A Grave Denied

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Well, now,“ Brendan said, grim satisfaction rolling out of Bobby’s receiver in waves, ”amazing what a name change will do for the database.“

“Why didn’t his fingerprints pop up on search?” Kate said, leaning into mike range.

The satisfaction changed to disgust. “We’re in the process of switching from paper fingerprint cards to electronic files, in order to sign on with the National Fingerprint File. I’m guessing your guy fell through the cracks.” A pause, followed by a heavy sigh. “Plus it’s the Feebs. I mean, jeeze, what’re ya gonna do. Listen, Kate?”

“Yeah?”

“You said this guy kept his head down in the Park?”

“So down he didn’t register on hardly anyone’s radar.”

Another pause. “Yeah. Well. His file ain’t pretty. Tell Bobby to check his e-mail.”

“Will do. And thanks, Brendan.”

A rich chuckle. “I’m adding it to the tab, Shugak. You keep getting me up in the middle of the night. I’m telling you, it’s costing you. Horizontally.”

She laughed. “Ooooh, you big bully, I’m scared now,” and knew enough to know that while 2 a.m. guaranteed few listeners there would always be at least one lonely trapper tuned in, and that the stories about Kate Shugak having radio sex with a member of the Anchorage law enforcement community would be circulating around the Park at first light and crossing the bar at the Roadhouse at opening time.

Brandon hung up and Bobby signed off. Fifteen minutes later, the file on one Leon Francis Duffy arrived in Bobby’s in box as an attached file. Kate, too impatient to wait for it to print out, opened it and started scrolling.

Dinah, elbowed to one side, accepted a mug of coffee from Jim and went to sprawl next to her husband on a couch. He grabbed her, heedless of her mug, and whispered in a mock snarl, “When can we get rid of these yo-yos so’s you and me can get horizontal?”

She made a token effort to save the coffee and an even more desultory effort to repel boarders before giving up.

Jim pulled up a chair to read over Kate’s shoulder. He felt rather than saw her stiffen, and smiled to himself. The smile vanished when he realized that her reaction hadn’t been caused by his proximity but by what she was reading.

“Leon Francis Duffy, born in Madison, Wisconsin, graduated Mendota High School in June 1968, joined the army what looks like the week after. Served one tour in Vietnam and received an honorable discharge, which he took in Anchorage, Alaska. Why Anchorage, do you think?”

“Keep reading,” she said, tight-lipped.

He did so. “Oh. A year later he was working in the yard at Spenard Builder’s Supply, pulling down a regular paycheck, to all intents and purposes a model citizen, and then he gets arrested for molesting a twelve-year-old girl on the way home from school. Charges dismissed. Oh, crap. Two more arrests, one ten-year-old, another twelve-year-old.”

The printer spat out the last sheet and she thrust the bundle at him. “Here.”

He shuffled the paper into order. Kate remained where she was, arms folded, glaring at the screen. Jim continued to read out loud. “The third charge stuck, and Leon Francis Duffy was sentenced to eight and a half.” Jim flipped the page. “He was a model prisoner, served the minimum five and a half years for good behavior at Highland Mountain Correctional Facility, and… evidently disappeared from the public record after release.” Jim flipped another page. “His probation officer never heard from him even once. Imagine.”

“Imagine.”

He squinted down at the page. “See the note from the corrections officer he was assigned to?”

“I couldn’t read it on the screen,” Kate said. “Is it any clearer printed out?”

“ ‘I regard Mr. Duffy as one of two of the most dangerous prisoners in this facility to be released this year. Mr. Duffy has refused treatment for his condition, refused to accept counseling of any kind, and has never accepted responsibility for the actions that brought him to be incarcerated. If he is released, I am convinced he will go on to commit the same offense again.”“ Jim looked up. ”And they let him go anyway. Imagine.“

“Imagine. So he came to the Park.”

He looked at the rigid set of her spine and wisely offered no sympathy. “So it seems.”

“I never heard a hint, even a whisper that he was bent. I had him out on the homestead. He worked for me.”

“He worked for everybody.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve got good instincts, Jim.”

“The best in the business,” he said. “Listen, Kate. We’ve all got our blind spots. Mr. Fix-it was yours.”

“How much damage did he do here?”

Jim was too smart and too experienced to give the obvious answer. “Not much. It’s hard to hide that kind of thing in a small community. If he’d married, say a woman with children from a previous relationship, and if one of those children had been a girl, then I’d be seriously worried. But he didn’t.” He thought. “He could have been that one guy who was moving himself out of the reach of temptation.”

She rubbed at the scar on her neck. “You read the report. You saw what the officer said about Duffy’s attitude. It’s the classic Who, me? response of the sexual predator. And they don’t learn, and they don’t grow, and they don’t ever, ever change, and they never, never stop.”

