Howie stared back, blinking, agonized, and for the moment blessedly mute.
Jim sighed. "Maggie!"
A head poked in. "Boss?"
"Get Howie's rifle off of his snow machine and bring it in, would you?"
"Sure thing, boss."
"No!" Howie said, making an abortive attempt to stop her, but the door shut smartly in his face. "Have a seat, Howie," Jim said.
When Maggie got back with Howie's rifle, Howie was rigid in a chair in front of Jim's desk, tugging at the handcuff holding him to the left arm of the chair. It was still cold outside, although those clouds he'd seen over the Gulf earlier in the week had paid off in a thickening overcast. This morning smelled like snow. Nothing worse than chasing down a perp in a snowstorm. Actually, nothing worse than chasing down a perp, period. They never watched where they were going, for one thing, and for another, it was just plain exhausting. Jim much preferred to dispense with the possibility altogether.
"Thanks, Mags," Jim said, reaching for the rifle. "Close the door on your way out, please."
Jim sat on the edge of his desk and examined the rifle. A.30-30 Winchester Trapper, well used and not well cared for. Jim looked up and allowed himself a personal comment. "You really are a worthless piece of shit, Howie."
"I didn't do it! I didn't do anything! I'm innocent! I want a lawyer! Get me whathisname, Louis's lawyer! He'll fix it so I don't have to stay here, so I can go home!"
"Rickard?" Jim said.
"Yeah! Him! Get me Rickard! On the phone, right now!"
"Well, I could do that, Howie," Jim said. "Or you could just tell me what happened. If you weren't there, you don't have anything to worry about."
Something about the deep, inexorable tone in Jim's voice unlocked Howie's spine, and he slumped in his chair. "I wasn't at the trailer over half an hour that Monday. I just stopped to take a crap and grab some grub."
"Where'd you go?"
Howie mumbled something.
"Where'd you go, Howie?" Jim went around his desk and sat down.
"I was up the head of the valley," Howie said, studiously addressing the floor.
"What were you doing up there?" Jim said. "That's a ways to go just to sightsee, and it's been a damn cold stretch of weather lately."
"Might have been doing some hunting," Howie said defensively.
"Caribou?" Jim said.
"Maybe," Howie said.
"Out of season?" Jim said. "Howie, you astonish me. Anybody with you?"
Howie rolled his shoulders.
"Be a lot better if someone can corroborate your testimony, Howie. It can't do you any good if all you did was go on a joyride with nobody looking."
"Fuck," Howie said in a kind of furious mutter. "Martin was with me."
"Thought I recognized that old Yamaha," Jim said. "Anybody else?"
"We was just taking those caribou because we was hungry," Howie said, and then added, "we was taking the meat to the elders." He looked up, inspired. "Ask the aunties. They'll tell you."
There was a gloating kind of certainty in Howie's eyes that Jim didn't like. "Okay, I'll ask them. Where's Martin, Howie?"
"I don't know," Howie said. "We split up after we come down off the mountain."
"I see," Jim said. "Tell me, Howie, who have you pissed off lately?"
Howie stared at Jim, wounded. "Nobody," he said. "I didn't hurt nobody."
"Yeah," Jim said. "You need to think about this some, Howie. Somebody shot Mac Devlin in the back. I actually think you're telling me the truth, mostly because I saw you up there butchering out half the Gruening River caribou herd, so I don't think you did shoot him. I shudder to think what's going to happen to you when Ruthe Bauman finds out about your off-season slaughter, incidentally."
Howie looked aggrieved. Before he could say anything, Jim said, "But Mac wasn't supposed to be at Suulutaq. So far as I know, he didn't tell anyone he was going there, either. Which means that maybe whoever shot Mac didn't know they were shooting at Mac. Maybe whoever shot at Mac was thinking he was somebody else. Maybe whoever shot Mac was thinking he was shooting at somebody who was supposed to be there, whose job should have kept them there twenty-four seven, Monday to Monday."
Howie's head came up and he stared at Jim, his face sallow and starting to sweat.
Jim smiled at him. "Yeah, Howie," he said happily, "I'm thinking somebody tried to kill you and shot Mac Devlin by mistake." He shook his head sorrowfully. "Poor Mac."
"Poor Mac," Howie said mechanically, and seemed to revive. "What do you mean, poor Mac! What about me?"
"What about you? Lucky you, I'd say." Jim knotted his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair to look at the ceiling. "Well. Unless they try again, of course."
"Unless they try again?" Howie said.
"Yeah, you know," Jim said, adding helpfully, "to kill you." He shook his head. "Seemed like a pretty serious effort to me. In my experience, anybody who's that determined is likely to give it another shot. So to speak." He stood and came around the desk. "Here, let me get that off you so you can get out of here."
"Wait," Howie said. "Wait, Jim, wait!" He hopped the chair backward, trying to get out of range of the handcuff key.
"Howie, come on now. You've got to sit still or I'll never get that cuff off you."
"I got something to tell you! Something you don't know about Louis!"
"Louis's dead, Howie," Jim said, grabbing him before he could hop any farther. He jammed the key in the cuff and twisted. The cuff came free but before he could stop him Howie slammed the cuff back around the arm of the chair and locked it, holding his hand over it so Jim couldn't get at it again.
"Howie," Jim said, starting to get a little irritated, "I've had a long couple of days. Knock it off."
"The aunties hired his killing, Jim! They hired it done!"
SIXTEEN
Jim bagged the rifle and took it out to the Niniltna airstrip, where he was lucky enough to catch George Perry on a flight to Anchorage. He gave him the rifle for delivery to the crime lab.
Howie he locked up, and told Maggie no one was to talk to Howie except him. "Okay, boss," she said.
Maggie Montgomery's chief qualification for the job of dispatcher/ telephone answerer/clerk was her determined incuriosity. "My plan is to leave the job at the office when I go home every day," she'd told him during the interview, and he'd hired her on the spot. She might try to tell him what to do on occasion-as in attempting to discourage him from finding Louis Deem's killer last year-but that he could live with. Discretion in a cop shop was a rare and precious commodity, especially in a small town, and Jim was willing to put up with any amount of backtalk in private so long as he got a smiling, uncomplaining, and stolidly uncommunicative face in public. So far, Maggie, an Outsider who had married a Moonin she met on a fish processor in the Bering Sea, was holding up very well, both as his chief cook and bottle washer and as a Park rat. She might just stick.
He went down to the Riverside Cafe and got a hamburger and french fries to go and delivered it back to Howie. Howie actually thanked him. Jim wanted to open the door of the cell and beat him to death, and something in Jim's eyes must have indicated this because Howie dropped his eyes and became very, very still.
Jim went back to his office and closed the door, and then, for several minutes, he just stood there in the middle of the room, hands dangling uselessly at his sides. For the life of him he couldn't figure out what to do next.
He'd always figured Howie was the most likely suspect, but all this time he had thought Bernie had hired it done directly.
The year before, Bernie Koslowski's wife and son had been murdered in their own home. General consensus was that the killings had been committed by Park bad actor Louis Deem, whom it was supposed Enid and Fitz Koslowski had caught in the act of burglarizing the cabinet full of gold nuggets in the living room.
Shortly thereafter, Louis Deem had been shot and killed on the road to the Step. Bernie was the obvious suspect, so Jim had looked hard at Bernie, to the general disapprobration and not a little vocal abuse of the entire Park. The subsequent investigation had cleared Bernie of all suspicion of the crime.