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  PLAY WITH FIRE

  Dana Stabenow

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Play With Fire

  A ten-year-old boy ‘hires’ Kate to find his missing father and when Kate stumbles across a body in the woods she fears she may have found him. Finding out what happened will lead Kate to a right-wing religious sect, a conspiracy of silence and a smouldering evil.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Play With Fire

  Dedication

  Maps

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About Dana Stabenow

  About the Kate Shugak Series

  Also by Dana Stabenow

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  For Dixie and Brian and Sandy and Gary

  and especially for Rhonda Lynn

  here’s to the Taylor Express

  and the Malemute Saloon

  and the motormouth in bunny boots

  and the days we thought would never end

  Maps

  Introduction

  Shortly after I sent in the final draft of Play With Fire, I got a phone call from my editor in New York City. She was, shall we say, unhappy with the poodle scene. “Dana! How could you write such an awful, disgusting scene! Your readers will be horrified! We’re going to get letters from the Humane Society and the ASPCA and Friends of Pets! We’ll be lucky if we aren’t sued!”

  I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist. I waited until she ran down, which took a while, and then said, “Um, it’s a true story. It was on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News last year. Although it was actually a chihuahua, not a poodle.”

  There was a long, fulminating silence. “I’ll get back to you,” she said, and hung up.

  She never mentioned it again. The story remained as written.

  I prefer my dogs to be real dogs, not yappy, overgrown rats. You might already have known that.

  One

  The origin of mushrooms is the slime and souring juices of moist earth, or frequently the root of acorn-bearing trees; at first it is flimsier than froth, then it grows substantial like parchment, and then the mushroom is born.

  —Pliny

  “KATE. LOOK UP.”

  Kate kept her head down, in part out of a natural obstinacy, in part because she lacked the energy to do otherwise.

  The young woman with the blonde ponytail lowered her video camera and huffed out an impatient breath. “Kate, how am I supposed to make my Academy Award-winning documentary film on the Mad Mushroom Pickers of Musk Ox Mountain if you won’t cooperate?” She slapped down a persistent mosquito. “Come on,” she said in a coaxing voice and raised the camera again. “One teensy-weensy, insignificant little smile. What could it hurt?”

  With the paring knife she held in her right hand, Kate cut half a dozen more mushrooms and tossed them into the overflowing five-gallon plastic bucket next to her. Suppressing a groan, she straightened a back that screamed in protest and bared her teeth in the blonde’s direction. Spread across a face covered equally with soot and sweat, the fake grin echoed the whitened, roped scar pulling at the otherwise smooth brown skin of the throat below. All in all, it was a fearsome sight.

  “Great! Fantastic! Beautiful! You look like a woman who runs with the wolves!” The blonde’s face scrunched into an expression of ferocious concentration behind the eyepiece. The camera lingered long enough for the grin to fade to a grimace as Kate stretched again, then panned down and left, to rest on the quizzical yellow stare of the gray wolf-husky hybrid sprawled on a rise of ground. “Get up, Mutt,” the blonde pleaded. “Give me a little action. A grin, a snarl, anything! Look like the wolf Kate runs with!”

  Mutt, chin resting on crossed paws, closed her eyes. It was too hot to do anything else.

  The blonde grumbled. “You people are just not cooperating with me.” The camera panned up and left, to linger on a sign nailed to a blackened tree trunk. The plywood base was painted white. Its message was lettered in neat block print, by hand, and was brief and to the point:

  1 JOHN 2:22

  The blonde lowered the camera and delved into the capacious left-hand pocket of her coat, a voluminous gray duster that swept behind her like a train, snapping twigs from blueberry bushes, trailing through narrow streams of peaty water, picking up the odd bear scat. It was wet to a foot above the hem. Her jeans were wet to the knee.

  A paperback edition of The Holy Bible materialized from the duster pocket like the voice of God from the burning bush. A few seconds later she found it. “‘Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.’” She looked up. “Only the third one today and we’re almost to the end of the New Testament.” She pondered a moment. “Let me pose you an existential question.”

