For the first time, the possibility that she really was investigating a murder in the first degree took solid root.
She went back to the file drawers. Many of them were taken up by paperwork that made up the lifeblood of the Federal Aviation Administration: aircraft registration forms, pilot check rides, aircraft history and maintenance status along with engine annuals. Kate wasn’t able to wade into all of it—she would have needed a month longer than she had—but it appeared to her untrained eye that Finn Grant had bought a third single Otter and three Cessna Caravans in the last year alone. There was also the necessary ream of paperwork backing up the most recent Otter’s conversion to a turbine engine, dated the previous August.
That did give her pause, because she remembered George Perry in Niniltna telling her a story only last year about flying most of the way around the world in pursuit of just one single Otter so he could keep up with Niniltna business as usual and at the same time meet the demands of custom from the Suulutaq Mine. If he didn’t, mine management would find someone else to ferry their employees to and from work. George had the monopoly and wanted to keep it. He’d found his Otter somewhere in Africa—had it been Ivory Coast?—and brought it home in triumph by way of Vancouver, BC, where he’d had the piston engine pulled and a turbine engine installed at a cost of a cool $1.5 million.
The point being, George said, was that you couldn’t find single Otters nowadays, it was too good an aircraft and they were all working, not sitting around with FOR SALE signs in the window.
A single Otter, turbo conversion, and three brand-new Cessna Caravans. Kate shook her head and wondered just how much Finn Grant had overcharged Gabriel McGuire for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge. Although she supposed there were limits to the wallet of even the world’s biggest box office draw.
Again with the snide, she thought, exasperated. Why did the man rub her so much the wrong way? She’d met him one time, she hadn’t exchanged more than a couple dozen words with him. Enough.
She closed the drawer with unnecessary force, catching it at the last minute before it banged shut and casting a guilty look over her shoulder. She moved down to the last of the cabinets, all of which were made from the same polished teak as Tasha’s desk in the outer office and the desk in this office as well, and slid the first drawer out.
She surfaced half an hour later, her brow creased.
As expected, the tourist business at Eagle Air slowed during the winter months, when the creeks froze up and the bears went to sleep. There were some December and January caribou hunts up around Mulchatna and some four-day board retreats that didn’t involve hunting or fishing. There were a lot of those in the summer as well, but from the copies of the king salmon punch cards she found, most retreats were conducted rod in hand.
Most independent air taxies in Alaska took up the slack in tourism in winter by flying locals between villages and towns and towns and Anchorage. From the evidence in these drawers, Eagle Air, Inc., had instead moved exclusively into air freight.
The cargo manifests went back eighteen months, or the hard copies did, the ones the loadmaster, often Grant, and the pilot, a rotating group of half a dozen names, had signed. The contents were listed variously as electric apparatus, testing instruments, and electronics. The destination for all of them was the airport code ADK. ADK, ADK.
As in Adak, Alaska?
Kate went back to the map. Adak was an Aleutian island about twelve hundred miles south-southwest of Anchorage, which would put it, what, about nine hundred miles from Newenham, give or take. Adak had been a naval air station before BRAC shut it down, just like BRAC shut down Chinook.
Kate frowned. Adak had been a topic of conversation at Native gatherings for some years. The regional Native corporation in the area had negotiated a deal for the existing buildings and facilities, which included a very nice airport, indeed, and an extensive harbor with docks. The docks were capable of supporting a healthy commercial fishing industry and cargo in sufficient quantity to sustain a population of six thousand people, including USAF personnel and their dependents. The airport was large enough and modern enough to support a naval air squadron, and the corporation had intended to develop Adak for tourism. It was a wild, beautiful place, an obvious choice for adventure and ecotourism, until the Middle East decided to embrace regime change as a regional activity and the price per barrel of oil went up over a hundred dollars.
