Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead
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on the schedule.
Darlene saw her first, and looked furious. "Where the hell have you
been?" she said beneath her breath when Kate reached her side.
"I got tied up," Kate said without a smile.
"Yeah, well, you're supposed to be watching out for Anne, and you can't
do that if you're not here!"
"You're right. Want to fire me? Oh wait, that's right, you can't, you
don't pay me. Put a lid on it, Darlene," she added, when Darlene's face
darkened and she opened her mouth to retort. "Where do you go after this?"
"Back to the hotel," Darlene said, putting on a false smile when Anne
turned to give them a curious look.
"Fine, I'll see you back there."
"You're leaving again? What about Anne, damn it?"
"Don't let her wade too far into the crowd."
"Where are you going?"
"I'll be back to the hotel later."
With difficulty, Darlene bit back whatever she had been going to say,
but Kate could feel the other woman's eyes boring into her back all the
way to the door.
"Why don't the two of you just shoot it out at thirty paces and be done
with it?" Kenny said. "What's going on there, anyway?"
Kate, feeling generous since she'd been the last to score, said, "Oh, I
don't know. Personality conflict, I guess."
The four of them drove back out to Paula's trailer, carrying with them
Paula's laptop and notes retrieved from the cop shop on the way. As Kate
had expected, the manila
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envelope containing the copies of Paula's disk and notes were gone.
Seeing the picnic table triggered her memory, and she told them about
Gordy Boothe. "So she was tucked in by midnight," Kenny said. "And she
didn't own a car. And the letter to Anne was discovered at two-thirty.
Well, hell, I don't know. I suppose she could have walked in."
"It's five miles, Kenny, and she didn't look like an athlete to me."
"Or someone could be trying to throw suspicion her way. Maybe it was
supposed to look like suicide."
"She killed herself because she felt guilty she was trying to blackmail
Anne Gordaoff? Come on, Kenny."
"Yeah, yeah." Disgruntled, Kenny squeezed behind the table, apparently
not noticing that he was sitting on the stain left by Paula's blood.
"Think blackmail material was what they were looking for?" Kate said,
more to be saying something than because she needed an answer.
"She was looking up stuff on Peter Heiman. Could be she found out
something he doesn't want us to know, and told someone who told him."
"She was also looking up stuff on Anne," Kate said, picking books up,
straightening bent pages, and slipping them back onto shelves. Jim
leaned up against the sink, staring at nothing with a frown on his face.
"Hey," Kate said. "Books. On shelves."
He looked at her. "What? Oh. Yeah, what the hell, okay."
"She had them arranged alphabetically by author, starting there." She
pointed at the now righted shelf.
Jim muttered something under his breath, but he bent to the task. Like
Kate, he rifled through each book before he put it back on the shelf,
looking for anything the hurricane might have missed. He found nothing.
Kate got the nonfiction section reshelved and sat down with Paula's hand
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written notes. Kenny had plugged in Paula's computer and was calling up
files and scrolling through them, lips pursed in concentration.
After fifteen minutes various aches and pains began to make themselves
felt, and Kate put the kettle on for tea. Paula had Lipton and honey in
the cupboard. She made three cups. "Thanks," Kenny said, reading through
a file. "Did you know Peter Heiman lost his brother in Vietnam?"
"You didn't? It's part of the family legend. The Heimans have been
around a while."
"I was in Anchorage then, and I never bothered with the news. Never do
now, for that matter. Reporters are all a bunch of kids who've majored
in anorexia and minored in big hair." He drank some tea. "Ever notice
how they're always talking to each other instead of you? Start all their
sound bites with "Well, Maria?"
"Well, no," Kate said. "I don't have television out on the homestead."
"Smart woman." He went back to the computer.
The bathroom had been tidied. The bedroom was still half in chaos. Jim
had put the mattress and the springs back on the frame and was sitting
down, immersed in Most Secret. She set the mug at his feet. "Finding any
clues as to who killed Paula?" she said. He grunted something without
looking up.
