Fatal Thaw (20 page)

Still indignant, Kate snapped, "The difference is you can't give the bladders back to the bears." "Oh? And you can give the tusks back to the walrus?"

"No, I can't give the tusks back to the walrus," Kate said, aping Jack's heavily sarcastic tone, "but I can and will pass them on to Chick Noyukpuk, and he can carve them into cribbage boards or sea otters or anua for spirit masks and sell them to an Anchorage gift shop and maybe make a few bucks. That way, the tusks stay where they're supposed to, in the Park, or at least whatever Chick earns from them will. The bladders would just get tossed in the trash."

"Chick Noyukpuk? The Billiken Bullet? The drunk musher who wrecks every snow machine he sets his eye on?" Jack threw up his hands and addressed the ceiling. "Oh well, then how could I possibly object?"

"When he's sober he is a fine artist," Kate snapped. "Time!" Bobby roared. "Much as I approve of comic relief, you two are worse than a couple of kids. Food's on, shut up, sit down, and eat. Now!" he roared, when Jack opened his mouth.

Kate and Jack sat. The food, an omelet seasoned with caribou sausage and sharp cheddar, was delicious, which was a good thing, since conversation lagged.

Kate was clearing the table when a distant whapwhapwhap heralded the arrival of the trooper. The engine grew louder, settled and died. Heavy footsteps crunched the ice created by the overnight drop in temperature, followed by a perfunctory thump on the door before it opened. Chopper Jim stepped inside.

"Hey, Jim," Bobby said.

"Bobby," the Trooper replied. "Jack. Kate." "Had your breakfast?"

"Yeah. I wouldn't say no to a cup of coffee, though." "Coming right up." They arranged themselves around the fireplace and waited until Bobby had handed out steaming mugs. "Well?" Jack said.

"It's a match," Jim said.

Kate's head jerked up and Jack smirked at her.

Jim fished something small out of a breast pocket and tossed it to Kate.

She caught it automatically, a misshapen slug of lead. She looked from it to Jack in sudden suspicion, and he nodded. "When I left the Step I went down to the boat. I dug it out of the forward bulkhead of the cabin." He smiled thinly. "It looks worse than your head."

Kate turned to Jim. "This match the bullet that killed Max Chaney?" He nodded.

"But not the bullet that killed Lisa Getty." He voice was certain and Jack looked annoyed.

Chopper Jim shook his head. "Nope."

The single, laconic syllable irritated her. "Lisa Getty was growing commercial quantities of marijuana in her backyard, Jim," she said. "Why didn't you mention that when you talked to Jack?"

"I didn't know."

"Come on!" Kate glared at him. "Lisa had enough pot in that greenhouse to put the entire Park into orbit without benefit of rocket. I found drying frames and a case of baggies in the barns. No one knows his beat better than a small town cop, and in people this Park is just one gigantic small town. If anybody knew that Lisa was growing dope, you would." He looked at her, at her angry face, a meditative expression on his own.

"We didn't talk much."

"You didn't have to, talk to her, anyway," she retorted. "You knew, didn't you? Probably about the dealings in walrus ivory and bear bladders and sealskins and sea otter hides-hell, Lisa probably shot sea gulls, just for the hell of it! Why didn't you tell Jack?"

"Kate," Bobby said.

"I'll tell you why," Kate said, ignoring Bobby. "Because you wanted me to do your dirty work for you. Because you didn't want to piss off everyone in the Park following up leads that led, for one reason or another, into just about every house and cabin and cache in a million square acres! Not to mention which half the men in the Park went into mourning when she died. That's no secret, in fact, for my purpose it's probably better to assume she's slept with everyone I've talked to so far. Including you," she said pointedly. She looked at the trooper, raised an eyebrow and added, "And just where were you the morning Lisa Getty got shot?" She brightened a little. "Where were you when Max Chaney got shot?"

Bobby turned a sharp laugh into a choking fit, and even Jack had to smile. "What about you?" Chopper Jim asked, affable and unperturbed.

"Where was I when somebody took a shot at you, Kate?"

"Kate," Bobby said again, and something in his firm, inexorable tone halted her in mid-tirade. "All this is beside the point and you know it.

Get to it, woman."

