Killing Grounds (24 page)

She was lying full length on the body of Evan "Mac" McCafferty, Cal Meany's summer hire, Dani's lover and the only witness to both of their murders. He was unconscious. She pulled herself to her knees to take a closer look. His pulse was rapid and thready, his skin clammy and his respiration labored. Blood clotted the hair at his temple, his left arm was twisted back to front. His ribs moved loosely beneath her hands as Kate got to her feet.

Neil Meany, standing at the edge of the open hold, reached down with the boat hook, he sharp metal hook at the end of the wooden handle caught Kate on the twisted flesh of her scar. It stung, and she felt a arm trickle pool in the hollow at the base of her throat.

It was not so very long ago that Kate herself had used a similar boat hook in her own defense. They were very effective weapons, as the grave in Dutch Harbor could attest to. She stood very still, and met Neil Meany eyes.

He was very calm, too calm. 'Im good with this," he said.

"So I see," Kate said, her voice level.

"My brother didn't think so. My brother didn't think I could do anything. I guess I showed him."

Kate knew a momentary desire to laugh out loud and fought it back.

"He wouldn't let me on the boat did you know that? Did you?" he repeated, nudging her with the boat hook.

"No," she said. "No, I didn't know that."

"Come on up," he said, urging her with the hook, as if he were going to tug her on deck the way he would a gaffed halibut. "Come on."

She swallowed convulsively. "Ya'll-you might skewer me with that thing if you keep it on me while I do."

He glanced at the boat hook in some surprise. "Oh. Yes. Of course." And he removed it, as simple as that.

In the hold looking up, with no access to the controls or escape, she had no tactical advantage. On deck would be better. If he didn't gaff her over the side first. Besides, the smell of gas fumes that had collected below decks made her head swim, and she knew she had to get out of them if she was going to retain either sense or consciousness.

The hold wasn't that deep, but she was barely five feet tall. She flexed her knees and swung her arms, once, twice, on the third swing jumping to catch the edge of the hold with her hands. An agile twist and she was on deck. She could still smell the gas fumes, but they weren't as strong on deck as they were in the hold, and her head began to clear.

Not five feet away Neil Meany faced her, holding the boat hook across his chest in both hands in the manner of an infantryman waiting on the order to charge. Fix bayonets, Kate thought giddily, and gave herself a shake. This would do no good, no good at all.

Gentle wavelets lapped at the hull. The rain had eased off into a heavy mist. The skiff was gone, and Jim with it. No cavalry. Fog swirled around the drifter, over the deck and around Kate and Neil Meany.

McCafferty's labored breathing echoed up out of the hold, and Neil Meany made a gesture of distaste. "Close up the hold," he said.

She thought of the gas fumes, looked at the boat hook Meany was still holding and closed up the hold. When she was done, he said, "Thank you."

Just as politely she replied, "You're welcome," and again had to repress a fit of hysterical laughter. "Neil," she said when she could, "put down the boat hook."

"No," he said. "I know how to use it. I told my brother I did. He didn't believe me, but I did. I showed him."

"You certainly did," she said, entirely without irony. "But now that you've showed him, you don't need it anymore. Put it down."

His eyes flashed and for a second he looked exactly like his brother. "Don't tell me what to do!"

"All right," she said. "I won't."

"Don't tell me what to do," he said more calmly. "My brother always told me what to do. I don't like it." As one recalled to his manners, he said, "I'm sorry, Ms. Shugak, 1 don't know where my head was at. There's a deck chair right behind you. Unfold itslowly!"

She froze as the boat hook flashed out within inches of her face.

"Slowly," he said. "That's right. Please. Be seated."

She sat. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

She sat and he stood for a few silent moments. She was wet clear through Jack's windbreaker and her jeans, but her feet were still dry. As long as her feet were dry, there was hope. She looked across the deck. Neil Meany seemed settled into position for the duration. She was careful to speak politely and formally. "Can you tell me about it, Mr. Meany?"

He looked at her blankly. She tried again. "What convinced you to come to Alaska with your brother?"

