Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  She grinned suddenly. Maybe it did.

  Dieter and Eberhard, both armed, climbed into the first seat behind Demetri. Gunther got into the seat behind them, brown nose as usual never far from Dieter's ass. Senta chose to go with Old Sam, who saw her into her seat with devoted attention to how well her slacks fit.

  She smiled at him in thanks, giving it her all. Old Sam rolled an appreciative eye in Jack's direction. Hubert and Gregor got into the seat behind Senta, and Berg behind them.

  Jack tucked a full pack, coolers of pop and beer and a couple of thermoses into each trailer. "Snacks and drinks," he said. "Enjoy the view. I promise you, it's a beaut."

  There were a few strained but polite smiles. The engines on the four-wheelers turned over and the little caravan rolled out of camp and up to the top of the airstrip. Kate and Jack stood still until the sound of the engines had faded away. She jerked her head toward the creek.

  "Did you notice Klemens?" "Not particularly," Jack said. "Why, what?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know, he looked a little gray around the edges. All of a sudden older and kind of, I don't know, shakier."

  Jack stared at the diminishing cloud of dust retreating up the strip.

  "It's one thing to kill in war, Kate. Usually whoever you're trying to kill is trying to kill you, too, and you can make it out to be a matter of simple self-defense. Besides, you're under orders, sworn to uphold and defend the constitution of whatever your country is from all enemies foreign and domestic. And usually your government has done a pretty good job of demonizing the enemy so that they're hardly human to you anymore." He paused. "It's another thing entirely to kill, either accidentally or in cold blood, in peace time, someone you work with every day." He looked at her. "In my more fanciful moments, I like to think that when you commit a crime as heinous as murder, you lose some part of yourself. Some piece of you is forever broken, some ingredient essential to the composition of your humanity, that one thing that keeps you a step ahead of the apes is irrevocably lost to you, and you can't ever get it back." He paused. "Most perps never know it's gone.

  Some do, though. Klemens would be one of those guys. I'm not surprised he's looking old. He should."

  "Maybe. Probably." Still, Kate was troubled.

  "Let's get those rifles under wraps."

  We'll want to toss the cabins, too."

  He grinned. "Great minds think alike. Although I doubt these bozos packed in a motive for murder with them."

  "Probably not. I still want to look."

  "Agreed. What do we do if Klemens catches us at it?"

  Kate shrugged. "We don't let him." She eyed him measuringly. "What did you give them for snacks?"

  He looked limp with innocence. "Peanut butter on pilot bread."

  "Jack. Shame on you." Kate's voice was shocked. "Feeding someone peanut butter on pilot bread isn't just manslaughter, it's premeditated murder." She knotted a hand in his shirt and hauled him down to her level for a kiss.

  The rifles were easy to find, most of them leaning up against the walls of the cabins with the ammunition stacked neatly on the floor or table beside them. Dieter's Purdeys were in their gray carrying case beneath his bunk. "Where do we put them?" Jack said.

  There was a pile of old burlap gunnysacks in the garage, marked with the faded logo of the Mat-Su Valley Spud Coop and the year 1968. Clouds of dust billowed forth when they were picked up and they smelled of mold, but they were still sound of fabric. Kate filled them with rifles and ammunition and tied off the mouths of the sacks with duct tape. There were six sacks when they were done, fastened together in bundles of two with another length of duct tape.

  Jack regarded the result with satisfaction. "Some people say that the computer is the finest product of human civilization. Others argue that it's the VCR remote, or maybe Ziploc bags. I say it's hundred-mile-an-hour tape. I've seen it secure a splint around a bone, keep the roof on a house during a chinook and the strut of a plane together in the air."

  "I feel like I should start singing the national anthem or something,"

  Kate said, giving the duct tape around the mouth of the last gunnysack a final twist.

  Jack held up a forefinger. "I'm not done. Duct tape, it is said by I forget who, is like the Force. It's light on one side, dark on the other and it binds the universe together."

  Kate groaned. "Are you done now?"

  "There is no finer example of the mind of man at work," Jack proclaimed.

  "Now I'm done."

  A pair at a time, they carried the gunnysacks down to the empty fuel tank next to the runway. There was an access hatch on top of the tank, and after much sweat, swearing and the vigorous application of the largest monkey wrench to be found in the garage, they got it open.

  Jack sniffed. "Smells like diesel."

  "To fuel the generator," Kate said, nodding. "I thought I told you."

  "No, I mean there is probably still some down there on the bottom. All sealed up like this, it hasn't had a chance to evaporate, and even if it had there would still be some residue."

  They were kneeling side by side in front of the hole. He looked at her.

  "So how do you want to do this? You want to just toss them in?" He looked at the case holding the Purdeys.

  Kate looked down into the black well of the tank. "If they are in this tank with the hatch on tight, they can't shoot at us with them."

