Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate drew in a sharp breath.

  Dinah held up one stern hand, like a traffic cop, and repeated Kate’s own admonitions to herself almost word for word. “Don’t, Kate, don’t borrow trouble. They’ll bring them back and then we’ll see. We can handle whatever happens. Just keep calm.”

  But Kate noticed that her hands were a little unsteady with the teakettle.

  They drank in silence. The minutes crawled by, the drag of every second like a fingernail on a blackboard. It was twenty-plus miles from Bobby’s house to where Jim said the PLB was transmitting from. Bobby and Jim would have taken the road to a mile or so past the turnoff to Camp Theodore, Ruthe’s ecolodge. There they would have left the road to Bernie’s and taken to the river.

  Kate walked to the window and looked out. It was a clear, cold night, and it was early enough that there shouldn’t be any traffic on the river and less on the road. She stared at the track that led from Bobby’s yard to the little bridge that crossed Squaw Candy Creek and disappeared into the trees, willing the nose of the white Blazer with the trooper seal on the side to appear.

  It didn’t. By a sheer act of will she turned her back on the window and walked away.

  Bobby’s house was one large, open A-frame room, except for the bathroom in one corner—bedroom, kitchen, living room surrounding the central work station in one continuous space. At the work station, a doughnut-shaped desk supported a whole bunch of electronic equipment, which was connected to a snake’s nest of wires writhing up a central pole to disappear through the roof. Outside, they were connected to antennas and microwave shots and who knew what else hanging off the 112-foot tower that stood out back.

  Bobby Clark had lost both legs below the knee in Vietnam. After too long in a vet hospital, he spent the intervening years making a lot of money in endeavors that no one was so impolite as to inquire into before he arrived in the Park, flush in the pocket and with a mind to buy land and build. The A-frame and the tower went up the first year and shortly thereafter Bobby became the NOAA weather observer for the Park. It was gainful employment that gave him a vague aura of respectability and more important, a verifiable income. If said income didn’t come close to equaling his expenditures at least its existence laid the hackles of law enforcement personnel who might be otherwise inclined to inquire as to the provenance of his additional funding.

  Bobby broadcast Park Air from that same console, a pirate radio station featuring pre-seventies rock and blues, with occasional forays into post-acoustic Jimmy Buffett, and irregularly scheduled public service programs featuring swap-and-shops, talk radio, and broadcasts for messages on the Bush telegraph. He flew a Super Cub specially altered to accommodate his disability, drove a pickup and a snow machine ditto, and he was Dinah’s husband and the father of a three-year-old imp named for Kate. She’d delivered the imp and done duty as best man and maid of honor both at Bobby and Dinah’s wedding, all three on the same day, the memory of which never failed to give everyone involved the heebie-jeebies.

  She looked around the room, noting the distance between Katya’s crib and the California King not that far away, and her eyes came to rest on Dinah, who was watching her with a worried expression. “You’re going to need to add on,” Kate said. “Katya’s getting to be an age where she could seriously interfere with your love life.”

  Dinah actually smiled. “Tell me about it. She’s already interrupted us a couple of times. There is nothing more, um, deflating, than a three-year-old kid saying, ‘Daddy, get off, you’re squishing her!’ ”

  Kate laughed dutifully.

  “We’ve already talked about building another room,” Dinah said.

  “Where will you put it?”

  Appreciating Kate’s determination to act as normally as possible, Dinah fell into discussing the proposed addition. It would be built on the east side of the existing house, cutting a hole in that wall, extending the foundation, and building the room on top of it. “She’s almost too big for the crib now anyway, she’s been climbing in and out of it for almost a year. We think—”

  Mutt’s ears pricked up and she padded forward. “Listen,” Kate said sharply, running to the window.

  The white Blazer bumped into the clearing, followed by the brand-new black Ford Ranger Bobby had bought Dinah for her birthday that year. The motion detector lights on the outside of the A-frame lit up the two snow machines lashed to the trailer it pulled, both of them looking worse for wear.

