Whisper to the Blood Read online

  Praise For New York Times Bestselling Author

  Dana Stabenow

  A DEEPER SLEEP

  A Kate Shugak Novel

  “A cleverly conceived and crisply written thriller.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A splendid series.”

  —USA Today

  “An engaging plot…a vivid depiction of the Alaskan wilderness.”

  —Booklist

  “All the elements that have made this series successful shine.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  PREPARED FOR RAGE

  “A frightening, tightly written thriller.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Apollo 13 meets United 93…Stabenow knows Coast Guard and astronaut lingo.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Stellar…entertainment and suspense of a high order.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  BLINDFOLD GAME

  “Edge-of-seat quotient: High.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “[An] explosive climax.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Action-packed…an ingenious plot.”

  —Denver Post

  “The author jacks up the adrenaline.”

  —People

  “The drama [is] so harrowing you’ll be looking for a life vest before the last wave drenches you…. [A] smashing maritime adventure.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Stabenow’s descriptions of the ensuing duel at sea… make for edge-of-seat stuff….And the creepy, authentic-sounding terrorist scenario will make readers sit up and take notice of a state that some Americans forget is actually there.”

  —Booklist

  “Excellent.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Blindfold Game, like its predecessors, can be read on two levels—as a cleverly executed thriller with an intriguing protagonist or as a fascinating exploration of an exotic society with its own unique culture. Either way, you can’t lose.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  A TAINT IN THE BLOOD

  A Kate Shugak Novel

  “A powerful tale of family secrets to include murder and blackmail.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Every time I think Dana Stabenow has gotten as good as she can get, she comes up with something better.”

  —Washington Times

  “If you haven’t discovered this splendid North Country series, now is the time…highly entertaining.”

  —USA Today

  “Full of strong story and sharp description…as perfect a description of a spoiled wilderness as any I’ve read that it deserves to be noted as one of her best…what makes Stabenow stand out is the way she plants us firmly in the soil of Alaska.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “With escalating suspense and Kate’s sensuous new love affair with Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin, this book reveals previously hidden depths of Kate’s personality. New readers will be enthralled by Stabenow’s latest read, a standout in the mystery genre.”

  —Romantic Times

  Whisper

  to the

  Blood

  Dana Stabenow

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SIX MONTHS AGO

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  A Month Later

  A Night Too Dark

  This one is for my editor,

  Kelley Ragland,

  and long overdue.

  And if she doesn’t mind sharing,

  it’s also for Andy Martin

  and the rest of the Minotaur gang, too.

  My heartfelt thanks for the great editor, the great covers, and

  all the great wine.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Irene Rowan,

  whose wonderful and sometimes heartbreaking stories

  inspired the plot of this novel.

  My thanks to Talia Ross,

  for the loan of her way-cool name.

  And last but by no means least,

  my thanks to Pat and Cliff Lunneborg,

  who once said to me, “Do what you love. The money will come.”

  I’ve been waiting to say that in a book ever since.

  To see a map of Kate Shugak’s Park, visit

  www.stabenow.com/novels/kate-shugak

  . . . enemies that whisper to the blood . . .

  —Theodore Roethke, “Prognosis”

  Six Months Ago

  VANCOUVER, BC (AP): A Canadian-based mining firm, Global Harvest Resources Inc. (GHRI), yesterday announced the discovery of a gold, copper and molybdenum deposit on state-leased land in Alaska’s Iqaluk Wildlife Refuge. At a press conference at the company’s headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia, GHRI said preliminary estimates put the recoverable gold at 42 million ounces.

  “That’s more than seven times the total amount of gold mined during the Klondike Gold Rush,” said GHRI chief executive officer Bruce O’Malley.

  It’s not only gold in them thar hills, according to O’Malley. “There are also 24 billion pounds of copper and 1.5 million pounds of molybdenum,” a hard metal used to strengthen steel, in what GHRI has named the Suulutaq Mine. Suulutaq is the Aleut word for “gold.”

  At current prices, the gold alone in the Suulutaq Mine is worth over $38 billion.

  The governor’s office in Juneau issued a press release that said, in part, “The people of Alaska applaud Global Harvest Resources’ entrepreneurial efforts in making this discovery, and look forward to a long and profitable relationship with them.”

  State senator Pete Heiman (R), representing District 41, appeared optimistic when asked about the proposed mine. “Global Harvest has already committed to hiring locally, two thousand employees during construction and a thousand for operation afterward, for as long as the ore holds out,” he said. “Anything that puts my constituents to work is a good thing.”

  Calls to the Niniltna Native Association’s headquarters in Niniltna, the community located nearest the prospective mine, were not returned as of press time. The village of Niniltna itself is unincorporated and has no elected officials.

  CHAPTER 1

  September

  “Grin bought out Mac Devlin.”

