A Cold Day for Murder (Kate Shugak #1)

by Stabenow, Dana

“And keep the fat man from killing him,” Kate said sadly, “and the downtown dicks from arresting him, and keep the black bird for himself.”

  Jack heaved a deep, mournful sigh, probably over the unattainable Mary Astor.

  The fire crackled in the fireplace and the thin arctic sun sent nearly horizontal beams in through Bobby’s enormous windows. The reflection off the snow outside was painful to look at for long. Bobby rolled over and pulled the sheers to block it out.

  Kate said to Jack, “Let’s take a ride on up to Park Headquarters.”

  “Why? Gamble’s already been up there. Everything he got is in the file.”

  She gave him an old-fashioned look. “The way Miller’s call to his daddy was? I want to talk to the people who worked with Miller myself.”

  “Is there enough snow?”

  “Of course there’s enough snow, there was enough snow yesterday to—” She stopped and looked at him in sudden realization. To get to Park Headquarters would require another trip across Lost Chance Creek. “You don’t have to come,” she said gently. “And I’ll come straight back here, I promise.” Jack said nothing. “You hired me to do this job for you, Jack. And you’re right, there probably isn’t any reason for me to go. I’ve just got this itch, you know, like I’m staring right at something, like I’m bumping into the same thing over and over again, but I just can’t—” She broke off and shook her head in frustration. “I’m going up there.”

  Jack set his jaw and reached for his boots. “You go, I go.”

  “No, really, Jack,” she started to say.

  “No, really, Kate,” he mocked her. “The shrink said the more I faced up to it, the easier it’d get.”

  She looked at him, at the strained look around his eyes and the sweat already popping out on his forehead, and her heart melted. “We could fly in.”

  He looked at her, and the sweat on his brow was sucked back into his pores like magic. “I forgot they had a strip up there. How long is it?”

  “Greg takes his Tri-Pacer in there all the time. I think it’s about a thousand feet. Is that long enough?”

  Jack’s grin was wide and relieved and she had her answer. “Not that I can’t cross that goddam bridge,” he added, in case there was any doubt. “I just have to do it my own way.”

  “Of course,” Kate murmured without the trace of a smile.

  Bobby looked from one to the other and said, “Please don’t bother to explain yourselves on my account. We mushrooms are used to being kept in the dark and fed shit three times a day. No, really,” he added as they reached for parkas and snowsuits and headed for the door, “we like it.” He was shouting variations on this original theme from his open doorway as Kate and Jack went off on the Super Jag, Mutt barking an indignant accompaniment next to him. Mutt didn’t like being left behind. Bobby didn’t like being left in the dark.

  · · ·

  Park Headquarters was in the geographical center of the Park, on a natural plateau where the foothills left off and the mountains began. The gravel airstrip ran down its exact center, as if the people who had cleared and surfaced it were afraid that if they worked too close to either edge they might fall off the world. The plateau stood at a crossroads of sorts, between plain and mountain, between river and glacier, between civilization, such as it was, and wilderness, or what was left of it.

  Jack side-slipped down to a three-point landing and rolled out to a stop thirty feet from the group of buildings clustered around the end of the runway. “Not bad,” Kate had to admit. Jack’s grin was smug. They climbed out and headed for the large building at the center of the cluster and went inside.

  “Hey, Dan,” Kate said, stretching out her hand with a warm smile. “Working hard or hardly working?”

  He snorted, a tall man with a freckled face, bushy orange-red hair and twinkling blue eyes that could have charmed the British out of Northern Ireland. Kate had seen plenty of that twinkle when she met Dan for the first time; after a while he had discovered to his astonishment that she really didn’t want to play anything but pinochle with him. He discovered to his further astonishment that, if he worked at it, he could be just friends with a woman. For a while he worried that the cold Alaskan air was sapping his virility, but one of Kate’s aunts and two of her cousins dispelled that notion to everyone’s complete satisfaction, and he relaxed and began to enjoy their relationship. “Hell, Kate,” he said now, “between the squatters and the miners and the trappers and the hunters—”

  “Okay, okay, Danny boy, enough whining. You’d stab anyone who tried to take this job away from you and you know it.”

