“And,” she said, her eyes narrowing again, “there have been rumors filtering north that Finn Grant may have been the victim of foul play.” She stood up and glared at him. “There have also been rumors of possible suspects. Your wife being one of them!”
As adversarial as their relationship was, both professional and personal, the one unquestionably laudable thing about Jo Dunaway’s character Liam knew for certain was that she was absolutely, unswervingly loyal to Wy Chouinard, college roommate and in-everything-but-blood sister. So this trip to Newenham was personal for her, which only increased the pressure on the professional him.
Not to mention the potential nest of snakes it opened up in regards to Finn Grant’s possible murder.
When he did not respond, she said, “Well?”
“I have no comment at this time,” he said.
“Is there an ongoing investigation into Finn Grant’s death?”
“I have no comment at this time,” he said.
“Is there any reason to suspect that his death was caused by anything other than mechanical error?”
“I have no comment at this time,” he said.
“Sure you don’t,” she said. “I’m staying on for a few days. Oh, don’t worry”—a sardonic note when she saw his expression—“I won’t be crowding the newlyweds, I’ve got a room at Alta’s.” Again with the smile so sweet, it made his teeth hurt. “Burgers and brew at Bill’s tonight, though. I already checked with Wy.”
He was on his feet before she got a step closer to the door. “Jo,” he said, his voice coming out like the crack of a whip.
She had backbone, did Jo Dunaway. She didn’t jump or respond in any way until she got a hand on the doorknob. Just by way of reinforcing the First Amendment. “Yeah?”
His eyes bored into her. “If you have any information germane to an ongoing investigation, you have a duty to be forthcoming with that information.”
She shook her blond corkscrew curls back from her face and said in a gentle voice, “But according to you, Liam, there is no ongoing investigation. Or not one you can comment on at this time.”
He waited for the door to close behind her and put his head down on his desk. “Fuck,” he said with deep and sincere feeling.
He wondered how best he could impart this latest wrinkle in the maybe-murder of Finn Grant to Kate Shugak, and if, faced with another couple of hundred suspects, she might not rightfully be expected to turn tail and head back for Niniltna as fast as she could run.
He raised his head and reached for the phone to call the boss. If there were any rumors floating around about this non-case, he might as well be the last one to hear them.
Seven
JANUARY 18
Chinook Airport, twenty-five miles south of Newenham
The hangar was painted white with green trim and boasted the name Eagle Air in large, dashing script with an attendant, requisitely fierce eagle logo, wings spread, beak open, talons extended. It filled up the entire hangar door.
“Looks big enough for a 747,” Kate said, meaning the hangar.
“Plus three single Otters and four Caravans. All three Otters are turbo, too.”
“Pilot envy,” Kate said.
The pilot smiled. “Maybe a little. Makes ’em go faster, all right, but the downside is they need a lot more space to land and take off in.”
“Leaves the shorter strips for you.”
“True enough. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on one of their Caravans, though. Be great for moving the mail, especially at Christmas. You know what Christmas is like for mail to the Bush.”
Kate nodded. She knew.
Wyanet Chouinard was half a foot taller than Kate, with brown eyes wrinkled at the corners from squinting at horizons. Her hair was dark blond hair with bronze streaks, and she wore it pulled back in a thick ponytail that ended well below her shoulders. Her Carhartt bibs were black with oil and grease stains and her XtraTufs looked like they’d been used to teethe ferrets. Kate had felt at home with Chouinard from their first meeting.
They and Mutt were standing next to Chouinard’s Cessna, a well-loved 180 with plenty of miles on her. Nevertheless, she looked a hell of a lot cleaner than her owner, smart and trustworthy in white paint with brown and gold trim, Nushugak Air Taxi Service spelled out in fancy black script down her fuselage. The two backseats had been pulled to make room for the mail from Manokotak and Togiak. Togiak was where Chouinard had picked up Kate.
