Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  "Speaking of ex-soldiers," Kate said. "Klemens isn't the only one around."

  She sat on Eberhard's bunk and looked at Jack. Jack sat on Dieter's bunk again and looked back.

  "No family pictures," Kate said. "They're going to be gone two weeks, including travel time, and they don't put out pictures of their families?"

  "Maybe Eberhard isn't married."

  "He had a mother, didn't he?" "Besides, I told you, they're European."

  "Does Dieter have kids?"

  "Yes. Two sons, I think."

  "Even Europeans love their kids, Jack."

  "Yeah. Maybe he's got pictures in his wallet." Jack gave the cabin a long, considering look. "No books, either."

  "Nope."

  "Not even the Alaskan Almanac, or the Milepost, or Alaska Magazine, or The Spell of the Yukon." "Not big readers," Kate said.

  "Doesn't look like it."

  Another pause. "I tell you what it does look like," Kate said at last.

  "It looks like Dieter's on vacation."

  "And like Eberhard's here to work," Jack agreed. "It doesn't fit, does it?"

  "Or it's a good show."

  "Or it's a good show," Jack said, nodding. "Who's in the next cabin?"

  TWELVE.

  I'm just saying it could be an uncomfortable night.

  THE NEXT CABIN HOUSED GUNTHER AND KLEMENS.

  "Very tidy," Jack said.

  "Very," Kate said, and proceeded to trash the room.

  They surfaced five minutes later, disappointed. "Nothing," Jack said.

  "Gunther carries his security badge, but then he would."

  "Explain."

  "He's a kid, Kate, and he's the head of security for a major multinational firm. That badge defines him. He'd use it for everything, to show off to his parents, to impress security officers of other companies, to con special privileges out of cops." Jack grinned.

  "And to get girls. Definitely, to get girls."

  Kate was indignant. "Girls don't fall for that kind of crap."

  "Wanna bet?"

  "Well," she mumbled, "not anybody you'd want to date."

  He caught her up to give her a smacking kiss. "Got that right."

  She wriggled free. "No personal pictures here, either. Klemens reads, though." She picked up a well-thumbed copy of a German translation of Henry David Thoreau. "I saw him reading this yesterday, or another book like it. Does a cold-blooded killer read Thoreau?"

  "Oh Kate, come on. I've known cold-blooded killers who never missed the new Danielle Steel."

  "Yeah. Yeah, I know." She put the book down where she had found it.

  "Next cabin?"

  "Just let me check on Klemens first." Jack hot footed it down the trail and disappeared. A few moments and he was back. "All clear. I think he's asleep, he doesn't look like he's moved an inch."

  "He's got an awfully clear conscience if he can just doze off the day after he killed a friend and employee."

  The next cabin was Hendrik and Fedor's. Only one bunk had been slept in.

  A handful of used Kleenexes were piled on the table, some falling to the floor, right in front of a picture in a gold frame. The picture was of Fedor and Hendrik dressed in identical cream-colored linen shirts, skin tanned an identical golden brown, hair bleached an identical blond, the sea a deep Mediterranean blue in the background.

  They looked very young, very handsome and very happy.

  "Look," Jack said, on his knees next to the bed. He sat back on his heels and held out a notebook. "It was shoved in between the pad and the board."

  Kate opened it, and gave an irritated sigh. "Great. It's in German."

  "Of course."

  "It's handwritten, and recently. The numbers are the same. Their dates are backward, though, the day before the month." She turned a page. "The last entry is September twenty-sixth. See? Twenty-six slash nine." She turned a page. "Wait a minute. Here's another entry in a different hand, dated September twenty-eighth."

  "Fedor died on the twenty-eighth," Jack said. "Hen drik must have written something in it."

  "Looks like. The Department of Education should never have dropped the foreign language requirement in high school." She held up the notebook.

  "We're hanging on to this, too. The troopers can find a translator back in town."

  "Doesn't Demetri read German?" "I don't think so," Kate said, tucking the notebook into her shirt. "He can speak it like a native, but I don't think he ever learned to write it."

  "Terrific."

  "Best thing we did was get that bunch the hell out of camp," Kate said, rising to her feet and dusting her knees. "Ten to one this notebook wouldn't have been here otherwise."

  He looked out the door. "All clear. Who's next?"

  Hubert and Gregor were next. Their cabin was a model of familial loyalty combined with just the right touch of Protestant work ethic.

  There were family pictures, one for each side of the room, and laptop computers with battery packs, one for each side of the room. Kate turned on one of the computers and was confronted by an unending screen of indecipherable text made up of unrecognizable symbols. "Hubert," she said. "Senta told me Hubert was in research and development."

