Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  Fred Grant was still staring at the two men on the floor. He raised his eyes and saw Tina for the first time, and his face changed. “Tina! Oh my god, no, Tina, no no no!” He flung himself across the room, tumbling to his knees next to her body.

  “Don’t you dare touch her!” Jeannie shouted. “Don’t you dare!”

  “Bruce Lee wouldn’t have had a chance against an M4 on full auto, Moses,” Liam said. “You of all people should know that, you dumb bastard.” He was trying to dial 911 on his cell with a shaking, bloodstained hand. Kate took it from him and made the call.

  “Bill is going to be so pissed,” Moses said. His right side looked worse than Tina’s. Kate couldn’t believe he was still breathing, either, let alone talking.

  “No shit,” Liam said, “and I don’t have the guts to tell her you died, so you hang on, you cranky old bastard, do you hear me? You’re tough, you can do it.” The desperation was audible in his voice.

  “Tell Wy I’m sorry,” Moses said. “I never wanted her to have any part of the voices. Fucking genes.”

  “Don’t worry about that now, Moses, just hang on.”

  Moses smiled, blood welling from his mouth to spill down his chin. “I’m outta here, boy. You treat her right.”

  “You know you can’t trust me to do that without supervision,” Campbell said. “You’ve got to stick around and make sure. Moses!”

  Moses’ eyes were closing. “At least the goddamn voices’ll leave me alone now,” he said, his voice slurring.

  Kate squatted next to them. “The ambulance is on its way.” It wouldn’t be in time. She had seen that look before.

  “Moses,” Campbell said, pleading. “Come on, man.”

  The old man’s eyes opened and looked straight at Kate. “You know he didn’t do it, right?” he said, his voice strong and clear. “Jesus, you can’t be that slow.”

  He looked at Campbell and said, “Your uniform’s a mess. You’re a sartorial disgrace to your service, son.”

  And then he died, too.

  “Liam?”

  Kate and Campbell both looked up at the sound of that shaken voice.

  The pregnant stepmother had shoved past an immobile Fred Grant to stand in the doorway, staring at the office with a shocked face.

  Her beige pants were soaked all the way down the insides of her legs.

  Thirty-three

  JANUARY 23

  Anchorage

  It turned out Kate would get another ride on Gabe McGuire’s jet after all. This time all the seats were filled, with all the previous passengers except Jean and including new passengers Oren Grant and Fred Grant. Evelyn, still in the hospital, still not talking, and Jeannie Penney, along with Tasha Anayuk, were left behind, although Special Agent Mason made it clear that agents would be in Newenham to interview them all within twenty-four hours, and to please make themselves available for however long the FBI would need them.

  The flight was less than an hour. Once McGuire came back to talk to Kate. He looked at her face and returned to the cockpit.

  They were met at Million Air in Anchorage by an FBI van and driven to the FBI headquarters on Sixth Avenue, where they were conducted into separate interview rooms.

  Kate dictated her statement in a level, expressionless voice and signed where they told her to. Gamble, the FBI agent she had had dealings with in the past and who seemed to have pissed off his superiors in D.C. badly enough to earn himself a lifetime posting to the Anchorage station, came into the room at one point. He looked at her and then looked away again, as if averting his eyes from something indecent. She didn’t know what was the matter. She’d showered and changed her clothes before she’d got on the plane. The odor of placenta could have lingered on, she supposed, and looked down at her hands. She’d never really understood the phrase baby catching before. At least Katya had taken a decent amount of time in making her appearance. This kid had slid into the world like she was Tommy Moe coming off Chair 6 at Alyeska. For one terrified moment Kate had been afraid she was going to drop her.

  Campbell’s stepmother, whose name Kate never did learn, looked almost indecently relieved. Campbell himself had turned an interesting shade of green and had retreated into the hallway after he’d hoisted stepmama onto the couch in the television room.

  Fifteen minutes afterwards Joe Gould, Newenham’s lone EMT, showed up, too late for the deaths, too late for the birth. He pronounced Tina and Moses dead at the scene, which seemed a little redundant, and ventured a mild joke on Kate’s skill at midwifery. Between the three of them he was lucky to get out of there alive.

