Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  She met the look without flinching, and he was first to lower his eyes. He knew as well as she did that it was fatal to play favorites in any investigation, and when Kate arrived in Newenham, she had had no proof of Chouinard’s lack of involvement in the crime. She didn’t now, come to that, but at this point the suspects were so thick on the ground she was happy to let her gut dictate the removal of at least one of them.

  Kate could see his sudden realization that while he was explaining himself to his wife, there was a reporter in the room. He said to Dunaway, “All of this is off the record, Jo. You don’t write about it. You don’t talk about it.” He pointed at Kate. “You don’t tell anyone about her, either, are we clear on that? Or I will charge you with interfering with an ongoing investigation.”

  Dunaway gave him a look that would have smelted a man of inferior steel. “I’ve known Wyanet Chouinard a lot longer than you have, Liam Campbell. She’s my oldest and dearest friend and I would never do anything that might hurt her.” She turned on her heel and went out the door, slamming it hard behind her.

  Kate waited for the echoes of that slam to die away. “Uh, I’ve got to get to work.”

  Liam looked at her, back down at the bullet thumb drive, and over at his wife. Clearly, there was much he wanted to say, and equally clearly, much he would not say in front of Chouinard.

  “We’ll talk later,” Kate said, and made good her escape.

  Or so she thought, because Dunaway was lying in wait outside. She planted herself in Kate’s path, ignoring Mutt’s menacing growl with more sangfroid than anyone who had ever heard it before, and said not quite through her teeth, “Wyanet Chouinard is in everything but blood my sister. I don’t know exactly what you’re doing here, but if whatever it is you’re doing hurts her in any way, I will feel a strong need to do a lengthy investigative report on the life and times of one Kate Shugak. Do you understand me?”

  Kate walked around her and got on the ATV.

  Dunaway walked over and stood in front of them. “Do you understand me?”

  Mutt jumped up behind and Kate started the engine and put it in gear. She thumbed the throttle, focused somewhere beyond Dunaway’s right shoulder. The right front tire was about to run over Dunaway’s foot when she stepped out of the way. Kate did not look back.

  Dunaway cursed, long and fluently, and stared after them in frustrated speculation.

  She’d spent the last two days nosing around Newenham, pretending she was doing a story on a reality television show said to begin filming in the area the following summer, featuring the wild and hairy salmon fishing season. Her ploy had opened virtually every door she had knocked on—who doesn’t want to be on TV—but she had discovered very little more about Eagle Air FBO and Finn Grant than she already knew. No one had heard the name of Alexandra Hardin, or not in conjunction with Grant, not even the local banker, and no one knew where Finn was getting all his spending money.

  Her face cleared and she pulled out her cell phone.

  She had just remembered that she knew an FBI agent.

  Twenty-one

  JANUARY 20

  Newenham

  She and Mutt were half an hour late to work.

  Bill got there half an hour later. At Kate’s look she said, “Don’t even start. As I suspected, last night’s festivities led to a long day in court. Hold down the fort, I’m taking a nap.” She marched back to her office and closed the door firmly behind her.

  Five minutes later, Moses Alakuyak walked in, marched past Kate without so much as a by-your-leave, and let himself into the office. That time, Kate heard the lock click.

  Her shift started out slow and continued that way. A few people showed up for the hair of the dog, grumpy and silent. She saw the man who had taken her place at the library. He seemed to be avoiding her eye. Later he was joined by another man, short, black-browed, heavyset, and balding. At six o’clock Chouinard and Campbell came in and took the booth in the back. Kate took a tray over. “What’ll you have, folks?”

  Chouinard looked amused, Campbell annoyed and maybe a little embarrassed. At least they were no longer at each other’s throats. “Beer and a burger,” he said.

  “Same,” Chouinard said.

  Makeup food. Kate took the order to the pass-through, where stolid Dottie the cook and happy-go-lucky Paul, her son and aide-de-camp, looked happy to have something to do. The order was up in record time, and Kate delivered it with a pleasant smile. “Anything else?”

