A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. “I was hoping to talk you into organizing the NNA shareholders who live in town.”

  “Organize them to do what? Support your moves on the board?”

  “Nothing like that,” Kate said. She took a breath and moderated her tone. “Start a regular shareholder meeting here.”

  “In Anchorage?”

  “Yes. I—We were thinking you could maybe have monthly or even weekly meetings, the people getting together to say hi and exchange news and introduce the grandbabies. The aunties could come in and teach a quilting class. You could get somebody else in to teach beading or basket weaving. Ask Ossie to teach dance classes. People could bring food. I—we could get Park rats to send in meat and fish. It doesn’t have to be political, Axenia, it could just be about family, visiting, keeping in touch.”

  “And where would this meeting take place? A lot of NNA shareholders I wouldn’t have in my house.” Her expression indicated present company not excepted.

  One of the great things about a tribe was that it was all about family, Kate thought. And one of the worst things about a tribe was that it was all about family. There was no bloodier warfare than brother against brother. Or cousin against cousin. “I managed to talk a few bucks out of the board. It’d be enough to rent the Alaska Native Heritage Center once a month for six months.”

  “And what would we do at these meetings?”

  “It would be your show.” Kate shrugged. “They’ve got a theater, you could even watch movies if you want.”

  Axenia examined this proposal with suspicion bordering on scorn. “Why? What’s in it for you?”

  “Over a third of NNA shareholders live in Anchorage, Axenia. Half or more of them never make it back to the Park for the annual shareholder meetings. I—The board feels like the Anchorage shareholders have been orphaned. This is a way to, I don’t know, bring them back into the family, I guess.” Maybe not such a desirable objective, Kate was thinking now. “Auntie Joy thinks we should send a board member into town to attend, so they can answer questions and hear about problems.”

  “What do you get out of it?”

  Kate looked at Axenia. If she stayed, Axenia would just keep asking that question over and over again. “Think about it, Axenia,” she said, sliding to the floor. “If it sounds like something you’d like to do, let Annie know and she’ll get you contact information for the Anchorage people.”

  “Or maybe I’ll just run for the board myself,” Axenia said, her voice rising as Kate walked away. “Maybe I’ll run for president!”

  “Feel free,” Kate said. “Thanks for the coffee and cookies, and say hi to Lou. I’ll find my own way out.”

  She was proud she didn’t slam the door.

  Fifteen

  She checked her phone for messages. None. She cursed Brillo, the doc at Providence, Kurt, and Brendan with a fine impartiality, and felt better, if a little guilty. They were all capable guys but they weren’t miracle workers.

  Where next? She should drop in at the Raven offices, she really should. Instead she drove right by the building on Dimond and went to Costco, there to spend a productive hour buying flour by the twenty-pound bag, olive oil by the gallon, and Tampax forty-eight to the box. Kate was so done with fertility, she didn’t know why it couldn’t be done with her. As a bow to that fertility, however, she included a box of condoms, and filled the cart with other necessities, finishing up at the book table. The books were cheap but every third one seemed to be by the same author. She trundled the cart around to the other side. Ah, lots of Alaska books. She went in, and surfaced half an hour later when her phone rang.

  It was Brendan. “Is this some kind of test?”

  “What?”

  “Is there a camera on me, waiting to record the moment when I tear my hair and burst into tears?”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Not a goddamn thing on Gammons.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Other than I’m reliably informed that he was in fact born. Where the hell do you come up with these people, Kate?”

  “The ‘born in Roy’ holds up?”

  “Yup, but I can’t find his parents, where he went to school, nothing. I talked to the same cop your girl talked to. He says he’s found a few people who maybe remember the parents, but they’re not sure, and they can’t remember anything about them other than they were thought to have died young.” There was a brief silence. “Kate?”

  “I suppose he could have been an orphan who lived a very clean life.”

  “Try sanitary. Hell, try sterile.”

  “Some people do. What about Allen?”

  Brendan’s voice changed, grew deeper, richer, the vowels resounding with resonance and meaning, the consonants crisp in contrast. Kate knew that tone. Someone’s cart bumped her in the butt. It was another book lover, and she moved over to a deserted corner between the bicycles and the garden tools.

  “Ah, well now, Mr. Allen,” Brendan said, rolling out the words like GM would a new car, if they hadn’t gone belly-up by then. “Mr. Richard Henry Allen, native of Minnesota, L’etoile du Nord.”

  “Okay,” Kate said.

  “The Star of the North, the state motto. State bird the common loon, but state flower the showy lady slipper.”

  When Brendan had something really juicy he liked to milk it for all it was worth. Kate leaned against a stack of wheelbarrows and prepared to wait him out. “Okay.”

  “Official state song? ‘Hail, Minnesota.’ ”

  Kate closed her eyes and hung her head.

  “Minnesota’s exports were up thirteen percent in the last quarter. Their number-one biggest trading partner? Canada. Australia’s way down there at sixteen.”

  “Brendan—”

  “They’re pretty industrious, Minnesota. Never mind what Garrison Keillor says, they’re not all Norwegian bachelor farmers. Some of them are Norwegian bachelor geeks. They exported over a billion dollars in computer and electronic goods last year, three-quarters of a billion in machinery, and a quarter of a billion in chemicals.” He paused. “You still there, Kate?”

