Less Than a Treason (Kate Shugak Book 21)

by Dana Stabenow

  “You gonna be able to get out of here again?” Bobby said.

  “Might have to leave one of you behind.”

  “Great.”

  The cold cut like a knife and their breaths steamed in the air. There was always a price to pay for good winter weather and it always came in the below freezing area of the thermometer. Dead grass crunched beneath their feet as they went single file between two small houses, the slightly larger one with the smoke plume coming out of the stack on the right.

  A man with a rifle held in front of him stood at Scott Ukatish’s front door. Been hard to miss the sound of their landing. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “Hold on there, friend,” Jim said, hands raised. “We saw the smoke, and we know Scott’s in Cordova.”

  “I know. He sold me this place last summer.”

  “Didn’t know he’d put it on the market.”

  “He didn’t. I was on a rafting trip down the river. I saw this place and stopped in. He told me he was leaving and I bought it.”

  “Been living here ever since?”

  “I have.”

  The guy was tall and lanky and had a face that had spent a long time outdoors, thick-skinned with a permanent tan. Somewhere between his late thirties and early forties. His hair was dark and short and badly cut, like he’d been doing it himself without a mirror. He was wearing a plaid shirt worn at the elbows over a pair of Carhartt’s that were the very definition of broke in. He definitely wasn’t Martin Shugak.

  “You live here alone…?”

  “Yeah. I like my peace.” His rifle was an AR-15 that looked new but not brand new. “You’re disturbing it.”

  “A guy named Martin Shugak drop by here recently?”

  “Never heard of him.” He gestured with the rifle. “Goodbye.”

  The man went back inside and closed the door before all the heat got out but not before Jim got a glimpse of the interior. It looked clean and neat, with a full bookcase made of fresh pine two-by-twelves that extended over an entire wall and a tiny wood stove with a busy fire burning brightly behind a glass door.

  The door shut firmly in their faces.

  “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry,” Bobby said.

  Jim led the way back to the airstrip and they climbed in and donned their headsets. The engine again started at a touch—Robert Weisner was already assuming a godlike aura in Jim’s fond memory—and 18 Kilo Oscar made a graceful ascent into her natural habitat with runway to spare. He climbed to five thousand feet and looked south and west. It was clear all the way to Prince William Sound and then some. “Want to go to Cordova?”

  Bobby, riding shotgun, gave him a look beneath lowered brows. From the back Bernie said, “You don’t like it that he didn’t give us his name.”

  “Just getting a feel for my new airplane,” Jim said, and put her nose on south southwest.

  · · ·

  Sunday, November 6th

  the Park

  The next morning Kate went to breakfast with her defenses up, but Auntie Vi seemed less inclined to attack. A good night’s sleep helped almost anything and it seemed they had both had one. Sourdough pancakes and eggs and sausage patties consumed over conversation no more toxic than “Please pass the syrup” completed the cure. Kate leaned back in her chair, nursing a second cup of coffee and looked through the kitchen window at Quilak peaks drenched in alpenglow. Given enough time, most might be right once again with the world. The Park had its own curative properties.

  Most. Not all. Which was more than anyone had any right to expect.

  “Auntie, is Clarence Bocee still around?”

  Auntie Vi snorted. “Clarence! That—that—” there followed an Aleut word that Kate didn’t know but sounded pretty reprehensible “—rock hound! You stay away from him, Katya!”

  “He used to work with Mac Devlin, didn’t he?”

  Another snort, equal in indignation. “Greedy carpetbaggers, both of them, boomers, make money and take it out of state.”

  “You mean like Global Harvest, auntie?”

  Global Harvest being the parent company for the Suulutaq Mine, which had bought Auntie Vi’s bed-and-breakfast and hired her to run it for them.

  Auntie Vi reared up, affronted. “I live here! I spend money here! I pay Amelia Totemoff and Grace Kvasnikof to work here and they live here, too!”

