KS13.5 - Wreck Rights Read online

  He did. “You know him?”

  She nodded. “It’s Paul Kameroff. Some kind of third cousin’s son to Auntie Vi.” She sounded tired. “How did he die?”

  “A bullet to the back of the head. No exit wound.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Small caliber weapon?”

  “A twenty-two, we think. Haven’t recovered the bullet as yet.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Where’d you find him?”

  “At the bottom of Hell Hill.”

  She frowned. “Someone shot him and then tossed him out of a car window?”

  “Looks like. We’d never have found the body if it weren’t for a semi jack-knifing over the side on top of him.”

  “Another one? That’s the fourth this winter.”

  “And the state says there’s nothing wrong with the grade of that curve,” he said. “So anyway, the seagulls were out, scavanging like mad, and some of them stumbled over Paul here. His hands and feet were tied, by the way.”

  “Tied, and then shot, and then tossed,” she said.

  “Yeah. What was he into?”

  “Nothing.” She saw his expression. “I mean it, Jim. Nothing. Paul was, well, to tell the truth he wasn’t too bright. He was a couple of years behind me in school, and he never would have made it through if his sister hadn’t carried him. Sonia,” she added. “They were a year apart, I think.”

  “He live in the Park?”

  “She stayed, he left when someone—probably Emaa or Auntie Vi—finagled him a Teamsters’ card. Last I heard, he was working roustabout for RPetCo up in Prudhoe Bay. Week on, week off, free food and board while he was working, good salary, pretty cushy deal all around. Paul might not have been very bright but he was smart enough not to screw that up.” She looked down at the body. “Or so I would have thought.”

  “What does a roustabout do?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever they ask him to. Oilfield cleanup, moving flow pipe around the Stores yard, on the emergency response team for fires, loading and unloading luggage for the charter, driving crew change buses, supervising the stick pickers.”

  “What kind of trouble could he get into on that job?”

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, you told me.” He jerked his chin at the body. “And yet here he lies with a bullet in his brain.” He let the silence lie there like a wet, heavy blanket, and knew a fleeting gratitude that at least she didn’t turn his knees to water when he was on the job.

  “Let’s go out there,” she said.

  “Out where? You mean where we found the body?”

  “Yeah.”

  · · ·

  It was as gray and drizzly at the scene as when he and Hazen had left it. You wouldn’t have known that a ragged ridge of tall mountains was holding up the edge of the eastern sky if you hadn’t seen them on a clear day, or that a river draining twenty million acres of national park was winding its serpentine way through the valley below. No, this was just a barely two-lane road hacked out of the side of a steep hill, with one too many switchbacks in it for safety.

  As witness the wrecks of the two trailers below. “You’re not going to make me climb down there again, are you?” he said dismally, but she was already over the snow berm and scaling the snow-covered hillside. Mutt gave a short, joyous bark and leaped the berm in a single bound, vanishing into the underbrush in search of the elusive arctic hare. Sighing heavily, Jim followed less gracefully, grabbing for bushes and tree limbs to slow his descent. He reached the bottom of the ravine just as she was climbing inside the remains of one of the trailers. “Kate!” he said sharply, “wait, don’t go in there, the whole damn thing’s probably ready to collapse!”

  She went in anyway and cursing, he followed. “For crissake,” he said, picking a gingerly path through twisted boards and splintered pallets, “what’s left to look at in here? Everything got tossed outside when the trailers went over.”

  She’d brought the flashlight he carried with him in the Blazer, and she was quartering what was left of the floor of the trailer, not an easy task because the trailer had come to rest upside down. He crunched through a pile of chocolate chips, fuming. “What are you looking for?” he said. “What the hell’s the wreck got to do with Paul Kameroff?”

  She clicked off the flashlight and clambered back outside. He gritted his teeth and followed her through the trees still standing to the second trailer. This one was resting on its side, or what was left of it. Jim noticed that, like the other trailer, all the tires were missing. The Park rats hadn’t wasted any time, but he did wonder what they thought they were going to use them on. It wasn’t like you could mount the tire of an eighteen-wheeler on a Ford Ranger F150 pickup truck. Not and go unnoticed, at any rate.

