A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “Why?” He looked like he might burst into tears. “I don’t want to divorce them. I love them all, I want to take care of them all.”

  Whatever. “Randy, you remember you said you knew Dewayne Gammons?”

  “Yeah.” He looked a little whipsawed at the change of subject, which was what she’d intended.

  “You said he didn’t have any friends.”

  “No. Well, not to speak of, not like I saw him hanging around with the same guy all the time.”

  “Do you remember a roustabout named Richard Allen?”

  “Hell, sure I remember Rick,” Randy said. “Worked with the geologist out on the rigs, pulling core samples? That gang works all hours, they’re in and outta the mess hall all the time. Rick was a nice fella.” He chuckled. “Had a pile of dirty jokes he could tell, never the same one in a row. And big dreams, always talking about making a pile and retiring to a tropical island.”

  “Did you ever see him with Dewayne Gammons?” It was a long shot, but Gammons and Allen going missing at what from the pay records looked like very near the same day seemed entirely too coincidental to her.

  He sucked at his teeth. “I remember one time, middle of the night, I was just coming on shift, and Rick come through the loading dock. Gammons was with him. They were both looking to score something fresh outta the oven.” He shrugged. “Lotta guys do that. I generally give ’em whatever they want. Food is about all a guy’s got to look forward to on a remote job site like this one.”

  “Were they talking to each other? Did you hear them?”

  He shrugged again. “They was talking, sure.” He reflected. “Kind of weird conversation, now I think of it.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Talking about the best way to die. Drowning, plane crash, shooting.” Randy gave a mock shudder. “Creepy, but I don’t mean like they was planning any of this. Just speculating. And hell, I was busy mixing dough and cutting cookies. Dint have no time to listen in.” He brightened. “I give ’em some of my lemon cookies, they’re a specialty. I just made some more last night, you want some?”

  “No,” Kate said, giving up, “but I’ll take one of those croissants.”

  “Okay, Randy,” Jim said, “appreciate your help. Oh. And, uh, you should do something about that situation with your wife. Uh, wives. Anyway, do something about that before I have to come arrest you, okay?”

  “But I don’t want to do anything about it, Sergeant, don’t you understand? I love them all—”

  On the dock Kate said, “So now we know Rick Allen and Dewayne Gammons disappeared on the same day, and we know they were friends.”

  “It’s still not much.”

  “We also know they were both obsessing over ways to die.”

  “We know they had one conversation about ways to die,” he said. “One conversation does not equal an obsession.”

  She led him to the room that served as Suulutaq’s left luggage locker, used the master key to open it, and switched on the light. She pulled down Gammons’s duffel and daypack and said, “Take those out to the pickup and come back here.”

  It was an order, not a request, and Jim smothered a grin as he did what he was told. When he got back to the room, she had pulled down another duffel, a roll-on suitcase, and a briefcase. She took the briefcase and the roll-on and he shouldered the duffel. “Who does all that stuff belong to?”

  “Gear left by workers who never come back.”

  “Ah. The first load of luggage—”

  “Belonged to Gammons. According to the tags, this load belonged to Richard Allen.”

  Haynes was at the truck with Lyda’s body in the back, face now drawn and tired. “Figured somebody should keep watch.”

  “Somebody was,” Kate said. “Mutt, up!” Mutt jumped into the back of the truck, landing light of foot and not coming within a toe-nail of any of what was back there with her.

  “Wait a minute, what’s all this stuff?” Haynes said.

  “Evidence in an ongoing investigation,” Jim said, scribbling a receipt and handing it to her. “We’ll get it back to you as soon as we can.”

  “I don’t know if I can let you take all that,” she said, staring at the pile of luggage. “It’s someone’s personal property, the mine could be liable for—”

  “Investigation of a potential felony supersedes pretty much everything, including private property rights,” Jim said, and gave her a cheerful smile. “You want to ride up to the strip with us? You can bring the truck back.”

