Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 08 - Killing Grounds

by Killing Grounds(lit)

  His legendary charm left Kate cold, or so she told herself; she had fended off his advances in the beginning because she disliked the idea of standing in line, and now kept it up more out of habit than anything else. Habit and Jack, she reminded herself. She blinked in the face of that steady blue gaze and with an effort did not step back from it.

  Flirtation aside, Jim was the consummate professional law enforcement officer, and she respected his instincts, his ability and his sangfroid in the face of the call of the weird. She remembered only too well the scene in Bernie's Road-house nearly three years ago, when the drunk pipeliner had pulled a gun and placed the muzzle at Jim's forehead. Without batting an eye, Jim had said, "What seems to be the problem here?" The drunk pipeliner, made aware of who he was up against, surrendered.

  The feeling of respect was mutual, and he said, as he climbed into the cab of the rump-sprung pickup she'd borrowed from Gull, "What have we got, Kate?" knowing that her observational skills were acute, her judgment was sound and she would lay out events in concise, chronological manner, without histrionics and without coloring the facts with personal prejudice.

  Although there had been a moment there, last spring, when he thought she'd shown signs of becoming less an adjunct to law enforcement and more a champion of tribal sovereignty. It was a moment, in fact, when by some mysterious alchemy she had taken on the authority of her grandmother. He still wasn't entirely sure she hadn't lied to him about that domestic disturbance he'd responded to in Niniltna, to find her already in place and the situation resolved. Just by the quality of silence that surrounded the incident he knew he'd missed something, but long experience with the parochialism of Bush villages kept him from pressing the issue. A few discreet questions had revealed that the parents had enrolled in the Native Sobriety Movement and that the kids were turning in B's and C's in school. He was all for local solutions to local problems, and so long as the situation remained stable and the kids were doing all right, he was willing to walk away.

  Besides, if he accused Kate Shugak of obstruction of justice he'd never get into her pants.

  Kate started talking when they turned from the airport parking lot onto Highway 10. It was thirteen miles from Mud-hole Smith International Airport to town, and Eyak Lake had iust appeared on their right as she came to that morning's discovery of the body.

  "Where is the body?" Jim said.

  "Wrapped in a tarp in Knight Island Packers' cooler."

  He slanted a grin her way. "Meany deliver to Knight Island?"

  Kate nodded. "When the price was right."

  "Professional courtesy," he suggested.

  She didn't smile.

  He was sitting erect in the passenger seat, the round crown of his hat just brushing the ceiling of the truck's cab. His long legs were cramped because Kate had the bench drawn up far enough for her feet to reach the pedals, but he was the only person Kate had ever seen who could look dignified with his knees up around his ears, so it didn't matter. They came to the end of Eyak Lake and Le Fevre's street sign flashed by on the right. "Well, Kate," he said, ruminatively, "you going to tell me how he died?"

  She took a deep breath, held it and released it slowly. "This one you should see for yourself, Jim, without any preconceptions."

  "But it was murder? You're sure about that?"

  She laughed, a short, sharp, unamused bark.

  "Urn." The sound was noncommittal. "What's your best guess?"

  She snorted, slowing as they passed Eyak Packing Company and putting the blinker on to turn left on Railroad. "Motive we got, suspects we got more. He beat up on his son, who's big enough to have taken him out, by surprise anyway. He was screwing at least one wife, as personally witnessed by me, and Gull is only too happy to assure me that there were just dozens more, so there's all their husbands, plus Meany's own wife."

  "She in town?"

  "No, she's working the setnet site."

  His eyes narrowed. First motive, and then opportunity, how nice. In law enforcement it was axiomatic that in murder cases the spouse was always the number one suspect, since ninety percent of the time the spouse did the killing. "You talk to her yet?"

