A grave denied (27 page)

Kate displayed neither shock nor anger. She’d been expecting Kate waved a dismissing hand. “But really, a decent copy machine would be a legitimate operating expense, seeing as how government copy machines need access codes to operate, which makes it easy to track who’s copying what.”

Johnny, without knowing why or how it had happened, recognized in a dim way that the balance of power had shifted, and began to breathe again. Everything was going to be all right.

At that point Jane’s language deteriorated. The only good news was that she was keeping her voice down. Johnny listened with strict attention. The next time Lyle Paine put Van’s Carhartts down, Johnny was going to melt down his eardrums.

Eventually even Jane ran out of new and interesting ways to describe Kate’s relationship with her ancestors and had to fall back on the tried and true. “You fucking bitch,” she whispered, the words coming out in a long hiss. “Do you know how long it took for me to get my credit straightened out? And all that stuff you ordered on my Visa card! And the money you took out of my bank account! You’re nothing more than a common thief!”

At that Kate did wince. “Surely not common,” she said.

Johnny almost laughed.

“I won’t pay you a dime in child support,” Jane said.

Johnny wanted to shout in triumph. He felt a warning kick beneath the table and swallowed it.

“No one’s asking you to,” Kate replied evenly.

Jane turned on Johnny. “I won’t pay for you to go to college, either.”

He met his mother’s eyes with a flinty composure that surprised and pleased Kate. “Dad had a college fund set aside for me. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you for a dime.”

“We’re heading back to the Park tomorrow,” Kate said. “If you like, Johnny could write a few times a year, letting you know how he’s getting on.”

“Like hell I could,” Johnny said, feeling his oats.

“I don’t care if I never hear from the ungrateful little bastard ever again,” Jane said. Seriously stung, she was eager to hurt back.

Johnny, now that he knew he was safe, tried to imitate Kate’s composure. “If I had anything to be grateful for, I’d be hurt by that remark,” he said.

“Okay,” Kate said, getting to her feet before the blood on the table was more real than imagined. “We’re done here. Goodbye, Jane.”

She hustled the boy out of the restaurant and into the Subaru, and they were out of the parking lot and speeding down Northern Lights Boulevard before she realized she’d stuck Jane with the bill.

Johnny would never know how relieved she had been that it had not been necessary to reveal what else she had found in that burglary of Jane’s house. There were some things a son should not know about his mother.

“Home tomorrow,” she said out loud, and felt good about it for the first time since the cabin burned down.

After Johnny had gone to bed and Kate was alone in the living room,
Terminator
playing on Jack’s VCR, she muted the television, picked up the phone, and dialed a number from memory, keeping mental fingers crossed. When a woman answered, she breathed a sigh of relief. “Fran, it’s Kate Shugak. Please don’t hang up, and please don’t let Gary know it’s me.”

There was a long silence, but no click and no dial tone. Background noise included voices and the inevitable television. Kate said, “If you can, get to a paper and pencil.” There was another long silence, followed by scrabbling sounds. “I know a counselor who works with kids who have been sexually abused. Her name’s Colleen Diemer.” She recited the number once, waited, and repeated it. “She’s very good. If you and Gary need to talk, she can refer you to someone who counsels adults. But whether you two do or not, get your daughter to her, or to someone like her.” She paused, and continued with difficulty. “There are things she just can’t say to you or to Gary. Things that need to be said. Colleen Diemer. Her office is in one of the medical buildings on Lake Otis, just north of Tudor. Her staff is really good about working out payment. There are all kinds of state and federal programs to subsidize the fees.”

Fran said nothing.

Kate took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “Colleen is very trustworthy, Fran. She’ll understand about Gary. She won’t call the house, she won’t send you a bill there.”

“Who’s that, honey?” Gary’s voice said in the background.

“No, thank you,” Fran said, “we’re happy with our long distance service as it is. Good-bye.”

