Restless in the Grave (25 page)

Eighteen

JANUARY 20

Newenham

Kate woke alone, not that there was room in that narrow twin for anyone else but her. She had become unaccustomed to sleeping alone for any length of time, and it was next to impossible not to wake up and feel for the warm body next to her. Jim was always remarkably accommodating in the matter of morning wood, too. Whether he knew who was reaching for it or not.

An image of Gabe McGuire’s bare chest slid before her closed eyes.

With an oath, she sat up, swinging her legs over the side, and yelped when her feet touched the cold floor. Mutt, happily chasing rabbits in her sleep, jumped up and barked and growled in four different directions at once.

“Sorry, girl.” Kate pulled on socks and let an indignant Mutt outside.

Moses Alakuyak was standing on the stairs.

“No,” Kate said, even as he pushed past her into the room.

“Yeah,” he said, “this’ll have to do, we don’t want to walk in on the kids this morning,” and started shoving all the furniture against the walls. When he’d redecorated to his satisfaction, he went into the bathroom and came out in his ninja outfit. “You know he didn’t do it, right?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Maybe it came out more forcefully than she had intended.

The Old Nick ninja snorted. “On your feet, girl.”

No doubt about it, he sounded more like Old Sam every time she saw him.

Ninety minutes later he went into the bathroom and came out in his civilian clothes. Kate was sitting on the bed, head hanging, sweat dripping from her nose, the muscles of her thighs vibrating beneath her elbows. “I thought you’d be in better shape than this,” he said.

She managed to raise her head long enough to give him a killing glare.

The little son of a bitch laughed all the way down the stairs when he left.

“How do I keep letting him do this to me?” she asked the room. The room wisely returned no answer. Kate was no pushover, but Moses Alakuyak was another order of magnitude of tyranny entirely, and she and the room both knew it.

Meantime, the sweat had dried on her body and she realized how cold it was in the apartment. The garage beneath was unheated, while the apartment itself had electric radiators. Her landlady was picking up all utilities, it was true, but Kate was enough of an Alaskan to be appalled at the potential heating bill to leave them on low overnight. She turned them up pretty quick now, though, and went to stand beneath some hot water while the apartment heated up.

Dry and dressed, she was warmer but no less horny. The only marginally effective substitute for horniness was food, preferably good food. The kitchen had one frying pan and one saucepan, but no toaster. She couldn’t find a spatula for love or money. There was one fork, four spoons, and a table knife. Fortunately Kate had her Swiss Army knife, which amazingly she’d remembered to put in her checked luggage when she’d had to go through TSA in Anchorage on the way to St. Paul. There was one plate, three glasses, and one chipped ceramic mug with the handle broken off.

She’d bought some groceries on the way back from Eagle Air yesterday afternoon, including eggs, sausage, and a rustic loaf. She poured a little oil into the frying pan set on high heat, and when it began to smoke tossed in a piece of bread sliced into cubes. She put water on to boil in the saucepan, and fit the single-cup plastic coffee filter she’d bought the day before with a folded paper towel and filled it with coffee, the real stuff this time, her first purchase the day before. When the bread was brown and crisp, she crumbled in some sausage, and when it was browned, she poured in two eggs beaten in one of the glasses. Salt and pepper, and a handleless mug of coffee, liberally dosed with half and half, she took her breakfast to the postage stamp–sized table in the corner overlooking the river and sat down to tuck in. Done in short order—this was the hungriest job she’d ever worked—she pushed the plate back and crossed her legs on the table to sip her coffee.

It was another gloriously clear day. There had to be a honking big high pressure system hanging over Bristol Bay that hadn’t moved an isobar in any direction in the last twenty-four hours. Okay by her. Made an investigation all that much easier if she didn’t have to fight the weather, too. Of course, there was indubitably a low building up its own pressure in back of that high that would bring in one hell of a blow when it finally pushed the high out of the way. “Let’s be gone by then,” she said.

There was an admonitory yip from the other side of the door, and she went to let Mutt in. She’d bought food for Mutt the day before as well, at which Mutt turned up her nose. Kate took a closer look and saw a suspicious bit of white fur caught in Mutt’s teeth. She only hoped it was an arctic hare and not someone’s cat.

