Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

She looked at Mutt. “I ask because I can see Gary catching Dreyer in the act and blasting him with a shotgun. Hell, I can see myself doing that. But what if he found out after the fact, like maybe not until fall, oh, say, September. Would he take his shotgun and get on a plane and come to the Park, kill Dreyer, hide his body beneath Grant Glacier, and leave? It argues a certain amount of cold-bloodedness that I’m not sure Gary Drussell is capable of.”

Mutt bared her teeth ever so slightly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kate told her. “He could have hired you.”

Mutt yawned.

“But he didn’t.” She thought. “I’m not a father, but if Dreyer had gone for boys, and if he’d even looked at Johnny… Okay. Let’s move on.” She examined her notes. “Now we come to Bernie my-idiot-friend Koslowski, full-time and well-respected Park businessman, bartender, hotelier, and basketball coach, and part-time fool-arounder. He had what I think was a fairly serious affair-serious for Bernie, anyway-with Laurel Meganack. Laurel broke up with him because his marriage kept him from spending time with her. Shortly thereafter, she slept with Len Dreyer.”

Mutt sneezed.

“Let’s not quibble,” Kate told her. “She seduced him on the floor of the cafe kitchen, all right? My question is, is that enough to drive Bernie to murder? Of course not. But then along about-surprise! -September, Bernie hires Dreyer to regravel the paths between the cabins and the Roadhouse, at which time Enid, Bernie’s wife, seduces Dreyer, not once but twice.”

Mutt wore an expression of worldly wisdom.

“You’re right, of course,” Kate said. “Enid probably only slept with him the second time because Bernie didn’t catch them at it the first time. Not to be crude, but I wonder that Dreyer, with a record in very young things, could even get it up for Enid. Enid is tubby, gray-haired, and wrinkled. She looks sixty-five if she looks a day.” More tapping of the pencil. “Okay, Bernie catches him in the act, and the only surprise there is that Enid is more upset that Bernie isn’t upset than she is that Bernie caught her cheating.”

She bent a stern look upon her four-footed friend. “My question to you is this: Was Bernie’s lack of emotion when he caught Enid a put-on? Was he hiding how he really felt just to hurt back, and was he even then plotting a revenge involving the business end of a shotgun? Or” -Kate raised an admonitory finger-“was he still angry that his ex-girlfriend, one Ms. Laurel Meganack, slept with Len Dreyer? Did he perhaps feel a tad more proprietary toward the new cafe wench than he did his own wife? Did that feeling surpass any feeling he had about catching Enid in the act with Len, thus explaining his non-reaction reaction? Perhaps finding Enid with Len put the finishing touch on what he knew about Len and Laurel; perhaps finding Enid and Len together brought it all back and moved him finally to act. He knew all about the glacier from the bar talk every night, it would have been an obvious place to hide a body. Especially in the late fall, when you can’t count on the bears to clean up after you.”

Bernie was the source of many good, shrink-wrapped things to eat and Mutt wasn’t about to rat him out. She pretended to fall asleep.

“My feelings exactly,” Kate said. “Still. Have to keep him on the list.” She considered. “How about Enid? No. There’s no motive there. Dreyer had served his purpose when Bernie caught them, she was done with him, and it wasn’t like killing Dreyer would hide their, what, affair is too strong a word. Two-night stand.”

Mutt’s ear twitched.

Kate considered her notes. “And lest we forget,” she said, “there are the two strangers in our midst, Mr. Keith Gette and Mr. Oscar Jimenez, who urgently needed their greenhouse repaired first thing last spring. We have been to the old Gette homestead, Mutt. I think we both know what they’re growing in that greenhouse.”

Mutt looked up and wrinkled her nose.

“Exactly.” Kate brooded. “Here this slob inherits a perfectly good homestead from his deceased cousins and the first thing he and his buddy do is start a commercial dope farm. I mean, really. He might have done a little market research first, there’s no way he’s going to move that much weed in the Park, and if he decides to wholesale it in Alaska, it’s not like he can sell it out of the back of a pickup truck. I mean you can do that with Avon’s Skin-So-Soft, but there’s a market for Skin-So-Soft in mosquito season.”

Mutt looked patient.

Kate held up a hand, palm out. “I know, I know, I’m getting off the subject. My point is that if Dreyer saw what they were planting in that greenhouse, he could have blackmailed them to keep quiet about it. He probably wouldn’t have called it blackmail, of course, maybe just a small loan from time to time to keep him in beer. But they could have gotten tired of it.”

Mutt emitted a noise somewhere between a snort and a yip.

“You think it would have taken more than a summer’s worth of floating him loans for them to get tired enough of it to shoot him? May I remind you who held a shotgun on whom when we went up to the Gette place?”

Mutt lifted her lip in a sneer.

“True,” Kate admitted. “I don’t think that shotgun of Jimenez’s has been fired since the Eisenhower administration, either. Still. They had motive, damn it. I’m putting them on the list.”

Mutt laid her head back down, apparently defeated, but Kate knew better. She sat back and gazed out of the window, for the first time not seeing the burnt ruin that had been her home, which was at least one good thing to put to Dreyer’s credit. From high overhead an eagle called, a haunting, high-pitched sound, just before she plummeted down to snatch up a leveret from one of the snowshoe hares’ broods across the creek. The baby hare hadn’t lived long enough to learn caution in the open. He would never learn it now.

“You know,” Kate said, “it occurs to me that Len Dreyer had the perfect job for a predator. He ran tame in and out of every home in the Park. He saw us all in our jammies and bunny slippers and bed hair. He saw husbands fighting with their wives and kids beating up on their siblings. He knew who was having trouble paying the bills and who was drinking too much. A perfect opportunity for a predator. He could watch and wait and strike when it best suited him, because he would know when he was least likely to be caught.”

She looked at Mutt, who had sat up and fixed her with a steady yellow gaze. “He targeted young girls, prepubescent, slight of build. The women he slept with were of a similar physical type. I think we can rule out Enid and Laurel as contributory to his standard, as they seduced him.” The news about Dreyer’s real identity and past conviction would, given the reality of the Bush telegraph, soon be known across the Park. She didn’t want to be anywhere near Enid or Laurel when they heard it. “We should concentrate on the places we know he worked, where girls and women of that general description lived. There could be other parents besides Gary Drussell with a motive for murder.”

She shuffled through her notes and read down the list she had compiled that morning, combining what she had discovered from Bernie and Bonnie and the information that Dandy had culled from his ex-girlfriends.

In May, Dreyer/Duffy worked for the Drussells, during which time Kate was certain he had assaulted the youngest daughter. Early June saw him rototilling the Hagbergs’ garden, a yearly chore, and he was back a month later putting in a foundation for an outbuilding, in company with Dandy Mike. In July he also repaired the Gette greenhouse.

In August he did some work on George’s hangar, and installed Bonnie Jeppsen’s new toilet.