Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  Until three years ago, Finn Grant had been the sole owner and proprietor of his business, until then known as Bristol Bay Air. Bristol Bay Air had a rotating list of assets, most of these airplanes, everything from a Piper Super Cub on wheel-skis to a Single Otter turbo on floats. There was a hangar at Newenham airport, until two years ago mortgaged to the hilt, at that time paid off in one lump sum, and today free and clear. There was a new deed to it with no listed lien holder, dated eighteen months before.

  The only paper she could find on the house she was standing in was a tax assessment from the Bristol Bay borough. Her lips pursed in a silent whistle. A million five in a town the size of Newenham was a pretty hefty chunk of the tax base. Grant must have slept with the borough assessor’s wife, too.

  She could find no mortgage paperwork, no liens, no lines of credit. Could Finn Grant really have paid cash to build this Tara-wannabe three hundred plus miles off the road system? It wasn’t like he was spending a lot of time in his own bed, if everything she’d heard so far was true. Still, if a career in criminal investigation had taught Kate anything, it was that trophies came in all shapes and sizes.

  She closed the first drawer and opened the second. This one was dedicated to Eagle Air, a corporation that had evidently sprung into being full grown from the brow of Grant two years before. Hugh Reid was a partner in and also vice president of Eagle Air LLC. There were other partners and investors, about a dozen of them, with generic names like Northwest Partners, Pacific Capital, and Arctic Investments, most of whose business addresses were post office boxes in Lucerne, or Las Vegas.

  There was a deed of sale for Chinook Air Force Base, seller, the federal government, buyer, EAI, for a cool five million dollars, cash.

  Kate raised her eyes from the file and stared at the wall. Five million seemed pretty low for an air base as nicely appointed as the one she’d seen yesterday. She doubted five million would buy fifty feet of paved runway anywhere in Bush Alaska.

  There was a fat file of invoices and receipts for the remodel and furnishings of the FBO, all of them marked PAID IN FULL, including a dozen queen-sized Tempur-Pedic mattresses from the Cloud Collection at $3,600 a pop, shipped air freight from Sadler’s in Anchorage.

  Jesus Christ, she almost said out loud, and raised her head to listen, just in case she had. The television in the room across the hall was still broadcasting a muted roar from the crowd. There was no sound from the floor above. She put the folder back in the drawer, closed it, and found the income tax returns.

  Finn Grant kept good records, she’d say that for him: the drawer held tax returns going back twenty years. She pulled one out at random and looked at the signature. Prepared by Clementina T. Grant, and signed by her for him, too.

  So Tina kept the books.

  Kate had another thought and opened up last year’s return. This one had been prepared by an accounting firm in Anchorage.

  She checked. So had the two years before.

  So Tina had retired from family bookkeeping. Kate wondered if her retirement had been voluntary.

  One thing was certain, Grant’s income had jumped considerably over the past two, no, three years. She compared returns. The year before he bought Chinook Air Force Base was when the rise in income had begun. He’d filed extensions for eleven out of the past twenty years, but not in the last three.

  The third drawer was the catchall for everything else, receipts, statements, deeds, bills of sale, organized by businesses. A couple of fishing charters, a guiding business, an air taxi. She flipped through the folders. There was nothing on the day-to-day expenses of Eagle Air. Those must be kept on the computer or out at the base itself.

  Tucked into the deed file she found a transfer of title for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge and the 160 surrounding acres from Bristol Bay Air, Inc., to Gabriel McGuire Enterprises Ltd., for the sum of “one dollar and other valuable considerations.”

  That was interesting.

  Outouchiwanet Lodge must have been a homestead in its first incarnation, 160 acres being the standard parcel granted by the federal government under the Homestead Act. No matter how rustic or remote, one dollar seemed pretty cheap. The other considerations would have had to be pretty valuable, indeed.

  She closed the file, replaced it in the drawer, and slid the drawer home.

  The light from the pencil flash caught the corner of a file folder on top of the filing cabinet. She opened it, and found herself reading the letter Tina’s daughter Irene’s commanding officer had written to Finn and Tina following her death.

  Irene was a good soldier and a damn fine pilot who backed up a ton of natural ability with a fierce dedication to training. She was well liked by her crew and trusted absolutely by every man and woman who rode with her, myself included.

