Bad Blood (15 page)

Maybe his reputation for sangfroid was safe after all. He bent over the corpse, but didn’t see anything new. He took a long last look around the crawl space. Now that his eyes had become more accustomed to the dark, he saw that the boxes were mostly cardboard with the names of the contents scrawled on the sides,
DISHES, TOWELS, SILVERWARE, SHEETS
. They lined the four walls of the space, leaving the area in the center, where the ladder led down from the hatch, free. The floor of the crawl space was packed ground covered in sheets of clear, heavy-duty plastic, which so far as Jim could tell, ran up all four sides of the space. There was no kiss of moisture on his cheek. He couldn’t smell so much as a single spore of mildew. Good construction job. Hermetically sealed, practically.

He looked at the body at his feet.

Tomblike, even.

The dust lay thick on the plastic underfoot, scuffed by innumerable footprints. It also showed the markings of many more boxes than currently present.

He got out his phone and switched on the camera, with flash.

Ten minutes later, he was back in the waning sunlight of his second evening on the Gruening River in three days, the body in a bag on the unfinished floor of the house next to him. Roger and four of the other Kuskulanans watched him with much the same appalled expression. The sixth man, younger, red-eyed and wild-haired, was staring at Kate.

She’d been coming out of the post office when he’d touched down in Niniltna, and had ridden shotgun back to Kuskulana. Now she stood to one side, meditating on a fine old paper birch growing at the edge of the clearing, hands in her pockets. The hatch to the crawl space was in front of her. One toe was tapping it thoughtfully, as if keeping time to some song only she could hear. Mutt was standing next to her, alert and watchful.

Jim slotted his flashlight back into his belt and pulled off his cap to wipe a clammy forehead on his uniform sleeve, taking a couple of steps forward to stand beside her, ostensibly to clear out his lungs. Almost as an afterthought, he bent over to look at the hatch, both sides, very slowly and very carefully indeed.

Her toe stilled.

The hatch was made of a double layer of three-quarter-inch plywood. There was a large metal ring set into the top that when released tucked back into a groove on the surface. The edges of the bottom had been routered to fit into the hatch. He tried it to be sure, and noticed something he hadn’t seen at first. There were jagged, nail-sized holes, a dozen of them, equally spaced around the top edge of the hatch cover.

The hair rose on the back of his neck.

He wiped out the sweatband of his cap and pulled it back on, turning to walk back to look at the open hatch. There were a dozen corresponding holes in the edge of it.

He looked around and spotted a sturdy red toolbox sitting next to a pile of short ends of lumber of various sizes, and walked over to open it. Screwdrivers, wrenches, a hammer, a box of bright ten-penny nails.

“Whose house is this?” he said, pleased to hear that his voice sounded calm and pleasant. Or maybe not so much, because even Roger took an involuntary step back.

Kenny Halvorsen, the younger man who was still staring at Kate, said, “It’s Mitch’s. My brother, Mitch Halvorsen’s. Recognize the name?”

Kate turned her head to meet his eyes without flinching. Halvorsen’s face reddened.

“You found the body,” Jim said. “You called 911.”

“Yeah,” Kenny said, breaking off the staring match with Kate and looking at Jim.

“He’s been down there awhile,” Jim said, an understatement that would have done the Queen of England proud. “Did no one miss him? Wife? Kids?” He looked at Kenny. “His brother?”

“He’s divorced, no kids,” Roger said. “His ex lives Outside. Nevada, I think.” He looked around. “I figured he was out fishing.” Everyone nodded, Kenny a little belatedly. “Last time I saw him was in May, waiting on George for a flight to Anchorage so he could catch a plane to Chignik for herring. He doesn’t usually come back to the Park during the summer.”

“Who was building his house?”

“He was,” Kenny said.

“Only him?”

“I did the dirt work,” Roger said, “and put in the foundation. Quad-Lock.”

“Not for love,” Kenny said.

Roger looked at him. “None of my family eats air, Kenny.”

Kenny’s face was a mess of tears and snot, which made his sneer even more fearsome. “Neither does mine, Roger. Fortunately, we didn’t have to, lately.”

“Kenny.” Roger’s voice was a single warning note.

“What,” Kenny said, “you gonna sic Ryan on me the way you did on Mitch?”

“I didn’t sic him on you,” Roger said, angry but controlled. “Mitch said some unacceptable things in Ryan’s hearing. Ryan called him on it and Mitch swung first.”