  “Dinah.”

  “Oh quit, it’ll be good for you.” She didn’t say why, only squared her shoulders, raised one arm in the obligatory oratorical stance and declaimed, “If scripture is posted in the forest and there’s no one around to read it, does it make any sense?”

  “Almost as much as if someone were,” Kate couldn’t resist replying.

  “I was afraid of that,” the blonde said gloomily, and slapped at another mosquito. “Damn these bugs! I feel like I’m running a blood blank for anything with three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings!” She slapped again. “Jesus! How do you stand it?”

  Kate’s jeans were wet to the thigh. Sweat was pooling at the base of her spine. It felt like eighty degrees on this Thursday afternoon in late June. The sun wasn’t setting until it got good and ready— at this time of year not until midnight—and she’d had enough of existentialism two pages into No Exit and three weeks into English 211 at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks fourteen years before. She pushed back a strand of black hair, leaving another streak of soot on her cheek, and hoisted the bucket. Ten feet away sat a second white plastic bucket, similarly full, and she headed toward it with grim determination.

  “You can’t!” Dinah wailed. “Kate! Dammit, I’ve been waiting for this light all day! Ouch!” She smacked another mosquito.

  Kate picked up the second bucket, balancing the load, and paused for a moment to wonder if, after all, she should have taken Billy Mike up on his crew share offer. Hands, arms and back, she now knew from bitter experience, ached just as badly after a week of picking fish out of a skiff as they did from a week of picking mushrooms off the forest floor. She hitched the buckets and followed Mutt up the hill.

  Dinah scrambled after her. “Okay, okay, I’ll get up with you tomorrow, we’ll catch the morning light, it’ll be all right.”

  “I’m so pleased for you,” Kate said, plodding around a burned-out stump. “My whole life would be blighted if you missed your shot.” Another trickle of sweat ran down her back. A mosquito whined past her ear, and behind her she heard another smack of flesh on flesh.

  “Hah! Another victory of woman over Aedes excrucians!”

  Kate didn’t want to know, but there was a rustle of cloth as Dinah produced another book, a small paperback entitled Some Notes on the Arthropod Insecta Diptera in the Alaskan Wilderness. She dodged a blood-thirsty specimen, waved off another on final approach, slapped at a third and read, “ ‘Aedes excrucians is the most abundant and annoying of Alaskan mosqui
toes.’ ”

  Kate remained silent, and goaded, the blonde turned up the volume. “ ‘It differs from other mosquitoes in that it remains active during warm sunny afternoons, especially aggravating to its victims. Its habitat is the marshlands attendant to rivers found from Wrangell to Fort Yukon, from Niniltna to Naknek, and from Kotzebue to Noatak.’ ” Dinah shut and pocketed the book. “I just hope you’re happy, is all.”

  Kate hadn’t called up this particular swarm of Aedes excrucians, or any other for that matter, but she held her peace. A buzzing specimen hovered near her right brow, sniffed the air, turned up its proboscis in disdain and whizzed past. From behind Kate a moment later there was a smack of flesh on flesh and a muttered curse.

  They kept climbing the slope before them, leaving the marsh behind and heading for higher ground, and eventually the bugs began to decrease in number, though they were never entirely absent, not at this time of year, not anywhere in Alaska. When at last the two women reached the top of the rise, Kate paused for breath.

  They were hiking through what had once been a pristine primeval forest. The previous summer the worst fire in decades had swept through the area and torn a strip off the Alaskan interior in places as much as five miles wide. When the smokejumpers had at last battled it to a standstill, 125,000 square acres of interior Alaskan scrub spruce, white spruce, paper birch, quaking aspen and balsam poplar had been laid waste, not to mention—and what Kate grudged more—countless lowbush and highbush cranberry, raspberry, salmonberry, lingonberry and nagoonberry stands.

