a Night Too Dark (2010) (24 page)

Eighteen

By the time she got to the hospital Gammons had relapsed into his waking coma. She swore at length, startling a passing nurse in pink scrubs and provoking the admiration of a group of interns, who paused in their rounds to hear her out, rapt expressions indicating they were taking mental notes for future reference.
When she ran out of breath Lempe said, “Yes, well, Ms. Shugak, as I told you before, there isn’t a great deal to be done.”
She suspected he was hiding his personal glee that Kate Shugak had been thwarted in her scorched-earth search for the truth. “What did he say?”
“I wasn’t there, I—”
“Who was there? Who can tell me what he said?”
The nurse in pink had been there. She approached Kate with caution, keeping enough distance between them so that if need be she’d have a head start. Kate fixed her with a basilisk stare. “Nurse . . . Pritchard, is it?” She was reading from the name tag fixed to the pink top.
Pritchard gave a timid nod.
At least it wasn’t Ratched. Kate indicated Lempe with a jerk of
her head. “The doc here tells me you were in the room when Mr. Gammons woke up.”
Another timid nod.
“What did he say?”
Pritchard gave Lempe a nervous glance and Kate stepped between them, staring into Pritchard’s eyes. Pritchard was six inches taller than Kate and outweighed her by seventy pounds but she took a step back. “What. Did. He. Say,” Kate said again.
Pritchard’s face might actually have lost a little color. Her voice came out in a rapid squeak, like somebody fast-forwarding a tape. “It was like he woke out of a nightmare he was screaming what are you doing Rick no no don’t please don’t.”
It took Kate a moment to apply proper attribution and punctuation. “He said, ‘What are you doing, Rick? No! No, don’t! Please, don’t!’ ”
Pritchard nodded, looking longingly at the door.
Kate was remorseless. “Those were his exact words?”
Another frightened nod.
“Okay, thanks.”
Pritchard spun on her heel and scuttled down the corridor.
Kate turned to look at Gammons, back in his chair, staring out the window. “If he says anything more, it would be useful if accurate notes were kept.”
Lempe gave her a curious look. “Does what he said help your case?”
“Part of it,” she said.
Kate called Brendan on her cell phone as George was loading the Otter for the flight home. It was an all-freight flight this trip, which was good for her Costco purchases, but he had had to install a seat for her. He was still grumbling when Brendan picked up. “Brendan? It’s Kate.”
“Kate! My one, my own, my only true love.”
“Any other news on those names?”
“As a matter of fact.”
“Brendan, my plane is about to leave.”
“Your friend Allen was an embezzler, a con man, and a big-time recidivist. He left a paper trail in various names from Minnesota to California, everything from identity theft to credit card scams. He must have been pretty good because he’d only been convicted once, for running a pyramid scheme out of a phony investment office in Tucson. He made the mistake of hanging around too long and a bunch of his investors showed up and beat him up bad enough that he couldn’t run when they called the cops. Even then, he was out in three months with good behavior. You got all that?”
“I got it. Brendan, you’ve got a leak in your office.”
His voice changed. “What?”
“The FBI knows you were running Allen. They’ve been following the money, too.”
“Why?”
She told him.
“Holy shit.”
“That’s what I said.” George caught her eye and tapped his watch. “Gotta go, babe. Thanks for the help.”
She climbed in next to George and he had them in the air five minutes later. He was silent most of the way home, which suited her fine because she wanted to sort out everything she’d learned in Anchorage, to try to bring some sense of order to it.
Allen had been a ringer for both John King and True North, running a wholesale market in proprietary information out of the Suulutaq Mine, from whom he was drawing a third paycheck. You had to admire the efficiency of his opportunism. Even for a man of Allen’s past, though, playing three sides against each other had to be wearing.
Lyda had noticed something, hence the file on her computer.
But Allen had predeceased her, so he hadn’t killed her. Who had?
Who had shot Dewayne Gammons? It was Lyda’s pistol, it fit the holster in her drawer. Who took it? Or had she given it to someone?
Allen’s body was in the clearing with the gun.
Gammons was wandering around the woods with a bullet hole in him.
A circumstantial case could be made that Allen shot Gammons. Why? Why would one friend shoot another? They could have been brothers, they—
“Oh,” she said out loud. “Oh!”
“What oh,” George said over the headset. “What’s with the ohs?” His eyes roved the sky. “We got traffic? Where?”