Chinook Airport, latitude 59-02-40.8000 north, longitude 158-30-19.8000 west, elevation eighty-one feet, twenty-five miles south of Newenham, home to Eagle Air and Eagle Air FBO, sat at the corner of two runways, 1/19 and 8/26. Paved runways were in many Alaskan communities an almost unimaginable luxury, as witness the newly paved strip at Niniltna that had made George Perry look so smug last Saturday morning. Chinook had no control tower and the nearest flight service station was in Newenham, but it had a bright orange windsock at the end of Runway One-Zero, at present indicating a steady ten- to twelve-knot wind out of the northwest.
The paint job on the hangar was so new, it made their eyes water from fifty feet away. The first building was complemented by a second, equally oversize building next door, two stories high. Kate estimated it at ten thousand square feet, or about half the size of the hangar. A communications tower bristling with antennas and dishes loomed in the background and made Kate feel like she was back in Niniltna.
“Pretty ritzy for a one-horse operation,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” Chouinard said. “Finn Grant had an open house when it was finished, we all got the tour.” She added a little grimly, “Whether we wanted it or not.”
“And?”
“And while it might not look like it, those buildings are actually original to the air force base.”
“Nice remodeling job.”
“You should see the inside. Offices that look like they were designed for Donald Trump. A ready room for pilots that’s even plushier. A business center complete with six state-of-the-art computers with high-speed wireless Internet access, a printer the size of a baby grand, and two fax machines. Speaking of baby grands, there is even an upright piano.”
“You’re kidding.” Kate laughed. “This Finn Grant guy watch a lot of World War Two movies about the Royal Air Force?”
“Could be. There’s also a self-serve café stocked with delicacies flown in daily from City Market and Alaska Silk Pie—”
“Alaska Silk Pie?” Chouinard had all of Kate’s attention. “They have Chocolate Silk Royale?”
“And,” Chouinard said, “there’s a lounge full of squashy dark blue leather furniture and a flat-screen television the size of a barn door, with a built-in cupboard stocked with DVDs they can watch on the big screen in the adjacent mini-theater. Everything from Finding Nemo to Debbie Does Dallas. There’s even a rock fireplace. With a slate hearth.”
That sounded a little like fireplace envy. Kate eyed the row of windows across the second floor. “What’s upstairs?”
“Individual bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and a sitting room, for those aviators needing to spend an extra day or, more likely, for those who got weathered in going one direction or another.”
“Wow,” Kate said, awed in spite of herself. She’d spent most of her air time in airplanes that smelled of clam juice and moose blood, not to mention the puke of the last drunk passenger to throw up in it. When she got weathered in, she usually spent the night on the floor of the high school gym.
“Yeah, I know,” Chouinard said. “That, and the quarter-million a pop it cost to turn three single Otters into turbo, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“Married it.” Chouinard closed the Cessna’s door and hoisted the brown canvas mail sack over her shoulder. Mutt trotted off to mark new territory. The two women began to walk toward the hangar office. “Clementina—his wife—was a Tannehill. Old-time Southwest family. I think her grandfather had a stak
e in the mines in Platinum.”
“Wow squared,” Kate said, properly respectful. As an Alaskan she would have heard of the Tannehills, but she and Campbell had agreed that it would be better all around if his wife didn’t know who Kate really was, at least not at first. It was hard enough to keep a secret when two people knew it. Three people and you might as well call CNN. Until now, Kate hadn’t been south and west of Tyonek, or at least not ashore except at Dutch Harbor and on one of the Aleutian Islands, which memory still made her feel like a popsicle. Alaska was a big place. Having Mutt along might stretch the bounds of an undercover identity, but the plan was to get in, get the job done, and get out again before anyone remembered a certain speech at the AFN Convention some years back.
Besides, Mutt had made her objections to being left behind vigorously, vehemently, and vociferously known, and Kate hadn’t been willing to go through another scene like the one at Canyon Hot Springs last October, when Mutt had come this close to quitting the firm. The last two years had tested their partnership enough for one lifetime.
By prior arrangement, she had flown PenAir to Togiak and spent the night. When Wy arrived on her mail run, Kate bought a seat to Newenham. Her cover story was a girl and her dog on the run from village life. It wouldn’t hold up for long, she didn’t look much like a Yupik—legs too long and not enough chest—but she wasn’t worried. So many people saw Alaska Natives as interchangeable.
