Restless in the Grave (27 page)

By contractual agreement, the Suulutaq Mine was required at least in the early exploratory stages to have Alaska residents as 50 percent of their employees, and they were further required to recruit first from the Park. Most of the locals employed at the Suulutaq were earning more money in a month than they had in any previous year of their lives. The younger they were, the less wisely they spent it. “Alcohol involved?”

“When isn’t it.”

“Shit,” Johnny said, face pulling into a scowl. “I don’t get that. Sex by force. I just—” He shrugged, baffled. “Drunk or sober, high or straight, I just don’t see the attraction.”

“It’s not the sex, per se, it’s the power.”

“I know that. I still don’t get it.”

“I hope you never do,” Jim said. “The worst news is, one of them’s her cousin. Or second cousin. Something like that, a family relative, anyway. Somebody she thought she could trust when he invited her to a party. Turned out she was the party.”

“How is she?”

“As of last night? Beginning to get really, really angry.”

“No wonder you’re fried.” Johnny stared down at his plate, his appetite gone. “You should have stayed in town.”

Jim would rather have been hanged, drawn, and quartered than admit that he wanted to be home in the bed he shared with Kate, whether Kate was in it with him or not, rather than in his crash pad bed at Auntie Vi’s. “Yeah. After I rounded up the perps and, uh, restrained Darryl and got him and his cell cleaned up, I was on autopilot. Next thing I knew I was home.”

“You should have slept in.”

“Can’t. Things to do, places to go.” He gave a close approximation of the old shark’s grin. “People to see.”

“Right.” They finished their breakfast but their hearts weren’t in it.

Suited up to head out, Jim paused. “Hey.”

Johnny looked up from stuffing his daypack. Jim thought he saw a box of condoms disappear inside but he didn’t say so, remembering all too well age seventeen. “How pissed off will Kate be if I hold off telling her something until she gets back? Something not good, something she’s going to want to know, but something she most likely can’t do anything about?”

Johnny frowned down at his pack, relieved that Jim had missed the condoms and that this wasn’t going to be one of those conversations. “Is it something that in and of itself will piss her off?”

“On a scale of mild simmer to full boil?” Jim sighed. “We’re talking Mt. Redoubt on a five-eruption day.”

Johnny was impressed. “We could sell tickets.”

“We could, although I’d rather be selling them from Beta Centauri. I haven’t told her yet. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Johnny said. “Wanna tell me?”

“No.”

Johnny thought about it. “If you tell her now, while she’s on a case, she’ll be pissed off at the situation and pissed off she can’t do anything about it, and just generally pissed off at the messenger. That’d be you. If you wait to tell her when she gets home, she’ll only be pissed off at the situation, pissed off she can’t do anything about it, and pissed off at you for not telling her.”

Jim sighed again. “So she’s pissed off whether I tell her or not.”

“Good luck with that,” Johnny said.

Jim flipped him off and left.

*   *   *

When he got to town he continued past the trooper post to the Niniltna Native Association building. Annie Mike walked to work every day, come rain or whiteout, so he couldn’t tell if she was at work yet. He went inside, where he found Phyllis Lestinkof holding down the front desk. Phyllis looked neat and crisp in blue slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt open at the throat to display a tiny sparkling pendant on a nearly nonexistent chain, with matching earrings cupped inside a stylish haircut. “Hey, Phyllis,” he said. “Looking good.”

She gave him an efficient nod and an impersonal smile. “How may I help you, Sergeant Chopin?”

“I’d like to talk to Annie Mike, if she can spare a moment,” he said. He could do formal when the occasion warranted, and evidently Phyllis had decided her first week on the job did.

“I’ll see if she’s in,” Phyllis said, and waited pointedly until he wandered over to the other side of the lobby.

Annie was in and she would see him. Although he knew the way perfectly well, Phyllis escorted him to Annie’s door, knocked in a restrained fashion, waited to be bidden to enter, and announced him before she’d let him inside.

The door closed behind him with a discreet click and he said, “I feel like I was just ushered into the Oval Office.”

“Good,” Annie said. “About time we showed a little professionalism around here.”

