A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “I got it. Brendan, you’ve got a leak in your office.”

  His voice changed. “What?”

  “The FBI knows you were running Allen. They’ve been following the money, too.”

  “Why?”

  She told him.

  “Holy shit.”

  “That’s what I said.” George caught her eye and tapped his watch. “Gotta go, babe. Thanks for the help.”

  She climbed in next to George and he had them in the air five minutes later. He was silent most of the way home, which suited her fine because she wanted to sort out everything she’d learned in Anchorage, to try to bring some sense of order to it.

  Allen had been a ringer for both John King and True North, running a wholesale market in proprietary information out of the Suulutaq Mine, from whom he was drawing a third paycheck. You had to admire the efficiency of his opportunism. Even for a man of Allen’s past, though, playing three sides against each other had to be wearing.

  Lyda had noticed something, hence the file on her computer.

  But Allen had predeceased her, so he hadn’t killed her. Who had?

  Who had shot Dewayne Gammons? It was Lyda’s pistol, it fit the holster in her drawer. Who took it? Or had she given it to someone?

  Allen’s body was in the clearing with the gun.

  Gammons was wandering around the woods with a bullet hole in him.

  A circumstantial case could be made that Allen shot Gammons. Why? Why would one friend shoot another? They could have been brothers, they—

  “Oh,” she said out loud. “Oh!”

  “What oh,” George said over the headset. “What’s with the ohs?” His eyes roved the sky. “We got traffic? Where?”

  She looked around as if she’d just realized where they were. Beneath them the Kanuyaq spiraled out like a broad silver ribbon. Ahead of them the Quilaks loomed large and menacing. “Sorry, George,” she said, contrite. Bad idea to make loud noises sitting next to a pilot in midair. “I think I just figured something out. Maybe. Possibly. There’s a chance I might actually know at least part of what happened here.”

  “A part of what happened where?” George said.

  “Just fly the plane,” she said. “Can’t we go any faster?”

  A miffed George put them down on the Niniltna airstrip in good time. Kate abandoned her purchases and ran down the hill to the trooper post.

  “He’s not here,” Maggie said, “there was a shooting over in Tebay Lakes, possible fatality. He said he wouldn’t be back until tonight at the earliest.”

  Kate had been so preoccupied she hadn’t even noticed that Jim’s plane was gone. “Damn it,” she said, frustrated. She almost stamped her foot.

  Maggie sniffed. Kate still wasn’t forgiven for standing up for the mine, even if she hadn’t. She hadn’t, had she? After the conversation with Kostas McKenzie the evening before she wasn’t so sure.

  Mutt came to the door of Jim’s office and looked out at Kate with a long, meaningful stare.

  “Hey, girl,” Kate said.

  Mutt turned her back on her.

  “Oh, come on, Mutt,” Kate said.

  The doorway to Jim’s office remained empty.

  Then the door behind her opened and Jim walked in, and Mutt bounced out right past Kate as if Kate wasn’t even there. There followed a red carpet welcome for Jim Chopin that would have shamed the producers of an Oscar Award ceremony.

  Jim, bending down to exchange salutations, quirked an eyebrow at Kate. “Told you she’d be pissed.”

  She grabbed his arm and hauled him into his office, almost shutting the door in Mutt’s face. Mutt gave an admonitory yip and looked at Kate with reproachful eyes.

  “Your eyes sparkle, your cheeks are flushed, words tremble upon your lips. Ace detective that I am, I deduce that you have news.” Jim hung up his jacket and ball cap and removed his gun and holster and put them away in the bottom drawer. “Let me make some coffee. All they drink in Tebay Lakes is Folgers.” He shuddered. Jim Chopin was a world-class coffee snob, a soul mate to Howard Schultz whether the Starbucks boss knew it or not.

  “I think I know what happened,” she said. She wasn’t quite dancing in place, but close.

  “You know who killed Lyda Blue?” he said, pausing in the act of filling the carafe.

