Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  Years later her fears came full circle when a murderer tried to kill her in just that fashion. She had outwitted him, barely, and the memory gave her the courage to walk into the cold-storage locker today without hesitation.

  She stood on one side of the table. Jim on the other, mini-recorder in hand. He gave the date and the time and continued, “Master Sergeant James M. Chopin reporting, standing in the walk-in cooler of Knight Island Packers in Cordova. Present are Kate Shugak, tenderman, who found the body, and Darrell Peabody, Knight Island Packers’ superintendent, who has graciously offered the body house room.”

  Kate wondered how much editing was done on Chopper Jim’s tapes back at his Tok office.

  “The body has been identified as Calvin Meany, drift net fisherman, Anchorage resident, PWS permit.” Jim read Meany’s permit number, driver’s-license number and Social Security number into the recorder, from cards extracted from the wallet Kate produced. “Body was discovered floating in Alaganik Bay at six-thirty a.m., this morning.” He clicked off the recorder. “Okay, let’s take a look.”

  Kate helped pull the tarp back, and heard Peabody swallow loudly behind her. Even Jim, who in the course of his professional career had seen just about everything bad that one human being could do to another, was surprised into expression. “Jesus Christ.” The words, forced out of him, were compounded of surprise, disgust and not a little awe.

  As Kate had seen from the catwalk of the Freya’s bridge, Meany had been strangled. Whether it was before or after he had been stabbed in the heart with a sliming knife, the white plastic handle still protruding from his chest, was yet to be determined. Whether he had died by strangulation, or stabbing, or from concussion from many of the blows he had sustained to the head and upper body was also yet to be determined. His left arm had sustained a fracture of both ulna and radius, ripping the skin of his forearm so that the bones gleamed against the shriveled shreds of skin around the edge of the wound. He had defensive marks from wrist to elbow on his right arm. Silently, Kate pointed to both sets of his knuckles. They were ripped and swollen. There were dark bruises on his shoulders and torso. Something sharp had torn at the skin on the left side of his head, tearing a gash from temple to jaw. He was bloated from his immersion in seawater.

  There was a long silence. Their breath formed little clouds in the room’s chill air. At last Jim stirred. Over the body, his eyes met Kate’s. “My kingdom for a forensic pathologist,” he said, and clicked the recorder back on.

  *

  Jim slammed the gate shut on the bed of the truck, removed his hat and tipped his head back to draw in a long, sweet gulp of fresh air. Across the road was the eight-hundred-slip boat harbor. The new harbor was accessible by three ramps leading down to the first, third and fifth of the five floats, each anywhere from nine hundred to twelve hundred feet long. The twenty-four-foot slips began on the left, and the slip size increased to the right, ending with sixty-foot-slips on the last float. The old harbor descended into the basin from the opposite side of the artificial basin, and consisted of four floats half the size of the new ones, with a quarter the slip capacity. The city had sorely needed the new harbor; looking at it now, all floats, old and new, filled to capacity, Kate thought they should have moved and extended the breakwater for a harbor twice its present size. Especially since Cordova was a typical Alaskan town in that it was perpetually broke, and the harbor generated 20¢ a daily foot, $4.55 a monthly foot, and $13 a yearly foot. Cal Meany’s drifter had been thirty feet long; if he’d maintained a slip in this harbor it would have cost him damn near $400 just to park while he went for groceries. No wonder he kept sneaking into transient parking.

  A door slammed and Kate looked down the road to see Gull emerge from the harbormaster’s office, step to the middle of the road and bend down lo pick up something, which resolved itself into the limp body of a squirrel. His laugh carried clearly to where they stood, a hearty, heartless, even triumphant laugh, before Gull tossed the corpse into a nearby Dumpster and went back into his office.

  Jim looked back at Kate. “What was all that about?”

  Kate sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m in the mood. Humor me.”

  Which Kate interpreted as a plea for a little light relief from the grim task so fresh in both their memories. “You know Gull.”

  “Big Chief Friend of E.T. Who doesn’t?”

  “The squirrels got into his insulation.”

  Jim raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the diagnosis of record?”

  A smile forced its way across Kate’s face. “No, real squirrels this time. He said he could hear them, pitter-patting between the roof and the ceiling, night and day. Drove him nuts.”

  “Why didn’t he set a trap?”

  “He did. They took the bait and sprung it.”

  “Poison?”

  “Said he couldn’t take the chance his namesakes might get into it.”

  They both looked at the harbormaster’s office, the ridgepole lined with seagulls keeping a collective beady eye out for anyone cleaning a fish down on the floats. Every now and then one would nip at another with a sharp yellow beak, and as they watched, a new gull came in for a two-point landing, missed his footing, backwinged, fell off the edge and was ridiculed by a raucous chorus as he came around for a second try. The roof was white with guano. “God forbid,” Jim said.

  “So,” Kate said, “he planted a nut tree.”

  “A what tree?”

  “A nut tree.”

  Jim digested this in silence for a few moments. “What kind of nut?”

  “I have no idea. It’s that little scraggly tree to the left of the office.”