And after all, she had her orders from Jim. Just try to wrap it up in a week. She smiled to herself.
The glitter of sun on snow was painful to the eye. It was a relief when they stepped into the shadow of the second building. As they reached the office door, it crashed open and bounced off the wall. Both of them jumped back out of the way just in time, as a well-nourished twenty-something clad in tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt with the Eagle Air eagle’s wings lovingly cupping her breasts came trotting out of the office. She was not wearing a bra and her shoes had four-inch heels. The shoes were a bright yellow to match the eyes, beak, and talons of the Eagle Air eagle, so Kate had to assume they were part of the uniform.
Four-inch heels? In January? She’d kill herself first.
“Hey, Wy,” this vision said on the fly. “Got a flight coming in, the mailbag’s on the desk.”
“Sure, Tasha.” The pilot vanished inside.
Tasha opened a door into the hangar and wheeled out a short airstairs. By then Kate could hear the approach of an airplane, a jet by the sound of it. She squinted against the sun and found it on approach off the end of one-zero. As she watched, the gear descended out of the fuselage and the aircraft touched down light as a feather, using the friction of tires on pavement and all eight thousand feet of runway length to chew up speed. By the time it reached the apron in front of the hangar, it was moving at a pace decorous enough to satisfy the most aviophobic passenger, as well as the most persnickety FAA checkrider.
It was another private jet, to her untrained eye the twin of the one she’d seen parked on the Niniltna airstrip when she and Campbell had flown out Saturday morning. Austere in anonymous white paint, no logo and no tail numbers. Even the hushed sound of the engines seemed reticent and circumspect.
“That’s the 550,” Chouinard said, reappearing at Kate’s side. “New York to Tokyo in fourteen and a half hours.”
“Gulfstream?” Kate said, which was the only possible remark she could have made that might sound reasonably intelligent. She’d learned it only three days before.
Chouinard nodded. “I’d heard about this one, but I’ve always just missed seeing it.”
“You know the owner?”
“Fifty-one thousand feet cruising altitude,” Chouinard said, eyes fixed on the jet. “No commercial traffic to worry about, or weather either, for that matter. Mach point-eight, with four crew and eight SOBs. Rolls-Royce engines, fifteen thousand pounds of thrust each. And they’ve got an integrated avionics suite—PlaneView, they call it—LCD displays, EVS—”
“You realize you might as well be speaking tongues,” Kate said.
“Oh.” Chouinard laughed and said a little sheepishly, “Sorry. Got carried away there for a minute.”
The engines wound down and stopped, and the hatch popped open. A bunch of guys trooped out. They looked like guys, if a little better-looking and in a lot better shape than most.
Especially the one in the lead, who looked very familiar. “Who’s that?” Kate said.
“Huh?” Chouinard was still looking at the jet.
Another man came bustling out of the office, hand outstretched. He was short and a little pudgy with thinning hair and an unctuous manner. He wore a khaki safari suit and a red scarf knotted around his neck that made him look like he might be partnered up with Crocodile Dundee, a natural mistake he corrected at once. “Hugh Reid, Mr. McGuire,” he said in a nasal voice. “We met once before, I’m sure you don’t remember. I am—I was—I am Finn Grant’s partner.”
McGuire took Reid’s outstretched hand in a brief clasp. Reid seemed to want to hang on, but McGuire managed to divest himself and gestured vaguely at the posse behind him. “Hugh Reid, guys. Finn’s partner. Are you a pilot, Hugh?”
“Er,” Reid said, “I’m afraid not, no.”
“I see. Then in Finn’s, uh, regrettable absence, who will be taking us out to the lodge?”
“Why don’t we just take the jet?” This from a short, thin man with thick glasses and a nervous manner.
“Because, Willy,” one of the other guys said, “no way is Gabe landing this baby on gravel.”
McGuire smiled at Kate over Reid’s shoulder. “Lester would kill me if I did. Hi. Gabe McGuire.”
