A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “Who the hell was it?”

  “Kostas McKenzie.”

  “The Gaea guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She thought of the solid shoulders, the square set of the head, and compared them to the man she’d met on the Suulutaq airstrip and in his office in Anchorage. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” he said, pretty much at his last tether of self-control, “you’re saying she’s been turned to the green side by an environmental group?”

  “Yes. But there’s more.”

  “What?”

  She ignored his long-suffering tone for the moment. “She and Truax have a thing going on, I know I read the body language right on that.”

  “So? I would think selling out her lover would be the last thing she’d do.”

  “Yeah, but Mrs. Truax spent the Fourth of July at Auntie Vi’s B and B with Mr. Truax, and Haynes wasn’t happy about it. It’s one of the reasons I think she came out to the homestead. She was staying at Auntie Vi’s, too, and she probably didn’t want her nose rubbed in it.” Kate thought back over the conversation, pulling and tugging at every word, and said, “Son of a bitch. You know what else?”

  “What?”

  “She felt me out about Allen’s body, wanting to know if it had been positively identified. And then later, she tried to convince us that it wasn’t Gammons who came stumbling out of the woods.” She turned and looked at him, and then had to shove Mutt’s head out of the way so she could see him. “Because if it was Gammons, she knew we’d have to identify who the body really was.”

  “Why didn’t she want us to identify the body as Allen’s?”

  She faced forward again. “I don’t know.”

  They flew in a tense silence for a few minutes. “She was right there while he was stealing the data,” Jim said.

  “She saw him,” Kate said.

  “Maybe that’s what gave her the idea,” Jim said.

  “And Lyda saw her,” Kate said. There might be something else, another reason Wayne took off, she heard Lyda’s hesitant voice say. “There was something Lyda tried to tell me just before I left the mine that day, something about maybe Gammons didn’t try to commit suicide.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. “I put my foot in it, said something smartassed, and she froze up on me.”

  He looked at her.

  “Don’t say it,” she said. “I know. There is no excuse.” I could have gotten Lyda killed, she thought, and knew he was thinking the same.

  They were halfway to the mine, the two arms of the Quilaks enclosing the valley looming larger through the windscreen.

  “Maybe Gammons caught Allen thieving,” Jim said a few minutes later.

  Kate readjusted her ideas. “And maybe Allen marched him into the woods at gunpoint?”

  “Maybe. Maybe just speeding up the last part of the plan.”

  “But before Allen disposed of him, Gammons said something to Lyda, and then Lyda started keeping watch. Wait a minute.” She turned to look at him and again had to shove Mutt’s head out of the way. “She didn’t know Lyda and Gammons had a relationship.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “Not until I told her so.”

  He looked over and saw the rigid set of her jaw. He concentrated on driving the plane.

  They set down on the mine’s airstrip a little after noon and they went directly to the mess hall. The tables were full and the hubbub was loud, but it tapered off when they saw Kate attended by a state trooper in blue and gold and a full-grown gray wolf. Kate spotted Van and Johnny and went to their table, although Mutt beat her to Johnny by thirty seconds. Kate bent over and said in a low voice, “You seen Holly Haynes?”

  They exchanged glances. “I think she went out to eighteen-E,” Van said.

  “One of the rigs,” Johnny said, his hands buried in Mutt’s fur.

  “How do we get out there?”

  Johnny looked over at Jim. “Drive. There’s not what you’d call a road, but it’s navigable.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s going on, Kate?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Jim caught up with her outside. “Let’s go find Truax.”

  “You go find Truax,” she said, “I’m going to find Haynes.”

  “Hold it,” he said.

  She stopped. Mutt stopped, too, great head swiveling back and forth between the two of them.

  “I want to find her and talk to her, too, but we don’t really have any proof we can confront her with.”

  “Means, opportunity, and we got about three different kinds of motive. Goddammit, Jim, I’m not going to—”

  As they stood arguing a pickup came around the corner of a building and bumped over the uneven surface to a spot in front of the bull rail in front of admin. Haynes got out, wearing coveralls covered in mud up to the collar. She pulled off a hard hat and ran her fingers through sweat-soaked hair.

