No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  “Kate.” It was Vanessa, calling from the kitchen.

  She must have dropped it in the fight. She looked around, feeling a little light-headed like she always did after hand-to-hand combat.

  “Kate?” It was Vanessa again.

  She saw that Jim had pulled O’Hanlon’s coat down his arms and was pulling his belt off, probably to tie his feet. Kate bent over Gaunt and unbuckled his belt and pulled it free. She unzipped his pants and pulled them down around his ankles where they caught on his boots. He made a faint protest which she ignored. She restrained his hands at the wrist with the belt.

  He was staring at her in pain mixed with disbelief.

  “You don’t fuck with the aunties,” she said.

  “Kate!”

  “All right, all right, I’m coming.” She looked at the kids and held her palm out. “It’s okay. Go back to bed. Dormez-vous.” And then she remembered that that was French.

  “Kate!”

  She heard Jim swear and turned to slide between the table and the doorway. Vanessa was on the floor in front of the sink, holding a blood-soaked dishcloth to Auntie Vi’s shoulder. “I can’t stop it! I can’t stop it, Kate!”

  Kate found herself on her knees next to Auntie Vi, who had her chin tucked in so she could squint down at her wound. She looked alarmingly calm.

  “Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it,” Jim said. “I didn’t think he hit her. I didn’t think he hit anywhere close.”

  “Your arm is bleeding,” Van said, looking at Jim.

  He gave it a cursory glance. “I caught a couple of pellets. It’s nothing serious.” He looked back down at Auntie Vi. “Nothing like this.”

  “Jim,” Kate said, “call Matt. Tell him to get here as fast as he can and bring everything with him.” Without looking Kate reached for the drawer that held the kitchen towels and pulled it all the way out, grabbing a handful and shoving them over the one Van was already holding to Auntie Vi’s shoulder. They were quickly soaked. Van was sobbing quietly, her hand smoothing back Auntie Vi’s hair where it had come loose from its braid.

  Jim stood up and in a moment she heard him talking urgently into his phone but all her attention was on Auntie Vi. “The boys’ll be here soon, Auntie, and they’ll get you all fixed up. Five minutes, just hold on till they get here and patch you up and you’ll be fine.”

  Auntie Vi leaned her head back on the floor. She looked past Kate and smiled, and Kate turned to see David kneel down next to her. He leaned over so he could look directly into Auntie Vi’s eyes. “No mueras. No mueras, abuelita!”

  The words seemed to get Auntie Vi’s attention in a way that nothing else in that moment could. She met David’s eyes and an actual smile spread across her face. “Okay,” she said, although she could have had no clue as to what he was saying, and then she winked at him.

  And then all four Grosdidiers crashed into the room carrying all their emergency gear and Kate had never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

  Fourteen

  MONDAY, JANUARY 7

  Niniltna

  “THEY FLEW UP TO THE STEP,” AGENT Mason said. “It’s in mothballs for the winter as you, ah, know, with just a single caretaker on site.”

  “Did they kill him?” Kate said. She felt bruised all over and was moving slowly but at least she was moving. Jim, a bandage on his upper left arm where Peter had dug out several shotgun pellets, was in the kitchen making coffee and fried egg sandwiches. She and Mason were sitting at the dining room table. Johnny and Vanessa were trying to disappear into the living room couch so no one would notice them and tell them they had to leave so the grownups could talk.

  “They did, I’m sorry to say. But since you and, ah—” He looked over at the half-wolf, half-husky sprawled in front of the fireplace.

  “Mutt. Her name is Mutt.”

  “Ah, Mutt and the rest of the cavalry apprehended them in such efficient fashion, we have the, ah, smoking guns in evidence.” He didn’t smile. “Literally.”

  “Will they roll?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so, but…”

  “Will you offer them a deal?”

  He gave her a wary look. “That would, ah, depend on if they roll.”

  Across the room Mutt raised her head. Kate said, very gently, “They shot my aunt in her own home. The only reason she’s not dead is that we had competent emergency medical aid five minutes away. I would not take kindly to hearing that the perps skated on a charge of attempted murder because they helped the FBI make a drug trafficking case.”

