Fatal Thaw (15 page)

"What celebration, Enid?"

Enid gestured with the bottle in a way that made Kate realize that the celebration had begun at the Roadhouse much earlier in the day, perhaps even the previous night. "In memorium." She stumbled over the word, and the rest of the group helped her out-"That's right, in memorium"-although none of them were in much better shape.

Kate looked around and realized they were on the site, or very close to it, where Lisa Getty's body had been found. Incredulous, she asked, "In honor of Lisa Getty?"

Enid snickered. "Hell no." She topped off her glass with an unsteady flourish, emptying the bottle to the last drop. "In honor of Roger McAniff, bless his heart, who shot that fucking bitch and killed her dead. He got it right one time, right, girls?"

"Hear, hear," someone said, and someone else said, "I'm just sorry it was so quick."

Kate couldn't find a single unfamiliar face. There was .Enid, Bernie's wife; there was Sarah, Pete Kvasnikof's wife; there was Susan Moore, Jimmy Bartlett's room mate-for-life; there was Luz Santos, who had been engaged to Chuck Moonin; there was Betty Sue Brady, Lee's widow; and there was Denise Smithson, whose husband Phil had worked as Lisa's deckhand and then got off the boat in Cordova and got on a plane to Anchorage and never come back. It was a fairly representative cross-section of the Park-tall and short, fair and dark, thin and plump, old and young-with nothing in common but their concentrated hatred of Lisa Getty. "To McAniff!" Enid said, her glass held high, and "To McAniff!" the other women responded. They drank deeply, and when the glasses were drained to the last drop, they threw them against the trunk of a large fir, to shatter and fall to the ground in a glittering, broken shower that mingled with the half-ice, half-slush layer of snow until it was impossible to tell where the shards of glass left off and the crusty snow began.

There was `a shout of approval and cheers and congratulatory smacks on the back, but the circle did not break and their expressions did not ease. They hunched over their hatred, cradling it jealously. It was a malignant, ugly thing to see. Kate felt sick, and it wasn't her wound.

"Ladies, I think you'd better head on home. You're not driving yourselves, are you?"

Enid giggled, and hiccupped. "Hell, no, Bernie took all our keys away. We hitched a ride in."

"Have you got a ride home?" That stumped them. "Well," Kate said, "go on up to the post office. Ralph'll find somebody going your way."

Enid shrugged and grinned, pushing a hand of hair out of her eyes. "Okay."

As the circle began to break up, Kate couldn't resist saying, "McAniff didn't kill Lisa Getty."

"What?"

"The cops tested McAniff's rifle. The bullet that killed Lisa Getty came from a different She watched them carefully, but once they believed her, the response was collectively and, so far as Kate could see, completely surprised. Enid was the first to recover from the news, and she waved a dismissing hand. "Doesn't matter. Whoever did it, did the whole Park a favor." That seemed to be the general consensus, and the women stumbled off, crashing through the trees with fine disregard for either environmental preservation or personal safety.

Kate stood where she was, breathing deeply, trying to quell her roiling stomach. She had known Lisa was disliked among her own sex in the Park, but until today she had had no idea just how much. Her skin crawled and she wished she could take a bath. She raised her head, fixing her gaze on the small patch of sky the treetops allowed to show through. branch cracked behind her, and she whirled, her thumping.

Mutt's ruff expanded. Kate straightened and put calming hand on her head.

Lottie was rooted in place, as if she had grown there among the scrub spruce and mountain hemlock and diamond willow, gathering her own rings of age over the short summers and the long winters. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her pale skin looked waxen. She was as still and as hushed as the trees clustered thickly around her, abetting her silence.

That silence felt reverent but less than serene. "Lottie,"

Kate said, her voice a bare thread of sound. She cleared her throat, the sound rasping across the stillness. "I'm sorry you had to see that." She paused. "Lottie, you shouldn't be here."

The urgency in her voice got through. Lottie stirred. Her blue eyes opened, and she looked around. It took her a moment to focus, and when she did, her gaze fixed on the bandage on Kate's right temple, and then slid past without comment or question.

