Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  She exited the elevator on the seventh floor and walked down the hall to the door that identified the business only by brass numbers indicating the address of the suite. She opened the door to behold Agrifina Fancyboy in all her glory. A fresh-faced Yupik from western Alaska, Agrifina had watched one too many Lauren Bacall movies on satellite television growing up and in her professional persona as Kurt’s assistant had cultivated an intimidating style of dress, accessorized with a paralyzing poise. She looked up from the computer into which she was inputting information at the speed of light. “Ms. Shugak.”

  Kate didn’t bother saying, “Kate, Agrifina, please,” because Agrifina had ignored her the first dozen times she’d said it so why keep trying. “Ms. Fancyboy. Is he available?”

  “I believe so, but allow me to ask.” Agrifina rose from her ergonomic yet elegant chair, probably designed by Versace, and paused for a moment to allow for the full force effect of her two-piece gray suit with an asymmetric lapel, probably made from the finest wool shorn from sheep with only the finest of pedigrees on the South Island of New Zealand. As she turned to knock on Kurt’s door Kate noticed that her stockings had acquired seams. Maybe that was a thing now. She couldn’t bring herself to look twice at Agrifina’s heels, which appeared to have gotten an inch higher since the last time Kate had been in the office. Kate wriggled grateful toes inside her Asics, although she really wished they’d make them in black instead of bubblegum pink and neon green.

  “Kate!” Kurt exploded out of his office and gave Kate a hug that raised her right up off the floor. It seemed to have become a meme. He set her down again without letting go. “We all thought you were dead!”

  “People keep saying that.”

  Kurt looked around. He was the first one to do so since she had come down from Canyon Hot Springs. Not Auntie Vi, not even Bobby and Dinah, no one had so much as given a sideways look at the current gaping black hole that walked next to Kate every moment of every day.

  “She’s not with me,” Kate said.

  Kurt grimaced. “Sorry.”

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “You absolutely can.” Kurt let her go. “Could you bring us some coffee, honey?”

  Inside his office Kate raised an eyebrow. “‘Honey?’”

  His grin was the very personification of shit-eating. “We might be an item now.”

  “‘Might?’”

  He squirmed in his chair. “Are, I guess.” He ran a hand through his hair, messing up a perfect cut that Kate would bet large had been orchestrated by the little demon of orderliness channeling the 50s in the outer office. “I don’t really know what happened. We were working late one night, and—”

  “Stop. Stop right there. That’s need to know and I don’t, oh god how I don’t.”

  His grin softened. “She’s really something, Kate.” His voice softened on the words and he might even have gone a little dreamy around the eyes.

  She’d busted Kurt for selling bear gall bladders to Chinese buyers, and then hired him when they both wound up in Anchorage at the same time and she needed a grunt for leg work. The job had evolved into her being his silent partner in Pletnikof Investigations, which in two years itself had grown into one of the go-to firms in Alaska for employee vetting. He also did some investigative work for civil and criminal lawyers and was always on tap for whatever Kate threw at him. She only wished there were more Park rats like Kurt.

  “So.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You look a little pissed.”

  She worked her jaw back and forth to loosen it up. “A woman came into the Park looking for an AWOL husband. Last night she hired me to find him, sometime after which she lit out up the Step road on my four-wheeler. This morning her body was found about a mile up said road from the village. So, yeah, I am a little pissed.”

  Kurt’s eyebrows went up. He sat back in his chair and made a come-on motion with his hand, and she told him the saga of Fergus and Sylvia McDonald. He listened with a gathering frown. “So she’s dead, possibly by foul means, and he’s missing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want a workup on both of them?”

  “As much as you can as fast as you can. She wrote me a retainer check.” Kate pulled it out of her jacket pocket and handed it over. “Let’s put Pletnikof to work for her.”

  He read it and whistled. “Full pay? She really wanted him found.”

  “Looks like it.”

  He cocked his head. “But?”

  “He was tarryhooting off in the Bush, Kurt. Maybe he found something.”

  “Maybe something found him. Maybe a grizzly who mistook him for a pre-nap snack?”