  “Noted.” Mason decided it would be politic to change the subject. “What was your aunt doing with a shotgun in the kitchen, anyway?”

  Kate pointed at the gun rack over the door, which held a double-barreled pump action shotgun and a .30-06.

  “Yes, but your weapons are, ah, in a gun rack. A much more traditional method of storage.”

  She smiled. “I might have a backup not in plain sight in any number of places.”

  “Or two,” Jim said from the kitchen.

  “Or three,” Johnny said from the couch.

  “Or four,” Van said from next to him.

  “What about that hot pink Beretta I won for you at the NRA dinner?” Johnny said.

  “Do you really think I’m ever going to shoot that thing? I’d be laughed off the range.”

  “Okay, four,” Johnny said.

  “You went to an NRA dinner?” Jim said.

  Johnny spread his hands. “Some old fart Fairbanksan bought a bunch of tickets and gave them away to UAF students. It was a free meal.”

  “You should have seen it,” Val said. “It was like Borderlands 3, only with real guns and no aliens.”

  “And nobody got shot.”

  “Good to know,” Jim said.

  Mason cleared his throat and looked at Kate. “I, ah, quite see your point.”

  “You were saying about Gaunt and O’Hanlon?”

  “They’re known to us and they’re pretty tough nuts with very little leverage. Kevin Gaunt has several ex-wives, no children, and Allan O’Hanlon has one daughter, ah, estranged.” Mason leaned back in his chair with his hands linked behind his head, speaking from memory. He’d flown into Niniltna the afternoon before. Nick, the trooper from Tok, had flown in at sunrise that morning and was thoroughly pissed off when Mason showed up to take control of a crime scene that would have been a slam-dunk case to his, Nick’s, credit. “They both worked for ICE until four years ago, when they took early retirement and started a consulting firm, Gaunt, O’Hanlon Ltd.”

  “What does Gaunt, O’Hanlon Ltd. consult on?”

  “Security procedures and installations.”

  “And you said that with such a straight face,” Kate said, admiring. “Are they making a living at it?”

  “They were operating at a healthy profit from their first year.”

  “Pretty good for a startup.”

  He inclined his head. “We haven’t been following them, per se, but they have appeared in proximity to enough hard characters and near enough to some fairly hinky events that they have become persons of interest. I’ve got someone tracking their passport activity. They travel a lot, most frequently to New York, Seattle, and Mexico, but there are some trips to Central and South America, too. We noticed that over the past two to three years, their passports started showing up at the US–Canadian border.”

  “Which checkpoint?”

  “Lynden, Washington.”

  “On the way to Vancouver, then.”

  “Possibly.”

  “New York, Seattle, Vancouver,” Kate said. “And then Mexico, Central and South America. I don’t suppose they’ve made any recent trips to China, Japan, or South Korea.”

  Mason shook his head. “Impossible for them to pass unnoticed through those countries.”

  “Where was their point of origin?”

  “Most often? Chicago.” He sighed, and brought his chair back down on all four legs and scrubbed his hands through his hair
. He looked tired. “I’m sure they’re working for whoever it was who put the pills on Curley’s plane, which is the same whoever Curley was working for. Even without a successful interrogation it’s pretty clear from what you report them saying that they were sent here to recover Curley’s phone.”

  And kill any witnesses, Kate thought. “You cracked it yet?”

  He snorted. “My guys are afraid it has some kind of failsafe that will make the phone explode if the wrong password is entered. They’re working on it.”

  “What kind of money are we talking here?”

  “You can buy a kilogram of fentanyl for $80,000 and turn it around for a $1.6 million profit. That Ziploc bag you found?” He nodded at Jim. “Just under two kilos. And you know there has to be more up there under all that snow.” They all looked out the window. It was snowing again, big fat flakes that melted as soon as they landed. At the elevation of the wreck it would be sticking around until April or May, if not June.

