The second after his first footfall sounded she was off again, running flat out, as fast as she could go, straight down the middle of the trail, taking her chances that Senta wasn’t coming up it from the other direction. She didn’t think so; Senta didn’t seem the type to head out after a lover/co-conspirator, but it was still a risk. Kate took it.
The switchbacks ended suddenly. It was astonishing how much faster it had been going down than going up. It wasn’t far now, half a mile or so to where the peeling bole of the birch leaned precariously over the trail. Kate took the track at a steady trot, head down, arms pumping, lungs burning, ignoring everything but the need to cover distance and cover it fast. She was no longer cold and the mist was her ally now, refreshing her, encouraging her, urging her on.
She felt rather than heard his footsteps pounding behind her and she put on speed, the last she had in her. If she’d still had it, he was near enough to have caught her braid and brought her down.
He still might. Had she run too slowly? Had she allowed him to catch up too soon?
Would she make it?
There! There was the leaning birch. She scrambled up the bank and plunged in, leaving him cursing and clawing the foliage behind her.
The trail she had left behind that morning was faint, he wouldn’t have been able to see it but she could, oh, she could. A broken branch here, a footprint left in a pile of leaves there, a crushed clump of horsetail. She ran, knocking her shoulders against tree trunks that seemed to jump into her path, tripping over roots, tangling her feet in devil’s club.
Behind her there was a loud thump and more cursing. Pursuit ceased. Eberhard must have run into a tree.
Kate skidded to a halt, waiting, listening. Moments passed, while her heartbeat slowed and she caught her breath. Had he knocked himself out? A groan answered that question.
Perhaps he needed encouragement. She fished out a quarter and a penny and tapped them together, clink, clink, clink. Nothing. Clink, clink, clink-clink, arrhythmic but continuous. A muffled curse came wetly to her through the mist and she pulled out a rubber band. One end around her left thumb, the other stretched around the quarter. She waited until he was almost on her, a dark figure looming up out of the mist, and let fly at where she hoped his face might be. The quarter hit some part of him with a satisfying fleshy chunk. He cursed and broke into a stumbling run, arms reaching blindly. It looked like he’d lost the rifle.
She turned and ran flat out through the trees, taking the most dangerous risk of all, and burst into the clearing with the brush pile.
She paused long enough to register the outraged expression on the face of the grizzly as he reared up on his hind feet, muzzle bloody from his latest feeding, front claws extended to defend the kill he had returned to, as grizzlies always have and always will, until the last bit of meat was gone, until the last bone was cracked and sucked dry of marrow, until all those delicious brains had been licked from the inside of the skull.
Kate took the brush pile and his putrefying kill in one colossal leap, clearing his outstretched claws by inches— she couldn’t have done it again if she tried for a hundred years—and crashed into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing.
Eberhard stumbled out of the trees. Kate had startled the grizzly, had alerted him to trespassers, but she had been too quick for him, and now here was another trespasser blundering onto his private cache of meat. It was bear season, all right, but this time the bear was doing the hunting. He was ready and waiting when Eberhard ran straight into his arms.
Eberhard’s screams were louder than the bear’s.
*
Smoke curled up from the chimney of the lodge, but it could have been a trap, set to lure her in.
Eberhard had been gone a long time, however, and Senta must be getting worried about him.
It had taken Kate three hours to make her way back to the lodge, inching her way to avoid a possible ambush, and another thirty minutes to crawl in close enough to survey the situation. Senta probably thought he couldn’t live without her that long, and if his story was to be believed, he’d been gone since the previous night. Senta must be getting a little antsy.
There was only one of her.
But she had a rifle.
Rifle. Rifles. There were a bunch of rifles in the garage. But to get to the garage Kate would have to circle around behind the lodge, and there were windows on every side of that building except the one facing the garage. And they’d left the ammunition in the lodge.
Kate lay in the thick brush at the edge of the clearing and considered.