It was a nice office, eggshell paint on the walls, cherrywood furniture, a seating area, a console with a large framed print of the Niniltna Native Association logo hung above it. The wall-to-wall carpeting was an institutional gray but there was a nice area rug on top of it, and plants were thriving in the corners and on the desk.

Behind it sat the new-minted chair of the Niniltna Native Association. She was still Annie Mike, widow, mother, secretary-in-perpetuity of the Niniltna Native Association, plump and capable, if a little harried. But in spite of that tension, she seemed taller, somehow, as if the authority and responsibility invested in her by Kate and the shareholders had given her added physical as well as mental, emotional, and corporational stature. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, and he wondered if it would have happened so quickly if Kate hadn’t gotten out of town as fast as possible immediately after Annie’s election. Kate had been right about that.

This morning Annie wore a bright pink polyester pantsuit with a paisley shirt underneath, but the cheerful color was not reflected in her expression. There were deep shadows beneath her eyes, as if she had been taking a lot of calls way too far into the night. Shareholders leaning on her, he thought, wanting her to fill the vacuum Kate left behind. “You look pretty in pink,” he said, and was rewarded when her face relaxed into a smile.

“Stop trying to flirt with me or I’ll tell your girlfriend,” she said, and came around her desk to sit in one of the two armchairs.

Kate hadn’t spent one more minute than was absolutely necessary in this office. Annie, by contrast, looked at home.

“Is Kate around?” she said, reading his mind.

“Uh, no,” he said. “She’s out of town on a job.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “I left her a message on her voice mail. She hasn’t called back.”

“Well. You know.” He gave a vague gesture and hoped he hadn’t broken a sweat. “Cell phones. Lose messages all the time.”

“Mine never does,” Annie said a little grimly, and Jim thought of the phone ringing off the hook at the post. Annie was right about that.

“Speaking of Kate,” he said. “I need your advice. A piece of information has come my way. I know it’s going to send Kate into orbit. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it, either.”

“Tell me,” Annie said.

“Erland Bannister has bought into the Suulutaq Mine.”

Annie was silent for so long, he began to wonder if he’d shocked her into speechlessness. “I see,” she said at last. “And you know this how?”

He told her.

“I see,” she said again, and brushed at a bit of nonexistent fluff on her hot pink pants leg. “I did not know this, Jim.” She didn’t look happy about it, either.

“It sounded to me like it happened recently. Bannister seemed … more than usually pleased with himself.”

“The word you are looking for is
smug,
” Annie said dryly.

Jim gave a short laugh. “I suppose so. Yes, all right, the bastard seemed pretty damn smug.”

Annie looked introspective. “I wonder which is more important to him, a good return on his investment, or rubbing Kate’s nose in his participation in it?”

“About equal, be my guess,” Jim said. He felt weary, and did not attribute it solely to next to no sleep the night before.

“I think you’re wrong,” Annie said after a moment. “I think it has much more to do with Kate.” Her eyes met his. “She put him in jail.”

“He tried to kill her,” Jim said, exasperated. “After conspiring to conceal another murder, and colluding to send his sister to prison for life for a crime she didn’t commit.”

“That’s not the way he sees it,” Annie said. “She put him in jail, it took him two years to get out, and he wants revenge. One of the best ways to do that is to invest in something that will bring him to the Park on a regular basis. Kate’s Park. He’s out of the family business, did you know?”

“Heard something about that,” Jim said. “Nothing specific.”

“It was kept very quiet,” Annie said, “but you can take it from me that Erland Bannister is no longer in any way connected to Bannister Enterprises or to the Bannister Foundation. Victoria Muravieff made sure the word went forth.”

Jim looked at her, fascinated. The quiet little mouse taking notes in the corner was all kinds of gone, replaced by this mogul with sources all over the Alaska power structure. The Return of Ekaterina Shugak. He wondered if Kate understood the magnitude of what she had wrought. “Did she buy him off?”

“Victoria?” Annie considered. “That wasn’t the feeling I got. There was more a sense of … duress, shall we say.”

“Erland didn’t go willingly.”

“No. And another reason to be angry with Kate.”

