A grave denied (34 page)

Telma smiled. “She is a fine girl. My cousin’s child.”

“Vanessa is not interested in the cooking yet,” Virgil said.

“Oh,” Kate said. “What is she interested in?”

“The reading. She would read all day of every day if we let her. And she likes that boy of yours, that Johnny.”

“She has good taste then,” Kate said easily. “He’s a good kid. How long has Vanessa been with you now?”

Virgil frowned in thought. “She comes to us last May, so almost a year now.”

“Must be nice, having a girl,” Kate said, with feeling.

“She is a quiet little thing,” Virgil said, “no trouble at all in the house.”

Kate wondered about that. One of the first signs of abuse was a retreat into oneself. “Was she always this quiet?”

“Oh, yes,” Virgil said. “From when she first came to us, she is always quiet.”

“I like children,” Telma said unexpectedly.

Kate didn’t know what to say to that, although she was glad of the sentiment. She ought to just come right out with it, like she had with Gary Drussell, but this was an older couple with no experience of children and certainly none of child abuse, and from Virgil’s attitude, the news about Len Dreyer’s past history had not permeated to the Hagberg homestead.

“But helpful,” Virgil said, “very, very helpful, at least out of doors and away from her books. She is good with the wood chopping, after I show her how. She helps me with the weeding of the garden all summer. And she is interested in the tanning of the caribou hide I bring home in the fall.”

Kate smiled and nodded. “Have you been teaching her how to drive?”

He shrugged. “The four-wheeler she already uses to go back and forth to school after the snow melts. Before, I teach her the snow machine. It is not difficult, and the girl is quick.”

“My boy is the same,” she said. “I was thinking of teaching him how to run the tractor, too. He wants to drive the truck.”

Virgil smiled. “At fourteen, all boys want to drive the truck.”

“Nice to have help down on the farm,” Kate said.

“It is that,” Virgil said.

“Especially now that it looks like we won’t be able to hire any, so far as we know.”

“Neighbors will help,” Virgil said. “I will help.”

“I appreciate that, Virgil, but I was thinking more along the lines of fixing roofs and replacing glass and rototilling gardens. It was nice to have help you could hire. Dreyer crossed a lot of items off a lot of peoples’ lists.”

“He did,” Virgil said. “Have another cookie, Kate Shugak.”

“A good worker, everyone said so,” Kate said.

“A sad thing,” Virgil said, shaking his head. “He did a fine job in the garden last spring. You should come see.” He got to his feet.

“Huh? I mean, okay.” Kate rose. Telma smiled impartially upon them both as Virgil led Kate out of the house.

Virgil paused on the porch. “Your dog. Where is she?”

Kate nodded toward the woods. “Either chasing rabbits or asleep in the sun.”

“Ah. That is good. I have too many rabbits on my land. Come see my garden, Kate Shugak.”

She followed him around the house. Maybe he’d be easier to talk to away from Telma. He was more of this world than his wife. If Dreyer had hurt Vanessa, he might actually have noticed something.

They walked through a copse of evenly spaced trees, all neatly pruned. There were squares of raspberries, blueberries, and currants. The garden was impressive, orderly rows of rich soil thirty feet in length in a plot fifty feet wide.

Every five feet there was a line of flat rocks, providing access to the produce without harming any of it. “Wow,” she said, impressed and envious. She turned. “Where did you—”

The last thing she saw was the bottom of a spade coming straight for her head.

“Ah, shit,” Jim said.

Johnny had been right, it was Dandy Mike. Johnny had also been right about the birds. Something else, maybe a fox or even a wolverine, had been at Dandy, too. The magpies and the ravens had fluttered away at his approach, but not far, and they scolded him from their perches in the trees for interrupting their meal.

“You dumb bastard,” Jim said to the corpse, “you dumb bastard! I told you to stay away from this case. I told you you didn’t have the training for this. Goddamn you anyway!”

