a Night Too Dark (2010) (23 page)

few as possible. The Earth was resplendent in its customary blue-and-white regalia. Beneath the image was the name GAEA, and beneath it the slogan, “One people, one planet.”
It was a clean image, unfussy, the artist had been restrained from doing too much, and it was very attractive. Kate was reminded again that the Niniltna Native Association had yet to decide upon its own new logo, following the grand plan she had instigated at the last annual shareholders’ meeting in January. She sighed.
The glass door with half a goddess on it swung out smoothly and heavily, all by itself announcing Gaea to be an organization with weight and gravitas. Money well spent. Inside, the front two-thirds of the room was filled with desks and tables. Volunteers were on the phones and computers. It wasn’t a hive of industry but there was enough of a hum of activity so as to give the impression that Gaea was an organization with a serious base of support.
The last third of the space against the back wall was partitioned into a small kitchen, a bathroom, and the boss’s office. Only the bathroom had a door you couldn’t see through. The first impression you got walking in was transparency. Kate applauded their decorator.
“May I help you?”
It was the same voice that had answered the phone, and it belonged to a sweet young thing in a cropped top and low-rider jeans, who wore far too much black eyeliner and had punked purple hair shorter than Kate’s held back by a wide band of rainbow spangles. Small silver hoops traveled from one lobe to the top of her ear, while its fellow sported a single hoop six inches in diameter that kept catching on the shoulder of her top.
She was totally styling, and Kate almost said so but caught herself in time. “Hi, I’m looking for—”
“Kate Shugak!”
She looked around and found the man himself emerging from the one enclosed office, hand outstretched and a beaming smile on his
face. “I’m so glad you could drop by.” He looked around. “Where’s Mutt?”
This remark bespoke a personal knowledge of Kate’s personal life that alarmed her a great deal. Before she could snub him for his presumption he put a hand beneath her elbow. “Let me show you around.”
He escorted her through the room, introducing her to everyone as “Kate Shugak, chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association, the largest village closest to the Suulutaq Mine.” The words “Suulutaq Mine” appeared to be the most relevant ones, as people’s eyes lit up and she was welcomed warmly into the fold. When the royal progress was complete, Kate looked at McKenzie and said, “You do know I’m not against the mine.”
He grinned again. “Not yet you’re not. Give us a little time and we’ll convince you.”
She cocked her head. “Well, I haven’t met any bomb-throwing fanatics today, I’ll give you that much.”
“We keep them in the basement,” he said.
Much against her will, it drew out a smile. “Okay. Make your pitch.”
A map of Alaska covered the entire eastern wall, with an inset of the Park superimposed on it. “Okay if I start from go?”
“Sure. I’d like to hear what everyone hears.”
He nodded and in an instant shifted from genial host to crusader. He positioned himself in front of the map without obscuring the area in question and pointed to locations when he mentioned their names. “The Suulutaq Mine is a proposal by Global Harvest Resources Incorporated to build one of the world’s largest gold mines in interior Alaska, approximately fifty miles north of the shores of Prince William Sound.”
Good sound bite, Kate thought. Everyone hearing the words “Prince William Sound” immediately flashed on a picture of a dying sea otter covered in some of the eleven million gallons of crude oil
spilled there thirty years before by the RPetCo Anchorage. A subtle tarring of GHRI with RPetCo’s brush. Work with what you’ve got.
“Global Harvest has not yet applied for permits, but they are in the process of drilling for core samples to determine the extent of the deposit and the amount of recoverable ore. So far, estimated deposits include over forty-two billion pounds of copper, almost three billion pounds of molybdenum, and almost forty million ounces of gold, which would make it the second largest gold mine in the world.”
Clever again, Kate thought. While gold had its practical application in electronics and aerospace, it was best known for its luxury use in jewelry. Who cared if Donald Trump’s thirteenth wife got her Cartier wedding set? Especially if it came at the expense of something that you could be convinced was far more precious. Guilt by useless luxury association.
“Global Harvest has yet to apply for permits, but they propose to build a large open-pit mine as well as an even larger underground mine. Both endeavors will require a great deal of water, which Global Harvest is proposing to acquire from creeks here, here, and here. All three feed into the headwaters of the Gruening River, which then flows through this gap into the Kanuyaq River. These creeks are flourishing habitats for five different species of salmon, a source of food for Alaskans native to the area going back ten thousand years.”
Really, she was going to have to start keeping a scorecard. By using “Alaskans native to the area” he included everyone who wasn’t Native, too. A feat of rhetorical gymnastics that many Alaska state legislators had yet to achieve.