He actually laughed, an incongruously robust roar of merriment that seemed to ring off the enclosing mist. "He loaned me money to go back to school and get my master's degree. He loaned me the money to study for my Ph.D. It was all very formal, papers drawn up by a lawyer, notarized, the whole nine yards."

His mouth twisted into a mirthless grin. "He didn't talk me into coming up here, Ms. Shugak. He called the loans, and said I had to work them off, working up here for him. He said he wasn't asking for much, he said any summer we couldn't gross two hundred and fifty thousand was a summer that wasn't worth fishing, and that I'd get a deck share." He shifted. "When he put it like that it didn't seem so bad. But I didn't work out on the boat. I couldn't read charts, he said. I kept almost running her aground, he said. I had no feel for running the reel, he said. And"his voice dropped, as if he were confessing a sin so terrible it was almost too much to speak it out loud"I get seasick."

The mist swirled across the deck, engulfing him in a shroud of white for one brief moment, then wafted away.

"So he put Frank on the boat and me on shore."

It didn't take Kate more than a few seconds to grasp the importance of this. "And the crew share on a setnet site is a lot less than the crew share on a drifter, and it would have taken that much longer for you to pay off your brother's loan."

He looked pleased with her, as if he'd spent too much of his life reducing his thoughts to words of one syllable and welcomed the opportunity for a higher level of discourse. "He said," he repeated, as if the repetition alone were enough to convince anyone of the Tightness of his actions, "he said if I crewed three summers for him, I could pay him off and have enough left over to finance the rest of my course work, and enough to support me while I wrote my dissertation."

He brightened. "I'm a Yeats scholar, did I tell you?" He straightened and declaimed to the fog, " 'The Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.' "

The sound of the Irish poet's verses died away, and he slumped back against the console, face lapsing into sorrowful lines. "Bitter of tongue," he said again. "My brother was nothing but. Just like my father." He looked across at her. "What was your father like, Ms. Shugak?"

He didn't raise me to kill people, she thought, but fortunately Meany wasn't all that interested in her reply.

"Mine was just like my brother. He hit us. Whether we did what he said or not, he hit us. Damn him. Damn him!" He struck the deck viciously with the boat hook. "Damn him!"

Yeah, yeah, Kate thought, here we go, let's blame two, maybe three murders and two felony assaults on a repressed memory of child abuse. The smell of gas tickled her nostrils, seeping up insidiously from the crack between hatch cover and deck. She wondered if there was a leak somewhere. If there was, she wanted off this boat right now.

Deliberately, she checked the beginnings of Meany's rage with a question, maintaining the polite and formal manner of an envoy from the undersecretary. "What happened that night, Mr. Meany? What happened the night of the Fourth? Did you see your brother bring the drifter into the bay on your way home from Anne Flanagan's?"

"Yes," he said obediently, and then looked surprised at himself. "Yes. I was on my way back to the setnet site, and I saw him drop anchor."

"That would be at about midnight?" Kate deliberately fudged the time to see what he'd say.

He frowned. "More like one. Probably closer to one-thirty. I went out to talk to him." He looked at her and said earnestly, "You see, I'd just spent the evening with Anne and her children. You know Anne Flanagan?" Kate nodded. Meany's sigh was ecstatic. "A wonderful woman, Ms. Shugak. She reads poetry, did you know that? We talked of poetry that night. She could quote lines from 'The Second Coming.' His face contorted. "God, how I miss it, the conversation, the erudition, the simple awareness of the existence of literature. People call it an ivory tower, but they don't know. They don't know, Ms. Shugak. I would have given anything, anything to get back to it."

Kate remembered, from a long way off, sitting in Anne Flanagan's cabin and sneering at academic frustration as a motive for murder.

"And on the way home from Anne Flanagan's on the night of the Fourth," she said, nudging him back to the narrative, "you saw your brother's boat arrive."

"And on the way home I saw my brother's boat arrive," he said obligingly, "and I went out to talk to him."

Before she could stop herself, she said, "How on earth did you get out there without anyone seeing you?"

His smile was sly. He sang, "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave no proof through the night that my skiff was still there. They were partying so hearty on the bay that night that I could have stripped naked, painted myself purple and set fire to the skiff and no one would have noticed."