He whipped off his cap and slapped it against his leg. It stung, even through his jeans. “Shit,” he said again, and went for the crime-scene kit he had in the crew cab. He shot two rolls of film, and made a drawing of the crime scene with measurements before he brought out a body bag and muscled Dandy into it and the bag into the back, scolded all the while by the magpies and the ravens. He thought about fetching the shotgun clipped to the dash of the pickup and letting it loose on them, and then he got his temper under better control.

Dandy had caught a blast in the chest from a shotgun held on him at short range, just like Len Dreyer/Leon Duffy, which meant he either knew his murderer well enough to allow him to get that close even with a weapon in his hand, or his murderer had surprised him.

Jim surveyed the clearing. He didn’t know what the hell Dandy Mike was looking for here, but with the cabin burned there wasn’t a hell of a lot of cover. What with the rain and the tracks from Johnny’s four-wheeler and the footprints of Johnny and Vanessa, there wasn’t a lot to read from the ground. The bushes and shrubs looked as though Dandy had been pulled from the clearing through the brush. He followed it, bent in half, eyes straining for anything the killer might have dropped. There wasn’t so much as a shell casing.

He quartered the clearing, nose to the ground. Although the rain had washed most of it away, he thought he could see a darker patch of ground that might once have been blood. A very faint trail that might have been dragging boot heels led to the bushes. He went to the truck and opened the body bag. Yes, Dandy had mud built up on the heels of his boots. He zipped the bag back up, avoiding another clear look at what was left of Dandy’s face.

Rigor mortis had set in and had yet to go off, but Dandy had been lying outside and it was still only early May. Jim juggled numbers in his head. He’d probably been shot the day before, Monday afternoon, say anywhere between six p.m. and, oh hell, it could be as late as midnight. Shit squared.

At least he hadn’t been stored in a glacier.

So Dandy had returned to the site of Den Dreyer’s cabin, and had had the monumental bad luck of meeting Len Dreyer’s murderer doing the same thing. Or had the murderer been following him? He’d certainly followed Kate.

He had a teeth-grinding need to find Kate, to make sure she was all right. The strength of the need, the urgency of it, annoyed him. Kate Shugak was the last person in the world to need a baby-sitter. Which he was not, by the way.

And he had more pressing business. He climbed in the pickup and drove to Niniltna as fast as he could without bouncing Dandy’s body out of the back. He made the airstrip in time to see George Perry preflighting the Cessna.

George looked alarmed at Jim’s precipitous approach, or that was what Jim thought. Jim didn’t bother to reassure him. “Got a body, it has to go to the medical examiner in Anchorage right now.”

“You’re kidding me,” George said. He looked at the body bag. “Who is it?”

“Dandy Mike.”

George looked thunderstruck. “You’re kidding me,” he said again.

“No.”

George was beginning to get it. “He hasn’t been… nobody killed
Dandy”
he said.

“Shotgun, close range, right in the chest.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “You mean like Dreyer?”

“Exactly like Dreyer,” Jim said grimly.

“When?”

“Yesterday, sometime between six p.m. and midnight, near as I can figure. The lab’ll narrow it down.”

The oddest expression flashed across George’s face. In any other situation Jim would have called it relief, but that made no sense at all. “Get him into Anchorage,” Jim said.

George all but saluted, and was in the air by the time Jim was at the river, making the turn for Bobby’s house.

“I’ve got to get home,” Vanessa said.

Dinah looked at the girl. She was sitting in the middle of the living room, playing with Katya. There was a bowl of magnetic fish between them, and the two were engaged in catching them with miniature fishing poles with magnetic lures. Katya kept nudging Vanessa’s hook out of the bowl but Vanessa kept sneaking it back in again. Both of them were giggling. Dinah didn’t think she’d ever seen Vanessa Cox with a smile on her face before.

“They’ll be worried about me, Mrs. Clark,” Vanessa said, and hooked a pink fluorescent fish with purple lips and fins.

“Dinah,” Dinah said automatically. She looked out the window. It was five o’clock, and there was still plenty of daylight to go. “Why don’t you stay for supper? Johnny can drive you back after.”

