Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Ruthe surveyed the scene, her face grim. “How long ago, do you reckon?”

  Johnny swallowed hard and steeled himself to step forward and grasp Mac’s hand. It was cold. He tried to move it. It wouldn’t. “Rigor has set in,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Oddly, he seemed to have adapted to the smell, and was able to speak more easily. “Rigor mortis starts setting in about three hours after death. It takes about twelve hours to reach maximum stiffness, depending on conditions.” He looked around and saw a small Monitor stove, probably fueled by the tank outside. “It’s warm in here.” He tried to move Mac’s hand again, and succeeded in shifting it just a little. “I’d say he’s been here longer than three hours but less than twelve.” He looked at Ruthe. “It’ll go off again in about seventy-two hours. If someone trained is there to observe it, they can get a good idea of time of death.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “For now, we need to get out of here.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s a crime scene, Ruthe. We shouldn’t be in here, and we need to leave now and go get Jim.” He walked out of the trailer. Van was on her feet, washing her face with a handful of snow. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and tried to smile with stiff lips. “I’m okay. Was that . . . was that Mac Devlin? The MacMiner guy?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “What happened? What are you doing?”

  He had bent over to look in the snow around the stairs. There was hardly any light left to the day and he couldn’t see anything. “It looks like he was shot from a long way away, in the back, with a rifle, but a lot of times a killer can’t resist taking a closer look. It’s how we catch them.”

  “‘We’?”

  “It’s how my dad used to, anyway.” He straightened.

  “You learned a lot from him.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged, trying to be casual. It wasn’t easy, with the memory of Mac’s gruesome remains fifteen feet away. “It was interesting.” He swallowed. “Well, you know. When it wasn’t gross.”

  “He’s dressed like he just walked in the door,” Ruthe said from the doorway. Something clicked and a light came on over the doorway. “Parka, snow pants, boots, and all.”

  “I think maybe he was shot in the act of stepping inside,” Johnny said, standing straight and looking up at Ruthe. He pointed two fingers at her. “He’d probably already opened the door, and was standing on the threshold.” She turned around, standing in the open doorway and looking at Johnny over her shoulder. “The bullet hit him and the impact spun him around—” Ruthe’s hands flew up and she staggered two steps forward, turning to face him “—and then he fell on the desk.”

  Ruthe looked over her shoulder again, at Mac’s corpse this time, and came back to the door and frowned at him. “But the door was closed when we got here.”

  Johnny frowned, too. “The killer could have closed it if he came up to take a look. Or maybe Mac could have pulled it shut when he fell.” Johnny gestured at his feet. “I can’t see anything other than our tracks, Ruthe, but that doesn’t mean Jim won’t be able to. You should close the door. And lock it, if you can.”

  She reached behind the knob, felt around, and nodded her head. Pulling the door to, she tried the knob and nodded again when it held. “Okay. Time to go for help. Like you said, Jim needs to know about this, pronto.”

  “Wait.” Johnny fumbled with one of his pockets. “Here. We can trigger this.”

  It was an orange electronic device the size of a pack of cigarettes. Ruthe took it. “What’s that?”

  “A PLB, a personal locator beacon. Kate insisted on getting one for me to carry in case I got into trouble in the Park. If I trigger it, it’ll send our coordinates and a 911 call via satellite to the local police. That’s Jim.”

  “Clever. And smart of Kate.” She shook her head and handed it back to Johnny. “No can do.”

  “But he could fly out here, and land. There’s a wind sock, I saw it on our way in.”

  “So did I,” Ruthe said, “but he’s not flying out here in the dark and landing in a place he’s never landed before, also in the dark. If you trigger that thing, they’ll think we’re in trouble. We aren’t. No. We go get him.”

  Johnny hesitated. “One of us should stay here. Make sure no one contaminates the crime scene.”

  “No,” Ruthe said definitely. “I’m not leaving either one of you around here with some nut on the loose with a gun.” Impossibly, she grinned, and jerked a thumb at the trailer.

