A fine and bitter snow (22 page)

He stifled a groan and rolled over on his back.

He wondered if he was ever going to get laid again in his lifetime.

Why her? he asked himself for what might have been the thousandth time. Why this one stubborn, independent, irritating, exasperating woman? She was certainly far too short, especially for him. They'd look like Mutt and Jeff. Where had all the tall blondes in his life suddenly gone? The tall, charming, amenable, accommodating blondes, the ones who were waiting for him when he got to their houses and who let him go again without question the morning after?

The ones who cared as much for him as he did for them.

He remembered again that day in September when he and George had flown into George's hunting lodge south of Denali and had found Kate Shugak, covered in blood and dirt, keening a dirge to the lifeless body of her lover clasped in her arms. No one had ever loved him that much.

Tell the truth, Chopin, he thought. You never knew it was possible until you saw Kate with Jack. You thought it was something you read in a book or saw at the movies. You never thought it could happen in real life.

He kicked free of the sleeping bag, feeling through his T-shirt the heat of the wood burning in the fireplace.

He was, he realized, circling perilously close to the
L
word. He'd stared down men with .357s with less fear. He thought of his parents, those two strangers in the split-level house in San Jose, one staring at the television, the other logged onto the Internet, looking for the next cruise they could take. They had been married for forty years, and he couldn't remember an outward sign of affection more passionate than a chaste kiss, usually on the cheek. He supposed they loved each other, but he had long since decided that if that was love, no thank you. If he'd caught them groping each other in the kitchen, just once, maybe he would have looked at life and relationships a little differently. He didn't know.

He didn't know a goddamned thing.

Kate shifted and murmured something.

Except that he had a ferocious and apparently perpetual itch that it seemed only this woman could scratch. He raised his head. "Kate?" he said softly. "You awake?"

"No, she isn't awake, you moron," Bobby's voice hissed from the far corner, "and if you don't fucking shut up and settle down, I'm going to toss you outside on your goddamn ear."

It was a long night.

He was shoveling in Dinah's ambrosial French toast and Bobby's caribou sausage links the next morning about nine o'clock when Dandy Mike came rushing up the steps.

Jim hung his head over his plate, wishing Dandy away. "No," he said.

It didn't work. "Jim!" Dandy said. "You've got to come!"

"Haven't we done this before?" Jim wondered out loud.

"You have to come! John Letourneau is dead!"

There was an electric moment. Jim's eyes met Kate's. "I beg your pardon?"

"John Letourneau is dead!" Dandy said again, impatient. "Come on, you have to come!"

Jim, still holding Kate's gaze—did she look as heavy-eyed as he felt, or was it just his imagination?—said, "John Letourneau is dead? Where?"

"At his house," Dandy said, calmer now. "I went over to borrow his grill for a party I'm throwing this afternoon, and when he didn't answer the door, I went around the back to find the grill, and I saw him through the window."

"You're sure he's dead?"

Dandy flushed. "Yes. I checked this time. His heart's not beating and he's cold."

"Anybody with you when you went?"

"Scottie Totemoff." Naturally. Scottie Totemoff was Dandy Mike's boon companion. He wondered how Demetri and Billy, both hardworking, responsible men, good providers, good husbands, good fathers, had managed to produce two of the biggest layabouts the Park had ever seen. "He was going to help me with the grill. And the party."

"Of course he was," Jim murmured. Undoubtedly, and the drinking.

"I left Scottie to keep watch, make sure nobody gets in to contaminate the scene." He waited to see the effect caused by this mastery of the language of his newly adopted profession.

"There's no hurry, then," Jim said mildly, and drank his coffee. "I might as well finish my breakfast."

Scottie was waiting for them on the deck, pacing back and forth. "About time you got here," he told Dandy. "I'm freezing my ass off."

"Why didn't you go inside?"

"There's a dead guy inside!"

"You'll have to get used to that if you want to work with us," Dandy said importantly. "Right, Jim?"

"What?" Kate said.

"Let's take a look," Jim said, and went inside.

John had been hurled backward out of his chair by the force of the blast, which had sheered off the left side of his chest. The room was spattered with most of it. Dandy's tracks between door and body were very clear.

The shotgun had fallen with him. His finger was still hooked inside the trigger guard.

"Didn't put it in his mouth," Jim said.

"Sometimes they don't," Kate said. "Usually it's because they don't want to mess up their faces."

"John probably didn't want to mess up his hair," said Jim. Kate looked at him. "Sorry. Cop humor."

She pointed. "He left a note."

"I see it." It stuck out of the old typewriter like a banner. Jim bent over to read it. " 'I killed Dina Willner. I'm too old to go to jail.' "

"Wait a minute." Kate stepped up to peer around him. "That's it? What the hell kind of suicide note is that? He doesn't say why?"

"He doesn't even say how." Jim stood up. "So, okay. This totally sucks."

In Kate's opinion, it could not have been better put, even if it would have sounded more appropriate coming out of Johnny's mouth.

Rigor was well established and Letourneau was difficult to move. Getting him into the back of Dandy's truck was bad enough, but Jim thought he was going to have to break one of Letourneau's legs to get the body into the Cessna. He was inexpressibly relieved when he didn't.

After forming an honor guard escort to the airport, Dandy and Scottie had peeled off to the Roadhouse, where, in spite of sworn promises to the contrary, he knew they were fast spreading the word. "I'll fly him into Ahtna," Jim said to Kate. "Get the body off to the lab."

