A Cold Day for Murder (10 page)

“I don’t care, Katya,” Xenia said in a small voice to the tabletop. “I just want out.”

Kate searched her face for a long moment. “All right,” she said at last. “Think over what I’ve said for a week or so. If you still feel the same way, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Oh, Katya, thank you! I knew you’d come through for me!”

“I haven’t done anything yet,” Kate said dryly. “In the meantime there is something you can do for me.”

“What?”

“Emaa tells me you’ve been seeing one of the park rangers.”

Prepared for a strong reaction, Kate was nevertheless shocked by the result of her question. The color drained out of Xenia’s face, her body slackened and she swayed in her chair as if she were going to slide down to the sawdust-covered floor. Kate reached out quickly to steady her, but the girl waved her off with one shaking hand. “I’m all right,” she muttered, avoiding her cousin’s eyes.

“So you were seeing him,” Kate said. “Mark Miller.”

“Yes.” The noise in the bar almost drowned out the girl’s nearly inaudible response. She sat still as a parka squirrel scenting a fox.

Kate looked at her bent head, frowning. “Was it…serious?”

There was a brief silence. “I thought so,” the girl said, seeming to pick her words with great care. “He said he loved me, that he was going to marry me and take me away from here.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Six weeks ago, October 26,” the girl said promptly.

Kate raised an eyebrow. “You’re very certain of the date.”

“Yes.” Still that almost inaudible voice.

“Did he tell you why he was leaving, where he was going?”

“He just left,” Xenia said to the tabletop. “He didn’t even leave me the key to his jeep.”

“He left it here?”

“Sure,” Xenia said, too carelessly. “Left it outside the Roadhouse to seize up in the cold. Dumb Outsider.”

“Dumb,” Kate said, her voice cool. “You use that word a lot. Dumb is anyone who doesn’t do what you want them to, is that it?”

“No it’s not!” Xenia’s lip quivered. “Anyway, he left without saying a word. He lied to me and then he dumped me, okay? And if you don’t mind I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m going to get a ride back to town.” The girl shoved back her chair and flounced out of the Roadhouse.

Kate sat looking thoughtfully after her cousin for a long time, and then rose and went to the bar. “Bernie?”

He came over. “Yeah?”

“Did you know Xenia was dating Mark Miller?”

Bernie reached for a glass and his bar rag and polished one with the other thoughtfully. “And if I did?”

Kate sighed. Bernie was that rarity, a bartender who didn’t gossip about the private lives of his clientele. “If it was just Miller, Bernie, I’d write him off and tell the Park Service to go looking for the body when the snow melts. But the first person to come looking for Miller wound up missing, too, a guy named Ken Dahl. I brought him in here a couple of times.”

“I remember. Blond guy, always shaking hands with somebody.”

“That’s the one,” Kate said shortly. “Anyway, he came up here two weeks ago—”

“I know. He came in here, too.” Bernie grinned. “Like I said, everybody comes to Bernie’s.”

Kate hid a long, silent intake of breath, and said, “Would you care to tell me about it?”

“About Miller or Dahl?”

“Let’s start with Miller. He was seeing Xenia.”

“Yup.”

“Often?” Kate said patiently. It did no good to get irritable with Bernie; he’d just close up like a clam and invite you out of his bar. He had a sign hung over the back of his bar which read, we reserve the right to refuse service, and Bernie took that to be his credo, his guiding light, his raison d’être, right up there next to no customers allowed behind the bar and free throws win ball games. “Bernie?” Kate repeated when he didn’t reply.

Bernie inspected the polished glass critically. “I’d call every night often.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “So would I. How serious do you think it was?”

Bernie gave up on the glass and started wiping the bar rag back and forth across the bar in long, ruminative strokes. “He was damn serious. Of course, I don’t know that he liked her as much as he liked the fact that she was part of the Park.” He smiled a little. “She was indigenous to the place, like the copper and the caribou. He did tell me one night he was planning on marrying her and living here happy ever after.”

“She told me he promised to take her out of here,” Kate said.

Bernie shrugged. “Xenia always did think she could make the three-pointer when an assist on a lay-up was all that was in the playbook.” The bar rag stilled, and Bernie raised calm brown eyes, as if to examine the effect his next words would produce. “Martin didn’t like it.”