  “I—” She cast a glance over her shoulder in the direction of the admin building. “All right.” Haynes climbed in after Kate. “You pretty much cleaned out Lyda’s desk. We might need some of it for day-to-day operations, especially the hard drive on her computer.”

  “We’ll return everything when we’re satisfied we have all the evidence we need to close the case,” Kate said.

  Haynes frowned, not liking the answer. “It’s not too much to say that she ran this camp. There will be a lot of operational stuff on that hard drive, pay sheets, meal plans, work schedules, flight manifests, equipment maintenance.”

  “Surely you have backups of the files and programs you need for the day-to-day business,” Jim said.

  Haynes gave a heavy sigh. “Yeah, of course. It’s just that Lyda handled most of them through her computer. She’ll have a lot of shortcuts that the rest of us don’t.”

  Kate was beginning to wonder just how competent Vern Truax and Holly Haynes were as managers.

  “We’ll get it back to you as soon as possible,” Jim said. They came up over the rise and stopped next to the Cessna.

  When everything had been loaded, Jim slammed the tailgate. “Okay, we’re good to go.”

  Kate, Mutt, and Jim got into the aircraft. Haynes stood next to the pickup, watching them, still subdued and pale.

  They had to wait for the Beaver to land, and it was unloading before they began to taxi for takeoff. “What the hell?” Kate craned her neck to see as they went by.

  “What?” Jim said.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Vern Truax himself came up the hill to meet her, holding out both hands to clasp hers.

  “Who?”

  “Ulanie Anahonak,” Kate said. “And Vern Truax is greeting her like a long-lost friend.”

  “Other board members aren’t allowed to visit the mine without the chair’s say-so?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “Think Harvey Meganack tells you every time he comes out here?”

  “No.”

  “Then give it a rest.”

  She watched Ulanie and Vern disappear into the admin building, before facing forward again and readjusting her headset. “Jim, Lyda Blue did not kill herself.”

  “How many times did you see her, Kate?”

  “Once. Well, twice, if I include on the airstrip yesterday.”

  “How long ago was the first time?”

  “A month.”

  “When you spent how much time with her?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  The Cessna rolled forward, jolting over the gravel. Sitting as far forward as she could get without actually occupying one of the two front seats, Mutt’s head bumped Kate’s shoulder. “A lot can happen in a month, Kate. And her self-acknowledged best friend was a guy who was by all accounts unconditionally suicidal.”

  “Jim—”

  “We’ve got a preexisting allergic condition, crumbs from cookies that I’m betting aggravated the condition, and a note. Notice I’m not even mentioning the empty holster. If it matches the gun I found, what was Lyda Blue’s gun doing out in that clearing? Was Lyda involved somehow in Gammons’s disappearance? And did that involvement lead her to take her own life?”

  “When I was talking to the people who knew Lyda Blue,” Kate said, “I asked them if anyone else hadn’t come back to work at the same time Dewayne Gammons didn’t come back. Three of them said this guy Rick Allen.”

  “You think he might be
our DB?”

  “Jim! We got a guy eaten by a bear, only it turns out the bear ate somebody else, and the guy who we thought got eaten is alive. Now we got the live guy’s girlfriend dead, only she’s got a holster that is probably going to match the pistol you found by the dead guy.” Kate shook her head. “At this point I’m willing to swear in court that the dead guy is Jimmy Hoffa, just so I can get off this merry-go-round before I throw up.”

  The Cessna rose into the air. Jim put the nose on Niniltna and pulled the throttle out. George’s last flight for Anchorage on the new schedule left in forty-five minutes. The day had gone cloudy, with the tallest peaks in the back range obscured and the nearer mountains muted to a dull olive by lack of sunshine. It looked cold. It felt cold. Kate shivered.

  She was still unhappy at the thought of Lyda’s suicide, and Jim was not unsympathetic. “You liked her, Kate, I get that. But if you’re convinced it wasn’t an accident, and I admit there is enough circumstantial evidence to at least support the possibility that no way did she eat a peanut butter cookie by mistake, then it was suicide, or it was murder.”