  Kate gave something like a sob. “Kate—” Dinah started to say, but by then Kate was out the door and halfway down the steps.

  Jim popped his door and stuck his head out. “They’re okay, Kate,” he said. “They’re all okay.”

  By then Johnny was out of the cab and on the ground, looking tired and beat up, and Kate had her arms around him and her face buried in his bib overalls. She wasn’t crying, she never cried, but she didn’t want anyone to see whatever it was on her face. His arms came around her, hugging her back just as fiercely.

  She might have sniffled, just a little, and then she forced herself to let him go. “You’re okay, then,” she said, a little gruffly.

  “Yeah,” he said, with a long sigh.

  She looked past him, at Ruthe and Van, Ruthe angry, Van exhausted. “All of you?”

  “Yeah. All of us. Kate?”

  “What?”

  He suddenly looked older than his years. “Mac Devlin has been murdered.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Jim was in the air at first light, on his way to Suulutaq. Kate was with him. “You’ll need help loading the body,” she said. “And if some nut is running around out there with a gun, you could use the backup, preferably backup that knows enough not to mess with your crime scene.”

  No point arguing with that, and Jim didn’t waste his breath. She had her snow machine. If he hadn’t let her come with him, she would have been on the river by sunrise.

  Bobby had fetched the Grosdidier brothers, who patched up the walking wounded and made sure everyone saw two fingers, after which Bobby drove them and Van home. Ruthe put away a gargantuan breakfast, eggs and bacon and potatoes and the better part of a loaf of bread, toasted and slathered with butter, and departed for home on the Jag, resisting Dinah’s entreaties to rest up on one of the couches before making the journey. “Gal’s almost psychic, she’ll know something’s wrong and she’ll be anxious after me,” she said, adding, not unaffectionately, “Damn cat.”

  On the doorstep she paused. “I never liked Mac Devlin much,” she said after a moment, appearing to chew on the words. “But he was a Park rat, and a neighbor. We lent him one of our cabins the year his burned. He stayed there for two months while he rebuilt. After that, whenever we needed some dirt work done, he was there with his D6 or his front-end loader. Never had to ask more than once. Never had to ask, really, just had to say what needed doing and he was there, usually the next day.”

  She looked at Kate. “You’ll find out who did this, and why, and you’ll make sure they get what’s coming to them.”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  Ruthe nodded, still in that ruminant way, and took herself off.

  Katya attached herself to Johnny like a barnacle and refused all attempts to remove her, until she finally fell asleep, drooling into his shoulder. Dinah detached her and put her to bed. In turn, Johnny passed out on one of the couches. Kate covered him with a blanket and stood looking down at him.

  “Little fucker like to give his momma a heart attack?” Bobby said fondly, rolling his chair up next to her.

  “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake him.”

  “Couldn’t wake that boy with a goddamn air horn,” Bobby said. “Wanna try?” Without waiting for an answer he rolled to the table and tucked into his own breakfast. “When’s my next fare?” he said between bites.

  “Me to the airstrip,” Kate said. “I’m flying out to Suulutaq with Jim as soon as it’s light.”

  Bobby chewed and swallowed. Mutt was sitting next to him, gaz
ing at him with an adoration that had very little to do with the strip of bacon he was eating. He fed it to her anyway, still eyeing Kate. “Mac Devlin,” he said. “The Park’s least favorite miner. At least until Global Harvest came along. You know Global Harvest bought him out for about ten cents on the dollar?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t happy about that.”

  “No,” Kate said, “he wasn’t.”

  “He’s been popping up everywhere in the Park that Macleod broad has shown up talking about the mine—Bernie’s, the Riverside Café, up the store. I heard he was at the Chamber of Commerce meeting she spoke at in Ahtna, even. You could almost say he was stalking her.”

  “You could,” Kate said.

  “What the hell was he doing out there, Kate? Trying to burn it down? Even Mac Devlin had to know what a futile gesture that would be.”

