A Fine and Bitter Snow

10

And we’re here, why again?“ Kate said. She knocked her boots free of snow at the door of the Park Service headquarters on the Step, at the same time moving just outside Jim’s reach. ”It’s late and I’m tired, and you know perfectly well Dan O’Brian had nothing to do with Dina’s death.“

“I found him standing over the body,” Jim countered. “He might have seen something, heard something. I have to talk to him.”

“You already have.”

He was silent for a moment. “Yeah.”

Her gaze sharpened. “What?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “A feeling, like maybe he’s not telling me everything.”

“Crap. Dan O’Brian’s not a guy to withhold knowledge of a crime.”

“Maybe,” he said in a level voice. “Maybe not.” He looked down at her and raised an eyebrow. “I told you I could have dropped you at Bobby’s on the way.”

Like she would have let him interrogate Dan O’Brian without her being in the room. She stamped up the stairs without deigning to reply and then slammed into the building, nearly catching his nose in the door.

Well, at least she wasn’t indifferent to his presence. He followed her down the hall, long legs eating up the distance between them.

Dan was still in his office, head down in a stack of paperwork. He looked up when they came in. “Great,” he said, tossing down his pen. “Cheese it, it’s the fuzz.” Mutt trotted around the desk and bounced up for her usual exchange of sugar. “Except you, babe. You I’m happy to see anytime.” He directed an unfriendly gaze at Jim. “What?”

Kate took up a strategic position perched on the corner of Dan’s desk. Jim sat opposite and cocked one heel on the other corner, a relaxed pose that deceived no one. “Tell me again. Everything you saw, everything you heard, every detail-I don’t care how insignificant you think it is.”

“Jesus.” Dan pushed away from the desk and leaned back, rubbing his face hard with both hands. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Tell me again,” Jim repeated.

Dan sighed sharply and dropped his hands to the desk in front of him. In a flat, dry voice, he repeated his story as if by rote. Due to Washington politics, his job was in jeopardy. He had consulted with friends (he didn’t look at Kate) and had decided to fight for it, which meant asking Park rats with influence to intercede on his behalf. Dina Willner and Ruthe Bauman were wired into the conservation movement, his relationship with them was good, and so they were naturals to ask for help. He drove to their cabin. He found them-he swallowed. “I found them like that,” he said. “Then I heard footsteps on the stairs, and I thought maybe this was who did it coming back.” He rubbed his head, which still sported a knot on it, although reduced in size. “After that, it was like the Keystone Kops or something. I yanked the door open the same time somebody shoved it open from the outside, and bam! The next thing I know, I’m on the floor next to Dina, looking up at you coming through the door. I thought it was you who smacked me.”

“It was Dandy, bringing the mail.”

Dan nodded. “Yeah, he told me.”

“What time was this?”

“Midafternoon. Say three, maybe? Three-thirty?”

“Did you see anything?”

“Other than stars? No.”

“Hear anything?”

Dan sighed. “I wish. I didn’t hear a damn thing.”

Kate, watching, was alarmed to see that Jim’s instincts had not deceived him. There was something that Dan wasn’t saying. “Dan,” she said.

“Goddamn it, Kate,” he said, his voice rising. “Dina and Ruthe were and are friends of mine. Do you think if I knew something I wouldn’t tell you? That I wouldn’t want to help you find who did this horrible thing and kick the shit out of them myself?”

“No,” Kate said, her voice by contrast calm, even soothing. “I don’t think that.”

And yet, as they walked down the path of hard-packed snow to where the snow machine sat waiting, she couldn’t help thinking that Dan O’Brian had sounded as defensive as he had angry. He had wanted them out of his office, had seemed almost desperate to see them go. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. As if he had allowed them to stay, he might have said more than he wanted to.

Hearing Jim take a breath, she said, “Don’t. Don’t even go there.”

She’d seen what he had, and that was all he’d been looking for. He exhaled without speaking. In grim silence, they mounted up, this time with Mutt, in response to a barked order, hopping between them.

