Whisper to the Blood (41 page)

"H
e bought me breakfast
there," Johnny said, handing it back. He looked sick. "I was
starving. I thought it was so nice of him. He left me at the counter, said he
had to see a man about a horse."

"How long was he gone?"

"Twenty minutes, maybe? Half an hour?" Johnny shook his head.
"I don't remember exactly. I thought—" "What?"

Johnny ducked his head and studied the floor intently. "I thought maybe
a woman. I saw them, the ones who hang around the truck stops. They were
everywhere we pulled in." He glanced up fleetingly. "I'm sorry, Jim.
If I'd told you when he got here—"

"It's okay," Jim said.

"No, it isn't. Maybe Ms. Macleod would be alive if I had."
"You didn't kill her, Johnny. And Gallagher hasn't confessed."
"Yet. But you got him. Kate told me about the monofilament."
"Yeah,' Jim said, not without a certain satisfaction. Besides the little
bundle in the kitchen catch-all, there was enough mending twine in Auntie Vi's
net loft to stock a marine supply store. Jim didn't know if the geeks at the
crime lab could match batches of the stuff, but even if they couldn't it put
the means of Macleod's murder very close to Gallagher's hand.

They'd recovered the bullets in the
Boise
homicides, too, and Gallagher's weapon was already on its way to the crime lab
in
Anchorage
.
"Yeah," he said, "we got him."

Kate came in as Johnny was leaving. "You okay?" she said.

"Jim says I didn't kill her."

"Jim Chopin, while a man and by definition foolish and fallible, is in
this case absolutely and miraculously right."

Johnny watched his hands as they tried to tie his knit cap into a knot.
"I shouldn't have told him where I was from, Kate. He wouldn't have shown
up here." He looked up. "Maybe if I hadn't, Ms. Macleod would still
be alive."

"Maybe. Maybe not. He'd already killed two people, don't forget. And
you were with him. You could have seen something."

He paled a little. "You think he would have tried to kill me."

"I don't know. Fortunately, not an issue now."

Johnny's expression lightened. "I guess so. Yeah."

"Go on," she said, opening the door to the post. "You're
going to be late for school. Just make damn sure that's where you're
going."

"Yes, Kate," he said, and bolted out the door.

I
saw Howie and Willard, headed for
home," she said in Jim's office. "You still think he might be making
it up about the aunties hiring him to do Louis Deem?"

"You asked them again?"

"Haven't had time."

He snorted. "Yeah, you're as petrified as I am that it's true. And then
what?"

Kate had other issues with the aunties as well, but he couldn't help her
with those. "You're sure he didn't kill Mac Devlin?"

He nodded. "Yeah. He was out there all right, with your cousin Martin
and some guy named Sheldon, poaching caribou for resale. And Howie's rifle
doesn't match the bullet the ME dug out of Mac's back." She was silent,
frowning at the floor. "Kate?"

She looked up. "Want me to talk to Martin and Sheldon?"

"Sure. Probably even pay you for it. I'm going to take Greenbaugh into
Anchorage
personally as
soon as it gets light."

"He okay to travel?"

"They got doctors in
Anchorage
can take care of him just fine. The sooner he's safely inside Cook Inlet
Pre-Trial, the better I'll feel."

"Has Greenbaugh said he killed Talia yet?"

"He's not talking. After Mutt's emergency tracheotomy last
night"—Mutt's ears perked up at mention of her name—"I'm
not sure he can. But I called Global Harvest. The day Macleod died, he called
them and told them he wanted her job."

"They give it to him?"

"Are you kidding? Guy hasn't even been in the state a year. Hasn't even
made it through his first winter. No time served, no name recognition. Global
Harvest didn't get to be the world's largest gold mining company because they
were stupid."

It was almost word for word what she'd thought herself. Spooky. "So
who's the new Talia, did they say?"

"They don't know yet. The guy said they'd made a job offer and were
waiting to hear back. You get a call you didn't tell me about?"

Kate smiled, a little distracted.

"You okay, Kate?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'll go talk to Martin and Sheldon today."

