“Did you fly him out?”

He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No,” he said in a whisper. “He flew Spernak that time.”

He looked at her, his expression miserable. He started to speak, and then shook his head again.

The door swung shut gently behind him.

After a while she got up and washed out the mugs.

So there it was. She thought of Tracy Drussell sprawled on that couch in Anchorage, convinced that she had invited the assault inflicted upon her, when all she had been doing was testing her wings. It wasn’t her fault that the sky had opened up and swallowed her whole. Kate hoped like hell that Fran had called Colleen.

And she hoped like hell no one else needed Colleen’s services before this was over.

She needed to find Jim and fill him in, but whenever she thought about getting up, she sat back down again. If it were left up to her she’d have given Drussell a medal. At least she would have before he tried to burn her cabin down with her and Johnny in it.

She was sitting on the other side of the booth this time, the one that faced away from the rubble pile. Something dug into her hip. It was a loose-leaf binder, Johnny’s. He must have forgotten it when he left for school that morning. Not surprising, as he’d been in quite the snit, or pretended to be. Not for lack of something better to do, because any minute now she was going to get up and climb into her truck and go looking for Jim, tell him she’d solved his case for him, she flipped open the notebook and began to read. Johnny’s writing was cramped but legible. She smiled at the first paragraph, and then she laughed out loud.

She was deep into it before she realized it was more of a diary than it was the journal his teacher had assigned them, and that the teacher would probably never see it, and that neither should she.

But about halfway in something started to niggle at the back of her brain. She flipped back to the beginning and began again. “Oh shit,” she whispered, “shit, shit, shit.”

She slammed the binder shut and leaped to her feet. Mutt was at the door a second later. Kate grabbed keys and windbreaker and they were gone.

₁₆

Are you sure about this?“ Vanessa yelled over Johnny’s shoulder. ”Sure,“ he replied the same way. ”You always start with the scene of the crime.“

“But you say Kate doesn’t think he was killed there.”

“You know what I mean.”

They hit a bump and she was almost bounced off. Four-wheelers were notoriously rough rides, and the road up to the Step was a notoriously rough road, if you could call something that was essentially two ruts with a grassy ridge between a road.

“I thought Betty Freedman was going to climb on behind me before we got out of there,” she yelled.

“No kidding. Did you tell her what we were doing?”

“No!” she said, indignantly.

“Sorry,” he said. “She was just so determined to come with. I thought maybe you said something.”

She had been hanging on to his waist. Now she removed her hands, and he felt her body, a pleasant warmth against his back, lean away from him. “You told me not to say anything. I didn’t say anything. I don’t go around blabbing our business to everyone.”

What he thought was the correct turnoff came up on their right and he took it. The road deteriorated into a six-foot-wide game trail choked with tree roots, between which someone had dropped round smooth rocks that looked as if they’d been hauled up from the bed of the Kanuyaq River. It was a jolting and extremely uncomfortable ride, and he was glad when Vanessa grabbed hold again.

It ended in a small clearing, at the center of which was a not large pile of charred timbers. He killed the engine. Vanessa climbed off. He followed. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. He touched her shoulder. “Hey.”

She wouldn’t look up. He put a hand under her chin and pushed. “Come on, Van. Talk to me. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, it was stupid. I know you wouldn’t tell anyone what we were doing.”

“I know how to keep a secret,” she muttered.

“I know you do.”

She sniffed, more an expression of disdain than distress. “No, you don’t.”

“Okay, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

She kicked a rock across the clearing. “Okay.”

Her hair was all messy from the helmet, but he liked it anyway. He liked most of what he saw about Vanessa Cox. She was smart, but unlike Betty Freedman she didn’t spend all day every day proving it. Johnny liked smart. She didn’t talk a lot, but then he couldn’t abide a chatterer-Andrea Kvasnikof drove him up the wall and sometimes out of the school. And when she did talk, Vanessa was absolutely honest.

Honesty was big with Johnny, maybe even bigger than smart. His mother wasn’t honest. She would have lied about Kate molesting him without turning a hair. She would have put Kate in jail if she could have. Johnny hated a liar. Vanessa didn’t play games, either, like he saw the other girls at school play with the other boys. He liked that, too.

Johnny Morgan knew enough to know he wasn’t your typical teenager. He looked around at his thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-old classmates, and knew that he was a hundred years older in experience and maturity by comparison. Most teenagers thought they were immortal, that nothing could ever hurt them, and that they were going to live forever. Johnny knew better. His parents had split up and he got stuck with his mother for too long, and then his father got her to let Johnny live with him, Johnny still didn’t know how and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He’d been living with his father, who had been big and strong and smart and way cool, at least as cool as fathers could get. And then he was gone.

Johnny saw his classmates screwing around with booze or dope or huffing, or even just not doing their homework. Why did they bother with school, if they weren’t going to do the work? Admittedly all too often boring to the point of inducing narcolepsy, nevertheless the work would pay off with a high school diploma in the end, and that diploma got you into places like trade school or college or even just a job. Not having one kept you out.

The fact that he planned on taking the GED when he was sixteen and getting an early out of high school so he could apprentice with Kate Shugak didn’t detract from this opinion.

He looked at Vanessa. There was one thing he would be sorry to leave behind with high school. In addition to her other virtues, Vanessa was kinda cute, too, with that dark hair and those big dark eyes looking gravely out at the world. His hand was still beneath her chin. On impulse he leaned forward and kissed her.

He never would have done it if he’d thought about it, and then it was too late. Her lips were soft and cool beneath his. It felt good, it even felt wonderful, but in spite of prolonged study of the tongue scene in Top Gun, he didn’t really know what to do next and he wasn’t sure he was ready for next anyway, so he pulled back and looked at her. “Are we okay?”

“I guess so,” she said slowly. A lovely wild rose of a blush colored her face. She touched her mouth with tentative fingers.

He’d thought he was in love with Kate, but in his heart of hearts he’d always known that Kate was unattainable, a goddess who would always be out of his reach. Vanessa was here and now. He wanted to kiss her again and see what happened, but they had come there on business. He reminded himself of that, several times, and cleared his throat. “Okay. Let’s look around and see what we can see.”

She followed him to the remainder of Len Dreyer’s cabin. “What are we looking for?”

He said, and hoped it sounded like he knew what he was talking about, “Clues. Something that will give us a lead on who killed Len Dreyer.”

“I thought you said his name was really Leon Duffy.”