by Неизвестный
Kris had wanted to ask Ben about Evie, whether he knew about Vern, and what he remembered about her body in the creek. But when he pushed the warm cup of tea into her hand and turned off the overhead light, and lit a kerosene lantern, which threw a golden softness into the room, a quietness settled over them that she didn’t know how to break. They sat sipping the tea; looking out the window at the shadows cast by the city’s hard yellow lights and listening to the gusts of wind tap the window with pellets of rain and the crackle of the spruce in the wood stove.
Her tea was gone and the cup cold in her hands when Ben said, “It’ll clear tomorrow.”
Kris laughed.
“It’ll clear off by daylight and get cold,” he said quietly. “Let’s pack some food and have lunch out the road.”
“I thought you said it would get cold.”
“It will.”
“What fun is it shivering in the cold and eating frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” Kris demanded.
“We’ll keep you warm.” Ben smiled.
“What do you mean we?” Kris snapped, surprised he’d hit on her.
“All my cold weather gear is here,” he said.
Kris relaxed. “I’ve got to go to dinner with some people tomorrow night.”
“We won’t last more than a couple of hours,” said Ben. “You’re eating with the couple who was at the funeral?”
“How did you know?”
“I saw him give you a card.”
Kris fished the card out of her pocket. It was creased and crumpled now. She smoothed it out on her thigh; it read Loren Lambale, vice-president, National Bank of Alaska.
“Some rich guy who put together the money for a new extension at the AWARE shelter. He paid for Evie’s funeral.”
“It looked like more than the city would pay for.”
“Yeah. So dinner wasn’t something I could get out of.” Kris laughed uncertainly. “I’m not good at saying please and thank you and answering a lot of questions.”
“It’ll probably be a good meal.”
Kris squeezed the tea bag against the side of the mug with a finger. “He’s phony. Right at the funeral he was telling me how much he’d done for the shelter. Justin says he’s sanctimonious.”
“Justin knows him?”
Kris shook her head. “No, that’s what he said when I described him. Anyway, I’ve got to meet him at the parking garage tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“He said he’d be working in the afternoon.” Kris stood, leaving her cup on the chair. “So when should I come by tomorrow?”
“Eleven? It’s an hour drive out to the beach. We can be back by three.”
“OK. You’re sure you got enough clothes for me. too?”
“Yes, I think they’ll fit.”
When he stood, he was about her height, though he’d be taller if he stood straight. She put on her jacket and tugged the poncho down over her head. Ben followed her to the door. She hesitated, not knowing what to do with her hands, then jammed them in her jacket pockets.
“See you tomorrow,” she said, stepping into the night.
Saturday, November 14
Barrett’s door was ajar. Kris pushed it open. His head was bent low over a newspaper spread on his desk. A circle of pink scalp showed through thinning hair on the back of his head. As she watched him, she felt her defenses close around her. In her experience, cops were men who hid their criminality behind a uniform. Kris tapped her fingers against the door and Barrett looked up.
“Come in.” He motioned to the metal chair in front of his desk and folded the paper. “How are you?” Barrett sat back in the chair, clasping his hands together at the back of his head; the shirt stretched over his chest. No suit and tie today; he had on jeans and a flannel shirt; black hair curled out of his open collar and his sleeves were rolled part way up muscled forearms. He was larger than he’d looked in the suit.
“Working hard,” Kris said, glancing at the newspaper.
“Saturday. Paperwork day.” He pointed his chin at the forms piled on the desk behind his model tank. Its gun was cocked higher; he must play with it. “It’s relentless.”
“Paperwork’s more important than a murder?”
Barrett grinned; maybe he thought she was being cute.
“How was the funeral yesterday?” he asked. “It was in the paper.” Barrett brought his arms down and reopened the newspaper, putting his finger on a small paragraph on an inner page.
“I need to find out about a guy named Vern,” she said. “He did time in Lemon Creek last summer on a DUI. My mother was with him.”
