Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  He remembered the Aero Jet taking off from Niniltna that August morning, too.

  Maybe he should get a helicopter. A small one, enough for the pilot, a passenger, and a couple of hundred pounds of freight. One that could handle a little altitude. Say an altitude similar to that of Canyon Hot Springs. With the ability to land on a space the size of a postage stamp because that was about the sum total of horizontal to be found there. A craft small enough to not shear off the rotors on the canyon walls.

  He was pretty sure they hadn’t built it yet.

  A flash of light showed through the trees. Someone was coming down the lane from the main road. He watched as a fire engine red Chevy Suburban lumped and bumped its way into the clearing and pulled up in front of the house with a lunge and a jerk. A diminutive woman in jeans and a First Nations sweatshirt jumped down from the cab.

  “Oh hell,” he said, and went to open the door, just in time for Auntie Vi to bounce through. Not a woman so much as a force of nature, Auntie Vi never walked where she could bounce.

  “She’s back,” Auntie Vi, never one to waste time on preliminaries, said. She tossed a gallon Ziploc filled with fry bread on the table with such vigor it slid off onto the floor.

  He froze in the act of closing the door. His tongue seemed to have cleaved to the roof of his mouth.

  Auntie Vi, not one to suffer fools gladly, poked him hard enough with one sharp finger to rock him back a step. “You hear me, stupid man? She’s back!”

  Seven

  Friday, November 4th

  Niniltna

  In the morning Kate went out to find her four-wheeler gone.

  So was Sylvia McDonald.

  The first they knew of this was when the new trooper thumped at Auntie Vi’s door at oh-dark-thirty. He stood in the kitchen where Kate was eating her bacon and eggs and homemade sourdough bread toast dripping with butter—the great thing about Auntie Vi, she’d still feed you no matter how mad she was at you—and said, “Are you Kate Shugak?”

  The new trooper was tall but looked as if his uniform weighed more than he did, the open collar displaying an Ichabod Crane neck and an Adam’s apple that stuck out farther than his chin. His buzz cut was so short it was hard to determine his hair color. His eyes were big and brown and thickly lashed, making him look a little like Bambi before Bambi grew into his legs. He didn’t look old enough to vote, let alone to have graduated from the trooper academy and done his three supervised tours. “I am,” she said. “And you are?”

  He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a Jet Diver with a fish on. Kate watched, one loaded fork suspended halfway between the plate and her mouth. It was kind of mesmerizing. “I’m Cooper Cochran, Alaska state trooper, temporarily assigned to the Niniltna post.” His voice almost broke and he flushed a bright, vivid red. “I’m new.”

  His blue uniform jacket and pants with the gold stripe running up the sides had yet to wash out its synthetic shine. “How can I help you?”

  “Do you own an ATV?” He consulted his tablet. “A Polaris?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kate said around a mouthful of toast, and hooked her free thumb over her shoulder. “It’s parked right out—”

  Something in his expression warned her. She swallowed and put her fork down. “It’s not parked right out front, is it?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not.” Swallow, bob. “It’s been found overturned on the side of the Step road about a mile from here. Did you leave your keys in it?”

  Kate shook her head, eyes never leaving his face. There was more but he wasn’t ready to spit it all out quite yet. “No, Auntie Vi makes us leave them on the board there.” She pointed at a square of plywood nailed up next to the door, festooned with three rows of cup hooks. “People can come get the keys to move the vehicle that’s got them blocked in.” She stood up. “And I see that my keys are gone.”

  The baby trooper looked at Auntie Vi, standing behind the counter with her arms tightly folded and the standard glower on her face. “Did you have a Sylvia McDonald staying here last night, ma’am?”

  The glower faded a little.

  “Crap,” Kate said. “This way, officer.” She went swiftly down the hall and knocked on Sylvia’s door. There was no answer. She tried the handle. It was unlocked. The small case was still sitting open on the chair, but the messenger bag was gone and so was Sylvia McDonald.

