Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead
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think I'd come back from the dead, she thought, annoyed. "Brendan?" she
said again.
There was a feminine murmur in the background, and the receiver was
muffled when he replied to it. "Yeah, I'm here, Kate. Long time no talk.
Just a minute, honey," he added, presumably not to her.
"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry to call so early, and on a Saturday morning,
too." Brendan McCord was an assistant district attorney in Anchorage,
with whom Kate had worked during her five and a half years on the
investigator's staff. "You didn't get married, Brendan, did you?"
"Jesus, no!" Brendan's voice was truly horrified. "Don't say things like
that, Shugak. My heart's not as strong as it used to be. Besides, you
know I've been waiting for you."
Kate grinned into the receiver as she heard another murmur, less
languorous and more annoyed this time. "Sure you have." Enough with the
pleasantries. "Do you know Anne Gordaoff?"
"I know of her. She's running for state senator from District 41, isn't
she?"
"Yes. I'm working security for her." She told him about the threatening
letters.
"Kind of comes with the territory, doesn't it?"
"That's what I said, but then they waved a bunch of money at me."
"Were you cheap?"
"No, but I was easy," she said, and they both laughed.
She sobered. "Things just got worse, Brendan. Someone's been killed,
someone working on the campaign."
He was instantly on the alert. "Who?"
She told him.
"Kenny Hazen's a good man," he said thoughtfully. "The body on its way
to town?"
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"Yeah, and Jim Chopin flew in this morning." She left out the activities
of the early evening because she'd had enough men yelling at her for one
day.
"Ah, the Man in Blue. Yeah, and?"
"You know this Jeff Hosford?"
A moment passed. "Attorney?" Brandon said.
"In his former life, yes."
"Dischner, Seese, Christensen, and Kim."
Unconsciously Kate straightened in her chair. The dispatcher's voice
behind her faded away. "Dischner? As in Eddie P.?" As in whose offices
she had burgled in company with Mutt, Jack Morgan, and the FBI less than
two years before?
"Yup. He's a gopher. Go for this, go for that. Or he was."
"You sure? He's Gordaoff's fund-raiser. He was flashing a lot of money
around for a gopher."
"I wouldn't know about that. In town he runs-ran-in and out of the
courtroom with notes. Like that. A newbie they are breaking in. Or they
were. I haven't seen him around for a while. Explains it if he was
working for Gordaoff."
"He was a little old for a newbie."
"Took him seven tries to pass the bar."
"You're kidding."
"I never kid about the bar exam."
"My mistake," she said. "Can you check him out for me?"
There was the rustle of paper, the scratch of pencil. "Okay, Jeff
Hosford, I'll make a few calls. Can you call me back on Monday?"
"Yes."
"I should have something by then."
"Great. Thanks, Brandon."
He hesitated, and she said, "What?"
"Good to hear your voice, Kate, that's all." He hesitated
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again, before adding, "I miss the hell out of Jack."
"Me, too," Kate said, and slowly took a breath, in, out, managing the
pain. "Me, too," she repeated, and hung up before they were both in tears.
She went back into Kenny's office. "Guess who Jeff Hosford used to work
for?"
"Who?"
"Eddie P."
Jim sat up, dislodging Mutt's adoring head, which had been resting on
his knee. She gave him a reproachful look. "Edgar P. Dischner?"
"That's the guy."
"If he was working for Eddie P., he was bent," Jim said.
"Tell me something I don't know, Chopin," Kate said. "Brendan McCord's
going to ask around about him. I'm supposed to call him back on Monday."
She looked at Kenny. "I'll let you know what he says."
"Eddie P.," Jim said. He pulled off the blue ball cap with the trooper
seal on the front and ran his hand through his hair, a thick, dark mane
he kept trimmed to just within the regulation length and no shorter. "If
Eddie P. is mixed up in this, things just got a whole lot more
complicated. Eddie P. is asshole buddies with every mover and shaker
around. Well. The ones not already in jail."
"Damn it," Kenny said. "I hate this political shit. Give me a
straight-forward Spenard divorce every time."
Kate shrugged. "Absent physical evidence, and no witnesses ..." Her
voice trailed away.
"I really do not like this," Kenny said.
