Free Fatal Thaw by Dana Stabenow Page B

presence of so much grief and pain and rage, shook her head without replying. She had no answers for Lottie.
    Outside, Mutt nudged her head against Kate's hand, but Kate stood where she was, listening. There was no sound from inside the house, nothing to indicate that Lottie had descended from her mountain of grief. Kate turned to her left and went around to the back, moving quietly along the slippery paths. The backyard of the Getty homestead looked pretty much like her own, although much less neat. A tumble of empty, rusting fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon Blazo tins stood heaped beneath a concealing, albeit rap idly melting, layer of snow. There was an open garage filled with hand tools, a small tractor, a snow machine with a trailer attached, and an old ceramic toilet bowl, minus the tank. There were two small windows over the workbench, both of them so festooned with cobwebs and years of grime that the light they shed on the inside was negligible.
    In front of the barn, hands in her pockets, Kate stared around, her gaze unfocused, letting the feel of the place sink in. It was like a hundred other homesteads all over the Alaskan bush. There was a food cache, a fuel cache, a woodpile, a generator shack and a barn, none of which contained anything out of the ordinary. There was even a satellite dish on the roof of the main house, and Kate wondered idly how much it cost in fuel to run the generator through the winter. She'd given some thought to installing a dish herself, if only for MTV and VH-1 and the Nashville Network.
    A honking wedge of Canadian geese flew into view. They were early, but there were a few newly opened leads in the marsh next to Niniltna. It definitely was spring.
    Her eyes followed the flock and caught in a thinning of the treetops behind the barn. She walked around and found a greenhouse, close to and not much smaller than the barn, built of two-by-fours and plastic siding. A profusion of greenery showed through the translucent walls.
    From the outside, the tall plants filling up the interior in leafy profusion looked like tomato plants.
    From the inside, they did not. "Son of a bitch," Kate said, more in sorrow than in anger.
    She returned to the barn and pulled and shoved her way into the clutter, making no attempt to keep her activities quiet. She moved a crate of eggs to one side, lifted a sack of potatoes into a corner and boosted a barrel of flour which the mice had found before her onto the crate. She found what she was looking for stacked high in the far right corner, beneath a lashed-down tarp.
    She came out of the barn beating the dust out of her clothes and looked up to find Lottie watching her, mute. Kate didn't apologize. She jerked her head toward the greenhouse. "Did you know? Were you partners?" Lottie said nothing, and Kate forgot about shielding Lottie from the news.
    "Lottie, McAniff didn't shoot Lisa." The other woman's head snapped up, and Kate nodded grimly. "That's right. The police ran a test on the bullets they found. They know that the one that killed Lisa came from a different gun."
    Lottie didn't move, didn't speak; her expression didn't change. It infuriated Kate. "Lottie! If you two were wholesaling dope out of your backyard, any fights you had with one-time or potential customers give us one hell of a list of suspects! Who were you selling to?"
    When Lottie still didn't answer, Kate, exasperated, went to her and shook. her. It was like trying to shake Angqaq Peak. "Talk to me!"
    Lottie's face seemed to crumple, her voice to Kate had to strain to hear her. "What?" she said. "What did you say?"
    Again the stumbling, shrunken voice. "Are you going to tell?"
    "Oh hell," Kate said, disgusted, and left.
five
    SHE could hear the noise from Bobby's house all the way down to where Squaw Creek joined the Kanuyaq River. Its main component seemed to be stentorian male voices doing a lot of whooping and yelling of song lyrics that were faint but audible, even above the noise of