  Next to the computer was a jam jar filled with cut plants. There was a stalk of fireweed with one remaining blossom trembling at the top, horsetail, angelica, wormwood, sour dock and one frond of field fern, among others. "Looks like Hubert's into herbs." She remembered him wading into the fireweed the night she had slain the boom box

  "Those are herbs?" Jack said with a quizzical look. "Look like weeds to me."

  "You can make tea from fireweed and wormwood. Sourdock paste relieves itching. Horsetail's a diuretic, some say an abortifacient."

  "Come on."

  She cocked an eyebrow. "You can use devil's club to treat burns. As handy as you are in the kitchen, I ought to plant a patch next to the cabin."

  His heart skipped another beat. "I'd rather suffer the burn than have to pick the devil's club to cure it." Inwardly, he rejoiced. She was taking his presence at the cabin as a given. And she wasn't telling him he had to learn to cook. He wanted to ask her to marry him then and there.

  Nobly, he restrained himself. One step at a time.

  Blissfully unaware of the euphoria her casual words had induced, she turned on the other computer, fumbled her way through the directory and was nearly blasted out of the cabin by the resulting color and sound.

  "Where's the volume control on this thing?" she yelled. Jack found it and turned it down. "What is it?" he said.

  "A commercial, I think," Kate said. "Or part of a promotional campaign.

  Senta said Gregor was the head of public relations."

  "That would explain the boozer's nose," Jack said, nodding.

  "Yeah, it does kinda look like it belongs on W.C. Fields's face, doesn't it? Bet we find a bottle stashed in here somewhere."

  "Nah. He's carrying it." Jack saw her look and added, "It's a silver flask. I saw him take a nip out of it this morning."

  They watched the screen for a few moments as a hearty male voice spouted a string of German while a series of pictures flashed the smiling faces of happy workers all sporting the snazzy DRG logo on a hat or a tie or a shirt pocket.

  Jack turned it off. "Pretty picture, when the truth of the matter is that most of their work is probably done in Laos by people making seven cents an hour."

  Kate surveyed the room and shrugged. "Looks like the temporary residence of a couple of hardworking family men. It might even be true, or it is when Gregor's at home. Let's move on."

  The next cabin, and the last one in line that wasn't falling into the Nakochna, belonged to Senta and Berg. Berg proved to have, besides the usual clothes and toiletries, a secret stash of Hershey bars. "Plain,"

  Jack said peevishly. "Why couldn't it be the ones with almonds?"

  "That Berg, so inhospitable toward his friendly neighborhood burglars."

  Kate was looking for Senta's p
urse. In her experience, a woman's purse was second only to a man's mother in filling in the blanks of an individual's character. "Aha."

  She found it under the bunk, a darling little mini-backpack affair, probably the latest thing down the runway in Milan. It was made of real leather burnished a deep chestnut, soft and supple to the touch, and had two pockets fastened with a single and probably genuine gold buckle. The outer one was big enough to hold a passport. Kate opened it, and it was her turn to be peevish. "God, I can't believe it." "What?" Jack said, unwrapping a Hershey bar and taking a bite with relish.

  "She even looks good in her passport picture. That's against the rule."

  "The rule?" "The rule that says all passport pictures make people look like toads.

  They're usually worse than driver's licenses."

  "Let me see." He swallowed and looked. "Yum."

  "Watch it, big boy, she'd eat you alive."

  He grinned. "I'd slide down kicking and screaming all the way." "And this is the man," Kate told Mutt, who had reappeared to (lop in the doorway and sleep off her midday snack, "who professed his eternal devotion to me on top of a fuel tank in the middle of the Alaskan Bush, beneath a full moon, and not even twenty-four hours ago. See?" she said to Jack. "Mutt thinks you're disgusting, too."

  Jack regarded Mutt with a sapient eye. "Mutt is too stuffed to move out of her own way, let alone think anything of the kind. And it was a hunter's moon, as I recall."

  Kate sniffed. "Hey, she's thirty-eight, four years older than me."

  "So?"

  Kate closed the passport and tucked it back into its pocket. "So she's got that kind of a face, you know? The first time I saw her I thought she could be anywhere from thirty to fifty." She meditated. "I wonder why the guys took their passports with them."

  Jack produced a wallet like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.

  "Even on a hunt?" Kate said.

  "Even on a hunt," Jack said, deadpan. "It's a guy thing."

  "Oh. Yeah. Right. Then why didn't Dieter put the letter in his wallet?"

  "We may never know," Jack said, much struck.

  She shook her head. Jack was not approaching the task at hand with what Kate considered an appropriate amount of solemnity. She returned to the backpack. At least women had enough smarts to leave their purses behind when they went out shooting.

