A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  It was Labor Day, and everyone was in town for the parade and the salmon bake at the gym and the farmer’s market and craft fair at the school. Unless he’d managed to finagle a way out of it Chopper Jim would be leading the parade in his white Blazer, and the Grosdidier boys would be bringing up the rear in their fire-engine-yellow Silverado with the mobile pharmacy in the back. In between Miss Niniltna would be holding court on the back of a flatbed draped with the school colors of blue and gold, the Kanuyaq Kings varsity and junior varsity teams would be dribbling in formation behind her, and the Suulutaq Mine would be swaggering behind them and tossing candy like they worked for Hershey’s. Every kid in Niniltna with a bike or a trike would be dressed in last year’s Halloween costumes and part of the parade only when they weren’t scrabbling for their share of the candy.

  He was sorry to miss the fry bread and smoked fish at the gym, but he figured everyone felt that way, especially Chopper Jim and Dan O’Brian, which considerably improved his chances for a nice, quiet, successful hunt.

  Yes, he had been there a few hours, and he expected to be there a few hours more, but he was in no hurry, and he was a man who enjoyed his own company. His thoughts ranged freely across the years and the Park and all of the people in it. He thought of people who had gone, like Emaa, and of people who should have been gone a lot sooner, like Louis Deem, and of people still around, like Kate.

  He was a mite concerned about Kate. She had a habit of rescuing people, which was all right in moderation, but not so much when you went into it wholesale. It was particularly aggravating when it substituted a greenhorn for an experienced deckhand just about the time the first salmon hit fresh water.

  Although he had to admit that Petey Jeppsen and Phyllis Lestinkof had not been completely worthless on the Freya this past summer. They were both clumsy and ignorant, of course, practically couldn’t tell a humpy from a dog at the start of the season, but they’d shouldered in and worked hard. Neither one had taken their first paycheck to the bars uptown when they delivered in Cordova, and when they got seasick they remembered to puke to leeward. Further, when Kate had joined them for the silver season in August, neither Petey nor Phyllis had complained at being bumped down to second and third on deck. Petey’d had no problem taking orders from Kate, either. Sometimes the male of the species could get a little uppity when placed in an inferior position to the female, especially on the deck of a fishing boat in Prince William Sound.

  He heard the brush rustling before he saw it moving. He pulled the Winchester tight into his shoulder, finger on the trigger.

  He was rewarded when the biggest sumbitchin moose he’d seen in ten years strolled out like the king of the forest. Lordy, was he beautiful, a thick shining brown hide, a graceful, evenly balanced rack richly covered in velvet that was only now beginning to fray and peel, moving with a princely stride on haunches that would feed a family of four for six months.

  Old Sam smiled, blew out a long quiet breath, and centered the front sight on one big brown eye.

  It was an hour later, when he’d gutted the bull and pulled the skin halfway down the carcass, that he found the bullet hole.

  Now, this wasn’t necessarily unheard of. Plenty of clueless assholes wandering around the Park with too much gun and no idea how to use it. Not to mention a lack of backbone to go after one they’d wounded, as was right and proper, hell, in Old Sam’s book a moral obligation.

  Old Sam hated bad shots.

  The hide had closed up over the hole the bullet had made going in, which was why he didn’t see it until he pulled the skin down. The flesh had closed up after it, too, which told him the shot wasn’t recent. It took a bit of finesse to extract the bullet without ruining the surrounding meat, and when he had it he sat back on his haunches and looked at the piece of metal he was holding between a bloodstained thumb and forefinger.

  It was a little bullet. Damn little, a .22 if Old Sam was any judge, and he was. Who the hell went up against a moose with a .22?

  He remembered the pistol Jim had found in the clearing, which wasn’t more than half a mile from this very spot. It had tripped up Jim, and it had probably tripped him up a month before that.

