She was on the doorstep, kicking the mud from her shoes, when a movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw a tall man enter the clearing. “Oh shit,” she said beneath her breath.
Mutt burst from the clearing and launched a joyful assault. The man laughed, trying to dodge out of the way of an enthusiastic tongue. When Mutt liked, she liked.
“What?” Johnny said, appearing in the doorway, a pen behind his ear, one finger marking his place in his journal.
“We’ve got company,” she said, and opened the door wide.
The far-too-familiar shark’s grin flashed out at her. “Hey, Kate.”
“Jim,” she said.
The grin, if anything, widened. “Your lack of enthusiasm is duly noted,” he told her. “Hey, Johnny.”
“Hey, Jim.”
Kate, noticing the answering smile on Johnny’s face, thought sourly that Johnny was still young enough to be impressed by the crisp blue and gold of the state trooper uniform, not to mention the Smokey the Bear hat. Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Jim in his Smokey hat since before… well, since before last summer in Bering. He was wearing a dark blue ball cap with the trooper insignia on the crown and a noticeable lack of gold braid. And while he wore the uniform shirt, it was tucked into a pair of faded blue jeans, and the shiny half boots had given way to shoepacks, scuffed and muddy.
She looked up and saw him watching her. One dark blond eyebrow raised ever so slightly. She couldn’t help it, the flush crept right up her neck, over the thin white roped scar stretching almost from ear to ear, and into her face.
For some reason, it didn’t amuse him. The smile faded from his face and he said briskly, “I’ve got a job for you, if you’ve got the want ads out.”
3
At minimum, Bush courtesy required that no visitor be turned away without refreshment, and it was, unfortunately, time for dinner. Jim accepted Kate’s less than enthusiastic invitation and settled in on the L-shaped built-in couch, long legs stretched out in front of him with the air of a man entirely at home. Johnny was shaping moose burger into patties. Kate, having drained the fries and put them in the oven to keep warm, and having set the table and otherwise occupied herself in the kitchen half of the cabin, which after all was only twenty-five feet on a side, and having been the recipient of an ungentle elbow when she got in Johnny’s way, twice, found herself with nothing better to do than pour two mugs of coffee and offer one to their guest.
Jim blew on the steaming liquid, a small smile in his eyes.
Kate cleared her throat and sat down on the couch as far away from him as was physically possible. “What’s the job?”
The smile didn’t go anywhere but he answered readily enough. “You hear about Len Dreyer?”
She nodded at Johnny. “Got my very own personal town crier.”
Johnny looked over his shoulder at the two of them, a fragment of ground meat adhering to his cheek, and grinned.
“He did a good job there,” Jim said. “Kept everybody out, kept them from contaminating the scene.”
“Was Len killed there?” Kate said.
Jim shook his head. “I doubt it. He caught a shotgun blast through the chest at point-blank range. There wasn’t enough blood at the scene for it to have happened there.”
Kate thought about it, about the physics of a body left beneath the overhang of a glacier. “How long had he been there?”
“I don’t know. He was stiff, but given the location, I don’t think we can put that down to rigor.”
“No. Did you talk to Dan O’Brian?”
“Why would I? Did he know Dreyer?”
Kate hunched an impatient shoulder. “Everybody knew Len. No, I was thinking about the glacier. It’s receding.”
He raised that eyebrow again, the one that made his expression shift from shark to Satan.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It just seems an odd place to hide a body.”
“If you wanted to hide it,” Jim said. “Maybe the killer wanted Dreyer to be found.”
“By whom? Who the hell walks around inside glaciers?”
The eyebrow stayed up. They’d been conversing in low voices, so as not to break the concentration of the glacier trekker making hamburgers ten feet away. She smiled in spite of herself, and it was a rare enough occasion to make Jim’s breath catch.
Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin wasn’t the only man who had found Kate Shugak to be beautiful, not least the father of the young man currently beating moose burger into submission across the room. From anything Jim had been able to discover, there had been no one else for Jack Morgan from the moment he’d set eyes on Kate Shugak, what would it be, nine, ten years before? No, more like twelve. Kate had taken a degree in justice from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, done a year at Quantico, and had gone straight to work as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney’s investigative arm, of which Jack Morgan had been head. From all accounts, the future was pretty much set in stone from that moment forward, and it wasn’t a future when those two were not together.
Of course, that didn’t include the eighteen-month period following Kate burning out on working sex crimes and moving back to this very homestead, after which Jack arrived at this very door, FBI in tow, to hire her to find a missing Park ranger. That had marked the end of Kate’s self-imposed seclusion and the beginning of her career as a, pardon him, consultant. Jim had tossed her cabin the previous summer when she had gone missing, and he had run across her tax return. That was what she had put in the space marked “Your Occupation”: Consultant. It was the only real smile he remembered getting out of the exercise. She was still pissed at him for tossing the place, too. Among other things.
He looked at her now, the smile lighting her narrow eyes, eyes sometimes hazel, sometimes a light brown, sometimes verging on a mossy green. He’d never been close enough for long enough to figure out which was the one true color. Her hair was thick and black and as shiny as a raven’s wing, and had once hung to her belt in a neat French braid. Now it was cropped short, brushed straight back from a broad brow, falling into a natural part over her right temple, the ends apt to curl into inky commas around her ears. Her cheekbones were high and flat and just beginning to take on that bronze tint he had noticed during previous summers, all gifts of her Aleut heritage, although the high bridge of her nose was all Anglo and the jut of her chin as Athabascan as it got.
She seemed tall but wasn’t, reaching a neat five feet on a lithe, compact frame. She had a tall personality, he decided. There were curves, plenty of them, from which the inevitable T-shirt and jeans did nothing to detract, but they were sheathed in a deceptively smooth layer of muscle, firm and well-toned, that gave her a grace of motion that could fool the eye into thinking she wasn’t as strong as an ox and as quick as a snake. She was both.
She became aware of his steady, unblinking scrutiny, and the smile went out like a light. It was replaced with a wary expression, shuttered, watchful. Vigilant, perhaps, was the most appropriate word. The watch was set, bayonets fixed, ready to repel invaders. He hid a grin. It suited him to have her on her guard around him. She wouldn’t have been worried if he didn’t constitute a threat. And Jim Chopin wanted very much to be a threat to Kate Shugak. If only in the most horizontal meaning of the word.
Their eyes met, and he smiled at her, a long, slow smile filled with memory and purpose.
The sizzle of moose burgers hitting olive oil filled the room, followed by the inviting smells of charred meat and garlic.