Jim remembered a conversation he’d had last year with Kate about Erland’s antecedents, and had a pretty good idea what Victoria had used to pry Erland’s hands off the family business. By now, Erland would know who had handed Victoria that pry bar. Arrogant, power-hungry, homicidal Bannister might be, but nobody ever said he didn’t have his finger on the pulse of the state. Information was power, he knew it, he collected it, and he used it.

Annie was looking at him, eyebrows raised, so he straightened out his face and said, “So he’ll be looking for new investments. New Alaskan pies to stick his fingers in.”

Annie nodded. “And if one of those pies is in the backyard of the woman who orchestrated his downfall, so much the better.”

“Great,” Jim said heavily.

A moment of mutually shared gloom ticked past before Jim got to his feet. “Well, thanks, Annie, for not making my day.”

“Sorry, Jim.” She offered him a sympathetic smile. “And, Jim?”

He paused at the door, looking at her over his shoulder.

Her round face was serious and her gaze bored into his, demanding his attention. “Know your enemy.”

He hadn’t told her about Axenia being on the jet with Erland. He would tell Kate, and Kate could tell her. Niniltna Native Association business was not his business, other than on an individual, civil, and/or criminal basis.

He was almost running by the time he hit the front door.

*   *   *

At the post, Maggie was on the phone, explaining why she would not dispatch an Alaska state trooper to mediate a dispute over the sale of a secondhand snow machine. She hung up and glowered at him. “You need help. We need help.”

“I know.” He thought of the state budget, and of how thin the troopers were already spread. He thought of Liam Campbell on his own in Newenham, with seven times the population of Niniltna and without even any local cops for support. With the kind of money the Suulutaq was going to bring into the state, he’d bet half his salary that the Niniltna post would get help before the Newenham post did.

Which didn’t necessarily mean he’d turn it down.

“You look tired,” she said. “Anything to do with the four assholes in back?”

“Everything to do with them,” he said. “You read the reports?”

She nodded grimly.

“You up to taking them to Ahtna in the van?”

She brightened. “You’ll handle the calls?”

His shoulders slumped. “I’ll handle the calls.”

She was up out of her chair and halfway out the door before he’d finished his sentence.

He logged on and read through yesterday’s daily trooper dispatches. He couldn’t say with any truth things were any worse in the Park than they were anywhere else in the state, unfortunately.

Maggie pulled the van out of the impound lot in back of the post and Liam helped her cuff-and-stuff the three rapists and the Darrylinator in the back. “Got your pepper spray?” She nodded. He looked at the sky, low and gray, kind of how he was feeling. “Okay, be on your way, and if it looks worse by the time you turn ’em over to Kenny, stay the night, okay?”

She flashed him a smile. “You don’t have to ask me twice.”

He knew without asking that she’d already called her husband, and that she would be stopping at their house to pick him up, and that the reservation had already been made at the Ahtna Lodge. At least someone would be getting laid tonight.

There were, mercifully, few nuisance calls the rest of the morning. At noon, he caught up on his paperwork and went down to the Riverside Cafe for lunch in a slightly better frame of mind. He sat at the counter, the better to be fussed over by proprietor Laurel Meganack, a pocket Venus in T-shirt and leggings, her smartly cut black hair flopping flirtatiously in bright brown eyes that took in his hunger and his fatigue at a glance. There was a large mug of coffee in front of him before he had his jacket off, and she began assembling a canned salmon salad sandwich with onions and sweet pickles and mayo on sourdough bread before he ordered. He got himself on the outside of that and got a refill on his coffee and started to feel something approaching human.

He looked around. The cafe was surprisingly only half full. Before they’d started exploring the Suulutaq, the Riverside had been a Park rat hangout. Afterwards, it was eternally full of young McMiners, dog-dirty and loaded for bear. Today was a welcome respite.

He nodded at the man two stools down. “Demetri.”

“How you doing, Jim.”

“Busy,” Jim said.

“I bet.” A rare smile lit the other man’s square, serious face. Echoing Jim’s thoughts, he said, “Nice to be in here without the rabble rousers bringing the roof down.”

“Isn’t it, though.”

“You see this?” Demetri handed him something that proved to be a trifold brochure, with the name
GAEA
next to a circular logo of a woman with long dark hair cradling the earth in her arms. The distinct outline of Alaska was visible.