by Thomas Zigal
He told her that something unexpected had come up and he might be out later than he’d planned. “Do you remember Jake Pfeil’s sister?”
“Yeees,” she said, drawing out the word as if to focus her recollection. “Beautiful girl. Didn’t she become some kind of loony ecoterrorist? My lord, what a family.”
“She’s back in the valley. I have to track her down and talk to her about Ned.”
A long silence on Meg’s end. She didn’t want to hear about police work. “Don’t worry, Kojak,” she said, “dinner will be a-waitin’ on the stove.”
“Mmmm, tofu burgers. The boys are in for a real treat.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “Those kids could use a day without meat. You, too, Muscle Beachboy.”
“God, I miss that. Kojak. Muscle Beachboy. No woman has ever called me those things quite like you do.”
She laughed, a luscious, throaty sound he hadn’t heard in a long time. They were making their way back to a genial friendship. Their son deserved the effort.
“How are the bruises, Kurt? You feeling okay?”
“Don’t ask. I need drugs.”
“I suppose you’ve forgotten there are other ways to deal with pain.”
They had been through years of meditation together. Yoga. Massage therapy. Pursuits that seemed as far away now as the Korean War.
“Tell you what, little Sufi girl,” he said, testing her sense of humor, “when I come home why don’t we light some candles and incense, put on a Cat Stevens album, and rub each other down with patchouli oil? That ought to get rid of my headache.”
He could feel her quick smile, the way her playful eyes crinkled with mischief. “In your dreams, Beachboy,” she said.
The door creaked behind him and Muffin Brown slipped into the room.
“Gotta go,” he said to Meg. “See you later this evening.”
Muffin dragged back a chair. “Hot date tonight, Kurt?”
He blushed.
“The word patchouli was before my time,” she said. “Tell me, does it leave an aftertaste?”
He shot her a sidelong glance and then resumed watching the two people in the interrogation room. “Why did you assign a rookie to this case?”
“Rookies need to break in somewhere. I like Linda. She’s intense and she’s got a good head for small details. This case is the right fit for her.”
A former schoolteacher from Alamosa, Linda Ríos had been recruited in Muffin’s effort to hire more Spanish-speaking officers for the valley.
“You’re not treating this like a homicide, Muffin.”
“Unless your boy breaks down and confesses,” she said, “it’s not a homicide until Lorenzo Banks tells us it is.”
He rose from the desk, as impatient with the way things were going as Tyler appeared to be, slouched over the interrogation table, grunting monosyllabic responses. “One minute Ned was worried about somebody coming after him,” he said, “the next minute he was dead. That sounds like homicide to me.”
He walked to the door and was almost out of the room when she called his name. “Thanks for bringing him in, partner.” She nodded at the glass. “I don’t know anyone else who could’ve done that without a fight on their hands.”
“Piece of cake,” he said.
Chapter ten
By the time he veered off the paved road a half mile north of Ashcroft and stopped to lock the hubs on his old Willys, the sun had long disappeared behind the Elk Range and the narrow valley was imbued with a soft violet light. Within fifty yards the Jeep was rocking along a rutted four-wheel-only track that followed Express Creek up to Taylor Lake at 12,000 feet. Snowmelt gorged the creek, a splashing rush of white water through this wilderness of blue spruce and lodgepole pines, the hiss as palpable as the alpine chill descending over the forest.
He hadn’t been to the Pfeil family cabin in thirty years and missed the secluded turnoff, a small breach in the trees. Smelling woodsmoke, he retraced his route, searching for dark wisps from the chimney, and finally located the old passage into deeper woods. The cabin was still the same modest pine-log hideaway that Rudi Pfeil had built in the ’50s as a weekend retreat from the pressures of running a virgin ski resort, a place where he could take his family to hike and fish and escape the telephone. It appeared as if no improvements had been made to the structure in all these years. The exterior needed a fresh stain-coating, the front porch sagged toward one end, shingles were missing here and there on the roof. Kurt parked next to a glossy white GMC pickup and wondered if the Pfeils still owned this property. It was the only place in the valley where Kat would still feel at home.
