by Nora Roberts
with the moose he'd run off.
He didn't know enough about them to be sure they didn't hold grudges.
The snow was deeper than he'd anticipated and made him curse himself for not slapping on his snowshoes. So he did what he could to use the tracks.
He saw a streak he thought might be a fox and, when he stopped to catch his breath, spotted a herd of shaggy-coated deer. They trudged along, no more than fifteen feet to his north. He could only assume he was downwind as they didn't so much as give him a glance. So he stood watching them until they wound their way out of sight.
He worked his way to Carrie's back door, past what he assumed was a garden or toolshed, around the building on stilts that would be their cache. Someone had cleared the back stoop, and there was a stack of firewood, covered with a tarp, by the door.
He used the key and stepped inside a combination mudroom and laundry area. Since his boots were wet and caked with snow, he took them off, leaving them and his coat.
The kitchen was clean, almost to a gleam. Maybe that's what women did, or some women, when they were coping with grief. They got out the cleanser and the mop. And the polishing cloth, he thought as he continued through the house, the vacuum cleaner. There wasn't a speck of dust to be found. Nor any of the usual clutter of living.
Maybe that was the point. She wasn't ready to live again yet.
He went up, identified the kids' room by the posters on the walls, the disorder on the floor. For now, at least, he bypassed the master bedroom where the bed was carefully made and a patchwork throw was draped over the back of a chair.
Did she sleep there now, unwilling, unable to lie down on the bed she'd shared with her husband?
Beside the bedroom was Max's office. And here was the clutter, the dust and debris of normal living.
The desk chair had a strip of duct tape along one of the seams—the everyman's repair job. The desk itself was scarred and battered, an obvious second- or thirdhand purchase. But the computer on it looked new or very well tended.
There was a desk calendar, one of those cubes that followed a theme and gave you a picture and a saying each day. Max's was a fishing theme, and it had a cartoon man holding up a minnow-sized fish and claiming it was bigger when he'd hooked it.
The date was January nineteenth. Max hadn't made it back home to rip it off to reveal the next day's joke.
There was no message written on it, no handy clue such as: Meet [insert name of killer] at midnight.
Nate bent to go through the trash can under the desk. He found several other pages of the cube, some with notes.
IDITAROD ART----POV DOG?
BATHROOM TAP DRIPPING. CARRIE PISSED. FIX!
And the one from the day before his death, the one covered with scribbles of one word: PAT. Nate took it out, placed it on the desk.
He found several envelopes indicating Max had sat there, paying bills on one of the days shortly before he died, a couple of candy wrappers.
He went through the desk drawers, found a checkbook—$250.06 on the balance after the bill-paying stint—two days before he died. Three passbooks for savings accounts. One for each of his children, one joint for him and his wife. He and Carrie had a $6,010 nest egg.
There were envelopes, return address labels. Rubber bands, paper clips, a box of staples. Nothing out of the ordinary.
In the bottom drawer he found four chapters of a manuscript. The top page indentified it as:
COLD SNAP
A Novel by Maxwell T. Hawbaker
Nate put it on the desk and got up to search the shelf unit running along one wall. To his pile, Nate added a box of floppy disks and a scrapbook holding newspaper articles.
Then he sat down to test his computer skills.
It wasn't password-protected, which told him Max hadn't thought he had anything to hide. A run through the documents netted him a spreadsheet on which Max had carefully listed mortgage and time payments. Family man, Nate thought, responsible with his money.
Nothing he could find on finances showed any large sums, anything out of the ordinary. If Max had been blackmailing his killer, he hadn't recorded the income alongside his monthly debits.
He found more of the novel and the start of two more. A check through the floppies showed that Max had conscientiously backed them up. There were a few bookmarked sites—fishing for the most part.
He found some saved e-mail: fishing buddies, responses from a couple of people regarding sled dogs. Follow-ups, Nate assumed, on the planned Iditarod article.
He spent an hour threading through, but nothing jumped out and yelled clue!
Gathering up what he had, he carted it down to the mudroom where he confiscated an empty box to dump it all into.
He wandered back into the kitchen. The kitchen calendar had a bird theme. No one had thought or bothered to turn it over to February much less March.
More than half the little squares had notes. PTA meeting, hockey practice, book report due, dentist appointment. Normal family routine. The dentist appointment had been Max's, Nate noted, and he'd been due for it two days after his death.
He flipped it up, glanced over February, at March. A lot of notes there, too, with GONE FISHING in large capital letters over the second weekend in March.
Nate let the page fall again. Routine, normal, ordinary.
But there was that single calendar page from the trash can upstairs, covered with the name Pat.
Four pairs of snowshoes hung in the mudroom.
Studying them, he put on his boots, his coat, hefted the box and started out again.
He was back in the woods again, up to mid-shin in snow, when the gunshot blasted through the quiet. Instinctively, he dropped the box, dug under the coat for his own weapon. Even as he gripped it, there was a thunder in the woods. A single deer, a thick-bodied, heavily antlered buck leaped into view and continued its leaping gallop.
With his heart thudding, Nate started moving in the direction it had come from. He'd made it about twenty yards when he saw the figure melt out of the trees—and the long gun it carried.
They stood for a moment in the echoing stillness, each with a weapon in his hand. Then the figure lifted his left hand, shoved back his hood.
"He scented you," Jacob said. "Spooked and ran even as I fired. So I missed."
"Missed," Nate repeated.
"I'd hoped to take some venison to Rose. David hasn't been able to hunt lately." He lowered his gaze, slow and deliberate, to Nate's sidearm. "Do you hunt, Chief Burke?"
"No. But when I hear a gunshot, I don't go looking for who fired it unarmed."
