Northern Lights
for the sticky buns?"
"No." Otto held out a manila envelope. "I wrote up where I was, what I was doing and so forth in February of '88. On the night Max died, and when Yukon got killed. Thought it'd be better all around if I put it down before you had to ask me."
"Why don't you come back to my office?"
"Don't need to. I got no problem with this." He puffed out his cheeks. "A little problem, maybe, but less doing it like this than having you ask. I don't have much of an alibi for any of the three situations, but I wrote it down."
Nate set down the bun to take the envelope. "I appreciate it, Otto."
"Well. I'm going fishing."
He left, passing Peter on the way out.
"Hell," Nate muttered.
"You're in a tight spot." Peach gave him a little rub on the arm. "You've got to do what you've got to do, even if it means hurting feelings and getting danders up."
"You're not wrong."
"Um." Peter looked back and forth between them. "Something wrong with Otto?"
"I hope not."
Peter started to follow up, but Peach gave a quick shake of her head. "Well, the reason I'm late is my uncle came by this morning. He wanted to tell me there's a guy squatting north of town by Hopeless Creek. There's an old cabin there. It looks like he's moved in. Nobody'd care much except my uncle thinks he may have broken into his work shed, and my aunt says there's food missing from the cache."
He grabbed a sticky bun, bit in. "He—my uncle—went by to check it out this morning before he came to see me, and he says the guy came out with a shotgun and ordered him off his property. Since he had my cousin Mary with him—taking her into school—he didn't hang around to reason with the guy."
"All right. We'll go reason with him." Nate set his untouched coffee and Otto's envelope on the counter. Then went to the weapon cabinet and got two shotguns and ammo. "Just in case reason doesn't work," he told Peter.
The sun was bright and hard. It seemed impossible that only a few weeks before, he'd have made this trip in the dark. The river wound beside the road, cold blue, forming a keen edge of color against the snow that still lined its banks. The mountains stood, clear as monuments carved in glass, against the sky.
He saw an eagle perched on a mile marker post, like a golden guard to the forest behind him.
"How long's this cabin been empty?"
"Nobody's lived in it, officially, as long as I can remember. It's rundown and built too close to the creek so it floods out every spring. Hikers might use it for a night now and then, and ah, kids might use it for . . . you know. Chimney's still standing, so it'll hold a fire. Smokes something awful though."
"Meaning you've used it for . . . you know."
Even as he smiled, color edged Peter's cheekbones. "Maybe once or twice. What I heard was a couple of cheechakos built it way back. Going to live off the land, pan the creek for gold. Figured they'd get by on subsistence, and after a year start collecting their PFD. Didn't know squat. One of them froze to death, the other went crazy with cabin fever. Maybe ate some of the dead guy."
"Lovely."
"Probably just bullshit. But it adds to it when you're taking a girl there."
"Yeah, pretty romantic stuff."
"You want to turn off up there." Peter pointed."It's a little rough going."
After about three yards bumping and grinding his way along the narrow, snow-packed rut, Nate decided Peter was the master of understatement.
The trees were thick and smote out the sun, so it was like driving through a tunnel paved by sadistic ice demons.
He rolled his tongue back, so it wouldn't get in the way of his teeth when they snapped together, and muscled the wheel.
He wouldn't have called it a clearing. The dilapidated square of logs hunched in a hacked-out square of trash willows and spindly evergreen on the icy bank of the spit of creek. It huddled there in the shadows, one window boarded, the other crisscrossed with duct tape. A sagging length of porch sat over a few stacked cinder blocks.
A filthy Lexus four-wheel-drive with California tags stood in front. "Call Peach, have her run those tags, Peter."
While Peter used the radio, Nate debated. There was smoke puffing sluggishly out of the tilted chimney. And a dead mammal of some sort hung nastily over a post by the door.
Nate unsnapped his weapon but left it holstered as he eased out of the car.
"That's far enough!" The cabin door swung open.
In the dimness Nate could see the man and the shotgun.
"I'm Chief Burke,
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