“Or two. What about avalanches?”
“Dan O’Brian’s better at avalanche prediction than I am. NOAA says the temp is holding.” He looked up at the sky, framed by the ridges on either side of the canyon. “But I’d as soon be out of here before we test their forecast. The Mother of Storms has gotten so bitchy lately I wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to change things up with rain and then we would be fucked.”
“In January?”
“Ask the folks in Shaktoolik if they think it’s unlikely.”
They flipped down their shields and proceeded slowly up the canyon, in which the level of snow rose drastically higher as they went and whose walls pressed inexorably inward in an increasingly claustrophobic way. There was a moment when Jim thought he could almost see into Canada over the top of one crag. He found it hard to catch his breath. They were at, what, nine thousand, ten thousand feet? Big Bump was over thirteen thousand feet, he remembered that much. His fingers and toes seemed to be going numb, and he knew that had to be wrong because he’d stuffed almost a whole box of HotHands into his mitts and boots before he’d ever put them on.
He was so intent on keeping to the track George was laying down that he nearly ran into him before he realized the other man had stopped. His sled crunched to a halt inches short of George’s right boot as it hung over the edge of his seat. He flipped up his shield and tried to look like he had meant to do that. George was pointing to their right and Jim followed his finger to a jumble of rocks whose sharp edges were dulled by drifts of snow.
He squinted. One of those things was not like the other. “Is that the tailplane Matt was talking about?”
“I think so. Can’t be sure unless we dig down and I’d just as soon wait until spring.”
“Me, too,” Jim said with feeling.
“Those kids are damn lucky Matt and Laurel were at the cabin and heard the crash.”
“Yeah,” Jim said hollowly. “Lucky.” The fragment of fuselage leading down from the tip of the tailplane had to be filled with snow, probably packed hard by the wind. If the kids had still been belted into their seat, they wouldn’t have had a chance.
George looked around. “What the hell were they doing?”
“And where the hell were they going?”
“Only a couple of things would have got me out in the middle of a storm like that one. A medivac.”
Jim nodded. “And money.”
“Have to be a hell of a lot of money. Unless somebody’s discovered diamonds in the YT and they’re smuggling them over the border.” He looked at Jim. “Heard anything like that?”
“No. Heard a lot about drugs, though.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
George jockeyed his sled as close to the tailplane as he could so as to brush off a bit of snow and confirm that it was in fact the tailplane. “Like I figured,” he said. “Small private jet. Maybe even the Citation I mentioned.” He tried to break a piece off to take back for identification purposes but the snow immobilized everything and it was frozen hard anyway and he gave up.
Jim drove his sled past the tailplane as far up the canyon as he could before the incline became so steep he was likely to tip the sled back over on himself. He came down again crisscrossing his previous route back and forth, slowly, painstakingly. About halfway down he nearly ran over a boulder and swung hard uphill, letting gravity slow him down. When he pulled right up next to it he discovered it wasn’t a boulder at all but a human head staring up at the sky. It looked like a yeti, hair frozen into spikes, eyes wide open, mouth agape, skin frosted over.
His hand closed convulsively on the brake and the sled lurched so suddenly to a halt that even as slowly as he was going he bumped hard up against the sled’s windshield. He was motionless for a few seconds, conscious only of his heart thudding in his ears and the bridge of his nose hurting where it had hit his helmet shield.
He heard George shout, and pushed himself slowly back onto the seat and waved George up the slope.
It took them nearly an hour to dig out the body, in part because they kept sinking into the snow up to their waists when they stepped off their sleds. They’d both brought collapsible shovels and rope, which helped. It also helped when they discovered that the bottom half of the dead man’s body had been sheared off in a diagonal cut that had removed his left arm below the elbow, all of his left leg and half of his right leg.
“Jesus,” George said.
“Count your blessings,” Jim said. “At least he’s frozen so he doesn’t smell.” When George made a noise Jim said, “Don’t puke right on him if you can help it.”
“Jesus,” George said again, and swiveled quickly to rolf into a snowbank that had never done him any harm. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and looked back at Jim. “You just had to say something.”
“Sorry.” And he was, in the few moments he had to spare in levering this fucking dead weight piece of evidence out of a treacherous landscape where he could find no footing and where every moment he was afraid of bringing the entire fucking mountain of snow down on top of them.
“You’re not puking, you cold-ass son of a bitch.”
“Not my first body.”
They shoveled snow from around the deceased and got a rope under its arms and tied it off to George’s sled. He started it up and put a steady strain on the rope and the body finally popped out of the hole like a cork out of a bottle. The flesh of the abdomen tore across where it had stuck to the ice and revealed a lot of frozen intestine, and George threw up again.
They muscled the body into a couple of black garbage bags and then onto the trailer hooked to Jim’s sled, not without inventing a whole new class of profanity. Jim hauled himself back up on his sled seat and lay back, panting.
“Jim?”
“What?” he said. Was it his imagination or had the sky turned completely gray again over the past hour? Probably just felt like it.