S
he didn't bother looking for Martin.
Instead, she went straight out to the Sheldons' place. It was about five miles
downriver from Niniltna on the road to Bernie's, a couple miles after the
turnoff to Bobby's place on
Squaw
Candy
Creek
and a couple of miles before the turnoff to the Nabesna Mine. The Sheldons had
been Mac Devlin's nearest neighbors.

The snow machine nosed down the narrow track, which went in about a mile
before ending in a large clearing. There was a small, neat house, a cache on
stilts, and a couple of outbuildings. Next to one of these was a D6 Caterpillar
tractor, yellow body and ten-foot steel blade. Kate recognized it immediately,
as some years back she'd had occasion to employ it as a means of resolving a
chronic property dispute between the Jeppsens and the Kreugers. It would have
wrung Mac's heart to see it sitting out in the weather. He'd always taken good
care of his equipment. It was one of his few discernible virtues.

She pulled up to the house and killed the engine. Mutt hopped down and Kate
dismounted as the door opened. A man stood in the doorway squinting out at the
morning light, tall, balding, suspenders holding up his Carhartts, T-shirt
stained with coffee and what looked like egg, worn leather mocs on his feet.

"Mr. Sheldon?" Kate said, without moving, because he was also
holding a bolt-action .30-06. He wasn't aiming it anywhere in particular and
she wasn't going to give him cause to do so. She hoped.

"Yeah?"

"I'm Kate Shugak, Mr. Sheldon. I'm a Park rat like yourself, live about
thirty miles the other direction, off the road to Ahtna."

"I've heard of you." The rifle remained held loosely in front of him.
"What do you want?"

"I need to talk to you. Okay if I come in?"

He seemed about to refuse, and then Mutt trotted up and looked at him with
wide eyes and alert ears. "Nice-looking dog. Got some wolf in her."

"Some. May I please come in and talk to you, Mr. Sheldon?"

He shrugged and stepped back. "Sure, I guess. If you want."

She waited until he set the rifle in a corner before stepping into the
kitchen, where unwashed dishes were piled high in the sink and more were spread
on table and countertop, along with silverware, cutlery, and pots and pans.
There was the sour smell of moldering food in the air, probably emanating from
the gnawed-looking haunch of caribou sitting on the table, and dirt crunched
underfoot.

"Sorry about the mess," Sheldon said. "My wife's away."

There was a propane cooker and a woodstove with a kettle on top. He moved
the kettle to the cooker and turned the burner underneath on high, produced a
jar of Sanka and another of creamer and a bowl of sugar crusted around the rim
from countless wet spoons dipping into it. The kettle boiled almost immediately
and Sheldon used his arm in a sweeping movement to shove everything on the
table to one side and set out heavy white mugs and Fig Newtons in a tattered
plastic sleeve. Kate doctored her coffee, sipped it, and took a bite of a
cookie. She fed the rest to a bright-eyed Mutt sitting alertly at her side.

Hospitality satisfied, Sheldon said, "What's this about?" His face
looked hollowed out, his eyes bruised. His thinning hair looked as if it hadn't
been combed in a week or washed in a month. He hadn't shaved in a while,
either, and his fingernails were grimed with dirt. He spoke in a monotone,
without life or hope.

"I think you know, sir."

"Do I?"

Kate made her voice as gentle as possible. "I understand your son was
killed this fall."

His head snapped up and he stared at her. His eyes reddened and filled with
tears. "Shit," he said, rubbing them with the back of his hand.
"Shit. You'd think after all this time . . ." He dropped his hand and
glared at her. "What's that got to do with you?"

"I understand it was an accident," Kate said. "The Cat turned
over on him."

"Accident my ass," Sheldon said, firing up, "that fucker
Devlin sold me that Cat when he knew the track was about to fall apart. My boy
took it out to work on the creek out back, been showing some color. He thought
he might pick up a few nuggets, maybe pay for his tuition, price of gold what
it is . . ." His voice trailed away as the energy drained out of him
again. "Killed him, that piece of shit Cat did." He looked at Kate
again but the glare was gone. "Devlin sold me a defective piece of
equipment. Should have known when he let it go so cheap. Should have looked it
over more careful." His head drooped. "Should never have let Roger
drive it."

"Is that why you killed him, Mr. Sheldon? Is that why you shot Mac
Devlin in the back?"

