“Salamantoff?”
O’Leary nodded. “We found his body in his bedroom.”
“You’re kidding,” Kate said, and earned herself another long look. She couldn’t help it-lying just wasn’t her very best thing. “Was he shot, too?”
O’Leary nodded.
“Same gun?”
“By the entry and exit wounds, yeah. Take ballistics a few days to be sure.”
“There were two men,” Kate said.
“I read your statement,” O’Leary said.
“Did you raise any prints?”
O’Leary shrugged.
“Got this, though,” and handed her a mug shot of the dead man.
“Thanks,” she said, a little surprised.
O’Leary’s middle name was not “helpful.”
“Anybody spot the Pontiac anywhere?”
O’Leary shrugged again.
“When you find them, look for bite marks,” Kate said.
O’Leary looked down at Mutt, who was standing one pace behind Kate, and almost smiled.
Kate left the number of the town house and the one for her cell phone at the nurses’ station with strict instructions to call her if Kurt showed any sign whatsoever of regaining consciousness. To be sure, she slipped into his room when the nurse’s back was turned and left a note under the bedside phone to that effect, too. She stood for a moment looking down at him. Tubed and wired and bandaged. No respirator, though. Kurt was breathing on his own, always a good sign, and the heart monitor registered a reassuringly steady blip.
He seemed to be frowning, his brow puckered. Truth to tell, he looked more than a little pissed off, and for some reason this caused Kate’s heart to lift a little. Pissed off was nowhere near to dying. She touched his shoulder. “I left both my phone numbers, Kurt,” she said in a low voice. “Call me when you wake up.
In the meantime, I’ll get on the trail of those sons a bitches in the Pontiac.“
Kate pulled some pork ribs out of the refrigerator and put them on to boil with salt and garlic powder, started rice in the rice cooker, and took a diet Sprite over ice with a lime twist into the upstairs bathroom. She stripped out of the clothes stained with Kurt’s blood and got into the shower. She let the water, hot as she could stand it, beat down on her back and took a long, cold swallow of her drink.
She turned her face into the water, soaking her hair, breathing the steam in deep.
Kurt was going to be all right, that was the main thing. “He’s going to be all right,” she said out loud, and then she said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch” and slapped the tile with her open hand hard enough to make it sting.
She soaped down, rinsed off, and toweled herself dry, then stalked into the bathroom and yanked on clean clothes. Mutt, who had followed her into the bathroom, trailed her into the bedroom. Kate took her bloodstained clothes into the laundry room and started the washer. Mutt followed her there, too, and followed her into the kitchen, where Kate boiled water for tea, got out a cup, and added a huge dollop of honey. She took the cup of tea into the living room and curled up in the easy chair, the afghan from the back of the couch tucked in around her. Mutt whined at her, so she scooched over, and Mutt climbed into the nest with her. It was a tight fit, but Kate was more than grateful for the reassurance that emanated from Mutt’s warm, solid body.
Suddenly, Kate was freezing. She was shaking so hard the tea spilled over the side of the cup and her teeth chattered on the rim. She had an immediate desire to call George and tell him to come get her and Mutt out of this friggin‘ town at once. She had an equally immediate desire to find the two shooters in the Pontiac, cut out their livers, and feed them to Mutt as a special treat.
Kate had never had anyone working for her hurt before.
Come to that, Kate had never had anyone working for her before.
It was one thing to get hurt herself. The risk of injury, even death, was always there in her line of work. The last time she’d been in the hospital the doctor had offered her frequent flyer miles.
But Kurt was new to the job, a mercy job Kate had thrown him because she’d felt guilty about separating him from his previous profession of poaching. It wasn’t like he was a professional private investigator. He’d never had any training, and other than the rare brawl at the Roadhouse, he probably had no experience in defending himself. He’d just been stumbling around in the dark, making it up as he went along.
Kate didn’t have a lot of personal investment in Kurt Pletnikoff. They lived on opposite sides of the Park, they hadn’t been in the same grade at school, they hadn’t been friends or lovers. He was some kind of second cousin twice removed-Kate thought through Auntie Vi, or maybe Auntie Balasha-but then, that could be said of half the residents of the Park.
But she’d accepted responsibility for him when she had hired him. From that moment forward, he was one of hers. She’d thought to share a little of the Bannister wealth, maybe give Kurt a head start in the next stage of his life, since she’d been instrumental in ending the last one.
She didn’t feel guilty about that. Somebody had to stand up for the Park bears, poor little defenseless creatures that they were.
She could have sent Kurt out into the PI fray with a little less insouciance and a little more preparation, though.
For the first time, Kate understood what it must be like to send a soldier out into battle, and to have to explain to his loved ones why he hadn’t returned.
Mutt whined, an anxious sound, and touched her cold nose gently to Kate’s cheek. Kate closed her eyes and leaned her head against Mutt’s and tried to think. Charlotte had hired her to free Victoria. She had hired Kurt to help her do so. Someone had shot Kurt and had been waiting at the cabin to shoot her, too. It was just plain blind luck, and Mutt, that she hadn’t charged right in the door and picked up her very own personal bullet in the chest.
She managed to down most of the tea, and the heat of the brew and the sweetness of the honey finally managed to calm her trembling. She was able to feel her feet again. She could think.
She wondered whether Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff might perhaps be innocent of the charge of murder that had had her incarcerated for thirty years. Perhaps whoever had really done the crime might be alarmed that someone was checking into the case again.
But if that was true, if Victoria was innocent, why had she refused to talk to Kate? What, was she nuts? Who the hell turns down a Get Out of Jail Free card? Who wants to stay in prison?
Victoria could be one of those people who had become completely institutionalized, so used to the structured life of the prison that she could not envision any other. It happened, Kate had seen prisoners released on probation reoffend and be back inside within the week. For some of them, a bed and three meals a day were worth it. Kate didn’t think Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff, scion of Alaska’s landed and moneyed gentry, was one of them. Someone who had the ability, even after being tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the with malice aforethought murder of her son, to finish a BA and a master’s degree and who had single-handedly gone on to organize and run what amounted to a small high school and community college on the inside was not institutionalized. At this point, Victoria pretty much was the institution, only she didn’t go home at night along with the rest of the staff.
Reopening a thirty-year-old case had its risks. There were always secrets that people thought they had buried deep, but in Alaska, never deep enough. The community was too small, and the memories of the old farts too good.
When she thought her hands were steady enough, she got up and went to her day pack, where she got out the notebook she’d taken from Kurt’s pocket before the police and the ambulance got there.