Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  "My grandfather. Simon Seabolt."

  This time Bobby would not be silenced. "That preacher guy from the Chistona Little Chapel?"

  The boy nodded, and Dinah stopped rolling and said, "Was he the man you were with yesterday afternoon at the Tanada Tavern?"

  The boy nodded again, and Dinah shot Kate a triumphant look. "Told you he looked like an Old Testament prophet."

  Not so sotto voce Bobby muttered, "A Bible- thumper. Just what we need.

  Jesus Christ."

  The boy looked disapproving.

  Kate said, "Does your grandfather know where your father went?"

  He shook his head. "Nobody does. They woke up one morning and he was gone."

  "You haven't heard anything from him?"

  The boy shook his head again. "No one has."

  "He didn't leave a note?"

  Another shake.

  "He hasn't written you or your grandfather?"

  A third shake.

  It sounded to Kate like the usual case of dropout syndrome, but for the body in the mushrooms. The Body in the Mushrooms; it sounded like the title of an Agatha Christie novel. She wondered what Miss. Marple would have thought of this case. Not that this was a case, or anything remotely resembling one, she reminded herself, and contradicted that thought with her next question. "Matthew," she said carefully, keeping her ruined voice as gentle as she could, "your father has been missing for over a year. I'm sure your grandfather has talked to the state troopers, and if they can't--" She stopped. The boy was shaking his head, a very definite shake, back and forth, one time only, but for all that, a gesture that held absolute certainty. "He didn't talk to the troopers?"

  Matthew didn't reply, just shook his head.

  "If he didn't talk to the troopers, Matthew," she said as gently as she knew how, "chances are he knows where your father is. If he didn't file a missing person's report, it might mean that your father doesn't want to be found."

  He shook his head some more.

  Kate, un admiring of the rigid set of his spine, said, "Then what does your grandfather think happened to your father?"

  The blue eyes didn't waver and the young voice had lost none of its moral certainty. "He doesn't know."

  Not only was the spine rigid, the jaw was out thrust and pugnacious.

  Kate regarded both for a long, thoughtful moment. If the kid got any more tense he might break. "How did you get here?"

  "On my bike."

  "Your grandfather know where you are?" He shook his head and she sighed.

  "We'd better get you home before he finds out you're gone and starts to worry." She rose to her feet and dusted off the seat of her pants.

  "I can ride home."

  She gave him an affable smile. "Sure you can. With me, in my truck.

  We'll put your bike in the back."

  He hesitated a moment before giving in. "Okay." She got the impression he had more to say, but a sidelong glance at Dinah, face hidden behind her camera, and a glowering, hostile Bobby restrained him. "God bless you both, brother and sister."

  "I'm not your brother," Bobby snapped.

  "We are all brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord."

  Kate got the boy down the hill before Bobby melted his ears. As she lifted the fat-tired mountain bike into the back of the pickup the boy said, "I'm hiring you."

  The bike settled into the bed of the pickup with ease. She looked up and met the steady blue gaze. "You mean your grandfather isn't." "No." He said it firmly, without equivocation.

  She looked at him in silence for a moment. He stood there like Peter at the gates, inflexible, unyielding, unswerving in his devotion to duty.

  Only the righteous and the godly got by.

  "All right," she said at last. "Get in."

  In the half-dawn, half-dusk twilight that passes for night in Alaska in the summer, it took Kate that much longer to negotiate the distance between the turnaround and Chistona. The store and the church were deserted. "No, don't," the boy said sharply when Kate would have pulled into the parking lot next to the church. "Drive a little down the road."

  "That your grandfather's house?" Kate nodded at the log cabin sitting in back of the simple white frame church. He said it was, and she said,

  "Then here we stop and I don't move until I see you inside the front door."

  His lips tightened. "Okay, but you can't come in."

  "I don't want to," she said, opening the door and getting out. She pulled the bike out of the back and stood it up.

  He took it from her and looked up at her, hesitating. "Will you find my father for me?"

  Kate didn't have the heart to tell him she was fairly certain she already had. Time enough for that when she was sure. "Yes."

  Leaning the bike against his hip, he dug in the pocket of his jeans and produced a fistful of crumpled bills. "Here," he said. "I can pay."

  "Good," she said, and accepted the money. When she counted it later it came to thirty-four dollars, all in dollar bills, all covered with the grime that is standard issue in ten-year-old pockets.