  She deflated a little. “No, dammit,” she said. “At least not yet. But I think I’ve got it figured out about Gammons and Allen.”

  “Gammons wake up?”

  “No, dammit, and would you just let me talk it out first?”

  “Sure,” he said, “fine, believe me, I’ve had enough drama for one day.”

  She allowed herself to be diverted, she told herself, only for a second. “Why, what was going on in Tebay Lakes?”

  “Bob Ellis called in on the short band, all excited, and said there’d been a shooting and that someone was dead and there was a crazy guy with a gun shooting up the place. I get there and it’s Boyd Beebe shooting at his house because Ellen locked him out again.”

  “Bob and Boyd getting into the home brew again?”

  His expression hardened. “Yeah, they were both shit-faced. I told Ellen she has to stop making that stuff.”

  “Her root beer is pretty good,” Kate said. Jim looked up from ladling a generous quantity of Tsunami Blend into the filter. She shrugged. “Their daughter ran off a couple of years back. I found her for them. Ellen always drops off a case of root beer for me when they come through town. I haven’t shared any with you yet?”

  “You have not.” Jim switched on the coffeemaker and stood there willing it to brew faster. “Ellen was a little well to live herself when I got there. Tell me something. How many people you think move to the Bush so they can drink themselves to death?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Confiscated the rifle.”

  “What if a bear shows up?”

  “We can only hope it eats them.” The coffeemaker beeped. At last, at last, thank god almighty. He filled two mugs, handed her one, and went to sit behind his desk. He cradled the mug in both hands and let the aroma waft upward, through his nostrils, past his sinuses, to infuse his cerebral cortex and stimulate his synapses.

  “So—”

  “Just let me enjoy this one moment, okay?”

  Kate flung herself into the chair opposite and tapped a bad-tempered foot.

  He drank, drank again, and felt the caffeine flood into his bloodstream with a revivifying buzz. Dealing with drunks could sap your very will to live. He opened his eyes and sat back. “Okay. Talk to me.”

  “I want to walk through it out loud and you pick holes, okay?”

  He saluted her with the mug and leaned back to prop his feet up. “One of the things I’m best at.”

  “First of all, let me just say this is the weirdest damn case you’ve ever had me work on.”

  “Thank you. We aim to please.”

  “Yeah, you can yuck it up all you want, Chopin, but just wait till all this lands back in your lap.” She raised herself up by the arms of the chair, crossed her legs beneath her, and shook her bangs out of her eyes. She was so damn cute, and how much he would rather be throwing her down on the nearest horizontal surface and having his way with her. He was sure it would beat the hell out of whatever was coming next.

  It would beat the hell out of pretty much anything, come to that.

  “Okay. I’ll try to tell this linearly.” She frowned. “I’ll try.” She took a deep breath and began to speak in headings and subheadings.

  “True North Investments is an international venture capital firm that backs natural resource exploration, discovery, and extraction.”

  Jim opened his mouth, caught her eye, and closed it again.

  “John King, president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska, the majority producer in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields of Alaska, sits on the True North board of directors.

  “Global Harvest Resources Inc. discovers the second-largest deposit of gold in the world in our backyard. It m
ay in fact turn out to be the largest gold mine in the world if they ever manage to define its limits.

  “Global Harvest is an international corporation but they’re more oriented toward exploration and discovery than they are toward production. This time, the projected deposit being so large, they have decided it will be more profitable to run it themselves.

  “True North looks at the Suulutaq Mine and looks at Global Harvest and scents the possibility of a buyout or a takeover. They start making investments in Global Harvest stock, but they need more information for a more informed decision. They look around and find a Minnesota con man named Richard Henry Allen and recruit him to go to work for Global Harvest at the Suulutaq Mine, with instructions to weasel his way into the good graces of the mine geologists so he can get the copies of the data that the core samples are producing.

