Kate and Jim spent a good part of the afternoon searching Niniltna for Louis Deem, but it was as if he had vanished into thin air. He wasn’t on the road home. He wasn’t at the post office, the store, the Riverside Cafe, or the Roadhouse. They found Willard at Auntie Balasha’s, chowing down on fresh bannocks as she watched with a fond smile. “Can’t my boy eat? Can’t he?”
He could. From what they were able to understand around the mouthfuls of bannocks, he hadn’t seen Louis that day. He was sure he would have remembered, and if he had forgotten, Anakin would have reminded him, wouldn’t he? He patted the action figure in his pocket and forked up more food.
Deem wasn’t on his boat in the boatyard. George said he hadn’t flown Deem out of the Park, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have driven, Kate pointed out, so they called Kenny in Ahtna.
Kenny called back an hour later to say that he’d driven out to Deem’s place. Nobody home. He’d driven back to Ahtna and checked the Seven Come Eleven. No dice.
By then it was getting on for four o’clock, and they drove back to Niniltna so Kate could pick up Johnny from the Mikes’ house, where he’d had strict instructions to go after school.
Jim pulled up in front of the house. Kate stopped halfway out of the Blazer. “You okay, Jim?”
He stared straight ahead through the windshield. “Sure.”
“You did what you had to do. No way you’re going to get crosswise of Robbie Singh. You’d never get another conviction out of her court. So Louis’s out again.” She shrugged. “Maybe we were in too much of a rush. Maybe we should have taken a little more time before we hauled him in.”
“Nice of you to say ‘we,’“ he said.
“We all wanted him locked up, Jim. Maybe me most of all. Now we’ve got a chance to take our time, to gather the evidence, to put a real case together, one the judge won’t throw out.”
He put the Blazer in gear. “Meantime, he’s on the loose.”
“He is that,” she said. “But we’ll be careful. And we’ll deal with what comes.”
He attempted a smile, but it was a poor effort.
She stared at him, puzzled. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” he said, and went to meet Bernie Koslowski for coffee at the Riverside Cafe.
Sec. 11.41.115. Defenses to Murder
(b) In a prosecution under AS 11.41.110 (a) (3), it is an affirmative defense that the defendant
(1) did not commit the homicidal act or in any way solicit or aid in its commission ...
—ALASKA STATUTES
TEN
Brendan McCord had been right. The Smiths’ lawyer was better than the Park Service’s lawyer, and the same day Robbie Singh made Jim Chopin spring Louis Deem, a superior court judge in Fairbanks stayed the execution of the Smiths’ eviction notice. Not that the Smiths had taken any notice of it in the first place. That evening Dan O’Brien went down to the Roadhouse to drown his sorrows, and also because he had a mild flirtation going on with Laurel Meganack, of whom he had hopes of seducing.
It wasn’t an entirely successful evening. Laurel brought him beer and smiled, but then she brought everyone beer and smiled. Half the Park was there, too, and most of the single men and some of the married ones were on the same mission he was. Bernie would do well to hire Laurel on full-time for all the custom she was generating.
“How’s Bernie?” he said, pulling out his wallet.
Her smile dimmed. “Okay, I guess.” She brought his change and lingered for a moment, momentarily dashing the hopes of Dan’s competition. “He was having coffee at the cafe this afternoon with Jim Chopin. They didn’t look like they were having a good time, exactly.”
He imagined the conversation. “No, I don’t guess they would.”
He finished his beer, which did nothing to ease his morose frame of mind, and headed back up to the Step.
It was late enough to be dark and, as he told Jim later, he was already feeling a little skittish. What with, in order beginning a mile up the Step road, first the pissed-off cow moose charging out of the brush with two twin calves on her heels who looked barely old enough to walk, second the grizzly in extra large who by the shine and length of his coat had just woken from a refreshing winter’s nap and was probably feeling peckish, and third the porcupine that had for reasons best known to itself climbed into the back of Dan’s pickup while it was parked outside the Roadhouse and frightened the living hell out of him a mile from home by scraping his quills along the metal bed loud enough to be heard over the engine, his nerves were shot to hell. “Jesus, Jim, what a sound. I thought the grizzly had somehow jumped into the back of the truck as I went by him and was trying to bite through the cab.”