  “No thanks,” Chouinard said.

  “Did you see everything on that thumb drive?” Campbell said.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Like I told you, the only name that meant anything to me was hers.”

  She waited, but he bit into his burger, probably as a means of avoiding further conversation.

  She was behind the bar, washing glasses, when Gabe McGuire walked in. Even the hungover looked up at that, and then looked away again deliberately, trying so hard to pretend he was just another guy that it was instantly obvious he wasn’t. He ignored it, looked around, spotted Campbell and Chouinard, and joined them. Kate took a deep and she hoped unobtrusive breath, picked up her tray like it was a buckler, and arrived at the booth with a smile fixed to her face.

  McGuire looked up at her without surprise. “Kate,” he said lazily.

  “What can I get for you?” Kate said.

  “Dottie frying chicken tonight?”

  “I can ask.”

  “If the answer is yes, please tell her all dark, and green salad with oil and vinegar.”

  “Anything to drink?”

  “Iced tea.”

  “Chicken? Wednesday isn’t a chicken night.” Dottie looked through the pass-through. McGuire gave her a little wave, and dour Dottie actually smiled. “Coming right up.”

  Bill and Moses emerged from Bill’s office, rumpled and radiating an air of sleek satisfaction. “I hate you both,” Kate said to Bill in passing.

  Bill laughed out loud.

  “And your shirt’s buttoned up crooked,” Kate said, and did a round. The run on Bloody Marys continued. When she brought McGuire his chicken, he said, “Take a break, why don’t you.”

  She got a drink. By the time she got back to the booth, Chouinard and Campbell were leaving. “We’ll be talking,” Campbell growled in her ear. They left and she wasn’t fast enough on her feet to get out of it, so she slid in opposite McGuire. There was a sardonic look in his eye, as if he were fully aware of her feelings, but he wasn’t going to offer her an easy out, and then Mutt came over. She rested her chin on the table and blinked sad yellow eyes up at McGuire. He looked at Kate and raised an eyebrow.

  “Her middle name is Iron Gut,” Kate said.

  McGuire liberated a thigh from the mountain-high pile—Kate wondered if Bill knew how extravagant Dottie could be with Bill’s chicken, given the right incentive—and offered it. Mutt took it delicately between her teeth and retired to enjoy the largesse.

  McGuire craned his neck to watch. “Sure she’s okay with chicken bones?”

  “If she was going to choke on a bird bone, believe me, she would have done it years ago.”

  “She makes me feel like Little Red Riding Hood. She’s not a wolf, is she?”

  “Only half,” Kate said.

  It surprised a laugh out of him. The sound of it surprised a smile out of her, and he stopped and gave her an appraising look. “You should do that more often.”

  “I have to get back to work,” she said.

  “Really,” he said, biting into a drumstick. He had strong, even teeth. She wondered how much they’d cost him. “Which work is that?”

  “Sorry, what?” She left off admiring his teeth long enough to meet his eyes. They were very nice eyes, dark, steady. She pulled herself together. This was an actor, for chrissake, someone who at the first sign of a wrinkle ran screaming for the plastic surgeon. “Work,” she said. “Right now, I’ve got a job bartending and I’d best get back to it.”

  “You haven�
��t been sitting here for five minutes, Bill’s not yelling at you, and no one’s hollering for a refill. Relax.”

  For whatever reason, she sat down again.

  “So,” he said, “what’s your sign?”

  This time she laughed out loud. He grinned. “Well, if you won’t tell me what your day job is…” He gestured with a wing. “How did you get that scar?”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she said.

  “Is it why your voice is so rough? Not that it sounds bad, I hasten to say.” He met and held her eyes. “Sounds kinda sexy. Somewhere between a cat’s purr and…” He smiled, long and slow. “A buzz saw.”

  “Shouldn’t you be back out at your lodge?” Kate said. “Won’t your posse be looking for you?”

