A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow

  “Hey.” The woman was looking over at him, her eyes hard. “Do you mind?”

  He dropped his hand. The silence in the little cabin bothered him. He had never been greeted with anything less than outright rejoicing in the Alaskan bush during the winter, or during the summer, either, any summer you could find anyone home. Especially at isolated homesteads like this one.

  He swung around and took his first real look at the woman who wasn’t even curious enough to ask his name. The woman who, until fourteen months ago, had been the acknowledged star of the Anchorage District Attorney’s investigative staff. Who had the highest conviction rate in the state’s history for that position. Whose very presence on the prosecution’s witness list had induced defense lawyers to throw in their briefs and plea-bargain. Who had successfully resisted three determined efforts on the part of the FBI to recruit her.

  Twenty-nine or thirty, he judged, which if she had had a year of training after college before going to work for Morgan would be about right. Five feet tall, no more, maybe a hundred and ten pounds. She had the burnished bronze skin and high, flat cheekbones of her race, with curiously light brown eyes tilted up at her temples, all of it framed by a shining fall of utterly black, utterly straight hair. The fabric of her red plaid shirt strained across her square shoulders and the swell of her breasts, and her Levis were worn white at butt and knees. She moved like a cat, all controlled muscle and natural grace, wary but assured. He wondered idly if she would be like a cat in bed, and then he remembered his wife and the last narrowly averted action for divorce and reined in his imagination. From the vibrations he was picking up between her and the big man he would never have a chance to test his luck, anyway.

  Then she bent down to bring another scoop of flour up from the sack on the floor, and he sucked in his breath. For a moment her collar had fallen away and he had seen the scar, twisted and ugly and still angry in color. It crossed her throat almost from ear to ear. That explains the voice, he thought, shaken. Why hadn’t she gone to a plastic surgeon and had that fixed, or at least had the scar tissue trimmed and reduced in size? He looked up to see the big man watching him out of blue eyes that held a clear warning. His own gaze faltered and fell.

  But she had noticed his reaction. Her eyes narrowed. She lifted one hand as if to button her shirt up to the collar, hesitated, and let it fall. “What do you want, Jack?” she said abruptly.

  The big man lowered his six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame down on the homemade couch, which groaned in protest, sipped at his coffee and wiped the moisture from his thick black mustache. He had hung his parka without looking for the hook, found the sugar on the right shelf the first time and settled himself on the softest spot on the couch without missing a beat. He looked relaxed, even at home, the suit thought. The woman evidently thought so, too, and her generous mouth tightened into a thin line.

  “Parks Department’s lost a ranger,” the big man said.

  She floured the counter and turned the dough out of the pan.

  The big man’s imperturbable voice went on. “He’s been missing about six weeks.”

  She kneaded flour into the dough and folded it over once, twice, again. “He couldn’t have lost himself in a snowstorm and froze to death like most of them do?”

  “He could have, but we don’t think so.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “This is Fred Gamble, FBI.”

  She looked the suit over and lifted one corner of her mouth in a faint smile that could not in any way be construed as friendly. “The FBI? Well, well, well.”

  “He came to us for help, since it’s our jurisdiction. More or less. So as a professional courtesy I sent in an investigator from our office.”

  The woman’s flour-covered hands were still for a moment, as she raised her eyes to glance briefly out the window over the sink. Gamble thought she was going to speak, but she resumed her task without comment.

  The big man looked into his coffee mug as if it held the answers to the mysteries of the universe. “I haven’t heard from him in two weeks. Since he called in from Niniltna the day after he arrived.”

  She folded another cup of flour into the dough and said, “What’s the FBI doing looking for a lost park ranger?” She paused, and said slowly, “What’s so special about this particular ranger?”

  The big man gave her unresponsive back a slight, approving smile. “His father.”

  “Who is?”

  “A congressman from Ohio.”

  She gave a short, unamused laugh and shook her head, giving the suit a sardonic glance. “Oh ho ho.”

  “Yeah.”

  Gamble tugged at his tie, which felt a bit tight.

  “So you sent in an investigator,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “When? Exactly.”

  “Two weeks and two days ago, exactly.”

  “And now he’s missing, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t think both of them could have stumbled into a snowdrift.”

  “No. Not when the investigator went in specifically to look for the ranger.”

  “Maybe it was the same snowdrift.”

  “No.”

  “No.” She worked the dough, her shoulders stiff and angry. “And now you want me to go in.”

  “The feds want the best. I recommended you. I told them you know the Park better than anyone. You were born here, raised here. Hell, you’re related to half the people in it.”

  She sent him a black, unfriendly look, which he met without flinching. “Why should I help you?”

  He shrugged and drained his cup, and stood to refill it. “You’ve been pouting up here for over a year. From what I read outside just now you haven’t left the homestead since the first snow.” He met her eyes with a bland expression. “What’s next? You going to give the spruce trees a manicure?”

  Her thick, straight brows met in a single line across her forehead. “Maybe I just like living alone,” she snapped. “And maybe you should get out of here so I can get on with it.”

