Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 07 - Breakup

by Breakup(lit)

  on it, which we won't, and traces of her blood on it, which we won't, it

  wouldn't be enough."

  236

  "No." Kate shook her head. "It wouldn't."

  "Especially if he's as smart as you think he is, and loved her up in

  front of all their friends in town. No motive."

  "Oh yes there was," Kate said. Sex or money, she thought, the two most

  popular motives for murder. She was pretty sure it was one of Morgan's

  Laws, but she couldn't remember which one. She'd have to ask Jack the

  next time she saw him. Soon, she thought. Tomorrow would be good.

  "Whether anyone saw it or not, there was motive up the wazoo."

  "Come on, Kate," Dan said. "A lot of wives screw around on their

  husbands. A lot of husbands don't take them out and feed them to bears."

  "A lot of husbands don't have Stewart's ego." Kate remembered Stewart

  forcing her hand against his erection. It had been a taunt, a blatant

  provocation, his response to her challenge. He must have thought she

  just wouldn't be able to resist all that male pulchritude and would

  fling herself on him. She'd met men like him before, men whose certain,

  unwavering belief in their own irresistibility formed the pillar of

  their existence. It was imprudent to disillusion them, imprudent and

  dangerous and potentially fatal. As Carol Stewart and Nathan Harrigan

  had discovered, at the cost of their lives. "It's all ego with him."

  "And how," Dinah said from the doorway. Her face was pale, but she met

  Bobby's questioning look with a reassuring smile. "Mr. Stewart thinks

  very well of himself. What was it Bernie called him? Something movie

  starish?"

  "Redfordy," Dan supplied.

  Dinah nodded. "Right. And he'd encourage the resemblance. King stud.

  He'd take adultery as a personal affront. Especially if the guy worked

  for him."

  "And especially if they did it here," Kate said, waving a hand to

  indicate the Park. "Stewart's very own personal hunting ground. Adding

  insult to injury."

  "I wonder," Dinah said thoughtfully.

  "What?"

  237 "If maybe Carol Stewart didn't bring Nathan Harrigan here for that

  very reason. Stewart's kind always screw around. Maybe she was making a

  point, taking her lover on her husband's own ground."

  Kate's mouth twisted up at one corner. "If she did, her revenge was very

  short-lived."

  Jim tossed the Swiss Army knife down in disgust and folded his arms. He

  didn't want to believe any of it, not because it wasn't true, but

  because he was afraid that it was and he had not a shred of hard

  evidence to back any of it up.

  "He make it back to Niniltna?" Kate said.

  "Stewart?" At her nod, the trooper nodded.

  "Too bad. I was kind of hoping that bear would show up again." Her smile

  was cold. "Mandy's dad, who has been big-game hunting in Africa, assures

  me that once a lion tastes human flesh it won't eat anything else. Be

  nice if the same held true for bears. In this one case, anyway."

  "Where is he now?" Dan said. "Stewart."

  "Back in Anchorage," Jim said. "No help for it, Dan," he said in

  response to the ranger's disbelieving look. "No probable cause, no hard

  evidence of foul play. He cooperated fully. Couldn't hold him."

  "As a matter of curiosity," Kate said, "was Carol Stewart insured?"

  "Yes, but just a standard policy through his business. He had an

  identical policy, and they both took them out years ago."

  "Ought to pay for both trips, out and back," Kate said coolly. "Like I

  said. Smart."

  Dinah made an inarticulate protest, quickly smothered. Bobby caught her

  hand and glared at Kate.

  "Son of a bitch," Jim said suddenly, and brought his fist down hard on

  the table in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Everybody jumped.

  "Son of a bitch."

  Kate thought of Pastor Seabolt, and of the long, hot June days in

  Chistona. "Something I learned last summer, Jim," she said.

  238

  "What?"

  "Sometimes? There's just no cure for a situation."

  He didn't like it. None of them did.

  Dan broke the silence this time. "What did Stewart say to you last

  night, Kate?"

  "Nothing," she said, with perfect truth. "Nothing at all."

  Bobby said shrewdly, "What did you say to him?"

  She chose her words with care. "I suggested he make this his last visit

  to the Park."

  "Breathing the air here might be hazardous to his health, is that it?"

