Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “I was at the Roadhouse the night she was killed,” Harvey said. “Ask Bernie if you don’t believe Iris. Ask Old Sam.”

  “You know how to drive a snow machine,” Kate said as if she didn’t hear him. “You know the way to Double Eagle. I’m sure you must have a few spools of monofilament lying around here somewhere.”

  “Ask the aunties,” he said, “they were there. There’s no way I could have left the Roadhouse and killed her and gotten back in time to come home with Iris.”

  “And he didn’t leave,” Iris said fiercely. “Instead of wasting your time harassing us, why don’t you go find the real killer?”

  Kate looked at Jim and raised an eyebrow. Jim got to his feet. “All right, Harvey. We’ll check your alibi. Don’t leave the Park until you hear from me, okay?”

  “How dare you—” Iris started to say, and Harvey grabbed her knee. “Don’t, Iris.” He looked up at Jim and nodded. “Okay.”

  Kate stood up and looked at Harvey’s bent head until he felt it and looked up. “I want to know what Global Harvest hired you for, Harvey. The board’s going to want to know, too. And when they hear about it, so are the shareholders.”

  “We can own stock in them if we want to!” Iris said shrilly. “It’s none of your business! Who are you, Kate Shugak, to be asking? You live halfway to Ahtna in a house you didn’t even pay for! You get a job you don’t even know how to do, and instead of learning how, you run around poking your nose into other people’s business! Poking and prying, that’s all you know how to do!”

  “Nice seeing you again, Iris,” Kate said, and followed Jim to the door. “Harvey, could you step outside for a minute? Board business, Iris. You understand.”

  Kate pulled the door shut firmly in the face of Iris’s spluttering, and said bluntly, “You and Macleod were awful friendly at the board meeting in October, Harvey. Anything you want to tell us about that?”

  He tried to bluster his way out of it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate. I’m a married man.”

  She looked at him. Jim stayed quiet.

  Harvey’s face reddened, and he cast an apprehensive look over his shoulder at the closed door. “Okay, maybe, once. It was just—It just happened one time when I was in Ahtna meeting with—” Too late he caught himself.

  “Meeting with Macleod?” Kate said. “And maybe somebody else from Global Harvest?”

  He stared at her, trapped.

  She looked at Jim, who shrugged. “Think Iris is going to change her story?”

  “She might if she knew Harvey’d been screwing Macleod. Iris can get a little proprietary.”

  Jim didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  “Jesus!” Harvey said in a whisper, casting another agonized glance over his shoulder. “You can’t do that, Kate! Besides, I keep telling you, I didn’t do it! And besides,” he said, a sudden flash of intelligence piercing his panic, “why would I kill her if I was sleeping with her?”

  “Good question,” Kate said back at the post.

  “It’s too good an alibi not to be true,” Jim said.

  “But you’ll check anyway.”

  He nodded. “I’ll check. In the meantime, you’ve got work to do.”

  “Really. Work for which I will be paid?”

  She went directly to the airstrip, where she commandeered George and his Cessna, and flew to Cordova, where she tracked the mayor down at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Elks Club. He paled when he saw her but he didn’t object when she beckoned him out of the room. Lacking a better option, she barred them in the men’s room and said point-blank, “Were you sleeping with Talia Macleod?”

  He gulped and lost color but said baldly, “Yes.”

  She appreciated the no-frills reply. She appreciated further that he made no apologies and no explanations, and dealt with him more gently than she might have otherwise.

  The affair had been short-lived, beginning the day of Talia’s first visit to Cordova as the local rep for Global Harvest. The mayor, a tall fair man with blue eyes and a pink complexion, attractive but not overwhelmingly so, said that it amounted to half a dozen encounters over a couple of months, and faded out mostly from lack of opportunity and, Kate suspected, his own fear of discovery.

