A Cold Day for Murder (17 page)

“Why not just drop the whole thing?” Bobby said. “No Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the wrench. No decaying bodies, no smoking guns, no crime to investigate. Why don’t you just pack up and go home?”

“Gee, I’d love to,” Jack said, “but the FBI and a United States congressman have different ideas. And there’s the little matter of my own investigator’s disappearance. Ken Dahl wasn’t the kind of guy to vanish without a trace.”

“Jimmy Hoffa’s wife probably said pretty much the same thing about him,” Bobby observed. “So what do we do now?”

Jack looked at him, alert and bright-eyed, and grinned inwardly. Bobby Clark, ace detective. “We go back to the beginning. First. I’m playing the devil’s advocate here, but are we agreed that Miller is, in fact, dead?”

Kate said, “He hasn’t been to work since October 26. His boss and his girl haven’t seen him in six weeks, the same amount of time his Toyota’s been sitting in front of Bernie’s, in the process of being stripped down to its turn signal lever. His daddy hasn’t seen him in six months. He hasn’t called anybody, or written, or sent a message by jungle drums.”

Jack gave a judicial nod. “So he’s missing. Doesn’t necessarily mean he’s dead.”

“Where’s Ken Dahl?” Kate said bluntly.

“Maybe he fell down the same black hole swallowed up the ranger,” Bobby suggested.

“Okay,” Jack said, making a note and ignoring Bobby. “Then we assume for the sake of discussion that they are both dead, Miller we don’t know why, Ken because he was looking for Miller. Second, we have motive for murder. Boy, do we have motive. Miller’s testimony before that subcommittee was in favor of very limited development in the Park. As such it was bound to piss off everyone in the known world with the possible exception of Morris Udall. Even Bernie admits that Mark Miller was a good ranger with a lot of good ideas, but so is half the department. With his daddy in his corner, though, he had extra.”

Jack stared at his notepad, frowning. “With his daddy backing him up he maybe had the stroke to push his ideas through. Not only that, but he dated Xenia and pissed off Martin. And Billy Mike tells us Miller also pissed off the tribal council for lecturing them on assigning the Qakiyaq Forest timber rights to an Oregon contractor without consulting with the council or making provisions for a training program for the locals. We know he pissed off Mac Devlin when he slapped an EPA injunction on him for fouling Carmack Creek with the sludge from his gold dredge, and then he started to get in Mac’s way on the Nabesna mine deal.” He sighed, and said, “We’re just lousy with suspects, all with a surplus of motives.”

“And all of whom have airtight alibis,” Kate said morosely.

“That ranger boy just didn’t have the knack of winning friends and influencing people, did he?” Bobby said. He was sitting very erect in his chair, his sharp black eyes darting from Kate to Jack and back again, enjoying all this detecting business immensely. “Hell, he even pissed old Abel off when he said at that hearing that the Park should be opened up to all tourists and not just those able to afford to fly in, and said the only way to do it was build and maintain a road with campsites and gas stations.”

“Abel was there?” Kate said, startled.

“Hell, Kate,” Bobby said, “Abel testified against the plans for development his own self.”

Kate said, disbelieving, “Abel? Abel testified at the hearing?”

“Yes indeedy.”

Awed, Kate said in a hushed voice, “What on earth did he say?”

Bobby put the tips of his fingers together and pursed his lips. “Well, first he stood up and said he’d been told the definition of a committee was a body with six heads and no brain and now he knew it was true. Then he sang ’em ‘This Land is Your Land,’ chorus and verse. Then he told ’em if they upgraded and maintained the road and put in campsites the tourists would come and ruin the natural grandeur of the park, preserving which, he reminded them, was what d-2 was all about.” Bobby reflected, and added, “It was the best show I’ve seen since Wayne Newton’s in Vegas.”

Kate was laughing helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“‘Course Abel didn’t tell them he practically funded single-handedly the state’s fight against d-2 when it was first proposed,” Bobby added. “Sumbitch was starting to sound like he voted for Carter.” He caught himself and gave Kate an apologetic look. “I don’t mean to bad-mouth the old man any, Kate, but you ask other folks who was there and they’ll tell you. That day Abel sounded green enough to sprout.”

Kate wiped her eyes. “Oh Bobby. I will be sorry until the day I die I wasn’t there to hear it.”

