Years later her fears came full circle when a murderer tried to kill her in just that fashion. She had outwitted him, barely, and the memory gave her the courage to walk into the cold-storage locker today without hesitation.

She stood on one side of the table, Jim on the other, mini-recorder in hand. He gave the date and the time and continued, "Master Sergeant James M. Chopin reporting, standing in the walk-in cooler of Knight Island Packers in Cordova. Present are Kate Shugak, tenderman, who found the body, and Darrell Peabody, Knight Island Packers' superintendent, who has graciously offered the body house room."

Kate wondered how much editing was done on Chopper Jim's tapes back at his Tok office.

"The body has been identified as Calvin Meany, drift net fisherman, Anchorage resident, PWS permit." Jim read Meany 's permit number, driver's-license number and Social Security number into the recorder, from cards extracted from the wallet Kate produced. "Body was discovered floating in Alaganik Bay at six-thirty a.m., this morning." He clicked off the recorder. "Okay, let's take a look."

Kate helped pull the tarp back, and heard Peabody swallow loudly behind her. Even Jim, who in the course of his professional career had seen just about everything bad that one human being could do to another, was surprised into expression. "Jesus Christ." The words, forced out of him, were compounded of surprise, disgust and not a little awe.

As Kate had seen from the catwalk of the Freya's bridge, Meany had been strangled. Whether it was before or after he had been stabbed in the heart with a sliming knife, the white plastic handle still protruding from his chest, was yet to be determined. Whether he had died by strangulation, or stabbing, or from concussion from many of the blows he had sustained to the head and upper body was also yet to be determined. His left arm had sustained a fracture of both ulna and radius, ripping the skin of his forearm so that the bones gleamed against the shriveled shreds of skin around the edge of the wound. He had defensive marks from wrist to elbow on his right arm. Silently, Kate pointed to both sets of his knuckles. They were ripped and swollen. There were dark bruises on his shoulders and torso. Something sharp had torn at the skin on the left side of his head, tearing a gash from temple to jaw. He was bloated from his immersion in seawater.

There was a long silence. Their breath formed little clouds in the room's chill air. At last Jim stirred. Over the body, his eyes met Kate's. "My kingdom for a forensic pathologist," he said, and clicked the recorder back on.

Jim slammed the gate shut on the bed of the truck, removed his hat and tipped his head back to draw in a long, sweet gulp of fresh air. Across the road was the eight-hundred-slip boat harbor. The new harbor was accessible by three ramps leading down to the first, third and fifth of the five floats, each anywhere from nine hundred to twelve hundred feet long. The twenty-four-foot slips began on the left, and the slip size increased to the right, ending with sixty-foot-slips on the last float. The old harbor descended into the basin from the opposite side of the artificial basin, and consisted of four floats half the size of the new ones, with a quarter the slip capacity. The city had sorely needed the new harbor; looking at it now, all floats, old and new, filled to capacity, Kate thought they should have moved and extended the breakwater for a harbor twice its present size. Especially since Cordova was a typical Alaskan town in that it was perpetually broke, and the harbor generated 20c a daily foot, $4.55 a monthly foot, and $13 a yearly foot. Cal Meany's drifter had been thirty feet long; if he'd maintained a slip in this harbor it would have cost him damn near $400 just to park while he went for groceries. No wonder he kept sneaking into transient parking.