A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate was silent for a moment. “Where were you last night about nine o’clock?”

  Martin thought hard about this, his brow furrowed. Realization was long in coming, but when it did, his face flushed. He looked from his cousin to his sister with an expression half-guilty, half-pleading. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “Yes,” Kate said dryly, “that. You could have killed me.”

  “Aw shit, Katya,” Martin said, “you know I can put a bullet wherever I want.”

  “Yes, well,” Kate said, “why shoot at me at all?”

  “I wan’t—wasn’t shooting at you,” he insisted. “I dint even know you was there.” He waved his hands expressively in the air. “I was just…you know, aiming in the general direction of the NorthCom shack. She”—he hooked his thumb toward Xenia—“keeps picking up these little bastards and I keep having to scare them off. I tell you, Katya,” Martin said with a martyred air, “I tell you, it’s a full-time job being Xenia’s brother.”

  Kate gave Xenia a long look and said, “I can understand that, Martin. It’s a full-time job being her cousin.”

  “Yeah,” Martin said with deep fellow feeling. “So anyway, no hard feelings about last night, right, Kate?”

  “No, no hard feelings, Martin,” Kate said, and added casually and cruelly, “I can’t speak for Abel, of course.”

  Martin’s face lost its alcoholic flush and went a little gray. “Jesus Christ, Kate, was that who that was with you?”

  Kate nodded.

  Martin licked his lips, and braced himself. “He know it was me?”

  Kate smiled.

  Martin swallowed, tried to speak, went red, then white, shoved himself upright and staggered back to the bar. Xenia, ignoring everyone, flounced over to another table and proved how unconcerned she was with Kate’s opinion by drinking a great deal of beer and talking loudly and laughing often.

  Jack sat back and nursed his beer. “Well?”

  “I love my family,” Kate said, her voice grim.

  “Besides that.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” she said flatly.

  Jack sighed. “Yeah.” There was a brief silence. He thought of something else and brightened. “This means we don’t have to climb down into the Lost Chance gorge, doesn’t it?”

  Kate managed a mirthless smile. “As soon as we find Dandy Mike and he confirms Martin’s story, that’s what it means.”

  “That’s what I thought it meant,” Jack said in a satisfied voice. “Does Abel know it was Martin who shot at you two last night?”

  “Not yet.”

  Jack finished off his beer and rose to his feet. “Oh, Katie, you can be such a hard-nosed bitch.”

  She batted her eyelashes at him. “You do say such sweet things, Jack honey.”

  Chapter Eight

  Bobby was in the process of negotiating a fee, to be paid in moose steaks, for the broadcasting of a sale notice of Samuel Dementieff’s last summer’s red salmon gear. “Five roasts, not less than five pounds each,” Bobby said in his usual roar, glaring at the elderly fisherman. “And don’t think I won’t weigh ’em, either.”

  Sam, seventy going on fifteen, glared right back and said fiercely, “Three, and you repeat the ad every night for a week.”

  “Four; and you get the weekend back-to-back special,” Bobby said, leaning forward and glaring harder.

  “Three,” Sam said, leaning forward in turn, “and I’ll throw in the tongue, and I get the weekend special and the week in between.”

  Mention of the tongue weakened Bobby visibly, as Sam had known it would. “And you play The Doors around it,” he added. “I like ‘Light My Fire.’” With gnarled hands he smoothed his cap on over his grizzled hair.

  The deal was struck. It took them another ten minutes of haggling to compose the ad, and Bobby another five to pare it from a hundred words to fifty, each one of which Sam examined suspiciously and approved reluctantly, letter by letter. At the door he turned to fire his parting shot. “Starting tonight?”

  “Will you get the hell out of here, you old pirate!” Bobby yelled. Sam Dementieff smiled, a thin, triumphant smile, and swaggered out. “And what the hell do you want?”

  This last was addressed to half a dozen teenagers loitering purposefully on the porch. The kids, three of whom Kate recognized as part of Bernie’s first-string junior varsity girls’ team, looked down at the snow melting on their boots and said nothing. “And get in here before you give the place a bad name,” he added irritably with a slight reduction in decibels, but only slight, because he didn’t want anyone ever to be able to say he was softening up in his old age. “Well? You there. You’re Mike Kvasnikof’s son, aren’t you? Eknaty, isn’t it?”