For several minutes he sat behind the wheel with the engine dead, waiting for guard dogs or a demented caretaker with a sawed-off shotgun, trying to recall his last visit here. Jake Pfeil had thrown a wild victory party the night their football team won the district championship, Kurt’s sophomore year. The first time he’d ever gotten drunk. He smiled now, picturing that younger self stumbling out into the snow to barf all over his lumberjack shirt and then pass out. Bert and Jake had dragged him by his ankles through forty yards of ice and brush and dropped him fully clothed into the steaming Swedish bath. A week later John Kennedy was assassinated and the parties ended out here forever, the whole world darkened by mourning. It seemed like such a long time ago.
When Kurt was satisfied he wouldn’t be shot for trespassing, he crawled out of the Jeep and walked to the door. No lights on inside, no response to his knocks. He knew better than to peek through a window. If Kat Pfeil was here, she deserved her privacy. He would leave a note and return in the morning.
As he started back to the Jeep for paper and pen he noticed white smoke roiling through the dense underbrush south of the cabin and stopped to watch the ghostly vapor whirl up into the grainy blue dusk. Steam was rising from that old Swedish bath. Was someone down there? He followed the footpath leading to where Rudi Pfeil had devised his most clever addition to the hideaway, his pride and joy. Kurt recollected that creek water was pumped through a primitive boiler shed and then piped into a bowl-shaped sitting pool lined bottom and sides with granite boulders. When he was growing up, there were scandalous rumors that their parents liked to slip off down this path late at night to drink brandy and soak together in the nude.
The trail gave out unexpectedly and he had to battle his way through chokecherry and kinnikinnick, dodging the spruce branches scratching at his face and a mess of snowbrush underfoot. He stopped in a small clearing to orient himself and pick needles out of his hair, then spied vapor coiling up through the foliage ahead. He continued on until he caught sight of the old boiler shed—and a woman sitting motionless in the steaming pool. Her eyes were closed, sleek black hair curling onto her bare shoulders. From this distance her face was still an artist’s study in delicate bones, the vision of beauty Kurt had dreamed about every night on his army bunk in Germany. Jake’s little sister.
She swayed her floating arms, disturbing the fervid water, brewing up another cloud of steam. Kurt stepped back into the thicket, suddenly unsure of what to say under these circumstances, how to introduce himself, knowing that he should return to the cabin and wait there. But she stood up then, steam billowing around her tall willowy figure, and he was unable to pull himself away. She reached for a towel lying on a boulder and began to pat herself dry, her body angled in profile. The girl of his adolescent dreams at forty-two, if his math was correct, her buttocks as smooth and taut as a ballerina’s, a small breast buried in the towel. Could this woman have murdered Ned Carr?
Bent over slightly, drying her hair now, she shifted in the pool until she was facing Kurt. An evening breeze parted the heavy steam and he could see the surgery scars that crosshatched the left side of her body from rib cage to knee. Her breast was partially gone, the stitched flesh of a mastectomy, but he knew it wasn’t cancer that had nearly taken her life two years ago in a Siskiyou motel. Remembering her flawless beauty as a young girl, the band of freckles across her bare sh
oulders in a sundress, Kurt felt ashamed of himself for staring at her like this, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off her damaged body.
His mind registered the hammer cock a full second before he heard the command. “Down on your knees, asshole,” said a female voice behind him, furious and convincing, “or they’ll find your body on the county road with a hole between your shoulder blades.”
Kurt knelt down in the dewy spruce needles and placed his hands on his head.
“Keep your eyes on the ground and don’t make any sudden moves,” the woman said, her footsteps moving closer through the brush. She sounded like a female version of his old master sergeant. “Who are you with, creep? The Feebees? Or you some kind of hired timber thug?”
“Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department,” Kurt said. “Now I advise you to put down that gun.”
He saw Kat look up from the bath, suddenly aware of voices. She fumbled for her robe and withdrew a pistol from the terry pocket, the last image in his mind before a boot sole found the middle of his back and thrust him facedown in the mulch. The sergeant had a leg like a rugby pro.