  Jim looked at the little scraggly tree. “Uh-huh. What, he figures to grow nuts to give the squirrels something else to eat besides his insulation?” Kate shook her head. “What, then?”

  “The squirrels live over there.” She pointed at a stand of alder, birch, diamond willow and spruce trees covering the hill rising up toward town. “They have to cross the road to get to the nut tree. Gull figures with all the traffic, eventually they’ll be flattened going to and fro.”

  “I see.” Jim regarded the tree, which seemed to be missing some branches, not to mention some leaves. “Think it’ll survive the winter?”

  “I have no doubt whatsoever,” Kate said. “Gull has invested heavily in fertilizer and tree wrap. The minute the temperature drops below thirty-five, he’s out there swaddling up that tree like it’s his firstborn child.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jim’s eyes wandered down to the empty transient parking slip. “You know, I hear the Cetaceans have developed a mini-force field that acts as a personal shield. They’re test-marketing it on Rigel Five. Supposed to adjust its insulating factor to the current conditions. Fits in your pocket, not too expensive.”

  “Really?” Kate said politely. “If there were any Cetaceans in Cordova, I’d recommend it to Gull. As it is… ”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Their eyes met and they smiled.

  Jim resettled his hat, flat brim not a bubble off level, and straightened his already straight shoulders. He nodded at the corpse in the back of the pickup. “Give me a ride to the airport?”

  “You going to fly him in?”

  “Quicker than waiting for tomorrow’s jet, and the sooner we get the body back to Anchorage and the techies in the lab, the better.”

  She nodded, and they climbed in.

  Jim was silent until they were well out of town. He sighed, and said, “Beaten, strangled and stabbed. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank finds a bullet in him.”

  “Kind of emphasizes the killer’s sincerity, doesn’t it?”

  “Kind of.”

  They passed the Powder House, a southcentral Alaskan institution on a par with Bernie’s Roadhouse in Niniltna. From the stories Old Sam told, and hints she’d had from other old-timers and elders, Stephan had hoisted more than a few at the Powder House when he got this far south.
>
  He hadn’t hoisted any at home. He had left that to her mother. Kate shook the memory off before it took hold.

  They were almost to the airport before Jim said, “Unless, of course, we’ve got more than one killer.”

  Kate slumped a little in her seat, sorry he’d put her fear into words. “I hate the weird ones. I hate the weird ones.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jim could afford to sound laconic. “I suppose you expect me to go on out to the setnet site and interview the family.”

  The shark’s grin was back, wide and predatory, with entirely too many teeth showing.

  “I’m tendering,” she said. “Some of us actually have to work for a living, you know—we’re not subsidized to live in luxury by a grateful state.”

  He let out a great shout of laughter that rang off the metal insides of the cab.

  “Shit,” Kate said, with feeling.

  “Thanks, Kate,” he said, still laughing. “I appreciate the offer. And the laugh.”

  “Up yours,” she said.

  With true nobility, he refrained from giving the obvious reply, but only because he needed help in muscling Meany’s stiff and awkward body out of the truck bed and into the back of the plane. They slammed the door on the macabre object, ignoring the wide-eyed looks of a cluster of airport workers standing near the terminal. “I’ll be back, this evening if I can, tomorrow if I can’t.”

  “Hurry,” she said, with emphasis. “If this strike continues, most of your best suspects are going to head south for the winter.”

  “I’ll hurry.”

  “Meantime, I’ll dig up what I can, but if they start fishing again, I start tendering.”

  He eyed her, considering. “You want me to put you on temporary staff? There’s a per diem.”

  “God, no!” she said, genuinely horrified.

  He spread his hands. “I offered.”

  “And I turned you down flat. Just get your sweet ass back here as soon as you can.”

  The grin flashed again. “Why, thank you, Kate. I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

  *

  Back in town, Kate narrowly avoided a squirrel darting across the road and pulled the truck up in front of the harbormaster’s office. Through the window, she could see Gull sitting at his desk. He looked up and waved her inside.

  “Thanks for the use of the truck, Gull,” she said, handing over the keys.

  He looked at them, thought about it for a moment and then, as if inspiration had struck, stuffed them into a pocket. Not a man who maintained a strict guard over the material things in his life, but then the truck was the property of the city, and there weren’t many places to drive a stolen vehicle in Cordova.

  “So, Chopper Jim get off with the stiff all right?” he said, sitting back and putting his feet on the desk.

  She mimicked his actions, linking her hands and stretching so that her bones popped. “Yeah.”

  Gull scratched the back of his head. “Hell of a thing.” It was an offhand observation; he didn’t look shocked or horrified or disgusted, but then he could quote chapter and verse of a century’s worth of atrocities committed against the noble red man by the base white man from the Mexican to the Canadian border. He wasn’t one to get overly excited at a single murder, no matter how redundant in method. “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Kate said. “Or rather, I’ve got too many of them. Did you see Meany when he came in yesterday afternoon?”

  Gull snorted, and folded his gigantic paws over his chest. “Hell, I saw him yesterday evening. I had to run him out of transient parking. Son of a bitch. You know. Kate, it’s not the fact that guys like him try to steal from the city that upsets me so much, it’s the discourtesy.”

  “Discourtesy?”

