Kate walked in. “I always feel like I’m entering the sanctum sanctorum when she ushers me in here.”
Kurt Pletnikof was already around his own desk, arms outspread.
“Oof,” Kate said, her voice muffled in his chest.
He beamed down at her. “I didn’t know you were in town.”
Her ribs appeared to be intact. “I didn’t know I was going to be in town.”
His gaze sharpened. “You on a case?”
“I’m with Jim, and he is.”
“Ah. The usual, then. Want some coffee?”
“Just came from breakfast.”
Kurt found half a stick of pepperoni for Mutt and the three of them retired to the seating area meant for privileged guests, or well-heeled clients.
The office, inner and outer, showed the hand of an interior decorator who worked for pay and not for love. A symphony in maroon and gray with teak grace notes, Kurt’s corner office looked through adjacent windows onto Knik Arm, and summer mornings made it glow with an especially rich and tactile light. The desk was arranged across one corner, with the seating area in the opposite corner and sets of file drawers between. There were a few paintings perfectly spaced on the walls between the windows and the various pieces of furniture. “Aren’t those new?” she said.
Kurt nodded. “Don’t worry, we didn’t buy them, they’re on loan.”
“Who from?”
He saw her expression and laughed. “I didn’t take them in lieu of payment, if that’s what you’re worried about.
“Maybe a little.”
“There’s an art gallery a couple of blocks over. The owner and I have, ah, an arrangement.”
Indicating that the paintings, unlike the interior decoration, might be there for love. Diplomatically, Kate refrained from comment but made a mental note to check out the gallery and the owner. There was a large art book on the coffee table featuring classical statuary. She opened to a page at random, and found a marble tear coursing down a marble cheek. “Quite a figure on Persephone there,” she said. “No wonder Hades got a yen.”
Kurt leaned back, linking his hands behind his head. “Most of my clients are wealthy men. Wealthy men like looking at pictures of naked women they think they might one day be able to afford to buy.”
Kate closed the book and scanned the cover. “I doubt there are any Berninis on the market at present,” she said.
“The illusion, then,” Kurt said, shrugging.
Kate sat back in her turn and looked at him. Like her, Kurt Pletnikof was a Park rat, a second or maybe a third cousin by way of one of the aunties. Their first meaningful interaction had involved half a dozen gall bladders from poached Park grizzlies and a hatchet. That was, what, three, almost four years ago now. She’d essentially blue-ticketed him out of the Park, and he wound up on the soup line at Bean’s Cafe in Anchorage, where she’d found him again and hired him at minimum wage to do a little freelance investigatory work on an ongoing case.
It had been an action instigated, she admitted to herself, mostly by her own guilt. He was hungry and homeless and it was useless to tell herself that his own actions were responsible for putting him in that soup line. To the surprise of them both, he’d been good at investigative work. More, he liked it. When he got out of the hospital, she had bankrolled him as a silent partner and he had opened up his own one-man agency. He’d taken some computer courses at the University of Alaska Anchorage and discovered a real gift for cybercrime.
Pinkerton North, Jim called them, but even he was respectful of Kurt’s results. The first year he’d done a great many background checks, divorce cases, and missing persons work, but the second year he’d scored a major coup by solving a commercial embezzlement case, and this year he’d helped the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Task Force bust an Internet child pornography ring operating out of Wasilla. This had brought him to the attention of Alaska’s major players, who so far as Kate could tell, appeared to spy on one another as a matter of standard business practice. They were also in constant need of discovering who among their own had leaked what to whom. The Native corporations were especially happy to be able to hire an Alaska Native for their PI work. Kate lived in daily expectation of hearing that Kurt had hired on anywhere from one to twenty associates and was building his own forensics lab.
