At minimum, Bush courtesy required that no visitor be turned away without refreshment, and it was, unfortunately, time for dinner. Jim accepted Kate’s less than enthusiastic invitation and settled in on the L-shaped built-in couch, long legs stretched out in front of him with the air of a man entirely at home. Johnny was shaping moose burger into patties. Kate, having drained the fries and put them in the oven to keep warm, and having set the table and otherwise occupied herself in the kitchen half of the cabin, which after all was only twenty-five feet on a side, and having been the recipient of an ungentle elbow when she got in Johnny’s way, twice, found herself with nothing better to do than pour two mugs of coffee and offer one to their guest.
Jim blew on the steaming liquid, a small smile in his eyes.
Kate cleared her throat and sat down on the couch as far away from him as was physically possible. “What’s the job?”
The smile didn’t go anywhere but he answered readily enough. “You hear about Len Dreyer?”
She nodded at Johnny. “Got my very own personal town crier.”
Johnny looked over his shoulder at the two of them, a fragment of ground meat adhering to his cheek, and grinned.
“He did a good job there,” Jim said. “Kept everybody out, kept them from contaminating the scene.”
“Was Len killed there?” Kate said.
Jim shook his head. “I doubt it. He caught a shotgun blast through the chest at point-blank range. There wasn’t enough blood at the scene for it to have happened there.”
Kate thought about it, about the physics of a body left beneath the overhang of a glacier. “How long had he been there?”
“I don’t know. He was stiff, but given the location, I don’t think we can put that down to rigor.”
“No. Did you talk to Dan O’Brian?”
“Why would I? Did he know Dreyer?”
Kate hunched an impatient shoulder. “Everybody knew Len. No, I was thinking about the glacier. It’s receding.”
He raised that eyebrow again, the one that made his expression shift from shark to Satan.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It just seems an odd place to hide a body.”
“If you wanted to hide it,” Jim said. “Maybe the killer wanted Dreyer to be found.”
“By whom? Who the hell walks around inside glaciers?”
The eyebrow stayed up. They’d been conversing in low voices, so as not to break the concentration of the glacier trekker making hamburgers ten feet away. She smiled in spite of herself, and it was a rare enough occasion to make Jim’s breath catch.
Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin wasn’t the only man who had found Kate Shugak to be beautiful, not least the father of the young man currently beating moose burger into submission across the room. From anything Jim had been able to discover, there had been no one else for Jack Morgan from the moment he’d set eyes on Kate Shugak, what would it be, nine, ten years before? No, more like twelve. Kate had taken a degree in justice from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, done a year at Quantico, and had gone straight to work as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney’s investigative arm, of which Jack Morgan had been head. From all accounts, the future was pretty much set in stone from that moment forward, and it wasn’t a future when those two were not together.
Of course, that didn’t include the eighteen-month period following Kate burning out on working sex crimes and moving back to this very homestead, after which Jack arrived at this very door, FBI in tow, to hire her to find a missing Park ranger. That had marked the end of Kate’s self-imposed seclusion and the beginning of her career as a, pardon him, consultant. Jim had tossed her cabin the previous summer when she had gone missing, and he had run across her tax return. That was what she had put in the space marked “Your Occupation”: Consultant. It was the only real smile he remembered getting out of the exercise. She was still pissed at him for tossing the place, too. Among other things.
He looked at her now, the smile lighting her narrow eyes, eyes sometimes hazel, sometimes a light brown, sometimes verging on a mossy green. He’d never been close enough for long enough to figure out which was the one true color. Her hair was thick and black and as shiny as a raven’s wing, and had once hung to her belt in a neat French braid. Now it was cropped short, brushed straight back from a broad brow, falling into a natural part over her right temple, the ends apt to curl into inky commas around her ears. Her cheekbones were high and flat and just beginning to take on that bronze tint he had noticed during previous summers, all gifts of her Aleut heritage, although the high bridge of her nose was all Anglo and the jut of her chin as Athabascan as it got.
She seemed tall but wasn’t, reaching a neat five feet on a lithe, compact frame. She had a tall personality, he decided. There were curves, plenty of them, from which the inevitable T-shirt and jeans did nothing to detract, but they were sheathed in a deceptively smooth layer of muscle, firm and well-toned, that gave her a grace of motion that could fool the eye into thinking she wasn’t as strong as an ox and as quick as a snake. She was both.
She became aware of his steady, unblinking scrutiny, and the smile went out like a light. It was replaced with a wary expression, shuttered, watchful. Vigilant, perhaps, was the most appropriate word. The watch was set, bayonets fixed, ready to repel invaders. He hid a grin. It suited him to have her on her guard around him. She wouldn’t have been worried if he didn’t constitute a threat. And Jim Chopin wanted very much to be a threat to Kate Shugak. If only in the most horizontal meaning of the word.
Their eyes met, and he smiled at her, a long, slow smile filled with memory and purpose.
The sizzle of moose burgers hitting olive oil filled the room, followed by the inviting smells of charred meat and garlic.