  “I’m sorry, auntie,” Kate said, and she was. Auntie Vi deserved better than having her niece snipe at her. “So is Clarence still living in that cabin out past Bobby’s?”

  This produced another rant about good girls chasing after bad men, which Kate bore meekly. She could have explained but she didn’t think it would do any good. Auntie Vi wasn’t in a listening mood.

  She put on every article of clothing she had with her and set out, her breath smoking the air, driving through a Niniltna coated with frost. Every limb of every tree, evergreen and deciduous alike, looked as if they had been carved from white quartz. Every house and cabin was frosted with a thick layer of crusty white rime, their windows scrolled with ice flowers. Smoke curled from every chimney in slow motion, gray wisps that hung in the still air like phantoms.

  It looked like an illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien crossed with a painting by Thomas Kinkade. With maybe some Disney thrown in, and on the whole so sweet it was a little nauseating. A dog barked as Kate went by, another, and then another, and soon every dog in the village was setting up a howl that seemed to wash over the frozen river and back again and up into the foothills to echo off the peaks of the Quilaks, themselves icy scimitars drawn against the morning.

  If it didn’t snow soon, and a lot, next year’s fire season was going to be an interesting one, to say the least.

  The wooden bridge over Squaw Candy Creek was frozen in place and the ATV tires bumped over it with barely a rumble. Half a mile down the road there was a turnoff on the river side, from which a narrow trail led to a cabin perched precariously near the river’s edge. The yard was filled with bits and pieces of heavy equipment, excavator claws and buckets, grader blades, dozer tracks. Part or all of a gold dredge was stacked in pieces, and the only thing in the yard higher than it was the stack of firewood piled next to the cabin.

  She wound through the debris in the yard and killed the engine. Cabins commonly bore the racks of caribou and moose above their doors. This one was outlined in gold pans fixed to the wall with a single bolt through their centers. None of the pans had ever seen an Amazon buy link and Kate suspected some of them dated back to the Stampede. Wall art, Park style.

  The door opened and a head poked out and squinted at her. “Kate?”

  “Clarence.”

  “I heard you were dead.”

  “I heard that, too. You got a minute?”

  “Sure.” He ushered her inside, did an arm sweep of the seat of a recliner only slightly younger than the cabin, and waved her into it. “Want some tea? I just brewed up some samovar.”

  Nothing sourdoughs liked more than some samovar tea, and Kate accepted the mug with pleasure and inhaled the spicy citrus aroma with near orgasmic enjoyment.

  “Ah—”

  She looked up to see Clarence holding up a bottle of Gran Marnier. “Gah,” she said, “no, and I mean no thank you.” She watched him tilt it toward his mug. “You’re not.”

  “I am,” he said, and did so, a healthy glug.

  “God, Clarence, that’s like swearing on Sunday in a born-again Baptist church. You just don’t do that. And geeze, it’s only ten-thirty in the morning.”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, and took a defiant swallow.

  The interior of the cabin was like a thousand others in the park, one square room with a sleeping loft. There was a wood stove for heat and a Coleman two-burner for cooking, a sink that drained into a five-gallon bucket with marine blue paint still flaking from it, and built-in plywood shelves sagging beneath the weight of canned and dry goods. There were some books, most in the Alaskan-minerals-and-where-to
-find-them genre but also including anything ever written by David Weber and Johnny Ringo, and many more magazines, all to do with mining. A galvanized steel tub hung on one wall of unfinished two-by-twelves, big enough for Clarence to bathe in if he didn’t mind his knees around his ears while he did so. A washboard hung next to it.

  Clarence didn’t look as if he’d made use of the tub for either himself or his clothes in recent memory. A few years or a decade older than Kate, it was hard to tell, his sandy hair was thinning and scraggled down the back of his neck and his brown eyes were a little bloodshot. His skin looked like he’d been eating out of cans for a while and not green beans or spinach, either. He wore tattered jeans and a faded plaid shirt, and she could see his left heel through a large hole in his sock. One lone pair of gnawed-looking Sorels sat next to the door beneath a Carhartt’s jacket that had aged from its original brown to a kind of glacial gray.