  “Besides, I just locked the door to the only warm place to wait.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The journey back down the side of the hill to the valley seemed a lot shorter, but it was well past dark by the time they got to the river. They stopped to gas up the snow machines and wolf down steaming bowls of ramen that Ruthe insisted they take the time to cook on her single-burner Coleman stove. “It’s been a long day and we’re all tired. We need fuel to get us home. Drink lots of water, too, and keep a bottle handy, tucked in somewhere it won’t freeze.”

  She had them stuff peppermints into their outer pockets. “A sugar hit for the road,” she said, “when we start to run out of steam.”

  “We could stop at one of the villages,” Johnny said.

  “We could,” Ruthe said. “I don’t think we should. Once the word gets out, there’s going to be a stream of rubberneckers up there, and some of them won’t stop with looking.”

  She looked at Johnny. He nodded. “You’re right. Best to get the word to Jim as fast as we can. He can fly in tomorrow at first light.” He looked at Van. “You want to drive awhile?”

  A smile broke through the strained look on her face. “Sure!”

  Behind her back Ruthe gave him an approving nod, and he felt good because he knew he’d done something smart.

  They packed up and headed out.

  The dark fabric of the night sky was textured with stars and constellations and globular clusters, the North Star directly overhead as the Little Dipper’s handle started a slow and steady revolution around it. There would soon be a waning moon rising in the eastern sky, more than enough to light their way home. The frozen river was wide and flat and smooth and a good clean trail had been broken by the day’s traffic. So long as they didn’t drive into an open lead and freeze to death before they drowned, it should be a quick trip.

  Or even if they did.

  “Keep it at a steady fifty,” Ruthe shouted. “No point in blowing out an engine if we don’t have to.”

  Van gave her a thumbs-up, and she hit the gas. Johnny’s arms tightened around Van’s waist, and she wriggled a little farther back into the vee of his legs, her body warm and firm against his. There was an occasional snow machine, and one truck going in the opposite direction. For the rest, they were alone on the river. In any other circumstances, this would have been an enchanted evening.

  The snow machines ate up the miles with a steady, reassuring roar, the lights of tiny Red Run passing on the left, and later the lights of the even tinier Potlatch. There was a long stretch of nothing before Chulyin. Here the trail hugged the right bank and the scraggly white spruce made insubstantial shadows on the snow that wavered as they passed by.

  “Are you okay?” Johnny said.

  “Fine!” she said. “Can I keep going?”

  “Absolutely!” he said, and then he frowned. His engine sounded suddenly louder, and then louder than that. He looked at Ruthe ahead of them. She didn’t look around, so evidently she wasn’t noticing anything odd.

  “What—” he started to say, and then the first of them launched itself from the riverbank, soaring over their heads so close one of the skids glanced off the windshield, inches in front of Van’s face. It cracked with a sound like a gun going off and Van screamed and involuntarily took her thumb off the throttle. They slowed fast enough to throw him against her.

  “No!” Johnny said. “Keep going! Keep going!” he yelled at Ruthe, who had paused to look over her
shoulder, and was starting to turn. He saw another snow machine cut in front of her. The driver had something in his hand and he was raising it as he came at her.

  “Christ!” Johnny said. “Ruthe, watch out!” He got a confused impression of a third snowgo behind them and fumbled for the rifle in the scabbard strapped to the seat.

  Something hit his shoulders, hard, jerking his arms free of Van’s waist and tumbling him off of the snow machine. In the very short space of time between launch and impact he felt as if he were floating, the stars passing dizzily overhead in slow motion.

  And then he hit with a force that drove the breath from his body, and everything went black.

  He woke up to the steadily increasing feeling of cold seeping into every part of his body. After a moment he realized that he was facedown in the snow. He made a tremendous effort and managed to raise his head an inch.

  All was silent and still. There was a faint radiance from the east, the moon announcing its imminent entrance, ready to light up the frozen length of the Kanuyaq River like a phosphorescent ribbon, leading the way home.

