Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  She alternated walking and running all the way out to Point Woronzof and back again, seeing only a skijorer being towed by two black labs. The labs were so overjoyed by the presence of another human being on the trail that they both jumped at Kate as she passed, yanking their owner off his feet and into the ditch on the beach side. She waded through the melee to give him a hand up. “Thanks,” he said, unhooking one ski from around his left ear and the other from behind his back. He gave her an interested look, evidently in the belief that turning himself into a human Tinker Toy made him attractive to the opposite sex. She was off down the trail the next second, having contrived to touch neither dog during the encounter.

  She felt good, physically. Mentally, emotionally, the jury was still out and it was fine with her if they stayed out for the foreseeable future. Her boot camp method of healing hadn’t left a lot of time for anything else, and truth be told she had welcomed the singularity of purpose. Her attention had been much divided over the past nine years. The scars were evidence of just two attempts on her life. There had been more, including that homicidal jackass on the boat and the undignified experience of being clocked and dumped into an actual dump, inside an actual garbage bag.

  She wondered how many more lives she had left, and then she wondered if she was doubting her immortality. Forty was the age for that, so she’d heard, so she had a year to get used to it.

  Her phone dinged. A text message. She read it, pocketed her phone again and picked up the pace. She got back to the townhouse, showered, dressed, and called Brillo, who sighed heavily when he recognized the voice on the other end of the satellite. “Either her head hit something hard or something hard hit her head. The bodies are stacking up like cordwood around here, Shugak, Jesus, try to be patient, wouldja? I said I’d call you if and when I knew anything more and I will. Now lemme alone to get some goddamn work done.”

  She clicked off and thought about all the trees she had looked at by the side of the road where they’d found Sylvia and Kate’s four-wheeler. All of them were too far away from Sylvia’s body and she had found no blood or brain matter on any of them.

  Her phone beeped and whistled. She read the screen and sighed. “Gavin.”

  “Oh, hi, Kate. I hope it isn’t too early to call. I was just wondering if—”

  “No, Gavin, no ID on those bones yet.”

  She hung up on whatever Gavin Mortimer was about to say next. Her phone rang again, this time with the prologue to City of Angels. She answered. “Kurt.”

  “Hey, Kate. I got some info on the McDonalds.”

  “Go.”

  “They’ve been all over North America, Canada and the US, and one time even in New Guinea, working in resource extraction. She always works in the office, him always in the field. They buy in, too, they’ve got an investment portfolio worth about a million bucks—you and I are definitely in the wrong line of work—most of it invested in natural resource companies. Copper in Montana, gold in California, silver in Colorado, copper again in Arizona but the company went bust. They still own stock in it, though, oddly enough. Near as I can figure it they go to work for the company, check it out, and then buy stock and never sell it. And they never spend more than two or three years in one place.”

  “Restless.”

  “Yeah, actually, that might be true. So far I haven’t picked up a whiff of any kind of shenanigans, like they’re clearing out the safe on their way out. One thing, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “Sylvia was a CPA.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Foster School of Business, U-Dub. Where they met, I think, because he was at Earth and Space Sciences at U-Dub at the same time, working on his graduate degree.”

  “Family?”

  “No children, on purpose, I think, at least I can’t find any bills for fertility clinics.”

  “Parents? Siblings?”

  “Both only children, both orphans. Might have been something they had in common.”

  “Huh.” They listened to each other breathe for a while. Kate said, “What’s a CPA doing working as a secretary?”

  “Excellent question, Shugak. You could almost be a PI yourself.”

  “You’d clean up if you took that show on the road, Pletnikof. And?”

  “And I took a quick run back at all their places of work. There is no there there, Kate. Not a whiff of anyone doing anything wrong. Still, I suppose if you were looking to estimate the financial health of the company you were working for, you could do worse than be a CPA in a secretarial position and a geologist on the ground.”

  “Who was her boss at Suulutaq?”

  “Bruce O’Malley.”

