Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 08 - Killing Grounds

by Killing Grounds(lit)

  She felt a nudge in the small of her back. "Well, come on, girl," Old Sam said impatiently, "what are you waiting for?" He set off up the steep slope at a brisk pace, and Kate followed. By the time she caught up with him, he was hammering on the door of the cabin.

  It was a trim little building, one of the prefabricated ones, with a corrugated-tin roof and neat powder-blue plastic siding. It stood over the high-water mark on pilings, its back to the bank as the forest primeval leaned down and tried to snatch it up in great green arms. The deck was unvarnished cedar that had gone a beautiful silvery gray, and still smelled wonderful in the salt air. The door opened abruptly just as Old Sam was fixing to hammer on it a second time.

  By her age and general air of wear and tear, the woman standing in front of them was the wife. "Mrs. Meany?" Kate said. "Mrs. Calvin Meany?"

  "Yes." The single word was uninviting, either of further conversation or of entrance.

  "My name is Kate Shugak. This is Sam Dementieff. We're the ones who found your husband's body this morning."

  She didn't say anything, just stood in the doorway with her arms folded tightly against her. She had been pretty once, and with luckwidowhood, perhaps?and a change of occupation might be pretty again. Dark auburn hair streaked with gray was matted against her skull, her skin was freckled and sunburned and her eyes were green and tired. Her figure was spectacular; from the neck down Mrs. Meany looked like Sophia Loren. Kate was impressed; anyone who could look statuesque in high-tops, filthy jeans and a faded brown plaid shirt was definitely out of the ordinary, and deserving of respect.

  Mrs. Meany did not appear to be stricken with grief. On the other hand, neither did she appear to be overtly hostile, or nervous. "May we come in?" Kate said.

  Mrs. Meany didn't move. A voice came from the cabin. "Better let them in, Marian."

  A man appeared behind Mrs. Meany. He was short of stature and stocky in build, much like Calvin Meany, but the blunt, nearly simian features of Meany's face had been by some subtle transmutation thinned down, even refined here. The brow was broader, the nose high-bridged, even aristocratic, and when he met Kate's eyes there was no trace of the predator that had lurked at the drifter's shoulder. He was massaging a shoulder, and the knuckles of his hands were swollen and scraped and bruised. He looked as if a change of occupation might benefit him, too. "I'm Neil Meany," he said. "Calvin was my brother. This is Marian, his wife. Please come in."

  A gentle touch on one shoulder and Marian stepped obediently to one side. She didn't close the door behind them, Kate noticed, but left it open, probably to encourage an early departure.

  It was a one-room cabin, lined with pink insulation between the two-by-four studs. Two sets of bunk beds stood against the far wall, a table and six chairs in one corner and a stove, a sink and cupboards in another. There was one window in each wall, the panes stained with smoke. The room was dim except for the muted light of the cloudy evening through the open door. No one had bothered to light a lamp, and the stove, a converted fifty-five-gallon drum, was cold to Kate's casual touch.

  The handle on the fuel door across the stove's belly was fashioned from an old metal doorknob, with latch. Kate had stumbled over a box of doorknobs just like it in the Freyas focsle three days before. She looked over at Old Sam, who was glowering at her from beneath lowered brows, daring her to comment. She didn't.

  "Please," the brother said, gesturing. "Sit down. Would you like some tea? Dani, why don't you put the kettle on."

  The girl in one of the top bunks turned the page of her comic book. "Like, put it on yourself, okay?"

  "I'll do it." Marian Meany moved swiftly to the stove, detouring around Kate and Old Sam and Neil, pouring water out of a white plastic jerry can into a large kettle and lighting the camp stove on the counter. She remained there, staring out the window that faced on the bay.

  Marian Meany moved like a woman one step ahead of a clenched fist. Old habits were hard to break. Kate looked from the widow to the two men at the table.

  The brother was on his feet, the younger man sitting down. The younger man had high, wide, slightly slanted brown eyes and a way of peering out from beneath tufted brows that gave him a distinctly vulpine look. His mouth was wide and full-lipped. He smiled at Kate, his face lighting with practiced charm.

  She didn't smile back.

