KS13.5 - Wreck Rights Read Online Free PDF Page B

were standing by to pick it up.”
    Hazen looked at her. “Where the hell do you get this stuff?”
    She shrugged. “I read a lot.”
    Jim, unheeding, was thinking back to that drizzly morning below the curve coming off of Hell Hill. “Are you saying—”
    “One, Paul Kameroff went to work for Masterson Hauling and Storage last fall, leaving a perfectly good job on the North Slope for no good reason. Two, his sister Sonia called him at work once or twice a week from November on. Three, Bert O’Shaunnessy said she braked because she saw a woman run in front of her semi. Four, all the Masterson trucks were hauling groceries bound for AC in Tok.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Hazen said.
    “You’re saying that the grocery loads Masterson Hauling was running to Tok were deliberately targeted?” Jim said.
    “By this Sonia? Who’s what, the sister of the dead man?” Hazen said.
    “By Sonia and who’s ever in it with her,” Kate said. “There were a lot of people on the hillside that day, you told me. She was just one of them.” She drank coffee. “You should talk to the drivers of the other trucks that went over. See how many of them saw someone run in front of their semi.”
    “And Masterson found out,” Jim said.
    Kate nodded. “He’d lost at most one truck per year in previous years, and there are other trucking outfits that make that run. He must have wondered why he was being picked on.”
    “So,” Hazen said, “Paul Kameroff was fingering loads for his sister Sonia?”
    “There was a big dry board in Masterson’s office,” Kate said. “It had all the trips on it, all the trucks, where they were going and what they were carrying, when they were leaving and when they were scheduled to arrive. I think Sonia called Paul a couple of times every week just to see what was heading our way.”
    “I don’t get it,” Jim said. “The trucking firms lose a semi of stuff a year, maybe, and they don’t make a fuss about who picks it up after. The Park rats are onto a good thing here. Why get greedy, why ruin it? Is the Park having a rough year?”
    “I don’t think they were picking up stuff for subsistance purposes,” Kate said.
    “You think they were reselling it?” Jim said.
    She nodded. “Otherwise, why so many? It was bound to attract notice. Which, of course, it did.”
    There was a brief silence. “You think—” Hazen said.
    “I think Masterson figured it out, killed Kameroff, and tossed the body in the back of Bert’s trailer knowing it was going to be run off the road like the others had been,” Kate said. “Knowing that the body would be a message to the people at the other end.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Hazen said again. “The driver could have been killed.”
    “She sure could,” Kate said. She looked at Jim. “I told you. That’s a tough crowd.”
    · · ·
     
    Jim found a friendly judge and got a warrant to toss the premises of Masterson Hauling and Storage. He didn’t find anything. The three drivers of the previous three wrecks had taken early retirement long before he ever got there and had moved Outside. Candi was genuinely distressed when she couldn’t find their personnel files. The union local knew a different judge and Jim never did get a look at the union’s membership files.
    Sonia Kameroff cried a lot during her interrogation, and said very little. Bert O’Shaugnnessy couldn’t positively identify Sonia as the women she’d seen running in front of her semi. Jim talked to a few of the others he had seen at the wreck that day, only to be greeted with blank stares. “Trucks always go off that hill,” one man told him. “Always will, it’s a bad hill. Shit, Jim, we’re doing a public service by cleaning up the mess. That trucking outfit sure ain’t gonna do nothing. And no point in letting all that food go to waste.”
    “I can’t prove a damn thing,” Jim said to Kate.
    “No,” Kate said, face turned up to the sun. They were in back of her cabin, sitting on