“I don’t know that, either.” He hesitated. “But even if you couldn’t—”
Kate picked it up. “Even if you couldn’t, if you were involved in some kind of international conspiracy to commit embezzlement and fraud and evade taxes and dump products, stuff like that, maybe Interpol would come knocking on your door. And maybe you’d be scared enough you were going to lose those seaside frolics with Julia Roberts that you would voluntarily cooperate with the feds, or whatever you call them over there.”
Jack stood still, an arrested look on his face. “You think Dieter’s the stooge?”
“Jack, you said it. DRG is Dieter’s meal ticket, hell, his party ticket. He’s not going to let anyone sell it out from under him.”
He nodded once, slowly. “Okay, that makes sense, I guess.”
“Of course it does.” She bent back over the letter. “Look here, something written in the margin next to most of the paragraphs. Like Dieter’s been rereading it, making notes to himself. Notes on things to clear or incriminate his employees, perhaps? To corroborate evidence given, maybe? Look at all the notes next to Fedor’s name.” Her eyes narrowed. “And isn’t this Senta’s name next to Berg’s, this scribble here?”
“In German, who knows,” Jack said, adding succinctly, “Shit.”
“You’re repeating yourself.” Kate flipped back to the first page. “Nothing next to the paragraph on Eberhard, I see.”
“He trusts him?” Jack suggested.
“I don’t,” Kate said flatly.
“You don’t like him,” Jack observed. “It’s not the same thing.”
Kate ignored this and tapped the letter with a forefinger. “Why not Senta?”
Jack shook his head. “Beats me.” The corners of his mouth quirked up. “No reason not to. In my experience the female is always deadlier than the male.”
Kate ignored this, too, and tapped the letter again. “Should we keep it? Illegal search and seizure. Inadmissible in court. All that picky constitutional stuff.”
Jack didn’t hesitate. “There have been two violent deaths associated with this group. I say we take everything we find that has even the most remote chance of being relevant to those deaths and worry about the legalities later.”
Kate’s heart warmed to him. Her man. “Okay.” She stuffed the folded paper into a back pocket. She patted it, and said, “I wonder why he didn’t just carry it with him? Stick it in his hip pocket?”
“Those safari suits don’t have hip pockets,” Jack said. He held up a hand. “I know, I know, they’ve got pockets everywhere else. I don’t know, Kate.” He grinned. “Yesterday gave Dieter an object lesson in the wear and tear your average Alaska big-game hunt will inflict on your clothes. Maybe he decided he’d better leave it behind from now on.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re also underestimating the paranoid’s need for secrecy.”
“Who says Dieter’s paranoid?”
“All CEOs are paranoid,” Jack said. “Everybody’s out to get them, the department heads all want their jobs, the IRS wants their records, their wives want alimony, their stockholders want to hold them accountable.” He gave a sharp nod. “Paranoid. Trust me.”
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, is that it?” Kate looked around the tiny cabin into which they had lately broken and entered. “Lucky we’re so normal, right?” She reassembled the shells into their box.
Dieter’s side of that dark little cabin was almost colorful in its disarray, clothes, sleeping bag, comb and brush and toiletries scattered all over the place, dirty clothes stuffed into a garbage bag tossed in a corner, suitcase spilling more clothes onto the floor, flashlight, extra rolls of film, film canisters and their lids, double-A batteries, everything was everywhere in a jumbled mess. Dieter didn’t pick up after himself. He didn’t have to; usually he had people to pick up after him.
Eberhard’s side of the room looked like a monk’s cell by comparison. There was a ditty bag with a safety razor, a toothbrush and dental floss in it. There was a towel and a facecloth neatly draped over the towel rod mounted on the wall at the foot of his bed. There was a small suitcase with spare underwear and shirts folded into precise creases inside it. There were two boxes of ammunition for the Weatherby aligned just so on Eberhard’s side of the small table. The sleeping bag was lined up precisely on the center of the bunk with the pillow tucked carefully inside the head of the bag.
