Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

Of course. He still did. "What next?"

  "Next, four of his parishioners were arrested for a gay-bashing in Omaha. There'd been other attacks on gays, but they couldn't make Seabolt's parishioners for them." He looked bland again. "Pastor Seabolt just naturally had an ironclad alibi for the night in question.

  In fact, for every night in question."

  "Naturally. They get off?"

  "Who's telling this story?"

  "Sorry. Did they get off?"

  He grinned that shark's grin, tight, white and wide. "All the members of Pastor Seabolt's church swore on a stack of Bibles the accused were at a church social or Bible study or something the night those two unfortunate and misguided young men were attacked. And the physical evidence didn't hold up, so they walked." He paused. "One of the victims was blinded in one eye."

  "What next?"

  "That's what I like about you, Shugak, you're never satisfied."

  She ignored that, but her indifference was not quite as convincing as his. "What else?"

  "The Oklahoma state police are pretty sure that Seabolt's bunch was behind the bombing of a women's health clinic in Oklahoma City in 1987.

  Two people died."

  Kate sat up straight. "The year before he came up here."

  "Yeah. Interesting timing, isn't it?"

  "Very."

  "Not as interesting as one of the victims, though."

  "Oh."

  "Nope." He raised his eyes from contemplation of the remains of his coffee. "She was the daughter of a state senator."

  Kate gave a short, unamused laugh and shook her head. "But they couldn't prove anything, of course."

  He shrugged. "He's here. He'd made Oklahoma too hot to hold him, but that didn't mean he couldn't move somewhere else and start over." Lucky us, Kate thought. Maybe someone had taken hold of the United States by the southern coast and had given one good shake and everything nobody Outside wanted to live with had fallen into Alaska.

  "So?" Jim said, draining his coffee. "What now?"

  The line of RVs was taking turns at the gas pump at the station next door. "I think I'll go see Auntie Joy."

  "That Joy Shugak, in Gakona?" She nodded. "How come?"

  She pushed her plate back and slid out of the booth. "Because nobody sneezes within a hundred miles of here without Auntie Joy hearing about it. And because Emaa's staying with her, and nobody sneezes within a thousand miles of here without her hearing about it."

  "Good enough," he decided, and slid out to tower over her. "Mind if I tag along?"

  "Sure. Fine. Has this become an official investigation?"

  He smoothed the crown of his hat and put it on his head, centering it just so, the brim absolutely straight, the tie of the gold cord directly over his eyes. "Shall we say, I'm satisfying a personal curiosity." He gave that shark's grin again. "Means I get to spend some more time with you, babe." She smiled back at him. "Jim?"

  "Yes?"

  "The next time you call me babe?" She dropped her voice so he had to lean closer to hear. "I'll rip your tongue out."

  Auntie Joy's house was an old one, originally built of logs but added on to every ten years or so for the last century. It looked a lot like Emaa's house in Niniltna, and the Gillespies' store in Chistona, with a roof that lurched from one level to another like a sailor on leave, exterior walls made variously of log festooned with moss, clapboards chipping white paint, blue aluminum siding and tarpaper shingles. Inside it was crowded with bodies, noisy with laughter and smelled of baking bread. Kate followed her nose to the kitchen, Jim bringing up the rear.

  "Kate!"

  "Hi, Kate!"

  "Kate, long time no see!"

  "Kate, where have you been?"

  A black-haired, thickset man Jim didn't know but who reminded him of Cal Worthington planted himself in Kate's path and put a confiding hand on her shoulder. "Kate, you think you could get your grandmother to get behind a logging operation down the Kanuyaq? A guy I met--" She smiled, mumbled something, shrugged off the hand and edged around him.

  "Hey, Kate," a thin man sitting in one corner of the living room said, not unenthusiastically, but not with any great pleasure, either.

  She paused. "Hey, Martin. How you been?"

  "Okay."

  "I missed you in Anchorage last March."

  "I made it home all right, as you can see." He patted the hip of the girl sitting in his lap. "You know Suzy?"

  "Sure, Suzy--Kompkoff, isn't it?"

  The girl shook her head. "Not anymore."

  "Oh."

  "Or it won't be, once the divorce comes through."

  Kate nodded. The last time she'd seen her, Suzy had been pregnant. She wondered who had the baby, and hoped with all her heart Suzy hadn't left it with Mickey.

  "We're both straight now, Kate," Martin said.

  "I didn't ask, Martin," Kate said in a level voice.