  He remembered Kate talking about the two guys tarryhooting off into the woods, one a suicide until he changed his mind and the other with a gun so he could change it back again. He remembered mention of a hoofprint in the skull that had been found. He examined the four hoofs on his moose. He didn’t find anything except grass stains and pine needles.

  He sat back and gave thought. Well, now, he was in something of a pickle, wasn’t he. The moose was illegal, no doubt about that. If he took the bullet in and handed it over to the authorities, he’d have to say where he got it, and that illegality would become clear. There could be consequences, which could affect his barbecue.

  But the bullet might be evidence of some kind in this crazy-ass case of Kate and Jim’s, where there didn’t seem to be any crime committed other than spying on a gold mine. It was difficult to get himself worked up over that.

  Old Sam hated being a responsible citizen.

  He cut the feet off at the first joint and put them in a game bag. The bullet he tucked into the pocket of his shirt and buttoned the flap after it just to be sure.

  And then he went back to butchering out the moose.

  Old Sam hated waste worst of all.

  Kate looked at the bullet, and at the package wrapped in white butcher paper labeled 5# ROST in black Marks-A-Lot. “I’m as susceptible to bribes as the next law enforcement professional, Uncle, but you know I’m going to have to tell him where I got it.”

  “Yeah, I know, but not before I get it all hung. Ain’t nobody, even Dan O’Brian, going to take it then. Not if they want some of my barbecue.”

  Because despite the years-long war between Old Sam and the Parks Service, Dan O’Brian was one ranger who had a standing invitation to the barbecue.

  Old Sam nodded at the roast. “That’s the part the bullet come out of. Leave it sit out a day or two, it ought to be just about right.” He left.

  Mutt stuck her head over the counter and sniffed interestedly at the roast.

  “Go catch your own,” Kate told her. She put the roast on a shelf up high and then, because Mutt was sulking, said, “Want to go into town?”

  Well, shit.” Jim looked at the bullet Kate had placed on the desk in front of him. “I thought we were done with that goddamn uncase.”

  It took until the following Saturday, the day of Old Sam’s barbecue, before the report came back from ballistics. The bullet taken out of the moose had indeed been fired from the pistol Jim had found in the clearing with the body. Kate had driven in early, and the two of them sat in his office, digesting the news in silence.

  At length, Jim stirred. “Okay. As crazy as I thought your theory was, I’m bound to say it’s looking more like that’s the way it went down. Allen had earned enough money from his various employers, it was time to leave, and he set up Gammons to take the fall so they wouldn’t come looking for him if they found out he’d been double-crossing them both.”

  “All neat and tidy,” she said, almost a growl.

  “Boy, Kate, you really want to arrest someone out at the Suulutaq in the worst way, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you?” she said.

  “Not as bad as you do,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s because you hate the Suulutaq Mine so much.”

  She looked up, startled. “What are you talking about? I don’t hate the mine.”

  Jim had been thinking about what Old Sam had told him back in July, thinking and watching Kate and listening to her, and thinking some more. “Yeah you do. You hate that goddamn mine worse than anyone else in the Park. Oh, I know, you haven’t said so, and you’ve been the voice of reason and responsibility when you’re in your board chair persona. But you hate it like poison. You see it changing the Park out of all recognition, and you see the dollar signs lighting up the eyes of your shareholders, Auntie Edna se
lling takeout, Auntie Balasha selling souvenirs, Auntie Vi plain selling out. You hate every bit of it. If you could you’d shut Suulutaq down and boot Global Harvest not just out of the Park but out of the whole goddamn state.

  “And it’s not because you really believe the mine will destroy the land or the wildlife. You want jobs for Park rats, industry for a tax base so there can be schools and hospitals and libraries. But you’d rather do without all of that stuff than have the Park change on you. You’d rather do without than have your life changed as much as that mine is going to change it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and rubbed both hands over his face and linked them behind his head, looking at her with that impartial cop stare that could do a whole character dissection without ever touching a scalpel. “Failing that, you want there to have been a murder. You want me to haul Truax and Haynes in here and charge them with everything from murder to polluting your personal environment.”