Jim shifted on the couch in Bobby’s living room, restless. It didn’t help that he could hear the soft sound of Kate’s regular breathing, and that his overactive imagination could put that sound much closer to him without any effort at all.

The fire crackled on the hearth. A log shifted and sparks flew upward, casting a faint glow over the dark head buried in the pillow on the other couch. It was a wide couch. Plenty of room. She probably wouldn’t even wake up if he slid in next to her. She probably wouldn’t even stir. Maybe she’d just roll over and he could curl into her spoon-fashion. He could slide his hands around her waist and pull her in tight. He thought of that ass against his crotch and had to shift again to make room for his erection. It didn’t even bother him anymore; it was like the damn thing was on automatic around her.

He tried like hell not to think about it. Think about Riley Higgins instead, he told himself, and for a few moments he actually did. Bobby was right: The guy was a poor fucker, but that didn’t in and of itself make Higgins not a murderer. Crazy people did crazy things. Higgins, by empirical evidence newly observed, was manifestly crazier than a bedbug. He could have taken out both Dina and Ruthe in one of his rages.

Kate stirred. He watched with hungry eyes as her body slid inside the sleeping bag. If he were lying beside her, he could slide his hands over her breasts. He tried to remember what they looked like, but everything had happened so fast that afternoon, he wasn’t sure he’d even seen them. If he moved slowly enough, if he was smooth enough, maybe he’d get a look, before she ripped his balls off and Mutt ripped his throat out and Bobby shot him dead.

He rolled over and punched his pillow into a new shape. What about Dan O’Brian? What was going on there? He had worked cases with Dan O’Brian, he’d hoisted more than a few beers in his company, and he knew the man. Or thought he did. The last thing he wanted was to bring Dan O’Brian in and sweat him, but he was going to have to if Dan didn’t open up. He didn’t even want to think about the repercussions that would follow, both for Dan and for himself. He could just imagine what Billy Mike would have to say. And, oh god, Auntie Vi.

He didn’t really think Mutt would rip his throat out. He wasn’t 100 percent certain about Bobby. He was pretty sure Kate would rip his balls off, though.

Or not. She certainly had responded to him that afternoon at the cabin. No matter what she had said or done afterward, no matter how much she was avoiding the issue, no matter that she was twisting herself into a pretzel to deny the interlude, she had been with him all the way. He wondered how long it would take to get her back to that place.

On the plane back to Niniltna, he’d said, “So we’re not going to talk about it?” Silence had been her answer. Okay, fine. He probably would want conversation somewhere down the line, but just at the moment, all he wanted was a month in bed, just the two of them, and the rest of the world held at bay with a big red keep out sign. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask.

He wondered if, in the course of a normal sexual relationship, she was a talker or the quiet, intense type. The first time, she had called him Jack. The second time, she hadn’t said anything at all. Of course, he had not been spectacularly articulate himself.

He wondered what her favorite position was. He’d had some imaginative partners in his life. But face it, Chopin, he told himself. If acquiring Kate Shugak as a partner means the missionary position for the foreseeable future, you’ll take it and love it.

He wondered how long and what it took to make her come. He wondered if she screamed when she did. Well, he kind of knew the answers to both those questions now.

He stifled a groan and rolled over on his back.

He wondered if he was ever going to get laid again in his lifetime.

Why her? he asked himself for what might have been the thousandth time. Why this one stubborn, independent, irritating, exasperating woman? She was certainly far too short, especially for him. They’d look like Mutt and Jeff. Where had all the tall blondes in his life suddenly gone? The tall, charming, amenable, accommodating blondes, the ones who were waiting for him when he got to their houses and who let him go again without question the morning after?

The ones who cared as much for him as he did for them.

He remembered again that day in September when he and George had flown into George’s hunting lodge south of Denali and had found Kate Shugak, covered in blood and dirt, keening a dirge to the lifeless body of her lover clasped in her arms. No one had ever loved him that much.