  She saw them and her hand froze.

  “Haynes.” Kate’s voice was hard and uncompromising. “We need to have a conversation.”

  Haynes dropped her hard hat and ran.

  She hit the double doors of the admin building. Kate hit the doors on the backswing, got through them and saw Haynes halfway up the stairs.

  “Vern! Vern!” Haynes was screaming the mine superintendent’s name loud enough to be heard in Fairbanks. “Vern!”

  She vanished around the corner and Kate heard her feet pounding down the hall. Kate took the stairs three at a time and as she got to the top she heard Vern say, “I’m right here, for crissake, stop yelling! What the hell’s the problem?”

  Kate got to the door of his office to find Haynes standing with Truax on the other side of his desk. She was looking up at him, pleading, and he was looking down at her, displeased. Kate was reminded of the day Haynes had come running to Vern on the airstrip with news of Lyda’s death. Just so now had she looked at him then, her last hope of heaven, of succor, of rescue. All-y all-y out are in free.

  Kate started forward. Truax saw movement from the corner of his eye and looked around to frown at her. “Kate? What the hell is going on?”

  Kate looked at Haynes, who was teary and trembling. “Ask your staff geologist. Or should I call her your mine squeeze?”

  “Kate,” Jim said sharply.

  Ignoring Jim, Kate said to Truax, “Your girlfriend there killed your favorite employee.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Haynes said, still looking up at Truax. “It was an accident.”

  Twenty-two

  Jim had cuffed and stuffed Haynes into the back of the Cessna, where she rode next to a very attentive Mutt. In Niniltna, Jim transferred her to one of the cells. He read her her rights, and the last thing Truax had said to her was, “Sit tight and keep your mouth shut until the lawyer gets there.” Of course Truax might change his mind about the lawyer when he learned that Holly had taken up data sales where Rick Allen had left off.

  Regardless, Haynes was talking. Jim set up the video camera and reminded her once every couple of minutes that she had the right to remain silent, making sure the camera picked it up. She’d stopped trembling and her eyes were dry. She spoke directly to Kate, standing outside the bars of the cell.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her,” she said for what was maybe the tenth time. “I just wanted her to be sick enough so we could medevac her to town. Get her out of the way so I could have a little breathing space and figure out what to do next.” She fixed Kate with the same pleading stare that hadn’t worked on Truax. “You understand, don’t you? You’ll help me make everyone else understand, won’t you?”

  Jim crooked his finger at Kate and let her take his seat opposite Haynes. In a low voice into the mike on the camera he said, “Kate Shugak, private investigator, contract employee, taking over the interrogation at”—he looked at his watch—“two fifty-four P.M.” He folded his arms and leaned against the bars.

  Haynes didn’t even notic
e the switch. Later, when her attorney pointed out that there had been nothing but circumstantial evidence against her and that all Jim had to swear out an arrest warrant was her detailed confession on videotape, she would be very sorry indeed that she had been so forthcoming. Kate was glad she didn’t have to take notes, she never would have been able to keep up.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you?” Haynes said.

  “Sure, I’ll help you,” Kate said. The image of Lyda Blue standing next to Haynes was as clear as Haynes herself, unsmiling, intent, bearing witness. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”

  It took two hours because Haynes rambled and backtracked, and because she was determined to justify every single one of her actions. Sleeping with a married man, selling core sample data, intercepting the cookies Jules made especially for Lyda, soaking them in the peanut oil she’d bought at Bingley’s store, delivering them to Lyda’s door, carrying them inside her room. Taking a seat and watching Lyda bite into the first one.

  She had seen Allen go into the admin building late one night in March. “It was the first week we were on the job,” she said in disbelief, like it should have taken longer, as if in decency Allen should have had to work up to outright theft. “Of course I figured out right away he was selling it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Truax at once?”

