few moments' tugging, Kate pulled
her knife and cut it. Jack uttered an inarticulate protest
about destroying evidence. She stilled it with a single
shake of her head. "We won't need it."
He let the tree go and stood staring at her through
narrowed eyes as it swung back and forth above them
in steadily diminishing arcs. "You know who did it,
don't you."
It wasn't a question, and she didn't answer.
"You find it?" Bobby asked the moment they walked
in.
Kate nodded curtly. Mutt squatted next to the door,
ears up, watching Kate's every move with an intent
yellow gaze. "You find
"Her who?" Jack inquired.
"Didn't look." "Why not?"
already know where she is."
"Where?"
Kate jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "George hired
her to take a climbing party up the Big Bump."
"Going up Angqaq Peak, eh?" Bobby shook his head.
"Beats me why some people go to all that trouble
just because it's there. Me, I'll settle for the Discovery Channel." He
cocked his head, eyeing her with
inquisitive gaze, looking like an black-eyed,
black-headed robin. "She really do it?"
Kate nodded her head at the pillar of electronics that held up the
center of the house. "Can you raise the Park
on that thing?"
Bobby was hurt. "I can raise Tranquility Base on that
thing if I have to. Who you want to talk to?
"Dan O'Brian."
"Consider it done," Bobby said grandly and rolled to the radio.
Kate's conversation with Dan O'Brian was short and terse. Jack's lips
set in a thin line as he listened. Bobby signed off when she was
through, and Kate looked around from the radio. "Where's your pack?"
"In the closet in the corner. You going after her?" Kate opened the
closet door, and like the Kanuyaq when the ice melted, its contents
cascaded onto the floor in a fierce, joyous current of junk. She waded
through it and pulled out an old canvas pack on a metal frame. "Got any
longies?"
"Left-hand drawer under the bed, right side. Where'd you find the rifle?"
She found the long underwear and began to strip, as Bobby looked on,
frankly admiring, and as Jack looked on, angry at both of them but smart
enough to hide it, or try to. "I'm so slow I make glacial erosion look
speedy," Kate said, voice muffled in her sweater. She fumbled for the
right holes in the Longies top and shoved her hands through. "I was
standing there looking at those trees, and I knew it had to be there
somewhere. It had to be. Then last night, when I was talking to Eknaty
and he was telling me about when Lottie took him hunting, I remembered
how Abel taught me to keep game out of the reach of bear and wolves and
wolverines while we he were on a hunt. You got some wool socks?" This as
she donned jeans over the longies.
He watched until the last inch of skin was covered, and then, with a
sigh of regret for all good things past, Bobby said, "I don't have any
feet, Kate."
"Right, sorry, I forgot." She looked at Jack, who sat down and began
unlacing his boots.
"Find yourself a nice, young, supple;, medium-sized birch," Kate
continued. "Bend it down, stake it out, tie your meat or your supplies
or whatever you want too keep out of the reach of whoever or
whatever-walks below
while you're gone, and let it go. Simple,
effective. I don't know why it is, but nobody ever looks up. You got a
vest?"
"Eddie Bauer one-hundred percent pure goose down." Kate smiled slightly.
"Only the best."
"You bet." He rolled over to the coatrack, snagged the vest and tossed
it to her. "You tie something as bulky as a rifle to the top of a birch
tree with no leaves on it, somebody's going to see it eventually."
She pulled on the vest and snapped it closed. "Then you pick a spruce,
one young enough to bend but old enough to have some height. Pick one in
a clump of birch and spruce and cottonwood, all tangled up together, on
a piece of state land anybody would be instantly jailed for trying to
clear, and if you do it right you couldn't see it from the air, let
alone the ground."
Bobby shook his head. "Lot of traffic around there, air and ground.
Sounds iffy to me."
"She was in a hurry." Kate shrugged. "It's hard to quarrel with success.
Even I had a hard time figuring out what she did with it, and I've known
Lottie all my life."
Jack was rummaging in his grip for spare socks.. At Kate's words, he
paused, his thick eyebrows coming together in a frown. "You knew."
"Knew what?" Kate held up a pair of glove liners and
paused, looking down at the pack.
