“Problem with that is,” he said, “it would be just as easy for an unauthorized person to find something in the files as it would be for Lyda.”
It wasn’t quite a question. “Yes.”
He looked up from the monitor to meet her eyes. “So someone switched out the blood tests.”
“Easier just to swap out the entire med section. But yeah. Just as easy for someone to switch the blood tests.”
“Gammons and Allen pretty similar, physically?”
Kate looked down at the two employee head shots, Allen on the left, Gammons on the right, and their physical data. “White, brown/brown, medium/medium. Faces are similar enough, I suppose. Always hard to tell from a head shot.”
Jim sat back and linked his hands behind his head. “Okay. So the DB has Gammons’s blood type.”
“Yes.”
“But the DB isn’t Gammons.”
“No.”
“Allen went missing the same time as Gammons.”
“Yes.”
“And our favorite bigamist overheard a conversation where the two of them were talking about ways to die.”
“Yes.”
“A suicide pact?” He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth, but if you didn’t enjoy the weird you had no business becoming a cop in the first place.
Kate shook her head. “Then why switch the files?”
He nodded. “Why, indeed. And who?” He reflected. “So, logically …” His voice trailed off. Logic, thus far, was in this case notable only by its absence.
“It would help to know when the files were switched.”
“You mean—”
She nodded. “Before they went into the woods? Or after?”
“Crap. I hadn’t thought of that.” He stared at the ceiling. “The one person who might have been able to figure that out is dead.”
“Yes, she is,” Kate said.
“And is looking less like a suicide by the moment.” He unlinked his hands and turned the monitor. “Come look at this.”
Kate leaned over his shoulder to look at the screen. It displayed two columns of numbers. First column was a date. Second column was a very long string of numbers separated by dashes. The first date was in April, the latest the first of July. There were four entries.
“It’s in her personal file, in a folder marked ‘Mine’ that was password protected.”
“You figured out her password?”
“It was her birthday.”
Kate closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Yeah, I know. She was keeping track of something, Kate. The question is, what?”
“The dates aren’t at regular intervals. One in April, two in June, one in July.”
“The numbers on the right … they’re in sequence.”
“Core samples, maybe? Those middle numbers could be depths. The last numbers are so similar I’m thinking they’re coordinates. You know, maybe latitude and longitude?”
He looked at her, her face so close to his that his breath disturbed a strand of short dark hair that lay across her cheekbone. He was seized by a sudden impulse to bite her earlobe. “Why core samples?”
Their eyes met, a faint smile in hers. She knew. Oh yeah, she always knew. “There’s a lot of proprietary information being accumulated at the Suulutaq Mine, Jim.” She tapped the screen, drawing his attention back to the monitor. “Scroll down.”
“Huh?”
“Look at the doohickey on the vertical scroll bar. With the cursor on the bottom row of numbers, it’s nowhere near the bottom of the document. Scroll down.”
He scrolled down. The columns disappeared off the top of the screen, and three lines of type rolled up on the bottom.
As far back as I’m able to go with the records available here.
There may be others.
The cursor blinked steadily at them from the end of the page.
Jim stirred. “Okay,” he said. “Looking less like an accident, and a lot less like suicide.”
Kate’s grin was fierce. She checked the clock on the wall. “George has a crew-change flight going into Anchorage in fifteen minutes.”
“What? Why do you need to go into Anchorage?”
“For one thing, I can take Gammons’s and Allen’s files to the ME, see which matches who. If Gammons’s file matches the DB, and we know Gammons is alive, then I’ll take Allen’s file to the hospital and make them check it against him. Once we have confirmation that someone switched the files, we can work on why.”
“What do Allen and Gammons have to do with Lyda Blue’s death?”
She looked at him. He raised an eyebrow. If the state was paying her way to town, he wanted to lay out why. She huffed out an impatient sigh and ticked off on her fingers. “One, all three worked at the mine. Two, Lyda had a relationship with Gammons. Three, Allen was a gofer for Holly Haynes, which would have put him in the office a lot and therefore Lyda would have known him pretty well, too.”