  Portrait of an unsuccessful gold miner. Still, not necessarily an unhappy one. Clarence probably owned his cabin and the property it stood on free and clear. The Kanuyaq ran right outside his kitchen window and was full of salmon in summertime. In spring a herd of caribou might wander down out of the Quilak foothills to fill up their tanks on the grass on the other side of the river, and there was always a moose or two wandering by. Kate had seen the chest freezer on the porch outside. There might be a garden in the yard somewhere between the blades and the tracks. Even if there wasn’t there were always fiddlehead ferns and dandelion greens and berries of every kind to pick wild and eat and freeze for winter. A subsistence lifestyle didn’t have to cost a lot, especially if you were single and without kids. And for gold miners, family was always secondary to the allure of Au-79. It didn’t look like Clarence even had a dog.

  Her eyes came back around to Clarence, who was regarding her with the usual interest of a male Park rat within five feet of a woman of even marginal nubility for the first time in too long. “You’re looking good, Kate.”

  “Thanks, Clarence.” She didn’t add “You, too” because it would only encourage him. “I was hoping you could do me a favor.”

  He brightened, because this sounded like a deal he might be able to parley into other goods and especially services. “Absolutely.”

  She pulled up the photo app on her phone. “I’ve got a few pictures of some ore samples. Any idea where they came from?”

  He scrolled through the photos. “Huh.”

  Kate sipped her tea and waited.

  Clarence felt around in the magazine stand next to his chair for a pair of reading glasses and perched them on the very tip of his nose and scrolled through the photos again. Any awareness that a female was within range had completely vanished from his consciousness, but then gold miners were like that, too.

  Kate enjoyed her tea and berated herself silently for not stopping in to the Kobuk Coffee Company while she’d been in Anchorage.

  He looked up, frowning. “It’s hard to tell from just a photo. Any chance I can see the actual samples?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He accepted this without a blink because he wouldn’t have shown his samples to anyone else, either. He sat back and pushed his glasses up on his forehead so he could massage his eyes. “If I had to guess, I’d say these came from somewhere near the Suulutaq.”

  Kate put her mug down slowly. “Really.”

  He leaned forward and pointed. “See that line of copper? For all the hoohaw about the Suulutaq being the second biggest gold mine in the world, there is even more copper there than gold there.”

  “You don’t look all that convinced,” she said.

  He shrugged and handed her phone back. “Like I said. If I had to guess.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks, Clarence. I appreciate it.” She pocketed the phone and pulled out a pint jar of nagoonberry jelly. “Auntie Vi put this up this fall. One of her best batches, I think.”

  “Wow.” He handled the jar with proper reverence. “Nagoonberry. Man, I never get any of this stuff unless it’s a potlatch or something and I’m first in line. Tell her thanks for me, Kate.”

  “You bet,” Kate said, but she wouldn’t. She only hoped Auntie Vi wasn’t keeping count of the jars in her pantry.

  She drove up to the airstrip.

  George was loading a plane for the Suulutaq and she wangled the last seat. It was a full flight, again odd for a mine that had it felt like only moments before been on the verge of shutting down before it ever opened up. When they touched down at the mine she spotted three core drills at work up on the plateau, and there were lights on in every window of the two-story modular building that was mine headquarters. Inside, Vernon Truax was at his desk, a fifty-ish man thickening around the middle with large-knuckled hands and a broad, bluff face. “Kate Shugak,” he said without getting up. After all, she was no longer the chair of the Niniltna Native Association and thus worthy of no particular courtesy.

  “Vern,” she said. “Things looking busy around here.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Well. There was that whole thing about your EIS.”

  He waved it away. “We’re expecting some major changes with the new administration coming in. And have you seen the price of copper lately? Not to mention gold?” He grinned, and it was a tight, triumphant grin, the grin of a guy who lived and breathed big business and saw nothing but good times and black bottom lines ahead. “Was there something you wanted? I’m kind of busy here.”

