A deeper sleep (12 page)

She looked around at the circle of faces and couldn't bear to stay there another minute. She turned.

"Uh, Kate," Dan said, shifting from foot to foot. Like any other Park rat, he knew the long and bloody history of Louis Deem, but while Kate's priorities were all about the people, his were all about the land.

"What?" she said, biting off the word.

He jerked his head at Father Smith. "Aren't you going to serve him with the, you know, the thing?"

She stared at him, and then remembered. "Oh. Right." She pulled a document from her pocket and slapped it against Father Smith's chest. His hand came up automatically to catch it before it fell. "You are hereby notified by the state of Alaska that your title to this property is in question. You are ordered to vacate it until such time as clear title is established in a court of law. Have a nice day."

He'll kill her," Kate told Jim.

"Probably," Jim said.

His calm reply infuriated her. "He'll marry her, he'll steal everything of the Smiths' that isn't nailed down, and then she won't get the crease right when she irons his jeans, and he'll kill her for it."

"You really think Louis Deem irons his jeans?"

"This isn't funny, Jim!" Kate took a hasty turn around his office. Mutt, wisely, was keeping to her neutral corner. Mutt tended to stick with what worked.

"No." Jim shook his head. "It isn't funny, but I can't do anything, Kate, and you know it."

"Yeah, you have to let him kill her before you can do anything."

Jim opened his mouth to defend himself. Fortunately, Kate was on a tear, so it wasn't necessary.

"Let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?" Kate ticked off on her fingers. "When Louis Deem is twenty-one, he gets hauled into court for the statutory rape of sixteen-year-old Jessie McComas."

"Who," Jim said, attempting to exercise a preemptive strike, "insists that it was not rape, that she and Louis are madly in love and are going to live happily ever after. She's half right. They do marry. They don't live happily ever after."

"Louis does," Kate said. "Jessie, on the other hand, dies six months later in a fall through the ice when she's fetching water from the creek out back of Louis's cabin. The inquest rules it death by misadventure, although they never could come up with an explanation for the lump on the back of her head. Particularly when she was found facedown in the creek."

"Who was the coroner on that case?"

"Magistrate Matthew Nelson."

"Oh yeah. I remember now. Meltdown Matt. He retired soon after."

"I'm pretty sure the state insisted on it," Kate said. "And then we have little Ruthie Moonin, Louis's second wife. She lasted longer than Jessie, almost a year, until Louis's truck fell on her when she was changing his tire. He never did explain why she was changing the tire and he wasn't, but the trooper—"

"Harry Milner."

"Trooper Milner couldn't find just cause and had to let it go. That's where our Louis got his homestead. It belonged to Ruthie's parents, and she was an only child."

"He kill them, too?"

"No," she said, reluctant to admit to even a negative virtue to Louis Deem. "Not that he wouldn't have, but they were dead by then. Ruthie was an orphan, and sole heir. Why do you think he married her?"

Again, the question was rhetorical.

"For crissake, Jim, this guy used to sneak up on Mandy's dog lot and use her dogs for target practice!"

"I didn't know that," Jim said. "What happened?"

"It took Chick three tries before he finally tracked Louis down."

"Chick turn him in?"

Kate snorted. "Chick beat the crap out of him. There were broken bones and internal injuries. For a while we were hoping Louis was going to die, but no such luck."

"What happened to Chick?"

"Nothing." At Jim's look, Kate added, "Harry Milner had his retirement locked in, and by then he knew how bent Louis Deem was. He was hoping Louis was going to die, too. He told Chick he was a bad, bad boy and refused to arrest him the next three times he caught Chick drunk driving."

"Did Louis bring charges?"

Kate's face hardened. "No. By the time he was up and walking around again, Mandy'd got Chick back on the wagon. Louis romanced one of Bernie's waitresses into supplying Chick with free drinks the next time he came in alone. Chick wound up in detox and he nearly died. Mandy kicked him out again and he wound up in the drunk tank again and I had to bail him out. Again."

"And the waitress—"

"Mary Waterbury. Pretty little thing. Almost married that asshole Lester Akiakchak. I wish she had. Lester's worthless, but at least he's not homicidal." She looked at him. "Jim, we taught this guy how to kill. Not only that, we taught him that he can get away with it."

"I know, Kate." They brooded together in silence for a moment, and then Jim said, "Louis only marries Natives."

"Of course he does," Kate said, "and only Natives with regular dividends from their Native corporations. And Ruthie had land and a house. And now Louis lives in it."

"And Howie."

"And Howie."

"And Willard."

Kate's lips tightened. "And Willard." She looked at him, her eyes glittering. "He'll kill Abigail. You know it, I know it, pretty much everyone in the Park knows it except for Abigail and her idiot family."

"Abigail isn't Native," Jim said.

"Abigail is the eldest child of parents who own forty acres of land that sit on the edge of the Park between the nearest town and an old gold mine, and gold at present is selling for over five hundred an ounce."