Breakup was the signal for every species in the Park to go stark raving mad. This did not exclude Homo erectus. Or judges.
Dan had climbed back into the cab after evicting the porcupine, waited for his heart to slow down to something approaching a normal beat, and started the engine. He put it in drive, rounded the next curve, and the headlights picked up the shine of two eyes. He braked hard. “Oh fuck. What now?”
He waited, the engine idling, for the eyes to blink. They didn’t.
In fact, the longer he sat there, the more they looked like eyes in a face.
A human face.
After a while he steeled himself to climb out of the truck, his .30-30 in hand and a round in the chamber, and walked forward for a closer look. The headlights of his truck picked out the body of a man, arms and legs splayed in a grotesque starfish, his head twisted to the left, his eyes open and staring, his mouth open in a silent scream.
And Dan could have counted his vertebrae through the hole in his chest, if he hadn’t been otherwise occupied barfing up three beers and a package of salt and vinegar potato chips by the side of the road.
When he had recovered enough to look again, he saw that it was Louis Deem.
I didn’t know what to do, if I should load him up and bring him to you, or if I should leave him here and bring you to him.” “You did good, Dan.” Dan checked over his shoulder. “The bears are up, Jim.” He checked over Jim’s shoulder. “I told you about that one I almost hit on the way here, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“Big bastard, big enough to make my truck feel pretty flimsy. He looked hungry. He could have come along and chewed on the body while I was getting you.”
“Good thing he didn’t.”
Dan couldn’t seem to stop talking. Nervous. Edgy. “I know how important it is to leave a crime scene intact. We do a little of that ourselves.”
“I know you do.”
“And, you know.” Dan jerked his chin at the body. “Probably the guy who did this really was aiming at Deem, but you never know.”
“No. You never do.”
“I didn’t want to hang around without backup. So I lit some flares and came for you as fast as I could.”
The flares were still burning, two red glows in the darkness, one at the beginning of the curve below, one a hundred feet above the body. “You did good, Dan,” Jim repeated.
“Have you got anything to drink, Jim?”
Jim walked to the Blazer and got out the pint of Scotch he kept there for medicinal purposes. Dan uncapped it and took a big swig. “Jesus. It’s Louis Deem, isn’t it.”
“It sure is.”
“He’s really dead.” Dan sounded awed, as if he, too, had subscribed to the Park mythos that Louis Deem was as unkillable as he was unconvictable.
“He really is.”
“Are you okay, Jim?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I don’t know. You sound a little out of it.”
The trooper looked at the horizon. “Be light in another hour, be able to see more, take photos. Let’s sit in the Blazer. Be warmer.”
In spite of the alcohol burning its way down his esophagus, Dan was starting to shiver from reaction, and he welcomed the suggestion. They climbed in, and Jim started the engine and tur
ned the heater fan on full.
Dan took another swig. “I gotta say, Jim, this doesn’t break my heart.” He passed Jim the bottle.
Jim took a drink and didn’t say anything.
“Did I ever tell you about the time he hit on one of my rangers? New girl, fresh out of college, nice, smart kid. She’d been in the Park maybe five minutes before he zeroed in. Never mind kissing him on the first date, I told her, don’t let him hit you on the first date. Two weeks later, she shows up for work one morning with a black eye. She wouldn’t say he did it, wouldn’t hear of calling you, but at least she stopped going out with him. Later on she told me she’d given him a bunch of money for some scam he was running.” Dan toasted the corpse with Jim’s bottle. “So long, you rat bastard. May you rot over a slow fire in hell.”
Absentmindedly, he nudged Jim with the bottle. “Oh. Sorry. You’re on duty.”