  “O’Malley? Wait, isn’t he the—”

  “President and CEO of Suulutaq? Why, yes, Kate, I believe he is.” The shit-eating grin came clearly over the airwaves.

  “Well, now.” Kate sat back in her chair. “So that’s a thing.”

  “I thought so.”

  She sat in silence for a while after they’d hung up.

  Two people put themselves through school, marry and travel North America, with a side trip to New Guinea according to Magnus Campbell, serially investigating the health of mineral resource extraction companies, investing accordingly and doing well by themselves as a result. Nothing wrong with that on the face of it, it was a Kodak moment of the American dream. Inevitably their attention turns northwards, to Alaska, the biggest pot of literal gold at the end of any mining rainbow. They go to work for Suulutaq Mine, the second largest deposit of gold—and copper—ever discovered on the planet, and maybe the first when they got done exploring it.

  Where the American dream screeches to a halt, when one of them goes missing and the other is found dead, possibly murdered, which in itself argued against the viability of the first.

  Fergus McDonald, with a rock hammer, in the Park. What had he found? He’d found something, all right, and she’d bet it had had something to do with the envelope that had disappeared from Sylvia McDonald’s handbag.

  She checked the time and called Magnus Campbell at his office, only to be forwarded to an efficient secretarial type who informed her that Mr. Campbell had not come in that day. She thanked her and called his house, Campbell one of the last humans left with a land line. The phone picked up on the third ring. A man’s voice said, “Hello?” and nothing else, and it was the nothing else that activated her spidey sense.

  “Where the hell are you, Hank?” she said. “I’ve been waiting outside Walmart for ninety fucking minutes with two full carts, and so far three different guys have tried to pick me up, and I swear to god the fourth guy to come by—”

  “Ma’am. Ma’am. MA’AM.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Since when do you ma’am me, you moron?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “What? No, I—” She pulled the phone away from her face and counted to three. “Oh, sir, I’m sorry, I guess I do. I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to—I’m just so—I’ll let you go now.”

  She clicked off and counted again. When the man on the other end hadn’t hit star sixty-nine in ten seconds she heaved a sigh of relief, blocked the number and headed for the garage.

  Magnus Campbell had lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a nine-plex on Jefferson in Spenard, and when Kate got there it was surrounded by police cars. She was waved through by a uniformed officer and parked a couple of blocks down. She walked back up the street to loiter at the back of the gathering crowd and waited for someone else to ask what happened. Obligingly a newer arrival did and three different people tried to tell him at once, human beings always happy to spread bad news.

  “Home invasion.”

  “Somebody broke into this dude’s apartment and he caught ’em at it and they had a fight and he’s like dead, man!”

  “Totally!”

  “Who was it, anybody know?”

  A round of shrugs. “Some dude.”

  And then Nick Lut
her slid by, riding shotgun in an APD cruiser. Kate pulled her head into the collar of her coat like a turtle and walked away with deliberate slowness.

  · · ·

  Saturday, November 5th

  the Park, Anchorage

  George had an early flight into Anchorage that morning. Jim got the last seat at the last minute and avoided George’s eyes as he shelled out the fare George extorted out of anyone flying west. The only time in the last decade he’d had to pay for a flight was when he’d gone Outside for his father’s funeral. He asked George if Martin had flown out of the Park recently. George said that since Martin still owed him for the last three flights he’d been on George wouldn’t allow Martin within spitting distance of one of his aircraft. Martin was well aware of that, so no.

  They landed at the Lake Hood strip instead of Merrill, most of the passengers Suulutaq employees who were flying Outside for their two weeks off. Jim hiked over to Ted International and rented an SUV. He drove straight to the townhouse and spent far too long knocking on the door with no answer. He peered through the window and saw the mug on the coffee table. There was no window on the garage door so he couldn’t tell if the Forester was there or not.

  He climbed back in the SUV and called Kurt. The woman who answered the phone sounded like Doris Day at her shirtiest with Rock Hudson but finally put him through. “Kurt, it’s Jim Chopin.”