  “The kids identified Gaunt and O’Hanlon as the two men who sold them to Curley. They flew commercial, David thinks from Texas. At any rate he saw people wearing cowboy boots and big cowboy hats and bolo ties, just like in the movies.”

  “Can they remember what day?”

  “It was after Thanksgiving, because they saw the star from the windows of Curley’s house.” She saw his look of confusion and said, “That big star on the mountains in Anchorage. You could practically touch it from Curley’s front window.”

  “Yes, I, ah, remember.”

  Jim came out with mugs hooked around the fingers of one hand and a plate of sandwiches cut in half. He sat down at the table. “Why’d they pick Niniltna to transfer the drugs?”

  “Just guessing, but—” Mason shrugged. “It’s the perfect spot. Forty-eight hundred feet long, newly paved, maintained by the Suulutaq so it’s always plowed, no tower so nobody keeping track of flights in and out, enough traffic to hide in plain sight.”

  “I had a friend who works at Ted’s tower. He says they don’t have to file a flight plan at all, and even if they did they could say they were going to Fairbanks. Anywhere, other than where they were really going.”

  Mason nodded.

  “About that Niniltna traffic,” Jim said. “I was talking to Mrs. Doogan, the high school principal, last week. Her office window looks right out on the airstrip. She says she’s seen a lot of small jets in and out over the past couple of years. She put it down to the Suulutaq mine, owners, investors, like that, coming in to take a look at where their money’s going.”

  “She notice any, ah, identifying marks?”

  Jim shook his head. “She recognized Erland’s G II like we all do, he’d been in and out so often. But the rest of them rarely have even tail numbers, or not ones you can read from a distance anyway. Also, George Perry? Chugach Air Taxi? He says he might have heard two jets on New Year’s Eve, not one. He can’t swear to it because he couldn’t see anything when he looked out the window because of the blizzard. But anecdotally at least it backs up your reconstruction of events.”

  “So,” Kate said, “they make the pills in Canada and fly them into Niniltna, where they transfer the load to Curley’s jet and he brings them back to Anchorage, where he repackages them and sees that they are distributed. From there they’re sold to Alaskans or mailed or carried overseas. Right so far?”

  Mason nodded and took a half a sandwich. The yolk was still a little runny and some dripped down his wrist. He licked it off and washed it down with coffee. “If we could get a line on the money, we could blow the whole thing.” He was looking at Kate.

  “I might have an idea about that.”

  Mason sat back in his chair, looking pleased. “I hoped you might.”

  I bet you did, you little sidewinder, she thought. She held up her phone. “Let me make a call.” She grabbed her parka. Mutt leapt to her feet and followed her out on the deck. Kate closed the door behind them both and raised her face to the sky, eyes closed, and let the snowflakes melt on her skin, clean and cold. Mutt took the stairs in a graceful leap and disappeared into the underbrush, startling a willow ptarmigan into the sky with an indignant squawk. “Yeah, if she’d wanted to catch you, she would have,” Kate told it as it beat air going away. She got out her phone and called Stephanie.

  “Two calls in one week! Are you dying?”

  It was meant as a joke but Kate was still too close to having nearly lost Auntie Vi not to flinch. “Not so far as I know. I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  Next she called Kurt. “How’s it going?”

  “On the hacking into the Bannister Foundation’s records? Very slowly. I hate to say it, Kate, but so far as I can tell from these accounts, it looks squeaky clean. But Tyler had a thought last night and we’re going to run with it today. I’ll let you know.”

  “Any breadcrumbs you can find on the donors. The big ones, Kurt.”

  “Yeah, I was going to track back every $25 Erland got from that grandma in Tuntutuliak and report faithfully back to you.”

  “Smart ass.”

  “Is it true about Auntie Vi?”

  “Yes. She’s alive, Kurt.”

  Kurt took a long breath. “Auntie Joy’s the one you can’t help loving. Auntie Balasha never says much but she is always there to talk to, and sometimes that’s all you need, and sometimes it’s what you need most. Auntie Edna scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “She scared the bejesus out of everyone.”

