No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  He sighed and recrossed his legs so he could fuss with his other crease. “Very well, Ms. Shugak. I represent the living trust of the late Erland Bannister, which was filed in probate shortly before he died in November. As such it is my duty to inform you that he named you his primary trustee.”

  “Holy shit,” Kurt said, startled out of his imitation of the Sphinx.

  Hutchinson ignored him, watching Kate. There was a trace of amusement in his expression, but no uncertainty. He was for some reason sure of her acceptance.

  Kate looked back at him and found absolutely nothing to say. Or to think, for that matter. Her mind was a complete blank. Until this moment she had thought the letter an elaborate joke, but there was something about Hutchinson, as much of a caricature lawyer as he was, that told her this was anything but. She knew a sudden and fervent wish that she and Mutt were sledding up to Canyon Hot Springs to help Jim and George search for body parts in the snow.

  Hutchinson opened his briefcase (it was lined with black silk, Kate noticed) and extracted a file. He held it out to her. “This document contains the particulars, Ms. Shugak. I’ve included my card. Please call with any questions you might have.” He shut the case and stood up.

  “Wait a minute,” she said.

  “Yes?” He appeared to be enjoying himself. It made her distrust him all the more. “Did Erland discuss naming me as his trustee with you?”

  “I’m afraid that comes under the heading of attorney–client privilege, Ms. Shugak.”

  Kurt snorted.

  “I don’t know anything about being a trustee,” she said, “but I know enough to know that I don’t want to be Erland’s trustee.”

  Hutchinson cocked his head. His expression didn’t change but she thought he was disappointed. “That is of course your prerogative, Ms. Shugak.”

  “I can refuse?”

  “You can,” he said. “Personally, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s a great deal of work for often ungrateful people. No person of means ever leaves their property in such a way as pleases everyone they leave behind.”

  Kate could hear the relief in her own voice. “Then I refuse.”

  “As you wish.” He turned to go.

  “Wait,” Kate said.

  Hutchinson paused, and took just a fraction of a second too long to turn back to face her. “Yes?” There was an underlying tension to the word, faint but there if you were paying attention, and Kate was. There was an expression in his eyes of what looked like triumph, like he’d just won a bet.

  A bet with a dead man?

  “Kate,” Kurt said, a warning note in his voice.

  “What happens if I refuse? Is there another—a secondary trustee named in Erland’s will?”

  He looked down and tugged at the hem of his vest. “Are you refusing to serve as the trustee for Erland’s estate, Ms. Shugak?”

  She thought it over. “Ah,” she said after a moment. “I see. If I refuse to serve as trustee, you have no responsibility to inform me of any provisions Erland made.”

  A small smile curled the corners of his mouth.

  Kate got to her feet. “I imagine I have some time to make up my mind. I’ll be in touch.”

  Something changed in the atmosphere of Kurt’s office then, nothing she could put a name to, but she saw by Kurt’s expression that he felt it, too. It was as if someone had opened the window and invited the winter inside. She heard Mutt stand up behind her. She didn’t growl, but then she didn’t have to.

  To his credit Hutchinson kept his eyes on Kate. Only a moment passed before he extended his hand again. Again Kate took it. This time he stepped in, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face. She looked up at him and smiled. From the corner of her eye she saw Kurt flinch and this time Mutt did growl.

  “You’re in my space,” Kate said, her voice very soft. “Back up.” She helped him by using his hand as a lever to physically push him. He stepped back before it became obvious that his moving was her idea, and then fell back another pace to allow her to pass.

  “You are everything Erland said you were, Ms. Shugak.”

  “I don’t take that as a compliment, Mr. Hutchinson.”

  When the door closed behind her and Mutt he gave a low whistle. “That is one no-bullshit woman.” He grinned. “I like her.”

  Kurt studied him for a long moment. “Yeah. Just tell me where to send the flowers for your funeral.”

  Hutchinson laughed.

  Kurt did not.

