Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  So, Jim thought. On the water by six fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour to get to the fish wheel. Pat’s estimate on Tyler’s fish-picking abilities could be taken with a grain of salt. Say thirty minutes. Jim checked his phone. It was now just after ten o’clock.

  Rigor set in after three to four hours, held on for twelve. Fix a tentative time of death at, say, somewhere between 8:45 A.M. and 12:45 P.M. “What time did you find him, Pat?”

  “Got here about five,” Pat said. “Fish wheel was stuck. Took me a while to figure out why.”

  “How long is ‘a while’?”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed. Jim met them with a steady gaze, refusing to apologize for the question.

  Pat blinked first and looked away, across the river. “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “What had the basket stuck on?”

  Pat shrugged again. “A stick.”

  “What stick? Where is it?”

  Another shrug from Pat. “I must have tossed it. I got a little distracted there, what with trying to see if Tyler was still alive and all. Useless little fucker though he was, he’s family, and he was my first concern.” His cigarette had again burned all the way down to his fingers. His free hand searched for the packet. It was empty and he crumpled it up and threw it into the little skiff. Not into the water. Not on the beach. Not into his skiff. Into Tyler’s skiff. It was a statement, Jim thought, although he didn’t yet know exactly what statement that was.

  The sun wouldn’t go below the horizon again for another month, and then only for a few minutes, but when it got this low, the light was dim enough to reduce old men sitting in skiffs to grayish outlines.

  Jim squatted again, this time to put his hand in the river.

  If Tyler had died at 8:45 A.M., normally rigor would have set in by 12:45 P.M. If Tyler had screwed around, on his cell like the old man said or maybe just sacking out in the sun, and had not started picking fish until later, rigor would only now be coming on, or not coming on at all. In neither case should rigor be so fully involved as it was, but that discounted the effect of the body being immersed in the water from then to discovery. Temperature played hell with rigor, especially in the Arctic.

  His hand was numb again. He pulled it out and dried it off, and made a mental note to replace the thermometer to his evidence kit. The last one had disappeared at the last crime scene.

  He pulled out a flashlight and walked up and down the gravel bank, peering into the shallows at the water’s edge and into the shrubbery at the land’s edge. He found an empty Coke can, a dozen empty Budweiser cans, some waterlogged cigarette butts that looked as if the fish or the ducks had been taking the occasional desultory nibble, a small pocketknife with just a blade and a nail file, an empty bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a crumpled thermal receipt with the print so faded, it was unintelligible. He bagged them all.

  Roger sat shivering in his skiff, Pat immobile in his. Roger’s skiff was a large aluminum affair, free of rust and dents, a powerful new Mercury Marine on the back connected to a shiny red fuel tank by a clean black hose. A set of oars was run beneath the thwarts, and oarlocks dangled inside the skiff from their holes. A workmanlike tackle box sat next to the oars, and two fishing poles were locked into opposite sides below the oarlocks. A bought-new bailing can sat in the bow, with an aluminum body and a smooth wooden handle.

  Pat’s skiff was a lot older but much the same in its spare neatness.

  Jim stepped over to look into the third skiff. “This Tyler’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tyler’s skiff, on the other hand, was half the size of the other two, holding so much junk, Jim was surprised it was still floating. His bailing can was made from a sawed-off plastic gallon milk jug. His kicker looked like Ole Evinrude had put it together with his own hands, and his fuel tank looked like it was about to rust through from the inside. The bottom was covered with a collection of bits of two-by-four and a torn-off section of rain gutter and a piece of rebar and cogs and gearwheels and other unidentifiable machine parts, including a quart-size ziplock full of mismatched nuts and bolts. There was a twelve-pack carton of beer dissolving around the last can, the same brand as he’d found on the beach. Jim spotted a fishing reel—but no poles—and a ballpeen hammer and a couple of screwdrivers and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, but no toolbox. The tools looked as rusty as the fuel tank.

