“I appreciate your passion and I respect your cause. But I can’t allow ideology alone to push me for or against.” She pulled out her phone and looked at the display. “I appreciate the time you’ve taken to show me your operation.” She nodded at the door. “I like your logo, too. Who was the artist?”
More civil than friendly now, he said, “I’ll find out and get that name to you.”
“Thanks.”
“And please, take a brochure,” he said, snagging one off a nearby table. “There’s a form to fill out if you’d like to join. We’re an IRS-certified nonprofit 501(c)(3), which means we’re deductible. Would you like to write us a check? We’re happy to accept any amount, and for three dollars you get a lifetime membership, a subscription to the Gaea newsletter, and a mug. With the logo you like on it.”
He escorted her to the door, and to everyone’s surprise when he opened it Holly Haynes walked in. She saw Kate and her eyes widened.
“Hi, there, Miss Haynes,” McKenzie said with his attractive smile. “Did you come to volunteer?”
Kate laughed. McKenzie had a smart mouth.
Haynes looked from Kate to McKenzie and her expression hardened. “No, I came here to complain about that commercial you’ve been running that says we’re dumping toxic mud into the groundwater that feeds into the Kanuyaq River.”
Kate left without waiting to hear McKenzie’s answer. She climbed in the Subaru, checked her phone for messages, and left the parking lot.
A beige, four-door sedan fell in behind her and followed her all the way home.
Seventeen
She was up and dressed and on her second cup of coffee by seven o’clock the following morning, staring out the window at the beige four-door sedan idling next to Westchester Lagoon. It had been there when she woke up, and it was still there an hour later.
The phone rang. It was Kurt. “I got news. Come on down to the office.”
She stopped at City Market for three canelas and more coffee and drove downtown. The sedan followed at a discreet distance. She parked in the Captain Cook parking garage because Kurt had told her that he validated parking.
Agrifina greeted her with a reserved smile. “Mr. Pletnikoff is expecting you, Ms. Shugak. Go right in.”
Kate inclined her head in formal recognition of the power of the keeper of the keys. “Thank you.” Mrs. Podhoretz had nothing on Agrifina Fancyboy.
She pulled Kurt’s door closed behind her and said, “I swear, that girl out there thinks she’s living in 1950.”
“I told you, she’s channeling Lauren Bacall, only shorter. And, you know, Yupik.”
“I brought her coffee and a pastry but I’m scared to give them to her. She might think it’s only something Thelma Ritter should do. And I’m not that funny.”
Kurt rolled his eyes and delivered the goods himself. He came back in, grinning. “ ‘Please tell Ms. Shugak it was very kind of her to think of me.’ ”
“Alaka,” Kate said, “where’s Emaa when we need her.” Emaa could out-formal the Queen of England. She could have matched Agrifina politesse for politesse, whereas all Kate wanted to do was run very fast in the other direction.
They settled on the couch with coffee and pastries, a vast array of paperwork spread over the coffee table.
“First,” he said, “an article in The Wall Street Journal about a venture capitalist firm called True North Investments. It was formed a few years ago to fund resource extraction projects above the Arctic Circle. Their spokesman will neither confirm nor deny that they are interested in acquiring a share of GHRI stock, possibly a controlling interest.”
Kate digested this. “A takeover?”
He nodded. “I found the same story elsewhere, Business Week, Forbes, Kiplinger, a couple of others. They all said pretty much the same thing.”
He blew on his coffee and took a big bite of the pastry. He was as big a ham as Brendan. She wondered if the characteristic was endemic to people who snooped for a living. Maybe because they worked so much out of the limelight, they had a tendency to go for the big reveal whenever they had a captive audience.
Kurt washed down his thorough mastication of the bit of pastry with a healthy swallow of coffee, patted his lips with a napkin, and smiled. “At least some of the blind deposits into Allen’s account?”
“Yes?”
“Are from True North Investments.”
“Really.” Kate sat back. “Allen was accepting money from True North Investments? A possible competitor to Global? For whom he was working at the Suulutaq Mine? And accepting a paycheck, I might add.”
He didn’t miss her too-demure expression, and said smoothly, “I’m guessing you already know about RPetCo. It was just too easy to trace.”
She nodded. “Brendan popped it in about two seconds.” Lest he feel that she had not thought him capable of finding out this information himself, she said, “He said it was impossible to trace the source of the other payments.”
He grinned. “Only the best butter. I know a guy who knows another guy in banking in New York who knows somebody else in Switzerland. They were able to follow the money trail for us.”
Kate choked on her coffee. “Switzerland?”
He waved a hand. “Don’t ask. It’s a, you should pardon the expression, global world, Kate. The money had been run through a dozen banks and some of them were offshore. This is how this works. And my contacts made sure I knew that they don’t find answers easily and never this quickly.”
Kate wondered how big a fee Pletnikoff Investigations was paying the guy in Switzerland. She did not ask. There were advantages to being a silent partner. “Is there any way you can acquire True North’s financial records?”
“No way,” Kurt said. “They are very big hitters with serious internal security. They’re a private concern so there’s no published prospectus and no published annual report, either.”
“Is there a president or a board of directors?”