  Dan propped his feet up on his desk and leaned back with his hands linked behind his head. “I reckon you’re here about Miller.”

  “I reckon you’re right,” Kate mimicked him, propping up her own feet. “Dan O’Brian, meet Jack Morgan. Jack’s head of the D.A.’s investigative office, Dan.”

  Dan grinned at Jack. “Miller’s daddy been after you?”

  “He’s been after the FBI, who’ve been after me.”

  “Yeah. They were up here, too.” Dan shook his head. “I liked that kid, I really did. Lot of enthusiasm, lot of smarts, but he did wave his daddy like a flag. It could get tiring.”

  “Tiring enough for you to pull his plug?” Jack said hopefully.

  Dan leaned back his head and laughed. “Sometimes, I admit, I’d liked to have strangled the sanctimonious little shit,” he said. “And sometimes I’d have had to stand in line to do it. But I didn’t. Neither did anybody else up here on the Step.”

  “You familiar with what he did the last day he was seen?”

  “Shit, who isn’t? Since Kate started sniffing around you can’t work up a decent conversation on the CB without dragging Miller into it.” He turned a bright, inquiring gaze on Kate.

  “Danny boy,” Kate said sadly, “we’ve got zilch. Every lead we’ve had has gone right down the toilet.” She nodded at Jack. “When Miller disappeared Jack sent Ken Dahl in to look for him. Now he’s missing, too.”

  Danny pursed his lips together in a silent whistle. “Blond, blue-eyed?”

  “That’s the guy. He come up here?”

  Danny said blandly, “Yeah, he made it this far. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I recognized him right away from the description Bernie gave me.”

  Caught off guard, Kate said, “How?”

  “He had his mouth open.” Kate reddened and Danny grinned. “What do you want to know, Kate? I told everything I knew to the feds when the FBI rode up on their white horse.”

  Kate was silent for a moment. “Tell me about him. Miller.”

  Dan looked at her, and drawled, “He was twenty-three. Short. Skinny. More energy than a nuclear power plant. More enthusiasm than a bull moose in rut. Talked all the time about My Father The Congressman.”

  “What did you have him doing?”

  “Let’s see, he got here early last spring, just after you nailed Sandy. Nice work, that, by the way. Poaching’s down by more than half in the Park this winter from last. Lot less drunks waving their rifles around.” Kate hoped Dan wouldn’t be climbing down into Lost Chance Creek anytime soon. “Anyway, Miller. Last spring Mac Devlin was politicking to start work on the Carmack, so I sent Miller down there to check on the operation. Gave him the go-ahead to shut it down if Devlin was stepping out of line, which I and everyone else knew he was. Miller naturally found out, too, and he did shut him down.”

  Dan grinned. “So then Miller appointed himself guardian angel of every stream in the Park that had been frightened by the sight of a gold pan. He spent most of his time after that poking around mining and sledging operations, checking permits and runoff and seeing if the summer miners were packing out what trash they packed in. Hell, it needed doing, so I let him do it.”

  “How did he get along with people in the Park? People who lived here, I mean. Other than Mac.”

  “He didn’t. Like I said, he’d been poking around the mines. It turned out he’d taken
a mineralogy course in college. He got his daddy to send him this little hammer, and he started taking samples out of every abandoned mine shaft he poked his head down.” Dan shrugged. “You know how it is. Those old homesteaders aren’t going to mine it themselves, but they’re damned if they’re going to let anyone else move in on them, either.”

  “Anybody in particular complain?”

  “Nah, that’s the funny thing. They’d stumble over him on their property and be breathing tar and feathers. Then he’d start talking to them about this vision he had of the mines opened up and operated by the government, which would use the profits to develop the Park for tourism. That boy was an Outsider from the word go and a king-size pain in the ass, but he had an idea that he believed in.” Dan grinned at them. “And my, could he talk. That tongue of his was pure silver and jointed at both ends. Put him and Billy Graham in the same room and lock the door on them and my money’d be on Billy Graham coming out a born-again greenie. Yeah,” Dan said, stretching, “Miller turned the tide on more than a few homesteads that I know of, and he crossed up Mac again and again, the last time over the Nabesna. But like I said, it needed doing. Devlin’s needed somebody sitting on him since the first day he slunk back into the Park.”