  “Never mind me, Brendan. There’s a hoe here I’m thinking of using to cut my throat.”

  He chuckled. It sounded less than avuncular. “I found our boy’s bank account in Minneapolis.” Brendan always got proprietary when he liked them for something.

  Kate opened her eyes. “Did you?”

  “I did. He used a different name but his own Social Security number. Guess he wanted to be sure he was eligible to collect those benefit checks come sixty-two. He was thinking ahead, our boy, just not far enough ahead of me.”

  “And?”

  “And the account shows regular direct deposits from the Suulutaq Mine. One every two weeks, same amount every time.”

  After all this there had to be more. “And?”

  “And,” Brendan said, “there are other deposits.”

  “Where from?”

  “First you want to know how much.”

  “Oh.” Kate was silent for a moment. “Oh. Okay. How much?”

  “You know if you’re moving large chunks of cash around you have to report anything over ten grand.”

  “Yeah.”

  “These amounts varied between seven and nine thousand, so I’m thinking our Mr. Allen knew that, too.”

  “Where’d the money come from? And how often?”

  “Well.” Brendan cleared his throat. “I don’t know yet, Kate. The amount was funneled through a lot of banks, different ones each time, and half the time including an offshore bank. Four times a month. Almost like a salary, except the amount changed every time.”

  They listened to each other think for a few moments. “Someone was paying him off,” Kate said.

  “Ah, but what was he selling?”

  “Good question. Thanks, Brendan, I—”

  “Not so hasty, Ms. Shugak, ma’am. That was just the first unaccounted-for thing in his bank records.”

&
nbsp; “Do tell.”

  “Indeed.”

  “No, Brendan, I mean really, do tell me.”

  “He had another regular payment coming into his account. Same level of amounts, this payment twice a month like clockwork.”

  “Jesus, Brendan, how much money did this guy have squirreled away?”

  “Just under three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Someone banged into her cart and apologized. Kate waved them off—she could barely make out their faces through suddenly blurred vision—and said, “Are you kidding me?”

  “Nope. Here’s the best part, Kate.”

  “What? What!”

  “This payer wasn’t quite as careful. We traced that sucker right back to its source. Took my guy approximately seventeen and a half minutes.”

  “Who was it?”

  He told her.

  Sixteen

  It had been a long time since she’d been in the RPetCo building, almost five years since she’d been hired to find a drug dealer at their camp in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. A lot had changed since then. For one thing, there was now a veritable bank of security guards in the lobby, dressed alike in polyester blazers with the RPetCo logo embroidered discreetly over their hearts. One of them took her name, asked to see some picture ID, and made a phone call.

  “Have you got a fax here?” she asked another of the guards. They did. “Okay if I have something sent over? Your boss is going to want to see it.”

  He thought this over with a gravity better befitting the weighty cares of an agent of the Secret Service, decided it would be difficult to fax a bomb, and agreed. She called Brendan and gave him the number. A moment later the fax hummed into operation.

  While the fax was printing out the bank of elevators opened to disgorge hundreds of employees heading home at what Kate guessed would be a much smarter clip than they had come in that morning. She searched the faces, looking for someone she knew. No one looked familiar, no one said, “Hey, Kate Shugak!” She would have liked to have seen Sue Jordan, hear what diabolical new methods she had thought up to terrorize all the men in the RPetCo Hilton, but Sue was probably in Prudhoe Bay doing just that at this very moment, and Kate wouldn’t have wished otherwise.

  “Ms. Shugak? This way, please.” Someone in the building must have remembered her, because she was escorted without further delay into an elevator that wafted them to the top floor.

  Yes, someone must have remembered her, because a security guard accompanied her every step of the way.

  The elevator debouched into a massive suite of offices on the penthouse floor. The guard led the way between a dozen desks, most of them abandoned by now. The boss’s door was guarded by a grayhaired woman in expensive tweeds and sensible shoes. The guard said, “Kate Shugak, Mrs. Podhoretz,” and turned Kate over with the air of having successfully handed off a very hot potato.

  “This way, Ms. Shugak,” Mrs. Podhoretz said. One of Mrs. Podhoretz’s sensible shoes squeaked. She led Kate to the grand set of double doors, mahogany by the look of them. She knocked and said, “Ms. Shugak, Mr. King,” and stepped back to let Kate inside. The door closed behind her.

  The man at the desk might have lost most of his hair but he hadn’t changed much otherwise. He still had the same general build as a fireplug, his face was the same freckled square, he had the same baleful glare. The glasses had been updated, he’d lost the aviator frames with the Coke-bottle lenses and replaced them with rimless. It made his eyes look bigger and his glare meaner.

  “Hey, John,” Kate said.

  He stood to shake her hand, a hard, dry, hot grip. “Jack Morgan was a good man. I was sorry to hear he was gone.”

  “Thank you.”

  He sat down again in his high-backed black leather chair. That was all she was going to get in the way of greeting or sympathy from John King, president and CEO of the Royal Petroleum Corporation, and that was fine with Kate.

