A Fatal Thaw Read online

  It took her two tries to climb to her feet. She stood where she was, trembling, eyes closed, gulping in great breaths of air. Her chest hurt. Her scalp ached. Her lungs burned. Somewhere behind them the Polaris was still running. The engine rose in whiny protest, spluttered and died. Kate sucked in another deep breath and opened her eyes.

  The killer lay where he had fallen. Mutt stood over him, teeth bared against his throat, a low, rumbling growl issuing unbroken from deep in her throat. In that moment she seemed all wolf. Kate recovered her shotgun and approached them warily. She reached his rifle, kicked it away. “All right, Mutt.”

  The dog lifted her head slightly, her teeth no longer touching the killer’s throat, but that continuous, rumbling, paralyzing growl never stopped. “It’s all right, girl,” Kate said and reached out a steadying hand. Beneath it Mutt flinched once, and Kate tensed. “You done good, girl. Now let go. Mutt,” she repeated, more sternly this time, “release.” The growl missed a note, diminished, and died. Mutt looked up at Kate and gave her tail a single wag. Kate inhaled again and straightened. “Good girl.” And then, more fervently, “Good girl.”

  The killer was conscious. He looked up at them calmly, all tension drained out of his body. He even smiled, a happy, bloody smile that reached all the way up into mischievous, twinkling eyes, one nearly swollen shut. He giggled. “You’ll never guess what I’ve been doing.” He giggled again. “I’ve been a bad boy.” He licked the blood from his lips and appeared surprised. He raised one wondering hand, touched it to his mouth and looked at his stained fingers. “I’m bleeding,” he said. His face puckered. “He should have sold me Boardwalk. I told him. He should have sold it to me.” He started to cry.

  Kate took three faltering steps to the side of the road and was thoroughly and comprehensively sick, which was how Chopper Jim found her when he landed twenty yards down the road a few minutes later.

  Two

  JACK MORGAN SIGHED. “It’s too bad everyone lived right on the road. McAniff didn’t have to go out of his way any to find targets.”

  “No.”

  Jack tilted his chair back and crossed his booted feet on the top of his desk. A pile of paper six inches high tilted and almost slipped to the floor. He didn’t seem to notice, and Bill Robinson, grumbling beneath his breath, bent forward to straighten it. It still amazed him how Jack, chief investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney’s office, could find anything in that office in time for trial. Small, square and windowless to begin with, it was made even smaller by the overflow of file cabinets, crime scene drawings, evidence bags, three chalkboards covered on both sides with his boss’s scrawling script and a stack of paper that started somewhere near the door and rolled across the room in drifts, like snow after a blizzard, to engulf Jack’s desk. More paper in the form of maps were tacked to every square inch of the walls, with crime scene drawings taped over every square inch of the maps, all heavily marked with more notes in Jack’s illegible scrawl. Jack leaned toward the black, broad strokes of a Marksalot for arrows, exclamation points and marginal balloons.

  Even Bill had to admit that Jack’s conviction rate proved that he could and did find what he needed when he needed it, though only Jack and maybe God alone knew how. And it wasn’t his office. He shook his head, not for the first time, and sat back in his chair to line up the corners on the neat stack of paper in his lap.

  “Okay, Bill,” Jack said, staring at the ceiling with his hands linked behind his head. “Run it down for me.”

  Bill turned a page, shuffled it to the bottom of the pile with meticulous precision, and cleared his throat. “His neighbor was the first to be hit. Name of Stephen Syms, 34. Lived in the Park year-round, fished in the summer, did what he could in the winter. His neighbors on the other side were the Getty sisters, Lottie and Lisa. They heard the shots at about ten A.M. and according to Lottie went over to take a look. By the time they got there, Stephen Syms was dead and McAniff gone. They looked for tracks and didn’t find any, and there’s only the one road, so they got out their snow machine and followed it into Niniltna.”