The year before, he’d acquired Agrifina Fancyboy, a girl from Chuathbaluk, found on the same soup line at Bean’s that Kate had found Kurt on. Agrifina displayed a dedicated professionalism, inspired by, Kate suspected, a terror of being forced back to the village. Sort of like Kate’s cousin Axenia, who had married up and now resided in one of the nicer subdivisions in Anchorage, and who lived the determined life of the perfect suburban wife and mother with the same kind of motivated ferocity Agrifina projected on the job at Pletnikof Investigations.
Kate surveyed Kurt with no little satisfaction, and perhaps a little smugness, and maybe even a little gratitude. She’d been too much a student of the human condition for trust to come easy to her. Kurt Pletnikof had proved the exception to that rule.
So far.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. “Got your most recent report on Erland.”
He nodded.
“Not a lot going on there.”
He nodded.
“Which we both know is bullshit.”
He nodded. “Indeed we do.” Erland Bannister was the proximate cause of putting Kurt in the hospital after their first case together. “On the face of it, he’s into rehabilitation and redemption, big time, starting with putting his money where his mouth is. He’s investing locally, in everything from a photographer’s book project on Kickstarter—five hundred dollars—to an A and P school in Kodiak—fifty thousand dollars—to a minority stake in a new natural gas project west of Beluga—five million dollars. He’s bought into a local film production studio.”
“Is Gabe McGuire a partner?” Kate said.
Kurt’s eyes widened at her sharp tone. “Not that I know of. Why?”
“No reason,” Kate said, and relented when Kurt raised an eyebrow. “I met McGuire on that case in Newenham last winter. He knows Erland, and he’s in the film business.”
“Erland Bannister knows many people, Kate.”
She nodded, and made a come-along motion with her hand.
“He’s started a nonprofit foundation, the Bannister Foundation,” Kurt said, consulting his notes, “and is funding all sorts of charitable projects all over the state. He attends fund-raisers for the University of Alaska–Anchorage, Alaska public radio, Standing Together Against Rape, the YWCA, and the Kenai Classic, and he’s bidding often enough and high enough in their live auctions to win a ten-day cruise up the Inside Passage on someone’s private yacht. He’s managed to get himself on half a dozen boards, had his photo taken at Gore Point picking up Japanese tsunami debris, and—you’ll love this—he ran in the Heart Run in April, placed sixth in his age group, and raised thirteen thousand dollars for the American Heart Association from his sponsors.”
“He’s running competitively in three-mile races?” Kate said. “The guy’s as old as Bilbo Baggins.”
“I know. At this rate, he’ll be burying us all.”
She looked at him.
“Allow me to rephrase that,” he said.
“Never mind,” she said. “Any mention of the Bannister Foundation funding an airplane for the Flying Pastor in the Park?”
“Really?” Kurt said. “I hadn’t heard. They finally replaced Father Fred?”
“With Anne Flanagan, and financed her new plane while they were at it.”
“I’ll check, but it sounds like just the kind of project the Bannister Foundation is most fond of: small, local, and religious. Up, swish, score.”
“Anything else?”
He shrugged. “I did like you said, I haven’t crowded him, or stepped over any lines. It hasn’t been all that difficult.”
“How’s that?”
“This all-new and improved Erland Bannister
evidently never met a reporter he didn’t like. From what I hear, no journalist or blogger is able to get out of the way fast enough to avoid interviewing him. And,” he added, “whenever the subject of his trial and conviction on conspiracy to murder comes up, he doesn’t proclaim his innocence.”
“No?”
“Heavens, no. He shakes his head and looks sad, and talks about bad choices and unfortunate coincidences. He never says a mean word about APD or the district attorney’s office, and he always ends with a hymn to family values, especially his own, and a reference to his family’s long residence in the state of Alaska.”
“I bet his sister just loves that.”
“She doesn’t say anything one way or another. So far as I can tell, Victoria Muravieff regards herself as an only child.”
Kate was silent, examining the middle distance with a slight frown.
“What,” Kurt said.
She looked up. “Misdirection.”
