Breakup (28 page)

"He tossed it. Probably used it first to scare the bear off. We never would have heard the shots over the noise of the road or the truck's engine."

Dan sat up straight in his chair. "Remember, Kate, when we said we'd called the trooper? Stewart was surprised. He didn't think anyone official could make it to the scene so quick."

"He was probably counting on it," she agreed.

"Maybe we could go back up there," Jim said, "run a search pattern, see if we can dig that rifle up."

"You know that nine-millimeter Cindy took out after Ben with?" At their nods, Kate said, "She told me she pitched it into the river. Hell, it's right there, all you have to do is step to the edge of the cliff and let go. Stewart's rifle is probably offshore of Port Dick by now, and probably the pack with it, so we can't look for gun oil or anything on the fabric."

"But-"

"It's in the river," Kate said flatly. "I'd bet every dime I've got on it."

Her eyes fell on the fat manila envelope reposing innocently on one shelf. Well. Maybe not every dime.

There was no dragging the Kanuyaq, which emptied into the Gulf at a gallop during a spring thaw with heavy runoff. "So," Jim said heavily, breaking the glum silence, "Harrigan and Carol Stewart were having an affair."

"His landlord said there had been a girlfriend," Kate said. "He said she was blonde. Carol Stewart was blonde."

"The landlord also said the girlfriend might have been a brunette," Jim said. "So, Stewart finds out about Harrigan and his wife, and he plans his revenge. He brings Harrigan up last fall, breaks his leg and leaves him for dead, and brings his wife up this spring and feeds her to a bear? This what you're telling me here, Shugak?"

"Yes."

"How did he kill her?" Jim asked. "He couldn't have used the rifle, there's no way you could hide that from the coroner. You're the one says he's so smart, he'd have to have known that. So how did he kill her? You hardwired into that, too?"

She ignored the sarcasm in his tone because she knew it wasn't really directed at her, and reached in her pocket. The Swiss Army knife clattered to the table. They stared at it, mesmerized. "Auntie Vi says he had one of these. Maybe even this one. Cindy stumbled over it the morning of the attack, when she chased Ben up the road."

Chopper Jim picked up the knife and located the blade. Over it, his eyes met Kate's. "You didn't think to bag it?"

"At the time, I didn't know it might be important. Besides, it'd been lying in the slush and the mud before Cindy found it. Cindy's handled it, I've handled it, Auntie Vi's handled it."

"Hell, I remember now, I watched you clean it yesterday afternoon."

She nodded.

"Not much of a killing machine," Dan said, examining the two and a half inch blade critically.

"One slice from behind." Kate's hand went to the scar on he r throat, a thin ridge of roped flesh that had healed badly and now would never fade. "You take the victim by surprise, you're stronger than she is anyway-" Her hand dropped. "You don't need a bowie knife to get the job done." She added dispassionately, "He would have waited to kill her at least until he heard the bear. Fresh blood, hungry bear. Unbeatable combination."

Dinah shoved her chair back. "Excuse me," she said, and left the cabin.

Bobby started to go after her. "Don't," Kate said.

He scowled at her.

She shook her head. "Don't," she repeated.

He looked at the open door, hands resting on the wheels of his chair. With an oath, he brought them back up to the arm rests. "And if Stewart hadn't heard a bear?"

Kate's shoulders rose and fell. "It didn't have to happen the first day. Auntie Vi said they were booked in for a week. He had time to wait for the perfect opportunity. He just lucked out the first day. A bear showed up on schedule, Stewart killed Carol, let the bear chew on her enough to obliterate the evidence." She reflected. "Then he heard us coming, and either chased the bear off or it ran off. Stewart didn't have time to break the weapon down again, so he pitched it into the river and came to meet us." She frowned down at her coffee. "Too bad we couldn't have tested his hands for residue."

"I don't know." Dan crossed his arms and frowned. "Seems awfully iffy to me."

"Then he would have fallen back on plan B."

"There was a plan B?"

"Dan," Kate said with finality, "there is always a plan B for the Mark Stewarts of this world."

"Hell." Jim sat back, lips flattened into a thin line. "It doesn't matter much whether he used the knife. Even if we found his fingerprints on it, which we won't, and traces of her blood on it, which we won't, it wouldn't be enough."

