A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  “Ballistics says the bullet that killed Lisa Getty came from a different rifle than the bullets that killed the other victims.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Different rifle.”

  “Yup.”

  “Different shooter?”

  “Looks like.”

  She put down the butter knife, balancing it just so on the saucer. When she put down the bread he knew he had her. Not much got between Kate and food.

  “Before you ask, we double-checked for errors. I even had Gamble run the printouts on the rifle through the CLIS database. Same answer, three times.”

  “Gamble,” she said. “The suit you brought in last year?”

  “Uh-huh.” He indicated the files that littered the top of the table. “Want to take a look?”

  “No.” She picked up her bread, spread it with salmonberry jelly and took a big bite. The words muffled, she added, “But I will.”

  After breakfast, she retired to the couch with the files and read steadily through the afternoon. At about three o’clock she put down the one she was reading and went outside. She climbed the ladder to the cache and rooted around. There were two small packages of caribou steaks and a moose roast, all that was left of her winter meat supply. She brought it all down. It was still freezing at night, but the days were warm enough now that the meat would soon spoil. “Mutt!” she called. “You horny bitch, get your hot behind home! Now!” There was no reply. She hadn’t really expected one. There were legends about timber wolves and their stamina. Kate didn’t know whether to laugh or swear. In the end, she did both. “Oh hell. Enjoy it while you can, girl.”

  Inside, she chopped all three packages into stew meat. Lighting the propane cooker, she put her biggest stew pot over the flame and into it sliced a can of bacon and the two largest onions she could find in the root cellar in back of the barn. Mincing a couple of large cloves of garlic, she stirred then into the bacon and onions. The smell made her stomach growl. Adding the meat and dried herbs she sautéed the mixture until it was brown. She found some celery that wasn’t too withered and some carrots in excellent shape. She produced a couple of cans of stewed tomatoes and tossed those in, too, filled one of the empties with water and added it, thought it over and added two more. The liquid in the pot barely covered the ingredients. She cleaned the kitchen, waiting for the pot to boil, and when it did added a couple of cups of macaroni, covered the pot and turned down the heat. She’d brought another loaf of bread with her from the cache, and she left that out on the counter, still wrapped in tin foil.

  Jack, who had spent a peaceful afternoon reading his way through her collection of F. M. Busby, marked his spot in The Long View and sniffed appreciatively. “Can I help?”

  “Nope.”

  He regarded her back with a speculative eye for a moment, decided against insisting, and reopened his book. Giving the counter a last wipe with the washcloth, she hung it over the pump and went back to the files. An hour later she finished reading the last file and sat, frowning at it. The stew was simmering, a cheerful, bubbling sound, and the aroma of garlic and onions and moose and caribou filled the house. Turning the cooker off, Kate set the pot out on the step to cool and called again for Mutt, in vain. It was still light out but she got a start on the evening by lighting the lamps, and the room was filled with a cozy, hissing glow.

  Shelves lined every available inch of all the walls of the cabin except what backed up the two stoves. Most of the shelves were jammed with books, old and new, hard covered and paperback, all showing signs of being read and reread and read again. One of the shelves pulled out to form a rudimentary desk with stuffed cubbyholes directly behind it. Kate dragged a chair over from the table and rummaged around until she found paper and pen. She sat for a moment, thinking, and then bent over and began to write.

  Eyeing her unresponsive back was unproductive and less fun than Rissa and Bran were having with UET. Jack went back to his book.

  At six she brought the stew back in and reheated it. Jack dog-eared his book and went to set the table. At the first bite of stew he closed his eyes in momentary ecstasy. “Good,” he said indistinctly. “Maybe your best.”

  They both had seconds and mopped up the juice with hunks of bread torn from the loaf.