"You know who did it. You've always known."
"Oh for crying out loud, Jack," she said, exasperated.
"What's the matter with you? What's the first thing you
taught me on the job? What's Morgan's First Law?
nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest.'
Of course I knew. I doubt that there was a soul in the
Park, who thought about it for more than thirty straight
seconds, who didn't know who did
"Really," Jack said between his teeth. "Mind telling
me how?"
She looked down at the glove liners, looked up at Bobby. "Take'em," he
said. "Better to have'em and not need'em than the alternative."
She checked her watch. "We've got just enough time for a bedtime story.
I'm only going to tell it once, so listen carefully.
"Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife living in the Alaskan
bush. They had two daughters. The oldest was a bear of a child,
something over ten pounds at birth, and from the time she could walk and
talk she was a taciturn, difficult person. I don't think she ever was a
girl." Kate paused. "Although I'm not sure she ever was a woman, either."
Jack wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but Kate went on. "The
younger daughter, born ten years later, was everything the elder was
not. She was little, she was dainty, she was pretty, she was charming.
She had all the social graces Lottie lacked."
Kate smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Naturally, her parents, in
particular her father, who disapproved of unfemininity on male
chauvinist principals, just loved Lisa to death."
"And Lottie?"
"Oh, he tolerated Lottie. They both did. They put up with her. They were
aware of their responsibilities as her parents, after all." Jack
flinched at the sarcasm in her voice. "At least her mother was. Her
father ridiculed her, which just confirmed her sense of worthlessness.
She became morbidly sensitive over her size-"
"I've met her," Jack said in a puzzled voice. "She's not that big." He
tossed Kate the spare socks he'd pulled from his daypack.
She caught them. "Thanks. Next to you, no. Next to Lisa? And she was
next to Lisa every day of her life." Jack nodded slowly.
"Well. Lottie never behaved quote, normally, unquote. She was.
defensive, antagonistic and so hard to get along
with that her family
not unnaturally turned with
immense relief to Lisa, who responded to the attention by getting better
grades, going on to college and then choosing to return home to live.
What about a tent?" she said to
Bobby. "Just in case?"
"There's my survival kit." "Perfect."
"You be careful with it, woman. I just bought it new."
He hauled at a bundle of what looked like fabric and
sticks in a fluorescent orange stuff bag. Another stuff bag
appeared; this one with a sleeping bag and a rolled foam pad inside it.
Kate strapped the bags to the bottom of the backpack as Bobby rolled
into the kitchen and ransacked the cup boards for his camp cooking gear.
"In all that time, Lottie,
who I don't think ever left the
"Heads up."
She looked up just in time to field the cooking kit,
and tucked it into a side pocket. Bobby piled a dozen foil packages of
prepackaged food in his lap and wheeled
them
"Well, Lottie had no life except what was lived in
Lisa's shadow. Then along came Max Chaney, who for reasons unknown takes
it into his head to fall in love
with Lottie."
"What!" Even Bobby was staring at her.
"Eknaty Kvasnikof was working for Lottie
He says they had something going." She shook her head. "They say there's
someone for everybody. Maybe
Max was for Lottie. But ..." She looked at Jack and grinned, a narrow,
unamused little grin. "You knew this was coming, right? Lisa seduces Max
away. Lottie befriends Eknaty Kvasnikof, and Lisa seduces him, too.
Lisa puts their livelihood at risk shooting black bears for their
bladders and walrus for their tusks and growing pot in felonious
quantities and God knows what else. She puts every social relationship,
every friend of the
family at risk by screwing anything in the Park on two legs. You got any
chocolate, Bobby?"
Bobby looked offended. "It's one of the four major food groups, right?
Of course I have something with chocolate in it. You want more?"
"All you got." "Hershey bars?"
Her head snapped up, and she looked at him hopefully. "I -can go farther
on a Hershey bar than I can on a porterhouse steak. You got some?"
He produced half a box from the freezer like a magician producing a
rabbit from a hat.
"Meanwhile, back at the Tale of Two Sisters," Jack prodded impatiently.
Kate tucked the chocolate carefully into another pocket on the pack.