He was right, and Kate stopped dancing around and got to it. "I know where the rifle that killed Lisa Getty is." "What?" The three men spoke with one voice.

"You didn't tell me that yesterday," Bobby snapped. "I didn't realize where it was until last night, and we couldn't have found it in the dark."

"And you can today? This morning?" "I think so."

"Need any help?" Chopper Jim asked with a guileless expression.

"You've been such a big help so far, working so hard, doing so much legwork, sharing information on this case, I think we can allow you a little time off now," Kate cooed.

She was incensed when he didn't bother to look offended. He drained his mug and rose to his feet. "Then I'll be off." He put on his hat and touched a finger to its brim. "Anything I can do."

Kate thought of several things he could do, none of them productive of results in a murder investigation but all of them deeply satisfying to contemplate. He knew it, and from the hint of the smile on his face she knew he knew it. She waited until the door closed behind him, but not long enough for him to be out of earshot. "Prick," she said, with heartfelt loathing.

The sound from the porch might have been a cough or a laugh, and Kate sat, stewing, until the sound of the chopper died away, and then said to Jack, "Suit up. Mutt, up and at'em. Let's move like we got a purpose, people." She sounded just like the drill instructor Bobby had had at San Diego.

He removed himself from the line of fire, stayed there until the door closed behind them and gave a loud, vociferous sigh of relief that he was staying home.

"We've been over this ground, the troopers have been over this ground, everybody in Niniltna has been over this ground a hundred times. The troopers bagged enough crap to top off the Anchorage landfill. Why are we back here?" Jack's voice was plaintive.

"I still can't believe it took me so long to figure out," she said, and followed the yellow crime-scene tape, tattered now but still showing a ragged path through the trees, walking in the reconstructed path of the killer. When she came to where Lisa's body had lain, Kate halted for a moment, the memory of yesterday's witches' coven shivering through her.

Determinedly, she shook it off and reached for the nearest birch and, hand over hand, pulled it down to the ground until it bowed into a U-shape. She examined its top carefully and let it spring back. She reached for the birch beside it.

Jack watched her, mystified. "What in the hell are you doing?"

Kate nodded at the next clump of birches. "Start pulling those down."

"What!" "Pull down the goddam trees and look at their tops," Kate half shouted, her ruined voice a rough scrape across exposed nerves.

"All right, all right, anything for a quiet life." Jack waded through the snow to the nearest tree and yanked its trunk into a taut, straining bow.

"Careful," Kate snapped, "don't break them, just bend them so you can see their tops."

"What, there aren't enough of them around, you're afraid I'll injure one beyond all hope of recovery and eternally upset the ecological balance of the Park?"

Stepping back, she released the hold she had on her birch and let it spring upright. Its top whipped past his face and vaulted erect to some twenty-five feet above their heads. Kate watched it weave back and forth in a steadily slackening swing, among a thickly clustered group of birches huddling together in insular fraternity, keeping all their cards close to their white, birch-bark chests, all secrets secluded within the tops of their rustling branches.

"Wait a minute," she said. She smacked her forehead in irritation.

"Where is my head at? She'd have tied it off to a spruce, or a birch next to a spruce, in a clump of them probably. Yeah, for better concealment until the leaves came out."

Her grin was tight. "It's the same problem I've been having all along, not seeing the trees for the forest." Stepping back, she surveyed the scene through narrowed eyes. "Here. I'll try this one. You start on that clump over there."

He shook his head, wrestling with his scrub spruce. "Kate, you have had me doing some pretty dumb things in my life, but this-" His voice died away, as he stared at the top of the tree he had pulled down.

The 30.06 was tied lengthwise to the topmost part of the trunk of a tall, slender spruce. The butt rested in the crotch where a branch met the trunk; lengths of green fishing twine, the kind used for net mending, bound the stock and barrel tightly to the bark. The stock was sticky with pine sap.

Kate slogged through the wet, shifting snow to reach around him. The twine was damp and crusted with sap as well, and after a few moments' tugging, Kate pulled her knife and cut it. Jack uttered an inarticulate protest about destroying evidence. She stilled it with a single shake of her head. "We won't need it."

He let the tree go and stood staring at her through narrowed eyes as it swung back and forth above them in steadily diminishing arcs. "You know who did it, don't you."

