“Sounds like it might be a plan,” Bobby said, thinking it over. “How’s the road?” He was referring to the gravel road leading into the Park. It was graded twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, and the rest of the year left to fend for itself. In spring, it was death on the transaxel.
Billy winced. “They haven’t graded it yet. They want to wait until they’re sure it won’t snow again.”
Bobby snorted. “So basically we’re waiting until Memorial Day, like usual. Well, hell. I guess we could do the convoy thing, have a truck with a come-along on it before and another behind.”
Billy nodded. “That’d probably work.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Dinah said. “But ask Kate first.” She sneaked a glance over her shoulder. Ah. Things had regressed from kissing back to yelling.
“How’d you do this?” Jim said, grabbing a wrist and forcing her hand from her sleeve, to reveal what seemed to his horrified eyes like third-degree burns on the back. Blisters had already formed.
Kate mumbled something.
“What?” Jim said, managing to infuse the single word with enough menace to back down George Foreman.
Her wide mouth set in a mutinous line. “The cabin wasn’t all burned down when I got here. I went inside to get some things.”
“I see,” Jim said. “You went inside a burning building. To ‘get some things.” Are you out of your friggin’ mind?“ He had her by the shoulders again, and he was shaking her, again.
She wrenched free this time. “Will you knock it off! I’m okay!” She stared at him haughtily, very much in princess of the Park mode, and hoped that he couldn’t see she was about to burst into tears.
His face was brick red and he was literally speechless with rage. He took a few gulping breaths, glared at her for a moment, and then slammed out of the truck and stamped over to Bobby, who surveyed him with interest. “Count to ten,” he told the trooper.
Jim expressed his opinion of Kate’s intelligence in a few well-chosen phrases that commanded the admiration of everyone present.
Bobby, careful to keep his back to the truck in which Kate still sat, grinned. “Scared you, did she?”
“Up yours, Clark,” Jim said, and with a mighty effort, forced the door closed on his rage and locked it, tucking the key away for a time when he could get Kate alone and bring her to a realization of the error of her ways. He didn’t hold out much hope of succeeding but he was eager to try. He reached up to pull off his cap and noticed his hand was trembling. He swore again and slapped the cap against his knee. “What time did she show up?” he said to Bobby.
Bobby checked Dinah’s watch. “About four hours ago, give or take. I called you and we came right back out.”
Jim nodded and pulled the cap back on, screwing it down over his ears. “An hour to get to your house. So she left the fire about five hours ago, give or take. She wouldn’t have left until she was sure it was gone. So it was probably torched around midnight. Maybe. Unless it was something more sophisticated than a match.”
“You know anything about arson?”
Jim shook his head. “Fuck all.”
“They’ve got specialists for that back in the world, don’t they?” Bobby said.
“Yeah, sure, but I doubt that I can get the state to fork out the airfare for one when said arson doesn’t involve either extensive property damage or multiple deaths.”
They turned as one to look at the wreckage, and the smoke had cleared enough now to see the handle of the old-fashioned water pump that had once presided over the sink sticking up out of the rubble like a forlorn sentinel. The loft was pretty much intact, having fallen almost as one piece as the walls below had burned. Jim suspected that the falling loft had had something to do with smothering some or all of the fire, and wondered when it had come down. Probably right about the time Kate decided to rescue her “things.”
The rage started hammering at the locked door. Never had self-control seemed more elusive. One of the first things taught in trooper school was how to establish authority at a crime scene. If he’d had to take that test this morning he would have failed miserably. For the first time in his career, he wished he had someone else he could hand off a case to.
Thinking out loud, he said, “Log cabin, sixty-odd years old. Probably would go up like tinder once it was torched. Small, too, so it wouldn’t take long.” He looked around the clearing. The outbuildings were intact, although the roofs of shop and outhouse had some scorch marks. The wooden stand beneath the half dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel oil stacked in a neat pyramid had burned and collapsed, and the drums had broken free of their strapping and rolled into a haphazard scatter into the brush.
Billy cast a wary eye over his shoulder. “This have something to do with Dreyer’s death?”
Jim hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the red pickup. “She thinks so,” he said.
Bobby grinned again. “Feeling guilty?” he said, entirely without sympathy. Dinah nudged him, and Jim saw it, which was the only thing that saved Bobby from instant annihilation.
He walked over to the cabin. The heat from the still-smoldering embers was warm on his face. He walked around the perimeter, looking for the line of copper tubing leading from the fuel oil into the cabin. It was still there, and as near as he could figure by eyeballing it, it hadn’t been tampered with.
He heard a footstep and turned to see Kate. “Did you lock your door last night?” He saw the answer on her face. “Of course you didn’t. Who does, in the Park? So it was probably just a matter of someone opening it and pitching a lit firestarter inside. Probably knew you sleep in the loft. Probably knew hot air rises. Probably figured you’d be dead of smoke inhalation before you woke up enough to get to the ladder. Do you get it, Shugak? Somebody tried to kill you last night.”
“I got it, Chopin,” she said tightly. “I’ve had longer to think about it than you have.”
For the first time he was able to look beyond his own fear and rage and see hers, and the sight only exacerbated his own. “You’re fired,” he said tightly.
She looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re fired!” he bellowed. “Canned, sacked, riffed, laid off! I don’t want you anywhere near this case from now on! You will talk to no more people about Len Dreyer, do you hear me! Not one! You will collect no more evidence! If the murderer kneels at your feet and offers you a signed confession sealed by a notary public, I want you to walk away! Walk away, do you hear me?”
“I think they can hear you in Canada,” Bobby said.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jim said furiously, rounding on him.
“Okay,” Bobby said, hands patting the air. Billy, Annie, and Dinah backed up a step in unison.
“And stay the fuck out of police business!”
“Anything you say, buddy,” Bobby said. Billy, Annie, and Dinah backed up another step, and Bobby lowered his hands just long enough to roll the tires on his chair back, just so he wouldn’t be hanging it out in front all alone. None of them could remember seeing Jim angry. Jim Chopin didn’t get angry; in fact, they had thought that he couldn’t, that maybe he didn’t know how or that it had been trained out of him in trooper school and on the job. Their mistake.
Their reaction went a long way toward restoring Jim’s composure. “Okay,” he said more calmly. He turned back to Kate. She had something big and square clamped beneath an elbow. “What’s that?”
“My photograph album,” she said. “The one I put together from the pictures in Emaa’s kitchen.”
Another wave of fury almost swamped him. He battled it back, and managed to ask in a reasonable tone of voice, “That what you went back for?”