Restless in the Grave (12 page)

Bill slid the bar rag up and down the wooden surface of the bar. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I do know that practically everyone who knew him wanted the bastard dead. With the possible exception of Hugh Reid.”

Kate conjured up the image of the eagerish middle-aged guy in the safari suit fawning over Gabe McGuire at Eagle Air. “Grant’s partner.”

“Yeah.”

“What about the wife?”

“Tina?” The temperature in the bar dropped perceptibly.

Kate refused to be intimidated. “We always look first at the spouse. And not without cause, as you well know. Being the magistrate and all.”

For a split second Bill looked angry, and in the next moment she laughed. “Yeah. Well, not this time. I’ve known Tina since I landed in Disneyham, and a saner person never lived. She’s not capable of murdering someone, let alone her husband. However much she—”

“However much she what?”

Bill hesitated, then grimaced. “Ah, shit. He screwed around on her with every woman between Unalaska and Kaktovik who was dumb enough to fall for his lame line. He damn near bankrupted her family fortune half a dozen times, and he had to have been the world’s worst father, neglectful, abusive—hell, downright oblivious.” Bill sighed. “No, not a lot of love lost between Finn and Tina. But she didn’t kill him.”

“Did she know how to?”

Bill got down from her stool and pitched their empties in the trash. “Find me someone within a thousand miles who didn’t.”

Means, motive, and opportunity. In Kate’s line of work, that was called three strikes. Prudently, she did not say so. “Who else looks good?”

“Not Wy Chouinard, for damn sure,” Bill said.

Mutt, snoozing at Kate’s feet, woke up with a snort at the snap in Bill’s voice. “I didn’t ask you who you thought didn’t do it,” Kate said, her own voice calm. “I’m asking who you think did. If anyone.”

“Oh, hell,” Bill said. “I’m sorry.” She moved her shoulders as if she were trying to shake something off. “Hard when it comes that close to home.”

Kate looked down to meet Mutt’s great yellow eyes and remembered the last time someone had taken a shot at her and hit her dog instead. “Yeah.”

“Christ, if it comes to that, I had motive myself. Half of Southwest Alaska came here to drink off their mad after he screwed them over, and half of them showed up in my court the next morning. I have a lot more leisure time now that Finn Grant is good and dead.” Her laugh was more of a bark.

“Was Grant really that irresistible?” Kate said.

Bill shrugged, ashamed of her flash of temper. “I never saw the attraction myself, but I watched him operate over this bar for the last twenty years. He was a big man, big voice, big spender. When he wanted something, he went at it a hundred and ten percent.” Her brow creased. “He was always a dog, but the last two years it was like his appetite doubled right across the board. There weren’t enough women for him to lay, enough businesses he could gobble up, enough money he could spend on his new toy out at Chinook.”

“You said he nearly bankrupted his wife’s family,” Kate said. “If that’s the case, where did he get the money to upgrade to something like that FBO out at Chinook?”

“You’ve seen it, have you?”

“We stopped there on the way here, Chouinard had a mail drop. Even met a movie star.”

Bill’s head came up. “Gabe McGuire?”

Kate, surprised, said, “You know him?”

Bill tipped her head back and let loose with a long, reverential whistle.

Kate’s laugh was a little forced. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess? What’s wrong with you, you gay or a man in disguise? The guy’s a walking, talking incitement to riot.”

Kate remembered McGuire on the Chinook tarmac that morning and thought again how much he reminded her of Jack. “How long has he been coming to Newenham?”

“Gabe?” Bill thought. “About five years, I think. Give or take.”

“‘Gabe’?” Kate said, one eyebrow going up.

“Yes, Gabe,” Bill said. “We’re by way of being friends now, but as you can guess, the man likes his privacy when he comes north. We don’t mention him much to outsiders. Anyway, to answer your question, Finn has—had been hauling him out to Outuchiwanet Lodge ever since Gabe made it big enough to afford it. He hides out there for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, hunting, fishing. Sleeping and reading, mostly, he told me once. No radios, no TV, no phones, no Internet access, just a lake and mountains and the lodge.” Bill smiled. “About as pissed off as I’ve ever seen Gabe was when Finn told him that GCI was expanding cell coverage to the Bush communities north of here.”