It had cost Kate six hundred dollars to fly home from Dutch Harbor, one way, and that was five years before. Adak was twice as far down the Chain. She didn’t want to think what a round-trip ticket Anchorage–Adak–Anchorage would cost, and no tourist would, either, especially after they had already shelled out for the round-trip ticket to Anchorage for themselves, their spouse, and their two and a half children.
The docks and boat harbor were large enough to tempt an Outside investor to build a fish plant on Adak to process crab and Pacific cod, but it was currently in the throes of a bankruptcy battle between the Native corporation and a large number of angry creditors. At the mercy of weather and vandalism, the unoccupied portion of the base, also known as most of it, was rumored to be in a state of disintegration.
What the hell was Finn Grant doing shipping cargo to Adak? At last count, the population was around three hundred, and the Native corporation was scrambling to keep its investment from heading straight into the fiscal toilet.
She closed the drawer and looked at the clock on the wall. She’d been here almost an hour. Outside the window, the bright moon stretched long shadows on the tarmac. Through the crack in the window she could hear the distant sounds of four-wheelers and snow machines, and now and then a faint scream of laughter, or just a scream. Surprising that so far she had heard no gunshots. Surprising, too, that none of the revelers had come to Eagle Air to avail themselves of two long straight stretches of pavement for drag racing.
She turned and her headlamp caught a gun rack on the wall. One of the many firearms it held was a dark, familiar shape, and she stepped closer.
It was another AK-47, she thought the same model she’d seen in Grant’s home office. Again with the moose-inappropriate firearm, but by all accounts from many wars a simple, effective, reliable weapon, designed to kill as many people as possible without jamming. The weapon, so Bobby Clark said, that had won the Vietnam War. He had one on his wall, too, although Bobby’s had a wooden stock and hand grip.
She’d been curious after Bobby showed her his, so she’d looked it up. A weapon that had been reproduced by nations from Albania to Yugoslavia, over a hundred million of them had been manufactured worldwide. It or a local variation thereof was the weapon of choice in every dirty little insurrection in every backwoods little nation on every continent since the first one had been stamped out in the USSR, right through to today. General Kalashnikov must have been so proud. Although he’d had more than a little help from the German weapons developers the USSR had relocated safely on their side of the border following World War II.
Next down was a single-barreled pump-action shotgun. She checked. A Remington Model 870, same as hers. Next was another pump-action shotgun, this one in a camo finish, a Benelli. It looked newer than the Remington, and the weapon below it was the twin of the alien-killer she’d seen in the gun safe back at the house.
It appeared that Finn Grant hadn’t limited his spending on mansions and remodels and high-end furnishings and gourmet snacks. She wondered if his FBO investors knew.
She also wondered if the presence of this much firepower might have something to do with the dividend shindig maintaining a discreet distance.
She turned and surveyed the office. She’d been through the desk, through the files, and absent a computer she was just about out of ideas. Nothing on the coffee table, nothing under the cushions of the two chairs near it. The map was screwed to the wall, and the framed duck stamp hanging on another wall lifted easily and revealed nothing but more wall.
She went over to the desk and went through it o
ne more time. Pens, pencils, knives, diary, coins.
Ammunition.
Perhaps sensitized by the weaponry on the walls of both offices, she spilled the box of cartridges across the top of the desk.
One of those things was not like the other.
The brass of the casings shone in the light of her headlamp, but one did not reflect as much light. Further, he was a portly little fellow, broad in the beam, with a much blunter nose. She picked it up, and then picked another up to compare weights. The fake cartridge weighed much less than the real one. She put down the real cartridge to examine the fake one more closely. It was plastic. There was a crack between the bullet and casing. She inserted a fingernail, and the bullet pulled out of the case to reveal a thumb drive.
Oh, hell yes.
A soft whine through the crack in the window brought her head up. The engine of a small vehicle sounded much closer than it ought to have. In one continuous movement she stuffed the thumb drive in a pocket and swept the cartridges and the box back in the drawer and closed it. A snow machine, she thought, an Arctic Cat maybe, one of the new ones, coming fast. Probably one of the party-hearty crowd from Newenham.
