tomatoes and tossed those in, too, filled one of the empties with water
and added it, thought it over and added two more. The liquid in the pot
barely covered The ingredients. She cleaned the kitchen, waiting for the
pot to boil, and when it did added a couple of cups of macaroni, covered
the pot and turned down the heat. She'd brought another loaf of bread
with her from the cache, and she left that out on the counter, still
wrapped in tin foil.
Jack, who had spent a peaceful afternoon reading his
way through her collection of F. M. Busby, marked his spot in The Long
View and sniffed appreciatively. "Can I help?"
"Nope." He regarded her back with a speculative eye for a moment,
decided against insisting, and reopened his book. Giving the counter a
last wipe with the washcloth, she hung it over the pump and went back to
the files. An hour later she finished reading the last file and sat,
frowning at it. The stew was simmering, a cheerful, bubbling sound, and
the aroma of garlic and onions and moose and caribou filled the house.
Turning the cooker off, Kate set the pot out on the step to cool and
called again for Mutt, in vain. It was still light out but she got a
start on the evening by lighting the lamps, and the room was filled with
a cozy, hissing glow.
Shelves Lined every available inch of all the walls of the cabin except
what backed up the two stoves. Most of the shelves were jammed with
books, old and new, hard covered and paperback, all showing signs of
being read and reread and read again. One of the shelves pulled out to
form a rudimentary desk with stuffed cubbyholes directly behind it. Kate
dragged a chair over from the table and rummaged around until she found
paper and pen. She sat for a moment, thinking, and then bent over and
began to write.
Eyeing her unresponsive back was unproductive and less fun than Rissa
and Bran were having with UET. Jack went back to his book.
At six she brought the stew back in and reheated it. Jack dog-eared his
book and went to set the table. At the first bite of stew he closed his
eyes in momentary ecstasy. "Good," he said indistinctly. "Maybe your best."
They both had seconds and mopped up the juice with hunks of bread torn
from the loaf.
"That was great," Jack said, leaning back with a satisfied
sigh. "I don't know how long it's been since I had moose stew. Too damn
long. No, don't. I'll get it." He smothered a burp and rose to clear the
table. Kate went back to the desk. Filling the dish pan alternately from
the gallon teapot sitting on the wood stove and the water pump, he
washed the dishes, put the remains of the stew into a smaller pot and
put the pot outside. He started coffee, hunted around until he found the
chocolate chips and the walnuts, and made a batch of Toll House cookies,
which pretty much defined the limits of his expertise in the kitchen.
When they came out of the oven, Kate shoved back her chair and stretched
her arms over her head, bending to touch her toes. He gestured with a
plate full of cookies. She moved to the broad, padded bench that ran
around one side of the room beneath the shelves. He brought the cookies
and a mug of coffee, properly doctored. She bit into a cookie and had to
control a grunt of approval. The coffee scalded her tongue on first sip,
and she blew on it to cool it down.
"So what do you think?"
"You never put in enough chips. Chocolate's one of the four major food
groups, you know."
The corners of his mouth twitched, and Kate realized it was the first
time she'd seen them. She decided she liked him without a beard and was
glad it hadn't been covering up a receding chin or pouty lips or buck
teeth.
"What are the other three?" he asked. "What other three?"
He grinned to himself. "The other three major food groups."
"Oh." She pulled herself together and dragged her attention back to her
cookie. "According to Bobby, fat, salt and sugar. All well represented
here, I'm happy to report." He laughed, and she licked chocolate from
her fingers. "No sign of the murder weapon, I suppose?"
He shook his head. "I had half a dozen people go over
the ground from sunup yesterday morning until sundown yesterday night.
Nothing."
"Someone could have been taking a shot at McAniff and missed."
"And someone could have wanted to kill Lisa Getty and stumbled onto what
they in their relative innocence thought was the perfect crime."
Her look was cool but she didn't deny it. She thought of something else.
"Could McAniff have had two rifles?" "No.
"You're sure?"
"I'm not sure of a goddam thing in this case, but we do have an
eyewitness. Becky Jorgensen says not."
