A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow

“Ah, that sumbitchin’ spy must have got himself arrested in the latest coup; he ain’t been on the air for six months now. Want some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  He scratched his head and said, “Now that I come to think of it, I haven’t had my supper. How about some food?”

  She smiled wanly. “Come to think of it, I haven’t had my supper either.”

  “What sounds good?”

  “Everything,” she said fervently.

  “Lemme seventy-three His Majesty and I’ll get right on it.” He spoke into his mike, holding one side of the headphones to one ear, and switched his set off.

  Kate watched him. He had the typical bulk of the wheelchair jockey, thick through the shoulders, chest and arms. Coal black from head to thigh, skin, eyes and hair, tonight he was dressed in black as well, jeans, shirt, even the T-shirt showing beneath his collar. “Why do I get the feeling that if you had feet you’d be wearing black socks and shoes, too?” Kate said as he hung up his headphones.

  “Color coordination is everything,” he said, smoothing his tight black curls complacently.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Also makes me easier to spot from the air if I get lost in a daytime blizzard,” he told her and grinned the friendly, infectious grin that could blind you if you weren’t careful.

  The wheels of his chair squeaked on the polished hardwood floor. There were no carpets in Bobby’s house, unusual even in the poorest Alaskan home. No real Alaskan liked putting his or her bare feet on a barer floor on cold winter mornings. Bobby didn’t care, mainly because he had no feet, having lost both legs up to and including the knee in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. Ten years later he materialized in the Park, six months before Jimmy Carter created seventeen new national parks out of fifty-six million Alaskan acres, and therefore just in time to stake a claim on Squaw Candy Creek, a tributary of the Kanuyaq two miles upstream of Niniltna.

  Kate never learned what he had been doing during the intervening decade, but since he had enough money to import lumber and a water pump and an electric generator and a thousand-gallon fuel tank from Anchorage, and hire labor from the town to construct his homestead, and had shown nary a sign of starving since, she had her own suspicions. He was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s weather observer inside the Park, monitoring all the tedious statistics of temperature and wind speed and wind chill and humidity and precipitation and barometric pressure, and making the delicate daily differentiation between cumulus, altocumulus and fracto-cumulus every six hours. The pittance received for this sedentary and very boring job was enough to keep Bobby in controlled recreational substances that came twelve fifths to a case with “Product of Kentucky” stamped on the outside, but the rest of the time he seemed to subsist, and subsist well, on barter and air.

  Bobby wheeled his chair around on the bare wood floor, popped a wheelie just to remind Kate he could, and scooted over to the kitchen. Bobby liked speed in non-chemical form, on his snow machine, in his specially modified, souped-up Cessna 170 and in his two customized wheelchairs around the house.

  “Two?” Kate had commented the first time she saw the second one. “Why two?”

  “Well, it’s this way, Kate,” he’d said expansively, wheeling around her in a tight circle to show off his precision cornering. “This one’s for when I feel like chasing something.” He sent her a friendly leer, and she laughed. “Like today. The other one has a motor.”

  “For when you don’t feel frisky,” she’d suggested.

  “Or for when I have a hangover,” he added, clarifying things.

  Bobby’s house was one big, square room without any inner walls or doors except to the bathroom. The center of the room was taken up by a four-sided work area crammed with electronic equipment and books, with multiple cables leading up the center pillar and through the roof to a forest of antennae and instrumentation and wiring that in daylight looked as if it were ready to lift into orbit. There was a teak shelf running the length of one wall, filled with record albums in their original jackets and almost in their original state at sale. No one handled them except Bobby, and he took them out only to record them on new cassettes after the old cassettes wore out. He was waiting for DAT to come out, at which time he intended to convert to CDs, but in the meantime he defiantly maintained his record collection and made life for the clerks at Robber Joe’s Records in Anchorage a living hell tracking down out-of-print albums. Kate had placed some of his orders there, and the expressions on their faces when they saw her coming always made her feel a little sorry for them.