“The mine site sits in a high, broad valley facing southwest, between spurs of the Quilak Mountains. Global Harvest proposes building the largest dam in the world to contain the acid mine drainage and metal leaching produced when rain and snow fall on tailings and when chemicals used to process the ore leak or spill.”
Acid was a scary word right there. Acid rain, anyone?
“This proposed dam will be made of earth, not concrete.”
Ah, a little selective omission, an essential ingredient in every compelling argument. The planned dam was going to be bigger than the Three Gorges Dam in China, and the plans called for two dams, not one.
“All five species of salmon who call these waters home—”
Anthropomorphizing fish, now, reminding her again of PETA’s fish kittens. A hard sell, she’d have thought, but that was just her.
“—along with rainbow trout, lake trout, arctic char, arctic grayling, and Dolly Varden spawn, migrate in the waterways downstream of the Suulutaq Mine. It is one of the richest and most unspoiled fish habitats left in the world. Entire coastal towns rely on the commercial catch of salmon every summer in the flats off the mouth of the Kanuyaq River. Sports fishermen come from all over the world to fish the mountain streams. Alaska Natives have been subsisting on the salmon catch from these waters for generations.”
Now the prospective mine was poisoning the playground of the rich, not to mention the food supply of an entire race.
“The valley where the open pit is to be dug is home to the Gruening River caribou herd. While a small herd by comparison to the Mulchatna and Western Arctic caribou herds, the Gruening River herd has been found to be biologically unique, a herd that may be a bellwether for all other North American caribou herds. As such it is targeted for extensive study by accredited global wildlife institutes. The Gruening River caribou herd has also been a traditional part of the subsistence lifestyle of the Natives in the area, a significant protein essential to their physical health and cultural well-being.”
A little vague, there. What study had found the Gruening herd unique? Which institutes had done what targeting? Nice inclusive conspiratorial touch at the end, though. Most of us eat meat.
There was more about the grizzly bears (Kate could have offered
up some eyewitness testimony to the health of the Park grizzlies but she refrained), the moose, the sheep, the goats, and the migratory birds, and the stated determination of the federal government to open up all eligible federal lands in the area to hard rock mining, a blatant “
Après moi, le deluge
” message if Kate had ever heard one.
McKenzie’s presentation lasted fifteen minutes and not one minute more, and concluded with a list of sponsors, as he reeled off names that featured green heavy hitters like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ducks Unlimited, and Earthwatch. There were familiar corporate names as well, companies like Apple, Wal-Mart, General Electric, and, to Kate’s secret amusement, RPetCo Alaska. The list ended with a lengthy catalog of do-gooder nonprofits, ranging from familiar names like Rockefeller and Carnegie to what must have been nonprofits new to the business of saving the planet, Clean and Green, Big Blue Marble, Alaskans for Sustainable Jobs, The Seventy-one Percent Society, Clean Air for All.
She had to admit she was impressed. It argued a breadth of support that crossed ideological lines. Of course, she reminded herself, they could all have bought in at the lowest level.
Throughout, McKenzie was confident, informed, and succinct, his passion leavened with humor and his fanaticism tempered with reality. He didn’t impugn the morals of GHRI’s executive body, he didn’t refer to those managers of federal lands as rape, ruin, and run boys. He was gently, implacably, immovably rational. Kate decided it was probably the most dangerous thing about him.
He dropped his arm. “So?”
“Pretty effective,” she said.
“And?”
“And what?” She shrugged. “It’s not me you have to convince.”
“Come on,” he said. “You’re the head of your Native Association, an association that is the only recognizable form of organized government within a hundred miles of the mine. What you say and do
carries a lot of weight.” He drew closer and touched her arm, turning her gently toward the map. “Look at it, Kate. Twenty million square acres of virtually untouched, unspoiled land.”
“You come on,” she said. “Oil in Katalla. Copper in Kanuyaq. Coal in Ahtna. Private and commercial gold mines in virtually uncountable numbers going back over a hundred and fifty years. The Park is no stranger to the mining industry, Kostas.”
He looked disappointed.
“Besides, you’re a little premature, aren’t you? GHRI hasn’t even completed their EIS yet. That and the permitting process is going to take at least two years. All they’re doing at present is trying to define the limits of the mine, which isn’t easy because it seems to double in size every time they take another core sample. And let’s not forget that they have every legal right to do this. They bought their leases from the state in open auction, fair and square.”
He listened to her with attention and without condemnation. Probably tucking everything away so he could come up with a way of refuting it the next time he gave his speech.