  Mutely appealed to by his friends, Eknaty Kvasnikof hesitated and then said with a rush, “Mr. Clark, you know that commercial you’re broadcasting for the bake sale the junior high class is having on Saturday at the gym?”

  “What of it?” Bobby said. “It’s on the spindle, I’ll get to it in order tonight at eight when I go on the air. Get out.”

  Eknaty cast a wild eye about him for support. His friends looked at their feet, at the ceiling, out the window, anywhere but at Bobby or at anything that might draw Bobby’s attention. Eknaty swallowed and said in a timid voice, “Well, when you do, we were wondering…maybe you could play some modern music before and after? Not too modern,” he hastened to add. “Actually, it’s kind of a classic.”

  Bobby snorted. “Mod-run music,” he said, rolling his eyes at Kate, who had the temerity to laugh. “A classic, no less. Which?”

  Eknaty reached beneath his parka and pulled out a copy of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

  There was an electric silence. Bobby’s eyes bulged. Bobby’s neck swelled. Bobby’s black skin went blacker. Before he had one word out the kids were already trampling over themselves in their haste to get to the door, reminding Kate irresistibly of the scene at the Roadhouse the night before. A string of unprintables followed the stampede outside, and Bobby rolled over to the open door to roar after them, “Idjits! Any moron knows that any track recorded after Credence Clearwater broke up is noise ain’t fit to inflict on a fruit bat! Now get the hell off the earth!”

  He slammed the door so hard that the rafters rang, shutting out the faint cries of panic receding down the road, and threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Well,” Jack remarked in an unruffled voice, “I guess it’s Jim Morrison tonight and like it.”

  “How the hell are you, Morgan?” Bobby said, wiping away tears and sending his chair whizzing across the room.

  Jack did a quick two-step to keep his toes out of range, and gripped Bobby’s hand in a warm clasp. “Got a license yet for that broadcast of yours?”

  “What broadcast?”

  “You’re nothing but a born-again outlaw, Clark,” Jack said, and Bobby grinned hugely.

  “Why, I thank you, Jack, I purely do. If you thought on it for a year, you couldn’t have come up with a nicer compliment.” He turned to look at Kate. “Abel stopped by on his way home this afternoon, Kate, and cussed you up one side and down the other.” He sighed reminiscently and added, “I do love to hear that old man cuss. It’s an art form, the way he puts four-letter words together.”

  “Oh hell. Why’s he mad this time?” Kate said, sounding plaintive. “I haven’t done anything lately.”

  Bobby grinned again, this time a wicked, evil grin. “Seems he found out who was shooting at you two last night.” He watched Kate’s expression change with evident satisfaction. “Seems he thinks you knew all along it was Martin and didn’t tell him just because you thought Abel might shoot him. I told him I couldn’t believe you would think such a thing, since we all know what a mild temper he has, and he called me a—let me see, a black-faced, black-hearted Park parasite without the brains God give a lemming, and at that he thought he might be insulting the lemming.”

  “And?”

  “And
after that he got really nasty.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Bobby scratched his head. “From what I could make out, I think the idea was to go home and stay home for the rest of his natural life, and if somebody started shooting at you not to look for him to get in the way ever again.”

  “Good,” Kate said fervently. “Let’s hope he stays there this time. The third time’s liable to be the charm for him taking my bullets.”

  “Maybe everybody’s really been shooting at Abel, not you,” Bobby suggested.

  Kate yawned. “I wish.”

  It had been a long day, a longer week and the longest ever year, and the warmth of Bobby’s fire and the comfort of Bobby’s couch were siren songs too seductive to be ignored. She summoned up just enough energy to shrug out of her parka, kick off her shoepacs and stoke up the fireplace. With the men’s voices a low, pleasant hum in the background and Mutt curled up on the floor next to her, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, not even waking when Jack drew a quilt over her.