  An enormous bed was shoved up against one wall, a couch and couple of easy chairs against another, with an open rock fireplace between them. In the kitchen the sink, the stove top and the counters didn’t quite come up to Kate’s hips but were perfect for Bobby to reach from his chair. There were windows from floor to ceiling on the wall that faced south. Through those windows, the full moon cast a serene glow over the ice-encrusted spruce, outlining the Quilaks’ snow-crowned peaks to the east and teasing at the thin current of water running swiftly between the frozen shores of Squaw Candy Creek.

  Kate built up the fire, which while meeting his radio schedule Bobby had as usual forgotten to feed, so that the inside of the house was almost as cold as the outside. The flames caught and crackled, and she subsided on the couch with a grunt of relief. The tension coiled in her belly began to ease.

  “So what brings you into Niniltna, Katie?” he asked, zipping across the room with a steaming mug balanced on one arm of his chair. Before she could answer or thank him he zipped back to the kitchen to load up with a grill, ground caribou patties, buns and the rest of the makings.

  “Don’t forget the mustard,” she said, and he opened a cupboard and added another jar to the tray on his lap. French’s, she saw. Bobby spared no expense. He whizzed back across the hardwood floor to the fireplace and unburdened himself on the raised hearth. He raked some coals to the front of the fireplace, set up the grill and slapped down the meat.

  It started sizzling immediately. Kate’s mouth watered. She hadn’t had anything to eat since Ekaterina’s fried bread that afternoon. “Jack Morgan came to see me yesterday. He wants me to find someone for him.”

  “Who?” Bobby said without turning around.

  “A park ranger, name of Mark Miller. You meet him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Seen him lately?”

  Bobby shrugged. “Don’t pal around with him enough to have kept track. Little guy, right? About as relaxed as Alexander Haig? Heard he was sweet on Xenia.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kate said. “Can’t you hurry those burgers up?”

  “You want to cook?”

  “No,” Kate said immediately, “no, I’m sorry, Bobby, I won’t kibitz any more, I promise.” She held her breath.

  “See you don’t,” Bobby sniffed. “How long’s this Miller been missing?”

  Kate relaxed. She would eat after all. “Six weeks.”

  “Hmm. I suppose the usual explanation won’t do?”

  Kate shook her head, and then, remembering Bobby couldn’t see her, said out loud, “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jack sent someone in to look for him, and now he’s missing, too.”

  There was a hiss of sizzling fat as Bobby pressed the spatula against the burgers. “What’s the Anchorage District Attorney doing looking for a missing federal employee? I thought the feds had people who do that for them.”

  “Enter the FBI.”

  Bobby turned to look at her, a long, hard, black stare. “Just who the hell is this park ranger related to, anyway?”

  Kate smiled faintly. “A U.S. congressman.”

  Bobby, still staring, took it in, thought it over and nodded as if all his worst suspicions had been confirmed. “They go to Jack for help?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he came to you.”

  “Yeah. I feel like I’ve told this story a hundred times since
this morning.”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  She ticked them off on her fingers. “Abel, Mandy, Emaa, Bernie, Xenia, the new NorthCom operator—come to think of it, what happened to the old NorthCom operator?”

  He shot her a broad, over-the-shoulder grin. “The tribal council—how did Billy Mike put it?—” Bobby deepened his voice and rolled the words off his tongue with all the authority of a Shakespearean actor. “‘…brought pressure to bear on Taylor Benson’s employer, one Far North Communications Corporation, and recommended that although no proof had been found to implicate Taylor Benson in the nefarious deeds of one Harold C. “Sandy” Halvorsen, Park bootlegger emeritus, that said Taylor Benson had nevertheless proved less than vigilant in overseeing and alerting the council to the unusual number of orders for antifreeze placed by the same Mr. Halvorsen, and the tribal council would be grateful if he was removed from his post forthwith.’”

  “Billy Mike didn’t say all that.”

  “Did too!”

  “He didn’t use the word ‘nefarious,’ I know that much for a fact.” Kate added, “Or ‘forthwith,’ either.”

