Icy Clutches

John shrugged. “Well, maybe seeing him again brought it all back. I think she had a thing for him, you know? Something she wouldn't even admit to herself. A person's judgment gets screwed up when that happens.'

'Maybe,” Gideon said. “Do you actually believe this, or are you just throwing around ideas?'

'Just throwing around ideas. Our boy Judd's got a pretty good motive too. Did you know he is up for some high mucky-muck state job? An appointment by the governor?'

Gideon shook his head.

'Well, he is. Imagine if all this stuff got raked up in Tremaine's book. First the guy messes up his work so bad they have to go out and do it over again. Then he sits around nursing a mosquito bite, for Christ's sake, while they're all getting creamed in an avalanche—which they wouldn't be, if not for his screw-up—and he doesn't even try to help them.'

'You think the governor might think twice about appointing him?'

'I know if I was Judd I'd be worrying about it.” He began shifting things on the table, looking for something. “Damn, didn't I get any ketchup?'

'For pizza?'

'What, are you kidding me? For the chicken. Ah,” he said, and tore open a packet that had been under the edge of his tray. He made a puddle of it on the rim of his plate, stuck in a piece of chicken thigh, and heartily bit in. “Two interviews, two suspects,” he mused, chewing. “By the time I talk to the other three I'll probably have five.'

Gideon nodded. “It just about has to be one of the people he was meeting with, doesn't it? No one else here had any connection with him. That we know of,” he said as an afterthought.

'Yeah. Of course it's possible someone came in from the outside, did it, and took off again, but pretty unlikely. They'd have had to come by plane, either to Gustavus or straight to Bartlett Cove by seaplane. Pretty hard to do that without being noticed.'

'And pretty hard to wander inconspicuously around the lodge looking for Tremaine's room when there are only a few guests and everybody knows everybody else by sight.'

'That's right. I got initial statements from all of them, you know. Nobody saw any strangers. Nobody saw any anybodies. They all had dinner together—expecting Tremaine, who never showed—and then around seven they started going to their rooms. So they said. Shirley Yount read in front of the fire till eight-thirty, then she went to her room too. Nobody came out again till this morning.'

'Well, one person did.'

'True.'

They addressed their food for a while, looking out the window at a forest of young alder and hemlock, A couple of the turkey-sized, speckled birds that hung around the woods meandered vacantly among the trees. Blue grouse, Julie had said they were. The day had gotten so gloomy the, lights were on in the room.

'Doesn't the sun ever shine around here?” John said.

Gideon laughed. “You've only been here four hours.'

'It's as bad as Seattle,” John muttered, swabbing up a glob of ketchup with a thickly battered, unidentifiable piece of chicken (assuming there was any chicken under the deep-fried coating). He chewed with placid enjoyment, his muscular jaws working slowly. “They're sending out another agent to work with me. He'll be out on today's plane. Julian Minor. Remember him?'

'Wasn't he with you on the Lake Quinault killings?'

'That's the one.'

Gideon recalled a middle-aged black man, competent and methodical, with rimless glasses, neat, grizzled hair, and the chubby, tidy, pin-striped appearance of a contented tax accountant. And a prim, anachronistic vocabulary straight out of the age of celluloid collars: “Be that as it may...” “I take your point...” “Thus and so...'

'I remember him,” Gideon said.

'Well, he sure remembers you.'

'Did he ever forgive me?'

'What's to forgive? Just because you left him cooking a putrid piece of cadaver in a pot on a stove for three hours?'

'Two hours,” Gideon said.

Other than that, John's description was accurate. A rotting human hip joint had been found in a river, and Gideon had had to boil the shreds of flesh off the bones with an antiformin and sodium-hydroxide solution. But he'd had to go somewhere, and somehow poor Julian Minor, with his white shirt cuffs folded neatly back, had gotten stuck with the task of periodically stirring the greasy mess with a long wooden spoon. Like a witch in Macbeth. He had given Gideon a lot of room after that.

'Well, there won't be any cooking chores this time,” Gideon said. “Did the people from the crime lab finish up?'

'Oh, yeah, they're gone. So's the body. Dr. Wu too. You want to guess what they looked for and didn't find?'

'Fingerprints?” Gideon said after a moment.

'Good guess. Oh, there were plenty of latents on the walls and towel racks and stuff; they probably go back weeks.'

'Years.'

'Fingerprints don't last years. Didn't you know that?” Gideon glowered at him.

'Anyhow,” John said cheerfully, “the front doorknob was wiped off—nothing on it but the maid's prints—and the