Lost in the crowd, Jack had said. "What did you say to your brother?"

"I told him I wanted to go back to school. I told him I'd overheard his conversation with Bill Nickle, that I knew what he was trying to do"

"Conversation with Bill Nickle?" Kate said sharply. Neil Meany looked surprised, and she apologized at once. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Meany. Please continue."

"I told him I knew what they were up to," he said, like a child reciting his lesson for the day. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. "A single-destination resort, that's what they called it. Can you imagine? 'Down the mountain walls from where Pan's cavern is'? He was going to bring in tourists to copulate in the foam with the nymphs and satyrs. Can you imagine?"

Kate couldn't.

"I may not want to live here," he said, "but I can certainly appreciate what is and what isn't appropriate to the region. My brother," he added disdainfully, "was planning some kind of northern Las Vegas. Really."

"He laughed at me," Neil Meany said, his face flushing. "That night? He laughed at me, just like he always laughed at me. I hit him with the boat hook, and he stopped laughing." He paused. "He was surprised, I think, that I was strong enough. But I was. Of course," he added, with the true scholar's meticulous regard for the truth, "somebody had been before me. He looked like he'd been in a fight. He was all bruised and bloody." His smile was blinding. "It was wonderful."

Especially wonderful that he wasn't moving as quickly as he usually did, Kate thought. "You didn't quite kill him."

He stared at her. "What?"

"There was water in his lungs. He was still breathing when you pitched him overboard."

"Really." His brow furrowed. "I strangled him with the boat hook. I pressed him back against the cabin, right here" he pointed to a spot that Kate didn't bother to look at"and pressed the handle against his throat, as hard as I could. He made the most awful gurgling sounds. I was certain he was dead before he went over the side." He thought it over in frowning silence, and then dismissed it with the wave of a hand, clearly deciding it didn't matter. He hadn't denied pitching his brother overboard, so Kate decided that cause of death didn't matter, either. "Where did the knife come from?"

He shrugged. "He grabbed it off the deck. I took it away from him and stabbed him with it before I threw him over."

"Why? If you thought he was already dead?"

He smiled again. "I liked killing my brother, Ms. Shugak. I liked it so much I wanted to do it again." The smile widened into a wholehearted grin. "If I could have figured out a way to hang him from the yardarm, I would have done that, too."

"How about Dani, Meany?" she said, abandoning formality now that she had his confession. "Did you like killing Dani, too?"

The grin vanished, and the bastard actually got tears in his eyes. "No, Ms. Shugak. No, I didn't. But they saw me."

"Dani and Mac?"

He nodded. "They saw me come ashore that morning, on their way back from their little beach."

"You didn't know they had at first, did you?"

"No." He said it sadly. "They told me. They told me they wouldn't tell if I gave them money. Money to get away, they said." He looked at her, earnest, sincere, lethal. "But I couldn't give them money, could I? I needed it for tuition and fees." He smiled again and it was all Kate could do not to flinch away from what it did to his face. "So I said I would, and then last night I followed them upstream. Mac ran when I killed Dani. I had to run after him. He made me run after him. I had to chase him all the way down the trail to the beach. He was at the skiff when I caught up with him. This was in the skiff." He held out the boat hook, made a face and gave a little-boy shrug. "I was angry. He made me angry."

“ You hit me, too, didn't you?" she said. "You were on board the Freya last night, looking forwhat were you looking for, anyway?" The smell of gas fumes was growing stronger by the minute, she thought, vaguely alarmed. There had to be a leak somewhere.

"You frightened me with your questions," he said reproachfully. "I wish you hadn't, but you did. I had to know what you knew. And then you came back, and the only way off the Freya was through you." He raised a hand, palm up, as if to say, What else was there for me to do?

She didn't bother asking him if he'd meant to kill her. She'd been waiting, on alert, for an opportunity to jump him, but the toxic vapor from the leaking gas made her head swim. She fought off a wave of nausea, and asked a question at random. "How did you get to and from shore without my hearing or seeing your skiff?"