With the splint, Old Sam was marginally mobile. He could make it up to the spike camp, and maybe even look for other survivors. But he’d need some help, soon.
She considered for an hour, waiting, watching. She listened for the sound of voices, anything to indicate that Senta wasn’t alone, but there was nothing.
One of the four-wheelers had gone over the edge, again according to Eberhard. That left one more, and that had been left at the top of the ridge that morning. So Senta was on foot.
Kate eyed the smoke again. Senta was also warm and dry and fed.
Bitch.
Kate was still cold and still hungry and still exhausted. The sky was gray overhead, the ground sodden beneath. A flash of red caught her eye, and she turned her head to see a troop of ptarmigan parade past. She had been lying so still for so long they had mistaken her for part of the landscape.
They looked to her hungry eyes like a bunch of drumsticks marching in step. Her mouth watered.
This was ridiculous. Senta couldn’t be in six places at once. Seven of the eight shelters had to be empty, and empty long enough for her to sneak in and grab some dry clothes and maybe one of Berg’s Hershey bars before her stomach crawled right up her throat and out of her mouth.
She made up her mind and backed soundlessly into the brush again, wriggling backward on her stomach. It didn’t take any particular skill to move soundlessly in the forest, no matter what Zane Grey said. All you had to do was take your time. Take it slowly and carefully and be aware of where every part of your body was and what it was doing. Kate was very slow and very, very careful. One leg stretched straight out in back of her, toe down, both hands raised her torso and pushed up and back, her toe took the weight and she was six inches backward from where she had been. She had to feel carefully for purchase and for anything that might make a noise before she put her weight on it, but so long as she didn’t get in a hurry, it was possible.
It took her twenty minutes to thread her way back to the creek. She crept down the bank path, worn smooth so close to the lodge.
Exposure and exhaustion must have taken their toll, because she never did figure out how what happened next happened.
What happened next was that a bucket came crashing down on her head, a water bucket wielded by the man filling it at the water pump. He brought it down hard, too, and only the fact that it was half full of water and unwieldy saved her. She ducked out of the way of the bucket but not of the water, and it was very cold water.
“You son of a bitch,” Kate said. She came to her feet with a surge of anger and kicked him as hard as she could right square in the balls.
He folded up like a collapsed balloon, his rosebud of a mouth an “O” of surprised agony, his hands going protectively to his crotch, his ass hitting the ground with a solid squelch. Glasses, thick and unwieldy, slid down his nose.
It was Berg. Kate blinked the rain out of her eyes and looked again. Yes, it was Berg. But Berg was just a fool, a buffoon, a nonentity, a nonstarter so inept he took naps under bear bait. What the hell was he doing here? “What the hell are you doing here?” Kate said out loud. “I thought you went over the cliff with the rest of them.”
“No,” a new voice said. Senta emerged from the trees, Eberhard’s Weatherby in her hands. “No, Berg works for me.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kate said again. She was more angry than afraid. She glared at Senta and said furiou
sly, “Is there anyone at DRG you weren’t fucking?”
Senta smiled, the familiar predatory smile, full lips carefully outlined in carmine. “No,” she said simply. “Except for Dieter. He wouldn’t. We were cousins. He said we shouldn’t.”
“Why, Senta?” Kate said. “Why come here? Why involve us? You wanted DRG, fine. You couldn’t find an easier way to get it than stage a mass murder in the Alaskan Bush?”
“But it was the perfect solution,” Senta said proudly. “Far, far away from home, isolated in the wilderness, no one left to say what really happened. I could do anything I wanted.”
Keep talking, Kate said, just keep talking. She let her eyelids droop in a half-bored way that said, Impress me, I dare you. It had impelled the truth out of more perps than Senta had shades of lipstick. She shifted her weight unobtrusively from one foot to the other, keeping her balance, staying ready. Tell me all about it, Senta, about how clever you are, how brilliant your plan was, how everything would have worked if only you’d had smarter people working for you.
