Restless in the Grave (41 page)

Campbell laughed. Mason looked like he wanted to but didn’t dare. Dunaway ignored her. “One transaction was the same amount every month, and it went to the same account. In Bermuda.”

She waited for someone to ask her. No one did. She huffed out an indignant sigh, and Kate saw Mason hide a smile. If the FBI agent actually had a thing going with the muckraker, Kate might have to take remedial action of some kind. Maybe get the special agent into the hands of a deprogrammer. That or pluck out her own eyes.

“It’s a place called the Circle of Life,” Dunaway said. “It’s a long-term full-care facility for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.”

“Is it the real deal?” Campbell said.

“So far as I can tell from here, yes,” Dunaway said. “I talked to someone in the Bahamian government with oversight responsibility for social services and he says he’d put his grandmother in Circle of Life if he could afford it.”

“Who signed her in?”

“Her nephew,” Dunaway said, and smiled. “Hugh Reid. His father, the senior Reid in the firm’s name, was Alexandra’s mother’s brother.”

“They certainly kept it all in the family,” Campbell said after a momentary silence.

“I talked to the admitting nurse,” Dunaway said. “The nephew brought a friend along to help him with his aunt on the journey from Alaska. A big man with a buzz cut and a loud voice. They had to tell him to keep it down because he was disturbing the patients.”

“Finn Grant,” Campbell said.

Dunaway nodded, too caught up in the story now to resent interruption. “I didn’t know it was him right away. After I found Alexandra, after I learned she was in no shape to sign checks, I started following the money again. The forensic accountant finally managed to trace one of the sums through half a dozen dummy corporate accounts and I think it was like a dozen banks and then—”

“Bothans, dying,” Kate said.

Dunaway glared at her. “It was deposited in the Eagle Air corporate account in the Last Frontier Bank in Anchorage. Where Finn immediately started writing checks on it. Big ones, I think mostly for planes, and payroll.”

“Pilots and mechanics,” Campbell said.

“The guy I talked to in the Bahamas?” Dunaway said. “The one in social services? I got him to contact his opposite number in whoever oversights aviation in Bahamian airspace and I got the tail number off the jet they flew in on.”

“Who was the owner?”

For the first time Dunaway looked a little disgruntled. “Haven’t been able to trace that yet.” She rattled off the number without referring to her notes. The first letter of its registration number was a
C
.

“Not American-owned, then,” Mason said. He sighed. “We can probably help with that.”

Campbell looked puzzled. Dunaway looked exasperated. “I don’t even believe you’re married to a pilot.”

“All U.S. tail numbers begin with an
N,
” Kate said to Campbell. She jerked her head. “Talk to you a minute?”

They went out on the porch. “Did you run down all those names on Grant’s thumb drive?” He nodded. “Anything?”

Campbell shook his head. “They were all dead, in jail, or out of town in the twenty-four-hour period surrounding Grant’s death, or they have strong alibis with credible witnesses. I tracked down Artie Diedrickson and Leon Coopchiak. They put you in the Dumpster, by the way.”

“Figured,” Kate said.

He laughed, and shook his head. “They were looking for the thumb drive. Leon saw Finn with it once. And then Artie saw part of Leon’s starring role over your shoulder at the library. And Artie and Leon winding up at Bill’s at some point during every day is pretty much a given.”

“Now I think about it, I think I sold them both a beer,” Kate said.

“You could have suffocated and died in that freezer,” he said.

“But I didn’t,” Kate said. “Fortunes of war.”

Campbell shook his head again, maybe in disapproval, maybe in admiration, maybe both. “Finn was definitely blackmailing everyone on that list, and successfully, too. They all had plenty of motive, most of them had means, but none of them had opportunity.”

“Then I’m done here,” Kate said. “This—” A wave indicated the other side of the door. “—puts a whole different light on Finn Grant’s death. When you hired me to investigate it, you had a guy dead in a plane wreck who had had a very public fight with your wife the day before. Now you’ve got a guy who made a career out of bullying and blackmailing everyone within a two-hundred-mile radius, who is also an international arms smuggler.”

“You have certainly expanded the list of suspects, I’ll grant you that,” Campbell said.

“Which takes the heat off your wife,” she said. “Which was why you wanted Grant’s death investigated in the first place.”

“I suppose so.” Campbell considered. “There’s still the matter of the wreck, and if it was an accident.”

