Blood Will Tell (8 page)

Kate took Minnesota to International Airport Road and turned right. She didn't run more than three red lights and the journey was accomplished in eight minutes flat. She turned right off the frontage road, bumped over a set of railroad tracks, passed through a gate and started looking for apartment numbers.

The condominium complex was arranged in six buildings, a smaller horseshoe inside a larger one with detached garages in front of each building. Parked in the fire lane between the two buildings on the right was a blue-and-white. Behind the blue-and-white was an ambulance. Kate went past them, found a parking space and walked back down, arriving at the ambulance at the same time as the paramedics and the stretcher. On the stretcher was a covered body.

Neither of the medics was known to Kate. She took a deep breath. "Excuse me."

The medic at the head of the stretcher looked up. "Yeah?"

Kate nodded at the stretcher. "Enakenty Barnes?"

The medic at the foot of the stretcher nodded. "That's what his driver's license says."

"How'd he die?" "Broken neck," said the first medic.

"Wasn't that far a fall, but he landed wrong." The second medic demonstrated with his hands. "Spine snapped like a piece of dry wood."

"I'm a cousin," Kate said, her voice even. "I can I.D. him for you."

They exchanged a glance. The first medic shrugged and dropped the stretcher legs. The second folded back the blanket.

Enakenty's eyes were closed but he didn't look as if he were sleeping; he looked, in fact, a little puzzled, as if not quite sure how he came to be there, in that place, at that moment. That made two of them, Kate thought.

Up to this point, she had not been angry. Since she had come of age she had shunned anything to do with Association business, avoiding Native politics like the plague, so that when Ekaterina asked her to look into the board's current machinations she was able to acquiesce while remaining detached, if a little annoyed at being maneuvered into it. But as she stood there, looking down into Enakenty's lifeless face, something deep down began to stir, something very like anger.

There wasn't any blood or obvious contusion on the square face with the heavy jaw. His skin was darker than Kate remembered it, and his dark hair lighter, but that might have been the gray forming at the temples.

The last time she'd seen Enakenty Barnes was at the Class C state basketball championship in Niniltna, in March the year before. He had one kid each on the boys' and girls' teams and never missed a game. On the surface he and Martha had had one of the better marriages in the Park, although Kate thought she remembered some rumors of Enakenty playing around. It could have been true. It could just as easily not have been true, given the fact that rumor, gossip and innuendo were the only things that kept the Park going between Halloween and breakup.

Enakenty had been a good fisherman, delivering fish on his father's permit when his father's back went out, making the payments and the insurance premiums on the boat every year, taking his kids out with him, paying them a crew share. He was a responsible if unimaginative board member, never missing a meeting, fulfilling his duties and representing the shareholders without complaint. Enakenty Barnes had been an ordinary man, a regular guy, maybe even a good old boy. He wasn't anything special or extraordinary, neither a hero nor a villain. He got along with his wife, he loved his kids, he made his boat payments, he worked for his community, and now he lay dead in front of Kate, forty years before his time. There was something obscene in the very sight. Her anger grew.

Sarah Kompkoff's death, alone, she might have accepted as accident. But a second board member so soon afterward, and so conveniently before one of the most important board meetings in the Association's history? Kate hated coincidences.

Iqaluk meant money for some, subsistence and a centuries-old culture for some, politically correct kudos for others. If it had meant death for Enakenty Barnes, cousin, husband, father, fisherman, tribal leader, Kate Shugak was going to know the reason why. For just a moment she let the anger flare up and beat hot and hard within her breast. She didn't let it take over, but she tasted it, got used to the flavor, felt its strength. Anger, properly contained and channeled, was a good motivator and a useful tool.

Doors slammed and the ambulance pulled away. Kate put the anger in storage somewhere down deep inside and looked around with a cool, steady, detached gaze, a cop's eye that gathered in and stored information for later retrieval and evaluation. The blue-and-white was empty. Over its roof she saw a flash of yellow, and followed it between the garages and the condos to a back yard fenced with chain link and festooned with crime scene tape. The building had three floors. The second and third floor apartments had railed balconies; the first floor had unfenced patios. The roof was steeply pitched and shingled with cedar shakes.

A police officer stood in the center of the taped-off area, next to a spray-painted outline of a body, frowning over a notepad. He looked up at the crunch of Kate's feet on dead grass. "Ma'am, you can't come--"

His eyes focused on her face and his voice changed. "Shugak? Is that you?"

