A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “You think he went looking for Gammons?” Jim said after a moment.

  “I do. I think Allen knew from the get-go he wouldn’t be able to get away with it forever—Brendan said he was a pretty good con man, only one conviction with three months served—and I think he was looking for a fall guy among his fellow employees from that day forward. Hell, he may have scouted Gammons in Washington, may have been the one to talk Gammons into coming to Alaska and applying at Suulutaq in the first place. True North was probably looking at keeping him in place for the long term, which he knew increased the chances he’ll get caught. He looks at Gammons and thinks, Wouldn’t it be convenient if I died? Nobody comes after a dead man.”

  She sat back. “Remember, Jim, we wouldn’t even have known that the guy who stumbled out of the woods into my yard was Gammons if Lyda hadn’t been at the airstrip that day. No, Gammons was right where Allen put him, a virtual twin with chronic depression. Allen only had to nurse it along, and according to Randy Randolph he did that right well.”

  “Randy, by the way, did not begin his career in multiple marrying in Alaska,” Jim said. “I ran his record, too, and he’s got wives strung out in a line from here to North Carolina.”

  Kate laughed. “Just don’t tell Bonnie, or Suzy. Or that third one—what was her name?—who took you out in front of the grocery store.”

  “Mrs. Randy Randolph,” Jim said, with dignity, “and I was not taken out, I tripped.”

  “You went ass over teakettle,” Kate said.

  “Getting back to the subject at hand,” Jim said. “Allen switches the medical reports, cleans out Gammons’s room of anything approaching a life just to be sure, and drives out to see his best buddy off into the next life.

  “What he doesn’t know is that Gammons has made friends with one Lyda Blue, and life is not quite as dark and hopeless as it once was. Gammons changes his mind, Allen pulls out the pistol and fires it to change Gammons’s mind back or to kill him and maybe, I don’t know, make it look like suicide. Only one of the bullets hits Gammons. One of the others hits or frightens a moose who, unfortunately, takes exception to this injury to his or her person, and stomps Allen to death on the strength of it.” He sat back in his chair. “It’s all very tidy.”

  “Except for Lyda Blue,” Kate said.

  “If she was murdered, Kate, she either saw something or she was a part of the scam. She had guilty knowledge she couldn’t live with, or she was aiding and abetting and she was afraid she was going to get caught.”

  “You don’t think she was taking a cut,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Maybe she did it for love. It’s been known to happen.” He leaned back and rubbed his face. “I need more coffee.” Getting up to refill his mug he said, “Speculating is fun and all but how much hard evidence do we really have?”

  “The payments traceable back to True North and RPetCo Alaska. The switched files. Gammons’s bullet wound. Lyda’s pistol, the weapon that probably inflicted the wound. The truck. The fingerprints.”

  “How did Allen get hold of Lyda’s pistol?”

  “You said it yourself, it’s a small camp. Allen was a con man, a swindler and an embezzler and a thief. A guy like him would make a regular habit out of inventorying the contents of every room in the camp.”

  He sat back down and frowned at his coffee, which didn’t deserve it. “Con men don’t usually upgrade to murder, Kate. It doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t, if he felt under enough threat.”

  “Under threat, from a venture capital firm and an Alaskan oil corporation? What was he afraid they’d do, string him up by their silk ties?”

  “Ah,” she said, and it was as near a cackle as he’d ever heard her make, “now we come to the best part. At the same time, independently of anything going on at Suulutaq, the FBI—”

  The coffee mug landed on the table with a thud that should have cracked its bottom. “The FBI?”

  “—in the person of Special Agent Fred Gamble, of whom you have heard me speak before—”

  “I thought he’d been transferred to Oklahoma.”

  “Omaha,” she said, with an airy wave. “Other opportunities. Things happen. You know. Special Agent Gamble is I believe still striving to find a headline case that will get him reassigned to somewhere that isn’t Alaska. In pursuit of this goal—”

  Oh yeah, he could see she was really enjoying herself now.

