Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense

by Mike Doogan

  The chief smiled.

  “One of mine?” Jeffords said. “What do you think, Nik, that I have a stable of politicians who jump when I snap my fingers?”

  Actually, that’s exactly what Kane thought, but he couldn’t see that saying so would get him anything but a lecture on how representative democracy worked. Instead, he asked, “Is he a friend of yours or not?”

  Jeffords was silent for a moment.

  “I think it’s fair to say that Senator Hope and I don’t see eye-to-eye on some things,” he said.

  Jeffords was clearly not going to tell him anything useful about his relationship with Matthew Hope, so Kane changed the subject.

  “What do you know about the case?” he asked.

  Jeffords looked around the firing range, as if expecting to see a grand jury sitting in it somewhere.

  “The newspapers have given it extensive coverage,” he said.

  So he wants to be able to tell people he never discussed the case with me, Kane thought.

  “If you don’t like this guy’s politics, why get involved?” he asked.

  “I’m not getting involved,” Jeffords said with a thin smile. “You’re getting involved.”

  Kane opened his mouth, but Jeffords spoke again.

  “I really can’t tell you any more, “he said.

  Can’t, or won’t, Kane thought. Either way, he knew trying to pry information out of the chief was useless.

  Kane thought about what Jeffords was offering. He wouldn’t put it past the chief to dump him into a sticky situation just to show him that he’d be better off staying with the security firm. But the chief had too much at stake to send Kane blundering into the political world just to teach him a lesson. So this was probably a legitimate job, and it did sound more interesting than what he’d been doing. Of course, watching paint dry sounded more interesting, too. As long as Jeffords didn’t want him to do anything he just wouldn’t do. He watched as Jeffords’s fingers, nimble despite his age, danced just above the counter, reassembling the Glock. Then he began feeding rounds into an empty clip.

  “So do you want me to try to get this guy out of the trouble he’s in or not?” Kane asked.

  Jeffords’s thin smile became a grin. I’ll be damned, Kane thought. He might still be human after all.

  “You know I’d never ask you to do anything but what you thought was right, Nik,” the chief said. “We both know that wouldn’t do any good. What I’d like you to do is go and talk with Mrs. Foster and, if you find it agreeable, work for her.”

  He snapped the last round into the clip.

  “I believe she’s prepared to offer you quite a lot of money,” he said. “You do need money, don’t you, Nik?”

  “Everybody needs money,” Kane said.

  The truth was that Kane was doing pretty well financially. He was drawing a salary from the security firm and a pension from the police department, and since he wasn’t drinking he didn’t have any expensive habits. But wanting to go out on his own was part of an effort to gain greater control of his life. Working, as he saw it, was a matter of trading his time for money and, as he got older, time got to be more and more important. More money would buy him more time to do what he wanted. If he could just figure out what that was.

  “I’ll have to hand off my part of a surveillance,” Kane said. “Then I’ll go see this Mrs. Richard Foster and I’ll try really hard to take the job.”

  “Good,” Jeffords said. He slapped the clip into the automatic and holstered it. “Wait here.”

  He went back to the range master’s stand, returning with a much plainer automatic, a couple of clips, and a black fabric belt holster. He laid them all on the firing table.

  “You should have a little practice,” Jeffords said.

  Kane looked at the gun for a long moment, then shook his head.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Jeffords blew air through his lips in exasperation.

  “Then at least take the weapon with you,” he said. “It’s a gift from me.”

  Kane could see that saying no would start an argument. It was easier just to take the gun.

  “Okay,” he said, picking up the automatic and accessories from the stand and stowing them in various pockets. “But I don’t see why you’re so concerned. If this case is political, what’s the worst that could happen? A nasty campaign ad?”

  Jeffords gave him another real smile.

  “You have no idea,” he said.

  2

  Politics is the art of human happiness.

  HERBERT ALBERT LAURENS FISHER

  Kane was sitting at his computer, reading up on the White Rose Murder, when his cell phone rang.

  “You have to come and get your things out of the house,” his ex-wife, Laurie, said.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Kane said. “How are you?”

  He could hear her take a deep breath and exhale with a sigh.

  Great, he thought. Just ten seconds on the telephone, I’m pissed off and she’s long-suffering.

  “Nik,” she said with obvious patience, “we’ve talked about this. We’re not married anymore and it’s time to make the separation complete. We’ll both be better off.”

  “I haven’t got anyplace to put that stuff,” he said.

  Oh, that’s good, he thought. Be childish. That’s appealing.

  “Don’t be like that, Nik,” she said. “You’re making good money now. Get out of that crappy apartment and get a house big enough for your things. Build that cabin in the woods you always used to talk about. Rent a storage locker. Move on with your life, and let me move on with mine.”

  Kane bit back a smart-ass remark and waited. He still didn’t understand what had happened between them. For twenty-five years Laurie had been, in addition to everything else, his best friend. She’d stood behind him during his trial and his years in prison, raising their kids, visiting him every week, toughing it out. Then, less than a month after he’d gotten out, she’d announced that she wanted a divorce.

