a Night Too Dark (2010) (10 page)

Now the snow had retreated to the tops of the mountains, and the mine site was a sea of mud surrounding seven prefab modular buildings and an assortment of heavy equipment ranging from what Kate supposed was the infamous John Deere grader to Caterpillar tractors in two sizes, a backhoe loader, a crane truck, and a couple of forklifts. Some were digging holes in the newly thawed ground. Others were smoothing rudimentary tracks to connect the buildings, airstrip, and drilling rigs. Some were shifting cargo stacked on pallets at the end of the runway to one of the buildings below. All were in operation.
Kate looked for a fuel dump and found it, a heap of 150,000-gallon fuel bladders that must have been brought in by sling via helicopter. The bladders were surrounded by a Ready Berm, and a drive-through
berm was inflated nearby, where a dump truck was being fueled with a collapsible hose connected to a fuel pump connected to one of the bladders.
“Where they getting their electricity?” Kate said into her mike.
“Oil-powered generators for now,” George said, the static making his voice sound as raspy as hers, “but they’re looking into wind and solar and hydro. One of the engineers told me it’ll probably be a combination of all three. And they found a low-sulphur coal deposit up the valley, they’ll probably rope that in, too.”
“Gravel?” They’d need a lot of gravel for roads and pads for building sites. The production life of the Suulutaq Mine was projected at twenty years. Twenty-year-old buildings in Alaska were regarded as permanent, if not downright historic.
He pointed at a notch in one wall of the valley. “They found all they need in a creek bed thataway.”
“They keeping to leased property? Not encroaching on Iqaluk?”
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “Do you really think they’d screw around this early in the game?”
“I think nobody’s watching them very close yet,” Kate said, “and I think they’ll try to get away with as much as they can before anybody is.”
Scattered around the valley at various distances from the camp were five drill rigs. All five were active, the crown and traveling blocks and drill lines visible and in motion through the network of the derricks.
George made another circle. The Beaver was just lifting off the end of the runway for the return trip back to Niniltna. “Seen enough?”
Kate nodded, and George brought them into a neat three-point landing on the rudimentary gravel airstrip that had been bladed when the snowpack melted, which, along with everything else, had cost GHRI a whale of a lot of money.
But at eight hundred dollars, no, Kate corrected herself, now
more than nine hundred an ounce, they could afford it. Recessions always drove people toward gold and stocks in gold mining companies. It was the commodity that never failed.
And Alaska had more of it than almost anyone else in the world, and the Suulutaq Mine had more of it than any other mine in Alaska.
They got out of the Cessna, Mutt trotting ahead to baptize a compactor, which appeared to be the single piece of heavy equipment within ten miles that wasn’t at present in motion. Kate and George walked toward the edge of the small rise that supported the airstrip, where they paused for a moment to look down at the camp. There were five small modulars and two large, arranged in two rows. Doors were connected by rudimentary wooden boardwalks, Kate would bet at the insistence of the people who had to mop the floors.
They followed the road down the side of the rise. The mud was beginning to dry out under the influence of the increasing strength of the sun, but it still sucked at their feet as they dodged heavy equipment to the entrance of the office building. There was a bull rail with electrical plug-ins out front with a pickup and a van nosed up to it. Placed conspicuously over a generously sized set of double doors was a large and colorful rendition of the Global Harvest sunrise-over-the-Quilaks logo. It was, Kate had to admit, very attractive.
George pointed at the doors. “That’s the admin offices. I’ll be in the mess hall.” He pointed again. “The big building in the back. Come get me when you’re ready to go.”
He vanished around a corner. Kate pushed one of the doors open and she and Mutt walked into a large room that took up most of the first floor of the building. There were desks interspersed with long flat gray folding tables. The walls were lined with four-drawer beige-enameled metal filing cabinets. A 1:10,000-scale map of Suulutaq dominated one wall, with a much smaller map of the Park tacked onto a corner, and a map of Alaska the size of a hardback book pinned as an afterthought to one side.
A young woman, dark and plump and of Yupik descent if Kate was going to make a guess, was typing something into a computer. She looked up, exchanged glances with Mutt, and said with superb unconcern, “May I help you?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “My name is Kate Shugak. I—”
“Yes, Ms. Shugak, just one moment, please.” The young woman abdicated her desk with no undue haste and made a beeline for one of the tables, where a man and a woman Kate saw was Holly Haynes were hunched over a long strip of paper marked with a continuous, spiking graph. The young woman murmured into the man’s ear, and all three looked across at Kate. He evidently found her attire—the usual blue jeans, sweatshirt, jacket, and sneakers—and perhaps her lack of entourage less than convincing. He looked back at the young woman for confirmation. She nodded.
