Though Not Dead (41 page)

“They had been stored in the basement of the old courthouse in Ahtna,” Ms. Sherwood said. “When they built the new courthouse five years ago, Judge Singh asked us if we would like to have them.”

Five years ago, Kate thought. Old Sam had done some work for the new courthouse, hauling Kanuyaq River rocks to Ahtna for the façade. “Do your records show 1937 and 1939 as missing?”

Ms. Swanson shook her head. “I’m afraid they were not properly inventoried when they were accepted into the collection.”

“So they could have been part of the collection,” Kate said. “Which means they could have walked out of the building at any time.”

Ms. Sherwood’s nostrils flared slightly. “Not since I have been curator here, no.”

“Why not?”

“Are you familiar with RFID technology?” She saw her answer on Kate’s face. “Radio frequency identification. It was the second mission I undertook after I was appointed.”

“What was the first?”

Ms. Sherwood nodded at the computer. “The digitization of all of our records.”

“What does this RFID do?”

“A small electronic tag is placed on each item in the collection. It does two things. One, it trips an alarm if it is moved from its display. Two, it tracks the item.”

A chill ran up Kate’s spine. “How far?”

“Up to forty feet. It will be more eventually, as the technology advances, but at present, so long as staff is vigilant, it is enough to intercept the item before it gets to the parking lot outside. And presumably a getaway vehicle.”

Kate breathed again. The 1939 journal was tucked safely away at the Westchester Lagoon town house a mile away. “Sounds expensive,” she said.

“Not very, when you consider that the combined value of the collection is in the millions of dollars. Many of the items are priceless simply because they are irreplaceable.” Ms. Sherwood hesitated. “Ms. Shugak. Am I correct in thinking you are related to Ekaterina Shugak?”

“She was my grandmother.”

“I see.” Ms. Sherwood rose to her feet. “There is something you might like to see.”

She led the way back into the main room and to a glass-topped table planted directly in front of the Native studies bookcase. Inside was a Raven feast bowl, made of solid copper, eight inches wide, twelve inches long, and thirteen inches deep. The label read, “The gift of Ekaterina Shugak, 1972.”

“Holy crap,” Kate said. They had been speaking in hushed voices, but at this the three people seated at the tables raised their heads.

“Sorry,” Kate said to them. “Sorry,” she said to Ms. Sherwood. She looked back down at the bowl.

“Do you know anything about its history?” Ms. Sherwood said.

Kate shook her head. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it,” she said.

“Is there someone older you could ask? The story behind the artifact is as valuable, if not more so, than is the artifact itself.”

Kate thought of the aunties, and looked back at the bowl. The original carving was blunted by long use, and there were dents on the interior and exterior surfaces and scratches in the patina. It looked Tlingit.

It looked, in fact, like something a Tlingit chief might bring as part of a bride price when he married into an Interior tribe. “I can ask,” she said. “I can’t promise you any answers. Is there a photograph?”

There was, and Kate tucked it carefully away.

Ms. Sherwood escorted her through the gate. Kate lingered while she reseated herself. “Ms. Sherwood?”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind very much telling me the name of the person who first came to look at the judge’s journals?”

“He did not give me his name,” Ms. Swanson said.

“But you let him in anyway,” Kate said.

Ms. Sherwood forbore to point out that she had let Kate in, too. “He had a quite impeccable reference.”

“Did he,” Kate said. “Would you mind telling me who it was? And if he was in here again today?”

Ms. Sherwood had an uncharacteristic moment of hesitation.

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” Kate said. “I’m trying to track down another family artifact.” She looked over her shoulder at the display case holding the feast bowl, and from the corner of her eye saw Ms. Sherwood follow her gaze.

She looked back to meet Ms. Sherwood’s direct gaze. There were no flies on Coco Chanel. “And if I tell you, you’ll try to find out about the history of the feast bowl?”

Kate didn’t flinch. “Of course.”

“Erland Bannister,” Ms. Sherwood said.

*   *   *

Kate arrived back at the Subaru without any notion of how she’d gotten there. Mutt, snoozing in the sun with her chin on the passenger-side windowsill, woke up with a snort. “Tell me,” Kate said to her, “explain to me how a guy I helped put away two years ago can be mixed up in this fucking scavenger hunt of Old Sam’s?”

