Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

The room held a full-size bed with a nightstand and a lamp next to it, a dresser with four drawers, and an easy chair grouped with a floor lamp and an end table. A tiny bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a shower was tucked behind a door between dresser and chair. Outside the window spruce branches brushed the glass with scratchy fingers.

"Not a neatnik," Jim said from the doorway.

"Looks like Johnny's room," Kate said. "Or the Grosdidiers' house."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

The bed was a jumble of blankets and sheets, socks and underwear spilled out of an open drawer, dirty clothes were tossed in a corner. Crumpled beer cans had missed the wastebasket.

Kate made a quick circuit. "No letters, bills, mail of any kind. Stack of these, big surprise." She held up a fistful of copies of the latest Global Harvest flyer.

"When did Johnny say Gallagher showed up?"

"September."

"Four months. Long time to go without paying a bill."

"Auntie Vi would have kicked him out if he hadn't been paying his here." Jim looked over his shoulder. "What?"

"Thought I heard something."

"Mutt's outside."

"Right. Gallagher own a vehicle?"

"A pickup, Johnny said."

"Global Harvest would have given him a company snow machine for the river trip."

"Yeah, he had his own when I saw them leaving for the trip on the river. Wasn't any snow machine outside."

Kate looked under the bed, and pulled out a large duffel bag, black and red and worn at the seams. "Padlocked." She slung the bag over to the door. Jim got out his key ring, selected a slender tool, and bent over the lock. It took about two seconds. "Pitiful. No wonder it's TSA approved." He shoved the bag back at her.

She unzipped the bag and looked inside. She looked inside for so long that he said, "What?"

"Who's dealing coke in the Park these days?"

She dragged the bag back over to him and they both looked down at the Ziploc with the white powder inside it.

"Open it up," Jim said.

Kate did, and Jim licked his little finger, dipped, and tasted. "Yeah. Coke."

"Isn't full, either." "I noticed."

"That's a lot for personal consumption."

"I noticed that, too."

"Maybe my question is, who's using in the Park these days, and who's supplying?" She looked at Jim.

"I haven't heard anything. Even Howie seems to have stopped dealing lately." He thought. "Actually, I haven't heard of him dealing anything since before Louis died."

"Me, either." She nodded at the Ziploc. "But one of us would have heard if Gallagher was dealing."

Too late, they both remembered that Kate had been left out of the loop on the assaults on the river. "You'd think so," he said, voice carefully neutral.

"Shit." Kate rested her elbows on her knees. "Would you like me to investigate further, officer?"

"Can't use any of it as evidence."

"Fruit of the poisoned tree," she said. "Still." She reached in the bag and moved the Ziploc to one side. "Well, well."

"What?"

She pulled out a wad of bills fastened together with a rubber band.

There were a dozen more. All the bills looked well-used. Like maybe Gallagher had been taking payments in cash for something he was selling.

Kate repacked the bag, relocked the lock, and restowed the duffel beneath the bed. She rose to her feet, dusting her hands and knees. "Now what?"

"Well," Jim said, "we know more than we did before. We know Gallagher's running under an assumed name, and we know he is or was dealing coke."

"Doesn't mean he killed Mac or Macleod."

"No. Does Auntie Vi ever make her guests fill out any kind of form?"

She looked at him. "Did she make you fill out one?"

"No." He smiled down at her. "But that's me."

She rolled her eyes. "As long as their check or Visa card clears the bank, she doesn't care who they are or where they come from."

They closed the door and locked it and put the key back on the hook in the kitchen. Kate, unable to help herself, made a beeline for the flying pig cookie jar on the counter. No-bake cookies today. Kate took one, put the lid back, and then took the lid off again and took one more.

Auntie Vi's counters, while scrupulously clean, were barely visible beneath the detritus of her life, of which the flying pig was only one manifestation. There was a stack of unread Alaska Fisherman's Journals, another of legislative circulars that had been heavily notated and highlighted in yellow. She had three sets of canisters, one brass, one bright blue enamel, the third Lucite. A knife block bristled with knife handles, there was a beer box full of bright squares of fabric, a copy of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook on a stand, open to a scone recipe.

Kate sorted idly through a large shallow wicker basket that held a jumble of those tools essential to everyday civilized life. Pens, pencils, a Frosty the Snowman notepad, a handful of Hershey's Nuggets, a tape measure, an oven mitt, pushpins, safety pins, paper clips. There was a Camelot CD (original cast, Auntie Vi was a known Robert Goulet enthusiast). There were twist ties, a roll of duct tape, a roll of electrician's tape, a roll of Scotch tape, a spool of string.

Under the roll of duct tape she found a small untidy ball of green monofilament. "Hey," she said.

"Wait a minute." Jim was looking at the calendar hanging on Auntie Vi's wall. It was a big one, featuring gorgeous photographs of the Hawaiian Islands. The month pages featured large squares for the dates. There was something written in almost all of them, bake sales, basketball games, due dates for Park rat soon-to-be moms.

"Look at this." He turned his head and she held up the monofilament. "He eats breakfast in this kitchen every morning."

"Uh-huh," he said. "Look at this." He pointed at that day's date.

She followed his forefinger to the entry. "GH mtg, RC, 7pm." She looked up at him. "Global Harvest, Riverside Cafe?"

"Let's go see."

They parked in the store's parking lot and walked but they needn't have bothered. There was almost no one parked out front of the cafe. Kate sighed.

"What?"

"If Global Harvest stays on this mission of all information, all the time, people are bound to get bored and wander off."

"Think that's their plan?"

"It'd be mine, if I wanted to put in a strip mine in Iqaluk and I knew it was going to piss off a lot of people in the Park."

Jim held the door for her. "Stay," she said to Mutt, and went in.

Inside, Laurel Meganack was drying glasses behind the counter. She gave Jim a flat, inimical stare. She wouldn't even look at Kate. Maybe a dozen people were gathered around the corner table. Gallagher was on his feet, talking animatedly as he pointed to a map of the Park he'd taped to the wall. He looked up and his voice faltered when he saw Kate and Jim. Heads turned.

"Hey, Dick," Jim said.

"Sergeant Chopin," Gallagher said.

"Or should I say Doyle," Jim said.

"Who?" Gallagher said, but he waited a beat too long.

"Got a few questions for you," Jim said. "If you could come on down to the post, I'd appreciate it."

Gallagher looked past Jim at Kate, and whatever he saw in her face made the rest of the color drain from his own. "Sure," he said, "no problem. Just let me get my coat."

He turned and reached for the coat lying over the back of a chair. As he did so Kate hit Jim with a low tackle behind the knees and the bullet from the Sig Sauer P220 Compact only knocked the ball cap from his head and shattered the window in the door. From the other side of the door Mutt uttered a series of outraged barks.

There were screams and shouts and chairs scraping and bodies hitting the floor, and then another loud crash when a second window went. Kate and Jim were on their feet and looking at the broken window at the end of the counter Gallagher had evidently dived through. Jim started forward and Kate turned and hit the front door. "Mutt!"