  He was a good writer, he stuck to the facts and he didn’t sentimentalize. The letter didn’t sound rote, and a real sense of loss came up from the page.

  There was another letter tucked in behind the first. This one wasn’t on letterhead stationery and the typing had not been proofed, but it was even more poignant than the first.

  November 23

  Dear Mrs. Grant,

  I’m not real good at this kind of thing, ma’am, but I wanted to rite to let you know that I flew with your daughter a lot of times during my tour in Afghanistan. She was a reel good pilot we all felt safe with her. Some pilots you don’t even want to get anywhere near there aircraft but she dint take no chances with us or her aircraft. Its bad enough she died its how she died thats got us all down. Its just wrong the enemy is using our own weapons against us. I know I wont ever be able to use an M4 again without thinking of her. I’m so sorry for your loss, ma’am. And for ours.

  Sincerely yours,

  SPC GS Waichowski

  Sobered, Kate closed the folder and set it back on top of the filing cabinet, understanding a little better the debilitating and ill-concealed despair that colored Tina Grant’s general attitude. She herself couldn’t imagine reading a letter like that about Johnny and not being at the very least suicidal after the fact.

  Sound from the television room stopped, and she heard movement. She shut off the penlight. A door opened and unsteady footsteps sounded in the hall. Outside the window she heard Mutt get to her feet and tried to send her a telepathic message to make no sound.

  The footsteps went past the office door and up the stairs. Kate heard a door closing, and turned the penlight back on to scan the room for any other clues. The arc of light caught something against the wall behind the door that made her pause. She moved in for a closer look.

  It was a gun safe of a size to hold enough arms for a squad of marines. She opened the door, which was of course unlocked, and beheld a virtual armory of collector’s items. Kate was no expert, but she was pretty sure the thin light of her flash passed over a pair of Purdey shotguns, what looked a little like a blunderbuss, and … She looked closer. An AK-47? It sure looked like it belonged on the cover of a book by Robert Ludlum.

  The weapon next to it looked like something Sigourney Weaver would use to kill the aliens who were trying to impregnate her adopted daughter. It didn’t look like anything you could shoot a moose with. Not if you wanted to eat any of the moose afterwards.

  Kate was not a member of the gun culture. For her, weapons were a tool, not a toy, and the mere existence of a weapon like the alien-killer in the gun safe was not by itself reason enough for her to want to have one of her own, or to shoot it, or even to hold it. She tolerated the gun culture in which she had been raised, but she’d never really understood it. Abel Int-Hout had been a collector, with a wall full of over-under rifles chased in silver and so individually heavy that Kate as a child hadn’t even been able to pick them up, let alone raise one to her shoulder. Conversely, Old Sam had owned one bolt-action rifle, period. Said any job couldn’t be done with a Model 70 Winchester didn’t need doing, and the man who couldn’t feed his family on the strength of it was no kind of a man.

 
She owned two firearms herself, a .30-06 rifle and a 12-gauge pump action shotgun. Both were used for hunting food for the freezer: the rifle for mammals, the shotgun for birds. She was a good shot, not a great one, mostly because she took her time and didn’t get excited. Her father, Abel, and Old Sam had all three emphasized the need for placing the first bullet in the right place. Spoil the meat with a bad shot and you had to keep hunting. Put the moose down the first time and everybody got to go home. And eat.

  Eating was her prime motivation for hunting, and if she thought about it, probably a little pride in continuing a family tradition that went back generations. She liked knowing that the meat on her plate had been romping around the Park twenty-four hours before, stripping the leaves from a diamond willow and eyeing up a likely cow browsing in the next copse over. Meat that came shrink-wrapped at Costco had spent its life in a warehouse with its head locked over a feed trough, never to see the sun.

  She understood admiration for fine workmanship. She understood the need for accurate, efficient weaponry with which to win a war. She did not understand the need to have bigger guns and more of them than the next guy. It felt superficial, blustering, vain. The firearms in the gun safe weren’t tools. They weren’t even toys. They were trophies, and the man with the most of them when he died won.

  Which seemed like a pretty good description of Finn Grant.

