Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Jim took photos of that, too, and more of the body and the head. He handed Kate a pad and pencil. “Take some notes for me?”

  He got out a tape measure and measured the distance between everything, snow machine, body, head, trees, monofilament ends. Kate jotted down numbers with increasingly numb fingers.

  He opened his Leatherman and reached up to cut the almost invisible length of pale green monofilament that had been wrapped multiple times around the base of the tree, taking care to preserve the knots, although the filament was so fine it would take a microscope to tell if they were granny knots or double sheet bends. He bagged it carefully, and did the same with the remnants of line on the opposite tree. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s bag the body and get out of here before we all freeze solid.”

  Kate shook out a body bag, Jim picked up the head, and Matt turned, walked two steps away, and threw up. Mutt whined once, softly.

  They loaded Macleod’s body on the trailer Matt was towing. Jim hooked her snow machine to his and Kate took her trailer. They hauled everything to Ken Kaltak’s house and took his statement, which varied very little from Gallagher’s. At Jim’s request, Ken fetched half a dozen of the other villagers, and for the most part everyone’s statements agreed. Everyone in the village had turned out for GHRI’s dog and pony show. With that many people present, it was inevitable that there were moments when Macleod and Gallagher’s time was unaccounted for, but not so often or for so very long that Jim thought he had to run down more witnesses.

  “Anybody in Double Eagle seriously pissed about the mine?” Jim said.

  “Not this pissed,” Ken said definitely.

  Jim persisted. “Macleod have any arguments forced on her? Anybody try to pick a fight?”

  “Not that I saw.” Ken reflected, and added, a little reluctantly, “She flirted with anything in pants. Even me, with Janice standing right next to me. But Jesus, Jim, you don’t decapitate somebody for flirting. I mean, if Genghis Khan isn’t around.”

  “She flirt with Gallagher?”

  Ken thought. “He was always there, a step behind, but she kept it pretty businesslike, at least in public.”

  “She order him around?”

  “More like he was anticipating her every need. She didn’t even have to ask, and he had it ready for her.”

  “The perfect assistant, in fact.”

  “Pretty much.” Ken looked at Jim. “Why, you think he did it? Stringing that line would have taken some time. I don’t recollect he went missing from the gym that long. And she was his meal ticket. He looked pretty happy in his work to me.”

  Jim gave a noncommittal grunt, and they left soon after. The trip back to Niniltna was necessarily slower than the trip out had been, and it was almost four o’clock before they pulled up in front of the post. “I’ll get George to take her into Anchorage in the morning. Help me put her in the walk-in?”

  The post had a free-standing walk-in cold locker out back, lined with plywood shelves, and there they placed Macleod’s body.

  In Jim’s office, he didn’t bother to shed his parka before he called Fairbanks to let them know. Kate waited while he typed up a preliminary statement and sent it off. “I heart the Internet,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  “Should we—”

  “Tomorrow’s going to be a nightmare,” he said. “She was a celebrity in Alaska, and she had a pretty high profile Outside, too. Plus she was a babe, and if that wasn’t enough, she was a blonde. I’m guessing local media, big-time, and didn’t she have a stint on one of the networks as a commentator?”

  Kate didn’t know.

  “It’s going to be about as bad as it can be,” Jim said gloomily. “I hate a celebrity murder. Let’s just go home, okay?”

  They went home and went to bed, and Kate wasn’t alone in spending the better part of the night staring at the ceiling.

  Jim was gone before eight the next morning, Johnny to school shortly thereafter, declaiming something about New Hampshire in iambic pentameter, and Kate soothed the savage breast by some intensive housecleaning. When she was done the fireplace was spotless, so were all the dishes and towels, and both beds were freshly made with clean sheets, although negotiating the flotsam and jetsam of Johnny’s room was, as always, a challenge. They could have eaten off the floor under the stove and the refrigerator, too, always supposing anyone would ever want to do that.

