Bad Blood (20 page)

“Oh,” Kate said. “You mean you want a hangar out at the homestead strip, for your own.”

“I hate getting in a cold airplane,” Jim said, pulling off his headset and opening the door. Mutt squeezed between his shoulder and the airframe and took the distance to the ground in a single graceful leap.

Jim and Kate followed more sedately.

“Not only an airstrip, but an airplane, and a hangar, too.” Kate handed him her headset and he pulled his pilot’s bag from the back and tucked them inside.

“Think how much quicker we’d be home if we fly,” he said.

Which would mean we wouldn’t have to drive,
Kate thought, except for bringing in the big stuff. She remembered Paul and Alice and the vision of herself at the controls of a Caterpillar D9 tractor, pushing up a mound of dirt to block the trail between her homestead and the Park road.

“Well,” she said, helping him push the plane back to its tiedowns, “it’s an idea.”

He looked up to see the smile in her eyes. “What?”

“Back at HQ,” she said, “did you go upstairs to ask for another trooper for Niniltna?”

They went to opposite wings. They would be in the air again shortly, but you never anticipated a calm day in Alaska staying that way for longer than five minutes. Jim was never going to be the guy who came out to check on his aircraft only to find it had flipped in a gust of wind because it hadn’t been properly tied down. He paid more attention to the overhand knot than it perhaps deserved and chose his words with care. “Well, I don’t want a VPSO.”

She came around the tail. “You’re dictating terms?”

He looked up to see that the smile in her eyes had moved to her lips.

“How much was it your father left you, again?”

*   *   *

At the post, Maggie, Jim’s dispatcher, was looking no more harried than usual, fielding 911 calls about drunks, vandalism, and sexual harassment. “Boss,” she said when they walked in, “we need help.”

“I know,” he said. “I talked to the Lord High Everything Else this morning. I think we’ll be getting another trooper out of the next graduating class, and maybe even two.”

“You’re kidding,” Maggie said, stunned.

“You’re kidding,” Kate said, stunned.

“If the price of gold stays up, and even if it doesn’t, the Suulutaq Mine is looking like it’s here to stay,” Jim said, pulling off his cap. “Niniltna’s transient population has already doubled, with the result that our caseload has tripled.”

“Quadrupled,” Maggie said.

“Someday, too soon,” Jim said, “something big is going to blow up and something bad will go down because we just don’t have the resources to deal with it.”

Like Kushtaka and Kuskulana, Kate thought. Their eyes met and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

“One trooper and one dispatcher, however magnificent,” he said, smiling at Maggie, who brightened right up, “are not sufficient to protect and to serve today’s Park.”

Kate applauded, discreetly.

“Thank you,” Jim said, “thank you very much.” To Maggie he said, “Anybody in the cells?”

“Probably should be,” Maggie said, “but there wasn’t anybody here to arrest ’em.”

“Good enough,” Jim said, and went into his office, followed by Kate and Mutt.

“You headed back to Kuskulana?” she said.

He nodded, booting up his computer to check his e-mail. “If Brillo is right and somebody pried up that hatch cover to find Mitch Halvorsen dead, that means somebody found him before yesterday. Which means there’s a good chance Tyler’s murder was retaliation. Just being there in uniform might help keep a lid on things.”

“They won’t talk to you,” Kate said.

“I know,” he said. “Kushtaka won’t, either. Still have to try.”

“Water on stone,” she said.

He affected mock surprise. “You didn’t know that was what most of police work is?”

There was too much e-mail and none of it worth reading. He opened a window into the state trooper dispatches from the previous twenty-four hours. A teenager had assaulted his mother and younger brother in Wasilla, a dozen fishermen were summonsed for fishing during a closed period along various parts of the Alaska coastline, a seventy-five-year-old man in Fairbanks shot at two troopers responding to a disturbance. The troopers returned fire, and no one was hurt in the subsequent shoot-out at the Midnight Sun Corral, which, Jim thought, would be drawing some unwelcome attention from the Lord High Everything Else. Troopers were supposed to hit what they aimed at.

