Whisper To The Blood Part 23

"Which way did you go?"

"Well, the school's kind of back from the river." "We know," Old Sam said.

"Of course. Sorry. I didn't go through the village, I took the creek and went around."

"Why not go through the village?"

Gallagher hesitated. "Well, to tell you the truth, Sergeant Chopin, I'm not real good with driving the snow machine yet. I'd just as soon not turn myself loose where there's people everywhere. You know?"

Either because Gallagher was afraid he'd hurt someone, or because he was afraid he'd make himself look bad in front of the villagers, Kate thought.

"So you took the creek to the river," Jim said. "Then what?"

"Well, it's only a couple hundred feet to the river, and it was real dark, the trees and the bushes hanging over everything and all. I didn't see her on the way down."

"What did you see?"

"Her snow machine. Of course at first I didn't know it was hers, so far all of them look alike to me. It's like women and cars, you know? Show me a female who can tell the difference between a Chevy Silverado and a Ford Ranger and I'll marry her." He smiled. "I'm like that with snow machines."

No one smiled back, and his own vanished. "But you recognized Talia's," Jim said. "How'd that happen?"

"Well, it was just sitting there, stuck in a s...o...b..nk, idling, with n.o.body on it and n.o.body around. I pulled up next to it and I saw her stuff in the trailer. I shouted for her a couple of times and there was no answer. So then I got to thinking that maybe she hit a b.u.mp and fell off and the snow machine kept going. So I went back up the creek, slow like, you know, looking for her." He paused, and swallowed.

"And?"

"And I found her," Gallagher said. "Both parts."

There was a momentary silence. "Both parts?" Jim said.

"Yeah." His face was pale and damp with perspiration, and his clasped hands were grinding against each other. "Her body was lying over to my left, kind of close to the bank, in the shadows, you know? So it was no wonder I didn't see her on the way down." He swallowed again.

"Want some water or something?"

"No, no, I'm okay, it's just, it's so G.o.dawful, Sergeant Chopin."

"What was, Mr. Gallagher?"

Gallagher looked up and said, "Her head was missing."

"What?" Jim said.

Gallagher nodded. "I found it about twenty feet up the creek."

Kate felt Old Sam look at her and turned her head to meet his eyes. It was the first time she'd ever seen that expression on his face.

"I went and got someone from the village to stay with her, and then I came back. I know you hang out a lot at that bar out the end of the road, Sergeant Chopin, so I figured I had a good chance of finding you there. You weren't but Sam was, and he brought me here."

He spread his hands. "The rest you know."

TWENTY.

They left at first light, Jim on one snow machine, Kate on another, Matt Grosdidier on a third hauling an empty sled. d.i.c.k Gallagher was still asleep at Auntie Vi's, and Jim said there was no reason to get him up. They were in Double Eagle well before noon. Ken Kaltak came out to greet them, looking as if he hadn't had a lot of sleep. "Thank christ you're here so I can be done with this freak show."

"Did anybody touch anything?"

"Not after I got there," Ken said flatly. "I can't answer for before. It doesn't look like it, but I'm not a cop. Kate, Matt."

"Hey, Ken. How was she . . ." Kate's voice failed her. "How was it done?"

Ken shook his head. "This you gotta see for yourself."

He led the way to the creek, a narrow, winding affair between low banks, those banks thick with willow, alder, and spruce, all of them drooping beneath the weight of a heavy layer of snow. They turned the path of the creek into a low, cold tunnel into which even the noontime sun could not reach. Jim's head brushed a branch and snow fell silently down his neck. He stooped a little and walked on.

"Stay," Kate told Mutt, and followed him.

Talia's head was where Gallagher had said it was, about twenty feet away from her body. The face was turned away but the open portion of the neck revealed frozen blood and tissue and the bony beginnings of a brain stem. It was not a pretty sight. Kate heard Matt, just behind her, take a sharp breath.

Her body lay on its back, arms and legs splayed wide. Her snow machine was nosefirst in the s...o...b..nk on the right-hand side of the creek. The trailer had jackknifed, probably when the snow machine had run into the bank, but it hadn't overturned.

Jim bent over the windshield and ran his flashlight over every inch of the clear plastic. He stepped back and walked back up the creek. "Kate, you take the right side. I'll take the left."

"Got it."

Ken and Matt watched, Ken with his attention firmly fixed on the overhanging trees, Matt looking a little green around the gills, a color that matched one of the colors in his Cinemascope black eye. About halfway between the snow machine and the body, Kate said, "Here."

