*
As she left the cabin, Kate eyed the gun rack above the door. It held a twelve-gauge, pump-action shotgun, much like her own, with enough firepower to take the heart out of most predators, especially the two-legged kind. The homesteader in her approved, if the investigator in her deplored this further evidence in support of Neil’s innocence. She hadn’t seen any other firearms inside. He could have tossed it down a convenient abandoned mine shaft, but she didn’t think so. Neil Miles was representative of the Park’s resident dope growers, a group collectively notorious for a nonviolent lifestyle.
The guy was a vegetarian, for God’s sake. However greatly provoked, Kate couldn’t see how someone who, when he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a moose if he were starving to death, could shoot a human being in support of the law of supply and demand. No, she concluded gloomily, Neil might have given Lisa a carnation and a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, but he wouldn’t have shot her.
“What do you want to bet he reads Thoreau?” she asked Mutt.
Mutt yawned.
Neil Miles’s homestead was perched on top of a rising swell of land in the middle of a long, wide valley swept smooth by glacial recession. The soil was dark and rich, and if the summers were short this far north, the summer days were eighteen hours long and, this far inland, hot. The moisture-laden winds off the Gulf of Alaska wrung themselves out against the southern slopes of the Quilaks, and the resulting summer rains were nourishing without being torrential. You could grow anything in the space of a Green Valley’s short, hot summer, and the homesteaders did, and more than one grew it for resale. On that cheery thought Kate pressed the Jag’s starter and half-rode, half-pushed her way out of Neil’s front yard.
*
After her fourth stop and another interview identical to the previous three, Kate made straight for the Step. The higher they climbed, the colder it became and the smoother the track, and the last few miles went fast, switchbacks and all. They emerged onto a plateau, a flat, treeless step of land three thousand feet up from the valley and anywhere from six to sixteen thousand feet below the jagged peaks at its back. The Step was a mile in length and three thousand feet across and had an airstrip running down its exact center. An old Cessna Kate recognized as the one George Perry had been working on two days before was lifting off one end of the strip as she emerged onto the plateau. She waved, and the plane rocked a hello before dropping its right wing in an abrupt bank toward the mountains.
South of the Step lay the Kanuyaq River and civilization, or what passed for it in the Park. North of the Step lay the Quilak Mountain Range. At one end of the airstrip, Park headquarters was a clump of prefabricated buildings that housed representatives of every government bureaucracy that had anything to do with federal land management and natural resources, as well as a few that had nothing to do with either. Coexisting in frequently unfriendly proximity were the U.S. Department of Wildlife, the Alaska State Department of Fish and Game, the Alaska State Division of Mines, the Alaska State Division of Forestry, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, and last, but as Dan O’Brian would certainly tell you most emphatically, not least, the National Park Service.
Presiding over this cacophonous, controlled brawl was Dan O’Brian. As head ranger he was in nominal charge of keeping the sports fishermen from assaulting the subsistence fishermen, both groups from attacking the commercial fishermen, and all three of them from rising up in concert to do away with the grossly outnumbered but resolute agents of the Department of Fish and Game. It was enough to induce paranoia in the most well-balanced and even-tempered individual, which was probably why when Kate tracked Dan down, she found him howling obscenities behind the closed door of his otherwise empty office.
“Taken up primal scream therapy, Danny boy?”
Dan O’Brian never did anything halfway. When he hated, he hated, and when he loved, he loved, and he adored Kate. His voice broke in mid-howl. Jumping to his feet, he came around the desk and swept her up into a rough embrace and a smacking kiss.
“Watch yourself, bozo,” she said, fending him off, “or I’ll sic Mutt on you.”
He leaned over, grabbed Mutt’s head between two rough-skinned hands and gave her a smacking kiss, too. Mutt’s eyes closed halfway and she almost purred. “That dog’s heels are even rounder than yours,” Dan observed. “What’re you two doing up here this early?” His gaze sharpened. “You looking for work? We got half a dozen fire watch positions opening up in another month.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “You expecting a lot of fires this season? It’s only April, Dan.”
