A grave denied (24 page)

That was one way of putting it, Kate thought, looking involuntarily through the pass-through at Jim, thick hair rumpled, laughing at something Bobby had said. He looked up suddenly and caught her staring at him.

Laurel was speaking again and Kate willed the sudden drumming from her ears so she could listen.

“I had him in here to do some fix-up stuff the contractor left behind.”

“When?”

Laurel thought. “We opened the first week of school, the first Tuesday after Labor Day. Everybody’s back from fishing by then, and Billy and I figured we’d get a boost from the teenagers coming in when classes let out.” She shrugged. “They don’t have anywhere else to go, and I make a pretty mean milkshake, if I do say so myself.”

“What did you have Dreyer do?”

“Oh, you know, the linoleum wasn’t completely glued down in one corner, they used flat paint instead of glossy on one wall of the bathroom, the garbage disposal wasn’t hooked up right. Like that. So I asked around and somebody recommended Len.” She sighed theatrically, hand on her heart. “There’s just something about a guy with a pipe wrench that does it for me. He had his head under the sink and he’d stripped down to his T-shirt, and he was kinda buff, you know? I, well, I guess I jumped him.” Her smile was a little shamefaced. “The troopers could probably run me in for assault.”

“So it was a one-time thing?”

“Yeah. He wasn’t that interested in more.” Her brow creased. “Funny, you know? I mean, it’s not like I’m Miss America or anything. But most Park rats wouldn’t turn me down. It’s supply and demand, you know?”

“I know,” Kate said.

₁₂

Well, now,“ Brendan said, grim satisfaction rolling out of Bobby’s receiver in waves, ”amazing what a name change will do for the database.“

“Why didn’t his fingerprints pop up on search?” Kate said, leaning into mike range.

The satisfaction changed to disgust. “We’re in the process of switching from paper fingerprint cards to electronic files, in order to sign on with the National Fingerprint File. I’m guessing your guy fell through the cracks.” A pause, followed by a heavy sigh. “Plus it’s the Feebs. I mean, jeeze, what’re ya gonna do. Listen, Kate?”

“Yeah?”

“You said this guy kept his head down in the Park?”

“So down he didn’t register on hardly anyone’s radar.”

Another pause. “Yeah. Well. His file ain’t pretty. Tell Bobby to check his e-mail.”

“Will do. And thanks, Brendan.”

A rich chuckle. “I’m adding it to the tab, Shugak. You keep getting me up in the middle of the night. I’m telling you, it’s costing you. Horizontally.”

She laughed. “Ooooh, you big bully, I’m scared now,” and knew enough to know that while 2 a.m. guaranteed few listeners there would always be at least one lonely trapper tuned in, and that the stories about Kate Shugak having radio sex with a member of the Anchorage law enforcement community would be circulating around the Park at first light and crossing the bar at the Roadhouse at opening time.

Brandon hung up and Bobby signed off. Fifteen minutes later, the file on one Leon Francis Duffy arrived in Bobby’s in box as an attached file. Kate, too impatient to wait for it to print out, opened it and started scrolling.

Dinah, elbowed to one side, accepted a mug of coffee from Jim and went to sprawl next to her husband on a couch. He grabbed her, heedless of her mug, and whispered in a mock snarl, “When can we get rid of these yo-yos so’s you and me can get horizontal?”

She made a token effort to save the coffee and an even more desultory effort to repel boarders before giving up.

Jim pulled up a chair to read over Kate’s shoulder. He felt rather than saw her stiffen, and smiled to himself. The smile vanished when he realized that her reaction hadn’t been caused by his proximity but by what she was reading.

“Leon Francis Duffy, born in Madison, Wisconsin, graduated Mendota High School in June 1968, joined the army what looks like the week after. Served one tour in Vietnam and received an honorable discharge, which he took in Anchorage, Alaska. Why Anchorage, do you think?”

“Keep reading,” she said, tight-lipped.