  “Discourtesy,” he said firmly. “I mean, the Fomalhauters weren’t having enough problems with the repairs to their exhaust duct—their Star Grazer’d taken a hit from a rogue microplanetoid—then this earthbound yo-yo tries to put a goddam drift netter up their tailpipe.”

  Kate wondered if Gull knew anything more about astronomy and the potential for extraterrestrial life than he did about the Native American. Probably not, but who was she to spoil his fun?

  Then it hit her. “What time was that?”

  “What, when the Fomalhauters landed?”

  “No,” Kate said gravely, “when Meany tried to drive up their tailpipe.”

  He scratched again. It seemed to help him think. “I don’t know, about ten maybe? He always does that, or did it, coming in later in the evening, thinking I won’t nail his ass.”

  “And did you? Nail his ass?”

  “To the floor. I was practicing ‘The Ojibway Square Dance’ on my flute—it sounds better when you sit next to an open window—and I looked up and there he was, the prick, sneaking up on the float, without running lights, can you imagine? He’s lucky I wasn’t the Coast Guard. So I marched right down there and ran him off.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “I didn’t see anybody else,” Gull said. He added, “Of course, Meany was on the flying bridge, and like I said, he was running dark. There could have been somebody in the cabin, I suppose. Like ten or twelve women,” he added, “all married to somebody else. I’m telling you, Kate, the guy went for quantity.”

  “Did you have words?”

  “I yelled at him,” Gull said with satisfaction. “He didn’t bother yelling back, he just slammed her into reverse so fast he rammed the slip and damn near stripped the gears. Some kind of boat jockey he is.” He snorted, sounding like a disdainful bull.

  Kate thought about that for a few moments, then for the time being abandoned it. Gull had no motive, other than the continuing battle over transient parking, a battle he carried with enthusiasm to every skipper of every boat, sport or commercial, seiner or drifter, who dared preempt a foot of the transient float. There ought to be signs, like the blue-and-white wheelchair they had for Handicapped Parking. Maybe a fluorescent decal every ten feet of float with a flying saucer on it. Alien Anchorage. Outlander Landing. Put it next to a red circle with the figure of a man in the center of it and a red slanted line crossing him off. Little Green Men and Bug-Eyed Monsters Only. Kate wondered what shape the Fomalhauters took, and decided not to ask. “So that was about ten o’clock.”

  Gull nodded, then brightened. “It must have been about twenty after when I came in, because I turned on the TV in time to watch Jackie Purcell lie about the weather.”

  So Meany was still alive at ten, and his son may or may not have been on board. She should head on out to Alaganik, start banging on hatches, talking to fishermen to find out if they’d seen anything at Alaganik the night before. But they’d chased him off hours before the period ended, none of them had given pursuit, none of them had been fishing except for Meany, and most of them had been drinking and partying besides, and Meany had been such a popular guy that none of them would be inclined to care one way or the other if the murderer was caught, anyway.

  Except the murderer.

  She ought to take a look at Meany’s boat, too. They’d left it in Alaganik at anchor. Someone had given the son a ride to his family’s setnet site, where his mother and uncle were supposed to be. Her next stop, she thought drearily.

  They were startled out of their separate reveries by the crackle of the radio and Lamar Rousch’s voice, rendered thin and reedy by the FM bandwidth, announcing the next fishing period. Gull leaned over to turn up the volume, and when Lamar signed off, turn it down again. “No period,” he said. “Escapement must be down.”

  “For crying out loud,” Kate said, “about a million reds must have gone up the Kanuyaq yesterday from Alaganik Bay alone, and nobody was hanging any nets in their way. Well, two, but hell.”

  Gull gave his head a sympathetic wag. “I wonder sometimes myself how accurate those fish counts can be. You know, there was a trader from Andromeda riding deadhead on the last SeaLandSpace freighter through here, he wa
s telling me—”

  A movement caught her eye and she looked up to see Old Sam heading down the ramp. “Oops. There’s my boss. Gotta go. Thanks again for the truck.”

  Gull waved her off with a regal hand, very much master of all he surveyed. “Okay, Kate. See you.”

  She caught up with Old Sam as he was about to board the Freya. “Hey, Sam.”

  “Hey, girl.” Nimble in the face of eighty winters, Sam hopped over the gunnel and landed lightly on the deck.

  She followed him into the galley, and sat down as he began assembling the ingredients for dinner. With something of a shock, Kate realized that it wasn’t even six o’clock. It had been a full day. “Listen, Sam?”

  “What?” he said, pulling a package of mooseburger out of the sink where he’d left it to thaw at breakfast. He turned a burner on and got out a frying pan.

  She sidled in next to him and made her own patty. She liked hers thicker than he did his. “Could we maybe head back for Alaganik after dinner?”

  He paused. “Why? It’s early yet. And we don’t even know what hours the period’s going to be, let alone if anybody is fishing it.”

  “There isn’t one,” Kate said. “It was on the radio in the harbormaster’s office.”

  “No period?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Why the hell not?” Old Sam said indignantly. “Christ on a crutch, what about all the fish we saw heading north yesterday? And hardly anyone with a net in the water?”