Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  He wasn’t bothering today.

  “What are you talking about?” the trooper said.

  “I’ve got prior business here,” Lamar replied, and turned to Auntie Joy. “Joyce, Bill’s brought it to our attention that you’ve been violating the federal prohibition on fishing Amartuq Creek. I’m here to serve you with a cease-and-desist order.”

  “Now wait just a minute—” Jim said.

  “You’re a little late, aren’t you, Lamar?” Kate said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate,” the fish hawk said, trying and failing to look like it.

  “Then permit me to enlighten you. She’s been fishing this creek for the last five years.”

  The tall, gray-haired man bristled. “The main reason the sport fishermen’s quota gets cut every year!”

  Jack snapped, “Right, Bill, like there aren’t commercial fishermen scooping up entire schools of fish the other side of the marker every period the whole friggin’ summer.”

  “That’s a goddam lie,” Lamar said, his pink skin flushing scarlet to the roots of his blond hair.

  “Not to mention a couple hundred trawlers with mile-long nets sucking up every living thing off the bottom of the north Pacific Ocean. Somehow I doubt that one piddly little fish wheel on Amartuq Creek counts for much in the grand scheme of things.”

  “Especially when the Fish and Game cut the catch on the creek and don’t bother cutting it in the bay,” Kate said hotly. “Like hauling entire schools of fish out of Alaganik doesn’t have anything to do with the decline of reds up Amartuq Creek.”

  “Dammit, Kate!” Lamar said, his baby cheeks going pinker. “We don’t have any numerical proof of that!”

  “Now look,” Jim said, trying to reestablish his authority with a deep, carrying voice, “Joyce is my witness, and I—”

  “You subsistence fishermen think the world revolves around you. It’s time the sport fishermen got a crack at the take, and by God, I’m going to see to it we do!”

  “You only think you will, you fly-fishing son of a bitch,” Kate snapped.

  “I know I will, you—” His gaze encountered Jack’s and he derailed that train of thought just in time. “We’ve got interests in this area,” he said tightly. “Vested interests, and financial backing. We can generate more money in licenses and guiding and food and lodging than a piddly little fish camp that ain’t good for nothing but providing dog food for a bunch of old-timers that’d be better off in the Pioneer Home anyway!”

  Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that sounded distinctly uncomplimentary.

  Bill Nickle reddened. “You’ve got your orders, Lamar, from the commissioner himself. Serve her.”

  “Over my dead body!”

  “That can be arranged, Shugak!”

  “Quiet!” Chopper Jim bellowed out the command with all the authority of twenty-five years of experience.

  It didn’t silence the Amartuq Creek Debating Society, but it woke up a peacefully slumbering grizzly male in a clump of diamond willow across the creek, who had been sleeping off the stupefying effect of a dozen early silvers gulped for brunch. Jim’s bellow startled him to his feet, where he tripped over a branch, somersaulted down the bank and into the creek with a tremendous splash, followed by an even more tremendous bawl of outrage that flushed birds from every tree in sight, startled a yearling moose out of a thicket and caused a family of otters to vacate their fishing hole for less boisterous habitation downstream.

  The party on the opposite shore stared, finally and mercifully dumbstruck, as the grizzly, grousing and whining and generally indicating his displeasure with rude awakenings in general and this one in particular, shook himself off and lumbered up the bank, crashing through the brush in high dudgeon.

  The noise of entire trees being felled seemed to go on forever, until the watching group began to realize that something else was crashing through the brush on the opposite side of the stream, something coming toward them. Jim put his hand on the flap of his holster. It was the first time in their acquaintance that Kate had seen him reach for his weapon. Just as his hand closed over the pistol butt, Johnny burst from the enveloping alders about twenty feet down from where the grizzly had disappeared. He and the grizzly must have passed each other like semis on an interstate, Kate thought, watching as the boy seemed to race across the top of the water in their direction. He was yelling something inarticulate at the top of his voice. His face was red, his hair on end, and he looked frightened out of his wits.

