Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw

by A Fatal Thaw(lit)

  what was obviously a severe inner struggle, Jack bent his head over his

  plate and continued eating.

  She waited until they finished and, amid thunderous silence, cleared the

  table, washed the dishes and dried them. Reaching for her parka, she

  paused in the doorway. "Now," she said, sweetly malicious, "can I trust

  you two to behave while I'm gone?"

  There was a flood of profanity and at least one solid object thudded

  against the door she hurriedly pulled closed behind her. "Maybe not,"

  she told Mutt, "but boys will be boys."

  Mutt gave a reproving growl and turned to stalk stiffly down the drive,

  disapproval evident in every line of her body. Bloody but unbowed, Kate

  followed.

  She found Johnny Wu the only place he could be, at Auntie Viola's. Her

  aunt rented out her three spare bedrooms (shared bath, included

  breakfast) for the highway-robbery amount of $100 a night during those

  winter months when the Niniltna Lodge was closed. There was nowhere else

  in town to stay, and you either anted up with a smile or you slept out

  in the cold. Kate came in just as he was settling his bill, and from the

  satisfied expression on Aunt Viola's face he had paid in cash. Auntie

  Viola always preferred cash. She inquired if Mr. Wu cared for a receipt,

  and beamed to hear that he did not. The cash vanished into a convenient

  pocket, and she shook Wu's hand heartily and invited his speedy return

  to her establishment. Over his shoulder she caught sight of Kate in the

  entryway, stamping slush from her feet. "Kate!" she said with a wide

  grin. "I didn't know you were in town. This is Mr. Wu, from Outside."

  "No, ma'am, I told you before, I'm from Hawaii. How do," he said to

  Kate, before his eyes widened in

  recognition. "Didn't I buy you a drink yesterday at the Roadhouse?"

  "You sure did, and I thank you," Kate told him. She gave Auntie Viola, a

  short, plump woman with a shrewd twinkle in her brown eyes, a quick

  kiss. "Auntie, could I use your living room? I want to talk to Mr. Wu

  for a minute."

  "Sure, honey, no problem, take your time." Auntie Viola hurried past

  them to open the door into the living room and ushered them inside. She

  hesitated in the doorway, flicking at some imaginary dust on the buffet

  hutch, until Kate assisted her out, closing the door firmly behind her.

  Her business with Wu did not take long and they were both very pleased.

  with each other at its conclusion. Kate even gave him a ride to the

  airstrip on the back of the Jag, turned him over to George Perry

  personally, helped load his bulging duffel bag into the now reassembled

  Cessna and waited until it was off the ground.

  She gave a final wave as it disappeared into the west. When she lowered

  her eyes, her gaze became tangled and caught in the stand of trees at

  the far end of the strip. Their tops clustered together against the

  almost colorless sky, and their trunks hugged the ground, presenting a

  stiff, united front. Her good humor faded and her arm dropped to her

  side. On an impulse she walked forward. All the evidence there was was

  in the state crime lab in Palmer; she'd seen the inventories and the

  results of the tests in Jack's files. There was nothing left to look at

  in the copse that had seen so much blood spilled just ten days before.

  She told herself all this, and kept walking.

  It was another still day, a bare hint of a breeze stirring the air, the

  sun warm on her back. She entered the woods as she had before,

  carefully, silently, respectfully, Mutt leading the way. Much of the

  winter snowpack had melted beneath the onslaught of so many pairs of feet

  over the last days, leaving bare, hard ground still frozen beneath the

  melting slush.

  Kate paused and cocked her head. Voices came from somewhere inside the

  copse. There was a distant, single pop that made her flinch. Low,

  smothered laughter followed. It was not a pleasant sound. Mutt's ears

  went up and, her pulse quickening, Kate pushed her way back between the

  branches.

  Kate caught the limb of a birch across her cheek, a spruce elbowed her

  in the side, a knot of alders tried to trip her up. She fought her way

  in, ducking and weaving, until she came to the heart of the copse. There

  she halted, out of breath.

  A group of half a dozen women stood in a small circle; surprised faces

  turned to look at her. A short, plump brunette held a bottle of

  champagne, the cork out. The rest of the women held glasses filled to

  the brim with golden bubbling liquid. They gaped at her, until the

  brunette asked, a little unsteadily, "Come to join in the celebration,

  Kate?"

  "What celebration, Enid?"

  Enid gestured with the bottle in a way that made Kate realize that the

  celebration had begun at the Roadhouse much earlier in the day, perhaps

  even the previous night. "In memorium." She stumbled over the word, and

  the rest of the group helped her out-"That's right, in

  memorium"-although none of them were in much better shape.