  He’d been in Cordova at a basketball game the night Talia was killed in Double Eagle, accompanied by his wife and two youngest children. His oldest child, a son, was the star point guard for the Wolverines’ varsity team.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Kate said, and opened the door to the very irritated man who had been thumping on it for the past five minutes.

  She went directly to the high school and spoke to a large, fair woman with flyaway blond hair and china blue eyes with the thickest, longest lashes Kate had ever seen. Chris confirmed that there had indeed been a varsity home game that night and that the mayor—and his wife—had been in the audience. Indeed she, Chris, had been in the same section of the bleachers, one row up, and had said hello to the mayor’s family as they had come in.

  Kate went to the Club Bar, where she found George simultaneously wolfing down a serving of fish and chips and hitting on the waitress. She interrupted this budding romance without compunction, and heard about it all the way to Ahtna, landing there as the last light leached from the sky.

  They spent the night at the Lodge—any excuse for one of Stan’s steak sandwiches—and were at the door of Costco when it opened the next morning. They sought out the manager, a short, square man with a twinkle in his brown eyes that complemented a broad smile, and a bushy crop of wayward hair that was graying at the temples.

  Yes, he had heard of Talia’s death, a shame, a young woman of so much talent and promise. Yes, he said, they had had a relationship, brief, mutually enjoyable, nothing serious. He’d been in Ahtna at work the night she had died. Kate checked with the staff at the store, who corroborated his statement. He was unmarried, he told her three or four times, and let her go with regret and a complimentary wedge of Cambozola cheese and a box of Bosc pears, enjoining her to drop by when she was next in town.

  “I like the way you interrogate a suspect,” George said when she loaded the loot in the back of the Cessna, but then he’d been doing some shopping of his own and the back of the Cessna was full.

  They touched down on the airstrip in Niniltna at two o’clock that afternoon. Kate drove directly to the post, where Mutt, who hated being left behind, got up from her spot on the floor next to Jim’s chair just so she could flounce around in a circle and thump down again with her back pointedly to Kate. And then she farted.

  Jim reached behind him and opened a window. It must have been ten degrees outside, but it was necessary. “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Kate said. “Mayor and manager both had affairs with Macleod. Mayor and wife have the same rock-solid alibi, son’s basketball game, confirmed. Manager, single, was working that night, also confirmed.”

  Jim nodded. “It figures. They know if she was sleeping with anyone else?”

  “I asked. The mayor said probably, the manager said maybe. It doesn’t sound to me like anyone in pants was safe from Talia Macleod, married, single, old, young. Anything here?”

  “Nothing new,” he said.

  He was a little tight-lipped. Kate could choose to believe it was because of her tone in speaking of Talia Macleod, who’d at least had the good taste to hit on him, too. She didn’t say anything though, because she’d been where he was. The longer a murder went unsolved, the less likely it was ever to be solved. Practicing police officers hated mysteries. They especially hated mysteries that involved public figures.

  “I’m for home,” she said. “Don’t be late, something special for dinner tonight.”

  CHAPTER 25

  When he walked in the door there was a large plate with a wedge of some gooey blue cheese and a mound of toasted, salted walnuts, accompanied by a bowl of pears. There were napkins and paring knives at each place setting.

  “No meat?” Jim said.


  “Trust me,” Kate said, and raised her voice. “Dinner!”

  Johnny ambled down the hall and flopped into his chair. “What’s this?”

  “Cheese and fruit and nuts,” Kate said. “Trust me.”

  Both of her men behaved as men will do and grumbled and whined and wrinkled their noses and shuffled their feet and implored the gods to explain why she was trying to starve them to death, but in the end plate and bowl were both empty.

  “Okay, nice appetizer,” Jim said, “what’s for dinner?” He ducked out of the way of the thrown napkin as Johnny snickered.

  “Oh well, if you insist,” Kate said, and went into the kitchen and pulled a moose burger meatloaf and roast potatoes out of the oven, loftily ignoring the cheering section.