  “The perfect ranger,” Kate suggested.

  “Well now, I wouldn’t go that far.” Dan scratched his belly and confessed, “I do admit I was glad Miller was mostly out in the field, because when he came up to Headquarters he always had a better idea how to run things.”

  “What things?”

  “Anything,” Dan said ruefully, and Kate and Jack laughed. “Yeah, it was funny at first, but when he started telling rangers who had been in the business twenty years how to clean out deadfall and counsel campers and ride herd on hunters, he was begging to get himself pushed off the Step.” Dan shook his head, smiling at the memory. “He could wear you out.”

  “You liked Miller, too,” Kate accused.

  “What do you mean, ‘too’?” Dan said, a little defensively.

  “Bernie, Bobby, now you. All the people I’d expect to have hated the kid’s guts. When you talk about him, you all get that same funny expression on your faces and that same funny tone in your voices, like you couldn’t decide between sending him naked into a swamp full of mosquitoes or adopting him for a son and heir.”

  Dan shrugged uncomfortably. “Yeah. Well.”

  “What did you tell Ken Dahl when he showed up?”

  Dan scratched his head. “Same thing I just told you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Wait a minute,” Dan said. “We kept a copy of the transcript of the testimony in front of the House sub-committee. He wanted to see it, so I let him read it.”

  Kate exchanged a glance with Jack, who said, “Could we have a copy?”

  “Sure.” Dan rummaged around in an overflowing file cabinet for some twenty minutes, cursing beneath his breath all the while. Eventually, with an air of triumph Kate considered too mild in relation to the task accomplished, he produced a folder shedding sheets of paper like a fish shedding scales. “George!”

  George, a thin young man with an enormous nose, a handlebar mustache and bare feet, stuck his head in the door and inquired in a serene voice, “You bellowed, your eminence?”

  “Is that Xerox machine working today?”

  “It’s the only machine out here that is.”

  “Could you make a copy of this file for me?”

  “Sure, but it’s your fault if the paper jams.”

  “Live dangerously. Risk it.” George left and Dan said, “Can I hitch a ride back to town with you? I got a girl in Niniltna I want to see.”

  “When don’t you?” Kate said absently. She was frowning at her crossed ankles. Dan exchanged a quizzical glance with Jack, who shrugged. They waited.

  Kate became aware of the silence that had fallen in the room and uncrossed her ankles. “No,” she said, rising to her feet. “No, you can’t hitch a ride with us. I’m sorry, Dan, but we’re not going back to Niniltna just yet.”

  Jack shot her a quick look, but said nothing.

  Dan shrugged and grinned. “I’ll get on the CB and get her to come up here.”

  “Who is it this time?” Kate said.

  “A gentleman never kisses and tells,” Dan said virtuously, and pretended offense when Jack laughed at him.

  · · ·

  Jack followed Kate outside to the airstrip, tucking the bulky file in his parka pocket. She stood next to the Cessna in silence without moving, her eyes troubled. At last Jack said, “Where are we going?”

  She stood, irresolute, not replying. Jack nudged her and repeated the question.

  Her chin lifted. He heard her take a deep breath and she turned and said, “Have you got enough gas to get us to Anchorage?”

  “You want to go to town now?”

  “Yes.”

  “From here?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her. “We’ve got enough gas. Why do you want to go to town?”

  “I want to bail Chick out of jail.”

  Her answer rocked him back a little. “Chick who?” he said cautiously.

  “Chick Noyukpuk.” Jack’s expression remained blank and Kate said, “The Billiken Bullet.” Still no response, and Kate said with asperity, “It is inconceivable to me that you have lived for twenty-two years in this state and you still don’t know who the Billiken Bullet is.”

  “Who is he?” Jack said meekly.

  Kate gave a martyred sigh. “He’s Mandy’s roomie.” She looked at him and added, “Mandy? Next door to Abel? You know—”

  “The lady with more dogs than James Thurber,” he interrupted. “I remember now, the little guy with no front teeth. They mush dogs.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes,” she said, opening them. “They mush dogs. And they live together.”

