No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  “I wanted him to know that I know,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to need a pretty big favor shortly, and I need Pete to think I’ll keep my mouth shut if he gives it to me.”

  “Ah.” Jim had a pretty fair idea of what that favor was, and he couldn’t say he disapproved.

  “Hey.” She raised up on her elbow to look down at him. “I didn’t tell Mason I’d connected all the dots.”

  “True enough.” He pulled her back down and tucked her head under his chin. “No judging going on here.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing. Get it done, Kate. It’s what you do best.”

  Eighteen

  MONDAY, JANUARY 14

  Anchorage

  “I DID WHAT YOU WANTED,” KATE SAID. “Specifically, I did your job for you.”

  “You hacked the encryption?”

  “No,” she said. “My people couldn’t manage that. So they came at it from another direction. The Bannister Foundation backed their books up into the cloud. My guys found the second set of books.”

  “Where were they?” Mason said. “We couldn’t find them.”

  Kate looked irritatingly tolerant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s ineptitude. She also looked as if she were enjoying herself immensely. What Jim, leaning up against the wall with his arms folded, thought was even more interesting was that Special Agent James G. Mason was letting her enjoy herself at his agency’s expense. It made Jim think more highly of him.

  They were back in Mason’s office in Anchorage. “There is a second set of books.” It wasn’t quite a question.

  She gave him a very old-fashioned look. “As we all knew there would be.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I’ll have them emailed to you as a digital file,” she said. “But I want something first.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I told you we’d pay you.”

  “Indeed you will,” she said. “This is something else. I want the FBI to find someone for me.”

  “Who?” She handed him a piece of paper. He read it out loud. “Maria Jose Trevioso.” He looked up. “Who’s this?”

  “It doesn’t matter, it only matters that you find her.”

  “US citizen?”

  “No.” Kate nodded at the note. “Read the rest.”

  He did. “Tegucigalpa? She’s Honduran?” He tossed the note down on his desk. “She’s an illegal.” He squinted at her. “She’s those kids’ mom, isn’t she?” Kate did not reply. “You’ll notice, Kate, that I haven’t said much about those two kids.”

  “No, you haven’t and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your restraint.” Jim had to bite back a grin. “Ms. Trevioso is their mother. They were separated from her at the border and held in cages, before Gaunt and O’Hanlon, representing themselves as federal agents, kidnapped them and sold them to a known pedophile. They transported two minors across state lines for the purposes of sex trafficking. They are ex-federal agents. You’ll notice I haven’t said much about them. It’s not a good look for any of you, especially in the current political climate. With an election coming on fast.”

  Mason, wisely, Jim thought, remained silent.

  “Find her, Gerry. I want her reunited with her children in twenty-four hours, and then I’ll give you all the information I have uncovered in my investigation.” It was her turn to lean forward. She even let her voice drop to its lowest register, the one she hardly ever bothered to use, except in bed. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”

  I can vouch for that, Jim thought.

  Mason started at Kate like she was a cobra with its hood spread. “You’ll have to give me the kids so I can send them to wherever she is.”

  “Oh, no, Gerry. Those kids aren’t leaving the Park. You’re finding her and having her brought here on the first flight heading north from wherever she is. I don’t care if she’s already back in Honduras. I expect to be picking her up at Ted Stevens International Airport tomorrow or I will tell my guys to erase what they’ve found from existence. They’ll do it, too. They’re my guys.”

  There might have been a little sputtering. “But that’s conspiring to conceal evidence in a federal investigation! Besides, there are procedures, and custodial issues! All those things take time!”

  Kate’s lip curled. “No, there aren’t, and no, they won’t. No federal agent is putting their hands on those kids ever again. In fact, they and their mother are going to be put on a fast track to become fully enfranchised citizens of the United States of America.”

  Mason said, still faintly protesting, “They’ll need sponsors.”

  “They’ll have them. One very highly placed one, too.”