"Sayles?"

He was tall and solid and looked bulkier than he was in his uniform. His face was a wedge of flesh and bone, his eyes were deep sunk beneath bushy brows and he had a smile like a piranha, all teeth and appetite.

He strolled over to the tape and raised the pencil to push her collar to one side. He tsked over the scar. "What's the matter, Shugak, you piss off somebody with a bad aim?"

She didn't move. APD Officer Steven Sayles knew the story as well as she did; he'd been first on the scene and had called in for the ambulance.

He was probably responsible for saving Kate's life. She hadn't thanked him then. She didn't now. She nodded toward the outline. "What happened?"

He looked faintly disappointed not to get a rise out of her. "You related?"

"A cousin. What happened?"

"You got here pretty fast. How'd you hear about it?"

"You called the landlord to find out who he was. He called Enakenty's wife. She called my grandmother. My grandmother called me. What happened?"

He used the pencil to point to the top balcony on the end. "A perfect ten in the Alaska Landings Swan Dive Invitational."

"Jump or pushed?" Sayles shrugged. "Any witnesses?" O'Leary shook his head. "The apartment open?" He nodded. "Mind if I take a look?" He raised a weary eyebrow and one hand, palm up, which she took for official authorization. He went back to his notepad while she went around to the front of the building. The front door was locked. There was a keypad next to the door and she pushed buttons until she got an answer. Kate identified herself as an investigator and a woman with a shaky voice buzzed her in. Two and a half flights up on the left, the door was open. Something crunched beneath her foot as she stepped inside.

The living room had a cathedral ceiling that stretched all the way up to the inside peak of the roof. The kitchen was small, the dining room smaller. There were two good-sized bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The living room had a sliding glass door, open. Kate crossed the living room and went out onto the balcony.

The overhanging eave of the roof was festooned with five different sets of wind chimes made of glass, brass and wood. They hung motionless and mute in the still air. Sayles, busy with his notepad, didn't bother to look up. The railing came to Kate's breast. She was five feet tall.

Enakenty hadn't been much more than five-three. The rough wood of the railing was spotless in a coat of smoke-gray paint. No blood stains, no broken slats, not even a footprint on the top rail. There was a barbecue filled with ash and a yellow-and-white plastic deck chair folded up in one corner. A door on the right opened into a storage closet, filled with empty boxes, firewood, a bag of charcoal, a box of Sterno logs, a bag of kitty litter and a bag of cat food.

Kate went back inside. The kitchen was completely furnished. All the cups matched the plates, the Revereware pots all had lids that fit and the white plastic utensils looked fresh out of Costco. The refrigerator contained a loaf of white bread, a package of English muffins, a half gallon of two percent milk, a carton of eggs, a two-pound block of Tillamook Extra Sharp, a pound of bacon, a pound of pork sausage, a pound of butter and a jar of strawberry preserves. There were two whole pineapples. The date on the milk said it was good for ten more days. The jar of preserves hadn't been cracked. Neither had any of the eggs. There was a pound of unopened Kona Macadamia Nut coffee from the Lion Coffee Company in Honolulu in the freezer.

The guest bedroom was empty but for a full-size bed, a nightstand and a lamp. A copy of Donald Trump's autobiography was on the nightstand. A copy of Lee lacocca's was on the shelf beneath. The closets were empty.

The adjacent bathroom was immaculate.

Down the hall in the master bedroom, one half of the closet was given over to what Kate presumed were Enakenty's clothes. There weren't many of them, half a dozen plaid shirts, two pairs of Levis, three T-shirts with Crazy Shirts Hawaiian logos and a pair of bermuda shorts with neon fish swimming across them. The other half of the closet was so empty it echoed. The bed was made. Kate stripped back the covers and sniffed the sheets. They smelled like soap, and from the creases looked just put on that day. She looked for and couldn't find the used sheets.

The master bathroom was bare but for a single toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, a bar of soap and a set of plush towels that matched the set in the guest bathroom.

Kate had stayed in Holiday Inns with more warmth and charm.

She came out of the bathroom and a spot of color behind the bedroom door caught her eye. She swung the door wide. On the floor behind it was a tiny puddle of red silk, which when Kate held it up seemed even less substantial than it had on the floor. It looked like a delicate lace bra with a pair of panties attached, of a size to fit a skinny thirteen year-old. The last time she looked, Enakenty's wife Martha had been a robust thirty-seven.