  Bobby barked out a humorless laugh. "So might riding shotgun on that

  damn D-6 with you on the throttle. Jesus, Shugak, when I said you should

  take executive action, I didn't mean you should take it on a Caterpillar

  tractor. You got a death wish or what? My eyes about dropped out of my

  head when you took off outta that barn." He looked her over critically,

  and added, "You sure that was really you in your body last night?"

  "Maybe it was her evil twin," Dinah suggested, recovering enough to join

  in. "Brought out by the full moon."

  "I figured the Antichrist," Dan said.

  "Nah, pod person," Jim said, adding hastily, "Not that I would know,

  since of course I wasn't there."

  The taut atmosphere of frustration and anger eased to where laughter and

  friendship might be possible once again.

  Kate drained her mug and pushed back her chair. "It's moose backstrap

  for dinner. Who's staying?"

  They were gone by nine, and there was still enough light left for Kate

  and Mutt to walk out back and sit down on the large, smooth boulder

  embedded in the edge of the creek bank. Overhead the sky turned from

  blue to pink to orange to red and back to blue again. The stars came out

  one at a time, Venus first, brighter than every other body in the sky,

  save the sun and the moon.

  239 Soon the stars would be burned out of the sky by the light of the

  midnight sun, and Venus would fade into the east for the summer. Kate

  had an affinity for the stars, for the constellations, especially for

  Orion. As a little girl she had pictured him standing, harpoon in hand,

  poised at the water's edge, intent on spearing his next meal. Much

  later, in Masterpieces of World Literature at the University of

  Fairbanks, she had learned he was supposed to be carrying a sword and

  shield, and still later that he raped one of the Pleiades, or maybe it

  was Artemis, the first in a long line of the disillusionments that come

  with growing up and leaving the magic behind.

  Breakup certainly qualified. The season was supposed to be one of hope

  and renewal, spent gathering rosebuds while ye may. Instead, it all too

  often degenerated into destruction and despair. It had been a clear,

  cold April night when her mother had begun the long walk home from a

  party, only to pass out at the side of the road and die of exposure.

  Well, she thought with cold satisfaction, it might have taken thirty

  years, but she had paid back for her mother, in spades. It had been a

  long time since they'd had a bootlegger in the Park.

  Her satisfaction was fleeting. People got away with murder during

  breakup. People got away w
ith murder and then got away. First Lottie

  Gette, now Mark Stewart. Kate shifted restlessly on her rock. Failure

  was not an option open to her, and yet here it was, staring her in the

  face, and for an instant panic clawed at the back of her throat.

  She beat it down before it could take over. All right, it had been three

  days of frustration, personal and professional. And sexual. This last

  was going to be the easiest to relieve; as soon as the homestead was in

  decent enough shape she was headed into town in her brand-new, slightly

  bruised truck. She would go into Niniltna to tell Bobby to call Jack and

  let him know she was coming. Jack was a smart man; by the time she

  managed the two hundred-odd miles into town he would have farmed his son

  out to a friend's

  240 house for the duration. She had a sudden vision of going through his

  front door like a conquering army and her need was so great she couldn't

  even smile.

  Hormones had even more to answer for than Charles II and Walt Disney.

  But it was the personal and professional frustration that nagged at her

  most. What was her profession nowadays? She'd been absent from the DA's

  staff for, what, four years now. In the blank marked "Occupation" on her

  tax form she had written "private investigator" for the first time,

  mostly because the bulk of last year's income had been earned in that

  capacity, but the truth was she didn't even have a Pi's license. Hell,

  in Alaska, there wasn't any such creature, there was only a state

  business license, available to anyone who could fill out the form and

  produce fifty bucks. That was it, that was all you needed, bing, bang,

  boom, you were in the peeper business.

  But if she wasn't a private investigator, what was she?

  And then there was the acute personal frustration of being thrust into a

  position of responsibility for the tribe, of shouldering duties and

  assuming obligations she had never sought and had certainly never

  wanted. It wasn't just the tribe, either, it was the whole goddam Park,

  Native and white, cheechako and sourdough, ranger and miner and

  homesteader, fisher folk and fish hawk. Predicaments R Us, You Bring

  'Em, We Fix 'Em, K. Shugak, Proprietor. Meetings Mediated, Marriages

  Counseled, Murders Solved. She didn't even have to advertise, they came,

  bringing their baggage with them, whether she wanted them to or not.