"She saw him where, inside the cabin, from another room, for how long,
maybe five seconds max? Watching while he killed her husband? And then
she ran and never looked back." Kate picked up another cookie and held
it. "Maybe he had another rifle outside."
"Clerk at Niniltna General Store says he bought one, and only one, the
day before."
"And the bullets from all the other victims match that rifle?"
"Yes. "But not the bullet that killed Lisa." "No."
"You're sure?"
"Ballistics ran the same check three times. Gamble ran it through CLIS
twice. We're sure."
Jack got up to refill their mugs. She watched him in frowning silence.
"Well?" She jerked her chin at the files. "Has Chopper Jim seen
those?" "He wrote half of them. It's his territory. He was in charge of
the investigation."
"So he knows all this."
"If he's the trooper in charge, why can't he-" "He was sleeping with her."
The generous curves of Kate's mouth compressed together into a thin
line. She held back her first comment, which was profane and futile, her
second, which was physically impossible, and went with her third. "If
that's all it takes to be suspected of murdering Lisa Getty, we can
include half the Park."
"So I hear."
"Who else was in the area that morning?"
"That we know of? Like it says in the files." Jack ticked them off one
by one. "Lottie Getty. Becky Jorgensen. Lyle and Lucy Longstaff, before
they died. Lisa herself. George Perry was also there but he was about
five thousand feet straight up, so I don't know that he counts."
"That's it?" "That's it."
She took another cookie. "What do you want me to do?" He shrugged. "Do
what you do best. Go in, poke around, a nudge here, a shove there.
Pretty soon something will break loose."
Kate felt her temper rise. "Couldn't stay away from me, huh?"
"Not for much longer, no," Jack said. "Missed me that much, did you?"
"More."
"You prick." She rose hastily, banging her shoulder on the shelf
overhead and dislodging a dozen cassette tapes. She turned just in time
to keep the deck from crashing to the floor.
Jack said the only thing a wise man could. "I'm sorry." He stood and
touched her shoulder. She shrugged away and bent down to pick up the
tap
es, taking an inordinate amount of time sorting them into their
correct order and lining them up in a neat, alphabetical row by title.
He read the titles over her shoulder and shook his head admiringly. "You
sure are narrow in your taste in music, Kate."
She stooped to pick up a cassette she'd missed before,
and slid Beethoven's Greatest Hits between k.d. lang and Jake and Elwood
Blues.
"You must go through the batteries," he tried again. Still no reply.
He sighed. "I don't have to tell you the first twenty-four
hours following the crime are the most important."
"No," she said, and he winced away from the deepening roughness of her
ruined voice. "You don't have to tell
don't have to tell you it's been ten days on this one."
"The longer we wait to move, the greater the chance
we'll never find the killer." "Yes."
"As it is, we're probably just going through the motions. The killer's
had too much time to clean up after him- or herself. All they have to do
is sit tight and wait us out." "Yes."
"But we do have to go through the motions, regardless." "Yes.?
He paused, watching her unresponsive back, her quick, deft hands, not
quite so quick and deft as usual, as she rearranged her cassettes.
"You'll do it, then?"
"Don't I always?"
He winced again. If she'd seen it she would have been glad. She sorted
her tapes with a steadier hand, her thoughts a week away and twenty-five
miles down the old railroad bed, in a stand of trees on the edge of a
forty-eight-hundred-foot dirt airstrip. She had known all of those
victims, some of them all her life.
Feeling restless and more than a little guilty, Jack wandered around the
room. Coming to a stop in front of her desk, he looked down at the pad
of paper covered with Kate's writing. Notes highlighting the important
points of the case, he supposed. He wondered what she had made of it.
Glancing over to see her back still turned to him,
he stretched out an exploratory finger to pull the tablet around so he
could read it.
"Stewed tomatoes," he read. "Evaporated milk, green beans, white flour,
whole wheat flour, oatmeal, raisins, dried apricots." It was a grocery
list, a long one, with quantities listed in case lot amounts meant to
last a year. Practical, he decided, was the best word to describe Kate
Shugak. "Four hundred a day," he said out loud.
With an effort, Kate returned to the here and now. "Plus expenses."