  · · ·

  A mile up the Step road, the body lay tumbled into the ditch at the side of the road. Cochran had taped off the scene but he wasn’t experienced enough to always carry a tarp in the vehicle, so she lay exposed to the sky, surrounded by crime scene tape Cochran had laid around her on the ground. Unbeknownst to Kate, the same raven that four years before had first found the body up at Canyon Hot Springs had discovered Sylvia’s body in the interim, and he and the rest of the unkindness had as usual gone for the soft parts first. Cochran fell back a step and turned away to vomit, thoroughly and noisily, into a clump of grass.

  “Go on,” Kate said, “git, shoo!” She advanced on the body, waving her arms, and the ravens ascended reluctantly in the air, expressing their displeasure with raucous caws and a few well-placed shits.

  Cochran wiped his mouth the sleeve of his uniform jacket and looked like he might vomit again. “You really shouldn’t be inside the tape, ma’am.”

  Kate crouched down to look at the body. Sylvia lay on her back as if she had fallen there. The ravens hadn’t really gotten started on much beyond the eyes and lips before Kate and the trooper had gotten there. She bent over to look at the back of Sylvia’s head. There seemed to be some darkness there other than the natural cast of shadow, and she reached out a hand to raise Sylvia’s head. There was a large, deep depression visible even through her hair, stained with blood and brain matter. Behind her, she could hear Cochran retching again. She put Sylvia’s head back down.

  The four-wheeler was upside down in the ditch next to the road twenty feet away. Sylvia’s messenger bag was halfway between her body and the road. Kate went to the bag and picked it up. It was unzipped.

  “Uh, ma’am, you shouldn’t be touching that. Please put it down.”

  Kate rummaged inside the bag for a moment and came out with a wallet. She dropped the bag and handed him the wallet. He looked from it to her. “Verify her identity,” Kate said.

  “You already did that.”

  “Did I?” Kate went back to search the pockets of Sylvia’s coat and pants. “Pockets are empty,” she said, straightening up. “Have you got a body bag?”

  He looked at her.

  “A tarp?”

  He had a truly technicolor blush.

  When he didn’t move she said, “Have either at the post?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Good, then you’d better go get one.”

  He turned and paused. “Am I supposed to—”

  “Do you have a pad and pencil? And a tape?”

  Nope. The cloud of humiliation he left behind rivaled the billow of dust. Kate got out her cell phone and took photos of the scene with the EasyMeasure app, making sure to get exact distances between the ATV, the body, the messenger bag, and the nearest trees. The keys to the four-wheeler were still in it.

  She’d just snapped the last photo of some interesting tire marks on the road when Cochran returned. He wasn’t alone. “Hey, Nick,” she said. “Didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Rolled in this morning. They’ve got us covering Ahtna and Tok as well as Niniltna.”

  “Constantly in motion.”

  “You said it.” Half as tall and twice as wide as the younger trooper, with the shine on his uniform definitely worn dull, Nick was carrying an aluminum case that Kate knew from experience served as his murder bag. “I’ll have to ask you to step back from the scene.”

  “Of course.” She could bullshit the kid but knew better than to try that on the veteran. She retired down the road and found a stump to sit on. It was a nice enough morning, mostly clear and cold as hel
l. The high pressure system hanging over this part of Alaska had maintained a stubborn toehold on the region for more than a week. A low had to be growing up in back of it. Better it blew in sooner than keep building into a storm that when it finally pushed back the high would flatten everything from Katalla to Fairbanks.

  She watched the two troopers go about their business. It was a depressingly familiar scene. Nick did have a measuring tape and put Cochran on one end and measured what Kate had measured and recorded with her phone app. He went through the vic’s clothing and bag. He did everything methodically, by the book, with a calm, almost cold efficiency. Nick didn’t do empathetic.

  Sylvia had lied to Kate the night before and Kate had known it when she did so. And here she lay, face turned up to the sky, divested of the animating spirit that made her peculiarly herself. Her body was an offense, an obscenity even.