  He had time to think all this as he slogged through the knee-deep snow, and time to wish he’d never called Kate in, or better yet, never met her in the first place ever in his whole life. Trouble, that’s what she was, nothing but trouble. And the proximate cause of his boots being wet through to his socks. He swore.

  “Give me your hand.”

  He looked up and she was standing in the hole of the trailer, looking perfectly natural surrounded by twisted metal and torn wood. “Why?” he said. “Wasn’t anything in the other one, everything the trailer was hauling is now piled up in some Park rat’s cache, what the hell is there to see?”

  “Come up and find out,” she said.

  It was a challenge, and he took her up on it, using her hand and the rickety side of the trailer to pull himself up. A can of cream of mushroom soup came rolling out from a dark corner and he stumbled over it to bump into Kate.

  He froze.

  She smiled up at him, not moving. “Gosh,” she said, “you’ve picked up some snow, Jim.” She leaned over to brush a clump that clung to his pants leg, and she took her time standing up again. There was the inevitable reaction, fight it though he would. He stood very still, his jaw working. She smiled again, and the pitiful thing was she wasn’t even working him at full power.

  “What,” he said through his teeth, “was so all-fired important in here that you just had to see?”

  “Over here,” she said, leading the way.

  The surface beneath his feet shuddered and shook. He wasn’t sure if it was the wreck or him. What’s the difference, he thought, and almost laughed.

  She played the flashlight over an intact corner of the trailer. “Look. You see it?”

  Jim tried to focus. “What? Wait.” His voice sharpened. “What’s that?”

  “Blood, I think. On what used to be the floor.”

  Jim had a lowering feeling that he knew what she was getting at, but he said stubbornly, “So what? Maybe there was a side of beef strung up in that corner. Maybe it dripped a little.”

  “This isn’t a reefer, Jim, it’s straight storage. Nothing but dry or canned goods. I think you should take a sample and get the lab to run it through their magic machines.”

  · · ·

  “You’re a witch, aren’t you,” he said two days later. “Go ahead, you can say it, I won’t tell. I may personally burn you at the stake, but I won’t tell.”

  They were sitting at the River Street Café in Niniltna, where Laurel Meganack presided over grill and table and dispensed not awful coffee out of a large stainless steel urn. The village of Niniltna (year-round population, 403) wasn’t large enough for a street sign but the Niniltna Native Association board of directors, which had been persuaded to front the money for the café against their better judgement, didn’t want to be publicly coupled to the business. The Kanuyaq River was about twenty feet from the front door, and there was a kind of a game trail that ran between the two, and that was enough for Laurel.

  “Whose blood was it?” Kate said.

  Mutt sat between them, pressed up against Jim’s leg, looking back and forth between her two beloveds. Jim gave her ears an absent-minded scratch. “It was Paul’s,” Jim replied. “But then, you knew that.”

  “
I thought maybe,” she said.

  “Yeah. So his body wasn’t on the ground when the trailer went over, it was in the trailer and got thrown out when the trailer hit bottom and broke open.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Paul Kameroff wasn’t killed in the Park. He was probably killed in Anchorage and loaded into the trailer there.” Jim brooded over his coffee. “To what purpose?” he said. “To be unloaded with the rest of the groceries in Tok?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No.” Jim sat back and looked at her, and there was no trace either of seduction or of a susceptibility to seduction in his steady gaze. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Laurel Meganack swished by with the coffee pot and a bright smile. “You sure you folks don’t want something to eat? I make a mean asparagus omelet.”

  Jim had a hard time controlling his expression. “Thank you, no.”

  Kate didn’t bother hiding her grin.

  “What?” Laurel said.

  “He hates asparagus,” Kate said.

  “Hmmm.” Laurel topped off their mugs and said to Kate with a grin of her own, “And you would know this how?”

  Jim noted with interest the faint color in Kate’s cheeks, and kept watch as she became involved in doctoring her coffee with evaporated milk until the coffee was a nice tan in color. After that came the sugar, a lot of it. Jim averted his eyes and tried not to shudder. “Ballistics took a look at the bullet.”