  “And maybe,” he said, “you could use a little excitement right about now. At least looking for a couple of missing persons would give you the chance to talk to someone. Taken a vow of silence, Kate?” In spite of his outward appearance of calm, the big man’s tone was barbed.

  Her hands stilled and she fixed him with a stony gaze. “Dream on, Jack. I’ve got my books and my music, so I’m not bored. I run a couple traps, I pan a little gold, I bag a few tourists in season and raft them down the Kanuyaq, so I’m not broke. I guided a couple of hunting parties this fall and took my fee in meat, so the cache is full. I won’t starve.” The corners of her mouth curled, and she added, her words a deliberate taunt, “And Ken comes up from town every few weeks. So I’m not even horny.”

  The big man’s jaw set hard, but he met her eyes without flinching. Gamble shifted in his seat and wished he’d never insisted on coming with Morgan to this godforsaken place, living legend or no. He cleared his throat gently. “Listen, folks,” he said, examining his finger-nails, “I get the feeling that if I weren’t here the two of you would either duke it out or hit the sack or maybe both, and maybe that would be a good thing, but at this moment I don’t really give a flying fuck about you or your personal problems. All I want is to get the Honorable Marcus A. Miller, representative of the great state of Ohio, off my goddam back. Now, what do you say?”

  The flush in her cheeks could have been from the heat of the stove. She held the big man’s gaze for another long moment, and then whipped around and kneaded vigorously. “There’s nothing you have I need or want, Jack, so don’t ask me for any favors. You won’t be able to pay them back.”

  The fire crackled in the wood stove. Kate divided the dough into loaves and opened the oven on the oil stove to check the temperature. Gamble got up and refilled his coffee cup for the third time. The big man stirred, and said into the silence, “You busted that bootlegger for the Niniltna Corporation.”r />
  There was a brief pause. “That was different.”

  “Kate—”

  “Shut up about that, Jack. Just—shut up about it. Okay?”

  Into the following silence Gamble said gently, “We’ll pay you.”

  She shrugged.

  “Four hundred a day and expenses.”

  She didn’t even bother to shrug this time.

  The big man finished his coffee and motioned for the other man to do the same. He set both cups in the sink, standing next to her without looking at her. He worked the pump and rinsed them out and placed them upside down in the drainer. He dried his hands and pulled down his parka. Before shrugging into it, he reached into a deep pocket and pulled out a manila folder, which he tossed on the table. On his way out he paused at the door, glanced over his shoulder at Kate, up to her elbows in bread dough, and smiled to himself.

  The woman’s voice came out low and husky. “Jack.”

  He paused on the doorstep.

  “Which investigator did you send in?” It was a question, but she didn’t sound curious. She sounded as if she already knew.

  He lifted the latch and opened the door. “Dahl went in.” He paused, and added gently, “He had the most bush experience, you see. All that personal, one-on-one training you gave him.” He stepped outside and said over his shoulder, “I left the ranger’s file on the table. Get Bobby to call me when you have something.”

  Outside, Gamble looked at him and said, “Where’d she get that scar?” Jack busied himself with the starter on the engine, and Gamble repeated, “Morgan. Where did she get that scar?”

  The other man sighed, and said flatly, “In a knife fight with a child molester.”

  Gamble stared at him. “Jesus Christ. That part of the story is true, then?”

  “Yeah.” The big man’s eyes were bleak.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gamble repeated. “What happened?”

  Jack unscrewed the gas cap and rocked the snow machine back and forth, peering inside the tank. “Somebody made an anonymous call to Family Services, reporting a father of five to be a habitual abuser of all five children. They called us. Kate went to check it out and caught him in the act with the four-year-old.”

  Gamble closed his eyes and shook his head. “You nail the perp?”

  Morgan unhooked the jerry can from the back of the machine and emptied it into the gas tank. “He’s dead.”

  Gamble’s sigh was long and drawn out. “Uh-huh.” He stared at the cabin. The sun was out by now, but he felt cold all the way through. “When did this happen?”

  “Fourteen months, thirteen days.” The big man thought for a moment, and added, “And seven hours ago.”

  Gamble stared at him. “You’re sure about the time frame?”

  The big man’s ruddy cheeks darkened a little. It could have been the cold. He didn’t answer.

  Gamble thought for a moment. “That would have been about the time she left the D.A.’s office.”

  “About.”

  “Disability?”

  “Nope. Quit.” Morgan replaced the gas cap and gave it a final twist. He raised his eyes to stare at the closed cabin door, before which Mutt sat, alert, motionless, looking at them with her ears up and her yellow eyes unblinking. “She walked out of the hospital the next day and tacked a letter of resignation to my door with the knife she took off the perp.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gamble said for the third time.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Hell of a mess. His blood was still all over the blade.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Lousy crime scene inventory. APD should never have let her leave with it.” The big man looked steadily at the cabin, as if by sheer will his gaze would penetrate the walls and seek out the woman inside. “She used to sing.”

  Gamble maintained a hopeful silence. It was the first remark Morgan had made all day that Gamble hadn’t had to drag out of him.

  “She knows all the words to every high sea chantey ever written down,” Morgan said softly.