  Kate looked up from the dining room table, where she was wrestling with a time sheet for her last job. It had required extensive surveillance, some of which she had subbed out to Kurt Pletnikoff in Anchorage. Kurt was turning into quite the one-man Continental Op, and while Kate was glad to see the erstwhile Park screwup make good, and while she begrudged none of the hefty percentage of her fee he was earning, the bookkeeping strained her negligible mathematical skills to the red shift limit. It took her a moment to focus on Jim’s news. “Grin?”

  “Global Harvest Resources Inc. GHRIn. That’s what we’re calling them around the Park, hadn’t
you heard?”

  “No. Appropriate, though. They have to be grinning from ear to ear.”

  “To be fair, everyone is—fed, state, local.”

  “Not everyone local is,” Kate said.

  “Yeah.” Jim slung his jacket around a chair and pulled off the ball cap with the Alaska State Trooper insignia, running a hand through his thatch of dark blond hair. Jim was ever vigilant against hat hair. “And not Mac Devlin anymore, either. He’s been operating on a shoestring for years, waiting on the big strike that never came. Last fall he had to sell off all his heavy equipment to pay his outstanding bills. Well, just to gild the lily, whoever his bank is got hit hard in the subprime mortgage mess, so they called in a lot of debt, including what they had on the land his mine sits on.”

  “And the Nabesna Mine also just happens to sit right on the route to the valley where Global Harvest has its leases,” Kate said.

  Jim nodded. “Owning the Nabesna Mine will give them easy access.”

  “Hell,” Kate said, “Mac’s road into the Nabesna Mine gets them partway there. And give the devil his due, it’s a pretty good road.”

  “Better than the state road into the Park.”

  “No kidding. Although that’s not saying much.” She pointed with her chin. “The coffee’s fresh. And there’s gingerbread.”

  “Outstanding.” He busied himself in the kitchen. “Mac’s pretty pissed about the whole deal. You know how he was such a rah-rah boy for the Suulutaq from the get-go? Now he’s saying Global Harvest and his bank must have been in cahoots, that they conspired to force him to sell for pennies on the dollar.”

  “Where’s he saying this?”

  “At the Roadhouse.”

  “What were you doing out at Bernie’s?”

  “Your cousin Martin was making a nuisance of himself again, so I went out to lay down a little law.”

  Kate sighed. “What’d he do this time?”

  “Got stumblebum drunk, tripped over a chair, and spilled a beer on the current quilt.”

  “Holy shit,” Kate said, looking up. “Is he still living?”

  Jim regarded the quarter section of gingerbread he had cut with satisfaction, and not a little drool. “The aunties were pissed.”

  “Imagine my surprise. And Martin?”

  Jim looked up and grinned. It was wide and white and predatory. “I think Bernie called me out more to get Martin into protective custody than because Martin was misbehaving in his bar.”

  “Martin being one of his better customers,” Kate said. “Any other news from the front?”

  Howie Katelnikof, boon companion to the late and unlamented Louis Deem, had been at the Roadhouse, too, hanging around the outskirts of the aunties’ quilting bee, but Howie’s life was hanging by a thread where Kate was concerned. Jim thought, on the whole, better not to mention Howie’s presence.

  It wasn’t that Jim, a fair-minded man, didn’t understand and to a certain extent didn’t even approve of Kate’s homicidal intentions toward Howie. He was as certain as he could be, lacking direct, concrete evidence, that Howie was responsible for the attack that had put Kate’s truck in the ditch with Kate and Johnny in it, an attack that had also put Mutt in the hospital with a very nearly fatal bullet wound. There would be justice done at some point, no doubt, probably when Howie and the eagerly awaiting Park rats least expected it. Kate knew well the value of patience.

  “The usual suspects,” he said, in answer to Kate’s question. “Pretty quiet on the northern front.” He frowned down at the gingerbread, which didn’t deserve it. “I have to say, it’s been an odd summer all around, though.”

  Between the case and deckhanding for Old Sam on the Freya during the salmon season, Kate was a little out of touch on current Park happenings. “How so?”

  He meditated for a moment. “Well, I guess I could sum it up by saying people haven’t been calling me.”

  She looked up at that, amused. “What, are you bored? Suffering from a deficiency of mayhem?”

  He smiled briefly and without much humor. “I guess what I mean is I’m getting called out a lot, but only after the fact.”

  She was puzzled. “I’m sorry? You’re always called out after the fact. A crime is committed, victim calls the cops. That’s the way it works.”

  “That’s the way things are supposed to work.” He put the Saran Wrap back over the cake and leaned on the kitchen counter. “I’ll give you an example. Just today, Bonnie had to call me down to the post office to break up a fight between Demetri and Father Smith.”

  “What happened?”

  “Smith dug up a section of Beaver Creek.”

