Fatal Thaw (3 page)

"Fuck you," the farmer hissed. "Do it."

Kate leaned the shotgun against the woodpile and picked up the axe.

After staring at it for a moment, she put the axe back down and picked up the shotgun. She felt like pacing, but pacing back and forth across the clearing with a crazy person going around shooting at people seemed like a bad idea. It might have been the safest thing to do, but she couldn't bear the thought of cooping herself up in the cabin. She turned to the woods. A frustrated whine and an eager scratching at the inside of the door told her Mutt had seen her. She paused. There was a rustle across the clearing. The timber wolf was back. "Damn." In the state she was in and with this embodiment of lupine perfection hanging around, Mutt would be no use to her. Squaring her shoulders, she walked across the clearing and up the path that led to the road. The miner vanished into the trees as the killer reloaded the Winchester.

The frantic, laboring sound of someone crashing through thick woods and a winter's worth of snow cover came clearly to him through the still air. He threw in the bolt and cast a speculative glance toward the sound. He stretched and yawned. The snow under the trees was too darn deep to hassle with. The miner would probably bleed to death anyway.

Besides, he was tired. His stomach growled. Hungry, too.

Kate was dozing when she heard it. At first it had sounded like a single, distinct crash, like a large-scale breaking of glass, but now there was no doubt about it. It was a snow machine, and it was coming her way.

She'd walked from where the path that led to her home stead intersected the old railroad bed until she found a long, straight stretch of the road. At the end of the straight stretch farthest from Niniltna, she searched out a squat, thickly branched spruce tree that was neither too close nor too far away from the edge of the road, stamped out a path and forced her way in between the branches.

She squatted beneath it now with the shotgun resting across her knees.

Peering out between the branches, she had a perfect view of half a mile of road, from where it curved to avoid Honker Pond to where she crouched.

The noise of the snow machine grew louder. The sky was clear and pale and innocent of helicopters or planes or any other kind of cavalry.

"Damn you, Jim. Isn't that just like a cop, never around when you need him." When she looked back down the snow machine had rounded Honker Pond and was headed straight for her. There was no one else in sight.

She muttered a curse and clicked the safety off the shotgun. She rechecked the load, pulled the stock in against her shoulder, sighted carefully down the barrel, and waited. The snow machine labored up the slight slope, until she could see his face, red from the force of the wind against it, lips pulled back from his teeth in a humorless grimace. It was a Polaris snow machine, all right, and the guy was wearing a red-and-black checked mackinaw and a brown-billed cap with earflaps. A chill shivered down her spine. She took her time lining up her shot. No matter what this yo-yo had done, she didn't want to kill him. She had enough on her conscience without another death, however justified.

He was almost upon her when the snow of the road exploded in front of his machine. Pieces of ice flew up and hit the windshield and his face.

He yelled and jerked. The machine swerved. The handlebars ripped out of his hands and he fell, rolling awkwardly, slung rifle and all.

Kate plunged out between the branches of the spruce. One caught in her hair and almost yanked her off her feet. She slipped and lost her grip on the shotgun. It smacked into the snow and slid several feet from her. Across the road, the killer staggered to his feet and unslung his rifle. She felt around and grasped a piece of deadwood and threw it at him as hard as she could. It caught him square across the face. He staggered a little. "Dog gone it," he said. He recovered, and in one automatic action raised his rifle and sighted down at her.

Her hair still tangled in the spruce, the stock of the shot gun several feet away, Kate froze. She stared across the hard, packed roadbed into his calm, clear, quite mad eyes, and she knew she was staring at an escape from pain, a loss of laughter, the cessation of joy, all of them, straight in the face. She didn't move, couldn't.

He smiled at her. "Know anywhere around here some body might get a bite to eat?"

There was a crash of tearing brush, and Kate was hit hard in the back of the knees. Her feet went out from under her, her hair ripped free of the branch and the world whirled around as she made a perfect backward somersault, landing on her chest with a thump that drove all the breath out of her.

Mutt's forepaws hit the killer square in the chest. He fell flat on his back with a hundred and forty pounds of proprietary rage on top of him.

