He looked at her sideways. “We could look at that, too.”
“You could but until you crack those phone—” she nodded at it in his hand “—and find evidence that Erland was in fact involved in this mess, you have no standing.”
“Whereas you as his trustee—”
She nodded. “I can legally volunteer any and all access.” Jim got out of the Forester and opened the back door for Mutt, who bounced over exuberantly and banged into Kate’s thigh, knocking her back a step. A sound like a bee whizzed by her cheek and there was a crackle of broken safety glass behind her.
“Gun! Gun! Gun!” Mason screamed, and the next thing Kate knew she was on the ground with Jim on top of her. Mutt barked, the deep, menacing sound rolling across the parking lot. Jim had his arms around Kate and they were rolling over the ice-encrusted pavement until they came to rest beneath some heavy vehicle with high clearance.
Mason was yelling at the other people coming and going from the bank. “Get down! Shooter on the roof! Get down, get down, get down!” The security guard inside the bank opened the door. “FBI! Call 911! Active shooter this location!” The security guard earned his paycheck that day by doing what he was told, ducking back inside and barring the door against a flood of customers stampeding outside.
“Are you okay?” Jim’s voice sounded distantly in Kate’s ears. He was running his hands over her body. “Are you shot? Are you hurt? Kate?” Another shot hit the vehicle above them with a crunch of metal and he flinched. “Mason! Where’s the shooter?”
“I’m a little busy here!” Another shot hit a different vehicle nearby and a tire went suddenly flat.
Mutt shoved in next to them and hunkered down, a long, low, steady growl issuing forth with enough menace in it to shrivel any shooter’s balls. “Good girl. Stay here.” Jim looked back down at Kate. “Kate,” he said with an obvious effort at some measure of calm. “Are you hurt?”
Kate tried to think past the adrenaline. “I don’t think so,” she said. She clenched her hands and flexed her feet. “I can feel everything, and everything seems to be working.” Her heart especially, it was working really well, peak efficiency.
“Good.” He slid off her to her free side and peered out. “Mason! What’s happening?” They heard a siren approaching.
“Stay where you are!”
“Where is he?”
“I think on top of the Century 21 building across the street!”
Jim scrabbled around until he could look in that direction.
“Be careful!” Kate said. The siren grew louder and tires crunched over the ice into the parking lot from both Ingra and Gambell.
Jim pulled the ball cap from his head and held it out. Nothing. “He heard the sirens. He probably heard them before we did.”
“APD responding to shots fired! Identify yourselves!”
“Special Agent Mason with the FBI!” Mason shouted.
“Come out with your hands up!”
It took ten minutes for everything to sort itself out, and another five minutes before Mason convinced APD to check the roof of the Century 21 building. By then the shooter was long gone, but there were security cameras on every single corner of every single one of the nearby buildings and Mason was busy confiscating all the footage he could before APD got it together enough to realize this was their crime scene.
Kate, trembling a little, stood leaning against the Forester with Mutt on one side and Jim on the other. They knew a couple of the responding APD officers, which helped when it came time to give their statements.
They were just finishing up when Mason approached. Kate’s look literally stopped him in his tracks. “On New Year’s Eve a small jet crashed in the Quilak Mountains above Niniltna. Two children were recovered from the wreck alive, along with a wholesale quantity of fentanyl and, as it happens, a phone belonging to the owner of the aircraft. The phone was used to make a call, and evidently alerted someone to its location.
“On Wednesday night someone tried to break into our house in Anchorage while Jim and I were in residence. That same night possibly the same someone shot and killed Erland Bannister’s attorney.
“On Saturday night my aunt, Viola Shugak, was shot by two men who invaded her home looking for the two kids and Gary Curley’s phone.
“Half an hour ago someone took a shot at me from the top of that building—” Kate pointed “—as I was exiting this building—” she pointed again “—after having accessed Erland Bannister’s safety deposit box.”
Mason was smart enough to restrict himself to a nod.