“Right after I have another drink I am.” Jim accepted the bottle, raised it in the body’s direction in his own salute, and took another hit of the Scotch. He handed the bottle back to Dan.
“All right,” Dan said, taking another swig. “My kinda trooper.”
The sun came up an hour later. Jim photographed the scene as Dan, now feeling warm and cozy, directed. “Pretty neat,” he said. “Not cool neat, I don’t mean. Neat as in—in—”
“Tidy,” Jim said.
Dan tried to snap his fingers, and then tried again with more success. “That’s it. One shot?”
“Looks like.”
Dan inspected the splash of blood and guts surrounding the body. “Got shot right here, you think?”
“I’d say so.” Jim looked up from the camera. “Did any vehicles pass you on your way home?”
Dan shook his head. “No one. There aren’t that many people living this far up, and besides, the Road-house was still open when I left.”
Jim nodded as if that was what he had expected. “Pretty efficient killer. No crime scene, so no physical evidence except the body. No witnesses.”
“Too bad you couldn’t find him,” Dan said. “We could give him a medal.”
Jim eyed him. “You’d tell me if you had seen a vehicle, wouldn’t you, Dan?”
“Sure! Absolutely. No question.” Dan raised his right hand and with drunken solemnity he stared deeply into Jim’s eyes. “Honest. I didn’t see anyone, Jim. Well. Except for, you know.” He turned and blew a messy raspberry in Louis Deem’s direction. “Take that, you murdering bastard!”
Off balance he stumbled forward, and Jim caught him before he fell. “Okay, Dan. Why don’t you wait in your truck?”
And it was on the way back to the truck that Jim saw the impression of the tire by the side of the road, a perfect imprint in what after yesterday’s warm temperature had been mud when the tire drove into it, and had frozen into a perfect tread overnight.
He hoped he had enough plaster of paris in his crime kit to get an impression.
Jim rousted George Perry out of bed and had him fly the body to the crime lab in Anchorage. He walked into the post at eight A.M. sharp, and Maggie said, “Is it true?”
The Bush telegraph was operating at its usual light-speed efficiency, and Maggie, he remembered now, was a second cousin of Ruthie Moonin’s, which went a long way toward explaining the scene in the front office yesterday morning, when he’d let Louis Deem go. He remembered, too, that he’d had to reprimand Maggie for “forgetting” to order meals in for Louis Deem when he was a resident of the post in the past. Verbally, of course, and behind the closed door of his office. No way was he going to put a written report in her personnel file that would haunt her state employment record for the rest of her professional life. Not for letting Louis Deem go hungry he wasn’t.
“Is it true?” she said. “Is Louis Deem dead?”
“Yes.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes,” he said, and wondered if he should ask her where she’d spent the night. No, he decided, not unless he was prepared to ask the same question of every one of the Park’s eight thousand residents.
Maggie didn’t laugh. She didn’t cry. She didn’t leap up into the Snoopy happy dance. She was waiting, he realized, for the other shoe to drop. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She eyed him. “Why don’t you not try too hard to find out?”
“Maggie.”
Her laugh was entirely without humor. “Like I’m the only Park rat you’re going to hear that from.”
And of course she was right, he thought wearily, a couple of hours later. Billy Mike had been first in the door, and upon confirmation of the news, he’d shaken Jim’s hand in warm congratulations, followed by the entire board and most of the 173 shareholders of the Niniltna Native Association, individually and in groups. In the middle of all this, Auntie Balasha appeared with a plateful of three different kinds of cookies and actually kissed him on the lips. “You good boy, Jim.”
As soon as he could do so with any civility he shut the door of his office and called Kenny Hazen. Louis Deem’s place was just the other side of Lost Chance Creek. He didn’t want to drive out there a third time in a week. It would be quicker to fly to Ahtna and drive from there.
The Ahtna police chief was waiting for him on the tarmac. The road from Ahtna to Lost Chance Creek was in the same condition as it was the rest of the way to Niniltna, bare of snow with the thinnest veneer of ice. “I heart global warming,” Kenny Hazen said.