Barrett’s eyes pinned her, his face instantly intent. “How did you find this out?”
“Glory Hole.”
“Good job,” Barrett said. “I knew if I sent you in there, you’d find something I couldn’t.”
“You didn’t send me.”
“Do you have a last name?”
“No.”
“Not a problem. Anything else?”
Kris wasn’t going to tell him about the truck or Montana Creek—she wanted to get to Vern first; Barrett could talk to him later. “Yeah, they said that he treated her good. New dress, haircut, she was happy.” She didn’t want him to get cocky; to think he was getting close.
“Right. The dress she was wearing was new.” He pulled the file out of the cabinet behind his desk; it was thicker than the last time she’d seen it. He shuffled through loose papers. “It had been purchased at Fred’s,” he said, reading from a sheet. “The stock manager said they’d received a shipment of those dresses about three weeks ago.”
Kris kept her face blank, but she was surprised. Evie had to be murdered before a cop did something for her? Before she’d left, Kris remembered Natives in Fairbanks getting harassed so much that they couldn’t drive across town without being pulled over; they called it being picked up on a DWN: Driving While Native.
“What else?”
“A fair amount,” he said and flipped back to the front of the file. “First, the footprint the old trapper found in the mud was your mother’s. Right foot. We found no other prints in either direction on the trail. We did find fibers on the bushes they crashed through on the way down to the stream. Some matched your mother’s dress; the others were a high quality wool. Dark blue. It appears the killer was wearing a very expensive suit.”
Next page. “As I suspected, she was hit with both barrels of a side by side. Somebody didn’t want her easily identified, or was very angry at her. Ballistics says it was number two shot from Remington Nitro-Steel Magnum cartridges. They identified the cartridge from the wadding blown into the wound and the powder residue. But this is strange; it was a ten gauge. The ME dug out all of the pellets – over four hundred; the only cartridge Remington manufactures with that many pellets is a ten gauge. Two hundred and eighteen number twos apiece.
“Unless you’re hunting turkeys, no one uses ten gauges any more. A hundred years ago they were common because the black powder used then wasn’t very explosive and so you needed a bigger gun.”
He looked up at her. “With modern powder, you can use smaller gauges and lighter guns. In fact, only one place in town stocks cartridges that size and it hasn’t sold any in months, which probably means they were mail ordered. And unfortunately, most of the mail order outfits are NRA folks who hang up on out of state cops without a subpoena, so tracing the cartridges is probably a dead-end.”
Another page. “Your mother’s blood alcohol was zero, no detectable drugs or controlled substances.”
Kris stayed quiet. Why was he telling her this?
“What is interesting,” he said, “is that apparently Stewart was down the trail twice as long as he claimed. We found a carpenter who was working on one of the houses up the side of the hill. You can’t see it from the road, but the staircase to it takes off from the cul-de-sac there where you park your car. The guy was ready to quit; he was cold and wet and he looked at his watc
h when he heard Stewart’s truck come in. He said it sounded like it had holes in the muffler. There are, I checked. It was 3:20, thereabouts when he looked at his watch. He packed up at four, carrying his tools down the steps. It took him several trips and in between trips, he heard Stewart’s truck take off. That’s forty minutes. Stewart had told us fifteen or twenty. We can corroborate the time the carpenter said Stewart left. It’s a ten-minute drive back into town and Stewart came in here at ten after four.”
“He lost track of the time,” Kris said.
“I doubt it, but count the minutes: Five minutes to the bridge if you move really slow. Five minutes to find the body and five minutes back. That’s fifteen minutes max, twenty is generous.”
“He’s an old man.”
“Can’t be too old. He climbs those stairs to his house.”
Kris hadn’t thought of that. Justin had counted the steps: ninety-eight and Ben had to haul groceries and firewood up them.
“He didn’t do it,” she said.
“Are you two friends now?” he asked.
“I can tell.”
Barrett pulled another sheet out the file. “Stewart had your mother’s age wrong. He’d thought forty-two, but she was thirty-seven.”