Tell the truth, Chopin, he thought. You never knew it was possible until you saw Kate with Jack. You thought it was something you read in a book or saw at the movies. You never thought it could happen in real life.

He kicked free of the sleeping bag, feeling through his T-shirt the heat of the wood burning in the fireplace.

He was, he realized, circling perilously close to the L word. He’d stared down men with.357s with less fear. He thought of his parents, those two strangers in the split-level house in San Jose, one staring at the television, the other logged onto the Internet, looking for the next cruise they could take. They had been married for forty years, and he couldn’t remember an outward sign of affection more passionate than a chaste kiss, usually on the cheek. He supposed they loved each other, but he had long since decided that if that was love, no thank you. If he’d caught them groping each other in the kitchen, just once, maybe he would have looked at life and relationships a little differently. He didn’t know.

He didn’t know a goddamned thing.

Kate shifted and murmured something.

Except that he had a ferocious and apparently perpetual itch that it seemed only this woman could scratch. He raised his head. “Kate?” he said softly. “You awake?”

“No, she isn’t awake, you moron,” Bobby’s voice hissed from the far corner, “and if you don’t fucking shut up and settle down, I’m going to toss you outside on your goddamn ear.”

It was a long night.

He was shoveling in Dinah’s ambrosial French toast and Bobby’s caribou sausage links the next morning about nine o’clock when Dandy Mike came rushing up the steps.

Jim hung his head over his plate, wishing Dandy away. “No,” he said.

It didn’t work. “Jim!” Dandy said. “You’ve got to come!”

“Haven’t we done this before?” Jim wondered out loud.

“You have to come! John Letourneau is dead!”

There was an electric moment. Jim’s eyes met Kate’s. “I beg your pardon?”

“John Letourneau is dead!” Dandy said again, impatient. “Come on, you have to come!”

Jim, still holding Kate’s gaze-did she look as heavy-eyed as he felt, or was it just his imagination?-said, “John Letourneau is dead? Where?”

“At his house,” Dandy said, calmer now. “I went over to borrow his grill for a party I’m throwing this afternoon, and when he didn’t answer the door, I went around the back to find the grill, and I saw him through the window.”

“You’re sure he’s dead?”

Dandy flushed. “Yes. I checked this time. His heart’s not beating and he’s cold.”

“Anybody with you when you went?”

“Scottie Totemoff.” Naturally. Scottie Totemoff was Dandy Mike’s boon companion. He wondered how Demetri and Billy, both hardworking, responsible men, good providers, good husbands, good fathers, had managed to produce two of the biggest layabouts the Park had ever seen. “He was going to help me with the grill. And the party.”

“Of course he was,” Jim murmured. Undoubtedly, and the drinking.

“I left Scottie to keep watch, make sure nobody gets in to contaminate the scene.” He waited to see the effect caused by this mastery of the language of his newly adopted profession.

“There’s no hurry, then,” Jim said mildly, and drank his coffee. “I might as well finish my breakfast.”

Scottie was waiting for them on the deck, pacing back and forth. “About time you got here,” he told Dandy. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

“Why didn’t you go inside?”

“There’s a dead guy inside!”

“You’ll have to get used to that if you want to work with us,” Dandy said importantly. “Right, Jim?”

“What?” Kate said.

“Let’s take a look,” Jim said, and went inside.

John had been hurled backward out of his chair by the force of the blast, which had sheered off the left side of his chest. The room was spattered with most of it. Dandy’s tracks between door and body were very clear.

The shotgun had fallen with him. His finger was still hooked inside the trigger guard.

“Didn’t put it in his mouth,” Jim said.

“Sometimes they don’t,” Kate said. “Usually it’s because they don’t want to mess up their faces.”

“John probably didn’t want to mess up his hair,” said Jim. Kate looked at him. “Sorry. Cop humor.”

She pointed. “He left a note.”