He frowned a little. Her voice sounded odd. "You okay?"
"Plus expenses," she repeated. "You got it."
There was a brief pause. "One time, you can't come to see me just to
come see me?"
He shrugged. "Well. As long as you're here."
"I should make you sleep on the couch tonight. "Yeah, you probably
should. Are you going to?"
She swore at him. He laughed.
WHEN Kate killed the snow machine's engine, the resulting silence was
broken once by the distant buzz of another snow-machine engine, a second
time by the faraway yip of a dog. Mutt disdained a reply and jumped down
from the back of the Jag. She looked up at Kate inquiringly, obviously
ready, willing and able to get on with the job. "You look entirely too
smug," Kate told her.
One of Mutt's eyebrows quirked up as if to say, You should talk.
"Go to hell," Kate told her.
A low, amused woof was her reply.
They had stopped in front of a large log cabin with a U.S. flag flying
from a pole mounted on one corner of the roof and a satellite dish
hanging from another. Kate dismounted and went inside.
The man behind the counter looked up. "Hey, Kate." "Hey, Ralph. You
filling in?"
He nodded. "Until they hire somebody permanent. Come rain, come shine,
come sleet, come massacre, the mail must go through." Their eyes met.
"Sorry. You here for yours?"
"All but the bills."
He grinned. "I'll see what I can do. Take me a minute, the mail plane
just came."
"No hurry."
He rummaged through the mass of envelopes large and small, thick and
thin, and she wandered down to the end of the counter and looked behind
it. He raised his head. "Right here?" she said.
His hands stilled. "Yeah. Right here. She shook her head. "Hell of a thing."
"Guy was some kind of a nut." His lips tightened. "I knew Pat Jorgensen
twenty years. He was good people. He didn't deserve to die like that."
Ralph paused. "You could have saved some of the taxpayer's money, out
there on the road."
"So I hear.
"Shame you didn't."
"That's what people keep telling me." Her voice was a soft, torn sound.
Ralph Peabody, burly with a square red face and no hair, looked stolid
but wasn't insensitive. He forbore to say more and resumed sorting
through the envelopes.
"Mind if I go through?" Kate asked, nodding toward the curtained doorway
that separated the tiny post office from the main body of the house.
He gave her a curious look but shrugged. "Go ahead. Becky's still in the
hospital."
"Bill around?"
"Him and Betty are in Anchorage with her."
She pushed aside the curtain, a thin, flowered cotton hanging from a
slender metal rod that upon closer inspection proved to be copper tubing
nailed to the door's molding with carpet tacks, and walked through. She
turned, still holding the curtain back. The doorway framed Ralph's bent
head, the counter and the door of the post office perfectly. The miracle
was that McAniff had not seen and shot Becky as she stood there, a
horrified witness to her husband's murder.
Kate looked closer. There was a large stain on the floor beneath Ralph's
feet. She shut her eyes briefly. She, too, had known Pat Jorgensen, for
longer than Ralph, and yes,
he had been good people, and no, he had not deserved to die like that.
She let the curtain fall and turned. She was standing in the living room
of the log house, a spacious room with an enormous console television
dominating one corner, two worn but comfortable-looking easy chairs
parked in front of it. Across from the stone fireplace sat a flowered
couch long and wide enough for Pat to sleep on with room to spare. There
was a multicolored afghan in clashing neon colors folded neatly over its
back. Becky crocheted, Kate remembered. There wasn't a friend of hers
who hadn't been presented with an afghan in colors bright enough to
guarantee a headache if you looked at it long enough.
A picture window was cut into the wall facing the air strip, with Angqaq
Peak and attendant, acolyte Quilaks rising in the background. Between
the strip and the mountains were the trees, clustered together like
gossips fearing to move out of earshot. Above the trees she could see
wisps of smoke from the chimneys of homes and businesses in Niniltna,
and a large column of steam from the town's electric plant. It must have
looked like shelter and sanctuary to a panicked sixty-four-year-old
woman who had just seen her husband gunned down in cold blood.
Kate stepped to the
main door of the house, which opened off the living
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw Page 6