“What’s that?” Jim turned his head to see George pointing in the hole in the snow left by the body. He struggled to sit up as George slipped back down into it. He bent over and stood up again, a bulging gallon Ziploc bag in one hand. It was packed with what had to be thousands of small white tablets.
Jim stared at it for a long moment, and then he laid back down on his seat, much preferring the farther prospect no matter how gray and threatening.
“A helluva a lot of money,” George said.
“Yep,” Jim said, staring up at the merciless sky. “Shit.”
On the door of a bland office near the top of a tower in a glass-and-steel wilderness thousands of miles to the south there was a discreet knock.
“Yes.”
“Sir?”
“What is it?”
“We’ve located the phone.”
A brief silence. “Where is it?”
“At the transfer point.”
Another silence, punctuated by a long, heartfelt sigh. “God. Damn. It. I warned that asshole not to go himself.”
“There’s more, sir.”
“Of course there is. What?”
“It appears there were survivors after all.”
“What? He made it out alive?”
“No, my source says both Mr. Curley and the pilot were killed in the crash.”
“Good. Who then?”
A clearing of throat. “It appears there were two children on board.”
“What the—oh, you are fucking kidding me. Curley brought his toys with him? He couldn’t do without his underage pussy for the length of a goddamn freight run?”
“It appears not, no, sir.”
“Motherfucking, moronic ASSHOLE.”
“As you say, sir.”
A brief, fulminating silence “How did you locate the phone?”
“Someone made a call from it, sir, to a cell phone bought in Honduras.”
“Honduras?”
“Yes, sir, from a small electronics store in Tegucigalpa. One of ours is already en route to see if the store keeps records of ph
one sales. It is my belief that one of the children has the phone, sir, and made that call.”
A longer and considerably more fraught silence. “You will deploy whatever resources necessary to do whatever has to be done to find that phone. Curley ran his part of the operation on it. It cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”
“I was under the impression that those phones defaulted to factory setting if anyone unaware of the code tried to access that particular file.”
“That’s what the nerds tell me, Jared.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do I look like the kind of man who believes anything told him by people who wear Ewok T-shirts to work?”
“No, sir.”
“And, Jared?”
“Sir?”
“This stays in-house. No word of this leaks to our Russian friends. The last thing we need is the Bratva fucking things up. Those assholes have no boundaries. It’s our mess and we’ll clean it up. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing.”
“Sir?”
“You’ll remember the little problem we had in the same area last fall?”
“Very clearly indeed, sir.”
“There was a woman—”
“A private investigator, sir.”
“Yes, well, that might be what she files her taxes under, but she could be more accurately described as a wrecking ball. I don’t want her anywhere near this.”
“No, sir.”
“I mean it, Jared. If she’s sniffing around, I want her discouraged. Or disposed of. I really have no preference as to which. Discreetly, of course.”
“Of course, sir.”
Six
THURSDAY, JANUARY 3
Anchorage
HOWEVER ENJOYABLE THE JOURNEY, there is nothing like your own bed. Especially one with your own Jim in it. Kate smiled her way out of sleep and rolled over to take advantage of her own Jim, and woke all the way to the realization she was not in her own bed, she was in Anchorage, and Jim was in her own bed in the Park.
She got up, dressed, and stamped downstairs. Mutt looked at her from her sprawl in front of the fireplace and her jaw dropped in a lupine laugh. “Oh, shut up,” Kate said, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. When the sky began to lighten she bundled up and went out to check on the status of the Coastal Trail, around Westchester Lagoon and through the tunnel to where the trail followed the eastern edge of Knik Arm. The air was still, the sky was a hard, gray shield overhead, and the Knik was filled with shards of sheet ice that tinkled against each other on the outgoing tide.
She settled into a rhythm of walking and running, counting her steps with one part of her mind while the rest of it worried over what she had learned the day before. Mutt loped in front of her, making occasional forays into the brush on either side to frighten the living hell out of the occasional Arctic hare. She was probably mentally marking the places she’d started them from for snack time later.
Kate’s breath left white clouds hanging in the air behind her as her muscles began to warm up and her legs settled into a rhythm. Erland Bannister, a man of great power and influence, had hated her with every part and fiber of his being. That he’d tried to have her killed more than once, and, worse, that he had failed would have set his hatred in concrete. And let’s not forget the little matter of her being the proximate cause of him being jailed for it. That sting would not have lessened when he’d managed to weasel his way out of jail on a technicality with the help of a corrupt judge.
The trail was hard packed and turning to ice in places, especially the cross-country ski tracks set into the left-hand side. She came around the corner into Lyn Aery Park and found Mutt dancing delightedly around a skier sprawled across the trail, skies and poles and legs and arms twisted into a knot of Gordian complexity. “Help!” came a high, thin, panicked voice from inside the knot. “Help me! There’s a wolf attacking me!”
“Only half!” Kate leapt over him in one smooth jump. “Mutt! Leave that poor guy alone and come on!” A moment later Mutt shot past her at full gallop and crashed into a leafless stand of elderberry, from which immediately a panicked crow took to the air in a blur of black wings, leaving a lone feather floating down to the ground behind.