"Me, either," Jim said. He looked at Kate. "How's life on the campaign
trail?"
"Haven't had to throw myself in front of a bullet yet." An unfortunate
choice of words, given the present situation, but she didn't eat them.
"Keep it that way." Jim got to his feet, nodded to Kenny. "Keep in
touch. Let me know what McCord has to say."
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"Will do." The door closed, and Mutt stood with her nose pressed to the
crack. She wasn't whining, exactly, but she was definitely hankering.
"Mutt," Kate said, and Mutt abandoned the crack with reluctance and
returned, to plunk down with a deserted air.
"What do you do next?" Kenny said.
Kate shrugged. "I've got a job. They've already paid me. I'll do it.
I'll keep my eyes open. You and I both know that the killer was most
likely someone he knew. Which means someone connected with the campaign."
"With Dischner involved ..."
"I admit, it throws us a curve. Still."
"Still," he agreed. "I'll start talking to the list of names you
collected at the gym. In the meantime? Watch your back, Kate."
She grabbed Mutt's ruff and shook it. Mutt's great tongue lolled out as
she laughed up at Kate. "I've got Mutt to do that for me."
They spent the first two weeks of October traveling around the Park.
Kate had never been on a campaign trail, and within the first week she
knew enough to know that she'd never go on another, no matter how good
the pay was. Anne knocked on the door of every homestead on the road to
Glenallen. She visited every house in the village of Niniltna. She
visited the Step so Dan O'Brian could harangue her on the issue of
subsistence, although he pretty much phoned it in because he was one of
the few rangers in the state smart enough to manage his park with the
advice of Park elders, Native and non-Native alike. When Billy Mike told
him the black bear population in the Quilak foothills had dropped by a
quarter of what it had been twenty years ago, Dan closed the Park to
black bear hunts for five straight seasons, until the black bear
population had turned around, and even then he allowed hunting only by
subsistence permit the first two years. For a fed, Dan O'Brien
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looked suspiciously like one of their own to Park rats. Peter Herman,
who had a lot of financial supporters who lived in Anchorage and hunted
in the Park, had been trying to get him fired for the last eight years.
There wasn't a meeting or an event or a festival, no matter how small,
that Anne missed during those two weeks. The Park Sledders snow machine
club met in Valdez and she was there, keeping her mouth shut when they
voted unanimously to forward a request to the state legislature to open
the entire Park to snow machining. When Auntie Joy hosted a quilting bee
in Glenallen, Anne was there, needle in hand. That night a pair of
instructors showed up from the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Anchorage to
teach the cha-cha at the Nickel Creek Lodge, and Kate had the privilege
of watching Anne and Doug fumble their way through crossover breaks. She
was then treated to the sight of Doug hitting on the female instructor,
a buxom blonde named Cheryl who won Kate's heart when she transformed
Doug's attentions into a request for further instruction and proceeded
to work his ass off, literally, with thirty minutes' focus on Latin
motion. Doug hobbled off the floor looking like he'd thrown his back
out. Anne, working the room a table at a time, didn't appear to notice.
The Plum Bob Lake Mycological Society met for a seminar, and Anne took a
test on how to recognize the good morel mushroom and passed it. The Tok
Little Theater staged a presentation of Bus Stop and Anne was in the
front row. The annual dinner of the Park Pioneers was held in Eureka and
Anne was the featured speaker. She never drove by a bar, always stopping
to go in and introduce herself.
Each day began at breakfast with whatever passed for the local chamber
of commerce in whatever village or town they had gone to bed in the
night before. This was usually followed by an appearance at the local
school, talking to the high school civics class. Lunch, invariably
hamburgers with the fat congealing on them or very bad pizza, was
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eaten on the run, unless it was eaten in the school's cafeteria.
The afternoons were dedicated either to travel to the next town,
village, homestead, or wide spot in the road, or to more knocking on
doors. Dinners were command performances by the candidate before
organizations with names like the FAS Support Group, the Alaska Miners
Association, Mutts and Mushers, and the Nabesna Hospital Guild. Entrees
featured chicken in every imaginable form and halibut way past its
prime, with vegetables fresh out of the can. Kate had never eaten so
much bad food for so long in her life.