  “Oh.” Jack thought it over, and added, “When he’s not in jail, you mean.”

  “When Chick’s not in jail,” Kate agreed.

  “And you want to bail him out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  Kate gestured vaguely. “The usual. Drunk and disorderly. Disturbing the peace. Assaulting a police officer. Resisting arrest.”

  Jack took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Oh. That usual. Mind telling me why we’re bailing him out?” Kate opened her mouth, and then closed it again. “No, huh?”

  “It’s just a hunch,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

  “Okay,” he said simply. “Let’s go.”

  Nine

  “I DIDN’T TAKE THE DAMN THING,” Chick said. “I told that damn trooper in Anchorage, and I told that damn judge— Did you hear what she said to me?”

  “Who said?”

  “That judge who sentenced me,” Chick said, sitting up straight on Bobby’s couch and looking indignant.

  They had made the trip to Anchorage and back in record time, and all Kate saw of town was Fifth Avenue on the way to the Cook Inlet Pre-Trial Facility, Third Avenue on the way to the courthouse, and Sixth Avenue on the way back to Merrill Field, all of them glittering red and green with Christmas decorations. It was late in the afternoon when they took off for the return trip, and the sun had long since set. Strobes from the tops of the Arco and BP towers and exhaust from the traffic made the streets look like something out of Faust. She was inexpressibly relieved when they were airborne and outbound. Sitting next to her, she knew Jack had felt the tension build on the way into town and ebb on the way out, and she was grateful that he knew enough to remain silent.

  Chick Noyukpuk, oblivious to any emotional trauma experienced by anyone not himself, slept his way home curled up in a blanket in the backseat. Now he was wide awake, drinking coffee laced with Wild Turkey and watching hungrily as Bobby barbecued moose steaks on the fireplace grill.

  “What did the judge say?” Jack said, resigned to playing straight man.

  “She s
aid I was a convicted felon and couldn’t vote no more.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. He raised an eyebrow in Kate’s direction.

  “Have you ever voted?” she asked Chick.

  “No,” Chick said belligerently, “but that don’t mean I don’t want to. You just wait till the next election, I’ll vote, by God I will.” He pushed his jaw out. There was a moment of silence. “When’s the next election?” he said.

  “It’ll be a while,” Jack said in a soothing voice.

  “But I still didn’t steal that goddam snow machine,” Chick said, uncharacteristically reverting to his original complaint. He saw Kate’s skepticism and raised his voice. “I didn’t, Kate. On top of knowing I’d be back in the guest cabin when I got home if I did steal the damn thing, have you ever known me to pass up a ride on a Snowcat?” She said nothing, and he demanded, “Well?”

  “No,” Kate said slowly, “no, I haven’t.”

  “Who says there was one?” Bobby muttered to Jack, but the big man was watching Kate and didn’t respond.

  A minute passed, and another. A third went the same way and Bobby couldn’t stand it. “Is this the little gray cells’ part?” he begged. “Huh, is it, is it?”

  “Shut up,” Kate said curtly, without looking at him. “I’m thinking.”

  “Oh well, pardon me all to hell, she’s thinking,” Bobby told Jack. He forked the steaks off the grill in offended silence and handed brimming plates around.

  Chick sniffed his dinner and closed his eyes in ecstasy. “Real food! Now I know I’m home.”

  Kate looked down at the moose steak on her plate, a little charred and sizzling still from the grill. She cut a piece and lifted it halfway to her mouth, and paused, looking at the steaming, pink meat oozing juices. She dropped her fork back on her plate and pushed it away.

  “What’s the matter?” Bobby asked. “Something wrong with your steak?”

  “No.”

  Bobby picked up her plate and inspected the cut of meat. “I can grill up another if you—”

  “No, Bobby, thanks anyway. I’m not really that hungry.”

  “Never known you to turn down one of my steaks before,” Bobby said, hurt. The men set to without further conversation, cleaning their plates. Bobby, still offended or pretending to be, whisked the debris into the kitchen and badgered Chick into washing the dishes, watching with such a merciless eye that Chick, unnerved, broke two plates.