  “That was great,” Jack said, leaning back with a satisfied sigh. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I had moose stew. Too damn long. No, don’t. I’ll get it.” He smothered a burp and rose to clear the table. Kate went back to the desk. Filling the dish pan alternately from the gallon teapot sitting on the wood stove and the water pump, he washed the dishes, put the remains of the stew into a smaller pot and put the pot outside. He started coffee, hunted around until he found the chocolate chips and the walnuts, and made a batch of Toll House cookies, which pretty much defined the limits of his expertise in the kitchen.

  When they came out of the oven, Kate shoved back her chair and stretched her arms over her head, bending to touch her toes. He gestured with a plate full of cookies. She moved to the broad, padded bench that ran around one side of the room beneath the shelves. He brought the cookies and a mug of coffee, properly doctored. She bit into a cookie and had to control a grunt of approval. The coffee scalded her tongue on first sip, and she blew on it to cool it down.

  “So what do you think?”

  “You never put in enough chips. Chocolate’s one of the four major food groups, you know.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched, and Kate realized it was the first time she’d seen them. She decided she liked him without a beard and was glad it hadn’t been covering up a receding chin or pouty lips or buck teeth.

  “What are the other three?” he asked.

  “What other three?”

  He grinned to himself. “The other three major food groups.”

  “Oh.” She pulled herself together and dragged her attention back to her cookie. “According to Bobby, fat, salt and sugar. All well represented here, I’m happy to report.” He laughed, and she licked chocolate from her fingers. “No sign of the murder weapon, I suppose?”

  He shook his head. “I had half a dozen people go over the ground from sunup yesterday morning until sundown yesterday night. Nothing.”

  “Someone could have been taking a shot at McAniff and missed.”

  “And someone could have wanted to kill Lisa Getty and stumbled onto what they in their relative innocence thought was the perfect crime.”

  Her look was cool but she didn’t deny it. She thought of something else. “Could McAniff have had two rifles?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not sure of a goddam thing in this case, but we do have an eyewitness. Becky Jorgensen says not.”

  “She saw him where, inside the cabin, from another room, for how long, maybe five seconds max? Watching while he killed her husband? And then she ran and never looked back.” Kate picked up another cookie and held it. “Maybe he had another rifle outside.”

  “Clerk at Niniltna General Store says he bought one, and only one, the day before.”

  “And the bullets from all the other victims match that rifle?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not the bullet that killed Lisa.”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Ballistics ran the same check three times. Gamble ran it through CLIS twice. We’re sure.”

  Jack got up to refill their mugs. She watched him in frowning silence.

  “Well?”

  She jerked her chin at the files. “Has Chopper Jim seen those?”

  “He wrote half of them. It’s his territory. He was in charge of the investigation.”

  “So he knows all this.”

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s the trooper in charge, why can’t he—”

  “He was sleeping with her.”

  The generous curves of Kate’s mouth compressed together into a thin line. She held back her first comment, which was profane and futile,
her second, which was physically impossible, and went with her third. “If that’s all it takes to be suspected of murdering Lisa Getty, we can include half the Park.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Who else was in the area that morning?”

  “That we know of? Like it says in the files.” Jack ticked them off one by one. “Lottie Getty. Becky Jorgensen. Lyle and Lucy Longstaff, before they died. Lisa herself. George Perry was also there but he was about five thousand feet straight up, so I don’t know that he counts.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  She took another cookie. “What do you want me to do?”

  He shrugged. “Do what you do best. Go in, poke around, a nudge here, a shove there. Pretty soon something will break loose.”

  Kate felt her temper rise. “Couldn’t stay away from me, huh?”

  “Not for much longer, no,” Jack said.

  “Missed me that much, did you?”

  “More.”

  “You prick.” She rose hastily, banging her shoulder on the shelf overhead and dislodging a dozen cassette tapes. She turned just in time to keep the deck from crashing to the floor.

  Jack said the only thing a wise man could. “I’m sorry.” He stood and touched her shoulder. She shrugged away and bent down to pick up the tapes, taking an inordinate amount of time sorting them into their correct order and lining them up in a neat, alphabetical row by title. He read the titles over her shoulder and shook his head admiringly. “You sure are narrow in your taste in music, Kate.”

