Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  There was the movie about the gold rush, but Nome was a long way from Niniltna. There was no reason their paths should ever cross again. She never wanted to see another one of his movies, if it came to that.

  I think you’re just as attracted to me as I am to you, and because you think of me as a face on a magazine cover, and in spite of that self-confidence you clank around in like a suit of armor, I think you don’t know what to do about it.

  It wasn’t bad, as lines went. But it was only a line. Probably written by a screenwriter, delivered in a film of his she hadn’t seen. She rubbed her face against Jim’s chest, the pilling of his ancient sweatshirt rough against her cheek. This was real, this was here, this was now. A movie star was someone who couldn’t pass a mirror without checking their hair.

  Oblivious, Jim was still reading the newspaper, and craning her neck she saw that he had moved on to the obituary page.

  Grant, Clementina “Tina” Tannehill. Wife, mother, businesswoman.

  Donations in her memory may be made to a special account at the First Frontier Bank branch in Newenham, Alaska.

  For further information, contact her son, Oren Grant, also of Newenham, Alaska.

  “A loving son,” Jim said, tossing the newspaper on the floor.

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “One thing his father got right.”

  Mutt snoozed on her quilt. A log popped in the fireplace.

  Jim took a deep breath and blew it out. He scooted his butt to the edge of the couch and got his feet beneath him, just in case a quick getaway was called for. “Remember the day you left, the little jet parked in front of George’s hangar?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Kate said, a little bewildered at this seeming change of topic.

  “It was Erland Bannister’s jet, Kate,” Jim said.

  Kate stiffened.

  “It might even have been the jet he was shopping for when he ran into McGuire shopping for his, who knows? Anyway, it was his jet, and he was on it.”

  “What,” Kate said, spacing the words out, “was Erland Bannister doing in the Park?”

  “You won’t like it,” he said.

  Kate looked at him, eyes like flint.

  “He’s invested in the Suulutaq. I’d guess in a fairly substantial way, because he had Truax on board.”

  Kate didn’t say anything. After exchanging a glance with Johnny, who had learned all this before Kate had and who had been and remained now extremely apprehensive as to her reaction. Jim said, “Just out of curiosity, I got hold of a copy of Global Harvest Resources’ annual report. There’s a list of non-majority shareholders in it. One of them is Arctic Investments.”

  Kate’s face was wearing a strained expression.

  “I checked with George,” Jim said. “The jet’s papers are in the name of the aforementioned Arctic Investments. They’re a registered corporation in Alberta. And Erland Bannister is its majority shareholder, as well as its president and CEO.”

  “Arctic Investments?” Kate said in a queer voice. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure, yes,” he said. “Or I should say, Kurt Pletnikof is. I, ah, availed myself of his services. Figured you wouldn’t mind. Why?”

  “Because,” Kate said, feeling suddenly tired all over, “Arctic Investments is one of the partner companies in Eagle Air.” She stopped.

  “What?” he said.

  “His tail number,” she said. “Did it begin with a C?”

  He frowned. “Yeah. It’s registered in Canada. Kurt said it was probably a tax dodge.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “What?” he said again.

  “I’ll have to check with Mason,” she said. “But remember the reporter I told you about? Jo Dunaway?”

  “I remember,” he said.

  “She said Alexandra Hardin was brought to the Bahamas by two men, from their descriptions Grant and Reid.”

  Jim nodded. “And?”

  “And she said they came in a private jet, piloted by Grant.”

  “Tail number start with a C?” At her nod, he swore.

  “My sentiments exactly,” she said. She raised her mug in a toast. “Here’s to Erland Bannister, who has the best eye to the main chance of anyone I’ve ever met.” She drank the rest of her cold cocoa and set the mug down on the floor with a savage thump. Mutt snorted and almost woke.

  “I apologize in advance,” Jim said.

  “Honest to god,” she said, spacing out the words, “I’m not sure how much more I can take.”

  “Axenia was on the jet with Erland.”

