Whisper to the Blood

TWENTY

They left at first light, Jim on one snow machine, Kate on another, Matt Grosdidier on a third hauling an empty sled. Dick Gallagher was still asleep at Auntie Vi's, and Jim said there was no reason to get him up. They were in Double Eagle well before noon. Ken Kaltak came out to greet them, looking as if he hadn't had a lot of sleep. "Thank christ you're here so I can be done with this freak show."

"Did anybody touch anything?"

"Not after I got there," Ken said flatly. "I can't answer for before. It doesn't look like it, but I'm not a cop. Kate, Matt."

"Hey, Ken. How was she…" Kate's voice failed her. "How was it done?"

Ken shook his head. "This you gotta see for yourself."

He led the way to the creek, a narrow, winding affair between low banks, those banks thick with willow, alder, and spruce, all of them drooping beneath the weight of a heavy layer of snow. They turned the path of the creek into a low, cold tunnel into which even the noontime sun could not reach. Jim's head brushed a branch and snow fell silently down his neck. He stooped a little and walked on.

"Stay," Kate told Mutt, and followed him.

Talia's head was where Gallagher had said it was, about twenty feet away from her body. The face was turned away but the open portion of the neck revealed frozen blood and tissue and the bony beginnings of a brain stem. It was not a pretty sight. Kate heard Matt, just behind her, take a sharp breath.

Her body lay on its back, arms and legs splayed wide. Her snow machine was nosefirst in the snowbank on the right-hand side of the creek. The trailer had jackknifed, probably when the snow machine had run into the bank, but it hadn't overturned.

Jim bent over the windshield and ran his flashlight over every inch of the clear plastic. He stepped back and walked back up the creek. "Kate, you take the right side. I'll take the left."

"Got it."

Ken and Matt watched, Ken with his attention firmly fixed on the overhanging trees, Matt looking a little green around the gills, a color that matched one of the colors in his Cinemascope black eye. About halfway between the snow machine and the body, Kate said, "Here."

She tried not to mess up the snow next to it, but it was a futile effort. It probably didn't matter, as with the warming weather there had been intermittent snow showers over the past two days and there wasn't much to see.

She heard Jim's breath at her shoulder and pointed with a gloved finger, slightly trembling. "See it?"

His breath exhaled on a long sigh. "Yeah. Line for mending gear, right?"

"Yes."

They regarded it in silence. "You can get this stuff anywhere, he said.

She nodded. "Yes," she said again, a little mournfully. "Everybody has a spool lying around. I've got some in the garage. I think I even saw some spools at the Bingleys' store, in that corner in the back where she's got all the nonedible stuff."

"So no possible chance of tracking down which spool this came from."

"Probably not, but that's for the crime lab to say. You never know, Jim, they can do some pretty amazing stuff." "Let me get the camera."

He was back a moment later, and took a series of photos. It took longer than it usually did because of the cold-he had to keep tucking the camera inside his parka to warm it up so the shutter would work.

They found a corresponding length wrapped around the base of a tree opposite the first one. Jim took more photos.

"About the right height," he said, measuring the top of the creek bank against his height. "Three feet, maybe?"

"The windshield," she said.

"Yeah, but it's swept, it doesn't go straight up, it slants. It hits the mono hard enough, the mono slides right up the windshield and snaps back. She must have been kneeling on the seat for it to catch her right on the neck like that."

"If she'd been sitting," Kate said, "the mono could have caught her forehead. Same result, but then maybe it would have just broken her neck."

"Would have left a mark."

Neither one of them moved to check if such a mark was on Macleod's forehead. If that was what had happened, Macleod's head would still have been attached to her body.

Kate couldn't believe she was putting those words together in a sentence. She had another thought. "That may have been more in line with what the murderer was planning, Jim. When the filament broke the two ends snapped back around the base of both trees. If she hadn't been decapitated, if we'd just found her with her neck broke, would we even have thought murder?"

He considered. "Maybe not."

"He might not have been expecting this. Who would?"

"And an accidental death doesn't come under the same magnifying glass a murder does," Jim said, nodding. "He wouldn't think he had to be that careful. Gotcha."

"Maybe not hard evidence," Kate said, "but there'll be something."

They both hoped she was right.

Nothing else was found at the scene, however. They brought the snow machine back up the creek and Jim took more photos with it positioned between the two trees. He strung crime scene tape between them, pulling it taut, and pushed the snow machine forward. The tape caught the windshield about midway. Kate climbed on, straddling the seat, and at Jim's request Ken and Matt pushed it slowly forward while Jim took photos. As the windshield pressed against the tape it rode up, until it snapped off the windshield and whipped over the top of Kate's head, ruffling her hair.