  Bill flipped a page. “Okay, scene shifts to Niniltna, post office next to the airstrip. Postmaster’s name was Patrick Jorgensen, 63, moved to Niniltna in 1949, married, raised a family, been the postmaster there for the last twenty years. He was shot once at point-blank range. His wife, Becky Jorgensen, 64, saw it all from the next room and ran out the living room door and down the strip. McAniff must have heard something because he followed her out and shot at her, she thinks a couple of times.” He looked up at Jack. “Her memory gets a little confused at this point, and who can blame her. He shot at her at least once, though, because she’s got as neat a hole through her upper right arm as you ever saw. Swish, right through, didn’t touch the bone or the artery.” He shook his head.

  “She was lucky.”

  “She wasn’t the only one.” He flipped to a third page. “About the time she got to the end of the strip—by the way, she couldn’t tell me why she didn’t duck into the trees on one side or the other. She just ran, flat out, trying to put as much distance between the rifle and her.”

  “Maybe between the mess it left of her husband of thirty-two years and her,” Jack said gently.

  “Maybe. It was a mess. So, she gets to the end of the strip and who should appear out of the trees but Lyle and Lucy Longstaff, both 24. He was a Park rat, hunted, fished, panned a little gold. She was a bank teller he met and married in Anchorage, on New Year’s Day.”

  “This New Year?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. She quit her job in January and moved to his cabin down on Gold Creek. They’d come up to Niniltna to meet the mail plane.” Bill was a square, stolid man with a square, stolid face without much expression. And yet, as Jack listened to him tick off the victims and their descriptions from his neatly typed list, Bill’s counting-down acquired something of a dirge-like quality. In his careful enunciation of the names of the dead, in his use of their full names each time he said them, it was as if he were testifying to their very existence, to the space they had once occupied on the earth, in the only way he would permit himself. All cops know that emotional involvement in any case is fatal, to themselves and usually to the case. Many of them succeed in their work only by devising a kind of working separation of person and profession, sort of like church and state. Or they try to. The best succeed at least part of the time. And yet. And yet.

  “So, McAniff shoots Lyle Longstaff and Lucy Longstaff; theirs are the two bodies George Perry, the mail plane pilot, saw lying at the end of the runway. McAniff went into the woods at the end of the runway after Becky Jorgensen, evidently shooting as he went, because here’s where the fell hand of fate steps in.

  “The Getty sisters made it in from Syms’s cabin, and the first place they stop is the first place everybody stops coming into Niniltna.”

  “The post office.”

  “Right. They see Patrick Jorgensen laid out back of the counter and hear shooting down the runway. They split up and circle around the woods in back of the strip where they heard the shooting. McAniff lost Becky Jorgensen, then, and it looks like he lay down a screen of shots, trying to get her. Lottie Getty stumbled across Becky Jorgensen and they hightailed it out of there. It was just dumb bad luck Lisa Getty ran into one of McAniff’s bullets.” He paused. “She was a looker.”

  “I saw the pictures.”

  “Yeah. Thirty years old, looked like Marilyn Monroe, beauty spot, body and all. What a waste.” Bill shook his head, and he turned to the next page. “So, Perry lines up for a final and all of a sudden finds the air over the strip filled with more bullets than a hot LZ and he was outa there.”

  “Understandable.”

  “He climbed out of range and circled for a while, looking down at the scene through binoculars. He saw McAniff head down the road to Ahtna, and he was the one who finally got a message through to Jim Chopin in Tok, who saddled up and headed
out. Meanwhile, back at the massacre.” He shuffled some more paper.

  “John Weiss, thirty-seven, his wife Tina, thirty-five, and their two children, Mary, six, and Joseph, five, lived on a farm about ten miles out of Niniltna.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot up the town when he went through?” Jack interjected.

  “He didn’t go through town, he went over the river and through the woods and picked up the road at Squaw Candy Creek.”

  Jack’s feet came down with a thump. “Squaw Candy Creek. Bobby Clark lives on Squaw Candy Creek. Has anyone—”

  “Black guy in a wheelchair, does the NOAA reporting from the Park?” Jack nodded, and Bill waved a reassuring hand. “He’s okay. Chopper Jim checked on him.” Bill gave a dour smile. “Jim says Clark was mad as hell that McAniff didn’t come his way, he would have shown the fucker how fancy he could shoot.”

