A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  Jim reined in his imagination. “Let’s move down twelve feet and do it again.”

  This time, two-thirds of the way across the clearing Jim’s toe hit something hard, and he tripped and nearly fell again. He swore and caught his balance.

  “What?” Old Sam said.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said, parting the grass and peering down. “I kicked something.”

  He moved some more grass aside, and paused.

  “What?”

  Jim pulled a thin rubber glove from his pocket and pulled it on. From another pocket he pulled an evidence bag. With the gloved hand he reached down and picked up a small pistol, a revolver with a brown grip that wasn’t wood, with the little silver Smith & Wesson badge on both sides.

  He looked at Old Sam, who looked from the pistol to where they’d come out of the woods into the clearing. “I be damn,” he said.

  “What?” Jim said.

  “I bet that sumbitch is what tripped me up,” Old Sam said. “Lost my goddamn rifle, too, which is why Kate got my bear.”

  “ ‘My’ bear?” Jim said.

  Old Sam grinned. “Did I say ‘my’ bear? Slip of the tongue.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Jim said, and they both looked back at the pistol. “Twenty-two Long Rifle CTG.”

  “I’m impressed,” Old Sam said.

  “It says so on the barrel,” Jim said. He smelled the muzzle. Old Sam raised an eyebrow, and Jim shook his head. “It’s got green stuff starting to grow on it. Been here a while.”

  “Long as the body?”

  “That would be the question.” The revolver had a swing-out cylinder, and Jim broke it open and held it up to look through it.

  It had been fully loaded. All six rounds were spent. He remembered the loose round Kate had found on the floor of Gammons’s pickup.

  The ravens sent up a chorus of whistles and clicks. Jim looked up to find that the treetops had taken on a Hitchcockian air, with black birds perched in every second tree. “Okay, this doesn’t give me the creeps or anything.”

  Old Sam was looking up at the ravens, head cocked to one side.

  “What?” Jim said.

  “They’re not here for no reason,” the old man said.

  “What—” Jim stopped. “Oh.”

  Old Sam looked at him, his face grim. “See how they’re grouping up on that side?”

  Jim did. “Probably just a dead rabbit or something.”

  “Maybe.” Old Sam waded through the grass in that direction. “Maybe not.”

  They found the dead moose calf. They also found the human skull.

  It had been reduced mostly to bone, with a few strips of gristle and skin left to it, which explained the ravens and crows. A distinctive squawk made Jim look up at the trees again. And the magpies. Grass had grown through the one unbroken eye socket. The brain cavity had been picked and sucked and licked clean. The hair was gone, probably plucked by innumerable beaks and used for bird nests.

  Jim looked at Old Sam. No one had told him the month before that the skull hadn’t been found, and he hadn’t thought to ask. No wonder the ME had been so focused on blood types. “You didn’t look for the skull?”

  Old Sam squinted at the ravens. “Yeah, well, like you said. We were in a bit of a hurry.”

  Jim used a pen to hook the skull through the eye socket and drop it into another evidence bag. He sealed it and raised it to eye level.

  His heart lifted. There were still some teeth attached to the jaw, and a couple of the teeth had fillings.

  Twelve

  Kate had to wait until noon for a seat on a flight out to the mine, and this time she flew in the Beaver with the new guy. He was in his late twenties, cocky and capable, and was hitting on Kate before they’d been in the air five minutes, Mutt sitting just behind them notwithstanding. Kate advised him to attend to his flying. He gave her a comprehensive once-over, a cheerful grin. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  The reappearance of Dewayne Gammons a month after he’d been pronounced dead had reawakened all of the niggling little doubts she’d had a month ago over the presumption of suicide. There was no real reason for this, since it didn’t appear that the body in question had been the victim of foul play. It didn’t stop her from reviewing the points one by one as the land passed beneath them and the rocky arms of the Quilaks rose up before them.

  The round of .22 ammunition found rolling around in the truck. Where was the box it came from? Where was the firearm it was made for? Who did both belong to?