  Please. He’s all I have.

  Kate could feel the anger rising up behind her breastbone, pushing to get out. It was her own peculiarly animating spirit.

  Her phone rang. “Hi, Kate Shugak? It’s Gavin Mortimer. I was wondering if you’d had any news regarding the identification of the body you found on your property.”

  “No, Gavin, I haven’t,” Kate said, still looking at the second dead body she’d seen in two days. “I told you I’d call when I did.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just—he was a friend of mine.”

  “I understand.” She hung up.

  The two troopers slid Sylvia McDonald into a bag and zipped it up. A raven expressed his displeasure from a nearby spruce bough and launched himself up and away with a disgusted flutter of blue-black wings.

  Kate waited until they had the gate closed. “You flying her back to Anchorage, Nick?”

  He nodded. “I’ll need to take your statement.”

  “How about I hitch a ride and you take it in flight?”

  He shrugged. Not big with the verbal, either.

  “Can I take my ATV back to Auntie Vi’s?”

  “Will it run?”

  The three of them rolled the ATV upright. It started on the first try. “Takes a licking,” Kate said.

  “I’m taking off as soon as we load the body,” Nick said.

  “Meet you at the strip,” Kate said.

  She parked the ATV at Auntie Vi’s, who was extremely annoyed when Kate said she was going to Anchorage and said so, pungently. Once she was out of range, Kate called Bobby to let him know where she was going and hoofed it up the hill to the airstrip in good time. The body was laid out in the back of the 180 and bungeed down. They were in the air at ten a.m. and change. Kate watched out her window as Niniltna and the Kanuyaq River fell away and behind as the Cessna leveled out and headed west by southwest.

  “They give you Jim’s plane?” she said.

  “Yeah.” Nick almost smiled.

  Figured.

  · · ·

  At almost exactly the same moment came a hammering at the door of the A-frame. “This ought to be good,” Bobby said, already up, mug in hand. He strolled over to the door and opened it. “Why, Jim. What an unexpected…displeasure.”

  Jim pushed his way inside without being asked. “Where is she?”

  “Well sure, come on in.” Bobby said, closing the door behind him. “Happy to see you anytime.” His grin was broad and sharp.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Clark,” Jim said, his shoulders tense. “Where is she?”

  At that moment came the distinctive growl of an airplane on takeoff.

  Bobby smiled. “At this exact moment? About five hundred feet overhead and climbing.”

  “What?” Jim stared at the ceiling. “What the hell? Where is she going?”

  “Anchorage.”

  “Anchorage! Why? She hasn’t even been home yet!”

  “She’s on a case,” Bobby said blandly, and crooked an evil eyebrow. “Unlike yourself.”

  Ecstatic for the opportunity to relieve his feelings on the nearest available target, Jim said stepped forward to go toe to toe. “Bobby, why don’t you just—”

  “Stop. It.”

  The words, handed down like lightning from Olympus, halted both men all upstanding. Dinah came out from the bedroom, tugging on the second of a pair of slippers that looked as if they’d been born in a purple shag rug left over from the Sixties. She was in robe and pajamas but she had taken the time to brush her hair, because Jim. “I’m going to make more coffee and then Bobby is going to make his justly famous Nutbush Omelet and Park Air Pancakes and the three of us are going to sit down and eat and visit like civilized. Human. Beings. And the long-time friends that we are.” She glared impartially at the two of them.

  Jim took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked Bobby in the eye and with an effort used his inside voice. “I quit. Get over it.”

  Bobby took a deep breath, intercepted a look from Dinah and visibly detumesced. She pointed, and Bobby hung his head and stumped into the kitchen, muttering.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Dinah said.

  “Nothing,” Bobby said, casting a malevolent look over his shoulder at Jim as he pulled eggs and pork chops from the fridge.

  “That’s what I thought,” Dinah said, and pulled a chair out from the table. “Sit down, Jim.”

  Jim sat.

