Free Any Taint of Vice: A Kate Shugak Story (Kate Shugak Novels) by Dana Stabenow

1
    The call came in on Kate’s cell phone too early on a Monday morning. She was up but not necessarily coherent. “What?”
    “It’s Kurt Pletnikof, Kate.”
    “Your name on the display was the only reason I answered,” she said. “What?”
    “Victor Boatwright’s son is missing.”
    Steam rose from her first mug of the day, stopped halfway to her mouth as she stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the south side of her house. The Quilak Mountains were as yet only a ghostly presence against the light of the rising sun.
    “Kate?”
    “Then find him,” she said. “It’s what you do.”
    “I did just mention that to him,” he said. “The General says he wants you.”

    She drove into Niniltna and hitched a ride into Anchorage on one of George’s Suulutaq Mine crew-change flights. Kurt was waiting for her when they landed at Merrill. An ex–Park rat, an ex–bear poacher and an ex–drug smuggler, Kurt was these days a private investigator. Set a thief to catch a thief, and Kate was pleased to be his financial backer and silent partner.
    Though today, not so much. Tight-lipped, she nodded a greeting and held the rear passenger door open for Mutt before climbing in next to Kurt. The 140-pound sidekick thrust her head between them as they turned left on East Fifth, yellow eyes taking the measure of the big town with the tall buildings and the many cars. Fewer bears than the Park, but the larger per capita percentage of perps and felons filled in the predator gap.
    They turned south on the Seward Highway and east up into the Chugach Mountains, to a community of McMansions on broad, curving driveways lined with neatly groomed paper birches of precisely the same age. On a clear day, the view would go all the way to Iliamna. Today the clouds were thick and low and dark.
    The General’s aide, Oscar Square, answered the door with a cold eye and a cool greeting, but then he and Kate had met before. He twitched not an eyebrow at the half-wolf, half-husky at Kate’s side, only stepped back to open the door wide enough to let all three of them inside, and led them to the General’s study. It was a poor imitation of Henry Higgins’s library—dark oak and brown leather sitting on an expensive imitation Anatolian carpet in deep red and dull gold. Heavy curtains at the tall windows were restrained with gilt ropes, and a silver coffee set sat on a low table between a matching couch and chair.
    The General occupied the entire room from a bloodred wingback chair. Tall, spare, he had piercing blue eyes, a blade of a nose, and a thin mouth held in a permanently displeased line supported by a prominent, clean-shaven chin. His thinning gray hair was worn in a brush cut, and there was a distinctly martial note about the knife crease in his jeans. “Thank you, Oscar,” he said, thin lips stretching into a smile that everyone present understood was just for show.
    Square nodded and vanished. He was still the perfect gofer, Kate thought, and turned her head to see the General looking at her. “Ms. Shugak,” he said.
    “General,” she said.
    Kurt and Mutt maintained a prudent silence. This was a fight for the big dogs.
    “Mr. Pletnikof will have told you that my son is missing,” the General said.
    “Yes.”
    “I found these in his bedroom.” The General produced a manila envelope and handed it across the table. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver coffeepot. There was only one cup. He sat back and sipped while Kate opened the envelope and extracted the contents.
    They were in living color, with digital time stamps in the lower left-hand corners. The camera lens had been mounted high in a corner of a small room containing a massage bed. On the bed was Cal Boatwright, the General’s son, and a woman unknown to her engaged in an act that was illegal in most Southern states.
    Cal hadn’t aged well. Kate noted a receding hairline, an incipient beer belly, love handles, and the beginnings of jowls. The woman