  It was Gammons’s truck, which argued the ammunition was his. He’d had no pistol on him when he had crashed headlong into Kate’s yard, although he could have dropped it somewhere in the past month. But why take a pistol if you were planning to die? Unless you were going to shoot yourself with it. But he hadn’t.

  Maybe he’d tried to, and missed.

  The size of the round and the size of the firearm it was made for led to another question. Who in their right minds took only a .22 into the Park with the bears just up? A .22 would most emphatically not stop anything bigger than a lemming.

  It would, however, be useful against another human being.

  Lyda Blue had not recognized the writing on the suicide note. Okay, Jim was right, it was a printed note. The crime lab had compared it with the little of his handwriting to be found in his personnel file and declared that there wasn’t enough of a sample to say one way or another. Nor had they been able to find enough left of a fingerprint either in the file or on the note to make a match. Still, Kate remembered that split-second moment of hesitation between when Lyda had first seen the note and when she had dissolved into tears. Kate was sure Lyda had seen something in that note, something she had chosen not to share.

  Or maybe Jim was right and all of this was just a product of her fevered imagination.

  The round, the missing gun, the note. What else?

  The truck. There was no road between the mine and Niniltna. Gammons had to have parked the truck in Niniltna and taken the company flight to the mine. Which meant the truck had to have been parked somewhere secure or Howie Katelnikof or Martin Shugak would have made it their business to acquire it, either one piece at a time with a lug wrench or more probably all at once with a tow bar.

  In any event, finding out where Gammons had parked the truck between shifts wouldn’t prove anything about the body one way or another. It was just another piece of information, and you never knew which piece would cause the whole puzzle to fall into place. A while back Kate had worked a case that had hung on the different colors of aviation gas through the ages. Details were important.

  When Gammons came out of his funk she could put all of these questions to him. When she was done today she expected to have more.

  The pilot, who had introduced himself as Bud, set the Beaver down on the mine’s airstrip with a bounce that told anyone watching he wasn’t flying his own plane. They rolled to a stop and someone popped the pilot’s door before the prop had stopped rotating. Vern Truax was on the other side and he did not look as if his wife’s weekend booty call had been a success. He saw Kate and his mouth tightened. “I’ve got someone I want you to take back to Niniltna immediately.”

  Bud looked confused. “What about the off-shifters?”

  Truax leaned in. “I want your ass and his ass in the air going northwest. Immediately.”

  Bud lost color. “Yessir, Mr. Truax.”

  “You can come back for the shift change when you dump his ass in Niniltna. Clear?”

  “Yessir, Mr. Truax.”

  Truax gave Kate a barely civil nod. “Kate.”

  “Vern,” Kate said, and climbed back through the plane and out onto the ground, Mutt jumping down next to her.

  Truax was clearly in a white-hot fury. Kate thought it might have something to do with the man standing next to him, who stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “Kostas McKenzie, Ms. Shugak. I’ve heard a lot about you. I expect everyone has.”

 
; She took it. He hung on a little too long and he gripped a little too hard, like maybe he had something to prove. Mutt took a step forward. McKenzie looked at her and held on a little longer, just to make his point.

  “Have we met?” Kate said when she’d managed to free herself.

  “I’m with Gaea,” he said.

  He looked to be in his late thirties, medium all over, height, girth, and weight, brown/brown, perfect American teeth displayed in a genial smile that looked practiced, a ruddy complexion that indicated a life spent mostly outdoors, and attire that inferred money spent. He didn’t give off the impression of a Suulutaq Mine employee, or at least not one paid by the hour.

  After a minute she had it. He’d been in the café on Memorial Day. When he didn’t say anything else she said, “And Gaea is …”

  He laughed, throwing his head back and baring all of his beautiful orthodonture. He had a kind of animal magnetism that Kate recognized and mistrusted in the same moment. Louis Deem, the nearest thing the Park had ever produced to a Ted Bundy, had had a similar quality.

