A grave denied (23 page)

“What did he say?”

“Nothing! He didn’t say anything! He stood there, and then he walked out again, like it didn’t mean a damn to him! He—” She started to sob again. “He even closed the door behind him. He closed it behind him, like he wanted to give us privacy! He wasn’t even angry!”

Or, given his predilection for screwing around himself, he wasn’t prepared to throw any stones, Kate thought. “Did you talk about it later?”

Enid, regaining some control, blew her nose and shook her head. “No. I tried, but he cut me off.”

And it had been festering ever since. In both of them, probably.

Well, Kate didn’t do therapy. She got to her feet. “Thanks for the coffee.”

Enid trailed after her like a lost puppy. “Is that all?”

“Yeah, pretty much. You said Dreyer didn’t mention any family or friends, or where he came from before he lived in the Park.”

“I don’t think Dreyer was his real name.”

Kate halted. “Really? Why?”

“A letter fell out of his pocket. You know. That first day. It was addressed to a Leon Duffy.”

Len Dreyer. Leon Duffy. Many people who assumed aliases chose names with the same initials. Easier to remember. “He say how old he was?”

Enid looked uncertain. “Uh, around my age, I think. Late forties, maybe? Maybe older.”

That would fit, if Bobby was right about Dreyer serving in Vietnam. Kate wondered where he’d gotten the letter. Not through Bonnie at the local PO, that was sure. Maybe it was an old letter. A keepsake from a loved one, say! The killer could have gotten rid of it so as to delay identification of the body. “Did you happen to notice what he was driving?”

Enid shrugged. “Some beat-up old truck. With a canopy, maybe?” She thought. “Might have been gray.”

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Enid. I’m sorry I had to ask you about it.”

“It’s okay.” Enid drew a shaky breath. “You know what’s the worst, Kate? The worst is it wasn’t even that much fun. I made the pass. I took him to the cabin. I even undressed him, and me.”

“Enid-”

“He had his eyes closed the whole time. Like he didn’t even want to see what he was screwing.” She tried to smile with trembling lips. “There’s a name for that, isn’t there? A mercy fuck, isn’t that what they call it?” A tear slid from the corner of her eye.

“If it’s that hard to take, why don’t you leave?” Kate said.

Enid looked shocked. “I couldn’t do that. There are the children. And besides…” She looked down at her hands, twisted together in a painful knot. Her voice dropped. “He didn’t love me when we married. I thought, well, I thought that love, or maybe even just a little affection, would come in time. It didn’t. I shouldn’t have married him. It’s my fault.”

She stood in silence for a moment. When she raised her head the old Enid was back, armor in place. “Well,” she said brightly, “thanks for stopping by, Kate.” She opened the door and Kate, perforce, went through it.

She stood on the deck listening to Enid’s footsteps recede.

She was thinking of the witches’ coven in the woods she had stumbled onto a few years back, led by Enid and celebrating the death of Lisa Gette, who had slept with the husbands of every attending wicca-for-a-day. Even now, years later, the memory was strong enough to run a chill up her spine. Those women had been united in hatred, united in celebrating death.

It was too much of a cliche, but as Kate knew from long experience with the Anchorage D.A., that didn’t make it untrue. Husband screws around, wife has a revenge fuck with the handyman, husband walks in, husband kills handyman. Certainly the white of Enid’s face said that she was terrified that Bernie had in fact done just that. And there was that betraying glance at the gun rack.

The timing was off, though. Len Dreyer had laid gravel and Enid around Labor Day. He’d been seen elsewhere multiple times between Labor Day and the end of October.

Didn’t mean Bernie couldn’t have bided his time, planned it out. That’s what a prosecuting attorney would say. A prosecuting attorney would also say that Bernie, by virtue of an everyone-comes-to-Bernie’s Park practice, would be among the first to know about Grant Glacier advancing. According to Millicent and Dan, the glacier’s subsequent retreat hadn’t gotten the same kind of press. No immediate reason to believe it wouldn’t be the perfect grave.

