No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22)

by Dana Stabenow

  She shook her head. “According to their website, the Bannister Foundation was giving away millions of dollars in grants four times a year. The level of largesse indicated the necessity of grants managers, program managers, an events manager, an office manager.”

  She nodded at Mason. “Then you contracted me to find out how Curley’s people were handling the money end of his drug operation. I guessed you knew I’d been named Erland’s trustee, and that’s when it all started to come together. You had already been looking at the Bannister Foundation, hadn’t you?”

  He bounced back against the springs of his desk chair and smiled.

  “It was pretty obvious that either you were trying to figure out if I was complicit, or you wanted someone on the inside.”

  She took a long, hard pull at the bottle of water. “It happens that I know one of the students enrolled at Bering VoTech, one of the Bannister Foundation’s grant recipients last year. I had her check on the amount of the grant. She said it was half a million. The teachers have the students write thank-you letters to donors and foundations who give them money, so the number came easily to mind. But here’s the thing. The amount given to Bering VoTech as listed in the Bannister Foundation accounts is $1.5 million.”

  Someone in the room drew in a sharp breath.

  She met Mason’s eyes. “Bannister doesn’t put the amounts of the grants on their website. They don’t issue press releases, they don’t host fundraisers or donor appreciation events, and, as I later discovered, they seem to have no mechanism in place for grant recipients to report how they, the receiving organizations, had spent Bannister’s grants. All that seemed unusual, not to say bizarre. Week before last I happened to be in Ahtna, so I went to talk to the people at the Ahtna Women’s Shelter, another grant recipient of the Bannister Foundation. The foundation’s records showed a grant going out for $250,000. When I asked Marlena Peratrovich, their executive director, about it, not naming the sum, she told me, and I’m quoting her verbatim here, ‘I’ve worked a lot harder for a lot less than $25,000.’ She expressed her gratitude to Jane Wardwell for the personal care she had taken in guiding her through the application process. Another applicant told me it was the simplest grant application she’d ever gone through and, again I’m quoting here, ‘I had to kind of force them to listen to what I wanted to do with their money.’ ‘Them’ in this case being, again, Jane Wardwell.

  “Last week I flew to Seldovia, King Salmon, and Kichatna, home to organizations who had received Bannister Foundation grants. The story was similar in all respects. Jane Wardwell was the only person they talked to at the foundation, and that the grant application process was basically ask and ye shall receive. And they did, but again, the amounts they said they received were markedly different than the amounts the Bannister Foundation had listed in their accounts. Seldovia received $10,000 for their library, Bannister’s accounts showed $100,000. A wind energy company in King Salmon got $300,000 but the books showed $1 million. Kichatna Academy got $400,000, whereas the books showed $1.4 million.”

  She shrugged. “The Bannister Foundation has a lot of money coming in and on the face of it comparatively little going out. Whatever could be going on here, do you think?”

  Mason sat back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell us.”

  “Mr. Chopin spoke to Valerie Doogan, the principal of the Niniltna School. Her office has a front row seat to the airstrip. Ever since they started doing the prep for the Suulutaq Mine she says air traffic has exponentially increased, including a lot of small anonymous private jets. She thought it was muckety-mucks flying in to check on their investment. Oh, and—although you’ll have to dig into this yourselves to find out the specific details—it is anecdotally known in the Park that Erland Bannister had a substantial financial stake in the Suulutaq Mine. It provided all the cover he needed for frequent flights to Niniltna.”

  “Jesus,” somebody said. “Fucker really lined this out.”

