Fatal Thaw (4 page)

Jack sighed with relief. "That's our Bobby. Thank God."

"The Weisses lived in another house by the side of the road. Apparently Tina Weiss caught it first, in the out house. Near as we can figure, McAniff shot John Weiss once in the left thigh, after which Mary and Joseph ran out onto a little lake the farmhouse fronted on. McAniff shot them as they were about to make the trees on the other side. It was almost like he waited until they got that far before shooting." "Gave them a sporting chance," Jack suggested acidly. "Who does this guy think he is, General Zaroff?" "From the evidence it looks more like he was seeing just how good a shot he was." He met Jack's eyes. "Small targets, moving, that kind of thing."

Jack closed his eyes and said wearily, "Jesus Christ." "John Weiss, who we think was conscious and saw all this, was trying to crawl out to them when McAniff walked over and shot him. One shot, right here." Bill demonstrated with a cocked finger to his left temple. "Point-blank range. Powder burns beneath the skin, casing next to the body. He just walked up, stared him straight in the eye, and shot him."

There was a brief pause as both men imagined the scene in their minds; the mother shot where she sat; the father allowed to live long enough to witness the cold and deliberate murder of his own children; the last, lone and by then probably welcome shot to the head. Jack's skin crawled, and he shook himself and got up to refill their cups. The coffee was hot and strong and burned going down, and it brought Jack back from that cold scene by the lake to the more prosaic surroundings of his crowded office.'

"Next stop, the access road to the Nabesna Mine. It was just more dumb bad luck that had MacKay Devlin turning onto the road to Niniltna when McAniff passed by. He says he hung a right a little fast and skidded to a stop on the old railroad bed right in front of McAniff's snow machine. McAniff had the 30.06 out and up before Devlin could blink his eyes, and Devlin says he just took off running. He says McAniff shot at him five or six times, which agrees with the number of casings we found at the scene." Bill blew on his coffee and sipped at it. "Only nicked him once, on the outside of the upper right arm. Just like Becky Jorgensen. The McAniff specialty."

"Lucky for Mac." "You know Devlin?" Jack nodded. "I think he was more than just lucky."

"How so?"

"I figure McAniff must have been getting tired. At any rate, he didn't pursue Devlin the way he did the others. He got back on the snow machine and drove down the road. And, as we all know now, about twelve miles later he ran into Kate Shugak."

Not by a glint in the eye or a change of tone did Bill betray knowledge of Jack's history with Kate, or of Kate's previous employment on the Anchorage D.A. investigators' staff, but then he'd only been with them himself for eighteen months. While highly unlikely, it was possible the gossip had cooled off. Jack doubted it.

"Hers had been one of the homesteads Chopper Jim had warned on the way in," Bill said. "She took her shotgun out to the road, waited for him and bagged the bastard." He drank coffee and observed, "Too bad she didn't kill him." "She wouldn't."

"Seems a pity. Would have saved us a lot of time and the taxpayers a lot of money."

"True." "So." Bill began gathering the files into a pile. "What've we got here? One, two, three, four, five, six, six, seven, eight, nine, count'em, nine murders in the first degree. Jesus. And one, two attempted murders."

"Those two attempts include the try at Mac Devlin?" Bill looked up. "Of course. Why?"

Jack smiled, a small, wry smile but a smile nonetheless. "In the Park, shooting at Mac Devlin isn't quite the same. thing as attempted murder." "Then what is it?"

"I think it's more in the way of a team sport." Bill looked puzzled, and Jack said, "McAniff. Tell me about him." Bill produced yet another manila file folder and opened it to the first page. "You know mass murderers virtually didn't exist until the sixties. Since then, there've been enough to begin building a profile."

"How fortunate for us."

"Yeah. Anyway, Roger McAniff fits the profile, so well it's scary. He's thirty-one, and M&Ms are usually in their twenties or thirties. He's five-six, which makes him a little shorter than average, and M&Ms usually are. He weighs in around one seventy-five, which makes him overweight, which also fits into the profile, but when you consider he's coming off an Alaskan bush winter, maybe that statistic doesn't mean very much in this case. He's got a mustache."