  “I heard. What’s up?”

  “I’m in town. Where’s Kate?”

  A short silence. “She’s in town, too.”

  “I know that. Is she staying at the townhouse?”

  “She didn’t say, but that is usually where she stays when she’s in town.”

  Jim felt his temper rise. “So you’ve seen her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She happen to mention how long she’ll be here?”

  Jim heard the creak of a chair. “She’s on a case.”

  “The missing geologist and his dead wife?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that, Jim.”

  “You won’t, you mean.”

  “She will hurt me if I do.”

  Fair enough. “She have her phone with her?”

  “Why don’t you call her and find out?”

  “Thanks, Kurt. You’ve been so helpful. Really.” He hung up.

  Displaying what he felt was praiseworthy self-restraint, he had not attempted to call. He hadn’t even texted. She’d come down out of the mountains, she knew where he was, she would have called him if she’d wanted to talk to him.

  “Fuck.” He opened the text app.

  I’m in town. Call me.

  There was no immediate response.

  He tapped in a number and gathered together the tatters of his self-control. “Hey, Brendan. It’s Jim, Jim Chopin.”

  “As I live and breathe, Jim Chopin, Chopper Jim, the Father of the Park, come to call. Or just call, in this case.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said, trying not to think about the time he’d walked into the townhouse to find Kate and Brendan all cozied up together over drinks in front of the fire. “I’m in town. I haven’t caught up to Kate yet. Have you seen her?”

  “Why, yes, I have.”

  “You know where she is now?”

  “Nope,” Brendan said cheerfully, and didn’t add, “and I wouldn’t tell you if I did” but the subtext was clear. There might also have been a “Neener, neener” tagged on there somewhere.

  “Thanks anyway,” Jim said and hung up. That fucker Brendan for sure had seen Kate a lot more recently than Jim had.

  He looked at the ditty bag he’d brought with him. There was no point in calling Brillo who had only ever tolerated him when he brought along Kate and Mutt. Who else? Fred Gamble had retired this spring and moved Outside. He thought a little harder and remembered Kate’s trip to Newenham the previous January. He tapped in a number.

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “I wonder if you could put me in touch with a particular agent,” he said. “Not one necessarily stationed in Alaska.”

  It appeared that the FBI was good for more than subverting elections even if it was just finding one of its own agents. He hadn’t been waiting five minutes after he’d hung up when his phone rang. “Sergeant Chopin?”

  “Agent Mason? Thanks for calling back so promptly.”

  “I, ah, recognized your name in association with someone else I have met previously in Alaska.”

  “Yeah, and I know which someone else, and first thing I’d better tell you is that it’s no longer Sergeant Chopin. I used the title to get past reception.”

  “Ah.” A pause. “I did know that, actually.”

  A trap, into which amazingly he had not fallen. “My point is that I have no law enforcement standing whatsoever to ask any favors of the FBI.”

  “Point granted, but, ah, now I’m curious.”

  Jim opened his grip and pulled out the glass Bernie had given him. “I’ve got a glass with fingerprints on it. I was hoping you could lift them and run them for me.”

  Another brief silence, during which he imagined Agent Mason, whom he’d never met, stroking a properly square FBI chin with meditative fingers. “What, ah, precisely would this be in aid of?”

  “There’s a guy missing in the Park. The fingerprints belong to one of two, well, people of interest, shall we say, in his disappearance. They aren’t locals. The Park is—”

  “I’m, ah, familiar with the Park, Mr. Chopin.”

  “These two men stood out enough to engage the interest of some friends of mine, one of whom served one of them a drink in this glass.” Jim waited. This would work or it wouldn’t.

  “Where, ah, are you at present, Mr. Chopin?”

  “Anchorage.”

  “Ah, Anchorage, excellent. Do you know where the FBI office is there?”

  “I do.”

  “Go there. Someone will meet you in the lobby.”

  Click.