  Kurt laughed. “True dat. But Auntie Vi? She always has your back, no matter what. Right or wrong, good or bad, she’ll go to the mattresses for you.”

  “She did this time, too.”

  “Those two guys involved somehow in this Bannister Foundation thing?”

  “I think so.”

  Kurt’s voice hardened. “We’ll get it done, Kate.”

  He hung up and Kate’s phone rang immediately. It was Stephanie. “How’d you find out so fast?”

  “It only took one phone call, Kate.”

  She went back inside and laid it out for Mason. “Is that enough for a warrant, do you think?”

  “Do you think the people in Anchorage are in on it?”

  Kate really, really wanted to see Jane doing the perp walk on the ten o’clock news. “I don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t have any proof one way or the other, not yet.”

  Mason shook his head. “I don’t know that I can get a warrant for his entire office based on evidence so wholly, ah, circumstantial.”

  “Somebody shot his lawyer. Two to the chest, one to the head.”

  “Gaunt and O’Hanlon weren’t yet in the state. We believe Curley’s employer may have employed local, ah, talent in that instance, and called in Gaunt and O’Hanlon when it failed. Fun fact: We have no record of them arriving via commercial carrier. A private jet did land that afternoon in Anchorage. Its flight plan said it originated in Chicago. It took off again yesterday afternoon at one p.m. It did not land back in Chicago.”

  “Got an owner?”

  “It belongs to a consortium called Executive Air Charters. Private jet rentals for corporate executives. We’ve been in, ah, contact, and they’re having some difficulty sorting out their records.”

  “They’re saying they don’t know who rented a piece of equipment that cost them $50 million?”

  “More like sixty, but I get your point.” Mason’s smile was thin. “We’re, ah, encouraging the recovery of their memory.”

  Kate thought for a few moments. “Gaunt and O’Hanlon wanted Curley’s phone. Whoever they’re working for was monitoring the number and when David tried to call his mom it let their bosses know where it was, and they went to a lot of expense to get it back. If Erland was in the same business with the same people, they might have given him the same kind of phone.” She looked up. “If you could crack both phones, there would be all the evidence you’d need.”

  “We haven’t cracked Curley’s yet.”

  Cyber secu
rity was the overriding concern for businesses everywhere now. It was entirely possible that the elevated encryption was merely a symptom of that. It was also entirely possible that it was evidence of the paranoia of every criminal organization on the planet.

  Or not. “I wonder who has Erland’s personal effects,” she said.

  Jim smiled at her from across the table. “After all,” he said, “you’re his trustee.”

  “Which you knew,” Kate said, looking at Mason.

  Agent Mason didn’t even try to look innocent. “You were a way in.”

  “You do push your luck, Agent Mason.”

  He smiled. “It’s Gerry, Kate.”

  Fifteen

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 8

  Anchorage

  “ERLAND’S PERSONAL EFFECTS?” JANE frowned and then remembered that it caused frown lines. “The smaller valuables I put in his safety deposit box. The rest I expect are at his home.”

  “His phone?”

  “In the safety deposit box.”

  “Where’s the safety deposit box?” Kate said, and was sorry when Jane didn’t even try to argue with her. Probably had something to do with walking into Jane’s office with an FBI Special Agent at her heels.

  The phone was in the box. It was the exact same make and model as Curley’s phone. Kate turned it on. It was password protected. Jane denied all knowledge of passwords but Kate noted a sheen of sweet on her forehead.

  Kate handed the phone over to Mason. “Now you have twins,” she said. “Will it help?”

  “Was there anything else in the box that might have been of use?”

  She shook her head. “Some jewelry, a photograph album of family pictures going back to the Stampede.”

  In the bank’s parking lot she said, “Something you should know. In my capacity as trustee of Erland Bannister’s estate, and given that he had reduced his holdings to the Bannister Foundation, I, ah—” he grinned “—copied the Bannister Foundation work product files from Jane Morgan’s laptop. At present, my people are working on tracing all of the donations back to the people who actually wrote the checks.”