Jim sat on a convenient boulder, facing into the sun, and went over his notes. Len-Leonard? -Dreyer was a white male in his mid to late fifties. He hadn’t had a wallet but that wasn’t unusual in the Park, where there weren’t any ATMs requiring cash cards and where barter was the major method of exchange of goods and services anyway. A driver’s license might be needed once you hit Ahtna and the Glenn Highway, so you wouldn’t necessarily carry it around in your pocket unless you were making a special trip outside the Park. Some Bush rats didn’t bother getting a license at all because they didn’t drive anything bigger than a four-wheeler or a snow machine.

There was a roll of bills totaling $783 and sixty-seven cents in loose change-bet Dreyer didn’t have a bank account, either- a moly bolt, three Sheetrock screws, one metal washer, half a roll of Wintergreen Lifesavers, and one of those miniature screwdrivers with interchangeable heads. There was a well-used Leatherman clipped to his belt.

Whoever had killed him hadn’t gone through his pockets, or the money would have been gone. Or they didn’t care, which made the crime personal. But then when was it ever anything else in the Park. Sometimes Jim thought he’d sell his soul for just one random, faceless welfare mugging, instead of the intermittent internecine warfare practiced by the denizens of the Park. With varying levels of enthusiasm and at different levels of intensity, true, but it was there in every clique, group, and gang nonetheless, white, Native, old, young, male, female, subsistence, sport, or commercial.

Except Bobby. Good old Bobby Clark, a minority of one, a majority of mouth.

And Kate Shugak, a photograph of whom could be found in Webster’s after the word “loner.”

He didn’t envy the medical examiner the task of determining how long Dreyer had been dead. The body had been cold and stiff, but then it had been sitting under a glacier for who knew how long. Rigor set in after twelve hours, held on for another twelve, and passed off in the next twelve, and Jim had a feeling that the body had been there longer than thirty-six hours. He hoped the medical examiner who drew Dreyer liked mysteries, because he was pretty sure finding a time of death wasn’t going to be easy.