A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  “A campus commando.” Bobby told Kate, not without affection.

  “Nope.” Bernie gulped down the rest of his beer. The Game Boy beeped indignantly at him and he looked back at it. “Just somebody with a low lottery number, not enough stroke to get in the National Guard, and a distaste for tropical climates.”

  “Max Chaney you met,” Bobby said, “and you know Jeff.”

  Jeff Talbot, a dark, lithe man who contrived to look dapper in blue jeans and a gray wool shirt, snapped a salute and grinned at Kate. “U.S. Marine guard, American embassy, Saigon. At your service, ma’am.”

  His eyes wandered over her in lingering fashion, but she knew that with Jeff it was more genetic imperative than implied insult and she ignored it. “Hi. George,” she said to the pilot.

  “Hey, Kate,” George said, waving a beer bottle at her. “Long time no see.”

  “George was at Ton Son Nhut. Demetri Totemoff, Nha Trang, and Pete Kvasnikof, Pleiku.”

  “Hi, Kate, how’s Jack?” Pete inquired.

  “He’s fine,” Kate replied.

  “I’ll just bet he is, now,” Pete said, but he said it to himself.

  “Okay, guys,” Bobby said, “’bout time to break this party up and run you off.”

  There were groans and grumbles of protest.

  “Hey, whaddaya want?” he demanded. “We done sung the ‘Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.’ At least three of you got wives, and, Jeff, I know for a fact you can’t go twenty-four hours without getting laid; your pecker’ll shrivel up and die on you.”

  “Can’t have that,” Jeff said with his quick grin. He stood and drained his beer. “Thanks, Bobby,” he said, reaching down a hand. “Good one, this year.”

  “Yeah.” They did a jive handshake, complete with high and low fives, and Jeff left. The starting of his snow machine outside acted like a signal to the rest of the group, and one by one they lined up to thank Bobby and make their goodbyes.

  “I’ll be out to the Roadhouse to visit tomorrow,” Kate told Bernie.

  “Good.” He gave her shoulder a poke. “See you then.”

  Max Chaney stuck out his hand, missing Bobby’s by about a foot, stared right through Kate and drifted out the door like smoke. “Is he driving?” she asked Bobby in a low voice.

  “Nah. He flew down from the Step yesterday and Pete brought him out.”

  “Good.” When the door closed behind Max, the last to leave, Kate inquired, “How’d it go this year?”

  “All right.” Bobby began emptying ashtrays into the garbage. “It’s getting to be less like work and more like fun.”

  “About time.” Kate found the broom and began sweeping.

  He looked up and said soberly, “Some of those guys have some awful goddam tough ghosts to exorcise. You’re too young and you weren’t there. You don’t know.”

  “I’ve been known to crack a book or two, and I’ve been listening to you for thirteen years,” she pointed out.

  “You don’t know,” he repeated.

  It was true, and Kate was glad of it. “You seem relatively sane.”

  “I’m one of the lucky ones. I buried my ghosts with my legs,” he said, without bitterness.

  “What’s so lucky about losing your legs?”

  “I was in the hospital for months. I had the chance to decompress. The other guys were in the jungle one day and in downtown San Francisco being called baby killers the next.” He shook his head. “Grunt Rule Number 1. Never lose a war if you can help it. It upsets the folks back home.”

  She paused in her sweeping and looked at him. “So, when you throw a party like this, you’re helping them to decompress?”

  He shrugged. “We hang out, have a few beers, smoke a few joints, remember, talk, listen to music, yell, scream. Sometimes we pound on each other a little. We let off steam, take the edge off.”

  “Hasn’t the edge dulled a little by now? It’s been twenty-plus years.”

  “For some, yes, For some, no. For some on some days, yes. For some on some days, no.”

  “When I was little, I remember my father and Abel talking—”

  He shook his head. “No, Kate. They were Class of ’45. Different thing.”

  “Different how? They got shot at, their friends died.”