Jacob made an obvious business of clicking on the safety. "You found him, and I go home without meat."
"Sorry."
"It was' the deer's day, not mine. Do you know your way out?"
"I can find it."
"Well, then." Jacob nodded, turned and moving with grace and ease in his snowshoes, melted back into the trees.
Nate kept his weapon out as he walked back, as he picked up the box he'd dropped. He didn't holster it again until he was back in his car.
He drove to Meg's to push the box into the back of a closet. It was something he had to pursue on his own time. Since his pants were wet to the knees, he changed, then went down to the lake with the dogs to check for any sign of breakup before he drove back into town.
* * *
"Signs are up," Otto told him.
"So I see."
"We've gotten two complaints already, about minding our own business."
"Anybody I need to talk to?"
"Nope."
"You got two calls, chief, from reporters." Peach tapped the pink While You Were Out notes on her counter. "About Pat Galloway and Max. Follow-up, they said."
"They have to catch me first. Peter still on patrol?"
"We sent him out for lunch. It was his turn." Otto scratched his chin. "Ordered you an Italian sub."
"That's fine, thanks. Would a man go hunting two, three miles fr
om his own place, when he's got acres of hunting ground where he lives?"
"Depends, wouldn't it?"
"On what?"
"What he was hunting, for one."
"Yeah. I guess it would depend on that."
* * *
The cracks in the river lengthened and widened as the temperatures held above freezing. From the banks, Nate saw his first sight of the cold, deep blue shimmer between the gleam of white. Fascinated, he watched it spread and heard what sounded like artillery fire. Or the crashing fist of God.
Plates of ice heaved up, swamped and surrounded by that blue, then floated placidly, like a newborn island.
"Something almost religious about your first breakup," Hopp commented as she walked up beside him.
"My first breakup was with Pixie Newburry, and it was more traumatic than religious."
Hopp stood in silence as ice crackled and boomed. "Pixie?"
"Yeah. She had these big almond-shaped eyes, so everybody called her Pixie. She dumped me for this kid whose father had a boat. It was the first wave in a sea of broken hearts for me."
"Sounds shallow to me. You were better off without her."
"Didn't seem like it at twelve. I didn't think this would happen so fast."
"Once nature decides to move, there's no stopping her. And you can bet she'll slap us back with a few more licks of winter before she's done. But breakup's a time for celebration around here. We're having an informal breakup party at The Lodge tonight. You'll want to put in an appearance."
"Okay."
"You've been spending more time at Meg's than The Lodge, sleeping arrangement—wise." She smiled when he merely looked at her. "It's been mentioned, here and there."
"Is my choice of sleeping arrangements a problem—official-wise?" "No, indeed." She cupped her hand around a cigarette, used a thick silver Zippo to light it. "And on a personal front, I'd estimate that Meg Galloway's no Pixie Newburry. It's been mentioned, too, here and there, that there are lights on at Meg's pretty late at night."
"Maybe we have insomnia." She was the mayor, Nate reminded himself. And Galloway's journal hadn't referred to a woman on the mountain. "I'm spending some of my off time on the Galloway matter."
"I see." She stared out at the river as the blue and the white battled. Most people go fishing, read a juicy book or watch TV on their off time."
"Cops aren't most people."
"You do what pleases you, Ignatious. I know Charlene's planning to bring Pat back here, soon as she's able, and bury him. Wants a full-fledged funeral. The ground ought to be thawed enough soon to manage it by June, unless we get another long freeze."
She drew in smoke, sighed it out again. "Part of me wishes that would be that. The dead are buried, and the living have to live. It's hard on Carrie, I know, but you keeping this going won't bring her husband back."
"I don't believe he killed Galloway. And I don't believe he killed himself."
Her face stayed perfectly still, her eyes stayed on the busy river. "That's not what I want to hear.
God's pity on Carrie, but that's not what I want to hear."
"Nobody wants to hear they may be living next door to someone who's killed twice."
She shuddered now, once and violently, and drew on the cigarette. She puffed at it hard, expelling smoke in bursts. "I know the people who live next door to me and a mile away and three miles from that. I know them by face and name and habits. I don't know a murderer, Ignatious."
"You knew Max."
"Oh God."
"You climbed with Galloway."
Her eyes sharpened now and focused on his face. "Is this an interrogation?"
"No. Just a comment."
She breathed in and out while the ice cracked. "Yes, I did. My man and I did. I enjoyed it, too, the challenge of it, the thrill of it, in my younger days. Bo and I settled for hiking, a night of camping in good weather the last few years he was alive. That Bo was alive," she said.
"Who'd he trust most when he was on the mountain? Who did Galloway trust up there?"
"Himself. That'd be the first rule of climbing. You'd better trust yourself first and last."
"Your husband was mayor back then."
"It was more honorary than official in those days."
"Even so, he knew the people around here. Paid attention. I bet you , did, too."
"And?"
"If you put your mind to it, thought back to February of '88, you might remember who, besides Galloway, wasn't in Lunacy. Who was away for a week or more."
She tossed the cigarette down where it sizzled against the snow. Then she kicked snow over it to bury it from view. "You're giving a lot of credit to my memory, Ignatious. I'll think about it."
"Good. If you remember anything, come to me. Just me, Hopp."
"Spring's coming," Hopp said. "And spring can be a bitch." She walked away, leaving him by the river. He stood in the chilly wind, watching that river come back to life.
Twenty-Two
It wasn't just river ice that cracked and heaved during breakup. Streets, frozen through the long winter burst with fissures the size of canyons and potholes wide enough to swallow a truck.
It didn't surprise Nate that Bing had the contract for road repair and maintenance. What did surprise him was that no one seemed to give much of a damn that the repair and maintenance moved at the pace of a lame snail.