"Lottie," Kate said, "go home. Lisa's dead. You can't change that by hanging around here. It's not ..." She hesitated, searching for the right word. "It's not healthy. I'll . . ." Again she hesitated. "I'll take care of this. Go on home now."

No response. Kate swore beneath her breath and looked around for inspiration. The surrounding trees presented a blank face in solidarity with Lottie. Kate decided to go for shock value. "I hear Lisa was seeing something of Max Chaney before she died."

The instantaneous change of expression on Lottie's usually stolid face astounded her. The skin reddened, the lips drew back into a snarl.

Lottie's hands curled into claws, and Kate felt all the hair on the back of her neck rise. Mutt took a pace forward, getting between the two woman, facing Lottie and uttering one sharp, warning bark.

"Okay, Mutt," Kate said, putting a hand on the dog's back. "It's all right, girl. It's okay." She looked up at Lottie, and given their difference in height it was quite a way up, which Kate was aware of as never before. "Isn't it?" Lottie didn't reply, and Kate repeated, "Isn't it okay, Lottie?"

Still with that near-snarl on her face, Lottie looked from the dog to Kate and back again. Some of the tension went out of her. Her hands uncurled. "No, it's not okay, Kate," she said in her dull, thick voice.

"It's not okay, and it's never going to be okay again."

She left, crashing blindly and indifferently through the trees, breaking branches off with her shoulders and crushing last year's seedlings beneath her boots. Kate, shaken down to her core for the second time in the space of half an hour, retraced her path through trees that seemed a lot less hostile to her exit than they had to her entrance.

The seat of the Jag felt steady beneath her, and she leaned forward over the handlebars, her eyes closed, thinking hard. Max Chaney. Max Chaney, who had taken Mark Miller's place in the Parks Service when the latter had been killed the year before. Opening her eyes, she sat up straight and asked Mutt, "How about a trip up to the Step? We can stop at Neil's on the way."

In fact they made several stops on the way up to Park Service headquarters, at small homesteads scattered along the rough track that once was had been a roadbed, when the Kanuyaq & Northern Railroad ran between the copper and silver mines in the foothills of the Quilak Mountains and the port of Cordova on the coast of Prince William Sound.

It was maintained only during the summer, and the half-frozen, broken surface of ice and mud was rutted and mushy. It was slow going, and sometimes Mutt had to walk while Kate got off and pushed their way out of yet another rut.

At the first homestead, a one-room cabin in the middle of a clearing still littered with the stumps of newly fallen trees, they were greeted with a sullen hostility that Kate wisely ignored. "Neil," she said patiently, "you know and I know what you've got growing out back. It's what's growing out back of half a dozen homesteads that I know of up and down this road. Because the troopers haven't spotted it from the air yet doesn't mean they couldn't, if someone gave them a tip as to where to look. Five'll get you ten Chopper Jim knows all about it already, and just hasn't had the time or the inclination to bother. If someone makes a complaint, he'll have to." She waited.

The white, ropey scar that bisected her throat was just visible in the opening of her collar. It began to itch beneath his fixed gaze. "Lisa Getty was a competitor, Neil," Kate said, still patient. "Somebody killed her, and it wasn't McAniff." Jack may have wanted to keep Lisa's murder quiet, but he hadn't been shot at.

Kate was done with discretion.

"You think I did it?" Neil, a burly, ponytailed man, said with a glower.

"You tell me. Where were you that morning?'.' "I was here."

"Did you have company?"

He hesitated, and shook his head.

But Kate saw that hesitation and snapped, "Dammit, Neil, I don't care if you were making a sell. I'm not going to turn you or the buyer in if you were. Somebody killed Lisa Getty, and it wasn't Roger McAniff. Who was here that morning? Who's your alibi? I'll talk to them, and if I'm satisfied they're telling the truth, that'll be the end of it. Come on, Neil, you know my word's good."

He hesitated a moment longer and then said with patent reluctance, "Jeff Talbot came by that morning. He bought a couple lids and split."

"What time?"

He shrugged. "Ten. Maybe ten-thirty."

Which would not have left Neil enough time to make the scene of Lisa's murder and home again to sell dope to Jeff Talbot.

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. 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 home steaders 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 Interi or." He gave a fatalistic shrug. "It feeds the kids."