But just in case it wasn’t, Kate said, “Stay,” and then had to repeat herself firmly. “Stay, Mutt.”
She switched off her headlamp and made for the bathroom she’d used that afternoon as the sound of the snow machine roared up to the front door. She was barely inside the bathroom before the door to the office opened. Applying her eye to the crack of the bathroom door, she saw someone zipped into a formfitting snowmobile suit, black with neon green stripes. They pulled off a visored helmet and headed for the office.
It was too dark for Kate to see who it was, but she was pretty sure it was a woman. Tina? But why come by night, by what was presumably stealth, when she had the run of the place during the day?
Tasha? From what she’d seen at Bill’s earlier in the evening, by now Tasha was passed out cold, Kate hoped alone and in what Kate hoped was her own bed.
The light in the office went on, and drawers opened and closed. Whoever was in there wasn’t being quite so stealthy as Kate, or saw no need to be.
Maybe she should just tiptoe out. Maybe that corner between office and hangar was still dark and she could wait there until whoever this was left and she might get a look at them, and maybe even follow them.
She put her hand on the doorknob and someone else drove up, this person on an ATV, running a little rough. The engine stopped and she heard the squeak of boots on snow coming toward the door.
She sure hoped nobody had to pee.
And that Mutt wasn’t getting too restless with all the traffic going in and out.
Noise in the office had stopped abruptly when the ATV pulled up. The door to the office opened again and Kate, peering once more through the crack, saw someone much larger than the first person come through. A man this time, who either wasn’t wearing or who had already doffed his helmet outside. She couldn’t make out his features but he seemed middling tall and either beefy or muscular, and his stride was long and solid, making the floor tremble just that little bit when his feet hit the ground. He made straight for the office, opened the door, and went in.
A voice spoke, too low for Kate to catch the words. Another voice answered, a man’s voice.
The first voice raised in volume. Definitely a woman. “There’s nothing here.”
“Let it be,” the man’s voice said. “There’s nothing you can do now. Just go on home and leave it behind you.”
“You found it, didn’t you? And you took it. Damn you! You’ll beggar us, don’t you get that? I won’t let that happen!”
The man’s voice changed. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing! Give me that!”
There was the thud of flesh on flesh and footsteps staggering back and forth.
And then, there was a gunshot.
Fifteen
JANUARY 19
Newenham
There were in fact several, three or four in a row very fast, as if someone were ripping off a series of really loud farts. Kate knew again that horrible conviction of mortality everyone always feels in the presence of flying bullets, and teleported herself into the very small space between the toilet and the wall, arms wrapped around her head. In the very short space of time she was allowed for clear thought she hoped that the interior construction of Eagle Air FBO was as high in quality as the exterior.
The shots stopped as abruptly as they had begun when something large and metallic hit the floor. “Fuck!” the man yelled.
From outside the building, Mutt half barked, half howled. Before the sound had died away, Kate was on her feet with her hand on the knob when heavy footsteps moving fast went out the front door and a moment later the ATV started up and moved away in high gear.
Kate came out of the bathroom at the same time Mutt crashed through the front door. “I’m fine, you moron, go get the guy! Mutt! Fetch!” Mutt growled, turned on a dime, and launched.
Kate ran to the office.
The overhead light illuminated the scene inside to vivid and horrible effect. Sprawled on the perfectly waxed bamboo floor, Evelyn Grant lay in her own blood, a rich, darkly red pool that rapidly increased in size as Kate, momentarily paralyzed, watched. The alien-killer was a few feet from her right hand.
“Fuck is right,” Kate said, and ran to the bathroom to grab the hand towels. She ran back to the office, dropped to her knees, and slid the rest of the way over the slick bamboo floor to the injured woman. She folded one towel in fourths and pressed it against the side all the blood seemed to be coming from. “Evelyn,” she said. “Evelyn?”
