Kate raised her brows. "Bribery?" She looked at Gamble again for confirmation and he nodded. "Extortion?" Gamble hesitated, then nodded again. "Fraud? Maybe even racketeering?" A third nod.
Kate's heart thudded once, high up in her chest. How much money were they talking about? Enough so that the threat of its loss would provoke someone to murder? She smiled again at the federal agent, putting her elbows on the arms of her chair and steepling her fingers to look at him over them. "My goodness me. Could we possibly be talking about tax evasion, too?" There was no hesitation this time, the nod was prompt, definite and vigorous. Oh God, emaa, she thought, what have we gotten ourselves into here? "Well," she said in a cheery voice, "is it time to call in the IRS?" Jack said to Gamble, "None of what you find here tonight is going to be admissible in court. You don't have a warrant, do you?" The Fibbie opened his mouth and Jack said, "It would be easy enough for me to find out."
There was a pause. Jack, Kate and Mutt waited expectantly for the answer. "No," Gamble said reluctantly, "I don't have a warrant."
"So you're here on a fishing expedition," Jack said. "Why the bear went round the mountain," Kate agreed, "to see what he could see."
"You're looking for something to pursue that will lead to a discovery of legitimate evidence," Jack said.
"Morgan's Second Law," Kate murmured, avoiding Jack's eye. "Which legitimate evidence in turn will lead to a prosecutable case, with enough big names in it, perhaps, to merit Agent Gamble a promotion?"
"Not a promotion," Jack said, staring at Gamble through narrowed eyes,
"or not only. A transfer. Agent-in-charge somewhere warm."
Gamble's mouth opened and shut, but nothing came out. His chagrin was so obvious that in spite of her worries Kate had difficulty in not laughing out loud. Jack had no such reservations. He grinned widely.
"A laudable objective," Kate said loyally, rushing to Gamble's rescue.
"Snow and ice and twenty below aren't for everyone, Jack."
Gamble sent her a grateful look.
"Tell me, Gamble," Jack said irrepressibly, "where do you want to be stationed? Miami, maybe?"
Gamble shuddered. "No way. Too hot, and I don't mean the weather."
"You want D. C.?"
"No." Gamble shook his head. "Too many people scrambling for the same piece of pie."
"Where, then?"
He mumbled an answer, and Kate said, "I beg your pardon?"
"Omaha."
"Omaha, Nebraska?" This time Jack avoided Kate's eye.
In a kind of a furious mutter Gamble said, "My wife's family is there."
He read their silence correctly and said defiantly, "It'll be good for the kids, they'll be close to their grandparents and all."
"Of course they will," Kate said warmly. "Omaha." She cast about wildly for something, anything appropriate to say. "Don't they have great beef in Omaha?"
Gamble seized on it gratefully. "It's one of the meat packing capitals of the world."
"There you are then." Her smile held more than a bit of steel and all of it for Jack. Heroicly, he swallowed his laughter and rubbed his hands together. "Well, shall we get started?"
"
"We?" " said FBI Agent Gamble.
"There are an awful lot of files here," Kate said with persuasive charm.
"With three of us looking, it will take less time to go through them."
Gamble considered her. Jack said, "We're not trying to horn in on your case, Gamble. Kate's here on a family matter, and I'm just along for the ride." "What family matter?" Gamble said, retaining just enough wit to be suspicious of any such thing, and coming far too late to the recognition that he had imparted a great deal of information without receiving any in return. J. Edgar would have cashiered him on the spot.
Jack again left this to Kate, who met Gamble's eyes with the frank, open expression of a born liar. "Well, Mr. Gamble, it's like this." She leaned forward and dropped her voice, giving Gamble the impression she was imparting a secret so closely held that only he was worthy to share it. "Raven Corporation, that is, my regional native corporation, has a great deal of construction going on at this time, and given Dischner's reputation my grandmother has become concerned that dealings with him might taint our organization." Kate sat back and spread her hands. "She asked me to look into it." She smiled. "So here I am."
Gamble followed all of this closely, his mouth open in concentration.
"That's quite a story."
Kate thought so, too, considering she'd just made it up this minute.
Really, she thought, remembering the Susitna story she'd whipped up for Johnny, she was getting awfully good at this. Maybe even dangerously good at it.
Gamble hesitated.
"We'd better get a move on before the cleaning staff gets here," Kate said.
"They've already been and gone," Gamble said, making up his mind. "I had one of my people check on their schedule for me." "What about the building alarm?" Jack said. "I thought I disabled it on the way in, but you'd fixed it already, hadn't you?"
Gamble gave a superior smile. "One of my people took care of it this afternoon." Jack said to Kate, "I just love working with the federal government, don't you?"
The three of them rose to their feet. Behind Gamble's back, Jack mouthed, "Great beef in Omaha?"