Senta obliged. “You see, Dieter has family. Two sons.” She smiled again, this time at a fond memory. “They are both in love with me, and they are both underage.”
Johnny, Kate thought with a pang. How was she going to tell Johnny?
“They can be managed,” Senta said. “His wife—” She shrugged. “She is nothing, she could be managed, too. They would all lean on me if Dieter was gone, and then I would have all that lovely money to play with. So Dieter had to go.”
“At first all you were going to do was discredit him, right?” Kate said. “You were the source for the investigation, weren’t you?” With a sudden inspiration, she added, “And I’ll bet you were framing Fedor to take the fall.”
Berg groaned at their feet, his hands cupped against his crotch. Both women ignored him.
“That little fag.” Senta’s lip curled again. “Always poking his nose in where it didn’t belong, wanting to know where every penny went.”
“Ah,” Kate said with a thin smile. “You’ve been embezzling, too, have you, Senta?”
Senta shot her an angry glance. “He was a deviant, who could believe anything he said?”
“What’s the matter, Senta?” Kate said. “Did Fedor turn you down?”
She thought for a moment she’d gone too far, Senta half-raised the rifle.
“What made you change your mind?” Kate said quickly. Why take us with you down this road to hell, you homicidal bitch? “Why did you decide to kill Dieter? Why kill the rest of them, too? And if you’d decided to kill him, why plant that cartridge in the creek next to Hendrik’s body?”
“What is this about planting a bullet?” Senta said with some surprise.
The rifle lowered again, as she was reminded that Kate was of an inferior species, less quick than herself, less intelligent, less swift of perception, less of everything all the way around. Senta forgave Kate’s obtuseness with a generous smile. “Dieter was always mad for the hunting. Shoot, shoot, shoot, elephants in Africa, tigers in India, jaguars in South America.” She gave an elaborate shudder. “You should see his office, full of the heads of dead animals. He was going to come to Alaska anyway, he had always wanted to.”
It didn’t matter now how many guides Dieter had pissed off on how many continents. “Who suggested that he make it a corporate retreat?”
“You know men.” Senta tossed her head. “A word here, a word there, and he thought of it all by himself.”
“And then Fedor died.”
“Opportunity knocking,” Senta said lightly, smiling.
So it was an accident after all, Kate thought. Poor Klemens. “What happened to Hendrik?”
Senta sneered. “Another deviant. He heard us talking.”
“You and Eberhard?”
“Yes. We met down by the creek the evening Fedor died.” She smirked. “I think Fedor must have been suspicious and told Hendrik something. We saw him hiding. Eberhard went back to follow him, and saw him talk to you.” She shrugged. “Hendrik was always a little clumsy. He slipped, he fell. Who is there to say it was different?”
“And that’s when you decided it would be so much easier on everyone if Dieter died too, and the rest of them as well.”
Senta beamed, delighted to prove Kate wrong yet again. “No, Eberhard had the idea first when he took the safety off Dieter’s rifle.”
“What—” It took Kate a moment to catch up. “You mean Eberhard clicked the safety off Dieter’s rifle after he shot the moose?” Kate tried to remember. Dieter had constantly been handing things to Eberhard that day, and yes, the rifle had been one of them. “I guess it was bad luck he only shot himself in the arm.”
Senta’s face clouded. “Yes. And then Hendrik hears us talking about it, down by the creek, and about other things. And then Eberhard saw him talking to you, so Hendrik had to go. That was when we thought of turning Fedor’s death to our advantage, you see.”
“Yes, I see.”
Kate did see, all too well. The conceit that comes with killing once successfully had intoxicated the killers to the point that any solution up to and including mass murder looked reasonable, even necessary to them. And, of course, foolproof. No annoying witnesses left to cloud the issue. The perfect crime.
Senta proved it with her next words. “What could be more believable than two deaths, accidents, of course, followed by a ride up to a high place in the wilderness, a depressed corporate officer loses his grip and they are all dead except for a few—a very few—fortunate survivors?”