  Gamble waited, but Morgan said nothing more. He started the engine and they climbed on the snow machine. Over the noise of the engine Gamble shouted, “Well?”

  Morgan looked back at the cabin. “She’ll do it.”

  Gamble snorted.

  “She’ll do it,” the big man repeated. “Roll those snowsuit legs down or your feet’ll get frostbite. And next time for chrissake bring some goddam boots.” He pushed off with one foot and the machine began to slide forward.

  “It’s your call, Jack, but are you sure we shouldn’t find someone else to do this job?” Gamble persisted. “You sure she’ll look for them?”

  “I’m sure,” the big man said. His certainty did not sound as if it gave him any joy.

  Jerking awake at three the next morning, fleeing dark dreams of an endless procession of frightened, bleeding children begging her not to hurt their parents, Kate, sweating, trembling, swearing loudly to drown out the blood pounding in her ears, came to the same conclusion. The hauntings would continue no matter what she did; she knew that already. But for a time, perhaps, the ghosts would take on a different shape, mouth different words, stare accusingly for different reasons. It was enough.

  Chapter Two

  The Park occupied twenty million acres, almost four times the size of Denali National Park but with less than one percent of the tourists. It was bordered on the north and east by the Quilak Mountains, a coastal range that wandered back and forth over the Alaska-Canada border and whose tallest peaks shared an average height of sixteen thousand feet, not the twenty thousand feet of Denali’s McKinley, but high enough to awe and to challenge. Glaciers three thousand feet thick and thirty miles long poked their cold tongues out of every pass, all of them in recession, but only slowly and very, very reluctantly. On the south was the Gulf of Alaska; in the west the more or less parallel lines of the TransAlaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road and the single north-south track of the Alaska Railroad. The land, gently sloping and open in the west, rose rapidly into the mountains in the east and was drained by the Kanuyaq River. Two hundred and fifty miles long including every twist and turn, the river was frozen over in winter, swollen with glacial runoff and salmon in summer, wide, shallow and navigable for less than six months out of the year. The Park’s coast was almost impenetrable from the sea, choked with coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder and devil’s club. This thinned out as the land rose, until above the tree line there was nothing but kinnikinnick, rock and ice.

  Hunters, among the Park’s few tourists, came from the South 48, Europe, Asia and Africa to hunt in the Park. Dall sheep roamed over the glaciers while caribou wandered from Alaska to Canada and back again. As the land was settled and cleared, more and more moose could be found up to their bellies in shallow lakes and streams, their mouths full of greens. There were even bison in the Park, transplanted there in 1950 and by 1980 numbering a hundred and thirty. There was one grizzly for every ten square miles; more than enough, everyone agreed. Gray wolf and wolverine, coyote and red fox, ground squirrels, lynx, beaver, land and sea otters, muskrat, mink, marmot, snowshoe hare and beaver made it a trapper’s paradise. In every creek and tributary of the Kanuyaq that staple Alaskan food, the almighty salmon in all its species, ran and spawned and died, their offspring to travel deep into the Pacific, then return and begin the cycle once again.

  The major difference between tourist mecca Denali National Park and this one was a road.

  Denali had one.

  The only road into the heart of this Park was the crumbling remnant of a railroad grade forty years old that had once supported the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad during its thirty-year exploitation of the richest copper deposit on the North American continent. It had been well engineered and well built, and in summer was flat and hard and drivable, if and when it received its monthly scraping by state road grader. After the first snow fell the state road crews stopped where the national park boundaries began.

  But it was a won
derful park, rich in mountains, for it took in parts of the Mentasta, Nutzotin and Chugach ranges, as well as supporting the entire Quilak range. It boasted several hundred miles of coastline along Prince William Sound, site of one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world, and you could always fly in to fish, if you could fly, or could afford to pay someone who did. A shame that so few could, Park rats told each other, some even with straight faces.

  There were dozens of airstrips within the Park, some sworn to by FAA charts, but between the time the chart was printed and the time the pilot with a ruptured oil line looked for them they would be overgrown by a hungry forest or eroded out of existence by a change of course in the Kanuyaq. There was a well-maintained 4,800-foot gravel strip at Niniltna, but tribal policemen met you on the runway and searched your plane for liquor and drugs, which, depending on what you were carrying in the back of your airplane, made putting down in Niniltna village something between a personal nuisance and a felony arrest.

  And so, though it might in name be a park for all the people, in fact only those with access to a plane and the political muscle necessary to promote a permit were able to take advantage of all that pristine wilderness. With small plane rentals running $185 an hour wet and the customer paying the entire four-hour round-trip if the air taxi had no load going back, generally their only renters were park managers and United States senators and the occasional state governor, and their guests.

  Yes, it was a great park, a spectacular park, a national treasure, everyone agreed, not least those who lived there. You just couldn’t get at it.

  There were eleven new loaves of bread, five wrapped in foil and stored outside in the cache. Kate put six in her backpack for Abel, since he was the only person she knew who could slay yeast with a single glare. She’d ruined the twelfth loaf when the pot holder slipped and she burned her fingers, and she’d thrown the loaf pan across the cabin in a fit of temper she was glad no one but Mutt was there to see.