  And then Wyanet Chouinard showed up, white faced and red eyed, with Jo Dunaway in tow, and Bill Billington, who looked to have aged a hundred years in the space of a single phone call.

  Mason wanted Dunaway to come with them. Dunaway flatly refused. Kate thought he should have insisted, but he didn’t, and later she admitted to herself that he was right. Whatever knowledge Dunaway had, she would be more than happy to exchange for exclusive rights to what was going to be the biggest story of the year. But she would support her friend first, her friend who had just lost her grandfather in a gun battle. Much as she would have liked to, Kate couldn’t fault her instincts.

  And write the story she would. A month later, Kate and the rest of the state read the five-part feature in the Anchorage News. From almost the moment of the death of Alexandra Hardin’s father, followed by her inheritance of his considerable estate, Hugh Reid and Finn Grant had been bilking it for funds, not only to build Eagle Air FBO and to buy new aircraft but pretty much anything else that took their fancy, including two recreational helicopters (until then Kate hadn’t known there was such a thing), a fancy sailboat in San Diego, an apartment in New York City, and weekends in Vegas for them and their steadily increasing amounts of new best friends. Not to mention high-end escort services for Grant in particular, wherever he shopped for aircraft. The FBI staged raids of two airplane hangars, one in Anchorage and one in Portland, where had been found retail quantities of weapons from grenades to the ubiquitous M4 to rocket launchers, body armor, and missiles, surface-to-air and airborne.

  Hugh Reid was in custody by then, of course. Reid said that Grant had hired Reid’s firm to form a holding corporation, which firm’s solid reputation had attracted other investors. As it always does in certain circles, Reid said, word got around. One of the men Grant had served with in the army had gone into the acquisition of arms from poorly guarded U.S. armories in a big way. He already had buyers, but he was always looking for a secure, efficient, and profitable means of distribution. When he sniffed out the existence of Grant’s suddenly deep pockets, he approached Grant with a plan, contacts, and merchandise. Greed only begets more greed, and despite Reid’s reservations—or so Reid said, and as Mason pointed out, he was the last man standing—Grant jumped on the opportunity for triple and quadruple profits.

  Boyd cut a deal and had given up the warehouse in central Washington State, conveniently located in a business park six blocks off a major highway and not a mile from a railroad line. The weapons had been stolen in small lots from a lot of different armories located in a dozen states, which, again according to Mason, had army security in a bit of a tizzy. Grant hadn’t been thinking small, according to Boyd. The plan all along had been to use small arms to establish his ability to sell good product efficiently and discreetly, in small lots, defining and testing the safest route as they went. Later, they’d move on to bigger ordnance on bigger aircraft.

  Kate had told him about Tasha and the Herc while she was giving her statement in Anchorage. “What was next,” she said, “army tanks on C-5s?”

  “He was a robber baron, essentially,” Mason said, Kate thought not without a certain amount of misplaced admiration. “He would have fit right in with Carnegie or Rockefeller or Astor.” He shrugged. “Many a respectable fortune was built on far less savory beginnings.”

  “You had an informant, didn’t you,” Kate said. At his look she sai
d, “Oh, not someone you knew about, over there in the middle of the war. But someone was working this from this end, weren’t they? Someone you found out about after we got here. I saw Gamble look in earlier. And they had flipped someone involved in Eagle Air in exchange for information.”

  Mason met her eyes. “How did you guess?”

  “Jo Dunaway knew about the investigation into Alexandra Hardin’s estate. First thing any good reporter does is check with primary sources, and the primary source for interstate fraud and racketeering is always going to be the FBI.” She shrugged. “I know Gamble. He likes reading the news and knowing he’s ‘a source high up in the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity.’” She paused. “Was the informant Fred Grant?”