“Fine so far as it goes, but according to your scenario Allen was dead for over a month and Gammons was in the hospital in Anchorage when Lyda died.”
“It’s all connected, Jim, it has to be.”
He sighed. “Why not just let George take the file in?”
“I can harass Brillo to hurry the autopsy.”
“You’re in a hurry.”
“You should be, too, Jim,” she said. “If Lyda found someone spying on Suulutaq’s operations, the longer we take to put this case together the more time they’ll have to cover their tracks, and the harder it’ll be to prove they killed her before she could turn them in. Another reason I want to go to town is I want to talk to Gammons, if he’s come out of it. And I’ve got one other thing that will be easier to check out in town, too.”
“The contact number in Allen’s file?”
“Yes.”
“Lyda’s note said it was a wrong number.”
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I want you to let me give it to Kurt Pletnikoff.”
“Ah. This would be the guy you blue-ticketed out of the Park and set up in Anchorage as a PI.”
“Yes.”
“He any good?”
“Hey, he’s the Meyer to my Travis, the Mouse to my Easy, the Hugh to my Cadfael.”
“Not to mention the Costello to your Abbott,” Jim said, who had not forgotten why Kurt Pletnikoff had been blue-ticketed out of the Park in the first place.
“He’s good, Jim,” Kate said. “He took some kind of a data mining class, or whatever they call it, and I won’t say he’s a genius but he is damn good at trolling for information on the Internet. He’s also fast, and we won’t have to sit around waiting for him to call back. I’m going to give him everyone’s Social Security numbers and tell him to get me everything he can on them, too.” He didn’t say anything. “A screwup doesn’t have to stay a screwup forever, Jim.” She thought of Petey Jeppsen.
“He’s not going to break any constitutional amendments, is he?”
She knew she’d won then. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
He recognized and admired the determination in the square set of her shoulders, the stubborn jut of her chin, the militant look in her eye. She was pissed off at Lyda’s death, and she would not rest until she knew what had happened in every detail, and the perpetrator, if there was one, had been brought as near to justice as possible.
It didn’t matter that she’d liked Lyda. She would have reacted the same way to any wrongful death. Lancelot, that’s who Kate reminded Jim of, and while she might not be able to swim a moat in a coat of heavy iron mail, she was sure as hell blessed with an iron will. God help anyone who got in her way in this mood.
It wasn’t going to be him, that was for sure, and besides, she was making enough sense for him to let her run out the string and see what was there. “I suppose you’ll be billing the state for the work.”
She grinned. “You suppose right.”
“You taking Mutt?”
Kate gla
nced out the window, where Mutt lay beneath the wide branches of one of the few healthy spruce trees left in the Park. “No.”
“She won’t like that.”
“I’ll be back before she knows I’m gone. I’m going to go see Brendan, too. He might be able to dig up something we can use, too.”
“Are you now.” He grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, thorough kiss. “Just marking my spot.”
Fourteen
Calm and clear had followed the previous night’s brisk blow, every pilot’s dream weather conditions, and every passenger’s dream ride. Kate sat up front, riding shotgun next to George, and admired the way he flew as if he and his craft were one being. She always felt safer in small planes, anyway, with pilots and mechanics she knew on a first-name basis. She adjusted the muffs over her ears and pursed her lips to make sure the mike would pick up her voice. “A regularly scheduled airline. Who’d a thunk it?”
His grin was wry. “The bank is who. I got loan payments to make every month now, Kate.”
At five hundred dollars round trip Niniltna to Anchorage, running full most flights, chances were he’d have no trouble making them. “How long is the flight?”
“Little over an hour.”