"You know, Jack, if you treat someone like shit for long enough, pretty
soon they're going to start looking around for the bottom of a shoe to
scrape themselves off of. The reverse," she added, "holds true. If you
treat someone like a saint for long enough, pretty soon they start
believing their shit don't stink. That was Lisa all over. She could do
no wrong. All you had to do was ask her.
"I'm sure Lottie protested Lisa's behavior. I'm equally certain Lisa
ignored those protests, when she didn't laugh them off. After everything
I've heard this past week, I wouldn't put it past Lisa to have
deliberately looked around for more and better ways to piss Lottie off.
She enjoyed it." Kate reached for Jack's spare socks. She donned them on
top of her own and the ones he'd taken off, and her feet barely fit back
into her own boots. She shook her head, removed one pair, put her boots
back on, and pulled the last pair of socks on over her boots. "It's been
a way of life," she said, "for both of them. All the ego Lottie lost,
Lisa got." She rose to her feet and took a few investigatory steps. Her
boots felt snug but not tight. The wool of the socks stretched over the
soles of her boots squeaked against the hardwood floor. "Hardly any of
this was news, to me or to anyone else who's lived in the Park for the
last twenty years."
She looked at Jack. "Yes, in answer to your question, I did know who
killed Lisa Getty, almost from the first moment of being told she had
not been killed by Roger McAniff. I defy you to find someone in the Park
who didn't."
Jack whipped his head around to stare accusingly at Bobby. "It was
pretty obvious," Bobby admitted.
"You got a ski pole or something, Bobby?"
"Right, Kate, I do so much skiing. How about a broom handle?"
"If that's what you got, that's what I'll take." Reaching in back of the
refrigerator, Bobby pulled out a broom and sawed off the handle with a
serrated steak knife.
Jack felt left out. Bobby and Kate seemed to under stand all, he
nothing. He paced off a length, turned and bellowed, "Mind telling me
why the hell we've spent all this time running our asses off over a
billion square acres of wilderness trying to find some other poor
schmuck who might have killed her?"
"Lottie's dying, anyway." Kate looked up and met Jack's eyes and
insisted, "Yes, spiritually, she is. She's lost her foil." Her voice was
sad. "What happens when you look in the mirror and nothing looks back?
She doesn't have anyone left to hate, and I think hate is all that kept
her going. Except maybe for those few weeks when she and Max Chaney were
an item. But Max Chaney was only a man. Lisa was her sister. Men might
come and men might go, but for better or worse, Lisa was her sister."
Kate looked up at Jack. "You bet I looked for some body else. I wanted a
hundred other somebodies to point at and say maybe. I didn't.want to
have to put Lottie in
jail, and I didn't think she was a danger to anyone else."
"She took a shot at you!"
"Yes," Kate admitted. "But if she'd really wanted to kill me, she would
have. Lottie hits what she aims at." "Like Martin," Bobby said.
"Yes," Kate said, almost wry, "in the last six months I've had more than
my share of people shooting at me without meaning to get a hit."
"You've got to get into a different line of work," Bobby agreed.
"Will you two stop making like Stan and Ollie and get serious!"
"She did shoot Max Chaney, before you could talk to him," Bobby pointed
out.
"Yes." Kate nodded, her smile fading. "Yes, Max Chaney is dead. Lottie
must have known it was only a matter of time before I found out she'd
been seeing him."
"You think he knew?"
"I don't know." Kate shook her head. "I didn't know him. And now he's
dead, and that is my fault."
"You didn't pull the trigger."
"I could have stopped her. I should have. I didn't." The sound of a
distant helicopter crept in beneath the
door. She shrugged into her parka, donned glove liners and gloves and
hoisted the pack to her back. "Now I have to, before she hurts someone
else."
"Which way you going?" Bobby asked her.
"Which way does Lottie usually take her climbing
"Jesus, Kate. You could always wait for her to come
border's on the other side of the Big Bump,
Not the way she went up, anyway. The Canadian
No." Kate shook her head. "I don't think she's coming
the truth. I as good as told her so in the woods yesterday. She'll know
that by now I've found out about C
haney.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw Page 21