“Watch this hand,” Kurt said, “so you don’t see what this hand is doing.”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m with you. Just because you’re paranoid about Erland Bannister doesn’t mean he isn’t out to get you.”
“But?”
“But…” It was his turn to frown. “He’s boxing you in, Kate.”
“Look at me, says Erland,” Kate said. “Look how squeaky clean I am now, what a good citizen I am. See all the good things I do, all the good causes I support.”
Kurt nodded. “How could you possibly believe all those mean things that woman said about me?”
“She was uninformed, mistaken, confused,” Kate said.
“Oh yeah,” Kurt said, “she just didn’t understand.”
“Might even be a little crazy,” Kate said.
“At the very least on the rag.”
“If he’s going to this much trouble to look this good,” Kate said.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Kurt said. “You want me to really get into it?”
She thought about it. “Wait,” she said.
“For what?”
She met his eyes. “For when I really need you to.”
He hesitated, and then let her turn the conversation to current cases being run by the firm. “One other thing,” he said when she got up to leave.
“What?”
He went to a cabinet and extracted a plain buff file folder. “You wanted this.”
She took it. He watched her open it and scan the contents.
She closed it again without surprise. “Thanks, Kurt.”
“Did you know?” he said.
“I suspected. Why I had you check for me.”
“You going to talk to him?”
“Probably not.”
He was surprised and showed it.
“He’s not breaking any laws, Kurt. The Supreme Court says money is speech.”
She spoke evenly, without emphasis or anger. He looked at her closely but she had that impenetrable Shugak mask on, the same one that had made anyone who tried to cross her grandmother think twice and maybe three times. There was never any knowing what was going on behind it, until the wearer cared to communicate their feelings. And then you were left in no doubt, if you were left standing at all.
He looked at Mutt, who had stood up when Kate opened the folder. Her yellow eyes were intent on Kate, her tail motionless.
Kurt Pletnikof thought how grateful he was not to be Demetri Totemoff.
Seventeen
FRIDAY, JULY 13, EARLY AFTERNOON
Niniltna
They were well into the Park when Jim banked left.
“Where we going?” Kate said.
“Want to show you something,” he said.
She was silent until she realized they were coming up on the homestead. She smiled. “The scenic route home?”
“Partly,” he said. They lost altitude until the tops of the remaining trees looked close enough to clean the gear. She saw the ridgeline of the house first, and the reflection of the sun off the windows nearly blinded her.
Mutt thrust a muzzle over Kate’s shoulder and left a big wet nose print on the glass. She gave a long interrogatory whine. “Patience, girlfriend,” Kate said. “No parachutes your size.”
Jim flew past the house and the outbuildings, over the big, flattened erratic at the top of the cliff, and banked right to follow Zoya Creek north. The ground rose and the Cessna rose with it. A few moments later, Kate saw the adit to the Lost Wife Mine and the rough zigzig trail that led up the cliff face to it. Jim banked right again and flew a wide circle, tilting the plane so that he and Kate could both look out his window. She leaned forward to see past him. “What?” she said.
“There’s an old airstrip down there,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “When the mine was being worked, they used it to fly in supplies. I never maintained it, and so far as I know, neither did my father, so it’s pretty overgrown now.”
He straightened out the plane and headed back down the creek toward the homestead. “It’s about half a mile from the homestead by air.”
“A bit less,” she said.
“And it’s on the right side of the creek, so we wouldn’t need a bridge.”
She raised her eyebrows. “No.”
He jerked his head at Mutt. “If we had our own airstrip, we could be home in fifteen minutes instead of a couple of hours. And I could respond from home a lot quicker.”
She digested this. “It’s an idea,” she said finally, cautious as always with any suggested changes on her home ground.
“A good idea? A bad one?”
“Don’t rush me.” She pointed. “See that?”
He was content to have planted the seed and let her change the subject. He banked left and right again, serpentining. “Looks like an old trail. Really old. I never would have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out.”