  He put his head back down and thought about this. That’s right, they were on the river. He frowned, and the movement rubbed the ice into his cheek. It stung, and seemed to stimulate his brain cells. Ruthe. The Gruening River caribou herd. The Suulutaq trailer. Mac. The rush to tell Jim. The attack.

  Van.

  Vanessa.

  He pulled himself inch by painful inch to his knees and looked around.

  His snow machine sat twenty feet away. The sled was gone. The sled with all their supplies in it. Memory returned in a terrifying rush.

  “Van,” he tried to say. “Ruthe.” He staggered to his feet. “Van! Ruthe!”

  He thought he heard a low moan from one direction and staggered toward it, almost falling over a dark, huddled lump. It was Ruthe. “Ruthe!” he said. He shook her, possibly a little less gently than he should have. “Ruthe!”

  She groaned again. In the steadily increasing light of the rising moon her face looked bleached of all color, like a death mask. “Johnny?”

  “Yes,” he said, almost sobbing. “It’s me. Are you okay? Here, squeeze my hands. Good, now push your feet. Good. Good.”

  “Where’s the girl?” she said, raising her head.

  He staggered to his feet. “Van! Vanessa! Where are you, Van?”

  He found her beneath the lip of the riverbank. She didn’t answer his call, she didn’t move, and he was shaking so badly from fright and the cold that he could barely pull down her collar to check the pulse in her throat. It beat strongly against his fingers, warming it. “Oh, Van,” he said, his head drooping. “Oh, Van.”

  Her voice was a thready whisper. “Johnny. What happened?”

  Her voice, the sense of her words was like an on switch for a fury he hadn’t known was there. He surged to his feet and very nearly howled at the sky. “Those assholes jumped us!”

  “What assholes?”

  “Those assholes on the snow machines!”

  She raised herself painfully to one elbow. “I know you’re mad, but don’t yell, okay?”

  Her pitiful little smile melted his heart. “Okay,” he said, mastering his anger, not without effort, at least for the present, and dropping again to his knees. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I understand, believe me.” Van tried to rise and faltered, putting a hand to her head. “Oh,” she said, and then leaned over and vomited in the snow. He tried to help her, to hold her hair out of the way, and then brought her handfuls of clean snow so she could rinse out and off.

  She looked up at him and smiled again, this time a little less tentative. “Tell me you don’t know how to show a girl a good time,” she said.

  He surprised himself by laughing. It was a pale effort, but it was real.

  He got back to Ruthe to find her on her feet. She was wheezing slightly. “Are you okay?”

  “Think I busted a rib,” she said.

  “I think that asshole busted it for you,” he said, his anger coming back to a simmer. “Fucker was using a two-by-four.”

  “I see they took your sled. Why didn’t they take the snowgo, too?”

  “Not enough drivers, probably. I don’t remember really well, but I think there were only three of them, one for each machine.”

  “Where’s mine, then?”

  They found it a thousand yards up the river, nose buried in a drift beneath the lip of the riverbank and miraculously still with the sled attached. “I pushed the throttle all the way up, last thing before I fell off,” Ruthe said. “It must have got away from them and they were scared they’d get caught if they wasted time looking for it.”

  “Not as scared as they’re going to be when I catch up with them,” Johnny said fiercely. The thought of beating on the guy with his own two-by-four was as warming as the fire Van had started next to his snow machine.

  He fumbled for the pocket that held the PLB and pulled it out. He held it up and said to Ruthe, “Are we in trouble now?”

  Her sleep was made restless that night by dreams of Johnny heading off over the horizon on a snow machine, laughing over his shoulder at her just before the machine carried him over the edge of a cliff. And dreams of Jim, too, although these dreams were less story and more snapshot, Jim kissing her much against her will—really and truly, against her will—the day Roger McAniff went on a killing spree in the Park, Jim crouched behind the bar after getting his Smokey hat shot off during the most recent shoot-out between the Jeppsens and the Kreugers, Jim bleeding all over the floor of Ruthe and Dina’s cabin after she’d beaned him with the file box. And bleeding all over her afterward.

