A Cold Day for Murder (23 page)

She went around the snow machine parked in front to the pickup truck behind it. It was a small diesel, an Isuzu Trooper, with a homemade toolbox mounted in the bed behind the cab. She popped the hood. She’d disconnected but not removed the battery when the first big snow fell the previous autumn. Now she took it out and set it on the counter. She left the garage and went to the generator shed. The Onan 3.5KW had been new last fall, but it was also diesel and balked at an easy start as a matter of principal. She bled off some air from the compression-release valve and, grunting, gave the hand crank a few more turns. The engine caught, and she winced away from the resulting roar. She shut the door on it and returned to the garage. A single, 150-watt light bulb she had forgotten to turn off in February lit up the dim interior. She hooked the truck battery up to the trickle charger and left it.

As an afterthought she went around to the back of the cabin and climbed the wooden ladder to the rack that held the diesel fuel tanks, a dozen fifty-five gallon Chevron drums mounted on their sides, connected with lengths of insulated copper tubing to each other, the cabin and the generator shack. Pulling the dipstick from its rack next to the ladder, she tested each barrel. The diesel was used only to run the truck, the cabin’s oil stove and the generator to run the power tools in the garage, so the barrels were all about a quarter to a third full. It was enough to see her through to late May or early June, when the road opened up and the tanker from Ahtna could get through. “Close enough for government work,” she said out loud, and wiped the dipstick and capped the last barrel.

She went back into the house and reappeared with a bucket of soapy water, a sponge and a squeegee and began to wash the windows on the garage. After a while the sun grew warm enough to remove her sweatshirt and work in shirtsleeves. “Bet we hit thirty-five today,” she said. She stopped and looked guiltily at the cabin. Huge yellow eyes stared reproachfully out at her from the window over the sink. “Get your paws off the counter, dammit,” Kate called, but her heart wasn’t in it. Something halfway between a whine and a howl was the reply, and she sighed and put down the squeegee.

Mutt greeted her at the door with ecstatic yips and tried to weasel her way outside. Kate wound one hand in her ruff and with the other reached for the choke chain and leash. She led Mutt outside, slipped the choke chain around Mutt’s cringing neck and fastened the leash to a length of wire stretched between two trees at the edge of the clearing. The leash was just long enough to let Mutt run up and down the length of the wire without tangling itself. Mutt immediately dropped to her belly and, without a trace of shame, groveled for freedom.

“Don’t look like that,” Kate told her. “You know it’s for your own good.”

· · ·

The killer donned hat and jacket and gloves and shouldered the rifle. He took the little mirror from its nail on the wall and held it at arm’s length to survey his appearance. He frowned and made a minute adjustment to the collar of his shirt. His brows puckered a little over the wrinkling effect of the rifle’s strap on his new mackinaw. He smoothed the jacket down with one hand, readjusted the strap just a hair to the left, and was satisfied.

He looked around the cabin. It was spotless, the chipped white porcelain of the sink scrubbed clean, the stove top scoured and gleaming blackly, the floor swept, the bunk made up neatly beneath its olive-drab army blanket. He nodded his head, pleased. No one was ever going to be able to say he wasn’t a good housekeeper.

His first stop was a mile down the road. He enjoyed the walk, the cool, calm air, the chittering of the squirrels. Once he paused and cocked his head, certain that he’d heard a golden-crowned sparrow trill out its trademark three descending notes, Spring Is Here. It didn’t repeat itself, and he moved on.

When he came into the clearing of the next cabin down the road, he met his neighbor coming in from the outhouse. He was greeted, if not with enthusiasm, then at least with civility. “Hey, hi there. Great first day of spring, isn’t it? Want some coffee?”

He turned toward the cabin and the first bullet caught him in the back, severing his spinal cord and exploding out of his chest in a hole six inches across. The second bullet went in the back of his neck and ripped out the front of his throat, changing his last terrified scream into a bubbling gurgle of bewilderment.

