No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  Matt went back to the clinic to see if his brothers had killed anybody while he was gone. Jim finished his coffee, left Laurel a lavish tip to start her trousseau off right, and went outside to where the sled was parked. He climbed on and turned the key and let the engine warm up for a minute, thinking. Still thinking, he idled down the road a bit and instead of continuing on to the homestead turned right to climb the hill past the trooper post (at which he managed to avoid looking directly) and the Niniltna Native Association building, and arrived at the school. It was a typical Bush school, a prefab shipped in parts and assembled on site, twenty-five years old at least and getting a little long in the tooth. The gym, built entirely on site of rebar-reinforced concrete, stood a little behind, connected by a covered walkway. School didn’t start again until next week so it was quiet. He’d done his share of Career Days here so he knew the way to the principal’s office. Mrs. Doogan was at her desk, and looked up when he rapped on the partially open door. “Jim! Hey.”

  “Valerie. Got a minute?”

  “Do I ever.” She threw down her pen and shoved away the stack of papers in front of her. She was a middle-aged woman with a wiry runner’s build. She was, in fact, a marathoner who had successfully completed the Mount Marathon race half a dozen times without bleeding, an accomplishment in and of itself. She had light brown hair cut short in an unfussy style that needed no maintenance, pale, freckled skin and steady brown eyes that tolerated no nonsense. After over twenty years teaching in Niniltna, there wasn’t much that could throw her and almost nothing that surprised her, kind of like a cop with that much time in the job. “Coffee?”

  He shook his head. “I was just down at the Riverside.”

  She got up and took her mug over to the coffee maker sitting on the credenza. “Anything new on the crash?” He shook his head. “Kids okay?”

  “As good as they can be. Vanessa has managed to communicate with them a little bit. We know their names now.”

  She returned to her desk and sat down. “If they need a Spanish-speaking counselor—”

  He winced. “We’re trying to keep their presence here on the down low, at least for the moment.”

  “Well. When there’s need.” She sipped coffee. “And otherwise? Life off the job good?” He smiled. She laughed. “I see that it is. Well, I can’t say we don’t miss you. They’re closing down the post, did you hear?”

  “Just a rumor, so far as I know.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. If it’s true, until they find someone to replace you it’ll be Nick flying in from Tok again when there’s trouble.” She made a face. “When he can be bothered.”

  “Come on, Valerie. You know that isn’t fair. He’s got a lot of territory to cover, and he’s only one guy. We need more troopers. We always have.”

  “And the governor and the legislature doesn’t like paying for public safety,” she said with a sigh. “I know. They don’t like paying for education, either. Even less now than they ever did before.”

  “How are you doing for enrollment these days?”

  “Almost forty, counting K through twelve. Five in this year’s graduating class, god willing and the creeks don’t rise. We’re lucky to be so far over the limit.”

  She was talking about the ten-student limit. When the student count dropped below that, the state shut the school down. After that the choices for Park parents were either home schooling or moving to Cordova or Ahtna. Or, horrors, Anchorage. It was the same story all over Alaska. Some villages with shrinking student enrollments advertised Outside for families with children to move in, all expenses paid. He remembered that morning’s conversation with Laurel and Matt. “Do you still have a shop class?” he said. She laughed. It was enough of an answer. “How about home economics?”

  She shook her head. “Not at the moment, but…” She eyed him speculatively. “I’m hoping I can swing a grant to bring both back.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “There’s a foundation in Anchorage that has set aside funding for education in the Bush, and they actually contacted me about it. They say that even though we have a road we qualify.”

  “That sounds good.” Something in her expression made him say, “Doesn’t it?”

  “It was nice not to have to go begging, I’ll say that much.” She pursed her lips for a moment. “But it’s the Bannister Foundation.”

  “Erland Bannister’s homemade charity?”

  She nodded.

  “Huh,” he said, and realizing as soon as he said it how woefully inadequate a response it was.

  “How big a stink do you think she’d make if I applied and we got the money?”

  If Kate really was Erland’s trustee, which according to her profanity-laced phone call last night was not a sure thing, it might be less stinky than Valerie was anticipating. “No way am I putting words into her mouth, Valerie. Ask her yourself. I would point out, however, that he tried to kill her.”

  “More than once,” she said dryly. “I am aware, as I am also aware he served about three and a half minutes for his crime. But…”

  “What?”

  She met his eyes. “Erland Bannister himself came to talk to me about a grant application last fall. Flew in on his fancy jet, marched into this office and sat right where you’re sitting now, and gave me to believe that all I had to do was apply for the check to be written. I didn’t trust him or anything he said, it goes without saying, and after he left I wanted to clean every surface he touched with Clorox and steel wool. But I did go to his foundation’s website. There’s a list of people and organizations the Bannister Foundation has given to. I called a few of them. On the surface it looks legit.”

  He looked over her shoulder. A few scrub spruces and a stand of alders had been encouraged to form a dust-catching privacy screen between the school grounds and the airport, but the ground between fell away enough that the principal’s office had a fine view of the full length of the Niniltna airstrip. “Did you see him fly in?”