  “Maybe. Maybe something else.” She shifted in her chair. “Got a feeling, is all.”

  “I’ll back your feelings against anyone else’s hard evidence any day. Got anything for me to start on?”

  “Her driver’s license number.” She scribbled the number on a tablet he shoved across, along with the mailing address that had also been on the license when she got a quick glimpse of it that morning. “Right now, could you find me their home address?”

  Kurt, who in the fullness of his employment as Pletnikof, PI had discovered a heretofore unknown talent for skimming the cream off the Internet with a few keystrokes, squared his shoulders and hunched over his laptop with a determined look in his eye. By the time Agrifina had come in with mugs full of the best coffee Kate had ever had, hers perfectly doctored to her taste, and a plate of homemade lemon sugar cookies crisply brown at the edges, Kurt had an address for her.

  “That was quick.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Facebook.”

  She sighed. “I can’t tell if you’re that smart or everyone else is that dumb.”

  He scribbled it down and handed it to her.

  Her own eyebrows went up this time. “Nice neighborhood.”

  Kurt grinned. “But—”

  They said together, “—I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  · · ·

  Sylvia and Fergus McDonald had lived above Potter Marsh in one of the McMansions that had popped up there like very large, very expensive mushrooms after Big Oil came in in the 80’s. Over ninety percent of the subdivision’s residents either worked directly for Conoco, Shell or Alyeska, and ninety-nine percent of those who voted were registered Republicans only because if they voted Libertarian they couldn’t win.

  The McDonalds’ home had less pretension than some, with only four bedrooms and five bathrooms and a three-car garage. The worst that could be said was that their view excluded Redoubt even on a clear day. Nevertheless, Kate thought, geologists must make serious coin.

  Kate made a pass up the street and turned around, parking half a block up on the opposite side. It was eleven in the morning and the street was quiet, all the worker bees off to their nine-to-fives and the kiddies off to school. The lawns in front of each house were squared off with military precision and none of the very few trees permitted by covenant were old enough to vote, let alone drink. Apart from a beige sedan parked down the hill there were no cars in evidence. There was probably a covenant about that, too.

  She pulled on a pair of thin vinyl examination gloves, tugged a UAF Nanooks ball cap low over her forehead and got out of the Forester, closing the door gently behind her, and walked up the street to the McDonalds’ house with an every-right-to-be-here stride. She turned onto the slate path that led up to the door and kept a steady pace when she saw that the door was slightly open. She went up one side of the steps and ghosted across the porch to the side opposite the hinges and leaned forward to listen. From inside came a faint rustling, the scrape of a drawer.

  Could be a serviceman, a housekeeper, even a relative, but there were no lights on that Kate could see. Most break-and-grab guys left doors open for quick egress once the job was done, and most of them left the lights off while at work, too, the better not to attract the wrong kind of attention.

  She gave the door the barest of touches with the knuc
kles of one hand and it swung wide without a sound. New construction or good construction, or both. There was no protest from inside and she slipped over the sill and crouched at the end of a table against the left wall. A clear glass bowl sat on the table half-filled with change, keys, tie tack backs and push pins. On the floor next to the table sat a beat-up brass spittoon right out of a saloon in a John Wayne western.

  The hallway stretched the length of the house, a large archway on the right, two doors on the left and ending in a kitchen. It appeared that the McDonalds had fallen into the clutches of a decorator because all the walls were painted in different primary colors. The ceiling, mercifully, was white but the colors combined with the mahogany laminate floors created such a dark atmosphere that Kate wouldn’t have been surprised to bump into the Minotaur.

  A quick glance through the archway revealed a large living room overfilled with dark leather furniture and glass tables in steel frames. The facing wall was lime green. The rustling sounds seemed to be coming from the first door on the left, which was also slightly open. Kate crept around the table and peeked in.

  It was an office, in the process of being thoroughly trashed by a large man in jeans and a Chicago Bulls windbreaker, his head encased in a black balaclava that made him look like a member of ISIL. Subtle.

  All the drawers were out of the large desk, paper scattered over the floor, and the man was in the process of pulling the books out of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase one row at the time, making so much noise now that Kate could have shouted at him and he probably wouldn’t have heard her. It pained her to see books so misused, and she pondered the possibility of going to their rescue.

