Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

Even with the new skylight in the roof there wasn't enough light in the little room to see what he was talking about. "What's wrong?" she said, peering into the dim comer in which he was standing.

A booted foot crunched on sand, and she recoiled when a disembodied hand thrust a can of pork and beans in her face. "Yuk," she said, wrinkling her nose at the smell. "Somebody leave the rest of his supper behind?"

"I don't think so." Brushing by her, Jack stooped to go through the door. His voice was grim, and Kate followed him outside.

The light confirmed what his fingertips had felt. The can was punctured, a hole the size of a.38 caliber bullet entering under the V in Van and exiting just above the bottom seam.

Jack regarded the hole meditatively. "Think whoever put this stuff here used it for target practice?"

Without answering, Kate ducked back inside the dugout.

Together they hauled out everything inside. As they removed each box, Jack marked it with his omnipresent black Marksalot, and they restacked them outside in the same position they had been in inside. The contents of the perforated cans had spilled out over the cases and dried to a sticky dark brown that looked like old blood.

"Some of it might be old blood," Jack observed. The outward facing surface common to three of the boxes, the three messiest ones, looked crumpled, as if a heavy weight had slammed into them where they were stacked against the dugout's wall.

Jack stood looking at the cardboard boxes, hands in his pockets. "What we got here is two choices," he said at last.

"And they are?"

"Either somebody was really and I mean really tired of pork and beans."

"Or?" Their eyes met. Her mouth compressed into a thin line. "You got a can opener in the plane?"

They opened every case and then every can with a hole in it. They found a dozen such cans and, rattling around in the sixth box they opened, one lone slug. Jack held up the misshapen piece of metal and said, "This could be anything from a.22 to a.357." Nevertheless, he stored it carefully away in a Ziploc bag. Into another Ziploc he scraped some of the dried brown fluid from the front of one of the boxes. He'd brought a flashlight back with the can opener and they examined the floor of the dugout, without result. Jack bagged some samples of the dirt anyway. He made several drawings of the scene, and when he was through they repacked the cans in their cases and loaded them into the back of the Cessna. The toilet paper, which had survived the armed assault relatively unscathed-"Naturally," Jack said, "the slug would have been in a lot better shape if it had impacted the asswipe"-was stacked back where they'd found it.

The little room, dark and dank and smelling of mildew, had begun to close in around Kate and she was glad to leave it. The air outside felt fresh and clean and she pulled it into her lungs in big, cleansing breaths.

The dugout stood on the south slope of a tiny rise that fell away to the beach. Jack stood with his back to the water, looking at the structure, impressed by its air of having grown there. The rye grass grew tall and thick and right up to the walls and over the roof, and even now, in winter, from three, even two steps away, the door was invisible. He could see how the Coasties had missed it. Of course, they hadn't been looking with murder in mind. "Who built this place? And why?"

"You said this island has a natural strategic location,"

Kate reminded him, pulling the door closed, noting as she did that it was made of meticulously assembled planks in which no nail had been placed without careful thought and attention. "You think the Aleuts wouldn't have noticed that, too?"

He was skeptical. "You think there was a village here at one time? You think this place has been here that long?"

"Why not? It's built in the old way. Those dirt walls have been there so long they feel like concrete. Look at this door. Those planks are salvage, and old salvage at that. See? Hand-planed. And these nails? Those weren't mass-produced. Some whaler broke up offshore a hundred years ago and whoever lived here made doors out of the wreck. And that hole you fell through."

"What about it?"

"Before the Russians introduced doors, the Aleuts built these barabaras with the doors in the roof." She looked around. "I bet if we looked, we'd find the ruins of others."

"There are no records of a village on Anua, Kate. There's no mark on the map for archaeological ruins. This is probably just some seal hunter's cabin."

She shook her head. "The beach is long, wide and relatively level. There aren't that many good beaches in the Aleutians. Mostly it's just one steep slide from mountaintop to ocean bottom. That makes this a natural site"-she gave him a brief smile-"for landing kayaks.

They walked the ten feet to where the rye grass left off and the beach began. Over a mile in length, Kate estimated, with a jumbled rock formation on one end and cliffs on the other. A creek burbled seaward, cutting a shallow bed through the center of the beach down to the waterline. There, the surf pounded viciously at the gravel, and the ebb and flow of the swells coming in from the southeast alternately revealed and swallowed up a half-dozen reefs within the curve of the land, staggered one after the other, jagged and threatening. "Yeah," Jack said dryly, "real inviting place to beach a boat."

"They would have found a way in," Kate said, positive.

"And it would have been a tremendous natural defense against attack."

"What are you looking at?"

Her eyes were squinted against the sun. "Right there, I-yes! I think it is!" she cried, pointing, and took off running.

"Oh, Christ," Jack said, and took off after her.

He caught up with her where the towers of rock broke the furious surf into white sheets of spray some hundred feet away. Not near far enough away, in his humble opinion, and he was about to say so when he saw that she was stripping out of her clothes. His heartbeat, which had started to slow down at no sign of a mad marksman with a mad on for Van Camp's Pork and Beans, began once again to speed up. "What in the hell are you doing, Shugak?"

"Look," she said, pointing in front of them.

"What?" He cast about wildly for some reason for Kate to be stripping down to the buff, on an Aleutian Island, between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, in the middle of October.

They were standing at the edge of a tumble of rock that stretched between beach and the rock towers. The surf pounded at the towers in what Jack considered to be determined and ominous fashion. Some amphibious mammal, probably one with very large and very sharp teeth, was barking in large numbers somewhere beyond those rock towers. Gulls screamed and dived in the blue sky above. Kate gave an exasperated sigh at his confused expression and pointed again. "Right in front of you, idiot."

His gaze dropped. Directly in front of the toes of his boots, on the tumble of rock between them and the ominous surf, there was a series of shallow pools in the dips and hollows between the rocks. One of the larger pools began at their feet, stretched out some twelve feet across and looked to be some three to four feet deep. He gave the still, green surface a suspicious look. "Tidal pools?" he said. "So what?"

"Not tidal pools, hot springs!" Kate said impatiently.

"See the steam! Can't you smell the sulfur?" She shucked out of panties and bra and waded in. "I knew it!" she said, feeling her way with her feet. "The bottom is almost smooth and-yes," she said, bending over and feeling beneath the surface with her hands, "I can feel where they leveled out a place to sit." She turned and lowered herself into the water. It came up almost to her chin, and she let loose with a long, voluptuous sigh. "Not too hot, not too cold, just exactly, perfectly right."