  Meantime, McKenzie reined in his guffaw to a genial chuckle that Kate heard as produced. “Gaea is an environmental activist nonprofit group. Like the Wilderness Society, or the Sierra Club.” There was a twinkle in his eyes, albeit one devoid of patronage, as if he was aware of his organization’s low profile and unconcerned and even amused at it. It argued a less self-involved personality than she had first thought. “Only newer.”

  “And I would guess with a much smaller membership and virtually no public profile,” Kate said, “because I’d never heard of you before this summer.”

  The twinkle persisted. “For now, yes. Anyway, I took the liberty of introducing myself because we’ve taken an interest in the Suulutaq Mine.”

  “You and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, oh my,” Kate said.

  “And because you are the chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association, and because the NNA is the closest thing to a governing body the Park has, I thought we should at the very least be acquainted.” He produced a business card. She looked at it. There was a tiny logo in one corner, a dark-haired woman in flowing draperies cradling a ball. It was the same logo she had seen on the flyer in Gammons’s room a month before. “This is the address of our local office. I’d be happy to show you around the next time you’re in Anchorage.”

  “You have a local office?” Kate said.

  “Sure do.” He turned his smile on Truax, who scowled. “We even plan to open an office in Niniltna.” He took a moment to bask in the reaction to his last statement before turning and climbing into the plane. An unnerved Bud wasted no time in getting airborne. McKenzie tossed them a jaunty wave as they lifted off the end of the airstrip.

  “Well, this just gets better and better,” Kate said. When PETA tried to change fish into kittens she’d pretty much tuned out of the environmental movement for the foreseeable future. “You invite him out here?”

  A bark of angry laughter. “Hell, no! Fucker sneaked in on one of the crew-change flights. Somebody didn’t show up, there was an empty seat, and he just climbed on board and rode in and started snooping around.”

  That took a certain amount of gall. It was something Kate might have done herself. “What did he want?”

  Vern exploded. “What do those bastards ever want? Evidence that we’re poisoning the land with toxic waste and slaughtering all the animals and for all I know causing the earth to rotate in reverse. Jesus!” He fixed her with a furious eye. “There are legally required environmental standards and we adhere to all of them, Kate.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Even the ones we don’t agree with, even the ones that seem ridiculous, like filing paperwork when somebody spills a quart of oil when they’re changing the filter on a truck.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I will go so far as to say that in certain cases we exceed those standards because we don’t think they’re strict enough. It’s not like we go out shopping for ways for assholes like that to come down on us.” He made a gesture that was perilously close to giving the finger to the rapidly receding aircraft.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He took a deep breath and made a visible effort at calm. She admired his self-control. “He was here for four hours before Holly overheard him asking too many of the wrong questions.”

  “Tell me something, Vern. If he’d asked for a tour, would you have given him one?”

  “We run regular tours one Sunday every month during the summer for journalists and spouses,” Vern said, so prompt it sounded rehearsed. “Anyone who wants to join it, all they have to do is fill out a form at the office in Anchorage.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “Representatives of outfits like Gaea get priority seating on those tours?”

  For a moment she thought he was going to explode again. Instead he burst out laughing. “Okay, you got me. Maybe not priority seating.” He shook his head. “What can I do for you today, Kate?”

  “I need a list of every male employee who walked out on their jobs here for the last two months. Say three months, just to be safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember Dewayne Gammons?”

  “Who could forget? He was the dumb fu—the guy who returned his body to nature.”

  “Yeah, well, it turns out not so much. He’s alive.”

  Truax’s head came up. “What?”

  “Didn’t Lyda tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  Kate could understand Lyda not wanting to talk about Dewayne Gammons’s return from the dead. Such a loser, she had said. Once recovered from the shock of seeing him alive, she had probably been angry with herself for showing so much emotion.

  As for everyone else on her plane, true to form Gammons’s presence on the airstrip had not registered with his coworkers. He’d erased himself from the camp’s consciousness before he’d even left. “He’s alive,” she said. “He walked out of the woods on the Fourth of July.”