  “And?”

  “They ran it through every possible data base going back to the Civil War. No matches.”

  “There wouldn’t be,” she said. “This was a hit, Jim. Whoever did this was a pro.”

  He thought of the neat knots on Kameroff’s wrists and ankles, the equally neat placement of the bullet in the back of the head. It was all very, well, neat. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty obvious. Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “We got mob in Alaska?”

  She considered. “We got the Aleut mob,” she offered. “You don’t want to cross them, they’ll sic Senator Stevens on you.”

  When he stopped laughing, she said, “I been asking around since I saw you last.”

  “Asking who? And asking what?”

  “Paul’s family. Sonia, mostly, although she’s not saying much.”

  “Sonia’s the sister.”

  “Yes.”

  Her expression was unreadable. He waited. When nothing else came, he said, “And you found out what from all this asking around? Anything that will help us find out who tied up Paul Kameroff and put a bullet in his brain?”

  She glared at him. “I don’t need to be reminded of the object of the exercise.”

  “Funny, I thought you did. I won’t let the Park’s tribal loyalty screw up my investigation, Kate.”

  “Neither will I.”

  “Good to know.”

  She drank coffee, a delaying tactic to regain control over her temper. “For one thing, I found out that my information on Paul was out of date. He wasn’t working for RPetCo on the Slope anymore, he’d moved to town.”

  “Who was he working for?”

  “Masterson Hauling and Storage.”

  He paused in the act of raising his mug. “Really.”

  “Really.”

  “That would be the same outfit that owns the tractor trailer that went over the side of Hell Hill a couple nights ago.”

  “It would.”

  “Well,” Jim said, putting down his mug. “Isn’t that interesting.”

  “You might even call it a clue,” she said. “When do you leave?”

  “Immediately.” He reached for the cap with the trooper seal on the crown.

  Mutt got to her feet, tail wagging. She was always ready for action. “Got room for two more?” Kate said.

  He paused. “I meant what I said, Kate.”

  She replied without heat. “I did, too.”

  “I won’t hide what I find, no matter who it involves.”

  “I know.”

  He put his cap on and tugged it down. “All right, then. Let’s move like we got a purpose.”

  · · ·

  The Cessna was fueled and ready at Niniltna’s 4800-foot dirt airstrip. Kate untied her while Jim did the preflight and they were in the air fifteen minutes later. He leveled them out at five thousand feet and set the GPS. It was only then that he realized he’d be spending an hour plus touching shoulders with the one woman in all the gin joints in all the world who like to drive him right out of his mind. He could hear her inhaling over the headphones, and clicked off the channel, but that didn’t help because he could still see the rise and fall of her breast out of the corner of his eye. He knew she didn’t wear perfume but he could smell her anyway, an alluring mixture of soap and woodsmoke that his renegade pheromones translated as all heat.

  A cold nose against the back of his neck made him jump, and Kate laughed. It was a very seductive laugh, or so it seemed to him, and he found himself leaning forward into the seatbelt as if he could push the plane along faster by doing so. He had never been so grateful in his life to hear Anchorage ATC come on the headset and he burned up the Old Seward Highway like he was driving for NASCAR, only at five hundred feet. The landing at Merrill Field was a runway paint job and he was out of the plane the instant it rolled to a stop.

  It didn’t make him feel any better to see the tiny smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

  · · ·

  Masterson Hauling and Storage was headquartered in a massive warehouse in midtown off Old Seward near International. It was surrounded by a lot of other warehouses, car dealerships, a candy factory, a strip club and the Arctic Roadrunner, home of the best cheeseburger in the state. “What time is it?” Kate said.

  “Not lunchtime.”

  She gave him an exaggeratedly hopeful look. “After?”

  Jim was partial to a good cheeseburger himself. “Works for me.”

  The reception area of Masterson Hauling and Storage was a small room behind a door with a window in it. There was a yellow-and-green striped love seat much the worse for wear next to a pressed board telephone stand laden with a phone and a phone book and a stack of American Trucker magazines. At a desk a young woman with bleached blonde hair spiked into a Dali sculpture was applying more liner to brown eyes that already looked strongly raccoonish. “May I help you all?” she said. She saw Mutt and the burgeoning smile went away. “I’m so sorry, we can’t have animals in here.”