In a movement faster than Kate could follow Mutt clamped her teeth in the stock of the Winchester and shook it loose from his grip like a bear shaking off a mosquito. The rifle hit the ice six feet away and slid for twenty more. The killer lay where he was, dazed, his throat exposed, and Mutt lunged directly for it, her teeth closing in on either side.

Kate's breath returned with a rush. "Hold!" she shouted. Mutt froze, her teeth indenting but not breaking the skin of his throat. "Hold, girl,"

Kate repeated, grasping at air, her voice a husky croak, "hold."

It took her two tries to climb to her feet. She stood where she was, trembling, eyes closed, gulping in great breaths of air. Her chest hurt. Her scalp ached. Her lungs burned.

Somewhere behind them the Polaris was still running. The engine rose in whiny protest, spluttered and died. Kate sucked in another deep breath and opened her eyes.

The killer lay where he had fallen. Mutt stood over him, teeth bared against his throat, a low, rumbling growl issuing unbroken from deep in her throat. In that moment she seemed all wolf. Kate recovered her shotgun and approached them warily. She reached his rifle, kicked it away. "All right, Mutt."

The dog lifted her head slightly, her teeth no longer touching the killer's throat, but that continuous, rumbling, paralyzing growl never stopped. "It's all right, girl," Kate said and reached out a steadying hand. Beneath it Mutt flinched once, and Kate tensed. "You done good, girl. Now let go. Mutt," she repeated, more sternly this time, "release." The growl missed a note, diminished, and died. Mutt looked up at Kate and gave her tail a single wag. Kate inhaled again and straightened. "Good girl." And then, more fervently, "Good girl."

The killer was conscious. He looked up at them calmly, all tension drained out of his body. He even smiled, a happy, bloody smile that reached all the way up into mischievous, twinkling eyes, one nearly swollen shut. He giggled. "You'll never guess what I've been doing." He giggled again. "I've been a bad boy." He licked the blood from his lips and appeared surprised. He raised one wondering hand, touched it to his mouth and looked at his stained fingers. "I'm bleeding," he said. His face puckered. "He should have sold me Board Walk. I told him. He should have sold it to me." He started to cry.

Kate took three faltering steps to the side of the road and was thoroughly and comprehensively sick, which was how Chopper Jim found her when he landed twenty yards down the road a few minutes later.

JACK Morgan sighed. "It's too bad everyone lived right on the road.

McAniff didn't have to go out of his way any to find targets."

"No. Jack tilted his chair back and crossed his booted feet on the top of his desk. A pile of paper six inches high tilted and almost slipped to the floor. He didn't seem to notice, and Bill Robinson, grumbling beneath his breath, bent forward to straighten it. It still amazed him how Jack, chief investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney's office, could find anything in that office in time for trial. Small, square and windowless to begin with, it was made even smaller by the overflow of file cabinets, crime scene drawings, evidence bags, three chalkboards covered on both sides with his boss's scrawling script and a stack of paper that started somewhere near the door and rolled across the room in drifts, like snow after a blizzard, to engulf Jack's desk.

More paper in the form of maps were tacked to every square inch of the walls, with crime scene drawings taped over every square inch of the maps, all heavily marked with more notes in Jack's illegible scrawl.

Jack leaned toward the black, broad strokes of a Marksalot for arrows, exclamation points and marginal balloons.

Even Bill had to admit that Jack's conviction rate proved that he could and did find what he needed when he needed it, though only Jack and maybe God alone knew how. And it wasn't his office. He shook his head, not for the first time, and sat back in his chair to line up the corners on the neat stack of paper in his lap.

"Okay, Bill," Jack said, staring at the ceiling with his hands linked behind his head. "Run it down for me."

