Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense

by Mike Doogan

  “If you…had…an alibi?” Kane panted.

  Hope nodded.

  “Do…you?” Kane asked.

  Hope shook his head.

  “Where…were…you?” Kane asked.

  “In my office,” Hope said. “Then at home. Enjoying my freedom. Alone.”

  At the top of the stairs, they crossed another street and started up another flight, longer and steeper, that ran between houses. Kane decided to save his breath for climbing. Hope seemed to be doing the same. Their efforts soon brought them to a more level road that led past a few houses, then around the shoulder of a still-higher hill. Ahead lay a seemingly undisturbed valley.

  That’s Alaska, Kane thought. One minute city, next minute wilderness.

  The sun shone brightly through broken clouds. A light wind cooled them as they walked. They followed the road, then turned off to a path that led over a bridge across a partially frozen creek. They found themselves on a well-traveled trail sandwiched between the creek and a steep hillside. Hope led the way in silence.

  “I like a good nature hike as well as the next guy,” Kane said at last, “but I’m here under the impression that you have some things to tell me.”

  Hope stopped in the lee of a small stand of spruce, turned, and said, “I’m being advised to tell you about my relationship with Melinda Foxx.” He paused. “But I’m finding it hard to do so.”

  Kane unzipped his coat. The heat of the sun had warmed him too much during their walk.

  “Why’s that?” Kane asked. “You must have checked by now to see if I’m trustworthy. If you didn’t think I was, we wouldn’t be here.”

  A smile flashed across Hope’s face.

  “It’s not you,” he said, “at least, not you personally. It’s just that…”

  Hope stopped talking for so long that Kane began to fidget.

  “I’m just a simple Indian,” Hope said at last. “I have to be careful.”

  Kane laughed.

  “You can forget that ‘many moons ago my people’ routine,” Kane said. “I’m not buying. You’ve been playing the political game for—what, ten years now? And pretty successfully, too, by all accounts.”

  Hope opened his mouth to say something, but Kane continued, “But you’re making a mistake in dealing with me. I don’t care about the politics. I’m here to help you beat this murder charge, as long as you didn’t do it. And as long as you don’t tell me about any other crimes you may have committed, what you tell me stays with me. And even if I was inclined to blab, I’m constrained by attorney-client privilege because I work for your lawyer. So stop playing coy and tell me.”

  The two men looked at each other for a handful of minutes.

  “Melinda was giving me information,” Hope said. “Information about Senator Potter, about what he was doing.”

  “You mean, like, about his shady contracts and illegal campaign contributions?” Kane asked.

  Hope nodded.

  “Why was she doing that?’ Kane asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Hope said. “She said it was because she believes in good government and what he is doing is wrong.”

  “That’s it?” Kane asked. “She was just being a good citizen?”

  “That’s what she said,” Hope replied, “but in politics, there’s usually more than one reason that things happen.”

  “Do you know what other motivations she might have had?” Kane asked.

  Hope shook his head.

  “I don’t,” he said.

  Kane stood thinking for a while, then asked, “Did you see her the night she was killed?”

  “I did not,” Hope said. “She sent me an e-mail saying she’d meet me in our usual meeting place, that she had something important to tell me. But she never arrived. I went looking for her, and that’s how I found her. Her body.”

  Kane looked carefully at the other man.

  “And that’s it?” he asked. “She was helping you for reasons you don’t know. She had something to tell you, but she never showed up?”

  “That’s everything I know,” Hope said.

  The faint sound of a human voice made the two men look around. High above them, two people in brightly colored coats moved across the hillside. They seemed to be roped together. Kane couldn’t tell if they were men or women. Or children, for that matter.

  “Why haven’t you told anyone about this?” he asked Hope.

  “I don’t want anyone to know,” the senator said. “If my colleagues knew I had a spy in another senator’s office, it would cause me a lot of problems.”

  Kane shook his head.

  “So political decorum is more important than saving your neck?’ he asked.

  “It’s more than decorum,” Hope said. “Much of what we do is done on faith, because we believe that someone will do what he or she says. And sometimes two people tell each other things that must be kept quiet, at least for a while. So trust is essential, and me having somebody spy on one of my colleagues is not exactly a trustworthy thing to do.”

  “Did it bother you personally?” Kane asked. “Beyond the chance you’d get caught, I mean? Did it cause you moral qualms?”

  He let the silence stretch out until he was sure Hope wasn’t going to answer, then said, “Never mind. Did you keep the e-mail?”

  Hope shook his head.

  “No, I erased it,” he said. “I didn’t want it sitting around where somebody might find it.”

  The voice above them grew excited. Kane looked up to see the leading figure stop. Was he kicking at something, or just trying to keep his feet? Suddenly, the spot he was standing on began moving. He scrambled backward. Rocks came loose and bounded down the hillside toward where Kane and Hope stood.