"She was practically twelve inches taller than me," Kate said, a little pale.

"Let's do it again," Jim said, tight-lipped. "This time kneel on the seat."

Ken and Matt pushed the snow machine back, Kate braced her left foot on the running board and her right knee on the seat, leaning forward on the handlebars, and they did it all over again. This time the yellow tape slid up the windshield and caught Kate across the forehead. It stung. She didn't complain.

Jim took photos of that, too, and more of the body and the head. He handed Kate a pad and pencil. "Take some notes for me?"

He got out a tape measure and measured the distance between everything, snow machine, body, head, trees, monofilament ends. Kate jotted down numbers with increasingly numb fingers.

He opened his Leatherman and reached up to cut the almost invisible length of pale green monofilament that had been wrapped multiple times around the base of the tree, taking care to preserve the knots, although the filament was so fine it would take a microscope to tell if they were granny knots or double sheet bends. He bagged it carefully, and did the same with the remnants of line on the opposite tree. "Okay," he said. "Let's bag the body and get out of here before we all freeze solid."

Kate shook out a body bag, Jim picked up the head, and Matt turned, walked two steps away, and threw up. Mutt whined once, softly.

They loaded Macleod's body on the trailer Matt was towing. Jim hooked her snow machine to his and Kate took her trailer. They hauled everything to Ken Kaltak's house and took his statement, which varied very little from Gallagher's. At Jim's request, Ken fetched half a dozen of the other villagers, and for the most part everyone's statements agreed. Everyone in the village had turned out for GHRI's dog and pony show. With that many people present, it was inevitable that there were moments when Macleod and Gallagher's time was unaccounted for, but not so often or for so very long that Jim thought he had to run down more witnesses.

"Anybody in Double Eagle seriously pissed about the mine?" Jim said.

"Not this pissed," Ken said definitely.

Jim persisted. "Macleod have any arguments forced on her? Anybody try to pick a fight?"

"Not that I saw." Ken reflected, and added, a little reluctantly, She flirted with anything in pants. Even me, with Janice standing right next to me. But Jesus, Jim, you don't decapitate somebody for flirting. I mean, if Genghis Khan isn't around."

"She flirt with Gallagher?"

Ken thought. "He was always there, a step behind, but she kept it pretty businesslike, at least in public."

"She order him around?"

"More like he was anticipating her every need. She didn't even have to ask, and he had it ready for her."

"The perfect assistant, in fact."

"Pretty much." Ken looked at Jim. "Why, you think he did it? Stringing that line would have taken some time. I don't recollect he went missing from the gym that long. And she was his meal ticket. He looked pretty happy in his work to me."

Jim gave a noncommittal grunt, and they left soon after. The trip back to Niniltna was necessarily slower than the trip out had been, and it was almost four o'clock before they pulled up in front of the post. "I'll get George to take her into Anchorage in the morning. Help me put her in the walk-in?"

The post had a free-standing walk-in cold locker out back, lined with plywood shelves, and there they placed Macleod's body.

In Jim's office, he didn't bother to shed his parka before he called Fairbanks to let them know. Kate waited while he typed up a preliminary statement and sent it off. "I heart the Internet," he said. "Let's go home."

"Should we-"

"Tomorrow's going to be a nightmare," he said. "She was a celebrity in Alaska, and she had a pretty high profile Outside, too. Plus she was a babe, and if that wasn't enough she was a blonde. I'm guessing local media, big-time, and didn't she have a stint on one of the networks as a commentator?"

Kate didn't know.

"It's going to be about as bad as it can be," Jim said gloomily. "I hate a celebrity murder. Let's just go home, okay?"

They went home and went to bed, and Kate wasn't alone in spending the better part of the night staring at the ceiling.

Jim was gone before eight the next morning, Johnny to school shortly thereafter, declaiming something about New Hampshire in iambic pentameter, and Kate soothed the savage breast by some intensive housecleaning. When she was done the fireplace was spotless, so were all the dishes and towels, and both beds were freshly made with clean sheets, although negotiating the flotsam and jetsam of Johnny's room was as always a challenge. They could have eaten off the floor under the stove and the refrigerator, too, always supposing anyone would ever want to do that.