“You would have heard,” he said. “I would have heard. Billy, Auntie Vi, Bernie, someone would have heard.”

“I sure as hell would have heard!” Bobby roared, causing them both to jump. His chair skidded to a halt and he glared impartially at both of them. Dinah, outlined against the gathering light outside the big windows in the creek-facing wall, came soft-footed up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Jim said, “we all would have.” He looked at Kate. “And none of us did. Maybe he was that guy, Kate.”

“No,” she said. She moved finally, to save and close the file and swing around to face them. “Who was his corrections officer?”

Jim rifled through the stack. “Melinda Davis. You know her?”

“No. You?”

“No. We can call in the morning, see if she has anything to add.”

“No.” Kate got to her feet.

“No?” With him sitting and her standing she actually had the advantage of height on him. Not much, but a little. It made him want to pull her into his lap.

“No,” she repeated. “I’m going to Anchorage.”

“I’m not going to Anchorage,” Johnny said. “My mother’s in Anchorage. What if we run into her? What if she calls the cops? I’m staying here with Auntie Vi. I’ve got school.”

That last remark showed how truly desperate he was to stay in the Park. She said, and despised herself for doing so, “Some nut burned us out of our house. You want him to do the same thing to Auntie Vi?”

“Oh.” He flushed. “No.”

“Okay, then.”

George rolled the Cessna out of the hangar and they were in Anchorage in an hour and a half, and on the doorstep of Jack’s town house on Westchester Lagoon fifteen minutes after that.

Johnny hung back. “I haven’t been back here since she sent me away to Arizona to live with Gran. Do you think it’s okay?”

“I changed all the locks. And she lives on the other side of town. She’ll never know we’re here, Johnny.” Unless I tell her, she thought.

“Still.” He stopped just inside the doorway and looked around like he’d never seen the place before. “How come we’re here, anyway? I figured it would be sold. She wouldn’t let me come back here and take anything with me.”

Kate should have known that, and she should have taken steps to see that Johnny got his belongings following his father’s death. She would have, if she hadn’t been off wandering in a grief-induced fog of her own at the time. “He left it to me,” she said. “It’s part of your college fund. I suppose I should rent it out instead of letting it sit empty, but he had mortgage insurance and it’s free and clear, with enough left over for taxes.” She shrugged. “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Find a manager or something.”

She was as uncomfortable as he was, which, perversely, made him relax a little. “My stuff still there?”

“Everything’s just like it was.” One of the reasons she was finding it hard to move inside.

He took the decision from her hands, pushed the door open, and ran upstairs to what had been his bedroom. “It’s all here, Kate! My Nintendo and everything!”

“Good,” she said.

“What?”

“I said that’s good, Johnny.” She closed the door behind her.

The next thing she knew she was standing outside the door of Jack’s bedroom.

A cold nose thrust into her hand, and she looked down to see Mutt looking up at her. “Yeah,” she said, and went back downstairs to drop her bag in the sparsely furnished guest room.

The bed had about as much give to it as bedrock, but the relief she felt was palpable. “Okay, let’s go,” she told Mutt. In the hallway she yelled, “Okay, we’re outta here!” and Johnny came clattering down the stairs.

She went through the connecting door to the garage, where sat Jack’s Subaru Forester. Johnny brightened. “This mine, too?” She smiled. “You bet. But for now, I drive.” “Aw, Kate, come on, I can drive. I’ve driven your truck.” Kate opened a door and Mutt leaped into the back seat. “Get in the car, Morgan.”

He was still arguing with her as they were backing out of the driveway.

Gary Drussell hadn’t been in the phone book but he was listed. He wasn’t exactly friendly when she called, Kate noted, but he did give her his street address and directions on how to get there.

He lived in Muldoon, in back of the Totem Theaters. This was way too close to Jane, who lived across Muldoon off Patterson. Johnny said nothing, but Kate noticed he slid down in his seat until his eyes were barely at dashboard level. She quelled a craven impulse to do the same. She wasn’t afraid of Jane, but she was afraid of losing Johnny, and she was terrified of letting Jack down.

The Drussells were living in one of the zero-lot line homes that had gone up like weeds in Anchorage during the oil boom of the early ‘80s, most of them built on filled-in wetlands. This last made for either a damp basement or an unstable foundation or both, but by the time this was discovered the developers had long since decamped to Maui or Miami with their profits and their trophy blondes, leaving homeowners with a choice: bail or bail. Many more than Anchorage lenders were comfortable admitting to had simply turned in their keys and walked away. The rest invested in small pumps and garden hoses, and during especially rainy Augusts you could go into any one of these neighborhoods and count by tens the green plastic lines snaking from downstairs’ windows, emptying the water out of basements as fast as it seeped back in again. Ear, nose, and throat specialists reported a radical increase in upper respiratory complaints during such seasons, mostly from the mold and mildew that resulted.