"No." Kate shook her head. "It wouldn't."

"Especially if he's as smart as you think he is, and loved her up in front of all their friends in town. No motive."

"Oh yes there was," Kate said. Sex or money, she thought, the two most popular motives for murder. She was pretty sure it was one of Morgan's Laws, but she couldn't remember which one. She'd have to ask Jack the next time she saw him. Soon, she thought. Tomorrow would be good. "Whether anyone saw it or not, there was motive up the wazoo."

"Come on, Kate," Dan said. "A lot of wives screw around on their husbands. A lot of husbands don't take them out and feed them to bears."

"A lot of husbands don't have Stewart's ego." Kate remembered Stewart forcing her hand against his erection. It had been a taunt, a blatant provocation, his response to her challenge. He must have thought she just wouldn't be able to resist all that male pulchritude and would fling herself on him. She'd met men like him before, men whose certain, unwavering belief in their own irresistibility formed the pillar of their existence. It was imprudent to disillusion them, imprudent and dangerous and potentially fatal. As Carol Stewart and Nathan Harrigan had discovered, at the cost of their lives. "It's all ego with him."

"And how," Dinah said from the doorway. Her face was pale, but she met Bobby's questioning look with a reassuring smile. "Mr. Stewart thinks very well of himself. What was it Bernie called him? Something movie starish?"

"Redfordy," Dan supplied.

Dinah nodded. "Right. And he'd encourage the resemblance. King stud. He'd take adultery as a personal affront. Especially if the guy worked for him."

"And especially if they did it here," Kate said, waving a hand to indicate the Park. "Stewart's very own personal hunting ground. Adding insult to injury."

"I wonder," Dinah said thoughtfully.

"What?"

"If maybe Carol Stewart didn't bring Nathan Harrigan here for that very reason. Stewart's kind always screw around. Maybe she was making a point, taking her lover on her husband's own ground."

Kate's mouth twisted up at one corner. "If she did, her revenge was very short-lived."

Jim tossed the Swiss Army knife down in disgust and folded his arms. He didn't want to believe any of it, not because it wasn't true, but because he was afraid that it was and he had not a shred of hard evidence to back any of it up.

"He make it back to Niniltna?" Kate said.

"Stewart?" At her nod, the trooper nodded.

"Too bad. I was kind of hoping that bear would show up again." Her smile was cold. "Mandy's dad, who has been big-game hunting in Africa, assures me that once a lion tastes human flesh it won't eat anything else. Be nice if the same held true for bears. In this one case, anyway."

"Where is he now?" Dan said. "Stewart."

"Back in Anchorage," Jim said. "No help for it, Dan," he said in response to the ranger's disbelieving look. "No probable cause, no hard evidence of foul play. He cooperated fully. Couldn't hold him."

"As a matter of curiosity," Kate said, "was Carol Stewart insured?"

"Yes, but just a standard policy through his business. He had an identical policy, and they both took them out years ago."

"Ought to pay for both trips, out and back," Kate said coolly. "Like I said. Smart."

Dinah made an inarticulate protest, quickly smothered. Bobby caught her hand and glared at Kate.

"Son of a bitch," Jim said suddenly, and brought his fist down hard on the table in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Everybody jumped. "Son of a bitch."

Kate thought of Pastor Seabolt, and of the long, hot June days in Chistona. "Something I learned last summer, Jim," she said.

"What?"

"Sometimes? There's just no cure for a situation."

He didn't like it. None of them did.

Dan broke the silence this time. "What did Stewart say to you last night, Kate?"

"Nothing," she said, with perfect truth. "Nothing at all."

Bobby said shrewdly, "What did you say to him?"

She chose her words with care. "I suggested he make this his last visit to the Park."

"Breathing the air here might be hazardous to his health, is that it?" Bobby barked out a humorless laugh. "So might riding shotgun on that damn D-6 with you on the throttle. Jesus, Shugak, when I said you should take executive action, I didn't mean you should take it on a Caterpillar tractor. You got a death wish or what? My eyes about dropped out of my head when you took off outta that barn." He looked her over critically, and added, "You sure that was really you in your body last night?"

"Maybe it was her evil twin," Dinah suggested, recovering enough to join in. "Brought out by the full moon."