Enid had said that Bernie didn’t care, but even the most indifferent husband had been known to react adversely to his wife sleeping with another man. And then, Laurel Meganack had slept with Len Dreyer and with Bernie Koslowski both last year, which was a whole other motive Kate didn’t want to consider. Maybe Bernie was in love for the first time in his life. Maybe Dreyer had shouldered him out of Laurel’s bed.

She shook her head. “Damn it,” she said out loud. “Not Bernie. I know him, I’ve known him for years. He’s not a killer.”

Didn’t mean she wasn’t going to have to talk to him about it. She envisioned an unpleasant interrogation, followed by months of cold-shouldering. Great.

She wouldn’t tell Jim, though. At least not yet. She headed down the steps and through the path back to the bar.

She was ambushed before she got to the door, a pair of very muscular arms scooping her off the step. She found herself pressed up against the wall, a knee between her legs and a large pair of firm hands investigating the scene of what was before much longer going to be a crime, if only a misdemeanor.

There was an undercurrent of laughter in Jim’s voice when he left off nibbling on her ear and whispered into it instead. “Come on, Shugak, cuddle up, you know you want to.” He kissed her, and since her feet were dangling a foot off the ground, she couldn’t find enough leverage to fight him off.

Or that’s what she told herself.

It had been a long time since she’d been the target of this much unrelenting male attention, and Jim hadn’t had enough to drink to affect his moves. Her eyes went a little out of focus and then closed altogether.

No. There was nothing in the least reverential about Jim Chopin’s kiss.

Her conscience was guilty at withholding information relevant to the case they were working together, that was what it was. So she’d let him grope her a little, kiss her a little, touch her a—oh my. The man certainly knew where all the parts were, and needed no instruction in how to get them running. Her arms came up of their own volition to circle his neck. Mostly to help support her weight, seeing as how she was hanging there in midair and all. She might have tilted her head to give him easier access to that spot just below her left ear. She might even have knotted her hand in his hair and brought his head back so she could kiss him for a change, but that wasn’t very likely, now was it?

“Excuse me,” a very dry voice said.

Jim, wallowing in the middle of what was the very first wholehearted, unconditional response he’d ever had from Kate Shugak, even if he had taken her by surprise, swore ripely and said “What!” in a tone of voice that had all by itself disarmed more than one frisky perp in its day.

Dinah, surveying them with a bleak eye, said, “Bobby’s hungry. We were thinking of riding on into town and grabbing a bite at the cafe.”

“Sounds good,” Kate said brightly, and peeled out of Jim’s arms to hotfoot it around the corner and up the stairs into the bar.

Jim moved to follow her and was halted in his tracks by one upraised hand.

“What?” he said, exasperated, frustrated, horny, edgy, and embarrassed.

“What do you want with her?” Dinah said in a quiet voice.

Like it wasn’t obvious. He tried to adjust the bulge behind his fly without her noticing. “What are you talking about?”

“With Kate,” Dinah said, and this time her tone got through to him. “What do you want with her, Jim?”

“What?” he said again, this time bewildered.

“You want to lay her?”

This was so unlike Dinah’s usual mostly ladylike self that he simply gaped at her.

She regarded him with palpable scorn. “Yeah, well, take a number. Here’s the thing.” She stepped forward and actually grabbed herself a handful of his shirtfront and pulled him down to an elevation where she could get in his face. “Kate’s been a big girl for a long time now, and I don’t expect she’d take kindly to my meddling in her business. But I’m her friend, and I don’t want to see her hurt.”

“Hurt?” Jim said. “Who’s talking about hurting her?”

“You’ll hurt her, given half the chance,” Dinah said. “Kate’s not one of your good-time girls, Jim. When there’s someone in her life, it’s serious, and it’s monogamous. If you’re not serious, stay the hell away from her.”

He was angry now. He removed her hand. “You’re right,” he said, “it’s none of your business.”

He stalked around the corner.

Dinah stood where she was, staring after him. A smile that was one part mean spread slowly across her face.

