Restless in the Grave (22 page)

She turned and her headlamp caught a gun rack on the wall. One of the many firearms it held was a dark, familiar shape, and she stepped closer.

It was another AK-47, she thought the same model she’d seen in Grant’s home office. Again with the moose-inappropriate firearm, but by all accounts from many wars a simple, effective, reliable weapon, designed to kill as many people as possible without jamming. The weapon, so Bobby Clark said, that had won the Vietnam War. He had one on his wall, too, although Bobby’s had a wooden stock and hand grip.

She’d been curious after Bobby showed her his, so she’d looked it up. A weapon that had been reproduced by nations from Albania to Yugoslavia, over a hundred million of them had been manufactured worldwide. It or a local variation thereof was the weapon of choice in every dirty little insurrection in every backwoods little nation on every continent since the first one had been stamped out in the USSR, right through to today. General Kalashnikov must have been so proud. Although he’d had more than a little help from the German weapons developers the USSR had relocated safely on their side of the border following World War II.

Next down was a single-barreled pump-action shotgun. She checked. A Remington Model 870, same as hers. Next was another pump-action shotgun, this one in a camo finish, a Benelli. It looked newer than the Remington, and the weapon below it was the twin of the alien-killer she’d seen in the gun safe back at the house.

It appeared that Finn Grant hadn’t limited his spending on mansions and remodels and high-end furnishings and gourmet snacks. She wondered if his FBO investors knew.

She also wondered if the presence of this much firepower might have something to do with the dividend shindig maintaining a discreet distance.

She turned and surveyed the office. She’d been through the desk, through the files, and absent a computer she was just about out of ideas. Nothing on the coffee table, nothing under the cushions of the two chairs near it. The map was screwed to the wall, and the framed duck stamp hanging on another wall lifted easily and revealed nothing but more wall.

She went over to the desk and went through it one more time. Pens, pencils, knives, diary, coins.

Ammunition.

Perhaps sensitized by the weaponry on the walls of both offices, she spilled the box of cartridges across the top of the desk.

One of those things was not like the other.

The brass of the casings shone in the light of her headlamp, but one did not reflect as much light. Further, he was a portly little fellow, broad in the beam, with a much blunter nose. She picked it up, and then picked another up to compare weights. The fake cartridge weighed much less than the real one. She put down the real cartridge to examine the fake one more closely. It was plastic. There was a crack between the bullet and casing. She inserted a fingernail, and the bullet pulled out of the case to reveal a thumb drive.

Oh, hell yes.

A soft whine through the crack in the window brought her head up. The engine of a small vehicle sounded much closer than it ought to have. In one continuous movement she stuffed the thumb drive in a pocket and swept the cartridges and the box back in the drawer and closed it. A snow machine, she thought, an Arctic Cat maybe, one of the new ones, coming fast. Probably one of the party-hearty crowd from Newenham.

But just in case it wasn’t, Kate said, “Stay,” and then had to repeat herself firmly. “Stay, Mutt.”

She switched off her headlamp and made for the bathroom she’d used that afternoon as the sound of the snow machine roared up to the front door. She was barely inside the bathroom before the door to the office opened. Applying her eye to the crack of the bathroom door, she saw someone zipped into a formfitting snowmobile suit, black with neon green stripes. They pulled off a visored helmet and headed for the office.

It was too dark for Kate to see who it was, but she was pretty sure it was a woman. Tina? But why come by night, by what was presumably stealth, when she had the run of the place during the day?

Tasha? From what she’d seen at Bill’s earlier in the evening, by now Tasha was passed out cold, Kate hoped alone and in what Kate hoped was her own bed.

The light in the office went on, and drawers opened and closed. Whoever was in there wasn’t being quite so stealthy as Kate, or saw no need to be.

Maybe she should just tiptoe out. Maybe that corner between office and hangar was still dark and she could wait there until whoever this was left and she might get a look at them, and maybe even follow them.

She put her hand on the doorknob and someone else drove up, this person on an ATV, running a little rough. The engine stopped and she heard the squeak of boots on snow coming toward the door.

She sure hoped nobody had to pee.