“Hi,” she said, and didn’t smile back.
Reid trotting at his elbow like he was attached by an invisible leash, McGuire reached her in one long stride. His grip was warm and firm, and like Reid’s had a tendency to hang on. He looked her over and didn’t mind letting it show that he liked what he saw.
“Sorry,” she said, baffled, “have we met?”
A quiet laugh went around the entourage. McGuire held out his hand to Chouinard. “Hello. You’re Liam’s wife, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And if memory serves, you’re a pilot.”
“Uh-huh.” Chouinard was still staring at the jet.
He glanced at the hangar. “You work for Finn Grant?”
That did get her attention. “No,” she said, very definitely. “I run my own business.” She jerked a thumb at the Cessna behind them. “Nushugak Air Taxi Service.”
“Yeah? You rated on single Otters?”
“Yeah,” Chouinard said, realizing this conversation was heading toward money in the bank. “You need a ride out to your lodge?”
He nodded. “Five passengers total, and a daypack each.”
Chouinard jerked another thumb at Kate, now reduced to baggage. “I’ve got to run my passenger to Newenham and drop off the mail first.”
“No problem. We’ll make ourselves at home here while we wait.” He smiled at Tasha, who visibly melted right down into her four-inch heels. “If that’s okay with Tasha.”
In a fluttery voice Tasha said, “Of course, Mr. McGuire.”
“Gabe.”
Tasha blushed. “Gabe.”
Reid said, “Okay, Tasha, show these gentlemen to the lounge. We’ve got showers, Internet access, beds if you feel like a nap. Satellite television, DVDs, a full bar, Tasha can whip you up some sandwiches—”
He stood back, holding the door open and beaming over his shoulder at McGuire—See how efficient I am? How well I am taking care of your people? May I sacrifice a goat at midnight in your honor?—as the other men filed inside.
Chouinard said, “Okay if I ask your pilot for a tour of your jet?”
McGuire was amused. “Sure.” He waved a hand at one of his men. “Les, show Ms. Chouinard the baby.”
“I haven’t seen anything that perfect since the first salmon steak of the season,” Chouin
ard said, walking toward the jet.
She wasn’t talking about McGuire. He grinned and got out of her way.
Mutt came up, having marked out her territory at Eagle Air, and cocked an ear at McGuire. He went down on one knee and held out his fist, palm down. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Gabe. And you are?”
She sniffed his hand. They both looked at Kate.
“Mutt, meet Gabe,” Kate said, forced into it.
Mutt gave Gabe’s hand a tentative lick, and then another, more enthusiastic one. He had passed the taste test. Unfortunately.
McGuire rubbed Mutt’s ears, and her tail hit overdrive. He rose to his feet. “Mutt, huh?”
“She is one,” Kate said. He turned slightly, to get the sun out of his eyes, and something clicked. “You’re the actor.”
McGuire did not look thrilled at the recognition. “Some say yes,” he said. “Some say no.”
From the moment he’d stepped off the plane, she’d been a little off balance. She forced herself to examine him in an analytical light, as if he were a suspect she would later have to pick out of a lineup. He was tall, long-limbed, and muscular, moving with a confident kind of grace. His dark eyes were set deep beneath a broad shelf of a brow, his mouth was mobile and prone to humor over a very firm jaw, and he had eyebrows and cheekbones like George Harrison. He wasn’t handsome, but he was memorable. On camera, sneaking across the desert in camos with an RPG over his shoulder, he was rugged, rough-edged, and sexy as hell. His jeans were undoubtably designer, but they showed their miles without shame, and no Alaskan man would have been embarrassed to wear the faded red plaid shirt under the scruffy blue anorak.
Their eyes met, and Kate was alarmed at the slight shock of recognition, almost familiarity.
He reminded her of Jack.
Not a lot, they weren’t twins or anything, but there was something about Gabe McGuire in person, in the rough angularity of his features and the directness of his gaze that brought Jack Morgan forcibly to mind, in a way it never had the times she’d seen him on-screen.
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