It was an hour before the library opened. She got out her copy of
Team of Rivals
and opened it where she’d left off reading it in the Park, page 581. Thus far, despite unwitting and often deliberate provocation on the part of each and every member of his cabinet, Lincoln had resisted blowing up at anyone except for the army meteorologist. Everybody always got mad at the weather guy. She read twenty pages and quit, because she was on the wrong side of the middle of this book. Lincoln was just too good a guy and she wasn’t in any hurry to get to Ford’s Theater.

Under the phone book was a sales flyer for the local gear shop. A Ruger nine-millimeter automatic for $350. A Taurus Judge Magnum for $470. At least the Ruger was made in the U.S., but it wasn’t like you could take either handgun hunting and bring home anything to eat. Her eyes dropped to the bottom of the page. A Honda thousand-watt generator, good for ten hours on a gallon of gas, nine hundred dollars. It was the size of a suitcase, and even had a handle. She was about to tear out the ad when she noticed the date was May of the previous year.

She washed the dishes and called Campbell at the post. He sounded very mellow this morning. “How’s Evelyn Grant?” Kate said.

Campbell switched gears from mellow to business. “Conscious.”

“And talking?”

“Says she can’t remember anything at all during the time we most need her to.”

“Really,” Kate said. “She say why she was there?”

“Not very convincingly, she says she remembered some unspecified paperwork of her father’s that she needed. Can’t remember much about that, either.”

“She say why she waited until four in the morning to come looking for it?”

“No.”

“So,” Kate said, drawing out the word, “not your star witness in the case of the State of Alaska versus John Doe, in the little matter of aggravated assault, firearm involved.”

“Not at the moment.” He paused. “I heard a bit of a hoohaw between Tina and Oren in the hospital waiting room, before they saw me coming. Oren’s pissed at Tina over money.”

“Put that together with the argument I saw between Oren and Evelyn,” Kate said. “My professional estimation would be that that was mostly Oren, too, and my professional estimation of his character would I’d guess match yours. He has all the personal charm of a dung beetle. To be fair, though, we have to remember that in the space of, what, two months, Tina and Oren have lost a daughter and a sister and a husband and a father, and last night they almost lost another daughter and another sister.” She touched the scar on her throat. “No one ever shows to advantage after that kind of personal trauma.”

“Yeah.”

Campbell didn’t sound convinced, and he didn’t sound happy. Kate had heard that exact same tone in Jim’s voice when he knew he was going to have to bust someone he liked, or maybe just someone he knew. Price you paid when you policed a small community. Propinquity was hell on a law enforcement officer. One of the reasons why the divorce rate was so high in the profession.

And Campbell didn’t tell Kate to stand down, either.

*   *   *

The Newenham Public Library was laboring beneath the same kinds of budget cuts as starving libraries all over the nation, to the point that they’d cut back their hours to thirty a week. It was a pretty draconian measure for a Bush Alaska institution that, quite apart from being the sole-source provider of reading and reference material for three hundred miles, provided a refuge for residents who just wanted to get out of the house occasionally. If the library closed entirely, nondrinkers would fall back on the school gym, while everyone else would be at Bill’s. Sergeant Campbell’s workload would rise accordingly, which wouldn’t make him happy.

The librarian was Jeannie Penney, whom Tina Grant had introduced to Kate two days before. Kate was not the first library patron that morning, and was also less preoccupied with casing the library for a late-night burglary, so she paused to take a little time to run a mental make on Tina Grant’s best friend.

Jeannie Penney was a vibrant sixty-something who looked a lithe, well-packaged forty. She had long straight blond hair all the way down to her ass, electric blue eyes peeping shrewdly out from behind artfully tousled bangs, and skin like cream velvet. She dressed plainly, in pressed jeans and a snug cream-colored turtleneck, and wore the simple clothes better than anyone Kate had ever met. She moved rapidly around her one-room-in-a-strip-mall domain, scooping up books discarded by patrons and reshelving them in one continuous graceful movement, checking out a copy of David Wiesner’s
Tuesday
to a four-year-old who could barely see over the edge of her desk, his amused mother allowing him to do it himself, after which she helped a high school student find Vic Fischer’s book on the Alaska constitutional convention for a term paper.