  “They came home to a parade, and a G.I. bill, and job preference, and if that wasn’t enough, the Nuremberg trials showed them beyond a doubt that they’d fought the essence of evil and won.”

  “Bobby,” she said, “something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Sometimes you talk like y’all was raised in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp, and at others you seem to have just sauntered out of Harvard Yard. What gives?”

  He grinned at her, a teasing grin, and she knew that was the only answer she was going to get. “Okay,” she said, resigned, “then tell me what Bernie gets out of coming to the Tet Annual?”

  “Are you kidding? He looks at all of us and renders up thanks to the powers that be that he ran for Canada.” He paused. “And we look at him and wish we had.” After a moment Bobby grinned again, a trifle lopsided this time. “And this year, with that goddam McAniff blasting away at everything that moved, we needed it. It was definitely getting a little weird out. God knows we’ve had about all the weird we can take.” He paused. “Sometimes…”

  “What?”

  He looked at her, but his dark eyes were fixed on events long ago and far away, on a story that did not begin “once upon a time.” “Sometimes, when another movie comes out, or they start up another program on television, or do another documentary on the vets, you get to feeling like you’re never going to be able to clean the smell of the jungle off you.” His forehead creased, and he said in a low voice, “It’s a funny thing, Kate. I can still smell it. I can still taste it. You can taste death, you know. At Hue, the siege lasted a month. The bodies most of the time just stayed where they fell, and rotted there. You could smell them every time you inhaled. You could taste it in your rations, drink it from your canteen. It was the last thing you smelled at night, the first thing you smelled in the morning. It was all around you. You couldn’t get away from it, and you wouldn’t, until you made more of it, until you’d killed enough people dead so that there was no one left to die.”

  It was the first time in their thirteen-year friendship she’d ever heard Bobby talk about the war. Kate blinked her eyes clear and said nothing.

  “So,” Bobby said briskly, reaching for the last overflowing ashtray, “that’s pretty much it. Once a year we get together and get a little tanked and cuss the brass and the dopes in D.C., and remember the guys who didn’t make it, and cheer the fact we did.” He grinned at her. “It relaxes the tension better than a good massage.”

  Kate cast around for an equally lighthearted response. “That new ranger, whatsisname, Chaney, didn’t seem any too relaxed to me.”

  “Yeah, well, he was higher’n two kites, and besides, he’s recovering from more’n the Nam.”

  “Like what? Danny boy assign him to taking the trash out of the Park?”

  Bobby looked up and he wasn’t smiling. “He had a thing going with Lisa Getty.” Mistaking Kate’s sudden stillness, Bobby said, “Yeah, I know, who didn’t have a thing going with Lisa Getty. But he was new in the Park and he didn’t know that, and she wasn’t done with him, so he thinks it was true love, and now his heart’s broken.” Bobby paused. “Did I ever tell you, I got a little of that?”

  Kate was momentarily diverted and even a little shocked. “Bobby. You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope. Happened about ten, eleven years ago. Just after I got the roof on, she come visiting with a housewarming gift.” He grinned, and it was a very wide, very male grin. “Herself. I don’t think we got out of bed for a week. Swearta God, she was the all-time best piece of ass I ever had.” He caught her eye and added hastily, “Except for you, of course.”

  “Oh, of course.” Kate couldn’t help herself; she laughed out loud. “Oh, Bobby. Well, I’m glad you
enjoyed yourself, but I thought you had better taste.”

  “Yeah, well. She wasn’t easy to say no to, once she’d made up her mind.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, she stayed as long as it took to satisfy her curiosity about what it was like to fuck a black gimp, and then she split.” He saw her look. “Come on, Kate. We both know what Lisa was like. Don’t go all nil nisi bonum on me now.”

  She shook her head. “No. I just—I don’t like the thought of her using you.”

  “Why not?” He smirked. “I used her, sure as hell, as well and as hard and for as long as I could. Didn’t mean anything, but it sure felt good, and I was tired of jerking off, anyway.”

  “Bobby, no woman is safe from you.”