Sexual assaults in Togiak and Tyonek (assholes); DUIs in Bethel, New Stuyahok, Girdwood, and Juneau (morons); three failures to log personal use shrimp on their permits in Whittier (idiots); and a bunch of misdemeanors that had much more to do with stupidity unleashed that it did an increase in lawlessness among the population. At any rate, there were no REDDIs or other alerts, which meant he could get on with the investigation in Kushtaka and Kuskulana.

“They won’t talk to you,” Kate said, and he realized it was for the second time.

He blanked his screen and sat back in his chair to look at her. “I’m not walking away from this, Kate.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m not saying you should. I’m just saying, absent a smoking gun, it won’t be easy.”

“Will they talk to you?” he said. “Kenny Halvorsen didn’t seem all that happy to see you yesterday.”

“Probably not. But there has to be someone with some sense down there. Someone who’s tired of the communal warfare and is ready to help end it.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “I’m not expecting cooperation, Kate. But I’ll get it. However I have to.”

“What, you going to run in the entire populations of both villages and sweat them under bright lights? You know it doesn’t work like that, Jim.”

He knew, but he was spared from answering when the door opened and Maggie poked her head in. He didn’t like the expression on her face, and he really didn’t like what she had to say.

“Got a call from Kushtaka.”

He felt his shoulders start to droop and shored them up. “What?”

“Rick Estes is dead.”

His eyes met Kate’s. “Heart attack?” he said without much hope.

Eighteen

FRIDAY, JULY 13, AT THAT SAME MOMENT

Kushtaka

“Who called the trooper?”

“Tony Christianson, Roger’s nephew, was on his way downriver. He got there about the same time we did. He had his phone out before he was out of sight.”

“Always some fucking Kuskulaner around when you don’t want them,” Pat Mack said, not bothering to lower his voice.

The eldest was silent, his bright black eyes half-closed, his seamed face set in deep lines.

The daypack found on the beach next to Rick’s body sat on the table in front of them, open and its contents arranged in neat piles. Lacy underpants, two bras, a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, a toiletries kit with toothbrush, toothpaste, a brush, hair gel.

When the marriage certificate had been found and spread out on the table for all to see, Dale’s wife had shrieked, a raw sound of agonized denial that echoed far beyond their own walls and ripped fresh wounds in everyone present. Staggering back as though from a blow, when she hit the wall, her knees gave out and she slid to the floor, where she remained, keening into her arms.

Dale Mack was unable to tear his eyes from the document. No matter how many times he read it, there was no denying the names on the certificate, or the signature of the officiant. Or the date. His daughter, his only child, the heir to his flesh and his bone and his goods and his tradition, his precious Jennifer, that she could betray him, betray her raising, her village in this worst of all ways. To do it on the same day they were laying to rest one of their own … he shuddered, and finally raised his head to look around the room.

Only Pat Mack met his eyes, and Pat looked away again almost immediately. The younger men were straining at a leash that with every passing moment threatened to snap. The older men were just as angry, but they had more control.

Dale didn’t know who he feared more.

The silence stretched on too long. A cough, a shuffle of feet, a whispered comment glared into silence, for the moment.

The eldest still said nothing. Either he could not think of a way forward, or he saw every way as bad, or he had grown too old to care.

“Everyone who has a skiff,” Pat said, getting to his feet. “Come with me.”

Nineteen

FRIDAY, JULY 13, TWO HOURS LATER

Kushtaka

“Son of a bitch,” Jim said.

Kate couldn’t recall ever seeing Jim quite this steamed. He never lost his temper at a scene and he was always careful of his use of language in any interaction with the public. Profanity offended a lot of people and could put an investigation on the wrong track from the get-go. In a place like the Park, whose instinct was always first to protect its own, a state trooper needed all the goodwill he could get.

In this case, the Park included Pat Mack, Dale Mack, and most of the rest of the male population of Kushtaka, who sat in skiffs nudged around the water’s edge of the tiny beach a mile south of the village. None of them said a word, which was probably a good thing.

The beach was no more than a short, narrow shelf of smooth rocks between the earthen bank and the river’s edge, almost completely hidden by the overhanging flora. As a trysting place, it was unparalleled.