  “Meanwhile, sitting on True North’s board, John King gets wind of this. He’s been RPetCo’s CEO for over six years and the price of North Slope crude is dropping and so are RPetCo dividends and the shareholders are getting restless, thinking they might like a change of corporate leadership. King thinks that to save his job, maybe RPetCo might need to branch out, expand its resource base. The acquisition of Global Harvest by RPetCo Alaska might be just the jewel to cement the CEO crown on his head in perpetuity.

  “But he needs information, too, as he doesn’t have access to the actual data that Allen is feeding True North. So King figures since Allen is already in place he might be willing to sell the information he is stealing twice, and he is right. Allen, by the way, had a bank balance in Minneapolis amounting to a little under three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Jim choked on his coffee. Kate watched the resulting mop-up with some satisfaction. “So Rick Allen was a corporate spy,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “For not one but two masters.” He thought. “Three, if you count the fact that he was also drawing a paycheck from Global Harvest.”

  “He wasn’t spying for Global Harvest, for them he was doing a real job.”

  “Fine,” Jim said. “That still doesn’t explain why he and Gammons went tarryhooting out in the frickin’ woods in May.”

  Kate leaned forward, her face lit with the excitement of the chase. “Dewayne Gammons and Rick Allen are in the batch of first hires for the Suulutaq Mine. Lyda told me Gammons drove here with some of the other guys looking for work. What do you want to bet Allen was one of the other guys?”

  He made a come-on motion with his hand.

  “Okay, so we know from hearsay they were at minimum acquaintances. They could have driven up the Alcan together in Gammons’s truck. According to our friendly neighborhood bigamist, Randy Randolph, when they were working nights they snuck into the kitchen together for pastry fresh out of the oven, while, and this is important, engaged in a macabre conversation about death and ways to die.”

  “You’ll remember I’ve met Randy Randolph,” Jim said, “and I find it difficult to believe that he has ever used the word ‘macabre.’ And that if he has used it, he has never pronounced it correctly.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.” Jim drank coffee. “Tell me this much. Have we even got positive IDs on the goddamn bodies yet?”

  “Brillo called me this morning just before we took off. The blood type on the skull is the same blood type in Gammons’s file, which is to say Allen’s. Preliminary finding is that prior to death occurring the skull received a serious blow to his forehead by a sharp object. It was gnawed on by a bunch of different critters after death.”

  “And the sharp object?”

  “Brillo’s best guess? The front hoof of a moose.”

  “So even in Allen’s case we’re not talking about a murder.” Jim wondered how he was going to justify what was going to be an astronomical contract fee to his boss.

  “Wait,” she said, “just wait. Gammons’s doc says he thinks one of Gammons’s wounds was caused by a small bullet. He took photos and let me take ’em over to the crime lab.”

  “And Brillo says?”

  “He won’t swear to it, but he admitted it does bear a striking resemblance to a wound inflicted by a small-caliber bullet.”

  “Did you ask him if the .22 you gave him was small enough?”

  “I did, and he said it was, although he said even after laying outside for what his gun guy guessed was, get this, at minimum a month, the pistol is an older weapon and he didn’t think it was regularly used.

  “Brillo says if we can send him Allen’s belongings, he’ll probably be able to find some skin or hair and run the DNA on the skull and nail it for sure. We should do that, but I already know. The body in the woods is Rick Allen, it was misidentified as Gammons because the physical report in Gammons’s personnel file was actually Allen’s physical report, and vice versa.”

  “Who switched them?”

  “Allen.” She patted the air. “Wait. I’m not making you guess, I’m going to tell you straight out. I think Rick Allen came to the Suulutaq Mine as a spy, first for True North Investments, who are rumored to be in the market for a hostile takeover of GHRI, and second for John King.

  “He worked with Haynes, she said so. He was on and off the rigs, in and out of the office, he collated and filed reports. He had unlimited access to confidential data. It’s why he was so valuable to True North and to John King, and why they paid him so very well.