  Mason said nothing but his expression spoke volumes. Kate said, “He’s got a thing for Tina, that’s for sure. Or did have,” she added bleakly. “Plus, I doubt he would have minded stepping into his brother’s shoes as the owner and proprietor of Eagle Air. It’s why Grant’s operation was still going on when I showed up. Not because Tina wanted to get the names of all the pilots so she could turn them in to you, although I’d bet large that Fred told Gamble that. Did you give him immunity?”

  His expression this time was even easier to read. She laughed without humor and shook her head. “Because I’m pretty sure he’s the one who shot Evelyn at Eagle Air. Oren knew about Grant’s thumb drive, the one with all the evidence of his blackmailing on it. According to Oren, Tina meant to give them all their businesses back. I think the loose-lipped little bastard told Evelyn about it, and I think she went looking for it. Could be she wanted to hide the evidence of her father’s wrongdoing. Could be she was just as concerned over Tina’s determination to strand the whole Grant family high and dry, financially.” Her mouth twisted. “Although I’m pretty sure when you talk to her now, she’s going to say she meant to turn all that information over to the proper authorities.”

  “If any of this is true, how did Fred find out what she was doing?”

  “Try the usual suspect. Oren’s the common denominator. And Fred probably wanted a bone to throw Gamble, something to throw the FBI off the scent of the arms-smuggling operation so he could bank a few more checks. Blackmail on the scale practiced by Finn Grant would have been a pretty good diversion.”

  “Well,” Mason said, at something of a loss. “At least he didn’t kill her.”

  She looked at him. “Or us.”

  “Us?” he said.

  “He was there when we got back from Adak. You saw him. Chouinard’s tie-downs are a minute’s walk from Grant’s old hangar. Which hangar is conveniently supplied with a full toolbox.” At his incredulous expression she said with some exasperation, “Who else do you think sabotaged Chouinard’s plane? The one carrying an FBI agent and two witnesses essential to the gunrunning case he was building?” Not to mention me, she thought, and what she found far less easy to forgive, not to mention Mutt.

  “But—”

  “In Adak, Shorty said something to Boyd about the boss. This was—” Was it only two days ago? “This was when I flew down with Boyd. Shorty seemed real concerned about the boss. Finn Grant died last month. What boss was he talking about?”

  For the first time, she’d managed to shake Mason free of his habitual calm. “I—I don’t—Hugh Reid?”

  Her laugh was mirthless. “You haven’t seen him yet, I take it. No one is ever going to be afraid of Hugh Reid, I promise you. But I can see someone being afraid of Fred Grant.” And she was certain Fred Grant had made a noise in the hallway as Moses Alakuyak was coming into the room, in hopes that Oren the family fuckup would kill everyone standing and put Oren away, leaving only Evelyn in between him and control of Eagle Air. And he’d already shot her once.

  She remembered his outburst when he had seen Tina’s body. There had been real grief on his face.

  So perhaps not everyone.

  “Can you prove any of this?” he said.

  “You probably could, if you tried,” she said. “But you won’t, because somebody here gave him immunity, so why bother.” She tossed down the pen and got to her feet. “You people never get it right.”

  “You know, Kate,” Mason said as he waited with her at the elevator, “Hollywood action movies notwithstanding, there isn’t much anyone can do against an M4 with a full clip on full automatic, even if a moron’s holding it.”

  “Maybe especially if a moron’s holding it,” she said.

  Thirty-four

  JANUARY 25

  The Park

  She and Mutt spent the night in Jack’s condo, and took a cab to Merrill early the following morning. George took one look at her face and put her on shotgun, where she wouldn’t frighten the other passengers.

  The high that had been hanging over Bristol Bay for the last week seemed to have teleported itself to the Park. At any rate, the view was all the way to Canada before George began the descent into Niniltna. A river, yes, but not a delta, and the body of water it flowed into was only an edge of blue on the horizon. The Quilaks rose like a wall on the east, terrifying and comforting in their jagged proximity. The undulating landscape was lush with trees under a blanket of white. As George made his final, coming in over the river from the south, Kate saw a snowmobile head upriver, passing a four-wheeler headed down.