“Yeah,” Kenny said, “and I’m sure everyone here will say the same thing.”

“Because that’s the way it happened,” Roger said sharply.

They glared at each other. In spite of Kenny’s rage and tears, the family resemblance was very strong, the height, the cheekbones, although Kenny’s chin might have been a little weaker.

They both belatedly came to the realization that there were witnesses to their argument, one of them a very interested state trooper.

“Anyone else working on the house?” Jim said blandly.

Everyone shook their heads. Again, it was a communal gesture, damn near in unison. It reminded him only too well of the looks exchanged and the shaking of heads in Kushtaka. Or the boys on the landing. Same shit, same day.

Kenny wiped his nose on his sleeve and spoke brusquely. “He put on the roof and was just starting the framing before he left in the spring. He was planning to get the walls up and do the plumbing and electrical after fishing season.”

“You said you found the body,” Jim said.

Kenny nodded.

“What were you doing here?”

“He was letting me store some of my gear in his crawl space,” Kenny said.

Jim noted Kenny’s furtive look, the hunched shoulders, the fists jammed into his jeans, and knew Kenny was lying. He thought about impressions in the dust on the floor of the crawl space, but all he said was, “And?”

Kenny swallowed hard and looked around the circle. The other men, Roger and what looked like three of Kenny’s newest best friends, looked sympathetic but didn’t say anything to help get him off the hook. “I opened up the hatch and he … he was at the bottom of the ladder.”

There was a fine line between conducting an effective investigation and retaining one’s humanity. Jim was only getting started, though, plenty of time to turn bad cop. However great the temptation. “How were you able to recognize him?” he said instead.

Kenny’s eyes filled with tears again but he blinked furiously, desperate to keep them from falling. “That Gaga T-shirt. He hasn’t had it off ever since he flew to San Diego for one of her concerts last year. I think he was even sleeping in it.”

Jim nodded as if this all made perfect sense. Since he’d stopped listening to popular music when rap came in, he wasn’t all that
au fait
with the current music scene. Lady Gaga he vaguely remembered as someone who wore couture breakfast meat. “Roger?” he said. “Have you got an electric saw I can borrow?”

Roger looked startled, but said, “Sure, Jim.”

He headed off and Jim looked at Kenny. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to remove the hatch frame. It’s evidence. You might want to find a tarp to cover the hole.”

“Evidence?” Kenny looked bewildered, and might even have been sincere. “Evidence of what?”

“Murder,” Jim said, and only then realized how angry he was. Everyone else realized it, too, again taking that group step backwards, one of them nearly stepping off the floor of the half-made house. Jim waited until, windmilling his arms and with an assist from one of his friends, he was upright again. He met each of their eyes with a long, hard, cold stare, one after the other. “Cold-blooded, premeditated murder.”

The words had their effect, as he had meant them to, on most of his audience. Kenny, he saw, was looking at Kate again.

Kate was looking back, impassive, balanced over spread feet, knees slightly bent, hands curled loosely at her sides. Mutt stood at her side, ears up, tail still, yellow eyes fixed on Kenny Halvorsen’s face. With a slight shock, Jim realized the two of them were prepared to be attacked, and preparing to attack back.

*   *   *

Back at the airstrip, Mitchell Halvorsen’s body in the back of the Cessna, triple bagged because of the smell, Jim paused with his hands on the yoke. “Kate.”

She looked at him. Mutt was being uncharacteristically unobtrusive behind them.

“Someone nailed that poor bastard into his own crawl space and left him there to die.”

“I saw.”

“If it turns out that someone was a Kushtaker, and if it turns out that Mitchell Halvorsen’s death was why I pulled Tyler Mack’s body out of a fish wheel basket yesterday, I will track down both sonsabitches and arrest their goddamn asses.”

“I know.”

“I don’t care whose sons or nephews or cousins or brothers they are. They go down.”

“I agree.”

“I don’t care what Annie Mike or Auntie Vi or Auntie Balasha or anyone on the NNA board or any of the shareholders say. This isn’t family. This is murder, twice over, premeditated and loaded with malice aforethought.”

“Yes.”

“Neither of these men went down easy, and neither was anywhere near his time. Shit, Tyler was barely out of high school.”

“At some point soon,” Kate said, “you’ll notice I’m not arguing with you.”

He’d been speaking to the windshield through clenched teeth. At this, he turned to look at her.