  “In pursuit of this goal, it came to his attention that a venture capital firm called True North Investments was making many investments in Global Harvest stock and that John King, president and CEO of RPetCo, was on the board of directors.”

  “Where did Gamble pick up your trail?”

  “At RPetCo, when I went to see John King.” She looked demure. “He thought, given our prior dealings, that I might be able to shed some light on his investigation.”

  Jim closed his eyes and shook his head. “You know, Prohibition gave us two things, organized crime and the FBI. Honest to god, I wonder sometimes which was worse.” He opened his eyes. “I shudder at the many prospective answers to this question, but why is the FBI investigating True North and John King?”

  “Because True North is in receipt of large quantities of money with no provenance.”

  “Translation, please?”

  It burst out of her with a velocity that made him realize how hard it had been for her to hold it in for the last fifteen minutes. “True North is suspected by the FBI, the DEA, and various other governmental agencies of laundering money for the—wait for it—Carlomagno Coahuila drug cartel.”

  “Holy shit,” Jim said.

  “That’s what Brendan said.” Kate raised her mug to her lips for the first time. It was cold. She got up to refill it, and settled back in her chair with the air of one who had brought the news from Marathon to Athens on time and under budget and had lived to tell the tale.

  “I hope that True North business doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass,” Jim said. “Drug cartels are hell on leakers.”

  “According to Gamble they’re going to have a lot worse things to worry about shortly.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m considering the source there.” Jim looked at Kate. “So you think Allen found out about the drug money laundering and decided to vanish.”

  “Yes. He might have known from the beginning. A good con man is also a first-class researcher. He wouldn’t have come into this without checking into True North’s background.”

  “Say I’m prepared to accept this ridiculous story as something approaching the truth. How does the death of Lyda Blue figure into it?”

  Some of the light went out of Kate’s eyes, and he was sorry to see it go. She was awful cute when she got on the scent. “I haven’t figured that out yet. It has to be connected to Allen and Gammons, it just has to. We know from the file on her computer that she found out Allen was stealing data. And we know Gammons was shot with her pistol. All three of them were connected. Her death has to be, too.”

  “I’ll check with her family, see if they can identify it as belonging to her. But, Kate.” Their eyes met. “He was dead a long time before she was. If she was murdered, he didn’t kill her.”

  “I know,” she said. “There has to be something else, something I haven’t seen, or accounted for. We need to go back out to the mine and talk to a lot more people, especially the geologists. If Lyda noticed something, they might have, too. Oh.” She sat up. “I just remembered. Truax was throwing a guy off the mine when I got there the day Lyda died.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “His name is Kostas McKenzie. He’s the executive director of a nonprofit environmental activist organization called Gaea. He snuck in on a plane that morning and was snooping around.”

  Jim perked up. “Any chance of popping him for Lyda Blue’s death?”

  “No,” Kate said, with regret. “I checked with George and he was telling the truth about when he got to Suulutaq.
Rigor was too far advanced for him to have done it.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Especially since I think there is going to be trouble from that direction before very long. I went down to their office last night. Gaea has targeted the Suulutaq Mine for their trophy wall.”

  “Yeah, well, I think Global Harvest can defend itself.” He looked at the clock and stood up. “You know what? I’ve had a day, and I’m going to need some beer to get through the rest of it.”

  “Roadhouse?”

  “God, no. The last time I went to the Roadhouse for a quiet beer I had to break up a fistfight between a Park rat and a Suulutaq Mine worker over Dulcey Kinneen. And then Bernie insisted I counsel Dulcey against renting herself out by the hour. Let’s just go home.”

  The Suulutaq Mine had a lot to answer for and it wasn’t even in production yet.

  Nineteen

  The next couple of days were quiet and uneventful. Jim talked to Lyda Blue’s people and discovered that the pistol had belonged to her mother and that so far as they knew Lyda had never shot it. “Probably never cleaned it, either,” Jim told Kate. “Allen’s lucky it didn’t blow up in his hand.” He added, “And if that damn bear had left enough of his hand we could have tested it for gunshot residue and proved at least part of your theory.”