Holly Haynes said something. He straightened with a nearly audible snap of his spine and made brisk work of the office maze to arrive in front of Kate, where he could beam down at her with what she could not help but read as tremendous insincerity. “Ms. Shugak! I’ve heard a lot about you, it’s so nice to meet you in person!”
Kate repressed the urge to step back from both the volubility and the slight spray of his greeting and recovered her hand before he broke any more bones in it. “Thank you. And you are?”
He gave out with a laugh that seemed to her even less sincere than his demeanor. “Of course, of course, what was I thinking. I’m Vernon Truax, Suulutaq superintendent. Come on, let’s head on up to my office. Whoa,” he said, noticing Mutt for the first time. “That your wolf?”
“Only half,” Kate said.
Truax, regarding Mutt with a healthy mixture of alarm and respect, said, “Only half? Well, that’s okay, then.” It sounded more like a question than an assertion. Either way, Kate didn’t answer. “Uh, Holly, join us? Thanks, Lyda.”
The plump young woman resumed her station at the desk near the door. Haynes abandoned the strip of graph paper they’d been poring over to follow Truax, Kate, and Mutt upstairs to a corner room that, however prebuilt it looked, still had two large windows facing south and west. Executive offices were the same whether they were in Suulutaq or on Ninth Avenue in Anchorage.
“Kate Shugak, Holly Haynes.”
“We met in town yesterday,” Haynes said, amused. “I told you about it at dinner last night.”
Truax didn’t like the reminder. “Of course, of course. Well, Kate Shugak.” He said it like he was referring to one of the faces on Mount Rushmore. Kate was afraid for a moment he might bow, or maybe even genuflect.
“She’s the chairwoman of the board of the Niniltna Native Association,” Truax said, like nobody in the room knew that, “and I don’t have to tell you how important it is that we give them every access to our work here.” Like nobody in the room knew that, either.
This instant recognition and the subsequent bootlicking were not going to be an asset in her day job. It had been foolish of Kate not to have expected it, and she realized now that it was something to which she would have to give some serious thought.
An entire way of life seemed to be vanishing right before her eyes, and she had to put a sharp brake on the rising melancholy that recognition cost her.
“Sit, sit,” Truax said, and instead of taking the seat at his desk pulled up a third straight chair to form a circle in front of it. She had to admire his instincts for currying favor. He was certainly better at it than she was. “Can we get you anything? Coffee, tea, water, soft drink? No?”
Vernon Truax was a thickset man in his late forties, with a broad, ruddy face and large, scarred hands. He was balding and while eschewing the ever popular comb-over he did wear his remaining hair
in a thick fringe, probably in an attempt to hide the batwing ears that stuck out from his head at almost ninety-degree angles. He wore Carhartts that had seen honest sweat and hard labor. Kate had done her homework, as Jim’s agent and as Association chair, and she was familiar with Truax’s background. Degree from the Colorado School of Mines. Mining engineer twenty years in the field, the first six for Rio Tinto and the last fourteen for Global Harvest. No-nonsense, bit of a temper, thought well of by his bosses, respected but not feared by his employees. The Suulutaq wasn’t his first mine. For that alone Kate was inclined to forgive much.
Truax was waxing fulsome on the storied partnership between the mine and the Niniltna Native Association and when he got to the hands-across-the-Park refrain Mutt, perhaps sensing that Kate’s patience was beginning to fray, gave a vigorous sneeze that had just enough snarl in it to put a momentary stop to the apparently inexhaustible flow. Kate used the opportunity to interrupt Truax with a charming smile that begged forgiveness for her rudeness, partnered with the indefinable but nonetheless distinct impression that told him she didn’t give a damn if he was offended or not. “Mr. Truax—”
“Vern, please. And I hope I may call you Kate?”
“Of course,” Kate said. “Vern, I have to apologize for not making this clear from the get-go.” Not that he’d given her the opportunity. “In fact I am not here in my capacity as board chair of NNA. I’m here to make inquiries after one of your employees. Well, two, actually, but I’d like to start with a Dewayne Gammons.”
Truax exchanged a glance with Haynes, who raised her brows and shrugged. “Oh. I see. May I ask why?”