  “Your field geologist still missing?”

  He frowned. “How’d you hear about that?”

  “His wife hired me to find him.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Yeah, but she wrote me a check for a retainer and I haven’t run it out yet.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, whatever, and no, Mac still hasn’t shown up. And before you ask, I don’t know where he is.”

  “He a good worker?”

  “Yeah,” Truax said, a little grudgingly Kate thought. “He showed up, did his job. Never any problem with his work.”

  Kate had heard more heartfelt encomiums. “He ever go missing like this before?”

  “No. Well, he took off whenever he had some down time. He’d go hiking up in the hills or fly into Niniltna.”

  “Did he say what he was doing?”

  “He wasn’t real social, Kate.”

  “He have any friends here he might have talked to?”

  “Like I said. He wasn’t real social. He’d roomed alone, ate alone.”

  “Get along with his co-workers?”

  Truax shrugged. “Never heard any complaints. He always showed up when the core samples came out of the ground, and he put in his time on the subsurface map we’re making of the discovery.” He grinned again. “We might not be the second-largest gold mine in the world anymore.”

  “Nobody was mad at him? He hadn’t made any enemies?”

  “He’d had to have had actual conversations with his co-workers first, I would think.”

  She would think so, too. She pulled up the photo app on her phone and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “Pictures of some ore samples. I was wondering if you could tell me if they came from the Suulutaq.”

  “They better not have.” He scrolled through them a lot quicker than Clarence had and handed it back to her. “Nope.”

  “No? You’re sure?”

  He heaved himself up out of his chair walked over to a tall metal cabinet. “Take a look.”

  She followed his pointing finger to see shelves holding rows of cylindrical core samples. “Your samples?”

  He nodded. “Cores, not rocks, of course, but you can see the difference. There is more copper in the Suulutaq than there is gold, and not forgetting the molybdenum. Those photos show way more gold.” He closed the cabinet again. “Your samples don’t look like anything we’ve ever pulled out of the ground around here, and I’ve been here since the beginning.”

  “Did Fergus McDonald have an offic
e here?”

  “A desk, not an office.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Sure.” He walked her upstairs to a collection of cubicles, stopping at one. There was a picture of Sylvia tacked to the wall over the desk and some pens and paper clips in the center drawer. “No computer?”

  “He had a company-issued laptop. He must have taken it with him.”

  She looked in the side drawers. One held a collection of rocks that looked like they’d been tossed in whenever McDonald came into the building and emptied out his pockets. Unlike the samples she had seen in the McDonalds’ living room in Anchorage, no attempt had been made to catalogue them by location or date found.

  She closed the last drawer and felt the mine superintendent’s firm hand on her elbow. He ushered her to the front door and left her there. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  They exchanged insincere smiles and she headed for the airstrip, where she was able to catch George on his return flight. This time she was riding shotgun, but he took one look at her face and concentrated on flying the plane. It was infinitely safer.

  They landed back in Niniltna and as Kate was getting out Kurt called. “A USPS express mail charge just popped up on Sylvia’s Visa. She sent something to her husband care of general delivery in Niniltna the same day she flew there.”

  “What? Why? Why wouldn’t she just bring it with her?”

  “Because it was an online order to be sent from the business in New York City.”

  “What business?”

  “A dealer in rare manuscripts. Schuyler’s Rare Finds. Before you ask I already called and they were closed. Did she have it on her?”

  Kate remembered the express mail envelope she’d seen in Sylvia’s room at Auntie Vi’s. “She did the night before. She didn’t when we found her body.” She looked across the airstrip at the post office, a one-room addition to a small clapboard house. “I’ll call you back.”

  Cheryl Jeppsen, the Niniltna postmistress, greeted Kate with what was by now the standard look of surprise. “Kate, you’re back. I’d heard—”