“What kind of hunting and fishing is he going to do in January?” Kate said.

“Like I said,” Bill said with emphasis, “mostly he’s hiding out. Take a pretty rabid fan to get to Outouchiwanet from Newenham without a plane, and nobody around here, including Finn Grant, has ever ratted him out. Or will,” she added. “They all know Moses would eviscerate them if they did.”

“Who’s Moses?” Kate said.

“Moses Alakuyak,” Bill said with an inscrutable smile. “He’s, ah, what you could call the city father.”

“Haven’t met him,” Kate said.

“Believe me, you will.”

*   *   *

The clear day had segued into a clear night, with a sky full of stars and no moon. Kate held the four-wheeler to a medium speed to keep down the noise. Most of the houses and all the businesses she passed were dark, the Newenhamers all snug in their beds.

She pulled in next to the garage, parked under the stairs up to her apartment, and killed the engine. She peeked around the corner and cursed beneath her breath. The only lights on in the plantation house, on in any house within a mile radius were in the corner room with the television. Through a gap in the drapes, she could see the flicker of the television screen reflected against the glass of the windows.

She slipped upstairs and doffed boots and jacket. The clock read a quarter to two. What the hell was Oren watching at a quarter to two in the goddamn morning? Kate hated satellite television, not least because it kept people up past their normal bedtime.

She decided to wait an hour, and laid down for a nap.

At 3
A.M
. she was back at the foot of the stairs, peering around the corner at the house. The television was still on. Fuck this. She went around the back of the garage, crept across the open space between the buildings, and slid along the wall to where she could inch up and hoist an eyeball over the windowsill. Behind her, Mutt was a gray ghost drifting over the snow.

The television was on, all right, and Oren was in the room, but he was out, head lolling against the back of the couch, mouth open in a snore she could hear through the glass. His legs were crossed on the coffee table in front of the couch, knocking over one of the six empty bottles of Bud Light sitting on the tabletop. Tall black men chased a basketball across the television screen. While she watched, one of them launched a court-length pass worthy of the Kanuyaq Kings.

She dropped back down and duck-walked around the back of the house. The office window was dark. She forced herself to wait and watch for five very long minutes. No lights, no movement. She hadn’t seen a dog or any other pets when she’d been inside the house yesterday afternoon, and she was hoping there weren’t any.

She tested the window. It was a vinyl sash-weight, as new as the rest of the house. True to form, it wasn’t locked and slid up soundlessly at a touch. She told herself that she really should feel guilty about abusing Tina’s innocent hospitality in this way.

She really should. “Stay,” she whispered to Mutt. “And for god’s sake give us a shout if you hear anything.”

Mutt measured the distance between the ground and the windowsill. “Stay,” Kate whispered again, with more force this time. “I mean it, Mutt. Guard.”

As she turned to pull herself up through the window, she heard Mutt’s butt hit the snow with a disgruntled sound.

She eeled inside, walking forward on her hands until she could get a foot beneath her, and crouched beneath the window, one hand on the sill, listening. The sound of the television came dimly through the walls but that was all. She rose and stood to one side of the window looking out at the unmoving neighborhood. Silent still, silent all. She went softly across to the door. Should she lock it, or no? If she woke Tina or Oren, a locked door would slow them down and give her time to escape, her caped crusader identity intact. But if she locked it, they would know someone had been there when they couldn’t get in. She left it unlocked. Best-case scenario, no one ever knew she was here, and Mutt was all the DEW Line she would ever need.

She pulled out a pencil flashlight and went to the computer on the desk. Password protected. She tried Tina’s birthday, her children’s birthdays, Finn Grant’s birthday, which information she had provided herself with before she left the Park. None of them worked, which raised her opinion of Tina’s intelligence a notch.

Which meant Kate did things the hard way. Never mind the Paperwork Reduction Act, the paperless society had not yet truly arrived, so she could. She turned to the first filing cabinet.

One thing being chair of the Niniltna Native Association had taught her was how to read legal and financial documents.

