Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

Another silence. “Kyle. What’s going on?”

“I want you to take the kids to Seldovia, Lilah. Stay with the folks. You know they’d love to have them.”

“Kyle. We were there for a week over Christmas, if you recall, and I got the distinct impression that that was about six days too long for your father. Why this sudden urge to get me out of town? You got a girlfriend or something?” She paused. “Has this got anything to do with Hugh showing up in the middle of the night?”

“No,” he said, “nothing at all. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“That response is so totally feeble I’m not even going to comment on it.

“Lilah.” Kyle rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Just take the kids to Seldovia. Rent a bed-and-breakfast, I don’t care. Just go. Today.”

When she spoke again her voice was softer. “You’re scaring me, Kyle.”

“Good,” he said.

The seconds ticked off while she made up her mind. “I’ll take them to Seward,” she said finally. “Is that far enough away?”

Seward was a hundred miles down the road, with the Kenai Mountains between it and Anchorage. “Yes. That should be far enough.”

“I’ll call the Edgewater. At this time of year we could probably rent the whole hotel for fifty bucks a night.”

“That sounds good,” he said, trying not to show his relief.

“Kyle?”

“What?”

“Come with us.”

“I’ve got something I’ve got to do here first.”

He hung up and swiveled to look out the window. It was a pity he wasn’t really seeing anything, because the window had a spectacular view of Denali and Foraker on the northern horizon. The day was clear and cold and icily bright for the measly five or so hours the sun was willing to poke its head up over the horizon. They’d actually had snow this year before December and it was piled in four-foot berms between which traffic negotiated streets that had gone overnight from four lanes to two. If the weather didn’t suffer a meltdown in the interim, there ought to be plenty of snow for the dogsled races.

He loved this time of year, that fleeting time before the tourists came back and you could get a table at Simon’s without an hour’s wait. He was happy to be back in Alaska, too, a duty assignment he’d been hoping for since he’d joined the Bureau. Unlike the traitorous Hugh and Sara, Kyle had stuck loyally to the West Coast, graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in criminal justice and then going to work for the Internal Revenue Service. Truth to tell, in spite of the grief he received from pretty much everyone when he admitted to his employer’s identity, he’d gotten kind of a bang out of the work. He loved catching righteous citizens-and they were always righteous-who insisted indignantly that the law didn’t apply to them. In his own small way, he felt he was contributing to the reduction of the deficit, although the current administration in Washington was doing its enthusiastic best to keep that goal well out of his or anybody else’s reach.

He’d signed up to take Russian at a community college, because by then the Wall was long down and he’d been headed for home from the moment he graduated from college. The borders were opening up between Alaska and Siberia and there was a future there for a Russian-speaking FBI agent.

In Russian 101 he met Lilah, fresh out of school with a degree in accounting-large, dark eyes, hair a downpour of heavy black, a body by Venus. He was sunk at first glance. After class he followed her into the parking lot and wouldn’t let her leave until she gave him her phone number. When he walked her to her door at the end of their first date he knew she had a brain and a sense of humor to go with the looks. By Russian 201 they were engaged, and by Russian 301 they were married, and before starting on children they applied together to the FBI. Both had been accepted immediately. The Russian had helped, and it had also helped when they both requested assignment to Anchorage, as Kyle had known it would. Lilah was from Snoqualmie in Washington State and no stranger to snow and ice, although she didn’t much care for the four and a half hours of daylight Anchorage was reduced to in winter. But then who did?

Her picture smiled up at him from his desk, with Eli in her lap and Gloria leaning against her shoulder. Yes, he had one beautiful family.

His thoughts turned naturally to Hugh and Sara, also part of his family. Not, at present, quite so beautiful. Odd, he thought now, how they’d all wound up in law enforcement. But perhaps not so odd, when he remembered the first time an Alaska state trooper had come to Seldovia, a tall man with a deep voice and an unshakable sense of authority. There had been a stabbing death in a community where if you weren’t related by blood you were related by marriage to everyone there. The town had been in a turmoil, which might very well have escalated into a lynching if the trooper hadn’t flown in from Ninilchik to investigate. It took his calming presence half a day to bring people to their senses, and at the end of it he removed the perpetrator to Homer to be bound over for trial. There was chaos, and then the trooper came, and there was order. It had been a powerful example to three awestruck little ten-year-olds.

Kyle straightened in his chair. His childhood buddy Hugh Rincon was not an alarmist. If Hugh thought there was a terrorist threat from the Far East presenting itself to a western American port sometime in the near future, then his buddy Kyle was going to take it seriously. All three of them, he and Hugh and Sara, too, had family in Alaska.

He called the local Coast Guard member of his task force. “Joe? Kyle. I’m headed out of the office. Can I drop by?”

He shrugged into his coat on the way out. “I’m going down to the port. I’ll be back after lunch,” he told the receptionist. One of the joys of being the boss was, so long as your case file didn’t back up, nobody looked over your shoulder.

Eve’s eyes followed him all the way to the elevator. Inside, he turned and winked at her. She blushed. She was just a kid, barely twenty years old, fresh out of Charter College with an associate degree in computers. He was well aware that she had a slight crush on him. He worried all the way down to the garage that he should have told her to get out of town, too.

Joe’s office was eleven blocks down the street from Kyle’s, in a handsome building erected right where Anchorage began a short slide into Knik Arm. “You know you’re toast when the next big one hits,” Kyle said.

Joe Brenner shook his hand warmly. “Yeah, but I’ll have a great view on the way down.” Behind him the Knik was beginning to fill up with bergs of ice, created by the freezing temperatures and broken by the forty-foot rise and fall of the tide. A containership was nosing into the bergs on the far side of the Knik, its hull crusted with sea spray. It was riding right down on the Plimsoll line.

Kyle thought of Hugh and wondered what the ship was carrying in its hold.

He turned. Joe Brenner was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered, square-jawed man in Coast Guard blue, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a charming manner. He was a weather forecaster on a local television station. He was also a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve who had been called up after 9/11. He still made the occasional 10:00 p.m. newscast, and he was something of a local heartthrob, because for some inexplicable reason best known only to the great television audience weather forecasters got all the action.

“Lately,” he said to Kyle with an engaging grin, “the worst part of this job has been chasing people who watch me on the news away from the gate.”

“Any potential there?”

Joe shook his head. “Nah,” he said, a little sadly. “All jailbait.”