  “You should know,” he retorted.

  “Mmm.” She smiled at him in a way that made him forget what Lisa Getty looked like, and resumed sweeping. “So Max Chaney was seeing Lisa, was he? Since when?”

  “God, I don’t know. Couldn’t have been for more than two-three months or she would have dropped him.”

  That fit with what Jack had told her about Lisa and Chopper Jim. “Where was Chaney?” she said. “The day she was killed, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Up on the Step at Park HQ, I guess.” He shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

  Kate murmured some response and worked her way into the corner behind the wood box.

  Bobby regarded her back thoughtfully. “What are you doing in town, Kate?”

  “Why?” she asked, without turning.

  “Because it does just occur to me to wonder why you would be interested in Max’s whereabouts that day.” She said nothing. “Come on, Kate, what’s going on? You caught the guy who killed that bunch, Lisa included, caught him fair and square your own self, yet here you are, picking my brain about Lisa and Max.” He pursed his lips. “Unless, maybe—”

  The broom halted, and she regarded her toes with an interest bordering on fascination. “Unless maybe what?”

  She heard him shift in his chair, heard a faint squeak of rubber wheels on hardwood floor and moved her interesting toes out of the way just in time. She couldn’t avoid his bright, direct gaze. “No bullshit now, Kate,” he said, his drawl gone and all his verbs in their right places. “Was someone else shooting that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did that someone else kill Lisa Getty?”

  “Yes.” Kate stepped back, swept her pile of dust and butts and potato chip and pretzel fragments into a neat pile and reached for the dustpan.

  Bobby put it into her hand. “What was that crack Pete made? ‘How is Jack?’ Jack’s in the Park?”

  “He was.”

  “When?”

  “Sunday and Monday. He flew out again this morning.” She handed him the full dustpan, and he emptied it into the garbage and handed it back.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” Bobby observed.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. He didn’t come just to see you, though, did he?”

  “No.”

  Bobby lost what little patience he had. “Am I going to have to drag it out of you? What’d he say?”

  Kate refilled the dustpan and straightened. “He said the coroner says the bullet that killed Lisa Getty came from a different rifle than the bullets that killed the rest of the massacre victims.”

  “What’s McAniff say?”

  “He says he killed them all. Jack says McAniff was more than a little insulted at the mere suggestion that he might’ve missed one.”

  “Jesus.”

  She nodded. “I know. Creepy guy.”

  “No shit.” He stretched out one large, calloused hand, and she put her own into it. He drew her over to the couch, hoisted himself into it and pulled her down next to him. Taking her hand again, he played with her fingers. “Okay, woman. Tell Bobby all about it.”

  She did, from Mutt’s apprehension of McAniff to Jack’s report on the autopsies to her own vigil at the end of the airstrip to her interview with George, and finished up with an account of her visit to Lottie’s house. He listened attentively, without comment, until she told him about the greenhouse. “All dope?” he said.

  She nodded. “All of it.”

  “How many plants’d you say?” he asked with a faraway look in his eye.

  She suppressed a smile. “About seven to ten at hard labor’s worth.”

  He sighed. “Oh well, it was just a thought.”

  “Besides, you’re through with all that,” she pointed out and waited.

  In vain, because he just grinned at her. She shook her head at him.

  “So that’s it?” he asked, and she nodded. “Who can I tell?”

  “Keep it quiet, for now. I told George the same.”

  “Somebody tell Lottie?”

  She nodded. “Me. Today. And I’m telling you now because I want one person I trust to know where I am and what I’m doing at all times, just in case.”

  Bobby was pleased, and preened a little. “Why, of course. Do I get to help this time?”

  “Sure.” He looked delighted, and she added, “Bend your powerful brain to rounding up the usual suspects.”

  “Gotcha.” He seemed to ripple to attention, like a cat at a mouse hole readying to pounce. “Sam Spade at your service, darling. What are we looking for?”

  “The usual, Sam. Motive, means, opportunity. I’m sure Jack would appreciate some hard evidence.”