  She shook her head. "Waiting on you. Meany's setnet site and his drifter were the only nets in the water yesterday, when all the other fishermen were protesting the price drop, and I am here to tell you, the fleet don't like it when that happens." With which masterly understatement she braked to turn left on Nicholoff, passed Baja Tacos, the AC Value Center and Save-U-Lots stores and the harbormaster's office, to pull up in front of a rambling building with different levels of flat, corrugated-tin roofs, some one-story, some three-story, all walled with gray plastic siding. The parking lot was nearly empty, and Kate stopped in front of a door marked "Office" in big black letters, put the truck into second and turned off the ignition. She sat for a moment, staring straight ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel, as if making up her mind. He waited.

  With a muttered curse she turned to face him, and when she did, the sight of his impassive expression caused a reluctant smile to cross her own face. "I don't want it to be the kid."

  He nodded.

  "It used to be a lot easier. You know?"

  "I know."

  When she'd worked for the Anchorage DA, her duty was clear. Identify the perp, build a case on means, motive and opportunity that would hold up in court, arrest him and assist the DA in prosecution, followed by, if everyone did their jobs properly, an extended sojourn at Hiland or Spring Creek or Palmer hosted by the ever accommodating state of Alaska.

  She'd been a private citizen too long. She said abruptly, "Monday was the opener. July second. Flat calm, no wind, sunny, fish hitting everywhere you looked, fishermen filling up and delivering and filling up again and delivering again. Meany delivered that day. He had a load on, the drifter's trim line was damn near under water."

  Still noncommittal, Jim said, "Lucky for him it was a no-weather day."

  She nodded. "He had the son on board, kid maybe fifteen, sixteen years old. The kid did something stupid, something no worse than any other teenager with his hormones in an uproar hasn't done a billion times before anywhere in the world. Meany beat on him. He beat on him something fierce. He knocked him into the water, not once but twice. And then he kicked him."

  He waited.

  Her eyes met his. "The kid looked like it wasn't anything didn't happen once every day and twice on Sundays. He was used to it." She added, "I really don't want it to be the kid."

  He thought. "Okay. So here we've got a fishermen, dead not by his own hand"he cocked an eye at Kate and she shook her head"who was beating on his kid, probably a repeat offender." He waited for Kate's confirming nod. "A fisherman who was viewed as a scab by a hundred striking fishermen. A fisherman who was screwing around with another fisherman's wife, and rumor has it, with others as well. That about cover it?"

  "It does from what we know so far."

  His gaze sharpened. "You have reason to believe there might be somebody else wanted this guy wasted?"

  One shoulder raised, lowered. "Look at the pattern so far. This guy lived to piss off everyone around him." Kate remembered Tim's flushed, excited face late Monday afternoon, so proud of being high boat. I know this guy, Tim had said. And Tim had not mentioned his wife that day, only his mother. Unusual for a newlywed. Was the omission deliberate? Had he known Myra was screwing around? Had he known with whom?

  She would have to ask him, she realized reluctantly, or Jim would, and it would be less threatening coming from her. She didn't look forward to it, though.

  A memory of Auntie Joy's expression as she looked at Meany from the deck of the Freya flashed through her mind. She gave a mental shrug. That at least was something she didn't have to worry about. Auntie Joy had been at fish camp surrounded by five witnesses, one of whom was the chief investigator for the Anchorage district attorney.

  "Okay. We're lousy with motive and suspects. How about means?"

  Kate got out
of the truck. "The last time I saw him alive he was making for Cordova with a full load. Yesterday afternoon about one o'clock. He had to run a gauntlet of fishing boats to do it, with a lot of half-drunk pissed-off fishermen skippering them, but he made it."

  "His son on board?"

  She nodded. "On deck, picking fish out of the last of the gear and pitching them into the hold. But hell, that don't necessarily mean anything. We don't even know where Meany was killed."

  "What do you mean? You found him at Alaganik?"

  "Yeah, but who's to say he didn't get himself killed right here in the harbor, after he delivered?"

  "He did deliver, then?"

  She nodded again. "Mark Hanley, head of the beach gang, he says he pulled up to the Knight Island dock two hours after I saw him leave Alaganik."

  "He remembers exactly?"

  She gave a half-smile. "He was ticked at being called out. Nobody else was fishing, the beach gang was celebrating the Fourth with a barbecue and, as I understand it, Meany showed up just about the time the wet T-shirt contest started."

