    “Stranger things have happened,” Carnaby said. “What else we got? I mean, who the hell would do such a thing? Whatever it was about, it can’t possibly make any sense.”
    Active shrugged. “Most arsons are never solved. Remember the Investor ?”
    Carnaby winced at the name, as did most Troopers who had been in uniform at the time. Active had been only a kid then, but had heard plenty about the Investor fire when he hit the Trooper Academy several years later.
    The fishing vessel had been set ablaze near the hamlet of Craig in Southeast Alaska. Eight people had died, including a family of four. No one had ever been convicted of the crime.
    “God, I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a rerun of that one,” Carnaby said. “I didn’t work the Investor, but . . . the guys that did, they still obsess about it. It’s the kind of thing that stays with you your whole career. And after. All right, you get hold of Cowboy and see about getting up the river to Eastlake’s camp after he gets your guy out of One-Way Lake tomorrow.”
    Active nodded.
    Carnaby cleared his throat and looked at something scrawled on his desk blotter. “Listen, I had a call a couple hours ago from Harry Winthrop down in Anchorage. He was checking references.”
    Active’s eyes widened, but he held his tongue.
    Carnaby made him wait a good thirty seconds, then grinned. “I told him you weren’t a total screwup.”
    Somewhat to his own surprise, Active found himself whooshing out a breath. “I finally have a shot at getting out of here?”
    “More than, looks like,” Carnaby said. “I got the impression it’s just a matter of working the paper at this point. I imagine you’ll be in Anchorage by Christmas.”
    “Thanks, boss,” Active said.
    Carnaby waved it away. “Ah, I’d never stand in your way. Just wish I could buy a ticket out myself.”
    Carnaby, as they both knew, was likely to finish his career running the Chukchi Trooper post. A few years earlier, he had been unlucky enough to bust a prominent state senator from Anchorage on cocaine charges and had barely escaped with his job when the jury let the senator off. It was unspoken but understood from the top of the Troopers to the bottom that the politicians would allow Carnaby to stay on long enough to get his pension if he did it quietly and at the maximum possible distance from Anchorage. Carnaby’s family—a wife and a nearly grown son and daughter—still lived there, and Carnaby commuted home a couple of