  “You’d think,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it yet, Bobby. All I know is he’s been shot, and that he’s dead, and that it happened in the Global Harvest trailer at Suulutaq.”

  “Interesting to speculate, though,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of that going on in the Park.”

  “Yes,” she said grimly. “There surely will.”

  The high over the Park was holding and according to Bobby was supposed to keep holding at least through the weekend. It was another clear, calm day when they rose into the air off the end of the forty-eight-hundred-foot gravel airstrip that ran behind the village of Niniltna.

  “I love CAVU,” Jim said over the headset.

  Ceiling and visibility unlimited. “I heard that,” Kate said with feeling. “Have you talked to Macleod yet?”

  His voice came back over her earphones, sounding tinny and devoid of its usual resonant assurance. “Yeah.”

  “Where is she? I kind of thought she might insist on accompanying us.”

  “She probably would have, but she’s in Cordova.”

  “You talk to her on the phone?”

  “Yeah. She’ll be back in the Park this evening.”

  “She say what Mac Devlin was doing out there?”

  “No, but she said he was really unhappy over what Global Harvest paid him for the Nabesna Mine, and he didn’t mind saying so every time he saw her.”

  “Bobby said he was stalking her.”

  “Pretty much. She told me that she figured he was going to make enough of a nuisance of himself that Global Harvest would buy him off. And that Global Harvest knew that the longer they waited the lower Mac’s price would be.”

  “Whoa.”

  She could hear the shrug in his voice. “That’s business. It’s all about the bottom line for those people, Kate.”

  The Quilaks rose up on their left, the land falling gradually and inevitably to sea level in a series of lesser mountains, foothills, knolls, buttes, plateaus, and valleys, hedged about by glaciers large and small, creviced by rivulets, streams, and creeks, all frozen now, a hundred, no, a thousand wrinkled cracks in the face of the Park smoothed to a crisp white finish by a thick layer of snow. The sky was a pale, icy blue, the Gulf of Alaska a hint of deeper blue on the southern horizon, and the sun a small, bright ball of pale yellow on the rising half of its tiny winter arc. It’d be below the horizon again in five hours. They didn’t have a lot of time.

  Fortunately, the Suulutaq wasn’t far by air, and shortly Jim was banking left and losing altitude to glide the length of a wide, majestic valley, one end open to the southwest, curving up and right to the other, northeastern end in a roughly half-moon shape, the top end much narrower and steeper, and hemmed about by nervous mountains afraid to give up their jealously held treasures.

  Too late, Kate thought.

  Jim brought the Cessna down to fifty feet off the deck and passed over the isolated little trailer. The wind sock hung limply from its pole, and the snow looked smooth and settled enough to land on without sinking out of sight. He pulled up, came around, and let down the skis. They set down with a hiss of metal on snow, rolling out to a stop about ten feet from the cleared area between trailer, woodpile, and shed.

  “Show-off,” Kate said.

  The smug grin beneath his sunglasses was answer enough.

  They got out and walked carefully to the trailer, and any lingering amusement vanished when Jim popped the lock on the handle of the door and they went inside.

  The odor that the others had described was even stronger now, but rigor had yet to wear off. Jim took photographs of the scene as Kate prowled around outside.

  “No shells,” she said. “Guy was careful.” She walked a few steps away from the trailer and turned. “If it was Mac specifically he was shooting at, then he must have followed him out here.”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “If it was Everynut with a gun, shooting at anything that moved because the hairy pink enchiladas were after him, then it could have been the same thing. Or the nutcase was already here and Mac could have just been a target of opportunity. Or.” She took a deep breath and let it out and looked at Jim soberly. “It could have been someone who doesn’t like the idea of the Suulutaq Mine, and figured anyone who was out here was fair game. Mac. Howie.”

  “Talia.”

  “Who?”

  “Talia Macleod,” Jim said.

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Mutt, who had been conducting her own investigation by trotting to and fro with her nose to the ground, raised her muzzle in the direction from which they had come and barked sharply, once. Kate looked over her shoulder. “That’s George’s Cub. I heard she put him on retainer, so that’s probably her now.”