“It’s been a bad winter, and I hear salmon prices are going to drop even further this year than last.” He made a face and spread his hands. “You know how it is. Times are tough. When times get tough people get broke. Before long somebody heads out into the Park and finds themselves a stand of spruce infested with spruce beetles and strikes a match, and shortly thereafter goes to work smoke jumping for the Department of Interior.” He gave a fatalistic shrug. “It feeds the kids.”
Kate eyed him with something approaching respect. “You’re sitting pretty calm at the prospect of thousands of Park acres going up in flames.”
“Not calm. Reconciled to my fate, maybe. Anyway, you want a job?”
Kate felt the weight of the envelope lying against her breast and smiled to herself. “Not this year.”
“Damn. We could use someone on the line that knows a smoke trail from morning fog.” He sighed.
“No, I’m up here for something else entirely.”
Something in her voice alerted him. He returned to his seat, folded his hands on his desk and regarded her, at attention. “What’s going on?”
“You heard about McAniff’s little shooting spree down in Niniltna, I assume.”
His face darkened. “Who hasn’t?” He shook his head. “Bunch of good people dead, for no earthly reason that anyone can discover. Crazy bastard.” He eyed her curiously. “Chopper Jim said McAniff made a try at you and you nailed him.”
“Sort of.”
“Good girl.”
“Thanks. Mutt deserves most of the credit.”
“Good girl,” Dan told Mutt, unknowingly echoing Kate’s very words that day. Mutt’s tail thumped the floor enthusiastically. “What’s the going rate for apprehending homicidal maniacs these days?”
“The grateful thanks of John Q. Public.”
“Lucky you. So what’s the problem? You caught McAniff, murder weapon in hand. From what I hear, he hasn’t denied doing any of it.”
“On the contrary.”
“Bragging about it, is he?” Dan said distastefully.
“Nonstop, from what I hear.”
“Sick.”
“Yeah.”
“So what is the problem?” He gave her a shrewd look. “There is one, isn’t there?”
“The problem is, one of the victims was killed by a bullet from a different rifle.”
Sound seemed to seep out of the room, leaving an empty, hollow feeling behind.
“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Dan said at last, slowly, the syllables dropping into the silence like rocks down a deep well. “We got another mad killer on the loose with a 30.06?”
“So it seems.”
He seemed to see the bandage on her temple for the first time, and his eyes narrowed. He raised an eyebrow, and she nodded. “I think so.” She raised a hand to forestall his next question. “No, I didn’t see them.”
“Where were you?”
“Lisa Getty was the one shot with a different rifle. I was tossing her boat down on the river. They got me on deck.”
He sat upright. “Lisa Getty?” She nodded, and he said with utter loathing, “Whoever killed that bitch did everything in the Park on four legs a favor.”
Kate sighed. “Great. Another prospective charter member for the Grateful Lisa Getty’s Dead Fan Club. What, specifically, did you have against her?”
�
�Nothing I could prove or I’d’a jailed that bitch long since.” Dan was a tall man with bushy, carrot-colored hair, blue eyes that usually twinkled with good humor and an open, freckled face that was usually smiling. There was no smile and no twinkle now. “I followed her up into the Quilaks twice and found at least half a dozen dead black bear both goddam times.”
“Ah. Bladders gone?”
“Yep, and the fur and the meat just left there, wasted.”
“Not wasted, exactly,” Kate murmured, “coyotes and foxes got to eat, too.”
Dan carried on, unheeding. “God, how I hate that! I could live with the poaching, game has to be regularly harvested to keep the population down so it doesn’t run out of feed, but it’s the waste that pisses me off. And this time of year is the worst. Jesus, the goddam bears’ve been sleeping all winter, their coats are the best they’ll ever be, they’ve just woke up and they haven’t had a chance to get at the fish yet so their meat tastes the best it ever will, and that bitch shoots ’em and guts ’em for the fucking bladders and leaves the rest there to rot! Can you believe it?”
The question was obviously rhetorical. Kate, having been acquainted with the residents of the Park for a lot longer than Dan, who as a ten-year veteran was a comparative newcomer, wisely refrained from answering.