“No. She was forty-two,” Kris said. Evie’d had her when she was eighteen.
“Vital Stats has her born on April 4, 1978. Parents: Claude and Katrina Gabriel. Sometimes a birthday gets off by a day or two when it’s registered, but never by five years,” he said.
Thirty-seven. Kris felt a chill settle in her. That made Evie thirteen when Kris’d been born. The family had still been doing well then—house, regular meals, no one drinking. But it was the year their lives started coming apart. Evie’s father had rolled his truck and had been killed and, with no income, they’d lost the house. Thirteen; Evie’d been just a kid. Was she screwing at twelve? Sex had been a staple for Evie since the earliest days that Kris could remember, but Kris’d never seen twelve year olds go looking for it. Usually it came to them and they didn’t have a lot of choice about it.
And why would she lie about it? Why’d she want people to think she was older than she was?
“We also got a positive ID on her,” Barrett said.
“What do you mean you got a positive ID?” Kris said, suddenly confused.
“She had three fingers and a thumb left. We sent the prints up to Fairbanks and to the FBI in DC. The report from Fairbanks came in yesterday. Nothing on file with the FBI.”
“She was buried yesterday.” Kris’s voice hardened. “How could you bury her without a positive ID?”
“We were certain enough. Stewart ID’d her. Margie Shaker, at the AWARE shelter, also identified her.”
“Who are these people? What the hell do they know?”
Barrett sat back in his chair. “Kris,” his voice deepened and smoothed. “I didn’t want you to have to ID her. She wasn’t a pretty sight.”
Kris stood and leaned over his desk, her voice cold and hard. “Who the hell are you to tell me what I can see?” She could’ve seen her mother again.
“I thought it best,” he said quietly.
“You thought it best?” Kris stared at him, stunned. Then she exploded, grabbing the tank by its gun and flinging it against the wall. It bounced and crashed on the floor, its treads in the air like a dead roach.
“Don’t ever fucking think for me.” She steamed out of his office pissed that he hadn’t looked upset.
__________
Ben heard Kris coming up the stairs, each foot landing on the metal grates with more force than the climb required. He smiled as he let her in, ignoring the anger stamped in her face, and pointed to a pile of cold-weather gear heaped on a chair. She shrugged into his parka, patched where it had been torn by a sled runner—back when he still used steel—and still smelling of the smoke of trail fires. Its skirt hung almost to her knees and her face vanished in the shadows at the back of the hood when she pulled the metal zipper from the bottom of the skirt up to the ruff. The ruff was wolf, from a bitch he’d trapped so late in the season her pelt was too worn and mangy to bother selling.
Kris kicked off her sneakers and stepped into his shoepacks, but refused his wool pants. They looked, she said, too dorky. He asked if she would be warm enough and she said, pushing her bare hands out of the sleeves, her anger fading, that she might be, if she had mittens. Ben pointed to a cabinet by the door and then turned back to the kitchen to finish packing lunch. It was a standard for him, pea soup and potatoes; both pre-cooked since he wasn’t certain how long Kris would sit in the cold before she rebelled.
“What’s this?” Kris came into the kitchen holding his pistol. “A .38.” She opened the barrel. “It’s loaded. Why’s it loaded? Is this for bear?”
“No,” he said. “It’s too small for bear and besides, bear are reasonable folk.” He watched her click the cylinder closed and check the safety. He wasn’t surprised that she could handle a gun; Evie’d told him about their life in Fairbanks—and he’d lived there once himself. Kris looked at him and he said, reaching into a drawer for forks and spoons, “Cities are dangerous places.”
“This is for people?”
“That’s what makes cities dangerous,” he said without sarcasm, pulling out a couple of forks.
“Did you ever have to use it?”
“No,” Ben lied.
