Bad Blood (21 page)

Jim stood at the edge of the forest, looking at the collection of tumbledown little buildings, at the closed school, at the overgrown moose trail that passed for a main street. It was difficult, Kate thought, not to draw a comparison between Kushtaka and Kuskulana, and to find Kushtaka wanting.

Without a word, Jim turned and walked back to the little beach and the skiff with the body bag in it.

The Kushtaka landing was deserted as they passed it going back. Jim faced upriver, his face grim. “You know what they did, don’t you?”

Kate nodded. “They ran their skiffs up and down that section of river, using their wakes to wash off that little beach so you wouldn’t be able to find any evidence other than the body. Probably washed off the body pretty good, too.”

“Which means they know who did it. One of their own, or they wouldn’t have bothered.”

She said nothing, but her expression was eloquent.

“What?”

“Even if it wasn’t one of their own, if they think it was someone from, oh, say Kuskulana, maybe? They would have done exactly the same thing.”

“If they know who did it, then…”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “They will.”

He looked at the black body bag lying in the bow of the skiff and set his jaw. “Then I’ll just have to get to whoever did it first.”

Good luck with that,
Kate was too kind to say out loud.

“I feel like the chorus in a five-act play,” Jim said. “I can see everything that’s going on, but I can’t do fuck all about it.”

“Exit, pursued by a bear,” Kate said.

“Mitch Halvorsen died first,” he said, thinking out loud. “Then someone found his body.”

“Who the first time?”

“That I don’t know yet, but someone in Kuskulana. Some kid, maybe, or a bunch of kids, screwing around.”

It could have happened that way,
Kate thought. “We’re going with Kenny found him the second time.”

“Yeah,” Jim said, “two days after Tyler died. I want to know exactly when Kenny got home. Does he fly?”

“I don’t think so,” Kate said. She didn’t say that his cousin, Pete Liverakos, had. She’d never thought to follow up on who had inherited Pete’s airplane. A mistake, and not her first.

“Then we better pray he flew in on George. If he came upriver by boat, it’ll be that much harder to track his movements.”

“So he found Mitch on Tuesday, nailed the hatch back down, went across the river and killed Tyler, and then waited two days to ‘discover’ Mitch’s body?”

“It’s the explanation that makes the most sense.”

“Why wait two days?”

“Two days be more convincing than one.”

“Not to you.”

“No.” Jim’s voice was grim. “Come on, Kate. You know as well as I do that a murderer is the biggest optimist there is. They’ve just killed someone and because nobody’s noticed—yet—who did it, they think they can get away with everything else, too. If Kenny Halvorsen did kill Tyler Mack in revenge for Tyler killing his brother, he wasn’t going to boggle at blowing smoke my way.”

“If Tyler killed Mitch, and Kenny killed Tyler, who killed Rick Estes? And why? The books would have been balanced with Tyler’s death.”

“Maybe Kenny thinks two Kushtakers equals one Kuskulaner.”

Kate said nothing.

He knew that silence. “What?”

“Granted,” she said, “things between Kushtaka and Kuskulana have been steadily deteriorating ever since ANCSA. But murder is one hell of an escalation from robbery, even assault.”

“So?”

“So something started this particular chain of events,” she said. “Let’s go look at Mitch Halvorsen’s crawl space again.”

*   *   *

By contrast with Jim’s last visit, when people had been if not welcoming then at least civil, this trip through the village, the Kuskulanans were out of sight. Kate thought she saw Carol Christianson peer out a window as they went by, but no one came out to say hello.

It could be the fact that they were carrying a black body bag between them.

Or it could be something else entirely.

They stowed the body in the back of the Cessna and walked to Mitch Halvorsen’s half-built house. The hole Jim had cut in the floor gaped large beneath a blue tarp.

“What?” Kate said.

“I had that duct-taped to a fare-thee-well when we left yesterday.”

It was up by three corners and flapping in the breeze. “Wind could have pulled it up,” Kate said.

“Sure,” Jim said.

The ladder was still in place. Before they went down, Jim pulled it up and looked at the treads. There was mud on them. Jim tested it with a finger. “Dry, but not that dry,” he said.

“Someone’s been down there since you pulled Mitch’s body out?”