  “You’re good at avoidance,” he said, forking up a bite of salad. “Shows me something.” He chewed and swallowed, in no hurry. She recognized the certainty that came from spending most of a working day as the focus of a camera lens, a cast and crew of hundreds and an audience of millions. It wasn’t vanity, exactly, or even arrogance. Call it habit.

  “So why are you still here?” she said. And why am I still sitting here? she thought.

  “Always the cop,” he said in a long-suffering voice. She refused to respond to the goad, and he looked up with a grin. “I had a more than usually interesting night,” he said. “I thought if I hung around a little longer, I might find out why.”

  “Ask the trooper,” Kate said.

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “And he changed the subject.” He paused. “He said the woman who was shot is going to be okay.”

  “Yes.”

  “She say who shot her?”

  “I haven’t heard,” Kate said.

  He snorted.

  “How’d you get in from Eagle Air?” she said.

  “Tasha gave me a ride.”

  “Ah. You spent the day out there?”

  He nodded. “I was in conference most of the day.”

  Was that what they were calling it nowadays, she thought, and was immediately ashamed of herself, on Tasha’s behalf, if not McGuire’s.

  “Lining up the dough for a new project.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Want to know what project?”

  “Not especially,” Kate said.

  He laughed again. Heads turned toward them. Moses, on his customary stool at the bar, swiveled all the way around to give them a long, hard look. “How about I tell you anyway? It’s a film about the gold rush. And we’re going to shoot it in Alaska.”

  “Good plan,” Kate said. “A lot of it happened here.”

  “Don’t you want to know if there’s a part in it for you?”

  “I’m not an actress,” Kate said.

  “You got that right,” he said, laughter gone. “Thank god.”

  One appreciative look from a handsome man didn’t usually send a shiver down her spine. She wondered if that quality was the little bit extra that got him top billing, a personality that made every man want to be like him and every woman fall in love with him, a personality that the camera only enhanced and magnified for mass consumption. Such stuff were dreams made of.

  Not hers, she told herself. “Who are you playing? No, wait, let me guess. Jack London.”

  His eyes mocked her change of subject. Chicken, they seemed to be saying, and they weren’t referring to what was on his plate. She met his gaze with as much blandness as she could muster, and raised an eyebrow of her own.

  He shrugged and leaned back. Okay, I’ll play. “I don’t think Jack London made it as far as Nome.”

  “Nome,” Kate said. “Oh, then, of course it has to be Wyatt Earp.” She tried really, really hard not to imagine how sexy Gabe McGuire would look wearing a six-shooter slung low on his hip.

  He raised an eyebrow yet again at her tone. “You have an objection?”

  She raised a shoulder, let it drop. “Haven’t there been enough movies made about Wyatt Earp?”

  “About Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, yes,” he said. “Not about Wyatt Earp in Nome.”

  She looked around the bar. At any other time, three guys would be shouting out for a refill. Now, silent still, silent all. Couldn’t anybody see she was going down for the third time here? Grasping at straws, she said, “You really don’t have a satellite dish at Outouchiwanet?”

  His smile was too fucking knowing. “There was one. I took it down the same day Finn signed over the deed. With my own two hands.” He regarded said hands with satisfaction.

  “Can’t say I blame you,” she said, thinking of the havoc cell towers were wreaking on her Park at this very moment. “Pretty quiet out at the base today?”

  “Something you wanted to know?” he said. “If there is, stop pussyfooting around and spit it out.”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed. “Okay. Any traffic today?”

  He shrugged. “That Cessna came through again, the Cargomaster. Seems like there’s one of those every day. The air freight business must be good. Oh, and Reid came back. I’m guessing either Campbell or Tina Grant called him. He was flapping around like a seagull, squawking about how terrible it was, what happened to Evelyn, and he assured me nothing like it had ever happened before, it was an aberration, he knew just how I felt, coming up here for a private vacation and then this happens, dreadful, he’d do everything in his power to see my name didn’t come into it, yadda yadda.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  McGuire shrugged. “He’s a suck-up and a starfucker. I never would have put my name to anything to do with Eagle Air if it had been only Reid involved, I don’t care how bad I wanted Outouchiwanet. Finn was the brains in that outfit.” He paused, as if he were deciding whether to tell her what came next. “Reid offered to buy me out.”