As he began packing the rucksack, Ben watched Kris return the pistol and pull out his pair of mittens. They were Athabascan. Abbie Jane, from Allakaket, had made them for him from a caribou hide he’d given her back when he still needed a good pair of mittens. He watched Kris trace the beadwork with her finger, smell the leather, and brush it against her cheek. Ben turned back to the rucksack, leaving her alone. He’d had Abbie Jane make Evie a pair, too.
Kris took the pack from him after he’d cinched it closed. He shouldered into his jacket and they stepped outside. It was well above zero, their breaths were only faint wisps of steam, like tails of an arctic hare, which disappeared quickly in the dry air. Juneau’s winter might be too mild for his cold weather gear. In front of him, Kris pulled up her hood and burrowed deeper into the parka. Ben stepped carefully down the grated steps while Kris clanked on ahead. She waited at the bottom, an unaccustomed smile working across her face, as she looked back up at him. He led her to his truck and she scrambled in from the driver’s side. A couple of years ago, he’d had to bolt the passenger door shut when it began flying open on left hand turns.
Ben drove up to Fourth, cut behind the governor’s mansion, and dropped down to Willoughby. Saturday mornings were busy at Foodland but Ben found a space between two other trucks. They walked into the store and Ben asked her if there was anything special she wanted. Kris shook her head; so he led her back to the fish section and pointed to the sockeye fillets. A treat, he told her.
The clerk handed them to Ben, wrapped and bar coded, and they went and stood in the express line.
“Where’s your hat, young man?”
Ben looked at the cashier in surprise. She had gray hair, stood taller and straighter than he, and held him with bright, indomitable eyes.
“It’s cold out there. You’ll catch your death,” she said. “Nineteen sixty-eight.”
While Ben fumbled in his wallet the woman said to Kris. “Does he talk?”
“I don’t think he knows how to flirt,” Kris said and the woman laughed.
Ben handed her a twenty and counted his change before filling out the tax-exempt form. Back in the truck, they pulled onto Eagan and headed north, trailed by the snorting of Ben’s rusted-out muffler.
Ben had driven all of Juneau’s roads; it can be done in a morning. Eagle Beach is thirty-two miles north of Juneau on the city’s longest road, which dead-ended in a spruce forest just eight miles past the beach. No one was at the beach when they drove in, but Ben ignored the shelters and fire pits and carried the fish down to the water’s edge. The tide was high but falling; little waves lapped the pebbled
beach, which left behind a glaze of ice on the stones as the tide fell. In a few minutes the water would race into the distance, baring acres of lumpy mud flats.
He found a spot at the high-water mark, dropped the pack, and headed down the beach gathering firewood. In a few minutes he was back with an armful of driftwood. He disappeared again, this time into the scrub across the road, returning with a handful of alder and spruce twigs.
Ben gathered several larger rocks and placed them in a loose triangle.
“Want to light the fire?” he asked.
Kris dropped to her knees and slipped off her mittens. Ben took the lace-like spruce twigs, broke them into tiny lengths, and handed them to her. She laid them in a haphazard heap between the stones. When she had a little pile, she lit a match and stuck it into the middle. One or two twigs caught, turning dull orange and twisting in the small flame. The flame shrank and died. She struck another match and thrust it into its center. It went out. She struck another, but only the top twigs lit and the flame burned through them without dropping into the sticks below. Kris picked up the knot of sticks and cocked her arm to fling it into the water.
Ben touched her, stopping her, and, with his blunt fingers, gently helped her build a delicate pyramid of twigs. He handed her another match and pointed to the base of the pile. She struck the match and slid it under the twigs and the flame leapt quickly up through the pile. With unhurried care he handed her larger and larger sticks to place on the growing fire and in a few minutes the sticks were crackling and the heat of the flames played across their faces.
The smoke rose straight in the still air and Ben breathed in the tang of the spruce and the unfamiliar smell of the salt-water driftwood. He let the fire burn while he wove the salmon into the “Y” of a green alder branch with other sticks of alder. He opened and poured the pea soup into a pot and balanced it over the flames on the stones. When the fire had begun to lay down, he buried two potatoes in the fringe of ashes at its edge.