  Kate thought for a moment. “Demetri has a trapline on a Beaver Creek.”

  “This would be the same creek. Demetri was seriously pissed off, big surprise, but instead of getting me, or maybe Dan O’Brien, chief ranger of this here Park, to call Smith to account, Demetri tracks him down on his own and proceeds to beat the living crap out of him.”

  The Smiths were a large family of cheechakos who had bought a homestead from Vinnie Huckabee the year before and had come close to federal indictment for the liberties they had taken with the Park land across their borders, principally with a Caterpillar tractor they had rented from the aforesaid Mac Devlin. “Really,” Kate said. “What a shame.”

  “Yeah, I know, that’s why I didn’t toss the both of them in the clink. Anyway, I only meant the story as kind of an example of what’s been going on.”

  “A lot of people been messing around on Park lands?”

  “No, a lot of people taking the law into their own hands. Demetri alone wouldn’t make me think, but when Arliss Kalifonsky shoots Mickey the next time he raises a hand to her, when Bonnie Jeppsen tracks down the kid who put the rotting salmon in the mailbox and keys his truck, and when the aforementioned Dan O’Brien kicks a poacher’s ass all over downtown Niniltna when said poacher tries to sell Dan a bear bladder, then I think we can say we might maybe got something of a trend going on.”

  “Sounds like breakup, only the wrong time of year.”

  “God, I hope not. One breakup per year is my limit.”

  He brought cake and coffee to the table and just as he was sitting down she said, “While you’re up . . . ,” and pushed her mug in his direction. He heaved a martyred sigh and brought her back a full cup well doctored with cream and sugar.

  “They’re really moving,” Kate said. “Global Harvest. Buying out Mac this quick. When did they buy those Suulutaq leases?”

  Jim thought back. “When was the final disposition made on the distribution of lands in Iqaluk?”

  Iqaluk was fifty thousand acres of prime Alaskan real estate tucked between the Kanuyaq River and Prince William Sound, in the southeast corner of the Park. It boasted one of the last unexploited old-growth forests left in the state, although the spruce had been pretty well decimated by the spruce bark beetle. There were substantial salmon runs in the dozens of creeks draining into the Kanuyaq, and there wasn’t a village on the river that didn’t run a subsistence fish wheel. With several small caribou herds that migrated between feeding grounds in Canada and breeding grounds on the delta, Iqaluk had been aboriginal hunting grounds for local Alaska Natives for ten thousand years.

  It was equally rich in natural resources. Seventy-five years ago oil had been discovered on the coast near Katalla and had been produced until it ran dry. A hundred years ago, the world’s largest copper mine had been discovered in Kanuyaq. All that was left of the mine was a group of deserted, dilapidated buildings. Niniltna, the surviving village four miles down the road, had as its origins the Kanuyaq miners’ go-to place for a good time. It was a productive mine for thirty-six years, until World War II came along and gave the owners an excuse to close down the then depleted mine and rip up the railroad tracks behind them as they skedaddled Outside with their profits.

  With a history like that, it was no wonder that ownership of Iqaluk had been fiercely contested for nearly a century before
title was settled, which settlement had satisfied no one. Dan O’Brien, chief ranger, had wanted Iqaluk’s total acreage incorporated into the existing Park. The state of Alaska wanted Iqaluk deeded over wholly either to Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources or, failing that, to the U.S. Forest Service, famed for its aid and comfort to timber and minerals management companies. The Niniltna Native Association wanted it as a resource for hunting and fishing, if possible solely for its own shareholders and if not, at least for Alaska residents only, managed by a strict permitting process that gave preference to local residents.

  Land ownership in Alaska was, in fact, a mess, and had been since Aleksandr Baranov stepped ashore in Kodiak in 1791. Until then Alaska Natives had been under the impression that land couldn’t be owned, of which notion Baranov speedily disillusioned them. After the Russians came the Americans, with their gold rushes, Outside fish processors, and world wars, which brought a whole bunch more new people into the territory, including Kate’s Aleut relatives, resettled in the Park after the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands.

  Statehood came, due mostly to political machinations involving Hawaii becoming a state at the same time and Eisenhower wanting to field three Republicans to Congress to balance out the expected three Democrats from the Aloha State. After statehood came the discovery of oil, first in Cook Inlet and then a super-giant oil field at Prudhoe Bay. The new rush was on, to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to bring the crude to market, which project came to a screeching halt when Alaska Natives cleared their collective throats and said, “Excuse me? A forty-eight-inch pipeline across eight hundred miles of aboriginal hunting grounds? That’s going to cost you,” and made it stick. Passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and later, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, pulled a bunch more acreage off the table, which left less than ten percent of Alaska in private hands. Wildlife refuges, national parks, state parks, yes. Farms, ranches, corporate preserves, no.