Part 7 (1/2)
He grinned again. She didn't grin back. He sobered, and reached for the door. ”Okay, then. Lead me to it.”
It was a walk-in cooler, shelves on all four walls crammed with steaks and roasts and chops of beef and pork wrapped in white butcher paper, boxes of whole chickens wrapped in plastic, twelve-packs of corn on the cob, plastic gallon sacks full of peas and broccoli, and a case of frozen bread dough in two-loaf packagesa summer's worth of supplies for a perpetually hungry cannery crew. The harsh light of a single, hundred-watt lightbulb inside a wire cage illuminated everything clearly. The cannery superintendent, a thickset, dark-haired man who looked barely old enough to vote, hovered in the open doorway, clearly reluctant to step any closer to the tarpaulin-wrapped horror resting on the table that took up the center of the room. The surface of the table was streaked with old blood and scarred with knife cuts.
”We brought the table in from the slime line,” the superintendent said. ”Didn't seem right to just sling him onto the floor.”
Kate hated walk-in freezers. When she was a little girl, there had been a community freezer in back of the old city hall in Niniltna, a large room filled with shelves where everyone in town brought their moose and caribou. It had been her special task when she visited her grandmother in the village to go and get the evening's meat from the locker. She would get as far as the door, where she would stand, s.h.i.+vering, a sweat of fear down her spine, filled with an irrational knowledge that if she left the door to fetch the meat, the door would swing shut behind her, locking her in forever, leaving her there to die a cold and lonely death, just another package of frozen meat. It sometimes took her ten minutes to work up the courage to leap, s.n.a.t.c.h at the first package on her grandmother's designated shelf that came to her frantic grasp and leap back to stop the door from closing. Sometimes she lucked out and someone else would be at the locker at the same time. Mostly not.
Years later her fears came full circle when a murderer tried to kill her in just that fas.h.i.+on. She had outwitted him, barely, and the memory gave her the courage to walk into the cold-storage locker today without hesitation.
She stood on one side of the table, Jim on the other, mini-recorder in hand. He gave the date and the time and continued, ”Master Sergeant James M. Chopin reporting, standing in the walk-in cooler of Knight Island Packers in Cordova. Present are Kate Shugak, tenderman, who found the body, and Darrell Peabody, Knight Island Packers' superintendent, who has graciously offered the body house room.”
Kate wondered how much editing was done on Chopper Jim's tapes back at his Tok office.
”The body has been identified as Calvin Meany, drift net fisherman, Anchorage resident, PWS permit.” Jim read Meany 's permit number, driver's-license number and Social Security number into the recorder, from cards extracted from the wallet Kate produced. ”Body was discovered floating in Alaganik Bay at six-thirty a.m., this morning.” He clicked off the recorder. ”Okay, let's take a look.”
Kate helped pull the tarp back, and heard Peabody swallow loudly behind her. Even Jim, who in the course of his professional career had seen just about everything bad that one human being could do to another, was surprised into expression. ”Jesus Christ.” The words, forced out of him, were compounded of surprise, disgust and not a little awe.
As Kate had seen from the catwalk of the Freya's bridge, Meany had been strangled. Whether it was before or after he had been stabbed in the heart with a sliming knife, the white plastic handle still protruding from his chest, was yet to be determined. Whether he had died by strangulation, or stabbing, or from concussion from many of the blows he had sustained to the head and upper body was also yet to be determined. His left arm had sustained a fracture of both ulna and radius, ripping the skin of his forearm so that the bones gleamed against the shriveled shreds of skin around the edge of the wound. He had defensive marks from wrist to elbow on his right arm. Silently, Kate pointed to both sets of his knuckles. They were ripped and swollen. There were dark bruises on his shoulders and torso. Something sharp had torn at the skin on the left side of his head, tearing a gash from temple to jaw. He was bloated from his immersion in seawater.
There was a long silence. Their breath formed little clouds in the room's chill air. At last Jim stirred. Over the body, his eyes met Kate's. ”My kingdom for a forensic pathologist,” he said, and clicked the recorder back on.
Jim slammed the gate shut on the bed of the truck, removed his hat and tipped his head back to draw in a long, sweet gulp of fresh air. Across the road was the eight-hundred-slip boat harbor. The new harbor was accessible by three ramps leading down to the first, third and fifth of the five floats, each anywhere from nine hundred to twelve hundred feet long. The twenty-four-foot slips began on the left, and the slip size increased to the right, ending with sixty-foot-slips on the last float. The old harbor descended into the basin from the opposite side of the artificial basin, and consisted of four floats half the size of the new ones, with a quarter the slip capacity. The city had sorely needed the new harbor; looking at it now, all floats, old and new, filled to capacity, Kate thought they should have moved and extended the breakwater for a harbor twice its present size. Especially since Cordova was a typical Alaskan town in that it was perpetually broke, and the harbor generated 20c a daily foot, $4.55 a monthly foot, and $13 a yearly foot. Cal Meany's drifter had been thirty feet long; if he'd maintained a slip in this harbor it would have cost him d.a.m.n near $400 just to park while he went for groceries. No wonder he kept sneaking into transient parking.
