A Cold Day For Murder Part 7

Bernie nodded toward the room at large. "Right here. That last night anyone saw Miller, Martin walked in about one o'clock that morning and caught him and Xenia dancing and smooching it up. They had words. The damages cost Martin a hundred bucks, which is about par for him."

"You mean they had a fight?"

"I don't care what anybody says about you, Kate," Bernie said admiringly, "you are smarter than the average bear. It was the day of that hearing on building a road into the Park. Everybody came down to the Roadhouse for a drink after the committee adjourned, and stayed on.

There were about fifty witnesses. Most of them took bets on the fight, and helped pick up the tables and chairs afterward."

"And then Miller disappears off the face of the earth," Kate muttered.

"Wonderful."

"I'd say that about summed up the situation," Bernie agreed.

Kate thought about it for a while. "Xenia says Miller left his jeep here the night he disappeared."

"Sure. It's still sitting out back." He grinned. "What's left of it.

I'll show you."

She shrugged into her snowsuit and followed him outside, Mutt trotting behind her. It was perceptibly colder than when she had come in, and her breath made puffs of vapor that hung behind her in the air. She pulled her hood up around her face.

The Jeep was a Toyota Land Cruiser--because of its high ground clearance, small turning radius and four wheel drive, one of the most popular vehicles in the Park--which explained why Miller's vehicle was now missing all four tires and wheels, as well as the spare, the battery, the plugs, the filter, the distributor cap, one of the bucket seats, the windshield and the driver's side door. There was a pile of dog t.u.r.ds, frozen hard, between the front and back seats, and one of those air fresheners in the shape of an evergreen hanging from the rearview mirror, and that was all.

"There isn't a lot left to it, is there?" Kate observed.

"Not much sense in letting it sit here, freezing up into a piece of junk," Bernie said cheerfully.

"No," Kate admitted.

Along with the missing parts there was not the vestige of a clue to be found beneath the remaining seats or in the glove compartment or the wheel wells or in any one of half a dozen other places Kate thought to look.

"So, Sherlock," Bernie said. Standing in his T-shirt and jeans and thongs, he made Kate shiver just to look at him. "What next?"

"Did Miller say anything that last evening that would indicate what he was going to do next, where he was going after he left the Roadhouse?"

Bernie shook his head. "He was just a little guy, Kate, and you know Martin. Miller looked like he was having a hard time keeping up off all fours. I figured he was heading home to bed."

"Where was Xenia?"

"She'd run out of the bar during the fight." Bernie's voice did not change. "She never was much good on defense."

Kate was silent, and Bernie said, "Wait a minute. Early on Miller did say something about trying to make a call, and G.o.ddaming North Com He didn't say when, or who to, so that don't really mean nothing."

Kate hunched further down into her snowsuit. "Did you tell Ken Dahl all this?"

"Some of it," Bernie said. "Not all."

"Why not?"

Bernie shrugged and started back in. "He said he was an investigator. I figured, let him investigate." He paused and looked back at her. "Funny thing about this jeep."

"Funny ha-ha or funny strange?" "Funny strange. I left the bar around two-thirty that morning to go over to the house and grab a sandwich. This jeep wasn't here then."

Kate stared at Bernie. "You're sure?"

Bernie nodded.

"When did you see it next?"

"I sleep in mornings. The jeep was right here when I come over to open up the bar at twelve o'clock that afternoon." He grinned. "I remember because Abel was waiting for me to pour out his weekly bourbon."

She gave an involuntary smile. "He still comes in every week?"

"Like clockwork."

"Just the one shot?"

"Just the one."

She chuckled, but her amus.e.m.e.nt soon faded and she said, without much hope, "Enid didn't happen to see anything?"

He shook his head. "Or the kids neither."

Kate stood still, thinking. "So he went somewhere, and then he came back."

"It looks that way."

"But when? And then where did he go from here?"

Bernie shrugged. "That I couldn't tell you. There's so much traffic around here nights, I wouldn't know exactly when any one truck or snow machine or dogsled came or left." He grinned. "A D-9 Cat, of course, is pretty hard to miss."

"Or a helicopter," she said, and they both laughed. Her laughter faded and, frowning, she said, "And why would he come back? To pick up Xenia, maybe?"

Bernie shook his head. "Xenia ducked out early in the fight. I didn't see her again that night."

Kate sighed. "I better get on over to North Com then. Maybe Miller got a call and had to leave on a family emergency, or something like that."

Bernie looked at her.

"Oh shut up," Kate said, and climbed on her Super Jag for the trip back to the village.

FIVE.

The North Com shack was located within the city limits, fifty feet up the road from the Niniltna School. The shack was just that, a one-room shack made of plywood stapled to two-by-four uprights, crowned with asphalt shingles, lined between its two-by-fours with the ubiquitous pink Owens Corning insulation found beneath every Sheetrock wall in the state. The Andrews five-meter dish stood on its own tower out back, tilted on its polar mount true north 61 degrees from the horizontal to track Northern Light, the state's personal communications satellite.

There wasn't any line outside the door, an unusual sight that filled Kate with a sense of quiet satisfaction. Before the state legislature in 1986 pa.s.sed a law that permitted local communities to ban alcohol, Niniltna's North Com earth station accounted for some $800,000 a year in money orders, ninety-five percent of which were booze orders to liquor stores in Anchorage. Since the tribal council had pa.s.sed what Park locals referred to as the Dam pAct and sometimes the G.o.dDam pAct revenues had fallen to less than a fourth of what they had been. Local air taxi services had seen a boom in charter flights to the nearest liquor store, a hundred and thirty miles away. There were rumors North Com was thinking of shutting the Niniltna earth station down entirely, which would leave Niniltna and everyone else in the Park dependent for communications on the two ham operators operating within the confines of the Park, the shortwave between Anchorage and the Park monitored by Chugach Air Taxi Service, and the weekly mail flown into Niniltna each Monday, weather permitting, also courtesy Chugach Air.