  Agrifina Fancyboy was sitting at her desk, attired in a magenta two-piece button-down suit that beat Hutchinson’s for tailoring. Her hair was pulled back into a neat chignon, her makeup was flawless, her manicure fresh out of the box, and she looked like a cross between Awkwafina in Crazy Rich Asians and Lauren Bacall in anything. “I’ll be right back,” Kate said, because truth to tell Kurt’s secretary slash fiancée intimidated the hell out of her.

  She stepped out into the hallway and headed for the ladies room, checking both stalls before she got out her phone. She dialed a number. It picked up on the first ring. “Brendan?”

  “Kate Shugak, as I live and breathe! And I see you are doing both, which always makes my day. What can I do you for?” His voice sank into something dangerously close to a purr. “Or just do you?”

  “Something weird just happened and I need your advice. Can I buy you lunch?”

  He definitely purred this time. “You do speak my language, Ms. Shugak. You downtown? Good, Simon’s, ten minutes.”

  “You need an estate attorney for the real skinny,” Brendan said, digging into his first order of a dozen oysters on the half shell and washing it down with the best Sauvignon Blanc on offer. Of course, that was after he lectured the server at length on the iniquity of not having a muscadet on the wine list. It was going to be an expensive consult, she could see that, and Brendan was going to need a clean tie afterward, and possibly a clean shirt as well.

  “I don’t know an estate attorney,” Kate said. “I know you. Tell me what you know. If I need more, I’ll ask for a referral.”

  He sprinkled Tabasco with a lavish hand and gulped and grinned. “Fine by me. A trustee, you say?”

  “Yes. Which office it appears I have the right to turn down.”

  “Nearly lost to the mists of One-L but not quite, a properly written trust will in fact have named a successor trustee, someone to step in in case of the death or incapacity of the primary trustee.”

  “What are the duties of a trustee?”

  “The trustee has a fiduciary responsibility to manage the trust properly.” The tiny seafood fork was dwarfed by his enormous hairy hand as he pointed it at her. “They are liable for criminal prosecution if they’re caught not doing so, and there are about a kazillion cases I could point out as examples, but how nice that I don’t have to because you’ve had recent personal experience of one such case yourself.”

  It took her a moment, and then her face cleared. “The Hardin trust.” A case of suspected murder had taken her to Newenham almost exactly a year ago this month.

  “A slight difference exists in that the writer of this trust is dead—Erland is dead, isn’t he? And someone drove a stake through his heart before they put him in the ground just to be sure?”

  “And Alexandra Hardin was alive but mentally incompetent,” Kate said, ignoring him, “and her trustee put her away in an old folks’ home in the Caribbean and embezzled her funds.”

  He waved a valedictory fork and dived back into the oysters.

  “Guys like Erland, it’s never about how much money they have. It’s about how much more money they have than anyone else.”

  He was willing to play. “What do you think this charitable foundation is about, then?”

  “Damn if I know. Expiation? Atonement? The price of entry into heaven?”

  “Erland never struck me as a believer in anything other than his own omnipotence.”

  “True dat.” She sighed. “This makes no sense, Brendan.”

&
nbsp; “No shit, my delectable friend. Erland Bannister hated your guts.” He summoned his inner Admiral Ackbar. “It’s a trap!” She smiled reluctantly. More soberly he said, “Here be dragons, Kate. I think you should stay very far away from this. Hand it off to whoever the successor trustee is. Move to another state if you have to.” He paused, fork suspended, as he examined her expression. “But you’re curious.”

  It wasn’t a question. “Wouldn’t you be? And who’s to say the successor trustee isn’t a bad guy?”

  Brendan shook his head. “Hawaii, is what I’m thinking. Alaska Airlines flies there direct nowadays, and you’ve never been, have you? And wasn’t the guy you’re shacked up with some kinda surfer dude in a former life? Go. Now. Swim with the fishes in reality before, you know, someone makes you swim with the fishes metaphorically.”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed and he waved his fork again. “What? You’re the one who busted Erland in bed with the Chicago mob. Just saying.”