Jim grunted agreement.
“Reason it’s in such good shape is because people aren’t used to the road being drivable at this time of year. Otherwise it’d be pothole city.”
Jim grunted again.
“You’d think once the snow machines’ treads started kicking up gravel, they’d get a clue.”
No response this time.
Kenny gave up on light conversation. “How do you want to play this?”
“Bad cop, bad cop.”
Kenny’s grin was fierce. “Works for me.”
Louis Deem’s place was almost four miles down an expensively well-maintained gravel road. It was, to the best of Jim’s recollection, the only road in the Park other than the main road wide enough for two cars. “Bastard puts all the money he steals into upkeep, I’ll give him that,” Kenny said.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “I’m sure Ruthie Moonin would appreciate that no end.”
The road ended in a driveway carefully laid with the same gravel that topped the road in, a driveway that circled a full-grown spruce tree thirty feet in height. The main house was built of logs and neatly roofed with asphalt shingles in a complimentary shade of brown. The trim around the windows and doors was painted red.
To the right stood a shop sided with gray tin and the same red trim. The shop shingles were dark gray.
“Looks like something out of Better Homes and Gardens,” Kenny said, pausing to take in the scene. “Where’s the tar paper extension? The stack of fifty-five-gallon drums and Blazo tins? Where’s the fucking pile of two-by-four ends?”
They parked at the end of the bull rail in front of the main house, each space with its own plug-in for those cold winter nights when a head bolt heater was needed to keep the engine warm. There were four parking spaces in front in all, one empty. The first hosted an orange Chevy Suburban with the left front fender missing and the right front fender next in line to go. In the second space an elder statesman of an International pickup resided with an air of matronly resignation to the depredations of time, a rusty black in color. It had probably rolled off the assembly line before Eisenhower was president.
It sat in direct contrast next to the Ford Expedition that looked as if it had rolled off the line in Detroit the day before.
Kenny killed the engine. “The International is Willard’s, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s got a driver’s license?”
“Yeah.”
“How the hell did he pass?”
“He’s good with mechanical thi
ngs.”
“Yeah, but how’d he pass the written? He can barely read.” He climbed out, grumbling to himself.
Jim loosened his sidearm in its holster, just in case they got lucky and somebody tried to resist arrest. Through the windows on the shop doors he could see a wall hung with spare parts, doors, fenders, wheels, chrome fittings, and many other less identifiable parts. He had to admit it all looked very neat.
The closing of the doors on Kenny’s pickup sounded like rifle shots. Still no one appeared. “Clear consciences?” Kenny said.
“The sleep of the just,” Jim said. “I’ll roust them, you do the thing?”
“Sure.” Kenny took Jim’s crime scene kit. Jim walked up the steps to pound on the door with his fist. “Howie! Willard! Police! Open up!”
He had to pound and yell a couple more times before lights came on and he heard a voice. Howie. “All right, all right, Jesus, I’m coming, I’m coming!”
The front door opened and Howie Katelnikof stood there, his hair ruffled and a studied expression of injured innocence on his narrow face. He probably practiced it in the mirror every morning. “What the hell’s going on, Jim? We were sleeping, for crissake!”
Jim stepped forward. After an abortive attempt to stand his ground, Howie fell back and Jim walked past him into the house.
Willard paused in the act of heading down the hall that led to the back door. “I have to use the outhouse,” Willard said. He wouldn’t look at Jim, and his hands kneaded each other.
“I have personal knowledge of at least one flush toilet in this house,” Jim said, “and I refuse to believe that Louis Deem would live where he might have to wait to take a crap, so I’m guessing there’s more than one.” He looked at Howie. “When was the last time you saw Louis, Howie?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Howie said.
“That wasn’t the question,” Jim said. “I asked you when was the last time you saw him.”
“When I brought him clean clothes on Saturday.” All of Howie’s answers had the sound of being rehearsed, but then they always did.
A Deeper Sleep Page 16