“What the hell is going on here?” a voice said from the door.
She looked up to see Gabe McGuire standing in the doorway, dressed in gray sweatpants and brandishing a paint-splattered wooden yardstick like it was a broadsword.
“Oh, just what I don’t need,” Kate said. “What did you think you were going to do with that?”
He looked at the yardstick. “I don’t know. It was standing in the corner of the room. I just grabbed it when the noise woke me up.” Hair standing on end in a way it had never been allowed to on film, McGuire looked from the yardstick to Kate to the woman on the floor. “Jesus Christ,” he said blankly.
Kate looked down and saw that the first towel was showing signs of red. She swore and looked up. “Hey.” McGuire was still gaping at Evelyn. “Hey, you, shit-for-brains!”
McGuire looked up, his expression dazed.
“Yeah, you,” she said, “get over here.”
He stared at her for a long moment, before crossing the floor to kneel at her side. “Press here,” she said.
When he replaced her hands with his, she folded the second towel. “Here, use this, too. No, right here, can’t you feel the hole? Hard. Harder, damn it, if you don’t want her to bleed out right under your hands.”
“I know what I’m doing,” he snapped, and indeed, he seemed to, sliding the second towel beneath his hands without releasing pressure on the wound. Evelyn’s eyelids fluttered and she moaned, a pitiful sound. Her pulse was rapid and her skin was pale and clammy. The trash can next to the desk was small and rectangular. Kate dumped it, raised Evelyn’s feet and put the trash can beneath them.
She pulled out her cell and hit the speed dial. Campbell answered on the first ring. “It’s Kate Shu—Saracoff,” she said. “We need a paramedic at Eagle Air immediately. Evelyn Grant has been shot and she’s doing her damnedest to bleed out.”
“On my way.” Click.
“Love a cop who’s on the ball,” Kate said, thumbing the phone off. “You got her?”
“I got her,” McGuire said grimly. “I think the wound must be clotting. The blood flow is slowing down.”
“Don’t let up on the pressure.”
“I know what I’m doing,” he said again. He looked up, eyes fierce. “Mind telling me what the hell’s going on?”
“First you tell me
what you’re doing here,” she said.
He jerked his chin toward the ceiling. “I’m sacking out in one of the bedrooms, or I was. What are you doing here?”
“Why are you spending the night here?”
“I flew in from the lodge to take a video conference tomorrow.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “This morning.”
“You don’t have Internet access at the lodge?”
He looked at her as if she were insane. “Are you kidding me? We’ve got a satellite phone for emergencies. That’s it.”
She remembered the phone call Chouinard got when they were waiting for Satan to get into his ninja togs. “Brad one of your posse?”
He blinked. “Brad Severson, yeah, he’s my PA.”
“What time did you get here?”
“Oh, dark thirty.” He misinterpreted her expression. “Sunset or thereabouts. Wy Chouinard flew me over.”
“Was there anyone here when you got in?”
His eyes narrowed. “Just Tasha, and she took off right after I arrived. Something about a big party in town. You know, you’re starting to sound an awful lot like a cop.”
“How would you know?” Kate said. “No one else has been around since you got here?”
“Except for you? Except for her?” Indicating the woman whose side he was holding together with bloodstained hands. “Except for whoever shot her, which I assume wasn’t you? No.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“Until I heard someone shoot off an M4 fifty feet from the pillow my head was resting on? No.”
“How did you know what kind of a weapon was used?”
He nodded at the rifle on the floor. “I’m not blind.”
“How do you know it’s an M4?” Kate said.
He looked as exasperated as a nearly naked man doing compression on an open wound could. “I carried one every day for a month and a half last year.” She stared at him, uncomprehending and suspicious, and he said, “No Retreat. My last film.”
Restless in the Grave Page 17
