The Singing of the Dead (22 page)

When he ran out of steam, he felt better. Over his shoulder, Kate uttered a faint groan.

“Hang on, girl,” he said, and began the grim climb up the steep bank, in the dark, with a hundred-pound sack of potatoes over his shoulder. When he got back to his truck, he set her down carefully in the cab and told her, “You have not been a fun date.”

The potatoes stirred. “Jim?”

His heart leaped. “Kate? Can you hear me?”

“Of course I can hear you,” she said, sounding fretful. “I can smell you, too.”

His laugh was short but heartfelt. “You should talk.”

“Where are we? What are you doing here? What—where's Mutt?”

Mutt wormed her way in between them and lavished Kate's face with her tongue. For once, Jim envied her.

“What happened?” Kate said, when Mutt finally calmed down. “Where are we?” She blinked at her surroundings. “Whose truck is this, and why am I laying in it?”

He told her.

She was silent.

“Was somebody in the trailer with you?”

“No, I—no.”

“What is the last thing you remember?” A brief silence. “Kate?”

“I was reading a book, I think.”

“Reading a book?”

“Well, she had a lot of them, and I didn't find anything else, and I was there and so were they, so . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“I see. You were reading a book,” he said, his voice very calm. “Did you, while you were reading this book, notice if anyone joined you in the trailer?”

“I—no.”

“No one did, or you didn't notice?”

“No one did.”

“Right. You didn't notice. Either that, or you stuffed yourself in a garbage sack and dumped yourself in the landfill.” The rage was back. He tamped it down.

At every scene, your first act is to establish your authority. State Trooper 101, first day. For some reason, Kate Shugak could make him forget every rule he'd ever learned in class or on the job. For one brief, sweet moment he was tempted to finish the job whoever had started that afternoon. He mastered the impulse, and was proud of himself, and then was mad all over again.

In a level voice he said, “Did you find anything in the trailer?”

“I don't know. Let me think a minute. No, I—no. Nothing but books. That's what she had most of.”

“Did you dump them on the floor?”

“What?”

“Pawlowski's books. Did you dump them on the floor?”

“No! I would never—she had some old books, one was . . . do you mean somebody pulled them off the shelves?”

“Yes. All of them.”

“The same person who attacked me?”

“That would be my professional opinion, yes.”

She grabbed the steering wheel and pulled herself erect. The dome light was burned out, and she couldn't see Jim's face. “Come on, we have to get back there.”

“Like hell, we have to get you to a hospital.”

“You don't understand, Jim. Some of those books were really valuable.”

“I don't care if the covers were made of gold and the pages were made of silver! Your shoulder's messed up, something could be broken, you've got scrapes and bruises everywhere. When's the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

“Last year,” she said, annoyed, her voice stronger now. With Jim bellowing on one side and Mutt yipping anxiously on the other, she was not feeling at the top of her game. “It's okay,” she said to Mutt.

“Okay my ass! You—”

“Jim,” she said. It was one word, his name, flat, devoid of emotion. It meant business.

It stopped him, mercifully, at least for the moment. “What?”

“Shut up. Please. I've got a hell of a headache, and you yelling and her yipping makes it worse.”

He dropped his voice but he was still mad. “Why won't you go to the hospital? Give me one good goddamn reason!”

She felt an insane desire to laugh at the hissed whisper. That way lay a descent into hysteria, and she fought it back. “If you'd been stuffed into a trash bag and tossed into the city dump like last week's garbage, would you be in a hurry to tell anyone about it?”

* * *

They compromised, and went back to Ahtna. As Jim pointed out, they were all in need of a change of clothes. Kate took a shower. Mutt took a bath. Jim borrowed jeans and a sweatshirt from Kenny Hazen, who dropped Jim's uniform off at the only dry cleaners in town the following morning. There was no ridding his boots of the smell, though; for months afterward he would look down and see flies buzzing around his ankles.

Kate checked on the whereabouts of the other campaign staffers, who were all present and accounted for at another basketball game at the gym. Halftime and Anne was working the bleachers, Darlene at her elbow, Erin in tow, Doug chasing some skirt on the opposite side of the room, Tom at the center of an admiring group of teenage girls, Tracy snapping pictures, getting names, keeping one eye on the schedule.