The tea was hot and sweet, and woke her up enough to go back to Paula's
notes.
The three-subject spiral notebooks took her right back to college: shiny
red cover, wide-ruled pages, rounded corners, stingy bits of paper
caught in the wire spine from pages being torn out. Paula was not a very
organized note- taker, sprawling across margins, crowding interpolations
between graphs, adding a comment that related to a subject where there
was no more room and so had to be jammed into the bottom of the page or
written into the margin of the following page, connecting the two by a
number or ;,
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letter or an asterisk or a pound sign. The notebook was liberally
adorned with such signs, and Kate did a lot of paging back and forth
trying to reconstruct Paula's train of thought. It was like playing
connect the dots without the dots.
"Did you know that Peter Heiman is a shareholder in Last Frontier Bank?"
"What?" she said, not paying much attention.
Kenny peered at her over the lid of the laptop. "Peter Heiman's
grandfather was a silent partner in Last Frontier Bank."
It took a minute for her to surface. "Last Frontier? Yeah, I think I
knew that. You didn't know Abel Int-Hout, did you?"
In the bedroom Jim stirred.
"I've heard the name. Big spread on the road into the Park? Just down
the road from your homestead? He's dead, isn't he?"
Kate didn't blink. "Yes. His son Ethan lives there now."
"Ethan's back in the Park?" Jim said. She looked up and saw him standing
in the doorway, finger marking his place in the book.
"Yes, he moved back last year." She looked back at Kenny. "Abel was sort
of my guardian when I was growing up. Pete Heiman was one of his running
buddies. I remember something-" Her brow creased. "Something about his
grand-daddy being a silent partner with, who was it-"
"Margaret and the kids with him?" Jim said.
"They came with him," Kate said. Wasn't any of Jim's business if they
weren't still there.
"No wonder his campaigns always run in the black," Kenny said.
Kate stood to walk around the table and read over his shoulder in
silence. "Interesting. Paula was a good researcher."
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"I'm glad she wasn't looking into my past," Kenny agreed.
"Why, what have you got?" Jim said.
"Paula must have taken notes by hand and then transferred them to the
computer, because some of that stuff is in the notebook, too." Kate
thumbed through it until she found the right page. She read out loud,
"Last Frontier Bank. James Seese, Matthew Turner, Peter Heiman." Paula
had drawn a balloon around them, and a connecting balloon around Last
Frontier Bank. Below the balloons there was an arrow pointing down, and
in the right-hand corner an arrow pointing into the corner. "Means turn
the page," Kate said, and did so. On the reverse, Paula had written,
"Peter and Anne. Hosford?"
"Peter being Peter Heiman?" Jim said.
"Yes."
"Anne meaning Anne Gordaoff?"
"I don't know," Kate said. "Let me think a minute."
"Meaning," Jim said, "Hosford was the link between the Heiman and
Gordaoff campaigns. Like maybe Hosford was spying on Anne for Pete."
"I don't know," Kate said. "Just slow down here." She jerked her chin at
the computer. "What else has Paula got on Peter Heiman and Last Frontier?"
"Reads like a history lesson." Kenny scrolled back up. "It's a Seese
bank today, but a hundred years ago it was founded by two partners,
James Seese and Matthew Turner, Paula says, with Pete Heiman's
grandfather as a silent partner. Matthew Turner was Elizabeth Turner's
brother."
"Elizabeth Turner-" Kate said.
Kenny nodded. "Elizabeth Turner was married to Peter Heiman. The first
Peter Heiman. The first Peter Heiman was a silent partner in Last
Frontier. The second Peter Heiman inherited his father's interest. So
did the third Peter Heiman, who remains a minority stockholder in the
bank today." He sat back. "That's it."
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"That's enough," Kate said, with the hint of a smile at the corners of
her mouth.
"What?" Jim said.