  She’d gone out and gotten one, too. Kane couldn’t bring himself to fight it, couldn’t see rewarding her for all she’d done by being a jerk about it. But he’d dragged his feet, not signing the final papers until she’d gone off on him like a nuclear explosion. And, for some reason, he was unable to clear out of the house and finish the job.

  The house, their house, where they’d fought and sat companionably and made love and raised children, was just hers now, and she wanted him to remove his camping gear and guns and tools and everything else that reminded her of him, of them. She’d already removed everything inside the house, the gifts he’d given her and the photographs he was in, even the dishes they’d eaten off of. She’d covered the floors with new carpet and the walls with new paint. Laurie had erased him from her life, except for those few belongings still in the garage.

  He didn’t think she was being unreasonable, really, to want him out, to remove the last of his clutter from her life, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And he didn’t understand why.

  “My analyst says you’re trying to hold on to me,” Laurie said. After all their years together, she had a spooky ability to tell what he was thinking. “She says leaving things here is an attempt to exercise control over me and our relationship.”

  Kane laughed.

  “Well, that’s really working, isn’t it?” he said. He could hear the self-pity in his voice and it made him disgusted with himself.

  “Nik, please,” Laurie said. “You’re just making this harder for me. And for yourself.”

  Kane sighed. She was right, of course. And she was entitled to the life she wanted, even if it was without him. He knew that he couldn’t keep them together on his own. He knew that the right thing, the honorable thing, was to wish her luck and let her go. He thought of himself as a pragmatist, was proud of his ability to face facts without wincing, and yet…and yet he just wasn’t able to do the pragmatic thing here.

  Maybe I
am a control freak, he thought, just like Laurie and her goddamn analyst say.

  “Okay,” he said. “I may be going out of town on a case, but if I do I’ll come and get that stuff first thing when I get back.”

  “Do you think it will be long?” Laurie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kane said. “I’m going to Juneau. It’s that case of murder in the legislature, the young woman who was killed there a few days ago. It could be a while.”

  “Oh,” Laurie said. “I read about that in the newspaper. The White Rose Murder, they’re calling it.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to get mixed up in all that?”

  Kane heard trouble in her voice.

  “What is it, Laurie?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Nik,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  Kane waited. She’d tell him. She was too honest not to.

  “Dylan’s down there,” she said.

  It took Kane a moment to make sense of what she’d said.

  “Dylan?” he said. “Our son, Dylan? He’s in Juneau?”

  Dylan was the youngest of their three children, the only boy. He’d been twelve when Kane went off to prison, and he’d taken his father’s departure hard. He was at college when Kane got out, and when the boy returned for the summer he’d refused to even speak to Kane. As a child Dylan had been mercurial, happy one minute and weeping the next, full of enthusiasms that died out as quickly as they were born. In his father’s case, though, he seemed to have settled on hatred.

  Kane hadn’t been surprised. He knew all about hating your father. He’d planned to try to get through to his son during the summer, but Dylan had taken a job at an arts camp at the university in Fairbanks and Kane hadn’t seen him again.

  “What’s he doing there?” Kane said. “Shouldn’t he be in school?”

  Laurie’s voice was sharp with exasperation.

  “I told you all about this, remember?” she said. “His school has a junior-year sabbatical, where the students go out for a semester and work. Dylan’s working for a member of the House of Representatives. Tom Jeffords helped him get the job.”

  I suppose she did tell me, Kane thought, but I was probably thinking about something more important. That’s the kind of father I always was and, apparently, still am.

  “Well,” Kane said, “I’ll look him up when I get there, maybe buy him dinner.”

  Laurie was silent, then said, “Hmm.”

  “Hmm?” Kane said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Laurie sighed again.

  “What that means is that you should be careful with Dylan,” she said. “He’s still got a lot of anger at you for leaving us.”

  Kane could feel his self-control slipping away.

  “Leaving you?” he said. “I didn’t leave anybody. They put me in fucking prison. It wasn’t my choice.”

  “You made choices,” Laurie said, her voice rising, “and your choices led to prison.”

  Kane gripped the cell phone so hard his hand hurt.

  “I don’t need any secondhand analysis from you and that quack you’re seeing, Laurie,” he said. “Or any advice on how to get along with my kids.”

  He could hear her taking deep breaths.

  “Fine,” she said in a calmer voice. “Just come and get your things. I’ll give you two weeks. If you haven’t picked them up by then, I’m giving them to the Salvation Army.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Kane began, but the click of her hanging up stopped him. He closed his cell phone with great gentleness and put it into his shirt pocket. He sat thinking about the conversation, about how poorly he’d handled it.

  When he’d first gotten out of prison, Kane was in many ways still institutionalized. He wasn’t used to having choices, so he wore the same clothes every day. Large spaces made him nervous. The world was dangerously unpredictable, full of people doing whatever they wanted.

  Intellectually, he knew that these were responses conditioned by his years in prison. He knew that, with work, he could overcome them. But emotionally, he didn’t want to have to work at it. He wanted them to go away on their own. He wanted to just step back into his old life, back into his job on the police force, back into his marriage, and pretend that he’d never been in prison.