· · ·

The sun was high and warm in a clear, pastel sky, and the thermometer on the cabin wall read twenty-eight above. “Told you so,” she said to Mutt. Setting the chisel with a few taps of the blunt side of the axe, she stood back, raised the axe over her head, and brought the blunt side down on the chisel. The round of pine had seasoned through the winter and split cleanly at the first blow, with a satisfying crack, into two almost even halves. “I’m giving a loose to my soul,” she told Mutt. Mutt yawned and settled her chin on crossed forepaws. Her choke chain was pulled tight, her leash stretched as far as it would go between choke chain and wire, and the leash run as far as it could get from where Kate was chopping wood. She was not speaking to Kate, but she still had plenty to say, all of it eloquent. Properly chastened, Kate reversed the axe and used the blade to split each half into two chunks.

A jangle of chain and a flurry of hysterical barks interrupted the splitting of the second round. She looked up to see Mutt prancing frantically, in a manner wholly unsuited to her age and dignity, at the extreme end of the wire closest to the edge of the clearing. Every hair on her body strained against the leash. Kate followed her gaze and drew in a breath.

He was a timber wolf, ash gray in color, standing three and a half feet tall at the shoulder and weighing, Kate estimated, a hundred and sixty pounds. His eyes were large, brown and probably usually filled with intelligence. Today they were bright with something else, and they were fastened on the half-wolf, half-husky tethered to the wire next to Kate’s cabin. He shook his coat into amorous order, adjusted the curl of his tail and stalked forward.

He was, all in all, a very handsome fellow indeed. Well, Mutt was no hag herself, and Kate understood the impetus behind and almost wavered beneath the onslaught of imploring yips and entreating howls from both lovers. She managed to pull herself together, though, and spoke in a stern voice. “Dammit, Mutt, I told you. We don’t need any more puppies around here. The last bunch like to drove both of us into running away from home. We’re lucky they turned out to be halfway trainable so Mandy could put them to work.”

Mutt ignored the voice of reason, quivering, her ruff standing straight up, her tail curled coquettishly, her wide yellow eyes fixed on the wolf. He paused in his approach, glancing for the first time in Kate’s direction, taking her in at a single glance and dismissing her as negligible. Kate wasn’t quite sure she even registered on his peripheral vision as human and therefore a potential threat; his attention was clearly fixed elsewhere.

She moved over to the wire. Mutt danced around her eagerly, and Kate took one cautionary wind of the leash around her forearm, regarded it for a moment and took another. “Never underestimate the power of love,” she muttered, and Mutt proved her point by almost jerking her arm out of its socket when Kate detached the leash from the wire. Mutt pulled avidly for the trees, Kate grimly for the cabin. Sweating, straining, and swearing all the way, the tug-of-war turned her hands and forearm dark red and numb to all feeling. Finally, Kate managed to get her shivering, whining roommate back inside and the cabin door safely closed and latched behind her. She subsided limply on the doorstep and mopped her overheated brow. “Besides,” she told the eager scrabble of toenails against the other side of the door, “if I can do without, so can you.”

From the edge of the clearing the wolf howled, a long, lovelorn sound that rose to a frustrated crescendo. “Oh, shut up,” Kate snapped, and returned to vent her spleen on the woodpile.

· · ·

“Well, hey there, my first customer of the morning.” The portly, cheerful man turned to face him across the counter. “The mail plane hasn’t been in yet, so—”

The killer shot once. The expanding nose of the soft-tipped bullet shredded the back of the man’s head and stuccoed the wall of wooden cubbyholes behind him in grayish white and dark red. The man’s body stood, swaying for a moment, before slumping slowly and somehow gracefully to the floor.

There was a still, silent moment. The killer heard a quick, sharp intake of breath and wheeled to see the curtain that separated the post office from the rest of the house moving, as if someone had been holding it open and had just released it. He jerked it back, to reveal an empty living room, the door to it swinging wide. He went to the door and looked out, and saw her running down the long, narrow length of the airstrip, a pudgy little gray-haired woman in jeans and sweatshirt and stocking feet. He thought she screamed. A movement caught his eye and he looked beyond her. Two people on a snow machine broke out of the trees at the middle of the strip. The running woman yelled and waved her arms. The driver looked her way and turned the snow machine in her direction. The woman screamed and waved her arms more frantically.

