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river that evening. “How long would it take him to pick this many fish out of the pen and toss them into the skiff?”
    Pat expelled a cloud of smoke with a snort. “Woulda took me about five minutes. With Tyler checking his text messages every thirty seconds, probably take him an hour.”
    So, Jim thought. On the water by six fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour to get to the fish wheel. Pat’s estimate on Tyler’s fish-picking abilities could be taken with a grain of salt. Say thirty minutes. Jim checked his phone. It was now just after ten o’clock.
    Rigor set in after three to four hours, held on for twelve. Fix a tentative time of death at, say, somewhere between 8:45 A.M . and 12:45 P.M . “What time did you find him, Pat?”
    “Got here about five,” Pat said. “Fish wheel was stuck. Took me a while to figure out why.”
    “How long is ‘a while’?”
    The old man’s eyes narrowed. Jim met them with a steady gaze, refusing to apologize for the question.
    Pat blinked first and looked away, across the river. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”
    “What had the basket stuck on?”
    Pat shrugged again. “A stick.”
    “What stick? Where is it?”
    Another shrug from Pat. “I must have tossed it. I got a little distracted there, what with trying to see if Tyler was still alive and all. Useless little fucker though he was, he’s family, and he was my first concern.” His cigarette had again burned all the way down to his fingers. His free hand searched for the packet. It was empty and he crumpled it up and threw it into the little skiff. Not into the water. Not on the beach. Not into his skiff. Into Tyler’s skiff. It was a statement, Jim thought, although he didn’t yet know exactly what statement that was.
    The sun wouldn’t go below the horizon again for another month, and then only for a few minutes, but when it got this low, the light was dim enough to reduce old men sitting in skiffs to grayish outlines.
    Jim squatted again, this time to put his hand in the river.
    If Tyler had died at 8:45 A.M. , normally rigor would have set in by 12:45 P.M . If Tyler had screwed around, on his cell like the old man said or maybe just sacking out in the sun, and had not started picking fish until later, rigor would only now be coming on, or not coming on at all. In neither case should rigor be so fully involved as it was, but that discounted the effect of the body being immersed in the water from then to discovery. Temperature played hell with rigor, especially in the Arctic.
    His hand was numb again. He pulled it out and dried it off, and made a mental note to replace the thermometer to his evidence kit. The last one had disappeared at the last crime scene.
    He pulled out a flashlight and walked up and down the gravel bank, peering into the shallows at the water’s edge and into the shrubbery at the land’s edge. He found an empty Coke can, a dozen empty Budweiser cans, some waterlogged cigarette butts that looked as if the fish or the ducks had been taking the occasional desultory nibble, a small pocketknife with just a blade and a nail file, an empty bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a crumpled thermal receipt with the print so faded, it was unintelligible. He bagged them all.
    Roger sat shivering in his skiff, Pat immobile in his. Roger’s skiff was a large aluminum affair, free of rust and dents, a powerful new Mercury Marine on the back connected to a shiny red fuel tank by a clean black hose. A set of oars was run beneath the thwarts, and oarlocks dangled inside the skiff from their holes. A workmanlike tackle box sat next to the oars, and two fishing poles were locked into opposite sides below the oarlocks. A bought-new bailing can sat in the bow, with an aluminum body and a smooth wooden handle.
    Pat’s skiff was a lot older but much the same in its spare neatness.
    Jim stepped over to look into the third skiff. “This Tyler’s?”
    “Yeah.”
    Tyler’s skiff, on the other hand, was half the size of the