I’m just saying it could be an uncomfortable night.
THE NEXT CABIN housed Gunther and Klemens.
“Very tidy,” Jack said.
“Very,” Kate said, and proceeded to trash the room.
They surfaced five minutes later, disappointed. “Nothing,” Jack said. “Gunther carries his security badge, but then he would.”
“Explain.”
“He’s a kid, Kate, and he’s the head of security for a major multinational firm. That badge defines him. He’d use it for everything, to show off to his parents, to impress security officers of other companies, to con special privileges out of cops.” Jack grinned. “And to get girls. Definitely, to get girls.”
Kate was indignant. “Girls don’t fall for that kind of crap.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Well,” she mumbled, “not anybody you’d want to date.”
He caught her up to give her a smacking kiss. “Got that right.”
She wriggled free. “No personal pictures here, either. Klemens reads, though.” She picked up a well-thumbed copy of a German translation of Henry David Thoreau. “I saw him reading this yesterday, or another book like it. Does a cold-blooded killer read Thoreau?”
“Oh Kate, come on. I’ve known cold-blooded killers who never missed the new Danielle Steel.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” She put the book down where she had found it. “Next cabin?”
“Just let me check on Klemens first.” Jack hotfooted it down the trail and disappeared. A few moments and he was back. “All clear. I think he’s asleep, he doesn’t look like he’s moved an inch.”
“He’s got an awfully clear conscience if he can just doze off the day after he killed a friend and employee.”
The next cabin was Hendrik and Fedor’s. Only one bunk had been slept in. A handful of used Kleenexes were piled on the table, some falling to the floor, right in front of a picture in a gold frame. The picture was of Fedor and Hendrik dressed in identical cream-colored linen shirts, skin tanned an identical golden brown, hair bleached an identical blond, the sea a deep Mediterranean blue in the background. They looked very young, very handsome and very happy.
“Look,” Jack said, on his knees next to the bed. He sat back on his heels and held out a notebook. “It was shoved in between the pad and the board.”
Kate opened it, and gave an irritated sigh. “Great. It’s in German.”
“Of course.”
“It’s handwritten, and recently. The numbers are the same. Their dates are backward, though, the day before the month.” She turned a page. “The last entry is September twenty-sixth. See? Twenty-six slash nine.” She turned a page. “Wait a minute. Here’s another entry in a different hand, dated September twenty-eighth.”
“Fedor died on the twenty-eighth,” Jack said. “Hendrik must have written something in it.”
“Looks like. The Department of Education should never have dropped the foreign language requirement in high school.” She held up the notebook. “We’re hanging on to this, too. The troopers can find a translator back in town.”
“Doesn’t Demetri read German?”
“I don’t think so,” Kate said, tucking the notebook into her shirt. “He can speak it like a native, but I don’t think he ever learned to write it.”
“Terrific.”
“Best thing we did was get that bunch the hell out of camp,” Kate said, rising to her feet and dusting her knees. “Ten to one this notebook wouldn’t have been here otherwise.”
He looked out the door. “All clear. Who’s next?”
Hubert and Gregor were next. Their cabin was a model of familial loyalty combined with just the right touch of Protestant work ethic. There were family pictures, one for each side of the room, and laptop computers with battery packs, one for each side of the room. Kate turned on one of the computers and was confronted by an unending screen of indecipherable text made up of unrecognizable symbols. “Hubert,” she said. “Senta told me Hubert was in research and development.”
Next to the computer was a jam jar filled with cut plants. There was a stalk of fireweed with one remaining blossom trembling at the top, horsetail, angelica, wormwood, sour dock and one frond of field fern, among others. “Looks like Hubert’s into herbs.” She remembered him wading into the fireweed the night she had slain the boombox.
“Those are herbs?” Jack said with a quizzical look. “Look like weeds to me.”
“You can make tea from fireweed and wormwood. Sour dock paste relieves itching. Horsetail’s a diuretic, some say an abortifacient.”
“Come on.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You can use devil’s club to treat burns. As handy as you are in the kitchen, I ought to plant a patch next to the cabin.”
His heart skipped another beat. “I’d rather suffer the burn than have to pick the devil’s club to cure it.” Inwardly, he rejoiced. She was taking his presence at the cabin as a given. And she wasn’t telling him he had to learn to cook. He wanted to ask her to marry him then and there. Nobly, he restrained himself. One step at a time.
