Restless in the Grave (21 page)

The good news was that no one paid any attention to her. She was just another shareholder rejoicing in her dividend. She was a little concerned that the revelry might extend to Eagle Air, that she might arrive to the sight of a shivaree in progress, but when they poked a cautious nose up over the edge of the gravel pad, all was calm. Security lights shone from every corner of hangar and office, but no lights from any of the hangar or office windows. She circumnavigated the gravel pad once just in case, before leaving the four-wheeler at the base of the pad in back of the hangar.

She pulled out an enormous pair of heavy gray wool socks and pulled them over her boots so her soles wouldn’t squeak on the snow. The edge of the pad was about twenty yards from the hangar’s back wall. She and Mutt crept up over the edge onto the pad and inveigled themselves across the hard-packed snow and into the shadow of the building.

Kate leaned against the metal siding, waiting for a siren to go off or someone to shout “Halt, who goes there?” When nothing happened she tried the back door, a windowless metal slab of formidable solidity. It was locked. No reason it should be that easy. She and Mutt apparitioned around the building to the front door. Amazingly, like Tina’s front door, like Tina’s office window, like Tina’s garage, like the old hangar at the Newenham airport, like Kate’s apartment, it was unlocked. It seemed to be something of a meme. “Mutt,” Kate said, her voice the barest whisper, “guard.”

Mutt’s “Whoof!” was the bare minimum of sound. She floated soundlessly over the tarmac to where the base office intersected the hangar, where the edge of the roof and the location of the moon allowed a corner of gray shadow almost exactly the color of Mutt’s coat, and took up station. If you didn’t know she was there, you would never have seen her. Kate’s hand stilled on the doorknob, watching, and she thought that if Mutt’s IQ got any higher, Kate might have to abdicate as the senior partner of the firm. She laughed beneath her baclava and eased inside.

There was a night-light on the wall, a tiny bulb behind a small, elegantly wrought glass leaf. She waited, listening. There was no sound. She went around the edge of the room, the better to avoid creaks in the floor, just in case. She opened the door she had seen Tina go through the previous afternoon, and stepped inside, pulling the door closed behind her. It was a heavy wooden door with heavy brass fittings and a lever handle, precision machined, and it slid shut with barely a click. There was a great deal to be said for sparing no expense on construction, especially from the burglar’s point of view.

She leaned against the door and played her pencil flash around the room. No chest freezers. It did have corner windows, the one behind the desk facing the hangar. She went softly around the desk to investigate. The windows were vinyl sliders, with two locks, top and bottom. They unlocked as smoothly and as silently as the window opened.

No alarm whooped. She waited. There was the faintest of rustles in the shadow opposite, followed by the drift of a lupine specter in her direction. “Guard,” Kate whispered. She didn’t hear anything but she knew Mutt had assumed the picket position beneath the window.

She turned and surveyed the room. The desk was right in front of her so she put away the pencil flash and clicked on her headlamp and started there, coming up empty for the most part, finding only office supplies, pads, pens and pencils, a half-empty box of printer paper. There was a handful of the small Swiss Army knives in various colors scattered in the top drawer, the ones everyone in Alaska used to have in their pockets before 9/11 and TSA put a stop to it. These had been embossed on one side with the Eagle Air logo. Giveaways, no doubt. There was a box of .30-06 cartridges, six missing, and a ziplock bag holding some commemorative coins, their tarnish proclaiming them either pure silver or fake gold. There was a desk diary for that year that she opened hopefully, only to find it blank. Well, Finn had died on December 11.

A power cable came up through a hole in the desk but there was no computer. The computer in the office of Grant’s house had been a laptop. Tina probably brought it back and forth.