  The top row of books were gone, the second, the third, he had to bend a little to run an arm behind the fourth row and sweep them all onto the floor. The pile was growing and he wasn’t finding anything and it wasn’t improving his temper. “Fuck!”

  He kicked at the books and his back foot slid out from under him and he fell hard on his back, his head bouncing once off the floor. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He scrambled to his hands and knees and Kate pulled back a little too hastily and stepped into the spittoon, which gave an almighty clang when she tried to kick it off and it banged against the wall.

  “The fuck?” The door to the office slammed back against the wall and the man in the balaclava ran into and very nearly right over the top of her. Kate tumbled into an almost picture perfect backward somersault and miraculously ended up on her feet facing the burglar. The bad news was that her left foot had retained spittoon. It clanged loudly when she landed.

  “Fuck!” He jumped at her, to hit her, to shove her out of his way? It wasn’t clear. Who the hell knew how, she got her feet under her in horse stance, spittoon and all, and grabbed the hard right he was swinging in her direction in her right hand. She kept on pulling him through his punch, turning in place as she did without shifting her weight. It pulled him off balance and she helped by hitting him hard on his right shoulder joint with the flat of her left hand. He completely lost his balance then and went stumbling past her, unfortunately right through the open front door. She tried to shake off the spittoon but it wouldn’t shake and she gave up and went after him, clang, step, clang, step. He careened down the front stairs but he’d recovered his balance by then and he hotfooted it down the slate path, building speed out to the sidewalk and down the hill to the beige four-door she’d seen on the way in. He hadn’t locked the door to it, either, and the engine had started before he had the door closed and he was moving down the hill before Kate gained the sidewalk, clang, step, clang, step, clang, step. He’d dirtied the plate, the bastard. She should have noticed that before.

  Still, she felt pretty good. A little lightheaded, maybe, but good. The guy had had at least a foot and a hundred pounds on her and she was still standing and without a scratch. Moses Alakuyak would have been proud of her form, and she’d done it all on her own, too, without any backup, even if she had been hampered by a spittoon. Not bad.

  Before that unaccustomed lack of backup began to weigh on her more heavily than it already did she extricated her left foot from said spittoon and went back into the house for a quick, methodical sweep. None of the other rooms had been touched, just the office, so she took another quick look outside to make sure no one else had arrived to toss the house and went to assess the damage.

  The paperwork was the usual, bills, bank statements, mortgage paperwork. The McDonalds’ brokerage account indicated that Fergus and Sylvia must have started saving in their cradles, or, again, geology paid a lot better than investigating. There was a drawer full of tax folders going back a dozen years, each subsequent year showing a steady increase in income, but on the face of the amounts shown nothing so glaring as to indicate criminal activity. There was a thank you card from a young relative in Tennessee for a graduation check the previous June.

  There wasn’t a computer. Not a laptop, a desktop, or a tablet. Odd. She tried to remember if Sylvia had had one in her room. Might have been a laptop in the outside pocket of her little suitcase, as she might have seen no reason to get it out. The Park had full cell coverage now. People could and did access everything on their phones.

  She pawed through the books. They were mostly nonfiction, a lot on climate change by Brian Fagan, modern politics from Jared Diamond to Robert Kaplan, American history from the Founding Fathers to a recent biography of Bill Clinton. Also present was every single book ever written about the Klondike Gold Rush, from bibles like Pierre Berton’s Klondike to self-published chapbooks by various members of the Alaska Miner’s Association. Fergus McDonald evidently lived his job.

  As witness the shelf full of rock samples in the living room, the one non-decorator-inspired display in the entire house so far as Kate could tell. Well, other than the spittoon. Copper from Montana, silver from Idaho, many gemstones from Colorado including a tiny, beautiful tourmaline geode that looked like a slice of crystal watermelon. All had handwritten tags denoting dates and states. A personal collection, then, Fergus at leisure with his rock hammer.

