a Night Too Dark (2010) (25 page)

Gammons’s wounds was caused by a small bullet. He took photos and let me take ’em over to the crime lab.”
“And Brillo says?”
“He won’t swear to it, but he admitted it does bear a striking resemblance to a wound inflicted by a small-caliber bullet.”
“Did you ask him if the .22 you gave him was small enough?”
“I did, and he said it was, although he said even after laying outside for what his gun guy guessed was, get this, at minimum a month, the pistol is an older weapon and he didn’t think it was regularly used.
“Brillo says if we can send him Allen’s belongings, he’ll probably be able to find some skin or hair and run the DNA on the skull and nail it for sure. We should do that, but I already know. The body in the woods is Rick Allen, it was misidentified as Gammons because the physical report in Gammons’s personnel file was actually Allen’s physical report, and vice versa.”
“Who switched them?”
“Allen.” She patted the air. “Wait. I’m not making you guess, I’m going to tell you straight out. I think Rick Allen came to the Suulutaq Mine as a spy, first for True North Investments, who are rumored to be in the market for a hostile takeover of GHRI, and second for John King.
“He worked with Haynes, she said so. He was on and off the rigs, in and out of the office, he collated and filed reports. He had unlimited access to confidential data. It’s why he was so valuable to True North and to John King, and why they paid him so very well.
“I think he milked True North and John King for every dime he could.” She took a deep breath. “And I think he aided and abetted Dewayne Gammons in his attempted suicide. I think he meant to take advantage of their physical similarity. I think he meant to take advantage of Gammons’s depressive state. I think he switched the physical reports in their files.”
She sat back, with an air that invited, nay, expected applause. “You think Allen was setting Gammons up to take his place,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
“Why?” Although he had a pretty good idea.
“Either something happened to make him afraid he was about to get caught, or he’d saved enough money to, I don’t know, go to Aruba.”
“And that would be fine if it made any sense. If he meant Gammons’s body to be identified as his own, why drive Gammons’s truck out there, and leave it, leading us to the natural assumption that it was in fact Gammons?”
“Something went wrong. From what Lyda Blue and Randy Randolph and Gammons’s boss say, Dewayne Gammons was naturally on the brink of offing himself five or six times before breakfast every morning. The doc at the hospital says chronic depression a lot of times only gets worse the older you get. So Allen conceives of his master plan and zeroes in on Gammons as a likely victim. Randy hears them talking about death. Allen’s probably encouraging Gammons, egging him on. A good con man is first and foremost a good psychologist. One day Gammons decides he’s ready and asks his good buddy Allen to see him off at the end of their next shift.”
She paused and their eyes met. They both broke down in a guilty snicker over her unintentional double entendre. Kate pulled herself together. “One thing we haven’t done yet is find out where Gammons parked his truck in town. Maybe somebody saw both men get in it and drive off. At any rate, they drive out there and head into the woods.”
“So, Allen’s got his master plan,” Jim says, “but what if Gammons changes his mind at the last minute?”
“That’s why the pistol!” Kate said.
“The pistol was Allen’s backup plan?”
“Yes! And I think Gammons did change his mind, for whatever reason, could have been ordinary everyday cold feet, could have been his burgeoning relationship with Lyda. At the last minute he changed his mind and I think that’s why all the rounds in that pistol were fired, and why Gammons has a bullet hole in him. No wonder the guy’s lost it, who wouldn’t under those circumstances? You’re depressed and suicidal to start with, and then you meet a girl you like and who seems to like you back and maybe life isn’t so awful after all, but you’ve locked yourself into a course of action—and you’re a young man with an overload of testosterone which by definition means you’re susceptible to peer pressure—and then at the last minute you change your mind and then your best bud—and in this case your only bud—tries to shoot you. You get away, only to wander around in the woods for a month afterward where probably every living thing you run into is trying to eat you. Jesus,” she said in sudden realization, and perhaps her first glimmer of sympathy. “I might opt out myself in those circumstances.”
“So what happened to Allen?”
“He’s banging away with the pistol, trying his damnedest to kill the son of a bitch that’s supposed to be the dead him. If he’s dead True North and John King won’t come looking for him when the data flow stops, or, and what I think is more probable given Allen’s past history, when they find out he’s double billing. The shots startle a moose, maybe a cow, she barges out of the brush and stomps the bastard that’s scaring the bejeezus out of her two twin calves born the day before. And the ravens and the bears clean up the mess, and if Father Smith hadn’t stumbled across Gammons’s pickup when he did we might never have found the remains.”
