Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

She pointed. “He left a note.”

“I see it.” It stuck out of the old typewriter like a banner. Jim bent over to read it. “ ‘I killed Dina Willner. I’m too old to go to jail.” “

“Wait a minute.” Kate stepped up to peer around him. “That’s it? What the hell kind of suicide note is that? He doesn’t say why?”

“He doesn’t even say how.” Jim stood up. “So, okay. This totally sucks.”

In Kate’s opinion, it could not have been better put, even if it would have sounded more appropriate coming out of Johnny’s mouth.

Rigor was well established and Letourneau was difficult to move. Getting him into the back of Dandy’s truck was bad enough, but Jim thought he was going to have to break one of Letourneau’s legs to get the body into the Cessna. He was inexpressibly relieved when he didn’t.

After forming an honor guard escort to the airport, Dandy and Scottie had peeled off to the Roadhouse, where, in spite of sworn promises to the contrary, he knew they were fast spreading the word. “I’ll fly him into Ahtna,” Jim said to Kate. “Get the body off to the lab.”

“Do you doubt that it was suicide?”

Jim shook his head. “I doubt big time that he killed Dina Willner and assaulted Ruthe Bauman. I don’t doubt that he killed himself.” He thought about it. “Was he sick, do you know?”

“What, you mean like crazy?” Kate snorted. “Like a fox. John Letourneau was one of the saner men I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t mean like crazy, I mean like cancer, something like that.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Was he broke?”

“Not that I know of. Park rats say John’s got the first dime he ever made.”

Jim shook his head. “Then I don’t get it. What makes a man confess to a murder he didn’t commit and then kill himself?”

There was a short silence. “He wanted us to stop looking,” Kate said slowly.

“Bingo. I’m really thinking Riley didn’t do it now, Kate. But I’m going to need a shitload of proof, and I’m going to need it fast.”

Kate turned to him. “From the state of the rigor, I’d say he did it not very long after we left.”

“Less than an hour would be my guess,” Jim said.

Kate nodded. “Me, too. What did we say to trigger this?”

He said quickly, “It doesn’t have to be us. He could have made up his mind to do it before we got there. We could have held him up.”

She flapped an irritated hand. “Calm down. I don’t feel responsible.” He looked at her. “I don’t, Jim,” she said in a quiet voice, her eyes meeting his without reservation.

It was probably the most open look she’d given him since the other afternoon, and it encouraged him to say rashly, “Kate. We need to talk.”

She stiffened. “No, we don’t.”

“Yeah. We do. And we will.” He looked at the body in the back of the plane, up at the falling snow, and repressed an oath. “But not now. Soon, though.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. He thought she sighed. Goaded, he said, “I know you want me.”

“I’m not a child with her face pressed up to the candy store window,” she said. “I don’t let myself have everything I want.”

His smile flashed out. “I like it that you compare me to candy.”

The smile, with its manifest, practiced charm, was enough by itself to make her angry all over again. She was relieved. For a moment, she’d been afraid that she could no longer be angry with him. It helped her say firmly, “Too much candy makes me sick to my stomach.”

It sounded prissy even to her own ears. He laughed, a spontaneous baritone sound that rang out down the strip like someone was tolling a bell, and she wanted to kill him.

He took off, the Cessna disappearing into the low overcast almost immediately. The weather was purportedly better in Ahtna, but if the ceiling came down any lower, he’d be unable to return to Niniltna today. She stood there, watching him go, a scowl on her face, trying to make up her mind if that was a good thing or a bad thing. “Hell with it,” she said, and kicked a chunk of ice out of her path on the way back to her snow machine. Mutt sensed her roommate’s uncertain temper and maintained a discreet silence.

Kate killed the engine of the snow machine in front of John Letourneau’s front steps, still scowling. She didn’t know why she was back here, nor did she know what she was looking for that Jim wouldn’t already have found. Mutt, sitting next to her, whined an inquiry. “Beats the hell out of me,” she said.

They went inside. Kate found John’s bedroom and a hamper containing dirty clothes. She held a sock out to Mutt, who sniffed it with interest and looked up, brows raised. “Anybody else been here?” Mutt sneezed once to clear her head and started nosing around the room.

They found nothing out of the ordinary in John’s bedroom. The guest bedrooms, running along both sides of the lodge on the second floor, had been scrubbed clean after the last client had flown south for the winter. They proved equally uninteresting. The kitchen was spotless, and none of the three tables in the dining room looked like they had been used in the last few months. The living room didn’t look as if it saw regular use, either. If you discounted the blood and bits of flesh, bone, and organ drying hard to floor, wall, and window, the office was neat, well organized, and up-to-date, nothing in the in basket, the files in the metal cabinet meticulously alphabetized in drawers marked CLIENTS, SUPPLIERS, EMPLOYEES, and TAXES.

The whole place was as neat as a hospital that never admitted any patients.

“Where did this guy live?” Kate wondered out loud as she opened the door off the living room.

Ah.

It was a smaller room than the vast expanses to be found elsewhere in this mausoleum, and made smaller by the amount of stuff crowded into it. A bookcase took up one entire wall, containing the Gun Digest, the Shooter’s Bible, Black’s Wing and Clay, Black’s Fly Fishing, The Milepost, the Alaska Almanac, and everything Boone and Crockett had ever published, from B &C Big Game Awards for the previous twenty years to Spirit of Wilderness, essays in eight editions appearing to have been written by such low-key guest authors as Theodore Roosevelt and Norman Schwarzkopf. One whole shelf was dedicated to maps of Alaska and the Park, starting with the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer and ending with the USGS survey of the Park, commissioned after d-2 to illustrate the new boundaries. That survey in hand, along with a compass, Kate could walk from Ahtna to Cordova and never get her feet wet.

There were no trophies on the walls of this room. There was a mahogany-stained gun case. It was locked, but Kate could see two empty cradles through the glass pane on the door, and four other cradles filled with serviceable but not particularly exciting weapons, none of them new, none of them elaborately chased with silver scrollwork, none of them with carved walnut stocks. Three of them didn’t even have scope mounts. Evidently, John wasn’t into collecting. There was a drawer at the base of the cabinet, unlocked, containing boxes of ammunition.

There was one chair, a dark brown leather recliner, a floor lamp next to it. Stacked on the end table, within reach, were copies of Field & Stream, Fair Chase, and Alaska Magazine, dog-eared where his own ad appeared.

The ad took up a quarter of a page and was simple and direct: “We offer the world’s best hunting and fishing, with experienced guides, no crowds, deluxe accommodations and gourmet meals.” There was a picture of a big bull moose with a magnificent rack standing knee-deep in a tiny lake, with the Quilaks rearing up stunningly in the background. An 800 phone number appeared at the moose’s feet.