  Bobby shrugged and she heard the laugh in his voice. “I may have—er—prettied it up a little. For the sake of the story.”

  “You have been known to do that,” Kate agreed, deadpan.

  “It is, however,” Bobby said, “absolutely true that in a three-month period Halvorsen ordered enough Shell antifreeze from town to winterize the Nimitz, and that Taylor never turned a hair. But you know all that.” Kate nodded without replying, and Bobby looked at her curiously. “Billy Mike says that when he first asked you to do something about Sandy’s operation, you told him you weren’t a maid and to clean up his own house. What changed your mind?”

  She gave a short bark of mirthless laughter. “Not what, who. Bernie.”

  “What about him?”

  “He rode out to see me the day after I sent Billy on his way.” Kate leaned back and smiled tiredly at the ceiling. “It wasn’t the competition he minded so much, he told me. But Sandy was using kids out of junior high as rumrunners, and they were missing basketball practice.”

  Bobby laughed in spite of himself, and Kate grinned and said, “Yeah. And then there was Abel.”

  “Who was just itching for a chance to back you up.”

  There was a tinge of bitterness in Bobby’s voice, and Kate changed the subject. “That new NorthCom kid, he sure is—” She hesitated. “He sure is new, isn’t he?”

  Bobby craned his neck to grin at her. “I heard that. We had him eating fish head stew last time we was all down to the Roadhouse together. You should have seen him when the eyes rolled up to the top of the bowl. Johnny Jorgensen says if the kid keeps ordering wood the way he has been that Johnny won’t have to go fishing next year.”

  Kate thought of the last time she’d seen Bill, Johnny’s brother, and said, “That’s okay, Bill’s going to need to use the drift permit next summer to pay for his divorce anyway.”

  Bobby slapped the two halves of a bun together. “Here, put yourself on the outside of this.”

  Kate stretched her hand out and noticed in a detached sort of a way that her hand was shaking too much to be able to grip the plate holding up her dinner.

  “Woman, what in hell’s wrong with you?” Bobby said. He tossed the plate down on the hearth and wheeled his chair over to grasp her cold hands firmly between his warm ones. “Who cares enough about a couple of lost Outsiders to make you shake this bad?”

  “Somebody cared enough to take a shot at me outside the NorthCom shack,” she said wearily, and to her horror felt tears sting her eyes.

  “Well, now,” Bobby said, startled. He tried to subdue his natural roar and almost succeeded. “That’s what Abel meant, about getting you here safe?”

  She nodded, unable to speak, and Bobby scooted closer to the couch. He grasped the arms of his chair and in one smooth, economical movement swung himself over beside her. He put his arms around her and she subsided gratefully into his embrace. They sat like that for some time. Bobby rubbed her back and murmured soothing nothings and Kate gradually regained her composure. When he felt the worst of her trembling fade away he pulled back to look her over critically. “I think this is one time you could use a little something extra in your coffee.” He leaned forward to reach beneath the seat of his chair.

  She shook her head, warding off the bottle of Wild Turkey. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Hell yes, you’ll be all right,” he said, the roar back. He topped off his own mug, took a big swallow, and topped it off again. “It’s not as if the both of us ain’t been shot at before.”

  She gave him a half-smile. “Right.”

  “Question is, which dumb fucker’s doing the shooting this time?”

  She got up and refilled her coffee mug, cooling it off with evaporated milk and sweetening it with two teaspoons of sugar. Bobby’s coffee would dissolve the lining in your stomach if you didn’t doctor it up. “I think it was my cousin Martin.”

  “What!” This time his roar brought Mutt to her feet, ears straight up, ready to protect and defend. Kate soothed her with a quick word. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that that pimply-assed, gook-faced, chickenshit excuse for a man actually had the gumption to use you for target practice?” She nodded, and Bobby grinned. “I never thought he had it in him.”

  “Me either,” she said.

  Bobby thought about it for a while, before cocking an eyebrow at Kate. “He’s a good shot, drunk or sober, is that ole boy,” he said. “I been duck hunting with him.”