  She stooped to pick up a cassette she’d missed before, and slid Beethoven’s Greatest Hits between k.d. lang and Jake and Elwood Blues.

  “You must go through the batteries,” he tried again.

  Still no reply.

  He sighed. “I don’t have to tell you the first twenty-four hours following the crime are the most important.”

  “No,” she said, and he winced away from the deepening roughness of her ruined voice. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I don’t have to tell you it’s been ten days on this one.”

  “No.”

  “The longer we wait to move, the greater the chance we’ll never find the killer.”

  “Yes.”

  “As it is, we’re probably just going through the motions. The killer’s had too much time to clean up after him- or herself. All they have to do is sit tight and wait us out.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we do have to go through the motions, regardless.”

  “Yes.”

  He paused, watching her unresponsive back, her quick, deft hands, not quite so quick and deft as usual, as she rearranged her cassettes. “You’ll do it, then?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  He winced again. If she’d seen it she would have been glad. She sorted her tapes with a steadier hand, her thoughts a week away and twenty-five miles down the old railroad bed, in a stand of trees on the edge of a forty-eight-hundred-foot dirt airstrip. She had known all of those victims, some of them all her life.

  Feeling restless and more than a little guilty, Jack wandered around the room. Coming to a stop in front of her desk, he looked down at the pad of paper covered with Kate’s writing. Notes highlighting the important points of the case, he supposed. He wondered what she had made of it. Glancing over to see her back still turned to him, he stretched out an exploratory finger to pull the tablet around so he could read it.

  “Stewed tomatoes,” he read. “Evaporated milk, green beans, white flour, whole wheat flour, oatmeal, raisins, dried apricots.” It was a grocery list, a long one, with quantities listed in case lot amounts meant to last a year. Practical, he decided, was the best word to describe Kate Shugak. “Four hundred a day,” he said out loud.

  With an effort, Kate returned to the here and now. “Plus expenses.”

  He frowned a little. Her voice sounded odd. “You okay?”

  “Plus expenses,” she repeated.

  “You got it.”

  There was a brief pause. “One time, you can’t come to see me just to come see me?”

  He shrugged. “Well. As long as you’re here.”

  “I should make you sleep on the couch tonight.”

  “Yeah, you probably should. Are you going to?”

  She swore at him. He laughed.

  Four

  WHEN KATE KILLED the snow machine’s engine, the resulting silence was broken once by the distant buzz of another snow-machine engine, a second time by the faraway yip of a dog. Mutt disdained a reply and jumped down from the back of the Jag. She looked up at Kate inquiringly, obviously ready, willing and able to get on with the job. “You look entirely too smug,” Kate told her.

  One of Mutt’s eyebrows quirked up as if to say, You should talk.

  “Go to hell,” Kate told her.

  A low, amused woof was her reply.

  They had stopped in front of a large log cabin with a U.S. flag flying from a pole mounted on one corner of the roof and a satellite dish hanging from another. Kate dismounted and went inside.

  The man behind the counter looked up. “Hey, Kate.”

  “Hey, Ralph. You filling in?”

  He nodded. “Until they hire somebody permanent. Come rain, come shine, come sleet, come massacre, the mail must go through.” Their eyes met. “Sorry. You here for yours?”

  “All but the bills.”

  He grinned. “I’ll see what I can do. Take me a minute, the mail plane just came.”

  “No hurry.”

  He rummaged through the mass of envelopes large and small, thick and thin, and she wandered down to the end of the counter and looked behind it. He raised his head. “Right here?” she said.

  His hands stilled. “Yeah. Right here.”

  She shook her head. “Hell of a thing.”

  “Guy was some kind of a nut.” His lips tightened. “I knew Pat Jorgensen twenty years. He was good people. He didn’t deserve to die like that.” Ralph paused. “You could have saved some of the taxpayer’s money, out there on the road.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Shame you didn’t.”