  “Are you interviewing people at the mine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It going anywhere?”

  “No.”

  With each passing day, and no new clues in the death of Lyda Blue, Kate knew a steadily increasing sense of failure.

  And the summer had begun with such promise. Of course, her downturn in spirits could also be attributed in part to the approach of the dread NNA board of directors meeting. Kate and Annie had put together an agenda, and had discussed weapons and tactics. It was summer, after all. Maybe Demetri would be up at his lodge, and Old Sam down Alaganik way. Maybe someone would have burned Ulanie Anahonak at the stake. Her heart warmed at the thought.

  Yes, maybe they’d have the minimum quorum allowed by amended bylaw, so as to produce the maximum peace.

  She could only hope.

  How many designs for the new NNA logo now, Ms. Mike?” Kate said.

  Annie Mike, sitting erect at the small table in the corner, tapped some keys on her computer. “One hundred and thirty-seven. Fifty-two of them are from the same three shareholders.”

  There was a rustle around the table, but everyone was too afraid that Dominatrix Kate would rule them out of order if they spoke and so they maintained a prudent silence. With the exception of Old Sam, who said, “Yeah, and how many are worth the board looking at ’em? Five? Wait, what am I saying. Any?”

  “Out of order, Mr. Dementieff,” Kate said, but her voice lacked the edge it did whenever anyone else spoke without being recognized. He grinned at her, unapologetic.

  Besides, he was right. Kate had seen the submissions, and the art displayed therein was, well, amateurish at best. She looked down at the mug sitting at her right hand, which boasted the current logo, a Rorschach blot of barely distinguishable Alaskan icons in busy black. “I move that we commission a professional artist to come up with a design for a new logo,” she said. “I have a name in mind, and I have a sample of his work.” Annie got up and passed out Gaea brochures. McKenzie had made good on his promise to send her the artist’s name, who by a miracle had turned out not only to be local but to be Alaska Native as well. She wasn’t Aleut and she wasn’t an NNA shareholder, but you couldn’t have everything.

  Demetri looked up from the brochure. “You turning into a radical environmentalist on us, Kate? These folks can get pretty extreme, and they’re saying a lot of not very nice things about the Suulutaq Mine.”

  “For the moment, let’s focus on the logo. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping we’d get from the contest, a single clean image that feels familiar and universal and is beautiful in its own right.”

  “Second,” Auntie Joy said. She had loathed all the prospective logos they had received, a very un–Auntie Joy reaction.

  This was the second meeting of the Niniltna Association board of directors following the January shareholders meeting and the successful vote to increase the board’s size from five to nine. Alas for Kate’s hopes, all members of the board were present, and when she looked around the circular table in the upstairs room at board HQ in Niniltna, she still didn’t know what new kind of dynamic she had been the proximate cause of producing for this quarterly meeting, or for the future of the association. On the whole, she had to admit things were going a lot more smoothly than she had anticipated. Which only made her spider sense tingle in anticipation of disasters yet to unfold.

  On her right sat Auntie Joy. One of the four aunties and the only one on the board, Joyce Shugak was in her eighties, a subsistence fisher on a creek that emptied into Alaganik Bay, where all the other Park rats fished commercial. Married young, widowed young, and childless, she regarded everyone in the Park as one of her own, be they Native or white, squareheads or roundeyes. Aided by a spiritual nearsightedness that allowed her to see only the good in them no matter how badly they behaved, she beamed out upon the world with an impartial benignity and a cheerfulness viewed by more crotchety beings as interminable. On one hand, she was every Park rat’s grandma. On the other, it was sometimes hard to credit that she was actually of this world.