Kate stared at him. “Xenia’s brother?” she said. “He didn’t like her going out with Miller?”

“No,” Bernie said judiciously, “actually that’s not quite true. Martin hated it. He hated Xenia going out with an Anglo and an Outsider in the first place, and then he found out Miller was a ranger. Talk about adding insult to injury. He got pretty loud about it.”

Kate felt a sense of foreboding. “Where did he get pretty loud about it?”

Bernie nodded toward the room at large. “Right here. That last night anyone saw Miller, Martin walked in about one o’clock that morning and caught him and Xenia dancing and smooching it up. They had words. The damages cost Martin a hundred bucks, which is about par for him.”

“You mean they had a fight?”

“I don’t care what anybody says about you, Kate,” Bernie said admiringly, “you are smarter than the average bear. It was the day of that hearing on building a road into the Park. Everybody came down to the Roadhouse for a drink after the committee adjourned, and stayed on. There were about fifty witnesses. Most of them took bets on the fight, and helped pick up the tables and chairs afterward.”

“And then Miller disappears off the face of the earth,” Kate muttered. “Wonderful.”

“I’d say that about summed up the situation,” Bernie agreed.

Kate thought about it for a while. “Xenia says Miller left his jeep here the night he disappeared.”

“Sure. It’s still sitting out back.” He grinned. “What’s left of it. I’ll show you.”

She shrugged into her snowsuit and followed him outside, Mutt trotting behind her. It was perceptibly colder than when she had come in, and her breath made puffs of vapor that hung behind her in the air. She pulled her hood up around her face.

The Jeep was a Toyota Land Cruiser—because of its high ground clearance, small turning radius and four-wheel drive, one of the most popular vehicles in the Park—which explained why Miller’s vehicle was now missing all four tires and wheels, as well as the spare, the battery, the plugs, the filter, the distributor cap, one of the bucket seats, the windshield and the driver’s side door. There was a pile of dog turds, frozen hard, between the front and back seats, and one of those air fresheners in the shape of an evergreen hanging from the rearview mirror, and that was all.

“There isn’t a lot left to it, is there?” Kate observed.

“Not much sense in letting it sit here, freezing up into a piece of junk,” Bernie said cheerfully.

“No,” Kate admitted.

Along with the missing parts there was not the vestige of a clue to be found beneath the remaining seats or in the glove compartment or the wheel wells or in any one of half a dozen other places Kate thought to look.

“So, Sherlock,” Bernie said. Standing in his T-shirt and jeans and thongs, he made Kate shiver just to look at him. “What next?”

“Did Miller say anything that last evening that would indicate what he was going to do next, where he was going after he left the Roadhouse?”

Bernie shook his head. “He was just a little guy, Kate, and you know Martin. Miller looked like he was having a hard time keeping up off all fours. I figured he was heading home to bed.”

“Where was Xenia?”

“She’d run out of the bar during the fight.” Bernie’s voice did not change. “She never was much good on defense.”

Kate was silent, and Bernie said, “Wait a minute. Early on Miller did say something about trying to make a call, and goddaming NorthCom. He didn’t say when, or who to, so that don’t really mean nothing.”

Kate hunched further down into her snowsuit. “Did you tell Ken Dahl all this?”

“Some of it,” Bernie said. “Not all.”

“Why not?”

Bernie shrugged and started back in. “He said he was an investigator. I figured, let him investigate.” He paused and looked back at her. “Funny thing about this jeep.”

“Funny ha-ha or funny strange?”

“Funny strange. I left the bar around two-thirty that morning to go over to the house and grab a sandwich. This jeep wasn’t here then.”

Kate stared at Bernie. “You’re sure?”

Bernie nodded.

“When did you see it next?”

“I sleep in mornings. The jeep was right here when I come over to open up the bar at twelve o’clock that afternoon.” He grinned. “I remember because Abel was waiting for me to pour out his weekly bourbon.”

She gave an involuntary smile. “He still comes in every week?”

“Like clockwork.”

“Just the one shot?”

“Just the one.”

She chuckled, but her amusement soon faded and she said, without much hope, “Enid didn’t happen to see anything?”