  She made salmon salad for a late lunch—canned salmon, chopped onions, sweet pickles, and mayo—and didn’t have enough energy left over to slice bread, so she ate it out of the bowl with a fork, curled up on the couch and feeding herself blindly as she looked out the window. It was a gray day, which matched her mood. The previous day’s gruesome sights lingered unpleasantly before her mind’s eye.

  She had disliked Talia Macleod on sight, but she wouldn’t wish something like this on her, or on anyone. Except maybe Louis Deem, and he was already dead, and to be perfectly honest she would have been wishful of rather more dismemberment about his person than Macleod had suffered.

  She checked herself guiltily. This was no subject for humor, no matter how backhanded. She put bowl and fork into the sink, donned gear, said “Let’s take a ride” to Mutt, and headed for town.

  Her first stop was Bingley Mercantile, where she loaded up on three hundred dollars’ worth of staples: flour, sugar, coffee, tea, eggs, pilot bread, Velveeta, peanut butter, grape jelly, canned milk, canned vegetables, a case of Spam, another of canned corned beef, a mixed case of Campbell’s soup, salt, pepper, garlic powder, toilet paper, Ivory soap, dish soap, clothes soap, a packet of disposable razors, Tylenol, Neosporin, some Band-Aids, a box of assorted candy bars, a bag of peppermints; and at the last minute she tossed in half a dozen magazines, including a new Playboy and a new Penthouse, on the theory that foldout company was better than no company at all.

  “Point of order,” Cindy said when she rang up Kate’s purchases. Kate ignored the reference—et tu, Cindy?—and offered a bland stare and no explanation of her purchases as punishment.

  She left the store secure in the knowledge that in approximately four minutes and twenty-three seconds the rumor that Kate Shugak had turned lesbian would be circulating the Park on the Bush telegraph. It might even have gone out on Park Air, but for the fact that Bobby Clark had the best of all possible reasons to know that it wasn’t true. Not that that would stop him laughing like a hyena about it, also on the air.

  Be worth something to see Jim Chopin’s expression when he heard it.

  She loaded the small mountain of purchases in the trailer of her snow machine and headed out for Tikani. She made good time up the river beneath gray clouds heavy with moisture, presaging a big dump of snow. When she got close to the village she slowed down and approached with caution, but it was as deserted as it had been three days before. She nosed the machine up over the bank and stopped in front of Vidar’s house. A wisp of smoke trailed from the chimney. The woodpile didn’t look any taller than it had the last time she was there. She unloaded the trailer, piling everything against the door as quickly and as quietly as she could.

  She turned the snow machine around, banged on Vidar’s door with a heavy fist, hopped on, and hit the throttle, Mutt loping easily beside her. As slow as Vidar moved, they’d be out of sight by the time he got to the door. He’d have a pretty good idea who’d left him the supplies, but she didn’t want to put him in the position of having to thank her. It’d just make them both cranky.

  She spent the rest of the daylight hours stopping at individual cabins scattered along the river between Tikani and Niniltna. Perhaps a dozen in all, some that had been there since the Ark, these occupied by crusty old farts and less frequently crusty old fartettes with a taste for wilderness and solitude, not necessarily in that order and not always both. Most were homes that had begun life as log cabins, and some of them were beginning to sag beneath the weight of accumulated decades, but for the most part they were snug, tight little dwellings, and certainly none of
them were as threadbare as Vidar’s. Other cabins had been built more recently of materials brought upriver by barge or down the road by semi and patiently ferried across the river by skiff one two-by-four at a time, their interiors lightened by Sheetrock and paint, and their asphalt-shingled roofs a substantial contrast to tar-papered slabs weighted with sod.

  They were similar in size, usually one room with a loft, a floor plan that reminded Kate with a pang of her cabin. The smaller the cabin, the less fuel it took to keep warm and the cheaper the winter fuel bill, and since heat rose, the sleeping loft would stay warm longer than anywhere else in the house. A tried-and-true Bush floor plan.

  Everyone who lived on the river practiced subsistence in some form. They hunted for their own meat, they caught their own salmon, and most of them grew their own potatoes, turnips and carrots and cabbage, and tomatoes if they had a greenhouse, and broccoli and cauliflower if they were willing to fight off the moose.

