a Night Too Dark (2010) (22 page)

Fifteen

She checked her phone for messages. None. She cursed Brillo, the doc at Providence, Kurt, and Brendan with a fine impartiality, and felt better, if a little guilty. They were all capable guys but they weren’t miracle workers.
Where next? She should drop in at the Raven offices, she really should. Instead she drove right by the building on Dimond and went to Costco, there to spend a productive hour buying flour by the twenty-pound bag, olive oil by the gallon, and Tampax forty-eight to the box. Kate was so done with fertility, she didn’t know why it couldn’t be done with her. As a bow to that fertility, however, she included a box of condoms, and filled the cart with other necessities, finishing up at the book table. The books were cheap but every third one seemed to be by the same author. She trundled the cart around to the other side. Ah, lots of Alaska books. She went in, and surfaced half an hour later when her phone rang.
It was Brendan. “Is this some kind of test?”
“What?”
“Is there a camera on me, waiting to record the moment when I tear my hair and burst into tears?”
“What did you find out?”
“Not a goddamn thing on Gammons.”
“Nothing?”
“Other than I’m reliably informed that he was in fact born. Where the hell do you come up with these people, Kate?”
“The ‘born in Roy’ holds up?”
“Yup, but I can’t find his parents, where he went to school, nothing. I talked to the same cop your girl talked to. He says he’s found a few people who maybe remember the parents, but they’re not sure, and they can’t remember anything about them other than they were thought to have died young.” There was a brief silence. “Kate?”
“I suppose he could have been an orphan who lived a very clean life.”
“Try sanitary. Hell, try sterile.”
“Some people do. What about Allen?”
Brendan’s voice changed, grew deeper, richer, the vowels resounding with resonance and meaning, the consonants crisp in contrast. Kate knew that tone. Someone’s cart bumped her in the butt. It was another book lover, and she moved over to a deserted corner between the bicycles and the garden tools.
“Ah, well now, Mr. Allen,” Brendan said, rolling out the words like GM would a new car, if they hadn’t gone belly-up by then. “Mr. Richard Henry Allen, native of Minnesota,
L’etoile du Nord
.”
“Okay,” Kate said.
“The Star of the North, the state motto. State bird the common loon, but state flower the showy lady slipper.”
When Brendan had something really juicy he liked to milk it for all it was worth. Kate leaned against a stack of wheelbarrows and prepared to wait him out. “Okay.”
“Official state song? ‘Hail, Minnesota.’ ”
Kate closed her eyes and hung her head.
“Minnesota’s exports were up thirteen percent in the last quarter.
Their number-one biggest trading partner? Canada. Australia’s way down there at sixteen.”
“Brendan—”
“They’re pretty industrious, Minnesota. Never mind what Garrison Keillor says, they’re not all Norwegian bachelor farmers. Some of them are Norwegian bachelor geeks. They exported over a billion dollars in computer and electronic goods last year, three-quarters of a billion in machinery, and a quarter of a billion in chemicals.” He paused. “You still there, Kate?”
“Never mind me, Brendan. There’s a hoe here I’m thinking of using to cut my throat.”
He chuckled. It sounded less than avuncular. “I found our boy’s bank account in Minneapolis.” Brendan always got proprietary when he liked them for something.
Kate opened her eyes. “Did you?”
“I did. He used a different name but his own Social Security number. Guess he wanted to be sure he was eligible to collect those benefit checks come sixty-two. He was thinking ahead, our boy, just not far enough ahead of me.”
“And?”
“And the account shows regular direct deposits from the Suulutaq Mine. One every two weeks, same amount every time.”
After all this there had to be more. “And?”
“And,” Brendan said, “there are other deposits.”
“Where from?”
“First you want to know how much.”
“Oh.” Kate was silent for a moment. “Oh. Okay. How much?”
“You know if you’re moving large chunks of cash around you have to report anything over ten grand.”
“Yeah.”
“These amounts varied between seven and nine thousand, so I’m thinking our Mr. Allen knew that, too.”
“Where’d the money come from? And how often?”
“Well.” Brendan cleared his throat. “I don’t know yet, Kate. The amount was funneled through a lot of banks, different ones each time, and half the time including an offshore bank. Four times a month. Almost like a salary, except the amount changed every time.”
They listened to each other think for a few moments. “Someone was paying him off,” Kate said.
“Ah, but what was he selling?”
“Good question. Thanks, Brendan, I—”
“Not so hasty, Ms. Shugak, ma’am. That was just the first unaccounted-for thing in his bank records.”