  Mutt barked once and launched herself into the water, which quickly became too deep for walking. She paddled, inches ahead of Jack, who had moved smartly into the water a second behind her. Father and son and dog met at midstream, dog grabbed at son’s sleeve and held him steady until father arrived and plucked son out of the water, tucked him beneath his right arm and plowed to shore, dog bringing up the rear. They collapsed heavily on the sand, panting and soaked to the skin. Mutt waded ashore and shook herself vigorously, which got everybody else wet, too, and went to Johnny to poke at him with her nose, an anxious whine rising up out of her throat.

  The boy rested his forehead on her neck for a moment. “I’m all right, girl.” He looked up. “I’m all right, Dad. Really.”

  When Jack got his breath back he yelled, “Then what the hell was that Charge of the Light Brigade all about!”

  Johnny winced at the volume. “I found a body,” he said, and his face contorted. “It’s her. Dad!”

  “You what!”

  “Shut up. Jack,” Kate said rudely, and shoved him to one side, Jim breathing down her neck. “Johnny, take a couple of deep breaths. Auntie, bring a blanket, and something hot to drink. Come on,” she said to the boy, “get up out of the sand, sit on this log.” She knelt before him in the sand and started untying his boots. He uttered an inarticulate protest and she brushed aside his fumbling hands. “Let me. You need to warm up.”

  Jim paced around in the background while blankets and hot tea were fetched and Johnny was stripped and swathed and dosed. “Okay,” he said finally, “enough. Johnny, tell us about this body.”

  The boy huddled inside the blanket, shaking hands clutching the mug. “It’s her, Dad,” he repeated.

  “Who's her?” Kate said sharply.

  Johnny didn’t hear her, his eyes fixed painfully on his father. “The girl you saw the other night?” his father said. “Are you sure?”

  The boy nodded, teeth chattering as much from shock as from exposure, and then he shook his head. “It’s her hair, Dad,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears. “I could see her hair.”

  “Did you see her face?” Kate said sharply.

  Johnny shook his head violently. “No. I couldn’t—I touched her and she was all cold and stiff. I just couldn’t.”

  Kate got to her feet. “Show us.”

  *

  The reason Kate and the trooper hadn’t seen the body on the way up was because it was lying in a bend of the creek where a small brook had cut a smaller backwater into the bank, leaving a crescent-shaped sliver of beach and a prime fishing hole. They must have passed Johnny on the way, the rush of the creek and the noise of the kicker drowning out his frantic flight to the fish camp.

  They grounded the skiff and climbed out. “I spotted the hole on our way up on Wednesday,” Johnny said, in dry clothes, wet hair tousled from a hasty finger-combing. “There were fish jumping everywhere.”

  “Oh there were, were there?” his father said with a determined attempt at flippancy. “And didn’t think to share ‘em with your old man, I suppose?”

  Johnny gave a ghost of a smile. “Guess I forgot.”

  His father snorted.

  The repartee, if not easy, eased the tension among the four of them, and made it easier for Johnny to point to the dark shape lying half in, half out of the water. “I didn’t see her at first, I—I must have walked right by her. See, you can get to the beach across that fallen tree.” He swallowed hard. “Then the hook go
t caught, and I walked the pole around the beach trying to free it up, and—well, that’s when I saw her.”

  “Did you touch anything?” Jack said.

  “Of course not!” Johnny retained enough spirit to be indignant at the very suggestion of such a thing. “You always tell me you’re not supposed to touch anything, that the crime scene is as important to the investigation as the corpse, and sometimes even more.”

  “So I do.” By way of apology, Jack removed his Mariners cap (signed personally by Ken Griffey, Jr.) for the sole purpose of putting it on Johnny’s head and tugging it down over his eyes. “Daa-ad.” Johnny’s protest was halfhearted. He resettled the cap so he could see, and then turned his back to stare determinedly creekward as the others went to look.

  The bank had been cut away by the eroding force of rushing water, and the resulting strip of land was mostly gravel at this point. Sand would have been better for tracks. The gravel was churned up, but that could have been as much by spring runoff and fishing bears as by any human passage. Cottonwood and alder and some currant bushes grew right out to the edge of the overhanging bank, and one spruce tree had had the roots washed out from beneath it and had fallen over, bridging the brook.