  “You can’t save them all, Kate.”

  “No, I can’t, more’s the pity, but I can save the two right in front of me. Go find their mother. We’ll take it from there.”

  Jim didn’t know which Mason found more scarifying, that Kate Shugak, essentially a civilian in the war on crime, knew more about a case than he, Mason, a soldier sworn to that duty, or that she was holding said information hostage to her own terms.

  He, Jim, had never been more proud.

  That night Kate called Johnny. “Hey, kid.”

  “Kate, hey. How’s it going with Hoover’s Finest? Do you have them over that barrel?”

  “Did you expect anything less?”

  He laughed.

  “Where are you?”

  “At the homestead, me and Van both. Did you know she’s writing up the story of the attack on Auntie Vi’s house? She’s thinking it’s just the thing to ace her English Comp class.”

  “I’ll say,” Kate said drily. “What I Did on My Christmas Vacation.”

  He laughed again. “I know, right? Anyway, what’s up? Just checking in? All good here.”

  “No. There’s something I need to ask you.” And then for a moment Kate found herself uncharacteristically struck dumb. There was no easy way into this conversation.

  “Kate?” Johnny wasn’t laughing now. “Is this something I need to sit down for?”

  “I don’t know,” she said heavily. “It’s about your mother.”

  A brief silence. “Is she dead?”

  “What? No. Nothing like that.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said comfortingly. “It wouldn’t have mattered if she was. What then? Hold on a minute, I’m putting you on speaker so Van can hear. Okay, go.”

  Well, what had she expected? In her observation, the younger generation of Park rats coming up was truly different than her own. They formed romantic attachments early—see Johnny and Van—and defying all the actuarial tables they stuck together. Their possessions were only valuable insofar as they were useful and economical—Johnny and Van shared a lime green Volkswagen Bug (or New Beetle, as the manufacturer put it more loftily) that was nineteen years old. They’d bought it online for $2000 in Anchorage and driven it up the Parks Highway when the semester started at UAA the previous fall. It showed its age, but as Johnny said, “It starts and the heater works.” Kate was old enough to remember when what car a man drove defined him not only to himself but to the women who condescended to sit in the seat next to him. They weren’t buying houses, preferring to share or rent. If they did own they bought land and built when they could afford it and not before. They believed in climate change, Medicare for All, dumping the Electoral College, and, most unbelievably, in voting. Both Johnny and Van had registered the day they turned eighteen. Kate was hoping to live long enough to see how all that worked out for them, the park, the nation, and the world.

  There were some rustling movements. “Kate? You there?”

  “Sorry. Here’s the thing. Jane has been caught up to her ears in a criminal enterprise. I can explain if you want me to, but short story is, she’s going to be arrested, Johnny. It’s federal, not state, so unless she cuts a deal she’s going to prison, likely for a long time.”

  There was a long silence. “Johnny?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, I’m still here, Kate.”

  “I don’t know that I can stop this, because it’s kind of taken on a life of its own, but if you want me to, I can try.”

  Another long silence. “She made her own choices,” Johnny said finally. “She can live with them.”

  “You want to be sure about this, Johnny. You could very well never see her again.”

  “She never gave a shit about me,” he said, his voice cold and flat. “Except how she could use me to stick it to Dad or you. After Dad died she dumped me on my grandparents in Arizona when they lived in a place that didn’t even allow kids. She’s never once bothered to ask me how I got home. I don’t owe her a goddamn thing.”

  Another thing Kate didn’t hear his generation do a lot of was swear. “Okay then.”

  “Tell Jim that furnace he bought for the hangar is throwing out the BTUs like there’s no tomorrow. It feels like Panama in there.”

  “And you would know this how?”

  “Just tell him everything’s fine. When will you be back?”

  “Tomorrow, I hope. Love you both.”

  “Love you, too. See you soon.”

  Their generation wasn’t afraid to say “I love you,” either.

  Altogether a vast improvement over her own.