Her face, that olive-skinned, high-cheekboned oval that haunted him waking and sleeping, was set like stone. The wide-spaced, changeable hazel eyes with that suspicion of an epicanthic fold were flat and hard, and the wide, full lips were pulled into a hard line. She thrust a hand into the short cap of thick, ink-black hair and held it off her brow, before turning in her seat to look at him straight on.

“We find who did this,” she said, “and we kick their ass all the way down the road to Spring Creek.”

He was pretty sure she meant it.

Pretty sure.

Fourteen

THURSDAY, JULY 12
FRIDAY, JULY 13

Anchorage

Kate and Jim flew directly from Kuskulana to Anchorage, accompanied by Mutt, a body bag, and the hatch cover—including the frame it was set into—inexpertly cut out of the floor by Jim with help from Roger Christianson’s power saw. The hatch was two feet by two and a half, and Jim had been generous on the cut, which made the frame about four feet square. Or possibly rhomboidal, Kate thought.

Just getting it into the Cessna was awkward as hell, and into the trunk of a cab in Anchorage a virtual impossibility. Finally they paid off the cab with a ten-dollar bill and called Brillo at the crime lab. Twenty minutes later, a skinny lab assistant who was at a generous estimate eleven and a half years old showed up in a fire engine red GMC Sierra extended-cab pickup. For him, it was a long jump down from the cab. “Sergeant Chopin?” He gave Kate the once-over, and brightened from behind thick glasses with Buddy Holly rims. “And—?” Mutt stuck her head out from behind Kate, and he paled. “Is that a wolf?” he said in a faint voice.

“Only half,” Kate said. By now the reply was ritual. Something bad might happen if she didn’t give it.

“Just help me get this thing into the back of your truck,” Jim said.

Kate, to make up for his lack of civilized manners, beamed one of her better smiles.

The lab assistant, who when he regained the vertical and got his tongue untied introduced himself as Steve, unhooked his tailgate and helped Jim maneuver the hatch and frame into the back of the Sierra. The body was placed on top of it with noticeably less care, having no sharp edges with which to threaten the finish on Steve’s pickup.

They all climbed into the cab, including Mutt, after which there was still room for all of Annie Mike’s kids plus a platoon of marines. Steve, whose feet barely reached the pedals, drove with a panache that, if Jim hadn’t been riding with him, would have had him reaching for his ticket book.

At the lab, Brillo, the wiry black hair that had resulted in his nickname undiminished in either volume or exuberance, listened to what Jim wanted, objected as a matter of course, and dismissed him with an order to return the following day “but not before noon. I mean it, Chopin, goddammit!” He then turned his attention to Kate, who was hard-put to rebuff him since she was with Jim and Jim was asking him to shove all his current cases to one side in favor of producing a miracle of overnight deduction. As it was past ten o’clock, she might have thrown a little extra style into it, which made Brillo even more reluctant to give up her presence.

They escaped finally, and Jim prevailed upon a trooper passing through the front office to give the three of them a ride to the town house on Westchester Lagoon. The Subaru started with a turn of the key, and Kate went down to Safeway to lay in supplies, City Market being long since closed. She returned to the town house to find Jim in exactly the same position she had left him in, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his clasped hands, a heavy frown on his face.

She put away the groceries and nudged him. “Change into civvies, and we can hit the trail.”

He came out of it and blinked at her and then out the window. “It’s past ten.”

“So what? It’s still light out.”

It was, of course. They both kept a store of clothes at the town house. He came downstairs in jeans and sweatshirt and found his town sneakers next to the door.

The Chester Creek Trail ran along the edge of the lagoon until it passed through a tunnel beneath the railroad tracks where it ran along the edge of Knik Arm and became the Coastal Trail. It wasn’t precisely crowded, but there was even this late still traffic, a mother jogging behind a racing stroller, a commuter carrying a briefcase, a blader, two boarders, and a slight, dark woman with a pixie haircut walking two black Labs and a golden Alaska husky with ice blue eyes, properly on leashes, although they strained so hard in Mutt’s direction that Kate was of two minds who was doing the walking, the woman or the dogs. Next came a man with a golden retriever and a malamute, neither on leash. They came barreling up to investigate, where they ran into a DEW Line of Mutt’s bared teeth. They abased themselves immediately and let Mutt sniff them all over before sending them whimpering back to their master, tails tucked between their legs. Their master glared impartially at Kate and Jim and gathered his darlings to himself again, but not, Kate noticed, putting them on leashes. Audible threats of calling the pound trailed in his affronted wake.