  "Works for me," Jack said, and didn't even flinch when the first bundle landed on the bottom of the tank, with not exactly a splash but certainly with a sodden sort of splat. The gray case was too wide to fit in and the Purdeys went in one at a time and the case was tossed into a thick stand of alder growing nearby.

  "Okay," Jack said, standing at the foot of the ladder and wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans. "Where do we start?"

  "With Dieter's cabin," Kate said. "And let's do a good job, Jack.

  Eberhard isn't the kind of a guy not to have a second piece for backup."

  "I've always loved the way your mind works," Jack said. "Thank God you never took up a life of crime."

  She remembered thinking much the same thing when she was burgling his ex-wife's house the previous October and flashed him a brazen and totally unrepentant grin.

  His heart skipped a beat. It didn't bother him. He was used to it.

  The cabins were lined up on both sides of the trail paralleling the creek, bisecting the triangle of land between airstrip and creek bed.

  Six of them were in good repair. The seventh was falling into the Nakochna, restrained only by the same length of cable that was holding up a retaining wall built of all the junk George and his procession of lady friends and admirers had hauled from the camp and thrown over.

  There was an old boiler, a ton of toothed gear wheels and other engine parts, what looked like the rusted cylinders off an old steam engine, a dozen truck and tractor tires and other, less identifiable items mixed in with a lot of loose gravel. There were also half a dozen boulders two and four feet across. For now, the current had been balked of its prey.

  "A good effort," Jack said, surveying the scene, "but one heavier than usual snowfall and a warm, fast spring and it's good-bye, cabin. Can you see Klemens?"

  Kate grabbed a branch of an alder and leaned out over the bank, peering up the creek. The bank was ten feet high at this point and Jack winced and looked away as she swayed out over the edge. "Nope."

  "Maybe I should check on him one more time."

  "You've already snuck down there twice, Jack, and he hadn't moved from one time to the next. Let's just keep watch, all right? If we hear him we can duck into the brush." "Fine," Jack said. "It's thick enough. Why doesn't George cut it back here the way he does the yard?"

  "And ruin the berry picking?" Kate said, shocked.

  "Forgive me, I don't know what I was thinking," Jack said, dodging a patch of devil's club at the last minute.

  The cabins were lined up three and four on a side and staggered among the trees and
brush. While no cabin was directly across from the next, neither was it more than twenty or thirty feet from its neighbor, thus satisfying the needs of both privacy and safety. Jack took a moment to admire the care taken in the arrangement.

  "Yeah, yeah," Kate said, "come on."

  Jack muttered something about ferrets and holes and dogs and bones.

  Kate ignored him and led the way into Eberhard and Dieter's cabin.

  "Dieter likes toys," Jack observed, who in five minutes had unearthed a cellular phone, a personal pager and a Game Boy with a color screen loaded with Tetris in 3-D. He tried the phone. It wasn't working. The battery on the Game Boy was dead. There was a selection of tapes, all opera, mostly Wagner with a few Mozart thrown in for variety, or maybe just for Dieter to prove how cosmopolitan he was. Unfortunately, Jack thought with a hidden smile, there was no longer anything available on which to play them. Such a shame.

  There was a Global Positioning System locator, a piece of equipment that worked out its position from triangulation with satellites twenty miles up. This toy did work, flashing their precise latitude and longitude on the digital display, and, when asked, giving the location of the nearest airport, Skwentna.

  "This puppy looks high-end enough to pinpoint our position on the moon,"

  Jack said, not without admiration. "Dieter likes his toys, all right, and he doesn't mind paying top dollar for them, either."

  There was also a handheld computer that told the time in all twenty-four zones, changed deutsch marks into dollars, francs, pounds, lira, ringgits, won, yen and yuan, and had an address book with over three hundred names in it.

  "What the hell's a ringgit when it's at home?" Jack said. He scrolled through the names without recognizing any. "I suppose we wouldn't, unless Dieter has been donating large sums of money to American political parties whose agents' names have been lately headlined in sound bites on the ten o'clock news." "What?" Kate said.

  Jack, seated on Dieter's bunk, looked at her for a pensive moment. "I think the sooner I move to the Park the better. The world is too much with me in Anchorage."

  Boxes of ammunition with RWS markings were stacked haphazardly on the table. Jack tipped the only open one over, spilling out the nickel-plated shells. Kate fished out the round she'd found in the creek.

  "A perfect match," Jack said.

  "Perfect."

  "In the immortal words of Linda Ellerbee, I'm whelmed by your enthusiasm. Hey. What's this?"

  "What?" She peered around him.

  There was a folded sheet of paper in the bottom of the ammunition box, as if someone had dumped the shells, put in the paper and loaded the shells back in on top of it. Jack opened it up and laid it flat on the table. They stood staring down at it.

  It was a letter addressed to Herr Dieter Ulbricht with a logo at the top, and no matter how many times Kate read it, it still said the same thing: interpol, in large black block letters.