He fished around and came up with a piece of paper, which he handed to her. “Came over the fax five minutes ago. Wasn’t cheap, either.”
She read down to the bottom, and smiled. “Worth it, though.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. What else have you got?”
“That’s about it. Allen’s working for Suulutaq and taking money from two of their competitors. Put it together and what have you got?”
“Other than kabbibity-bobbity-boo? My guess is corporate espionage.”
“I knew that, I just gave it to you to be nice.”
“I know. Here’s something you don’t know.” She handed him the list of True North Investments’ corporate officers. “The last name?”
He looked. “John King?” He looked at her. “So?”
“So the president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska is also named John King.”
“Crap,” he said after a minute, “I knew that, but it’s such a common name I didn’t make the connection. You’re saying this is the same John King?”
“I’m betting on it.” She gave him the gist of yesterday’s interview with the president and CEO of RPetCo.
“He didn’t tell you about sitting on the board of True North Investments.”
“No, and I didn’t know enough to ask him yesterday.” She meditated for a moment. “I don’t know that it has anything to do with the murder of Lyda Blue,” she said at last. “If I had to guess, I’d say King learned about True North’s plans to acquire Global when he was named to True North’s board and decided to acquire some information on his own for a possible Global takeover by RPetCo.”
“Yeah, but what are the odds King would hire the same guy True North is using?”
“Are you kidding me? True North probably hired Allen first. King’s on the board, he hears about him. Why go to all the bother of finding someone else when the perfect spy is already in place?”
“And he would know Allen would be open to such a proposal, how?”
Kate snorted. “Al
len was a corporate spy. By definition that means for sale to the highest bidder. Why wouldn’t he want to sell the same information twice?”
“Why’d King have to buy it? Wouldn’t he have access to the same information through his seat on True North’s board?”
“I doubt in the kind of detail he would require for his own bid.” She thought about Phyllis Lestinkof, and the Grosdidier brothers’ clinic, and what might or might not be going on there. “There is such a thing as plausible deniability.”
Kurt followed this serpentine reasoning with a knit brow. “He that much of a twister?”
“He’s that much of a survivor.” Kate took a bite of pastry and washed it down with coffee. “We keep all this under our hats, for now at least.”
“Okay by me, I’m just the delivery boy.”
“I don’t know what to do with any of this information, anyway,” she said, speaking more to herself than to him. “I’m pretty sure that was Allen’s skull Jim found, and if so he’s dead. The guy I thought was dead is alive but he’s checked out mentally.”
“Permanently?”
“Nobody knows. He’s got what the doc thinks might have been a bullet hole in him. Jim found a .22 pistol at the scene that may or may not have been used to fire the bullet, which we don’t have, and have no way of recovering. The dead girl had what we think is the gun’s holster in her desk drawer. According to the baker at the mine, these two guys knew each other well enough to share a morbid fascination with death, and how to get there.” She drained her cup. “Honest to god, Kurt, I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. The best that can be said is I’m doing it on the state’s dime.”
“Well, you know more now than you did when you came,” he said, stacking the paperwork together and putting it into a file. He handed it to Kate as her phone rang. She listened, said, “Thanks, I owe you one.”
She hung up. “That was the ME. Blood samples from the skull matched the records in Gammons’s file, which is to say the skull belonged to Richard Henry Allen.”
“What about the pistol?”
“It belongs to the holster found in my vic’s room.”
“And still no way to prove it fired the shot that wounded Gammons?”
“Circumstantial, sure, the gun was there, Gammons was there, Allen was there. Oh.” She sat with her hand outstretched, the cup motionless about an inch from the tabletop.
“What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly. I think I just said something smart, but I don’t know what.” Her phone rang again.
It was Lempe at Providence Hospital. “Ms. Shugak? I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Gammons spoke this morning when he woke up.”
“I’ll be right there.” She closed the phone and stood up. “Doc says Gammons woke up. Thanks, Kurt. Bill for your time included?”
“In there.” He nodded at the folder.
“Good.” She went over to stand at his window, looking down at K Street. A beige four-door sedan was idling in one of the fifteen-minute meter spots. “One other thing.”
“What?”
“I was followed here this morning.”
“What!”
“Yeah, a beige four-door sedan. Actually, it followed me home last night from Gaea.”
“Gaea?”
“Start-up environmental group. The director’s pretty ballsy, he smuggled himself out to the mine a couple of days ago.”
“Why?”
“Because Gaea has taken on the Suulutaq Mine as their primary cause. I think McKenzie—that’s their executive director—wants to use it to make Gaea’s name and get lots of donations. Anyway, the sedan was parked outside the townhouse when I woke up. I stopped at City Market to see if they’d stay with me, and they did.”
He joined her at the window. “Well, you’re flying home today. Be hard to follow you in that.”
“Yeah, but I’m curious.” Gammons wasn’t going anywhere in the next hour. “I like to know who’s following me. And why.”
“Can’t say as I blame you.” He looked at her. “There’s a back door out of the basement.”
Ten minutes later Kate walked up the sidewalk and crossed behind the sedan to knock on the driver’s-side door. The driver started, stared at her through the glass, thought it over, and rolled down the window.