She tried not to mess up the snow next to it, but it was a futile effort. It probably didn't matter, as with the warming weather there had been intermittent snow showers over the past two days and there wasn't much to see.

She heard Jim's breath at her shoulder and pointed with a gloved finger, slightly trembling. "See it?"

His breath exhaled on a long sigh. "Yeah. Line for mending gear, right?"

"Yes."

They regarded it in silence. "You can get this stuff anywhere, he said.

She nodded. "Yes," she said again, a little mournfully. "Everybody has a spool lying around. I've got some in the garage. I think I even saw some spools at the Bingleys' store, in that corner in the back where she's got all the nonedible stuff."

"So no possible chance of tracking down which spool this came from."

"Probably not, but that's for the crime lab to say. You never know, Jim, they can do some pretty amazing stuff." "Let me get the camera."

He was back a moment later, and took a series of photos. It took longer than it usually did because of the cold-he had to keep tucking the camera inside his parka to warm it up so the shutter would work.

They found a corresponding length wrapped around the base of a tree opposite the first one. Jim took more photos.

"About the right height," he said, measuring the top of the creek bank against his height. "Three feet, maybe?"

"The windshield," she said.

"Yeah, but it's swept, it doesn't go straight up, it slants. It hits the mono hard enough, the mono slides right up the windshield and snaps back. She must have been kneeling on the seat for it to catch her right on the neck like that."

"If she'd been sitting," Kate said, "the mono could have caught her forehead. Same result, but then maybe it would have just broken her neck."

"Would have left a mark."

Neither one of them moved to check if such a mark was on Macleod's forehead. If that was what had happened, Macleod's head would still have been attached to her body.

Kate couldn't believe she was putting those words together in a sentence. She had another thought. "That may have been more in line with what the murderer was planning, Jim. When the filament broke the two ends snapped back around the base of both trees. If she hadn't been decapitated, if we'd just found her with her neck broke, would we even have thought murder?"

He considered. "Maybe not."

"He might not have been expecting this. Who would?"

"And an accidental death doesn't come under the same magnifying gla.s.s a murder does," Jim said, nodding. "He wouldn't think he had to be that careful. Gotcha."

"Maybe not hard evidence," Kate said, "but there'll be something."

They both hoped she was right.

Nothing else was found at the scene, however. They brought the snow machine back up the creek and Jim took more photos with it positioned between the two trees. He strung crime scene tape between them, pulling it taut, and pushed the snow machine forward. The tape caught the windshield about midway. Kate climbed on, straddling the seat, and at Jim's request Ken and Matt pushed it slowly forward while Jim took photos. As the windshield pressed against the tape it rode up, until it snapped off the windshield and whipped over the top of Kate's head, ruffling her hair.

"She was practically twelve inches taller than me," Kate said, a little pale.

"Let's do it again," Jim said, tight-lipped. "This time kneel on the seat."

Ken and Matt pushed the snow machine back, Kate braced her left foot on the running board and her right knee on the seat, leaning forward on the handlebars, and they did it all over again. This time the yellow tape slid up the windshield and caught Kate across the forehead. It stung. She didn't complain.

Jim took photos of that, too, and more of the body and the head. He handed Kate a pad and pencil. "Take some notes for me?"

He got out a tape measure and measured the distance between everything, snow machine, body, head, trees, monofilament ends. Kate jotted down numbers with increasingly numb fingers.

He opened his Leatherman and reached up to cut the almost invisible length of pale green monofilament that had been wrapped multiple times around the base of the tree, taking care to preserve the knots, although the filament was so fine it would take a microscope to tell if they were granny knots or double sheet bends. He bagged it carefully, and did the same with the remnants of line on the opposite tree. "Okay," he said. "Let's bag the body and get out of here before we all freeze solid."

Kate shook out a body bag, Jim picked up the head, and Matt turned, walked two steps away, and threw up. Mutt whined once, softly.

They loaded Macleod's body on the trailer Matt was towing. Jim hooked her snow machine to his and Kate took her trailer. They hauled everything to Ken Kaltak's house and took his statement, which varied very little from Gallagher's. At Jim's request, Ken fetched half a dozen of the other villagers, and for the most part everyone's statements agreed. Everyone in the village had turned out for GHRI's dog and pony show. With that many people present, it was inevitable that there were moments when Macleod and Gallagher's time was unaccounted for, but not so often or for so very long that Jim thought he had to run down more witnesses.

"Anybody in Double Eagle seriously p.i.s.sed about the mine?" Jim said.