  Next to Auntie Joy sat Marlene Colberg, one of the newly named board members. Marlene, midfifties, was a commercial fisherman, with a set net site on Alaganik Bay next to Mary Balashoff’s that she had inherited from her father. Her siblings had wanted nothing to do with it, decamping from the Park and some of them from the state as soon as they were old enough, so she fished it alone. She was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and weighed over two hundred pounds, none of it fat, a heritage from her Norwegian father, so she was certainly up to the physical challenge. There wasn’t that much to be seen of her Aleut mother in her features. Her blond hair was cut shorter than Old Sam’s, her eyes were deep blue, and her mouth a straight, firm line over a square and equally firm chin. Her hands, large-knuckled and scarred from a life spent picking fish and mending and hauling gear, were folded on the table in front of her. They looked unaccustomed to inaction. Her expression betrayed a little impatience, as if she had better things to do than waste five minutes talking about something as unimportant as a company logo. Kate remembered that Marlene had protested her nomination to the board, and had only acceded to it when overwhelmed by support from other shareholders. She was the least interested in governing of the new bunch, and probably the best of them.

  Between Marlene and Harvey Meganack was Herbie Topkok. Herbie ran Park Sled and ATV out of his garage, which was the local parts store for Honda, Kawasaki, Arctic Cat, Yamaha, Polaris, Suzuki, and whoever else made a snow machine or a four-wheeler. Kate was pretty sure that Herbie had a backdoor arrangement with Howie Katelnikof in the matter of spare parts, and she thought he might also have been the source of the four-wheelers the Suulutaq Mine workers were using to get back and forth into town. He was maybe five four, also in his midfifties, and a relatively new Park rat, as his parents had met at Chemawa in Oregon and had settled there to raise their family after graduation. Herbie, the eldest and a mechanic for a Ford dealership in Portland, had been the only regular visitor to the Park of the four children, traveling to Alaska every summer and working one log at a time on a cabin on the Kanuyaq just north of Niniltna on his parents’ ANCSA land allotment. When his third and last child graduated from high school, he made the move permanent. His wife had lasted one winter before heading back to Oregon. Herbie made enough out of the business to support himself in the Park and his wife Outside, and other than nonconjugal visits over the holidays, also Outside and with the children and the growing brood of grandchildren in attendance, they both seemed content with the status quo.

  Herbie, skin the color of toast, eyes black and a little protruding, stocky and taciturn, looked less than enthralled by
the subject of the logo, too. On his right, Harvey Meganack glowered at Kate, but she was used to being glowered at by Harvey and it didn’t bother her. She even carried the battle forward into the enemy’s camp. “Anything to add, Mr. Meganack?”

  He ground his teeth, and it was obvious that it pained him when he had to agree with the board’s chair. “No. Branding is important. We need a new logo.”

  Harvey was as usual clad in neatly pressed charcoal gray slacks and a white, long-sleeved, button-down Oxford shirt that looked lonely without the maroon silk tie that Harvey didn’t quite dare wear with it, not in the Park. A commercial fisherman like many of the people seated at the table, a registered guide like Demetri, the proud holder of a two-year engineering degree from the University of Alaska, and the boon companion of State Senator Pete Heiman, Harvey was a boomer of the first water. He owed his mop of dark hair, his round cheeks, and his incipient second chin to his Aleut mother, and his medium height, his five o’clock shadow, and his middle-aged spread to an Italian great-grandfather. Like many shareholders, he owed his Park rattery to a stampeder ancestor.

  “Good,” Kate said briskly, and smiled at Demetri Totemoff, on Harvey’s right. Without moving a muscle Demetri managed to look faintly amused. Born in the Park, married in the Park (his wife was Auntie Edna’s daughter, Edna Jr.), raised his kids on the Park, hunter, trapper, and proprietor of an increasingly high-end hunting lodge in the southern foothills of the Quilak Mountains within sight of the Alaskan coast, he was pro-business only insofar as it didn’t impact the wilderness experience of his clients. Of course, this particular wilderness experience included daily maid service and a four-star gourmet chef. His clients arrived in Anchorage on private jets and were whisked directly to Demetri’s eyrie in a scrupulously clean and perfectly maintained Beaver, which landed on the lake the lodge was built on and which taxied right up to the lodge’s dock so the clients never even got their feet wet.