It wasn't a question, and she didn't answer.

"You find it?" Bobby asked the moment they walked in.

Kate nodded curtly. Mutt squatted next to the door, ears up, watching Kate's every move with an intent yellow gaze. "You find "Her who?" Jack inquired.

"Didn't look." "Why not?" already know where she is."

"Where?"

Kate jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "George hired her to take a climbing party up the Big Bump."

"Going up Angqaq Peak, eh?" Bobby shook his head.

"Beats me why some people go to all that trouble just because it's there. Me, I'll settle for the Discovery Channel." He cocked his head, eyeing her with inquisitive gaze, looking like an black-eyed, black-headed robin. "She really do it?"

Kate nodded her head at the pillar of electronics that held up the center of the house. "Can you raise the Park on that thing?" Bobby was hurt. "I can raise Tranquility Base on that thing if I have to. Who you want to talk to?

"Dan O'Brian."

"Consider it done," Bobby said grandly and rolled to the radio.

Kate's conversation with Dan O'Brian was short and terse. Jack's lips set in a thin line as he listened. Bobby signed off when she was through, and Kate looked around from the radio. "Where's your pack?"

"In the closet in the corner. You going after her?" Kate opened the closet door, and like the Kanuyaq when the ice melted, its contents cascaded onto the floor in a fierce, joyous current of junk. She waded through it and pulled out an old canvas pack on a metal frame. "Got any longies?" "Left-hand drawer under the bed, right side. Where'd you find the rifle?"

She found the long underwear and began to strip, as Bobby looked on, frankly admiring, and as Jack looked on, angry at both of them but smart enough to hide it, or try to. "I'm so slow I make glacial erosion look speedy," Kate said, voice muffled in her sweater. She fumbled for the right holes in the Longies top and shoved her hands through. "I was standing there looking at those trees, and I knew it had to be there somewhere. It had to be. Then last night, when I was talking to Eknaty and he was telling me about when Lottie took him hunting, I remembered how Abel taught me to keep game out of the reach of bear and wolves and wolverines while we he were on a hunt. You got some wool socks?" This as she donned jeans over the longies.

He watched until the last inch of skin was covered, and then, with a sigh of regret for all good things past, Bobby said, "I don't have any feet, Kate." "Right, sorry, I forgot." She looked at Jack, who sat down and began unlacing his boots.

"Find yourself a nice, young, supple;, medium-sized birch," Kate continued. "Bend it down, stake it out, tie your meat or your supplies or whatever you want too keep out of the reach of whoever or whatever-walks below while you're gone, and let it go. Simple, effective. I don't know why it is, but nobody ever looks up. You got a vest?"

"Eddie Bauer one-hundred percent pure goose down." Kate smiled slightly.

"Only the best."

"You bet." He rolled over to the coatrack, snagged the vest and tossed it to her. "You tie something as bulky as a rifle to the top of a birch tree with no leaves on it, somebody's going to see it eventually." She pulled on the vest and snapped it closed. "Then you pick a spruce, one young enough to bend but old enough to have some height. Pick one in a clump of birch and spruce and cottonwood, all tangled up together, on a piece of state land anybody would be instantly jailed for trying to clear, and if you do it right you couldn't see it from the air, let alone the ground."

Bobby shook his head. "Lot of traffic around there, air and ground.

Sounds iffy to me."

"She was in a hurry." Kate shrugged. "It's hard to quarrel with success.

Even I had a hard time figuring out what she did with it, and I've known Lottie all my life."

Jack was rummaging in his grip for spare socks.. At Kate's words, he paused, his thick eyebrows coming together in a frown. "You knew." "Knew what?" Kate held up a pair of glove liners and paused, looking down at the pack.

"You know who did it. You've always known."

"Oh for crying out loud, Jack," she said, exasperated.

"What's the matter with you? What's the first thing you taught me on the job? What's Morgan's First Law? nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest.'

Of course I knew. I doubt that there was a soul in the Park, who thought about it for more than thirty straight seconds, who didn't know who did "Really," Jack said between his teeth. "Mind telling me how?"

She looked down at the glove liners, looked up at Bobby. "Take'em," he said. "Better to have'em and not need'em than the alternative."

She checked her watch. "We've got just enough time for a bedtime story.