“The only people other than Kurt Pletnikof, my partner in Pletnikof Investigations, and Brendan McCord of the Anchorage District Attorney’s office, who knew I was in town either time was the FBI and Erland Bannister’s executive assistant.” She stepped forward nose to nose with Mason and said, “That feels an awful lot like probable cause to me, Gerry.”
“She did give us his phone,” Jim said in a voice barely above a murmur.
“It doesn’t have to be her,” Kate said without looking away from Mason, “but it does have to be someone in that office.” She leaned in. “Or yours.”
“I believe I can make that case,” Agent Mason said, eschewing ahs entirely.
“Please do.” Kate turned to Jim. “I’m starving. Let’s go to the Bone.”
So they went to the Bone, a diner frequented by city employees from the mayor on down including a vastly comforting number of cops.
“Man, you’ve really got it in for Jane Morgan,” Jim said, shaking malt vinegar on his fries with a free hand.
“She never once asked about Johnny,” Kate said flatly. “He’s her son. So far as I know her only child, and a seriously good kid who is going to grow up into a seriously good, productive man. She used him as a weapon against his father so long as his father was alive, and now likes to pretend he doesn’t exist. I don’t have it in for her, Jim. I despise her.”
“All righty then.”
They called Kurt from the car. “Kate, it’s too soon to—”
“Kurt, how many grants did the Bannister Foundation give out last quarter?”
“Uh, twenty-seven? Lemme count.” A moment’s silence. “Sorry, thirty-two.”
“All for six figures or more?”
“They ranged from $100,000 to $1.5 million.”
“That $1.5 million to Bering VoTech?”
“Yes.”
“Give me three names no more than an hour’s flight time in a Cessna 206 from Anchorage, preferably not on the road system.”
“Hang on.”
Kate held the phone against her leg so Kurt couldn’t hear and said, “Pletnikof Investigations would like to hire you and your Cessna to fly me around tomorrow. Probably the next day, too.”
“Where we going?”
“Since people are shooting at us both at home and in Anchorage, I thought we should go somewhere else for a bit.”
“I’ll do it for fuel.”
She shook her head. “You, sir, are a lousy businessman. Done.”
Kurt’s voice came back on the phone. “It turns out that very few Bannister Foundation grants go to communities that are on the road system. You ready? The Bannister Foundation gave the Seldovia Public Library $100,000. Alaskans for a Sustainable Future got $300,000.” Kurt snickered.
“What?”
Kurt snorted. “‘Sustainable’ is a trigger word for progressives. Reeks of all the causes—climate change, food independence, alternative energy, all that shit. Be a long time before anyone audits their books. It’d be politically incorrect.”
“Okay,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. “Where is Alaskans for a Sustainable Future?”
“King Salmon.”
“Gimme another.”
“Let’s see, let’s see. Okay, here. Kichatna Academy got a whopping $400,000.”
“Where the hell is Kichatna?”
“About a hundred miles south of Denali.”
“Text me the correct spelli
ng of Kichatna so Jim can look it up on AOPA. And call me when you track down the donors.”
“If.”
“When. I have faith. But no pressure.” Kate hung up. Jim was looking up forecasts on his phone. “How’s the weather?”
“Holding, but I’ll bet there is one hell of a blow building up in back of this high.”
He’d clicked over to the AOPA app. “Do they all have fuel?”
“Not Kichatna but if we’re running low Talkeetna’s not even an hour away.”
“Which one first?”
“Weather comes out of the Gulf of Alaska, so Seldovia first, King Salmon second, Kichatna last so we can run before the storm if and when it hits. If we hop quick we might maybe beat it back to Niniltna.”
“How long to hit all three?”
“We can be in and out of Seldovia before noon tomorrow, but we might have to overnight in King Salmon.”
“Got sleeping bags in the back of the plane?” He nodded. “So we can always sleep in the gym if we have to.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. Better bring food, too.”
“That’s what I love about you, Chopin, always thinking with your stomach.”
Sixteen
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9
Anchorage, Seldovia, King Salmon
THEY SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE TOWNHOUSE and were in the air by sunrise. Mutt stretched out on the sleeping bags and mats in the back. “Bee-yatch,” Kate said. Mutt yawned and snuggled down.
