Northern Lights

going to tell you the body's not going to be released for a while anyway. It could be some time. And it seems to me that as his daughter Meg has as much right as his parents."
    "She won't fight for him. She doesn't care about things like that."
    "I'll talk to Meg."
    "Why would anybody kill Pat? He never hurt anybody. But me." She gave a watery laugh, the sort that sounded both sad and wistful. "And he never meant to. He never meant to make you cry or make you mad."
    "He make a lot of people mad?"
    "Me, mostly. He made me crazy." She sighed. "I loved him like crazy."
    "If I asked you to think back, really think back, to the weeks around the time he left, could you? The details of it, even the little ones."
    "I guess I could try. It was so long ago, it barely seems real anymore."
    "I want you to try, take a couple of days and really think back. Write things down when they come to you. Things he said, did, the people he was with, anything that seemed different. We'll talk about it."
    "He's been up there all this time," she whispered. "Alone in the cold.
    How many times have I looked at that mountain over the years? Now, every time I do, I'll see Pat. It was easier when I hated him, you know?"
    "Yeah, I guess I do."
    She sniffled, straightened. "I want his body brought here. I want to bury him here. That's what he'd have wanted."
    "We'll do everything we can to make that happen." Since she was softened up with the tears, and not currently hitting on him, it might be the time to press for information. "Charlene, tell me about Jacob Itu."
    She dabbed at her eyelashes. "What about him?"
    "What's his story? How did he hook up with Pat? It helps me to have a picture."
    "So you can find out what happened to Pat?"
    "Exactly. He and Jacob were friends?"
    "Yeah." She sniffled again, a bit more delicately. "Jacob's sort of . . . mysterious. At least I've never understood him."
    Judging from the sulky look, that meant she'd never been able to get him into bed. Interesting, Nate decided. "He strikes me as a loner."
    "I guess." She shrugged now. "He and Pat hit it off. I think he was sort of, I don't know, amused by Pat mostly. But they liked all that hunting and fishing and hiking crap. Pat was good at all the outdoorsy stuff. He and Jacob used to go out into the bush for days while I was back here dealing with a baby and work and—"
    "So that was the bond, the connection," Nate interrupted.
    "Well, and they both hated the government, but so does everybody else around here. He and Pat liked doing the living-off-the-land stuff together, but under it, it was Meg."
    "What was Meg?"
    "Well . . ."
    She shifted toward him into what Nate recognized as gossip mode.
    He stayed where he was, sitting intimately on the bed with her, unwilling to change the dynamics until he'd gotten what he was after.
    "Jacob used to be married."
    "Is that so?'
    "Ages ago. Eons. Back when he was like eighteen, nineteen, living in this little village in the bush outside of Nome." Her face was animated now as she gave her little hair toss and settled in to give him the dish. "I got all this from Pat—and here and there. Jacob never has much to say to me."
    She started to sulk again, to poker up. "So he was married," Nate prompted.
    "Some young thing, same tribe. They grew up together and everything—one of those soul mates deals. She died in childbirth. Her and the baby—the girl. She went into labor too early, a couple of months early, and there were complications. Whatever, I can't remember exactly what went wrong, but they couldn't get her to a hospital, not in time anyway. It's sad," she said after a beat, and her eyes, her face, her voice softened with genuine sympathy. "It's really sad."
    "Yes, it is."
    "Pat said that's why he became a bush pilot. If he'd had a plane, or they'd been able to get one in time, maybe . . . So he moved out here, said he couldn't stay there because there his life was over. Or something like that. Anyway, when we came around, when he saw Meg, Jacob said her spirit spoke to his. He wasn't even high," she said with a roll of her eyes. "Jacob didn't get high. He says that sort of thing. He told Pat that Meg was his spirit child, and Pat thought that was cool. It seemed weird to me, but Pat was okay with it. He figured it made him and Jacob brothers."
    "Did he and Pat ever argue about anything? About Meg, for instance?"
    "Not that I ever heard of. Of course, Jacob doesn't argue. He just
    freezes you with those long—what do you