  She stared at him. “My cousin Axenia? Axenia Shugak? Mathisen?”

  He nodded.

  She let her head drop forward into her hands. Jim exchanged another look with Johnny. It was silent until Jim reached for a large manila envelope.

  “Just one more thing about Bannister, Kate.”

  Her voice was muffled by her hands. “I don’t want to know.”

  “This, you do.” She raised her head and watched him open the envelope and extract an eight-by-ten photograph, black-and-white, although it had yellowed with age. It felt brittle to the touch. One of the corners had broken off.

  It was a picture of a room in a house, a large sitting room. There were built-in bookshelves along the walls filled with a lot of leather-bound books with gilt lettering on the spines, the kinds of books that were only for show, never read. There was a lot of furniture that looked as if it was covered in some dark leather, and there were half a dozen tall, narrow display tables, beautifully crafted with scrolled legs and beveled glass, artfully placed in an implied path so as to entice a viewer to walk from one to the other.

  At middle left there was an overturned wooden desk.

  The desk had a body beneath it, a middle-aged man with a bit of a paunch, dressed in a suit and tie. It was a black-and-white photograph, but Kate was guessing that the stain on his clothing and on the carpet beneath him was blood. He didn’t look like anyone she knew.

  She looked up, a question in her eyes.

  Jim nodded. “Emil Bannister.” He handed her a second photograph. This one was a close-up of the desk, which was still overturned, although the body had been removed. “Look at the corner of the desk, here.” He pointed.

  Kate followed his finger. It was hard to see in black-and-white, but it seemed to her there was a spot of something on one corner. She looked back up at Jim.

  He got up and got a magnifying glass from the kitchen. “You can see it better with this.”

  Through the glass the stain looked gummy. “You think it’s blood,” she said.

  “I do,” he said. “What’s more, I think it’s Emil’s blood. Which means he hit his head on it after he either fell or was pushed, or possibly struck. I don’t see any bruising on his face but these aren’t the most detailed crime scene photographs I’ve ever seen in my professional life. Not surprising, since they’re sixty-odd years old.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “I got Brendan to sniff them out for me,” he said. “Wasn’t hard. Remember you told me that you told Victoria Muravieff she ought to look into her brother’s parentage? Apparently she also looked into her grandfather’s death.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “If you’ll recall,” he said, “Erland’s statement was that his father had interrupted a burglary.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He said his father had caught the burglar in the act, that the burglar had attacked him.”

  “Not a burglar’s style, first of all,” Jim said. “Usually the smart ones aren’t even armed. Erland’s statement, taken at the scene—” He fished a single sheet of onionskin from the envelope. It was covered closely with print from a manual typewriter, faded almost into illegibility. “According to Erland’s statement, “in the struggle one of the exhibit cases was broken and the desk got knocked over. Erland says he got to the room in time to see the desk fall on his father. He ran to his father and the burglar got away.”

  “Y
es,” Kate said. The burglar, as Jim well knew, had been Old Sam Dementieff, Kate’s teacher, mentor, father figure, éminence grise, and lifelong friend before he had died the previous October. Old Sam had broken into Emil Bannister’s house because Emil Bannister had possession of the Sainted Mary, the Russian Orthodox icon that had been stolen from Kate and Old Sam’s tribe by Old Sam’s father thirty years before the break-in and Emil’s death. “Jim,” she said, “are you saying—?”

  “Look at that desk, Kate.”

  She looked at the desk, her heart beginning to thump in her ears. “It’s big,” she said.

  “It’s very big,” Jim said, “and very heavy. If I had to guess, I say it weighed somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty pounds. I submit that it is highly unlikely that a desk of that size and weight gets knocked over in a fight, especially when one of the fighters is doing his level best to shag it out the door.”

  He watched her face darken slowly, and waited, showing more calm than he felt.

  “There is no way,” Kate said, forming the words slowly and distinctly, “that Old Sam deliberately turned that desk over on Emil Bannister. Knocked him down in the struggle, maybe. And maybe Emil did hit his head on his way down. But Old Sam did not turn that desk over on him.”

