"Okay. We're lousy with motive and suspects. How about means?"

Kate got out of the truck. "The last time I saw him alive he was making for Cordova with a full load. Yesterday afternoon about one o'clock. He had to run a gauntlet of fishing boats to do it, with a lot of half-drunk pissed-off fishermen skippering them, but he made it."

"His son on board?"

She nodded. "On deck, picking fish out of the last of the gear and pitching them into the hold. But hell, that don't necessarily mean anything. We don't even know where Meany was killed."

"What do you mean? You found him at Alaganik?"

"Yeah, but who's to say he didn't get himself killed right here in the harbor, after he delivered?"

"He did deliver, then?"

She nodded again. "Mark Hanley, head of the beach gang, he says he pulled up to the Knight Island dock two hours after I saw him leave Alaganik."

"He remembers exactly?"

She gave a half-smile. "He was ticked at being called out. Nobody else was fishing, the beach gang was celebrating the Fourth with a barbecue and, as I understand it, Meany showed up just about the time the wet T-shirt contest started."

Jim grinned. "Not a happy camper."

"No."

"So you think the killer might have killed him here, driven his boat back out to the grounds and rolled him into the water?"

"Maybe."

"Why? To confuse anybody who comes looking for him?"

"Definitely to confuse someone. Wait till you see the body, Jim," she said, with emphasis. "This, you should pardon the expression, is overkill."

He grinned again. She didn't grin back. He sobered, and reached for the door. "Okay, then. Lead me to it."

It was a walk-in cooler, shelves on all four walls crammed with steaks and roasts and chops of beef and pork wrapped in white butcher paper, boxes of whole chickens wrapped in plastic, twelve-packs of corn on the cob, plastic gallon sacks full of peas and broccoli, and a case of frozen bread dough in two-loaf packagesa summer's worth of supplies for a perpetually hungry cannery crew. The harsh light of a single, hundred-watt lightbulb inside a wire cage illuminated everything clearly. The cannery superintendent, a thickset, dark-haired man who looked barely old enough to vote, hovered in the open doorway, clearly reluctant to step any closer to the tarpaulin-wrapped horror resting on the table that took up the center of the room. The surface of the table was streaked with old blood and scarred with knife cuts.

"We brought the table in from the slime line," the superintendent said. "Didn't seem right to just sling him onto the floor."

Kate hated walk-in freezers. When she was a little girl, there had been a community freezer in back of the old city hall in Niniltna, a large room filled with shelves where everyone in town brought their moose and caribou. It had been her special task when she visited her grandmother in the village to go and get the evening's meat from the locker. She would get as far as the door, where she would stand, shivering, a sweat of fear down her spine, filled with an irrational knowledge that if she left the door to fetch the meat, the door would swing shut behind her, locking her in forever, leaving her there to die a cold and lonely death, just another package of frozen meat. It sometimes took her ten minutes to work up the courage to leap, snatch at the first package on her grandmother's designated shelf that came to her frantic grasp and leap back to stop the door from closing. Sometimes she lucked out and someone else would be at the locker at the same time. Mostly not.