It had been a hell of a day.
"So what's your working hypothesis?” Julie asked as the wheels touched down. “That Tremaine was killed to keep him quiet about the other murder?"
"Who has a working hypothesis?” Gideon pushed back into his seat against the strain of the backthrust as the plane touched down, and waited for the engine roar to quiet. “But if I had one, I guess that'd be it."
"But who would even know what happened out there, besides Tremaine? Everybody else was killed in-” She made one of her pitiful attempts at snapping her fingers. “I forgot. John thinks Dr. Judd might not really have been that sick, that he might have followed them out there and killed Steven Fisk himself and then gotten back out before the avalanche."
"No, that's just an outside possibility. I don't think he really believes it."
Julie unstrapped her seat belt as the plane rolled to a stop, and stood up.
"What do you think?"
"I don't think it's too likely either.” He flicked open his seat belt, stretched, and stood up too. “What are we saying-"
Her hand went out. “Gideon-"
But she was too late. Straightening, he thumped his head on the overhead rack. “Damn!"
"It's just amazing,” she said. “You do it every time. You never miss. Some physical anthropologist in five hundred years is probably going to go bonkers trying to figure out how your skull got so lumpy."
Wincing, Gideon rubbed his head. “Thank you for your concern,” he grumbled, and looked at his hand. “No blood, anyway."
A flicker of worry crossed her face, like a shadow. “You're all right, aren't you?"
"Sure,” he said with a quick smile, “I built up a callus there years ago.” He reached up for their bags and squeezed her hand as they headed out of the near-empty plane. Julie squeezed back.
"Anyway,” he said, “what would we be saying Judd did? Went sneaking over the glacier after them? You can't sneak over a glacier like Tirku, not without being seen. So, if not for a fortuitous avalanche, which he couldn't have predicted, there would have been three witnesses to the murder, or at least three people who saw him there."
Julie nodded. “That's so. And Tremaine himself was right there. Why would he keep quiet about it all these years? From what John said, there wasn't any love lost between the two of them."
They entered the terminal building ("Wipe your feet,” the no-nonsense sign on the door told them), walked past the ten-foot-high stuffed polar bear that greets incoming passengers, and went out into the misty drizzle.
The fifteen-minute trip downtown was made in Juneau's version of an airport limousine, an old school bus painted blue, with MGT (for Mendenhall Glacier Transport) on the side. The route took them through the Mendenhall wetlands, a bleak silt plain left behind by the retreating glacier, then along Gastineau Channel, Juneau's sole avenue to the Inside Passage and the outside world. As with Glacier Bay-as with much of coastal Alaska-the only ways in or out of the state capital were by air and by water. The one highway out of Juneau led thirty-six miles to Auke Bay. And back.
As they walked the three blocks from the bus stop to the old Baranof Hotel on this dreary, drizzly late afternoon, Juneau looked like the isolated outpost it was, huddled uneasily in its narrow fjord at the foot of hulking Mount Juneau. Great snowfields clung to the mountain's steep flanks directly above them, seemingly ready to break free and come down on their heads at the next stiff breeze. Even the heavy sky seemed to press down on the little town; rain dripped from a layer of lowering clouds that smothered the tops of the surrounding mountains, closing in the fjord like a pewter lid.
The city itself was appropriately subdued in the face of this sullen, menacing Nature. The turn-of-the-century street lamps on Franklin Street glowed a gloomy yellow, the tourist shops that were the main tenants of the false-front, frontier-style wooden buildings were closed and dark, the street traffic minimal, the rainswept sidewalks nearly empty. Only the bars were open-the Red Dog Saloon, the Sourdough, Mike's; open and rowdy, to judge from the sounds. An occasional group of two or three men, mostly in parkas and rubber boots, shoved their way through one set of swinging doors and wavered half a block to the next one.
"Never arrive in a strange place at night on an empty stomach” had been Abe Goldstein's first rule to his class on anthropological field technique. “In the dark and with a low blood-sugar level, new places don't look so hot."
Well, it wasn't quite dark, just midway through the long northern twilight, but it had been six hours since lunch, and Juneau, famed for its beauty, didn't look so hot.
"Except for the concrete sidewalks,” Julie said, moving closer to him, “we could be in 1890.” She sounded a little low on blood sugar too.
They had splurged on a reservation at the Baranof, Juneau's grand old dowager of a hotel, and their spirits lifted when they walked in. Burnished wood paneling, Art Deco light fixtures, gold-framed mirrors, oil paintings, a grand piano in the lobby.
Civilization. Out of 1890 and into 1935.
They checked in, went up to their room (with a Mozart horn concerto playing sweetly over the elevator speaker), washed up, and came back down to the Bubble Lounge for a drink. Their order for dry Manhattans, which seemed just the thing for 1935, was taken by a tuxedoed waiter who bowed when he received it.
Julie laughed. “I was just thinking. This is exactly the kind of place John hates, isn't it?"
"John hates any place where the waiters dress better than the customers."
The amber drinks, in cut-glass cocktail glasses, were placed carefully on the table with another bow.
"Getting back to Dr. Judd,” Julie said thoughtfully. “Suppose we change the premise just a little."
"Fine. Did we have a premise?"
"What if Judd didn't kill him before the avalanche, but after?"
"After the avalanche?” Gideon looked up from his first swallow. It was all right, but it made him remember why dry Manhattans had gone out of fashion. “But Fisk would have been dead already."
"Why would he have been dead already? Tremaine was in the avalanche and he wasn't dead. Maybe Judd went up there, and he found Fisk unconscious or dying, and finished him off with the ax.” She shook her head wonderingly. “What did I talk about before I met you?"
"After the avalanche,” Gideon repeated slowly. “Now why didn't I think of that? Why didn't John?"
She grinned, pleased. “You didn't?"
"It never occurred to us. And it would answer a lot of questions. But-"
"Ah,” she said sadly.
"Well, there'd still be the question of why Tremaine kept it to himself all this time."
"He wouldn't have known anything about it. He was probably unconscious. He fell into a crevasse, remember?"
For a moment Gideon almost thought she had something. “No. Why bother to kill Tremaine now if he hadn't seen anything?"
"Um. Yes, that's a problem. Maybe John can work that out."
"And just what was Tremaine going to write about that was so sensational if he didn't know about the murder? Come to think of it, he did know about the murder because he mentioned it to his publisher."
"Well,” Julie said glumly, “I don't see that you and John have come up with anything better."
"You're sure right there,” he agreed, and took another pull, beginning to unwind.
They went over the possibilities again: a jealous Steven Fisk as murderer, with James Pratt as victim; a brooding, vengeful Pratt as murderer, with Fisk as victim; a humiliated Judd as killer, with Fisk as victim-or maybe Pratt as victim. Just because no motive had come to light yet didn't mean there wasn't one. And of course, Tremaine as murderer, with either Fisk or Pratt as murderee.