Bill turned a page, shuffled it to the bottom of the pile with meticulous precision, and cleared his throat. "His neighbor was the first to be hit. Name of Stephen Syms, 34. Lived in the Park year-round, fished in the summer, did what he could in the winter. His neighbors on the other side were the Getty sisters, Lottie and Lisa. They heard the shots at about ten A.M. and according to Lottie went over to take a look. By the time they got there, Stephen Syms was dead and McAniff gone. They looked for tracks and didn't find any, and there's only the one road, so they got out their snow machine and followed it into Niniltna." Bill flipped a page. "Okay, scene shifts to Niniltna, post ice next to the airstrip. Postmaster's name was Patrick Jorgensen, 63, moved to Niniltna in 1949, married, raised a family, been the postmaster there for the last twenty years. He was shot once at point-blank range. His wife, Becky Jorgensen, saw it all from the next room and ran out the living room door and down the strip. McAniff must have heard something because he followed her out and shot at her, she thinks a couple of times." He looked up at Jack. "Her memory gets a little confused at this point, and who can blame her. He shot at her at least once, though, because she's got as neat a hole through her upper right arm as you ever saw. Swish,,; right through, didn't touch the bone or the shook his head. "She was lucky."

"She wasn't the only one." He flipped to a third page.

"About the time she got to the end of the strip-by the way, she couldn't tell me why she didn't duck into the trees on one side or the other. She just ran, flat out, trying to put as much distance between the rifle and her."

"Maybe between the mess it left of her husband of thirty-two years and her," Jack said gently.

"Maybe. It was a mess. So, she gets to the end of the strip and who should appear out of the trees but Lyle and Lucy Longstaff, both 24. He was a Park rat, hunted, fished, panned a little gold. She was a bank teller he met and married in Anchorage, on New Year's Day."

"This New Year?" "Yeah."

"Jesus." "Yeah. She quit her job in January and moved to his cabin down on Gold Creek. They'd come up to Niniltna to meet the mail plane." Bill was a square, stolid man with a square, stolid face without much expression. And yet, as Jack listened to him tick off the victims and their descriptions from his neatly typed list, Bill's Counting down acquired something of a dirge-like quality. In his careful enunciation of the names of the dead, in his use of their full names each time he said them, it was as if he were testifying to their very existence, to the space they had once occupied on the earth, in the only way he would permit himself. All cops know that emotional involvement in any case is fatal, to themselves and usually to the case. Many of them succeed in their work only by devising a kind of working separation of person and profession, sort of like church and state. Or they try to. The best succeed at least part of the time. And yet. And yet.

"So, McAniff shoots Lyle Longstaff and Lucy Longstaff; theirs are the two bodies George Perry, the mail plane pilot, saw lying at the end of the runway. McAniff went into the woods at the end of the runway after Becky Jorgensen, evidently shooting as he went, because here's where the fell hand of fate steps in.

"The Getty sisters made it in from Syms's cabin, and the first place they stop is the first place everybody stops coming into Niniltna."

"The post office."

"Right. They see Patrick Jorgensen laid out back of the counter and hear shooting down the runway. They split up and circle around the woods in back of the strip where they heard the shooting. McAniff lost Becky Jorgensen, then, and it looks like he lay down a screen of shots, trying to get her. Lottie Getty stumbled across Becky Jorgensen and they hightailed it out of there. It was just dumb bad luck Lisa Getty ran into one of McAniff's bullets." He paused.

"She was a looker."

"I saw the pictures."

"Yeah. Thirty years old, looked like Marilyn Monroe, beauty spot, body and all. What a waste." Bill shook his head, and he turned to the next page. "So, Perry lines up for a final and all of a sudden finds the air over the strip filled with more bullets than a hot LZ and he was outa there." "Understandable."

"He climbed out of range and circled for a while, looking down at the scene through binoculars. He saw McAniff head down the road to Ahtna, and he was the one who finally got a message through to Jim Chopin in Tok, who saddled up and headed out.

Meanwhile, back at the massacre." He shuffled some more paper.

"John Weiss, thirty-seven, his wife Tina, thirty-five, and their two children, Mary, six, and Joseph, five, lived, on a farm about ten miles out of Niniltna."

"Why didn't he shoot up the town when he went through?" Jack interjected.

"He didn't go through town, he went over the river and through the woods and picked up the road at Squaw Candy Creek."

Jack's feet came down with a thump. "Squaw Creek. Bobby Clark lives on Squaw Candy Creek. Has anyone-" "Black guy in a wheelchair, does the NOAA reporting from the Park?" Jack nodded, and Bill waved a reassuring hand. "He's okay. Chopper Jim checked on him." Bill gave a dour smile. "Jim says Clark was mad as hell that McAniff didn't come his way, he would have shown the fucker how fancy he could shoot."