"Do you doubt that it was suicide?"

Jim shook his head. "I doubt big time that he killed Dina Willner and assaulted Ruthe Bauman. I don't doubt that he killed himself." He thought about it. "Was he sick, do you know?"

"What, you mean like crazy?" Kate snorted. "Like a fox. John Letourneau was one of the saner men I've ever met."

"I don't mean like crazy, I mean like cancer, something like that."

"Not that I know of."

"Was he broke?"

"Not that I know of. Park rats say John's got the first dime he ever made."

Jim shook his head. "Then I don't get it. What makes a man confess to a murder he didn't commit and then kill himself?"

There was a short silence. "He wanted us to stop looking," Kate said slowly.

"Bingo. I'm really thinking Riley didn't do it now, Kate. But I'm going to need a shitload of proof, and I'm going to need it fast."

Kate turned to him. "From the state of the rigor, I'd say he did it not very long after we left."

"Less than an hour would be my guess," Jim said.

Kate nodded. "Me, too. What did we say to trigger this?"

He said quickly, "It doesn't have to be us. He could have made up his mind to do it before we got there. We could have held him up."

She flapped an irritated hand. "Calm down. I don't feel responsible." He looked at her. "I don't, Jim," she said in a quiet voice, her eyes meeting his without reservation.

It was probably the most open look she'd given him since the other afternoon, and it encouraged him to say rashly, "Kate. We need to talk."

She stiffened. "No, we don't."

"Yeah. We do. And we will." He looked at the body in the back of the plane, up at the falling snow, and repressed an oath. "But not now. Soon, though."

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. He thought she sighed. Goaded, he said, "I know you want me."

"I'm not a child with her face pressed up to the candy store window," she said. "I don't let myself have everything I want."

His smile flashed out. "I like it that you compare me to candy."

The smile, with its manifest, practiced charm, was enough by itself to make her angry all over again. She was relieved. For a moment, she'd been afraid that she could no longer be angry with him. It helped her say firmly, "Too much candy makes me sick to my stomach."

It sounded prissy even to her own ears. He laughed, a spontaneous baritone sound that rang out down the strip like someone was tolling a bell, and she wanted to kill him.

He took off, the Cessna disappearing into the low overcast almost immediately. The weather was purportedly better in Ahtna, but if the ceiling came down any lower, he'd be unable to return to Niniltna today. She stood there, watching him go, a scowl on her face, trying to make up her mind if that was a good thing or a bad thing. "Hell with it," she said, and kicked a chunk of ice out of her path on the way back to her snow machine. Mutt sensed her roommate's uncertain temper and maintained a discreet silence.

Kate killed the engine of the snow machine in front of John Letourneau's front steps, still scowling. She didn't know why she was back here, nor did she know what she was looking for that Jim wouldn't already have found. Mutt, sitting next to her, whined an inquiry. "Beats the hell out of me," she said.

They went inside. Kate found John's bedroom and a hamper containing dirty clothes. She held a sock out to Mutt, who sniffed it with interest and looked up, brows raised. "Anybody else been here?" Mutt sneezed once to clear her head and started nosing around the room.

They found nothing out of the ordinary in John's bedroom. The guest bedrooms, running along both sides of the lodge on the second floor, had been scrubbed clean after the last client had flown south for the winter. They proved equally uninteresting. The kitchen was spotless, and none of the three tables in the dining room looked like they had been used in the last few months. The living room didn't look as if it saw regular use, either. If you discounted the blood and bits of flesh, bone, and organ drying hard to floor, wall, and window, the office was neat, well organized, and up-to-date, nothing in the in basket, the files in the metal cabinet meticulously alphabetized in drawers marked
CLIENTS, SUPPLIERS, EMPLOYEES, and TAXES.

The whole place was as neat as a hospital that never admitted any patients.

"Where did this guy live?" Kate wondered out loud as she opened the door off the living room.

Ah.

It was a smaller room than the vast expanses to be found elsewhere in this mausoleum, and made smaller by the amount of stuff crowded into it. A bookcase took up one entire wall, containing the
Gun Digest,
the
Shooter's Bible, Black's Wing and Clay, Black's Fly Fishing, The Milepost,
the
Alaska Almanac,
and everything Boone and Crockett had ever published, from
B&C Big Game Awards
for the previous twenty years to
Spirit of Wilderness,
essays in eight editions appearing to have been written by such low-key guest authors as Theodore Roosevelt and Norman Schwarzkopf. One whole shelf was dedicated to maps of Alaska and the Park, starting with the
Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer
and ending with the USGS survey of the Park, commissioned after d-2 to illustrate the new boundaries. That survey in hand, along with a compass, Kate could walk from Ahtna to Cordova and never get her feet wet.

There were no trophies on the walls of this room. There was a mahogany-stained gun case. It was locked, but Kate could see two empty cradles through the glass pane on the door, and four other cradles filled with serviceable but not particularly exciting weapons, none of them new, none of them elaborately chased with silver scrollwork, none of them with carved walnut stocks. Three of them didn't even have scope mounts. Evidently, John wasn't into collecting. There was a drawer at the base of the cabinet, unlocked, containing boxes of ammunition.

There was one chair, a dark brown leather recliner, a floor lamp next to it. Stacked on the end table, within reach, were copies of
Field & Stream, Fair Chase,
and
Alaska Magazine,
dog-eared where his own ad appeared.