  "It's my money," he said, anxious for the first time. "I earned it myself, picking mushrooms." "Good for you. Kid," she said when he would have turned away.

  "What?"

  "You know who your father's dentist was?"

  He looked surprised. "Sure. Dr. White."

  "Where's he at?"

  "Fairbanks. We drive up for checkups, once a year." He paused, and said,

  "Was that part of the investigation?"

  She never lied to a client. "Yes." She prayed he wouldn't ask why.

  All he said was, "So you're hired."

  "Looks like," Kate agreed, relieved, and watched as he leaned his bike against the cabin wall and went inside.

  Back at camp Dinah said meditatively, "He's kind of like the Blues Brothers, isn't he."

  Bobby and Kate both swiveled to look at her, identical expressions of incredulity on their faces. "He's on a mission from God," the blonde explained.

  "I don't know about that," Kate said. "I do know he's scared to death about something."

  "He's a sanctimonious little shit," Bobby said shortly.

  "He's a client," Kate said.

  "So? Doesn't make him any less sanctimonious." And with that Bobby crawled into his tent. Dinah looked at Kate, gave an uncomprehending shrug, and crawled after him.

  "Like we thought. No shirt, no pants, no shoes, nothing," Chopper Jim said. "Guy didn't have a stitch on him."

  "What was he doing out in a forest fire with no clothes on?" Kate said.

  Dinah smacked a mosquito. "What was he doing out without any clothes on, period? These damn bugs would have eaten him alive."

  Chopper Jim rewarded her with a wide smile. She wilted visibly, which was what Kate was pretty sure he'd flown up for this Sunday morning and buzzed the camp, setting the chopper down in a burned-out clearing a quarter of a mile away, instead of letting her phone in for the information on Monday. Bobby, predictably, bristled. Kate said, "Cause of death?" confidently expecting a reply of, "Smoke inhalation."

  She didn't get it. Chopper Jim allowed the smile to linger on Dinah just long enough before turning it on Kate. A sensible woman, she distrusted it on sight, and her distrust was fully justified by his next two words.

  "Anaphylactic shock."

  "What?" "What?" Bobby said, startled.

  "What's anaphylactic shock?" Dinah said, and turned immediately to search in vain for The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. Thwarted, she reached for her camera.

  Chopper Jim made a pretense of scanning his notebook but Kate knew that steel-trap mind had it all memorized, indexed and filed, on tap for instant recall. "Anaphylaxis is a physical reaction certain people have to certain substances, among them certain drugs, maybe penicillin, insulin, even aspirin, or certain foods, maybe shellfish, maybe strawberries, or certain insect bites. Bee stings, mostly."

  "Bee stings?"

  "Mostly. Upon exposure, the onset o
f anaphylaxis is sudden and severe, beginning with a constriction of the airways and the blood vessels.

  Other symptoms parallel allergic reactions, itching eyes, plugged-up nose, hives, swollen lips and tongue, impaired breathing, increased pulse rate.

  Untreated, it gets worse, including nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, loss of consciousness, cardio respiratory failure, and death.

  All within minutes of exposure." He closed his notebook. "Treatment must be immediate. Recommended therapy is an injection of epinephrine or adrenaline."

  "So this guy didn't get caught in the fire?" Kate said, readjusting her ideas.

  "I didn't say that," Chopper Jim said.

  Her look was pointed and said, Don't be coy, and there was that grin again. She hated that grin.

  "Could be the fire caught up with him."

  "After he died," she guessed, and he nodded. "So. Anaphylaxis."

  There was another, briefer silence, broken only when Dinah put down her camera and made a beeline for the bottle of Skin-So-Soft she'd bought off the back of the Subaru. She started at her ankles and worked her way up. Chopper Jim watched her. Bobby watched Chopper Jim. "So this guy,"

  Kate said, "this guy strips down to his birthday suit, goes jogging, gets bitten on the ass by a bee and falls down dead in front of a forest fire. That pretty much cover things so far?"

  Chopper Jim gave a judicious nod.

  "And nobody notices."

  Chopper Jim shook his head.

  Kate thought it over and came to a well-reasoned conclusion.

  "Bullshit."

  "Couldn't have put it better myself," Jim said.

  "Metzger did notice something a little strange."

  Kate looked at him.

  "Okay, stranger. Body had some deep cuts on his upper right arm.

  Metzger said the deltoid muscle was almost severed."