  "I'm sorry," Neil Meany said, "what was your name again?"

  "Kate Shugak, Mr. Meany," Kate said, "and this is Sam Dementieff, my uncle." Maybe not technically, but close enough for government work. "Sam owns the Freya, the tender anchored out in the bay there. Your brother delivered to us last period." Neil Meany glanced out the window and nodded. The light caught his face half in and half out of shadow; he looked tense and strained, natural enough in the circumstances. "Who is everyone else here, please?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "This is Frank and Dani Meany, my niece and nephew. And Evan McCafferty, our summer hand."

  "How do you do," she said. The summer hand smiled again. She ignored it. "We took your brother's body back to town this morning." She paused, but nobody asked. "The state trooper flew in and took the body to Anchorage."

  Meany frowned. "Anchorage? Why Anchorage?"

  "Because there has to be an autopsy, Mr. Meany."

  He went very still, eyes fixed on her face. "Autopsy?"

  "Yes. To determine how he was killed."

  "You mean he didn't just drown?"

  "No." At the sink Marian Meany turned around. Her face was backlit by the window and Kate couldn't make out her expression. This was awkward but necessary. Kate said levelly, "It looks like your husband was murdered, Mrs. Meany."

  "Oh."

  She didn't seem much interested in how, Kate noted. Or perhaps she already knew?

  The brother said it for her. "How was he killed, Ms. Shugak?"

  "We don't know." She added, just to see the expression on their faces when she did, "It could have been one of several ways."

  Neil Meany stared at her. "I beg your pardon?"

  Kate hesitated, more over how to phrase it than over fear of hurting anyone's delicate sensibilities. "Well, you could say whoever did it wanted to be very sure your brother was dead."

  An expression of revulsion crossed the mannered face, and Neil Meany put up a hand palm out. "Never mind. I don't want to hear it."

  Marian Meany remained silent. Kate looked at the boy sitting on the bottom bunk. "Your name is Frank, isn't it? Frank Meany? Is there anything you can tell me about your father's death, Frank?"

  "You're not the cops," the boy said, his heavy features, so like his father's, cast in the same sullen mold as the last time she'd seen him. "We don't have to talk to you."

  "No, you don't," Kate agreed. "But you're going to have to talk to somebody, sooner or later."

  The boy ducked his head down, refusing to look at her, but she could see the miseryand perhaps fearon his face.

  "Frank," Neil Meany said sharply. "This kind of behavior doesn't help us."

  The girl in the top bunk turned her head to look at him. "Fuck off, Neil. Like, you know, you have anything to say about anything we do. Don't talk to her if you don't want to, Frank."

  The silence in the little cabin gathered and grew. Kate kept her voice as nonthreatening as possible, and said, "Your sister's right, Frank, you don't really have anything to hide, do you? Did you have another fight with your father? That's certainly understandable, after the one I saw on Monday. Is that what happened?"

  A loud snort came from the top bunk. "Like, we never had a fight with our loving father, our loving father beat on us. There's a difference, okay?"

  Kate kept her eyes on the boy. "I saw you on the deck of your dad's drifter yesterday, when he went to town to deliver."

  The boy still wouldn't look up. "So?"

  "So, we need to know when was the last time you saw him."

  Making them all jump, the girl slammed her comic book shut and bounced down from her bunk. She stood between Kate a
nd the boy, her green eyes narrowed with hostility. She had a figure like her mother's, better displayed in leggings and a halter top that bared her navel. All she needed was a veil and some bangles and she'd fit right into a harem. "Like, he went into town with our loving father, okay?" she said. "And our loving father as usual came up with some asshole excuse to start beating on him, okay? Like, you know, our loving father didn't need an excuse? So Frank ran away, okay?"

  It was patently futile to look for grief from either of Calvin Meany's children. Kate couldn't blame them, and she would love to clear them of any complicity, but they weren't helping her much. "What time did you leave the drifter, Frank?" she said.

  "Right after they pulled up to the cannery dock," Dani said hotly. "You can ask the beach gang, they all saw our loving father beat the crap out of Frank. He knocked him into the friggin' hold, for crissake, okay?"