And that Mutt wasn’t getting too restless with all the traffic going in and out.

Noise in the office had stopped abruptly when the ATV pulled up. The door to the office opened again and Kate, peering once more through the crack, saw someone much larger than the first person come through. A man this time, who either wasn’t wearing or who had already doffed his helmet outside. She couldn’t make out his features but he seemed middling tall and either beefy or muscular, and his stride was long and solid, making the floor tremble just that little bit when his feet hit the ground. He made straight for the office, opened the door, and went in.

A voice spoke, too low for Kate to catch the words. Another voice answered, a man’s voice.

The first voice raised in volume. Definitely a woman. “There’s nothing here.”

“Let it be,” the man’s voice said. “There’s nothing you can do now. Just go on home and leave it behind you.”

“You found it, didn’t you? And you took it. Damn you! You’ll beggar us, don’t you get that? I won’t let that happen!”

The man’s voice changed. “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing! Give me that!”

There was the thud of flesh on flesh and footsteps staggering back and forth.

And then, there was a gunshot.

Fifteen

JANUARY 19

Newenham

There were in fact several, three or four in a row very fast, as if someone were ripping off a series of really loud farts. Kate knew again that horrible conviction of mortality everyone always feels in the presence of flying bullets, and teleported herself into the very small space between the toilet and the wall, arms wrapped around her head. In the very short space of time she was allowed for clear thought she hoped that the interior construction of Eagle Air FBO was as high in quality as the exterior.

The shots stopped as abruptly as they had begun when something large and metallic hit the floor. “Fuck!” the man yelled.

From outside the building, Mutt half barked, half howled. Before the sound had died away, Kate was on her feet with her hand on the knob when heavy footsteps moving fast went out the front door and a moment later the ATV started up and moved away in high gear.

Kate came out of the bathroom at the same time Mutt crashed through the front door. “I’m fine, you moron, go get the guy! Mutt!
Fetch!
” Mutt growled, turned on a dime, and launched.

Kate ran to the office.

The overhead light illuminated the scene inside to vivid and horrible effect. Sprawled on the perfectly waxed bamboo floor, Evelyn Grant lay in her own blood, a rich, darkly red pool that rapidly increased in size as Kate, momentarily paralyzed, watched. The alien-killer was a few feet from her right hand.

“Fuck is right,” Kate said, and ran to the bathroom to grab the hand towels. She ran back to the office, dropped to her knees, and slid the rest of the way over the slick bamboo floor to the injured woman. She folded one towel in fourths and pressed it against the side all the blood seemed to be coming from. “Evelyn,” she said. “Evelyn?”

“What the hell is going on here?” a voice said from the door.

She looked up to see Gabe McGuire standing in the doorway, dressed in gray sweatpants and brandishing a paint-splattered wooden yardstick like it was a broadsword.

“Oh, just what I don’t need,” Kate said. “What did you think you were going to do with that?”

He looked at the yardstick. “I don’t know. It was standing in the corner of the room. I just grabbed it when the noise woke me up.” Hair standing on end in a way it had never been allowed to on film, McGuire looked from the yardstick to Kate to the woman on the floor. “Jesus Christ,” he said blankly.

Kate looked down and saw that the first towel was showing signs of red. She swore and looked up. “Hey.” McGuire was still gaping at Evelyn. “Hey, you, shit-for-brains!”

McGuire looked up, his expression dazed.

“Yeah, you,” she said, “get over here.”

He stared at her for a long moment, before crossing the floor to kneel at her side. “Press here,” she said.

When he replaced her hands with his, she folded the second towel. “Here, use this, too. No, right here, can’t you feel the hole? Hard. Harder, damn it, if you don’t want her to bleed out right under your hands.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he snapped, and indeed, he seemed to, sliding the second towel beneath his hands without releasing pressure on the wound. Evelyn’s eyelids fluttered and she moaned, a pitiful sound. Her pulse was rapid and her skin was pale and clammy. The trash can next to the desk was small and rectangular. Kate dumped it, raised Evelyn’s feet and put the trash can beneath them.