  Jim was waiting for them at the airstrip. Mutt was first out the door of the Single Otter and crossed the space between in a single bound. When Kate, moving a little more slowly, brought up the rear, Mutt had both paws on Jim’s shoulders and was savaging his face with a serious tongue bath. He was laughing and trying not very hard to fend her off.

  He looked over Mutt’s head and saw Kate. He grabbed the huge gray paws and said, “Okay, enough, glad to see you, too.” He settled her down on the hard-packed snow. He seemed oddly relieved. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Kate said, and suddenly, inexplicably, began to weep.

  * * *

  She’d brought home a print-out of the front page of the morning newspaper with Dunaway’s story in it.

  FBI BUSTS ALASKA-BASED INTERNATIONAL ARMS SMUGGLING RING BY JO DUNAWAY

  jdunaway@anchoragenews.com

  Published: January 24, 10:34 P.M.

  Last modified: January 25, 6:37 A.M.

  Local attorney Hugh Reid was remanded into federal custody today pending charges of wire fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, theft of government property and illegal transportation and sales of arms in the ongoing federal and state investigation of Eagle Air Ltd. Reid is a partner in the law firm of Chapados, Reid, Reid, McGillivray and Thrall in Anchorage, which firm was also the administrator for the estate of the late John Neville “Wes” Hardin, Alaska businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist. An unnamed source high in the FBI said agents are only beginning to unravel the story of a group of Alaska entrepreneurs who were apparently in the process of building one of the biggest illegal arms dealerships in history, based on theft of American arms from military armories across the United States, and transporting them to sell to terrorists overseas.

  In related news, Anchorage District Attorney Brendan McCord petitioned the court to appoint a guardian ad litem for Alexandra Hardin, the heiress whose estate it appears Reid bilked for upwards of $200 million over a period of two and a half years. Hardin is the daughter and last living relative of John Neville “Wes” Hardin, and currently resides in the Bahamas in a long-term care facility for Alzheimer’s patients.

  “Mason was right,” Jim said. “Nothing you could have done.”

  “I know,” Kate said. “I know he was right.”

  They were at the house. Kate and Jim were on the couch, Johnny on the floor with his head pillowed on Mutt’s flank. She’d told them everything, the whole blackmailing, gunrunning, chest freezer– and Dumpster-diving, fish hold freight container, hitchhiking, flight-sabotaging, illegal arms–selling story.

  Well. She’d made only passing reference to Gabe McGuire, and that only because she couldn’t avoid it
. He hadn’t been mentioned publicly in connection to the case, at least not yet, but it was only a matter of time. Or Liam could mention him in passing when he was talking to Jim, and then Jim would want to know how she could possibly have left him out. So she said he was just like he looked in the movies. Hadn’t talked to him much. Seemed like an okay guy.

  “But you got to ride in his private jet?” Johnny said, stars in his eyes. “Twice?”

  “Me and a bunch of other people,” Kate said, conscious of Jim’s eyes on her.

  “Sweet,” Johnny said.

  She didn’t mention that she’d let her inexplicable reaction to Gabe McGuire nearly push her out of Newenham too soon, before she’d finished the job.

  “I’m just glad the little fuckup with the M4 missed you,” Jim said, pulling her under his arm.

  “That’d be me, too,” she said, curling up next to him and putting her head on his chest. The reassuring beat of his heart thumped against her ear.

  “That’d be me, three,” Johnny said soberly. “Dumpsters and chest freezers are one thing.”

  “Don’t forget the freight container, and the near miss with the Cessna,” she said. She smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, and in his youthful face she saw again the echo of his father’s.

  The faint echo of another man’s. Or was it? Maybe she just wanted Gabe McGuire to look like Jack Morgan so as to make her attraction to him seem a rational reaction. She hoped he was back in L.A., or on his way there. She hoped the feds seized every single piece of property Finn Grant had ever owned or ever thought of owning or ever had owned, including Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge, and sold it all off to pay Grant’s back taxes. She hoped Gabe McGuire never had cause to cross north of the fifty-third latitude ever again.