  There were so few of them because the properties they had been built on were some of the very few pieces of private property in the Park, grandfathered in when the Park had been created around them. The Park Service wasn’t happy that they were there, and lost no opportunity to harass the owners on any pretext, improper land use, overstepping or ignoring hunting regulations, driving a snow machine through a designated snow-machine-free area. Every Park rat had been guilty of all of these transgressions at one time or another in their lives. The river rats were the ones who got the most attention, though, probably because they were the easiest to get to.

  These citizens of the river were a varied lot, and some of them had extraordinary hobbies. Take Olaf Christiansen, a retired seiner from Cordova who had stumbled on an entire salmon-canning line in an abandoned cannery near Alaganik. He had disassembled it, brought it upriver by barge, and reassembled it in a lean-to next to his cabin, where he set it to run at one-tenth its normal speed. He was happy to show it to anyone who offered him five bucks, and they’d have a can of air to take home with them as a souvenir.

  Thor Moonin, originally from Port Graham, was an ivory carver of world renown. He made his living on jewelry, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, but he was also a world-class sculptor, with the ability to render anything life-size into an exquisite miniature replica—human heads, castles, and once a miniature Yupik village, complete with dogsleds and mushers. In a shed he had a pile of walrus and mammoth tusks that was taller than he was, and he didn’t mind the kids playing in there, either, although he did draw the line at dogs, because they had a tendency to mistake the tusks for bones.

  Betty Cavanaugh was a retired librarian from Anchorage and a bibliophile who collected Alaskana. She had three separate sets of Captain Cook’s logs in three different editions, and if Kate had been very good and had drunk all her coffee and had eaten all her bread and jam, she was allowed to page through one of the precious volumes during a visit after she washed her hands.

  They liked their privacy, the main reason they lived on the Kanuyaq River, but to a man and a woman they greeted Kate cordially, and without exception they tried to feed her. They did feed Mutt, whose sides tightened up like a drum. Nor were they backward in answering Kate’s questions.

  Yes, they knew the Johansen brothers. There wasn’t anyone on the river who didn’t, and not just by reputation, either. Bad actors, all three of them, couldn’t think where Vidar had gone so wrong. Maybe if Juanita had stayed around, might have been a different story, but probably not, the bad was likely born into them and there was no getting it out. Surprised they hadn’t wound up in jail permanently. Probably only a matter of time.

  Yes, people had been moving out of Tikani, there had been a virtual exodus over the past year, year and a half, people streaming downriver like they were fleeing the bubonic plague. Sure, that could be put down to the Johansen brothers, who had no concept of private property. The older they got, the less neighborly they became, and besides, Kate surely knew they had lost their school as well as their post office. There was only a rudimentary airstrip, barely long enough to let a Super Cub take off, empty, and it had been allowed to go to hell with devil’s club and alders. No reason for anyone to stay.

  Old Vidar was still up there? You don’t say. Well, I’ll be. Ought to drop in on the old goat once in a while. He wasn’t the friendliest person in the world, but shouldn’t ought nobody to be left completely alone year in and year out, wasn’t healthy to have only your own self for company, start talking to yourself, worse, start telling yourself jokes, worse still, start laughing at them. Sure, they’d check on him, they’d set up a schedule. Somebody’d be dropping in on him once a week, or maybe every other week’d be all they could manage, but Vidar’d probably go nuts if he had visitors more often than that anyway. In the dictionary where it said hermit, there was a picture of Vidar Johansen.

  Pity his boys were so useless they couldn’t be trusted to look after him themselves.

  Yes, they’d heard of the snow machine attacks. No, no one had tried anything like that with them. ’Course their river running days were over, and they had plenty to do to keep them safe to home. Failing that, they all had their 12-gauge, or their .30-30, or their .357.

  Could they put a name to whoever was most likely to be the perpetrators of said attacks? Well now, there weren’t no flies on Kate Shugak that they’d ever seen. What did she think?