  Without a word, Hope pivoted and ran up the trail. Kane was close behind. They could hear the clatter of rocks coming down and the softer, deeper sound of the water-soaked, sun-heated hillside giving way, bringing ice and snow with it. They ran faster. Kane’s pulse pounded in his head and the rasp of his breathing mixed with the sounds of the avalanche. Ahead of him, Hope stumbled, twisted in the air, and came down on his feet like a cat. They ran on. Bits of earth and broken rock pelted them, when, suddenly, they turned a corner and the avalanche was behind them. They ran on another fifty yards or so and Hope fell to his knees. Kane caught a tree branch and stood there on shaky legs, bent over, panting. He could still hear the noise of the avalanche crunching down the hillside.

  The noise had stopped by the time they caught their breath. The two men walked unsteadily back and looked around the corner. The trail was buried in dirt, rocks, ice, and snow for what looked like a hundred yards.

  “Damn,” Hope said. “Damn. We could have been killed.”

  Kane nodded and scanned the hillside. There was no sign of the two figures that had started the avalanche.

  He turned to look at Hope. The senator had his head down and was mumbling something that sounded like a prayer of thanks. When he was finished, he looked at the detective.

  “Did you see those two men?” he asked. “Are they all right?”

  “No sign of them,” Kane said. “Either they’re under all that or they’ve gotten out of sight. Too bad. I’d like to know if that was an accident.”

  Hope looked at him in surprise.

  “Do you think they might have caused the avalanche on purpose?” he asked. “That they were trying to kill us? That seems a little far-fetched.”

  “Far-fetched?” Kane said. He was surprised at the anger in his voice. “Two people are already dead, Senator. This is a serious business. I’d advise you to treat it that way.”

  Hope was shaking his head.

  “An avalanche as a murder weapon?” he said. “I find that hard to believe.”

  Right then, Kane wanted to take the other man by the shoulders and shake him. Instead, he took his cell phone from his pocket. It told him he had no signal.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to hike back to where I can call 911. They’l
l have to close the trail, and somebody may want to search for the people who caused this. And if they find them alive, I’ll have a few questions of my own to ask.”

  23

  Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.

  DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER

  Think we should have tried to find those men if they were buried?” Hope asked as they trudged back to the city.

  Kane shook his head.

  “What would we have dug them out with?” he asked. “Our hands?”

  Hope nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said, “and there’s no telling how unstable that hillside still is. We could have started another slide and gotten buried ourselves.”

  Kane wondered if he was rehearsing his answer, in case some reporter asked him why he hadn’t played hero. Not that it mattered. They really had no way to be of assistance.

  They walked along in silence for a while, each of them with his own thoughts. Kane was thinking about how good it was to have escaped the mixture of human stupidity, or malignity, and indifferent nature. When he reached a spot where his cell phone worked, Kane dialed emergency and reported the avalanche. He told the operator about where it was, and that he had seen two people on the hillside before the avalanche but not after. She took down the information, including his name and telephone number, and thanked him.

  By the time the call was complete, the two men had reached the top of a long flight of stairs that took them past some houses to a street. The street led downhill some more, past the city cemetery, then up and around, past the governor’s mansion, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century structure complete with columns.

  “So that’s where you want to live?” Kane asked.

  Hope stopped and turned to look at the detective.

  “Is that so unlikely?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t I want to be governor? Why shouldn’t a Native be in charge of the state that is so much more important to us than it is to most of you?”

  “Whoa, slow down there,” Kane replied. “I think anybody who wants to be governor is an idiot, no matter what color he is. Politics makes no sense to me at all.”

  Hope turned and started walking again.

  “Politics is all we have,” he said, “the only way we have to shape what our state will become. It’s how we sort out our differences and find compromises. It’s how we try to decide who we will be as a people and what legacy we will pass on to those who come after us. It’s very damned important, and there’s no shame in wanting to use it for good ends.”

  Kane shrugged.

  “Everybody thinks their ends are good,” he said, “even when they are completely opposed to somebody else’s good ends. Take this civil unions bill of yours. Your side says that gays should be able to establish their relationships legally. Your opponents say recognition like that only helps them lose their souls to sin.”

  “That’s just bigotry,” Hope said.

  “Maybe,” Kane said, “but maybe the bigots don’t think so. They think they are protecting their own rights and trying to help those who have made a bad choice. And I don’t see how all the politics in the world will find an acceptable compromise between that position and yours.”

  “Civil unions are a compromise,” Hope snapped, then walked awhile in silence. When he resumed, his voice was softer. “People have a lot of different ideas about gays, a lot of different ways to look at them. For myself, the way I look at them is as a group being discriminated against. I’m a Native in Alaska, so I know all about being discriminated against. I think discrimination is wrong, and that by allowing it against one group we encourage it against other groups. That’s why I’m trying to get the civil unions bill passed, to break people of the bad habit of discrimination.”

  Kane nodded.

  “Okay, fine, if that’s all there is to it,” he said. “But some people say you’re just using the issue to rally the troops for your run for governor.”

  Hope laughed.

  “Those people must think I’m truly stupid,” he said. “The people I’m supposedly rallying are already with me. In electoral terms, all I’m doing is rallying my opposition.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” Kane asked.

  They rounded a corner and the Capitol rose in front of them.