He did so. “Oh. A year later he was working in the yard at Spenard Builder’s Supply, pulling down a regular paycheck, to all intents and purposes a model citizen, and then he gets arrested for molesting a twelve-year-old girl on the way home from school. Charges dismissed. Oh, crap. Two more arrests, one ten-year-old, another twelve-year-old.”

The printer spat out the last sheet and she thrust the bundle at him. “Here.”

He shuffled the paper into order. Kate remained where she was, arms folded, glaring at the screen. Jim continued to read out loud. “The third charge stuck, and Leon Francis Duffy was sentenced to eight and a half.” Jim flipped the page. “He was a model prisoner, served the minimum five and a half years for good behavior at Highland Mountain Correctional Facility, and… evidently disappeared from the public record after release.” Jim flipped another page. “His probation officer never heard from him even once. Imagine.”

“Imagine.”

He squinted down at the page. “See the note from the corrections officer he was assigned to?”

“I couldn’t read it on the screen,” Kate said. “Is it any clearer printed out?”

“ ‘I regard Mr. Duffy as one of two of the most dangerous prisoners in this facility to be released this year. Mr. Duffy has refused treatment for his condition, refused to accept counseling of any kind, and has never accepted responsibility for the actions that brought him to be incarcerated. If he is released, I am convinced he will go on to commit the same offense again.”“ Jim looked up. ”And they let him go anyway. Imagine.“

“Imagine. So he came to the Park.”

He looked at the rigid set of her spine and wisely offered no sympathy. “So it seems.”

“I never heard a hint, even a whisper that he was bent. I had him out on the homestead. He worked for me.”

“He worked for everybody.”

“I know.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve got good instincts, Jim.”

“The best in the business,” he said. “Listen, Kate. We’ve all got our blind spots. Mr. Fix-it was yours.”

“How much damage did he do here?”

Jim was too smart and too experienced to give the obvious answer. “Not much. It’s hard to hide that kind of thing in a small community. If he’d married, say a woman with children from a previous relationship, and if one of those children had been a girl, then I’d be seriously worried. But he didn’t.” He thought. “He could have been that one guy who was moving himself out of the reach of temptation.”

She rubbed at the scar on her neck. “You read the report. You saw what the officer said about Duffy’s attitude. It’s the classic Who, me? response of the sexual predator. And they don’t learn, and they don’t grow, and they don’t ever, ever change, and they never, never stop.”

“You would have heard,” he said. “I would have heard. Billy, Auntie Vi, Bernie, someone would have heard.”

“I sure as hell would have heard!” Bobby roared, causing them both to jump. His chair skidded to a halt and he glared impartially at both of them. Dinah, outlined against the gathering light outside the big windows in the creek-facing wall, came soft-footed up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Jim said, “we all would have.” He looked at Kate. “And none of us did. Maybe he was that guy, Kate.”

“No,” she said. She moved finally, to save and close the file and swing around to face them. “Who was his corrections officer?”

Jim rifled through the stack. “Melinda Davis. You know her?”

“No. You?”

“No. We can call in the morning, see if she has anything to add.”

“No.” Kate got to her feet.

“No?” With him sitting and her standing she actually had the advantage of height on him. Not much, but a little. It made him want to pull her into his lap.

“No,” she repeated. “I’m going to Anchorage.”

“I’m not going to Anchorage,” Johnny said. “My mother’s in Anchorage. What if we run into her? What if she calls the cops? I’m staying here with Auntie Vi. I’ve got school.”

That last remark showed how truly desperate he was to stay in the Park. She said, and despised herself for doing so, “Some nut burned us out of our house. You want him to do the same thing to Auntie Vi?”

“Oh.” He flushed. “No.”

“Okay, then.”

George rolled the Cessna out of the hangar and they were in Anchorage in an hour and a half, and on the doorstep of Jack’s town house on Westchester Lagoon fifteen minutes after that.

Johnny hung back. “I haven’t been back here since she sent me away to Arizona to live with Gran. Do you think it’s okay?”

