A grave denied (4 page)

“You’re kind of solitary,” he said. “You like living alone or you wouldn’t be here on your dad’s homestead in the middle of twenty million acres of national park, with the nearest village twenty-five miles down an unpaved, unmaintained road.” He wasn’t being confrontational or accusatory, exactly. It was more like he’d adopted the impartial air of the scholar. A sociologist, perhaps, come to the Park to examine non-mainstream socioeconomic systems, about which he would then write his thesis, which would then earn him a doctorate, followed by a publishing contract, followed by a visiting chair at UC Berkeley, a college in a state which celebrated alternative lifestyles.

Johnny had continued to tick off items on his list, and Kate had reined in her imagination. “Even Dad only visited, or you visited him in Anchorage, you never lived together. Right?”

“Right so far,” she said obediently.

“I want to stay here with you. I’m not going back to Anchorage to live with her, and I’m sure as hell not going back to Arizona to live with my grandmother. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, so if I’m smart I’m going to annoy you as little as possible.”

She couldn’t help laughing a little. “You don’t annoy me, Johnny.”

He grinned. “Thanks, Kate. That’s so sweet of you,” and then had to duck when she’d thrown a spatula at him. “To tell you the truth, Kate, I’m feeling a little cramped myself.”

Amused, she said, “Oh, you are, are you?”

“Yes. It’s why I couldn’t stand Arizona, too many people. Which is why I think I need a cabin of my own.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“It doesn’t have to be as big as this one,” he said quickly. “No loft. Just room enough for a chair, a woodstove, a sink, and a bed. Maybe a desk where I can study. Look,” he said, and pulled out a notebook. “Like this.”

He’d drawn a floor plan that bore a strong resemblance to the cabins at Camp Teddy, and showed signs of having been influenced by Ruthe Bauman, the camp’s owner. Kate had to admit they had done a good job of it.

He took that as an opening. “It’d be a lot easier, a lot less labor-intensive to build a new, separate cabin than to add on to this one,” he said.

“It’ll cost more in materials,” she said, more to test him than to contradict him.

“Not really,” he said. “Look, I found a book on construction in the school library,” and he hauled it out. “You add on, you gotta mess with stuff like the foundation, and then there’s the roof.” He slapped the book shut. “And think about having to live in the mess while the construction’s going on. If we build me my own cabin, we can just live here until it’s done, like we are now. I figure we could get it done this summer, and I could move in in the fall, when school starts.”

He made a good argument. Still. “Johnny, I don’t like this idea of a fourteen-year-old boy living by himself.”

“I’ll only be thirty feet away. I measured it last night, come on, take a look,” and he dragged her into the yard. He’d been busy with strings and pegs, laying out a neat square on the other side of the outhouse, and had taken advantage of the mud to draw in the floor plan.

He watched her as she paced it out. She looked up to see the determined expression on his face, the sun slanting across it, making his blue eyes narrow, highlighting the untidy thatch of thick dark hair falling over his forehead, the stubborn chin. The strong resemblance to his father didn’t hurt anymore.

Well. Not as much.

Snow was melting inside the tops of her tennis shoes. “Let’s go back inside.”

They sat down at the kitchen table over new cups of cocoa. “I don’t know,” she said. “Kids are supposed to live with their parents.”

“Not this kid,” Johnny said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “let’s not go there, okay?”

“I’m not living with her, I don’t care what she does or says.”

“I know, I know, calm down.”
Her
was Jane Morgan, Jack’s ex-wife, Johnny’s mother and Kate’s sworn enemy. Jane had placed Johnny with his grandmother in Arizona when his father had died, and he had liked it so much that he had hitchhiked all the way back to Alaska the previous fall. Kate, who had worked as a public investigator specializing in sex crimes for five and a half of the longest years of her life, knew exactly and precisely every awful thing that could have happened to a young boy on that journey. She still couldn’t think of it without a chill running down her spine. He’d shown up in August with Jane hot on his heels. Somehow Jane had learned the location of Kate’s homestead, so Kate had tucked Johnny away with Ethan Int-Hout, but Ethan’s wife had returned with their two daughters and had returned Johnny to Kate with more haste than grace, citing a wholly imaginary lack of space. Johnny would have had hurt feelings had not the antipathy been wholly mutual.