Kate ignored him and followed Gamble into the file room next door.
Those files were extensive, covering nearly forty years of Dischner shenanigans and a multitude of sins. He sat on the boards of at least two local banks, had a controlling interest in a real estate firm, was a silent partner in the ex-governor's hotel and had percentages of oil leases from Cook Inlet to Prudhoe Bay. Gamble went from one file to another, uttering little cries of delight. Jack followed more slowly, looking for evidence less white collar in nature. He would have sacrificed a goat to Bacchus for the opportunity to charge Edgar P.
Dischner, attorney-at-law and officer of the court, confidant of congressmen, senators and governors, with a felony and have the evidence to make it stick. He remembered a couple of trials with him on one side and Dischner on the other, and manufacturing evidence, suborning material witnesses and jury tampering leapt to mind as likely possibilities.
Kate, operating on the proven theory that in any office the secretary did all the work, went into the office on the other side of Dischner's and turned on the computer on the desk. She hadn't worked a computer in years, and had to ask Jack for help. The password was easy, the name of Dischner's chner's first client for his first jury trial in an Alaskan court. It was Jack's inspiration, who had Dischner's client history memorized, and she was in without fuss. After that, it was a simple matter of calling up the directory, C-prompt DIR, and the screen scrolled rapidly upward with all the information anyone bent on felonious entry could wish for.
One of the files listed in the directory was labeled, helpfully,
"Files." Kate accessed it and found the office's current case load, indexed twice, alphabetically by client name and chronologically by court date. Kate leaned over to turn on the printer.
Jack stuck his head out to look at her, his hands filled with file folders. "You're cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West."
Kate looked like the Wicked Witch when she smiled. "I'll get you yet, my pretty."
He gave an elaborate shudder and disappeared, looking not displeased himself.
Two of the largest files were Pacific Northwest Paper Products and UCo.
She debated for a moment and accessed a smaller file to see how it was organized. It was basically a diary of events, and it included a code number. She looked at the number in silence for a few moments, and then got up and went into the file room and found the corresponding number on one of the many file drawers in the cabinet that was built into the wall. She had to stand on a footstool to reach the right drawer, but when she got it open the folder was right in front. Kate felicitated Dischner on his most practical and efficient secretary. She just hoped he paid
her enough.
She went back to the computer and exited to the directory, starred the PNP and UCo files and waited for the printer. It hummed, and a minute later sucked up a sheet of paper from the feeder tray. She sat back with her feet up on the desk and scrolled more leisurely through the directory. She knew a moment of cold satisfaction when she found Arctic Investors, and gave the command to print it, too.
She thought again how wonderful modern technology was. If she ever met Stephen Jobs she would kiss him on the lips. In the meantime, not one to pass up an opportunity, she pulled a folded and much-creased envelope from her hip pocket and reached for the phone. Harry and David's 800 number, like Eddie Bauer's, answered twenty-four hours a day. Jane sent a year's supply of fruit to her mother, to Jane's boss, whose name Kate got out of the listing of federal numbers in the phone book, and to Archbishop Francis T. Hurley of the Catholic Archdiocese of Anchorage.
Everybody needs brownie points, Kate thought, replacing the phone secure in the sense of a necessary job well done. Really, she was doing Jane a favor, getting her in good with family, employer and God.
She lingered for a few moments over the federal listings in the phone book, remembering that copy machine in Johnny's bedroom at Jane's house.
The next call was to the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.
Unfortunately, Elliott Bay lacked twenty-four-hour phone service. Kate put the phone down with sincere regret. She felt that Jane ought to have something appropriate to go along with the drawer full of underwear, say, the collected works of A.N. Roquelaure. Or maybe the Marquis de Sade. Why not both? She gave the phone a consoling pat. Next time.
The printer stopped chattering. She exited the computer, turned it off, reloaded the printer's paper tray and turned it off, too. Using the printout of file codes, she located the file drawer holding the paperwork on Arctic Investors. It held a lot of local addresses attached to numbers, mortgages and payments, repairs and maintenance, assets and expenses, profit and loss, but what it boiled down to was that the company had been formed in 1986 by Dischner and various partners, whose names were obscured by titles like Alaska Estates, Inc. Its primary assets were more than two hundred condominiums located in the Anchorage Bowl area. From the date and the listed assets, Kate deduced that the purpose of the company was to take advantage of the real estate bust that had flattened Anchorage in the mid-eighties. At that time there had been massive layoffs in the oil industry, and hundreds of people had quite literally walked away from their homes, most of them packing up their families and heading back Outside to look for work. Local banks, who had loaned bad money after good in the overpriced, ever escalating real estate market, were left holding entire vaults full of worthless paper, and said banks folded right and left. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had stepped in, consolidated half a dozen of the banks and put the properties up for sale at forty cents on the dollar.