  "You didn't have to," he replied, words and tone edgy, and Kate shook her head, produced a smile that had a lot of work in it and passed on into the kitchen. Jim nodded at Martin, with whom he'd had extensive professional dealings over the years, touched the brim of his hat to Suzy and followed. He was beginning to understand why Kate spent so much time alone on her homestead.

  Half a dozen old women sat at the kitchen table playing cards. Each shuffled through a deck, built black on red on black on the cards in front of them and by suit on the aces pooled in the center of the table.

  The play was fast and furious, there was heard more than one cheerful curse when a player beat another to the center pile, and the backs of two or three hands sported long, red scratches that were almost but not quite bleeding arterially. "Snerts!" somebody yelled and there was a loud, collective groan.

  "Joy, you cheated!"

  "Auntie, not again!"

  "Darn it, that was my three of spades, Joy."

  "That's it, Auntie, there's no point in playing with you, you always win, I quit."

  "You always say that, Helen," a broad faced merry-eyed woman said, "but you always come back for more."

  "I'm out of my mind is all," the other woman replied, and spotted Kate.

  "Kate!"

  Kate grinned. "Hi, Helen. Hi, Gladys. Hi, Tanya."

  This time the welcome was warm and genuine, and Jim stood back and watched the other women swarm around Kate, hugging her, kissing her, taking her face in both hands and examining it closely for the passage of time. It was a noisy, rambunctious scene, and over the hubbub his eyes met those of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak. She nodded once, coolly, and he walked around the crowd to pay his respects. "Mrs. Shugak," he said, making almost a bow over her hand.

  "Sergeant Chopin," she replied, inclining her head regally. Ekaterina was always very formal with Chopper Jim, possibly because she harbored the suspicion, correctly, that more than one of her grandchildren had been fathered by him, possibly because he had been the proximate cause of so many of her children's close encounters with the law. The latter might have been simply because she'd had so many of them; if in certain circles Chopper Jim was known as the Father of the Park, Ekaterina was as surely known as the Mother. And Grandmother, and the Great-Grandmother, and if she lived long enough, and she had every intention of doing so, the Great-Great-Grandmother.

  Kate, arm around Auntie Joy, watched them. Jim said something and a smile forced its way across Ekaterina's face, softening her wintry expression. Kate shook her head. Even Emaa. The man was a menace.

  The room cleared and Joy busied herself at the stove. "Coffee? Tea?"

  "Coffee'd be great, thanks, Joy," Jim said.

  "How about some cocoa, Auntie?" Kate said hopefully, and a grin split Joy's brown, seamed face.

  "Nestle's Quik?"

  "What else?"

  "Lumpy?"

  "How else?"

  An enormous kettle steamed on the back of Auntie Joy's stove. She turned the burner beneath it to high and went about assembling two plates of homemade cookies four inches in diameter and glazed with s
ugar. Kate sat down across from Ekaterina. Jim hung his jacket and hat on a peg by the kitchen door and sat next to Kate, the leather of his holster creaking.

  With all that hardware, badges and guns and cuffs and radios and nightsticks, he must have felt like he was in armor. But then, Jim Chopin looked as if he could swim a moat in a coat of heavy iron mail.

  The idea tickled Kate. A knight of the Last Frontier, jousting the length of Alaska's highways, challenging champions from foreign climes to duels of high speed and reckless endangerment. Sir Winnebago of Wisconsin. Baron Jayco of Virginia. Count Coachman of Connecticut.

  "What?" he said suspiciously, eyeing her smile.

  She shook her head. "Nothing." Sir James of Tok Junction. The Duke of the Department of Public Safety.

  "So how was your trip to Fairbanks, Katya?"

  Kate regarded her grandmother with a wry smile. "So you heard about that, did you?"

  Emaa shrugged, a superbly nonchalant gesture. Of course, the gesture said, of course I heard, I hear everything.

  And she does, too, Kate thought, which is why I'm here. "It went well.

  I found out some things I need to know. Jack came up." "Ah," Ekaterina said. "And how is Jack?"

  "Healthy," Kate said, "very healthy," and next to her Jim Chopin turned a sudden laugh into a cough.

  Joy saved him by bringing him a cup of coffee and he buried his nose in it. She set one of the plates of cookies down on the table and took the other one into the living room, returning to put three cups of cocoa on the table and take a seat next to Ekaterina. She looked at Kate with bright eyes. "So, Kate, what's this I hear about a teacher being murdered up in Chistona?"

  Jim's coffee went down the wrong pipe and came back up out his nose.