“If there is a way to prove a certain person loosened the nut on that oil screen,” Kate said, “the FBI, god rot ’em, is a lot more likely to find it. It is possible, hell, even given his reputation as a pilot and a mechanic, it is far more likely that Finn did it to himself. Even the best pilot screws up now and then. Mostly it doesn’t kill them. Sometimes, though…” Her voice trailed off, as she thought about that cold winter day. It would still have been dark at that hour of the morning, and freezing cold, but Grant would have had his Super Cub parked in Eagle Air’s Newenham hangar, where there would be heat and light. Of course, that’s why the lone toolbox was still there, so Grant would have tools at hand should repairs be necessary.

Convenient for a killer wanting to loosen the nut on an oil screen, too.

In her mind’s eye she watched over Grant’s shoulder as he preflighted his craft, checking the fuel, doing the walkaround to check the control surfaces, unbuttoning the cowl to check the oil and for leaks. He’d been flying all his adult life. It would have been second nature to him by then.

Kate remembered a chapter in a book on flying written by William Langewiesche, the son of the man who had written
Stick and Rudder
and a pilot in his own right. He’d said that one of the biggest mistakes an experienced pilot could make was getting too comfortable in the air. She thought that might hold true for a pilot who commuted to work in a Piper Super Cub he maintained himself.

“So,” Liam Campbell said, “should I ask how much this is going to cost me?”

“You should not,” Kate said, and smiled. “I just connected the dots for the FBI on an international arms-smuggling ring. I see a large check coming my way from the federal government. I’ll just head on home and get right to working up my bill.”

He laughed, and she admired the scenery when he did. The creases on either side of his laugh were so deep, they were almost dimples. He really was totally hot. Gabe McGuire, movie star–matinee idol–
People
magazine cover icon that he was, wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking.

As if he had plucked the name out of her mind, he said, “You want me to whistle up Gabe for a ride home? Least I can do.”

“No,” Kate said. Perhaps she spoke with more force than absolutely necessary because his eyebrows went up. “You seem pretty sure he’s in the clear. I’d be curious to know why. He is a partner in Eagle Air.”

“Coerced,” Campbell said. “Gabe talked to his attorney this morning, and they turned over the entire Outouchiwanet correspondence, emails, text messages, phone logs, offers, counteroffers, every substantiated word Gabe McGuire and Finn Grant exchanged on the subject of Outouchiwanet Mountain Lodge. It’s pretty clear that Finn wasn’t going to sell Gabe the lodge unless Gabe became a partner in Eagle Air, and unless Finn could use Gabe’s name to publicize the business.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “You couldn’t call it blackmail, precisely, but it’s making someone else do something they don’t want to do to get what he wanted. And as we know now, Finn was very good at that.”

“There are other lodges,” Kate said. “McGuire could have walked away.”

“He could have,” Campbell said. “He didn’t. It’s also pretty clear from the evidence they turned over that Gabe is a minority shareholder who was many steps removed from operations. What’s with you, anyway? You’ve really got the needle for poor old Gabe. You’ve already had one ride more than I have in that very nice private jet of his. You that sure you don’t want another?” He seemed a little amused about something, but he didn’t offer to share the joke.

“No thank you,” Kate said, more politely this time but no less decidedly. “I’ll grab the last commercial flight to Anchorage.”

“Have you checked to see if you can get a seat?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “It sounds like you already know the answer to that.”

“Mason already called,” he said.

“Crap,” she said. “And I gave my room away.”

“Well, as it happens, Mason hired Wy to take him and his two prisoners to Anchorage this evening. Her Cessna’s a six-seater. Room for all, and—” He nodded at Mutt. “—Mason gets help riding herd on Boyd and Shorty.”

Kate smiled. “Got her number?”

Thirty-one

JANUARY 22

Newenham

Jo Dunaway was still interrogating what Kate felt was a very patient Special Agent Mason. She was just relieved they weren’t in a clinch when she and Campbell walked back in the door.

“I need to talk to you,” she said to Campbell. “And you,” she said to Kate, although getting the words out seemed to hurt her.

“Love to,” Kate said with as much insincerity as she could infuse into her voice, “but I’m outta here.”