It made Kate proud that the Park had no such tiling as a Planning and Zoning Commission. Not that she had anything left to plan or zone.

Gary Drussell answered the front door before the recollection had time to plunge her into remembered gloom.

It was Saturday, with weak sunlight filtering through a broken cloud cover. His hair had darkened and his skin lightened since the last time she’d seen him. Instead of overalls covered in fish scales, he was dressed in sweats, dark blue with white piping, clean and neat. “Hi, Kate,” he said, and stepped back. “Come on in.”

“Hi, Gary. This is Johnny Morgan. Mutt okay in your yard?”

Gary cast a wry look at the street. “I think the question is, is the neighborhood okay with Mutt on the loose?”

“Stay,” Kate told Mutt, who gave a disgruntled sigh and plunked her butt down on the wooden porch.

“Morgan, huh?” Gary said, leading the way through a cluttered living room. A girl lay sprawled on the couch in front of a blaring television, remote in hand. She looked up, and Kate felt Johnny pause. She didn’t blame him; the girl was lovely, with a rich fall of dark hair, dark blue eyes, and new breasts pushing out the front of her cherry red T-shirt in a way no adolescent boy could ignore.

Gary led them into the kitchen without introducing them. He nodded at Johnny. “Any relation to Jack?”

“His son.”

“Nice to meet you. I liked your father, few times I met him. Not a lot of bullshit going on there, for a cop.”

“Thanks,” Johnny said.

“Heard he was dead. Hell of a thing. Want some coffee?”

“Sure.” Kate settled herself at the kitchen table, covered with a faded print cloth and a small Christmas cactus, which was for some inexplicable reason best known to itself blooming in May. The refrigerator was covered with snapshots and honey-do lists. The counters were crowded with a toaster and canisters and a knife block and a little brown clay bowl with feet for legs holding three heads of garlic, one of which had begun to sprout.

A cat wandered in and did the shoulder-dive thing against Gary’s leg. He reached a hand down and gave its head an absentminded scratch. The resulting purr nearly drowned out the sound of the television.

“What’s this about, Kate?” Gary said, offering her a can of evaporated milk.

She took it and poured with a lavish hand. “It’s about Leon Duffy.” She looked around to offer the milk to Johnny, but he seemed to have vanished. She heard a murmur of voices from the living room.

“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

“You knew him as Len Dreyer.”

“Oh. Of course. Len. Sure. Best hired hand I’ve ever had.” Gary cocked an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“You may not have heard. He’s dead.”

He raised both eyebrows this time. “Really?”

His surprise seemed minimal. “Yeah. Someone took out most of his chest with a shotgun.”

“That’s gotta smart.” Gary drank coffee. “A shame.”

Kate couldn’t help but note that Gary’s regret seemed even less than his surprise. “Why’s that?”

“Well.” Gary shrugged. “Like I said, he was first-class when it came to hired help. Never bid what he couldn’t deliver. Never said he could do what he couldn’t. Always showed up on time. Usually finished on schedule and on budget. Your basic home improvement dream team of one.” He looked at her, face guileless. “Why are you taking to me about him, by the way?”

It was Kate’s turn to shrug. “You’re a name on a list of people who had Dreyer do work for them in the days preceding his death. What’d he hire on for, anyway?”

If she hadn’t been watching him so closely, she wouldn’t have seen the infinitesimal relaxation of his guard. She did see it, noted it, drank coffee, and smiled an invitation for him to continue.

He did, relief making him a little more loquacious. “I was putting the house up for sale, and I wanted to spruce it up a little before I did. Get the best price out of it. You know.”

She nodded.

He became more expansive. “We remodeled the bathroom, ripped up that old linoleum and replaced it, stripped the kitchen cabinets and refinished them. That kind of stuff.”

“Sure,” Kate said, nodding some more. “Makes sense. What made you decide to move to Anchorage, anyway? I thought the Park had its hooks in you permanent.”

“So did I.” He watched coffee swirl around the inside of his cup for a moment before raising his eyes. “I been fishing the Sound since I could walk the deck of a boat. I inherited Dad’s permit when he died. I didn’t think I’d ever be doing anything else.” He sighed. “I swear, Kate, there’s more fish going up the river today than I’ve ever seen in thirty years of fishing, and at the same time the commercial catch is the lowest it’s ever been. What the hell is up with that?”

He already knew but Kate answered him anyway. “Used to be the commercial fishermen had it all their own way, Gary. Now you’ve got subsistence fishers and sport fishers wanting their share, too.”

“And then the market went to hell, what with the RPetCo oil spill and the farmed fish coming out of British Columbia and now Chile.” He was silent for a moment. “You hear they caught an Atlantic salmon out of Southeast?”

“No.”