  Kate looked around and realized they were on the site, or very close to

  it, where Lisa Getty's body had been found. Incredulous, she asked, "In

  honor of Lisa Getty?"

  Enid snickered. "Hell no." She topped off her glass with an unsteady

  flourish, emptying the bottle to the last drop. "In honor of Roger

  McAniff, bless his heart, who shot that fucking bitch and killed her

  dead. He got it right one time, right, girls?"

  "Hear, hear," someone said, and someone else said,

  "I'm just sorry it was so quick."

  Kate couldn't find a single unfamiliar face. There was .Enid, Bernie's

  wife; there was Sarah, Pete Kvasnikof's wife; there was Susan Moore,

  Jimmy Bartlett's room mate-for-life; there was Luz Santos, who had been

  engaged to Chuck Moonin; there was Betty Sue Brady, Lee's widow; and

  there was Denise Smithson, whose husband Phil had worked as Lisa's

  deckhand and then got off the boat in Cordova and got on a plane to

  Anchorage and never come back. It was a fairly representative

  cross-section of the Park-tall and short, fair and dark, thin and plump,

  old and young-with nothing in common but their concentrated hatred of

  Lisa Getty. "To McAniff!" Enid said, her glass held high, and "To

  McAniff!" the other women responded. They drank deeply, and when the

  glasses were drained to the last drop, they threw them against the trunk

  of a large fir, to shatter and fall to the ground in a glittering,

  broken shower that mingled with the half-ice, half-slush layer of snow

  until it was impossible to tell where the shards of glass left off and

  the crusty snow began.

  There was `a shout of approval and cheers and congratulatory smacks on

  the back, but the circle did not break and their expressions did not

  ease. They hunched over their hatred, cradling it jealously. It was a

  malignant, ugly thing to see. Kate felt sick, and it wasn't her wound.

  "Ladies, I think you'd better head on home. You're not driving

  yourselves, are you?"

  Enid giggled, and hiccupped. "Hell, no, Bernie took

  all our keys away. We hi
tched a ride in."

  "Have you got a ride home?" That stumped them. "Well," Kate said, "go on

  up to the post office. Ralph'll find somebody going your way."

  Enid shrugged and grinned, pushing a hand of hair

  out of her eyes. "Okay."

  As the circle began to break up, Kate couldn't resist

  saying, "McAniff didn't kill Lisa Getty."

  "What?"

  "The cops tested McAniff's rifle. The bullet that killed

  Lisa Getty came from a different

  She watched them carefully, but once they believed

  her, the response was collectively and, so far as Kate

  could see, completely surprised. Enid was the first to recover from the

  news, and she waved a dismissing hand. "Doesn't matter. Whoever did it,

  did the whole

  Park a favor."

  That seemed to be the general consensus, and the

  women stumbled off, crashing through the trees with

  fine disregard for either environmental preservation or

  personal safety.

  Kate stood where she was, breathing deeply, trying

  to quell her roiling stomach. She had known Lisa was

  disliked among her own sex in the Park, but until today she had had no

  idea just how much. Her skin crawled and

  she wished she could take a bath. She raised her head,

  fixing her gaze on the small patch of sky the treetops

  allowed to show through.

  branch cracked behind her, and she whirled, her

  thumping.

  Mutt's ruff expanded. Kate straightened and put

  calming hand on her head.

  Lottie was rooted in place, as if she had grown there

  among the scrub spruce and mountain hemlock and diamond willow,

  gathering her own rings of age over

  the short summers and the long winters. Her eyes were

  squeezed shut. Her pale skin looked waxen. She was as

  still and as hushed as the trees clustered thickly around

  her, abetting her silence.

  That silence felt reverent but less than serene. "Lottie,"

  Kate said, her voice a bare thread of sound. She cleared

  her throat, the sound rasping across the stillness. "I'm

  sorry you had to see that." She paused. "Lottie, you

  shouldn't be here."

  The urgency in her voice got through. Lottie stirred. Her blue eyes

  opened, and she looked around. It took her a moment to focus, and when

  she did, her gaze fixed on the bandage on Kate's right temple, and then

  slid past without comment or question.

  "Lottie," Kate said, "go home. Lisa's dead. You can't change that by

  hanging around here. It's not ..." She hesitated, searching for the

  right word. "It's not healthy. I'll . . ." Again she hesitated. "I'll

  take care of this. Go on home now."

  No response. Kate swore beneath her breath and looked around for

  inspiration. The surrounding trees presented a blank face in solidarity

  with Lottie. Kate decided to go for shock value. "I hear Lisa was seeing

  something of Max Chaney before she died."

  The instantaneous change of expression on Lottie's usually stolid face

  astounded her. The skin reddened, the lips drew back into a snarl.