  “I know. So have I.”

  “Means if he missed you he meant to.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “This is taking sibling rivalry a little bit too far,” he observed.

  “Don’t I know it,” she said ruefully.

  He hoisted himself back into his chair and whipped it around until they were eyeball to eyeball. “Okay, sweetheart, tell Poppa all about it.”

  She told him everything, clearly and concisely. She took him back over all of it—Jack’s visit, the suit named Gamble, first Miller and then Ken’s disappearance, Bernie’s odd liking for the little ranger and his account of the fight between Xenia’s brother and Xenia’s lover, the NorthCom operator’s failure to make Miller’s call for him, the strange case of the disappearing and reappearing Toyota, the shots in the dark, the truck on the bridge. It was only when she came to Xenia’s part of the story that she edited the tale, some perverse spark of family loyalty rearing its head, but she knew from the look he gave her that Bobby was perfectly capable of filling in the blanks. By the time she finished, her burger was stone cold and his, still on the grill, was a crisp, charred shadow of its former self. Her stomach growled, but she had lost her appetite.

  Bobby was frowning. “So you think Martin killed Miller and dumped him over the Lost Chance Creek bridge?”

  “I’m not sure,” Kate said, her brow creased. Bobby looked askance. “I know what you’re thinking and, yes, Martin Shugak’s very existence is a bane on the community. He’s been in and out of jail once or twice a year ever since he turned eighteen. He’s been accused of everything from statutory rape to bootlegging to aggravated assault to hunting grizzly without a permit.” Kate paused for breath, and added, “I just don’t know if he killed the ranger.”

  “Why not?”

  “He won that fight at the Roadhouse,” Kate said simply. “All the time we were growing up, I don’t remember Martin, with all his faults, ever repeating himself.”

  “And what was it he dumped off the Lost Chance Creek bridge if it wasn’t a body?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t a body,” Kate retorted. “I just don’t know whose.”

  “If he didn’t kill the ranger, why would he be shooting at you?”

  Kate smiled grimly. “You know what the bush telegraph is like, Bobby, you help run it yourself. I’ve been here almost a whole day, asking questions
. Some of it was bound to get back to him. If he knows I’ve talked with Bernie, he knows that I know he’s got a motive.”

  “If today’s one of his few good days and he’s sober enough to think at all.”

  “Mmm.” She paused, and said, “I wish I knew who Miller wanted to call that night.”

  “His father,” Bobby said.

  Kate, surprised, said, “What?”

  “He wanted to call his father in Washington, D.C. I didn’t realize the guy was a congressman,” Bobby added regretfully, as one who had lost a golden opportunity for some federal tit for tat. Bobby and the IRS had never really gotten along.

  “Bobby,” Kate said, sitting up straight, “I just came from the NorthCom shack. The operator said that on that night the dish was down and he had messages backed up for twenty-four hours’ worth of sending. He said Miller left without even filling out a form for the waiting list.”

  “That’s right,” Bobby said, nodding. “He came here.”

  “He what!”

  “You lose your hearing between now and a second ago? He came here,” Bobby repeated, patiently for him.

  “You jackass, why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “You jackass, because you didn’t tell me he went missing that selfsame night before!” Bobby roared.

  Kate, staring at him, realized her mouth was open and closed it. “Oh.”

  “‘Oh,’” Bobby mimicked her. “‘Oh’ is right.”

  “So Miller came here and asked you to get a message to his father?” Kate said meekly. “What did he say to him?”

  “I don’t know’s how I want to tell you,” Bobby said, very huffy.

  Kate gave him one of her better smiles, all sweet seduction and charm, a smile that would have made Chopper Jim proud. Bobby swallowed hard, and said gruffly, “He wanted to call his father in Washington, the Dick Capital of the world, so I called a ham I talk to in Georgetown.”

  “Did you listen to the conversation?”

  “Sure, the ham has to stand by, Kate,” he said. “Whoever talks on my radio is talking on my license, you know that.”

  “What was the conversation about?”