There might have been a whisper of a “thank you” as Kate hung up the phone, but it might also have been her imagination. She went back to
Terminator,
which was a positive haven of peace and nonviolence compared to some of the homes she’d been into on the job.

She only hoped she had not visited one of them this afternoon.

₁₄

Dandy was still torqued at what he saw as Jim Chopin’s patronizing dismissal of Dandy’s services. He was so torqued that he had slept alone the night before in spite of overtures on the parts of two different women.

His bed was located in the apartment he’d fitted up over the warehouse that sat on the five acres of land he’d received as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972 back when he was all of nine years old. The five acres sat on the river, and his father had built the warehouse as a place to park his fishing boat during the winter. Dandy’s apartment had started life as a net loft, but then the Native Association had begun paying dividends and Billy had started paying someone else to mend his gear, and Dandy had asked for the space. Billy shrugged. It was Dandy’s land, after all.

Dandy hadn’t done much beyond installing a bathroom and enough of a kitchen to allow his girlfriends to cook for him. The floor was hardwood with a couple of thick sheepskins scattered around for effect. A king-sized bed dominated one corner, with nightstands on either side with drawers big enough to accommodate condoms in bargain-size boxes and a weekend’s worth of clean clothes for sleepovers. In another corner there was a wide, long brown leather couch next to a Barcalounger, which sat in front of a 32-inch television. There was also a combination VHS/DVD player, and a set of shelves with an extensive selection of movies, most of them starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Dandy didn’t bother with satellite television, as he wasn’t into any sport you couldn’t play from a horizontal position and everything else was blood and gore. Women didn’t like blood and gore, as a rule. Dandy was willing to watch anything that got women into the mood, and he was continually expanding his movie library with that end in view. Audrey Hepburn was a recent discovery. The scene with Peter OToole under the museum stairs in
How to Steal a Million
had in recent testing proven itself to be fail-safe. He was hoping it would come out on DVD before his VHS copy was completely worn through.

Hands behind his head, he frowned at the ceiling. He was still annoyed with Jim for blowing off his efforts in the Len Dreyer case, but he was willing to forgive him because he knew what it was like to be led around by his cock, and he sympathized.

He was more annoyed with Kate, and he couldn’t decide if it was because she was the one leading Jim around, or if it was because she’d never tried to lead him, Dandy, around.

Easily sidetracked, he wondered about that. It wasn’t like Kate was a nun, she’d had her share. There was Ethan Int-Hout, and that doofus Anchorage investigator with more and blonder hair than Farrah Fawcett, and then there was Jack Morgan. The Kate-and-Jack thing went way back. Jeeze, Jack had been an okay guy, but sticking to one partner for, well, hell, he guessed it had been years. Years, for crissake. Dandy’s mind boggled. A real man wanted a little variety in his life. Sleeping with the same woman for years,
years,
that wasn’t variety, that was monotony, that was boredom. Dandy loved undressing a woman for the first time, loved the small discoveries that came with the act, the placement of a mole, the bony knees, the pillowy thighs. He loved finding out that a natural blonde wasn’t. Was she or wasn’t she? Only Dandy and her hairdresser knew for sure.

The trouble was, you could only undress a woman for the first time once. Fortunately, there were many, many women out there, and equally fortunately, many of them were happy to take a month’s romp at face value. Dandy Mike scorned to break hearts; he wanted whatever woman was in his life to have as good a time as he was, until it was time for both of them to move on. He prided himself that they almost always did. Oh, he’d had his failures, including one horrific experience when the girl of the month introduced herself to his mother and asked for help in planning the wedding, but on the whole he was fairly pleased with life in general. He attended the marriages of his classmates and friends with a smiling face, but privately he couldn’t imagine why any sane man would feel it necessary to settle on just one woman. It wasn’t natural, he thought, and just look at nature, while we’re on the subject. Why, he was reading an article just the other day, all about how new DNA studies were showing biologists that geese weren’t as monogamous as had been previously thought. The male of every species was designed to spread his seed as far and wide as possible. It strengthened the gene pool, insured the survival of the species. Dandy hadn’t finished college, but even he knew that.