  He looked up at Pat Mack, sitting in his own skiff, glowering. Jim didn’t think Pat was glowering at him, specifically, but at the world in general, and more likely at his recently deceased nephew, without whose labor the old man would now have to get along. Such as it was. “Whose son was Tyler’s, again?” he said.

  Pat patted his pockets automatically, and stilled. “Piers’.”

  Jim thought. “I don’t remember Piers.”

  “Died when his boat swamped on the Kanuyaq flats ten years ago. His wife died right after. I took on the boy.”

  Jim nodded. “The body has to go to the medical examiner in Anchorage, Pat.”

  “Why? Useless little fucker stumbled into the goddamn fish wheel. Ain’t nobody’s goddamn fault but his own.”

  “State law,” Jim said. “Every accidental death requires an autopsy. I’m sorry.” He moved to the body. “Roger, give me a hand here?”

  Still shivering, Roger climbed out of his skiff and complied.

  Act II

  Four

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 11

  Kate’s homestead

  It was the second week of July, an unusually fine day in the second month of a cool, rainy summer following a winter of record snowfall that had delayed the usual explosion of vegetative fecundity to the end of June. Only now could it be said that the deciduous trees were fully in leaf, rich shades of green in massed banks against a pale morning sky. Kate curled up on the couch, a mug of coffee in hand, and watched the light brighten in back of the Quilaks. Given birth by two tectonic plates pushing each other to the surface and nurtured on intermittent volcanic action and glacial wear and tear, the range of mountains forming the eastern border of the Park as well as the border between Alaska and Canada were in appearance simultaneously breathtaking in their beauty and terrifying in their menace. As the light of the rising sun crept westward, outlines changed and shadows grew and shrank, and if she watched for long enough without blinking, she could almost imagine the mountains marching in her direction.

  Which Kate supposed they were. Kate had been born after the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, 9.2 on the Richter scale, but she’d heard about it often enough from Emaa and Old Sam and the aunties. Terra firma was an illusion. A quake a day was the norm in Alaska, where every day was a triumph of optimism over experience.

  Kate never took the ground beneath her feet for granted.

  Aboveground movement in the yard caught her eye, and she turned her head to see Mutt materializing out of the underbrush in what always seemed to be an act of teleportation. Even after a partnership moving into its tenth year, Kate still marveled at the ability of a 140-pound half wolf–half husky to vanish and reappear at will into the landscape.

  Mutt gave an enthusiastic shake and trotted across the yard and up the steps. A moment later, Kate heard the latch click. Claws ticky-tacked across the wood floor. A cold nose shoved itself under her arm, sloshing the coffee in her mug. “Knock it off, monster,” Kate said, giving Mutt’s head a rough scratching. “Good hunting?”

  “Wuff!” Mutt said, her yellow eyes bright, her tail a drumbeat against the side of the couch. She betook herself to the tumbled quilt in front of the fireplace, scraped it into a new pile, turned around three times, and subsided into a boneless, somnolent heap of gray fur. Kate, watching, thought it was like someone throwing a switch on a perpetual-motion machine.

  She turned back to the windows that covered the southern wall of the house. The house, this two-story Lindal Cedar home that the Park rats built for her in three days three years before, was cool and quiet. Jim hadn’t made it home last night—again—an
d Johnny was working at the Suulutaq Mine, saving up for his freshman year of college at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. Van, his girlfriend, was attending UAA, too, and this fall they would both be living in the town house on Westchester Lagoon that Johnny had inherited from his father. Kate wasn’t sure what she thought about any of that, in order high school sweethearts, going to the same college, and sharing living quarters. She wasn’t going anywhere near the fact that after four years, Johnny was moving out of her house.

  Not that she had any say in it. He was eighteen, a legal adult. He couldn’t drink but he could vote, and the town house and the Subaru now belonged to him free and clear. Not to mention Jack’s retirement, which Kate as executor had invested in a modest little investment fund recommended by Victoria Muravieff that had at least not lost any money during the recession.