“I, for one,” Bobby said solemnly, hand on his heart, “shall always feel privileged that I was. It was a stirring example of democracy in action.”

“So,” Jack said, leading them relentlessly back to the main subject, “we’re lousy with suspects who had beaucoup reasons to wish Miller had never been born.”

“All of whom we’ve cleared,” Kate reminded him, but she didn’t sound as downcast about it as she had a half hour before.

“Maybe they all did it,” Bobby said, inspired. “You know, like in
Murder on the Orient Express
. I got a copy of it around here somewhere if you want to read it.”

“Let’s try to give Miller’s last known actions some kind of sequence,” Jack said.

Bobby made a face. “Where were you at eight-oh-five and three seconds on the night in question? Bo-ring.”

“Maybe. But it works. Got another piece of a paper? Thanks. Now, is it agreed that we follow the Miller trail on the assumption that Ken Dahl did the same; therefore, we follow one, we find them both?” He looked at Kate, and she nodded. “Okay. Miller began his day testifying before that Parks subcommittee. Next he goes to the NorthCom shack, all fired up to save the Nabesna mine from the evil machinations of that representative of Satan, that worthy heir to Snidely Whiplash, the one and only Mac Devlin. When he can’t get a message to his daddy at NorthCom he comes here and talks to daddy over Bobby’s radio. Afterward, he went to the Roadhouse, where he met Xenia and got into a fight with Martin. About what time would you say he left here, Bobby?”

Bobby shrugged. “I’d say around nine, but I wasn’t keeping track.”

“And he was driving his Toyota when he left. Okay. Now, Bernie says the Toyota was gone when he went to his house to grab a meal, so he was gone by midnight, and with what Bernie says about the fight, that more or less fits. But the Toyota was back in front of the Roadhouse by noon the next day.” Jack looked up from his list. “What may we infer from that?”

There was silence. Kate said slowly, “That it was driven back to the Roadhouse by whoever killed Miller. Always assuming he was killed.”

“I love a skeptic. Why?”

Kate sat forward, dark eyes intent. “That Land Cruiser would be like a red flag to anyone looking for Miller. The killer had to drive it somewhere else.”

“And that means that he was in fact killed somewhere else,” Bobby said with a burst of inspiration.

Jack bestowed a benevolent and approving smile on them both. “Very good.”

“Now all we need,” Kate said, sinking back into the couch, “is a witness who spent the hours between midnight on the twenty-sixth and noon on the twenty-seventh in front of the Roadhouse.”

“Sober,” Bobby added.

“Sober,” Kate agreed. “And didn’t freeze to death while they were at it.”

“Humphrey Bogart would have dug up half a dozen witnesses by now and still had time to screw Mary Astor,” Bobby said in disgust.

“And keep the fat man from killing him,” Kate said sadly, “and the downtown dicks from arresting him, and keep the black bird for himself.”

Jack heaved a deep, mournful sigh, probably over the unattainable Mary Astor.

The fire crackled in the fireplace and the thin arctic sun sent nearly horizontal beams in through Bobby’s enormous windows. The reflection off the snow outside was painful to look at for long. Bobby rolled over and pulled the sheers to block it out.

Kate said to Jack, “Let’s take a ride on up to Park Headquarters.”

“Why? Gamble’s already been up there. Everything he got is in the file.”

She gave him an old-fashioned look. “The way Miller’s call to his daddy was? I want to talk to the people who worked with Miller myself.”

“Is there enough snow?”

“Of course there’s enough snow, there was enough snow yesterday to—” She stopped and looked at him in sudden realization. To get to Park Headquarters would require another trip across Lost Chance Creek. “You don’t have to come,” she said gently. “And I’ll come straight back here, I promise.” Jack said nothing. “You hired me to do this job for you, Jack. And you’re right, there probably isn’t any reason for me to go. I’ve just got this itch, you know, like I’m staring right at something, like I’m bumping into the same thing over and over again, but I just can’t—” She broke off and shook her head in frustration. “I’m going up there.”

Jack set his jaw and reached for his boots. “You go, I go.”

“No, really, Jack,” she started to say.

“No, really, Kate,” he mocked her. “The shrink said the more I faced up to it, the easier it’d get.”

She looked at him, at the strained look around his eyes and the sweat already popping out on his forehead, and her heart melted. “We could fly in.”

He looked at her, and the sweat on his brow was sucked back into his pores like magic. “I forgot they had a strip up there. How long is it?”