“Speaking of ex-soldiers,” Kate said. “Klemens isn’t the only one around.”
She sat on Eberhard’s bunk and looked at Jack. Jack sat on Dieter’s bunk again and looked back.
“No family pictures,” Kate said. “They’re going to be gone two weeks, including travel time, and they don’t put out pictures of their families?”
“Maybe Eberhard isn’t married.”
“He had a mother, didn’t he?”
“Besides, I told you, they’re European.”
“Does Dieter have kids?”
“Yes. Two sons, I think.”
“Even Europeans love their kids, Jack.”
“Yeah. Maybe he’s got pictures in his wallet.” Jack gave the cabin a long, considering look. “No books, either.”
“Nope.”
“Not even the Alaskan Almanac, or the Milepost, or Alaska Magazine, or The Spell of the Yukon.”
“Not big readers,” Kate said.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Another pause. “I tell you what it does look like,” Kate said at last. “It looks like Dieter’s on vacation.”
“And like Eberhard’s here to work,” Jack agreed. “It doesn’t fit, does it?”
“Or it’s a good show.”
“Or it’s a good show,” Jack said, nodding. “Who’s in the next cabin?”
Twelve
I’m just saying it could be an uncomfortable night.
THE NEXT CABIN housed Gunther and Klemens.
“Very tidy,” Jack said.
“Very,” Kate said, and proceeded to trash the room.
They surfaced five minutes later, disappointed. “Nothing,” Jack said. “Gunther carries his security badge, but then he would.”
“Explain.”
“He’s a kid, Kate, and he’s the head of security for a major multinational firm. That badge defines him. He’d use it for everything, to show off to his parents, to impress security officers of other companies, to con special privileges out of cops.” Jack grinned. “And to get girls. Definitely, to get girls.”
Kate was indignant. “Girls don’t fall for that kind of crap.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Well,” she mumbled, “not anybody you’d want to date.”
He caught her up to give her a smacking kiss. “Got that right.”
She wriggled free. “No personal pictures here, either. Klemens reads, though.” She picked up a well-thumbed copy of a German translation of Henry David Thoreau. “I saw him reading this yesterday, or another book like it. Does a cold-blooded killer read Thoreau?”
“Oh Kate, come on. I’ve known cold-blooded killers who never missed the new Danielle Steel.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” She put the book down where she had found it. “Next cabin?”
“Just let me check on Klemens first.” Jack hotfooted it down the trail and disappeared. A few moments and he was back. “All clear. I think he’s asleep, he doesn’t look like he’s moved an inch.”
“He’s got an awfully clear conscience if he can just doze off the day after he killed a friend and employee.”
The next cabin was Hendrik and Fedor’s. Only one bunk had been slept in. A handful of used Kleenexes were piled on the table, some falling to the floor, right in front of a picture in a gold frame. The picture was of Fedor and Hendrik dressed in identical cream-colored linen shirts, skin tanned an identical golden brown, hair bleached an identical blond, the sea a deep Mediterranean blue in the background. They looked very young, very handsome and
very happy.
“Look,” Jack said, on his knees next to the bed. He sat back on his heels and held out a notebook. “It was shoved in between the pad and the board.”
Kate opened it, and gave an irritated sigh. “Great. It’s in German.”
“Of course.”
“It’s handwritten, and recently. The numbers are the same. Their dates are backward, though, the day before the month.” She turned a page. “The last entry is September twenty-sixth. See? Twenty-six slash nine.” She turned a page. “Wait a minute. Here’s another entry in a different hand, dated September twenty-eighth.”
“Fedor died on the twenty-eighth,” Jack said. “Hendrik must have written something in it.”
“Looks like. The Department of Education should never have dropped the foreign language requirement in high school.” She held up the notebook. “We’re hanging on to this, too. The troopers can find a translator back in town.”
“Doesn’t Demetri read German?”
“I don’t think so,” Kate said, tucking the notebook into her shirt. “He can speak it like a native, but I don’t think he ever learned to write it.”