  “I was gathering evidence,” Haynes said. She liked the sound of that so much she said it again. “I was gathering evidence. I was going to show it to Vern when I got enough of it, when I was sure what he was doing.”

  Kate could feel Jim’s eyes on the back of her head but she didn’t turn around. “What changed your mind? Why didn’t you show it to him?”

  Haynes didn’t answer this time.

  “Did he break off your affair?”

  Haynes looked up, startled.

  “Was that why you didn’t tell him about Allen? Revenge? Stick it to him for going back to his wife?”

  “He wouldn’t divorce her,” Haynes said.

  “And you weren’t that happy about the mine anyway,” Kate said. “ ‘I’m just not sure the world needs another gold mine,’ you told me. So you decided to sabotage it by selling proprietary information to Gaea, an environmental organization with the Suulutaq on its hit list.”

  “I didn’t sell it,” Hayes said. “I never sold it.”

  “You gave it away?” How Kate kept the contempt from her face she would never know.

  “I mailed it to Gaea anonymously. They never knew who it came from. I never would have sold it for money.” Haynes looked shocked at the very suggestion. Evidently murder was an acceptable vice compared to corporate espionage.

  “You continued to, uh, steal it and give it away for free after Allen disappeared, is that correct? When did you send off your first data sample?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember.”

  “Was it April?” Kate said, thinking of the first date on Lyda’s document. “Before?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember exactly.”

  It was before, Kate thought. You were probably copying Allen’s actions from the first night you saw him. That’s why the dates were different, you were doing your thing a day or a week behind Allen, at least until he disappeared. “When did you find out Lyda Blue knew what you were doing?”

  Haynes’s eyes wandered around the cell, pausing briefly on the camera. “Something she said made me wonder. She started to come into the office earlier every morning. She watched me send in the rig reports. But then she didn’t do anything, and I figured … And then you told me she was Dewayne Gammons’s girlfriend. I knew he and Allen were friends. I panicked, I guess.” She looked at Kate, again with the big cow eyes. “I never meant to kill her, I just wanted to get her out of the way for a little while so I could think.”

  And clean up any evidence you might have left in case Lyda told Truax, Kate thought. “And so you doctored the cookies and delivered them to her door.”

  They’d found no empty peanut oil bottles in Haynes’s room or in her office upstairs in the admin building. They’d found no hard evidence of any kind, in fact, other than the dates and numbers in Lyda Blue’s hidden file. Again, Haynes was determined to explain, clarify, give painstaking details of her anxiety, her agony of mind. “I told her I wanted to talk to her about some stuff in the office, stick picker rotation, you know, busy work. It was just an excuse. I told her the cookies were from Jules. She didn’t suspect anything.”

  She looked at Kate, begging for understanding, for sympathy. “I couldn’t sleep at all that night. And then when Vern told me to check on her, and I found her like that …” She shuddered. “It was so awful. You saw how upset I was that day, didn’t you? When I came running up to the airstrip to tell Vern what had happened?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I saw. When did you buy the peanut oil, Holly?”

  Haynes looked confused.

  “The day we met, Memorial Day in Niniltna, remember? I saw you with grocery bags from Bingley Mercantile. You said that camp food no matter how good it was palled after a while, that everybody squirreled away snacks in their room. Did I see some peanut oil in one of those bags? A whole month before you used it?” She’d seen nothing of the kind, but it was worth a shot.

  “I—,” Haynes stuttered, and the expression on her face told them she was only now beginning to comprehend their lack of sympathy. And what it meant.

  “I’m going to check, Holly, but I’m betting you were on the same job with Lyda Blue the last time she had an anaphylaxis. She almost died, her father told us. You had to know how violent her reaction to the peanut oil would be.”

  “Kate.” Jim’s deep voice held a warning note.

  Kate mastered her fury and stood up. “You saw the body. Lyda Blue died hard, Holly, and I promise you, I’m going to make it my personal crusade to see that you go down for it just as hard.”

