I hope that True North business doesn‘t come back to bite us in the ass, Jim said. Drug cartels are hell on leakers.

According to Gamble they‘re going to have a lot worse things to worry about shortly.

Yeah, well, I‘m considering the source there. Jim looked at Kate. So you think Allen found out about the drug money laundering and decided to vanish. Yes. He might have known from the beginning. A good con man is also a first-class researcher. He wouldn‘t have come into this without checking into True North‘s background.

Say I‘m prepared to accept this ridiculous story as something approaching the truth. How does the death of Lyda Blue figure into it?

Some of the light went out of Kate‘s eyes, and he was sorry to see it go. She was awful cute when she got on the scent. I haven‘t figured that out yet. It has to be connected to Allen and Gammons, it just has to. We know from the file on her computer that she found out Allen was stealing data. And we know Gammons was shot with her pistol. All three of them were connected. Her death has to be, too. I‘ll check with her family, see if they can identify it as belonging to her. But, Kate. Their eyes met. He was dead a long time before she was. If she was murdered, he didn‘t kill her.

I know, she said. There has to be something else, something I haven‘t seen, or accounted for. We need to go back out to the mine and talk to a lot more people, especially the geologists. If Lyda noticed something, they might have, too. Oh. She sat up. I just remembered. Truax was throwing a guy off the mine when I got there the day Lyda died.

Oh yeah? Who?

His name is Kostas McKenzie. He‘s the executive director of a nonprofit environmental activist organization called Gaea. He snuck in on a plane that morning and was snooping around.

Jim perked up. Any chance of popping him for Lyda Blue‘s death?

No, Kate said, with regret. I checked with George and he was telling the truth about when he got to Suulutaq. Rigor was too far advanced for him to have done it. Damn.

Yeah. Especially since I think there is going to be trouble from that direction before very long. I went down to their office last night. Gaea has targeted the Suulutaq Mine for their trophy wall.

Yeah, well, I think Global Harvest can defend itself. He looked at the clock and stood up. You know what? I‘ve had a day, and I‘m going to need some beer to get through the rest of it.

Roadhouse?

God, no. The last time I went to the Roadhouse for a quiet beer I had to break up a fistfight between a Park rat and a Suulutaq Mine worker over Dulcey Kinneen. And then Bernie insisted I counsel Dulcey against renting herself out by the hour. Let‘s just go home.