She was impressed. It would have taken two hours in the Cessna. “She’s a beauty,” she said, looking around at the spotless interior. There wasn’t a speck of caribou blood or a tuft of beaver fur anywhere, no duct tape as yet holding up the interior fabric or holding on the exterior shell, all the buttons and levers on the instrument panel still buttons and levers instead of clips and grips scavenged out of the toolbox. The GPS mounted to George’s right on the dash mimicked in electronic pixels the landscape moving beneath them. The sun was high and north, throwing the isolated peaks of Mounts Sandford and Drum into stark relief, and the sky was a gold-washed blue.
“You should start giving out frequent-flier miles,” she said.
She was shocked into near speechlessness when he replied, “Way ahead of you. We’re in talks with Alaska Airlines about a code-share agreement.”
Her mouth opened and closed, and the most she could muster up was, “Who’s we?”
“Bruce O’Malley. He figures it’d be a nice perk for the mine workers, plus something else he can offer prospective Alaskan employees. You know we like our mileage.”
She thought about this. “You’re going to need more pilots.”
“I know. Bobby Clark’s going to pick up the mail route, for the summer anyway.”
“He going to be able to unload the mail?”
“He said he’d put his legs on for the duration. Course, he’s charging me the equivalent of highway robbery for a salary, and Dinah’s not feeding me because I stole her husband, and Katya’s pissed ’cause I stole her daddy.”
Good for Bobby, Kate thought. “Bet he’s just happy he doesn’t have to deal with passengers.”
George laughed. “Always the worst part of the job. And I found a guy who spent the winter in Prudhoe Bay, flying supplies and crew to drilling rigs out on the ice. I put him on the Niniltna-mine run, turnabout with the other new guy, Bud Schaefer.”
“Flew over with Schaefer yesterday. Haven’t met the other guy yet.”
“Her. Name’s Sabine, for crissake.”
“Can she fly?” Kate said.
“Wouldn’ta hired her otherwise. Oh. Sorry, my sarcasm button kicked off there for a second.” He made a minute and probably unnecessary adjustment to the trim. “Doesn’t mean Sabine ain’t no name for a pilot.”
Kate made a silent vow to introduce the name “Sabine” into every conversation she had with George from that day forward.
It was quiet in back, and Kate looked over her shoulder to behold all ten passengers sound asleep in uncomfortable positions. Holly Haynes was sitting in the seat behind her, her jacket jammed between her head and the window. Ferrying paperwork into the Anchorage office, she’d said on the strip. Her expression was bleak and there were shadows under her eyes.
Probably reporting in person on Lyda’s death, too. Kate thought less of Truax for handing off that job.
She faced forward again and George spent the rest of the flight in Park gossip. She heard all about Gene Clauson getting caught with a case of beer and a fifth of whiskey in his plane on the ground at King City, a currently dry town. “Plus,” George said, relishing the story because it wasn’t about him, “all three of his passengers had booze in their luggage, including airline bottles stuffed in their shoes, a suitcase full of whiskey and rum, and three bottles of Kahlua in a Dora the Explorer knapsack.”
“Not feeling his pain,” Kate said.
“Fifty-five-thousand-dollar fine,” George said. “Twenty days in jail.”
“Still not feeling it,” she said, and retaliated with a libelous description of Randy Randolph, heartbreaker to the Park, and his career approach to marriage. George had been so busy he’d missed the story entirely, and by the time he’d stopped laughing they were on approach to Merrill Field. He put them down in landing that was a runway paint job and taxied over to a hangar Kate remembered from past arrivals. This one seemed bigger somehow. Possibly because it had a brand-new coat of paint, a new sign, and the old gas pump had been replaced by a new one, shiny in chrome and red enamel. When they rolled to a stop a young woman in Chugach Air colors came trotting out with a step stool, and a young man in like colors whizzed out on a four-wheeler hauling a trailer for the baggage and freight. The door popped open, the stairs were let down, and passengers and pilot were on the tarmac marching toward the office attached to the hangar mere moments later. Slick.
Kate didn’t like it at all.
“When you coming home?” George said, waving the waiting crew on board.