If she was not mistaken, Jim Chopin, Alaska state trooper and sworn ladies’ man, had just got his feelings hurt.

The four of them wound up at the Riverside Cafe, wolfing down sourdough pancakes and link sausage and eggs fried too hard. Laurel Meganack was there, cooking and serving and flirting with everyone in sight, particularly Jim Chopin, who in Dinah’s opinion did not appear to be encouraging her, and who in Kate’s opinion did not appear to be beating her off with a stick, either. All of this remained unspoken, of course, but the subtext lay heavily over the table.

They sat around drinking coffee after, Laurel making sure to keep Jim’s cup in particular full to the brim. Before Laurel plopped herself down in his lap, Kate cornered her in the kitchen.

“Hey, Kate,” Laurel said with a sunny smile, tending to the burgers on the grill, the dishes in the sink, and the coffee urn all at the same time. Watching her smooth efficiency in the compact kitchen made Kate feel like an underachiever.

“Got a minute?” Kate said.

Laurel flipped the burgers in three swift movements. “Now I do,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “What’s up?”

It was late and Kate had neither the time nor the inclination for diplomacy. “Rumor has it you had a thing with Bernie Koslowski last year.”

Laurel’s smile vanished. “I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Kate agreed, “except that some other stuff might have come out of it.”

“Like what?”

“Like some stuff concerning Bernie’s wife, Enid.”

“She never knew.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, “she did. And she slept with Len Dreyer to get even.”

Laurel didn’t change expression. She was a striking young woman, maybe five feet ten with thick reddish brown hair clipped back from her face, large brown eyes, and dark arched brows. She had a high-bridged nose, handed down along with her height from the Yankee whaler rumored to have been her grandfather, and a small rosebud of a mouth. Her T-shirt was cropped and her jeans low-rider, both playing hide-and-seek with the gold ring piercing her navel. Kate winced away from the sight. “That,” Laurel said, “would come under the heading of none of my business.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, “it is, because Len Dreyer’s dead.”

“I heard. You don’t think-”

“I don’t think anything, yet,” Kate said, “I’m just gathering information. Which I have more of, by the way. I’ve heard that you had something going on with Len Dreyer, as well.”

“What of it?”

Laurel was getting a little defensive, Kate was glad to see. Defensive people usually had to justify their actions, which meant they talked more. “Like I said, I’m just looking for information. I’m not accusing you of anything except sleeping with two different guys at the same time, which we could all plead guilty to at some point, right?”

“Or more,” Laurel said, and then looked as if she wished she hadn’t.

“I’m only interested in these two. How did things end with Bernie?”

Laurel shrugged. “Well, I think. It only lasted a couple of months. The wife and kids, his own business, not to mention the coaching job, they kind of cramp his style.”

Kate took a guess. “He wasn’t unhappy you called it off?”

“Well.” Laurel thought it over. “He wasn’t happy, exactly. Things were pretty good there for a while.”

“So he was unhappy.”

“No.”

“Which is it?”

“We agreed together we should call it off,” Laurel said, exasperated. “I wanted more than he could give, and no way was he leaving his family for me. He understood.”

“You wanted marriage?”

“Good god, no!” Laurel said, and surprisingly, laughed. “I just wanted him around more, is all.” She winked. “He’s got some nice moves. Know what I mean?”

Bernie was a friend and this was not a visual Kate wanted. “What about Dreyer?”

Laurel noticed her arms folded tightly across her chest, and gave Kate a wry smile, inviting her to recognize the body language. The burgers were done and she flipped them to the buns, arranged lettuce, tomato, onions, and pickle on the plates, at which time the deep fryer alarm went off and she went for the basket of fries. “Len was a mistake,” she said, shaking the basket.

“How so?”

“And my mistake, too,” Laurel said, letting the fries drain. She looked up at Kate. “I thought he was interested.” She shrugged and gave a self-deprecating smile. “Seemed like pretty much of a given. Let’s face it, the ratio of men to women in the Park is pretty much in our favor.”