Whisper to the Blood (32 page)

She spent the rest of the daylight hours stopping at individual cabins
scattered along the river between Tikani and Niniltna. Perhaps a dozen in all,
some that had been there since the Ark, these occupied by crusty old farts and
less frequently crusty old fartettes with a taste for wilderness and solitude,
not necessarily in that order and not always both. Most were homes that had
begun life as log cabins, and some of them were beginning to sag beneath the
weight of accumulated decades, but for the most part they were snug, tight
little dwellings, and certainly none of them were as threadbare as Vidar's.
Other cabins had been built more recently of materials brought upriver by barge
or down the road by semi and patiently ferried across the river by skiff one
two-by-four at a time, their interiors lightened by Sheetrock and paint and
their asphalt-shingled roofs a substantial contrast to tar-papered slabs
weighted with sod.

They were similar in size, usually one room with a loft, a floor plan that
reminded Kate with a pang of her cabin. The smaller the cabin, the less fuel it
took to keep warm and the cheaper the winter fuel bill, and since heat rose,
the sleeping loft would stay warm longer than anywhere else in the house. A
tried-and-true Bush floor plan.

Everyone who lived on the river practiced subsistence in some form. They
hunted for their own meat, they caught their own salmon, and most of them grew
their own potatoes, turnips and carrots and cabbage, and tomatoes if they had a
greenhouse, and broccoli and cauliflower if they were willing to fight off the
moose.

There were so few of them because the properties they had been built on were
some of the very few pieces of private property in the Park, grandfathered in
when the Park had been created around them. The Park Service wasn't happy that
they were there, and lost no opportunity to harass the owners on any pretext,
improper land use, overstepping or ignoring hunting regulations, driving a snow
machine through a designated snow-machine-free area. Every Park rat had been
guilty of all of these transgressions at one time or another in their lives.
The river rats were the ones who got the most attention, though, probably
because they were the easiest to get to.

These citizens of the river were a varied lot, and some of them had
extraordinary hobbies. Take Olaf Christiansen, a retired seiner from Cordova
who had stumbled on an entire salmon-canning line in an abandoned cannery near
Alaganik. He had disassembled it, brought it upriver by barge, and reassembled
it in a lean-to next to his cabin, where he set it to run at one-tenth its
normal speed. He was happy to show it to anyone who offered him five bucks, and
they'd have a can of air to take home with them as a souvenir.

Thor Moonin, originally from Port Graham, was an ivory carver of world
renown. He made his living on jewelry, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, but he
was also a world-class sculptor, with the ability to render anything life-size
into an exquisite miniature replica-human heads, castles, and once a miniature
Yupik village, complete with dogsleds and mushers. In a shed he had a pile of
walrus and mammoth tusks that was taller than he was, and he didn't mind the
kids playing in there, either, although he did draw the line at dogs, because
they had a tendency to mistake the tusks for bones.

Betty Cavanaugh was a retired librarian from Anchorage and a bibliophile who
collected Alaskana. She had three separate sets of Captain Cook's logs in three
different editions, and if Kate had been very good and had drunk all her coffee
and had eaten all her bread and jam she was allowed to page through one of the
precious volumes during a visit after she washed her hands.

They liked their privacy, the main reason they lived on the Kanuyaq River,
but to a man and a woman they greeted Kate cordially, and without exception
they tried to feed her. They did feed Mutt, whose sides tightened up like a
drum. Nor were they backward in answering Kate's questions.

Yes, they knew the Johansen brothers. There wasn't anyone on the river who
didn't, and not just by reputation, either. Bad actors, all three of them,
couldn't think where Vidar had gone so wrong. Maybe if Juanita had stayed
around, might have been a different story, but probably not, the bad was likely
born into them and there was no getting it out. Surprised they hadn't wound up
in jail permanently. Probably only a matter of time.

Yes, people had been moving out of Tikani, there had been a virtual exodus
over the past year, year and a half, people streaming downriver like they were
fleeing the bubonic plague. Sure, that could be put down to the Johansen
brothers, who had no concept of private property. The older they got, the less
neighborly they became, and besides, Kate surely knew they had lost their
school as well as their post office. There was only a rudimentary airstrip,
barely long enough to let a Super Cub take off, empty, and it had been allowed
to go to hell with devil's club and alders. No reason for anyone to stay.