“Be my guess.”

He replaced the ladder and they both descended. Last time Jim had only had his flashlight. This time Kate was carrying a six-volt LED lantern out of the plane that lit up the crawl space to the farthest corner. It was bright enough for him to see her expression. “What?”

“I don’t like dark, enclosed spaces. Never have.” She looked up, to see Mutt’s head outlined against the rafters as she peered inquisitively over the edge. “It helps that you cut out the hatch.”

“Be hard to nail us inside here like they did Mitch,” Jim said.

He saw her swallow, and nod. He focused on the floor. “His body was sitting at the bottom of the ladder.”

Her light swept the floor. Outlines of boxes were plain in the dust. She dropped to one knee. “A couple of pallets’ worth of boxes moved in and out of here, and I’d say fairly recently, like maybe during the last two or three days.”

He duck-walked to look over her shoulder. The dust was thick enough that there were outlines of boxes overlapping themselves, newer over older. “I should have done an inventory.”

“Of the crawl space?”

“Yeah.” He let his flashlight run over the boxes against the walls. “Because I think there are fewer boxes here than when I was down here last time.”

“What was that Brillo said?” Kate said.

“About what?”

“That if Mitch hadn’t died of dehydration, he would have died of alcohol poisoning?”

She pulled out a pocketknife.

*   *   *

An hour later, they were back outside, sitting on the edge of the house. The hole was again covered with the blue tarp and duct-taped to the floor. Jim uncapped a bottle of water and drank deeply. Kate finished it off. They were both sweaty and covered in dust. “So, no dope or booze on the premises,” he said.

“Not now,” she said. She looked down the road that led to the house. “Far enough out of town.”

“And on the right side of it for a bootlegging operation,” he said. “The airstrip’s five minutes away, and the mine’s, what, forty, fifty miles north-northeast.”

“Which doesn’t prove anything,” she said.

“Nope,” he said. “And wouldn’t, unless we caught them in the act.”

She nodded, and stood up to walk around the perimeter of the building site. “Here,” she said.

There was a track as wide as an ATV heading off into the bushes, concealed by a thick stand of alders.

“They fly it into Kuskulana,” Jim said.

“They offload it into Mitch’s basement,” she said.

“And then they haul it up the trail,” he said. “Just enough at a time to fill the trailer on a four-wheeler.”

“Or a snow machine,” Kate said. “You could fit, what, four, six cases of liquor and a lot more of beer into one trailer. Leaving plenty of room for a kilo or two of cocaine. Sell it fast and get out.”

Jim pushed back a branch. “At some point, this track probably joins up with the track the village put into the mine.”

She nodded. “No point in putting in a whole new trail when the village already did it for you.”

“There will be a little turnout,” he said. “Close to the mine.”

“But under some kind of cover,” she said. “So you can’t see it from the air.”

He nodded. “So, did somebody get greedy? One of the partners start cheating the others? Siphoning off some product, selling it on his own?”

She drummed her feet gently against the side of the house. “Bootlegging is a long tradition with the Halvorsens.”

“That guy,” he said. “Pete Liverakos. Cousin to the Halvorsens, right?”

She nodded. “He was originally from Outside. Lost his folks, some kind of car or plane wreck, I think. His nearest relatives lived here, Mitch and Kenny’s parents, I think, and they took him in. He was fifteen or sixteen. Early teens.”

“Rumors about him being a bootlegger true?”

She nodded.

“So we’re not too upset over his tragic loss,” Jim said.

“No,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Not too upset.”

“Not that it did any good in the long run,” he said.

She nodded again. “Like a hydra,” she said. “Chop off the head of one bootlegger, six more pop up in his place.”

“Too lucrative,” he said. “So how many Halvorsens left?”

“After Mitchell? Far as I know, Kenny is it. Not really the killing type, I would have said.”

Jim looked at her. “Everybody’s the killing type, Kate. Given the right motivation. You know that.”

She looked away.

“I found a Brown Jug flyer in Tyler Mack’s cabin,” Jim said.

She frowned at her feet. “You think he was going into competition with the Halvorsens?”

“He ran with Boris Balluta.”

Kate thought about that for a minute. “The new Howie and Willard? Only maybe just that little bit smarter.”