  Nineteen

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 15

  Anchorage

  THE NEXT DAY JIM WAS WAITING AT TED International when Alaska Airlines Flight 83 arrived five minutes ahead of schedule. He stood just outside security, holding up his phone. On the screen was a photo of the kids that Laurel had texted him that morning. She came through ten minutes later, a thin, exhausted woman with dark, unkempt hair and sunken dark eyes. He thought she looked much older than she probably was. She was wearing a thin windbreaker over a white tee, baggy khakis and worn leather sandals through which her feet showed, encrusted with dirt. A plastic grocery bag dangled from one hand. A woman dressed in a business suit walked around her with a look of disgust, and made an inaudible remark to the man next to her, and they both laughed.

  The woman looked around and saw him. Her eyes went to the photo on his phone and she came toward him in a stumbling run. She clutched at the arm holding the phone and unleashed a flood of Spanish.

  “I’m so sorry, I don’t speak Spanish,” he said, and guided her away from the gate and toward the chairs that lined the windows. He sat her down gently and let her have the phone. “Ma’am, do you speak any English? Habla English?”

  A voice spoke from over his shoulder. “She speaks English just fine.”

  She shuddered and fell silent, clutching the phone, staring at the photo of David and Anna as tears slid down her cheeks.

  Jim stood up slowly and turned to see a young man of maybe legal age in an ICE jacket too big for him. He had thin features and small eyes and greasy hair cut short on the sides with a floppy top. It appeared that contempt was his factory setting because there was plenty of it on display and it was all directed at the weeping woman sitting in front of them. “Here,” he said, shoving a piece of paper at Jim. “You’re supposed to sign this.”

  Twenty-two years on the job you learned something about taking command of the scene, about never losing your cool, about never raising your voice, about maintaining your authority in any and every situation no matter how far south it was headed. Jim backhanded the paper out of the little snot’s hand and grabbed him by the front of his jacket and hauled him up on his toes. Even then he had to bend over to get into his face and Jim was meanly glad this was so. “Who do you really work for? Blackrock? GEO?” He shook the kid hard enough for the greasy hair to flop back and forth and might have done more if he hadn’t seen Mason’s man approaching at a near run. He’d met him coming up the escalator. “Get this piece of trash on a plane south,” he said. “Do it now.” He pushed the young man hard so that he stumbled backwards into the agent’s arms.

  He hunkered back down in front of Ms. Trevioso. “Could I have the phone for a minute?”

  She had shrunk away from the altercation, her face turned aside. She handed him the phone without speaking. He called Laurel. “Put the kids on. Right now.” He handed the phone back. “Look. See. Your son and daughter.” She stared at him, unbelieving. He pointed at the screen. “Look. There they are. You can talk to them.”

  A girl’s voice said, “Mami? Mami!”

  Ms. Trevioso crumpled over the phone again. “Anna! David!”

  Jim stood up and turned his back, sheltering her from curious stares to give her as much privacy as he could.

  Jim called to let Kate know he had Ms. Trevioso and they were on the way to Merrill. “She doesn’t want to stay overnight in Anchorage, Kate, she wants to go straight to her kids. I’ll come back in tomorrow to pick you up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have fun with the Feebs.”

  “You’ll pay for that.” Kate hung up and put away her phone and looked at Mason across his desk. There was a stenographer present this time, taking down Kate’s statement. There were half a dozen other agents there as well, not to mention Mutt. The small office was very crowded.

  “You have the digital file, but I’ll run down the timeline for you,” she said. “On New Year’s Eve, a small jet crashed in the Quilak Mountains at the edge of property I own. There’s a cabin there and two friends were staying in it who responded to the scene, where they found the aft fuselage of the aircraft largely intact. There were two survivors inside, two minor children. The next day, New Year’s Day, they were brought to the clinic in the village of Niniltna. Unknown to their rescuers or anyone else at the time, they carried a mobile phone with them.