Darlene was at the candidate's elbow at every stop, during every
appearance, cueing her at every event. Kate saw Darlene whisper the name
of a voter five seconds before that voter got to Anne, and watched Anne
call the voter by name with an outstretched hand and a beaming smile
that contrived to give the impression she reserved that smile only for
them. When somebody asked Anne a question she couldn't answer, Darlene
was ready with the relevant information or with a smile of her own, and
a "We'll get back to you on that, Mr. Corley." When during one of the
high school visits Tom made a move on a girl who was obviously underage,
Darlene broke it up and led Tom, scowling, back to stand in his mother's
shadow.
Posters began to appear, on the windows and walls of bars and
restaurants, on posts stuck into the ground in front of people's homes,
plastered on telephone poles. There were buttons, too, metal rounds with
Anne's picture on a blue field and red letters that said, vote Gordaoff!
Kate began to see bumper stickers-put Gordaoff in her place-the state
senate!-on the occasional truck and not a few four-wheelers. She picked
up a copy of the Ahtna Tribune at the end of their first week on the
road and found a full page ad on page three, Anne Gordaoff and her whole
family grinning at the camera with a caption that read,
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"Alaskans for Alaska! Vote Gordaoff for State Senate!" The next week the
same page, a different picture, this one of Anne alone, much younger and
dressed in nurse's whites. "Anne Gordaoff has Made a Career out of
Caring for Alaskans-Vote Gordaoff for State Senate!"
Kate slept in a lot of different beds, and some were comfortable and
some were not. She ate a lot of her meals standing up or out of a bag.
She became sick of the sight of the back of Anne Gordaoff's head. She
became very tired of Darlene getting her up at five every morning to
prep her on the day's schedule. Doug Gordaoff hit on her. Tom Gordaoff
hit on her. Erin Gordaoff drifted around like a ghost, white, wan,
tear-stained, bereft. Anne refused to let the young woman go home and
grieve, insisting Erin stay with the campaign. Kate couldn't decide if
this was the best solution Anne could devise to comfort her daughter and
not stop campaigning, or if it was because Erin's bereavement gave the
campaign more sympathy, or if Erin's presence went to show that while
Jeff Hosford was gone, he was not forgotten, and by extension, Anne's
loyalty to her employees, past, present, and future.
Kate still couldn't decide if she liked Anne Gordaoff or not. She had
thought so, that evening at Bobby's when Anne had spoken in such
forceful manner against the cult of the Native victim, something Kate
had despised all her life. Since then, she had seen too much of Anne the
pragmatic politician to leave her admiration undiluted. It was easier to
draw her paycheck, watch the crowds for potential assassins, and not
think about it. As a result Kate played a lot of late-night, cutthroat
pinochle with Tracy Huffman and George Perry, whom Anne had hired to be
the campaign's chief pilot. Anne Gordaoff was wise in the ways of local
hire, yet another hot-button issue in a state with too many Outside
employers.
Anne herself was tireless. She spoke with patience to students, she
addressed their parents as equals, and she
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listened with respect to elders. There were a lot of Republicans in the
district and she marched up to their doors, too, and Kate was surprised
when none were actually slammed in her face. It seemed that Anne
Gordaoff was determined to speak to every single person who lived in
District 41. She wanted the job, and she was willing to work hard to get
it. Kate had to respect her for it, but thought that eating
freezer-burnt halibut every other night might be too high a price to pay.
Once in a while Kate saw people she knew. Demetri nodded at her from a
seated crowd in the Niniltna High School gym. Auntie Balasha brought her
hot fry bread at a potlatch in Gakona. At a home show in Glenallen a
big, beefy man in Carhartt's that looked as if he'd just finished
fileting a dozen silvers picked her up off her feet and squeezed the
breath out of her.
"Hey, Burt," Kate said. "Mind putting me down now?"
He laughed, a big, booming laugh, and she thumped down once more on
terra firma. "The last time I saw you, you were fresh outa Anchorage
with a scar across your neck made you look like you'd gone one on one
with a grizzly." He poked a blunt forefinger at the open collar of the
blue plaid shirt she wore over a white T-shirt, and she endured it
<
br /> because Burt Kennedy had known her as long as anyone had and had been
around longer than most. "Looks better now."
"Yeah."
"So how the hell are you?"