Icy Clutches

little hard to solve a murder when you don't know who the victim is.'

'Will Professor Worriner be able to help, do you think?'

'I hope so. All we can do is compare the new material to the fragments he identified as Pratt's and Fisk's back in 1964. With luck, we'll be able to make some kind of positive match. Or positively exclude one of them, which would be just as good.'

'You will,” Julie said. “I have every confidence.'

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Chapter 16

* * * *

Mr. Pratt, I'd like an answer.” John was nearing the end of the morning's interviews. He was getting tired. Too much information, too many unconnected pieces. And maybe a little too much breakfast. All those complex carbohydrates were sleep-inducing. Not to mention Gerald Pratt.

Pratt was holding a match to his pipe, nodding to show an answer was somewhere along the way. In the meantime, he was sucking in great gulps of smoke and puffing them back out again like the old Camels sign on Times Square. Puh...puh...puh...

Was he stalling? How could you tell? The gaunt, rawboned Pratt wasn't ever going to win any medals for speed. John glanced at Julian Minor in the chair at Pratt's left. Minor had his elbows on the arms of the chair, his hands resting lightly on his thighs, fingers splayed. Lips pursed, head bent, he was studying the perfect crescents at the ends of his flawlessly filed fingernails. One wing-tipped toe tapped noiselessly, discreetly, on the floor.

If Pratt didn't say something pretty soon, they were all going to fall asleep.

'Answer's no,” Pratt said.

'No, what?” Jesus, what was the question?

'No, I never heard Jimmy'd had any trouble with this Steve Fisk. Never heard he had any trouble with anybody.'

'He had some trouble with investors in Sea Resources.'

Pratt puffed tranquilly. “That,” he said, “was business.'

So it had been. Julian Minor had done his usual meticulous check on everyone involved, alive or dead, and had found that James Pratt had been more than a simple graduate student in 1960. It had been the time of the first great cholesterol scare, and Pratt had been involved in a dubious scheme to harvest kelp and process it into tablets that were supposed to lower blood cholesterol. Pratt and his partners, deeply in debt, were in hot water with creditors and investors. At the time of the survey they were being sued and were about to be investigated by both the IRS and the King County Prosecuting Attorney. Two years after Pratt's death, his partners, who had provided the capital (Pratt had supplied the botanical expertise), had paid backbreaking fines and gone to prison for three years.

'Were you involved in Sea Resources yourself, Mr. Pratt?” John asked.

'Not me. Jimmy was the businessman in the family.'

'I understand you fish for a living?” More of Julian's legwork.

'That's right. Out of Ketchikan.” He rearranged his long frame in the chair, showing welcome signs of life. “Pink salmon, mostly. Sometimes a little chum. Got me a fiberglass work boat, thirty-four-footer, diesel powered, radio, radar, the whole shebang. Big power reel on the afterdeck with a couple of hydraulic gurdies. Rigged for gill netting and trolling both.'

John understood about four words of this, and not just because the pipe had remained between Pratt's teeth the whole time. But at least now he knew the guy was capable of stringing together more than two sentences in a row when he was talking about something that interested him.

'No kidding,” John said.

Pratt was encouraged by this show of interest. “Rigged to handle longline gear, comes to that,” he added with quiet pride. “For halibut. Brought in a 440-pounder off of Hoonah last year. Name's Inez.' He removed the pipe. “The boat.'

'Mr. Pratt,” Minor said, restlessness spurring him to speech, “I'm given to understand you have the room next to Professor Tremaine's.'

'That's right.” He looked at the ceiling and ticked off names on his fingers. “Miz Yount, me, the professor, and Dr. Judd, all in a row. Don't know where the others are.'

'Did you hear anything unusual in Professor Tremaine's room last night?'

'Unusual?'

'Did you hear anything?'

There was a long, long silence. “Well, I did hear some voices, now that I think about it.'

John and Minor both sat up. “Angry voices?” Minor asked. “Arguing?'

'Just talking.'

'No other sounds?'

'Not that I remember.'

'Did you recognize them?'