“Fact.” He nodded once. “Absolute fact. Before you know it, the escapees from the B.C. fish farms are going to be interbreeding with wild Alaska salmon stock, and then what’ll happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you. We lose what market we do have because who the hell wants to eat that dry, diseased fish the farms produce? Fresh fish, my ass. I’ll tell you what else will happen, too-more guys like me, who used to fish for a living, will be forced to move into the goddamn city and find a goddamn indoor job where we have to wear a goddamn tie.”

They brooded together for a moment over the demise of commercial fishing in Alaska. The television was a steady drone from the living room.

Kate stirred. “Turns out Len Dreyer wasn’t his real name.”

He looked at her.

“His real name was Leon Duffy.” She sat up straight in her chair and took a deep breath. “Gary, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come straight out with it. Before he moved to the Park, Leon Duffy was arrested and jailed for molesting an eleven-year-old girl here in Anchorage.”

He stared at her without speaking. She couldn’t read his expression.

“He served five and a half years of an eight-year sentence. He got time off for good behavior. He disappeared off everyone’s radar screen after he was released.” She paused. “His next known whereabouts were the Park.”

The silence stretched out between them. The television was staying on one channel for a change, although the music, if you could call it that, resembled something between a pig squealing and fingernails on the blackboard. Kate winced. The barely discernable backbeat sounded like it needed a defibrillator. Maybe Bobby was right, maybe there had been no rock and roll recorded worth listening to since the ‘70s.

Gary stirred and she looked up. “He was never alone with my girls,” he said. “That’s what you’re asking me, right? If he molested my girls.”

The dogged way he said it nearly broke her heart. “Gary-”

“He didn’t. He was never alone with any of them. He worked with me. I was always with him. You get it? You see?”

“Yes,” Kate said gently, “I see.” She paused, and closed her eyes momentarily, gathering the strength together to ask the next question. “Gary, when was the last time you saw Len Dreyer?”

He gave a mirthless laugh and drained his mug. “The last time I saw Len Dreyer was the day we finished putting the hardware on the kitchen cabinets.”

“Can you remember what day it was?”

“Nope. Sometime last May, just before we packed up and moved.” He rose to his feet. “If that’s all, I’ve got things to do.”

“Knock it off!” she heard Johnny exclaim, and walked into the living room to see him on his feet, an inch from the door, and if she was not mistaken caught in the act of zipping up his jeans. His face was beet red and he couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, “gotta go. Gary, thanks for the coffee.”

His expression when he looked at his daughter, flushed, rumpled, and defiant, was half in sorrow, half in anger. “Anytime, Kate. Good to see you again. My best to Billy and Annie, and Old Sam, and Auntie Vi.”

“I’ll tell them.”

Fran and the two older daughters drove up as Kate and Johnny left the house. There were all slim and dark-eyed, with the same shiny dark hair and the same inimical expression when Gary reminded them who Kate was. “Good to see you, Fran,” Kate said.

“You, too, Kate,” Fran said, white to the lips.

The family stood watching as they backed out of the driveway and headed down the street.

They were stopped at the Bragaw light before she broke the silence. “What was going on back there, Johnny?” She glanced over at him.

He had his face turned to the passenger side window. His voice was choked. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The light changed, and Kate put the Subaru into gear. She drove slowly, while she searched out the right words to say. “I respect your privacy, Johnny, but what happened back mere might have something to do with Len Dreyer.”

They were caught again at the Lake Otis light. She admired the raven-stealing-the-sun-moon-and-stars sculpture on the southwest corner of the intersection, the only decent piece of public art in the entire city. A real raven perched on top of a light pole and directed traffic with a series of boisterous clicks, croaks, and caws.

“She made a move on me,” Johnny said at last, face still turned away.

“Yeah,” Kate said. “Tell me about it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Tell me anyway. I mean it, Johnny, this is important.”

Johnny had gone into the living room and introduced himself to Tracy who had made room for him on the couch. “At first she seemed really nice. She’s a senior at Bartlett, and we even know some of the same people from when I went to middle school when I was staying with Mom, kids who are at Bardett now.” He fell silent.

“Then what?”

His voice was muffled. “Then she-then she-she kind of scootched over next to me, and the next thing I know she’s kissing me. Well, I kissed her back!” He whipped around and glared at her.

“Okay,” Kate said. “Then what happened?”

He looked away again. “She started touching me. I mean really touching me, Kate. God, her father was right in the next room. And you, too!” His voice scaled up with his indignation.

Kate drove a while in silence. Sexual promiscuity was a classic symptom of an abused child. At last she sighed. “Johnny, I think maybe she might have been molested.”

“Well, that doesn’t give her the right to molest me!”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I don’t ever want to see her again. If you have to go over there again, you go without me.”

“Understood.”

They went the rest of the way downtown in silence. Kate pulled into a reserved space in back of the building.

Johnny cleared his throat and said, “Won’t we get a ticket?” Kate laughed.