“And,” she said, “there is the little matter of jobs, in an area that hasn’t had them in large quantity since 1936, in an economy that is in the toilet.”
“Say all that’s true,” he said. “Doesn’t necessarily make it right.”
She laughed and shook her head. “That’s what I enjoy most about environmental groups, their propensity to reduce everything to abstract ideology. Forty billion ounces of gold at a thousand dollars an ounce isn’t right or wrong or abstract, it’s concrete. It’s tangible, it’s a commodity which is in demand, which means there’s a market for it, which means someone is going to pay somebody else to get it out of the ground and get it to where somebody else can buy it. It’s called capitalism. I’m sure you must have heard something about it in high school.”
When he spoke, his voice was neutral. “So you’re going to come
out a hundred percent for the mine? There’s no moving you to our point of view?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m always willing to listen. The only thing I really know is I don’t know enough.” She thought of the aunties, and Axenia. “But I represent almost three hundred shareholders and all their children and grandchildren to come.” She thought of George Perry’s air taxi, and of Johnny and Val. “I have to think about their future.”
“This is their future,” he said, indicating photographs of gigantic strip mines hung on the wall. Heavy equipment was crawling up and down their sides like tiny yellow and green ants. Some had raised their own dust storms. None of them were a pretty sight. They weren’t meant to be.
“I appreciate your passion and I respect your cause. But I can’t allow ideology alone to push me for or against.” She pulled out her phone and looked at the display. “I appreciate the time you’ve taken to show me your operation.” She nodded at the door. “I like your logo, too. Who was the artist?”
More civil than friendly now, he said, “I’ll find out and get that name to you.”
“Thanks.”
“And please, take a brochure,” he said, snagging one off a nearby table. “There’s a form to fill out if you’d like to join. We’re an IRS-certified nonprofit 501(c)(3), which means we’re deductible. Would you like to write us a check? We’re happy to accept any amount, and for three dollars you get a lifetime membership, a subscription to the Gaea newsletter, and a mug. With the logo you like on it.”
He escorted her to the door, and to everyone’s surprise when he opened it Holly Haynes walked in. She saw Kate and her eyes widened.
“Hi, there, Miss Haynes,” McKenzie said with his attractive smile. “Did you come to volunteer?”
Kate laughed. McKenzie had a smart mouth.
Haynes looked from Kate to McKenzie and her expression hardened. “No, I came here to complain about that commercial you’ve been running that says we’re dumping toxic mud into the groundwater that feeds into the Kanuyaq River.”
Kate left without waiting to hear McKenzie’s answer. She climbed in the Subaru, checked her phone for messages, and left the parking lot.
A beige, four-door sedan fell in behind her and followed her all the way home.

Seventeen

She was up and dressed and on her second cup of coffee by seven o’clock the following morning, staring out the window at the beige four-door sedan idling next to Westchester Lagoon. It had been there when she woke up, and it was still there an hour later.
The phone rang. It was Kurt. “I got news. Come on down to the office.”
She stopped at City Market for three canelas and more coffee and drove downtown. The sedan followed at a discreet distance. She parked in the Captain Cook parking garage because Kurt had told her that he validated parking.
Agrifina greeted her with a reserved smile. “Mr. Pletnikoff is expecting you, Ms. Shugak. Go right in.”
Kate inclined her head in formal recognition of the power of the keeper of the keys. “Thank you.” Mrs. Podhoretz had nothing on Agrifina Fancyboy.
She pulled Kurt’s door closed behind her and said, “I swear, that girl out there thinks she’s living in 1950.”
“I told you, she’s channeling Lauren Bacall, only shorter. And, you know, Yupik.”
“I brought her coffee and a pastry but I’m scared to give them to her. She might think it’s only something Thelma Ritter should do. And I’m not that funny.”
Kurt rolled his eyes and delivered the goods himself. He came back in, grinning. “ ‘Please tell Ms. Shugak it was very kind of her to think of me.’ ”
“Alaka,” Kate said, “where’s Emaa when we need her.” Emaa could out-formal the Queen of England. She could have matched Agrifina politesse for politesse, whereas all Kate wanted to do was run very fast in the other direction.
They settled on the couch with coffee and pastries, a vast array of paperwork spread over the coffee table.
“First,” he said, “an article in
The Wall Street Journal
about a venture capitalist firm called True North Investments. It was formed a few years ago to fund resource extraction projects above the Arctic Circle. Their spokesman will neither confirm nor deny that they are interested in acquiring a share of GHRI stock, possibly a controlling interest.”
Kate digested this. “A takeover?”
He nodded. “I found the same story elsewhere,
Business Week
,
Forbes
,
Kiplinger
, a couple of others. They all said pretty much the same thing.”