  Lottie's hands curled into claws, and Kate felt all the hair on the back

  of her

  neck rise. Mutt took a pace forward, getting between the two woman,

  facing Lottie and uttering one sharp, warning bark.

  "Okay, Mutt," Kate said, putting a hand on the dog's back. "It's all

  right, girl. It's okay." She looked up at Lottie, and given their

  difference in height it was quite a way up, which Kate was aware of as

  never before. "Isn't it?" Lottie didn't reply, and Kate repeated, "Isn't

  it okay, Lottie?"

  Still with that near-snarl on her face, Lottie looked from the dog to

  Kate and back again. Some of the tension went out of her. Her hands

  uncurled. "No, it's not okay, Kate," she said in her dull, thick voice.

  "It's not okay, and it's never going to be okay again."

  She left, crashing blindly and indifferently through the trees, breaking

  branches off with her shoulders and crushing last year's seedlings

  beneath her boots. Kate, shaken down to her core for the second time in the

  space of half an hour, retraced her path through trees that seemed a lot

  less hostile to her exit than they had to her entrance.

  The seat of the Jag felt steady beneath her, and she leaned forward over

  the handlebars, her eyes closed, thinking hard. Max Chaney. Max Chaney,

  who had taken Mark Miller's place in the Parks Service when the latter

  had been killed the year before. Opening her eyes, she sat up straight

  and asked Mutt, "How about a trip up to the Step? We can stop at Neil's

  on the way."

  In fact they made several stops on the way up to Park Service

  headquarters, at small homesteads scattered along the rough track that

  once was had been a roadbed, when the Kanuyaq & Northern Railroad ran

  between the copper and silver mines in the foothills of the Quilak

  Mountains and the port of Cordova on the coast of Prince William Sound.

  It was maintained only during the summer, and the half-frozen, broken

  surface of ice and mud was rutted and mushy. It was slow going, and

  sometimes Mutt had to walk while Kate got off and pushed their way out

  of yet another rut.

  At the first homestead, a one-room cabin in the middle of a clearing

  still littered with the stumps of newly fallen trees, they were greeted

  with a sullen hostility that Kate wisely ignored. "Neil," she said

  patiently, "you know and I know what you've got growing out back. It's

  what's growing out back of half a dozen homesteads that I know of up and

  down this road. Because the troopers haven't spotted it from the air yet

  doesn't mean they couldn't, if someone gave them a tip as to where to

  look. Five'll get you ten Chopper Jim knows all about it already, and

  just hasn't had the time or the inclination to bother. If someone makes

  a complaint, he'll have to." She waited.

  The white, ropey scar that bisected her throat was just visible in the

  opening of her collar. It began to itch

  beneath his fixed gaze. "Lisa Getty was a competitor, Neil," Kate said,

  still patient. "Somebody killed her, and it wasn't McAniff." Jack may

  have wanted to keep Lisa's murder quiet, but he hadn't been shot at.

  Kate was done with discretion.

  "You think I did it?" Neil, a burly, ponytailed man, said with a glower.

  "You tell me. Where were you that morning?'.' "I was here."

  "Did you have company?"

  He hesitated, and shook his head.

  But Kate saw that hesitation and snapped, "Dammit, Neil, I don't care if

  you were making a sell. I'm not going to turn you or the buyer in if you

  were. Somebody killed Lisa Getty, and it wasn't Roger McAniff. Who was

  here that morning? Who's your alibi? I'll talk to them, and if I'm

  satisfied they're telling the truth, that'll be the end of it. Come on,

  Neil, you know my word's good."

  He hesitated a moment longer and then said with patent reluctance, "Jeff

  Talbot came by that morning. He bought a couple lids and split."

  "What time?"

  He shrugged. "Ten. Maybe ten-thirty."

  Which would not have left Neil enou
gh time to make the scene of Lisa's

  murder and home again to sell dope to Jeff Talbot.

  As she left the cabin, Kate eyed the gun rack above the door. It held a

  twelve-gauge, pump-action shotgun, much like her own, with enough

  firepower to take the heart out of most predators, especially the

  two-legged. kind. The homesteader in her approved, if the investigator

  in her deplored this further evidence in support of Neil's innocence.

  She hadn't seen any other firearms inside. He could have tossed it down

  a convenient abandoned mine shaft, but she didn't think so. Neil Miles

  was representative of the Park's resident dope growers, a group

  collectively notorious for a nonviolent lifestyle.

  The guy was a vegetarian, for God's sake.

  greatly provoked, Kate couldn't see how someone who, when he couldn't

  bring himself to shoot a moose if he were starving to death, could shoot