Evidently, Emily came to realize that, too. Lying back against the couch, she closed her eyes and said in an exhausted voice, “What do you want?”
“Why weren’t you in the car with her on the way home from the party?” Kate said.
A tear slid down Emily’s cheek, but only one this time. “I drove to Erland’s from work. Charlotte had to haul the food to Erland’s house, and she had to be there early to set things up.”
Kate suffered a slight feeling of deja vu, remembering where Victoria and Charlotte had been the night William had been killed. Bad things had a habit of happening when the Bannister women were away from home, and in particular when they were helping host parties at their male relative’s house.
Still, two similar occurrences thirty-one years apart didn’t necessarily constitute a pattern. “Were you behind her on the road?” Kate said.
Emily shook her head miserably. “Ahead. I left right after you did. There’s only so much of that crap I can take.”
“Then why do you go?”
“Because Charlotte wants me there. Wanted.” Another tear. “She hates all that glad-handing stuff. She isn’t a public person. Wasn’t.”
“Were you home yesterday?”
“What?”
“Did you stay home yesterday, or did you go into work?”
Emily, uncomprehending, said, “I stayed home, I-I couldn’t go to work.”
“Did a man come to see you?”
Emily gave a convulsive sniff. “All kinds of men. Policemen, mostly. Knocking, knocking at the door, they wouldn’t leave me alone. They kept asking questions about Charlotte, and her mother, and her father, and I just didn’t see what that had to do with anything, I just couldn’t, I-oh God, oh God, I can’t believe she’s dead.” Emily buried her face in her hands and began to rock back and forth. “Charlotte, oh God, Charlotte.”
“Emily.” Kate grasped her hands and pulled them from her face. “Is there someone I can call? Someone who can come and stay with you?”
Kate couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her there all alone. Emily kept shaking her head-at the thought of her loss or the thought of enduring companionship, Kate couldn’t tell. She looked for and found a desk, located an address book inside the top drawer, and started calling numbers. Twenty minutes later, two women showed up, so alike they were almost twins, stocky, short, cropped gray hair and piercing blue eyes.
“You Shugak?” the first one said, and walked inside without waiting for an answer. “I’m Becky. This is Lael.”
“Hi,” Kate said.
“Where is she?”
“In the living room. She’s pretty shook.”
“I don’t blame her,” Becky said gruffly. “I’d hate to think how I’d react if Lael-” And here the two women exchanged such an unexpected and naked look of emotion that Kate felt like she was intruding on something very private, and she averted her eyes.
“I tried calling her aunt and uncle,” Kate said, “but they aren’t picking up.”
“Hah!” Becky said.
“I left a message,” Kate said.
“Hah!” Becky said again.
“Oh, Becky!” Emily said from behind Kate, and rushed forward to be enfolded in an all-encompassing embrace. “Charlotte’s gone! Charlotte, oh my God, Charlotte!”
“It’s okay,” Becky said, patting Emily’s back soothingly. “If’s okay, Emily, Lael and I are here now. We’ll take care of you.”
Lael was already producing a bottle of pills from the day pack she was carrying. “A sedative,” she explained to Kate in a soft voice.
“You a doctor?” Kate said.
Lael nodded.
“Did you hear how Charlotte died?”
Lael’s lips tightened. “Charlotte Bannister was a good friend of mine, Ms. Shugak.”
“And she was my client, and she’s just been killed in what could be considered suspicious circumstances.”
Lael’s eyes widened. “I thought it was a hit-and-run.”
“It was.” Kate glanced over her shoulder at Becky and Emily and lowered her voice. “Look, I can’t say anymore right now, but just keep the doors and windows locked, okay? And here’s my number, if you need me for anything.”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
“Charlotte hired me to get her mother out of jail,” Kate said baldly.
Jim, still sequestered in his neutral corner, noticed that discretion had just suffered a hit. Kate’s favorite weapon had always been the bludgeon, and she would regard Charlotte’s death as a personal affront that had to be avenged. He felt a spark of sympathy, albeit a very tiny spark, for the perp. Like Kate, like any cop worthy of the name, he didn’t think much of coincidences. He was still pretty sure Victoria had committed the crime of which she had been found guilty, but he was equally certain that Kate, in ferreting around after the circumstances of that crime, had stirred up something nasty associated with that crime that had lain dormant for thirty-one years. There was nothing worse than that kind of nasty. Old nasty had a tendency to ripen. Left alone, it would eventually rot away. Exposed to the bright light of day before that happened, the stench rolled out and over everyone in sight. Considering the wealth and power connected with this case, the smell could reach all the way to Juneau and maybe even Washington, D.C.
Lael was quick. “And you think that might have something to do with Charlotte being killed?” she asked Kate.
“I don’t know. But I think if’s interesting that she was killed right after she hired me to start investigating a thirty-one-year-old murder case.”
In the car on the way down O’Malley, Jim said, “You’re taking the gloves off.”
She spared him a brief glance. “One. I hire Kurt Pletnikoff to do some legwork for me. Two, he finds a dead man-I’m guessing someone connected to this case. Three, he is shot and left for dead himself. Four, somebody tries to take me out. Five, my employer is killed.” She pulled to the side of the road, provoking an indignant honk from the Chevy Suburban that had been riding their bumper all the way down the mountain. “And notice I’m not even mentioning the attempt to buy me off with the Niniltna VPSO job.”
He looked around. “What are we doing? Kate, you parked right on the bike trail.”
She pointed at a shred of crime-scene tape tied to a tree branch. “This is where Charlotte got hit.”
A narrow dirt road intersected O’Malley at right angles. The trees grew in close and closed in overhead to form a canopy. Kate walked down it, Jim pacing behind. At intervals, houses were visible through the trees, but there was a good hundred feet before the first driveway. Kate turned around and paced back, looking down. She stopped and squatted. “Look,” she said, pointing.
Jim squatted next to her, scrutinizing the dirt track. There were tire tracks from a big vehicle, and a dark patch where the engine had leaked oil. “Somebody was parked here.”
Kate nodded. “Waiting.”
“And then started fast, spinning the tires, kicking dirt.”
“A big black pickup.” Kate rose to her feet and walked out to the intersection. It was 10:30, the sun well up in the sky, beating down on the backs of their heads as they looked west. “See the way the road rises just before it gets here?”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. Charlotte wouldn’t have seen them coming until the last minute.”
“The question is, how did they know when to hit the gas?”
A brief silence. “There were two of them,” Jim said finally. “Jesus Christ. There were two of them, with walkie-talkies or cell phones. The one down the road called the one parked in the lane, waiting until Charlotte was about to come over the rise, and told the guy in the truck when to go.”