  “You remodeled,” she said, looking around the office. “Nice.”

  “What do you want, Shugak?” he said, proving her point. “I only agreed to see you because you said it was urgent and that it affected the company.”

  “What’s the price of a barrel of Prudhoe Bay crude lately, John?”

  The glare increased in wattage. “Why the fuck do you care?”

  At their first meeting five years ago, when Jack had brought her to this same office so the president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska could look her over and decide if she was up to the job, she had learned that John King respected only those hardy souls who stood up to him. If he saw you flinch, cringe, or cry, he would bully you without mercy. Therefore Kate matched him attitude for attitude, saying in the same unyielding voice, “How much?”

  “Forty-two twenty-four,” he said. “Up two bucks from yesterday.”

  “But down about fifty bucks from a year ago,” she said.

  Again with the increase in wattage. “What of it?”

  “Five years,” Kate said, “that’s a long time as CEO.”

  “What the fuck do you want, Shugak?”

  “I made a few phone calls before I came here. There’s an RPetCo shareholders meeting coming up, next month, isn’t it? There are rumors that they’re angry about the decrease in their dividend. There are more rumors that they’re going to orchestrate a vote of no confidence in the corporation’s officers.”

  “You’re awful goddamn knowledgeable about the oil bidness all of a sudden.”

  No, she thought, I’ve just recently acquired some experience in running a corporation. Big or small, the politics were bound to be much the same. “So it follows that you’d want to roll something out, some plan to increase RPetCo’s share of potential resources, to convince the shareholders you’re still on top of the game. I figure you’ve probably already written that part of the speech, about how the recession’s hurt us all and it’s going to take a while to come back, and in the meantime RPetCo is making long-term plans to expand their presence in the resource industry.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “If you can get to a fucking point any time before the end of the year, I won’t throw you out on your cute little ass.”

  She almost said she was glad he thought it was cute and thought better of it just in time. Like the bullying and the profanity, sexual innuendo and harassment were part of John King’s stock in trade. She remembered P.J. on the Stores loading dock at the mine, and Lyda, who had been so apprehensive of Kate’s reaction. I’ve met P.J. before. She put the fax on his desk.

  He didn’t touch it. “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s a record of a series of bank deposits going back over the last six months, paid by various illegal stratagems into the account of one Richard Henry Allen. Allen is, or was, an employee at the Suulutaq Mine. What was he selling that you were buying?”

  He stared at the paper without touching it. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, you do,” she said, “and you’re going to tell me all about it.”

  “Why the fuck would I do that?”

  “Because you owe me,” Kate said, fixing him with her own glare. “I damn near got killed on that job up in Prudhoe and I put down your bad guy anyway.” She raised an eyebrow. “I had you figured as someone who didn’t welsh on his debts. Prove me wrong and I’m out of here.”

  They glared at each other.

  King broke first, picking up the fax and scanning it. She watched him but his expression didn’t change. He tossed the fax back down on the desk and punched a button on his phone. “Get in here.”

  The door opened so quickly Kate knew the person had probably been listening on the other side of it.

  “Ms. Shugak.”

  “Mr. Childress,” Kate said to RPetCo Alaska’s security boss. A retired Army officer with a brush cut and a habit of command, he was more polished than his boss.

  “John?” he said.

  “You heard?”

  Childress didn’t pretend not to understand. H
e nodded.

  John King glared at Kate one more time. “Tell her.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it,” King said.

  Kate crossed her legs, folded her hands, and settled back to listen.

  They had hired Allen in October, after Global Harvest announced they would be hiring for the mine in December.

  “Why Allen?” Kate said.

  Childress exchanged a glance with King. “He had what we felt were certain talents that would help him get the job done successfully.”

  “What was he, an actor? A con man?”

  Another glance told her she had come close to the truth. If Kurt couldn’t ante up, she resolved to have Brendan go a little deeper into Richard Henry Allen’s personal history.

  They’d told Allen to come to Alaska and apply for work at the Suulutaq Mine. “He was to draw no attention to himself, other than to work hard enough to earn promotion and responsibility. The end goal was to work with the geologists, so he would have access to the core samples.”

  “And get copies of the core samples to you.”

  “Yes.”

  Data that could inform either a buyout or an unfriendly takeover, Kate thought, meditating on her clasped hands. “When is the last time you heard from him?”

  “Over six weeks now,” Childress said.

  “Did he quit?”

  “No. He just stopped sending us core sample reports.”

  “Did you try to contact him?”

  Childress shook his head. “That’s not the way it worked. There was to be no direct contact, ever.”

  “How did you get the reports?”

  “He brought them with him when he came to town on his shift off and mailed them to a post office box in Houston. Someone in the Houston office would pick them up and courier them to my office.”

  “You paid him on delivery.”

  They both looked at her as if she had suggested they vote Democrat. “Yes.”

  That explained the regular payments every two weeks, Kate thought.

  “How did you trace the payments to us, Shugak?”

  She stood. “It took a friend a couple of minutes on a computer,” she said. “You guys aren’t exactly James Bond, are you?”