He took a deep breath and let it out, thinking.
“What?” she said.
“While you were gone, I got a wild hair and fingerprinted Gammons’s pickup. I lifted some prints from their belongings. On my way
back from Tebay Lakes I stopped off in Ahtna and had Kenny run them through the system for me. Gammons’s prints are all over the truck.” He waited a beat. “So are Allen’s.”
“See!”
“Wait a minute, Kate. How much of a coincidence is it that when Allen needs to find a substitute for himself, there’s Dewayne Gammons right there ready to hand? Practically his twin on a hundred-man crew on a remote site in interior Alaska. I mean come on.”
Kate leaned forward. “It’s only a coincidence if you’re looking at it from our point of view,” she said. “If you look at it going forward, from Allen’s point of view, a year or however long ago it was that True North hired him, it’s not a coincidence. It’s a plan.”
“You think he went looking for Gammons?” Jim said after a moment.
“I do. I think Allen knew from the get-go he wouldn’t be able to get away with it forever—Brendan said he was a pretty good con man, only one conviction with three months served—and I think he was looking for a fall guy among his fellow employees from that day forward. Hell, he may have scouted Gammons in Washington, may have been the one to talk Gammons into coming to Alaska and applying at Suulutaq in the first place. True North was probably looking at keeping him in place for the long term, which he knew increased the chances he’ll get caught. He looks at Gammons and thinks, Wouldn’t it be convenient if I died? Nobody comes after a dead man.”
She sat back. “Remember, Jim, we wouldn’t even have known that the guy who stumbled out of the woods into my yard was Gammons if Lyda hadn’t been at the airstrip that day. No, Gammons was right where Allen put him, a virtual twin with chronic depression. Allen only had to nurse it along, and according to Randy Randolph he did that right well.”
“Randy, by the way, did not begin his career in multiple marrying
in Alaska,” Jim said. “I ran his record, too, and he’s got wives strung out in a line from here to North Carolina.”
Kate laughed. “Just don’t tell Bonnie, or Suzy. Or that third one—what was her name?—who took you out in front of the grocery store.”
“Mrs. Randy Randolph,” Jim said, with dignity, “and I was not taken out, I tripped.”
“You went ass over teakettle,” Kate said.
“Getting back to the subject at hand,” Jim said. “Allen switches the medical reports, cleans out Gammons’s room of anything approaching a life just to be sure, and drives out to see his best buddy off into the next life.
“What he doesn’t know is that Gammons has made friends with one Lyda Blue, and life is not quite as dark and hopeless as it once was. Gammons changes his mind, Allen pulls out the pistol and fires it to change Gammons’s mind back or to kill him and maybe, I don’t know, make it look like suicide. Only one of the bullets hits Gammons. One of the others hits or frightens a moose who, unfortunately, takes exception to this injury to his or her person, and stomps Allen to death on the strength of it.” He sat back in his chair. “It’s all very tidy.”
“Except for Lyda Blue,” Kate said.
“If she was murdered, Kate, she either saw something or she was a part of the scam. She had guilty knowledge she couldn’t live with, or she was aiding and abetting and she was afraid she was going to get caught.”
“You don’t think she was taking a cut,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“Maybe she did it for love. It’s been known to happen.” He leaned back and rubbed his face. “I need more coffee.” Getting up to refill his mug he said, “Speculating is fun and all but how much hard evidence do we really have?”
“The payments traceable back to True North and RPetCo Alaska. The switched files. Gammons’s bullet wound. Lyda’s pistol, the weapon that probably inflicted the wound. The truck. The fingerprints.”
“How did Allen get hold of Lyda’s pistol?”
“You said it yourself, it’s a small camp. Allen was a con man, a swindler and an embezzler and a thief. A guy like him would make a regular habit out of inventorying the contents of every room in the camp.”
He sat back down and frowned at his coffee, which didn’t deserve it. “Con men don’t usually upgrade to murder, Kate. It doesn’t fit the profile.”
“It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t, if he felt under enough threat.”