“Tell me what you know about Len Dreyer,” Jim said over coffee. They had remained at the table following dinner, which had been received with healthy noises of appreciation, to the chefs great pleasure.
“He was good at just about everything,” Kate said. “Mechanics, carpentry, fishing. He worked for everybody in the Park, I think, at one time or another. I think he helped Mandy out one year on the Iditarod when Chick was still drinking. He could turn his hand to pretty much any task.”
“I know all that. What else? Was he married? Divorced? Girlfriend? Children? How long had he been in the Park? When did he get here? Did he have any fights with anyone? Anybody mad at him? You know the drill, Kate.”
She did, indeed. “I haven’t heard anything like that. I knew who he was, he did work for me on the homestead, but we weren’t friends.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“It’s not that,” she said, taking refuge in a mouthful of coffee. He waited.
Johnny was on the couch, feet up, scribbling something into a notebook, earphones on, the so-called music he was listening to mercifully the faintest of annoying buzzes. Even in the Park, you couldn’t get away from Britney Spears. If Duracell ever stopped making batteries, every kid within twenty million acres would rise up in revolt.
“Len was kind of reserved,” Kate said. “He was polite, even friendly, but he didn’t volunteer information about himself. I don’t remember him hooking up with anyone, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Sometimes I only go into town to pick up my mail. Ask Bernie, he’ll know.”
“Yeah,” Jim said. “That’s the problem.”
“What is?”
“I’ve got a hit-and-run outside Gulkana, one dead, one in critical condition in the hospital in Ahtna. I’ve got an aggravated assault in Spirit Mountain, where the husband’s screaming attempted murder but it’s looking more like battered wife syndrome and self-defense and I need time to find out for sure. I’ve got a guy busted for dealing wholesale amounts of coke out of a video store in Cordova, who says the owner was the dealer and so far as he knew he was just renting out movies, and I need to get into that.”
“There’s no mystery about Len Dreyer,” Kate said sharply, “you know he was murdered.”
“Yes, I do. Until the ME tells me different, I’m also pretty sure Dreyer wasn’t murdered recently, which lessens not only my chances of finding who killed him but-and that’s another thing. Why didn’t anyone notice he was missing? Why didn’t any flags go up?”
Kate shook her head. “That’s not unusual. Len probably holed up in the winter, like most of us do. You don’t see a lot of the Park rats from September to March, if you don’t count the regulars at Bernie’s. Even if someone went looking for him and didn’t find him home, they would figure he was out on a trap line or hunting caribou for the cache, or hell, even Outside on vacation. I hear Hawaii’s big with the crowd that has money.”
She added, “Or in Len’s case, doing a job for somebody. MIA isn’t a red flag offense in the Park. It doesn’t set off any alarms.” She gave him a hard look. “Usually.”
Jim had been primarily responsible for finding Kate when she had deliberately gone missing the previous year. “So?”
“So what?”
She bristled, and he repressed a grin. Betraying amusement would only irritate her further, and he needed her on the job. “So will you check out Len’s background for me? I’m going to be in the air most of next week, between Gulkana, Spirit Mountain, and Cordova.”
She wanted to say no, and he knew it. He watched her look over at Johnny, oblivious beneath his headphones, and he could almost hear the ka-ching of the cash register between her ears. Raising a kid was an expensive proposition, especially if you were anticipating a custody battle with his birth mother, and his birth mother hated your guts enough to be willing to spend every dime she could beg, borrow, or steal on getting her son back. Which reminded him of something else Jim had to talk to Kate about.
She looked back at him. “Usual rates?”
He only just stopped a satisfied smile from spreading across his face. “Of course. Keep track of your hours and expenses. I’ve got your Social Security number on file, and we’ll cut you a check when you submit your bill.”
The words were brisk and businesslike, but she examined them suspiciously for hidden meaning anyway. This time he did allow himself a full grin, a wide expanse of perfect teeth in a face tanned from exposure to sun and wind, crinkles at the corners of his eyes from staring through a windshield five thousand feet above sea level at an endless horizon, laugh lines fighting for space with the dimples on both sides of his mouth.
She caught herself staring at the dimples, bolted the rest of her coffee, and got to her feet in the same motion. “If that’s all, I’ve got some work to finish before dark.”
He rose with her. “Walk me out.” He jerked his head at Johnny.
Outside and far enough up the trail for Kate to feel that they were safely out of earshot, she said, “What?”
“Jane’s contacted a lawyer in Anchorage. He called me.”
She folded her arms across her chest, pushed out that Athabascan chin, and waited, her mouth a grim line.
“She hasn’t filed suit yet, but they are what he called ‘exploring the possibilities.” He says he thinks they can go before a judge and get an order remanding Johnny into Jane’s custody.“
She snorted. “Get Johnny to tell his story before that same judge and he’ll be thinking something else.”
“Kate, there was no abuse.”
“Depends on what you define as abuse,” she shot back.
“Kate.”