  That didn’t happen. Jeffords had refused to take him back on the force. Laurie had divorced him, saying he was not the man she had married. His children were strangers to him. He was fifty-six years old and living in a furnished apartment, without any significant ties to another human being. Whenever he was in the grip of self-pity, he even felt that life was better in prison, where he’d known everyone and they’d known him. He supposed that blighted sense of community was what kept some cons coming back behind the walls.

  He fought the self-pity and all the other feelings—shame and anger and uncertainty—that tried to take control of him. He wore different clothes and went into crowds and tried to relate to the people at work. But his job and his family had been his identity. His job and his family and, if he were to tell the truth, drinking. And now he had none of them, and that left a big hole where his life should be. He was having a hard time figuring out how to fill it. All he’d decided so far was that he needed to take control of himself and his life, and stop trying to crawl back into the dark hole of passivity that, even today, beckoned to him.

  If I can just get my feet firmly planted, he thought, I can try to make up for my mistakes, to both Laurie and the kids. Maybe he could start with Dylan.

  It wasn’t any surprise that his son was mad at him, and he had every right to be. What was it the Bible said? “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

  Kane shook his head and looked at his watch. If he left now, he could make it to his gym, have dinner, and still get to his surveillance on time.

  He might be an aging, isolated, dry alcoholic, and a sorry excuse for a husband and father, he thought with a wry grin, but he could still beat the crap out of a heavy bag.

  3

  Never take anything for granted.

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  You got to hand it to the guy,” Winslow said as he watched their subject’s car weave into his driveway, narrowly missing a beater pickup on big tires that was parked to the side. “He’s been to, what, three bars? No, four. And he’s still able to navigate home.”

  Kane snorted. He’d been within an inch of dropping a dime on the guy—a big, boring accountant named Robert Bland he’d been watching for eleven nights now—but didn’t want the complications that might arise from an arrest.

  No, tonight his job was to hand off to Craig Winslow, a new hire in his twenties, a southern boy straight out of the military police with, as far as Kane could tell, no training in anything but shooting, saluting, and busting heads. Winslow, who was driving, had been far too obvious in following the subject, but with Bland as drunk as a Kennedy, Kane didn’t think it made much difference.

  “Like I said,” Kane said, “this is aberrant behavior for the subject. Until tonight, he has been as exciting as American cheese.”

  The case was more of the agency’s usual. Bland’s wife had decided she liked women better than men—or a particular woman better than Bland, anyway—moved out, and filed for divorce. She and her lawyer were convinced that they had to catch Bland at something—hookers, hidden assets, kiddie porn—to offset in court Mrs. Bland’s sudden change of sexual identity. So they’d hired 49th Star Security to find something. But a records search had come up dry and neither Kane nor the day surveillance guy had seen Bland do anything interesting, let alone suspicious. Tonight’s drunk driving was it for bad behavior.

  “Can’t really blame the guy for having a few drinks,” Winslow said. “If your wife decided she liked muff diving better than what you got, you’d drink, too. If you didn’t do something worse. It’s a man’s worst nightmare, isn’t it?”

  Oh, good, Kane thought. A moral philosopher. Between Mississippi, or wherever
he was from, and the United States Army, Winslow would be amazing indeed if his ideas about the world were as advanced as, say, the 1900s.

  “We’re not here to make judgments about the subject,” he said, wincing at his own pompousness. “We’re here to catch him at something, or to be able to say with certainty that he isn’t up to something.”

  The night was typical for Anchorage in early March: overcast, dark, and cold enough that Winslow had left the agency’s nondescript midsize running so the windows wouldn’t fog. The only light was from a streetlamp at the corner. Kane watched Bland lurch from his car and start for the house that was all his at the moment, since his wife had moved in with her girlfriend. Bland entered a patch of shadows and didn’t reappear at his door.

  “What the hell?” Winslow said. “Did he fall down?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kane said.

  “Why not?” Winslow asked. “It’s icy enough.”

  Kane’s reply was drowned out by an earsplitting metallic racket. Blue smoke erupted from the exhaust pipe of the beater pickup.

  “What the hell?” Winslow said again.

  The pickup lurched, then shot out into the street, skidding and sliding through a 180-degree turn to point right at their car. The engine sounded like a blender full of nails, but it ran. Above the hood, Kane could make out Bland’s face, split by a maniacal grin.

  “Oh, jeez,” Winslow said. “Oh, jeez.”

  The pickup bolted forward. Winslow slammed the midsize into gear and stomped on the gas.

  If it had been summer, or Winslow had known more about driving on the ice, they would have made it. But when Winslow tromped on the accelerator, the tires spun before biting. The car surged forward, but not quickly enough. The pickup smashed into the left rear quarter panel, sending the midsize spinning. By the time Winslow got it under control again, their car was slewed across Bland’s driveway.

  Kane’s airbag was trying to smother him.

  “Muef furf,” Winslow said, his voice strangled by his air bag.