  Branches had been broken from the top-facing surface of the fallen tree and the bark had worn away, but that could as easily be from exposure to weather as from traffic. The traffic didn’t necessarily have to be human, either, as witness the porcupine chewing peacefully on an alder branch, who rattled his quills at the trooper in his own demonstration of civil disobedience and trundled off unhurriedly.

  The body was lying facedown, head toward the brook, feet toward the creek, limbs sprawled out, blond hair darkened by the water spread out around her head in a swirling halo. Jack pointed, and Kate and Jim nodded. They could all see the darker patch on the left side of the back of her head.

  “Let’s get her out,” Jim said, his voice curt.

  Rigor was well established and the body flopped over like a starfish. The skin of the face was dark with lividity. The eyes, mercifully, were closed.

  The trooper hunkered down on his knees and with one hand investigated the back of her head. “One blow. Her skull feels like mush back here.”

  “Probably didn’t know what hit her,” Jack said.

  “No,” the trooper agreed, his even tone belied by the fury in his eyes.

  Kate stared down at the youthful face, and said to Jack, “Was Auntie Joy at fish camp last night?”

  He looked at her with a good deal of understanding, and something else, something she was too caught up in her own concerns to notice or to interpret. “Yes.”

  “All night? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “My son the venture capitalist was whupping our asses at Monopoly until midnight. We’re sleeping outside. I would have woken up if anyone had left the cabin during the night.”

  “All right,” she said, unable to repress the wave of relief that swept over her, and immediately ashamed of it. To Jim she said, “This is Dani Meany.”

  Jim jerked erect. “Cal Meany’s daughter?”

  She nodded. If Dani Meany’s murder was connected to Cal Meany’s, as seemed likely, if they had been killed by the same person, which seemed even more likely, and if Auntie Joy had an unshakable alibi for the previous night, which Jack had just provided her, then Auntie Joy was in the clear.

  The trooper read her mind. “She’s still got to tell me where she went with Meany the night of the Fourth, Kate.”

  Her eyes met his in complete understanding. “She will,” she said firmly. If I have to pry it out of her with a crowbar, she thought.

  The trooper rose to his feet and thumbed up the brim of his hat. He stood staring down at the body with a brooding look on his face, and said out loud what they were all thinking. “It’s gotta be connected.” He raised his head. “Let’s look around for a weapon.”

  “Could be anything,” Kate objected.

  “Handy,” Jack pointed out. “If the killer just used a rock or something he grabbed up, we can’t prove premeditation.”

  “I could give a shit about degrees here, I want the prick that would bash a teenage girl over the head and leave her,” Jim said, and started casting about for a blunt instrument.

  In the end Kate found it, a smooth, three-foot length of driftwood caught in the snarl of dead root at the opposite end of the fallen spruce. Balancing on the spruce’s trunk, she very carefully knelt, one knee at a time, clutched a branch whose needles had rusted, and leaned down. The wound to her head throbbed painfully with the sudden rush of blood, but it was worth it when her groping hand grabbed the length of wood. She brought it back up and looked at the dark patch on the thick end that caught her eye. Could just be mud from the bottom of the brook, but she didn’t think so.

  She rose just as carefully to her feet, and stepped quickly down the trunk to the expanse of gravel. Mutely, she held the makeshift club out to Jim. He held it in his fingertips and scrutinized it carefully. The same thing that had caught Kate’s attention caught his as well, a smudge of something at the thick end. “Could just be mud,” he said, echoing her thought for the second time that day.

  “Could be. But look.” She stood facing the downed spruce. “Suppose the victim is about to step on the trunk to cross the brook to the bank. Suppose the killer is right behind her, and snatches up the driftwood.”

  “Pow, he brings it down on the victim’s head—” Jim said.