“I see it.” It stuck out of the old typewriter like a banner. Jim bent over to read it. “ ‘I killed Dina Willner. I’m too old to go to jail.” “

“Wait a minute.” Kate stepped up to peer around him. “That’s it? What the hell kind of suicide note is that? He doesn’t say why?”

“He doesn’t even say how.” Jim stood up. “So, okay. This totally sucks.”

In Kate’s opinion, it could not have been better put, even if it would have sounded more appropriate coming out of Johnny’s mouth.

Rigor was well established and Letourneau was difficult to move. Getting him into the back of Dandy’s truck was bad enough, but Jim thought he was going to have to break one of Letourneau’s legs to get the body into the Cessna. He was inexpressibly relieved when he didn’t.

After forming an honor guard escort to the airport, Dandy and Scottie had peeled off to the Roadhouse, where, in spite of sworn promises to the contrary, he knew they were fast spreading the word. “I’ll fly him into Ahtna,” Jim said to Kate. “Get the body off to the lab.”

“Do you doubt that it was suicide?”

Jim shook his head. “I doubt big time that he killed Dina Willner and assaulted Ruthe Bauman. I don’t doubt that he killed himself.” He thought about it. “Was he sick, do you know?”

“What, you mean like crazy?” Kate snorted. “Like a fox. John Letourneau was one of the saner men I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t mean like crazy, I mean like cancer, something like that.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Was he broke?”

“Not that I know of. Park rats say John’s got the first dime he ever made.”

Jim shook his head. “Then I don’t get it. What makes a man confess to a murder he didn’t commit and then kill himself?”

There was a short silence. “He wanted us to stop looking,” Kate said slowly.

“Bingo. I’m really thinking Riley didn’t do it now, Kate. But I’m going to need a shitload of proof, and I’m going to need it fast.”

Kate turned to him. “From the state of the rigor, I’d say he did it not very long after we left.”

“Less than an hour would be my guess,” Jim said.

Kate nodded. “Me, too. What did we say to trigger this?”

He said quickly, “It doesn’t have to be us. He could have made up his mind to do it before we got there. We could have held him up.”

She flapped an irritated hand. “Calm down. I don’t feel responsible.” He looked at her. “I don’t, Jim,” she said in a quiet voice, her eyes meeting his without reservation.

It was probably the most open look she’d given him since the other afternoon, and it encouraged him to say rashly, “Kate. We need to talk.”

She stiffened. “No, we don’t.”

“Yeah. We do. And we will.” He looked at the body in the back of the plane, up at the falling snow, and repressed an oath. “But not now. Soon, though.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. He thought she sighed. Goaded, he said, “I know you want me.”

“I’m not a child with her face pressed up to the candy store window,” she said. “I don’t let myself have everything I want.”

His smile flashed out. “I like it that you compare me to candy.”

The smile, with its manifest, practiced charm, was enough by itself to make her angry all over again. She was relieved. For a moment, she’d been afraid that she could no longer be angry with him. It helped her say firmly, “Too much candy makes me sick to my stomach.”

It sounded prissy even to her own ears. He laughed, a spontaneous baritone sound that rang out down the strip like someone was tolling a bell, and she wanted to kill him.

He took off, the Cessna disappearing into the low overcast almost immediately. The weather was purportedly better in Ahtna, but if the ceiling came down any lower, he’d be unable to return to Niniltna today. She stood there, watching him go, a scowl on her face, trying to make up her mind if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Hell with it,” she said, and kicked a chunk of ice out of her path on the way back to her snow machine. Mutt sensed her roommate’s uncertain temper and maintained a discreet silence.

Kate killed the engine of the snow machine in front of John Letourneau’s front steps, still scowling. She didn’t know why she was back here, nor did she know what she was looking for that Jim wouldn’t already have found. Mutt, sitting next to her, whined an inquiry. “Beats the hell out of me,” she said.

They went inside. Kate found John’s bedroom and a hamper containing dirty clothes. She held a sock out to Mutt, who sniffed it with interest and looked up, brows raised. “Anybody else been here?” Mutt sneezed once to clear her head and started nosing around the room.