  “Agreed,” Jim said, and handed her the first photo again.

  She looked at the photo, scrutinizing it for details she might have missed. There was a sense of wrongness about it, and she said, puzzled, “This was a photograph taken by the Anchorage police, right?”

  He turned the photograph over and pointed at the APD stamp and the date scrawled beneath it.

  She turned it faceup again. “Why is his body still under the desk? Why didn’t Erland try to…”

  Her voice trailed away, and he watched her eyes widen and her face drain of color as she realized what she had just said.

  Moses Alakuyak’s voice echoed so loudly in her ears, it was as if the old man were standing next to her, shouting. Which he had done in Newenham, hadn’t he, a time or two?

  You know he didn’t do it, right?

  Thirty-five

  JANUARY 26

  Niniltna

  Kate walked into the Niniltna Native Association a couple of days later. Phyllis Lestinkoff was pleased to admit her into the inner sanctum.

  “Hey, Annie,” Kate said.

  Annie waited for the door to close behind Kate. “Was that you in Newenham?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “Jim said you were on a job, and once I heard mayhem and murder, I knew it had to be you.”

  Unwilling, Kate felt a smile cross her face.

  “Plus you didn’t return any of my calls,” Annie said. “So you must have been busy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said. “Did you need to talk to me about something?”

  “Not today, but I’d like to know I could call you if I really needed to.” Annie gave her a level look. “I wasn’t the one who threw you off the deep end when you got landed with this job. Don’t take it out on me.”

  Kate’s jaw dropped. “I wasn’t.”

  Was she?

  She drew herself up. “By coincidence, that’s sort of why I’m here today.”

  “Really?”

  “You know that emeritus position you mentioned at the shareholders meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a paid position?”

  Acknowledgments

  In no particular order, my thanks to:

  Retired FBI Agent Bob Baker, who e-galloped to my rescue with some badly needed last-minute information on the M4 carbine.

  FBI Agent Eric Gonzalez, for introducing me to Bob and for turning a gratifying shade of white when I ran the plot by him.

  Larry DiFrancesco, pilot, who helped with photographs and details of Gabe McGuire’s Gulfstream.

  Cathy Rasmuson, for introducing me to Larry.

  Jim Eshenower, A&P mechanic and pilot, who conspired with me to murder Finn Grant.

  And pilots Wes Head and Stephanie Anderson, for introducing me to Jim.

  Any errors that remain are mine.

  ALSO BY DANA STABENOW

  THE KATE SHUGAK SERIES

  Though Not Dead

  A Night Too Dark

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Grave Denied

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  The Singing of the Dead

  Midnight Come Again

  Hunter’s Moon

  Killing Grounds

  Breakup

  Blood Will Tell

  Play with Fire

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Dead in the Water

  A Fatal Thaw

  A Cold Day for Murder

  THRILLERS

  Prepared for Rage

  Blindfold Game

  THE LIAM CAMPBELL SERIES

  Better to Rest

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  So Sure of Death

  Fire and Ice

  THE STAR SVENSDOTTER SERIES

  Red Planet Run

  A Handful of Stars

  Second Star

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Powers of Detection

  Wild Crimes

  Alaska Women Write

  The Mysterious North

  At the Scene of the Crime

  Unusual Suspects

  About the Author

  Dana Stabenow, New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner, is the author of eighteen previous Kate Shugak novels, four Liam Campbell mysteries, three science-fiction novels, and two thrillers. She was born, raised, and lives in Alaska, where she was awarded the Governor’s Award for the Humanities. Visit her online at www.Stabenow.com.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  RESTLESS IN THE GRAVE. Copyright © 2012 by Dana Stabenow. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Stabenow, Dana.

  Restless in the grave / Dana Stabenow.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-55913-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4299-5038-1 (e-book)

  1. Shugak, Kate (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T1249R47 2012

  813'.54—dc23

  2011037662

  eISBN 9781429950381

  First Edition: February 2012