  She closed the safe, and the pencil flash caught a framed photograph on the wall. She recognized Fred Grant, next to a man probably his brother, the late, unlamented Finn. Hugh Reid was there, his safari suit this time accented with a Winchester ball cap, and so was Gabe McGuire. They were all holding alien-killers like the ones in the safe. McGuire was the only one who didn’t have a huge grin all over his face, she’d give him that much.

  Upstairs, a toilet flushed and water ran. There was a ghost of a whine from outside the window. Mutt was right, time to go.

  She dropped out the window, next to a Mutt who had About time written all over her. Kate pulled the window closed and they sidled around the house and the garage and up the stairs to the apartment. Kate was in the lead and stepped through the door first.

  It was possible that getting away clean from tossing Grant’s office had led her to feel a tad overconfident. It was also possible that she was focused far more intently on getting home than she was on any dangers inherent in tracking down a putative murderer who had got away with it. It was further possible that she’d never taken the job seriously to begin with, had indeed seen it less as a job and more as a convenient means of absence from the Park at what she considered to be a propitious time.

  Whatever. For one of the few times in her life, Kate Shugak was taken completely and utterly by surprise. Mutt might have been a little more on the ball, but Mutt was a step and a half behind her. The door was jerked out of Kate’s hand and kicked shut in Mutt’s face. Simultaneously, someone threw a bag over Kate’s head and pulled it all the way down to her hips. She kicked backwards but didn’t connect, and didn’t get another chance, because she was lifted from her feet, tossed through the air, crashed into something hard that banged into the wall when she hit it, and landed hard. Something slammed shut over her head.

  She kicked out and connected painfully with a solid surface. She fought with the bag. It was made of some heavy material, duck or canvas, and wet-proofed, a slick surface her fingernails could only scrabble against.

  The top of her prison was opened and Mutt was thrown in on top of her. She knew it was Mutt from the language, which was deafening, and from the claw marks she could feel on her belly and shoulders even through the bag.

  The top of the box slammed shut again, squishing Mutt on top of Kate. Kate and Mutt both snarled, to no avail.

  They were locked in.

  Ten

  JANUARY 18

  The Park

  Meanwhile, back in Niniltna, Jim had his own problems.

  It was January. They were gaining daylight at the rate of half an hour a week, and to make matters worse, they’d had a long stretch of clear weather.

  To the inexperienced eye, this would not seem to create insurmountable problems for local law enforcement, but clear weather plus days that were five minutes longer than the ones before them seduced Park rats into thinking that spring had arrived, never mind what the calendar said or the thermometer read. There was a honking big high hanging out over the Mother of Storms that showed every sign of staying there until July. Jim haunted the NWS online forecast and swore to himself every morning when it predicted more of the same. What he wouldn’t give for a hurricane-force Arctic Express that would drive everyone indoors for a week, and keep them busy digging themselves out for another week.

  Because for spring, think breakup, and for breakup, think trouble with a capital T and that rhymed with C and that stood for an outburst of criminal activity in its most tiresome form. There hadn’t been a murder in a while (he refused to draw a connection between that happy nonoccurence and Kate’s absence from the Park) but there had been everything else on the books, up to and including assault of every kind and degree, robbery, burglary, and far too many nuisance calls via cell phone. Mary Kompkoff, for chrissake, had called in from her set net site on Alaganik Bay to report she’d caught Martin Shugak and an unidentified coconspirator (probably Howie Katelnikof) coming out of her gear shed with their arms full of her chain saw and various other power tools. Time was she would have handled the situation her own damn self, with the barrel of double-aught or a seal club, which before the advent of cell phones she had been known to do, with an enthusiasm that resulted in more than one medevac.

  Now, in direct contravention of what Jim had always considered to be the fine libertarian spirit of the Park, she was dialing 911. And she wasn’t alone. At closing time the night before, two drunk Suulutaq miners had absconded from the Roadhouse on Andy Gordaoff’s ATV. Somehow they’d gotten off the road, which by this time of year was well packed down with high berms on both sides and virtually impossible to lose even in a whiteout. They’d wound up on Squaw Candy Creek, crashed through the ice, staggered out soaking wet into a wind chill that Jim after the fact conservatively estimated at thirty below, and somehow managed to crawl up the driveway to Bobby Clark’s A-frame. Which they then entered without invitation. Bobby—naturally—called 911 and by the time Jim got there, Dinah was up making coffee for everyone and Katya was demanding the miners play Barbies with her.