“Greg takes his Tri-Pacer in there all the time. I think it’s about a thousand feet. Is that long enough?”

Jack’s grin was wide and relieved and she had her answer. “Not that I can’t cross that goddam bridge,” he added, in case there was any doubt. “I just have to do it my own way.”

“Of course,” Kate murmured without the trace of a smile.

Bobby looked from one to the other and said, “Please don’t bother to explain yourselves on my account. We mushrooms are used to being kept in the dark and fed shit three times a day. No, really,” he added as they reached for parkas and snowsuits and headed for the door, “we like it.” He was shouting variations on this original theme from his open doorway as Kate and Jack went off on the Super Jag, Mutt barking an indignant accompaniment next to him. Mutt didn’t like being left behind. Bobby didn’t like being left in the dark.

· · ·

Park Headquarters was in the geographical center of the Park, on a natural plateau where the foothills left off and the mountains began. The gravel airstrip ran down its exact center, as if the people who had cleared and surfaced it were afraid that if they worked too close to either edge they might fall off the world. The plateau stood at a crossroads of sorts, between plain and mountain, between river and glacier, between civilization, such as it was, and wilderness, or what was left of it.

Jack side-slipped down to a three-point landing and rolled out to a stop thirty feet from the group of buildings clustered around the end of the runway. “Not bad,” Kate had to admit. Jack’s grin was smug. They climbed out and headed for the large building at the center of the cluster and went inside.

“Hey, Dan,” Kate said, stretching out her hand with a warm smile. “Working hard or hardly working?”

He snorted, a tall man with a freckled face, bushy orange-red hair and twinkling blue eyes that could have charmed the British out of Northern Ireland. Kate had seen plenty of that twinkle when she met Dan for the first time; after a while he had discovered to his astonishment that she really didn’t want to play anything but pinochle with him. He discovered to his further astonishment that, if he worked at it, he could be just friends with a woman. For a while he worried that the cold Alaskan air was sapping his virility, but one of Kate’s aunts and two of her cousins dispelled that notion to everyone’s complete satisfaction, and he relaxed and began to enjoy their relationship. “Hell, Kate,” he said now, “between the squatters and the miners and the trappers and the hunters—”

“Okay, okay, Danny boy, enough whining. You’d stab anyone who tried to take this job away from you and you know it.”

Dan propped his feet up on his desk and leaned back with his hands linked behind his head. “I reckon you’re here about Miller.”

“I reckon you’re right,” Kate mimicked him, propping up her own feet. “Dan O’Brian, meet Jack Morgan. Jack’s head of the D.A.’s investigative office, Dan.”

Dan grinned at Jack. “Miller’s daddy been after you?”

“He’s been after the FBI, who’ve been after me.”

“Yeah. They were up here, too.” Dan shook his head. “I liked that kid, I really did. Lot of enthusiasm, lot of smarts, but he did wave his daddy like a flag. It could get tiring.”

“Tiring enough for you to pull his plug?” Jack said hopefully.

Dan leaned back his head and laughed. “Sometimes, I admit, I’d liked to have strangled the sanctimonious little shit,” he said. “And sometimes I’d have had to stand in line to do it. But I didn’t. Neither did anybody else up here on the Step.”

“You familiar with what he did the last day he was seen?”

“Shit, who isn’t? Since Kate started sniffing around you can’t work up a decent conversation on the CB without dragging Miller into it.” He turned a bright, inquiring gaze on Kate.

“Danny boy,” Kate said sadly, “we’ve got zilch. Every lead we’ve had has gone right down the toilet.” She nodded at Jack. “When Miller disappeared Jack sent Ken Dahl in to look for him. Now he’s missing, too.”

Danny pursed his lips together in a silent whistle. “Blond, blue-eyed?”

“That’s the guy. He come up here?”

Danny said blandly, “Yeah, he made it this far. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I recognized him right away from the description Bernie gave me.”

Caught off guard, Kate said, “How?”

“He had his mouth open.” Kate reddened and Danny grinned. “What do you want to know, Kate? I told everything I knew to the feds when the FBI rode up on their white horse.”

Kate was silent for a moment. “Tell me about him. Miller.”

Dan looked at her, and drawled, “He was twenty-three. Short. Skinny. More energy than a nuclear power plant. More enthusiasm than a bull moose in rut. Talked all the time about My Father The Congressman.”