  She snorted. “I’ve had a front row seat to all the air traffic in and out of Niniltna, before and after Suulutaq geared up. It felt like Seatac for a while there. When the EPA called them on their bullshit EIS, traffic slowed down some, but since we got our all! new! and improved! governor it’s kicked back up again.”

  “Not just George, then.”

  “Do you know, Jim, I’d never seen a private jet until they started the prep work for the Suulutaq Mine? Since then, they’ve been in and out several times a month. And the weird thing is, usually if there’s one, there are two. On the ground at the same time. In Niniltna!” She shook her head. “I’ve lived here for almost twenty years and I’m used to small plane traffic. I think I’d notice it more if there weren’t any. But we’re not talking Cubs and Beavers or even George’s Single Otter turbo. Starting to look like Scottsdale out there.”

  “The private jets,” he said. “You didn’t happen to notice any corporate logos?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tail numbers?”

  “Most of them don’t have any. I wondered about that a little. I thought the FAA required N numbers on every aircraft.”

  “They’ve probably got them, just small enough and tucked away somewhere so you can’t see them.”

  “Sneaky.”

  “I’m guessing that’s the idea.”

  She raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t elaborate. “About this grant, Jim. I don’t want to go to all the trouble of writing the grant application if she’s going to thunder in here and give me her best We-are-most-seriously-displeased-Ekaterina impression. Run it by her, would you?”

  Well, just goody. Nothing more romantic than floating a plan to bring more of Erland Bannister’s money into the Park.

  He’d almost made the door when his phone erupted into the Darth Vader theme. He took a deep breath, found an empty classroom, and closed the door behind him before he answered. “Hi, John.”

  John Barton, the Lord High Everything Else of the Alaska State Troope
rs and Jim’s ex-boss, let a fulminating moment pass in which Jim was reminded irresistibly of Redoubt on the boil before a full-blown eruption. “Jesus CHRIST! When were you gonna call me about what you found at the wreck site YESTERDAY?”

  “What’s there to talk about, John? You asked me to assist you in an investigation. I did and George brought the results into town last night. I presume Brillo’s boys met him at the airport and Brillo’s got custody of the evidence.”

  “OF COURSE HE DOES! That’s what REAL crime fighters DO!”

  “Yes, and I’m not one anymore, John,” Jim said with enough of an edge to remind Barton that he was bellowing at a private citizen and—a faint hope—moderate his tone.

  A brief silence while Barton struggled with his self-control. It wasn’t something that came naturally to him. “Do you think more of that shit is up there?”

  By which Jim correctly guessed that Barton was talking about the Ziploc full of pills and not the missing half of the deceased. “To justify flying it in on a private jet, I’d say there is almost certain to be. A lot more. But it’s buried in about fifty feet of snow and—” he looked out the window at the threatening gray sky “—my guess is about to accumulate more. Wait until spring.”

  “We can’t just leave it up there, Jim. Christ, every fucking tweaker in the Park gets wind of this they’ll be pointing their sleds and four-wheelers north by northeast and we’ll spend the rest of the winter pulling THEIR asses outta the goddamn Quilaks.”

  Alaska had the same problem with opioids as every other state in the union and most of the rest of the world, and Jim had seen plenty of it in his early days on the job, especially in the Matsu Valley and down on the lower Kenai. Fentanyl was the uber example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions as it had originally been invented by a doctor to manage severe pain. Now it was the illegal narcotic of choice by users and dealers alike. It was fifty times more powerful than heroin and a hundred times more powerful than cocaine and at one time had commonly been mixed with both, often without the user’s knowledge, which all too often ended in their deaths. Lately it was being sold more often and more profitably straight up, and was constantly being manufactured in new analogues in illegal pill mills in China, Mexico and most recently Canada. Every time the DEA identified a new strain, another version popped up on the market. It was like playing drug Whack-a-Mole and it was never a war they were going to win.

  By now the drug’s use was so widespread that communities were arming librarians and teachers and even grocery store clerks with naloxone because libraries and schools and stores were becoming the front lines of the overdose epidemic. He’d been ecstatic when they’d moved on from injectors to nasal spray, but in whatever form naloxone was the one tool a first responder had to maybe reverse an overdose.

  Strangely enough, the Park had thus far been spared the worst of the opioid epidemic, which was one of many minor reasons he’d welcomed the opening of the trooper post in Niniltna. The Park had its share of substance abuse-inspired human misery, but most of it was caused by alcohol. Informed by his time in the northwest of the state, he had come to the conclusion that this was the benefit of having strong elders, beginning with Ekaterina Shugak who had led by example, and extending to the aunties and the board of the Niniltna Native Association. It might be the single most essential element for a healthy and relatively sane population.

