Mutt gave a joyous yip and raced off, he tore down the beach in hot pursuit, Kate close behind, and for the rest of the walk Johnny was just a boy playing tag with a dog and a friend.
They arrived back at the townhouse at ten-thirty, red faced and breathless. Jack greeted them at the door with a scowl. "We're going to be late. Get upstairs and into the shower. I've got a clean shirt and your good jacket laid out on your bed. Hop to it."
Johnny disappeared up the stairs and Jack transferred his scowl to Kate.
"Where the hell were you?" "I told you we were going for a walk," she said mildly, shrugging out of her coat. "Relax, Jack. Court's not in session until one o'clock, and didn't your attorney tell you the trial might be delayed a few days anyway, if the one the judge was trying on Friday dragged over?"
He shook his head. "Ganepole just called, she says today's the day." He went into the living room. Kate went into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee before following.
He was pacing back and forth in front of the picture window, hands alternately fussing with his unnaturally slicked- down hair and the knot of his tie. Kate found a seat out of the way and drank coffee. "Do you need me in court today?"
He shook his head without looking at her. "Ganepole says the testimony of the current girlfriend is too easily discredited."
"So you won't need me at all?" Kate said, relieved.
"I don't know. I don't think so. Not unless things really get ugly and we have to throw everything we've got at her. Jane, I mean."
"She wants sole custody, right?"
He nodded, pacing.
"She won't get it, Jack. She can't stop you seeing him. You're his father, and you haven't done anything wrong." He paused long enough to shoot Kate an impatient, angry look. Again, she saw through to the fear beneath. "Jane is vicious, malicious and entirely without scruple."
Kate couldn't have put it better herself.
"Who knows what she's going to say once she gets on the witness stand?
She's a good liar, Kate, the best." "Not the best," Kate said. "Johnny has never believed anything she said about you."
His brow lightened. "That's true." He stopped pacing. "That is true." He sat down next to her and rubbed his palms over the creases in his pant legs.
In ten years Kate had never seen him in anything other than blue jeans.
The suit had stretched out of shape at the shoulders from hanging so long unused in the closet. Probably where the horizontal creases in the legs came from as well. The tie, a nauseous shade of lime green, she recognized from his court appearances. The judge undoubtedly would, too.
She put a hand over his. "Jack. Relax. You're not going to do Johnny any good if you get yourself all worked up. Jane is at her best on the attack. Don't let her make you scared. And don't let her make you mad.
Tell the truth, and keep telling it. Wear her down with it."
She found herself caught in a rough embrace, his face buried between her shoulder and her neck. "I'm scared, Kate. I'm scared to death. She says she wants to move to Tucson, be near her mother. I'll never see him then." Kate pressed her cheek to his and stroked his head, one eye on the mug of coffee she still held in her left hand, trying to keep it from spilling down his back. His hands gripped her, hard, once, before he let her go. His laugh was a little shaky around the edges. "Sorry. I must really be shook."
"Don't be." "Which one?" he said with an attempt at a smile. "Sorry, or shook?"
She cupped his cheek in a brief caress. "Either."
He leaned forward as if to kiss her and the phone rang. He swore and got up to answer. "If it's Ganepole with a delay, I'll--hello? Oh, hello, Ekaterina. Yes, she's right here. Hang on." He handed the telephone to Kate.
"Hello, emaa," Kate said. "No, I've been up for hours. Johnny and Mutt and I just came back from a walk. I'm sorry, what were you saying?" A pause. "What?"
At the window, Jack became aware of a change in Kate's silence and turned to look at her. She stood with the telephone to her ear, coffee mug forgotten in her left hand, all expression wiped from her face. "All right," she said at last. "Give me the address." She scribbled it down.
"No, emaa. No. Just stay there. As soon as I know anything, I'll come tell you. Emaa. You hired me for this. Well okay, maybe not this, but you've got me on retainer, right? So let me handle it." A long pause.
"Good. All right. Yes." She hung up.
"What's wrong?" Jack said.
She looked at him and through him, intent eyes focused on some distant object. "Enakenty Barnes is dead."
Kate took Minnesota to International Airport Road and turned right. She didn't run more than three red lights and the journey was accomplished in eight minutes flat. She turned right off the frontage road, bumped over a set of railroad tracks, passed through a gate and started looking for apartment numbers.
The condominium complex was arranged in six buildings, a smaller horseshoe inside a larger one with detached garages in front of each building. Parked in the fire lane between the two buildings on the right was a blue-and-white. Behind the blue-and-white was an ambulance. Kate went past them, found a parking space and walked back down, arriving at the ambulance at the same time as the paramedics and the stretcher. On the stretcher was a covered body.
Neither of the medics was known to Kate. She took a deep breath. "Excuse me."