  The next morning Bobby raised KL7CC in Anchorage and got him to call Gamble. In an hour the FBI agent had confirmed Mac Devlin’s alibi. By noon they had located Dandy Mike, in bed with one arm around Vic Porter’s wife and the other around a fifth of Canadian Club. When they told him what they wanted, Dandy laughed so loud and so long they almost didn’t bother confirming that it had been, indeed, a cow moose that had gone over the side of Lost Chance Creek bridge that dark night six weeks before.

  Back at Bobby’s house, Jack said, with more irritation than mystification, “If Martin didn’t kill Miller like Xenia thought he did, and if Xenia didn’t kill him like Martin thought she did, and if Devlin didn’t kill him like we all wish he had, we’re back to square one. We don’t have any bodies, other than a bunch of dead moose that by now is probably too worn out to turn into steak.” Jack appeared to regret the loss of the steak more than he regretted the loss of the culprit. “All we do have are, one, a park ranger, missing, and, two, the investigator I sent out after him, also missing.” He looked up. “And that’s it. There is no ‘three.’”

  “Why not just drop the whole thing?” Bobby said. “No Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the wrench. No decaying bodies, no smoking guns, no crime to investigate. Why don’t you just pack up and go home?”

  “Gee, I’d love to,” Jack said, “but the FBI and a United States congressman have different ideas. And there’s the little matter of my own investigator’s disappearance. Ken Dahl wasn’t the kind of guy to vanish without a trace.”

  “Jimmy Hoffa’s wife probably said pretty much the same thing about him,” Bobby observed. “So what do we do now?”

  Jack looked at him, alert and bright-eyed, and grinned inwardly. Bobby Clark, ace detective. “We go back to the beginning. First. I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, but are we agreed that Miller is, in fact, dead?”

  Kate said, “He hasn’t been to work since October 26. His boss and his girl haven’t seen him in six weeks, the same amount of time his Toyota’s been sitting in front of Bernie’s, in the process of being stripped down to its turn signal lever. His daddy hasn’t seen him in six months. He hasn’t called anybody, or written, or sent a message by jungle drums.”

  Jack gave a judicial nod. “So he’s missing. Doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead.”

  “Where’s Ken Dahl?” Kate said bluntly.

  “Maybe he fell down the same black hole swallowed up the ranger,” Bobby suggested.

  “Okay,” Jack said, making a note and ignoring Bobby. “Then we assume for the sake of discussion that they are both dead, Miller we don’t know why, Ken because he was looking for Miller. Second, we have motive for murder. Boy, do we have motive. Miller’s testimony before that subcommittee was in favor of very limited development in the Park. As such it was bound to piss off everyone in the known world with the possible exception of Morris Udall. Even Bernie admits that Mark Miller was a good ranger with a lot of good ideas, but so is half the department. With his daddy in his corner, though, he had extra.”

  Jack stared at his notepad, frowning. “With his daddy backing him up he maybe had the stroke to push his ideas through. Not only that, but he dated Xenia and pissed off Martin. And Billy Mike tells us Miller also pissed off the tribal council for lecturing them on assigning the Qakiyaq Forest timber rights to an Oregon contractor without consulting with the council or making provisions for a training program for the locals. We know he pissed off Mac Devlin when he slapped an EPA injunction on him for fouling Carmack Creek with the sludge from his gold dredge, and then he started to get in Mac’s way on the Nabesna mine deal.” He sighed, and said, “We’re just lousy with suspects, all with a surplus of motives.”

  “And all of whom have airtight alibis,” Kate said morosely.

  “That ranger boy just didn’t have the knack of winning friends and influencing people, did he?” Bobby said. He was sitting very erect in his chair, his sharp black eyes darting from Kate to Jack and back again, enjoying all this detecting business immensely. “Hell, he even pissed old Abel off when he said at that hearing that the Park should be opened up to all tourists and not just those able to afford to fly in, and said the only way to do it was build and maintain a road with campsites and gas stations.”

  “Abel was there?” Kate said, startled.

  “Hell, Kate,” Bobby said, “Abel testified against the plans for development his own self.”

  Kate said, disbelieving, “Abel? Abel testified at the hearing?”

  “Yes indeedy.”

  Awed, Kate said in a hushed voice, “What on earth did he say?”