She looked around as if she’d just realized where they were. Beneath them the Kanuyaq spiraled out like a broad silver ribbon. Ahead of them the Quilaks loomed large and menacing. “Sorry, George,” she said, contrite. Bad idea to make loud noises sitting next to a pilot in midair. “I think I just figured something out. Maybe. Possibly. There’s a chance I might actually know at least part of what happened here.”
“A part of what happened where?” George said.
“Just fly the plane,” she said. “Can’t we go any faster?”
A miffed George put them down on the Niniltna airstrip in good time. Kate abandoned her purchases and ran down the hill to the trooper post.
“He’s not here,” Maggie said, “there was a shooting over in Tebay Lakes, possible fatality. He said he wouldn’t be back until tonight at the earliest.”
Kate had been so preoccupied she hadn’t even noticed that Jim’s plane was gone. “Damn it,” she said, frustrated. She almost stamped her foot.
Maggie sniffed. Kate still wasn’t forgiven for standing up for the
mine, even if she hadn’t. She hadn’t, had she? After the conversation with Kostas McKenzie the evening before she wasn’t so sure.
Mutt came to the door of Jim’s office and looked out at Kate with a long, meaningful stare.
“Hey, girl,” Kate said.
Mutt turned her back on her.
“Oh, come on, Mutt,” Kate said.
The doorway to Jim’s office remained empty.
Then the door behind her opened and Jim walked in, and Mutt bounced out right past Kate as if Kate wasn’t even there. There followed a red carpet welcome for Jim Chopin that would have shamed the producers of an Oscar Award ceremony.
Jim, bending down to exchange salutations, quirked an eyebrow at Kate. “Told you she’d be pissed.”
She grabbed his arm and hauled him into his office, almost shutting the door in Mutt’s face. Mutt gave an admonitory yip and looked at Kate with reproachful eyes.
“Your eyes sparkle, your cheeks are flushed, words tremble upon your lips. Ace detective that I am, I deduce that you have news.” Jim hung up his jacket and ball cap and removed his gun and holster and put them away in the bottom drawer. “Let me make some coffee. All they drink in Tebay Lakes is Folgers.” He shuddered. Jim Chopin was a world-class coffee snob, a soul mate to Howard Schultz whether the Starbucks boss knew it or not.
“I think I know what happened,” she said. She wasn’t quite dancing in place, but close.
“You know who killed Lyda Blue?” he said, pausing in the act of filling the carafe.
She deflated a little. “No, dammit,” she said. “At least not yet. But I think I’ve got it figured out about Gammons and Allen.”
“Gammons wake up?”
“No, dammit, and would you just let me talk it out first?”
“Sure,” he said, “fine, believe me, I’ve had enough drama for one day.”
She allowed herself to be diverted, she told herself, only for a second. “Why, what was going on in Tebay Lakes?”
“Bob Ellis called in on the short band, all excited, and said there’d been a shooting and that someone was dead and there was a crazy guy with a gun shooting up the place. I get there and it’s Boyd Beebe shooting at his house because Ellen locked him out again.”
“Bob and Boyd getting into the home brew again?”
His expression hardened. “Yeah, they were both shit-faced. I told Ellen she has to stop making that stuff.”
“Her root beer is pretty good,” Kate said. Jim looked up from ladling a generous quantity of Tsunami Blend into the filter. She shrugged. “Their daughter ran off a couple of years back. I found her for them. Ellen always drops off a case of root beer for me when they come through town. I haven’t shared any with you yet?”
“You have not.” Jim switched on the coffeemaker and stood there willing it to brew faster. “Ellen was a little well to live herself when I got there. Tell me something. How many people you think move to the Bush so they can drink themselves to death?”
“What did you do?”
“Confiscated the rifle.”
“What if a bear shows up?”
“We can only hope it eats them.” The coffeemaker beeped. At last, at last, thank god almighty. He filled two mugs, handed her one, and went to sit behind his desk. He cradled the mug in both hands and let the aroma waft upward, through his nostrils, past his sinuses, to infuse his cerebral cortex and stimulate his synapses.
“So—”
“Just let me enjoy this one moment, okay?”
Kate flung herself into the chair opposite and tapped a bad-tempered foot.
He drank, drank again, and felt the caffeine flood into his bloodstream with a revivifying buzz. Dealing with drunks could sap your very will to live. He opened his eyes and sat back. “Okay. Talk to me.”
“I want to walk through it out loud and you pick holes, okay?”