What was on the shelves looked ready-made for a rural Alaskan community. A full bookshelf was given over to Chilton manuals, another entire shelf was packed with books about guns, including
Shooter’s Bible
s that went back twenty years, and one entire aisle was dedicated to handcrafts and DIY. The fiction section consisted mostly of popular fiction going back to Nevil Shute and Georgette Heyer and forward to Stephen King and Nora Roberts, all of them looking well thumbed.

“Sure we have a computer,” Jeannie said, tossing her hair back like a filly who was ready for the race. “Back in the corner there, see? Internet access? Of course! The city council and I had words about it, but we’ve got it.” The steel behind her smile was plain for anyone with the wit to see it. “And on a one-meg DSL line, too, none of this dial-up nonsense.”

Jeannie told Mutt she could wait outside, and Mutt went back outside and waited. Jeannie demanded Kate’s driver’s license and got it. “I will hold this hostage until you log off. Sign here.” One well-manicured finger pointed at a register, and Kate signed obediently. “You get half an hour. After that, if no one is waiting, you can have another half an hour.”

“Thank you,” Kate said, as it seemed like that was all she was going to be allowed to say. Jeannie Penney gave her a bright smile displaying perfect teeth and turned to her next patrons, an old Yupik man and his granddaughter who wanted help accessing the National Archives because he didn’t have a birth certificate and those—here was spoken a terrible-sounding word in Yupik—people in Social Security wouldn’t believe he had been born in his own village. Jeannie had the phone number of the right person to call at her fingertips and she dialed it for them then and there.

Kate admired efficiency in any endeavor and she had a soft spot for librarians and teachers anyway. She was, however, a little breathless as she made for the computer in the corner and logged on with the password Jeannie had given her. When she opened the cap on the thumb drive she saw that it had 256 gigabytes of memory, which seemed like a lot, until she plugged it in and a folder marked, originally, “Finn’s Notes” popped up. There was no demand for a password. She crossed mental fingers and clicked on it. It opened.

The only security she had encountered thus far in Newenham was the password-protected laptop on Tina Grant’s desk. It made her wonder what was on it.

The files on the thumb drive were folders, numbered and listed chronologically, the most recent items saved listed first. The folders held mostly Word documents, but there were also some audio files and the most recently saved folder contained a video file dated October of the previous fall. She found the volume control on the computer and turned it down as far as possible before hunching over the computer and clicking
PLAY
.

Ten minutes later she sat back and blew a long, silent whistle.

The video’s audio quality was poor and the camerawork left a great deal to be desired, but when you got past those you were left with unmistakably court-worthy evidence of an Alaskan big game guide not only flying and shooting the same day, but violating the wanton waste law when he and his client took only the trophy rack, leaving the moose carcass to rot. The camera even managed to capture the tail numbers on the Beaver sitting on a lake in the background.

Kate had seen videos like this before, shot by undercover Fish and Game agents on illegal hunts. Shortly thereafter the guide would show up in court, and upon conviction to be stripped of license, airplane, a large chunk of change, and considerable free time. And they were always convicted. Never mind voir dire, Alaska juries always had at least one member who hunted for personal use who had stumbled over one of those carcasses themselves.

Kate got online and Googled the guide’s name, Leon Coopchiak. It didn’t pop up in any court cases, federal or state. It did find a website on AlaskaHuntingGuidesDirectory.com, Jackknife Pass Outfitters, based in Newenham, where he was listed as one of three guides. It wasn’t a very sophisticated site, one page with a photograph of grizzly bears fishing for salmon in a small waterfall, with a two-button menu bar,
RESERVATIONS
and
CONTACT US
. Kate clicked on
RESERVATIONS
, and her eyebrows twitched together when the website for Eagle Air, Inc., Newenham, Alaska, popped up.

This was a much ritzier, multi-page website, with a gallery of photographs, a page of videos, a choice of lodge or camping adventures, full outfitting (“We carry only the highest-rated camping, hunting, and fishing equipment”), a list of the different trips offered (“You only shoot with a camera? We have nature tours from a day to a week, guaranteed to put you nose to nose with Alaskan wildlife from grizzly bears fishing for salmon to bull moose in rut to migrating caribou herds twenty-five thousand strong!”) and a picture of the chef (“The best gourmet camp food you will ever eat!”).