The medic at the head of the stretcher looked up. "Yeah?"
Kate nodded at the stretcher. "Enakenty Barnes?"
The medic at the foot of the stretcher nodded. "That's what his driver's license says."
"How'd he die?" "Broken neck," said the first medic.
"Wasn't that far a fall, but he landed wrong." The second medic demonstrated with his hands. "Spine snapped like a piece of dry wood."
"I'm a cousin," Kate said, her voice even. "I can I.D. him for you."
They exchanged a glance. The first medic shrugged and dropped the stretcher legs. The second folded back the blanket.
Enakenty's eyes were closed but he didn't look as if he were sleeping; he looked, in fact, a little puzzled, as if not quite sure how he came to be there, in that place, at that moment. That made two of them, Kate thought.
Up to this point, she had not been angry. Since she had come of age she had shunned anything to do with Association business, avoiding Native politics like the plague, so that when Ekaterina asked her to look into the board's current machinations she was able to acquiesce while remaining detached, if a little annoyed at being maneuvered into it. But as she stood there, looking down into Enakenty's lifeless face, something deep down began to stir, something very like anger.
There wasn't any blood or obvious contusion on the square face with the heavy jaw. His skin was darker than Kate remembered it, and his dark hair lighter, but that might have been the gray forming at the temples.
The last time she'd seen Enakenty Barnes was at the Class C state basketball championship in Niniltna, in March the year before. He had one kid each on the boys' and girls' teams and never missed a game. On the surface he and Martha had had one of the better marriages in the Park, although Kate thought she remembered some rumors of Enakenty playing around. It could have been true. It could just as easily not have been true, given the fact that rumor, gossip and innuendo were the only things that kept the Park going between Halloween and breakup.
Enakenty had been a good fisherman, delivering fish on his father's permit when his father's back went out, making the payments and the insurance premiums on the boat every year, taking his kids out with him, paying them a crew share. He was a responsible if unimaginative board member, never missing a meeting, fulfilling his duties and representing the shareholders without complaint. Enakenty Barnes had been an ordinary man, a regular guy, maybe even a good old boy. He wasn't anything special or extraordinary, neither a hero nor a villain. He got along with his wife, he loved his kids, he made his boat payments, he worked for his community, and now he lay dead in front of Kate, forty years be
fore his time. There was something obscene in the very sight. Her anger grew.
Sarah Kompkoff's death, alone, she might have accepted as accident. But a second board member so soon afterward, and so conveniently before one of the most important board meetings in the Association's history? Kate hated coincidences.
Iqaluk meant money for some, subsistence and a centuries-old culture for some, politically correct kudos for others. If it had meant death for Enakenty Barnes, cousin, husband, father, fisherman, tribal leader, Kate Shugak was going to know the reason why. For just a moment she let the anger flare up and beat hot and hard within her breast. She didn't let it take over, but she tasted it, got used to the flavor, felt its strength. Anger, properly contained and channeled, was a good motivator and a useful tool.
Doors slammed and the ambulance pulled away. Kate put the anger in storage somewhere down deep inside and looked around with a cool, steady, detached gaze, a cop's eye that gathered in and stored information for later retrieval and evaluation. The blue-and-white was empty. Over its roof she saw a flash of yellow, and followed it between the garages and the condos to a back yard fenced with chain link and festooned with crime scene tape. The building had three floors. The second and third floor apartments had railed balconies; the first floor had unfenced patios. The roof was steeply pitched and shingled with cedar shakes.
A police officer stood in the center of the taped-off area, next to a spray-painted outline of a body, frowning over a notepad. He looked up at the crunch of Kate's feet on dead grass. "Ma'am, you can't come--"
His eyes focused on her face and his voice changed. "Shugak? Is that you?"
"Sayles?"
He was tall and solid and looked bulkier than he was in his uniform. His face was a wedge of flesh and bone, his eyes were deep sunk beneath bushy brows and he had a smile like a piranha, all teeth and appetite.
He strolled over to the tape and raised the pencil to push her collar to one side. He tsked over the scar. "What's the matter, Shugak, you piss off somebody with a bad aim?"
She didn't move. APD Officer Steven Sayles knew the story as well as she did; he'd been first on the scene and had called in for the ambulance.
He was probably responsible for saving Kate's life. She hadn't thanked him then. She didn't now. She nodded toward the outline. "What happened?"
He looked faintly disappointed not to get a rise out of her. "You related?"
"A cousin. What happened?"
"You got here pretty fast. How'd you hear about it?"
"You called the landlord to find out who he was. He called Enakenty's wife. She called my grandmother. My grandmother called me. What happened?"
He used the pencil to point to the top balcony on the end. "A perfect ten in the Alaska Landings Swan Dive Invitational."