Blissfully unaware of the euphoria her casual words had induced, she turned on the other computer, fumbled her way through the directory and was nearly blasted out of the cabin by the resulting color and sound. “Where’s the volume control on this thing?” she yelled.
Jack found it and turned it down. “What is it?” he said.
“A commercial, I think,” Kate said. “Or part of a promotional campaign. Senta said Gregor was the head of public relations.”
“That would explain the boozer’s nose,” Jack said, nodding.
“Yeah, it does kinda look like it belongs on W. C. Fields’s face, doesn’t it? Bet we find a bottle stashed in here somewhere.”
“Nah. He’s carrying it.” Jack saw her look and added, “It’s a silver flask. I saw him take a nip out of it this morning.”
They watched the screen for a few moments as a hearty male voice spouted a string of German while a series of pictures flashed the smiling faces of happy workers all sporting the snazzy DRG logo on a hat or a tie or a shirt pocket.
Jack turned it off. “Pretty picture, when the truth of the matter is that most of their work is probably done in Laos by people making seven cents an hour.”
Kate surveyed the room and shrugged. “Looks like the temporary residence of a couple of hardworking family men. It might even be true, or it is when Gregor’s at home. Let’s move on.”
The next cabin, and the last one in line that wasn’t falling into the Nakochna, belonged to Senta and Berg. Berg proved to have, besides the usual clothes and toiletries, a secret stash of Hershey bars. “Plain,” Jack said peevishly. “Why couldn’t it be the ones with almonds?”
“That Berg, so inhospitable toward his friendly neighborhood burglars.” Kate was looking for Senta’s purse. In her experience, a woman’s purse was second only to a man’s mother in filling in the blanks of an individual’s character. “Aha.”
She found it under the bunk, a darling little mini-backpack affair, probably the latest thing down the runway in Milan. It was made of real leather burnished a deep chestnut, soft and supple to the touch, and had two pockets fastened with a single and probably genuine gold buckle. The outer one was big enough to hold a passport. Kate opened it, and it was her turn to be peevish. “God, I can’t believe it.”
“What?” Jack said, unwrapping a Hershey bar and taking a bite with relish.
“She even looks good in her passport picture. That’s against the rule.”
“The rule?”
“The rule that says all passport pictures make people look like toads. They’re usually worse than driver’s licenses.”
“Let me see.” He swallowed and looked. “Yum.”
“Watch it, big boy, she’d eat you alive.”
He grinned. “I’d slide down kicking and screaming all the way.”
“And this is the man,” Kate told Mutt, who had reappeared to flop in the doorway and sleep off her midday snack, “who professed his eternal devotion to me on top of a fuel tank in the middle of the Alaskan Bush, beneath a full moon, and not even twenty-four hours ago. See?” she said to Jack. “Mutt thinks you’re disgusting, too.”
Jack regarded Mutt with a sapient eye. “Mutt is too stuffed to move out of her own way, let alone think anything of the kind. And it was a hunter’s moon, as I recall.”
Kate sniffed. “Hey, she’s thirty-eight, four years older than me.”
“So?”
Kate closed the passport and tucked it back into its pocket. “So she’s got that kind of a face, you know? The first time I saw her I thought she could be anywhere from thirty to fifty.” She meditated. “I wonder why the guys took their passports with them.”
Jack produced a wallet like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.
“Even on a hunt?” Kate said.
“Even on a hunt,” Jack said, deadpan. “It’s a guy thing.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Then why didn’t Dieter put the letter in his wallet?”
“We may never know,” Jack said, much struck.
She shook her head. Jack was not approaching the task at hand with what Kate considered an appropriate amount of solemnity. She returned to the backpack. At least women had enough smarts to leave their purses behind when they went out shooting.
The second pocket of Senta’s purse was much larger, big enough to hold two wads of cash, one German, one American, a bottle of French perfume, a hair pick, a traveler’s size bottle of mousse, another of hair spray and a third of shampoo, a makeup kit, a bottle of nail polish, a fistful of credit cards—all platinum—and a three-month supply of birth control pills. There was a business card case with Senta’s name, job title, address and phone, fax and E-mail address printed in elaborately curlicued German lettering, all nouns capitalized, all umlauts dotted, all F’s and G’s serifed within an inch of their lives.