  Johnny was, she was glad to see, determined not to touch it unless and until he had to, which was why he was working his second summer two weeks on, two weeks off as a Suulutaq stickpicker. He’d sworn he wouldn’t work during the semester, but she wasn’t quite sure she believed him. A paycheck was a powerful stimulus. She’d managed to save some money toward his education herself, and she wondered now if she offered to pay him by the credit if he’d stick to his promise.

  Johnny, she told herself firmly, would be fine. The question was, would Kate? For a kid who’d been with her for only four years, he had become a remarkably permanent fixture in her life. He was the best thing Jack had given her.

  That big ugly man who knew all the lyrics to every Jimmy Buffett song ever recorded, who had been her boss in the Anchorage DA’s investigative branch for five and a half years, who had been her lover for almost that long, and who had known her better than any man ever had before or since, would have been a constant presence in her life with or without his son. The son he had committed to her care a few seconds before he died of wounds sustained while saving her own life. The pain of his loss had been so great that she had abandoned everything and everyone she knew to hide out on the YK Delta in western Alaska. Where, of all the unlikely people, Sergeant Jim Chopin, Chopper Jim, the so-called Father of the Park, had found her, and shocked her back into some semblance of sanity, and harried her back to the Park, where she had found Johnny on her doorstep.

  She came to herself with a start. Kate wasn’t one to look back. There was nothing to be done about the past, and what happened next was always so much more interesting. But the nights of an Alaskan summer seemed to encourage introspection by virtue of their very length.

  She grimaced. The only remedy to maudlin navel-gazing was to get in motion and stay in motion. She was good at both.

  She went upstairs to shower and dress and came downstairs again clean and full of purpose, there to make an enormous breakfast of deer sausage and eggs and toast loaded with butter and nagoonberry jam, washed down by another cup of that fabulous Javaloha coffee that Brendan had sent her from Hawaii. Of course, he had also sent her a six-pack of Spam-flavored macadamia nuts, which did not accompany breakfast and, absent starvation, would very probably never make it out of the can. She drank this coffee standing up, allowing herself no time to brood over it, after which she washed the dishes and pattered briskly down the steps into the yard.

  She wasn’t on Alaganik Bay on a fishing boat or a tender for the second summer in a row. It might be a trend. Her bank balance was healthy, which also might be a trend. No one had tried to burn down her house or drop a jet engine through the roof of it, lately. Last night she’d finished up the paperwork and sent out the bills for her last two PI jobs—an employee background check and a lost husband, both of which had proved a lot more complicated and a lot more productive of revenue than first estimated. No one else had come knocking on her door to clear up a personal or professional mystery, and the State of Alaska and the federal government had been remarkably reticent since she’d neatened up that little matter of international gunrunning the previous January. Although both their checks had cleared the bank just fine.

  She was faintly astonished to realize she was free to do whatever the hell she wanted. She stood in the middle of the clearing in front of her house, reveling in the clear, cool Park air, and thought about taking the summer off. A novel idea. She wasn’t quite sure what that would entail.

  The sun was well up in the sky by now, turning the Quilaks from their early-morning luminescent ghostliness into a solid dark blue fastness. If they did not quite lower, they definitely loomed, imposing, intimidating, impenetrable.

  Although not quite. Old Sam had left her property deep in that fastness, a homestead he had staked as a young man. Canyon Hot Springs, a steep, narrow valley at the very edge of the border between Alaska and Canada, which included the remnants of the cabin Old Sam had built, and a hot springs that bubbled up out of the ground. He’d left her a few other surprises as well, farther up the canyon.

  It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful place but difficult to access, a sweaty, bushwhacking journey on foot in the summer and a bewildering maze of dogleg turns by snowmobile in winter. She wondered how far the sun penetrated that narrow valley at this time of year. How long would it take, and how much effort, to get up there and see for herself?

  Her gaze dropped to the nearer prospect.