Once in the air there was nothing to do but think as the Cessna ate up the miles. “I wonder if they’ll really pay me.”
“Who, the FBI?” He looked at her. “Do you really care if they do?”
She knew what he meant. Mason had helped her find the poisoned worm in the apple Erland had tempted her with. She didn’t know that she would ever have bit freely into that apple on her own, but the expression on Marlena’s face when she talked about how Jane had come to Ahtna to help them and the tiny splint on the baby’s arm would live long in her memory. The temptation to do good was almost universally irresistible, as was the ability to justify means to an end, especially once one was well into the doing good business. Philanthropy could be every bit as addictive as, well, fentanyl.
Of course Erland would have known that, too.
But Jim was right. Mason’s arrival on the scene had been timely. No plane crash was a happy event in a state where one in thirty-seven citizens was a pilot and nearly everyone had at least one pilot in the family, but any plane crash that took out Gary Curley couldn’t be judged all bad, and that it precipitated the FBI’s involvement was only a bonus. No, she had cause to be very grateful to Special Agent James G. Mason, because working with him beginning three days after she’d met with Erland’s attorney meant she would be well suited up in good citizenship armor when the indictments started coming down. She’d fingered the Bannister Foundation—although she was certain that Mason, the twisty little weasel, had already been looking at it—and she’d not only cooperated with the FBI, she was very nearly leading the investigation. Probably didn’t hurt that she’d been shot at in the process, either, although she wasn’t feeling quite as grateful to either shooter.
The gray skies were continuing to glower with a threat as yet unrealized, so Jim flew a diagonal course over the Kenai Peninsula that debouched into the head of Kachemak Bay. From there it was twenty minutes until they touched down on the dirt strip on the mountain-lined, thickly forested fjord that managed to look spectacular even on this grim day. Seldovia was a village of three hundred people and at this time of year they were happy to see anyone new. An attractive older woman named Darlene, who had a twinkle in her eyes and a bubbly manner, gave them a ride to the library. The library was one room in the municipal building and it was closed but they found the librarian at home. Her name was Shirley and she had red hair and freckles and a hardcover copy of To The Hilt in one hand. Naturally this created an instantaneous bond between Shirley and Kate and promoted a fifteen-minute dive down the rabbit hole of crime fiction, which included the relative merits of Dick Francis and Ellis Peters and the need for decency in crime fiction heroes which of course created a natural digression into Damien Boyd’s Nick Dixon series, with a brief animadversion to Adrian McKinty and John Sandford and just how bad a good detective could be. People who read are never strangers.
Jim, more of a nonfiction man, managed to keep himself out of the line of fire, communing silently with Shirley’s husband, Les, over a mug of coffee mutely offered. When the cataract of learned criticism began to abate, he caught Kate’s eye and she looked a little conscious but not at all guilty. “I’m Kate Shugak,” she said, “and this is my friend Jim Chopin. I’m a private investigator—”
“No way! For real?”
“For real,” Kate said gravely, avoiding Jim’s eye. “I’ve recently been, ah, retained by the Bannister Foundation to follow up on a few of their grants. Purely as a matter of quality control.” She didn’t know what that meant but Shirley didn’t, either, and Kate made a pretense of consulting the Notes app on her phone. “As I understand it, last year you applied for and received a grant from the Bannister Foundation.”
Shirley was more than happy to talk about the grant, extolling the Bannister Foundation’s generosity and echoing Marlena’s glowing reference of Jane Morgan. Fifteen minutes later Darlene, who had evidently constituted herself as their personal taxi, pulled up outside and returned them to the airstrip by way of the Seldovia Native Tribe’s office. The president, a willowy woman named Crystal who would have looked at home showcasing Givenchy’s latest on a fashion runway, fed them on salmon and rice and her grandmother’s famous donuts for dessert (with dried salmon for Mutt) and showed them photos of Seldovia’s glory days before the 1964 earthquake, when there were five canneries and king crab and shrimp could still be taken commercially from Kachemak Bay. They barely made it into King Salmon before dark.
