Free Bad Blood by Dana Stabenow Page A

well, you might like to consider your source.”
    Kate’s expression didn’t change. She didn’t offer her hand, and she didn’t say anything, but something in the steady gaze of those hard hazel eyes caused some of the self-satisfied assurance to fade from Erland Bannister’s smile. Anne, watching, had the breathless feeling of sharpened weapons ready to be drawn on a moment’s notice, with no quarter asked for or given.
    She knew the story, of course. Everyone did, or a version thereof. Some years before, Kate had hired on to look into a suspicious death in Erland Bannister’s family, which had resulted in a nearly successful attempt on Kate’s own life and in Erland’s incarceration at the maximum security facility in Spring Creek. Owing to Erland’s seemingly limitless resources, he’d stayed there for only two years before the courts set aside the verdict on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. He was released and the district attorney’s office, seeing the writing on the judicial wall, had declined to prosecute the case a second time. About the only consolation the friends of Kate Shugak could take was that declining to prosecute was not the same as being released without a stain upon his character.
    In other words, if it looked like a skunk, if it smelled like a skunk, if it walked like a skunk, it probably was a skunk. Anne wondered what said skunk was doing in Niniltna. She also wondered why he was so au courant with Park affairs that he knew who she was.
    A question for another day. She said briskly, “Well, I’ve got to hit the road.”
    Erland broke off the staring match first and said courteously, “Certainly, Reverend.” He raised two fingers in a salute. “Kate,” he said, and turned and walked back across the airstrip.
    “What the hell was that?” Anne said in a low voice.
    “Well,” Kate said, “it wasn’t Justin Bieber.”
    Both women started to giggle, more from a relaxation from tension than out of mirth, but Erland heard them. He didn’t look around or pause in his stride, but even at that distance, Kate could see his neck reddening. Erland Bannister enjoyed a joke as much as anyone, just so long as the joke was never on him.
    Anne looked at Kate and raised an eyebrow. “Anything you want to tell me?”
    Kate watched Erland walk around his jet. “You already know everything there is to know.”
    Anne snorted. “Sure I do.”
    She climbed into the Tri-Pacer without further conversation. The engine twitched into life, and the nose pulled down as the prop accelerated into a blur. Anne waved at Kate, pulled the little aircraft around, lifted off neatly on a southeasterly heading.
    Kate climbed into her pickup and stared at Erland’s jet.
    She liked Anne Flanagan fine, but Niniltna and the Park had been blessedly—she smiled at her choice of adverb—blessedly free of the taint of religious controversy for most of her life. Niniltna had to be the only village of its size in Alaska without its very own Russian Orthodox, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches. Ahtna was a big enough town that it had at least a minimum complement of every denomination from atheism to Zoroastrianism, but in Niniltna, the one organized congregation met at the Roadhouse, and not too regularly, mostly because of simple logistics. The Roadhouse had begun life a century ago as an actual roadhouse, a waypoint on the stampeders’ trail between the Port of Cordova and Interior Alaska. It was fifty miles from Niniltna, the road was not maintained, in winter it was virtually impassable until the snow machines had beaten it into at least a semblance of flat, and lately falling spruce trees were a real hazard at any time of year. It didn’t make for regular meetings of the congregation.
    Ulanie Anahonak, the token right-wing nut on the Niniltna Native Association board, had been bemoaning the lack since she’d been sworn in, so far without much success. Most Park rats operated under the theory that if it ain’t