Killing Grounds (22 page)

"Could be anything," Kate objected.

"Handy," Jack pointed out. "If the killer just used a rock or something he grabbed up, we can't prove premeditation.

"I could give a shit about degrees here, I want the prick that would bash a teenage girl over the head and leave her. Jim said, and started casting about for a blunt instrument.

In the end Kate found it, a smooth, three-foot length or driftwood caught in the snarl of dead root at the opposite end of the fallen spruce. Balancing on the spruce's trunk, she very carefully knelt, one knee at a time, clutched a branch whose needles had rusted, and leaned down. The wound to her head throbbed painfully with the sudden rush of blood, but it was worth it when her groping hand grabbed the length of wood. She brought it back up and looked at the dark patch on the thick end that caught her eye. Could just be mud from the bottom of the brook, but she didn't think so.

She rose just as carefully to her feet, and stepped quickly down the trunk to the expanse of gravel. Mutely, she held the makeshift club out to Jim. He held it in his fingertips and scrutinized it carefully. The same thing that had caught Kate's attention caught his as well, a smudge of something at the thick end. "Could just be mud," he said, echoing her thought for the second time that day.

"Could be. But look." She stood facing the downed spruce. "Suppose the victim is about to step on the trunk to cross the brook to the bank. Suppose the killer is right behind her, and snatches up the driftwood."

"Pow, he brings it down on the victim's head" Jim said.

"Right-handed, then," Jack said. "And then, when the victim falls face forward into the creekdoesn't matter if she's unconscious or dead, because if she's unconscious she'll drown pretty shortlythen the killer climbs up on the trunk, crosses to the bank, tosses his club in the water, he thinks to float away or at least to be washed clean, and goes on his merry way." He took the club from Jim and examined it. "Just dumb luck it fell wrong side down for the killer and right side up for us."

"And cold water always delays rigor," Jim added, "so the time of death is confused."

"If he knew that," Kate said.

"If he cared," Jack said. He took a deep breath, and raised his voice. "Johnny?"

Johnny turned reluctantly. "Yeah, Dad?"

"Need you to take a look."

The color, only just returned to the boy's face, washed out again.

"Jack," Kate said.

The trooper, sensing something off, said nothing.

"Come on," Jack said, beckoning.

Johnny came with laggard steps, his eyes on the ground. He stopped just out of his father's reach.

"Come on, kid," Jack said, his voice gentling. "Just take a look. Is she the girl you saw the night of the Fourth?"

"What?" Kate said.

Unwilling, irresolute, Johnny looked anyway. He didn't gasp or stumble backwards, but Kate got the feeling it was only because of pride. His voice was thin and shaky. "How come her face is so dark?"

"She's been lying facedown for maybe twelve hours," his father told him. "Blood pools in the down side of the body after death. Is it her?"

The boy swallowed hard, and nodded. "It's her."

Kate stepped between the body and the boy. "What the hell's going on here, Morgan?"

Again, Jack took in a big breath. When he spoke there was a quality to his voice that Kate hadn't heard before, a mixture of embarrassment and pugnacity. "Johnny has something to tell you. Something he should have told you yesterday. Something I should have made him tell you." He squeezed Johnny's shoulder. "Go ahead."

Johnny looked up at Kate, and then away. When he spoke his voice was low, and she had to concentrate to hear his words.

The gist of the story seemed to be that the evening of the Fourth, the aunties had sprung Johnny from his fish camp duties (they had become duties his first day on shore) and he had gone for a hike down the creek, scouting likely locations for fishing with a rod and reel. He'd taken his father's .30-06 in case he met up with a bear with attitude, and, as Jack said, "The only way he can get backwoods experience is to go out into the backwoods."

Involuntarily Kate remembered her father and the deer hunt. Jack mistook the quality of her silence and said defensively, "He wanted to go alone. The bears are mostly after fish now, anyway, Kate. I didn't think he'd come to any harm." He added, "And he didn't."

"I didn't either," she said, "and I was six when my father turned me loose with a twenty-two. It's all right, Jack, I do understand. That part of it, anyway. Go ahead, Johnny. Tell us the rest."