There was no one inside. Usually the operator, who with an alternate worked a month on and a month off, slept on a cot in the back. A shelf held his hot plate and tiny refrigerator, and it was all screened by a curtain of faded cotton with a blue floral pattern and kept warm by an Earth stove. The local wood seller figured the operator must have come from somewhere Outside originally, down south and way down, because he burned at least a cord of wood in that Earth stove every month.

Kate banged the bell on the counter. Mutt stood a step behind her, trying to look as if she didn't know perfectly well that she was supposed to wait outside.

"All right, all right," came a voice from behind the curtain. "Hold your horses, I'm coming."

There were some whispers and a few giggles before the operator appeared around the edge of the flowered curtain, clad in mismatched wool socks that left far too much of his thin, hairy legs exposed, jockey shorts and a flannel shirt he was still b.u.t.toning. His lank brown hair was all over the place and his face looked very pleased with itself and invited Kate to be, too. He stretched and yawned and scratched. "What can I do you for?"

"Sorry to bother you," Kate said, hiding a grin. "I'm looking for information about a park ranger named Mark Miller."

There was a gasp and a sudden immobility from behind the curtain. Kate's inner grin faded. She stepped swiftly around the counter, shoved the operator out of the way and swept back the curtain to reveal Xenia cowering on the cot, naked beneath the grubby sheet clutched to her chin. She met Kate's eyes defiantly.

Kate let the curtain fall and went back around the counter and looked at the operator. "Do you know who Mark Miller is?"

The operator, fully awake now, eyed her warily and gave a cautious nod.

"Park ranger, new one." His eyes slid to the curtain and then back.

"He's missing."

"Yes. I'm looking for him."

"Who for?"

"Does it matter?"

The operator's eyes slid to the curtain again. He said nothing.

"Can you remember the last time he was in here?"

"The privacy of any communication through the public communications system of the state of Alaska is protected by both state and federal law," he recited.

"And by the Bill of Rights and the Const.i.tution of the United States and probably by d-2, too," Kate agreed. "So what? I haven't asked you to divulge the contents of any outgoing messages. I just want to know if he sent one."

He said nothing. Kate snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, and he transferred his gaze from the curtain to her face. "What's your name?"

"Melvin Haney."

"How long have you had this job?"

"Four months."

"Uh-huh." Kate folded her arms on the counter and leaned forward.

"Melvin, my name is Kate Shugak." His eyes widened, and dropped involuntarily to her throat, hidden by the turtleneck of her long underwear. "Mark Miller is the son of a United States congressman, and this congressman has set the FBI on his boy's trail." Melvin's eyes widened further, and at last Kate felt she had his complete attention. "The FBI went to the Anchorage District Attorney for help in locating the young man, and the Anchorage District Attorney came to me."

Kate smiled kindly at the young man, showing all her teeth. He flinched perceptibly. "Now, Melvin, I'm telling you all this so you'll know that law enforcement at every level in this country is interested in your answers to my questions here tonight. If I don't like them, your answers, that is, then the District Attorney's office won't like them, and if the D.A. doesn't like them, the feds won't like them, and if the feds don't like them, the congressman sure as h.e.l.l isn't going to like them, either. When that happens, I won't have any trouble getting the Niniltna Native a.s.sociation to request the Alaska Beverage Commission and maybe even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to make a trip up here to sift through your back invoices for the last six months, just to a.s.sure themselves that you've been abiding by the Dam pAct Kate gave him another wide smile. Mutt suddenly reared up to place both paws on the counter, and she showed all her teeth, too, in a display of concern over the tension she heard in Kate's voice.

He hesitated. "You Xenia's cousin? That Kate Shugak?" Kate kept her smile fixed to her face and pitched her torn voice to carry. "I can't say I'm flattered by any resemblance you might imagine you see. Talk to me. When was the last time you saw Mark Miller?"

He regarded the two sets of glistening canines gleaming at him from not far enough away and capitulated. "The night he disappeared."

"You're that sure about the date?"

He nodded. "I would have remembered anyway because he made such a fuss about getting a call through. Couldn't do it because the dish was down. He wasn't the first one to come in here and rant; I had outgoing stuff backed up for twenty-four hours."

Frowning, Kate said, "What did you mean, you would have remembered anyway?"

He shrugged. "There was another guy looking for him about two weeks ago. He pinned me down on the day Miller was in."

"Blond, blue-eyed?" she asked.

"Talked like Teddy Kennedy running for office?"

"Jesus Christ," Kate said under her breath. "Yeah, that's him. He say where he was going after he talked to you?"

"The ranger or the blond?"

"The blond."

"No."

"How about the ranger, he say where he was going?"

"Nope." Again his eyes slid to the curtain and back to her. "But everybody knows he went out to the Roadhouse. His car's out there."

She nodded. "Did you see him in it? Did you see him actually driving the Toyota?"

"Yeah."

Kate looked at him and said, "What do you think happened to him?"

"Beats me." He looked again at the curtain. "First I heard he was gone was when O'Brian over to Park Headquarters sent the message to Washington, D.C."

Kate nodded again. "Did you like him? Miller, I mean."

He looked confused. "I didn't hardly know him."

Kate looked deliberately at the curtain, and back to him. "Anything else you can remember?"

Awareness came slowly, and when it did his eyes popped and he shook his head violently. "I told you, I didn't hardly know the guy at all."

"Uh-huh," Kate said in a neutral voice.

He swallowed and said, "You think he's dead?"