He shook his head. “Or the kids neither.”

Kate stood still, thinking. “So he went somewhere, and then he came back.”

“It looks that way.”

“But when? And then where did he go from here?”

Bernie shrugged. “That I couldn’t tell you. There’s so much traffic around here nights, I wouldn’t know exactly when any one truck or snow machine or dogsled came or left.” He grinned. “A D-9 Cat, of course, is pretty hard to miss.”

“Or a helicopter,” she said, and they both laughed. Her laughter faded and, frowning, she said, “And why would he come back? To pick up Xenia, maybe?”

Bernie shook his head. “Xenia ducked out early in the fight. I didn’t see her again that night.”

Kate sighed. “I better get on over to NorthCom, then. Maybe Miller got a call and had to leave on a family emergency, or something like that.”

Bernie looked at her.

“Oh shut up,” Kate said, and climbed on her Super Jag for the trip back to the village.

The NorthCom shack was located within the city limits, fifty feet up the road from the Niniltna School. The shack was just that, a one-room shack made of plywood stapled to two-by-four uprights, crowned with asphalt shingles, lined between its two-by-fours with the ubiquitous pink Owens Corning insulation found beneath every Sheetrock wall in the state. The Andrews five-meter dish stood on its own tower out back, tilted on its polar mount true north 61 degrees from the horizontal to track Northern Light, the state’s personal communications satellite.

There wasn’t any line outside the door, an unusual sight that filled Kate with a sense of quiet satisfaction. Before the state legislature in 1986 passed a law that permitted local communities to ban alcohol, Niniltna’s NorthCom earth station accounted for some $800,000 a year in money orders, ninety-five percent of which were booze orders to liquor stores in Anchorage. Since the tribal council had passed what Park locals referred to as the DampAct, and sometimes the GodDampAct, revenues had fallen to less than a fourth of what they had been. Local air taxi services had seen a boom in charter flights to the nearest liquor store, a hundred and thirty miles away. There were rumors NorthCom was thinking of shutting the Niniltna earth station down entirely, which would leave Niniltna and everyone else in the Park dependent for communications on the two ham operators operating within the confines of the Park, the shortwave between Anchorage and the Park monitored by Chugach Air Taxi Service, and the weekly mail flown into Niniltna each Monday, weather permitting, also courtesy Chugach Air.

There was no one inside. Usually the operator, who with an alternate worked a month on and a month off, slept on a cot in the back. A shelf held his hot plate and tiny refrigerator, and it was all screened by a curtain of faded cotton with a blue floral pattern and kept warm by an Earth stove. The local wood seller figured the operator must have come from somewhere Outside originally, down south and way down, because he burned at least a cord of wood in that Earth stove every month.

Kate banged the bell on the counter. Mutt stood a step behind her, trying to look as if she didn’t know perfectly well that she was supposed to wait outside.

“All right, all right,” came a voice from behind the curtain. “Hold your horses, I’m coming.”

There were some whispers and a few giggles before the operator appeared around the edge of the flowered curtain, clad in mismatched wool socks that left far too much of his thin, hairy legs exposed, jockey shorts and a flannel shirt he was still buttoning. His lank brown hair was all over the place and his face looked very pleased with itself and invited Kate to be, too. He stretched and yawned and scratched. “What can I do you for?”

“Sorry to bother you,” Kate said, hiding a grin. “I’m looking for information about a park ranger named Mark Miller.”

There was a gasp and a sudden immobility from behind the curtain. Kate’s inner grin faded. She stepped swiftly around the counter, shoved the operator out of the way and swept back the curtain to reveal Xenia cowering on the cot, naked beneath the grubby sheet clutched to her chin. She met Kate’s eyes defiantly.

Kate let the curtain fall and went back around the counter and looked at the operator. “Do you know who Mark Miller is?”

The operator, fully awake now, eyed her warily and gave a cautious nod. “Park ranger, new one.” His eyes slid to the curtain and then back. “He’s missing.”

“Yes. I’m looking for him.”

“Who for?”

“Does it matter?”

The operator’s eyes slid to the curtain again. He said nothing.

“Can you remember the last time he was in here?”

“The privacy of any communication through the public communications system of the state of Alaska is protected by both state and federal law,” he recited.