She shook her head angrily. “I promised him, Jim. I promised him.”
He didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was referring to Johnny. “I know you did.”
“Will they make you enforce the order?”
“They haven’t got it yet.”
“Will they?”
“They’ll try.” He pulled his cap on, settling it firmly down over thick dark blond hair cut neat and short. “But I believe my footwork is a little fancier than theirs.”
She looked up quickly. He smiled at her, and vanished up the trail. She was still standing there when she heard the distant sound of a truck door opening. The engine started, gears shifted, and the sound receded into the distance.
When she became aware that she was straining to hear it, she turned abruptly and went into the garage, where her big red Chevy pickup sat, hood open, waiting for a tune-up after a winter’s inactivity. Nuts and bolts, spark plugs and oil pans and ball joints. Now there were things a woman could make sense of.
She found a open-end box wrench and waded in.
“Is he going to make me go back?”
She jerked, banging her head on the hood. “Ouch. Damn it!” She peered around the hood.
Johnny’s figure was outlined against the bright evening. His face was in shadow. “What?” she said, rubbing her head.
“I heard him telling you that she got a lawyer. Is Jim going to make me go back to her?”
So much for speaking out of the hearing of the children. She stepped down from the chunk of railroad tie she used to bring engines into arms’ reach and found a rag to wipe her oily fingers. “No one’s going to make you do a goddamn thing.”
“That’s not good enough, Kate.” His voice rose. “I won’t go back. I won’t!”
She tossed the rag into the rag barrel. “Johnny-” When she turned back to him, he was gone.
“Great,” she said out loud. “Just great.”
Mutt, sitting like a sentinel in the doorway, cocked an inquisitive ear, disliked the quality of the vacuum Johnny had left behind in the air of the garage, and padded off.
“Et tu, Mutt?”
So this journal writing isn’t so bad. Ms. Doogan kinda leaves us alone if we’re doing it in class, which is a plus. It’s not that I don’t like her or that she’s a bad teacher. It’s just that the textbooks are so boring. If they could get Greg Bear to write our science textbook I could stand to read it. Or Robert Heinlein, except he’s dead.
Speaking of the dead. Jim Chopin came out for dinner on Friday, partly to talk to me about the body we found. I didn’t remember anything I hadn’t told him before but I remember from Dad how cops always like to check everything over again. Plus I think he might have been a little worried about me finding the body.
Finding the body was weird. First time I’ve ever seen somebody dead. The other kids either, I guess. I thought Andrea was going to hurl. Betty was pretty calm but then she never gets excited about anything. Except maybe Eric. Van was scared but she held it together.
I don’t believe in god or ghosts or anything like that. Still, that body was weird. There used to be somebody home and then there wasn’t. So there is something that makes us all us.
Mostly I think Jim came to see Kate. He practically walks into the wall when she’s in the room, always looking at her, always smiling at her. Probably wants to sleep with her. Dad did, it was Mush City when she was around. I remember once Dad made her get dressed up to go to some party or other when she was staying with us in town. Man, she was gorgeous, she had this sparkly red jacket on and her hair was all stylin‘, she looked as good as anyone you ever see watching the Oscars on TV, and Kate can shoot a moose, too. She’s got two guns in a rack over the door, a.30-06 rifle and a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun. She says we’ll take the shotgun with us when we go duck hunting down on the Kanuyaq River delta in the fall and I’ll have a chance to shoot it then. She says I have to know how to protect myself in case something happens to her. I can’t imagine anything ever happening to Kate Shugak. But then I couldn’t imagine anything ever happening to Dad, either.
Saw two eagles on Sunday on the way back from the outhouse. They looked like they were fighting. Kate said they were mating. They’d fly real high and then they’d sort of smoosh together and fall, and then before they got too close to the ground they’d break apart and fly up again. Kate says she knows where their nest is, downstream in the top of an old dead cottonwood tree. She says she’ll take me to see it in a week or so, after the eggs get laid. I drove the four-wheeler to Ruthe’s in the afternoon and she told me it can take an eagle nine or ten days to lay two or three eggs. She had some cool pictures, one of a raven stealing a salmon right out from under an eagle who was eating it. I like ravens, too, but eagles are the coolest. I remember when I stayed on the river with Kate’s aunties I saw an eagle swoop down on the surface of the water and snatch up a salmon in its claws. Red salmon weigh an average of eight pounds, Ruthe says. That’s a big load for something that only weighs fourteen pounds, even if it does have wings eight feet across. What’s delta vee for an eagle, I wonder?
I like the way Kate is never embarrassed to talk about stuff. Van didn’t even know where babies came from until I told her.
She’s fourteen, the same age as me, and she’s hanging with me, you’d think the Hagbergs would have told her. But then maybe the Hagbergs don’t know. They don’t have any kids of their own, maybe they haven’t figured out how it works. Maybe the eagles will give them a clue. Showing is better than telling anyway.
I’ve figured out a plan to stay in the Park. I haven’t told Kate. Showing her is better.