  “Did he.”

  He gave her a small smile, turning his glass of iced tea round and round in his fingers. “Seemed to think I would like to be shut out of the whole thing.” He drank. “He was right, too. I wouldn’t have bought in if Finn hadn’t been holding Outouchiwanet hostage.”

  “Finn want you as partner for the star power?”

  He nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “How did you meet him? Finn Grant?”

  “A mutual acquaintance. Although I don’t know how a first-string guy like Erland ever got hooked up with a wannabe like Finn. Still.” He shrugged. “I guess we were all wannabes at some point.” He drained his glass and grinned at her. “I certainly was.”

  Kate felt a distant roaring in her ears. “Erland?” she said, in a voice not her own. Next to her, Mutt’s ears pricked and she looked up at Kate.

  He looked at her curiously. “Yeah, Erland Bannister.”

  “Oh,” someone else said, and in some distant portion of her mind noted how weak the response was.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes,” that other person said.

  He misunderstood. “Yeah, I found out after the fact, he’s a pretty big mover and shaker up here.”

  The roaring in her eyes died down, and she felt herself return to her body. “How did you meet him?” she said, carefully casual.

  His brow puckered—he should be more careful about wrinkles—but she could see him decide that it wasn’t a state secret, after all. “I’d just hit it big with the Cook bio, and I got offered Kandahar.”

  “I saw that,” she said.

  “Yeah? No actor should ever ask, but I’ll risk it: Did you like it?”

  She paid him the respect of thinking about it. Also because it gave her more time to adjust to the sudden and unwelcome appearance of a specter at the feast. “I don’t know that anyone with any truth in them could say they liked it. I couldn’t look away from the screen.” She looked at him and told the truth. “I couldn’t look away from you.”

  He looked—was it displeased? “It was an incredible script.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But it is all about that one character, that one year in Afghanistan filtered through him. His sq
uad is assigned to take and keep one tiny little valley in southeastern Afghanistan, he gets shot at, he gets dehydrated from the heat, he shoots some people, he gets bit by a tarantula, he gets shot at again and shoots some more people, two of his buddies get shot dead in one firefight, he gets wounded and his best friend dies, his fiancée Dear Johns him from back in the world, he gets shot at some more and shoots some more people, he makes friends with an Afghani kid who gets shot by his own for fraternizing with the enemy, he shoots some more people, and after a year, after losing half his squad, the army abandons the valley. It’s all about him.”

  Surprised, and showing it, he said, “He’s your way into the story.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know that I wanted a way into that story,” she said.

  “You against the war?”

  She shrugged. “As much as I ever pay attention to national politics. Seems like every president needs his little war.”

  He made a come-ahead motion with his hand, and since according to the Oscars he was a Motion Picture Academy–certified good actor, she believed he wanted to hear more. “I watched Kandahar with a friend who lost both legs below the knee in Vietnam. When the movie was over he told me, “‘I left my legs in Vietnam to keep South Vietnam free of the red menace, to keep the dominoes from falling. Now it’s all one big happy country, our best friend in Southeast Asia, and a luxury tourist destination. What was the point?’”

  “So, he didn’t like it,” McGuire said. “But you did.”

  She laughed in spite of herself, and shook her head. “The film was amazing.” She thought, and added, “It’d make an unbeliever out of you.”

  His turn to laugh. “So you are against the war.”

  “Wars,” she said.

  “All wars?”

  “Unless they’re coming across our borders in tanks?” She thought it over. “Yeah. Well, okay, Hitler had to be stopped, no question. But since then? Has anyone really threatened our borders? Korea? Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan?”

  “You don’t think 9/11 was a good reason for going to war?”