“Under threat, from a venture capital firm and an Alaskan oil corporation? What was he afraid they’d do, string him up by their silk ties?”
“Ah,” she said, and it was as near a cackle as he’d ever heard her make, “now we come to the best part. At the same time, independently of anything going on at Suulutaq, the FBI—”
The coffee mug landed on the table with a thud that should have cracked its bottom. “The FBI?”
“—in the person of Special Agent Fred Gamble, of whom you have heard me speak before—”
“I thought he’d been transferred to Oklahoma.”
“Omaha,” she said, with an airy wave. “Other opportunities. Things happen. You know. Special Agent Gamble is I believe still striving to find a headline case that will get him reassigned to somewhere that isn’t Alaska. In pursuit of this goal—”
Oh yeah, he could see she was really enjoying herself now.
“In pursuit of this goal, it came to his attention that a venture capital firm called True North Investments was making many investments
in Global Harvest stock and that John King, president and CEO of RPetCo, was on the board of directors.”
“Where did Gamble pick up your trail?”
“At RPetCo, when I went to see John King.” She looked demure. “He thought, given our prior dealings, that I might be able to shed some light on his investigation.”
Jim closed his eyes and shook his head. “You know, Prohibition gave us two things, organized crime and the FBI. Honest to god, I wonder sometimes which was worse.” He opened his eyes. “I shudder at the many prospective answers to this question, but why is the FBI investigating True North and John King?”
“Because True North is in receipt of large quantities of money with no provenance.”
“Translation, please?”
It burst out of her with a velocity that made him realize how hard it had been for her to hold it in for the last fifteen minutes. “True North is suspected by the FBI, the DEA, and various other governmental agencies of laundering money for the—wait for it—Carlomagno Coahuila drug cartel.”
“Holy shit,” Jim said.
“That’s what Brendan said.” Kate raised her mug to her lips for the first time. It was cold. She got up to refill it, and settled back in her chair with the air of one who had brought the news from Marathon to Athens on time and under budget and had lived to tell the tale.
“I hope that True North business doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass,” Jim said. “Drug cartels are hell on leakers.”
“According to Gamble they’re going to have a lot worse things to worry about shortly.”
“Yeah, well, I’m considering the source there.” Jim looked at Kate. “So you think Allen found out about the drug money laundering and decided to vanish.”
“Yes. He might have known from the beginning. A good con man is also a first-class researcher. He wouldn’t have come into this without checking into True North’s background.”
“Say I’m prepared to accept this ridiculous story as something approaching the truth. How does the death of Lyda Blue figure into it?”
Some of the light went out of Kate’s eyes, and he was sorry to see it go. She was awful cute when she got on the scent. “I haven’t figured that out yet. It has to be connected to Allen and Gammons, it just has to. We know from the file on her computer that she found out Allen was stealing data. And we know Gammons was shot with her pistol. All three of them were connected. Her death has to be, too.”
“I’ll check with her family, see if they can identify it as belonging to her. But, Kate.” Their eyes met. “He was dead a long time before she was. If she was murdered, he didn’t kill her.”
“I know,” she said. “There has to be something else, something I haven’t seen, or accounted for. We need to go back out to the mine and talk to a lot more people, especially the geologists. If Lyda noticed something, they might have, too. Oh.” She sat up. “I just remembered. Truax was throwing a guy off the mine when I got there the day Lyda died.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“His name is Kostas McKenzie. He’s the executive director of a nonprofit environmental activist organization called Gaea. He snuck in on a plane that morning and was snooping around.”
Jim perked up. “Any chance of popping him for Lyda Blue’s death?”
“No,” Kate said, with regret. “I checked with George and he was telling the truth about when he got to Suulutaq. Rigor was too far advanced for him to have done it.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Especially since I think there is going to be trouble from that direction before very long. I went down to their office last night. Gaea has targeted the Suulutaq Mine for their trophy wall.”
“Yeah, well, I think Global Harvest can defend itself.” He looked at the clock and stood up. “You know what? I’ve had a day, and I’m going to need some beer to get through the rest of it.”
“Roadhouse?”
“God, no. The last time I went to the Roadhouse for a quiet beer I had to break up a fistfight between a Park rat and a Suulutaq Mine worker over Dulcey Kinneen. And then Bernie insisted I counsel Dulcey against renting herself out by the hour. Let’s just go home.”