  Truax stared at her for a moment. “Gammons is alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want the files because—”

  “Because our best guess is still that the body is one of your ex-workers. Just not Gammons.”

  “Great. Yeah, okay, I’ll get Lyda to pull the files for you. I sure hope—”

  He broke off when Holly Haynes came running up over the rise to where they were standing. She looked wild and she was breathing hard, and she rushed straight at Truax like he was her last hope of heaven, certain of succor, of comfort. “Vern, come quick, something awful.”

  He gave Kate a fleeting glance and caught Haynes by her arms, holding her away from him. “Holly, what’s wrong?” When she didn’t immediately answer he gave her a shake that was less than loverlike. “Holly. What’s wrong?”

  She struggled free of his hands and bent over, hands on her knees, and tried to catch her breath. She said something without looking up.

  Vern frowned, bending down to catch what she was saying. “What? I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

  Haynes stood up straight, face red from the blood rushing to it. “It’s Lyda.”

  Vern stood up with her. “What about her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Kate went cold all over. Mutt looked up at her and gave a soft whine.

  “What do you mean, she’s dead?” Truax said. “Holly, if this is some kind of joke I have to say I don’t find it a bit funny.”

  “It’s not a joke.” Haynes was trembling and there were tears in her eyes. She took Truax’s hand and stared up at him. “She’s dead. I saw her.”

  “Where is she?” Kate said.

  Haynes looked at Kate. “What? I—”

  “Where is she?” Kate said.

  The hard, inflexible voice had its effect. Haynes stiffened, almost to attention. “In her room.”

  “Did you lock the door when you left?”

  “I—No, I didn’t, I—”

>   “Who has been in it, besides you?”

  “Just me. She didn’t come into work this morning. Everybody was out of the office and no one knew she wasn’t there until I got back from Rig 36. I went to check on her.”

  “And no one else has been in the room since?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Before Kate could say anything else Truax was double-timing it down the side of the airstrip. Kate followed through the buildings, up the steps and into the trailer and down the hall to Lyda’s room. “Stay,” she told Mutt, and Mutt took up station a few feet away from the door.

  There were people standing around, among them Jules the chef, who had tears streaming down his face. “Break it up, folks,” Truax said. “Go on, get back to your jobs.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Jules said, smearing snot and tears with his hand, “I just saw her at dinner last night, and she was fine then. What—”

  Vern thumped him on his shoulder and turned it into a shove toward the exit. “We all saw her at dinner last night, Jules. Go on, get back to the kitchen. God knows what the rest of the kitchen crew’s getting up to without you there to keep an eye on them.”

  Jules stumbled off, the last one out, his face a picture of misery.

  “Open it,” Kate said.

  Vern did, and took an involuntary step back.

  The smell hit them first, like it always did. The dead void themselves as their last living act, death’s first triumph before decomposition kicks in. Way down deep in that subconscious swamp, the one filled with snakes and heights and airplane crashes and commitment, the smell of our own mortality is the fear most immediate and most visceral. It wasn’t the first time Kate had smelled it and it wasn’t something she ever got used to. She had often thought that that smell alone validated the larger part of the salary any practicing policeman earned.

  The room reminded her of her dorm room at Lathrop, single bed, pressboard closet and desk, single upright chair. One window looked onto its twin in the next building over, the blackout blind drawn firmly down to present a bland blank face to the world. Lyda was lying half on her bed, half on the floor, the covers tangled around her legs. Her nightgown had ridden up her thighs. Kate went into the room, stepping with care, and laid two fingers against Lyda’s throat. The flesh was cold and motionless. She put the same two fingers beneath Lyda’s left wrist and tried to push it up. It remained locked in place. She looked around the room, eyes pausing for a moment here and there, and then came out into the hall. The lock on the door was of the button-on-the-knob variety. She pushed it in and closed the door behind her, testing to see that it was secure. “There’s a key?” she said.