Mutt shook herself vigorously and let out with a large “Woof!” which startled a shriek out of a woman on the other side of the open window who was on her way into the bank to clean out the joint account she held with her husband, in preparation for filing for divorce that afternoon.

Kate fished out her cell phone and called Brendan. The deep rich tones rolled over her like a warm bath of caramel. “Babe! You’re still in town! Dinner again tonight? I’m thinking sushi at Yamato Ya this time, and—”

“Brendan, where is Erland Bannister?”

A startled silence, then, “Right where we put him, last time I looked.”

“You’re sure?” Something in the quality of the silence that followed put her on alert. “Brendan? Is he getting out?”

“I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” he said.

She hung up and stared, unseeing, through the windshield.

Erland Bannister was an éminence grise of the Alaskan robber barons, every bit as eminent and successful as Lucius Bell and Peter Heiman the elder, and Hermann Pilz, his grandfather, and Isaiah Bannister, his other grandfather.

Erland Bannister had kidnapped Kate two years before because she had discovered a little too much about his family history. He’d had every intention of killing her shortly thereafter. She’d had other ideas.

Upon her escape he had been arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated for what almost everyone involved hoped would be the rest of his natural life.

She waited. The woman who had shrieked exited the bank and made a wide detour around the Subaru to get back to her own car. Seven minutes later Kate’s phone rang and she snatched at it. “Brendan?”

“He’s right where we left him, Kate. In Spring Creek.” But she could hear the relief in his voice.

Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward was the state’s only maximum security prison, built for felony offenders. Seward was a hundred miles down the only road south from Anchorage, on a narrow fjord called Resurrection Bay. “For how much longer?” she said.

Again, he let the silence speak for him.

She swore, imaginatively and at length. “Can you get me in to see him?”

She could hear the surprise in Brendan’s voice. “You want to see Erland Bannister?”

“Yes.”

A short silence. “When?”

“As soon as I can get down there.”

“Wait a minute.” She heard the keys click on his keyboard. “He’s in the general population. Tomorrow’s Sunday, so either one
P.M.
to four
P.M.
, or six thirty to nine.”

“I can be there by one.”

“I’ll clear it with the superintendent.” A pause. “He doesn’t have to see you if he doesn’t want to, Kate.”

“He’ll want to,” she said.

Twenty-six

She picked up a sliced smoked ham hock and a small cabbage on the way back to the town house. She put the ham hock into a pot of water with a bay leaf and a couple of cloves of peeled, smashed garlic, brought it to a boil, and reduced it to a simmer. “Come on,” she said to Mutt, and they went out to join the throng of walkers, bikers, rollerbladers, and skateboarders on the Coastal Trail.

It was a clear, cool autumn afternoon during one of Alaska’s rare Indian summers. The sky was pale blue, Knik Arm a pale gray, and the leaves of the deciduous trees every shade from pale yellow to golden brown, drifting delicately down to the ground one at a time to form crisp, colorful piles that begged to be scuffed into a cloud. Mutt romped through every one she came to, delighting a few commuters, alarming more. “You should keep your dog under control,” one said.

“She is under control,” Kate said.

“She should be on a leash.”

Kate didn’t raise her voice. “Mutt. Heel.”

Mutt, sniffing at a promising hole in a way guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of its inhabitants, streaked to Kate’s side and took up station to starboard, her shoulder precisely even with Kate’s hip, and cast a quizzical eye upon the volunteer trail warden.

They were allowed to continue on their way in peace. After Lyn Ary Park the traffic abated and Kate picked up the pace. It felt good to stretch her legs, and unless she went for a hike on one of the trails into the Chugachs, this was as close to a wilderness experience as she was going to get in Anchorage.

She had hiked those trails regularly when she lived in Anchorage, working for the DA. Flattop was too crowded for her taste, but the less-well-known Near Point was only three and a half hours trailhead to summit to trailhead, and in late June was awash in a sea of wildflowers, everything from chocolate lilies to western columbine. She’d climbed it two or three times a week in season, back in the day, and on visits to Anchorage after she’d moved back to the Park.