The killer brought the 30.06 to his shoulder in one smooth motion and shot once. The driver slumped over the handlebars and the machine swerved abruptly. The passenger screamed and tried to shove the driver aside so she could grasp the handlebars, to no avail. She screamed again, and went on screaming, as the machine slewed and swerved, back and forth, across the airstrip. Lining up the sight, the killer exhaled, held it and shot again. The screaming stopped abruptly. The snow machine, riderless, ran into the plowed snowbank at the side of the strip and flipped over.

He gave the Winchester a fond pat and looked around for the running woman. He found her all the way down at the end of the strip, stubby legs pumping tirelessly beneath the spur of adrenaline. Sighting carefully through the peephole, down the barrel and over the darkened bead that stood out so clearly against the hard-packed snow of the runway, he closed his fingers almost gently around the trigger, heard the shot and its echo immediately following, felt the kick of the butt against his shoulder, saw her stagger and fall. She lay still for a moment, before lifting herself up on her forearms and dragging herself into the trees. He shook his head, almost in admiration, and went after her.

He paused at the edge of the strip to look at the bodies of the two from the snow machine. He turned them face up with one foot, careful not to let the blood dull the gloss of his new boots. One body no longer had a face, the other no chest. The killer straightened one’s shirt, the other’s legs, and followed the tracks into the trees.

A sharp crack echoed through the woods, and instinctively he threw himself down and rolled. He came up shooting, working the bolt and spacing his shots in an arc. He paused to reload, listening. There was complete silence, and then he saw the broken branch in one of his own footprints. He clucked at his over-reaction and recovered her trail. A few yards down it, he found the body.

He approached cautiously, rifle held in front of him, a round in the chamber and the safety off. Mukluks, bright pink bib overalls, a checked shirt. “Oh,” he said, on a long note of discovery when at last he saw her face, and sank to his knees, beside her in the stained snow.

She was blonde and she was beautiful, even in death. The last time he’d seen her, that fair skin had been flushed, the full, red lips twisted away from her white, straight teeth in a sneer, the widely-spaced dark blue eyes narrowed in contempt. She had laughed at him.

He smiled down at her now, touched her cheek. It was cooling rapidly. He raised one lid to see if her eye was as blue as he remembered. It was. He admired the perfect fans her thick lashes made on her cheeks. His hand slid down her throat, shaped one breast, stroked her narrow waist, cupped between her thighs.

A small whisper, perhaps of wind, rustled through the grove. A sound, perhaps the whimper of a frightened squirrel, came from deeper in the stand of trees. It was enough to make him withdraw his hand.

He rose to his feet and threaded his way through the trees to the airstrip. Righting the overturned snow machine, he mounted it and thumbed the electric starter. It caught on the first try.

· · ·

The pile of split wood was waist high when Kate heard the rapid whap-whap-whap of a helicopter’s rotor. The sun was high in a still-cloudless sky, and her shirt was damp down her spine and beneath her arms. She sunk the axe into the tree stump that served as her chopping block and went inside to pump up a drink of water. She drained the glass, refilled it and brought it back outside, narrowly missing Mutt’s nose in the door. She sat down on the front step, groaning a little from sore muscles. A rustle of underbrush called her attention to the edge of the clearing, where Mutt’s would-be lover sat beneath a mountain hemlock. For a change he was not looking yearningly at the cabin but in an inquiring fashion at the sky. She squinted up as the noise of the helicopter became louder, and jumped to her feet when it roared the last few feet to hover over her clearing.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she yelled, her voice a furious croak. “You can’t land here!”

Mutt’s lover decided it was a better day for discretion than valor and broke for the high country. As the Bell Jet Ranger with the distinctive blue-and-gold markings of the Alaska State Troopers lowered to the exact center of the clearing, Kate was forced back up against the door of the cabin. She held her breath, watching the ends of the rotors sweep dangerously close to the eaves of every building in the semicircle of her homestead.

The blades slowed their rotation but didn’t stop. The engine powered down, and the door of the helicopter opened and a man in a state trooper’s uniform emerged. Holding on to his hat, he crouched over the few running steps that brought him face to crotch with Kate.