“Tonight if I can, tomorrow if I can’t.”
He nodded. “I’ll keep a seat open for you every flight until we’re ready to button ’er up. You be careful out among the English.”
It was his favorite line from his favorite actor from his favorite film. Kate laughed and waved him off.
She called a cab from the office and fifteen minutes later was unlocking the door to the Westchester Lagoon townhouse.
The townhouse had belonged to Jack Morgan. Kate now held it in trust for his son, Johnny. They’d talked about renting it out or even selling it off, but Jack had carried an insurance policy that had paid off the mortgage when he died. Monthly fees, annual taxes, and occasional maintenance came to less than what they would spend on a hotel room every time they came to town, especially in the summer, and besides, she liked the idea of Johnny having some property of his very own.
An unoccupied condominium was also less at risk of break-in than an unoccupied house would be, and Kate made sure to bring smoked fish in for the neighbors on both sides at the end of every summer in hopes that they’d keep an eye on the place. It came very well furnished, including the Forester in the garage. Seven years old, hadn’t been driven in months, it started on the first turn of the key that was left in the ignition. As she always did, she took a moment to enjoy the electric garage door opener before putting the car in first and heading out.
The crime lab was a square gray building on Tudor Road that looked as all business on the outside as it did on the inside. Kate handed over the holster and Gammons’s file and told Brillo what she wanted. He kicked when she said she wanted it by that evening (“Do you know the backlog we’ve got already, Shugak?”) but he’d worked with her before and he knew it would be easier to make her go away if he just gave her what she wanted. She left him yelling for someone from ballistics to get their ass in there.
Kurt and Brendan’s offices were downtown and Providence on the way there, so she turned off Tudor on Bragaw. As expected, she found a parking space in the hospital parking lot in the row nearest the door, because during an Alaskan summer no one had time to be sick. Inside, she asked her way to Dewayne Gammons’s room, and found him a building over and a couple of floors up, on a small, hushed war
d which, if brief glimpses through open room doors were any indication, seemed to cater to silent, unhappy people who didn’t get a lot of visitors.
Gammons himself was sitting in a chair, clad in hospital pajamas and robe and those horrible hospital slippers consisting of a thin sole and a wide band over the instep that were guaranteed to either fall off or, worse, trip you at the first step. He was staring out the window at the Chugach Mountains, green and lush in the bold, brash light of an Arctic summer day. There was more animation in the still scene on the other side of the glass than there was on his face.
“Mr. Gammons?” Kate said. “Dewayne?”
He didn’t look around, didn’t twitch, didn’t react in any way.
She knelt down next to him. “Dewayne, I’m Kate Shugak. Do you remember me? You walked out of the woods into my yard. Do you remember? It was the Fourth of July, and we had salmon on the grill. I was there with my auntie Vi and my uncle Old Sam, and you remember Holly Haynes from the mine, she was there, too.”
Gammons was silent.
“We found your truck,” Kate said. “It’s back in Niniltna, safe with the trooper. You can pick it up any time.”
Nothing.
“Did you go into the woods alone, Dewayne?”
Silence.
“Did you go with a friend, maybe? Rick Allen, did he go with you?”
His chest moved up and down with his breathing. Otherwise, he didn’t move.
Kate bit her lip. There was no other way to put this. “We have your note, Dewayne. We know what you meant to do. Did your friend Rick maybe come after you, to stop you?”
He stared out the window. There was a stubble of beard on his chin, his hands lay loosely along his thighs, and he looked somehow weary, drained of any energy for life, love, or laughter. His wounds were healing, and the bug bites, the ones he hadn’t scratched into infection, had shrunk to dark red spots. He almost looked like the photograph in his personnel file. Of course, he almost looked like the one in Richard Henry Allen’s, too.
Not without a twinge of conscience, Kate said, “Do you remember your friend Lyda, Dewayne? She worked out at the mine with you? You were friends, remember?”
A Night Too Dark Page 20