“Sergeant Chopin, the Alaska State Trooper stationed in Niniltna, hired me to.”
“I see.” But clearly Truax did not see. “I spoke to Sergeant Chopin yesterday on the sat phone as regards this matter, and Holly here
told me that he’d said he would be sending someone out. I naturally assumed it would be another trooper.”
“There isn’t another trooper assigned to Niniltna,” Kate said. “I am a licensed private investigator. The state frequently hires me to assist the troopers in those cases that might not be, shall we say, front burner.”
“Oh,” Truax said after a beat. “I see.” He exchanged another glance with Haynes, and then rose to his feet and went around to sit at his desk.
Kate appreciated the signal. She even got up and moved the chair in which he had been sitting to one side and readjusted her own chair so that they could see eye to eye across his desk. Mutt reacquired her spot at Kate’s right hand, maintaining her Muttly sangfroid. Haynes was wearing a poker face, she might have been alarmed, aghast, amused, or all three at Kate’s effrontery. She exchanged a glance with Truax, and there was a quality of intimacy there that made Kate wonder at the closeness of their association. It could be merely that they were longtime coworkers. Which would not necessarily preclude a romantic relationship. She looked from one to the other from beneath lowered lids. Truax was wearing a wedding ring. Haynes was not.
“About Mr. Gammons,” Kate said. “He does work here?”
“He does,” Truax said. “Or he did.”
“Did?”
“He hasn’t shown up for work in, hell, a month?” Truax buzzed his intercom. “Lyda?”
“Yes, Vern?”
“Bring up Dewayne Gammons’s personnel file, would you?”
A brief pause.
“Lyda? Did you get that? Root out Dewayne Gammons’s personnel file and bring it up to my office pronto.”
“Right away, Vern,” Lyda said.
Her voice over the speaker sounded different this time, hesitant, maybe even a little fearful? A few moments later the dark, plump young woman appeared in Truax’s doorway, manila file folder in hand. Kate watched her as she walked across the room and wondered if she was always that pale.
“Kate, this is Lyda Blue, everybody’s right hand around here. She and I have worked a couple of Global digs together. Lyda, this is Kate Shugak, the chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association and someone to whom we want to give every facility, you understand?”
Lyda gave Kate a long, unsmiling glance. “Yes, Vern.”
“Lyda is from Bering,” Vern said, like he was expecting Kate to pin a medal on him for hiring local. He took the folder from Lyda and gave it to Kate without looking at it.
She accepted it without opening it. “You say Mr. Gammons hasn’t shown up for work in how long?”
Vern looked at Lyda. Lyda said, “Almost a month.” She nodded at the file. “It’s all in there. Date hired, last day on the clock, date terminated.”
“Did you know him, Ms. Blue?” Kate said.
“I know all the employees at Suulutaq, Ms. Shugak.”
“Did you know Mr. Gammons well?”
“No better than any of the other employees.”
Kate wasn’t so sure. She’d caught a glimpse of an almost imperceptible falter in the bland smile, but she wasn’t going to pursue it here, in front of Lyda’s employers. “Thank you, Ms. Blue.”
“Thanks, Lyda,” Truax said. He waited until the door closed behind her, and looked at Kate.
“Sergeant Chopin will have told you that Gammons’s truck has been found about halfway between Niniltna and Park headquarters,” Kate said. “And that a search party found a body not far from there.”
Truax tried to look concerned. “Is it Gammons?”
“Sergeant Chopin has sent the body to the medical examiner in Anchorage for identification.”
“How did he die?” Haynes said, speaking for the first time.
“Again, details will have to wait on the findings of the medical examiner.” Kate opened the file and gave the contents a brief glance. She looked up and said, “I see he worked in Stores. Would it be possible for me to talk to his coworkers?”
“Certainly,” Truax said. “But didn’t you say you had questions about two of our employees, Kate?”
“I did,” Kate said, and this time allowed her face to relax into a rueful smile. “The second case isn’t quite so, ah, grim. Evidently, one of your employees has married into the Park.”
Truax smiled in return. It was a rather attractive smile when he wasn’t forcing it, good teeth, hints of dimples on both sides, and it reached his eyes. “Nothing I can do about that, Kate. I make it a policy never to interfere in the private lives of people who work for me, so long as their private lives don’t interfere with their work. Can’t say I object to Suulutaq workers forging closer ties with NNA shareholders and people who live in the Park, either.”