Old Vidar was still up there? You don't say. Well, I'll be. Ought to drop in
on the old goat once in a while. He wasn't the friendliest person in the world
but shouldn't ought nobody to be left completely alone year in and year out,
wasn't healthy to have only your own self for company, start talking to
yourself, worse, start telling yourself jokes, worse still, start laughing at
them. Sure, they'd check on him, they'd set up a schedule. Somebody'd be
dropping in on him once a week, or maybe every other week'd be all they could
manage, but Vidar'd probably go nuts if he had visitors more often than that
anyway. In the dictionary where it said
hermit,
there was a picture of
Vidar Johansen.

Pity his boys were so useless they couldn't be trusted to look after him
themselves.

Yes, they'd heard of the snow machine attacks. No, no one had tried anything
like that with them. 'Course their river running days were over, and they had
plenty to do to keep them safe to home. Failing that, they all had their
12-gauge, or their .30-30, or their .357.

Could they put a name to whoever was most likely to be the perpetrators of
said attacks? Well now, there weren't no flies on Kate Shugak that they'd ever
seen. What did she think?

Had they heard of Talia Macleod? Why, of course, the mine woman, used to be
some kind of famous athlete, wasn't it? She'd written them a letter saying
she'd be stopping by, and then her man had come upriver and dropped off an
information packet, along with a raffle ticket, winner got an all-expenses-paid
weekend in Anchorage. Geiger, wasn't it? No, Gallagher, that was it, Gallagher.
Eager beaver kinda guy, boomer, seen that type too many times before. Reckoned
Macleod wanted their support for the mine, and they were all looking forward to
seeing what she was willing to offer in exchange.

They were genuinely shocked when Kate told them of Macleod's death, and not
a few of them were more worried when she left them than when she had arrived,
for which she was sorry. It was better to put them on the alert than to leave
them in ignorance of the event, though, and she promised that when the killer
was identified and arrested she would let them know.

She headed for Niniltna after dark with the uneasy feeling that Park rats
who lived on the river were getting out the gun oil and the ammunition all the
way back to the Lost Chance Creek Bridge.

S
he pulled up at the post at eight
that evening, noting evidence of a great many tracks in the snow in front. Only
Jim's snow machine remained. She turned off the engine and got off, a little
weary. Mutt took this opportunity to stretch her legs and vanished in the
direction of the airstrip. There was a colony of rabbits denned up in a
clearing in back of George's hangar.

Kate went inside. Maggie had already left for the day. "Jim?"

"Yeah," he said, and she went into his office.

He was stretched out almost horizontally in his chair, his feet up on the
desk and his head on the windowsill. He had his eyes closed and his hands
folded on his chest and he looked like he was about to be carried out of the
office feetfirst to have prayers sung over him for the repose of his eternal
soul. "Hey," Kate said.

He opened one eye, and closed it again. "Hey." She sat down.
"How awful was it?"

His chest rose and fell. "Could have been worse. Larry King could have
shown up." Kate winced. "Really?"

"Really." He opened the eye again. "Where you been?"

She told him. When she finished they sat there, silent, for a while.
Eventually he uncrossed his feet and set them down on the floor, regaining the
vertical with a mumble and a groan. His eyes looked red, as if he'd been
rubbing them a lot. "You?" she said.

He gave his scalp a vigorous scrub with his fingertips and then tried to
smooth down the resulting haystack. "I got the body off to the lab. I just
talked to Brillo, and while he's going to do the usual, he says what we saw is
pretty likely what we got."

"Was she the intended victim, though?" Kate said.

Jim raised one shoulder. "Maybe, maybe not. Everybody uses the creek
after it freezes up to get back and forth to the school. If the killer really
was aiming for Talia, he was taking a hell of a risk that he'd get somebody
else."

"Mine related, you think?"