"Not this p.i.s.sed," Ken said definitely.

Jim persisted. "Macleod have any arguments forced on her? Anybody try to pick a fight?"

"Not that I saw." Ken reflected, and added, a little reluctantly, She flirted with anything in pants. Even me, with Janice standing right next to me. But Jesus, Jim, you don't decapitate somebody for flirting. I mean, if Genghis Khan isn't around."

"She flirt with Gallagher?"

Ken thought. "He was always there, a step behind, but she kept it pretty businesslike, at least in public."

"She order him around?"

"More like he was antic.i.p.ating her every need. She didn't even have to ask, and he had it ready for her."

"The perfect a.s.sistant, in fact."

"Pretty much." Ken looked at Jim. "Why, you think he did it? Stringing that line would have taken some time. I don't recollect he went missing from the gym that long. And she was his meal ticket. He looked pretty happy in his work to me."

Jim gave a noncommittal grunt, and they left soon after. The trip back to Niniltna was necessarily slower than the trip out had been, and it was almost four o'clock before they pulled up in front of the post. "I'll get George to take her into Anchorage in the morning. Help me put her in the walk-in?"

The post had a free-standing walk-in cold locker out back, lined with plywood shelves, and there they placed Macleod's body.

In Jim's office, he didn't bother to shed his parka before he called Fairbanks to let them know. Kate waited while he typed up a preliminary statement and sent it off. "I heart the Internet," he said. "Let's go home."

"Should we-"

"Tomorrow's going to be a nightmare," he said. "She was a celebrity in Alaska, and she had a pretty high profile Outside, too. Plus she was a babe, and if that wasn't enough she was a blonde. I'm guessing local media, big-time, and didn't she have a stint on one of the networks as a commentator?"

Kate didn't know.

"It's going to be about as bad as it can be," Jim said gloomily. "I hate a celebrity murder. Let's just go home, okay?"

They went home and went to bed, and Kate wasn't alone in spending the better part of the night staring at the ceiling.

Jim was gone before eight the next morning, Johnny to school shortly thereafter, declaiming something about New Hampshire in iambic pentameter, and Kate soothed the savage breast by some intensive housecleaning. When she was done the fireplace was spotless, so were all the dishes and towels, and both beds were freshly made with clean sheets, although negotiating the flotsam and jetsam of Johnny's room was as always a challenge. They could have eaten off the floor under the stove and the refrigerator, too, always supposing anyone would ever want to do that.

She made salmon salad for a late lunch-canned salmon, chopped onions, sweet pickles, and mayo-and didn't have enough energy left over to slice bread so she ate it out of the bowl with a fork, curled up on the couch and feeding herself blindly as she looked out the window. It was a gray day, which matched her mood. The previous day's gruesome sights lingered unpleasantly before her mind's eye.

She had disliked Talia Macleod on sight but she wouldn't wish something like this on her, or on anyone. Except maybe Louis Deem, and he was already dead, and to be perfectly honest she would have been wishful of rather more dismemberment about his person than Macleod had suffered.

She checked herself guiltily. This was no subject for humor, no matter how backhanded. She put bowl and fork into the sink, donned gear, said "Let's take a ride" to Mutt, and headed for town.

Her first stop was Bingley Mercantile, where she loaded up on three hundred dollars' worth of staples: flour, sugar, coffee, tea, eggs, pilot bread, Velveeta, peanut b.u.t.ter, grape jelly, canned milk, canned vegetables, a case of Spam, another of canned corned beef, a mixed case of Campbell's soup, salt, pepper, garlic powder, toilet paper, Ivory soap, dish soap, clothes soap, a packet of disposable razors, Tylenol, Neosporin, some Band-Aids, a box of a.s.sorted candy bars, a bag of peppermints; and at the last minute she tossed in half a dozen magazines, including a new Playboy Playboy and a new and a new Penthouse, Penthouse, on the theory that foldout company was better than no company at all. on the theory that foldout company was better than no company at all.

"Point of order," Cindy said when she rang up Kate's purchases. Kate ignored the reference-et tu, Cindy?-and offered a bland stare and no explanation of her purchases as punishment.

She left the store secure in the knowledge that in approximately four minutes and twenty-three seconds the rumor that Kate Shugak had turned lesbian would be circulating the Park on the Bush telegraph. It might even have gone out on Park Air, but for the fact that Bobby Clark had the best of all possible reasons to know that it wasn't true. Not that that would stop him laughing like a hyena about it, also on the air.