Northern Lights

bottom drawer he found four chapters of a manuscript. The top page indentified it as:
     
    COLD SNAP
A Novel
by Maxwell T. Hawbaker
     
    Nate put it on the desk and got up to search the shelf unit running along one wall. To his pile, Nate added a box of floppy disks and a scrapbook holding newspaper articles.
    Then he sat down to test his computer skills.
    It wasn't password-protected, which told him Max hadn't thought he had anything to hide. A run through the documents netted him a spreadsheet on which Max had carefully listed mortgage and time payments. Family man, Nate thought, responsible with his money.
    Nothing he could find on finances showed any large sums, anything out of the ordinary. If Max had been blackmailing his killer, he hadn't recorded the income alongside his monthly debits.
    He found more of the novel and the start of two more. A check through the floppies showed that Max had conscientiously backed them up. There were a few bookmarked sites—fishing for the most part.
    He found some saved e-mail: fishing buddies, responses from a couple of people regarding sled dogs. Follow-ups, Nate assumed, on the planned Iditarod article.
    He spent an hour threading through, but nothing jumped out and yelled clue!
    Gathering up what he had, he carted it down to the mudroom where he confiscated an empty box to dump it all into.
    He wandered back into the kitchen. The kitchen calendar had a bird theme. No one had thought or bothered to turn it over to February much less March.
    More than half the little squares had notes. PTA meeting, hockey practice, book report due, dentist appointment. Normal family routine. The dentist appointment had been Max's, Nate noted, and he'd been due for it two days after his death.
    He flipped it up, glanced over February, at March. A lot of notes there, too, with GONE FISHING in large capital letters over the second weekend in March.
    Nate let the page fall again. Routine, normal, ordinary.
    But there was that single calendar page from the trash can upstairs, covered with the name Pat.
    Four pairs of snowshoes hung in the mudroom.
    Studying them, he put on his boots, his coat, hefted the box and started out again.
    He was back in the woods again, up to mid-shin in snow, when the gunshot blasted through the quiet. Instinctively, he dropped the box, dug under the coat for his own weapon. Even as he gripped it, there was a thunder in the woods. A single deer, a thick-bodied, heavily antlered buck leaped into view and continued its leaping gallop.
    With his heart thudding, Nate started moving in the direction it had come from. He'd made it about twenty yards when he saw the figure melt out of the trees—and the long gun it carried.
    They stood for a moment in the echoing stillness, each with a weapon in his hand. Then the figure lifted his left hand, shoved back his hood.
    "He scented you," Jacob said. "Spooked and ran even as I fired. So I missed."
    "Missed," Nate repeated.
    "I'd hoped to take some venison to Rose. David hasn't been able to hunt lately." He lowered his gaze, slow and deliberate, to Nate's sidearm. "Do you hunt, Chief Burke?"
    "No. But when I hear a gunshot, I don't go looking for who fired it unarmed."
    Jacob made an obvious business of clicking on the safety. "You found him, and I go home without meat."
    "Sorry."
    "It was the deer's day, not mine. Do you know your way out?"
    "I can find it."
    "Well, then." Jacob nodded, turned and moving with grace and ease in his snowshoes, melted back into the trees.
    Nate kept his weapon out as he walked back, as he picked up the box he'd dropped. He didn't holster it again until he was back in his car.
    He drove to Meg's to push the box into the back of a closet. It was something he had to pursue on his own time. Since his pants were wet to the knees, he changed, then went down to the lake with the dogs to check for any sign of breakup before he drove back into town.
    • • •
     
     
    "SIGNS ARE UP," Otto told him.
    "So I see."
    "We've gotten two complaints already, about minding our own business."
    "Anybody I need to talk to?"
    "Nope."
    "You got two calls, chief, from reporters." Peach tapped the pink While You Were Out notes on her counter. "About Pat Galloway and Max. Follow-up, they said."
    "They have to catch me first. Peter still on patrol?"
    "We sent him out for lunch. It was his turn." Otto scratched his chin. "Ordered you an Italian sub."
    "That's fine, thanks. Would a man go hunting two, three miles from his own