She made salmon salad for a late lunch-canned salmon, chopped onions, sweet pickles, and mayo-and didn't have enough energy left over to slice bread so she ate it out of the bowl with a fork, curled up on the couch and feeding herself blindly as she looked out the window. It was a gray day, which matched her mood. The previous day's gruesome sights lingered unpleasantly before her mind's eye.

She had disliked Talia Macleod on sight but she wouldn't wish something like this on her, or on anyone. Except maybe Louis Deem, and he was already dead, and to be perfectly honest she would have been wishful of rather more dismemberment about his person than Macleod had suffered.

She checked herself guiltily. This was no subject for humor, no matter how backhanded. She put bowl and fork into the sink, donned gear, said "Let's take a ride" to Mutt, and headed for town.

Her first stop was Bingley Mercantile, where she loaded up on three hundred dollars' worth of staples: flour, sugar, coffee, tea, eggs, pilot bread, Velveeta, peanut butter, grape jelly, canned milk, canned vegetables, a case of Spam, another of canned corned beef, a mixed case of Campbell's soup, salt, pepper, garlic powder, toilet paper, Ivory soap, dish soap, clothes soap, a packet of disposable razors, Tylenol, Neosporin, some Band-Aids, a box of assorted candy bars, a bag of peppermints; and at the last minute she tossed in half a dozen magazines, including a new Playboy and a new Penthouse, on the theory that foldout company was better than no company at all.

"Point of order," Cindy said when she rang up Kate's purchases. Kate ignored the reference-et tu, Cindy?-and offered a bland stare and no explanation of her purchases as punishment.

She left the store secure in the knowledge that in approximately four minutes and twenty-three seconds the rumor that Kate Shugak had turned lesbian would be circulating the Park on the Bush telegraph. It might even have gone out on Park Air, but for the fact that Bobby Clark had the best of all possible reasons to know that it wasn't true. Not that that would stop him laughing like a hyena about it, also on the air.

Be worth something to see Jim Chopin's expression when he heard it.

She loaded the small mountain of purchases in the trailer of her snow machine and headed out for Tikani. She made good time up the river beneath gray clouds heavy with moisture, presaging a big dump of snow. When she got close to the village she slowed down and approached with caution, but it was as deserted as it had been three days before. She nosed the machine up over the bank and stopped in front of Vidar's house. A wisp of smoke trailed from the chimney. The woodpile didn't look any taller than it had the last time she was there. She unloaded the trailer, piling everything against the door as quickly and as quietly as she could.

She turned the snow machine around, banged on Vidar's door with a heavy fist, hopped on, and hit the throttle, Mutt loping easily beside her. As slow as Vidar moved, they'd be out of sight by the time he got to the door. He'd have a pretty good idea who'd left him the supplies but she didn't want to put him in the position of having to thank her. It'd just make them both cranky.

She spent the rest of the daylight hours stopping at individual cabins scattered along the river between Tikani and Niniltna. Perhaps a dozen in all, some that had been there since the Ark, these occupied by crusty old farts and less frequently crusty old fartettes with a taste for wilderness and solitude, not necessarily in that order and not always both. Most were homes that had begun life as log cabins, and some of them were beginning to sag beneath the weight of accumulated decades, but for the most part they were snug, tight little dwellings, and certainly none of them were as threadbare as Vidar's. Other cabins had been built more recently of materials brought upriver by barge or down the road by semi and patiently ferried across the river by skiff one two-by-four at a time, their interiors lightened by Sheetrock and paint and their asphalt-shingled roofs a substantial contrast to tar-papered slabs weighted with sod.

They were similar in size, usually one room with a loft, a floor plan that reminded Kate with a pang of her cabin. The smaller the cabin, the less fuel it took to keep warm and the cheaper the winter fuel bill, and since heat rose, the sleeping loft would stay warm longer than anywhere else in the house. A tried-and-true Bush floor plan.

Everyone who lived on the river practiced subsistence in some form. They hunted for their own meat, they caught their own salmon, and most of them grew their own potatoes, turnips and carrots and cabbage, and tomatoes if they had a greenhouse, and broccoli and cauliflower if they were willing to fight off the moose.

There were so few of them because the properties they had been built on were some of the very few pieces of private property in the Park, grandfathered in when the Park had been created around them. The Park Service wasn't happy that they were there, and lost no opportunity to harass the owners on any pretext, improper land use, overstepping or ignoring hunting regulations, driving a snow machine through a designated snow-machine-free area. Every Park rat had been guilty of all of these transgressions at one time or another in their lives. The river rats were the ones who got the most attention, though, probably because they were the easiest to get to.