"Jump or pushed?" Sayles shrugged. "Any witnesses?" O'Leary shook his head. "The apartment open?" He nodded. "Mind if I take a look?" He raised a weary eyebrow and one hand, palm up, which she took for official authorization. He went back to his notepad while she went around to the front of the building. The front door was locked. There was a keypad next to the door and she pushed buttons until she got an answer. Kate identified herself as an investigator and a woman with a shaky voice buzzed her in. Two and a half flights up on the left, the door was open. Something crunched beneath her foot as she stepped inside.
The living room had a cathedral ceiling that stretched all the way up to the inside peak of the roof. The kitchen was small, the dining room smaller. There were two good-sized bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The living room had a sliding glass door, open. Kate crossed the living room and went out onto the balcony.
The overhanging eave of the roof was festooned with five different sets of wind chimes made of glass, brass and wood. They hung motionless and mute in the still air. Sayles, busy with his notepad, didn't bother to look up. The railing came to Kate's breast. She was five feet tall.
Enakenty hadn't been much more than five-three. The rough wood of the railing was spotless in a coat of smoke-gray paint. No blood stains, no broken slats, not even a footprint on the top rail. There was a barbecue filled with ash and a yellow-and-white plastic deck chair folded up in one corner. A door on the right opened into a storage closet, filled with empty boxes, firewood, a bag of charcoal, a box of Sterno logs, a bag of kitty litter and a bag of cat food.
Kate went back inside. The kitchen was completely furnished. All the cups matched the plates, the Revereware pots all had lids that fit and the white plastic utensils looked fresh out of Costco. The refrigerator contained a loaf of white bread, a package of English muffins, a half gallon of two percent milk, a carton of eggs, a two-pound block of Tillamook Extra Sharp, a pound of bacon, a pound of pork sausage, a pound of butter and a jar of strawberry preserves. There were two whole pineapples. The date on the milk said it was good for ten more days. The jar of preserves hadn't been cracked. Neither had any of the eggs. There was a pound of unopened Kona Macadamia Nut coffee from the Lion Coffee Company in Honolulu in the freezer.
The guest bedroom was empty but for a full-size bed, a nightstand and a lamp. A copy of Donald Trump's autobiography was on the nightstand. A copy of Lee lacocca's was on the shelf beneath. The closets were empty.
The adjacent bathroom was immaculate.
Down the hall in the master bedroom, one half of the closet was given over to what Kate presumed were Enakenty's clothes. There weren't many of them, half a dozen plaid shirts, two pairs of Levis, three T-shirts with Crazy Shirts Hawaiian logos and a pair of bermuda shorts with neon fish swimming across them. The other half of the closet was so empty it echoed. The bed was made. Kate stripped back the covers and sniffed the sheets. They smelled like soap, and from the creases looked just put on that day. She looked for and couldn't find the used sheets.
The master bathroom was bare but for a single toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap and a set of plush towels that matched the set in the guest bathroom.
Kate had stayed in Holiday Inns with more warmth and charm.
She came out of the bathroom and a spot of color behind the bedroom door caught her eye. She swung the door wide. On the floor behind it was a tiny puddle of red silk, which when Kate held it up seemed even less substantial than it had on the floor. It looked like a delicate lace bra with a pair of panties attached, of a size to fit a skinny thirteen year-old. The last time she looked, Enakenty's wife Martha had been a robust thirty-seven.
Kate's hands felt large and clumsy holding the scrap of silk and lace, and she dropped it back down on the floor for Sayles to find and inventory.
Something crunched underfoot in the entryway off the front door again, and this time she stooped to look at it. Tiny grains of some white, rocklike substance, like they put in aquariums, only smaller and lighter. She wet a forefinger and picked up a couple and took them out to the balcony. The grains inside the bag of kitty litter matched those on the floor of the entryway. She bent over to sniff at the floor, and caught a faint whiff of old urine.
She went downstairs. There was a slender blonde just going out the front door. "Excuse me, ma'am?" Kate called from the landing. "Could you hold up a minute?"
The blonde was slender and pale with big blue eyes that looked on the verge of bursting into tears. She couldn't have been more than nineteen.
She had moved into the bottom right condo the previous week, she was renting from the owner, she had just finished her training at Reeve Aleutian Airways, she was beginning a new job as a flight attendant the next day, this was her first very own apartment and she didn't know why this had to happen to her. Kate refrained from pointing out that it hadn't happened to her, it had happened to Enakenty, and said, "Did you see anything, Ms. Coffey?"
"No, I didn't, I got home from Carr's just after. There was an ambulance and everything. It was awful." She sniffled. "Why is this happening to me? Everything was so perfect! Why did this have to happen to me?"
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell Page 7