She pulled out her cell and hit the speed dial. Campbell answered on the first ring. “It’s Kate Shu—Saracoff,” she said. “We need a paramedic at Eagle Air immediately. Evelyn Grant has been shot and she’s doing her damnedest to bleed out.”

“On my way.”
Click.

“Love a cop who’s on the ball,” Kate said, thumbing the phone off. “You got her?”

“I got her,” McGuire said grimly. “I think the wound must be clotting. The blood flow is slowing down.”

“Don’t let up on the pressure.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said again. He looked up, eyes fierce. “Mind telling me what the hell’s going on?”

“First you tell me what you’re doing here,” she said.

He jerked his chin toward the ceiling. “I’m sacking out in one of the bedrooms, or I was. What are you doing here?”

“Why are you spending the night here?”

“I flew in from the lodge to take a video conference tomorrow.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “This morning.”

“You don’t have Internet access at the lodge?”

He looked at her as if she were insane. “Are you kidding me? We’ve got a satellite phone for emergencies. That’s it.”

She remembered the phone call Chouinard got when they were waiting for Satan to get into his ninja togs. “Brad one of your posse?”

He blinked. “Brad Severson, yeah, he’s my PA.”

“What time did you get here?”

“Oh, dark thirty.” He misinterpreted her expression. “Sunset or thereabouts. Wy Chouinard flew me over.”

“Was there anyone here when you got in?”

His eyes narrowed. “Just Tasha, and she took off right after I arrived. Something about a big party in town. You know, you’re starting to sound an awful lot like a cop.”

“How would you know?” Kate said. “No one else has been around since you got here?”

“Except for you? Except for her?” Indicating the woman whose side he was holding together with bloodstained hands. “Except for whoever shot her, which I assume wasn’t you? No.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“Until I heard someone shoot off an M4 fifty feet from the pillow my head was resting on? No.”

“How did you know what kind of a weapon was used?”

He nodded at the rifle on the floor. “I’m not blind.”

“How do you know it’s an M4?” Kate said.

He looked as exasperated as a nearly naked man doing compression on an open wound could. “I carried one every day for a month and a half last year.” She stared at him, uncomprehending and suspicious, and he said, “
No Retreat
. My last film.”

“Oh.” She looked over his shoulder, finding a nice safe place on the wall to stare at. There was entirely too much skin showing on altogether the wrong man.

Mutt crashed through the office door and skidded to a halt, her toenails scraping across the wood floor as she danced for purchase. She took in the situation at a glance. Her hackles rose and a low growl issued from somewhere around her sternum.

“You lost him?” Kate said.

Mutt ignored her, continuing to growl at McGuire, as if to prove she was good for something.

“Officially now a perfect evening,” McGuire said, not nearly so terrified as he should have been. “What should we do for a second date?”

Kate was horrified when she almost laughed. “Mutt. Mutt! It’s okay, stand down, babe.” She got to her feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Upstairs to get more towels,” Kate said.

One of the bedroom doors was open. There was a pile of clothes on the chair, shoes and a daypack next to it. The bedclothes were thrown back, a pair of glasses and a paperback novel open on the nightstand. She grabbed a towel out of the bathroom and went back downstairs.

Mutt had taken up station before the desk, where she could keep an eye on the door and on McGuire at the same time. “Good girl,” Kate said.

McGuire looked up. “The bleeding has almost stopped.”

“Good. Maybe I can find some tape.”

“I can hold it until the EMTs get here.”

“Don’t know how long they’ll be,” Kate said. “Best to have a plan.”

She was investigating the drawers of Tasha’s desk when she heard an ATV approaching. She went to the window, hoping it wasn’t the guy who’d shot Evelyn coming back.

It wasn’t, it was Campbell, who killed the engine and came in, long legs eating up the ground. “Where?” he said when she met him at the door.

“In here.” She pointed at the office and stood back to let him go in first.

McGuire looked up. “Hey, Liam.”

Campbell was stern, if not accusatory. “What are you doing here, Gabe?”

McGuire looked at Kate, standing a little in back of Campbell. “Just like a cop.” He looked back at the trooper. “Got a conference call in the morning. Wy flew me in early yesterday evening, ask her, I was probably her last trip of the day. How long before the EMTs get here?”