"Mass murderers got mustaches?" Jack said, smoothing down his own neatly trimmed mustache and beard. "Most of them. Most of them are also usually white, usually male and usually likely to kill their victims in their victims' own homes."

"This guy is just typical as hell, isn't he?" Jack said, still stroking his beard.

"For a mass murderer," Bill agreed. "When'd he move to Niniltna?"

"Last fall. He was working as a computer programmer for Alaska Petroleum."

"On the Slope or in town?" "In town. There was a big rif-reduction in force-last September, and he got his pink slip then. About the same time his wife threw him out.

According to the head of the Niniltna Tribal Council-" Bill squinted at a page. "Billy Monk?"

"Billy Mike."

Bill made a careful note. "Right, Billy Mike, according to him, Talbot showed up in Niniltna around Halloween." "Enter the boogeyman."

"In person."

"From what we can tell without the autopsy reports, he's a pretty good shot." "Expert." Jack raised his eyebrows. "Literally. In the army, 80 to 83."

"See any action?"

Bill shook his head. "He was stationed in Panama. Not much going on there then."

"Didn't re-up?"

"Nope. Transferred to Fort Richardson in 83, took his out here."

"Army have anything to say about him one way or the other?"

"No, pretty much standard evaluations all the way across the board.

However." Bill flipped to another page. "You'll like this. When the troopers searched his cabin, they found a computer printout of the names, phone numbers and home addresses of Parks Department employees, and another of Department of Public Safety employees, including fish hawks and the State Troopers' own Alert Team. Nine of'em." He looked up.

"Including Jim Chopin."

"Jesus Christ." The vexing problem of whether or not it had come time to shave forgotten, Jack dropped his hand from his beard and sat up.

"Where'd he get those?"

Bill shrugged. "He worked with computers. Alaska Petroleum pumps half the oil out of Prudhoe Bay; theirs is one of the biggest and ,best.

We've got their department head going through their hard drives now, trying to backtrack and see if he accessed state computers through their system. Half the Department of Public Safety is hanging over his shoulder." "I'll just bet they are. Jesus," Jack repeated. "What the hell was he going to do with those lists?"

"Who knows?"

"Has anybody asked him?" "He's got a lawyer."

Jack grunted.

Bill straightened and stacked his papers into a neat pile. "Doesn't really matter, anyway. With or without charging him for attempted murder on MacKay Devlin, on conviction we should be able to put McAniff away for, oh, I'd conservatively estimate, say, 299,999 years. Without benefit of parole."

Jack toasted Bill with his coffee mug. "I hear his lawyers are considering pleading insanity caused by eating too much junk food and getting too little light in the winter." Bill's mouth turned down. "I can see it now. We the jury find the accused not guilty by reason of insanity, caused from eating too many Twinkies and spending a winter in the Alaskan bush. He'll probably be sentenced to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and be out on the streets in two years."

"Nope. He'll still have to serve his time," Jack said. He sat contemplating the prospect with patent satisfaction. "According to the new `guilty but mentally ill' provision in the criminal code."

"That's right, I forgot. One of the smarter things the legislature has done in the last ten years."

"Maybe the only." The phone rang on Jack's desk and he answered it.

"Jack Morgan. Oh hi, Slim. What can I do you for?" He listened. "What?"

He listened some more. "Are you sure?" An odd note in his voice made Bill look up. Jack's eyes were narrowed and intent, looking at something Bill couldn't see.

"Ballistics confirms? Did you-" Jack listened for a moment to the voice on the other end of the phone. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Great. Thanks, Slim. I think."

He set the phone in its cradle with great care and looked across the desk. "That was Slim Bartlett."

"The coroner."

"Yeah. He's got some news about the autopsies on the Niniltna massacre victims."

"What?" "First of all, Lucy Longstaff was pregnant."

Bill's lips tightened into a thin line. The wad of paper he held crumpled a little, and it took a conscious, visible effort to the relax the grip he had on it. He smoothed the sheets with exaggerated care.

"So. Ten murders."

"No. It's still just nine." Jack paused. "Slim told me something else, too."

"What?" "You're going to like this."

Bill Robinson was beginning to know Jack Morgan in this mood. He sat back and let him play it out. "The ice just went out at Nenana and I won?"

"Better." Bill waited. "Slim says that the bullet that killed Lisa Getty came from a different rifle than the one that killed the rest of the victims."

