"Well, not you, for starters," he murmured, breaking eye contact with Jack to smile down at her. "Oh, you meant Meany? Kinda forgot there for a minute. Well, the pathologist is a tad upset over Meany, Kate. She can't quite figure out how he died. There's water in his lungs, but his trachea is crushed, and then there is that knife, and unfortunately, the wound did bleed, so he was stabbed before he died." He paused, apparently thinking he might have missed something. He decided not. "That's about all she could tell me. She'll have more tomorrow, and the final report by Saturday, if her boss okayed the overtime. State cuts, you know." His mouth thinned, leaving them in no doubt of his opinion of legislative cutbacks to law enforcement.

"So we still don't know exactly when he died?" He shook his head, and Kate swore. "Dammit, Jim. If we don't know when, we're never gonna find out who. It's July, for crissake, it's light pretty much round the clock." She waved a hand for emphasis at the twilight sky that passed for night during an Alaskan July. "Somebody killed that many different ways has to have been seen going down for the third time, dammit!"

"Which reminds me," he said. "What'd you find out on your end?"

She gave him a look to let him know she knew she was being sidetracked. "He was beating on his son again at the cannery dock last night, admitted to by the son and witnessed by the whole damn beach gang, his wife and daughter are abuse victims if I've ever seen them, he moved in on the Ur-sins' setnet site and ran them off by threat if not by force, he cut Mary Balashoff's nets not once but twice during the past week and Gull is ticked because he tried to park in a space reserved for visiting dignitaries from Alpha Centauri."

Jim raised one very bland eyebrow. "Anything else?"

Kate took a deep breath, held it and then blew it out explosively. "Well, I didn't like him very much, either."

The three men laughed.

Kate, regaining her poise, said, "Old Sam says the whole bunch of them came here two years ago from Cincinnati, and from what his wife says, Calvin Meany has been driving them all like slaves ever since. You might want to check with the Cincinnati PD."

Chopper Jim knew what she meant; if Calvin Meany had been skating close to the edge of the law in Alaska, chances were he'd been doing the same in his previous neighborhood.

"You might want to talk to the Ursins, too. They live in Anchorage. And of course you'll want to talk to the family yourself. And you'll need to check the boy's alibi. He says he stayed overnight with the Wieses, Paul and Georgina, before Wendell Kritchen told him about his dad and gave him a ride back to the site." Suddenly Kate remembered the daughter. "You ought to interview the daughter yourself, Jim. Try to get her off by herself. I'm pretty sure she was holding something back."