  Their tailwind caught them a good jolt and Kate was thrown up against her seat belt. Another lumpity bump and she pressed her hand flat against the ceiling to keep her butt in her seat.

  Jim corrected for drift and said, “Either way, we’ll have to wait on the autopsy. In the meantime, nobody’s going anywhere, and we’ve got a pile of evidence to sift through.”

  She was silent, and it made him nervous. “What?” he said. “I can hear you thinking.”

  “Let’s get the body to Anchorage and see what we’ve got,” she said.

  Thirteen

  Jim’s office looked like someone had detonated a bomb. There were files and paper forms everywhere, and the map tacked to the wall had become a de facto bulletin board, with sheets of paper pinned all over it. A whiteboard was filled from one edge of the frame to the other with notes illegible to anyone who hadn’t written them. The smell of coffee heating too long in the carafe burned the back of the throat. Mutt had long since thrown in the towel and had gone outside to sprawl in the clear air.

  They’d spent the early part of the morning going through the personal belongings of Lyda Blue, Richard Allen, and Dewayne Gammons. To Kate’s increasing exasperation, they had found precisely nothing. Allen’s personal possessions amounted to toiletries, half a dozen changes of clothes, a traveling clock, assorted Penthouses and Playboys, and an MP3 player loaded with Clint Black, Brad Paisley, and Big & Rich. If Allen had had a wallet, he’d left with it and the bear must have gobbled it up right along with Allen, hip pocket and all. Bears were not known for their discriminating palates.

  Neither Gammons’s duffel nor his daypack had acquired anything new since she last examined them. Lyda at least had the saving grace of family photos and a file folder that held her Bering High School and Charter College associate’s diplomas, as well as a certificate naming her Employee of the Year at the Bravo Mine, Montana, two years before. It was signed by Vernon Truax, Mine Superintendent.

  “Explain to me again how so many of their employees just disappear,” Jim said without looking up from the monitor, where he was scrolling through the files on Lyda Blue’s hard drive.

  “We got a bunch of young people, mostly male, working out here in the back of beyond, making more money in a month than most people see in six. The mine loses at least one every pay period, right after paychecks are issued. I’ll bet that’s why they only pay them once a month.”

  “And you are looking at all the files instead of just the guy who went at the same time Gammons did, why?”

  “Because we still don’t know whose body we found in the woods. It could be any of them.”

  “It could be none of them.”

  “True.” Kate didn’t believe it, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. “But, I remind you, there aren’t any missing Park rats. Our best operational theory is the probability that the dead guy worked at the mine.”

  Jim clicked on a folder marked PERSONAL.

  “Three, because I don’t know how he died.”

  Jim looked up at that. “He was attacked by a bear. That’ll pretty much get the job done.”

  “We don’t know that, Jim. No, wait, listen. We don’t know that. We found the remains, that’s all. He could have been killed and the body eaten afterward. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Ravens, eagles, foxes, grizzlies, none of them turn up their noses at carrion, especially before fish hit fresh water.”

  “Okay,” he said, turning his attention back to the monitor. FINANCE, LETTERS, CONTACTS, FUN, and another folder marked MINE. Why would Lyda have a file on the mine in her personal folder? Or maybe it was “mine” in the lower case personal pronoun sense. Love letters, X-rated Web site shortcuts, bad poems written in praise of the hair on the backs of her lover’s hands.

  He clicked on it. It was password protected. He looked up her birth date and typed it into the space. He was in. Pitiful.

  Kate returned to the personnel folders. There were a dozen of them, all men, none over forty, five married. Notes in what Kate guessed was Lyda’s handwriting logged calls to the married employees’ home phones, termination of employment documents, and final paychecks mailed.

  Five of the remaining seven employees were equally straightforward. Three had their parents listed as their emergency contacts and the other two their girlfriends. All were eventually found, officially terminated, and paid off.

  Two of the twelve files remained.

