Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate was not given to introspection, a nasty, addictive habit she believed led to self-absorption and a lifelong preoccupation with one’s navel. Dreams weird enough to leave a shudder along the flesh were the best dreams to walk away from, as fast and as far as possible. Once upon a time, her dreams had been of former victims from her years as a sex crimes investigator in the Anchorage DA’s office, children mostly, children and women too beaten down for too long to fight back. She shook off those memories, too, something it was getting easier to do with every passing year, although the scar on her throat would never let her completely forget.

  She never would completely forget them, the children especially, their staring eyes, broken bodies and wounded hearts, but they no longer held her hostage to their memory, and she no longer felt guilty at having abandoned their successors to their fate. Five years was all she’d had to give, and she had given them, with every scrap of ability and dedication and passion she had to offer. When it was over, she came home, to recover her health, her equilibrium and her sanity, and to live out her life in a place that was as nourishing of spirit as it was calming of soul.

  Understanding this in so many words for the first time, she felt her heart lift a little, and it was then she heard it, a faint, thudding sound, coming from below. She had to listen hard, but it was there, and seemed to be coming from the starboard side of the hull. “Sam?” she called.

  There was no answer. Old Sam and Pete hadn’t turned in until long after she had, and with no delivery to make to the cannery Old Sam was probably still sacked out. She scrambled into her clothes and hopped out to the catwalk running around the bridge, pulling her tennis shoes on as she went. A bit of breeze formed a small, regular chop, and it lapped against the hull with a regular beat. For a moment she thought that was all it was, and then, as she leaned out over the railing, she caught sight of what looked like a bundle of sodden clothes pressed up against the black hull of the Freya. In that instant, a wave caught the bundle and it rolled face upward, resolving into the body of a man, the skin of his face leached white in the morning sun.

  Even at this distance, even with the water darkening the color of his hair, she could identify him. The broad forehead, the heavy jaw, the thick torso.

  It was Cal Meany.

  And his eyes, staring blindly up at the dawn of a new day, left her in no doubt, even if she hadn’t seen the swollen tongue protruding from between his half-open lips.

  He was most definitely dead.

  Eight

  NINE HOURS LATER Kate watched as an Alaska Airlines 737 rolled to a halt in front of the Mudhole Smith International Airport, there to disgorge a full load of passengers and two igloos of freight. Five of the passengers on flight 66 were locals, had little or no luggage and were whisked away by family members driving rusted-out Subarus and four-wheel-drive pickups; the rest were tourists, kayakers, sport fishermen, hikers and campers. One couple was met by a Bluebird bus converted into a recreational vehicle bearing Montana plates. An Isuzu pickup with Idaho plates picked up a pair of kayakers, with kayaks, and a tall, eager woman with flying blond hair screeched up in a puke-green Ford Econoline van with rapidly failing brakes and no plates at all and leapt out to embrace a man half as tall and twice as thick as she was, who returned her embrace with enthusiasm, to the point that Kate delicately averted her eyes.

  A baggage tractor lumbered up to the luggage window and began off-loading duffel bags, cardboard boxes fastened with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, frame packs, knapsacks, sleeping bags, fishing pole cases, tackle boxes and about fifty optimistically empty coolers. Passengers crowded around and the pile melted.

  Fifteen minutes later the first of the small planes began taking off, a Cessna 206 so heavy with freight and passengers it used up most of the runway before becoming airborne. If they caught any fish at all, it was going to take them at least two trips to get everything back to Cordova.

  The next small plane took off the second the Cessna was clear of the ground, this time a Super Cub on wheel floats with rifles tied to the struts and gear lashed to the floats. It, too, took an inordinate amount of pavement to get into the air. The third small plane was a Tri-Pacer, sprightly on its tricycle gear and with its light load of one pilot, one passenger, one pole, one pack, one rifle and one cooler. A fisherman who believed in traveling light and in solitude. Kate approved.

  At that point a Cessna 185 with the blue and gold seal of the Alaska state troopers embossed on the tail landed in a three-point runway paint job, and Master Sergeant James M. Chopin pulled up on the apron with a flourish. It was a new plane, and gleamed bravely even in the cloudy drizzle that was standard for Mudhole Smith. Jim emerged gleaming no less bravely, a tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged man clad in an immaculate uniform, shiny blue jacket zipped to just beneath the perfectly tied Windsor knot of his tie, hat freshly brushed and its brim pulled down just far enough to provide Jim’s bright blue eyes with just the correct amount of shade. Jim was well aware of the cachet the Alaska state trooper’s uniform lent the wearer, and he took care never to appear less than sartorially splendid, whether he was testifying in court in Anchorage, disarming a wife killer in Chitina or responding to the scene of a murder in Cordova.

  “Kate.” he said, giving her a formal nod, immediately spoiling the effect with a grin that reminded her of nothing so much as the expression on the snout of a great white shark on its second pass. “Where’s Mutt?”

  “At fish camp. Where’s your helicopter?”

  “In the shop. Fish camp?”

  “On Amartuq Creek, with Auntie Joy and Auntie Vi.”

  “Right. On Walden Pond with Thoreau, Gandhi and Dr. King, learning to practice civil disobedience. Mutt ought to be good at that.” It unsettled Kate when she and Jim shared the same opinion on any subject, and it was doubly unnerving when the opinion concerned her elders’ perfectly legitimate actions in defense of their cultural history.

  He sensed her uneasiness. His grin widened and he adjusted his hat a millimeter to the south. “Hear you found yourself another body.”

  “I don’t exactly go around drumming up business,” Kate said, irritated.

  His dimples deepened. Master Sergeant James M. Chopin was a die-hard flirt who made his home as state trooper in residence at Tok, a small community to the north of the Park that didn’t quite qualify as Bush because there was a road through it. Rated on both fixed wing and helicopter, he kept the peace of the Park’s twenty million acres from the air, the only way to get around Bush Alaska, and had been doing so for the last fifteen years. He’d been seducing Kate’s female relatives for at least that long, earning himself the nickname Father of the Park, used with affection by some (usually female) and with opprobrium by others (usually male).

  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 Roadhouse 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 beco
ming 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 Mudhole Smith International Airport to town, and Eyak Lake had just 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.

  “Um.” 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, a
s 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.”

  Nine

  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 packages—a 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.