Until three years ago, Finn Grant had been the sole owner and proprietor of his business, until then known as Bristol Bay Air. Bristol Bay Air had a rotating list of assets, most of these airplanes, everything from a Piper Super Cub on wheel-skis to a Single Otter turbo on floats. There was a hangar at Newenham airport, until two years ago mortgaged to the hilt, at that time paid off in one lump sum, and today free and clear. There was a new deed to it with no listed lien holder, dated eighteen months before.

The only paper she could find on the house she was standing in was a tax assessment from the Bristol Bay borough. Her lips pursed in a silent whistle. A million five in a town the size of Newenham was a pretty hefty chunk of the tax base. Grant must have slept with the borough assessor’s wife, too.

She could find no mortgage paperwork, no liens, no lines of credit. Could Finn Grant really have paid cash to build this Tara-wannabe three hundred plus miles off the road system? It wasn’t like he was spending a lot of time in his own bed, if everything she’d heard so far was true. Still, if a career in criminal investigation had taught Kate anything, it was that trophies came in all shapes and sizes.

She closed the first drawer and opened the second. This one was dedicated to Eagle Air, a corporation that had evidently sprung into being full grown from the brow of Grant two years before. Hugh Reid was a partner in and also vice president of Eagle Air LLC. There were other partners and investors, about a dozen of them, with generic names like Northwest Partners, Pacific Capital, and Arctic Investments, most of whose business addresses were post office boxes in Lucerne, or Las Vegas.

There was a deed of sale for Chinook Air Force Base, seller, the federal government, buyer, EAI, for a cool five million dollars, cash.

Kate raised her eyes from the file and stared at the wall. Five million seemed pretty low for an air base as nicely appointed as the one she’d seen yesterday. She doubted five million would buy fifty feet of paved runway anywhere in Bush Alaska.

There was a fat file of invoices and receipts for the remodel and furnishings of the FBO, all of them marked
PAID IN FULL
, including a dozen queen-sized Tempur-Pedic mattresses from the Cloud Collection at $3,600 a pop, shipped air freight from Sadler’s in Anchorage.

Jesus Christ,
she almost said out loud, and raised her head to listen, just in case she had. The television in the room across the hall was still broadcasting a muted roar from the crowd. There was no sound from the floor above. She put the folder back in the drawer, closed it, and found the income tax returns.

Finn Grant kept good records, she’d say that for him: the drawer held tax returns going back twenty years. She pulled one out at random and looked at the signature. Prepared by Clementina T. Grant, and signed by her for him, too.

So Tina kept the books.

Kate had another thought and opened up last year’s return. This one had been prepared by an accounting firm in Anchorage.

She checked. So had the two years before.

So Tina had retired from family bookkeeping. Kate wondered if her retirement had been voluntary.

One thing was certain, Grant’s income had jumped considerably over the past two, no, three years. She compared returns. The year before he bought Chinook Air Force Base was when the rise in income had begun. He’d filed extensions for eleven out of the past twenty years, but not in the last three.

The third drawer was the catchall for everything else, receipts, statements, deeds, bills of sale, organized by businesses. A couple of fishing charters, a guiding business, an air taxi. She flipped through the folders. There was nothing on the day-to-day expenses of Eagle Air. Those must be kept on the computer or out at the base itself.

Tucked into the deed file she found a transfer of title for Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge and the 160 surrounding acres from Bristol Bay Air, Inc., to Gabriel McGuire Enterprises Ltd., for the sum of “one dollar and other valuable considerations.”

That was interesting.

Outouchiwanet Lodge must have been a homestead in its first incarnation, 160 acres being the standard parcel granted by the federal government under the Homestead Act. No matter how rustic or remote, one dollar seemed pretty cheap. The other considerations would have had to be pretty valuable, indeed.

She closed the file, replaced it in the drawer, and slid the drawer home.

The light from the pencil flash caught the corner of a file folder on top of the filing cabinet. She opened it, and found herself reading the letter Tina’s daughter Irene’s commanding officer had written to Finn and Tina following her death.

Irene was a good soldier and a damn fine pilot who backed up a ton of natural ability with a fierce dedication to training. She was well liked by her crew and trusted absolutely by every man and woman who rode with her, myself included.