  Jim grinned. "Not a happy camper."

  "No."

  "So you think the killer might have killed him here, driven his boat back out to the grounds and rolled him into the water?"

  "Maybe."

  "Why? To confuse anybody who comes looking for him?"

  "Definitely to confuse someone. Wait till you see the body, Jim," she said, with emphasis. "This, you should pardon the expression, is overkill."

  He grinned again. She didn't grin back. He sobered, and reached for the door. "Okay, then. Lead me to it."

  It was a walk-in cooler, shelves on all four walls crammed with steaks and roasts and chops of beef and pork wrapped in white butcher paper, boxes of whole chickens wrapped in plastic, twelve-packs of corn on the cob, plastic gallon sacks full of peas and broccoli, and a case of frozen bread dough in two-loaf packagesa summer's worth of supplies for a perpetually hungry cannery crew. The harsh light of a single, hundred-watt lightbulb inside a wire cage illuminated everything clearly. The cannery superintendent, a thickset, dark-haired man who looked barely old enough to vote, hovered in the open doorway, clearly reluctant to step any closer to the tarpaulin-wrapped horror resting on the table that took up the center of the room. The surface of the table was streaked with old blood and scarred with knife cuts.

  "We brought the table in from the slime line," the superintendent said. "Didn't seem right to just sling him onto the floor."

  Kate hated walk-in freezers. When she was a little girl, there had been a community freezer in back of the old city hall in Niniltna, a large room filled with shelves where everyone in town brought their moose and caribou. It had been her special task when she visited her grandmother in the village to go and get the evening's meat from the locker. She would get as far as the door, where she would stand, shivering, a sweat of fear down her spine, filled with an irrational knowledge that if she left the door to fetch the meat, the door would swing shut behind her, locking her in forever, leaving her there to die a cold and lonely death, just another package of frozen meat. It sometimes took her ten minutes to work up the courage to leap, snatch at the first package on her grandmother's designated shelf that came to her frantic grasp and leap back to stop the door from closing. Sometimes she lucked out and someone else would be at the locker at the same time. Mostly not.

  Years later her fears came full circle when a murderer tried to kill her in just that fashion. She had outwitted him, barely, and the memory gave her the courage to walk into the cold-storage locker today without hesitation.

  She stood on one side of the table, Jim on the other, mini-recorder in hand. He gave the date and the time and continued, "Master Sergeant James M. Chopin reporting, standing in the walk-in cooler of Knight Island Packers in Cordova. Present are Kate Shugak, tenderman, who found the body, and Darrell Peabody, Knight Island Packers' superintendent, who has graciously offered the body house room."

  Kate wondered how much editing was done on Chopper Jim's tapes back at his Tok office.

  "The body has been identified as Calvin Meany, drift net fisherman, Anchorage resident, PWS permit." Jim read Meany 's permit number, driver's-license number and Social Security number into the recorder, from cards extracted from the wallet Kate produced. "Body was discovered floating in Alaganik Bay at six-thirty a.m., this morning." He clicked off the recorder. "Okay, let's take a look."

  Kate helped pull the tarp back, and heard Peabody swallow loudly behind her. Even Jim, who in the course of his professional career had seen just about everything bad that one human being could do to another, was surprised into expression. "Jesus Christ." The words, forced out of him, were compounded of surprise, disgust and not a little awe.

  As Kate had seen from the catwalk of the Freya's bridge, Meany had been strangled. Whether it was before or after he had been stabbed in the heart with a sliming knife, the white plastic handle still protruding from his chest, was yet to be determined. Whether he had died by strangulation, or stabbing, or from concussion from many of the blows he had sustained to the head and upper body was also yet to be determined. His left arm had sustained a fracture of both ulna and radius, ripping the skin of his forearm so that the bones gleamed against the shriveled shreds of skin around the edge of the wound. He had defensive marks from wrist to elbow on his right arm. Silently, Kate pointed to both sets of his knuckles. They were ripped and swollen. There were dark bruises on his shoulders and torso. Something sharp had torn at the skin on the left side of his head, tearing a gash from temple to jaw. He was bloated from his immersion in seawater.