Johnny cleared his throat and resumed his story. "It was getting late, and I'd run out of Jelly Bellys so I was thinking about turning around and heading back to fish camp for some dinner, when I heard somebody scream. It sounded like a girl, and it sounded close by, so I went to take a look." A slow flush climbed painfully up into his face. "I saw them across the creek. Right here, actually, on this beach. It was a girl, and she was with somebody. They, ah, they had all their clothes off, and they were, well, you know, they were doing it."

By now Johnny's face was as red as his shirt, but he struggled to get the story out nonetheless. "I was curious," he said, trying to meet Kate's eyes and not having much luck with it. "So I watched."

"They didn't see you, or hear you?"

If possible, his face became even redder. "No. They wereumnoisy. Especially her."

"This is her?" He nodded. "What happened next?"

He squirmed. "Well, theythey finished, is all. And after, they got dressed and left."

"How?"

He nodded over their heads. "They walked across that tree trunk and went into the woods."

"You ever see the guy before?" He shook his head. "What did he look like?"

"Uhskinny, dark hair." He floundered. He hadn't been watching the guy.

Kate rescued him. "That's it?"

Her matter-of-fact tone seemed to hearten him. He squared his shoulders. "That's it. What do we do now?"

She was up on the trunk and halfway across before the trooper caught up with her. The trunk shook beneath his added weight, and then shook again when Jack and Johnny mounted it.

It wasn't simple erosion, others had walked that trunk before her, and not just Johnny. Once on the bank, she could see a faint but clearly discernible trail leading through the brush, a trail which appeared to parallel the direction of Amartuq Creek. Could be a game trail, she thought. Certainly could have started out as one, and been used by the occasional sport fisherman.

Not to mention the occasional murderer.

A hand grabbed her arm. "Hold it, Kate," Jim said. "We can't leave her for the critters to eat on."

"They left her alone overnight, didn't they?" she said impatiently.

"So we got lucky," he said. "Come on."

"You go, you bring her out in the skiff. I'll meet you on the beach, at the Meanys' setnet site."

"You take the body, I'll take the trail."

She snorted. "Yeah, right," she said, and was gone.

Before Jim could stop them, Jack and Johnny had shoved past and vanished in her wake. He swore once, and then, realizing he was alone with a body that would only ripen with the day, taking any forensic revelations it had with it, he turned back to the grim task of removing both it and himself from four-legged temptation.

The undergrowth was still wet from the rain, and they were soon soaked through to the skin. No one complained, not even Kate.

"I'm sorry," Jack said, crashing through the brush behind her. "Johnny should have told you what he saw."

"Why didn't he?"

"I told him not to."

"I see." The trail turned sharply and she passed beneath a low-lying branch without giving warning of its existence. She was pleased with the resulting crack of wood on bone, followed by a yelp of pain and a curse.

"You okay, Dad?"

"I'm all right," Jack muttered, and raised his voice. "I know it was stupid, Kate. I know it was interfering. Hell, it was probably obstruction of justice. I just" They came to a dry creek bed with steep sides. The trail led down into it and up again, and without hesitation Kate bent her knees and slid down it and up the opposite side.

Breathless behind her, Jack continued, "From your descriptions of the Meany family, I figured it was the daughter and the summer hire. But I didn't think it had anything to do with Meany's murder." She glanced briefly over her shoulder. "Okay, okay, everything has to do with murder." He quick-stepped over the gnarled root of a very old Sitka spruce. "I just didn't want Johnny involved. Not in any of it, not even peripherally. I'm sorry," he repeated, like a mantra, or a magic charm powerful enough to exonerate himself. "I"

"Don't be an idiot," was her comforting reply, and his head snapped up to see her stopped on the trail, smiling at him. "You're supposed to be overprotective, you're his father. It's in the job description."

He stared at her for a moment. Then in a movement so quick she didn't have time to dodge back out of the way, his hand whipped out and caught the back of her neck.

Johnny, who had fallen a little behind, came panting up from the rear. "Jeez, you guys!" He pushed through the bushes to get around them and was off up the trail like a hare in front of the hounds.

Confession, absolution and a Mariners cap and Johnny was ready once again to take on the world. Boys of thirteen believe they are strong and true and immortal and invincible, and drawing attention to the fact that they are only aspiring heroes with a long apprenticeship ahead of them is tactless in the extreme. Kate didn't try, merely fell in behind.

