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twin tassels at the end of the gold cord encircling the brim. "Better be careful. You know how they are in the Park about protecting one of their own."
    Jack thought back to the previous December and couldn't suppress an inner shiver. "Yes. I know. So?" The trooper set his hat on his head, tilting the brim so that it came down low over his eyes. He looked up, his expression somewhere between rueful and resigned. "So. Looks like Kate's all we got."
    "Looks like." Jack made a pretense of straightening a pile of paper on his desk.
    "When you going in? Tomorrow?"
    "No." Jack thought. "I'll have the team go over the ground one more time and bag everything that doesn't actually move out of the way. And I think I might have ballistics run the bullets through CLIS." He raised a hand in the face of Bill's unspoken protest. "I know, I know, but with Kate Shugak you want to make sure."
    "Make sure of what?" Bill asked.
    "Make sure there's no way she can back out of it," the trooper said shrewdly.
    Jack's thick black eyebrows twitched together but he didn't rise to the bait. "I know a guy, Gamble, on the FBI. He owes me. He'll get them through the data base and get me a printout on the rifling characteristics pronto. I should be able to go into the Park on," he leaned forward to flip through his desk calendar, "at the latest, Sunday."
    "Want a lift?" Chopper Jim said.
    Jack shook his head. "I'll fly in myself."
    Kate. His spirits rose. He was going home, to Kate, when he hadn't thought he would see her again until his vacation in May. His heart actually skipped a beat, and he couldn't keep the smile from forming. He looked from Bill's curious and slightly disapproving expression to the trooper's knowing one and laughed out loud.
three
    KATE was replacing the window Mutt had charged through to her rescue nine days before. The sky was clear and calm, the sun warm on her back, the temperature above freezing and the task simple and straightforward, occupying her hands while letting her mind wander. That was the problem.
    "Yes," she said, "there is something about apprehending murderers in mid-massacre that tends to take the edge off of spring fever."
    Saying it out loud didn't help as much as she had thought it might.
    Grunting, she lifted the window in its prefab aluminum frame and settled it into the wall of the cabin. Through the glass Mutt looked at her pleadingly. Kate fumbled in her pocket for screws and began to set them in, one at a time, concentrating with a kind of stubborn determination.
    The horror of the scene on the road dogged her heels like a shadow, always on the periphery of her consciousness. It tarnished the promise of the early spring days and poisoned her dreams.
    Across the clearing there was a rustle of brush and she looked around to see Mutt's boyfriend springing to his feet and looking up in the sky to the west. Kate paused and cocked her head. A faint buzz sounded the approach of an airplane. The noise became louder and lower, and she whipped her head around just in time to see a blue, black and silver Cessna 172 roar over the clearing, the gear skimming the tops of the trees. A full-throated baritone made itself heard above the engine, belting out a song about dames and how there was nothing like them.
    She started to smile. The Cessna came around for a second pass and another verse. She was grinning as she grabbed her parka and ran for the garage, an indignant and frustrated Mutt yelping from the cabin. As she rolled the snow machine outside, the Cessna roared overhead for the third time and the chorus. The Super Jag unaccountably started at first try. Kate hit the throttle and roared out of the garage without stopping to close the door behind her, past the mystified wolf crouching beneath the hemlock tree and up the path to the road, without a glance or a thought to spare for anything but how fast she could make the twenty-five miles to Niniltna.
    He should have been on the ground long since, but when Kate got to