He blew on his coffee and took a big bite of the pastry. He was as big a ham as Brendan. She wondered if the characteristic was endemic to people who snooped for a living. Maybe because they worked so much out of the limelight, they had a tendency to go for the big reveal whenever they had a captive audience.
Kurt washed down his thorough mastication of the bit of pastry with a healthy swallow of coffee, patted his lips with a napkin, and smiled. “At least some of the blind deposits into Allen’s account?”
“Yes?”
“Are from True North Investments.”
“Really.” Kate sat back. “Allen was accepting money from True North Investments? A possible competitor to Global? For whom he was working at the Suulutaq Mine? And accepting a paycheck, I might add.”
He didn’t miss her too-demure expression, and said smoothly, “I’m guessing you already know about RPetCo. It was just too easy to trace.”
She nodded. “Brendan popped it in about two seconds.” Lest he feel that she had not thought him capable of finding out this information himself, she said, “He said it was impossible to trace the source of the other payments.”
He grinned. “Only the best butter. I know a guy who knows another guy in banking in New York who knows somebody else in Switzerland. They were able to follow the money trail for us.”
Kate choked on her coffee. “Switzerland?”
He waved a hand. “Don’t ask. It’s a, you should pardon the expression, global world, Kate. The money had been run through a dozen banks and some of them were offshore. This is how this works. And my contacts made sure I knew that they don’t find answers easily and never this quickly.”
Kate wondered how big a fee Pletnikoff Investigations was paying the guy in Switzerland. She did not ask. There were advantages to being a silent partner. “Is there any way you can acquire True North’s financial records?”
“No way,” Kurt said. “They are very big hitters with serious internal security. They’re a private concern so there’s no published prospectus and no published annual report, either.”
“Is there a president or a board of directors?”
He fished around and came up with a piece of paper, which he handed to her. “Came over the fax five minutes ago. Wasn’t cheap, either.”
She read down to the bottom, and smiled. “Worth it, though.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. What else have you got?”
“That’s about it. Allen’s working for Suulutaq and taking money from two of their competitors. Put it together and what have you got?”
“Other than kabbibity-bobbity-boo? My guess is corporate espionage.”
“I knew that, I just gave it to you to be nice.”
“I know. Here’s something you don’t know.” She handed him the list of True North Investments’ corporate officers. “The last name?”
He looked. “John King?” He looked at her. “So?”
“So the president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska is also named John King.”
“Crap,” he said after a minute, “I knew that, but it’s such a common name I didn’t make the connection. You’re saying this is the same John King?”
“I’m betting on it.” She gave him the gist of yesterday’s interview with the president and CEO of RPetCo.
“He didn’t tell you about sitting on the board of True North Investments.”
“No, and I didn’t know enough to ask him yesterday.” She meditated for a moment. “I don’t know that it has anything to do with the murder of Lyda Blue,” she said at last. “If I had to guess, I’d say King learned about True North’s plans to acquire Global when he was named to True North’s board and decided to acquire some information on his own for a possible Global takeover by RPetCo.”
“Yeah, but what are the odds King would hire the same guy True North is using?”
“Are you kidding me? True North probably hired Allen first. King’s on the board, he hears about him. Why go to all the bother of finding someone else when the perfect spy is already in place?”
“And he would know Allen would be open to such a proposal, how?”
Kate snorted. “Allen was a corporate spy. By definition that means for sale to the highest bidder. Why wouldn’t he want to sell the same information twice?”
“Why’d King have to buy it? Wouldn’t he have access to the same information through his seat on True North’s board?”
“I doubt in the kind of detail he would require for his own bid.” She thought about Phyllis Lestinkof, and the Grosdidier brothers’ clinic, and what might or might not be going on there. “There is such a thing as plausible deniability.”
Kurt followed this serpentine reasoning with a knit brow. “He that much of a twister?”
“He’s that much of a survivor.” Kate took a bite of pastry and washed it down with coffee. “We keep all this under our hats, for now at least.”
“Okay by me, I’m just the delivery boy.”
“I don’t know what to do with any of this information, anyway,” she said, speaking more to herself than to him. “I’m pretty sure that was Allen’s skull Jim found, and if so he’s dead. The guy I thought was dead is alive but he’s checked out mentally.”
“Permanently?”
“Nobody knows. He’s got what the doc thinks might have been a bullet hole in him. Jim found a .22 pistol at the scene that may or may not have been used to fire the bullet, which we don’t have, and have no way of recovering. The dead girl had what we think is the gun’s holster in her desk drawer. According to the baker at the mine, these two guys knew each other well enough to share a morbid fascination with death, and how to get there.” She drained her cup. “Honest to god, Kurt, I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. The best that can be said is I’m doing it on the state’s dime.”