Arctic Investors had formed a cash consortium and promptly bought them, created an in-house estate management agency to act as landlord, and rented them out. They had made out like bandits on their initial investment, according to the figures in the files, especially since the vacancy rate in Anchorage had shrunk to one percent over the last two years.
She looked in the next drawer down. It was a deep drawer, nearly four feet in length, and it included the entire working files of the management agency. Right there in Dischner's office, when he himself not four hours before had denied all knowledge of any such business. Who says there's no God? Kate thought contentedly.
What she found most interesting was the rental agreement signed by Enakenty Barnes. Dated December 1 of the previous year, Alaska Landings unit A304 was currently renting for $250 a month. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a heated garage for $250 a month in a town with a one percent vacancy rate seemed a little on the cheap side. She looked around the office for a newspaper and didn't find one. Never mind, Jack subscribed; she could look at it when they got home.
It didn't matter. She knew now that Dischner and Enakenty were connected, and to Enakenty's financial advantage. Poor emaa. She'd had even fewer votes on the board than she'd thought.
Neither Sarah Kompkoff nor Billy Mike's names had surfaced yet in Dischner's computer or in his files, which relieved her, but then Harvey Meganack's hadn't either, which seemed even less likely than Enakenty's $250 rent. Kate pondered that interesting fact for a few moments.
Somebody had paid for Harvey's new house and Harvey's new watch, and Kate was pretty sure it wasn't Harvey, a Prince William Sound fisherman whose livelihood had been hurt like everyone else's by the devastation of the RPetco Anchorage spill. Of course, just because Harvey's name wasn't in the computer didn't mean he wasn't connected to Dischner.
An unwelcome thought intruded. If that could be said about Harvey, it could be said about Billy, too. Her heart sank. It could even be said about Sarah. Before she went down for the third time in that slough of despond, she brought herself back from the ephemeral realm of speculation into the concrete kingdom of fact. She knew from personal observation that Harvey was connected to Lew Mathisen, and Lew Mathisen was omnipresent in Dischner's files, even turning out, upon investigation, to be a major shareholder in Pacific Northwest Paper. She located the PNP file and browsed through it. On one of the PNP documents a reference to UCo was made in conjunction with his name. Kate returned the file, closed the drawer, consulted her list, said "Excuse me" to Gamble, head down in a file drawer himself, and walked around him to open another.
The UCo drawer, or drawers, as might be expected, were jammed with construction contracts. Kate concentrated on contracts in her neck of the woods. There were plenty to concentrate on. Sewers in Niniltna and half a dozen other villages, a dock in Cordova, a wastewater plant in Ahtna-Good God. Here was a job paving, curbing and signing Katalla's streets, which would have sounded like routine maintenance to anyone who didn't know that Katalla had only one street, and that one went from the only bar in town to the small boat harbor. A million and a half dollars for a couple of hundred feet of fill and pavement, a couple of hundred yards of cement for curbs--no sidewalks, however, or none mentioned--and two stop signs. Kate began to think she was in the wrong line of work.
Katalla. She raised her head, staring off into the distance with a frown. Something tickled at the back of her mind, something about Katalla, something she had known once and forgotten. She searched after it but it eluded her, vanishing into the wispy fog of memory and time.
Making an involuntary frustrated sound, at which neither Gamble nor Jack so much as twitched, she bent over the files again. All of the contracts were written in legalese, but after she got past the requisite amounts of whereases and whyfors and thereats, they all had two significant features in common: Each contract was for a project in a town or village in the Alaskan bush with a large Alaska Native population, and each one had been written by or under the legal oversight of the well-known law firm of Dischner, Rousch and Ford, known familiarly to the local populace as Huckster, Shyster and Finagle.
Kate had a thought and went back through the contracts one more time, looking at signature pages. Each of the contracts regarding a prospective project within the authority of the Niniltna Native Association, as was required by association bylaws, had been approved by an Association board member. This would have been fine, except for the fact that there were five board members, and only three signatures showed up on the contracts, those of Harvey Meganack and Enakenty Barnes.
And Billy Mike.
Kate closed her eyes and swore, once and thoroughly, to herself. She opened her eyes again and flipped through the contracts one more time, running a rough total in her mind. She couldn't believe the result, and ran it through again. It came out the same. She thought of Enakenty Barnes, and of motive for murder. She had motive now.
Gamble was breathing heavily down her neck so she turned over the files and moved off to open another drawer at random, not really looking at what was in it. She remember
ed, with an inward shudder, the gold nugget watch with the rams' heads on Harvey Meganack's wrist. She wondered again who had paid for Harvey's new house. She wondered if Pacific Northwest Paper made other wood products. She wondered if Pacific Northwest Paper made other building products. She wondered if Pacific Northwest Paper maybe contracted out for construction work, and construction work in town as well as in the bush.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell Page 17