“Whoever the fuck you are,” she said, searching his hip pocket for an id, “somebody forgot to remind you it’s against the law to wander around on private property without the court’s permission.”
“Is that you, Randy?” Kat called out from the pool. “What’s going on?”
“Caught some jerk peeping around over here!” the woman shouted back, wrenching the wallet free of Kurt’s pants. “Everything’s cool, darlin’! I’ve got him neutralized. Need any help getting out?”
“No. I’m coming.”
The woman kept her boot pressed to the small of Kurt’s back. He raised his head and spit out a mouthful of damp soil. “When I get up from here, Randy,” he said, “you and I may have to go three rounds, Marquess of Queensberry.”
Her boot mashed harder. “Don’t push your luck, creep,” she said. “I’m fixing to hang your big ass up on one of these spruce limbs.”
He could hear Kat making her way through the brush. “Who is it?” she asked, breathless from the effort.
“He’s got a shield. Pitkin County cop. Take a look.”
Kat’s bare feet settled in the mulch a few inches from his eyes. There was a moment of silence while she studied the id.
“Ever heard of him?”
Kat’s muddy foot caught the side of Kurt’s face and turned his head, forcing him to look up her long tanned leg into the folds of bathrobe. “Hello, Kurt,” she said. “My, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Hello, Kat,” he said, mud and spruce needles blurring his vision.
“What are you doing snooping around out here?”
“Came to see how you’re getting along.” With her foot on his face he sounded like a man trying to speak his first words after a dentist’s Novocain.
“And now that you’ve had a good look, what do you think? How am I getting along?”
He reached up and took hold of her ankle and removed her foot from his face. “I’m here on official police business, Kat,” he managed to say. “I think we ought to handle this some other way.”
Randy dug the gun barrel into his neck. “You know this guy?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” Kat said. “Since day one of the family saga. When I was growing up he was a nicer big brother than my own big brother. Weren’t you, Kurt?”
The memory seemed to warm her. She didn’t sound as hostile now.
“Kat,” he said, “Ned Carr was killed in a mine explosion this morning. I came out here to ask you some questions. Now kindly tell your friend to take that gun out of my neck and let me up. Otherwise this could be a very long evening.”
Kat knelt down beside him and raked the mud off his cheekbone with the nose of her pistol. “Why the hell should I know anything about Ned Carr?” she asked, plucking needles from his forehead.
“Isn’t there someplace a little more comfortable where we can talk?”
She worked the stainless steel nose under his eye, deftly removing a wet clod. “I like you where I’ve got you,” she said.
He laid his head on the ground and stared at her hand. “Your finger’s on the trigger, Kat,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said, delicately tracing the barrel across his mouth and down his chin.
“I hope you’ve got the safety on.”
“If you’re worried about safety,” she said, “you should be carrying your own protection, darling.”
Randy released her foot and straightened up. “Okay, Katrina, I can see you’re getting off on this,” she said. “I’m going back to the house before it gets any weirder. Anybody coming?”
Everything in the cabin was exactly as Kurt remembered it—the faux rawhide furniture arranged for conversation, the hand-carved wood tables and kerosene lanterns, the tchotchke shelves filled with Christa Pfeil’s nutty collections of Swiss cowbells, beer steins, Hummel figurines, and salt-and-pepper shakers from the capitals of Europe.
Kat excused herself to get dressed and Randy invited Kurt to the kitchen for a glass of wine while she prepared dinner.
“You still want to go three rounds with me, Big Boy?” She grinned at him, setting her 9mm Glock on the counter and filling a glass with burgundy. “Or would you rather have a salad?”
He liked this woman. “Where did you get your training, Randy?”
“Ten years with Uncle Sam, ten years in the Sheriff’s Department out in Curry County, Oregon. Hell, I was once an mp at Leavenworth. You mess with me, I’ll take you to the mat.”
