“Hah!” Becky said.

“I left a message,” Kate said.

“Hah!” Becky said again.

“Oh, Becky!” Emily said from behind Kate, and rushed forward to be enfolded in an all-encompassing embrace. “Charlotte’s gone! Charlotte, oh my God, Charlotte!”

“It’s okay,” Becky said, patting Emily’s back soothingly. “If’s okay, Emily, Lael and I are here now. We’ll take care of you.”

Lael was already producing a bottle of pills from the day pack she was carrying. “A sedative,” she explained to Kate in a soft voice.

“You a doctor?” Kate said.

Lael nodded.

“Did you hear how Charlotte died?”

Lael’s lips tightened. “Charlotte Bannister was a good friend of mine, Ms. Shugak.”

“And she was my client, and she’s just been killed in what could be considered suspicious circumstances.”

Lael’s eyes widened. “I thought it was a hit-and-run.”

“It was.” Kate glanced over her shoulder at Becky and Emily and lowered her voice. “Look, I can’t say anymore right now, but just keep the doors and windows locked, okay? And here’s my number, if you need me for anything.”

“What are you doing here anyway?”

“Charlotte hired me to get her mother out of jail,” Kate said baldly.

Jim, still sequestered in his neutral corner, noticed that discretion had just suffered a hit. Kate’s favorite weapon had always been the bludgeon, and she would regard Charlotte’s death as a personal affront that had to be avenged. He felt a spark of sympathy, albeit a very tiny spark, for the perp. Like Kate, like any cop worthy of the name, he didn’t think much of coincidences. He was still pretty sure Victoria had committed the crime of which she had been found guilty, but he was equally certain that Kate, in ferreting around after the circumstances of that crime, had stirred up something nasty associated with that crime that had lain dormant for thirty-one years. There was nothing worse than that kind of nasty. Old nasty had a tendency to ripen. Left alone, it would eventually rot away. Exposed to the bright light of day before that happened, the stench rolled out and over everyone in sight. Considering the wealth and power connected with this case, the smell could reach all the way to Juneau and maybe even Washington, D.C.

Lael was quick. “And you think that might have something to do with Charlotte being killed?” she asked Kate.

“I don’t know. But I think if’s interesting that she was killed right after she hired me to start investigating a thirty-one-year-old murder case.”

In the car on the way down O’Malley, Jim said, “You’re taking the gloves off.”

She spared him a brief glance. “One. I hire Kurt Pletnikoff to do some legwork for me. Two, he finds a dead man-I’m guessing someone connected to this case. Three, he is shot and left for dead himself. Four, somebody tries to take me out. Five, my employer is killed.” She pulled to the side of the road, provoking an indignant honk from the Chevy Suburban that had been riding their bumper all the way down the mountain. “And notice I’m not even mentioning the attempt to buy me off with the Niniltna VPSO job.”

He looked around. “What are we doing? Kate, you parked right on the bike trail.”

She pointed at a shred of crime-scene tape tied to a tree branch. “This is where Charlotte got hit.”

A narrow dirt road intersected O’Malley at right angles. The trees grew in close and closed in overhead to form a canopy. Kate walked down it, Jim pacing behind. At intervals, houses were visible through the trees, but there was a good hundred feet before the first driveway. Kate turned around and paced back, looking down. She stopped and squatted. “Look,” she said, pointing.

Jim squatted next to her, scrutinizing the dirt track. There were tire tracks from a big vehicle, and a dark patch where the engine had leaked oil. “Somebody was parked here.”

Kate nodded. “Waiting.”

“And then started fast, spinning the tires, kicking dirt.”

“A big black pickup.” Kate rose to her feet and walked out to the intersection. It was 10:30, the sun well up in the sky, beating down on the backs of their heads as they looked west. “See the way the road rises just before it gets here?”

Jim nodded. “Yeah. Charlotte wouldn’t have seen them coming until the last minute.”

“The question is, how did they know when to hit the gas?”

A brief silence. “There were two of them,” Jim said finally. “Jesus Christ. There were two of them, with walkie-talkies or cell phones. The one down the road called the one parked in the lane, waiting until Charlotte was about to come over the rise, and told the guy in the truck when to go.”

Kate nodded. “Yeah.” She walked back to the Subaru and pulled her own cell phone from her day pack. Jim’s jaw dropped about six inches. She ignored him and called Brendan McCord.

She dropped Jim at the state courthouse. He sat in the car for a moment. “Two people, connected to the case you’re working on, both dead within a day of each other,” he said.

“I know,” she said a little grimly. “I’m glad I didn’t bring Johnny in with me.”

“Kate,” he said, and caught her chin in one hand and pulled her face around so she had to look at him. “It occurs to me that you could be in some danger.”

She let a slow smile spread across her face, and instead of pulling away like any normal Kate Shugak would have done, she leaned into his grip and purred, her lips touching his as they moved. “Were you thinking I’d need my very own personal bodyguard?”

“Ah shit,” he said, and kissed her hard. “Take care of yourself, damn it.” He opened the door and something-he didn’t know what-stopped him half in and half out of the car. Over his shoulder he said gruffly, “I should be out of here before five. You want to meet somewhere for dinner?”

She spent two hours going back over the case file, reexamining the record of the chain of events, the eyewitness testimony, the physical evidence. She reread the trial transcript, resetting her internal bullshit monitor up a notch to filter out all the extraneous information that was a part of every criminal trial (e.g., Q: “Where were you at 8:00 P.M. the evening of the twelfth, Miss Doe?” A: “Well, I was having dinner with my friends right after work-you know Sally is going through a really rough time with her boyfriend and Margie said we should show our support by giving her a good time-and boy I can tell you the margaritas at La Mex are the way to go, and anyway I didn’t get home until 7:00 p.m. and my mother called the minute I walked in the door, and she and Dad are thinking about retiring to Flagstaff next year and they wanted to know what I thought of the area and how often I could get down there, and when she finally hung up, Carrie-that’s my dog, named for the girl on Sex and the City, you know?-anyway Carrie really had to go, so I took her for a walk, and then I ran into Paul, the hunk who lives two doors down, and we were talking, and gosh, ”Kate could just imagine the adorable giggle‘-I guess I was talking to Paul about then. We kind of, you know, hit it off?“).

Unfortunately, none of the facts had changed since the last time Kate had visited them. Victoria was the one who had called in the fire, and, according to the statements of the firefighters, she was found sitting outside the burning house, crying and clutching fifteen-year-old Charlotte. Cowell had dabbled with the notion that the older, deceased brother, William, had set the fire to try to kill Oliver, the younger brother, motive determined to be an unnamed schoolgirl they were both in love with, which sounded like such a ludicrous stretch that even the judge had made fun of him. Of course, Cowell had also, in the best tradition of defense attorneys, speculated on the motives of everyone involved, up to and including the firefighters.

Only Victoria had any motive that could be supported by evidence however circumstantial. And only Victoria had not spoken in her own defense.