“Not so much, as things turned out.”

“No.”

“If Boris or Tyler or both of them killed Mitch, and Kenny killed Tyler in retaliation…”

“And Rick Estes, too? Unlikely.” She frowned. “For that matter, we don’t know Rick was murdered.”

“Somebody sure smacked him around.”

“Smacking around and murder are two different things. The wake from all those skiffs could have bounced him around that beach pretty good.” She added, “Did you see his hands? The knuckles were cut and bruised, like he’d held his own for a while, anyway.”

“Why would the Kushtakers kill one of their own?”

The weird cluck of the sandhill crane sounded over the trees, and they both raised their heads to watch five of the graceful wide-winged birds sail overhead like kites. Mutt watched, too, with equal interest but from a far different motive.

“You know, Kate,” he said, “every time Niniltna votes to go dry, my caseload drops by eighty percent.”

“I know,” she said.

“But I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t try to talk Bernie into moving the Roadhouse into town.”

“It’d about put the bootleggers out of business,” she said. “Lot easier to just go in a bar and buy a drink. And no danger of the wrath of Jim falling on them when they did.”

“Also,” he said, “girls in bars.”

“True,” she said.

“And it’d be easier to control anyone who got out of hand,” he said.

“And a lot shorter commute.”

“Also true.”

“I want to try something,” she said. “Climb back down in the crawl space.”

He returned to the house and disappeared down the hole in the floor. She walked ten paces from the house and stopped. “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes.”

She walked another ten paces. “How about now?”

It wasn’t a perfect experiment, because hatch and frame were two hundred miles away in Anchorage, but Kate was out of range of Jim’s voice well before she got a hundred feet down the road to town. She was at least relieved to determine that Mitch Halvorsen hadn’t died screaming for help within earshot of the entire population of Kuskulana.

Jim climbed out of the hatch and uncapped another bottle of water. They sat down next to each other on the edge of the house, legs dangling over the side. The sun was warm and a slight breeze stirred strands of her hair. He watched her drink, the movement of the strong muscles in her neck as she swallowed. The scar that bisected her throat from ear to ear, once an angry reminder of her life as an investigator for the Anchorage DA, had faded to a faint white line. Although it would never completely disappear, and she had never deliberately tried to cover it up with turtlenecks or buttoned collars. She wore it less as a badge of honor, he thought, than as a declaration of war.
Don’t fuck with me.

Smart people didn’t. “Bernie would never go for it,” he said.

“Neither would Annie Mike,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Crap.”

She gestured in back of them. “This explains a lot.”

He thought of the alcohol- and drug-related calls the trooper post had been receiving on a daily basis. Burglary. Robbery. Assault. DUIs. Spousal abuse. Child abuse. Murder. Daily acts of random violence. “How much of this is going to the mine workers,” he said, “and how much to locals?”

She didn’t answer, and he said, “You’re pretty lukewarm about finding a bootlegging operation in your own backyard, Shugak. What, because their sales seem to be directed mostly toward Suulutaq miners, you don’t have to give a damn?”

Stung, she said, “Not true.” And then she remembered the young miner on overload in the Riverside Cafe, and never giving him a second thought after she’d relocated him to a cell at the post. Would she have followed up on a Park rat? “Not true,” she repeated with less certainty.

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced.

She might have argued, but just then Kenny Halvorsen appeared, driving up on a beat-up Honda ATV. He pulled to a stop and let the engine idle, looking the two of them over, his gaze lingering on Kate. It wasn’t friendly. “What are you doing up here?” he said.

“Investigating your brother’s murder,” Jim said.

Kenny grinned without humor. “You’re on the wrong side of the river for that.”

His eyes had dark circles under them, and his features were sunken, as if it had been a while since his last square meal. Mutt, lying on the ground next to Kate, sat up and fixed an unwavering yellow stare on his face. He gave her an indifferent glance and went back to looking at Kate. A steady growl rumbled out of Mutt’s throat, stilled when Kate knotted a hand in her ruff.

Jim capped his water bottle and stood up, towering over the other man. “As it happens, I’m also investigating the murder of Tyler Mack. Where were you last Tuesday morning?”