  Jack sighed with relief. “That’s our Bobby. Thank God.”

  “The Weisses lived in another house by the side of the road. Apparently Tina Weiss caught it first, in the outhouse. Near as we can figure, McAniff shot John Weiss once in the left thigh, after which Mary and Joseph ran out onto a little lake the farmhouse fronted on. McAniff shot them as they were about to make the trees on the other side. It was almost like he waited until they got that far before shooting.”

  “Gave them a sporting chance,” Jack suggested acidly. “Who does this guy think he is, General Zaroff?”

  “From the evidence it looks more like he was seeing just how good a shot he was.” He met Jack’s eyes. “Small targets, moving, that kind of thing.”

  Jack closed his eyes and said wearily, “Jesus Christ.”

  “John Weiss, who we think was conscious and saw all this, was trying to crawl out to them when McAniff walked over and shot him. One shot, right here.” Bill demonstrated with a cocked finger to his left temple. “Point-blank range. Powder burns beneath the skin, casing next to the body. He just walked up, stared him straight in the eye, and shot him.”

  There was a brief pause as both men imagined the scene in their minds; the mother shot where she sat; the father allowed to live long enough to witness the cold and deliberate murder of his own children; the last, lone and by then probably welcome shot to the head. Jack’s skin crawled, and he shook himself and got up to refill their cups. The coffee was hot and strong and burned going down, and it brought Jack back from that cold scene by the lake to the more prosaic surroundings of his crowded office.

  “Next stop, the access road to the Nabesna Mine. It was just more dumb bad luck that had MacKay Devlin turning onto the road to Niniltna when McAniff passed by. He says he hung a right a little fast and skidded to a stop on the old railroad bed right in front of McAniff s snow machine. McAniff had the 30.06 out and up before Devlin could blink his eyes, and Devlin says he just took off running. He says McAniff shot at him five or six times, which agrees with the number of casings we found at the scene.” Bill blew on his coffee and sipped at it. “Only nicked him once, on the outside of the upper right arm. Just like Becky Jorgensen. The McAniff specialty.”

  “Lucky for Mac.”

  “You know Devlin?” Jack nodded. “I think he was more than just lucky.”

  “How so?”

  “I figure McAniff must have been getting tired. At any rate, he didn’t pursue Devlin the way he did the others. He got back on the snow machine and drove down the road. And, as we all know now, about twelve miles later he ran into Kate Shugak.”

  Not by a glint in the eye or a change of tone did Bill betray knowledge of Jack’s history with Kate, or of Kate’s previous employment on the Anchorage D.A. investigators’ staff, but then he’d only been with them himself for eighteen months. While highly unlikely, it was possible the gossip had cooled off. Jack doubted it.

  “Hers had been one of the homesteads Chopper Jim had warned on the way in,” Bill said. “She took her shotgun out to the road, waited for him and bagged the bastard.” He drank coffee and observed, “Too bad she didn’t kill him.”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “Seems a pity. Would have saved us a lot of time and the taxpayers a lot of money.”

  “True.”

  “So.” Bill began gathering the files into a pile. “What’ve we got here? One, two, three, four, five, six, six, seven, eight, nine, count ’em, nine murders in the first degree. Jesus. And one, two attempted murders.”

  “Those two attempts include the try at Mac Devlin?”

  Bill looked up. “Of course. Why?”

  Jack smiled, a small, wry smile but a smile nonetheless. “In the Park, shooting at Mac Devlin isn’t quite the same thing as attempted murder.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I think it’s more in the way of a team sport.” Bill looked puzzled, and Jack said, “McAniff. Tell me about him.”

  Bill produced yet another manila file folder and opened it to the first page. “You know mass murderers virtually didn’t exist until the sixties. Since then, there’ve been enough to begin building a profile.”

  “How fortunate for us.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Roger McAniff fits the profile, so well it’s scary. He’s thirty-one, and M&Ms are usually in their twenties or thirties. He’s five-six, which makes him a little shorter than average, and M&Ms usually are. He weighs in around one seventy-five, which makes him overweight, which also fits into the profile, but when you consider he’s coming off an Alaskan bush winter, maybe that statistic doesn’t mean very much in this case. He’s got a mustache.”