  The first shoot-out at Bernie's flashed through her mind. Nobody had

  told her to break it up. There had been fifty, sixty people in the

  Roadhouse that night. Any one of them could have taken the initiative,

  could have restored the peace, but no, Kate Shugak had ridden to the

  rescue yet again. Or crawled, in this case. And of course she had had to

  answer Mandy's cri de coeur, and there was no denying Billy Mike,

  invested with all the weight and majesty of tribal tradition, and Dan

  seemed to take it for granted that

  241 it was her job to bring Mark Stewart to justice, and how could she

  stand by and let Bernie get shot up a second time, and even that prick

  Jim Chopin regarded her as Tonto to his Lone Ranger, and . . . oh, the

  hell with it.

  The hell with all of it.

  Twenty feet below, cold, crystal water rushed downstream between narrow

  banks. From beneath a budding salmonberry bush, a snowshoe hare poked

  its head out, coat already turning brown for the coming season. An eagle

  passing high overhead called out a melancholy good night.

  A passing breeze caught at the branch of a fir tree. It reached down and

  brushed her cheek, the needles scratching gently at her skin.

  "Emaa?" Kate said softly.

  At her knee Mutt stirred, looking up at her with patient yellow eyes,

  and unthinkingly she knotted a reassuring hand in the coarse ruff.

  The bark of the branch smelled strongly of resin. "Emaa," Kate said into

  the gathering night, "they lean on me. All of them, they lean on me. How

  do I stand against it? How did you, all those years?"

  The silence was the silence of the living land, water tumbling stone,

  wind through the trees, the chatter of squirrels, and the song was

  almost lost in it.

  She sat up straight, watchful, waiting, listening. It came again, three

  pure descending notes, floating to her on the wisp of a breeze. The

  golden-crowned sparrow, the spring-is-here bird, the first one of the year.

  It sounded again, nearer this time. Her eyes groped for it in the dusky

  twilight, and after a moment there it was, six inches long, light brown

  with darker streaks on its plump body and a golden one on its head. It

  perched at the end of an insubstantial alder twig, swaying a little as

  it cocked its head, looking at Kate alternately from each bright eye.

  The song sounded again, Spring is here, here is spring. That

  242 was its job, to usher in spring in song. That was what it had been

  made for, what it was best at. It might dream of being an eagle,

  soaring, aloof, detached, but it was the spring-is-here bird, and it

  sang the news from the branch of an alder.

  Kate let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. "All right, Emaa."

  She got to her feet, and in a flutter of wings the sparrow was gone. "I

  love you, Emaa," Kate said, raising her voice. "I miss you."

  Mutt trotted ahead. Kate paused, shotgun cradled in the crook of one

  arm, and looked over her shoulder at the fading outline of the

  mountains, the lambent glow of the rising moon.

  "I need you," she said, almost whispering the words.

  Her only answer was the song again, three notes, coming clearly over the

  wind in the trees, the howl of a distant wolf, the drip of melting snow.

  It was enough.

  It would have to be.

  243

  Set against the stunning backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, the newest

  Kate Shugak mystery unfolds during the time of year locals love to hate:

  spring thaw.

  "Stabenow offers a knowing portrait of Alaska, its soul-stirring

  landscape and fascinating culture."

  -The Seattle Times

  "An intriguing blend of modern morality tale and ageless legend . . .

  The talented Stabenow tells a riveting tale that's as satisfying to the

  soul as it is to the intellect," Booklist proclaimed of last year's

  Blood Will Tell. In Breakup, Kate Shugak's loyalties-to the land, her

  heritage, her home-are put to the test when a series of mishaps lead to

  murder.

  April in Alaska is typically a period of rebirth and renewal, and after

  the long winter Kate has nothing more strenuous on her agenda than

  paying her taxes. But mayhem abounds as the meltoff flows; this year's

  thaw is accompanied by rampaging bears, family feuds, and a plane crash

  quite literally in Kate's own backyard. What begins as a series of

  headaches escalates into possible murder when a dead body is found near

  her homestead.

  Initially unwilling to involve herself in the investigation, preferring

  in- ' write off each odd occurrence as a peculiarity,

  244 yet she continues irresistibly to seek the

  truth. Compelled by her friends to act as problem solver and guided by

  t
he spirit of her Aleut grandmother, she finds herself slowly taking on

  the role of clan leader, a post she is bound to by honor and blood.

  As breakup becomes increasingly fraught with danger and destruction,

  Kate must decide whether she can cross the line from passive observer to