  “Right-handed, then,” Jack said. “And then, when the victim falls face forward into the creek—doesn’t matter if she’s unconscious or dead, because if she’s unconscious she’ll drown pretty shortly—then the killer climbs up on the trunk, crosses to the bank, tosses his club in the water, he thinks to float away or at least to be washed clean, and goes on his merry way.” He took the club from Jim and examined it. “Just dumb luck it fell wrong side down for the killer and right side up for us.”

  “And cold water always delays rigor,” Jim added, “so the time of death is confused.”

  “If he knew that,” Kate said.

  “If he cared,” Jack said. He took a deep breath, and raised his voice. “Johnny?”

  Johnny turned reluctantly. “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Need you to take a look.”

  The color, only just returned to the boy’s face, washed out again.

  “Jack,” Kate said.

  The trooper, sensing something off, said nothing.

  “Come on,” Jack said, beckoning.

  Johnny came with laggard steps, his eyes on the ground. He stopped just out of his father’s reach.

  “Come on, kid,” Jack said, his voice gentling. “Just take a look. Is she the girl you saw the night of the Fourth?”

  “What?” Kate said.

  Unwilling, irresolute, Johnny looked anyway. He didn’t gasp or stumble backwards, but Kate got the feeling it was only because of pride. His voice was thin and shaky. “How come her face is so dark?”

  “She’s been lying facedown for maybe twelve hours,” his father told him. “Blood pools in the down side of the body after death. Is it her?”

  The boy swallowed hard, and nodded. “It’s her.”

  Kate stepped between the body and the boy. “What the hell’s going on here, Morgan?”

  Again, Jack took in a big breath. When he spoke there was a quality to his voice that Kate hadn’t heard before, a mixture of embarrassment and pugnacity. “Johnny has something to tell you. Something he should have told you yesterday. Something I should have made him tell you.” He squeezed Johnny’s shoulder. “Go ahead.”

  Johnny looked up at Kate, and then away. When he spoke his voice was low, and she had to concentrate to hear his words.

  The gist of the story seemed to be that the evening of the Fourth, the aunties had sprung Johnny from his fish camp duties (they had become duties his first day on shore) and he had gone for a hike down the creek, scouting likely locations for fishi
ng with a rod and reel. He’d taken his father’s .30-06 in case he met up with a bear with attitude, and, as Jack said, “The only way he can get backwoods experience is to go out into the backwoods.”

  Involuntarily Kate remembered her father and the deer hunt. Jack mistook the quality of her silence and said defensively, “He wanted to go alone. The bears are mostly after fish now, anyway, Kate. I didn’t think he’d come to any harm.” He added, “And he didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” she said, “and I was six when my father turned me loose with a twenty-two. It’s all right, Jack, I do understand. That part of it, anyway. Go ahead, Johnny. Tell us the rest.”

  Johnny cleared his throat and resumed his story. “It was getting late, and I’d run out of Jelly Bellys so I was thinking about turning around and heading back to fish camp for some dinner, when I heard somebody scream. It sounded like a girl, and it sounded close by, so I went to take a look.” A slow flush climbed painfully up into his face. “I saw them across the creek. Right here, actually, on this beach. It was a girl, and she was with somebody. They, ah, they had all their clothes off, and they were, well, you know, they were doing it.”

  By now Johnny’s face was as red as his shirt, but he struggled to get the story out nonetheless. “I was curious,” he said, trying to meet Kate’s eyes and not having much luck with it. “So I watched.”

  “They didn’t see you, or hear you?”

  If possible, his face became even redder. “No. They were—um—noisy. Especially her.”

  “This is her?” He nodded. “What happened next?”

  He squirmed. “Well, they—they finished, is all. And after, they got dressed and left.”

  “How?”

  He nodded over their heads. “They walked across that tree trunk and went into the woods.”

  “You ever see the guy before?” He shook his head. “What did he look like?”

  “Uh—skinny, dark hair.” He floundered. He hadn’t been watching the guy.

  Kate rescued him. “That’s it?”

  Her matter-of-fact tone seemed to hearten him. He squared his shoulders. “That’s it. What do we do now?”