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only twenty-five feet on a side, and having been the recipient of an ungentle elbow when she got in Johnny’s way, twice, found herself with nothing better to do than pour two mugs of coffee and offer one to their guest.
     
    Jim blew on the steaming liquid, a small smile in his eyes.
     
    Kate cleared her throat and sat down on the couch as far away from him as was physically possible. “What’s the job?”
     
    The smile didn’t go anywhere but he answered readily enough. “You hear about Len Dreyer?”
     
    She nodded at Johnny. “Got my very own personal town crier.”
     
    Johnny looked over his shoulder at the two of them, a fragment of ground meat adhering to his cheek, and grinned.
     
    “He did a good job there,” Jim said. “Kept everybody out, kept them from contaminating the scene.”
     
    “Was Len killed there?” Kate said.
     
    Jim shook his head. “I doubt it. He caught a shotgun blast through the chest at point-blank range. There wasn’t enough blood at the scene for it to have happened there.”
     
    Kate thought about it, about the physics of a body left beneath the overhang of a glacier. “How long had he been there?”
     
    “I don’t know. He was stiff, but given the location, I don’t think we can put that down to rigor.”
     
    “No. Did you talk to Dan O’Brian?”
     
    “Why would I? Did he know Dreyer?”
     
    Kate hunched an impatient shoulder. “Everybody knew Len. No, I was thinking about the glacier. It’s receding.”
     
    He raised that eyebrow again, the one that made his expression shift from shark to Satan.
     
    “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It just seems an odd place to hide a body.”
     
    “If you wanted to hide it,” Jim said. “Maybe the killer wanted Dreyer to be found.”
     
    “By whom? Who the hell walks around inside glaciers?”
     
    The eyebrow stayed up. They’d been conversing in low voices, so as not to break the concentration of the glacier trekker making hamburgers ten feet away. She smiled in spite of herself, and it was a rare enough occasion to make Jim’s breath catch.
     
    Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin wasn’t the only man who had found Kate Shugak to be beautiful, not least the father of the young man currently beating moose burger into submission across the room. From anything Jim had been able to discover, there had been no one else for Jack Morgan from the moment he’d set eyes on Kate Shugak, what would it be, nine, ten years before? No, more like twelve. Kate had taken a degree in justice from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, done a year at Quantico, and had gone straight to work as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney’s investigative arm, of which Jack Morgan had been head. From all accounts, the future was pretty much set in stone from that moment forward, and it wasn’t a future when those two were not together.
     
    Of course, that didn’t include the eighteen-month period following Kate burning out on working sex crimes and moving back to this very homestead, after which Jack arrived at this very door, FBI in tow, to hire her to find a missing Park ranger. That had marked the end of Kate’s self-imposed seclusion and the beginning of her career as a, pardon him, consultant. Jim had tossed her cabin the previous summer when she had gone missing, and he had run across her tax return. That was what she had put in the space marked “Your Occupation”: Consultant. It was the only real smile he remembered getting out of the exercise. She was still pissed at him for tossing the place, too. Among other things.
     
    He looked at her now, the smile lighting her narrow eyes, eyes sometimes hazel, sometimes a light brown, sometimes verging on a mossy green. He’d never been close enough for long enough to figure out which was the one true color. Her hair was thick and black and as shiny as a raven’s wing, and had once hung to her belt in a neat French braid. Now it was cropped short, brushed straight back