“Do tell.”
“Indeed.”
“No, Brendan, I mean really, do tell me.”
“He had another regular payment coming into his account. Same level of amounts, this payment twice a month like clockwork.”
“Jesus, Brendan, how much money did this guy have squirreled away?”
“Just under three hundred thousand dollars.”
Someone banged into her cart and apologized. Kate waved them off—she could barely make out their faces through suddenly blurred vision—and said, “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. Here’s the best part, Kate.”
“What? What!”
“This payer wasn’t quite as careful. We traced that sucker right back to its source. Took my guy approximately seventeen and a half minutes.”
“Who was it?”
He told her.

Sixteen

It had been a long time since she’d been in the RPetCo building, almost five years since she’d been hired to find a drug dealer at their camp in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. A lot had changed since then. For one thing, there was now a veritable bank of security guards in the lobby, dressed alike in polyester blazers with the RPetCo logo embroidered discreetly over their hearts. One of them took her name, asked to see some picture ID, and made a phone call.
“Have you got a fax here?” she asked another of the guards. They did. “Okay if I have something sent over? Your boss is going to want to see it.”
He thought this over with a gravity better befitting the weighty cares of an agent of the Secret Service, decided it would be difficult to fax a bomb, and agreed. She called Brendan and gave him the number. A moment later the fax hummed into operation.
While the fax was printing out the bank of elevators opened to disgorge hundreds of employees heading home at what Kate guessed would be a much smarter clip than they had come in that morning. She searched the faces, looking for someone she knew. No one
looked familiar, no one said, “Hey, Kate Shugak!” She would have liked to have seen Sue Jordan, hear what diabolical new methods she had thought up to terrorize all the men in the RPetCo Hilton, but Sue was probably in Prudhoe Bay doing just that at this very moment, and Kate wouldn’t have wished otherwise.
“Ms. Shugak? This way, please.” Someone in the building must have remembered her, because she was escorted without further delay into an elevator that wafted them to the top floor.
Yes, someone must have remembered her, because a security guard accompanied her every step of the way.
The elevator debouched into a massive suite of offices on the penthouse floor. The guard led the way between a dozen desks, most of them abandoned by now. The boss’s door was guarded by a gray-haired woman in expensive tweeds and sensible shoes. The guard said, “Kate Shugak, Mrs. Podhoretz,” and turned Kate over with the air of having successfully handed off a very hot potato.
“This way, Ms. Shugak,” Mrs. Podhoretz said. One of Mrs. Podhoretz’s sensible shoes squeaked. She led Kate to the grand set of double doors, mahogany by the look of them. She knocked and said, “Ms. Shugak, Mr. King,” and stepped back to let Kate inside. The door closed behind her.
The man at the desk might have lost most of his hair but he hadn’t changed much otherwise. He still had the same general build as a fireplug, his face was the same freckled square, he had the same baleful glare. The glasses had been updated, he’d lost the aviator frames with the Coke-bottle lenses and replaced them with rimless. It made his eyes look bigger and his glare meaner.
“Hey, John,” Kate said.
He stood to shake her hand, a hard, dry, hot grip. “Jack Morgan was a good man. I was sorry to hear he was gone.”
“Thank you.”
He sat down again in his high-backed black leather chair. That
was all she was going to get in the way of greeting or sympathy from John King, president and CEO of the Royal Petroleum Corporation, and that was fine with Kate.
“You remodeled,” she said, looking around the office. “Nice.”
“What do you want, Shugak?” he said, proving her point. “I only agreed to see you because you said it was urgent and that it affected the company.”
“What’s the price of a barrel of Prudhoe Bay crude lately, John?”
The glare increased in wattage. “Why the fuck do you care?”
At their first meeting five years ago, when Jack had brought her to this same office so the president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska could look her over and decide if she was up to the job, she had learned that John King respected only those hardy souls who stood up to him. If he saw you flinch, cringe, or cry, he would bully you without mercy. Therefore Kate matched him attitude for attitude, saying in the same unyielding voice, “How much?”
“Forty-two twenty-four,” he said. “Up two bucks from yesterday.”
“But down about fifty bucks from a year ago,” she said.
Again with the increase in wattage. “What of it?”
“Five years,” Kate said, “that’s a long time as CEO.”
“What the fuck do you want, Shugak?”