  “He had some time to think about it,” Kate said. And how he would have loved incorporating the Park into his plans. Making her complicit in her ignorance. “What I think is that Erland set up the Bannister Foundation from the get-go to launder money from drug trafficking. The drugs were smuggled into Alaska by way of transfers on the Niniltna airstrip, easily camouflaged as business trips to the mine. Maybe even sometimes by Erland himself, he was in and out of there often enough. The drugs went to Gary Curley for breaking down into retail quantities, some sold in Alaska and the rest sent on for sale out of the country. You’ll know more about that than I do. The money went to the Bannister Foundation in the persons of Erland Bannister—who was his own executive director, a direct conflict of interest—and Jane Wardwell, and subsequently appeared as donations by multiple conveniently anonymous donors to the Bannister Foundation, who then gave a small fraction of it away as a cover story. The rest of it was forwarded on to the illegal drug manufacturers, whose operation this was.”

  “Any ideas on that front?”

  Kate shook her head. “That’s your bailiwick. Although I’d appreciate it if you’d figure that out so they’d stop shooting at me.”

  A brief silence, until someone said, “Really, kind of ingenious.”

  “I know, right? Who’s ever going to look hard at a nonprofit handing out money all over the state?”

  “Especially this state.”

  There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. “Exactly,” Kate said. “Alaska, in spite of its ideal location for an operation of this kind, is seen as a bastard child by—” she shrugged “—I was going to say the rest of the nation but really by most of the world. And you’ll notice, Bannister mostly gave in poor communities off the road system or otherwise isolated, generally with no or very slow Internet access. Some of them are still working on getting cell phone providers to come into their areas. Most of them don’t have a permanent law enforcement presence of their own and they never see a fed. Who will ever show up to ask them how much money they really got? And they’d certainly never complain about getting less money than had been reported, because, a, how would they know, and b, why would they care? In the Alaska Bush cash in hand will always trump every other concern.”

  Kate drained the bottle and screwed the cap back on. “In the meantime, the bulk of the ‘donated’ money is electronically transferred, as might be expected, to various offshore accounts, all numbered.”

  “We’ll get on that,” Mason said.

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” someone said sotto voce.

  “We did find the same name in three different places in the Bannister records,” Kate said, “but only three out of fifty-plus.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Not who, what. A law firm called Cullen and Associates.”

  Mason sat upright. “In Chicago?”

  She nodded. “You’ll remember last year we found evidence that Erland Bannister and the Chicago Outfit had Cullen and Associates in common.”

  “I do,” he said grimly. “And Eugene Hutchinson?”

  She shook her head. “So far as I can tell he was only Erland’s lawyer. He may just have been collateral damage.”

  He waited, and when she said nothing further he said, “That’s it?”

  She looked at him. “You stopped an organization that was transshipping illegal drugs to Alaska. If that jet hadn’t crashed you wouldn’t have known a thing about it. Sure, you’ll have to track down the distribution in the state and you’ll have to follow the money out of the state, but as far as I’m concerned this is a good day’s work.” She stood up and pulled an envelope from her pocket and dropped it on his desk. “Our bill. You’ll notice the biggest items are pilot hours and avgas, which is why I included a copy of the pilot’s log book. Prompt payment would be appreciated.”

  His phone rang. He listened to the voice on the other end for a moment and hung up. “We have a warrant to search the offices of the Bannister Foundation. Would you like to join me?”

  She thought it over.
She found that, after all, she didn’t really need to gloat in person at Jane’s downfall. On the other hand, she wouldn’t mind having a few blank spots filled in, and if Jane was in the mood to talk… “Sure.”

  Red and his co-workers were gone, along with the visqueen and the scaffolding. The security guard’s jaw dropped when he saw Mason’s identification and he made no move to call anyone. A rent-a-cop’s loyalty only went so far. They rode up in the elevator in silence, and when it arrived at the top floor exited out into what was still an echoingly empty office space. No receptionist on the front desk, no one getting coffee in the break room. The lights were on but no one was home.

  Mason’s agents fanned out, opening doors into individual offices. There were no cries of outrage or demands to know what was going on. There was no one to make them.

  Kate led Mason to the corner office that was Jane’s, and was a little surprised to find Jane was there, sitting at her desk.