The bank of file drawers against the wall were the inevitable next step, and revealed a day-to-day record of operations of Eagle Air, Inc., going back over two years, dating from shortly after the purchase of the air base. One entire set of drawers was devoted to computer printouts of flight plans that went back thirty years, back when Eagle Air was Bristol Bay Air and, before that, Arctic Air Express. Kate flipped through them rapidly. They were organized into monthly logs. The early logs were filled in laboriously—and for the most part illegibly—by hand, the Bristol Bay Air flights printed out on—Kate squinted in the light of her headlamp—what she thought might have been a dot matrix printer. It made her eyes hurt just to look at them. Eagle Air logs were crisp and professional spreadsheets, printed out on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pieces of paper, every number neatly centered in its column, each column equidistant from its neighbor, all columns neatly centered on the sheet. Kate gave a silent cheer to Hewlett-Packard and the invention of the ink cartridge.

She concentrated on Eagle Air Inc. and the last three years. Flights incoming listed a preponderance of company jets registered in names even Kate recognized, most of them right off the
Forbes
and
Fortune
500 lists. Kate’s lips pursed in a silent whistle. Finn Grant may have had some cause for Eagle Air’s luxurious furnishings and gourmet foodstuffs. You couldn’t expect the boards of directors of Exxon Mobil and Berkshire Hathaway to sleep in bunk beds with no mattresses and eat out-of-date MREs bought in odd lots on the Internet. It was how many Alaska outfitters treated their clients. Not that they charged them any less.

She passed the membership of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association in quick mental review, and an involuntary grin tugged at her lips. She’d like to see someone serve Harvey Meganack First Strike Rations.

The flight plans out listed three main locations as destinations, Zion River Lodge, Four Lake Lodge, and Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge. The records for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge stopped abruptly two years before, which would have been when McGuire invested in Eagle Air in exchange for deed and title to Outouchiwanet.

She closed the drawer and looked around for a map. It was on the wall next to the door, a big USGS 1:63,360 topographical map, reproduced, Kate discovered, on a metallic sheet set in a heavy wooden frame mounted directly on the wall. A cluster of magnets clung to one corner, and two bright blue plastic metal circles marked the locations of the two lodges Finn Grant had still been operating at the time of his death. The two remaining lodges and Eagle Air, Inc., formed a sort of scalene triangle stood on its longest point, with Eagle Air at the bottom and Zion River and Four Lake at top left and top right, respectively. She looked for Outouchiwanet Lodge and found it tucked into a bight in the side of Three Lake. Judging by the elevation markers on the contour lines surrounding the bight, Outouchiwanet had some spectacular view, always assuming sunlight ever got down in there to illuminate anything.

Interesting country north of Newenham, four long lakes, named, imaginatively, One, Two, Three, and Four south to north, each running east–west, stacked parallel one on top of the other. The mountains between them formed a formidable ridge between the Nushugak River delta and the Yukon–Kuskokwim River delta. Anyone who spent his adult life flying in and out of that kind of terrain, with all the attendant terrors of schizophrenic Alaskan weather thrown in, without incident until his untimely death, had seriously mad skills in the air. She remembered the guy in the bar comparing Finn Grant’s personality to his flying ability.

Which made his overlooking even so little a thing as a loose nut on the oil filter of his Cub that much less likely, she thought. There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots. Chaos theory be damned, old pilots got old by not making mistakes like that.

For the first time, the possibility that she really was investigating a murder in the first degree took solid root.

She went back to the file drawers. Many of them were taken up by paperwork that made up the lifeblood of the Federal Aviation Administration: aircraft registration forms, pilot check rides, aircraft history and maintenance status along with engine annuals. Kate wasn’t able to wade into all of it—she would have needed a month longer than she had—but it appeared to her untrained eye that Finn Grant had bought a third single Otter and three Cessna Caravans in the last year alone. There was also the necessary ream of paperwork backing up the most recent Otter’s conversion to a turbine engine, dated the previous August.

That did give her pause, because she remembered George Perry in Niniltna telling her a story only last year about flying most of the way around the world in pursuit of just one single Otter so he could keep up with Niniltna business as usual and at the same time meet the demands of custom from the Suulutaq Mine. If he didn’t, mine management would find someone else to ferry their employees to and from work. George had the monopoly and wanted to keep it. He’d found his Otter somewhere in Africa—had it been Ivory Coast?—and brought it home in triumph by way of Vancouver, BC, where he’d had the piston engine pulled and a turbine engine installed at a cost of a cool $1.5 million.