  It wasn't okay, but Kate didn't say so. "Where did you go, Frank?"

  Again, Dani answered for Frank. "We do have some friends, okay? People who actually like us, okay? He went to stay with them."

  Again, Kate addressed the boy. "Who did you stay with, Frank?" He kept his head down. "Frank." Her voice compelled him to look up, finally. "You can make me leave you alone by telling me their names."

  He held her gaze for a moment, and then his head drooped again. When he spoke his voice was an inarticulate mumble.

  "Who?" Kate said, the memory of Monday's scene keeping her patient with him as she would have been with no one else.

  He raised his head again. "The Wieses. Paul and Georgina. I'm friends with their son, Joe."

  "Thank you." She paused. "When you left the dock, was that the last time you saw your father?"

  "Yes, it was, okay?" Dani said.

  Kate looked up at the girl, and caught a flicker in Dani's angry eyes. She was holding something back, but the set of her jaw didn't look promising. "How did you get back to the site, Frank?"

  "He hitched a ride, okay?"

  "Who with?"

  Dani tossed her head. She looked older than her brother but not by much, and not for lack of trying to look that way. Kids never looked like kids anymore, they all looked like adults by the time they were ten. Or were working at it as hard as they could. "I don't know," she said with an elaborate shrug. "Some fisherman type, they all look alike, all covered with slime and scales."

  Frank actually spoke, his head still down, his voice muffled. "Wendell Kritchen. I saw him down at the harbor this morning. He told me Dad was dead, and gave me a ride out on the liana"

  "I know you," Marian Meany said suddenly, staring at Old Sam. "You're Sam Dementieff. The one they call Old Sam."

  "Yes, ma'am." The old man doffed his hat and bowed his head. Sam's company manners were faultless; he just didn't believe in wasting them on friends and family.

  She pointed out the window. "You own the tender out there."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Marian crossed the room and sat down, her hands on wide-spread knees, staring hard at Old Sam, looking more aware than she had when they arrived. "They say you're older than God, and that what you don't know about fish and fishing and fishermen isn't worth knowing."

  "That would be about right, ma'am." There was nothing of false modesty about Old Sam, either. And, Kate reflected, what they said was right.

  "Do you know anyone who would want to buy our permit and this cabin?"

  Her brother-in-law stirred in his chair, his eyes fixed on Marian's face in a steady gaze, but like Kate he said nothing.

  Old Sam looked Marian over with an assessing eye not entirely devoid of male appreciation. "You might want to try the Ursins," he said bluntly. "The people your husband forced out before you got here."

  She didn't so much as blink. "Do you think they'd want to come back?"

  "Depends on how much you want for the permit and cabin."

  "Whatever my husband paid for it."

  "Marian"

  "Hush up, Neil," she said. "You couldn't stand up to him alive any more than I could. Well, he's dead, and we're not going to pretend any of us ever wanted this kind of life. He bullied us to Alaska, and then he bullied us down here after he bullied the Ursins out. We were never any of us anything more than free labor for his little empire."

  "I didn't"

  "We're selling out," Marian Meany said flatly. "The second after someone writes us a check."

  Frank had raised his head and was looking at his mother with something approaching dumb adoration in his eyes.

  She gave him a brief, wan smile. "It's going to be all right, kids. We're going home. We're selling the setnet site and the drifter and the house in Anchorage and we're going back to Cincinnati."

  "Oh, goody," Dani, back in her bunk, said, and turned the page of her comic book.

  "Knock it off, Dani," her mother said, the lack of hope she felt of being obeyed evident in the tired repetitiveness of the words.

  "Like you have anything to say about what I do or don't do."

  In the same mechanical tone, Marian said, "Of course I do, you're my daughter."

  Dani turned her head and looked Marian straight in the eye. Her voice was low, almost gentle. "It's a little late for you to start playing mother, isn't it?"

  Marian turned away from the fury in her daughter's face. It might not be too late for Marian, but Kate wondered if the same could be said for Dani.

  The widow looked at her brother-in-law, the other adult, the one person in the room she might rouse to some enthusiasm at their changed circumstances. "You can go back to school, Neil. After we sell the boat and the permit, there'll be enough left for that, too. You can get your doctorate, teach Keats."