  There was also the Roadhouse, the one place within fifty miles where you could buy a legal beer, and where if you became visibly under the influence Bernie Koslowski would confiscate the keys to your truck or sled or ATV and toss your ass into one of the cabins he maintained out back of the bar. He knew the birthdays of everyone in the Park, too, and bounced the underage out the door as soon as they walked in. The moment he got to hear someone was pregnant, the Roadhouse stopped serving them. Bernie, the aunties, and the board of directors of the NNA worked separately but for the same ends. He only wished that law enforcement in every community in Alaska had that kind of backup. It sure helped ease the workload, and while alcohol abuse-related crime was as horrific to deal with as any other substance abuse-related crime, it was at least familiar and treatable. It was an advantage he’d rather have done without but it was an advantage, and one he hoped would extend to marijuana, which the state had voted to legalize for the second time. Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez had invested in two new high tunnels and were starting a crop this summer, they said for export but there were enough ex-hippies in the Park to sell to right out of their front door without the added expense of packaging and shipping. Jim expected the NNA and the aunties to have a say there as well. Bernie, he knew, was already worried about the competition.

  John was right, though. The moment Howie Katelnikof heard the news he’d be en route, and he even knew the way into Canyon Hot Springs. Worse, he would probably bring Willard Shugak with him to do all the grunt work, and Jim shuddered to think what Kate would have to say about that. “How much manpower and money are you willing to dedicate to this recovery?” he said. “Keeping in mind that it’s January, and it’s at ten thousand feet, and the weather is crap and about to get crappier.” He paused. Barton said nothing. “This isn’t tenable, John. You’re gonna get somebody killed.”

  “Then what the FUCK do YOU suggest, Chopin?”

  “Leave it till spring. Hire George Perry to do regular flyovers, weather permitting. Hell, you could send up a drone to take pictures whenever it’s clear. As soon as it warms up and the snow starts to melt and the wreck starts showing through the snow you can send in a team. In the meantime we keep quiet about it.”

  Barton breathed heavily over the satellite. “You’re putting a hell of a lot of faith in our ability to do that.”

  Jim sighed. “There are no good solutions here, John, just bad and less bad. Even if someone does hear about the wreck and even if they do go up to check it out, they won’t be able to find it. Even if they did, how many dealers and users do you know who like to work that hard?”

  On his way out of town he obeyed another impulse and pulled into the driveway of Herbie Topkok’s shop. It was a warehouse-sized building, not quite as big as his hangar. There was a two-story bay with an automatic door, big enough to hold a boat on a trailer and keep it and Herbie out of the weather while Herbie worked on it. The other half consisted of two smaller, single-story bays, both big enough to park Harvey Meganack’s Lincoln Navigator with room to spare, and any number of Subarus of any model, as it would need to do, Subaru being the Alaska state car.

  He sat on his sled, looking at the shop and the enormous house next to it. In his youth Herbie had been near enough high boat for ten years running in Prince William Sound. He’d always been frugal and he’d saved enough to build this shop and the house next to it, which was big enough to hold Herbie, his wife, and their six or seven kids. It was one of the few houses in the Park to which Jim had never been called, so it must have been a happy and well-run house. He liked to think there was at least one of them in the Park but police work inspired a jaundiced view in its practitioners and there were probably more. His own, for example. He wondered how Kate was faring in Anchorage, and didn’t even try to convince himself that he didn’t miss her. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

  Shop and house both were shut up tight, with no lights showing in either. There was no for sale sign out front but if Bobby and George were right and the kids weren’t coming back it was only a matter of time. He wondered how much they’d ask for it.

  What he really needed to do was go to Ahtna and buy a commercial-size snow blower, so as to blast the snow berm in front of his hangar to infinity and beyond. Then he could taxi his own damn plane right out of his own damn hangar and fly to Anchorage to ask his own damn questions of his own damn woman his own damn self.

  His own damn woman. Heh. There might have been a time when all his hair would have fallen out at the very thought.

  He pointed the sled toward home and hit the throttle. He was going to stop at Ma
ndy and Chick’s on the way. They had a snow blower.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Jared? Do you bring good news to my door? Has the entire cargo been recovered by our own people?” The barbed sarcasm was unmistakable.

  “I’m afraid not, sir. I’m very much afraid that none of the product will be recoverable.”

  “The whole shipment was lost? You’re hesitating, Jared. It’s never good news when you hesitate.”

  “No, sir. One of our sources tells us one of the bags of product may have found its way into the hands of the authorities.”

  “One of the duffels or one of the individual bags?”

  “One of the individual bags, sir.”

  A sigh. “So you’re telling me that not only have we lost two weeks’ worth of product, screwed our distributors, and fucked this month’s P&L, but we’ve now also drawn the attention of the feds to our operation?”

  “Just the locals so far, sir.” A clearing of throat. “And by locals, I mean—”

  “Oh, fuck me sideways. Her again?”

  “I’m afraid the medical examiner called her in to consult, sir. But as of my last update, federal law enforcement has yet to be alerted.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll call in the marines soon enough. Any news on that phone?”

  “No, sir.”

  A silence that seemed to build in menace, followed by a long, measured inhale and exhale. “What’s the problem?”

  “There seems to be some issue with accessibility to its location.”

  “Jared.”

  “Sir.”

  “Tell them that when I told them to find that fucking phone, I meant for them to find it or don’t bother coming home. And that I don’t sound like I’m joking.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because I’m not.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What about that lawyer, the one in Anchorage, what’s his name…”

  “Eugene Hutchinson, sir?”

  “Yeah, him. What does he have to say?”