Bill straightened with a jerk. "What!" "Yeah, I know."

"Shit!" "Yeah," Jack Morgan said thoughtfully. "I know." "Jim?" The trooper shrugged. "We've collected all the evidence there was to collect, and your people have examined it." He nodded at the pile of file folders on Jack's desk. Bill Robinson leaned against one wall, watching the exchange. "Those are all the statements we took. You've read them. Lottie Getty and Becky Jorgensen were together at the time Lisa Getty was shot. We tested Lottie's rifle and it came up clean. Becky was unarmed. George Perry never got on the ground. Hell, it was a Saturday morning. Usually pretty quiet in Niniltna on Saturday mornings, at least until the mail plane lands, and then everybody in town can hear it and they come out. Until then-" He spread his hands. "There's just no reason, or there wasn't, to suspect that anyone else was doing any shooting that day." He paused. "Is ballistics "They're sure. " "Did you have them run another test?"

"And a third. They all come up the same. Lisa Getty was shot by a different rifle than the others."

"Damn.,, "So," Jack said, studying his feet. "Where will you start?"

Heavy lids drooped over the trooper's eyes and Jack couldn't read the expression in them. "I'm. afraid I can't start Jack stared at him in disbelief. "Why the hell not?" Chopper Jim said evenly, "I was involved in a personal relationship with Lisa Getty recently."

Jack sat up. "How recently?" "Recent enough to keep me out of this investigation The trooper looked up, and the expression on his face was as close to defensive as Jack had ever seen Jim Chopin get. He was surprised it was even possible. He waited.

"It started New Year's Eve at Bernie's Roadhouse," Jim said at last. "It ended Valentine's Day at hers."

"Who broke it off?" "She did."

Jack's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. "Did you fight?"

"No." The word was brought out with unnecessary force, and Jack noticed it, and Jim noticed he noticed it, and Jack noticed him noticing. Their eyes met and they both laughed at the same time.

"Gotta ask, Jim," Jack said, sobering.

"Yeah. I'm not-I don't-" For a moment the trooper was uncharacteristically at a loss for words. "Oh hell," he said, and gave a short, humorless laugh. "It's a little different," he said, his voice wry, "being on the other side." "Yeah." Jack waited.

"It wasn't like we were in love or anything. It was just one of those things." If the legends were true, Chopper Jim went through "one of those things" on average about once a month. Jack sat back in his chair and regarded the man sitting across from him.

Even sitting down Chopper Jim looked every bit of his six-feet-ten-inch height and every one of his well developed and superbly maintained two hundred and seventy pounds. On his feet, in the Alaska State Trooper's uniform, all blue and gold and badge and gun, Jim simply radiated authority and competence and strength and probity and rectitude; most if not all of the virtues and certainly none of the vices. If you squinted, he looked a little like John Wayne. If you didn't, he still did.

The appearance was something of a fraud as far as women were concerned.

Beneath the flat brim of the hat, the calm, blue eyes could turn, without the slightest warning, deadly seductive. His jaw was firm and square and held up a quick, charming and totally untrustworthy smile.

Chopper Jim always carried with him a musky whiff of having just rolled out of bed, and the seductive sense of being just barely able to wait until he got back in it, preferably accompanied. Jack had hoisted a few with the trooper, off duty and out of uniform, and he had to admit, not without a trace of envy, that not for nothing did they call Chopper Jim the Father of the Park. Kate herself was not entirely immune, he realized for the first time with a small shock, or she wouldn't have maintained such an air of implacable hostility around the trooper. It remained to be seen how immune Lisa Getty had been.

Jim was speaking again. "We went at it hot and heavy for six, seven weeks. Then, on February 14th I flew into the Park and went to her house. It'd been a week since I'd seen her, and she was-well, never mind that. She let me in, and then she let me out again about five minutes later. She said," and Jim seemed to be trying to recall the exact words, "she said she liked me a lot, that it had been fun but it was time to move on, and she hoped there were no hard feelings. Then she opened the door and smiled at me." He paused. "She didn't even say she hoped we could still be friends. She did everything but help me outside with the toe of Her boot." He shook his head. "I've never been given the bum's rush before. At least not like that."