  Jim smiled down at her. “Sure you can,” he said in a suddenly slow and very deep drawl. He let an admiring gaze drift down to the tight white man’s shirt that was straining at its buttons, and from there to the name plate on the front of the desk. “Candi.”

  Candi forgot all about Mutt, and when she spoke again her voice was a little breathless. Candi was not long out of the very deep American south and her R’s had a tendency to defer to her H’s. “You all are a trooper?”

  “I am that.” Jim didn’t bother to introduce Kate, which was okay because Kate wasn’t registering even on Candi’s extreme peripheral vision. “Who’s your boss, Candi?”

  Her hands and eyelashes fluttered uncontrollably. “Why, that would be Mr. Masterson. Mr. Conway Masterson.”

  He let his smile widen. “I like the way you say his name, Candi.”

  More fluttering. “Why, I, why, thank you kindly, mister, officer—”

  “It’s Jim Chopin, Candi, Sergeant Chopin of the Alaska state troopers. I’d like to speak to your boss for a few minutes, if it’s convenient for him.”

  “Why certainly, Sergeant,” Candi said, and reached for the phone. She missed it on the first try, and blushing again, had to disconnect from Jim’s eyes.

  Jim looked at Kate. To his surprise, she was grinning and not bothering to hide it. “The Father of the Park has his uses,” she said.

  “I told you I never did deserve that title,” he said.

  She fluttered her eyelash
es. “Ah, but did you earn it, Sergeant Chopin, sir?”

  He thought longingly, not for the first time, just how much he’d like to wring her neck. Well. After.

  Candi hung up and twinkled up at Jim. “Mr. Masterson can see you now, Sergeant Chopin.”

  “Thank you, Candi.”

  “Just on up the stairs now, first door at the top. And don’t forget to stop off to say bye.”

  “I don’t think any man worthy of the name could forget to do that,” Jim said gallantly. Mutt was waiting for him around the corner. “What are you grinning at?” he said to her, and escaped up the stairs behind a Kate whose shoulders were shaking slightly.

  Conway Masterson’s office was large and utilitarian, the desk piled with bills of lading and maintenance schedules and correspondence, more of the same stacked on top of a wall of filing cabinets. There was one window overlooking the interior of the warehouse, and one of the fluorescent lights was flickering overhead. One wall was given over to a large dry board divided into grids indicating trucks out on runs to Homer, Seward, Valdez, Tok, Fairbanks, Coldfoot and Deadhorse, including departure time, estimated arrival, and cargo. A radio was playing country-western music, which didn’t add to the ambience, and Masterson himself was talking on the phone as they stood in the doorway. He waved them inside and kept talking. “Well, get to it, I’ve got four loads scheduled for the Fairbanks warehouse already this week and I’m down two trailers.” He hung up. “You’re the trooper,” he said to Jim. To Kate, he said, “Who’re you? And who the fuck said you could bring a dog up here?”

  Mutt’s ears went back, and a low growl rumbled up out of her throat.

  Masterson bared his teeth and growled back.

  Kate put a hand on Mutt’s shoulder before things got out of hand. Mutt stopped growling, but she didn’t sit down and she didn’t take her eyes off Masterson.

  “Kate Shugak,” Jim said. “She’s working the case with me.”

  “What case?”

  “The murder of one of your employees,” Jim said bluntly. “Paul Kameroff.”

  Conway Masterson was about fifty, with a bulbous, veiny nose barely separating small dark eyes, red fleshy lips and a stubborn chin that looked days past its last shave. His comb-over extended from just above his left ear to being tucked behind his right ear. He wore a rumpled navy blue suit off the rack from JCPenney, an unknotted red tie featuring a Vargas girl, and a white shirt with the third button down sewn on with brown thread. His eyes met Jim’s without a trace of awareness, but he took a little too long to answer for Jim’s taste. “Paul Kameroff? Who the hell’s he?”