These citizens of the river were a varied lot, and some of them had extraordinary hobbies. Take Olaf Christiansen, a retired seiner from Cordova who had stumbled on an entire salmon-canning line in an abandoned cannery near Alaganik. He had disassembled it, brought it upriver by barge, and reassembled it in a lean-to next to his cabin, where he set it to run at one-tenth its normal speed. He was happy to show it to anyone who offered him five bucks, and they'd have a can of air to take home with them as a souvenir.

Thor Moonin, originally from Port Graham, was an ivory carver of world renown. He made his living on jewelry, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, but he was also a world-class sculptor, with the ability to render anything life-size into an exquisite miniature replica-human heads, castles, and once a miniature Yupik village, complete with dogsleds and mushers. In a shed he had a pile of walrus and mammoth tusks that was taller than he was, and he didn't mind the kids playing in there, either, although he did draw the line at dogs, because they had a tendency to mistake the tusks for bones.

Betty Cavanaugh was a retired librarian from Anchorage and a bibliophile who collected Alaskana. She had three separate sets of Captain Cook's logs in three different editions, and if Kate had been very good and had drunk all her coffee and had eaten all her bread and jam she was allowed to page through one of the precious volumes during a visit after she washed her hands.

They liked their privacy, the main reason they lived on the Kanuyaq River, but to a man and a woman they greeted Kate cordially, and without exception they tried to feed her. They did feed Mutt, whose sides tightened up like a drum. Nor were they backward in answering Kate's questions.

Yes, they knew the Johansen brothers. There wasn't anyone on the river who didn't, and not just by reputation, either. Bad actors, all three of them, couldn't think where Vidar had gone so wrong. Maybe if Juanita had stayed around, might have been a different story, but probably not, the bad was likely born into them and there was no getting it out. Surprised they hadn't wound up in jail permanently. Probably only a matter of time.

Yes, people had been moving out of Tikani, there had been a virtual exodus over the past year, year and a half, people streaming downriver like they were fleeing the bubonic plague. Sure, that could be put down to the Johansen brothers, who had no concept of private property. The older they got, the less neighborly they became, and besides, Kate surely knew they had lost their school as well as their post office. There was only a rudimentary airstrip, barely long enough to let a Super Cub take off, empty, and it had been allowed to go to hell with devil's club and alders. No reason for anyone to stay.

Old Vidar was still up there? You don't say. Well, I'll be. Ought to drop in on the old goat once in a while. He wasn't the friendliest person in the world but shouldn't ought nobody to be left completely alone year in and year out, wasn't healthy to have only your own self for company, start talking to yourself, worse, start telling yourself jokes, worse still, start laughing at them. Sure, they'd check on him, they'd set up a schedule. Somebody'd be dropping in on him once a week, or maybe every other week'd be all they could manage, but Vidar'd probably go nuts if he had visitors more often than that anyway. In the dictionary where it said hermit, there was a picture of Vidar Johansen.

Pity his boys were so useless they couldn't be trusted to look after him themselves.

Yes, they'd heard of the snow machine attacks. No, no one had tried anything like that with them. 'Course their river running days were over, and they had plenty to do to keep them safe to home. Failing that, they all had their 12-gauge, or their.30-30, or their.357.

Could they put a name to whoever was most likely to be the perpetrators of said attacks? Well now, there weren't no flies on Kate Shugak that they'd ever seen. What did she think?

Had they heard of Talia Macleod? Why, of course, the mine woman, used to be some kind of famous athlete, wasn't it? She'd written them a letter saying she'd be stopping by, and then her man had come upriver and dropped off an information packet, along with a raffle ticket, winner got an all-expenses-paid weekend in Anchorage. Geiger, wasn't it? No, Gallagher, that was it, Gallagher. Eager beaver kinda guy, boomer, seen that type too many times before. Reckoned Macleod wanted their support for the mine, and they were all looking forward to seeing what she was willing to offer in exchange.

They were genuinely shocked when Kate told them of Macleod's death, and not a few of them were more worried when she left them than when she had arrived, for which she was sorry. It was better to put them on the alert than to leave them in ignorance of the event, though, and she promised that when the killer was identified and arrested she would let them know.

She headed for Niniltna after dark with the uneasy feeling that Park rats who lived on the river were getting out the gun oil and the ammunition all the way back to the Lost Chance Creek Bridge.

She pulled up at the post at eight that evening, noting evidence of a great many tracks in the snow in front. Only Jim's snow machine remained. She turned off the engine and got off, a little weary. Mutt took this opportunity to stretch her legs and vanished in the direction of the airstrip. There was a colony of rabbits denned up in a clearing in back of George's hangar.