Again the shoulder. "Lot of people not loving the idea of that mine,
Kate."

"I know," she said. "But to the point of murder?"

"Mac Devlin," he said. "At the trailer out at Suulutaq, from
a distance that argues they might maybe have been shooting at anyone working
for Global Harvest who happened to be there. And now Talia Macleod, Global
Harvest's mouthpiece in the Park, lately to have been seen pretty near
everywhere in it, promoting said mine."

"Same guy, then."

He nodded. "That's my thought. Too much propinquity not to be."

"I'm taking your Word of the Day calendar away."

He gave a tired smile. "How the river rats taking it?"

"In the immortal words of Brendan McCord, I left everyone mobilizing
for Iwo Jima."

"Great," he said. "We need more bodies, 'cause it's not
looking enough like the last scene in
Hamlet
already."

"They have a right to protect themselves, Jim," she said quietly.

"I know." After a brief pause, he said, "So. The Johansen
brothers?"

She didn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know," she said
finally.

He looked at her. "You figured them for the attacks."

"Since Louis Deem's dead, yeah," she said. "But. . ."

"What?" he said as she didn't continue. "I like that
scenario. On any other day, so would you."

"Murder?" she said, and shook her head. "It's convenient, the
mine as a motive, Park rats with a grudge, but I'm just not feeling it."

"I'm taking your DVDs of
The Wire
away," he said, and sat
up. "That's not all, though, is it. What haven't you told me that I don't
want to hear?"

Kate sighed. "I'm a little worried about the Johansens."

He raised an eyebrow. "That's a first. For pretty much anyone within a
five-hundred-mile radius."

"You know I went down the river the day after you found out about the
attacks. I talked to Ken and Janice, Ike, and the Rileys. On my way down, Ken
and Ike were foaming at the mouth and threatening to shoot on sight."

"Who?"

"Anybody," Kate said. "I'm probably lucky they didn't take a
shot at me."

"Were the Johansens mentioned?"

"Of course they were," Kate said. "They're nowhere near the
caliber of natural disaster that Louis Deem was, but you don't live on the
river for a year without learning who you don't want to be your new best
friends. So I kept on keeping on, down to Red Run to talk to the Rileys. And
here's the thing, Jim. They aren't foaming at the mouth. They aren't even
mildly disturbed. They're not worried about catching the guys who attacked
them, they have perfect confidence that Trooper Jim will get the job done, and
they're willing to put their faith in him."

"I appreciate the confidence."

"Yeah, well, don't pin that medal on yourself just yet. I go back up
the river and drop in again on Ike and Ken, and guess what? They're all calm
now, butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, and what do you know, they know the
law will catch up to the bad people who did this to them and that justice will
be served."

She looked at Jim expectantly, and he did not disappoint. "You think
the Park rats have taken care of this problem themselves."

"I'm terrified they did," she said. "I even went up and down
the river looking in all the likely places to stuff three bodies."

He laughed out loud.

"Yeah, yuck it up," she said with asperity, "but then I went
up to Tikani to see if maybe they were dumb enough to go home. They weren't
there, and they hadn't been in a while. Vidar hasn't even heard their engines
coming and going. And Jim, I just spent all day on the river, north of
Niniltna, true, but nobody jumped out at me and said boo. I didn't see much
traffic at all, come to think of it."

"That's not a surprise, given that two people have been murdered in the
Park in the past two weeks. Not to mention it's freeze-your-ass cold outside.
I'd stay home, too, if I could."

There was a peremptory bark outside and Kate got up to admit the lupine
member of the constabulary. Mutt bounded over to Jim and offered an exuberant
greeting. She returned to Kate's side and plunked down to begin a thorough
grooming of her already magnificent self.

"I like to close a case as much as any cop," Kate said, "but
murder? The Johansens?" She shook her head. "That's a hell of a step
up for them."

"I've got people looking into Talia's background, see if there is
anything there," Jim said. "But the Johansens attacked Johnny, Ruthe,
and Van with a two-by-four, let's not forget. Not to mention Ken and Janice,
Ike and Laverne, and Chris and Art and Grandma Riley."