  “Who?”

  “Macleod. Your new girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my new girlfriend.”

  She looked at him, startled by the bite in his voice. She couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but after a moment he smiled. “Well, she isn’t.”

  “Good to know,” she said. “Kinda hoping I had dibs there.”

  His smile broadened. “Good to know.”

  “Want to get Mac bagged up?”

  “Might as well.” They trudged back to the trailer, neither of them in a hurry to face the task ahead. It helped that rigor had not worn off. There was nothing worse than trying to stuff the body of a human being into an elongated plastic bag. It tended to flop around a lot. Stiff with rigor, you were just dealing with mass, much easier to handle.

  It wasn’t the first time for either of them and they were bringing him out of the trailer by the time George and Macleod had gotten to the door. They stood back, George stoic, Macleod pale. They deposited Mac in a snowbank for the moment.

  “Is it okay to go inside?” Talia said. Her face was pinched and she looked cold.

  “Sure,” Jim said.

  They went inside and stood around the office. “Talia, I’d like you to take a look around, see if anything’s missing.”

  She made a helpless gesture. “There isn’t anything out here to steal, really. There’s a television in the living quarters, with a bunch of DVDs and a player.”

  “All still there,” Kate said.

  “Anything in the way of papers or information about the mine that someone might want to take a look at?”

  She gave Jim an incredulous look. “Certainly nothing that I can imagine anyone killing for, Jim.” She pointed. “There’s the map, but it’s the same map that’s been reproduced in every one of the handouts, brochures, and flyers.” She picked up a flyer and waved it, and then tossed it back on its pile. “We knew there would be rubberneckers, especially after the first snow. The caretakers are instructed to let no one leave here without a fistful of Global propaganda.”

  “Where’s Gallagher?” he said. Kate looked at him, frowning a little.

  “Who?” Macleod said vaguely. “Oh. I sent him back to Niniltna with someone else. George didn’t want to bring in anything bigger than his Cub, so only room for one passenger.” She turned to face him. “There is one thing I don’t understand.”

 
; “What?”

  “Where’s Howie Katelnikof?”

  “Howie?” Kate said. “Why would Howie be out here?”

  “It was his week,” Macleod said. “I hired him to sit out here every other week, in rotation with Dick Gallagher. This is Howie’s week. He should have been here. He should be here now.”

  “Ah hell, I knew that,” Jim said, disgusted. “But I didn’t connect the dots.” He looked at Kate.

  While it was a truth generally acknowledged that Mac Devlin had not been the most beloved of Park rats, neither of them had been able to come up with a good reason for anyone to kill him. Beat on him a little, sure, maybe, but not shoot him. He wasn’t married, and if he had had a girlfriend Jim hadn’t heard of it. So far as anyone knew he had no children. On the face of it the list of suspects in Mac’s case wasn’t just short, it was virtually nonexistent.

  Howie Katelnikof, on the other hand, while he was also single and childless, had over the course of a long and prolific criminal career lied to, cheated, and stolen from anyone who had ever set foot in the Park who wasn’t smart enough to see Howie coming. He had also done a lot of Louis Deem’s wet work, especially when it came to intimidating juries. Kate herself had a very good reason to wish Howie dead. In fact, she had three.

  The list of suspects in an investigation into the murder of Howie Katelnikof would have been so long Jim would have had to take numbers. Hell, if somebody shot Howie, the Park rats would have taken up a collection to reward the shooter.

  That was a thought far too close to home for Jim.

  Kate and Jim flew the body to Cordova to put it on the jet to Anchorage, and returned to Niniltna, landing at twilight. They walked into the trooper post and dispatcher Maggie Montgomery’s face lit up. “Thank god! Here, take ’em!”

  He looked down at the fistful of messages with resignation. “What, a crime wave?”

  “They’re all about the snow machine attack on the river. Jim?”