Kate, deciding that running from Jane was not the answer, had settled him in on her homestead and prepared for a probably legal and undoubtedly expensive siege. Unskilled at saving money, nevertheless she had made an obscene salary the previous year working security for an election campaign. She was prepared to spend it all if necessary to get and keep custody of Johnny.
“Look out for Johnny for me, okay?”
his father, her lover, had asked her the day he had died in her arms. It never occurred to her to do anything else.

In this, she had the tacit approval of the law in the Park, in the person of state trooper Jim Chopin, who was currently involved in a building project of his own. Yes, the troopers were opening a post in Niniltna, staffed by the aforesaid Chopper Jim, an event that in Kate’s eyes drastically shortened the twenty-five miles of road between the village and the homestead. It seemed to have a distinct effect on the regularity of her heartbeat and respiration, too, so she tried not to dwell on it.

“Okay,” she had said. “We’ll build you your own cabin.”

Johnny had been prepared for everything but capitulation. “What?”

She grinned. “But,” she said, and she leveled a forefinger for emphasis, “you eat here, you hang mostly here, and I’m consulted if and when there are any overnight guests.”

“That works both ways,” he replied smartly.

She got up to rinse out her mug in the sink. “Dream on,” she said to the window, and had hoped that he hadn’t noticed the flush beneath the brown of her skin. The only downside to Johnny living with her was that now she had a witness when she embarrassed herself.

She was recalled to the present by the sun going behind the tops of the trees. The stone seat had gone cold, and she slid to her feet and walked back to the cabin. With Len Dreyer dead, she was going to have to put Johnny’s cabin up herself. This would require a rearrangment of her summer to-do list, some of which might have to be put off until the following year. She’d like to catch whoever killed Len Dreyer herself, and roast him — or her—over a slow fire.

She was on the doorstep, kicking the mud from her shoes, when a movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw a tall man enter the clearing. “Oh shit,” she said beneath her breath.

Mutt burst from the clearing and launched a joyful assault. The man laughed, trying to dodge out of the way of an enthusiastic tongue. When Mutt liked, she
liked.

“What?” Johnny said, appearing in the doorway, a pen behind his ear, one finger marking his place in his journal.

“We’ve got company,” she said, and opened the door wide.

The far-too-familiar shark’s grin flashed out at her. “Hey, Kate.”

“Jim,” she said.

The grin, if anything, widened. “Your lack of enthusiasm is duly noted,” he told her. “Hey, Johnny.”

“Hey, Jim.”

Kate, noticing the answering smile on Johnny’s face, thought sourly that Johnny was still young enough to be impressed by the crisp blue and gold of the state trooper uniform, not to mention the Smokey the Bear hat. Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Jim in his Smokey hat since before… well, since before last summer in Bering. He was wearing a dark blue ball cap with the trooper insignia on the crown and a noticeable lack of gold braid. And while he wore the uniform shirt, it was tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, and the shiny half boots had given way to shoepacks, scuffed and muddy.

She looked up and saw him watching her. One dark blond eyebrow raised ever so slightly. She couldn’t help it, the flush crept right up her neck, over the thin white roped scar stretching almost from ear to ear, and into her face.

For some reason, it didn’t amuse him. The smile faded from his face and he said briskly, “I’ve got a job for you, if you’ve got the want ads out.”

₃

At minimum, Bush courtesy required that no visitor be turned away without refreshment, and it was, unfortunately, time for dinner. Jim accepted Kate’s less than enthusiastic invitation and settled in on the L-shaped built-in couch, long legs stretched out in front of him with the air of a man entirely at home. Johnny was shaping moose burger into patties. Kate, having drained the fries and put them in the oven to keep warm, and having set the table and otherwise occupied herself in the kitchen half of the cabin, which after all was only twenty-five feet on a side, and having been the recipient of an ungentle elbow when she got in Johnny’s way, twice, found herself with nothing better to do than pour two mugs of coffee and offer one to their guest.