And, lo and behold, there was a picture folder. Most of them were of Senta: Senta in a crisp, tailored business suit either accepting or awarding some kind of plaque, Senta in a graduation gown, Senta in a bathing suit on a beach, blond hair shining gold in the sun and with just the right ratio of lean, hard flank to plump, soft breast.
“Woo woo,” Jack said, breathing heavily over Kate’s shoulder.
She elbowed him in the gut and flipped the folder. The last picture was of Senta as a girl of about eight, standing next to a boy on the verge of adolescence. Kate studied it. “Isn’t that Dieter?”
“Who?”
“The boy next to her. Isn’t that Dieter?”
Jack took the folder from her and frowned at it. “I don’t know. Is it? They look like siblings, don’t they?”
“Senta didn’t say anything about it if they are.” Kate remembered the look Dieter had given Senta when she had gone off with George. At the time, Kate had put it down to George poaching on Dieter’s private preserve. If Dieter and Senta were brother and sister, that look had meant something else entirely. According to Jack, Dieter was a rounder. Rounders were notoriously straitlaced as regards the amorous activities of the female members of their families, much more so than they were about their own.
“Maybe she’s family,” Kate said. “Maybe that’s why she’s not referred to in Dieter’s letter.” And then she was struck by another thought. “What are European inheritance laws like, anyway, Jack? Do you know?”
“No idea. Weirder than ours, probably, they’ve had longer to work on them.” He handed the picture folder back, and helped stuff Senta’s belongings back into her purse.
They emerged from the cabin to find that the sun had been obscured by the encroaching band of clouds Kate had seen from the runway that morning. “You know what this means,” Kate said.
“What?”
She jerked her chin at the gray sky. “It means George might really be weathered in in Anchorage and not be back with Demetri’s cavalry today.”
Jack looked toward the ridge. “It also means our guests will be back soon.” He looked down at her. “They’re going to notice that their rifles are missing. And probably that their cabins have been searched.”
“I don’t really give a damn what they notice.” Kate stretched, joints popping.
“Me either. I’m just saying it could be an uncomfortable night.”
“Well, if last night was any indication—” Kate began in a teasing tone.
Mutt’s ears went up, and in the next second Jack and Kate heard it, too. They turned as one to look to the northwest and waited.
Nothing. Kate forced herself to relax, forced a lightness she did not feel into her voice. “What do you think for dinner tonight, moose heart or moose liver or moose tongue?” They had plenty of all three left over from the previous hunt.
“How about all three? Damn!”
She had heard it, too, another shot and then another. “Three altogether,” she said uneasily. “But not three in a row.”
“Nobody said they were good shots,” Jack said.
Mutt was standing stock-still, nose sniffing the air, as if she could smell out the problem. Kate dropped a hand to her shoulder. “At ease, girl.” She looked at Jack. “You think we should go see what’s happening?”
“There are only two four-wheelers, right?” She nodded, and he shook his head and waved a hand at the sky. “The wind’s coming up, Kate.”
It was true, the wind was beginning to whip at the tops of the trees, to ruffle Mutt’s fur, to pull at Kate’s braid.
“I think we better stay here,” Jack said, “close to shelter. They’re probably already on their way back, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because the weather’s socking in, because they’ve bagged something juicy and are ready to call it a day, because Demetri and Old Sam aren’t idiots.” He looked at her and said more gently, “They aren’t, Kate. And there were only three shots.”
Kate took a deep breath, held it and let it out slowly. “All right,” she said, but she was still uneasy. “You know that gun rack on the west wall of the lodge?”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s empty it out, hide the rifles. And we don’t take these off”—she slapped the .357 pistols they had strapped to their waists—“for any reason whatever.”
“Why don’t we figure out a way to bar both doors while we’re at it?” Jack said dryly, but he followed her to the lodge and helped to take the rifles down one at a time. There were half a dozen of them, ranging from a tiny .22 automatic rifle in pristine condition to a Winchester twenty-gauge shotgun with a tarnished barrel and a scarred walnut stock. “Where do you want to put them?” he said.
“Not where we put theirs,” she said.
“Where then?”
In the end, they wrapped the weapons in more of the burlap potato sacks and climbed to the half-loft in the garage to secrete them in the center well of a spool of electric cable. They stacked half a dozen boxes of canning jars on top of the spool to hide the hole and what was poking out of the top of it. For good measure, they took the ladder down and hid it in the bushes on the side of the garage facing away from camp.