Vanessa hesitated. Johnny, engrossed in some electronic mystery posed by the jumble of equipment at the central console, looked up. “Stay,” he said. “You go home late a lot. They know you’re probably with me. They won’t really be worried, will they?”

Vanessa thought about it. “I guess not.”

Dinah made a mental note to know where Katya was every waking moment of her life until she was eighteen, and after that to enjoin Katya to call in every day until she, Dinah, was dead.

She thought of Billy and Annie Mike and she closed her eyes for a moment. Billy and Annie had six other children, plus a tiny American-Korean baby they had adopted the year before, and at least nine grandchildren that Dinah knew of. There would be comfort in that. But not much. Suddenly she crossed the room to scoop Katya up in her arms and hug her fiercely.

Katya’s protest was immediate and loud, and went out to everyone in the Park, because Park Air was up and running, Bobby on the mike broadcasting a bunch of want ads from around and about the Park. “Okay, you yo-yos, the principal down at the school, yeah, Mr. Oltersdorf, he needs a new battery for his truck. This is because the old one disappeared last night right outta his truck when he had it parked in back of the school while he was working late.” Bobby paused for effect. “He says for me to tell you that unless he gets his battery back, he’ll see to it that nothing is played at the prom but Beethoven. I told him to throw in a little Wagner while he was at it, but he seems to think that might be a little harsh. Me, harsh is my middle name. You done been warned. Let’s see, what’s next.” He balled up the handwritten note and tossed it over his shoulder, where it joined a dozen others scattered on the floor. “Here’s somebody else needing a carpenter, Fred Van Zyle out at Mile thirteen, wants to add on a floor. He’ll pay actual cash money, he says, but he wants to see something you’ve done first before he hires you on. Untrusting bastard, that Fred.” Another crumpled note went flying. “Auntie Vi will be hosting a quilting bee at the Roadhouse on Wednesday, starting at six p.m. Bring fabric, needles, and thread, but don’t think you’ll get the finished product until you convince them you have reproduced. Lessee, what else. A bake sale on Saturday to earn the senior class money to help pay off the tickets for their senior trip to Seattle in December. If Nelda Kvasnikof donates one of her death-by-chocolate cakes, I personally will be in the front row, and I advise you not to bid against me if you ever want to broadcast an ad over this station again. Okay, enough of that, here’s some soul sisters coming atcha, and why wouldn’t you be their baby if you had the chance?” The Ronettes rolled out of the speakers at full volume and Bobby rolled his chair over the hardwood floor to Dinah and swept her off her feet.

Katya, who had wriggled free, laughed and clapped her hands and trotted over to join in. A dancing family, the Clarks, Vanessa thought. She wished there was more music in her home. But she was lucky she had a home, she told herself. The Hagbergs, neither one of them ever said so, but she knew she could have easily wound up in foster care with strangers and probably even stranger kids. It was just so quiet on the Hagbergs’ homestead. Virgil didn’t talk much and Telma didn’t talk at all.

She looked at the tousled head of thick brown hair bent with intent over what looked like a nest of tiny, colorful snakes, and her heart did that crazy somersault thing again. She thought of him kissing her that afternoon. She wondered when it could happen again.

“Goddamn, woman,” Bobby roared, “not in front of the children!” Vanessa looked up to see Dinah, flushed and laughing, hop from the chair.

A happy family, she thought, and wished with all her heart that she was part of it.

The door was open to admit the balmy breeze that had been blowing in zephyr-like fashion all day, which was why Bobby Clark’s ugly brother could walk right in without knocking. That’s what Vanessa called him, the ugly brother. There were ugly stepsisters, weren’t there? So Jeffrey Clark was the ugly brother. Although he wasn’t that ugly. In fact, he and Bobby looked a lot alike, and Bobby was a good-looking man. Kind of like Denzel Washington in
The Pelican Brief,
only thicker through the shoulders and arms, and with more hair, and, of course, no legs below the knee. And his jaw was wider, and his eyelashes longer and thicker. But otherwise a dead ringer.

“Ah, Jesus,” Bobby said, unaware of the fantasy being woven about his person, “and it’s been such a fine day up until now.”