Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  He would like to talk to you first, Frau Shugak." Frau, Kate thought.

  What, it was written on her forehead that she was about to take a permanent live-in mate? "It's Kate, Berg," she said.

  Berg held the door open for her with a quaint little bow that spoke of early and intensive training on the part of a pair of very old-fashioned parents.

  "You're taking the Cessna?" Kate said in surprise.

  "It's faster," George said. "I'll be back that much quicker. And Demetri can do any spotting you need done better in the Cub." "True enough,"

  Kate said, but still, she wondered. It wasn't like George to burn gas that fast for the benefit of a dead man, especially when it would have been so easy to pull the rear seat from the Cub and fit Fedor's body into the vacant space remaining with his legs extending into the tail, or under the front seat for that matter.

  Instead, George had taken the shotgun seat and the seat behind it out of the Cessna and strapped Fedor, the blue tarp duct-taped around him now, to the floor in the vacant space.

  Of course, it could mean only that George was anxious to get back to Senta as fast as possible, but he put that thought to rest with his next words. "Turbulence," he said, nodding at the horizon. "I want all the power I can get."

  Kate looked, and was not pleased at what she saw. A thick band of gray was lying on the southeast horizon, investing the otherwise limpid blue sky with an air of approaching menace. She was even less pleased to realize that she had been so preoccupied she hadn't noticed it first.

  George climbed into the Cessna and paused, one hand on the open door.

  "I'm going to take off and circle overhead while I call Flight Service in Kenai for a forecast. You fire up the radio on the Cub and I'll relay it to you."

  "Okay."

  George slammed the door and started the engine. Kate stepped back, almost bumping into Gunther, and behind him, Berg and Senta, all with wistful expressions on their faces. The wistfulness was more for the fact that they weren't on the plane going back to Anchorage than for Fedor's death, or so Kate thought. And wasn't it interesting who hadn't shown up to see Fedor off? Not Hendrik, not Klemens, not even a ceremonial appearance by his boss, Dieter, who evidently didn't give a damn what anyone thought, he wasn't rolling out of bed at this hour for anyone.

  The propeller roared into life and the Cessna taxied down to the foot of the runway and turned. Kate went to the Cub and climbed in as the Cessna took off behind her. The radio came immediately to life, and in a few minutes George was relaying the forecast. It wasn't good. Kate signed off and climbed out. "Okay, guys, let's head back to camp."

  She led the way into the yard, Mutt trotting ahead. "Folks? Folks, could you listen up, please?" She waited until they had gathered around, all of them keeping a safe distance from Mutt.

  Kate looked for Hendrik but he wasn't there. "Some body go get Hendrik," she said. "What cabin was he in last night?" She knew better than to look at Berg or Senta, but from the corner of her eye she saw Berg blush. Senta looked supremely unconscious, a layer of invisible, impermeable armor between her and everyone else there, possibly between her and everyone else in the world. The reason she and Dieter disliked each other so much, Kate thought, was because they shared the same brand of arrogance, although Senta just might have an edge. Kate was reminded of a line from an old blues song: "Ain't nobody's business but my own."

  Something like that. Senta said all that and more without once opening her mouth.

  "Come on, folks, this is no time to be shy. Where did Hendrik sleep last night?"

  Berg mumbled something that could have been, "He was with me."

  No one very carefully looked at Senta. "Gunther?" Kate said. "Go find Hendrik."

  Gunther, still young enough to take orders without question, all but saluted and trotted off to find Hendrik. They waited, listening to him bang on doors and call Hendrik's name. Ten minutes later he panted up, breathless. "He's not in camp," he said. He looked worried.

  Kate remembered Hendrik's swollen eyes from the night before, his air of barely restrained panic and above all his fear, and knew a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. "Anybody see him this morning?" She looked from face to face, Dieter polishing his Merkel, Eberhard cleaning his Weatherby, Berg wolfing down a second heaping plate of scrambled eggs.

  Hubert and Gregor were helping Demetri clean up, although they both seemed to be more hindrance than help around even a camp kitchen.

  Gunther stood almost at attention, as if waiting for more orders.

  Klemens sat apart, avoiding eye contact, nursing a mug of coffee. Senta was filing her nails, two-inch talons enameled a brilliant red the same shade as her lipstick.

  No one said anything, and the pit in Kate's stomach grew colder. "This is not good, people. We're going to have to go look for him." "Why?"

  Dieter demanded with what looked like genuine impatience. "We want to hunt. Hendrik is lost, so what? Let him find himself. Let's go."

  "Not until the whole party is present and accounted for," Kate said.

  She would deal with George's hunting ban after Hendrik had been found.

  She watched with detached interest as his face turned a brick red. No, Dieter wasn't used to being contradicted, and he didn't take it well when he was.

  Well, hell, as George and Jack and even Old Sam had pointed out, he was a paying customer. "Look, Dieter, I'm not saying this out of capriciousness, this is something we have to do."