“I made a few phone calls before I came here. There’s an RPetCo shareholders meeting coming up, next month, isn’t it? There are rumors that they’re angry about the decrease in their dividend. There are more rumors that they’re going to orchestrate a vote of no confidence in the corporation’s officers.”
“You’re awful goddamn knowledgeable about the oil bidness all of a sudden.”
No, she thought, I’ve just recently acquired some experience in running a corporation. Big or small, the politics were bound to be much the same. “So it follows that you’d want to roll something out, some plan to increase RPetCo’s share of potential resources, to
convince the shareholders you’re still on top of the game. I figure you’ve probably already written that part of the speech, about how the recession’s hurt us all and it’s going to take a while to come back, and in the meantime RPetCo is making long-term plans to expand their presence in the resource industry.”
He leaned back in his chair. “If you can get to a fucking point any time before the end of the year, I won’t throw you out on your cute little ass.”
She almost said she was glad he thought it was cute and thought better of it just in time. Like the bullying and the profanity, sexual innuendo and harassment were part of John King’s stock in trade. She remembered P.J. on the Stores loading dock at the mine, and Lyda, who had been so apprehensive of Kate’s reaction.
I’ve met P.J. before.
She put the fax on his desk.
He didn’t touch it. “What the fuck is that?”
“It’s a record of a series of bank deposits going back over the last six months, paid by various illegal stratagems into the account of one Richard Henry Allen. Allen is, or was, an employee at the Suulutaq Mine. What was he selling that you were buying?”
He stared at the paper without touching it. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do,” she said, “and you’re going to tell me all about it.”
“Why the fuck would I do that?”
“Because you owe me,” Kate said, fixing him with her own glare. “I damn near got killed on that job up in Prudhoe and I put down your bad guy anyway.” She raised an eyebrow. “I had you figured as someone who didn’t welsh on his debts. Prove me wrong and I’m out of here.”
They glared at each other.
King broke first, picking up the fax and scanning it. She watched him but his expression didn’t change. He tossed the fax back down on the desk and punched a button on his phone. “Get in here.”
The door opened so quickly Kate knew the person had probably been listening on the other side of it.
“Ms. Shugak.”
“Mr. Childress,” Kate said to RPetCo Alaska’s security boss. A retired Army officer with a brush cut and a habit of command, he was more polished than his boss.
“John?” he said.
“You heard?”
Childress didn’t pretend not to understand. He nodded.
John King glared at Kate one more time. “Tell her.”
“All of it?”
“All of it,” King said.
Kate crossed her legs, folded her hands, and settled back to listen.
They had hired Allen in October, after Global Harvest announced they would be hiring for the mine in December.
“Why Allen?” Kate said.
Childress exchanged a glance with King. “He had what we felt were certain talents that would help him get the job done successfully.”
“What was he, an actor? A con man?”
Another glance told her she had come close to the truth. If Kurt couldn’t ante up, she resolved to have Brendan go a little deeper into Richard Henry Allen’s personal history.
They’d told Allen to come to Alaska and apply for work at the Suulutaq Mine. “He was to draw no attention to himself, other than to work hard enough to earn promotion and responsibility. The end goal was to work with the geologists, so he would have access to the core samples.”
“And get copies of the core samples to you.”
“Yes.”
Data that could inform either a buyout or an unfriendly takeover,
Kate thought, meditating on her clasped hands. “When is the last time you heard from him?”
“Over six weeks now,” Childress said.
“Did he quit?”
“No. He just stopped sending us core sample reports.”
“Did you try to contact him?”
Childress shook his head. “That’s not the way it worked. There was to be no direct contact, ever.”
“How did you get the reports?”
“He brought them with him when he came to town on his shift off and mailed them to a post office box in Houston. Someone in the Houston office would pick them up and courier them to my office.”
“You paid him on delivery.”
They both looked at her as if she had suggested they vote Democrat. “Yes.”
That explained the regular payments every two weeks, Kate thought.
“How did you trace the payments to us, Shugak?”
She stood. “It took a friend a couple of minutes on a computer,” she said. “You guys aren’t exactly James Bond, are you?”
She walked to the door. “Oh,” she said, hand on the knob, “probably no harm in telling you.” She smiled at King. “You weren’t the only people he was selling information to.”
She pulled the door closed behind her with the gentlest possible click, grinned at Mrs. Podhoretz, and sauntered to the elevator.
She’d leave the news that their spy was dead for another time.
She sat in her car while she tried to figure out where she should go next.
“I probably should stop by Raven.”