Kate's hands felt large and clumsy holding the scrap of silk and lace, and she dropped it back down on the floor for Sayles to find and inventory.

Something crunched underfoot in the entryway off the front door again, and this time she stooped to look at it. Tiny grains of some white, rocklike substance, like they put in aquariums, only smaller and lighter. She wet a forefinger and picked up a couple and took them out to the balcony. The grains inside the bag of kitty litter matched those on the floor of the entryway. She bent over to sniff at the floor, and caught a faint whiff of old urine.

She went downstairs. There was a slender blonde just going out the front door. "Excuse me, ma'am?" Kate called from the landing. "Could you hold up a minute?"

The blonde was slender and pale with big blue eyes that looked on the verge of bursting into tears. She couldn't have been more than nineteen.

She had moved into the bottom right condo the previous week, she was renting from the owner, she had just finished her training at Reeve Aleutian Airways, she was beginning a new job as a flight attendant the next day, this was her first very own apartment and she didn't know why this had to happen to her. Kate refrained from pointing out that it hadn't happened to her, it had happened to Enakenty, and said, "Did you see anything, Ms. Coffey?"

"No, I didn't, I got home from Carr's just after. There was an ambulance and everything. It was awful." She sniffled. "Why is this happening to me? Everything was so perfect! Why did this have to happen to me?"

"Did you know the people who lived in A304?"

The blonde shook her head and hunted through her purse for a square of Kleenex with which to dab at her eyes. "I just moved in. I'll have to get a new apartment now, I couldn't possibly stay here with dead bodies all over the place, and this one is so convenient to the airport, I'll never find anything--"

"Did you ever hear a cat upstairs?"

The blonde blinked. "A cat?"

"Yes. As in meow?"

Ms. Coffey blinked back tears. "Why, yes, now that I think of it."

"Lately? As in last night?"

"I don't know." The smooth brow creased with effort. "I got home late last night--we were celebrating our new jobs, you know--I don't--"

"Think about it for a minute," Kate urged.

The blue eyes widened. "Is it important?"

"It could be."

The smooth brow creased with thought. "I came in about one o'clock. I remember because I dropped my keys--" she held up a large bunch of keys

"--and on this floor they make a lot of noise." The floor was of ceramic tile. "When I bent over for the keys I dropped my bag."

Kate waited.

The blonde brightened. "You know, there was a cat meowing from somewhere upstairs. I remember, I apologized for waking it up."

Kate was beginning to get the picture. It must have been a good party.

"Of course," Ms. Coffey added, "there are five other apartments that open onto this entrance, including mine. The cat could have been in any one of them."

Kate nodded. "Thank you very much, Ms. Coffey."

"You're welcome, I'm sure. I'm just glad I was able to help." The blonde paused on the sidewalk outside the door, looking up at the kitchen window of A304. "It must be nice living on the top floor."

"I suppose," Kate said.

"Nobody walking on your roof all the time. And that one's on the end, too, so you'd only be sharing one wall with somebody else." "Yes," Kate said, edging away.

"Would you happen to know--" "No," Kate said, and ran for it. She went back up the stairs, pausing on all three landings to knock at the doors of the other four condos. There was no answer at three, and no sounds of animal movement behind them.

The fourth door was opened by a disheveled A and P mechanic who had just come off the night shift with Alaska Airlines, and he was neither a cat owner nor happy at being woken up. Kate went back out to the yard.

Sayles had just risen to his feet next to the spray-painted outline and was dusting the knees of his uniform pants. "Hey," she said.

He looked up. "Hey yourself."

She nodded up at the condo. "You know who owned it?"

"Some property management outfit." He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages. "Arctic Investors."

"You talked to them?"

Sayles nodded. "They have an office downtown. According to them, Enakenty Barnes rented it nearly a year ago. Hasn't missed any rent or been late paying it. Other than that, they haven't heard a peep out of him."

"Nobody was in the apartment when you got here?" He shook his head and tucked his notebook back into his hip pocket. "What are you calling it?"

He shrugged. "It'd make my life a lot easier if I called it an accident."

Kate thought of the chest-high railing. "Is that how you're calling it?"

He shrugged again, and Kate knew from the flat expression in his eyes that he'd reached the limits of his generosity Indeed, he'd been positively helpful, for Sayles, and she was grateful. "You about done here?" He nodded. "Want a burger?"