  Yesterday afternoon Cindy Bingley called in some excitement to report an assault on the front steps of her grocery store, and Jim arrived at the scene to find Alicia Malchoff, age fifty, whaling on her son, Lee, age twenty. It turned out Lee had impregnated one Julie Swenson, age seventeen, currently a senior at Niniltna High. When Jim understood the full story, his first impulse was to leave Lee to the tender mercies of his mother, and later, what everyone involved knew would be the even less tender mercies of Swede Swenson, Julie’s father. Instead, he charged Alicia with assault, interviewed a tearful Julie, charged Lee with sexual assault of a minor since Julia had been sixteen at the time, and sent everyone home (Alicia), to work (Lee, at the Suulutaq) or back to school (Julie).

  Less amusing was a 911 call from Bernie. Susie Kompkoff had shown up at the Roadhouse after one of her ex-boyfriends used a crowbar to teach her a lesson. A lesson in what, Susie didn’t know or wouldn’t say. Alcohol was involved, as it almost invariably was in these cases, and Jim had gone hotfoot to the ex-boyfriend’s cabin, taken him into custody, and shipped him direct to Ahtna for arraignment before Judge Singh. Susie was given a remedial patch-up at the Grosdidier brothers’ clinic and was now headed to Anchorage for appointments, in order, with the orthopedic surgeon, the dentist, the orthodontist, and the optometrist if she didn’t want to lose all sight in her left eye.

  There had been three other Assaults-DVR, three wrecks on the Ahtna road, the villages of Kushtaka and Kuskulana were getting an early start on their annual pissing contest, and one of Ranger Dan’s people had conf
ided in Dan that she was wanted for assault and attempted murder in Nuckolls County, Nebraska. Dan called Jim and Jim got online and sure enough, Virginia Ellen Perkerson, age thirty-six, had warrants for attempted murder in the first degree, two counts of assault in the second degree, assault in the third degree, and a petition to revoke probation. Dan brought Perkerson down from the Step and as a matter of curiosity Jim asked her why she had confessed to charges that were five years old and three thousand miles away.

  “I’m tired of Alaskan winters,” she said.

  So Jim sent her off to Ahtna with Susie’s ex. It didn’t help that Maggie was spending all her time commuting between Niniltna and Ahtna, which left Jim to answer the phone.

  Harvey Meganack had been driving home from a Costco run to Ahtna and passed some guy in a Suburban who was pulled over by the side of the road. The guy hopped back in his car, forced Harvey off the road, and yelled at him while Harvey, locked inside his Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer, dialed—naturally—911. The guy, who it turned out was pulled over while making a call on his cell when Harvey passed him, was on his way to Niniltna, looking for a job at the Suulutaq. He said Harvey had nearly sideswiped his vehicle and all he wanted to do was call Harvey to account for his reckless driving. Turned out the guy had a warrant out on him for violating a DVRO in Anchorage. He was now a guest of the trooper post, in company with a Suulutaq miner who’d been caught in the act of liberating Herbie Topkok’s Arctic Cat snow machine, and Herbie Topkok, who had remonstrated with said burglar with a little too much enthusiasm, and who Jim hoped would cool down after a night spent in a cell.

  He hadn’t even made it home last night, not that the bed there was any less cold or lonely than the one in the crash pad he maintained in town at Auntie Vi’s B&B. Sergei O’Leary had gone off his medication and started shooting at the attacking pink grizzly bears again. Jim had been called to the scene—naturally—where after a lively thirty minutes dodging bullets until the clip ran out on Sergei’s Kalashnikov, Jim had restrained Sergei and remanded him to the custody of the Grosdidier brothers. Jim had the distinct recollection that he had left Sergei cuffed to one of the two beds they maintained in the Niniltna Health Clinic, complete with IV drip replenishing his meds. Sergei had other ideas, and twenty minutes after Jim had finally been able to put his head down for a few hours’ well-earned rest, his phone went off. Matt Grosdidier, calling to say Sergei had yanked out his IV, somehow managed to haul himself and his hospital bed through the door of his room, down the hall to the connecting door to the brothers’ house, and to the gun rack in their living room. There, he had liberated Mark’s .357, which was loaded—naturally—and proceeded to shoot out all the windows.