  But nature, profligate and extravagant as always, had brought in the following spring wet and mild, and in the ashes of the devastating fire had sprung up a bumper crop of morel mushrooms that had produce buyers flying in en masse from Los Angeles to New York, cash in hand, and had Alaskans flying in en masse from all over the Interior, buckets in hand, in pursuit of that cash.

  Kate stretched gingerly. Once upon a time she had liked mushrooms. Now she felt about them the way she did about salmon at the end of the fishing season: that if she never saw another she’d die happy. She raised a hand to scratch her scar, inhaled some soot and sneezed three times in rapid succession. Picking fish was looking better all the time.

  At their feet the great loop of the Kanuyaq River gleamed a dull gold. Forty miles to the south of the rise, Mount Sanford rose sixteen thousand feet in the air, flanked by nine-thousand-foot Tanada and twelve-thousand-foot Drum, blue-white armor glinting in the late afternoon sun. If she squinted south-southeast, Kate made believe she could see Angqaq lording it arrogantly over the Quilaks. The peaks, sharped-edged and stern, looked normal and reassuring; it was the land between, a nightmare drawn in broad slashes of charcoal, that shocked and startled. The scar was a shadow on the land. Ash lay thick on the ground, showered from crisped branches. The trunks of trees had exploded in the heat of the fire and left acres of black splinters behind, looking for all the world like a game of pickup-sticks frozen in an upright position.

  It was a charred skeleton of a once-great forest. “What a waste,” the blonde said, her voice subdued. “What started it, do you know?”

  “Lightning.”

  “Lightning?” The blonde eyed the cumulus clouds gathering force on the southeastern horizon.

  Kate nodded. “It’s the main cause of forest fires.”

  “Oh.” The blonde eyed the clouds again. “Even Smokey the Bear might find it a little tough to fight lightning. What a waste,” she repeated, raising the camera and surveying the scene through the eyepiece.

  Kate heard the low whir of rolling film. “Not really.”

  The roll of film paused, the blonde raising a skeptical eyebrow.

  “It’s true. A forest fire is a way for the forest to renew itself and the wildlife in it. In the older forests the big trees get bigger and take over, and new growth doesn’t have a chance. New growth is what moose eat. A couple of years after a fire and the moose start multiplying because there’s more fodder. It happened on the Kenai after the 1969 fire there. It’ll happen here, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dinah didn’t sound convinced. “It’ll take a while, though, to regenerate.”

  Kate glanced around, and pointed. “What?” the blonde said suspiciously.

  Kate stooped to brush at some ash. Something indisputably green peered back at them, an alder by the shape of the leaves.

  “I’ll be damned,” Dinah said, impressed in spite of herself. Mutt sniffed at the shoot of green. Dinah focused on both and the camera whirred. “What a great shot. Death and resurrection. Destruction and regeneration! The green phoenix bursting from the black ashes of devastation!” Lowering the camera she delved once more in her left-hand pocket, producing the tattered Bible. Impatiently, she thumbed through the pages, muttering to herself. “Aha! And ‘Death is swallowed up in victory!’” She slapped the book shut and shot Kate a triumphant look. “One Corinthians, 15:54. ‘O death, where is thy sting?’” She slapped at a mosquito. “Damn. Did you know there are twenty-seven species of mosquito in the state of Alaska?” She looked back at Kate. “I can’t believe there is something already growing here. I would have bet big bucks it’d be years.”

  Mutt raised a leg over the green shoot. Kate forbore to draw Dinah’s attention to the act. “It doesn’t take long.” She dug a fist into the small of her back. “Of course, twenty-hour days and a good spring rain are a great head start.” She picked up the buckets, took one step forward and halted abruptly.

  Dinah bumped into her. “Sorry. What?” She followed Kate’s gaze and the breath whooshed out of her. “Holy shit.”