  Had they heard of Talia Macleod? Why, of course, the mine woman, used to be some kind of famous athlete, wasn’t it? She’d written them a letter saying she’d be stopping by, and then her man had come upriver and dropped off an information packet, along with a raffle ticket, winner got an all-expenses-paid weekend in Anchorage. Geiger, wasn’t it? No, Gallagher, that was it, Gallagher. Eager beaver kinda guy, boomer, seen that type too many times before. Reckoned Macleod wanted their support for the mine, and they were all looking forward to seeing what she was willing to offer in exchange.

  They were genuinely shocked when Kate told them of Macleod’s death, and not a few of them were more worried when she left them than when she had arrived, for which she was sorry. It was better to put them on the alert than to leave them in ignorance of the event, though, and she promised that when the killer was identified and arrested, she would let them know.

  She headed for Niniltna after dark with the uneasy feeling that Park rats who lived on the river were getting out the gun oil and the ammunition all the way back to the Lost Chance Creek Bridge.

  She pulled up at the post at eight that evening, noting evidence of a great many tracks in the snow in front. Only Jim’s snow machine remained. She turned off the engine and got off, a little weary. Mutt took this opportunity to stretch her legs and vanished in the direction of the airstrip. There was a colony of rabbits denned up in a clearing in back of George’s hangar.

  Kate went inside. Maggie had already left for the day. “Jim?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and she went into his office.

  He was stretched out almost horizontally in his chair, his feet up on the desk and his head on the windowsill. He had his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest and he looked like he was about to be carried out of the office feetfirst to have prayers sung over him for the repose of his eternal soul. “Hey,” Kate said.

  He opened one eye, and closed it again. “Hey.”

  She sat down. “How awful was it?”

  His chest rose and fell. “Could have been worse. Larry King could have shown up.”

  Kate winced. “Really?”

  “Really.” He opened the eye again. “Where you been?”

  She told him. When she finished they sat there, silent, for a while. Eventually he uncrossed his feet and set them down on the floor, regaining the vertical with a mumble and a groan. His eyes looked red, as if he’d been rubbing them a lot. “You?” she said.

  He gave his scalp a vigorous scrub with his fingertips and then tried to smooth down the resulting haystack. “I got the body off to the lab. I just talked to Brillo, and while h
e’s going to do the usual, he says what we saw is pretty likely what we got.”

  “Was she the intended victim, though?” Kate said.

  Jim raised one shoulder. “Maybe, maybe not. Everybody uses the creek after it freezes up to get back and forth to the school. If the killer really was aiming for Talia, he was taking a hell of a risk that he’d get somebody else.”

  “Mine related, you think?”

  Again the shoulder. “Lot of people not loving the idea of that mine, Kate.”

  “I know,” she said. “But to the point of murder?”

  “Mac Devlin,” he said. “At the trailer out at Suulutaq, from a distance that argues they might maybe have been shooting at anyone working for Global Harvest who happened to be there. And now Talia Macleod, Global Harvest’s mouthpiece in the Park, lately to have been seen pretty near everywhere in it, promoting said mine.”

  “Same guy, then.”

  He nodded. “That’s my thought. Too much propinquity not to be.”

  “I’m taking your Word of the Day calendar away.”

  He gave a tired smile. “How the river rats taking it?”

  “In the immortal words of Brendan McCord, I left everyone mobilizing for Iwo Jima.”

  “Great,” he said. “We need more bodies, ’cause it’s not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already.”

  “They have a right to protect themselves, Jim,” she said quietly.

  “I know.” After a brief pause, he said, “So. The Johansen brothers?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

  He looked at her. “You figured them for the attacks.”

  “Since Louis Deem’s dead, yeah,” she said. “But . . .”

  “What?” he said as she didn’t continue. “I like that scenario. On any other day, so would you.”

  “Murder?” she said, and shook her head. “It’s convenient, the mine as a motive, Park rats with a grudge, but I’m just not feeling it.”