“And I know,” he added, “I know she had a hand in that sudden drop in sea otter population we had in the Ikamag Fjords last year. Plus I’m positive she’s been flying into the Ahlbach seal rookery. Bitch was a goddam one-woman meat grinder.”
“I hear black bear bladders are fetching a good price.”
His spleen temporarily vented, Dan gave a gloomy nod. “Anywhere from six hundred to a thousand bucks apiece on the Asian black market. And why not? Any Hong Kong chemist’ll tell you, ground bladder of black bear’ll cure anything from impotence to influenza.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Like hell.” Dan glared at her suspiciously. “And don’t let it give you any ideas, either, Kate. We got a stable population of bear in this friggin’ Park and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Kate widened her eyes at Dan, the picture of innocence. He snorted, and she smothered a smile. “You sure Lisa was the one doing the poaching?”
“I’m sure. Like I said, I had my suspicions and I followed her a couple times. She left bear carcasses on her trail the way moose leave nuggets. I was dying to bust her, I just hadn’t been able to catch her in the act”
“Odd,” Kate said in a ruminative voice.
“What is?”
“Oh, I heard one of your rangers was spending some time with her.” She met his eyes. “That his idea, or yours?”
Beneath her fascinated gaze Dan swelled up to twice his normal size and exploded in a burst of rage. “One of my rangers was fucking that bitch? Which one? Tell me! I’ll kill him! Which one? Goddammit, Kate, if you know, you’d better say!”
Just for meanness Kate said, “It was Max Chaney,” and Dan erupted out of his chair and stamped over to the door and shouted Chaney’s name down the hall. When there was no reply, the door slammed shut with a force that reverberated up through the legs of Kate’s chair. Mutt came to her feet, alarmed.
Simmering, Dan sat down again, very erect. A long, timid silence ensued, broken by the cautious creak of the opening door. An eye peered through the crack. “You bellowed, boss?”
“Where’s that fucker Chaney?”
“Not on the premises, boss,” the voice said, gaining confidence now that its owner knew he wasn’t the one on the carpet.
“Well find him or find out where the hell he is!”
The door shut promptly, and feet beat rapidly down the hall and out of earshot.
“I remember once,” Kate said, “when I was working for the D.A.’s office, they made me take this class called Interaction Management. It was all about how to supervise one’s employees, to teach them how to get along with their fellow workers and encourage them to realize their full potential.” She looked at Dan. “Wonder why they didn’t call you in as a guest lecturer.”
The door crashed back against the wall, and a tall young man, thin almost to the point of emaciation stood breathing heavily in the doorway, his exhalations causing his magnificent handlebar mustache to ruffle like seaweed in a strong current. “You better come, boss.”
Dan was on his feet, his eyes fixed on the other man. “What’s the matter, Kevin?”
Kevin’s face was paper white, and he was shaking so hard Kate thought she could hear his bones rattling together beneath their negligible layer of skin. “It’s Chaney, boss. I think he’s dead.”
*
Max Chaney was dead all right, as dead as a bullet through the forehead can make one. It was a small, dark, perfectly round hole, with very little blood. He lay on his back in front of an open window in his tiny bedroom, as if the shot had caught him as he leaned out to take a breath of spring air. If so, it had been his last.
“Stop,” Kate said sharply from the doorway. “Don’t touch anything else. Everybody out. You, too, Dan. Kevin? Get on the radio and put in a call to Chopper Jim. Tell him there’s a man down, dead, same M.O. as Lisa Getty, looks like the same weapon. Tell him to get on the horn to Anchorage and get a forensics team up here crash. Got that?” Kate had to repeat herself. “Have you got that, Kevin?”
“Man dead, same M.O. as Lisa Getty, forensics team crash,” Kevin repeated numbly.
“After you talk to Jim, try to raise Bobby Clark on the radio. He might not be there but Jack Morgan probably will be.” Kevin hung fire where he was, staring at Chaney’s body with dilated eyes and a slowly greening complexion. Kate put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a little nudge. He seemed to come awake, and turned to stumble through the crowd gathered around the door.
