All of the miners and Park rats present were there for the only espresso drinks served between Niniltna and Ahtna. They also lusted after the lovely and nubile Laurel Meganack, too, almost as much as they lusted after her green chile cheeseburgers.

Today Laurel wasn‘t working alone. You‘ve got new talent, Dan said, craning to see around Laurel when she brought them menus.

Hands off, Laurel said. Heather‘s working out, and I‘d like to keep her a little longer than the last three girls I hired. Hey, Mutt.

They nodded at each other, woman to woman.

Kate, Laurel said.

Laurel, Kate said. Laurel was still a trifle peeved with Kate for the verbal roughhousing Kate had given her father last year during a murder investigation, but since then they had conspired together with Auntie Vi and Matt Grosdidier for the greater good, and as it happened for Laurel‘s greater good in particular. Both Jim and Dan were aware, in their dim male way, that constraint had existed, and that it was now gone. Good, they got to eat.

Laurel took their orders and swiveled off, a pocket Venus with thick dark hair sleeked back into a severe ponytail, a thin white T-shirt that displayed to advantage every detail of the low-cut, lacy bra beneath, and jeans that looked as if they‘d been sewn to her body. Laurel was a good fry cook and a world-class barista but she knew what brought them in the door.

Truth in advertising, Dan said, mesmerized.

No misleading of the consumer there, Jim said, rapt.

Both men recalled themselves at the same moment and gave Kate identical guilty looks.

She laughed at them.

It was an incongruous and yet somehow outrageously sexy rasping rumble of amusement. Laurel and Heather weren‘t the only women in the room worth a second look, and Kate was worth a third.

She wasn‘t a classic beauty, five feet, 120 pounds, and, compared to Laurel, modest curves. Her black hair was cut very short and gleamed beneath the fluorescent lights with an almost iridescent sheen. Her olive skin was clear and looked velvety to the touch. Her Aleut cheekbones were flat and high and her eyes were a changeable hazel she had inherited from multiple multiethnic forebears, beneath the eyelids she had inherited from the Asian ancestors who had crossed the Bering Sea land bridge into Alaska twenty-five thousand years before.

Her mouth was wide and full and when she bothered it was capable of curling into a sensual smile that revealed a set of white, even teeth that had everything to do with heredity and nothing at all to do with the dentist. On closer inspection, beneath a rounded but very firm chin, there was a white, roped scar that bisected her throat halfway between chin and clavicle, almost from ear to ear. The more alert might have figured out it was the cause of the husky voice and the rasping laugh. She didn‘t dress to attract, clad in jeans that fit comfortably and a cream-colored mock turtleneck beneath a navy blue sweatshirt with UAF NANOOKS on the front. Her feet were shod in worn boots with steel toes.