She flicked on the light.
It was the same stateroom repeated twice on each side of the passageway, a small square room with over and under bunk beds built into the bulkhead. A single porthole was set between the bunks, drawers beneath the bottom one. What wasn't standard issue was an old steel desk that had army surplus written all over it jammed in next to the beds, and a two-drawer filing cabinet next to it, same lineage.
After one look Kate didn't want to step foot inside the tiny bathroom opening off one side of the room for fear of catching something, what she didn't know, but something unpleasant was definitely growing in the saucer-sized sink. She didn't bother looking in the shower, mostly because she was afraid of what she'd find. The drawers beneath the bottom bunk were the dirty clothes hamper and from the smell had been so since sometime last year. She closed the second drawer hastily without bothering to paw through the contents.
With deep reluctance she turned to the desk. If there was one thing Kate hated more than flying in anything bigger than a Cessna 172, it was paperwork.
At first all she found were fish tickets and delivery statements. As a matter of curiosity she rummaged until she found the ticket from their last run, and was annoyed but unsurprised to find that Harry Gault had shorted the crew on their shares of the last delivery.
The engine beat steadily up through the floor. Yawning, she left the desk for the file cabinet. It was locked, but a few moments with a straightened paper clip had the top drawer open. Each drawer was stuffed with paper, but stuffed in an orderly and alphabetical way that belied the confusion of the desk. Jack Morgan could have learned something from Harry Gault's filing system. She pulled a file and thumbed through it, yawning again and hoping she wasn't going to nod off. Harry Gault coming in off watch to find her dozing at his desk might be more than even Kate could explain away.
The first file she pulled was a collection of lease purchase agreements between a Henderson Gantry of Ketchikan, Alaska, and various sellers of boats. From the physical description of each boat, most of them appeared to be service boats, tenders that ran between fishing grounds and canneries, or between oil rigs and town carrying supplies and crew changes, or ran pilots out to incoming very large crude carriers on their way in and out of Valdez. Kate thought it looked like the beginning of a fair-sized fleet. All of the agreements were dated in April and May of 1989, and all of them were underwritten by the same bank in Ketchikan, Alaska. Interesting.
A fair-sized fleet all bought at the same time and through not only the same bank but the same loan officer.
Henderson Gantry. Harry Gault. If they were one and the same, what was Harry doing with all these boats? "I thought you were strictly a hired hand, Harry old buddy," she murmured. She opened another file, and raised her eyebrows.
A fair-sized fleet that evidently was not making enough money to meet its mortgage payments. This file held warning notices from a bank. Not a bank, she noticed, but half a dozen different banks, and none of them Alaskan. She went back to the first file, puzzled. Yes, the Southeast First Bank had financed the purchase of the little fleet-her eyes widened, and she set the second file down on the desk next to the first and searched farther in the file cabinet.
She found what she was looking for in short order.
Almost immediately upon final signing of the original mortgages, all of the boats had been refinanced through other banks, Outside banks, most of them located in the Pacific Northwest, although two were refinanced through two different banks in San Francisco. This time the boats' owner was listed as a Harley Gruber, with impeccable references and a credit rating that would have made the city of Cleveland gnash its teeth in envy.
Kate made notes of names, dates, boats and banks, lips pursed around a soundless whistle. Harley Gruber, Henderson Gantry, Harry Gault. In her experience, people who assumed aliases almost always used names beginning with the same initials. "What have you been up to, Harry old buddy," she said under her breath, "that you need a new name every time you change business partners?"
She reached for another file and discovered one possible answer.
The latest file held lease agreements with Royal Petroleum Company. Each of the boats purchased in the Southeast had been leased to RPetCo for use in the cleanup of the RPetCo Anchorage, which had run aground off Bligh Reef in March of 1989 and spilled over ten million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the western half of Prince William Sound. The spill had virtually canceled the salmon fishing season that year, wiped out shrimp beds and entire schools of spawning herring, annihilated ducks and geese and terns and murres by the thousands, killed sea otters-in short, with a large and malicious sense of indiscrimination, the spill had spread a path of death and destruction across eight hundred miles of previously pristine wildlife habitat and Alaskan coastline.
If Kate lived in the Park, Prince William Sound was her backyard. She had relatives in Cordova and Tatitlek and Valdez and Seldovia and Kodiak and Iliamna who were still hurting from the spill, spiritually and financially, to this day, four years later. If Harry Gault or Henderson Gantry or Harley Gruber or whoever the hell he was had had anything to do with the farce of a cleanup that followed that devastating spill and its many peculiar financial arrangements with a relatively few, select boat owners, she, Ekaterina Ivana Shugak, would personally have Harry Gault's or Henderson Gantry's or Harley Gruber's balls served up on a platter for Sunday brunch. Wide awake now, she went to work with a vengeance.
As she was finishing up her notes and preparing a second assault on the filing cabinet, there was a thump overhead. There were no other sounds, nothing to indicate that Harry was doing anything but checking the chart, but Kate decided she had pressed her luck far enough. And she had enough to go on with. More than enough. She grinned, thinking of Jack's expression when he heard her story and saw her notes. The grin faded a little when she remembered Alcala and Brown, and she gave the files a speculative look. Was this information important enough for Harry Gault to kill two men for? She tried to remember, if she had ever known, the penalties for fraud and embezzlement. Her area of expertise had always been assault and murder; white-collar crime was out of her league. She yawned again, and wondered if collusion in the matter of who got the plum jobs on the spill cleanup could be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.
An involuntary chuckle rippled out of her torn throat.
She was getting sleepy again, and silly with it, and it wasn't her problem anyway. Jack Morgan wanted background on Harry Gault, and background on Harry Gault he would get. Working quickly but not carelessly, she reassembled the documents into their original files and the files into the cabinet. A few more seconds work with the paper clip and it was locked again. Pocketing her notes and cracking the door, she eyed the empty passageway for a moment before slipping outside and pulling the door shut soundlessly behind her.
She turned and bumped straight into Harry Gault.
With great restraint she managed to keep herself from bolting down the passageway in a panic. "Oh. Sorry, skipper. I didn't see you standing there."
His eyes flickered between her and the door to his cabin. Had he seen her come out, or had he just come down the stairs from the bridge? "What're you doing up? I thought I told Ned for everybody to get some shut-eye."
She scratched and produced a face-splitting yawn. "I woke up thirsty," she mumbled in a grumpy voice. The best defense is a good offense, and she gave him an impudent grin. "What about you? What're you doing down here? Who's steering the boat?"
"The autopilot."
"Oh." She manufactured another yawn. "Well, I'm going to get some pop. You want something?"
"No." He added grudgingly, "Thanks."
"No prob. See you in the A.M."