Darlene saw her first, and looked furious. “Where the hell have you been?” she said beneath her breath when Kate reached her side.

“I got tied up,” Kate said without a smile.

“Yeah, well, you're supposed to be watching out for Anne, and you can't do that if you're not here!”

“You're right. Want to fire me? Oh wait, that's right, you can't, you don't pay me. Put a lid on it, Darlene,” she added, when Darlene's face darkened and she opened her mouth to retort. “Where do you go after this?”

“Back to the hotel,” Darlene said, putting on a false smile when Anne turned to give them a curious look.

“Fine, I'll see you back there.”

“You're leaving again? What about Anne, damn it?”

“Don't let her wade too far into the crowd.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'll be back to the hotel later.”

With difficulty, Darlene bit back whatever she had been going to say, but Kate could feel the other woman's eyes boring into her back all the way to the door.

“Why don't the two of you just shoot it out at thirty paces and be done with it?” Kenny said. “What's going on there, anyway?”

Kate, feeling generous since she'd been the last to score, said, “Oh, I don't know. Personality conflict, I guess.”

* * *

The four of them drove back out to Paula's trailer, carrying with them Paula's laptop and notes retrieved from the cop shop on the way. As Kate had expected, the manila envelope containing the copies of Paula's disk and notes were gone.

Seeing the picnic table triggered her memory, and she told them about Gordy Boothe. “So she was tucked in by midnight,” Kenny said. “And she didn't own a car. And the letter to Anne was discovered at two-thirty. Well, hell, I don't know. I suppose she could have walked in.”

“It's five miles, Kenny, and she didn't look like an athlete to me.”

“Or someone could be trying to throw suspicion her way. Maybe it was supposed to look like suicide.”

“She killed herself because she felt guilty she was trying to blackmail Anne Gordaoff? Come on, Kenny.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Disgruntled, Kenny squeezed behind the table, apparently not noticing that he was sitting on the stain left by Paula's blood.

“Think blackmail material was what they were looking for?” Kate said, more to be saying something than because she needed an answer.

“She was looking up stuff on Peter Heiman. Could be she found out something he doesn't want us to know, and told someone who told him.”

“She was also looking up stuff on Anne,” Kate said, picking books up, straightening bent pages, and slipping them back onto shelves. Jim leaned up against the sink, staring at nothing with a frown on his face. “Hey,” Kate said. “Books. On shelves.”

He looked at her. “What? Oh. Yeah, what the hell, okay.”

“She had them arranged alphabetically by author, starting there.” She pointed at the now righted shelf.

Jim muttered something under his breath, but he bent to the task. Like Kate, he rifled through each book before he put it back on the shelf, looking for anything the hurricane might have missed. He found nothing. Kate got the nonfiction section reshelved and sat down with Paula's handwritten notes. Kenny had plugged in Paula's computer and was calling up files and scrolling through them, lips pursed in concentration.

After fifteen minutes various aches and pains began to make themselves felt, and Kate put the kettle on for tea. Paula had Lipton and honey in the cupboard. She made three cups. “Thanks,” Kenny said, reading through a file. “Did you know Peter Heiman lost his brother in Vietnam?”

“You didn't? It's part of the family legend. The Heimans have been around a while.”

“I was in Anchorage then, and I never bothered with the news. Never do now, for that matter. Reporters are all a bunch of kids who've majored in anorexia and minored in big hair.” He drank some tea. “Ever notice how they're always talking to each other instead of you? Start all their sound bites with ‘Well, Maria’?”

“Well, no,” Kate said. “I don't have television out on the homestead.”

“Smart woman.” He went back to the computer.

The bathroom had been tidied. The bedroom was still half in chaos. Jim had put the mattress and the springs back on the frame and was sitting down, immersed in Most Secret . She set the mug at his feet. “Finding any clues as to who killed Paula?” she said. He grunted something without looking up.

The tea was hot and sweet, and woke her up enough to go back to Paula's notes.

The three-subject spiral notebooks took her right back to college: shiny red cover, wide-ruled pages, rounded corners, stingy bits of paper caught in the wire spine from pages being torn out. Paula was not a very organized notetaker, sprawling across margins, crowding interpolations between graphs, adding a comment that related to a subject where there was no more room and so had to be jammed into the bottom of the page or written into the margin of the following page, connecting the two by a number or a letter or an asterisk or a pound sign. The notebook was liberally adorned with such signs, and Kate did a lot of paging back and forth trying to reconstruct Paula's train of thought. It was like playing connect the dots without the dots.

