She looked at him. He raised an eyebrow. If the state was paying her way to town, he wanted to lay out why. She huffed out an impatient sigh and ticked off on her fingers. One, all three worked at the mine. Two, Lyda had a relationship with Gammons. Three, Allen was a gofer for Holly Haynes, which would have put him in the office a lot and therefore Lyda would have known him pretty well, too. Fine so far as it goes, but according to your scenario Allen was dead for over a month and Gammons was in the hospital in Anchorage when Lyda died. It‘s all connected, Jim, it has to be.

He sighed. Why not just let George take the file in?

I can harass Brillo to hurry the autopsy.

You‘re in a hurry.

You should be, too, Jim, she said. If Lyda found someone spying on Suulutaq‘s operations, the longer we take to put this case together the more time they‘ll have to cover their tracks, and the harder it‘ll be to prove they killed her before she could turn them in. Another reason I want to go to town is I want to talk to Gammons, if he‘s come out of it. And I‘ve got one other thing that will be easier to check out in town, too.

The contact number in Allen‘s file?

Yes.

Lyda‘s note said it was a wrong number.

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn‘t. I want you to let me give it to Kurt Pletnikoff. Ah. This would be the guy you blue-ticketed out of the Park and set up in Anchorage as a PI.

Yes.

He any good?

Hey, he‘s the Meyer to my Travis, the Mouse to my Easy, the Hugh to my Cadfael. Not to mention the Costello to your Abbott, Jim said, who had not forgotten why Kurt Pletnikoff had been blue-ticketed out of the Park in the first place. He‘s good, Jim, Kate said. He took some kind of a data mining class, or whatever they call it, and I won‘t say he‘s a genius but he is damn good at trolling for information on the Internet. He‘s also fast, and we won‘t have to sit around waiting for him to call back. I‘m going to give him everyone‘s Social Security numbers and tell him to get me everything he can on them, too. He didn‘t say anything. A screwup doesn‘t have to stay a screwup forever, Jim. She thought of Petey Jeppsen.

He‘s not going to break any constitutional amendments, is he?

She knew she‘d won then. Cross my heart and hope to die.

He recognized and admired the determination in the square set of her shoulders, the stubborn jut of her chin, the militant look in her eye. She was pissed off at Lyda‘s death, and she would not rest until she knew what had happened in every detail, and the perpetrator, if there was one, had been brought as near to justice as possible.