  Kate’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “That’s just not true,” she said. Was it? She rallied. “I liked that girl. I spent more time with her than you did, and I don’t believe she would have killed herself.”

  “You’re still not even comfortable with your new house, Kate. Face it. There isn’t a nickel’s worth of difference between your attitude to the mine and Gaea’s.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said.

  “Why is Howie Katelnikof still walking around on two good legs?”

  “What?” Kate was really confused now.

  “He shot at your truck. He put you and Johnny in the ditch and Mutt in the clinic. We both know it. Hell, every Park rat with an IQ over two digits knows it. We’ve all been holding our breaths for the last year, year and a half, to see what you’re going to do about it. I myself have lived in daily expectation of scraping his remains up off some back road with a shovel, and I say a nightly prayer that you won’t leave any evidence behind I’ll have to act on.”

  “What the hell’s this got to do with the mine and how I feel about it?”

  “Howie’s a Park rat, one of your own whether you like it or not, so he can take a shot at you and get away with it. A Suulutaq miner, that’s a different story. You’ll move mountains for a perp walk featuring one of them.”

  The silence this time was a little more fraught. Kate tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t leave her wide open to more incoming. Too much of his ammunition was already finding its target. “Has her mother stopped calling?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Who gets Allen’s money?”

  “There’s a sister. She said he was a better brother to her dead than he ever was alive.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. Not what I’d choose for my epitaph. But then I suppose the dumb bastard thought he’d never need one. He was going to live forever under a palm tree somewhere.” He made some additional notes to the Allen file, saved it, copied it, and closed it. “So. You hanging around town until it’s time to go to Old Sam’s?”

  “God no,” Kate said, relieved that they seemed to be well and truly off the topic of her relationship to the Suulutaq Mine. Fucking mine was taking over every conversation she was in lately. “I’m heading back home. That is, if you’re done psychoanalyzing me, doctor.” She realized too late that there was maybe a little too much edge on the remark and rushed to fill the awkward silence following it. “I have to go back anyway, I’m supposed to make rhubarb sorbet for the barbecue.”

  That proved a useful distraction. “Got enough rhubarb left in the freezer?” he said, looking anxious. “I’m sure you could pick up extra from Annie or Auntie Vi if you need it. Or Dinah.”

  She was forced to smile. “I’ve got plenty.”

  “You’re going to make a lot, right?”

  She laughed and got to her feet. Mutt followed.

  “Just don’t start serving it up until I’m standing in front of you with a bowl and a spoon.” He paused, a pile of pink call slips in one hand. “Oh, hey, I forgot to tell you. I finally took those numbers Lyda had on her computer over to the mine.”

  She looked over her shoulder, one hand on the door. “I thought you’d already done that.”

  “No. Didn’t seem much point, with Lyda’s death being ruled accidental and the corporate spy already accounted for. But I had to go out to the mine to talk to Randy Randolph yesterday—”

  She groaned.

  “Yeah, another one showed up from Outside, and she may be the one with the oldest date on the marriage certificate yet. Anyway, before I flew out I printed out the numbers in Lyda’s file, and when I got there I showed them to Haynes. She checked them out against the core sample log.”

  “What’d she say?”

  He shrugged. “She said that Lyda had gotten the numbers transposed but that otherwise they corresponded with core samples Allen had forwarded to his extracurricular employers.”

  Kate’s brows came together. “Lyda got the numbers wrong?”

  “Yeah, I think Haynes said she got the core sample data right. She just got the dates wrong.”

  Kate turned to come back in the room. Mutt stuck her head around the door frame. Her vigilance had been unrelenting ever since Kate had gone to Anchorage without her.

  “Lyda got the dates wrong,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, I just said that. Didn’t I just say that?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Kate said.