A door slammed and Kate looked down the road to see Gull emerge from the harbormaster's office, step to the middle of the road and bend down to pick up something, which resolved itself into the limp body of a squirrel. His laugh carried clearly to where they stood, a hearty, heartless, even triumphant laugh, before Gull tossed the corpse into a nearby Dumpster and went back into his office.
Jim looked back at Kate. ”What was all that about?”
Kate sighed. ”It's a long story.”
”I'm in the mood. Humor me.”
Which Kate interpreted as a plea for a little light relief from the grim task so fresh in both their memories. ”You know Gull.”
”Big Chief Friend of E.T. Who doesn't?”
”The squirrels got into his insulation.”
Jim raised an eyebrow. ”Isn't that the diagnosis of record?”
A smile forced its way across Kate's face. ”No, real squirrels this time. He said he could hear them, pitter-patting between the roof and the ceiling, night and day. Drove him nuts.”
”Why didn't he set a trap?”
”He did. They took the bait and sprung it.”
”Poison?”
”Said he couldn't take the chance his namesakes might get into it.”
They both looked at the harbormaster's office, the ridgepole lined with seagulls keeping a collective beady eye out for anyone cleaning a fish down on the floats. Every now and then one would nip at another with a sharp yellow beak, and as they watched, a new gull came in for a two-point landing, missed his footing, backwinged, fell off the edge and was ridiculed by a raucous chorus as he came around for a second try. The roof was white with guano. ”G.o.d forbid,” Jim said.
”So,” Kate said, ”he planted a nut tree.”
”A what tree?”
”A nut tree.”
Jim digested this in silence for a few moments. ”What kind of nut?”
”I have no idea. It's that little scraggly tree to the left of the office.”
Jim looked at the little scraggly tree. ”Uh-huh. What, he figures to grow nuts to give the squirrels something else to eat besides his insulation?” Kate shook her head. ”What, then?”
”The squirrels live over there.” She pointed at a stand of alder, birch, diamond willow and spruce trees covering the hill rising up toward town. ”They have to cross the road to get to the nut tree. Gull figures with all the traffic, eventually they'll be flattened going to and fro.”
”I see.” Jim regarded the tree, which seemed to be missing some branches, not to mention some leaves. ”Think it'll survive the winter?”
”I have no doubt whatsoever,” Kate said. ”Gull has invested heavily in fertilizer and tree wrap. The minute the temperature drops below thirty-five, he's out there swaddling up that tree like it's his firstborn child.”
”Uh-huh.” Jim's eyes wandered down to the empty transient parking slip. ”You know, I hear the Cetaceans have developed a mini-force field that acts as a personal s.h.i.+eld. They're test-marketing it on Rigel Five. Supposed to adjust its insulating factor to the current conditions. Fits in your pocket, not too expensive.”
”Really?” Kate said politely. ”If there were any Cetaceans in Cordova, I'd recommend it to Gull. As it is . . .”
”You're probably right.”
Their eyes met and they smiled.
Jim resettled his hat, flat brim not a bubble off level, and straightened his already straight shoulders. He nodded at the corpse in the back of the pickup. ”Give me a ride to the airport?”
”You going to fly him in?”
”Quicker than waiting for tomorrow's jet, and the sooner we get the body back to Anchorage and the techies in the lab, the better.”
She nodded, and they climbed in.
Jim was silent until they were well out of town. He sighed, and said, ”Beaten, strangled and stabbed. I wouldn't be surprised if Frank finds a bullet in him.”
”Kind of emphasizes the killer's sincerity, doesn't it?”
”Kind of.”
They pa.s.sed the Powder House, a southcentral Alaskan inst.i.tution on a par with Bernie's Roadhouse in Niniltna. From the stories Old Sam told, and hints she'd had from other old-timers and elders, Stephan had hoisted more than a few at the Powder House when he got this far south.
He hadn't hoisted any at home. He had left that to her mother. Kate shook the memory off before it took hold.
They were almost to the airport before Jim said, ”Unless, of course, we've got more than one killer.”
Kate slumped a little in her seat, sorry he'd put her fear into words. ”I hate the weird ones. I hate the weird ones.”
”Yeah.”