Kate went inside. Maggie had already left for the day. "Jim?"

"Yeah," he said, and she went into his office.

He was stretched out almost horizontally in his chair, his feet up on the desk and his head on the windowsill. He had his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest and he looked like he was about to be carried out of the office feetfirst to have prayers sung over him for the repose of his eternal soul. "Hey," Kate said.

He opened one eye, and closed it again. "Hey." She sat down. "How awful was it?"

His chest rose and fell. "Could have been worse. Larry King could have shown up." Kate winced. "Really?"

"Really." He opened the eye again. "Where you been?"

She told him. When she finished they sat there, silent, for a while. Eventually he uncrossed his feet and set them down on the floor, regaining the vertical with a mumble and a groan. His eyes looked red, as if he'd been rubbing them a lot. "You?" she said.

He gave his scalp a vigorous scrub with his fingertips and then tried to smooth down the resulting haystack. "I got the body off to the lab. I just talked to Brillo, and while he's going to do the usual, he says what we saw is pretty likely what we got."

"Was she the intended victim, though?" Kate said.

Jim raised one shoulder. "Maybe, maybe not. Everybody uses the creek after it freezes up to get back and forth to the school. If the killer really was aiming for Talia, he was taking a hell of a risk that he'd get somebody else."

"Mine related, you think?"

Again the shoulder. "Lot of people not loving the idea of that mine, Kate."

"I know," she said. "But to the point of murder?"

"Mac Devlin," he said. "At the trailer out at Suulutaq, from a distance that argues they might maybe have been shooting at anyone working for Global Harvest who happened to be there. And now Talia Macleod, Global Harvest's mouthpiece in the Park, lately to have been seen pretty near everywhere in it, promoting said mine."

"Same guy, then."

He nodded. "That's my thought. Too much propinquity not to be."

"I'm taking your Word of the Day calendar away."

He gave a tired smile. "How the river rats taking it?"

"In the immortal words of Brendan McCord, I left everyone mobilizing for Iwo Jima."

"Great," he said. "We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already."

"They have a right to protect themselves, Jim," she said quietly.

"I know." After a brief pause, he said, "So. The Johansen brothers?"

She didn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know," she said finally.

He looked at her. "You figured them for the attacks."

"Since Louis Deem's dead, yeah," she said. "But…"

"What?" he said as she didn't continue. "I like that scenario. On any other day, so would you."

"Murder?" she said, and shook her head. "It's convenient, the mine as a motive, Park rats with a grudge, but I'm just not feeling it."

"I'm taking your DVDs of The Wire away," he said, and sat up. "That's not all, though, is it. What haven't you told me that I don't want to hear?"

Kate sighed. "I'm a little worried about the Johansens."

He raised an eyebrow. "That's a first. For pretty much anyone within a five-hundred-mile radius."

"You know I went down the river the day after you found out about the attacks. I talked to Ken and Janice, Ike, and the Rileys. On my way down, Ken and Ike were foaming at the mouth and threatening to shoot on sight."

"Who?"

"Anybody," Kate said. "I'm probably lucky they didn't take a shot at me."

"Were the Johansens mentioned?"

"Of course they were," Kate said. "They're nowhere near the caliber of natural disaster that Louis Deem was, but you don't live on the river for a year without learning who you don't want to be your new best friends. So I kept on keeping on, down to Red Run to talk to the Rileys. And here's the thing, Jim. They aren't foaming at the mouth. They aren't even mildly disturbed. They're not worried about catching the guys who attacked them, they have perfect confidence that Trooper Jim will get the job done, and they're willing to put their faith in him."

"I appreciate the confidence."

"Yeah, well, don't pin that medal on yourself just yet. I go back up the river and drop in again on Ike and Ken, and guess what? They're all calm now, butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, and what do you know, they know the law will catch up to the bad people who did this to them and that justice will be served."

She looked at Jim expectantly, and he did not disappoint. "You think the Park rats have taken care of this problem themselves."

"I'm terrified they did," she said. "I even went up and down the river looking in all the likely places to stuff three bodies."

He laughed out loud.

"Yeah, yuck it up," she said with asperity, "but then I went up to Tikani to see if maybe they were dumb enough to go home. They weren't there, and they hadn't been in a while. Vidar hasn't even heard their engines coming and going. And Jim, I just spent all day on the river, north of Niniltna, true, but nobody jumped out at me and said boo. I didn't see much traffic at all, come to think of it."