  Bobby put the tips of his fingers together and pursed his lips. “Well, first he stood up and said he’d been told the definition of a committee was a body with six heads and no brain and now he knew it was true. Then he sang ’em ‘This Land is Your Land,’ chorus and verse. Then he told ’em if they upgraded and maintained the road and put in campsites the tourists would come and ruin the natural grandeur of the park, preserving which, he reminded them, was what d-2 was all about.” Bobby reflected, and added, “It was the best show I’ve seen since Wayne Newton’s in Vegas.”

  Kate was laughing helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “‘Course Abel didn’t tell them he practically funded single-handedly the state’s fight against d-2 when it was first proposed,” Bobby added. “Sumbitch was starting to sound like he voted for Carter.” He caught himself and gave Kate an apologetic look. “I don’t mean to bad-mouth the old man any, Kate, but you ask other folks who was there and they’ll tell you. That day Abel sounded green enough to sprout.”

  Kate wiped her eyes. “Oh Bobby. I will be sorry until the day I die I wasn’t there to hear it.”

  “I, for one,” Bobby said solemnly, hand on his heart, “shall always feel privileged that I was. It was a stirring example of democracy in action.”

  “So,” Jack said, leading them relentlessly back to the main subject, “we’re lousy with suspects who had beaucoup reasons to wish Miller had never been born.”

  “All of whom we’ve cleared,” Kate reminded him, but she didn’t sound as downcast about it as she had a half hour before.

  “Maybe they all did it,” Bobby said, inspired. “You know, like in Murder on the Orient Express. I got a copy of it around here somewhere if you want to read it.”

  “Let’s try to give Miller’s last known actions some kind of sequence,” Jack said.

  Bobby made a face. “Where were you at eight-oh-five and three seconds on the night in question? Bo-ring.”

  “Maybe. But it works. Got another piece of a paper? Thanks. Now, is it agreed that we follow the Miller trail on the assumption that Ken Dahl did the same; therefore, we follow one, we find them both?” He looked at Kate, and she nodded. “Okay. Miller began his day testifying before that Parks subcommittee. Next he goes to the NorthCom shack, all fired up to save the Nabesna mine from the evil machinations of that representative of
Satan, that worthy heir to Snidely Whiplash, the one and only Mac Devlin. When he can’t get a message to his daddy at NorthCom he comes here and talks to daddy over Bobby’s radio. Afterward, he went to the Roadhouse, where he met Xenia and got into a fight with Martin. About what time would you say he left here, Bobby?”

  Bobby shrugged. “I’d say around nine, but I wasn’t keeping track.”

  “And he was driving his Toyota when he left. Okay. Now, Bernie says the Toyota was gone when he went to his house to grab a meal, so he was gone by midnight, and with what Bernie says about the fight, that more or less fits. But the Toyota was back in front of the Roadhouse by noon the next day.” Jack looked up from his list. “What may we infer from that?”

  There was silence. Kate said slowly, “That it was driven back to the Roadhouse by whoever killed Miller. Always assuming he was killed.”

  “I love a skeptic. Why?”

  Kate sat forward, dark eyes intent. “That Land Cruiser would be like a red flag to anyone looking for Miller. The killer had to drive it somewhere else.”

  “And that means that he was in fact killed somewhere else,” Bobby said with a burst of inspiration.

  Jack bestowed a benevolent and approving smile on them both. “Very good.”

  “Now all we need,” Kate said, sinking back into the couch, “is a witness who spent the hours between midnight on the twenty-sixth and noon on the twenty-seventh in front of the Roadhouse.”

  “Sober,” Bobby added.

  “Sober,” Kate agreed. “And didn’t freeze to death while they were at it.”

  “Humphrey Bogart would have dug up half a dozen witnesses by now and still had time to screw Mary Astor,” Bobby said in disgust.

  “And keep the fat man from killing him,” Kate said sadly, “and the downtown dicks from arresting him, and keep the black bird for himself.”

  Jack heaved a deep, mournful sigh, probably over the unattainable Mary Astor.

  The fire crackled in the fireplace and the thin arctic sun sent nearly horizontal beams in through Bobby’s enormous windows. The reflection off the snow outside was painful to look at for long. Bobby rolled over and pulled the sheers to block it out.