  Kate thumped him on the back and Joy got him a Kleenex. "Thanks," he said, mopping his watering eyes. "What makes you think he was murdered?"

  Joy gave him a look of impatient scorn. "Oh for heaven's sake, Jim, everyone knows Daniel Seabolt has been missing since last year, and everyone knows Kate found the body in suspicious circumstances." She liked the sound of that; it was a phrase she'd heard many times on television, direct from Chicago through the satellite dish mounted on her roof, whenever somebody found a body in Lake Michigan. "In suspicious circumstances," she repeated, and leaned forward. "How suspicious were they?"

  Kate looked at Jim, who shook his head and threw up his hands and took a cookie. It was smooth and buttery and a little crispy around the edges.

  Perfect. Well worth the price of a little inside information.

  Kate looked at Ekaterina. "At first I thought he'd been caught in the fire last year, but he didn't have any clothes on. And the coroner says he didn't burn to death or die of smoke inhalation."

  "What did he die of?"

  "Anaphylactic shock. It's an allergic reaction, where your mucous membranes swell up and you can't breathe. If you're not treated immediately, you can go into cardiac arrest. Some people get it from bee stings."

  Ekaterina, listening intently, said, "And this is what happened to Daniel Seabolt?" Kate nodded, and Ekaterina sat back in her chair, frowning. "He could have been swimming in Cat's Creek."

  Kate shook her head. "This was two or so miles from the creek."

  "How far from Chistona?"

  Kate looked at Jim. "A little over four miles by road. Maybe one, one and a half, crosscountry?"

  The trooper nodded. "About that."

  Ekaterina looked at him. "I hear no one reported him missing."

  He looked at her, a slight smile on his face. "No."

  "So you didn't even know he was." "Not until Kate told me she found him."

  Ekaterina turned to Kate. "How did you know who he was?"

  "His son hired me to find him."

  "Oh." Ekaterina frowned. "The little boy?"

  Kate nodded.

  "Not his father, Daniel's father, I mean?" Joy exclaimed.

  "No, the boy. Said his father had been gone since last year. Said he'd heard how I used to do this kind of work, and he wanted me to find his father for him." Kate chased a lump of cocoa around the rim of her mug with a spoon, captured it and mashed it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She swallowed the burst of chocolatey flavor reluctantly.

  "One morning, Dinah and I are out picking mushrooms and we stumble across the body. That night, this kid comes into camp and wants me to find his father." "That was easy," Jim observed.

  "I thought so," Kate said, a trifle grimly.

  "Daniel Seabolt was the son of the church pastor, Simon Seabolt,"

  Ekaterina said.

  "Yeah."

  "And was the father of the boy, Matthew," Ekaterina, who liked to have things made perfectly clear, said.

  "Yes."

  "He taught at the school," Joy said.

  "We know. I've just been talking to his boss in Fairbanks."

  "There was a big fuss up there year before last about what he was teaching in the school," Joy said.

  "We know that, too. Jim and I have just been talking to Philippa Cotton, who used to be on the school board up there, before they moved down here."

  Joy nodded. "That old man caused a bunch of trouble for those folks.

  Good folks, too, most of them."

  "What do you know of him, Auntie?" Kate said. "You live right down the road from Chistona. You must get up there sometimes."

  "We went up for services right after they got the church built," she said.

  "Really?" Kate raised her eyebrows. "You attended a sermon?"

  Joy nodded. "The first one he gave. It was the first church to open in the area in a long time. We were all very excited about it. The whole family"-that would make twenty-three people altogether, if Kate remembered correctly--"we all dressed up in our best clothes and piled into four cars and drove up Sunday morning." She stopped, pressing her lips together.

  Watching her, Kate said gently, "What happened, Auntie?"

  Ekaterina put a restraining hand on Joy's arm.

  Joy shook her head. "No, it's all right." She looked back at Kate.

  "He said we had to destroy our totems, our clan hats, our button blankets. We had to burn them all."

  "What? Why?"

  "Because they were idols. Thou shall have no other gods before me," he said." She looked at Ekaterina and shrugged. "I wanted to get up and walk out, but you don't do that. You just don't do that to a man of God."

  "So you stayed."

  "Yes."

  "What happened next?"

  Joy was speaking more to Ekaterina now, twisting to face her. Ekaterina kept her steady gaze on Joy's face, her hand on Joy's arm. One of the kids wandered in from the hubbub in the next room and gave the sober group at the table a curious look. Kate jerked her head at him and he made a face and went out again.