She hadn’t hiked it since she had been kidnapped and brought unconscious to a cabin in the back range of those same Chugach Mountains.

Coincidence? Survey says not.

“Erland Bannister is in prison for murder and kidnapping,” she had said to Ms. Sherwood after a moment of stunned silence.

Ms. Sherwood had waited a moment to reply. “That may be so, Ms. Shugak, but he is not forgotten by his friends.”

Sherwood took her orders from the Bells, owners of the Last Frontier Bank. Which meant Bannister had asked for a favor, and one of Lucius Bell’s descendants had granted it.

If Abbott was working for Bannister, then Bannister had ordered him after Kate. If it were simple revenge for locking him up for life, why would he have waited two years?

No, she’d been right the first time. Whatever was going on, it began with Old Sam.

So how did Old Sam know Erland? They weren’t contemporaries, Old Sam must have had at least twenty years on the other man.

But the Bannisters had come north in the Gold Rush, if Kate remembered her Alaska history correctly. So Erland’s father might have known Old Sam.

Mutt gave her an affectionate shoulder bump that nearly knocked her off her feet. They had reached the bench below Earthquake Park. The light was fading and she wondered how long she had been standing there lost in thought.

She turned and headed for home. When she let them in the door, the aroma of dinner had flooded the entire house. Drool pooled in her mouth. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Shoes kicked off, jacket tossed on a chair, she tuned in the radio to
All Things Considered
and cut half of the cabbage into one-inch squares. She removed the ham hock from the broth, cut up a potato, and added the cabbage and potato to the broth. She brought it back to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, and set the timer for twenty minutes. In the meantime she separated the meat from the bone and the fat. The meat went on a plate in a warm oven and the bone and the fat went into a bowl for Mutt, who settled down with it in the postage-stamp-sized backyard with an air of deep content.

The dinger went. She removed the plate of meat from the oven, ladled out potato and cabbage, buttered a slice of whole wheat bread from Europa Bakery, sat down, and tucked in. She didn’t think about Old Sam or Bruce Abbott or Erland Bannister. Nothing ever came between Kate and food.

After cleaning up she let Mutt back in and moved operations to the living room, where she built a fire in the fireplace and put her feet up, watching the flames flicker over Mutt’s prone form and sipping from a mug of steaming hot cocoa. Then and only then did she allow the case, for lack of a better word, to reinvade her consciousness.

Something had been tickling at the back of her mind since she’d found the second journal in the cabin.

Was Old Sam really leaving breadcrumbs for her? Had he known someone would come looking for something he had? Why would they wait until he died? She’d been attacked three times and Jane Silver once. The number argued in favor of someone looking for something valuable, and looking with considerable urgency, too. If they wanted it that badly, why not go after it when Old Sam was still living? He’d been a tough old bird, true, but no one was invulnerable. She thought about her pickup going ass over teakettle off the road.

But that was odd, too. The attacks in Old Sam’s two cabins had robbery as a motive. The attack on the road, on the face of it, had only assault with intent as a motive. No one had come stumbling out into the snow after her to search her or her truck for the icon or a clue as to its whereabouts. Or to dispose of competition.

The person who had attacked her at the cabin in Niniltna didn’t have to be the same person who had killed Jane Silver, and the person who had killed Jane Silver didn’t have to be the same person who had run her off the road on the way home. And the two people at Canyon Hot Springs didn’t have to be either of them. So it could be Wheeler and Gunn and Abbott all three, severally or together. And/or anyone within earshot of Virginia Anahonak.

She shook her head, frustrated. It was like playing Whack-A-Perp. It might be better to look at it from a different perspective. How many people could have known about the existence of the icon?

Other than what appeared to be an entire generation of Park rat elders, many of whom were still living.

Grandma used to say he shouldn’t have been a shareholder at all.

And even if it had never percolated as far as Kate, at least one of those elders had told their children’s children. Which widened the pool of suspects considerably.

Not a significantly better perspective, then. Her heart sank, but only for a moment. “Occam’s razor, Kate,” she said out loud.