The point being, George said, was that you couldn’t find single Otters nowadays, it was too good an aircraft and they were all working, not sitting around with
FOR SALE
signs in the window.

A single Otter, turbo conversion, and three brand-new Cessna Caravans. Kate shook her head and wondered just how much Finn Grant had overcharged Gabriel McGuire for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge. Although she supposed there were limits to the wallet of even the world’s biggest box office draw.

Again with the snide, she thought, exasperated. Why did the man rub her so much the wrong way? She’d met him one time, she hadn’t exchanged more than a couple dozen words with him. Enough.

She closed the drawer with unnecessary force, catching it at the last minute before it banged shut and casting a guilty look over her shoulder. She moved down to the last of the cabinets, all of which were made from the same polished teak as Tasha’s desk in the outer office and the desk in this office as well, and slid the first drawer out.

She surfaced half an hour later, her brow creased.

As expected, the tourist business at Eagle Air slowed during the winter months, when the creeks froze up and the bears went to sleep. There were some December and January caribou hunts up around Mulchatna and some four-day board retreats that didn’t involve hunting or fishing. There were a lot of those in the summer as well, but from the copies of the king salmon punch cards she found, most retreats were conducted rod in hand.

Most independent air taxies in Alaska took up the slack in tourism in winter by flying locals between villages and towns and towns and Anchorage. From the evidence in these drawers, Eagle Air, Inc., had instead moved exclusively into air freight.

The cargo manifests went back eighteen months, or the hard copies did, the ones the loadmaster, often Grant, and the pilot, a rotating group of half a dozen names, had signed. The contents were listed variously as
electric apparatus, testing instruments,
and
electronics
. The destination for all of them was the airport code ADK. ADK, ADK.

As in Adak, Alaska?

Kate went back to the map. Adak was an Aleutian island about twelve hundred miles south-southwest of Anchorage, which would put it, what, about nine hundred miles from Newenham, give or take. Adak had been a naval air station before BRAC shut it down, just like BRAC shut down Chinook.

Kate frowned. Adak had been a topic of conversation at Native gatherings for some years. The regional Native corporation in the area had negotiated a deal for the existing buildings and facilities, which included a very nice airport, indeed, and an extensive harbor with docks. The docks were capable of supporting a healthy commercial fishing industry and cargo in sufficient quantity to sustain a population of six thousand people, including USAF personnel and their dependents. The airport was large enough and modern enough to support a naval air squadron, and the corporation had intended to develop Adak for tourism. It was a wild, beautiful place, an obvious choice for adventure and ecotourism, until the Middle East decided to embrace regime change as a regional activity and the price per barrel of oil went up over a hundred dollars.

It had cost Kate six hundred dollars to fly home from Dutch Harbor, one way, and that was five years before. Adak was twice as far down the Chain. She didn’t want to think what a round-trip ticket Anchorage–Adak–Anchorage would cost, and no tourist would, either, especially after they had already shelled out for the round-trip ticket to Anchorage for themselves, their spouse, and their two and a half children.

The docks and boat harbor were large enough to tempt an Outside investor to build a fish plant on Adak to process crab and Pacific cod, but it was currently in the throes of a bankruptcy battle between the Native corporation and a large number of angry creditors. At the mercy of weather and vandalism, the unoccupied portion of the base, also known as most of it, was rumored to be in a state of disintegration.

What the hell was Finn Grant doing shipping cargo to Adak? At last count, the population was around three hundred, and the Native corporation was scrambling to keep its investment from heading straight into the fiscal toilet.

She closed the drawer and looked at the clock on the wall. She’d been here almost an hour. Outside the window, the bright moon stretched long shadows on the tarmac. Through the crack in the window she could hear the distant sounds of four-wheelers and snow machines, and now and then a faint scream of laughter, or just a scream. Surprising that so far she had heard no gunshots. Surprising, too, that none of the revelers had come to Eagle Air to avail themselves of two long straight stretches of pavement for drag racing.