Raven Inc. was a regional Native corporation, one of the thirteen
created with the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to administer the money and lands granted to Natives in that act. The thirteen regional corporations were the umbrella organizations for the two hundred plus tribal organizations, like the Niniltna Native Association. Raven Inc. headquarters was ordinarily a place the pre-chair apolitical Kate would shun like the plague, but things were different now. And it wasn’t like Anchorage was the world’s biggest city. Someone would have seen her and word would go around, especially if it got to be known she’d come to town and snubbed her fellow executives.
Now, there was a job right up Axenia’s alley.
Really, it only made diplomatic sense, as the head of a small but powerful association, as Emaa’s granddaughter and the (temporary) leader of hundreds of Native shareholders, she should at least drop in to show the flag.
Her cell phone rang. She’d never been happier to hear it.
It was Lempe. “My friend says the blood types match exactly.” When she was silent, the doc said, “Ms. Shugak, does this mean that Mr. Gammons is actually this person named Allen?”
“No,” Kate said, “no, the man in your hospital is Dewayne Gammons, all right.”
He was silent. “We’re transferring him to API. We need the bed on the ward for more critical patients.”
“He’s still not talking?”
“No.”
Some of Kate’s best perps had been cycled through the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. “I could have sworn I saw something when I mentioned his girlfriend.”
“Could you get her to come in and talk to him? He might respond to her.”
Kate took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Lyda Blue is dead.”
“I . . . see.” A brief pause, and when he spoke again his voice was cooler. “Ms. Shugak, I am aware of your propensity for getting information by any means. Some people find that admirable. I find it reprehensible. Don’t ever lie to a patient of mine again, even if that lie is only one of omission.”
“He couldn’t even hear me,” she said.
“And if he could? And if he remembers you asking about her? And if he comes out of this and asks for her? And I have to tell him she’s dead? It could throw him right back where he was before. I will see to it that you are stricken from his guest list.”
She was ashamed of herself, she had been when she’d asked Gammons about Lyda. “Doc,” she said, “Lyda Blue was murdered yesterday.” She was momentarily surprised to hear how certain she was. “I’m sorry for Dewayne Gammons’s condition, and I’m sorry as hell if I’ve exacerbated it, but he may be in possession of knowledge that will allow me to find out who did it, and why. If he regains consciousness or wakes up or even gets up to pee on his own, you will call me immediately, do you understand?”
A brief and frigid silence. “Is that all?”
“It is,” she said. And added, trying to keep the lines of communication open, “Thanks, doc. I owe you one.”
She was speaking into a dead phone. How to win friends and influence people. She looked at the time. Six o’clock. It took her five minutes but she finally figured out how to check her voice mail. Nothing. She thought about calling Kurt but she knew if he’d had anything to report he would have called her.
Wait a minute, who was that guy Truax had thrown off the mine yesterday? She still had his card in the back pocket of her jeans. Kostas McKenzie. Well, there was a suspicious name right there, Greek and Irish, or maybe the McKenzie was Scots, even worse, absolutely have to check that out.
Besides, she thought more soberly, if the Park was going to be the scene of future environmental protests, best to know as much as possible about it in advance.
She dialed the number on the card. It was picked up on the first ring, a breathless young voice very impressed with the urgent importance of the job her organization was doing. Would Kate like to donate to the cause? Well then, would she like to volunteer? Mother Earth was at grave risk from wholesale, environmentally unsafe resource extraction by conscienceless corporate giants interested only in gross profit and executive bonuses. Kate could answer phones, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, conduct surveys, write letters to her legislators and to her congressmen. There was so much to do if the planet was to be saved. The time to act was now. If you weren’t a part of the solution, you were part of the problem.
When she was able to get a word in edgewise Kate asked if the office would be open for much longer that evening. Office hours were from ten in the morning until nine at night, this information given to her in a voice thrilled at the prospect of recruiting another true believer into the army of the righteous. When she managed finally to get off the phone Kate pulled the Anchorage map out of the side pocket, found the street name on the card, and set off.
They were located on one of those ubiquitous four-space Anchorage strip malls. Gaea took up the middle two spaces, and everything looked very bright and shiny and new through the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the wall that faced the street. Kate pulled the Subaru into a spot in front of the double glass doors and looked at the logo printed in translucent paint across them both. It was a larger drawing of the logo on McKenzie’s business card and the leaflet in Gammons’s room, a kneeling goddess dressed in flowing blue-green robes, head bent over a globe cradled in her hands. The goddess was sort of a Euraisamerind racial blend designed to offend as