He saluted her with the mug and leaned back to prop his feet up. “One of the things I’m best at.”
“First of all, let me just say this is the weirdest damn case you’ve ever had me work on.”
“Thank you. We aim to please.”
“Yeah, you can yuck it up all you want, Chopin, but just wait till all this lands back in your lap.” She raised herself up by the arms of the chair, crossed her legs beneath her, and shook her bangs out of her eyes. She was so damn cute, and how much he would rather be throwing her down on the nearest horizontal surface and having his way with her. He was sure it would beat the hell out of whatever was coming next.
It would beat the hell out of pretty much anything, come to that.
“Okay. I’ll try to tell this linearly.” She frowned. “I’ll try.” She took a deep breath and began to speak in headings and subheadings.
“True North Investments is an international venture capital firm that backs natural resource exploration, discovery, and extraction.”
Jim opened his mouth, caught her eye, and closed it again.
“John King, president and CEO of RPetCo Alaska, the majority producer in the Prudhoe Bay oil fields of Alaska, sits on the True North board of directors.
“Global Harvest Resources Inc. discovers the second-largest deposit of gold in the world in our backyard. It may in fact turn out to be the largest gold mine in the world if they ever manage to define its limits.
“Global Harvest is an international corporation but they’re more oriented toward exploration and discovery than they are toward production.
This time, the projected deposit being so large, they have decided it will be more profitable to run it themselves.
“True North looks at the Suulutaq Mine and looks at Global Harvest and scents the possibility of a buyout or a takeover. They start making investments in Global Harvest stock, but they need more information for a more informed decision. They look around and find a Minnesota con man named Richard Henry Allen and recruit him to go to work for Global Harvest at the Suulutaq Mine, with instructions to weasel his way into the good graces of the mine geologists so he can get the copies of the data that the core samples are producing.
“Meanwhile, sitting on True North’s board, John King gets wind of this. He’s been RPetCo’s CEO for over six years and the price of North Slope crude is dropping and so are RPetCo dividends and the shareholders are getting restless, thinking they might like a change of corporate leadership. King thinks that to save his job, maybe RPetCo might need to branch out, expand its resource base. The acquisition of Global Harvest by RPetCo Alaska might be just the jewel to cement the CEO crown on his head in perpetuity.
“But he needs information, too, as he doesn’t have access to the actual data that Allen is feeding True North. So King figures since Allen is already in place he might be willing to sell the information he is stealing twice, and he is right. Allen, by the way, had a bank balance in Minneapolis amounting to a little under three hundred thousand dollars.”
Jim choked on his coffee. Kate watched the resulting mop-up with some satisfaction. “So Rick Allen was a corporate spy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For not one but two masters.” He thought. “Three, if you count the fact that he was also drawing a paycheck from Global Harvest.”
“He wasn’t spying for Global Harvest, for them he was doing a real job.”
“Fine,” Jim said. “That still doesn’t explain why he and Gammons went tarryhooting out in the frickin’ woods in May.”
Kate leaned forward, her face lit with the excitement of the chase. “Dewayne Gammons and Rick Allen are in the batch of first hires for the Suulutaq Mine. Lyda told me Gammons drove here with some of the other guys looking for work. What do you want to bet Allen was one of the other guys?”
He made a come-on motion with his hand.
“Okay, so we know from hearsay they were at minimum acquaintances. They could have driven up the Alcan together in Gammons’s truck. According to our friendly neighborhood bigamist, Randy Randolph, when they were working nights they snuck into the kitchen together for pastry fresh out of the oven, while, and this is important, engaged in a macabre conversation about death and ways to die.”
“You’ll remember I’ve met Randy Randolph,” Jim said, “and I find it difficult to believe that he has ever used the word ‘macabre.’ And that if he has used it, he has never pronounced it correctly.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay.” Jim drank coffee. “Tell me this much. Have we even got positive IDs on the goddamn bodies yet?”
“Brillo called me this morning just before we took off. The blood type on the skull is the same blood type in Gammons’s file, which is to say Allen’s. Preliminary finding is that prior to death occurring the skull received a serious blow to his forehead by a sharp object. It was gnawed on by a bunch of different critters after death.”
“And the sharp object?”
“Brillo’s best guess? The front hoof of a moose.”
“So even in Allen’s case we’re not talking about a murder.” Jim wondered how he was going to justify what was going to be an astronomical contract fee to his boss.
“Wait,” she said, “just wait. Gammons’s doc says he thinks one of