  “You know,” Jim said, sitting back from the table after the second course had likewise been cleared away, “this case is lousy with motive. What it lacks is evidence. Well, except for the body.”

  Johnny watched and listened, his eyes following the conversation from one face to the other and back again.

  Kate nodded. “Talia could have had other lovers.” He gave her his patented shark’s grin, and unreasonably reassured, she said, “And much as I hate to say it, I think our killer is a Park rat. There are no strangers in town unaccounted for in the witness statements.”

  Johnny looked at Kate and opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

  “My question is, do we still think the same person killed Mac as killed Talia?”

  “Been thinking about that,” Jim said. “What did they have in common? Global Harvest. Mac hated Global Harvest for ripping him off. But Talia was Global Harvest’s point man in the Park. I don’t know, Kate, if Talia had died before Mac, Mac would have had the hell of a motive for killing her.”

  “I don’t see that,” Kate said, frowning slightly. “Anyone could have told you that Mac was always a guy with an eye to the main chance. He was hoping to get more money out of Global Harvest for the Nabesna. Why would he kill the goose he was hoping would lay him a golden egg?”

  “By the way, I heard from the crime lab as I was leaving the post today. Howie’s rifle didn’t fire the bullet that killed Mac Devlin.”

  “Really. What a shame.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Or something like it.” He paused. “What I’d like to do is charge him with the murder of Louis Deem.”

  Kate looked at him. “Are you going to?”

  “I said what I’d like to do. Louis was killed with a shotgun, and I didn’t get enough evidence at the scene even to guess at how tall the perp was. Let alone who he was.”

  “There’s the tire print at the scene. You matched it to Howie’s truck.”

  “Yeah, but as Howie, the little weasel, points out, there isn’t a Park rat who doesn’t leave his keys in the truck when he gets out. Doesn’t matter if it’s at the store, the post office, the café, the Roadhouse, the school, home.”

  Kate remembered taking the key of her snow machine with her when she’d stopped to see Vidar. One time in how many years? Maybe her lifetime?

  “Anyone could have driven off in his truck. And the tire track alone won’t make a conviction, as Judge Singh was pleased to tell me.”

  “She wasn’t pleased,” Kate said.

  Jim, a little ashamed of himself, said, “I know. I’m just—”

  “I know,” Kate said.

  “Kate?” Johnny said.

  “And I told you, Howie’s reneging his confession all over the place anyway.”

  “And the aunties? What was the story they told you?”

  “Pretty much the same one they told you,” Jim said, unsmiling. “To a woman, they are shocked, shocked at the very idea of such a thing. Auntie Balasha says Howie must be mistaken, and she bawls when she says so.” He shuddered. “Auntie Edna says he’s full of shit. Auntie Joy says he was such a handsome little boy, she can hardly look at him without smiling at the memory.”

  “And Auntie Vi?”

  “Auntie Vi told me to tend to my business and the aunties would tend to theirs.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it just a story, then? Howie made it up?”

  Jim thought of Bernie. “I don’t know, Kate. I wish I did.”

  “Kate!”

  They both looked at Johnny in mild surprise. “There’s no need to shout, kid,” Kate said. “Something on your mind?”

  Now that he finally had the floor, Johnny seemed reluctant to talk.

  “Spit it out,” Kate said. “Van’s not pregnant, is she?”

  Johnny blushed beet red. “No! No, it’s nothing like that. Jeez, Kate.”

  “Sorry,” Kate said, sounding less than repentant. “What’s up?”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time,” Johnny said, and again seemed incapable of saying more.

  “You’re flunking physics,” Kate said.

  “No, Kate, stop it! It’s that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “That guy, Gallagher.”

  This was so far removed from the topic at hand that Kate was at first wholly at sea. “Huh? Who?”

  “The new guy?” Jim said.

  “Yeah, or he was last fall, anyway,” Johnny said. “He showed up in September. Van and I ran into him in Ahtna.”