  A brown bear stood to the right of the trail. He was about the biggest creature Dinah had ever seen in all her life outside a zoo, standing six feet at the shoulder and weighing literally half a ton. His brown fur was silver-tipped and his muzzle was sooty, as if he’d been nosing over burned logs.

  For once, Dinah forgot she was holding a camera. She almost dropped it. “Holy shit” she said again. She knew it was an inadequate assessment of the situation but she didn’t really know of anything to say that would be adequate.

  “Relax,” Kate said.

  “What if it charges us?” Dinah hissed.

  “Talk in your normal tone of voice,” Kate said, and moved forward.

  “Kate! What are you doing? You’re walking right toward it! Kate!”

  “Just follow me, Dinah,” Kate said, still in that normal tone of voice.

  Dinah swore helplessly and followed, hefting her camera to shoulder height, not sure if she were keeping it out of harm’s way or preparing to use it for a weapon. Then she recollected her mission and rolled film. She could see it now. She Died Rolling. Death in the line of duty. The American Documentary Filmmakers Association’d probably name an award after her. She wondered if there was an American Documentary Filmmakers Association. She wondered if they had an award.

  The bear looked even bigger through the lens, crowding the edges of the frame. It didn’t help that her hands were shaking. She realized that the back of Kate’s head was receding and quickened her step.

  The bear watched them impassively for the longest minute of Dinah’s life. When they had approached within ten yards he dropped his head and melted back into a pocket of alders at the edge of the burn area.

  “Just relax,” Kate repeated, steps even and unhurried. “There are two of us and we’re talking. He wants to come down this way, though, and bears are kind of inflexible once they’ve made up their minds to do something. It’s best we get out of his way. Lucky he wasn’t a sow. They’ve usually just dropped a cub this time of year. A sow would have been cranky as hell.”

  She kept talking and kept walking. Dinah was so close behind her now that her toes caught Mutt’s heels, and Mutt moved up to point, ears up but silent and unalarmed. The lens of the camera clipped Kate’s head once, earning Dinah a hard look from hazel eyes. They passed the thicket into which the bear had retreated without incident and walked on up the hill unmolested.


  Dinah was weak with relief, her legs wobbling, her knees barely able to hold her up. “Jesus, Kate. What if he had charged us?”

  “You’d have been toast,” Kate said serenely without pausing.

  Dinah stared at the black braid hanging straight down a very straight spine. “Why me? Why me and not you?”

  Kate grinned without turning. “Because I wouldn’t have to outrun the bear. I’d only have to outrun you.”

  There was a moment while Dinah worked this out. When she did, she gave an unconvincing snort.

  “Ha ha ha. Very funny.” She plodded along in silence for a moment. “I didn’t even know there were bears around here.”

  “You ain’t in New York City anymore, Dorothy.”

  “That’s why Bobby hangs everything from that tree every night.”

  “No bacon or sausage for breakfast, either.”

  “Bears like bacon?”

  “Almost better than anything else.” Kate could almost hear Dinah become a vegetarian for the duration in the sound of her footsteps. “Truthfully, bears will eat anything that’ll sit still for it. They don’t like to work for their food.”

  “We’d have been work?”

  “Uh-huh. They’ll eat anything or anyone that’s within reach, whether it’s been lying around for a day or a year, as long as it is just lying around.” She added, “That’s why you don’t find any bodies near plane crashes.”

  Dinah swallowed audibly. “Bears eat them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A breeze rose up, keeping the remaining mosquitoes off, and Dinah nosed into it gratefully. Over the top of the next rise the black ash stopped abruptly, as if a line had been drawn beyond which the fire was forbidden to cross. As they approached, an actual line appeared in the form of a six-foot ditch, a fire break dug by the smokejumpers the year before, one of many in an effort to direct the course of the fire away from the Glenn Highway, the main road between Anchorage and the Canadian border, and its sycophant settlements. On the other side of the ditch was a clearing, a small patch of new spring grass encircled by a stand of birch trees. Their white boles stood out against the rising ground of the blackened countryside, slender and strong.