  "Interpol?" Kate said, stirring herself to speak. Awed silence was all very well but, really, it was just another law enforcement organization.

  "I feel like I've just wandered into the middle of a James Bond movie."

  It was two sheets long with neatly spaced paragraphs, unfortunately all in German. "Shit," Jack said.

  "Yeah, blueberry bear shit," Kate said, holding the letter down by the corners with the tips of her fingers. "Dieter must have had this on him yesterday. Look. Every paragraph begins with a name, and look at the names." Her forefinger traced down, flipped the page, traced down again.

  Jack whistled. "What do you know, the gang's all here. Eberhard, Klemens, Hendrik, Fedor, Hubert, Gregor, Berg." He flipped back and forth. "But no Senta. Why not, I wonder?"

  She looked up at him. "What does Interpol do, exactly?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know, exactly. It's an international police organization, run out of Switzerland, I think."

  "Can you hire them?"

  "I don't know that, either." He hesitated. "But even if you couldn't--"

  Kate picked it up. "Even if you couldn't, if you were involved in some kind of international conspiracy to commit embezzlement and fraud and evade taxes and dump products, stuff like that, maybe Interpol would come knocking on your door. And maybe you'd be scared enough you were going to lose those seaside frolics with Julia Roberts that you would voluntarily cooperate with the feds, or whatever you call them over there."

  Jack stood still, an arrested look on his face. "You think Dieter's the stooge?" "Jack, you said it. DRG is Dieter's meal ticket, hell, his party ticket. He's not going to let anyone sell it out from under him."

  He nodded once, slowly. "Okay, that makes sense, I guess."

  "Of course it does." She bent back over the letter. "Look here, something written in the margin next to most of the paragraphs. Like Dieter's been rereading it, making notes to himself. Notes on things to clear or incriminate his employees, perhaps? To corroborate evidence given, maybe? Look at all the notes next to Fedor's name."

  Her eyes narrowed. "And isn't this Senta's name next to Berg's, this scribble here?" "In German, who knows," Jack said, adding succinctly,

  "Shit."

  "You're repeating yourself." Kate flipped back to the first page.

  "Nothing next to the paragraph on Eberhard, I see." "He trusts him?"

  Jack suggested.

  "I don't," Kate said flatly.

  "You don't like him," Jack observed. "It's not the same thing."

  Kate ignored this and tapped the letter with a forefinger. "Why not Senta?"

  Jack shook his head. "Beats me." The corners of his mouth quirked up.

  "No reason not to. In my experience the female is always deadlier than the male."

  Kate ignored this, too, and tapped the letter again. "Should we keep it?

  Illegal search and seizure. Inadmissable in court. All that picky constitutional stuff."

  Jack didn't hesitate. "There have been two violent deaths associated with this group. I say we take everything we find that has even the most remote chance of being relevant to those deaths and worry about the legalities later."

  Kate's heart warmed to him. Her man. "Okay." She stuffed the folded paper into a back pocket. She patted it, and said, "I wonder why he didn't just carry it with him? Stick it in his hip pocket?" "Those safari suits don't have hip pockets," Jack said. He held up a hand. "I know, I know, they've got pockets everywhere else. I don't know, Kate."

  He grinned. "Yesterday gave Dieter an object lesson in the wear and tear your average Alaska big-game hunt will inflict on your clothes. Maybe he decided he'd better leave it behind from now on."

  "Maybe."

  "You're also underestimating the paranoid's need for secrecy." "Who says Dieter's paranoid?" "All CEOs are paranoid," Jack said. "Everybody's out to get them, the department heads all want their jobs, the IRS wants their records, their wives want alimony, their stockholders want to hold them accountable." He gave a sharp nod. "Paranoid. Trust me."

  "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, is that it?" Kate looked around the tiny cabin into which they had lately broken and entered. "Lucky we're so normal, right?" She reassembled the shells into their box.

  Dieter's side of that dark little cabin was almost colorful in its disarray, clothes, sleeping bag, comb and brush and toiletries scattered all over the place, dirty clothes stuffed into a garbage bag tossed in a corner, suitcase spilling more clothes onto the floor, flashlight, extra rolls of film, film canisters and their lids, double-A batteries, everything was everywhere in a jumbled mess. Dieter didn't pick up after himself. He didn't have to; usually he had people to pick up after him.

  Eberhard's side of the room looked like a monk's cell by comparison.

  There was a ditty bag with a safety razor, a toothbrush and dental floss in it. There was a towel and a face cloth neatly draped over the towel rod mounted on the wall at the foot of his bed. There was a small suitcase with spare underwear and shirts folded into precise cre
ases inside it. There were two boxes of ammunition for the Weatherby aligned just so on Eberhard's side of the small table. The sleeping bag was lined up precisely on the center of the bunk with the pillow tucked carefully inside the head of the bag.