  “I’m doing it,” Hope said as they crossed the street, “because it’s the right thing to do.”

  They stopped in front of the building’s main doors. Hope mounted a couple of steps and turned.

  “We’ve all become very cynical about politics,” he said, sweeping an arm in a gesture that seemed to take in the whole state. “We come down here and spend money and pass one bad bill after another, beating up on people who can’t fight back. But when it comes to standing up against the powerful, or trying to protect the weak, we look the other way. I’m done looking the other way. I’m going to do everything I can to give gays legal protection. I’m done looking the other way.”

  Kane heard something in the other man’s voice that sounded like sincerity. Since setting foot in Juneau he’d heard and seen a lot about how the political machinery worked, and about the calculations of politicians with one eye on the main chance and the other on reelection. These were the first words he’d heard that were at all inspiring, and he found himself admiring the man who spoke them. For the first time, getting Matthew Hope out of a jam was more than just another job.

  “Okay, then,” he said, “but watch yourself. A lot of people are working pretty hard to sideline you, if not put you away for murder. So be careful.”

  Hope nodded at that, turned, and walked up the steps into the Capitol. Kane watched until he was out of sight, then continued toward the coffee shop.

  Maybe that’s the attraction to politics, he thought, the chance to do something noble. When he’d been on the police force, he’d sometimes thought of his job that way, although he never dared say anything out loud. The other cops would have kidded him right off the force. But he knew that he yearned to be part of something bigger than himself, and lots of other people did, too. He could see that was at least part of the attraction of religion and of politics, and he supposed that’s why some people became parents, to make their mark on the world and join in the chain of family that reached backward into history and forward past their time on earth.

  Religion doesn’t work for me, Kane thought. Maybe politics would. But the thought was quickly followed by doubt. Even if he decided to believe in Matthew Hope’s noble causes, there were plenty of people like Senator O. B. Potter, Governor Hiram Putnam, and even Chief of Police Tom Jeffords to make politics the soiled and unappealing process it had become. Institutions are no better than the people in them, he thought, and this cast of characters doesn’t inspire much confidence.

  The coffee shop was full of hippie-looking young people working on laptop computers, playing guitars, or chattering away. He got a coffee and a big cookie and sat down at the only empty table. As he ate, he wondered what one of these youngsters would say if he asked them what claimed their allegiance. Most likely, none of them would have an answer. When you’re young, he thought, life spreads out in front of you like a long, long picnic. You’ve got your youth and your infinite possibilities. You don’t need anything bigger than that.

  As he walked back to the hotel, he thought about what he needed to do next. Finding out about what Melinda Foxx had wanted to tell Hope might help. And learning whether Ralph Stansfield had been pushed. So talking with the people in Potter’s office seemed to be a good idea. And getting his hands on the rest of the autopsy. At least he had an idea about how to do that.

  And then there was Dylan.

  Sitting on his bed in the hotel, he looked through a little pocket legislative guide and tried Potter’s office. No answer. The same was true at Representative Duckett’s office.

  I guess they knock off early for the weekend, he thought.

  He didn’t have Dylan’s home number. He called Laurie to get it. No answer th
ere, either.

  If everybody had already scattered for the weekend, he wouldn’t be able to do much. But the last thing he wanted to do was waste a couple of days sitting around in a hotel room. He picked up the telephone directory, dialed the number for the troopers, and asked for Sam. The woman who answered the phone didn’t want to tell him anything, but he finally wheedled a cell phone number out of her. Sam answered on the first ring.

  “It’s Nik Kane, Sam,” Kane said. “I’d like a look at Melinda Foxx’s autopsy report.” He listened. “That won’t cut it, Sam,” he said. “I know you’ve got it.” He paused. “You don’t need to know how I know. You just need to know that how you handle this request will affect whether I file a complaint against your partner.” Pause. “Now, Sam. Blackmail is such an ugly word.” Pause. “That’s up to you. I’ll meet you anywhere.” Pause. “Here? Sure.” He gave his room number, then: “Twenty minutes? See you then.”

  Sam arrived with a briefcase and a sour expression.

  “This is low, Nik,” he said, opening the briefcase. “When I walk out that door, we’re quits.”

  “If that’s the way you want it, Sam,” Kane replied, “but I’m not the one who saddled you with a political investigation and a bad partner.”

  Sam took a report from the briefcase and handed it to Kane.

  “You’ve got to read it here,” the trooper said. “I’m not making any copies, and neither are you.”

  Kane sat down at the table. He made a show of reading the front of the report. No sense letting Sam know he already had it. What the coroner found when he opened Melinda Foxx up was routine until he got to the last page. He read the pair of paragraphs closely, then whistled.

  “Any idea who the father is?” he asked, looking at the trooper. Sam was standing stiffly with his back to the hotel room door. He hadn’t even taken off his coat.

  “What you get is what’s there,” he said. “That’s the deal. Nothing more.”

  Kane took out his notebook and made a few notes. Then he closed the report, got to his feet, and handed it back to Sam, who returned it to his briefcase and turned to go.