“Terrific.”
“Best thing we did was get that bunch the hell out of camp,” Kate said, rising to her feet and dusting her knees. “Ten to one this notebook wouldn’t have been here otherwise.”
He looked out the door. “All clear. Who’s next?”
Hubert and Gregor were next. Their cabin was a model of familial loyalty combined with just the right touch of Protestant work ethic. There were family pictures, one for each side of the room, and laptop computers with battery packs, one for each side of the room. Kate turned on one of the computers and was confronted by an unending screen of indecipherable text made up of unrecognizable symbols. “Hubert,” she said. “Senta told me Hubert was in research and development.”
Next to the computer was a jam jar filled with cut plants. There was a stalk of fireweed with one remaining blossom trembling at the top, horsetail, angelica, wormwood, sour dock and one frond of field fern, among others. “Looks like Hubert’s into herbs.” She remembered him wading into the fireweed the night she had slain the boombox.
“Those are herbs?” Jack said with a quizzical look. “Look like weeds to me.”
“You can make tea from fireweed and wormwood. Sour dock paste relieves itching. Horsetail’s a diuretic, some say an abortifacient.”
“Come on.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You can use devil’s club to treat burns. As handy as you are in the kitchen, I ought to plant a patch next to the cabin.”
His heart skipped another beat. “I’d rather suffer the burn than have to pick the devil’s club to cure it.” Inwardly, he rejoiced. She was taking his presence at the cabin as a given. And she wasn’t telling him he had to learn to cook. He wanted to ask her to marry him then and there. Nobly, he restrained himself. One step at a time.
Blissfully unaware of the euphoria her casual words had induced, she turned on the other computer, fumbled her way through the directory and was nearly blasted out of the cabin by the resulting color and sound. “Where’s the volume control on this thing?” she yelled.
Jack found it and turned it down. “What is it?” he said.
“A commercial, I think,” Kate said. “Or part of a promotional campaign. Senta said Gregor was the head of public relations.”
“That would explain the boozer’s nose,” Jack said, nodding.
“Yeah, it does kinda look like it belongs on W. C. Fields’s face, doesn’t it? Bet we find a bottle stashed in here somewhere.”
“Nah. He’s carrying it.” Jack saw her look and added, “It’s a silver flask. I saw him take a nip out of it this morning.”
They watched the screen for a few moments as a hearty male voice spouted a string of German while a series of pictures flashed the smiling faces of happy workers all sporting the snazzy DRG logo on a hat or a tie or a shirt pocket.
Jack turned it off. “Pretty picture, when the truth of the matter is that most of their work is probably done in Laos by people making seven cents an hour.”
Kate surveyed the room and shrugged. “Looks like the temporary residence of a couple of hardworking family men. It might even be true, or it is when Gregor’s at home. Let’s move on.”
The next cabin, and the last one in line that wasn’t falling into the Nakochna, belonged to Senta and Berg. Berg proved to have, besides the usual clothes and toiletries, a secret stash of Hershey bars. “Plain,” Jack said peevishly. “Why couldn’t it be the ones with almonds?”
“That Berg, so inhospitable toward his friendly neighborhood burglars.” Kate was looking for Senta’s purse. In her experience, a woman’s purse was second only to a man’s mother in filling in the blanks of an individual’s character. “Aha.”
She found it under the bunk, a darling little mini-backpack affair, probably the latest thing down the runway in Milan. It was made of real leather burnished a deep chestnut, soft and supple to the touch, and had two pockets fastened with a single and probably genuine gold buckle. The outer one was big enough to hold a passport. Kate opened it, and it was her turn to be peevish. “God, I can’t believe it.”
“What?” Jack said, unwrapping a Hershey bar and taking a bite with relish.
“She even looks good in her passport picture. That’s against the rule.”
“The rule?”
“The rule that says all passport pictures make people look like toads. They’re usually worse than driver’s licenses.”
“Let me see.” He swallowed and looked. “Yum.”
“Watch it, big boy, she’d eat you alive.”
