Free A deeper sleep by Dana Stabenow

time to time been able to aid the troopers in their inquiries into various missing persons, as well as sundry personal property that had been, ah, misappropriated. Besides, the troopers enjoyed the broadcasts as much as the next Park rat, especially when Bobby, swallowing hard, put up a weekly two-hour show featuring the likes of Clint Black. Loretta Lynn he could stomach and he thought Patsy Cline divine, but he also thought the last decent country western singer had died with Hank Williams. Senior. "If they wanna be rock stars, let 'em sing goddamn rock and roll," he growled, but beneath his breath when the law showed up with the latest Tim McGraw CD.
     
    Dinah had appeared in the Park almost four years before, a self-taught videographer with the declared intention of producing documentaries on life in Alaska. In spite of her being as white as he was black and twenty years his junior, they had married, and produced Katya minutes later. Kate had been in attendance front and center for both events, the memory of which she had been trying without success to erase from her cerebral cortex ever since.
     
    As Kate watched, Katya wriggled free of her father's lenient grasp and scooted over to where Mutt was pawing through the wood box in search of the thighbone of a T. rex Bobby always kept there in case wolves got into the house. Bobby rolled his wheelchair around the console and picked Dinah up out of her chair and wrestled her into his lap. She protested but not too much, and he rolled them both over to the living room and shifted them to one of the couches that formed an open square.
     
    Kate sipped coffee and waited for the giggling to die down, and then waited some more. "Perhaps the two of you would like to get a room."
     
    Dinah, face flushed with laughter and perhaps something more, struggled free of her husband's grip and sat up straight. "Nonsense." She smoothed her hair back and reached for the mug of coffee Kate had placed on the coffee table. "We're an old married couple."
     
    "Yeah," Bobby said, waggling his eyebrows, "and even if we weren't, we don't need no stinking room."
     
    Kate rolled her eyes, but she and Bobby had had a thing back before Jack, before Jim, and way before Dinah, and she understood Bobby's talent for showing a woman the view from the mountaintop.
     
    He bent a stern eye upon her, as if he knew what she was thinking. "You're looking awfully fucking smug there yourself, Shugak."
     
    "I don't know why you would say that, Clark," she said with all the primness at her command, which wasn't much and which was pretty much ruined by the shit-eating grin that followed, but she forestalled further cross-examination. "What does Brendan want?"
     
    Brendan was Brendan McCord of the Anchorage district attorney's office, a coconspirator of Kate's from her time served there, a longtime friend and an enthusiastic if erratic suitor.
     
    Bobby waggled his eyebrows again, which given how thick and long they were were admirably suited to the purpose. "The reason they're called state secrets is because, you know, they're secret. ADA McCord doesn't think I need to know."
     
    Kate waggled her own eyebrows back at him, which were less busy and altogether more elegant but did not fail of effect.
     
    "The Smiths," Bobby said.
     
    Dinah poked him in the side. "You're so easy."
     
    He gave her a lascivious grin. "But not cheap."
     
    Before they could get started again, Kate groaned. "I had a clue. What have they been up to lately?"
     
    The Smiths had materialized in the Park the previous fall with the title to forty acres of land ten miles outside of the Niniltna city limits and five miles inside the Park boundary. Title to said land did not include a right of way between the road from Niniltna and the property. There was a dirt airstrip, but the Smiths, defying life as it was known in Alaska, did not number a pilot in their midst. Father Smith professed an aversion to civilization and all that came with it,