  Eight

  Friday, November 4th

  Anchorage

  They landed at Merrill and were met by an ambulance. Sylvia McDonald was loaded into the back. Nick, not a man to use one word where none would do, gave Kate a nod and they left their separate ways.

  He’d taken her statement in his usual terse fashion, tapping notes into his tablet, evincing very little interest in her answers, even when she told him why Sylvia was in the Park and that she had hired Kate to find her husband. For her part, she kept her answers as brief as his questions and made only two unsolicited comments. “You didn’t find a phone.”

  “No.”

  “She had one. I heard it ding after I left her room last night.”

  “What time?”

  “About eleven.”

  He wrote it down. “Know her number?”

  Sylvia had given Kate her phone number after writing a retainer check and Kate read it to him from her own phone. “And she had an express mail envelope in her messenger bag addressed to her husband in her room. It had been opened.”

  “See who it was from?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t ask her how she knew the envelope was gone because he was smarter than that. “Anything else?”

  There was plenty, but there was also no point in saying so, or not yet. “No.”

  Nick tucked the tablet away and let his hands rest on his knees, eyes checking for traffic, feet easy on the rudder pedals. DPS’s Cessna was in good hands.

  The investigation into Sylvia McDonald’s death might not be. Between Tok, Ahtna and the Park, Nick had to be spread pretty thin. He probably had another dozen current cases and who knew how many more hanging fire, everything from taking two more caribou than the bag limit allowed to sexual assault of too many minors to armed robbery to Permanent Fund Dividend fraud. On the face of it Sylvia McDonald had gone for either a late night or early morning joy ride on Kate’s ATV, rolled it and died. Just another suicide by Alaska. Nick would drop the body at the medical examiner’s, who would do an autopsy as required by Alaska statute in any accidental death. The ME, whose case load was every bit as backed up as Nick’s. Absent any adverse evidence he found, he would absolutely back up the trooper. Complications took too much time. So much better for everyone concerned if Sylvia McDonald’s death was declared accidental.

  Better for everyone except perhaps Sylvia McDonald, Kate thought. And Fergus McDonald, still among the missing. She fished out her phone and called a cab to take her to the townhouse.

  The townhouse sat on Westchester Lagoon in a line of townhouses, three stories including a garage, kitchen/dining and bedrooms on three floors. Jack had left it to his son Johnny i
n his will and it was where they all camped out when they were in town. Johnny was currently enrolled in his first year of college at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She called him from the townhouse.

  “Kate! Dang, Van and I were beginning to think you were dead.”

  “Not the first time I’ve heard that since I came down from the mountains.”

  The relief in his answering laugh was plain to hear and she felt a slight twinge of guilt at having left him—and so many others—hanging as to news of her whereabouts. “George said he sent you my note.”

  “He did. Only reason I didn’t come home looking for you.” A pause. “You shouldn’t have taken off that way, Kate. Frightened the living hell out of everyone.”

  There was no answer she could give that would make sense to an immortal, invincible eighteen-year old, so she made none. After a moment he said, “Good you’re home, though.”

  “Actually, I’m in Anchorage, at the townhouse.”

  “What? Why?”

  She told him. He was silent for a few moments. “Well, I’d offer to help but I’m only two-thirds of the way through Justice 202.”

  Her turn to laugh. Justice 202 longform was Introduction to Criminal Investigation and Interviewing. “How well I remember. You managing to stay awake in class?”

  “Barely. When I start to doze off I think about Len and Virgil and Louis. Or any of your cases. Wakes me right the hell up.”

  “Yeah. How’s Van?”

  “She’s good. She’s great, actually. Kind of lucked out there.”

  “So did she.”

  She could practically hear his blush bounce off the satellite. They talked a little more and then Kate hung up and liberated the Forester from the garage.

  · · ·

  The office was in the Carr-Gottstein building downtown across from the old courthouse. Fancy digs for a Park rat made good, Kate thought as she passed beneath the statue of the whale kicking the whalers out of their boat as they tried and failed to harpoon him. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, and a pretty Alaskan one at that.