  She looked up as they appeared and went very still. It was instantly obvious that she remembered Mason from his previous visit and that she knew very well why he had returned. Mason nevertheless identified himself again and displayed the warrant to search the premises. Jane nodded as if she understood but Kate thought she looked a little numb.

  “Boss?”

  Mason disappeared, leaving Kate and Jane staring at each other.

  “I told him,” Jane said. It sounded to Kate as if the words had been forcibly pulled from her mouth. “I told him it was a bad idea. I told him you’d never fall for it.” A ghost of a sigh. “But he hated you so much. He would do anything, sacrifice anything or anyone for a chance at bringing you down, whether he liked to see it or not.”

  “When did he name me his trustee?”

  Jane swallowed. “When he got the diagnosis that his cancer was terminal.”

  “Was I supposed to find out about the money laundering?”

  “No.”

  She might not have, Kate thought, if Curley’s plane hadn’t crashed at Canyon Hot Springs. If Laurel and Matt hadn’t been spending New Year’s at the cabin. If Jim and George hadn’t found that Ziploc bag full of fentanyl at the crash site. If Mason hadn’t reached out to her about Curley. If the FBI hadn’t already had the Bannister Foundation in the crosshairs. “What was supposed to happen?”

  For a moment there was the merest trace of the old hostile Jane Morgan, Jack’s resentful, revengeful wife, in the twist of Jane’s lips and the narrowing of her eyes. “If you repeat any of this I’ll deny it.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Of course you will. What was supposed to happen?”

  Jane looked at the door but found the temptation to brag irresistible. She did lower her voice to a whisper. “After six months, I was supposed to discover that the check we are… we were about to cut for the Niniltna Public School was considerably less than the Bannister Foundation had granted them.”

  Kate remembered what Valerie Doogan had said. Now that I think about it, I had to kind of force her to listen to what I wanted to do with their money. And Jack had said that Erland had come to Val personally last year with the offer of a grant for the school.

  “Upon investigation, I was to ‘discover’—” Jane’s voice put the word in air quotes “—that this had happened with many of the Bannister Foundation grants. After which, I was to go to the FBI with the files and tell them everything.”

  “What were you supposed to say about me?”

  Jane said nothing, and any shred of sympathy Kate might have felt vanished in that moment. “I see. Was Eugene Hutchinson involved?”

  “Gene? No. He was a friend of Erland’s. He didn’t even practice anymore. All he did was write the trust and the will.”

  Why they hadn’t been able to find an office for him. “Got him killed anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you get out of it? Erland must have made the payoff pretty good for you to risk three to five to life.” Nothing, and Kate, goaded, said, “Pretty clever, by the way. Backing up the books to your accounts with Amazon, Apple, and Google. Good to know all that free cloud storage didn’t go to waste.” Jane couldn’t hide her surprise and Kate smiled thinly. “Oh, yes, we found them all. We even found the Dropbox backup through your Yahoo account. You really should have changed your password from the last time I hacked your finances. It’s been, what, six years?”

  Jane turned brick red. It was most unattractive.

  “Were you the secondary trustee, Jane? If I had said no thanks, would you have carried on moving money around for these fucking death merchants as usual?”

  Jane was by now the color of eggplant to the tops of her ears.

  Kate, sickened by the entire mess and perhaps a little by her own spite, turned and left Jane’s office.

  Mason looked up and saw her. “Hey, hold up.”

  Kate paused. “I’m done here.”

  “I get it,” he said. He looked around the offices. “There is no one here except her.”

  “There only needed to be her,” Kate said. “You saw the Safescan in Curley’s house. He received the pills, he packaged them, he sold them, he counted and banded the take when necessary, he deposited it.” She snorted. “He had his own aircraft that could make Seattle in three hours, Portland in four, LA and Chicago in five or six. Whatever bank he deposited it in, it all showed up as donations to the Bannister Foundation’s account from donors who aren’t meant to be identified. The overseas take probably came in by wire transfer from Gary Curleys in Japan, South Korea, Russia, where the fuck ever.” She shrugged. “All Jane had to do was manage the grant applications and send out the checks. With the two sets of books in hand you may be able to sustain a conspiracy charge against her, but none of it will matter a damn to the drug trafficking organization who reaped the profits if you can’t track back the deposits.”