He grinned. “I’d slide down kicking and screaming all the way.”
“And this is the man,” Kate told Mutt, who had reappeared to flop in the doorway and sleep off her midday snack, “who professed his eternal devotion to me on top of a fuel tank in the middle of the Alaskan Bush, beneath a full moon, and not even twenty-four hours ago. See?” she said to Jack. “Mutt thinks you’re disgusting, too.”
Jack regarded Mutt with a sapient eye. “Mutt is too stuffed to move out of her own way, let alone think anything of the kind. And it was a hunter’s moon, as I recall.”
Kate sniffed. “Hey, she’s thirty-eight, four years older than me.”
“So?”
Kate closed the passport and tucked it back into its pocket. “So she’s got that kind of a face, you know? The first time I saw her I thought she could be anywhere from thirty to fifty.” She meditated. “I wonder why the guys took their passports with them.”
Jack produced a wallet like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.
“Even on a hunt?” Kate said.
“Even on a hunt,” Jack said, deadpan. “It’s a guy thing.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Then why didn’t Dieter put the letter in his wallet?”
“We may never know,” Jack said, much struck.
She shook her head. Jack was not approaching the task at hand with what Kate considered an appropriate amount of solemnity. She returned to the backpack. At least women had enough smarts to leave their purses behind when they went out shooting.
The second pocket of Senta’s purse was much larger, big enough to hold two wads of cash, one German, one American, a bottle of French perfume, a hair pick, a traveler’s size bottle of mousse, another of hair spray and a third of shampoo, a makeup kit, a bottle of nail polish, a fistful of credit cards—all platinum—and a three-month supply of birth control pills. There was a business card case with Senta’s name, job title, address and phone, fax and E-mail address printed in elaborately curlicued German lettering, all nouns capitalized, all umlauts dotted, all F’s and G’s serifed within an inch of their lives.
And, lo and behold, there was a picture folder. Most of them were of Senta: Senta in a crisp, tailored business suit either accepting or awarding some kind of plaque, Senta in a graduation gown, Senta in a bathing suit on a beach, blond hair s
hining gold in the sun and with just the right ratio of lean, hard flank to plump, soft breast.
“Woo woo,” Jack said, breathing heavily over Kate’s shoulder.
She elbowed him in the gut and flipped the folder. The last picture was of Senta as a girl of about eight, standing next to a boy on the verge of adolescence. Kate studied it. “Isn’t that Dieter?”
“Who?”
“The boy next to her. Isn’t that Dieter?”
Jack took the folder from her and frowned at it. “I don’t know. Is it? They look like siblings, don’t they?”
“Senta didn’t say anything about it if they are.” Kate remembered the look Dieter had given Senta when she had gone off with George. At the time, Kate had put it down to George poaching on Dieter’s private preserve. If Dieter and Senta were brother and sister, that look had meant something else entirely. According to Jack, Dieter was a rounder. Rounders were notoriously straitlaced as regards the amorous activities of the female members of their families, much more so than they were about their own.
“Maybe she’s family,” Kate said. “Maybe that’s why she’s not referred to in Dieter’s letter.” And then she was struck by another thought. “What are European inheritance laws like, anyway, Jack? Do you know?”
“No idea. Weirder than ours, probably, they’ve had longer to work on them.” He handed the picture folder back, and helped stuff Senta’s belongings back into her purse.
They emerged from the cabin to find that the sun had been obscured by the encroaching band of clouds Kate had seen from the runway that morning. “You know what this means,” Kate said.
“What?”
She jerked her chin at the gray sky. “It means George might really be weathered in in Anchorage and not be back with Demetri’s cavalry today.”
Jack looked toward the ridge. “It also means our guests will be back soon.” He looked down at her. “They’re going to notice that their rifles are missing. And probably that their cabins have been searched.”
“I don’t really give a damn what they notice.” Kate stretched, joints popping.
“Me either. I’m just saying it could be an uncomfortable night.”
Hunter's Moon Page 15