His head came up again and they stared at each other, the silence stretching
out between them, pulling tighter and tighter, until he seemed to realize that
he'd left his answer too long.

"You were hunting caribou up back of Suulutaq with Howie Katelnikof and
Martin Shugak," Kate said. "Mac went out to the Global Harvest
trailer, probably to steal what he could and trash the rest. You saw him on
your way out. Followed him. Shot him in the back as he was going inside. That
the way it happened?"

He was still staring at her. "Was Roger your only son, Mr.
Sheldon?"

He blinked, and looked down at the table, his eye lighting on something. He
stretched out a hand possessed of a fine trembling and pulled it out of the
mess. "Yes," he said, looking at it. "He was our only
child."

He handed it to her. It was a photograph of three people, a man barely
recognizable as the one sitting in front of her now, not much younger but
healthy and happy. The woman was attractively plump, and they were both looking
adoringly at the third person in the photo, a gangly young man with a large
Adam's apple and silverrimmed glasses perched on a hawk beak of a nose
identical to the one on the face before her.

"I'm very sorry," she said, handing the photograph back.

"Me, too," he said.

"You didn't go out there meaning to kill Mac Devlin, did you, Mr.
Sheldon?"

"I didn't even know he was going to be there." Sheldon spoke in a
dreary tone. "Martin told me they could use an extra hand with the
caribou, and I'm a good butcher. They were going to pay me in meat, so I said I
would. He told me to come out a day after them, so they'd have some shot and
gutted and ready for me to work on. So I did." He turned blind eyes toward
the window, the only source of light in the room. "It was like you said. I
saw that bastard Devlin at the trailer." He shrugged. "I had my rifle
with me." He picked up the photograph again. "Seemed the right thing
to do at the time."

She sat in silence with him for some minutes, before getting to her feet.
"I'll have to take your rifle in, Mr. Sheldon," she said. "Give
it to the trooper in Niniltna. I expect he'll be out here in the next day or
so."

He nodded. "Good. Give me a chance to clean up the place." He
looked around. "Although I don't know what for. Nobody going to be living
here now."

It about killed her to drive off and leave him there, alone with his ghosts.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I
t snowed for Christmas, dry, fluffy
flakes that piled up fast, twenty-eight inches in eighteen hours. Christmas Day
dawned clear and cold, a beautiful morning. "Let's ski over to Mandy's
after dinner," Kate said.

"Deal," Johnny said.

They even had a tree, small enough for one string of lights and a few bright
ornaments, and topped with a tiny Eskimo doll in an exquisitely hand-worked
sealskin kuspuk and mukluks that Annie Mike had given all the board members for
Christmas. They'd agreed on the rules beforehand. There would be no singing of
carols, no recitation of the Christmas story, and each of them was allowed to
give the other only one gift. Kate gave Johnny a leather-bound atlas of
Middle-earth, elaborately illustrated and annotated, and Jim the four-book
memoir by Gerald Durrell about growing up on
Corfu
between the World Wars, first editions Rachel had found for her on the
Internet. Johnny gave Jim a Leatherman, the new Skeletool model. He gave Kate
one, too. Jim gave Johnny a small telescope, an Astro-Venture 90mm, with its
own spotting scope. "Your math better be up to this," he told him,
"because mine isn't."

While Johnny stuttered in vain for something to say that might come close to
expressing his surprise, his wonder, and his gratitude, Jim turned to Kate and
handed her a small, flat package wrapped clumsily in gold foil. A red
peel-and-stick ribbon was stuck to one corner. "Merry Christmas," he
said, the corner of his mouth kicking up in a half smile.

It was a copy of
Robert's Rules of Order (Newly Revised, In Brief).
She opened it and read out loud, her voice breaking on the words, "'So
You're Going to a Meeting.'" She closed the book and looked at him through
misty eyes. "Oh, Jim."

He leaned over and kissed her. "Tear 'em up, babe."

Later they ate ham roasted with pineapple rings and cloves in a brown-sugar
sauce, and after that they strapped on skis and went over the river and through
the woods to see Mandy, who heard their laughter long before they arrived and
was waiting for them at the door. "Hey, guys! Come on in, I've got pumpkin
pie fresh out of the oven."