“Somebody could always shinny up the cable on that traveling block,” Jack said. He caught her eye. “Sorry.”
“It’s not funny,” she said severely.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “But for some reason I’m in a good mood anyway. So sue me.”
He kissed her, a long, slow, savory kiss as the rising wind rippled through the campsite, setting spirals of golden aspen leaves to dance around them in a whirlwind of delight.
There was a shout from the creek, and as they looked Klemens came stumbling up the bank. “Come!” he said. “Come see!”
“Hell,” Jack said. “You think he knows about the cabins?”
“Or noticed the rifles were gone,” Kate murmured. She plastered a false smile on her face and stepped forward. “What is it, Klemens?”
“Come see!” he said. His face was red with excitement and for the moment at least he had forgotten his troubles. “Come now! I saw some moose fighting! Come see!”
Kate and Jack followed him to the creek and down the bank. The other side of the creek was thickly crusted with stands of spruce, Cottonwood, alder, aspen and diamond willow, a thicket impenetrable even by light, but after five minutes walk it thinned to a small meadow fed by a tiny stream that was the last tributary to join the Nakochna before the Nakochna itself joined the Kichatna.
They heard it before they saw it, and they didn’t need to follow his pointing finger to see it. Mutt heard it before any of them, and bounded ahead to watch avidly, quivering with interest.
“I heard noises,” Klemens said, lowering his voice and half crouching behind a salmonberry bush. “Look what I found!”
They saw.
Two bull moose were squaring off. stamping and snorting and grunting, tearing the hell out of the trees and bushes lining the edge of the little glade. There were half a dozen cows grazing in the brush; the reason for the fight. They seemed unimpressed, sparing not even a glance for the ruckus being raised on their behalf.
And a ruckus it was, with the two bulls uttering cries that sounded somewhere between a drunken pig and a mad cow. “Old Sam was right,” Kate said, “they are like drunks in a bar.”
One bull was younger, with a fork on one side of his rack and a spike on the other. He was game, though, and he was almost as big as the other older bull, which was a good thing, because so far as rack size was concerned he was totally outclassed.
“What do you think, seventy inches’?” Kate said
“Sixty, maybe,” Jack said. “Okay, sixty-five. Not a record, but nice. I’m glad Dieter isn’t here.”
Klemens glanced at Jack, and then looked back across the creek.
The rack on the older bull was, in fact, magnificent, broad, evenly balanced brow palms and an equal number of brow tines, four to each side. The older bull was using his rack to advantage, ripping up what seemed to be quite half the trees in sight, yelling and bellyaching all the while, the noise rising in volume as feelings escalated. The object was to intimidate, to throw the opponent off guard, if possible to force a retreat before it came to blows.
The other bull, perhaps too young to know better, refused to back down. The older bull smacked its lips and charged. Seven feet high at the shoulder, nine feet in length and weighing close to a ton each, the clash of flesh and bone and antler when the moose collided was felt all the way across the creek.
“Mein Gott!” Klemens said. He’d forgotten to whisper.
It didn’t matter, as the noise of combat was so loud that nothing could be heard over it. The younger bull, either too stupid or too horny to give, met a second charge head on. One of the brow tines of the older bull sliced open his forehead and blood flowed liberally down the young bull’s head and neck. He didn’t even notice, and tried to gouge his opponent with his single brow tine. The older bull treated this attempt with the disdain it deserved and stepped out of reach.
“Look!” Jack said, pointing.
Unbeknownst to either of the fighting bulls, a third bull, smaller in size as well as in rack, sidled quietly out of the trees and, while the other two bulls were preoccupied, proceeded to mount one of the cows. She stood where she was, accepting him placidly, her legs braced against the force of his thrusts. When he was done he dropped back to all four feet, gave her a friendly nuzzle, for all the world like a John taking leave of his Friday afternoon hooker, and ambled back into the trees.
Meantime, the battle between the two other bulls was still going on, with no quarter asked or taken.
Jack laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes. Even Klemens was smiling.
They watched until the younger bull received a second cut, this one on his flank from a point on the brow palm that would have impaled him if he hadn’t jumped out of the way. He lost interest after that and headed for the hills. The older bull, tired but triumphant, gathered up his harem and began moving them upstream.
“You were right.” Klemens said, staring after them. “It is good that Dieter is not here.” He met Jack’s eyes squarely.
