Northern Lights

thing."
     
     
    HE DECIDED TO START showing it around, get reactions. Since Bing was having breakfast in The Lodge, Nate walked by his table, let the earring dangle from his fingers. "Lose this?"
    Bing barely gave it a glance before staring back into Nate's eyes. "Last time I told you I lost something, I got nothing but grief."
    "I like to get things back to their rightful owner."
    "It ain't mine."
    "Know whose it is?"
    "Don't spend a lot of time looking at people's ears. And I don't want to spend any more time looking at your face."
    "Nice to see you again, too, Bing." He put the earring away. Bing had trimmed his beard an inch or so, Nate noticed and figured it was his warm-weather look. "February 1988. I can't find anybody around who can tell me, absolutely, you were here through that month. Have found a couple who think maybe you weren't."
    "People should mind their own, like I do."
    "Max was gone, and I hear you had a hankering, let's say, for Carrie back then."
    "No more than any other woman."
    "Seems like a good time to have moved in on her some. You strike me as a man who doesn't let opportunities go to waste."
    "She wasn't interested, so why waste my time? Shit. Easier to find one and pay the hourly rate. Maybe I went down to Anchorage that winter. There was a whore named Kate I had some transactions with. So'd Galloway. His business."
    "Whoring Kate?"
    "Yeah. Dead now. Damn shame." He shrugged it off as he ate. "Dropped dead of a heart attack between johns. They say, anyway." He leaned forward. "I didn't kill that dog."
    "You say, anyway, and you seem more concerned with that than with two dead men."
    "Men can take care of themselves better than an old blind dog. Maybe I was in the city some that winter. Maybe I ran into Galloway going through Kate's swinging door. Didn't mean a damn to me."
    "You talk to him?"
    "I had other things on my mind. So did he. Poker game."
    Nate lifted his eyebrows as if mildly surprised, mildly interested. "Is that so? You're remembering a lot of details all of a sudden."
    "You're in my face all the damn time, aren't you? Spoiling my appetite, so I've been thinking on it."
    "You get in on the poker game?"
    "I went for a whore, not to gamble."
    "Did he mention plans to climb No Name?"
    "He was yanking his pants up, Christ's sake, and I was about to yank mine down. We didn't chat. Said he was riding a streak, took a break to bang Kate and was heading back. Kate said something about the place being lousy with Lunatics, and that was fine with her. Business was good. Then we got down to it."
    "Did you see Galloway again, after your business was concluded?"
    "Don't remember seeing him." Bing stabbed at his food. "Maybe he came in the bar, maybe he didn't. I headed on up to see Ike Transky, trapper I knew used to have a place outside Skwenta, bunked with him a few days and did some hunting, little ice fishing. Came back here."
    "Transky back you up on that?"
    Bing's eyes went hard as agate beads. "Don't need anybody to back up what I say. Dead now, anyway. Died in '96."
    Convenient, Nate thought as he walked out. The two people Bing named as potential alibis were dead or gone. Or you could turn the prism and look at it from a different facet.
    Stolen gloves, a stolen knife, both left near a dead dog. Property of a man who'd seen and spoken to Galloway.
    It wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine Galloway going back to that game or stopping for a drink with friends.
    Guess who I just ran into on his way to bang Whoring Kate? S mall world, Nate thought. Small, old world. If Bing was telling the truth, it might be the killer was worried Galloway had mentioned who else from Lunacy was playing poker and paying for whores.
    Nate decided to make a few stops, dangling his single piece of evidence, on the way to the station.
    Later in the day, he showed it to Otto.
    The deputy shrugged. "Doesn't mean anything to me."
    A coolness had come between them, a stiff formality Nate regretted. But it couldn't be helped.
    "I always thought the Maltese cross was more military than religious."
    Otto never blinked. "Marines I served with didn't wear earrings."
    "Well." As he had at every stop through the day, Nate put the earring back in his pocket, buttoned it.
    "It's going around that you're showing that thing to everybody. People are wondering why their chief of police is spending time on a lost earring."
    "Full service," Nate said easily.
    "Chief," Peach said from her counter, "we've got a report of a