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Although Kate was begi
And she really, really wanted to know.
Using the steak knife, she cut rough pieces out of the canvas cot, shaped them into soles, and bored holes through which she laced the rope. The canvas was stiff and the rope was harsh against her skin. She found a man’s fla
She tucked the steak knife into the rope around her waist. She situated the table to the left of the open door and placed the chair so that it was just out of eyesight of the doorway. She went outside to look over the forty-foot spruce tree that stood at just the right spot to give her a good view of what would come up the road later this evening. She broke a few dead branches, bent a few living ones, and made a reasonably comfortable seat, padded with the canvas left over from the cot and the remaining bits of rope, about twenty feet up. It was clearly visible from the cabin, but in her experience, people seldom looked up. She cleared what she hoped was a fairly unobvious path to the ground, then went from ground to seat and back again a couple of times to familiarize herself with hand and footholds. She wanted to be able to ascend and descend as quietly as possible.
Her hands were sticky with sap when she was done. She went back to the cabin and gathered up half a dozen bottles of water. She took three of them up the tree. The other three she secreted in a hollow beneath a fallen spruce about a hundred feet off the road. If she needed them, they’d be there. She hoped she wouldn’t.
She went back to the cabin and cleaned up the broken glass in front of the window and hauled the stove back inside. It felt a lot heavier on the way in than it had on the way out. If she was right and they came late, chances were that with no ambient light to reflect off the glass, they’d never see that it was missing. If she was lucky, they wouldn’t notice the broken stovepipe. It was amazing what people missed seeing just because they had preconceived notions of what was supposed to be in front of them.
She got another bottle of water and scrubbed the sap from her hands. She’d found a nappy fleece jacket with a broken zipper that was at least thirteen sizes too big for her, but it was heavy. She hid it in the deadfall with the water.
The sun went behind the mountains and took at least as much time to set below the horizon. The forest was filled with the sounds of the birds and the beasts going about their business, hunting, feeding, grooming. A bear sounded off in the distance, and Kate hoped he or she wasn’t heading toward the cabin.
They came, as near as she could figure, around midnight. The witching hour, the hour when the blues band in your favorite neighborhood dive was just cranking it up, the hour when even Ted Koppel was ready to pack it in for the night, so it figured. They came in a nondescript pickup, a dull gray in color, plates the old blue-on-gold Alaska plates, no hubcaps, no mag wheels.
Only it wasn’t they. It was only one man, whom Kate recognized as Erland the moment he stepped out. She couldn’t believe it. She was even a little a
He saw the open door and halted, half in and half out of the vehicle. She began to descend the tree in stealth mode, glad her hair was no longer long enough to catch on spruce needles as she went.
She froze halfway down when he reached into the truck and took the keys out. Damn.
He walked up to the door. “Kate?” he said.
She came up behind him, the canvas and fallen spruce needles masking her steps. “Go on in,” she said.
He jumped and swore, and it did her heart all the good in the world. He sucked air in and let it out in an explosive breath. “You are one hell of a woman,” he said with what sounded like sincere regret.
“Well, don’t sound so sorry about it,” she said. “Go on, go in. Sit down.”
“How the hell did you get loose?”
“Sit,” Kate said, and leaned up against the wall next to the open door.
He sat, looking at her through the gloom. “Can we have a light? I think there’s an oil lamp around somewhere.”
One of the things Kate had learned during a five-year intensive stint with the Anchorage DA was that, contrary to popular fiction, bright lights did not make people spill their guts. On the contrary, the darker the room, the more forthcoming the secrets. “I like it the way it is,” she said.
She sensed rather than saw him shrug. “You’re the boss.”
She didn’t believe that for a New York minute. “Who killed William Muravieff?” she asked.
“Ah,” he said.
Kate waited out the silence that followed. Erland Ba
“First of all, I didn’t kill him,” he said finally.
“I did sort of figure that out on my own,” Kate said. “Was it Oliver?”
There was another, longer silence. “Ah, Kate,” he said, and there was a world of sorrow in the words.
“Was it really that petty?” she said. “William had the girl Oliver wanted, and Oliver killed him for it?”
Again she sensed the shrug. “When you’re sixteen and male, girls are all your thinking about. And Wanda was something.”
He still hadn’t admitted anything, but then she wasn’t wearing a wire, either. “And you let Victoria take the fall. It was just so convenient. She was making so much noise over your decision to replace your union employees with contract hires, and then, lo and behold, she gets arrested for murdering her own son. Her trial knocks your restructuring of the family business off the front pages long enough for you to get the dirty work done and over with, and then, my god, she’s found guilty. You must have thought you’d died and gone to heaven.”
“I kept hoping she’d beat the rap, right up until the verdict,” he said heavily.
“Bullshit,” Kate said. “She wouldn’t let her sons work for you after you a
Silence.
“And then, thirty years later,” Kate said, “certainly long enough for all the buried skeletons to have long since deteriorated, Victoria gets cancer and her daughter hires me so she doesn’t have to die in jail. And you start tying up loose ends and a loose ca
Erland must have read Disraeli. Never apologize, never explain. Arrogant but effective, especially when faced with three felony counts of murder, not to mention a felony count of kidnapping.
“You must have wished that Victoria had choked to death on a bone,” Kate said into the silence. “She was always more trouble than she was worth anyway. Marrying that worthless Eugene. Finding out you were cooking the books.”