  In his office, Jim backed up the taped confession to his computer and saved it, and then he made a couple of copies just to be sure. He looked at Kate, sitting in silence across from him. Mutt was leaning up against her, offering her the comfort of her body weight and warmth, a sure sign of Kate’s mood. “You okay?”

  She took a minute to answer. “Yeah,” she said at last. She rocked her head from side to side, stretching the tension out of her neck, and knotted a hand in Mutt’s conveniently placed fur. The texture of the gray hairs, so familiar, so necessary, steadied her. She looked across at Jim, who watched her with a steady gaze without sympathy, but with all the understanding she could wish for.

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I couldn’t. But it doesn’t change the fact that Lyda Blue is dead, and I couldn’t save her.”

  He thought of Old Sam and the conversation in the woods. “You can’t save everybody, Kate.”

  She didn’t argue with him, she just changed the subject. “You going to run her into town?”

  “Hell no,” Jim said. “She can sit in the cell overnight. I’m not missing Old Sam’s barbecue.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Time to go or it’ll all be et.”

  The last thing Kate wanted to do was go to a party, but she knew it would be the best thing for her. “Can’t have that,” she said.

  His smile approved her attempt at humor. It was a start. “Your truck or mine?”

  The flowers on Old Sam’s roof had long gone to seed, but the cabin was surrounded by a field of topped-out fireweed, their stalks a deep red bank of color. Old Sam got out the weed-whacker so that the area around the barbecue was clear. The moose haunch was revolving slowly over a bed of red-hot coals. There was a trestle table laden with bowls of potato salad and coleslaw and a platter of deviled eggs, the latter Auntie Joy’s annual offering and Old Sam’s particular weakness. Another trestle table served as the bar, over which Old Sam dispensed beer from a keg, wine from a box, and single-malt to the select few who could be counted on to appreciate it with the reverence it deserved. He pull
ed Jim a beer with a fine head of foam and broke out one of a lone six-pack of Diet 7UP for Kate, rolling his eyes as he did so. “Where my rhubarb sorbet, girl?”

  Kate gaped at him. In the press of other business she’d forgotten all about it.

  That was good for a five-minute peroration on the shiftless ways of the younger generation, too lazy to wipe the oil off a dipstick, no respect for the wishes of their elders, too ignorant to know how to mash up a couple of sticks of rhubarb and dump in some sugar and probably too dumb to stick it in the freezer afterward anyway. Jim sidled off in what he imagined to be surreptitious fashion, and she was left to stand against the flood as best she could. She bent her head and hoped she looked meek enough to inspire pity. Mercy would have been too much to ask for.

  It made her feel a little better to be yelled at so comprehensively.

  It was a real Indian summer kind of evening, warm, windless, no mosquitoes, and in the affectionate presence of family and friends Kate began at last to relax. By mutual unspoken agreement she and Jim said nothing of what had happened out at the mine that day or of the prisoner incarcerated in the cell at the post. No way this evening, a stellar event in the Park year, should be eclipsed by anything so mundane as murder.

  Johnny and Van were already there, playing red rover with Katya. Kate was glad to see it because Katya was very proprietary of Johnny, and it had taken her some time to learn to share him with Van.

  Katya’s father was holding forth to the circle surrounding his wheelchair on the comparative merits of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Paul Revere & the Raiders, with some commentary on the side about the Smothers Brothers. A few steps away Bernie Koslowski, showing more life than he had in a while, was refighting the Vietnam War with Demetri Totemoff and George Perry, although Bernie had been a campus commando and Demetri and George had run through the jungle. Dinah was taping the conversation for that documentary on Vietnam War vets she’d been working on ever since her first experience of Bobby’s annual Tet Vet celebration.

  The four aunties were lined up on the bench in front of the cabin with Annie Mike, the five of them sipping paper cups full of bad box chardonnay and chattering away like four round plump brown wrens and one hot pink cockatoo. “Hi, Aunties,” Kate said, and was surprised at her own relief when all four faces lit up at the sight of her.