"That's not a surprise, given that two people have been murdered in the Park in the past two weeks. Not to mention it's freeze-your-ass cold outside. I'd stay home, too, if I could."

There was a peremptory bark outside and Kate got up to admit the lupine member of the constabulary. Mutt bounded over to Jim and offered an exuberant greeting. She returned to Kate's side and plunked down to begin a thorough grooming of her already magnificent self.

"I like to close a case as much as any cop," Kate said, "but murder? The Johansens?" She shook her head. "That's a hell of a step up for them."

"I've got people looking into Talia's background, see if there is anything there," Jim said. "But the Johansens attacked Johnny, Ruthe, and Van with a two-by-four, let's not forget. Not to mention Ken and Janice, Ike and Laverne, and Chris and Art and Grandma Riley."

"We think they did," she said. "Let's find them first."

He raised an eyebrow. "You got any thoughts on that score?"

"Where to find them, you mean?" Her turn to frown. "According to Vidar, they haven't been back home in maybe as long as two weeks. Out that long, they'll need shelter, and food." She got up and walked to the map of the Park on the wall, and ran her finger down the line that represented the Kanuyaq River. "I'm guessing, if they're still alive, that they've squirreled themselves away in the hills somewhere."

"That narrows it down."

"Yeah, actually it does." Her finger left the river and traced the line of foothills between it and the Quilak Mountains. "There are a lot of old mines back there, a lot of old gold dredges, too."

"Yeah," he said, "probably fifty, a hundred? You able to narrow it down any more?"

"Dan could help us do that." She looked around in time to see the expression on his face. "He's got the most up-to-date records and maps about mines and equipment in the Park. He's always on the lookout for squatters. He'll know if there is anything out there in good enough shape to be used for more than an overnight shelter."

He didn't say anything, and she said persuasively, "Come on, Jim. I don't know what's going on with the two of you, but you have to talk to him sometime."

He scowled. She waited. Mutt groomed.

"When he found Deem's body?" Jim said.

"Yeah?" Kate said.

"He tampered with the crime scene." She waited.

He sighed. "Deem had the deed to the Smiths' forty acres in his pocket. He and Smith were co-owners. It retains subsurface rights."

"Oh," Kate said. "Like if they found gold on the creek."

"Dan's pretty sure it was all about the gold. He thinks Louis bankrolled Smith, and it was why he was going to marry Abigail and why Smith was going to let him. I think it's why Louis was headed up to the Step that day, to establish their mining rights."

"Why did Dan take the deed?"

"Ah, jesus, who knows. He was half in the bag for one thing. Moron. Nobody knows better than him, unless maybe it's you, that you don't remove evidence from a crime scene."

"You didn't charge him."

"No," he said glumly, "I didn't charge him. I should have, but I didn't."

Considering what he himself had done or not done in the matter of the murder of Louis Deem and the Koslowski murders, he was as at fault as Dan was of withholding evidence. Maybe, he thought now, that might be why he'd stayed mad at Dan for so long. It was hard to forgive someone for behavior of which you yourself were guilty. You knew only too well how much in the wrong you were.

She was silent for a moment, and then she repeated herself. "You have to talk to him sometime, Jim. If nothing else, you have to work with him."

"Fine," he said without enthusiasm. "You go on home. I'll detour up to the Step."

"No need," she said. "I passed him on the way here. Looked like he was headed for Bernie's."

He brightened a little.

They got up. Kate paused in the doorway. "Howie still in the back?"

"Yup."

"Good."

"Well, he won't leave until I catch whoever shot Mac, and when he heard about Talia I thought he was going to wet his pants. As long as I don't need the room and he buys his own food, I'm okay with it." He hesitated. "I did talk to Judge Singh, and she says that lacking anything more than a tire print we don't have a case against him for Louis."

"Did you tell her about the aunties?"

"Yes," he said, a little apprehensively. When she didn't go off on him he relaxed again. "She says she's disinclined to issue a warrant for a dog on the say-so of Howie Katelnikof."

"The aunties still not talking?"

"Haven't seen them today, I've been otherwise engaged. And Howie of course is now reneging his-quote-nonconfession confession-end quote-right, left, and center. He says he must have been drunk, and I hadn't Mirandized him, and I was threatening him anyway and he got scared and confused and he would have said anything to get me to leave him alone, and-"

"I get the picture. Still, good that he's here where we can keep an eye on him."

She preceded him out the door and she didn't see the curious look he gave her.