  The second pocket of Senta's purse was much larger, big enough to hold two wads of. cash one German, one American, a bottle of French perfume, a hair pick, a traveler's size bottle of mousse, another of hair spray and a third of shampoo, a makeup kit, a bottle of nail polish, a fistful of credit cards--all platinum--and a three-month supply of birth control pills. There was a business card case with Senta's name, job title, address and phone, fax and E-mail address printed in elaborately curliqued German lettering, all nouns capitalized, all umlauts dotted, all Fs and Gs serifed within an inch of their lives.

  And, lo and behold, there was a picture folder. Most of them were of Senta: Senta in a crisp, tailored business suit either accepting or awarding some kind of plaque, Senta in a graduation gown, Senta in a bathing suit on a beach, blond hair shining gold in the sun and with just the right ratio of lean, hard flank to plump, soft breast.

  "Woo woo," Jack said, breathing heavily over Kate's shoulder.

  She elbowed him in the gut and flipped the folder. The last picture was of Senta as a girl of about eight, standing next to a boy on the verge of adolescence. Kate studied it. "Isn't that Dieter?"

  "Who?"

  "The boy next to her. Isn't that Dieter?"

  Jack took the folder from her and frowned at it. "I don't know. Is it?

  They look like siblings, don't they?"

  "Senta didn't say anything about it if they are." Kate remembered the look Dieter had given Senta when she had gone off with George. At the time, Kate had put it down to George poaching on Dieter's private preserve. If Dieter and Senta were brother and sister, that look had meant something else entirely. According to Jack, Dieter was a rounder.

  Rounders were notoriously straitlaced as regards the amorous activities of the female members of their families, much more so than they were about their own.

  "Maybe she's family," Kate said. "Maybe that's why she's not referred to in Dieter's letter." And then she was struck by another thought.

  "What are European inheritance laws like, anyway, Jack? Do you know?"

  "No idea. Weirder than ours, probably, they've had longer to work on them." He handed the picture folder back, and helped stuff Senta's belongings back into her purse.

  They emerged from the cabin to find that the sun had been obscured by the encroaching band of clouds Kate had seen from the runway that morning. "You know what this means," Kate said.

  "What?"

  She jerked her chin at the gray sky. "It means George might really be weathered in in Anchorage and not be back with Demetri's cavalry today."

  Jack looked toward the ridge. "It also means our guests will be back soon." He looked down at her. "They're going to notice that their rifles are missing. And probably that their cabins have been searched."

  "I don't really give a damn what they notice." Kate stretched, joints popping.

  "Me either. I'm just saying it could be an uncomfortable night."

  "Well, if last night was any indication--" Kate began in a teasing tone.

  Mutt's ears went up, and in the next second Jack and Kate heard it, too.

  They turned as one to look to the northwest and waited.

  Nothing. Kate forced herself to relax, forced a lightness she did not feel into her voice. "What do you think for dinner tonight, moose heart or moose liver or moose tongue?" They had plenty of all three left over from the previous hunt.

  "How about all three? Damn!"

  She had heard it, too, another shot and then another. "Three altogether," she said uneasily. "But not three in a row." "Nobody said they were good shots," Jack said.

  Mutt was standing stock-still, nose sniffing the air, as if she could smell out the problem. Kate dropped a hand to her shoulder. "At ease, girl." She looked at Jack. "You think we should go see what's happening?"

  "There are only two four-wheelers, right?" She nodded, and he shook his head and waved a hand at the sky. "The wind's coming up, Kate."

  It was true, the wind was beginning to whip at the tops of the trees, to ruffle Mutt's fur, to pull at Kate's braid.

  "I think we better stay here," Jack said, "close to shelter. They're probably already on their way back, anyway."

  "Why?"

  "Because the weather's socking in, because they've bagged something juicy and are ready to call it a day, because Demetri and Old Sam aren't idiots." He looked at her and said more gently, "They aren't, Kate. And there were only three shots."

  Kate took a deep breath, held it and let it out slowly. "All right," she said, but she was still uneasy. "You know that gun rack on the west wall of the lodge?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Let's empty it out, hide the rifles. And we don't take these off'--she slapped the .357 pistols they had strapped to their waists--"for any reason whatever."

  "Why don't we figure out a way to bar both doors while we're at it?"

  Jack said dryly, but he followed her to the lodge and helped to take the rifles down one at a time. There were half a dozen of them, ranging from a tiny .22 automatic rifle in pristine condition to a Winchester twenty-gauge shotgun with a tarnished barrel and a scarred walnut stock.

  "Where do you want to put them?" he said.

  "Not where we put theirs," she said.

  "Where then?"

  In the end, they wrapped the weapons in more of the burlap potato sacks and climbed to the half-loft in the garage to secrete them in the center well of a spool of electric cable. They stacked half a dozen boxes of canning jars on top of the spool to hide the hole and what was poking out of the top of it. For good measure, they took the ladder down and hid it in the bushes on the side of the garage facing away
from camp.