  The server brought him another order of oysters and Kate’s fish and chips. They ate in silence, Kate brooding and Brendan manifesting oyster-induced ecstasy. “Actually,” he said, after spending a few moments considering another order and rejecting it with regret, “I’m glad you called.” He saw her look and grinned. He had a great grin, did Brendan. It was big and went well with his broad face, his messy, badly cut hair, the blue eyes that crinkled at the corners, and the body that was nearly as broad as it was tall. He wore off-the-rack from J.C. Penney in a dried blood brown and a tie of psychedelic hue that was only improved by his breakfast and lunch. He was as far from Eugene Hutchinson as a lawyer could get. Kate had known him since her days with the Anchorage DA. He was still there, fighting the good fight.

  “Why is that?” she said.

  “You’re not even the first Shugak I’ve heard from this year.”

  She sat up. “Who?”

  He flapped a hand. “Relax.” He grinned again, this time with a little of the shit-eater in it. “Auntie Vi.”

  “Auntie Vi!” Kate sat back. “Why on earth did Auntie Vi call you?”

  He blew his nose with an almighty honk on the cloth napkin and crumpled up the results and left it on his plate. Kate spared a moment of pity for the restaurant’s laundry. “She was calling on behalf of the Park elders, or so she gave me to understand. It seems a busload of Park elders wants to drive to Haines and take the ferry to Juneau for the Gold Medal.”

  The Gold Medal was an annual basketball tournament that had been going on for longer than the NBA had existed. Once a year male and female town teams from all over Southeast and a few points north met in Juneau in March for a ten-day series. Most teams were accompanied by a significant portion of the population of their towns and the competition was as fiercely cheered as it was fiercely fought. “Man, I always wanted to go to that,” she said. “Okay, so far so good. What’s the problem?”

  “Well.” Brandon smoothed his execrable tie and quirked a bushy eyebrow. “Under the new rules, the elders need passports to drive through Canada, which won’t let them cross the border without one.”

  “They don’t want to apply?”

  “Oh, they applied. But the Department of State, it seems, is loath to issue them passports because none of them have birth certificates.” He scooched back his chair a little, in case of flying debris.

  Kate could feel the color rise up into her face and took a long, calming breath. “Why did they ask you for help?”

  “It turns out I’m the only lawyer they know.”

  She nodded. “Of course.” And of course he would be. He’d been Jack’s best friend, and had visited the Park with him many times. The Niniltna Native Association had a battery of lawyers but of course none of the elders would imagine bringing this kind of problem to them. This was personal. “Were you able to help them?”

  “I thought I’d talk it over with you first.” Her flush was fading. He thought it was a pity.

  “I’ll call Pete Heiman.”

  “Our illustrious congressman? Kate, you know he’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”

  “Yeah, but he’s our dog, and if he’s going to be crooked he might as well be crooked on our behalf.”

  “He’s probably game fishing in Florida.”

  Kate showed her teeth. “That much closer to DC, then.”

  The server brought the bill and Kate managed to not look directly at the tab while signing it. They sat for a few minutes over coffee, because Brendan had to get in a little digestion before going back to keeping bad guys off the streets. “Kate?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do you ever think about Jack?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “All the time.”

  “I miss him. I miss him more with every half-assed, wet-behind-the-ears child the DA hires on as an investigator.” He paused, and said heavily, “I miss my friend.”

  “I miss him, too,” she said softly, watching the coffee swirl around inside her cup. She raised her eyes and looked across the table. “And then I remember that we had a good, long run, and that he died saving my life, and that we got to say goodbye.” She blinked back sudden but not unwelcome tears. “And I’m grateful. So many people have so much less.”

  He nodded. “And Jim?”