Erland had hated Kate, no doubt of that. She had cordially returned the sentiment. Brendan was right. The only reason for Erland to name her his trustee was for him to have planted some kind of poisoned pill within his estate, something that he would have orchestrated very carefully to do her the maximum damage at the most opportune moment.
Or maximum damage to someone she loved.
She thought that over for another half a mile, and came to the conclusion that, no, Erland wouldn’t have bothered with a secondary target, he would have aimed straight at Kate in an attempt to totally trash her credibility and blacken her name. It had always been personal between the two of them. He had never forgotten and never forgiven being taken down by, one, a woman, and two, an Alaska Native woman. He had been the fartiest of old farts, first among equals in the Old White Boomers Club. They had built the state up from what they regarded as nothing, expropriated it from the Native peoples they regarded as less than nothing, and done their level best to shape Alaska’s future into a statehood with themselves in power and a resource extraction model of capitalism with themselves as the primary beneficiaries. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972, where the federal government had been forced to pay the Alaska Natives land and money in exchange for a right of way over tribal lands for the TransAlaska Pipeline, had started the state down a road leading to at least a partial equality of the races, but guys like Erland were not known for elasticity of thought or acceptance of those previously determined to be other or lesser. And when they were crossed or flouted, they got mad and they got even.
But Erland would have known that that would be the first thing she thought, so he would have also known that her first instinct would have been to refuse.
So what trap lay in that direction?
A cow moose crashed out of a thicket and pounded down the trail, saw her, and veered back into the brush. A moment later Mutt appeared in her wake, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. “Shame on you,” Kate told her severely.
Mutt sneezed, tail wagging furiously, and dropped down on her forepaws, hairy butt in the air.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Kate said.
Oh yes she did, and she pounced, snagging the hem of Kate’s jeans in her teeth and tugging enough to break Kate’s stride. She stumbled and just barely caught her balance before she faceplanted on the trail. “Mutt! Dammit!”
Mutt yipped, spring-loaded a couple of nearly vertical bounces to land ten feet away, and looked over her shoulder, tail wagging furiously.
“All right, you asked for it,” Kate said, and gave chase, which lasted until Earthquake Park when Kate cried uncle and turned around to head back home. The city looked good from here. Bound by Knik Arm on the west and Turnagain Arm on the south, the glass sides of the cluster of tall buildings that formed downtown reflected images of the Chugach Mountains lined up behind them. They were unlike the Quilaks not only in elevation, being in general only a third as high as any single Quilak, but in geological personality. The Quilaks had a tendency to cluster together in disdainful rebuff. In contrast, the Chugach Mountains, while standing near together, were distinctly separate and much more welcoming. Almost none of the Quilaks were named other than the tallest, Angqaq or Big Bump. The Chugachs were named for everyone from Billy Mitchell to Rachel Carson.
This morning, the faintest hint of alpenglow receded up the peaks as the winter sun rose in the southeast. The star on the mountain was diminished, too, by the morning light, as were the exterior lights from the homes that climbed the lower reaches of the mountains to the east. Exhaust from everyone’s furnaces, home and business, streamed straight up into the still air, a forest of opaque plumes pierced by air traffic, Piper Super Cubs from Merrill, 747 cargo jets from Ted
Stevens International, and F-22s from JBER. There was always something of interest in the skies over Anchorage.
They returned to the townhouse an hour later, Kate with red cheeks and a runny nose, jeans soaked all down the front, and missing her hat and one glove, with Mutt looking exactly the same as when they’d left. The neighbor, a burly man with tufts of gray hair sticking up all over his head and wrapped in a fuzzy brown robe, straightened from picking up the paper on his doorstep and watched as they came up the walk. “So you’re back then,” he said.
“We are,” Kate said cheerfully.
“Could you keep the drivebys down to a minimum this time?”
“We can but try.”
He shook his head and went inside, and they did the same.
She showered and dressed in dry clothes. She’d hit Safeway yesterday and sat down to a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and sourdough toast made from store-bought bread that was barely worth biting into. Mutt gnawed on the jawbone of an ass excavated from the chest freezer in the garage. Supplies there needed replenishing if Mutt was going to be kept from free-range foraging, which had led to some mild unpleasantnesses during past visits. Anchorageites were such tender little flowers.
She made more coffee, pulled the curtains back in the living room, and curled up on the couch and disposed herself to think.
Erland had named her his trustee. Brendan said that meant she was legally and morally obligated to see to the distribution of his assets as he had set down such distribution in his will.
She and Erland weren’t friends, which meant there was some ticking time bomb implanted in his assets, set to go off at some point so as to cause her harm.
But while Erland had hated her, she was fairly certain he had also respected her, which meant that the twisty old bastard would have known that she would realize this. She didn’t consider herself paranoid, and she didn’t want to give Erland more credit than he was due, but that could mean that there was another giant man trap in her refusal to act as his trustee.
She sighed. There was only one way to find out. She got her phone and googled his charitable foundation. She clicked on the phone number.
No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22) Page 7