  “That doesn’t sound very optimistic.”

  “We’re on an old, cold trail.”

  “It ain’t even been two weeks!” Bobby roared.

  “Most crimes are solved in the first twenty-four hours,” she told him. “After that the chances of finding whodunit decrease geometrically, I think by the minute. Maybe even the second.”

  “What do you want, to find the killer standing over the corpse with a smoking gun in his hand?”

  “It could be a her.”

  “It surely could,” Bobby said dryly. “Two-thirds of the wives and most of the girlfriends in the Park had motive. This dope business bothers me, too. You know I don’t miss much, Kate.”

  “I know. It’s why I love you.”

  “Down, girl.” He was almost purring. “I did miss the fact that Lisa was dealing dope.”

  “We don’t know that she was dealing.”

  He gave her a tolerant look. “Lottie and Lisa smoking all day, every day for a year couldn’t finish off that much weed all by themselves. No, Kate, they were selling it. And if they were selling it, somebody was buying it. And you know how druggies have this tendency to wig out every now and then.” His eyes lingered on the scar at her throat.

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “I know.”

  “Could have been a dissatisfied customer.”

  She got up and paced back and forth with long, thoughtful strides. She was between him and the fireplace and he admired the way the flames outlined her form. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  She paused and looked at him. “The whole thing’s just so damn opportune.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Opportunity, the third thing we’re looking for.”

  “Yeah.” She resumed pacing. “I mean, there’s McAniff, blasting away with a 30.06 at everything that moves, and somebody else just happens to be laying for Lisa, in the same place, with another 30.06? How could they know that he’d be using a 30.06?”

  “Did they know?” Bobby asked, sounding skeptical.

  She halted. “You’re right, they didn’t have to. All they really needed was somebody else shooting, to cover the sound of their shots. By the time the difference in rifles was discovered, they’d be long gone. And were.”

  Bobby nodded. “A 30.06 is standard armament in the Park. If it comes to that, I’ve never seen you without yours, either on the rack in the back of your pickup or in a scabbard on your snow machine.”

  “True.” Kate sat back down. “It’d be nice to have some place to start in this mess.”


  “Well. The means we got.”

  “Not in hand.”

  “No, but we know how it was done and with what,” Bobby said, “thirty-ought-six, same as the others, only different.” He stroked his chin, looking as if he wished he had a meerschaum pipe to puff on. He jerked his head. “You need to use the radio to talk to Jack?”

  “Got nothing to say to him yet. Might need to, later. I hope so, anyway.”

  “No problem. KL7CC’s—”

  “I know. KL7CC’s always awake.”

  He grinned. “Need a place to sleep?”

  She grinned back. “Uh-huh.”

  “Want to share the bed?” he said, exaggeratedly hopeful.

  “The couch will be fine.”

  He sighed. “Goddam, woman, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  She winked at him. “Oh, yes, I do.”

  Six

  ALONG WITH THE USUAL assortment of snow machines and battered pickup trucks, there were half a dozen dog teams staked outside the Roadhouse as Kate drove up the next morning. Mutt leapt off the back of the Jag as they pulled to a halt, and trotted from one team to the next, touching noses with each team’s leaders, exchanging sharp, short barks of greeting with the others, not missing anyone, and generally working the crowd in a manner that reminded Kate irresistibly of Ekaterina Shugak working the crowd at an Alaska Federation of Natives meeting. She didn’t seem to be interested in much more than touching noses, Kate noticed with mixed feelings of relief and apprehension. Judging by the tracks she’d seen around the woodpile Tuesday morning, tracks the size of salad plates, the timber wolf was still hanging around, hoping, she was grimly convinced, for more than a handout.

  A yelp startled her. It wasn’t a bark of greeting or a whine for attention, it was a definite yelp for help, and she looked for its source. Around one corner of the building another dog team was anchored almost out of sight. There was another canine yelp and some suppressed snickers of human origin. She took a step forward, the better to see.