  "Yeats," he said.

  "Whatever." Marian turned back to Sam. "So, Mr. Dementieff? Do you know how to get in touch with the Ursins?" He nodded. "Will you?"

  "I'll call them when I get back to town."

  She smiled at him, a meaningless stretch of her lips. "Thank you."

  Old Sam grunted and crammed his hat back on his head. "Ain't done nothing yet."

  "Thank you just the same." Her company manners were good, too.

  "Listen, folks," Kate said, feeling it was more than time to get back to the point, "I need to know where you all were last night. It's just routine," she added, seeing the protests form on the faces in front of her. "Trooper Chopin asked me to get some of the preliminary questions out of the way, so he'll have a head start when he gets back."

  Dani sat up, comic book forgotten. "Chopper Jim's coming here?"

  "Yes, later tonight, or maybe tomorrow, and he"

  The comic book went flying as Dani leapt from the bunk and ran over to a curtain made by hanging a length of unhemmed chintz from a wire stretched across one corner of the cabin. When she yanked the material to one side, the glow of colors behind it was momentarily blinding. Cherry red and lime green figured prominently.

  "So where were you, Dani?" Kate said, patiently for her. She'd seen this reaction before in women expecting a close encounter of the trooper kind. Unbeknownst to Dani, Jim Chopin chose his victims carefully. They were all, without exception, over the age of consent, and they all, without exception, had vocabularies consisting of more than the Valley Girlisms "Like, you know?" and "Oh-KAY?" Kate was able to restrain any impulse she might have had to leap to the defense of the teenager's virtue.

  "Where was I?" Dani said. She pulled out an almost transparent little black dress with a nonexistent skirt and no bodice to speak of and paired it with flowered leggings trimmed with lace, a new high in setnet site chic. She regarded the resultant ensemble with a critical frown, decided it didn't reveal enough skin and dove back into the closet for more. "What do you mean, where was I?"

  Although from the look of things, Kate just might have to leap to the defense of Chopper Jim's virtue.

  The summer hire rose to his feet, and went to stand in front of the window, looking out. The set of his shoulders was stiff. Kate gave his back a long, thoughtful lo
ok, and said to the girl, "Where were you last night, Dani?" Kate didn't have an official time of death, so she guessed. "Say, from yesterday afternoon until this morning at about six-thirty?" There was silence, and she said, "You can talk to me now, or you can talk to Chopper Jim later"precisely the wrong thing to say.

  Dani emerged from her makeshift closet with lip curled and attitude intact. "Then I'll talk to Chopper Jim later." The girl tossed her head; her hair, a hundred miles from an electrical outlet, bounced around her face in perfect strands, looking as if it had been blow-dried by Vidal Sassoon himself five minutes before. There was so much in the gesture, all of it only too easy for Kate to sort and identify: rebellion, bravado, braggadocio and a current of sexual awareness that was as angry as it was intense. She'd seen it before, the unmistakable signs of a child brought to womanhood too fast and too soon.

  "We were both here," Marian Meany said. "Right here in the cabin. The period ended at six o'clock. We came in here and crashed."

  "That go for you, too?" Kate said to Neil Meany.

  He hesitated. "Yes. I mean no. I mean, I cleaned up here first, and then I went up the beach for a while."

  "Where up the beach?"

  Before he could reply Dani said mockingly, "Like, you know, Uncle Neil's got himself a girlfriend."

  The curse of fair skin is the inability to hide a blush, although Neil Meany's voice was steady enough. "I'm friends with the next setnetter up the beach. Anne Flanagan. She's got two daughters." His shoulders shifted uncomfortably beneath Kate's steady gaze, with what could have been manly embarrassment at having his manly affections discovered. "I found a glass ball in the gear. One of those Japanese floats. It was only a little one, but I thought the girls might like it."

  "You got there when?"

  He looked at his watch, a battered Seiko on a plastic band. "Well, I washed up first, and changed my clothes. Took maybe twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. I took the skiff to her site"her site, Kate noticed, not their site"maybe ten minutes all told. So I probably got to her place a little before seven. A quarter till?"