“I knew your grandmother,” Erland said.
“Everyone did,” Kate said. “How did you know I was in town?”
He swallowed scotch. “Word gets around.”
“What word?”
He smiled again. It came easily to him, and it lent him charisma. He would have found that out early on. He would have put it to work for him, the way he was putting it to work for him now. “A friend called. Said you’d been making inquiries about my sister’s case.”
The man she had called from Brendan’s list who had refused to talk to her. “Charlotte didn’t tell you,” Kate said in a neutral voice.
His smile faded. “No,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “We’re not as close as I’d like.”
“Have you talked to Victoria?”
He shook his head. “Not in thirty years.”
“Not since she went inside?”
“No.”
“Why?” Kate said baldly. “She’s right up the road, twenty minutes door-to-door.”
He shrugged helplessly, which Kate didn’t buy for a New York minute. “She refuses to speak to any of us.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Guilt, I suppose.”
“So you think she’s guilty.”
His eyes were very blue and very intent. “She didn’t deny it. She didn’t even take the stand in her own defense.”
Kate nodded. “I know. I’ve read the trial transcript.”
Someone approached the couch. Kate looked up to see Oliver Muravieff leaning on his cane.
“Oliver,” Erland said, getting to his feet and extending a hand.
It was grasped warmly. “Uncle Erland,” Oliver Muravieff said. He looked down at Kate. “Ms. Shugak.”
“You’re late, boy.” Erland clapped him on the shoulder. “Let me get you a drink.”
Kate watched him go thoughtfully. She didn’t expect Erland Bannister fetched drinks for just anybody. She looked at Oliver. What did Erland want from his nephew that he would wait on him?
He took his uncle’s place. “What do you think of the party?”
“Interesting,” Kate said.
Oliver gave a short laugh. “That’s what you say when you see a painting you hate. ”Interesting.“”
She didn’t contradict him. “Why are you here?”
He shrugged. “Uncle Erland asked me.”
“And you come when he calls.”
She was being deliberately offensive, but he smiled. It was an oddly grim expression, having little to do with amusement. “Yes,” he said, “I do, and so does everyone else here.”
“Oliver,” a voice said, and Kate looked up, to behold a man with more and bigger teeth than JFK, all of them switched on. Looking into that smile was like staring through a dark night into headlights turned on bright.
“How the hell are you?” Smiley Face said, beaming down at both of them, and without waiting for a reply, he added “Who’s your friend?”
Oliver’s face took on an even more dour cast. “Kate Shugak, Bruce Abbott.”
“Ah,” Bruce Abbott said, nodding wisely. “Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter. I heard your speech at AFN a couple of years back. Rousing, I thought.”
“You didn’t think I went over the top on the fish farming,” Kate said, sitting up and looking anxious.
He extended a hand and she put hers into it, which allowed him to pat it reassuringly. “Certainly not. We must protect our wild stock at all cost if we are to maintain the reputation for quality Alaska salmon enjoys. Not to mention a healthful subsistence lifestyle for the Native peoples.” He affected a shudder. “Nasty stuff anyway, farmed salmon. Dry, they have to dye it pink, diseased, tasteless. Your points were well taken.”
Interesting, Kate thought, especially since her impromptu speech had begun with a story about a moose kill and she hadn’t said a word about farmed fish. She beamed a smile at him that rivaled the brilliance of his own. Oliver made a sound in the back of his throat and stood up. “Take my seat, Bruce. I need a drink.”
He walked away before Bruce could answer. “May I?” Bruce said.
“Certainly,” Kate said, patting her hair and maybe fluttering her eyelashes a little. What the hell, give ol‘ Bruce a thrill while she figured out what the hell the governor’s chief of staff had to say to little old Kate Shugak from the Park. “We’ve met before, you know,” she said in breathless, confiding accents. She leaned forward and looked at him with wide, admiring eyes, or what she was hoping might be a close approximation thereof.
He looked astounded. “No,” he said in a tone of nattering disbelief. He gave her the once-over and flashed his teeth again. “I’m sure I would remember if we had.”
He’d been in some kind of supervisory position with the Department of Corrections at the Cook Inlet Pretrial Facility, back in the days when Kate used to be an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney. She had never liked the glad-handing, brownnosing little prick from the first time she’d watched him oil his way out of responsibility for the prisoner suicide that had happened on his watch. It had never been made officially known, but the employee grapevine said that he’d had his feet up on his desk, reading the newspaper instead of watching the monitors in the mods, one of which was trained on the suicide’s cell. The dead guy had been put on a suicide watch, too, so it wasn’t like Bruce Abbott wouldn’t have known the guy was at risk.
Kate decided that now was not the time to remind Bruce Abbott of past misdeeds. She smiled instead.
Under the influence of those admiring eyes, Bruce puffed out his chest and started dropping names. Every sentence began ‘The governor said to me“ and every other sentence began ”And then I said to the governor“ and all of their conversations were liberally sprinkled with references to the political high and mighty, both state and federal. Any local contacts, it went without saying, were dismissed as being too paltry even to mention.
Kate threw in a couple of bright-eyed “Reallys!” and one “Fascinating!” and stifled a yawn, but his acute political instincts told Bruce he was losing his audience. He switched on his smile again. “You’re being spoken of in high places, Kate. I may call you Kate?”
Something told her that what Bruce Abbott said next would turn out to be why she had been invited to this party. “Really,” she said. “I can’t imagine what anyone in the governor’s office might have to say about little old me.”
His eyes narrowed fractionally, and for a moment she thought she might have overdone it. But his smile switched on again, brighter than ever, accompanied this time by a fruity chuckle. “Oh, I didn’t mean to mislead you, Kate. Not necessarily the governor’s office, but certainly at high levels.”
“Really,” she said for what felt like the seventeenth time. The secret to a successful interrogation was to make the suspect do all of the talking. She would not ask what “they” had been saying about her. Besides, Bruce was dying to tell her, and why should she thwart him, poor man?
Realizing she was about to doze off with her eyes wide open, she pulled herself together.
“Yes, you have been mentioned as quite the little up-and-comer,” Bruce said.
“Have I?” Kate said. “Really, I can’t imagine why. As you know, Bruce, I’m not in politics myself.”
“Not everyone can be,” he said earnestly, “some just don’t have the gift for it. But we need you out here, too.” A gesture encompassed the greater part of the Great Unwashed, of which Kate presumed he meant she was a voting member. Not that she’d voted for his boss, but she didn’t find it necessary to say so at this very moment. She batted her eyelids again. Her eyes were drying out from trying to keep them open.
Bruce smiled and patted her hand again. “Yes, being Ekaterina Shugak’s granddaughter, well, that certainly puts you first on any list.”
“I’m on a list?” Kate said, suddenly wide awake.
He beamed his teeth at her. “Of course you are,” he said warmly, “and first on it, like I said.”