Seventeen
THURSDAY, JANUARY 10
King Salmon, Kichatna, Niniltna
KING SALMON SAT ON A BEND OF THE Naknek River, which wound between Naknek Lake and Kvichak Bay. It was built on sand dunes thrown up by thousands of years of glacial erosion and changing river courses, overgrown with coarse grass and a few trees. Anything less like Seldovia could not be imagined, and the view as they came into land reminded Kate yet again of how rich Alaska was in its geographical diversity. It was a company town, the company in this case being the federal government. It had begun life as an air force base, which explained the two runways (the north/south the same length as Niniltna’s and the east/west twice as long). After World War II it had morphed into a home for the National Park Service and NOAA. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and a Japanese aurora research radar station also contributed to the local economy, and in summertime proximity to the Bristol Bay salmon fishery would triple the population, which explained the multiple docks extending into the river from large buildings housing salmon processors on the shore.
King Salmon Alternative Energy Resources was traced to a guy named Ralph who had seven bent props nailed to the outside of his house. He was of an age roughly somewhere between fifty and a hundred, short, bald, wiry, and irascible, and inclined to take his and Jim’s sixteen-inch difference in height in bad part. However, once he and Jim had compared logbooks, proving to Ralph’s own satisfaction that he had ten times the hours Jim had, and once Jim had perforce accepted his lower-tier pilot status (so long as one ignored those seven bent props and Jim studiously did), Ralph became quite human. He was perfectly willing to tell them all about the Bannister Foundation grant, which was going to help fund a wind farm he was building on the side of the river west of town. The turbines would be networked with furnaces in each individual home and business in the area. Given that the single biggest expense in the Alaska Bush was heating oil and that it had to be brought in by barge after the ice had thawed, this seemed like a worthwhile and potentially very lucrative endeavor.
Ra
lph drove them out to the wind farm the next morning. The turbines were massive, two hundred and twelve feet high with nacelles the size of the 206’s fuselage and blades a hundred sixteen feet long. When they lifted off later Jim made a slow circle around the wind farm, which looked oddly even more impressive than it had from the ground.
“Admit it,” Jim said over the headset. “You’re already thinking about building a wind farm in the Park.”
“If it didn’t cost so much to live in the Bush, maybe the kids would decide to stay home,” she said. “Some of them, anyway. Enough to keep the town alive, maybe.”
“Johnny’s already figuring out a way.” He told her about the conversation they’d had.
“Legal Eagle, huh?” Kate smiled, and thought about her conversation with Van. On her 160-acre homestead there were five acres on the road midway between her homestead and Mandy’s from which the ground on the other side of the road fell away into a stunning view of the Kanuyaq River valley. She made a mental note to contact a surveyor in Ahtna to see how much it would cost to carve those acres out from her own. If it seemed like a good idea. At some future date. If someone she knew wanted to build their own home in the Park.
The Mother of Storms brooded on the horizon but held her fire and a little over two hours later they touched down on a dirt strip packed hard with snow. The overcast scraped the tops of the Alaska Range and Denali and Foraker floated on the northern horizon like ghosts of themselves haunting the landscape. The nearer view was a geologic tumble of rolling foothills and abrupt buttes and narrow canyons and wide valleys, well-watered by the meltoff from the Alaska Range in the north, thickly forested with spruce and aspen, and rich with wildlife furred, finned, and flying, an all-you-could-eat buffet for the taking for people willing to settle down, shoulder in, and do the hard work of forcing it to feed them.
The village of Kichatna was built at the confluence of two rivers on the remains of an old gold mine that had gone out of business after the Gold Rush. It had been revived again when Nixon took the US off the gold standard and the price per ounce went stratospheric, hunkered down through the whiplash of rising and falling prices over the next eleven years, and then closed again when the inevitable hangover set in and the price dropped almost thirty-one percent. Most of the whites had moved on to the next mine just in time for the original Dena’ina to take title of their ancestral land under the auspices of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22) Page 19