"I figured the Antichrist," Dan said.

"Nah, pod person," Jim said, adding hastily, "Not that I would know, since of course I wasn't there."

The taut atmosphere of frustration and anger eased to where laughter and friendship might be possible once again.

Kate drained her mug and pushed back her chair. "It's moose backstrap for dinner. Who's staying?"

They were gone by nine, and there was still enough light left for Kate and Mutt to walk out back and sit down on the large, smooth boulder embedded in the edge of the creek bank. Overhead the sky turned from blue to pink to orange to red and back to blue again. The stars came out one at a time, Venus first, brighter than every other body in the sky, save the sun and the moon.

Soon the stars would be burned out of the sky by the light of the midnight sun, and Venus would fade into the east for the summer. Kate had an affinity for the stars, for the constellations, especially for Orion. As a little girl she had pictured him standing, harpoon in hand, poised at the water's edge, intent on spearing his next meal. Much later, in Masterpieces of World Literature at the University of Fairbanks, she had learned he was supposed to be carrying a sword and shield, and still later that he raped one of the Pleiades, or maybe it was Artemis, the first in a long line of the disillusionments that come with growing up and leaving the magic behind.

Breakup certainly qualified. The season was supposed to be one of hope and renewal, spent gathering rosebuds while ye may. Instead, it all too often degenerated into destruction and despair. It had been a clear, cold April night when her mother had begun the long walk home from a party, only to pass out at the side of the road and die of exposure.

Well, she thought with cold satisfaction, it might have taken thirty years, but she had paid back for her mother, in spades. It had been a long time since they'd had a bootlegger in the Park.

Her satisfaction was fleeting. People got away with murder during breakup. People got away with murder and then got away. First Lottie Gette, now Mark Stewart. Kate shifted restlessly on her rock. Failure was not an option open to her, and yet here it was, staring her in the face, and for an instant panic clawed at the back of her throat.

She beat it down before it could take over. All right, it had been three days of frustration, personal and professional. And sexual. This last was going to be the easiest to relieve; as soon as the homestead was in decent enough shape she was headed into town in her brand-new, slightly bruised truck. She would go into Niniltna to tell Bobby to call Jack and let him know she was coming. Jack was a smart man; by the time she managed the two hundred-odd miles into town he would have farmed his son out to a friend' s house for the duration. She had a sudden vision of going through his front door like a conquering army and her need was so great she couldn't even smile.

Hormones had even more to answer for than Charles II and Walt Disney.

But it was the personal and professional frustration that nagged at her most. What was her profession nowadays? She'd been absent from the DA's staff for, what, four years now. In the blank marked "Occupation" on her tax form she had written "private investigator" for the first time, mostly because the bulk of last year's income had been earned in that capacity, but the truth was she didn't even have a Pi's license. Hell, in Alaska, there wasn't any such creature, there was only a state business license, available to anyone who could fill out the form and produce fifty bucks. That was it, that was all you needed, bing, bang, boom, you were in the peeper business.

But if she wasn't a private investigator, what was she?

And then there was the acute personal frustration of being thrust into a position of responsibility for the tribe, of shouldering duties and assuming obligations she had never sought and had certainly never wanted. It wasn't just the tribe, either, it was the whole goddam Park, Native and white, cheechako and sourdough, ranger and miner and homesteader, fisher folk and fish hawk. Predicaments R Us, You Bring 'Em, We Fix 'Em, K. Shugak, Proprietor. Meetings Mediated, Marriages Counseled, Murders Solved. She didn't even have to advertise, they came, bringing their baggage with them, whether she wanted them to or not.

The first shoot-out at Bernie's flashed through her mind. Nobody had told her to break it up. There had been fifty, sixty people in the Roadhouse that night. Any one of them could have taken the initiative, could have restored the peace, but no, Kate Shugak had ridden to the rescue yet again. Or crawled, in this case. And of course she had had to answer Mandy's cri de coeur, and there was no denying Billy Mike, invested with all the weight and majesty of tribal tradition, and Dan seemed to take it for granted tha t it was her job to bring Mark Stewart to justice, and how could she stand by and let Bernie get shot up a second time, and even that prick Jim Chopin regarded her as Tonto to his Lone Ranger, and . . . oh, the hell with it.