Rick Estes dangled a foot above the gravel, wrapped in the less than loving embrace of Mother Alder. His face was bruised but not bloody, the skin white between contusions. His jaw hung open and a tooth was missing. Water dripped from his clothes and from the surrounding leaves and branches. Kate nudged a few rocks to one side with her foot. The rocks were a dryish gray where they were exposed to the air, dark with damp beneath.

It hadn’t rained in three days.

The only marks on the beach were where the skiffs currently there had nosed in. There was nothing to be seen besides the body. Not an empty beer bottle or pop can, not a candy wrapper, not so much as a used condom. Which last, Kate thought, given the seclusion provided the little beach by the sharp downriver bend and the overhanging branches was at minimum unlikely and at maximum just plain unbelievable.

“Son of a bitch,” Jim said again, this time with bitter emphasis. He was either incapable of or indifferent to hiding the fury that surrounded him like a fine, red mist, and even the most stoic among the Kushtaka males recoiled a little. Kate saw Jim realize it, saw him visibly bite back what else had been threatening to spill out from between his clenched teeth. After a long moment, pregnant with bile, he said curtly, “Who found the body?”

“I did,” Pat Mack said. No one else so much as twitched.

The question had obviously been expected and the answer to it equally obviously rehearsed, which did not improve Jim’s temper. “Finding murdered Kushtakans getting to be a hobby with you, Pat.”

“Mr. Mack,” Kate said, keeping her eyes lowered and her voice just high enough to be heard above the river. “I think what Sergeant Chopin meant to say was, Is this how you found Mr. Estes? Just like this?”

“No, I didn’t mean to say that,” Jim said.

Kate subsided into crushed silence, and the men of Kushtaka exchanged approving glances. Teach the woman to raise her voice in men’s affairs.

“What I meant to say is exactly what I said,” Jim said, destroying any goodwill he had generated by putting the uppity woman in her place. “This is the second dead Kushtakan you’ve found in a week, Pat, and from the looks of it, the second murdered Kushtakan as well.”

“He fell out of his boat,” Pat said.

Jim stared at him, and then he laughed—a sharp, mirthless crack. “Sure he did. And then the tide came in and tossed him up in the trees. That same tide that washed this little beach so sparkingly clean. Oh, wait. Except there is no tide this far up the river.”

Pat Mack didn’t blink. “Been warm, last couple days. Lotta meltoff from upstream glaciers.”

For one fraught moment Kate thought Jim was going to belt the old man one right in the kisser.

He might have, too, if Mutt hadn’t stopped it. Sniffing interestedly at the bushes, where a muskrat cowered in terror, she heard Jim’s raised voice and trotted over. She plunked down on her butt in front of the trooper and barked once, sharp and severe.

He looked down at her. She looked up at him. Blue eyes met yellow, and blue eyes fell first.

In the meantime, there was a stirring among the Kushtakans. Kate looked over to see them shifting uncomfortably in their skiffs and exchanging wary glances.

The wolf was an animal of great power in traditional Native culture. Okay by Kate if Mutt calling Jim to order frightened the living hell out of their archaic, misogynistic little hearts.

Mutt got up, turned around, and sat back down again, this time with her eyes fixed without favor on the men in the skiffs. There was some whispering, cut off by a fierce glance from Pat Mack.

“What time did you find him?” Jim said, his voice curt but no longer accusing.

“At noon,” Pat Mack said.

“What brought you down here?”

“Looking for fish coming upriver,” Pat Mack said. “There’s a big run due, according to the fish hawks.”

“And my cousin in Cordova,” one of the other men said. “He fishes the flats. He said a big run of reds passed upriver in between periods.”

“Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Any idea what Estes was doing out here?”

“Maybe he was looking for the fish, too,” Pat Mack said. “We all knew the run was due.”

Jim struggled with himself again.

Mutt looked over her shoulder.

“Okay,” Jim said, unclenching his teeth. “I want all of you out of here. Now.”

His four-footed babysitter notwithstanding, he didn’t say please.

*   *   *

He and Kate got the body into a bag and the bag into the skiff Jim had borrowed yet again from Roger Christianson, of necessity a different one this time. The two of them walked the area side by side, back and forth, and found precisely nothing. They found and followed the path that led from the little beach to Kushtaka all the way back to the village. There was some trash here and there, but nothing that hadn’t been lying out in the weather for at least a year.