  Kate sat up. “When did you and Van run into him in Ahtna?”

  He looked at her, caught off guard. “I . . . I . . . it was after we brought the truck home.” He could see the thunderheads darkening and he cringed.

  “You skipped school,” she said in a level voice.

  His own voice was very small in reply. “Yes.”

  “And you went to Ahtna without permission.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you took Van with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is Johnny Morgan, prepare to die,” Jim said in a fake Spanish accent.

  Johnny swallowed hard and risked another look at Kate. “I know you’re mad, Kate, but we need to talk about that later. The thing is, I know this guy.”

  “We all know him now, Johnny,” Kate said. “Well, it’s not like he’s a fixture, but we’ve all met him by now. He didn’t run screaming at the first snow, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s see if he makes it through the whole winter.”

  “Kate!”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Kate bent her head but Jim could see the corners of her mouth indent. Johnny would pay for skipping school, but that would be later, and she did so love giving the kid a ride.

  “I know him,” Johnny said again. “I rode with him.”

  That brought Kate’s head up again, all traces of the smile erased. “What do you mean?”

  “On the way here. I rode with him.”

  “From Phoenix? When you hitched home?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kate stared at him out of narrow eyes, long enough to make him want to squirm some more. He didn’t, but it was a near thing. “Did he threaten you? Harm you in any way?”

  “No! No, nothing like that, Kate, I promise.”

  Jim saw Kate’s breast rise and fall on a long, silent sigh. “So you know him. He gave you a ride. He didn’t hurt you. He also didn’t turn you over to the nearest cop shop, which he should have. Although I can’t say, when all’s said and done, that I’m sorry he didn’t.”

  “Me, neither,” Johnny said, with emphasis.

  “So what?” Kate said. “Other than the fact that I should look this guy up and thank him for taking you from—outside Phoenix?—to where?”

  “All the way to Seattle.”

  At that Kate did look impressed. “Wow. Okay, that was a nice big chunk of the journey out of the way.” And a long way out of his mother’s reach. “We owe him, no question. What, you want us to give him some moose? I could make him fry bread. Does he need a job? Or no, wait, he’s got one.”

  “That’s not all there is to it,” Johnny said miserably. “The
re’s something else. Something I should have told you when he first came to the Park.”

  They left Kate’s snow machine in front of the trooper post and walked the rest of the way to Auntie Vi’s. It was full dark and cold with it, and their breath frosted on the air and their boots squeaked on the road no matter how stealthy they tried to be. By contrast Mutt skimmed soundlessly over the snow, drifting in and out of the shadows like a ghost.

  Auntie Vi’s house was on the uphill road between the village and the airstrip, just up from Bingley’s store and just down from the trooper post. It was a sturdy, practical, two-story home that Auntie Vi, a sturdy, practical, and entrepreneurial woman, had built specifically for a bed and breakfast. It was, so far, the only place to rent a room in Niniltna proper, but to be fair, Auntie Vi didn’t short her customers just because they had no choice in the matter. Her mattresses were new, her sheets clean, her pillows soft, and her meals as good or better than what you got at the Riverside Café. There was a common room with squashy couches and chairs, a television and a DVD player with an extensive library of films, a bookshelf full of books, a pile of board games, and a desk.

  “How many people has she got staying there at present?” Kate said, her voice a whisper of sound.

  “I don’t know,” Jim said. “I’m hardly ever here. Have you met Gallagher?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I could feel my Spidey sense tingling. You?”

  “I thought he was bent. No more or less bent than anyone else who comes into the Park, you understand. You know how it is, Kate. Lots of people come to Alaska on the run from something. Wives, cops, job. Traffic. You heard the story Gallagher—do we call him Greenbaugh now?—you heard the story he spun Johnny. Could be true.”

  “You didn’t check him out?”

  Again with the shrug. “No reason to so long as he kept his nose clean in the Park. I’m not one for borrowing trouble. There’s plenty of it already on offer.”