Jack, crashing along in their rear, said, "Who looks good to you for this one?"

"It has to be the same person who killed Meany."

He agreed, but played devil's advocate anyway, a routine they'd performed a thousand times before. "Why?"

"He made it back to Alaganik after all, and somebody finished him off there, not Cordova, like I thought."

"You thought he'd been killed in Cordova, and his body brought back to Alaganik?"

"Yes. Gull saw Meany trying to tie up his drifter at ten o'clock. Said Meany rammed the slip and stripped the gears."

"This would be Shitting Seagull of Intergalactic Space Dock fame?"

"He's a perfectly reliable source," Kate snapped.

There was a brief silence as they pushed through the brush, which Jack broke with a reluctant laugh. "Jesus. Kate, we've got to talk."

"And Mary Balashoff saw him drop anchor in Alaganik two hours later. She said he was clumsy, stumbling around the deck. That wasn't the man I saw when he delivered on the opener, so I thought it was somebody else. The boy, maybe, or the brother. Then we found out about the fight."

"I've met Tim Sarakovikoff," Jack observed. "If I'd had that young man teaching me my manners, I might not be walking any too steady my own self."

"True. So Meany did make it back to Alaganik, which means he was killed in Alaganik."

"And you think Dani Meany saw something she shouldn't have, and got dead for it."

"Yes."

"What was she like?"

She thought for another ten feet. "Lolita with heart," she said at last.

He digested this as the trail narrowed to snake around a knoll of mountain hemlock. "You liked her."

She remembered Dani's angry face during Kate's interrogation of her brother in the Meanys' cabin. "I admired her loyalty to her brother."

"Was she capable of blackmail?"

Kate's laugh was short and unamused.

"I see." He followed in silence for a moment. "So? Who looks good to you for Meany?"

"You mean besides the Anchorage family he screwed out of the setnet site, the setnetter whose gear he cut loose, the aunties whose fish camp he wanted to usurp, the husbands of the other wives he screwed and the fishermen whose strike he broke?"

"Besides those," Jack agreed.

She shrugged. "The family looks best, like always."

"Morgan's First Law," he agreed cheerfully.

"Now excluding Dani. And Frank's got an alibi."

"So. The wife or the brother."

She nodded. "They were here, anyway. The brother's got a weak-kneed alibi, but I haven't been able to figure out how he'd get from the beach to the drifter without anybody seeing him. I'm telling you, Jack, I'm still surprised there was only one death that night. It was totally nuts out."

"Nuts how?"

"Fourth of July nuts. They were jousting with boat hooks and water-skiing on hatch covers and playing chicken, for crissake!"

"Uh-huh." Jack nodded. "Maybe drinking a little, too?"

Kate snorted. "Yeah, maybe. Anyway, pretty much everybody was pretty much up all night. If the brother went out to the drifter, if he wasn't spotted, he would have been run over and sunk."

"Or just lost in the crowd," Jack pointed out.

Kate had thought of that, too. "True."

"And the wife?"

Kate remembered Marian's hurtle down the beach to their skiff. You're sure he's dead? she had asked them. You're sure? Kate gave a mental shrug. It wouldn't be the first time a suspect had acted the part of the grieving survivor. And now Dani was dead, Dani who had been the only witness to whether or not Marian had spent the night of the Fourth in the cabin. Kate could understand, even approve of the impulse to kill Cal Meany. But a teenage daughter as well? Still, "Meany was strangled. His trachea was crushed."

"By hand?"

"I don't know."

"Rope burns, like that?"

"Jim didn't mention any."

"Then there weren't any. How strong did she look to you?"

"Not that strong."

They shoved through wet salmonberry bushes. "She still could have done it, Kate. Remember the time it took us plus six cops to subdue that woman up on Hillside?"

"1 remember."

He raised his voice. "Johnny! Slow down!"

After what seemed like an unnecessarily long time thrashing through the brush the three emerged together into a clearing. Beyond the clearing was the mouth of the Amartuq. Through the trees they could see beach, driftwood, drifters and Freya riding peacefully at anchor. The tide was almost all the way in, the ceiling had come back down and it was threatening rain again.