"You think that's what he has in mind?"

"No, I think that's what Father and Mother Smith have in mind." At Jim's look, Kate said, "You've heard the rumor that some outfit has been granted permission to do some exploration on Salmon Creek?"

"The one next to the Smiths' property?"

"That's the one. When I was up on the Step this morning, I was looking at Dan's map, you know the one?" Kate waited for Jim's nod. "I saw the flag on the area. Kanuyaq Mining and Minerals."

"Never heard of them."

"Me neither, but I bet if we did a search of the incorporation papers, we'd find somebody named Smith somewhere up the bread crumb trail."

It sounded as likely as anything else. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Nothing," Kate said. "It's Dan's job to worry about illegal mineral exploitation on Park land. I'm worried about Abigail."

"Me, too," Jim said heavily. "Me, too."

Mutt tested the tension in the air with an inquiring nose and ventured out of her corner, padding over to rest her head on Jim's knee. He scratched behind her ears, and she let out a heartfelt sigh that increased the air pressure in his office by at least ten millibars.

He looked over at Kate, who was staring out the window with a set expression. "Kate?"

"What?"

"What did Louis Deem do to earn him that gold tooth?"

Her eyes were flat and unreadable. "Come on, Mutt," she said, rising to her feet. "Let's head for the barn."

Jim listened to Mutt's toenails beat a retreating tattoo on the new linoleum floors.

Out it wasn't Abigail's body they found a month later.

It was instead plump, perpetually unhappy Enid Esther Koslowski, sprawled head down on the staircase leading from her deck.

Two steps up from her lay her son, fourteen-year-old Fitz, in a broken, bleeding heap.

The two of them had been shot to death at point-blank range.

FIVE

THE FIRST SATURDAY IN APRIL

the Roadhouse

In the Roadhouse parking lot, people huddled together in small groups, holding on to each other like they'd fall over if they didn't. Jim opened up the back of the Blazer and pulled out the aluminum suitcase that held his crime scene kit. "Where's Bernie?"

The four Grosdidier brothers, the first string of Niniltna's emergency response team, gave a collective jerk of their heads. Jim squared his shoulders and threaded his way through the silent crowd, his mouth a grim line. Faces, pinched and pale and shocked, turned to watch, and one part of his brain began a list of potential witnesses.

In back of the Roadhouse were two rows of cabins which no matter what anyone said he knew from personal experience could not be rented by the hour. Bernie had put in a couple of covered picnic areas with fire pits and tables and benches for the occasional RV that stuck out the road in from Ahtna in the summer. A thick stand of birch insulated the cabin area from the Koslowski house, two stories high with a large deck supporting wrought-iron outdoor furniture and a gas grill big enough to roast an entire bull moose that was the envy of every man in the Park. The deck was reached by a wide staircase with two landings, both landings laden with flower boxes that in summer overflowed with an artful riot of nasturtiums and pansies. French doors led from the deck into the house.

Kate was there before him. Naturally whoever called would have called her first. Jim had been working late at the post, so he got the news second. Another state trooper might have been annoyed by this assignment of second-class law enforcement status, but he was past protesting it.

Billy Mike, who would have been the third call anyone made, was standing behind Kate, who sat cross-legged on the ground a few feet away from the foot of the stairs. Like the shocked, staring crowd in back of them, no one was talking.

Even though he'd been told on the phone, years of on-the-job experience were all that kept Jim moving forward at a steady, deliberate pace. His hand was sweating on the handle of the suitcase. He halted beside Billy and set the suitcase down as quietly as possible before it slipped from his hand.

Bernie was sitting on the steps between his slain wife and son. Enid and Fitz were too far apart and the stairs too steep for Bernie to pull them both into his arms. His legs were braced against different steps and his arms were outspread, one fist knotted in his wife's shirt, the other in his son's, as if by main force he could pull them back from death. He was rocking slightly back and forth, his face turned up to an indifferent heaven, his mouth open in a soundless cry.

There was a sound from the doorway, and Jim looked up to see the outline of a kid crouched there. "Oh Christ," he said beneath his breath. "Kate," he said, and had to repeat her name before she would look around. He nodded at the French doors, one of them shattered, at the white face peering through them.

She drew in a sharp breath, shot to her feet, and started forward involuntarily.

"Not that way," Jim said. "Go around to the back door. Try not to go inside."

She halted as if she'd run into a wall.

"It's a crime scene," he said, as gently as he could. "Go around to the back door. Try not to go inside, but get him out."

She nodded, all her attention fixed on the face behind the French doors.

She went around the back almost at a run. A moment later, Jim could hear her voice. The face in the door wavered and then disappeared, and moments later Kate reappeared, a protective arm around Johnny Morgan's shoulders, a Johnny who was white as a sheet and very shaky on his feet.

Fitz. And Johnny. Lab partners.