  “Mass murderers got mustaches?” Jack said, smoothing down his own neatly trimmed mustache and beard.

  “Most of them. Most of them are also usually white, usually male and usually likely to kill their victims in their victims’ own homes.”

  “This guy is just typical as hell, isn’t he?” Jack said, still stroking his beard.

  “For a mass murderer,” Bill agreed.

  “When’d he move to Niniltna?”

  “Last fall. He was working as a computer programmer for Alaska Petroleum.”

  “On the Slope or in town?”

  “In town. There was a big rif—reduction in force—last September, and he got his pink slip then. About the same time his wife threw him out. According to the head of the Niniltna Tribal Council—” Bill squinted at a page. “Billy Monk?”

  “Billy Mike.”

  Bill made a careful note. “Right, Billy Mike, according to him, McAniff showed up in Niniltna around Halloween.”

  “Enter the boogeyman.”

  “In person.”

  “From what we can tell without the autopsy reports, he’s a pretty good shot.”

  “Expert.” Jack raised his eyebrows. “Literally. In the army, ’80 to ’83.”

  “See any action?”

  Bill shook his head. “He was stationed in Panama. Not much going on there then.”

  “Didn’t re-up?”

  “Nope. Transferred to Fort Richardson in ’83, took his out here.”

  “Army have anything to say about him one way or the other?”

  “No, pretty much standard evaluations all the way across the board. However.” Bill flipped to another page. “You’ll like this. When the troopers searched his cabin, they found a computer printout of the names, phone numbers and home addresses of Parks Department employees, and another of Department of Public Safety employees, including fish hawks and the State Troopers’ own Alert Team. Nine of ’em.” He looked up. “Including Jim Chopin.”

  “Jesus Christ.” The vexing problem of whether or not it had come time to shave forgotten, Jack dropped his hand from his beard and sat up. “Where’d he get those?”

  Bill shrugged. “He worked with computers. Alaska Petroleum pumps half the oil out of Prudhoe Bay; theirs is one of the biggest and best. We’ve got their department head going through their hard drives now, trying to backtrack and see if he accessed state computers through their system. Half the Department of Public Safety is hanging over his shoul
der.”

  “I’ll just bet they are. Jesus,” Jack repeated. “What the hell was he going to do with those lists?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Has anybody asked him?”

  “He’s got a lawyer.”

  Jack grunted.

  Bill straightened and stacked his papers into a neat pile. “Doesn’t really matter, anyway. With or without charging him for attempted murder on MacKay Devlin, on conviction we should be able to put McAniff away for, oh, I’d conservatively estimate, say, 299,999 years. Without benefit of parole.”

  Jack toasted Bill with his coffee mug. “I hear his lawyers are considering pleading insanity caused by eating too much junk food and getting too little light in the winter.”

  Bill’s mouth turned down. “I can see it now. We the jury find the accused not guilty by reason of insanity, caused from eating too many Twinkies and spending a winter in the Alaskan bush. He’ll probably be sentenced to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute and be out on the streets in two years.”

  “Nope. He’ll still have to serve his time,” Jack said. He sat contemplating the prospect with patent satisfaction. “According to the new ‘guilty but mentally ill’ provision in the criminal code.”

  “That’s right, I forgot. One of the smarter things the legislature has done in the last ten years.”

  “Maybe the only.” The phone rang on Jack’s desk and he answered it. “Jack Morgan. Oh hi, Slim. What can I do you for?” He listened. “What?” He listened some more. “Are you sure?” An odd note in his voice made Bill look up. Jack’s eyes were narrowed and intent, looking at something Bill couldn’t see.

  “Ballistics confirms? Did you—” Jack listened for a moment to the voice on the other end of the phone. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Great. Thanks, Slim. I think.”

  He set the phone in its cradle with great care and looked across the desk. “That was Slim Bartlett.”

  “The coroner.”

  “Yeah. He’s got some news about the autopsies on the Niniltna massacre victims.”