“Did you know that Peter Heiman is a shareholder in Last Frontier Bank?”

“What?” she said, not paying much attention.

Kenny peered at her over the lid of the laptop. “Peter Heiman's grandfather was a silent partner in Last Frontier Bank.”

It took a minute for her to surface. “Last Frontier? Yeah, I think I knew that. You didn't know Abel Int-Hout, did you?”

In the bedroom Jim stirred.

“I've heard the name. Big spread on the road into the Park? Just down the road from your homestead? He's dead, isn't he?”

Kate didn't blink. “Yes. His son Ethan lives there now.”

“Ethan's back in the Park?” Jim said. She looked up and saw him standing in the doorway, finger marking his place in the book.

“Yes, he moved back last year.” She looked back at Kenny. “Abel was sort of my guardian when I was growing up. Pete Heiman was one of his running buddies. I remember something—” Her brow creased. “Something about his grand-daddy being a silent partner with, who was it—”

“Margaret and the kids with him?” Jim said.

“They came with him,” Kate said. Wasn't any of Jim's business if they weren't still there.

“No wonder his campaigns always run in the black,” Kenny said.

Kate stood to walk around the table and read over his shoulder in silence. “Interesting. Paula was a good researcher.”

“I'm glad she wasn't looking into my past,” Kenny agreed.

“Why, what have you got?” Jim said.

“Paula must have taken notes by hand and then transferred them to the computer, because some of that stuff is in the notebook, too.” Kate thumbed through it until she found the right page. She read out loud, “Last Frontier Bank. James Seese, Matthew Turner, Peter Heiman.” Paula had drawn a balloon around them, and a connecting balloon around Last Frontier Bank. Below the balloons there was an arrow pointing down, and in the right-hand corner an arrow pointing into the corner. “Means turn the page,” Kate said, and did so. On the reverse, Paula had written, “Peter and Anne. Hosford?”

“Peter being Peter Heiman?” Jim said.

“Yes.”

“Anne meaning Anne Gordaoff?”

“I don't know,” Kate said. “Let me think a minute.”

“Meaning,” Jim said, “Hosford was the link between the Heiman and Gordaoff campaigns. Like maybe Hosford was spying on Anne for Pete.”

“I don't know,” Kate said. “Just slow down here.” She jerked her chin at the computer. “What else has Paula got on Peter Heiman and Last Frontier?”

“Reads like a history lesson.” Kenny scrolled back up. “It's a Seese bank today, but a hundred years ago it was founded by two partners, James Seese and Matthew Turner, Paula says with Pete Heiman's grandfather as a silent partner. Matthew Turner was Elizabeth Turner's brother.”

“Elizabeth Turner—” Kate said.

Kenny nodded. “Elizabeth Turner was married to Peter Heiman. The first Peter Heiman. The first Peter Heiman was a silent partner in Last Frontier. The second Peter Heiman inherited his father's interest. So did the third Peter Heiman, who remains a minority stockholder in the bank today.” He sat back. “That's it.”

“That's enough,” Kate said, with the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“What?” Jim said.

She looked at him with no hint of awkwardness or challenge for the first time that day. “Paula doesn't mean Anne Gordaoff. She means Anne Seese.”

“Who the hell's Anne Seese?”

Jim caught on first. “Dischner, Seese, Christensen, and Kim. That Seese?”

“That Seese.”

“And you think Paula's referring to Eddie P.'s law partner?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Peter Heiman and Anne Seese have had a long-term affair going on, oh, at least since Pete's last divorce, and I'd bet before.”

“Holy shit,” Kenny said, faint but pursuing. “Anne Seese is Pete Heiman's main squeeze, Eddie P.'s law partner, and one of the Last Frontier Seeses?”

“One and the same.”

“So Jeff Hosford's real job, when he wasn't hustling bucks for Anne Gordaoff, was gophering for Peter Heiman's mistress?”

“Yes.”

“And Paula Pawlowski found out,” Jim said.

“Yes.”

“Think he'd kill to keep it a secret that he's porking Anne Gordaoff's daughter on Peter Heiman's dime?”