  Special Agent James G. Mason stuck out his chin. “We’ll find them. It’s what we do.”

  Good luck with that, Kate thought.

  He straightened to attention. “Thank you, Kate,” he said formally. “We would have got here eventually because it’s what we do, but it would have taken us longer without you, your skills, your connections, and your local knowledge.” He sighed. “It won’t stop them, of course. There’s too much money in it. But it’ll slow them down for a while, and you never know, maybe this time long enough for us to get out ahead of them for a change.” He held out his hand. She took it. “Thank you,” he said again.

  She almost smiled. “Prompt payment will be appreciated.”

  He laughed, and let her go.

  And Jane, she thought as she rode down in the elevator, still hadn’t said one word about Johnny.

  Twenty

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 15

  Anchorage

  AN UBER DROPPED KATE AND MUTT OFF AT Merrill where they picked up the Forester and drove back to the townhouse. The neighbor was spreading de-icer on his steps when she opened the front door to grab the mail. He wore the same ratty old brown bathrobe he always did. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said, and paused in case he wanted to say more, but he finished the steps and went back inside. She been staying in this townhouse while she was in Anchorage for over a decade and she still didn’t know his name. Apparently he liked it that way.

  She wanted to go home.

  She called the housesitter to let her know it would be empty again tomorrow, and to instruct her to call someone to replace the window. There wasn’t much in the way of food in the house but she didn’t feel like going out to shop. She nuked a frozen package of moose stew meat for Mutt. There was a bunch of fresh asparagus left in the refrigerator and a package of Top Ramen in the cupboard. She opened the ramen and put the flavor packet back in the cupboard, good for a hot cup of bullion on some future cold day. She sliced the asparagus on a diagonal into short pieces and put water on to boil. In a small bowl she whisked a large glop of mayonnaise with mustard, rice vinegar, sesame oil and soy sauce. When the water boiled
she added the cut-up asparagus and set the timer for three minutes. When it dinged she added the noodles and set it for another three minutes. When it dinged the second time she drained the contents, returned them to the pan, and tossed them with the dressing. It passed the taste test and she took the bowl and a fork out into the living room along with a can of Diet 7Up she’d found hiding in the door of the fridge. It was a little stale but not bad. Probably best not to look at its sell-by date. She turned on the gas fireplace and sat down on the couch and propped her feet on the coffee table.

  She ate slowly, watching the light fade from the sky and trying and failing to ignore the hole in the window. “Good girl,” she said to Mutt, whose bark had put the shooter off his aim. Although the curtains had been drawn that night so he was shooting blind anyway. Had it been only a warning, or had he been trying to kill them? He’d killed Hutchinson right after, so she thought the latter. She wondered if it was the same person who had taken a shot at them when they came out of the bank. He’d come a lot closer to success that time, and she remembered that Mutt bumping into her was why he hadn’t. “Really good girl,” she said. Mutt raised her head, yawned, and laid it back down again. Kate only wished she was as good at staying in the moment.

  Entirely too much shooting about their persons of late. She wondered if other PIs got shot at as often. She wondered if she ought to up her computer skills so she could start doing less fraught work like background checks on prospective employees. And how boring would that be?

  She finished her noodles and thought about hitting the Coastal Trail. She was still thinking about it when her phone rang. It was an Unknown Number. She answered it anyway. “Hello?”

  “Kate Shugak?” A young man, very polite.

  “Speaking.”

  “Would you hold one moment, please, for Mr. Smith? Thank you,” he said without waiting for her to reply. “Mr. Smith? Ms. Shugak is on the line.”