  So he drove to the faux-brick fortress on 6th Avenue and negotiated the defensive perimeter of bollards, a moat evidently being impractical, at least for the moment. He was met on the civilian side of security by an efficient prepubescent with hair pulled so tightly back into a bun her eyes were mere slits. She accepted the Ziploc bag and its contents with the air of one who had been on the receiving end of much worse in her day, and invited Jim to leave forthwith. He did so.

  Since he was downtown he dropped in at Bean’s Cafe and the Brother Francis shelter and since it was just getting light out took a cruise down Minnesota and through Spenard where a lot of homeless people hung out. At the light at Northern Lights he waved over a guy with a cardboard sign that said “Veteran, Will Work for Food” in black Marksalot. The guy, a Yupik with a runny nose, shook his head at Jim’s question. Jim gave him a twenty and repeated the exercise at Northern Lights and C. No word of Martin Shugak anywhere.

  He wondered what it would be like to be broke and on the streets, and then he wondered what the history books were going to say about this era in American history, when the rich got richer and the middle class disappeared and the poor moved into the streets. Who was it who said that nations were judged on how they treated their least advantaged citizens? Really, at this point the best favor the Baby Boomer generation could do for their nation was to die off as rapidly as possible.

  His stomach growled so he ended the internal rant and went to Jackie’s in Spenard and had fried spam and eggs with rice. Breakfast of champions. He went up to the counter to pay and an emaciated, pock-marked man with dreadful teeth dressed in a grimy leather duster was harassing the woman sitting next to him, who was dressed like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman before the makeover. Evidently she hadn’t worked hard enough the night before to suit him. She looked miserable and so did everyone else within earshot. “Keep it,” Jim said to the server, and turned to grab the pimp by the ear and haul him to his feet.

  “Hey! What the fuck, you fucking fucker—”

  A sad commentary on the quality of h
is education and the subsequent limits it appeared to have placed on his vocabulary. “Shut up,” Jim said and dragged him by the ear out the door. Behind him he heard it close on cheering and applause. He proceeded to kick the pimp’s ass across the parking lot, step, kick, step, kick, easily disarming the guy when he finally managed to get out his piece, a Lorcin .25, perfect size for shoving down his pants, although given the relative size of pants and pistol harder to get out, let alone find. Jim ejected the magazine and the round in the chamber and threw the handgun up on top of the roof of the facing strip mall. He pocketed the ammo and kicked the guy back across the lot. “Where’s your car, asshole?”

  The pimp, grizzling down his chin, pointed out a black Lincoln Town Car that looked brand spanking new. “That’s mine.”

  Jim sighed. “Of course it is.” He took the keys away from the pimp, beeped the car open, checked beneath the seat and in the glove compartment for a backup piece, and tossed him into his car and his keys after him.

  The guy was literally trembling with rage. “Who the fuck do you think you are, you fucking—”

  “Uh-uh,” Jim said, wagging a finger at him. The pimp jammed the keys into the ignition and let a heavy foot on the gas slam his door shut as he peeled out of the lot. Jim walked back to the restaurant and stuck his head inside. “You got enough money to get home, lady?”

  A wizened old geezer in what looked like an original Alaskan tuxedo said, “She does now,” and slapped a fifty on the counter next to her. He gave Jim an approving nod.

  Jim nodded back and left.

  Who knew how liberating taking off the uniform would be?

  He went back to the condo. Still no one home but her neighbor said, “She left about half an hour ago.”

  Of course she had. He got back in the SUV and stewed for a while, and then called one of the people on his list who had airplanes for sale. This one was bigstick, who had given him the link to the Texas website on airstrips. He was home and he told Jim to come the hell on over, it was turning into a goddamn party. He sounded like the old geezer at Jackie’s had looked and when he opened the door to his Airports Heights home Jim was only off by about ten years. This guy was Jim’s own height or taller, with a shock of white hair and blue eyes lost in creases put there by laughter or squinting into the sun, or both. “You the guy who called?”