“I changed all the locks. And she lives on the other side of town. She’ll never know we’re here, Johnny.” Unless I tell her, she thought.

“Still.” He stopped just inside the doorway and looked around like he’d never seen the place before. “How come we’re here, anyway? I figured it would be sold. She wouldn’t let me come back here and take anything with me.”

Kate should have known that, and she should have taken steps to see that Johnny got his belongings following his father’s death. She would have, if she hadn’t been off wandering in a grief-induced fog of her own at the time. “He left it to me,” she said. “It’s part of your college fund. I suppose I should rent it out instead of letting it sit empty, but he had mortgage insurance and it’s free and clear, with enough left over for taxes.” She shrugged. “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Find a manager or something.”

She was as uncomfortable as he was, which, perversely, made him relax a little. “My stuff still there?”

“Everything’s just like it was.” One of the reasons she was finding it hard to move inside.

He took the decision from her hands, pushed the door open, and ran upstairs to what had been his bedroom. “It’s all here, Kate! My Nintendo and everything!”

“Good,” she said.

“What?”

“I said that’s good, Johnny.” She closed the door behind her.

The next thing she knew she was standing outside the door of Jack’s bedroom.

A cold nose thrust into her hand, and she looked down to see Mutt looking up at her. “Yeah,” she said, and went back downstairs to drop her bag in the sparsely furnished guest room.

The bed had about as much give to it as bedrock, but the relief she felt was palpable. “Okay, let’s go,” she told Mutt. In the hallway she yelled, “Okay, we’re outta here!” and Johnny came clattering down the stairs.

She went through the connecting door to the garage, where sat Jack’s Subaru Forester. Johnny brightened. “This mine, too?” She smiled. “You bet. But for now, I drive.” “Aw, Kate, come on, I can drive. I’ve driven your truck.” Kate opened a door and Mutt leaped into the back seat. “Get in the car, Morgan.”

He was still arguing with her as they were backing out of the driveway.

Gary Drussell hadn’t been in the phone book but he was listed. He wasn’t exactly friendly when she called, Kate noted, but he did give her his street address and directions on how to get there.

He lived in Muldoon, in back of the Totem Theaters. This was way too close to Jane, who lived across Muldoon off Patterson. Johnny said nothing, but Kate noticed he slid down in his seat until his eyes were barely at dashboard level. She quelled a craven impulse to do the same. She wasn’t afraid of Jane, but she was afraid of losing Johnny, and she was terrified of letting Jack down.

The Drussells were living in one of the zero-lot line homes that had gone up like weeds in Anchorage during the oil boom of the early ‘80s, most of them built on filled-in wetlands. This last made for either a damp basement or an unstable foundation or both, but by the time this was discovered the developers had long since decamped to Maui or Miami with their profits and their trophy blondes, leaving homeowners with a choice: bail or bail. Many more than Anchorage lenders were comfortable admitting to had simply turned in their keys and walked away. The rest invested in small pumps and garden hoses, and during especially rainy Augusts you could go into any one of these neighborhoods and count by tens the green plastic lines snaking from downstairs’ windows, emptying the water out of basements as fast as it seeped back in again. Ear, nose, and throat specialists reported a radical increase in upper respiratory complaints during such seasons, mostly from the mold and mildew that resulted.

It made Kate proud that the Park had no such tiling as a Planning and Zoning Commission. Not that she had anything left to plan or zone.

Gary Drussell answered the front door before the recollection had time to plunge her into remembered gloom.

It was Saturday, with weak sunlight filtering through a broken cloud cover. His hair had darkened and his skin lightened since the last time she’d seen him. Instead of overalls covered in fish scales, he was dressed in sweats, dark blue with white piping, clean and neat. “Hi, Kate,” he said, and stepped back. “Come on in.”

“Hi, Gary. This is Johnny Morgan. Mutt okay in your yard?”

Gary cast a wry look at the street. “I think the question is, is the neighborhood okay with Mutt on the loose?”