*   *   *

An hour later Chouinard was preflighting the Cessna at the Newenham airport as her passengers arrived in two vehicles, one a rental driven by Dunaway, and Chouinard’s pickup, which carried an extra passenger, a woman with long, dark, not very kempt hair sitting in the front seat of the darkened cab. Kate got only a glimpse of her. “My stepmother,” Campbell said in passing, “Wy said she wanted to get out of the house.” He escorted Boyd and Shorty into the middle row of the Cessna and strapped them into their seats. Mutt and Kate climbed into the back and Mason rode shotgun.

Campbell came to the door as Chouinard was closing it up. He reached in to shake Kate’s hand. “I appreciate the help.” An eyebrow quirked. “If I deplore the methods.”

Kate grinned at him. “Take a number.”

He nodded and stepped back. He and his wife exchanged a kiss that Kate admired with a connoisseur’s eye, made Shorty and Boyd despair of ever kissing a woman again, and Mason pretended not to see. “Fly safe, babe.”

She smiled. “Always do.”

Campbell closed the door and walked away. “Everybody buckled up?” Wy said. “Good. Got two extra headsets. Who wants them?”

Mason took one, Kate the other. Chouinard faced forward and the propeller cranked over and moved quickly into a steady, comforting roar, pulling the nose down. Across the runway Kate could see Finn Grant’s old hangar, dark now. Gabe McGuire’s Gulfstream was gone, too, probably tucked safely away in the hangar at Eagle Air. If not carrying McGuire to his next red carpet appearance. Wherever, Kate was deeply relieved to be on a heading in the opposite direction.

Just why she was so relieved was not something she cared to explore.

The Cessna gave a little jerk and began to roll forward.

It’s the fucking Wild, Wild West.

Kate looked at the surrounding landscape of the Nushugak River delta, the wide mouth of glacial runoff spilling into Bristol Bay, the richest salmon fishery in the world. She thought of the harbor with the boats rafted together in twos and threes in their slips, of more boats shrink-wrapped in storage yards.

Chouinard’s voice crackled over Kate’s headphones, and the Cessna pulled out onto the end of the runway.

She remembered the photos she’d seen on the walls of Jeannie Penney’s library, of the boats so thick on the water, you could have walked clear across Bristol Bay without getting your feet wet. The story Jeannie had told her of the three fishermen exchanging shots over fouling their nets in someone else’s propeller.

The Cessna’s engine accelerated, and the propeller spun into invisibility.

She thought of the near-shooting war between the local Native corporation, Alaskan environmentalists, fishermen, and everyone who just wanted a job over the proposed platinum mines in the Togiak Wildlife Refuge. She thought of the seventy-five-year-old homesteader headed for his cabin upriver with a load of groceries and supplies in his skiff, who had been enticed into pulling over to help what he thought was a boat in distress, only to discover it was two National Park rangers faking engine trouble so they could force inspections on a good Samaritan who was sap enough to pull over. Shots had been exchanged, big surprise, and the old man and one of the rangers were in the hospital in Anchorage, with a strong public sentiment in favor of, as the delicate phrase went, making the rangers’ services available to the industry.

The Cessna began to roll, picking up speed.

Everything out here seemed to involve the business end of a rifle or a pistol or a shotgun. It wasn’t like Park rats didn’t shoot each other, but the Bay rats seemed to be that much quicker to reach for a .357 to punctuate an argument.

They rose smoothly into the air. The lights of Newenham fell away. The Cessna climbed quickly and easily to altitude through a clear, calm sky and rolled out on a heading for Merrill Field.

And now one of Southwest Alaska’s leading citizens, posthumously perhaps but nevertheless, was found to have been gunrunning, using a vast, unpopulated wilderness and an endless and for the most part unpoliced border to ship stolen automatic weapons to the highest overseas bidder. Which were used at least occasionally, if Special Agent Mason was correct, to shoot and kill American soldiers.

The twilight threw the landscape crawling beneath them into shadow. Distance and inaccessibility were better cloaking devices than anything a Romulan could think up. Dozens of unmarked airstrips for transportation, hundreds of quick-running streams for power—she’d seen a group of hikers come into the Park with a backpack power plant weighing less than thirty pounds that could generate five hundred watts from any stream four feet deep. What couldn’t you do with a reliable source of electricity? The tech was so there for self-contained, anonymous camps tucked away in remote corners of the state, conducting their business far from watching eyes. Where there was one Finn Grant, there had to be more, although she doubted there could ever be another so well financed.