  She had inherited this homestead upon the death of her parents, which homestead had been grandfathered in when the twenty-million-acre national park had been created around it by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980. The Park, about the size of Oregon, encompassed the land up to and including most of the Quilak Mountains on the east, to the Glenn Highway in the north, in places to the Alaska Railroad on the west, and to Prince William Sound on the south. Kate’s homestead was a little west of dead center, on Zoya Creek—named by her father for her mother—which fed into the Kanuyaq River. Kanuyaq was Aleut for “copper,” which had been discovered in large quantity at the beginning of the previous century in the foothills of the Quilaks. Copper was the foundation of the Park’s modern age, bringing in a railway from Cordova to the mine, the roadbed of which now served as the main access to the Park. Or it did when it was bladed by a state grader, which was twice a year, once in the spring and again in the fall.

  Although that might be about to change. Kate scowled at a bald eagle sitting on a scrag, who, as usual, scowled back. Pissed off was any eagle’s de facto demeanor. Probably why they felt like kin.

  Two years before, discovery of another massive ore deposit, gold this time, had considerably livened up life in Niniltna, the Park’s biggest village, as well as increased traffic on the road. Another unwelcome result was an increased clamor from industry—specifically Global Harvest Resource, Inc., the high bidders on the Suulutaq Mine leases—for the road to be improved. Another result was Park rats rising up in a body to say, “Just hold the fuck on.”

  Although that body was not so big as it might have been. The Suulutaq had put a lot of Park rats to work in numbers not seen since before the Depression, when the falling price of copper shut down the old Kanuyaq Copper Mine in 1936. Kate had even worked a case out at the Suulutaq, a murder, and been well paid for it, so the glass her house was made of was as transparent as anyone else’s.

  The environmental impact study was due out the following year, when the cost of the mine would be counted, in impacts on air and water quality, threatened or endangered species, historic and cultural sites, the social and economic effects on local communities, and finally in a cost–benefit analysis.

  In the meantime, the price of gold kept going up, seventeen hundred dollars an ounce the last time Kate had checked. Which only guaranteed that someone, somehow was going to get the gold out, no matter what the EIS said.

  Her eyes fell on the hammock, a new contribution from Jim, swinging gently between two trees at the edge of the clearing, the morning sun just hitting its surface to throw off sparkles from a layer of dew. A hammock, a jug of lemonade, and Reginald Hill’s latest and sorrowfully last book, The St
ranger House, beside her in the wilderness. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” she said, and turned her back on seduction.

  The homestead was the traditional 160 acres and, like the rest of any wilderness area in North America, had suffered cruelly over the past two decades from the spruce bark beetle. Kate had made a point of walking, snowshoeing, skiing, four-wheeling, and snow-machining every acre periodically, looking for the telltale rust, the little piles of sawdust and shed needles. Over the years, she had thinned out the spruce trees so there would be less competition for water and sunlight. The infected trees she had debarked, burning the bark to kill the beetles. The bad news was there were less than a third of the spruce trees on the property as there had been when her parents died. The good news was that now to the east she had a magnificent view of the Quilak Mountains from any part of the property. She swore to Ranger Dan that if she squinted, she could almost see the Park Service’s headquarters on the Step. To the west she could see Mount Sanford and Mount Drum, and on very clear days she imagined that the Chugach Mountains etched a blue white line low on the horizon.

  The shop door groaned when she pushed it back. She filled the chain saw with fuel and checked the oil. It started on the first pull. She changed her tennis shoes for insulated XtraTufs and found a pair of sturdy leather gloves. The four-wheeler, an ancient but thoroughly reliable Honda, also started at first touch. “If you take care of your tools, they’ll take care of you,” she said out loud, the ghosts of Abel Int-hout and Old Sam ranged approvingly at her back. The trailer was already hitched on behind. She put the chain saw in the trailer along with a jerry can full of extra gas, knotted a red bandanna around her forehead, and putted out of the garage.

  She let up on the throttle and let the engine idle, waiting, but not for long.