“Klemens,” Kate said impulsively, “did you mean to kill Fedor?”
Klemens looked at her, startled, but said immediately, “No, Katerina. I did not. I’m sorry,” he said to Jack. “You told me to stay, and I didn’t. I’m not like Berg, I don’t wander, but I did this time. And then I was alone, and frightened, and I saw movement in the brush.” He shrugged, a slight movement that betrayed his weariness. “I was frightened,” he repeated. “I shot. I would give anything if I hadn’t, but I did.”
Kate hesitated, looking at Jack. He raised an eyebrow. “Was Fedor talking to anyone about the legal troubles DRG is having with the United States government?”
“What?” Either Klemens was the best actor who ever lived or this was news to him. “How did you know about that?”
“Come on, Klemens, it’s been on CNN,” Jack said. “We have cable in Alaska now, you know.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and you haven’t answered Kate’s question. Was Fedor talking to someone about DRG? Was he a secret witness for the plaintiff, any one of the plaintiffs?”
Klemens sat down heavily on a nearby stump. “Was he a spy, do you mean? No, I will not believe such a thing. He worked for me, he was a good worker, an honest worker, a hard worker. There was the relationship with Hendrik, of course, but Dieter said it was my department and that it was up to me. Fedor was a good worker in spite of his, ah, in spite of the way he was, and I kept him on because of it. I liked him,” Klemens said defiantly. “He would not spy.”
“You’re the head of finance, right?” Kate said. He nodded. “I don’t have to tell you, Klemens, it’s all in the numbers. If a plaintiff wants information about a corporation he’s suing, his best bet would be to hire him a spy in the finance department.”
“Wait,” Klemens said. Color crept into his face. “Wait one moment, please. You think Fedor was a spy, a—what? An informant, isn’t that the word?”
“Perhaps.”
On a note of rising wrath, Klemens said, “And you think Dieter found this out and had me kill him?”
“Perhaps,” Kate repeated.
Klemens surged to his feet. The German fell from his lips in a steady stream, punctuated by savagely gesturing hands and reaching a decibel level to rival the outcries of the fighting moose.
He finished with a final, brief statement and stood glaring at them for a moment.
Mutt gave a low “Whuff.” He jerked around and stared at her as if he might give her a swift kick in the ribs for her presumption. Don’t do that, Kate thought, don’t do it, Klemens, not if you like your foot the way it is now.
He didn’t, swerving back to face them. “I did not kill Fedor for Dieter!”
“I think we got the message,” Jack murmured as Klemens pushed past him. He looked down at Kate. “Do you believe him?”
“I think I do,” Kate said thoughtfully. “Jack, I’d really like to know what Hendrik wrote in Fedor’s diary. Do you think—”
“No,” Jack said firmly. “We’re not taking chances with any of these people. We’ll wait for the troopers, Kate.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re right.” She shivered. “The wind’s picking up. Let’s go make some coffee. They’ll probably want something hot to drink when they get back.”
A couple of hours later she began to get restless. “They should be back by now, shouldn’t they?” She went to the door.
So far the storm was all wind and no precipitation, the gray clouds high above. She walked out into the yard and looked east. There the clouds looked lower and wetter and infinitely more threatening.
Jack followed her, sliding his arms around her from behind.
She turned and looked up at him, his face as well known to her as her own. He’d shaved two years ago after discovering that most mass murderers wore beards. Kate wasn’t supposed to know that, but one of Jack’s coworkers had told her on the sly, and she was saving the sliver of information for when it would do her the most good. He was tall, well over six feet, and burly, with untidy dark hair that continually fell into deep blue eyes, eyes that could on occasion see right through you and out the other side.
He was also loyal and trustworthy and brave and true. And he loved Jimmy Buffett only less than herself. Maybe this roommate stuff was going to be all right after all.
He smiled down at her. “What?”
“I thought you could read my mind.”
He grinned appreciatively, and then his gaze shifted from her face to behind her and the smile faded. He opened his mouth and the back of her head exploded.
An immense shadowy pit opened up invitingly at her feet and she fell forward into its muffling arms.
Jack seemed to be falling with her, and the last thing she saw before they were enveloped in darkness was a gray streak arrowing toward her, ears flattened and teeth bared.
There was a boom that reverberated through her bones, a single, agonized yelp and then nothing.