  Dieter looked confused.

  "She's not saying we need to do this just to piss you off," Jack translated. His tone was deceptively amiable.

  "This is something we have to do," Kate repeated. "Hendrik doesn't know his way around the Bush any better than you do. Maybe he went exploring.

  Fine. But he didn't tell anyone where he was going, when he left or when he'd be back. He could be lost. He could be hurt.

  We--" she indicated the guides "are responsible for his safety, the same way we are responsible for yours."

  The same way we were responsible for Fedor's, they were all thinking.

  "We have to find Hendrik, and we have to find him now, before he gets into trouble. You can help, or you can stay here in camp. I'd prefer that you help, because the more pairs of eyes on the job the better chance we have of finding Hendrik fast." Also, she thought, because if even one of them decided not to help, one of the guides would have to stay with them to see that they didn't wander off in their turn, and that was one less experienced tracker on the trail.

  To Kate's surprise, everyone volunteered. They had a search party organized in half an hour, each group led again by a guide. Dieter and Eberhard were with Kate, Hubert and Gregor with Old Sam, Gunther and Klemens with Jack and Senta and Berg with Demetri. They split into two groups, one walking up the runway and the other up the creek bank, spread out but no one out of earshot of anyone else. They began their search at the foot of the airstrip, where the Nakochna flowed into the Kichatna, and walked toward the distant outline of Blueberry Ridge.

  They found Hendrik in less than twenty minutes, but by then he was already far beyond any help they could give him.

  Impaled on the bare limb of a fallen cottonwood spanning the creek, he was very, very dead.

  TEN.

  I'm starting to feel like we're marooned on Ship-Trap Island. kate's party had been toiling up the runway. Jack's shout brought them crashing through the undergrowth that lined the bank of the creek, to skid to a halt on the loose gravel of the creek bed itself. In the water a few late hum pies switched their scraggly tails in a feeble attempt to move upstream. They wouldn't make it. They would die here, and wash up on the bank, fodder for the eagles roosting overhead.

  Two of the eagles were immature, brown in color, slightly smaller in size than the two roosting above them, whose white heads gleamed in the sunlight and who were probably the parents. All four had their chins tucked into their feathery chests, great yellow beaks matching the talons clutching the limbs of the t
rees. Motionless, too far away to see if their eyes were open, they could have been asleep. They probably weren't.

  Kate let her eyes travel slowly back down, until they rested on Hendrik.

  He had fallen backward on the trunk of the cottonwood, which was polished smooth and white from the water of the creek. The limb that pierced his heart was three feet long, slender and sharp.

  Too sharp, Kate thought on first sight.

  Jack, who was nearer the body, came to the same conclusion, and swung around, blocking the view. "Demetri, Old Sam, take these folks back to camp. Kate, you stay." "He is my employee," Dieter said, shaken but determined to establish his authority. "I'm staying." "Nope, Dieter, you're going," Old Sam said, and grabbed the president and chief executive officer of the multinational corporation known as DRG by the upper arm and hustled him willy-nilly up the bank and into the bushes.

  Demetri looked at Eberhard. Eberhard met Demetri's eyes, turned to see Kate and Jack watching the two of them, gave a small shrug and followed Dieter and Old Sam up the bank.

  The rest of the group complied without demur, pale faces and wide eyes indicating a haste to put the dreadful scene behind them. Kate turned her back on them; later, when she wanted to know where everyone was and what they had been doing and when they had been doing it, she would be watching them very closely indeed. But not now.

  "Guard," she told Mutt. She didn't want anyone sneaking up behind her.

  Mutt's ears went up, and in a graceful leap she gained the bank of the creek and slid into the underbrush, her dappled gray coat blending seamlessly with the branches and leaves, invisible except to someone who knew she was there. Mutt was better than a security camera and an alarm system any day.

  "Actually," Jack said, "the real reason I want to move in with you is that I want the dog and I don't think I can get her any other way."

  They turned to face the creek and regarded the body in silence for some minutes. Finally Jack stirred and said, "I'm starting to feel like we're marooned on Ship-Trap Island."

  "Huh?" He sighed. "Never mind. Just call me Rainsford." It took her a minute. "Oh. The Most Dangerous Game?" He nodded. "So who's Colonel Zaroff?"

  "We'd better find out," he said, his voice bleak. "Fast." "Agreed," she said. "You see anything in the way of tracks?"

  He shook his head. "The gravel's all churned up from my search party.

  It's been dry lately, so as long as you didn't wade in the creek you weren't going to track a lot of mud around."

  "Let's look at his feet."

  "Okay."

  They squatted, looking at the bottoms of Hendrik's shoes--thick-soled hiking boots, so new the spaces between the treads were still relatively free of sand and dirt. "Pretty clean," Jack said.

  They stood up again. "You think that point was sharpened?" she said.

  "It's possible. First thing I thought when I saw it." "Me, too." He sighed. "You want to finish that story you started to tell me this morning? Something about bumping into Hendrik on the way back from the John last night?"