  She was jerked awake before she got to the really good part, by Mutt’s full-throated bark and vehicle lights flashing across the interior of the house. She got up, pulled on sweats, and trotted downstairs. She reached for the .30-06 at the same time she switched on the porch light, which revealed Bobby’s snow machine stopped in the yard, engine running, one person dismounting and running to the stairs. A frisson of nameless fear shivered up her spine. She put the rifle back and opened the door. “What’s wrong?” she said before Dinah had her foot on the bottom step.

  Dinah looked up and without preamble said, “Johnny triggered his PLB. Jim got the word and the location and he’s on his way there with Bobby.”

  Kate ran upstairs and found clothes, ran back downstairs, pulled on bibs, parka, and boots, grabbed her gloves, goggles, and rifle, and ran outside. Dinah had pulled Kate’s snow machine out of the garage and Mutt was already waiting next to it. The engine started without fuss, Mutt hopped up behind, and Kate slid the rifle into its scabbard and followed Dinah up the trail, swung wide onto the road, where both women opened up the throttles.

  The miles sped by as Kate tried very hard not to think of all the different ways Johnny could have gotten hurt going down the river. A pickup could have run into them. A snow machine pileup. Some drunk in one of the villages could have been shooting at hallucinations and they got in between him and his target. The river could have opened up one of its inexplicable leads and they could have fallen in, and Johnny’s last conscious act before the water closed over his head was to trigger the PLB.

  She could feel the beginnings of hysteria, a coldness seeping over her from the inside that was worse than the windchill without. No, she thought, very firmly. You don’t know anything. Don’t speculate, don’t borrow trouble. It’ll be as bad as it is and you’ll deal. Right now all you’re doing is going from your house to Bobby’s. All you have to do is hold on until you get there.

  The trees lining the road blurred, the stars overhead were a silver smear against the black sky. They met no traffic along the way, and in Niniltna, Dinah slowed down just enough to take the turn for the road leading downriver that led to the Roadhouse and then opened up the throttle again. Kate stuck to her tail like a burr, Mutt holding the shoulder of Kate’s parka in her teeth to maintain her balance. The two miles between the village and t
he turnoff at Squaw Candy Creek passed in a blink and then Dinah was negotiating the trail that led to her and Bobby’s house. Kate saw with dismay that Bobby’s truck wasn’t outside.

  They killed the engines and went into the house, shedding outerwear as they went.

  “I’m freezing, let me make some coffee,” Dinah said.

  “Talk while you do,” Kate said. At her side stood Mutt, tense and ready to rip a new one in whatever had Kate so upset. She looked up and Kate rested a hand on her head. Mutt’s ears flattened and she gave an interrogatory whine.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Kate said with more confidence than she felt. “Everything’s going to be fine.” She hooked the rung of a stool with her foot and sat down. Mutt, not entirely convinced, allowed herself to be persuaded to sit, too, but she wouldn’t move from Kate’s side, leaning against her thigh, a solid, anxious presence. When Dinah gave her a strip of moose jerky, she took it politely, gave it a gnaw or two, and then set it down, which had to be a first.

  “Where’s my goddaughter?” Kate asked belatedly.

  “With Bobby. We figured it was better Katya was in the truck with him.”

  “What happened?”

  “At about—” Dinah glanced at the clock on the wall and calculated. “—I guess it would have been about one A.M. . . . maybe one thirty, everything happened so fast I wasn’t paying attention to the time . . . Jim banged on the door. He said that Johnny’s PLB—Your idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll have one welded to Katya’s ankle. The Park equivalent of a LoJack. Anyway, Jim said Johnny’s PLB went off and wherever the alarm is received alerted Kenny Hazen, who called Jim. Who evidently was in Niniltna?” A raised eyebrow.

  Kate raised her shoulders. “I don’t know, work, I guess. He didn’t make it out to the house last night.”

  “We need cell towers in the Park and we need them now,” Dinah said. “Jim was going out after them. Bobby said he’d ride shotgun. Jim said no, he didn’t know what the situation was, if anyone was hurt or how badly, be better if Bobby brought his truck, and the snow machine trailer, too.”