Senta smiled. “It happens in United States post offices all the time. But this, given the international nature of DRG, would make headlines all over the world. And,” she added, “think of the publicity, the sympathy it would generate. The investigation into DRG would vanish. The stock would rise, too,” she added. “You watch.”
Kate didn’t think Senta had any intention of letting her. Berg groaned again, louder this time, and began muttering in German beneath his breath, the same phrase over and over again, probably the words “Ouch ouch ouch” repeated.
“Get up, Berg,” Senta said sharply. She motioned with the rifle. “Let’s get in out of the rain while we wait for Eberhard.” She smiled at Kate, and this time her teeth seemed sharper somehow. “I promised him a pet. You remember.”
She looked disappointed when Kate didn’t break into a sweat at the very thought. She looked past Kate, in the direction of Blueberry Ridge. A suspicion leapt into the blue eyes and she opened her mouth.
At that moment Berg began a lurching movement to his feet. When he was just coming up off all fours Kate kicked him again, this time right under the chin.
The force of the blow carried him backward into Senta.
The Weatherby went off.
Berg screamed.
Kate ran.
She felt like she’d been running for most of her life.
She ran straight past the squirming jumble of bodies, one of which had a spreading stain on the front of his shirt and was screaming in a hoarse voice. The other, swearing furiously in German, was punching and kicking and hitting to get him off her.
Kate ran, but not too fast, not so fast that Senta would lose sight of her.
It had worked once, why not a second time?
Besides, she’d had another idea, an even better one this time.
Seventeen
He’s not dumb enough to starve his plaything.
THE TRESTLE TABLE SEEMED TO FLOAT BY as she ran through the yard, the table from which Jack had tossed the bullets into the fire. She scooped up a roll of duct tape as she passed and dropped it down the front of her shirt, Jack’s shirt. It seemed the thing to do, somehow. Duct tape always came in handy; hadn’t Jack said it bound the universe together? Kate curled a hand around it through the flannel fabric of her shirt and ran.
She had run south this morning, south along the mine road, south to lure Eberhard to his death.
She ran east now, toward the first d
ay’s kill. She ran, and again she heard the sound of pursuit, and again she ran just fast enough to elude capture. She wasn’t worried about Senta shooting her on the run; Senta could accidentally blow the guts out of someone at close range, always assuming she could manage to get the safety off first, but she wasn’t a marksman. It was one thing to shoot at a bull’s-eye, it was another to have an entire side of moose to aim at, it was a third and completely different thing to sight in on a much smaller target that kept moving out of your sights, especially when you had to move to keep them in those sights.
As if to prove her point, the rifle boomed. There was a thud as the bullet impacted the trunk of a white spruce twenty yards to Kate’s right.
No, she wasn’t in any danger, not at this distance and not at this speed.
Kate had led Eberhard away from Old Sam and now she led Senta away from the lodge.
She ran, an easy loping stride, arms pumping, chin up. It was almost habit by now.
After all the foot traffic of the first day’s hunt the path was clear. It was after noon by now and there was a brightening on the southern horizon; better weather coming. Better weather and the cavalry. She had to hurry.
Senta helped by staying on her trail like a hungry hound dog. Kate didn’t ask for more.
She ran through stands of aspens, golden leaves drooping and falling beneath the weight of accumulated moisture. She ran through clumps of hemlock and spruce, of alder and birch, of berry bushes and diamond willow and devil’s club and the eternal and endless fireweed and a hundred other trees and plants she lived with every day and which she didn’t know by name.
She ran until she was too far ahead and had to stop and wait until Senta could see her again. Senta, like Eberhard, was angry. The anger spurred her past exhaustion. The humiliation of defeat at the hands of a lesser being could not be allowed. She had a clear trail to follow and a prey that didn’t seem to be able to get that far ahead of her.
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