Nothing in life makes a body look as awkward as death, not even sex. Chaney’s limbs looked broken where they lay, as if death had somehow rearranged them to grow out at odd angles. His brown hair was neatly parted and combed, his skin was whiter than Kevin’s, and his eyes, wide, thickly lashed and brown in color, stared at the ceiling with a puzzled look. Waving back Dan, whose shock had given way to a cold, tight-lipped fury, Kate knelt next to the remains of Max Chaney and with gentle fingers closed his eyes. They were lukewarm to the touch, and somehow less firm than living flesh. He hadn’t been dead long; his arm moved easily when she flexed the elbow.
She controlled an inner shudder and rose. “Can you lock this door, Dan?”
Outside the building Mutt met her with a worried frown. Kate patted her head absently, which made the dog look even more worried. Dan, standing next to them and swearing steadily, broke off long enough to demand, “Well? What do we do now?”
Kate, staring at the peaked heads of the Quilak Mountains, didn’t answer. He nudged her and repeated the question.
Starting, she stared at him for a moment, as if recalled only by force from a place far away. “Wait for the trooper. Jack Morgan’ll be along, too; he flew in this morning. Tell them everything you know.”
“That won’t take long,” he growled.
“From the looks of things I’d guess the shot came from that stand of hemlocks just up the strip. Don’t go over there, and don’t let anybody else go over there. Let Jim and his team get to it first before you track up the snow.”
“They’re not going to find anything; it’s been melting faster than butter on a hot plate the last week. Wait a minute,” he added as she started toward her snow machine, “where do you think you’re going?”
“I’ve got to talk to someone. I’m sorry, Danny boy, but it’s important.” She mounted the machine and started the engine.
“Goddammit, Shugak, I’d like to know what’s more important than answering a lot of dumb questions from that dumbass trooper from Tok!”
“The only reason you don’t like Chopper Jim is because he beat you to my cousin Martha,” she yelled over the noise of the engine. “Come on, Mutt!
”
Mutt, with an apologetic look over her shoulder at Dan, hopped up behind Kate, and the machine lurched off down the mountain.
“Women!” Dan O’Brian said, with a loathing that encompassed mistress and dog, and set about the task of calming down twenty-five slightly hysterical Park workers, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger before in their lives, unless they were Fish and Game agents.
Eight
BY RUNNING THE ENGINE FLAT OUT Kate made it Step to town in less than an hour. She was lucky and met Bernie at the door of the Niniltna High School gymnasium. “Bernie, hold up! I want to talk to you.”
“Can’t stop now, I got a potlatch to go to.”
“I didn’t know you came to potlatches,” Kate said, momentarily diverted.
“I didn’t come, I was commanded,” he said. “Didn’t you hear? Ekaterina put the word out—the whole Park is supposed to be here. Besides, the first game of the tournament begins right after.”
“What tournament?” she asked innocently.
“Ha, ha. What happened?” he asked, nodding at her bandage. “Jack clip you one?”
“Ha, ha,” she replied. “Bernie, I need to—”
He waved her through the door and the words died on her lips.
The gym was large and rectangular, with a high ceiling, a hardwood floor and bleachers on one side. From one backboard hung an American flag, from the other the maple leaf of Canada. Centered on the opposite wall was a sign that read in large, black, plain-spoken letters, “Please Honor And Respect That This Is An Alcohol Free Event.” Beneath the sign half a dozen long tables placed end to end were stacked with platters and casseroles and bowls and trays, each featuring the owner’s very own special recipe for fish head stew or caribou sausage or blood stew or boiled moose tongue or muktuk or kulich or pashka. Drums were beating as Kate entered, the crowd in the bleachers spilled out around the walls of the room, and Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was calling down the tribes, and everything else was driven out of Kate’s head.
“Inupiat!” The drum beat on, the response was tepid, and Ekaterina said, her deep voice amplified by the microphone, “Inupiat! Come on, get out here! You know if you don’t I’ll come up there and get you out!”
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