“Cat trails never die in Alaska.”
“What was it?”
She sat back. “An old prospector’s trail, or a federal surveyor’s, or maybe even an alternate route scoped out by the Kanuyaq Mine developers back in the day. Maybe all of the above, in sequence. Old Sam said it dead-ended somewhere up the other side of the Step.”
“Ever follow it?”
She chose to tell only part of the truth. “Ethan and I found it one summer and as I recall got about a hundred feet before we decided flying was a far more efficient means of locomotion.”
He laughed and banked right to find the Park road. He followed it into Niniltna, the river on their right, the rolling, descending foothills of the Quilaks on their left, and the blue-white fangs of the Quilaks before them. Jim raised Chugach Air Taxi’s office on the radio, speaking clearly and distinctly in hopes of alerting anyone else who might also be approaching Niniltna in an aircraft. Niniltna airstrip wasn’t exactly Merrill Field, not yet anyway, but good pilots were natural conservatives, as well as ever alive to the undeniable fact that not all pilots were created equal. He clicked back to headset audio. “You know my father left me some money.”
She knew, and she also knew that “some money” was an understatement. “You’re going to buy an airplane, aren’t you.”
He grinned. “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery, Shugak.”
“Promise me,” she said, not joking, “promise me you’ll stop at one.”
He looked at her in well-simulated surprise. “Why, what would I do with more than one airplane?”
“Exactly,” she said. “You can only fly one at a time.”
“Of course,” he said, wounded.
Right, Kate thought.
They approached the outskirts of the village. Herbie Topkok was in his driveway, bent over an ATV, and straightened up to wave at them. Jim waggled his wings in response. A few minutes later, they were on the ground and rolling to a stop. “No,” he said as the prop slowed and stopped, “I don’t want a second airplane. But I’m going to want my own hangar.”
She unbuckl
ed her seat belt and nodded across the runway at Chugach Air Taxi. “George is building another. Rent space from him.”
“The state is going to, for this airplane.”
“Oh,” Kate said. “You mean you want a hangar out at the homestead strip, for your own.”
“I hate getting in a cold airplane,” Jim said, pulling off his headset and opening the door. Mutt squeezed between his shoulder and the airframe and took the distance to the ground in a single graceful leap.
Jim and Kate followed more sedately.
“Not only an airstrip, but an airplane, and a hangar, too.” Kate handed him her headset and he pulled his pilot’s bag from the back and tucked them inside.
“Think how much quicker we’d be home if we fly,” he said.
Which would mean we wouldn’t have to drive, Kate thought, except for bringing in the big stuff. She remembered Paul and Alice and the vision of herself at the controls of a Caterpillar D9 tractor, pushing up a mound of dirt to block the trail between her homestead and the Park road.
“Well,” she said, helping him push the plane back to its tiedowns, “it’s an idea.”
He looked up to see the smile in her eyes. “What?”
“Back at HQ,” she said, “did you go upstairs to ask for another trooper for Niniltna?”
They went to opposite wings. They would be in the air again shortly, but you never anticipated a calm day in Alaska staying that way for longer than five minutes. Jim was never going to be the guy who came out to check on his aircraft only to find it had flipped in a gust of wind because it hadn’t been properly tied down. He paid more attention to the overhand knot than it perhaps deserved and chose his words with care. “Well, I don’t want a VPSO.”
She came around the tail. “You’re dictating terms?”
He looked up to see that the smile in her eyes had moved to her lips.
“How much was it your father left you, again?”
* * *
At the post, Maggie, Jim’s dispatcher, was looking no more harried than usual, fielding 911 calls about drunks, vandalism, and sexual harassment. “Boss,” she said when they walked in, “we need help.”
“I know,” he said. “I talked to the Lord High Everything Else this morning. I think we’ll be getting another trooper out of the next graduating class, and maybe even two.”
Bad Blood Page 15