  “That’s what people keep telling me.” Her voice was a soft, torn sound.

  Ralph Peabody, burly with a square red face and no hair, looked stolid but wasn’t insensitive. He forbore to say more and resumed sorting through the envelopes.

  “Mind if I go through?” Kate asked, nodding toward the curtained doorway that separated the tiny post office from the main body of the house.

  He gave her a curious look but shrugged. “Go ahead. Becky’s still in the hospital.”

  “Bill around?”

  “Him and Betty are in Anchorage with her.”

  She pushed aside the curtain, a thin, flowered cotton hanging from a slender metal rod that upon closer inspection proved to be copper tubing nailed to the door’s molding with carpet tacks, and walked through. She turned, still holding the curtain back. The doorway framed Ralph’s bent head, the counter and the door of the post office perfectly. The miracle was that McAniff had not seen and shot Becky as she stood there, a horrified witness to her husband’s murder.

  Kate looked closer. There was a large stain on the floor beneath Ralph’s feet. She shut her eyes briefly. She, too, had known Pat Jorgensen, for longer than Ralph, and yes, he had been good people, and no, he had not deserved to die like that.

  She let the curtain fall and turned. She was standing in the living room of the log house, a spacious room with an enormous console television dominating one corner, two worn but comfortable-looking easy chairs parked in front of it. Across from the stone fireplace sat a flowered couch long and wide enough for Pat to sleep on with room to spare. There was a multicolored afghan in clashing neon colors folded neatly over its back. Becky crocheted, Kate remembered. There wasn’t a friend of hers who hadn’t been presented with an afghan in colors bright enough to guarantee a headache if you looked at it long enough.

  A picture w
indow was cut into the wall facing the airstrip, with Angqaq Peak and attendant, acolyte Quilaks rising in the background. Between the strip and the mountains were the trees, clustered together like gossips fearing to move out of earshot. Above the trees she could see wisps of smoke from the chimneys of homes and businesses in Niniltna, and a large column of steam from the town’s electric plant. It must have looked like shelter and sanctuary to a panicked sixty-four-year-old woman who had just seen her husband gunned down in cold blood.

  Kate stepped to the main door of the house, which opened off the living room, walked through the entryway and opened the outside door. Standing at the top of the steps, she paused, looking down the length of the runway. Mutt trotted around the corner of the house and stood, looking up, tail curled in a question mark.

  Across the runway from the house stood a cleared and filled section of land that supported a square, two-story building. A faded sign beneath the eaves read, “Chugach Air Taxi Service, Inc.” To the building’s right were tiedowns occupied by a dozen small planes, most of them still on skis. Kate came down the steps and crossed the strip to the hangar. The large sliding doors were closed. She went into the office by the side door and through it to the hangar. A man in gray-striped coveralls was bent over the open cowling of a six-seater Cessna 206. The Cessna could have used a paint job, the man a bath.

  Something metal went crunch. “Shit!” he yelled. He wound up and threw the screwdriver as hard as he could in what turned out to be Kate’s direction. She ducked and it whizzed over her head. Behind her Mutt jumped and caught the screwdriver’s plastic handle neatly in her teeth.

  “Nice to see you, too, George,” Kate said, standing straight. “What’s the matter with the Loose Goose this time?”

  “Damn magneto’s gone again,” he said glumly, “and my frigging mechanic picked now to go work repairing equipment on a fish processor in Dutch Harbor.” George Perry was tall and thin with shaggy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, both liberally splattered with grease. He looked more like a CPA than a bush pilot, but he cursed pretty good. He was cursing when Mutt trotted over and lay the screwdriver carefully at his feet. “Thanks, Mutt,” he said, stooping to pick it up with one hand and pull on Mutt’s ears with the other. She stood where she was, an expression of blissful idiocy on her face. “What brings you to town, Kate?”