She was smiling now, a stout, busty woman around fifty years old, her steel-gray hair cropped short on the sides and boxed in a half-inch flattop she had probably sported since boot camp. Her large upper body bulged under a hooded jogging sweatshirt with an Oregon State logo over the heart. When she removed her mirror shades Kurt was surprised to find striking blue eyes. His reaction did not escape her notice. Her smile slipped into something unexpectedly sly and knowing, and he realized that in spite of the tough-gal persona, this woman could turn on the charm.
“Why does Kat need a bodyguard?” he asked her.
Randy poured wine into two more glasses. “I don’t really think of myself as a bodyguard,” she said. “Just a friend with a Glock.”
“Have there been death threats since the bombing?”
“My, my, twenty questions.” She opened a cabinet and found a perfectly preserved McCoy salad bowl. “There were threats long before the pipe bomb, my friend. But you got one thing right. Ever since Siskiyou the termites have come out of the woodwork. Heavy breathers. Hate mail. Posters circulating around the hunting clubs with rifle crosshairs superimposed over her face. There are some real sick bastards in this world.”
He turned on the sink tap, cupped icy water in his hands, and splashed his face, washing off the streak of mud. “So she got the hell out of Oregon,” he said, examining his reflection in the kitchen window. “I don’t blame her. How long have y’all been here?”
“Long enough to catch some skiing.”
He wiped his face with a dish towel that smelled like raw onion. “So if you don’t mind me asking, Randy, cop to cop,” he said, watching her rummage through the ancient Frigidaire for garden vegetables, “how did an old bush ranger like you hook up with an outfit like the Green Briars?”
She raised up from the vegetable drawer and gave him a belligerent look. “I’m not a tree spiker,” she snapped. “I don’t give a shit about the Green Briars.”
She came toward him with an armful of vegetables and stopped close enough to head-butt him on the chin. “See this, Big Boy?” she said, tapping her crooked nose. “Got it broke on Bald Mountain trying to break up a fight between the stompers and the hippies. Tell you the god’s honest truth, I’m not fond of either side right now. Everybody in the woods is acting like a bunch of macho assholes.”
Kurt sipped his wine, watching her place cucumbers and tomatoes on a cutting board. “So
why did you go to work for Kat?”
“This is starting to sound a teensy bit like a police interrogation, is it not?”
“I’m trying to keep it friendly, Randy.”
“Why don’t you just tell me what you’re after, Sherlock, and we can cut to the final credits.”
He didn’t know what he was after right now. Maybe just a few minutes alone with Kat, to see how she was putting her life back together.
Randy looked impatient with his slow response. “How long you known Katrina?” she asked.
“All her life.”
She rubbed moisture from her forehead with a sweatshirt sleeve. “My partner and I were the first ones on the scene,” she said, lowering her voice. “Only time I’ve ever seen that much blood was when an eighteen-wheeler hit a big buck on the coast highway.” She glanced over her shoulder to make sure Kat was out of hearing range. “It didn’t take a genius to figure out they’d been set up. Nobody goes to sleep with a pipe bomb full of finishing nails under their bed, not even a death-trip Muslim fanatic. But the Feebees blew in from Eugene and locked us local yokels out of the investigation right away. I tried to talk some sense at them but they refused to consider any other suspects. So I called the DA and told him the whole thing stunk and the next thing you know my boss was standing over my desk recommending that I give serious thought to early retirement. So I said ‘fuck you people’ and handed in my shield and drove up to the Portland hospital with a dozen roses to get a look at the big bad girl that had turned two law-enforcement agencies and a billion-dollar timber industry into a swarm of lying shit beetles.”
Kurt wanted to believe that Kat was innocent. But he had read the reports implicating her in sabotage activities all over the Northwest.
“The Green Briars aren’t exactly Eagle Scouts,” he said.
“No, we’re not.” Kat was standing in the doorway. She had dressed in jeans and a fuzzy sweater with reindeer prancing across her chest. Her hair was dry now, a thick dark mass brushed away from her face. “But then the logging companies aren’t exactly Sesame Street, are they?”