  “Kate—” Her name was a drawn-out exasperation.

  “I’m telling you she didn’t get the dates wrong,” Kate said. “Truax wasn’t pissed off she was dead, remember, he was pissed off that he’d lost the person who made his camp march along like Napoleon’s army. Did you keep the dates?”

  “Kate—”

  She came around the desk to stand in front of his monitor. “Let me see them.”

  Like Brillo, Jim knew it was always going to be easier and less time-consuming if he just gave her what she wanted. He called up the file and displayed it.

  “Still got the dates of the pay-ins to Allen’s account?”

  He displayed those, too. “We did this before,” he said. “We noticed the dates were off when you first showed me Allen’s bank records, and we compared the two. It didn’t bother you then.”

  “One a month,” she said, ignoring him. “April, May, June, and then July 1, five days before she died.” She straightened, her face a mask, her eyes focused inward on the working out of some internal calculation. “April, Allen was still alive and spying. May, maybe, but by June he was dead, and by July he was even more dead.” She looked at him. “She didn’t screw up the numbers, Jim.”

  It took him a minute, and when he got there what she was intimating strained his credulity to the breaking point. “Kate. You think somebody else was selling Suulutaq data?” The significance of the last two dates hit him between the eyes. “And if you’re right, if Lyda’s dates are correct, that means somebody else continued to steal data after Allen disappeared.”

  “Lyda’s desk was right there,” Kate said, “in the room where they do all the work. This wasn’t her first mine, she was familiar with the routine. She saw something and she started keeping track. It just wasn’t Allen she was keeping track of.”

  He was skeptical, to say the least. “Setting aside the statistical improbability of one corporate spy in a hundred-man camp, who was the second?”

  “It isn’t a hundred-man camp, Jim, it’s a four-billion-dollar camp,” she said. “She said in her note at the bottom of the document, there may have been more incidents of data theft.” She went around his desk and was out the door.

  “Wait, where you going?”

  “I’ll be right back!”

  Bingley’s store was down the hill, past Auntie Vi’s and around the corner. Kate took the steps two at a time. She found what she was looking for between the sugar and the spices.

  She was back in Jim’s office five minutes later, out of breath. “Got the keys to the Cessna?”

  �
�Why, where we going?”

  “To Suulutaq.”

  Twenty-one

  What makes a cop? An observant eye and a good memory. At one time Kate had prided herself on having both. “She had two bags of groceries when she was in the café that day,” Kate said, her voice grim over the headset, “so she knew the store was there and that it had what she needed.”

  There was no point in protesting after they were in the air so he shut up and listened.

  “Lyda’s allergy would be known in camp, especially to people who had worked with her before.”

  “Okay, means,” he said. It was kicking up twelve to fourteen knots out of the southwest and the Cessna skipped over a few bumps. “Opportunity, obviously. What about motive?”

  “It’s all about the proprietary information, Jim.”

  “You think she was in it with Allen?”

  “One possibility. He worked with her, she admitted as much to me, and Truax confirmed it.”

  He tried to reconcile this information with what he knew. “It was about the money for her, too?”

  “Partly, probably, but I think there are a couple of other things. For one, principle.”

  He groaned. Sex and money were easy-to-recognize motives that were even easier to prove in court. Sex and money he knew he could handle. “Principle?” There was pain in the very articulation of the word.

  “Principle. She came out to the house on the Fourth of July, remember? Before Gammons stumbled into the yard and all the hullabaloo started she told me she was pretty ambivalent about the Suulutaq. ‘I just don’t know if the world needs another gold mine,’ she said, that’s quoting her verbatim. I think she is really unhappy about this whole project.”

  “Ambivalence isn’t usually a motive for murder, Kate.”

  “Agreed, but it might have been more than ambivalence. It just clicked in your office fifteen minutes ago who was sitting between her and Demetri. He had his back to us and I thought he was Demetri’s friend.”