Jim blew on the steaming liquid, a small smile in his eyes.

Kate cleared her throat and sat down on the couch as far away from him as was physically possible. “What’s the job?”

The smile didn’t go anywhere but he answered readily enough. “You hear about Len Dreyer?”

She nodded at Johnny. “Got my very own personal town crier.”

Johnny looked over his shoulder at the two of them, a fragment of ground meat adhering to his cheek, and grinned.

“He did a good job there,” Jim said. “Kept everybody out, kept them from contaminating the scene.”

“Was Len killed there?” Kate said.

Jim shook his head. “I doubt it. He caught a shotgun blast through the chest at point-blank range. There wasn’t enough blood at the scene for it to have happened there.”

Kate thought about it, about the physics of a body left beneath the overhang of a glacier. “How long had he been there?”

“I don’t know. He was stiff, but given the location, I don’t think we can put that down to rigor.”

“No. Did you talk to Dan O’Brian?”

“Why would I? Did he know Dreyer?”

Kate hunched an impatient shoulder. “Everybody knew Len. No, I was thinking about the glacier. It’s receding.”

He raised that eyebrow again, the one that made his expression shift from shark to Satan.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It just seems an odd place to hide a body.”

“If you wanted to hide it,” Jim said. “Maybe the killer wanted Dreyer to be found.”

“By whom? Who the hell walks around inside glaciers?”

The eyebrow stayed up. They’d been conversing in low voices, so as not to break the concentration of the glacier trekker making hamburgers ten feet away. She smiled in spite of herself, and it was a rare enough occasion to make Jim’s breath catch.

Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin wasn’t the only man who had found Kate Shugak to be beautiful, not least the father of the young man currently beating moose burger into submission across the room. From anything Jim had been able to discover, there had been no one else for Jack Morgan from the moment he’d set eyes on Kate Shugak, what would it be, nine, ten years before? No, more like twelve. Kate had taken a degree in justice from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, done a year at Quantico, and had gone straight to work as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney’s investigative arm, of which Jack Morgan had been head. From all accounts, the future was pretty much set in stone from that moment forward, and it wasn’t a future when those two were not together.

Of course, that didn’t include the eighteen-month period following Kate burning out on working sex crimes and moving back to this very homestead, after which Jack arrived at this very door, FBI in tow, to hire her to find a missing Park ranger. That had marked the end of Kate’s self-imposed seclusion and the beginning of her career as a, pardon him, consultant. Jim had tossed her cabin the previous summer when she had gone missing, and he had run across her tax return. That was what she had put in the space marked “Your Occupation”: Consultant. It was the only real smile he remembered getting out of the exercise. She was still pissed at him for tossing the place, too. Among other things.

He looked at her now, the smile lighting her narrow eyes, eyes sometimes hazel, sometimes a light brown, sometimes verging on a mossy green. He’d never been close enough for long enough to figure out which was the one true color. Her hair was thick and black and as shiny as a raven’s wing, and had once hung to her belt in a neat French braid. Now it was cropped short, brushed straight back from a broad brow, falling into a natural part over her right temple, the ends apt to curl into inky commas around her ears. Her cheekbones were high and flat and just beginning to take on that bronze tint he had noticed during previous summers, all gifts of her Aleut heritage, although the high bridge of her nose was all Anglo and the jut of her chin as Athabascan as it got.

She seemed tall but wasn’t, reaching a neat five feet on a lithe, compact frame. She had a tall personality, he decided. There were curves, plenty of them, from which the inevitable T-shirt and jeans did nothing to detract, but they were sheathed in a deceptively smooth layer of muscle, firm and well-toned, that gave her a grace of motion that could fool the eye into thinking she wasn’t as strong as an ox and as quick as a snake. She was both.