  There was a long silence. Their breath formed little clouds in the room's chill air. At last Jim stirred. Over the body, his eyes met Kate's. "My kingdom for a forensic pathologist," he said, and clicked the recorder back on.

  Jim slammed the gate shut on the bed of the truck, removed his hat and tipped his head back to draw in a long, sweet gulp of fresh air. Across the road was the eight-hundred-slip boat harbor. The new harbor was accessible by three ramps leading down to the first, third and fifth of the five floats, each anywhere from nine hundred to twelve hundred feet long. The twenty-four-foot slips began on the left, and the slip size increased to the right, ending with sixty-foot-slips on the last float. The old harbor descended into the basin from the opposite side of the artificial basin, and consisted of four floats half the size of the new ones, with a quarter the slip capacity. The city had sorely needed the new harbor; looking at it now, all floats, old and new, filled to capacity, Kate thought they should have moved and extended the breakwater for a harbor twice its present size. Especially since Cordova was a typical Alaskan town in that it was perpetually broke, and the harbor generated 20c a daily foot, $4.55 a monthly foot, and $13 a yearly foot. Cal Meany's drifter had been thirty feet long; if he'd maintained a slip in this harbor it would have cost him damn near $400 just to park while he went for groceries. No wonder he kept sneaking into transient parking.

  A door slammed and Kate looked down the road to see Gull emerge from the harbormaster's office, step to the middle of the road and bend down to pick up something, which resolved itself into the limp body of a squirrel. His laugh carried clearly to where they stood, a hearty, heartless, even triumphant laugh, before Gull tossed the corpse into a nearby Dumpster and went back into his office.

  Jim looked back at Kate. "What was all that about?"

  Kate sighed. "It's a long story."

  "I'm in the mood. Humor me."

  Which Kate interpreted as a plea for a little light relief from the grim task so fresh in both their memories. "You know Gull."

  "Big Chief Friend of E.T. Who doesn't?"

  "The squirrels got into his insulation."

  Jim raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that the diagnosis of record?"

  A smile forced its way across Kate's face. "No, real squirrels this time. He said he could hear them, pitter-patting between the roof and the ceiling, night and day. Drove him nuts."
<
br />   "Why didn't he set a trap?"

  "He did. They took the bait and sprung it."

  "Poison?"

  "Said he couldn't take the chance his namesakes might get into it."

  They both looked at the harbormaster's office, the ridgepole lined with seagulls keeping a collective beady eye out for anyone cleaning a fish down on the floats. Every now and then one would nip at another with a sharp yellow beak, and as they watched, a new gull came in for a two-point landing, missed his footing, backwinged, fell off the edge and was ridiculed by a raucous chorus as he came around for a second try. The roof was white with guano. "God forbid," Jim said.

  "So," Kate said, "he planted a nut tree."

  "A what tree?"

  "A nut tree."

  Jim digested this in silence for a few moments. "What kind of nut?"

  "I have no idea. It's that little scraggly tree to the left of the office."

  Jim looked at the little scraggly tree. "Uh-huh. What, he figures to grow nuts to give the squirrels something else to eat besides his insulation?" Kate shook her head. "What, then?"

  "The squirrels live over there." She pointed at a stand of alder, birch, diamond willow and spruce trees covering the hill rising up toward town. "They have to cross the road to get to the nut tree. Gull figures with all the traffic, eventually they'll be flattened going to and fro."

  "I see." Jim regarded the tree, which seemed to be missing some branches, not to mention some leaves. "Think it'll survive the winter?"

  "I have no doubt whatsoever," Kate said. "Gull has invested heavily in fertilizer and tree wrap. The minute the temperature drops below thirty-five, he's out there swaddling up that tree like it's his firstborn child."

  "Uh-huh." Jim's eyes wandered down to the empty transient parking slip. "You know, I hear the Cetaceans have developed a mini-force field that acts as a personal shield. They're test-marketing it on Rigel Five. Supposed to adjust its insulating factor to the current conditions. Fits in your pocket, not too expensive."