  She looked out the window. Moments passed. Brendan obviously wanted an answer because he actually held off on the smartass remarks. She looked back at him. “Jim is—more. More than what he seemed to be at first. Right now, he’s going through some stuff.”

  “I heard. I want to buy a plane and learn to fly just so I can land at that Cadillac of an airstrip of his everyone’s talking about.”

  She grinned. “He says first thing when the snow melts he’s putting a big black X at both ends.”

  He grinned back. “And you?”

  “He’s—growing on me.”

  “Treating you right?”

  “So far so good.”

  “If that ever changes—”

  “Yeah, yeah. And Mutt loves him.”

  “Mutt loves anything walking around on two legs with dangly bits between.”

  They walked outside, where a few people had gathered in an admiring circle around Mutt, all with their phones out. Mutt was sitting in sunlit dignity, her tail curled around her feet, radiating the royal We in every hair of her gray coat. She saw Kate and stood up, and if her subjects didn’t quite bow in obeisance there were expressions of dismay at her departure.

  She trotted over to Brendan and got a good head scratch out of it. Brendan walked them to the Subaru and saw them both inside. “You gonna turn it down?” he said, holding the door.

  She turned the key and closed the door without answering.

  “What I thought,” he said as she pulled out into traffic.

  At least Mutt was back in the saddle, he thought as he watched them head down L Street. She had been known to save Kate’s ass a time or two.

  Five

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2

  Canyon Hot Springs

  THE SUN WAS A FAINT, DESPAIRING PRESENCE overhead as they drove the Step Road from Niniltna to where the trail veered off over the foothills to the east and through the spruce thickets and over the bald knolls and around the doglegs. The sky was the palest possible blue, as if all the snow that winter had leeched the color from it. The Quilaks looked somehow flattened against it, as if rendered in 2D instead of 3D, their peaks a lifeless white instead of the more nuanced shades of blue and white and charcoal of a normal winter day. The effect made the mountains appear similar in height, instead of Angqaq as one mount to rule them all, one mount to bind them, with wings arrayed like subservient courtiers to the north and south. Jim thought the scene looked a little anime, black and white and shades of gray, and fixed in time and space when he knew damn well everything about the Quilaks was subject to radical change, instantaneous and dramatic. This new persona was unsettling to say the least.

  It was a relatively quick run, George in the lead setting the pace. G
eorge used the same skills on the ground as he did in the air, an uncanny sense of situational awareness, a positively supernatural hand–eye coordination, and a penchant for pushing any vehicle to its maximum speed. Jim had been flying since he was twenty-five and he had over five thousand hours in fixed wing, far less in helo. He paid attention to the weather, and didn’t take off unless and until he was sure he would get where he was going. If he flew every day for the rest of his life he still wouldn’t be as good as George. Damn few were. He knew for a fact George had stopped counting his hours when he reached ten thousand, and that was even before he’d bought his first single Otter turbo when the Suulutaq Mine started up.

  George leaned way out, pulling his sled up on one ski, and took the last dog leg without braking. The angle of the leg was so acute that almost everyone missed the entrance and was the reason most people never found the canyon behind it, even with explicit directions. Yeah, Jim wasn’t ever going to be as good a sled driver as George was, either. He slowed down and followed in much more sedate fashion and then picked up a little speed once he was through to the narrow canyon behind it. The hot springs, a series of seven pools that remained unfrozen throughout the coldest winters, smoked in a steadily descending line down the center of the canyon. Behind them stood a small cabin with an outhouse behind it, both buried to their eaves. Behind the outhouse the canyon climbed and narrowed, the gradually inclining sides of the foothills becoming steep mountainsides.

  Jim coasted to a stop next to George and raised the shield of his helmet and pulled down his balaclava. The cold stung his face but the unfiltered air felt good as he gulped it in. “What do you think?”

  They stared up toward the head of the canyon, which at first sight seemed to be wholly filled in with snow.

  “I think,” George said, “that to find anything up there we’d have to airlift in an excavator.”