  The first was of course Dewayne Gammons, twenty-nine, work history varied, mostly construction. He’d listed Roy, Washington, as his birthplace, and that was about the extent of the personal information he’d cared to share. There was no emergency contact, no listed friends or relatives. His check had been direct-deposited to a bank account in Anchorage, which as of the last time Lyda had checked—two days before the body in the clearing had been found—had not been touched since his final R & R to town. Lyda had gone so far as to call the police department of Roy, Washington, who told her they didn’t know Dewayne Gammons from Adam. The cop who had answered the phone had called the state bureau of vital statistics for a copy of Gammons’s birth certificate, which yielded the names of his parents, Sylvia and Francis Gammons, neither of whom were listed in the phone book or had any record of contact with the police. The cop must have liked the sound of Lyda’s voice, because he had even attempted to contact the doctor on the birth certificate (also dead, practice dissolved, patient files destroyed) and called round to the local Roy churches, again drawing a blank.

  Kate, as family-ridden as she sometimes felt, found it in herself to be grateful that she wasn’t that much of a blank space in the firmament. She looked at the employee photo clipped to the inside of the folder, taken with what appeared to be all the artistic talent of a clerk at the DMV, and said out loud, “You’ve been disappearing practically since the day you were born. No wonder you were depressed.”

  “Huh?” Jim said, intent on the monitor screen.

  “Nothing.” Lyda’s last entry in Gammons’s file was a note stating she had copied his medical records for sending to the medical examiner in Anchorage, as per the request of the state trooper office in Niniltna. Kate looked at Gammons’s medical records. Nothing there. Suulutaq’s in-house physician’s barely decipherable scrawl read, as near as Kate could make out, “All tests/reactions in the green, good to go.” All he would have seen, all he did see was another warm body. He wouldn’t have investigated any further. To be fair, he wasn’t paid to. Probably all Suulutaq was interested in on the medical side of things was any indication of preexisting conditions for which the employee might later claim workmen’s comp.

  She turned to the last file with a sense of anticipation. The twelfth missing employee and the only one unaccounted for was Richard Henry Allen, thirty-four, born Minneapolis, Minnesota, graduated from Coon Rapids High, worked as an apprentice lineman in Minnesota, Missouri, and
Washington before coming to Alaska and going to work for Suulutaq. His medical record was as average as Gammons’s, with a similar build and a face the employee photo revealed to be just as nondescript.

  The difference was Allen had an emergency phone contact. Lyda had called it and a business of some kind had answered. She hadn’t written down their name, probably since they had claimed no knowledge of a Richard Henry Allen. Lyda’s note read, “Wrote the number down wrong?”

  Kate was growing exasperated. Surely to god if there was one thing you could count on in modern life it was a paper trail.

  She compared Allen’s file to Gammons’s, spread out on the floor side by side, page for page. A couple of average guys, similar in age, height, weight, health, and, evidently, lack of ties. It wasn’t an unusual story in Alaska, the state was a magnet for the rootless adventurer every bit as much as it was for those on the run from past lives. About the rudest thing you could say to an Alaskan was, “Where are you from?” Many cheechakos embraced anonymity as a rite of Alaskan passage, and all sourdoughs respected it as a simple right.

  Jim could run a wants or warrants on Allen, which might tell them something. But it would take time. “The ME ID’d the body as Gammons’s,” she said out loud. “If I’m right, it’s Allen’s. Which means the files got mixed up.”

  She sat back on her heels and surveyed the disassembled files. Before she’d ripped them apart, they had been neat and orderly. Lyda had had a system for the personnel files, each required form in the same place in each file, organized with colored tabs so the relevant part could be accessed without hesitation. The medical section was the second section in each file, marked with a red tab, with patient history, tests, results, and physician’s evaluation in the same order in every file. Blood tests were the third page down in the medical section.

  “Jim.”

  He grunted.

  “Did you hear me? The files got mixed up. That’s how the body was misidentified.”

  “Yeah, I heard you.”

  “The problem is, no way did Lyda mix them up. I’ve never seen files like this. Woman could have given lessons in organization to Genghis Khan.”