She looked at him with no hint of awkwardness or challenge for the first
time that day. "Paula doesn't mean Anne Gordaoff. She means Anne Seese."
"Who the hell's Anne Seese?"
Jim caught on first. "Dischner, Seese, Christensen, and Kim. That Seese?"
"That Seese."
"And you think Paula's referring to Eddie P.'s law partner?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because Peter Heiman and Anne Seese have had a long-term affair going
on, oh, at least since Pete's last divorce, and I'd bet before."
"Holy shit," Kenny said, faint but pursuing. "Anne Seese is Pete
Heiman's main squeeze, Eddie P.'s law partner, and one of the Last
Frontier Seeses?"
"One and the same."
"So Jeff Hosford's real job, when he wasn't hustling bucks for Anne
Gordaoff, was gophering for Peter Heiman's mistress?"
"Yes."
"And Paula Pawlowski found out," Jim said.
"Yes."
"Think he'd kill to keep it a secret that he's porking Anne Gordaoff's
daughter on Peter Heiman's dime?"
"He might, if he were still alive," Kate said.
"So," Kenny said, "we've got the perfect motive to kill Paula Pawlowski,
only the guy with the perfect motive was killed before she was. Great."
Kate had a flashback to being submersed in a dark, warm sea. Too warm,
she was sweating, and the sea seemed to be clinging to her eyes, her
nose, her mouth; she couldn't
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breathe. She clawed at it. It resisted, then gave, and she could breathe
again, and she sank back down into the current and let it take her where
it would.
"Kate?"
She blinked, and realized that that was the second time Jim had said her
name.
"Are you all right?"
She shook herself. "Yeah. I just had a-yeah, I'm fine."
Kenny reached for his jacket. "Everybody with Gordaoff still at the
Ahtna Lodge?"
"Until tomorrow morning. We're supposed to drive to Klutina."
"Both murders are about this campaign, Kate," Kenny said.
"I know."
He looked from her to Jim and back again. "Watch your back."
"You said that already."
"Somebody tried to kill you today."
"I hadn't forgotten."
Kenny was far from satisfied, but there wasn't much else he could do. "I
want to talk to every member of the campaign before they go to Klutina
in the morning."
"Darlene'll bitch about throwing off the schedule."
"I don't care if I ruin their whole day. I want statements from all of
them about what they were doing yesterday afternoon, and I want to re
interview them concerning the night of Hosford's murder."
"I'll tell her."
"Get them down to the station at eight A.M."
"All right."
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What did Anne Gordaoff say when you told her that her chief
fund-raiser's day job was working for the enemy?"
"She said Ronald Reagan used to be a Democrat."
Jim was surprised into a laugh. "She's pretty tolerant, for a politician."
"She's not a politician, yet. What's the ME say about Pawlowski's time
of death?" Kenny asked.
"Somewhere between midnight and four A.M., but that from the temp we
gave them from the trailer it could have been earlier."
"Midnight would have been just after Boothe dropped her off, so he was
either waiting for her or right behind her."
"Or she."
"Or she."
"I told him she hadn't turned on the heat yet for the winter. Pretty
chilly in that trailer."
"She wasn't laying there that long."
"What did you get from the statements?"
"Jack all," Kenny said, not sounding happy about it. "The whole bunch of
them were at the basketball game, but there were about five hundred
people there, and no one can voice for any one of them being there the
whole time."
"Even Anne?"
"Everybody remembers seeing her all over the place. Nobody can put a
time to when they did, though, other
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than sometime between the jump ball and the buzzer sounding to end the
last period. People are always coming and going at a game, you know how
it is, going to the John, buying popcorn, sneaking out for a drink,
fathering a child. It's just damn near impossible to know where everyone
is at any given time, especially after the fact. Hell, Kate's one of the
best eyeballers around, and even she couldn't place any one of them at
any one place at any one time the night Hosford died."
"Turn up anything new when you asked them about that night again?"
"Not a goddamn thing. Unless you count the couple we turned up who'd