Kate grinned. “Fred Gamble of the FBI, as I live and breathe.”
The agent next to Gamble grabbed for the door handle, found his own door held closed against him, and looked through the window to see Kurt’s smiling face.
Gamble, Kurt, and Kate assembled back in Kurt’s office. The second agent, embarrassed at being tagged so easily, didn’t argue when told to wait in the car.
Gamble, short, balding, still wearing what looked like the same pilling polyester suit Kate had last seen him in how many years ago now, accepted a chair and asked for coffee. Agrifina provided some and he crossed his legs as much as his potbelly would allow and disposed himself to chat, if they made it worth his while.
“Last time I saw you, you were on your way to Iowa,” Kate said.
“Omaha,” he said, wincing.
“What happened?”
He gave an airy wave. “Other opportunities. Things happen. You know.”
Kate knew. “Where did you pick me up?”
Gamble looked shifty, but then she remembered that shifty was his natural expression. “We, um, acquired information about you asking a local DA to run a certain name through the system.”
Kate looked polite. “Did you?”
Gamble shifted and tried to cross his legs the other way. “Yes, well, this is someone we’ve been trying to track down for a few months, as large payments from an organization in which the FBI has been interested for some time have been rather flowing in his direction.”
Kate’s eyes met Kurt’s. Maybe they should let Agrifina talk to Gamble. They seemed to have graduated from the same school of involved syntax.
She decided to throw the dice. “Why are you interested in True North Investments?”
She paused to enjoy the look of shock that spread across his face.
“Yeah,” she said, “we know about their interest in Global. What do you know about them we don’t?”
Gamble thought it over. “Quid pro quo?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Sure. I’m just trying to find a murderer, that’s all. What’s up with True North?”
“Well.” Gamble fussed with a lint ball attached to the knee of his trousers. It came free, along with a significant amount of thread. He made up his mind and looked up. There was an air of expectation about him that warned her he was about to drop a hell of a bomb and that he was expecting a big reaction.
“There is some suspicion that True North is a front for laundering money for the Carlomagno Coahuila drug cartel,” Gamble said.
He needn’t have worried about her reaction.
“Holy shit,” Kate said.
Eighteen
By the time she got to the hospital Gammons had relapsed into his waking coma. She swore at length, startling a passing nurse in pink scrubs and provoking the admiration of a group of interns, who paused in their rounds to hear her out, rapt expressions indicating they were taking mental notes for future reference.
When she ran out of breath Lempe said, “Yes, well, Ms. Shugak, as I told you before, there isn’t a great deal to be done.”
She suspected he was hiding his personal glee that Kate Shugak had been thwarted in her scorched-earth search for the truth. “What did he say?”
“I wasn’t there, I—”
“Who was there? Who can tell me what he said?”
The nurse in pink had been there. She approached Kate with caution, keeping enough distance between them so that if need be she’d have a head start. Kate fixed her with a basilisk stare. “Nurse … Pritchard, is it?” She was reading from the name tag fixed to the pink top.
Pritchard gave a timid nod.
At least it wasn’t Ratched. Ka
te indicated Lempe with a jerk of her head. “The doc here tells me you were in the room when Mr. Gammons woke up.”
Another timid nod.
“What did he say?”
Pritchard gave Lempe a nervous glance and Kate stepped between them, staring into Pritchard’s eyes. Pritchard was six inches taller than Kate and outweighed her by seventy pounds but she took a step back. “What. Did. He. Say,” Kate said again.
Pritchard’s face might actually have lost a little color. Her voice came out in a rapid squeak, like somebody fast-forwarding a tape. “It was like he woke out of a nightmare he was screaming what are you doing Rick no no don’t please don’t.”
It took Kate a moment to apply proper attribution and punctuation. “He said, ‘What are you doing, Rick? No! No, don’t! Please, don’t!’”
Pritchard nodded, looking longingly at the door.
Kate was remorseless. “Those were his exact words?”
Another frightened nod.
“Okay, thanks.”
Pritchard spun on her heel and scuttled down the corridor.
Kate turned to look at Gammons, back in his chair, staring out the window. “If he says anything more, it would be useful if accurate notes were kept.”
Lempe gave her a curious look. “Does what he said help your case?”
“Part of it,” she said.
Kate called Brendan on her cell phone as George was loading the Otter for the flight home. It was an all-freight flight this trip, which was good for her Costco purchases, but he had had to install a seat for her. He was still grumbling when Brendan picked up. “Brendan? It’s Kate.”
“Kate! My one, my own, my only true love.”
“Any other news on those names?”
“As a matter of fact.”
“Brendan, my plane is about to leave.”
“Your friend Allen was an embezzler, a con man, and a big-time recidivist. He left a paper trail in various names from Minnesota to California, everything from identity theft to credit card scams. He must have been pretty good because he’d only been convicted once, for running a pyramid scheme out of a phony investment office in Tucson. He made the mistake of hanging around too long and a bunch of his investors showed up and beat him up bad enough that he couldn’t run when they called the cops. Even then, he was out in three months with good behavior. You got all that?”
A Night Too Dark Page 24