They found nothing out of the ordinary in John’s bedroom. The guest bedrooms, running along both sides of the lodge on the second floor, had been scrubbed clean after the last client had flown south for the winter. They proved equally uninteresting. The kitchen was spotless, and none of the three tables in the dining room looked like they had been used in the last few months. The living room didn’t look as if it saw regular use, either. If you discounted the blood and bits of flesh, bone, and organ drying hard to floor, wall, and window, the office was neat, well organized, and up-to-date, nothing in the in basket, the files in the metal cabinet meticulously alphabetized in drawers marked CLIENTS, SUPPLIERS, EMPLOYEES, and TAXES.

The whole place was as neat as a hospital that never admitted any patients.

“Where did this guy live?” Kate wondered out loud as she opened the door off the living room.

Ah.

It was a smaller room than the vast expanses to be found elsewhere in this mausoleum, and made smaller by the amount of stuff crowded into it. A bookcase took up one entire wall, containing the Gun Digest, the Shooter’s Bible, Black’s Wing and Clay, Black’s Fly Fishing, The Milepost, the Alaska Almanac, and everything Boone and Crockett had ever published, from B &C Big Game Awards for the previous twenty years to Spirit of Wilderness, essays in eight editions appearing to have been written by such low-key guest authors as Theodore Roosevelt and Norman Schwarzkopf. One whole shelf was dedicated to maps of Alaska and the Park, starting with the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer and ending with the USGS survey of the Park, commissioned after d-2 to illustrate the new boundaries. That survey in hand, along with a compass, Kate could walk from Ahtna to Cordova and never get her feet wet.

There were no trophies on the walls of this room. There was a mahogany-stained gun case. It was locked, but Kate could see two empty cradles through the glass pane on the door, and four other cradles filled with serviceable but not particularly exciting weapons, none of them new, none of them elaborately chased with silver scrollwork, none of them with carved walnut stocks. Three of them didn’t even have scope mounts. Evidently, John wasn’t into collecting. There was a drawer at the base of the cabinet, unlocked, containing boxes of ammunition.

There was one chair, a dark brown leather recliner, a floor lamp next to it. Stacked on the end table, within reach, were copies of Field & Stream, Fair Chase, and Alaska Magazine, dog-eared where his own ad appeared.

The ad took up a quarter of a page and was simple and direct: “We offer the world’s best hunting and fishing, with experienced guides, no crowds, deluxe accommodations and gourmet meals.” There was a picture of a big bull moose with a magnificent rack standing knee-deep in a tiny lake, with the Quilaks rearing up stunningly in the background. An 800 phone number appeared at the moose’s feet.

Apparently, John had not been a proponent of the hard sell. As many years as he had in his business, he probably got most of his clients by word of mouth and repeat business.

There was a television and a VCR in a cabinet opposite the recliner. The shelf below the VCR was packed with tapes bearing tides like Ecstasy and Exposed and Insatiable. A do-it-yourselfer, John Letourneau. It was an effective means of soothing the savage, but lonesome. Resolutely, Kate turned her mind from thoughts of her and Jim on the floor of the mountain cabin.

She wandered back out into the living room to stare through the window at the river. This was a lonely place, or it felt like it to Kate. But really, what was loneliness anyway? She was alone a lot of the time, she was used to it, she liked it, and she was good at it. She preferred autonomy to dependence. At the homestead, she had books to read and music to listen to, bread to bake and snow to shovel, fish to pick and traps to check, a rifle to clean and moose to hunt, butcher, and pack. People seldom knocked at her door. Her nearest neighbor was, at any given time, a bull moose or a grizzly sow or the big bad gray wolf that kept trying to seduce Mutt into forsaking Kate and civilization for him and the call of the wild.

The great thing about the moose and the grizzly and the wolf was that they had not been gifted by their creator with the power of speech. They couldn’t make conversation. The moose might kick your ass and the grizzly might rip it off and the wolf might eat it, but they wouldn’t talk you to death while they got on with the job.