Not that Dandy ever wanted to have children. He shuddered at the thought. He didn’t know how Bobby and Dinah were going to manage, always supposing for some unfathomable reason they still wanted to sleep together at all, in that big open house with a rug rat crawling all over it.

Nope, no question about it, old Jack must have been half a bubble off, as they said in the contracting business.

Where had he heard that saying? Oh, yeah. Len Dreyer. On the deck of the
Freya
last September.

Which reminded him of his grievance. Kate had old Chopper Jim on the hook, no doubt about that, she was just waiting until it was good and set before reeling it in. Thought she had the job landed at the same time, probably.

No two ways about it, Dandy was going to have to solve this Dreyer thing on his own just to get Jim’s attention. Once he had it, why, Jim would just naturally see what an asset Dandy would be to the local constabulary. And hopefully Dandy would never have to work this hard again.

The information he’d collected from his ex-girlfriends hadn’t made much of an impression. His face screwed up in thought. Well. He’d done a lot of jobs with Dreyer. Maybe he could put together the list of names he’d scrounged from his girlfriends, and maybe put in dates when he’d worked with Dreyer. Then maybe he could go talk to the people who had employed the two of them. They’d call that something on television — constructing a timeline, that was it. He’d construct a timeline for old Len Dreyer, was what he’d do, charting all old Len’s activities leading up until the day he died. Dandy didn’t know what day Len had died, but he dismissed that as a minor problem.

He swung out of bed, refreshed, and took a quick shower. He was scrambling some eggs when there was a knock at his door. He opened it to find Stacy Shumagin on his doorstep.

Well, shoot. Len Dreyer was dead, wasn’t he? He could wait.

The white Cessna with the gold shield on the side touched down neatly in a perfect three-point landing. It rolled to a halt in front of George Perry’s hangar, who waited for the prop to stop turning before ambling over to open the door. “Hey, Kate.” He looked across Kate at Jim. “Hey, Chopin. Taking business away from me, taking the food out of the mouths of my children.”

Since George had no children, this was taken for the jest it was.

“Hey, George,” Johnny piped up.

“Hey, squirt. How was Anchorage?”

“Educational,” Johnny said promptly, without the trace of a smile.

Kate grinned. “Think I can get out of this flying tin can, Perry?”

George stepped back and she hopped out. “Well. From the expression on your faces I’d say it was a successful trip. So, who did kill Len Dreyer?”

Jim paused, one foot in the plane, one foot on the ground. “Oh, shit.” And it had been such a nice ride home.

Kate turned to him. “That’s right, you said you were picking up the autopsy report.”

He frowned at her. “Not in front of the civilians.”

“You people are just no fun at all,” George said, and ambled back into the hangar, where his Super Cub could be seen, cowling peeled back and engine exposed. Even from where they were standing, it gleamed with the care George lavished upon it.

The airstrip was dark with overnight rain, but not enough to be muddy. A low, thin layer of cotton-puff clouds was dissolving beneath the noon sun. There was a flash of white in the brush across the strip and Mutt gave a joyous bark and shot off in pursuit. Johnny gave a sigh of pure joy and headed for the post office. They’d only been gone overnight, and on a weekend at that, but like every other Bush dweller Johnny lived for the mail, and he had new clothes coming. If there was a package slip he could always go round to Mrs. Jeppsen’s house in back of the post office and talk her into opening up long enough to get it for him.

“So?” Kate said to Jim.

“ME says Dreyer’s been dead about six months, give or take three in either direction. She’s going to do some more tests, but that’s her best guess and she’s thinking her final one. She says the deep-freeze effect delayed rigor and lividity and she doesn’t know if he was sitting, standing, or lying down when he caught it. Death resulted from massive trauma caused by a direct hit from a shotgun. From the stippling, she thinks the perp was less than four feet away.”