  “I think he milked True North and John King for every dime he could.” She took a deep breath. “And I think he aided and abetted Dewayne Gammons in his attempted suicide. I think he meant to take advantage of their physical similarity. I think he meant to take advantage of Gammons’s depressive state. I think he switched the physical reports in their files.”

  She sat back, with an air that invited, nay, expected applause. “You think Allen was setting Gammons up to take his place,” Jim said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Although he had a pretty good idea.

  “Either something happened to make him afraid he was about to get caught, or he’d saved enough money to, I don’t know, go to Aruba.”

  “And that would be fine if it made any sense. If he meant Gammons’s body to be identified as his own, why drive Gammons’s truck out there, and leave it, leading us to the natural assumption that it was in fact Gammons?”

  “Something went wrong. From what Lyda Blue and Randy Randolph and Gammons’s boss say, Dewayne Gammons was naturally on the brink of offing himself five or six times before breakfast every morning. The doc at the hospital says chronic depression a lot of times only gets worse the older you get. So Allen conceives of his master plan and zeroes in on Gammons as a likely victim. Randy hears them talking about death. Allen’s probably encouraging Gammons, egging him on. A good con man is first and foremost a good psychologist. One day Gammons decides he’s ready and asks his good buddy Allen to see him off at the end of their next shift.”

  She paused and their eyes met. They both broke down in a guilty snicker over her unintentional double entendre. Kate pulled herself together. “One thing we haven’t done yet is find out where Gammons parked his truck in town. Maybe somebody saw both men get in it and drive off. At any rate, they drive out there and head into the woods.”

  “So, Allen’s got his master plan,” Jim says, “but what if Gammons changes his mind at the last minute?”

  “That’s why the pistol!” Kate said.

  “The pistol was Allen’s backup plan?”

  “Yes! And I think Gammons did change his mind, for whatever reason, could have been ordinary everyday cold feet, could have been his burgeoning relationship with Lyda. At the last minute he changed his mind and I think that’s why all the rounds in that pistol were fired, and why Gammons has a bullet hole in him. No wonder the guy’s lost it, who wouldn’t under those circumstances? You’re depressed and suicidal to start with, and then you meet a girl you like and who seems to like you back and maybe life isn’t so awful after all, but you’ve locked yourself in
to a course of action—and you’re a young man with an overload of testosterone which by definition means you’re susceptible to peer pressure—and then at the last minute you change your mind and then your best bud—and in this case your only bud—tries to shoot you. You get away, only to wander around in the woods for a month afterward where probably every living thing you run into is trying to eat you. Jesus,” she said in sudden realization, and perhaps her first glimmer of sympathy. “I might opt out myself in those circumstances.”

  “So what happened to Allen?”

  “He’s banging away with the pistol, trying his damnedest to kill the son of a bitch that’s supposed to be the dead him. If he’s dead True North and John King won’t come looking for him when the data flow stops, or, and what I think is more probable given Allen’s past history, when they find out he’s double billing. The shots startle a moose, maybe a cow, she barges out of the brush and stomps the bastard that’s scaring the bejeezus out of her two twin calves born the day before. And the ravens and the bears clean up the mess, and if Father Smith hadn’t stumbled across Gammons’s pickup when he did we might never have found the remains.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out, thinking.

  “What?” she said.

  “While you were gone, I got a wild hair and fingerprinted Gammons’s pickup. I lifted some prints from their belongings. On my way back from Tebay Lakes I stopped off in Ahtna and had Kenny run them through the system for me. Gammons’s prints are all over the truck.” He waited a beat. “So are Allen’s.”

  “See!”

  “Wait a minute, Kate. How much of a coincidence is it that when Allen needs to find a substitute for himself, there’s Dewayne Gammons right there ready to hand? Practically his twin on a hundred-man crew on a remote site in interior Alaska. I mean come on.”

  Kate leaned forward. “It’s only a coincidence if you’re looking at it from our point of view,” she said. “If you look at it going forward, from Allen’s point of view, a year or however long ago it was that True North hired him, it’s not a coincidence. It’s a plan.”