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Dividend application, a too-large and too-obvious quid pro quo from a lobbyist anytime during the past eight years Heiman had been in office.
    At the last minute, as Darlene was leaving, the campaign manager had stopped in the doorway of the Airstream and added, “Look up the Gordaoff family history while you're at it, too.” She saw Paula's raised eyebrow. “If there's anything to find, you find it first.”
    Paula had shrugged. “Okay.” She'd worked for Darlene Shelikof before, on other campaigns, on political action committees, on lawsuits. She was a good researcher, and she was for hire. One thing about this campaign was that it was extremely well funded. Peter Heiman had tried to hire her, and Darlene had outbid him, which had to be the first time that had happened to an Alaskan Republican since the early days of the pipeline.
    Speaking of Peter Heiman—she sighed and bent over the reader once more. Peter Heiman had been elected senator from District 41 eight years before and had been returned to office four years after that with minimal opposition. That was before the legislature and the governor had pissed off everyone in rural Alaska by ignoring, avoiding, bullshitting, and otherwise bypassing the hot-button issue of subsistence to the extent that they had managed to overturn a publicly mandated demand to submit the issue to a general vote. The legislature's passive resistance on the issue of subsistence was what had put sovereignty on the map as an Alaska Native issue; if their own state government couldn't or wouldn't give them preference to hunt and fish, particularly in times of game shortages, they'd sidestep it and appeal to the federal government for the authority to oversee their own lands and waters, and take that, Juneau.
    The sting was all the sharper since the Native community had put the current governor and half the legislature in office, with endorsements from most of the Native regional corporations and a little matter of two hundred fifty-three votes from the tiny— and closest to the International Date Line—Native community of St. Martha's and therefore the last to be counted after voting day. Two days later the hottest selling item in St. Martha's was a T-shirt, the front of which read, “ST. MARTHA'S—THE LITTLE TOWN THAT ELECTS GOVERNORS!” Eighteen months later the hottest selling item in St. Martha's was that same T-shirt, the back of which now read, “AND AREN't WE ASHAMED OF OURSELVES.”
    All of which only went toward making Anne Gordaoff's chances of attaining office better than even.
    But Peter Heiman's credentials were impeccable; he was a card-carrying Alaskan old fart. His grandfather had come north with the U.S. Department of Agriculture right after the Alaska Purchase. (“Seven cents an acre! Did we take the Russians to the cleaners or what?” Peter Heiman was reported to quote his grandfather as saying in a profile in 1986, front page, Metro section, News . Paula noted that Peter's grandfather had died in 1943, and Peter hadn't been born until 1947.) The first Peter Heiman had been a farmer, sent to Alaska to oversee operations at five experimental farms (Homer, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Rampart, and Sitka) to see what would grow in Alaska and what would not. He had some success with crab apples, and even more with a gold miner's sister who shot the Lake Bennett rapids in 1898 along with the rest of the stampeders. At least she said she was his sister, and her alleged brother backed her up, but with a lot of those old gals you never knew. Once she was married, Elizabeth Heiman settled into a life of quiet and what looked to Paula like stiflingly dull respectability.
    Peter Heiman's father, the second of that name in Alaska and Elizabeth and Peter's only child, had been, in turn, a gold miner, a big-game guide, a Bush pilot, a Bristol Bay fisherman back when the Bristol Bay fleet fished under sail, had maintained radios for the U.S. Navy on the Aleutian Chain, and when the