  "Yeah." Kate leaned forward and tried to flex Hendrik's foot. It wouldn't budge. "Rigor's fully developed." She looked at her watch.

  "So, what, six to twelve hours ago."

  Jack raised Hendrik's foot and pushed back the cuff of his pants.

  "Lividity's fully developed, too. What time is it?"

  "Ten o'clock."

  Jack pulled the pants leg back into place and set Hen drik's leg down gently. "What is it, fourteen hours before the body temp falls to the ambient temperature?"

  "More like eighteen to twenty."

  "Well, he's cool, but not cold yet. It hasn't frozen overnight yet, has it?"

  Kate shook her head. "Not even close. It's been an unusually warm fall."

  She looked to the west. The bank of gray had crept higher in the sky, high enough to be seen, barely, over the treetops. "That could change with the storm."

  "Uh-huh." Jack followed her eyes. "Nasty." He looked back at the body.

  "So, we've got a time of death roughly anywhere between ten last night and four this morning."

  "Yeah. I was probably the last one to see him alive."

  "Next to last."

  "Right." "What did he say?" "Not much," Kate said. "We heard a noise. It was only the porcupine that lives under the garage, but it spooked Hendrik and he took off."

  "What did he want to tell you?" "He said Dieter had Klemens kill Fedor because of the lawsuits."

  "The lawsuits?" Jack's brow creased. "You mean the legal action being taken against DRG for unfair trade practices?"

  "He didn't elaborate. He didn't have time. We can't leave him here, Jack."

  He looked at her, an eyebrow raised. "And this from the woman who reamed me out for letting Fedor be moved?"

  Kate pointed. "There are four eagles sitting in that cottonwood, just waiting for us to walk away. They must be too stuffed with salmon to fly or they would have been on him already. I haven't seen a bear yet but I'd bet everything I own there is one inbound right now."

  "And the troopers?"

  "There's a pad of paper back at the lodge. We'll write everything down."

  She snapped her fingers. "I'm an idiot. Every one of those Germans has his own personal Leica. Gunther's is a little automatic, isn't it? I'll be right back."

  She headed down the trail to the lodge, where she found everyone sitting around the dead campfire in morose silence. When asked, Gunther produced his camera and voluntarily offered extra film. She took both, along with a handful of gallon Ziploc bags.

  She found Jack standing on the bank where the top of the cottonwood deadfall had landed, scrutinizing the ground. At her look he shook his head. "No. Some impressions of footprints, but nothing definite, and we've all been doing a lot of walking up and down this trail. You get it?"

  She held up the camera. "And extra film."

  "Is it a point and shooter, or do we have to fiddle with f-stops?"

  "Point and shooter with a built-in flash."

  "Better and better. Shoot some from down there first. You got anything for scale, for close ups of the wound?"

  Kate pulled out her trusty Swiss army knife. "Here. Try this. It's almost exactly three and a half inches long." "And bright red," Jack said approvingly. "It'll show up well. I believe you've done this before, Kate." "I believe I have," Kate said.

  "You're lighter, you get up here on the trunk and take the pictures of the body."

  "I've always loved how you save the best jobs for me."

  "It's nice working with you again, too, Shugak."

  It didn't matter that the creek was no longer very full or very wide.

  Kate hated getting her feet wet. She stepped very carefully onto the log.

  Hendrik lay in a splayed position, his head lolling back, his sightless eyes staring at the sky, mouth open, arms extended, fingers slightly curled, legs spread. All his body weight was suspended from the tree limb driven through his body, although he had not slid all the way down the limb to the trunk, giving the eerie impression that he was floating a foot above the log. "The count, with a stake through his heart," Kate said. "Who saw him first, Jack?" "I did," Jack said.

  She looked at him. "Poor baby."

  He managed a smile, faint but there. "I did kinda clutch for some garlic, there at first."

  "Must be a knot or something holding him up." "I thought that myself,"

  Jack said. "We'll see when we get him off it." "Goody," Kate said. She took a delicate step forward, another, until Hendrik's crotch impeded her forward movement. She leaned down to place her knife next to the wound, leaning precariously to one side to avoid poking herself in the eye with the pointed end of the stick impaling Hendrik. The blood on it was dried brown. So was the blood staining his wound and shirt. She stepped back and began shooting again, using up the roll of film in the camera and a second roll as well. When she was done, she pocketed her knife once more, removed the second roll of film from the camera and hande
d both to Jack.

  "A big man could do it," Jack said, buttoning a vest pocket over the rolls of film and frowning at the scene. "Look." Jack demonstrated with his hands on Kate's shoulders. "They're walking along the bank, Hendrik in front, whoever behind. They get to the log, with the branch. Whoever says something to make Hendrik turn to face him, Whoever shoves Hendrik backward and the sharp end of the stick pierces Hendrik's torso."

  Kate, dangling from his hands, said, "I get it, I get it."