"What do you want to know?" Letourneau said. She turned to watch.

Now that he had what he wanted, Jim added a little humility for effect. "I don't know, John, I'm just fishing, really. It surprised me that Dina had been married."

Letourneau gave a short laugh. "It'd surprise a lot of people."

"I thought she came to the Park with Ruthe."

"She did."

"But . . ."

John's back was very straight. He seemed to Rate rather like a soldier marching into battle, facing heavy enemy fire yet determined to do his duty. "Back when I was just proving up on my homestead, back when Dina and Ruthe first bought the camp and started importing tourists, they got some who wanted to shoot with more than a camera. They farmed them out to me. They helped me get my start. I was ten years younger, but we had a lot in common, and there weren't a hell of a lot of other people around in those days. Dina and I got to know each other." He paused. "And then it got to be more than that."

"How did Ruthe feel about your relationship?"

"I don't know. I never talked to her about it."

"Come on, John."

"I don't know, damn it," Letourneau said sharply. "We eloped, just the two of us. Dina flew us to Ahtna. We got married by the magistrate there. We lasted a month."

"What happened?"

"It's personal."

"What happened?"

"I'm telling you it has nothing to do with Dina's death."

There was a time to ease up. This wasn't it. "What happened, John?"

Letourneau swore beneath his breath and got up to pace to the fireplace. It was the first time Kate had ever seen him lose his composure. He turned and gave them an angry look. "I took her away from Ruthe. Ruthe took her back. That's all I'm going to say about it."

There was present anger and remembered misery on John Letourneau's face. There was also the whip of humiliation, an emotion in a man of John Letourneau's age and upbringing that would matter more than the first two. He'd been outperformed by a lesbian. His woman had gone from him to another woman.

"And since?" Jim said.

Letourneau mastered his feelings and returned to his chair, making a business out of refilling his mug and biting into another cookie. "There is no since. We coexist. I even send customers their way. They do the same. We get along."

Kate remembered Dina tripping Letourneau with her cane on the Roadhouse dance floor ten days before. In Letourneauspeak, "get along" could mean anything short of murder.

Or it could mean murder.

It was a well-known maxim of law enforcement that the spouses of the unexpectedly deceased were always the prime suspects. The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest. One of Jack Morgan's Laws.

But Jim Chopin had the prime suspect in custody. So what, Kate asked herself for the tenth time, were they doing here, exactly?