  "What caused the cuts?" "Metzger says it looks like glass."

  "Glass? As in drinking?"

  "As in window."

  "As in windshield? As in maybe he got hit by a car?"

  He shook his head. "As in window. It wasn't safety glass."

  Kate was silent for a moment. "You want a name to go with what's left of the face?" She was pleased when the trooper sat up and took notice.

  "I think he was a guy by the name of Daniel Seabolt, lived in Chistona."

  "Seabolt. Related to the minister at the chapel there?"

  "His son."

  "He missing?"

  "According to his son, since last August."

  "Since the fire, then."

  "Yeah." The four of them thought about it for a while. "I don't get this," Chopper Jim said finally. "I haven't heard a word about anybody missing from this area, not a peep." "Yeah," Kate said, "like I said.

  Bullshit." She added, "His kid says they went to the dentist in Fairbanks regular once a year. Dentist's name is Dr. White."

  He nodded. "Okay."

  "Good." Kate stood up. To Bobby she said, "I'll be late getting back."

  "Why? Where you going?"

  "It's Sunday. I think I'll go to church."

  The singing sounded good from the steps outside and Kate was sorry she'd missed the whole hymn. The Chistona Little Chapel was a small church, six rows of two pews each. All twelve were packed solid this morning and she had to stand in the back. There was an empty space against the wall next to a plump brunette with three toddlers clustered around her and a fourth on her hip. Kate folded her arms and prepared to listen.

  Contrary to what his appearance suggested, Pastor Seabolt did not roar or thump the pulpit. He did not even raise his voice; on the contrary, he was calm, reasoned, articulate, and convincing. He began with a story about the two angels who visited Lot in Sodom and drew the obvious (to his congregation, anyway, judging from the emphatic nods punctuating each of his statements) connection to the current condition of the United States of America. With a serious expression and a doleful shake of the head, Pastor Seabolt said it was not too late to bring America back to God, and he urged his parishioners to become champions for Christ. How, specifically? Kate wondered, and Pastor Seabolt told her.

  Protest. By lifting the ban on the gays in the military, the current administration, Congress and the courts had endorsed what God had condemned. America was becoming a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, for which Hollywood and Washington, D. C." were equally at fault. He was pleased to quote the Reverend Jerry Falwell on the subject, in that Hollywood, Washington, D. C." and Hell were three localities with much in common.

  At that Kate laughed out loud and was immediately the cynosure of many pairs of shocked eyes, including those of the blue-eyed choirboy standing between two other blue-eyed choir boys on the opposite side of the pulpit from the preacher. She turned the laugh into a cough.

  Pastor Seabolt urged his champions for Christ to marry and beget more champions and to raise them up in the moral and traditional family values. He declared that it was right and natural to marry, and unnatural and against the law of God to remain single. He digressed a moment to attack the women's movement (he spat the word "feminist" like it was a curse), proclaiming any true Christian woman would not, could not participate in such a movement. He named names so that the female members of the congregation would be perfectly clear on this: the proscribed organizations included the National Organization for Women, Emily's List, the Alaska Women's Political Caucus and Planned Parenthood. Mention of Planned Parenthood naturally led to a comprehensive condemnation of abortion, the Freedom of Choice Act and RU-486.

  He closed neatly with a return to Lot and the destruction of Sodom and in case they'd missed it the first time, pointed out the similarities between Sodom and Gomorrah and present-day America, and warned of the disastrous future facing them if they did not become champions of Christ and fight to rescue their country from the vast and morally perverted swamp into which it was currently sinking. "Let us pray," he said, and they bowed their heads forthwith. He'd given them plenty to pray about, Kate would grant him that much. She, a practicing heathen, was feeling a little unsettled herself.

  The service ended with another hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers," and the highest and sweetest voice in the choir came from the ten-year-old standing in the middle.

  Outside the church the mother of four said to Kate, "I haven't seen you in church before, have I?"

  "No, I've been picking mushrooms."

  She laughed. "Haven't we all. I'm Sally Gilles pie." The baby on her hip started to fuss and the other three to become restless.

  "Kate Shugak."

  "Where are you from?" Two of the boys started playing tag.

  "I've got a homestead outside Niniltna."

  "In the Park?" Kate nodded, and Sally said, "At least you're not as far from home as some of the pickers are."

  The older boy growled and pretended to be a monster, and the other two boys got into the act. Kate felt surrounded by whirling dervishes.