  There were a few old metal gold pans and a new plastic one, bright blue, and that was about all of interest to be found in this curiously anonymous residence. The only evidence of Sylvia’s existence was the full closet in the master bedroom upstairs and the collection of cosmetics and hair product in the bathroom. The garage was empty but for a cord of wood stacked against one wall and a pair of bikes hanging from the ceiling.

  When she’d asked the night before Sylvia had said she’d worked as a secretary at the Suulutaq offices in town. There were no pay stubs in the desk but the bank statements showed automatic deposits for each McDonald twice a month. Kate compared a brokerage statement with a bank statement from the same month and it showed no transfers between accounts, so the brokerage account had to be funded from some source other than their salaries. There was no indication of the account from which funds were deposited into the brokerage account.

  She did a second sweep and then left the house, toeing the door not quite closed behind her and walked at a steady pace up the hill to the Forester. It turned over at the first ask and she drove smoothly down the hill, passing the Anchorage police department cruiser going in the opposite direction with Nick Luther in the passenger seat. She kept her hat on and her head down and hoped he hadn’t spotted her. No lights and sirens in the rearview, and she turned onto Rabbit Creek Road and punched the button for the radio. Instead the last CD that someone, probably her, had put in came on. Jimmy Buffett.

  Jimmy Buffett was responsible for her and Jack, or that was their origin story and she was sticking to it. Once just hearing the first verse of “Happily Ever After” could send her into a blue funk with no end in sight. Now, it made her smile at the memory. He’d had a beard when she met him, which he’d shaved off when they’d been investigating a mass murderer and some profiler had said all mass murderers had beards. Jack had wanted to buy Buffett a beer in the worst way and about died when he’d heard the singer ha
d been in the state and actually performed in Dutch Harbor. “What if the day you met him was the one day a year he was an asshole?” Kate had said. “Everyone has an asshole day, Jack. Better to admire from afar and keep your illusions intact. Love the song, not the singer.”

  Retaliation for this heresy had followed swiftly and comprehensively and lengthily. Kate found herself smiling at that memory, too. She’d been lucky to have Jack in her life, and she would always be grateful he had given her Johnny, even if it had taken her a while to realize it.

  She was hungry so she stopped at the Lucky Wishbone for a Mom All-Dark and drove out to Point Woronzof, where a young couple were trysting in the front seat of a pickup. Kate parked at the other end of the lot and concentrated on the other view, which took in Susitna, Foraker, Denali and the Talkeetna Mountains all the way around to the Chugach. Between Kate and mountains the Knik Arm, sludgy with brash ice, moved steadily south on an outgoing tide.

  Kate switched over to the radio to catch the end of the noon news and opened her takeout. As luck would have it, the first item up featured the Bannister Foundation, the brainchild of Erland Bannister, eighty-one years young as the reporter coyly put it, grandson of Stampeders, heir to an Alaska empire built on banking, transportation, coal and, of course, oil. A man with a tragic past, who as a teenager had lost his father in an attempted burglary of their home, the murderer never caught. His sister Victoria, convicted of murder and attempted murder of her two sons, although she had later been released under circumstances that were still murky. His daughter, Charlotte, killed in her own home. His nephew Oliver, tried and imprisoned for fraud and racketeering and assault. Bannister himself wrongfully convicted of attempted murder, his verdict vacated after a year in prison. In spite of these multiple personal tragedies, a man who went on to become a giant of Alaskan industry.

  He had, the reporter announced breathlessly, liquidated his vast empire at substantial profit in the year following his release from prison, and had invested half of the proceeds in the Bannister Foundation, the newly created non-profit arm of the newly incorporated Bannister Inc. People could only speculate the capital held by Bannister Inc. but the Foundation’s holdings were reported to be in excess of $500 million dollars. What was the Bannister Foundation? The reporter was happy to elucidate, and the list of good works the Foundation supported went on, and on, and on, everything from international nonprofits like Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International to national charities like United Way, the Humane Society, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America to local concerns like Bean’s Cafe, the Brother Francis Shelter and, unbelievably, the Anchorage Planned Parenthood clinic. Kate would have thought the last thing Erland would have been interested in backing was an organization that supported women having power over their own bodies.