  “Local pilots Jim Chopin and George Perry returned to the scene the following day where they found the body of Gary Curley, presumed to be the owner of the wrecked airplane.”

  “I spoke with the director of, ah, Aurora Flight Services this morning, and she said that he and his pilot and two small children whom Curley referred to as his niece and nephew—” Mason looked as nauseous as Kate felt “—departed in his aircraft at ten p.m., destination Fairbanks. Fairbanks has no record of their arrival, and we believe that the aircraft flew instead to Niniltna. There was a massive storm ongoing at the time and witnesses on the ground in Niniltna recall hearing the sound of one jet aircraft landing and taking off, and possibly two, although the wind was howling so hard they couldn’t be sure, and with the snow coming down like it was they didn’t see anything out the window, either.

  “Found with Curley’s body was a gallon Ziploc bag filled with white tablets with no maker’s mark.”

  “Subsequently determined to be fentanyl,” Mason said.

  “In the meantime, I received the news that I had been named trustee for the estate of Erland Bannister,” Kate said. “For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he was a long-time Alaskan mover and shaker who died last November. His record makes for entertaining reading, you should take a look at it sometime, but for now understand that about four years ago he started a nonprofit foundation whose stated purpose was to raise and distribute money to worthy causes in Alaska. It came together very quickly and was funded to where it could begin soliciting grant applications almost immediately. It gave out grants its second year in business, to the tune of over $10 million. The grants have subsequently increased in number and amount every year.”

  She paused. Mason handed her a bottle of water. She cracked it and took a welcome swallow. She preferred doing to talking. Talking was dry work and no one ever believed half of what you said or did any of what you recommended. Dry and disheartening.

  “Erland had a lot of money. Maybe even that much money. But…” Kate shook her head. “During his lifetime, he might have given ten bucks to the Red Cross when no one was looking, but Andrew Carnegie he was not.

  “And we didn’t have the friendliest relationship, to put it mildly. He tried to kill me at least twice that I know of and I was a proximate cause of him going to jail for it. The only reason I could think of
that Erland would name me his trustee was that there was something hinky enough about his estate that it would destroy everyone it came in contact with. To that end, or so I believe, he convinced my cousin Axenia Shugak, to be on his board. Even if I refused the job of trustee, she would still be at risk. Erland knew me well enough to know that I couldn’t let that happen.”

  She didn’t mention Pete Heiman, but she’d had Kurt check with the FEC. Erland had donated half a million dollars to both of Pete’s campaigns for Congress. Up till then Erland hadn’t been a big political donor. He’d wanted Pete’s name on the organization and he’d paid for it. The evidence was there for Mason to find, if he wanted to look for it. Kate hoped he would and that he would make a meal out of it, but she owed Pete for the Treviosos and she wouldn’t help Mason get there.

  “None of it felt right, I don’t care how reformed Erland claimed to be when he got out of prison. So, acting in my authority as Erland’s trustee, on January second I copied the Bannister Foundation’s records from Erland’s assistant’s laptop and had my people go over the numbers. Everything on the face of it seemed legit, money coming in from big donors, money going out in the form of grants to various organizations and causes in the state.

  “A few other odd things, though. Erland’s assistant, Jane Wardwell, is someone with whom I have an unpleasant history. Why hire her as the point person to an organization I, as his trustee, was supposed to be overseeing? My best guess is that Erland hoped that our contentious relationship would divert my attention from what business the Bannister Foundation was really in.

  “Then, when I visited the Bannister Foundation offices, there wasn’t even a receptionist. I was met by Jane Wardwell and asked her where everyone else was. She said the other employees were on holiday. This was the first week of January.

  “On my way out, I fell into conversation with one of the construction workers who was doing finish work on the business park the foundation headquarters is in. He was puzzled, he said, because the building was ready for occupancy and while the signs indicated that it was fully occupied and staffed, he saw very few people working there.”