The main thing Kate had against people was that they talked too much and said too little.

She wondered now if she and John Letourneau had had that much in common.

She also wondered how much she and Jim Chopin had in common. Once upon a time, the immediate answer would have been a loud, definite “Nothing!” but Kate Shugak wasn’t into lying, not even to herself, and it was more than time that she took a good long look at this fatal attraction she seemed to be developing. Feeling panic close up the back of her throat, she beat it back and tried talking herself down.

For starters, Jim Chopin was nothing at all, in no respect, like Jack Morgan.

Except that he was tall. And in law enforcement. And had a deep voice. And was good at his job.

And was, she knew now, just as capable of firing her engine on all eight cylinders without taking his boots off. God. She closed her eyes and for a weak moment gave into memory. It had been like tigers mating, all teeth and claws. Who would have thought Jim Chopin, the man who raised self-discipline to a whole new level, could go that wild?

And just what was that, that little feeling buried away in the back of her mind where she couldn’t get at it? That couldn’t be pride, could it? That she had done that to him, had caused him to lose control so completely, had shown him just how thin the veneer of civilization lay upon him?

Starting to get that panicky feeling again, she seized upon the indisputable fact that Jim was a rounder with positive relief. She was a one-man woman. He was a many-womaned man. Ergo, it would be very, very bad for her to enter into any kind of relationship with him. Maybe it was just pride, she didn’t like looking down the road and seeing herself as one in a long line of Chopper Jim’s ex-girlfriends, littering the Park from the Brooks Range to the Gulf of Alaska. So? Pride wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Neither was self-preservation. Maybe she was afraid that any relationship they developed would mean more to her than it would to him. Maybe she was afraid that down the road she would be dumped, good and hard.

She gave herself an annoyed shake. “I’m not afraid,” she told the view. “It’s not that at all.”

The view remained serenely uncommunicative.

“Damn you, Jack!” she yelled. “Why’d you have to go and leave me here all alone?”

The words reverberated off glass and wood and rang in her ears. She closed her eyes against the sound and stood where she was, fists shoved into her pockets, rage and fear waging a battle for preeminence inside her.

Mutt’s claws ticky-tacked across the wood floor. She paused next to Kate, who opened her eyes, took a deep, shaky sigh, and looked down, to see Mutt deposit a white knit hat on the floor at her feet.

“What’s this?” Kate bent to pick it up.

It was a standard knit hat, a ribbed tube of two-ply white yarn pulled tight and tied off at one end and turned up into a brim at the other. Kate touched it experimentally. It was very soft, and fuzzy. Kate had a very faint acquaintance with yarn, as the four aunties were always either quilting or knitting. This might be angora, or have some angora in it. It wasn’t synthetic; it didn’t have that snag on her calluses.

She sniffed it. There was a faint flowery smell. She examined the inside of the brim and found a fair hair that was either pale blond or white.

She tried to imagine the hat on John Letourneau’s head and failed. “Where did you find it, girl? Show me.”

Mutt led her to the door. There was a bench next to it with a lid. Mutt nosed open the lid, and Kate saw that the compartment held a selection of hats, gloves, and scarves, some leather, some knit, some felt.

There were no matching gloves or scarf for the hat, but then, nothing in the bench matched anything else. They were all probably spares, some John had bought, some clients had left behind, available for future guests with chills. And probably each and every one had a different smell to it. Mutt gave her a pitiful look. “Not your fault, girl.” Kate tossed the hat back inside and closed the lid.

John Letourneau’s suicide might just be one of those little mysteries of life that remained unsolved. It comforted Kate, at least a little, to know they still existed. Unlike Jim Chopin, she didn’t want everything to be neatly explained, all the loose ends tied up and tucked away. She liked to think she’d leave a mystery or two behind herself. Just not anytime soon.

“Come on,” she said to Mutt. “Let’s go say hi to Bernie.”