“Well, you know more now than you did when you came,” he said, stacking the paperwork together and putting it into a file.
He handed it to Kate as her phone rang. She listened, said, “Thanks, I owe you one.”
She hung up. “That was the ME. Blood samples from the skull matched the records in Gammons’s file, which is to say the skull belonged to Richard Henry Allen.”
“What about the pistol?”
“It belongs to the holster found in my vic’s room.”
“And still no way to prove it fired the shot that wounded Gammons?”
“Circumstantial, sure, the gun was there, Gammons was there, Allen was there. Oh.” She sat with her hand outstretched, the cup motionless about an inch from the tabletop.
“What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly. I think I just said something smart, but I don’t know what.” Her phone rang again.
It was Lempe at Providence Hospital. “Ms. Shugak? I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Gammons spoke this morning when he woke up.”
“I’ll be right there.” She closed the phone and stood up. “Doc says Gammons woke up. Thanks, Kurt. Bill for your time included?”
“In there.” He nodded at the folder.
“Good.” She went over to stand at his window, looking down at K Street. A beige four-door sedan was idling in one of the fifteen-minute meter spots. “One other thing.”
“What?”
“I was followed here this morning.”
“What!”
“Yeah, a beige four-door sedan. Actually, it followed me home last night from Gaea.”
“Gaea?”
“Start-up environmental group. The director’s pretty ballsy, he smuggled himself out to the mine a couple of days ago.”
“Why?”
“Because Gaea has taken on the Suulutaq Mine as their primary cause. I think McKenzie—that’s their executive director—wants to use it to make Gaea’s name and get lots of donations. Anyway, the sedan was parked outside the townhouse when I woke up. I stopped at City Market to see if they’d stay with me, and they did.”
He joined her at the window. “Well, you’re flying home today. Be hard to follow you in that.”
“Yeah, but I’m curious.” Gammons wasn’t going anywhere in the next hour. “I like to know who’s following me. And why.”
“Can’t say as I blame you.” He looked at her. “There’s a back door out of the basement.”
Ten minutes later Kate walked up the sidewalk and crossed behind the sedan to knock on the driver’s-side door. The driver started, stared at her through the glass, thought it over, and rolled down the window.
Kate grinned. “Fred Gamble of the FBI, as I live and breathe.”
The agent next to Gamble grabbed for the door handle, found his own door held closed against him, and looked through the window to see Kurt’s smiling face.
Gamble, Kurt, and Kate assembled back in Kurt’s office. The second agent, embarrassed at being tagged so easily, didn’t argue when told to wait in the car.
Gamble, short, balding, still wearing what looked like the same pilling polyester suit Kate had last seen him in how many years ago now, accepted a chair and asked for coffee. Agrifina provided some and he crossed his legs as much as his potbelly would allow and disposed himself to chat, if they made it worth his while.
“Last time I saw you, you were on your way to Iowa,” Kate said.
“Omaha,” he said, wincing.
“What happened?”
He gave an airy wave. “Other opportunities. Things happen. You know.”
Kate knew. “Where did you pick me up?”
Gamble looked shifty, but then she remembered that shifty was his natural expression. “We, um, acquired information about you asking a local DA to run a certain name through the system.”
Kate looked polite. “Did you?”
Gamble shifted and tried to cross his legs the other way. “Yes, well, this is someone we’ve been trying to track down for a few months, as large payments from an organization in which the FBI has been interested for some time have been rather flowing in his direction.”
Kate’s eyes met Kurt’s. Maybe they should let Agrifina talk to Gamble. They seemed to have graduated from the same school of involved syntax.
She decided to throw the dice. “Why are you interested in True North Investments?”
She paused to enjoy the look of shock that spread across his face.
“Yeah,” she said, “we know about their interest in Global. What do you know about them we don’t?”
Gamble thought it over. “Quid pro quo?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Sure. I’m just trying to find a murderer, that’s all. What’s up with True North?”
“Well.” Gamble fussed with a lint ball attached to the knee of his trousers. It came free, along with a significant amount of thread. He made up his mind and looked up. There was an air of expectation about him that warned her he was about to drop a hell of a bomb and that he was expecting a big reaction.
“There is some suspicion that True North is a front for laundering money for the Carlomagno Coahuila drug cartel,” Gamble said.
He needn’t have worried about her reaction.
“Holy shit,” Kate said.