by Sue Henry
She caught a whiff of smoke in the air as they passed above the Johnsons’ unseen cabin and heard the sharp sounds of her neighbor chopping firewood.
With a startled and seemingly resentful croak at her passing, in a flurry of feathers a raven seemed to leap into flight from its perch on the bare limb of a birch and soared swiftly out of sight in sharp, black contrast to the surrounding white world.
Though covered with several additional inches of new snow that had fallen during the night, the familiar trail they followed was easily discernible and Tank led the team confidently along it, as he and other leaders had many times in the past.
When they came to the side road that she had followed west to Knik Road the day before, instead of turning down it, she took the team across onto a trail that headed more uphill, which she knew would swing around in a large loop to where another branched off and would eventually take them home. With so many kennels in the area, it was not surprising that there was a maze of trails and tracks that linked together and provided a good local training ground for many mushers and their dogs. She could see that at least one team, possibly more than one, had already traveled this second trail. From the new snow now covering it, they had evidently passed along it the day before, but everyone who ran dogs would be as anxious as she had been to be out, so someone might have passed very early, as soon as it was light enough to see the track.
In unspoken and unorganized effort, all those who ran teams helped to keep the trails in good order, cutting brush when necessary, clearing them of obstacles. Jessie stopped once to toss aside a branch that had broken and fallen, overloaded with heavy wet snow.
Headed south, she came at length to the trail that would take her west and downhill to the house and dog yard. It was a cutoff she had made years before and was almost never used by others unless they intended to wind up at her kennel. Directing Tank to take it, she began to watch more carefully, for this trail had not been used after the snow and was more crooked as it ran through the trees.
The dogs, trotting quickly, rounded a curve and disappeared behind a stand of spruce and brush that hid the front half of the team from their driver. As the sled followed, bearing right, she was startled when, though they were still moving forward, Tank slowed the team to half speed. Her response was a quick, heavy stomp on the brake, a device that jammed itself into the snow and kept the sled bow from hitting the wheel dogs that ran closest to the sled—brothers, Darryl One and Darryl Two, named for characters in the long-gone Bob Newhart television show. As they moved on, she felt the sled pass over some snow-covered thing in the trail that pitched the bow up, over, and down, then the rear.
“Whoa, Tank,” she called, keeping pressure on the brake and tossing out the snow hook on its line attached to the sled.
“Whoa, guys.”
The team came to a stop a few yards beyond what, looking back, she could see was a significant bump of something in the otherwise clear track.
Whatever it was, it did not belong there and had better be cleared, or they, or someone else, would run over it again next time they used the track.
“Hold ’em, Tank,” she instructed, as he turned to look back at her for instructions.
He sat down and watched her toss down and stomp in the snow hook, leave the sled, and walk back toward whatever it was they had run over. Several other dogs either sat or lay down to wait.
Good thing I’m not running rookies, Jessie thought with a grin as she moved away, knowing Tank would make sure the team stayed put, though the other ten veterans of many runs were almost as trustworthy.
Halfway there, she could see something dark in the tracks the dogs’ feet and sled runners had made as they passed over and drug snow from the obstacle. There was something else, pieces of something red, not just in the tracks but in the snow that had been disturbed by the passing team.
Within a yard of the thing in the snow, Jessie stopped cold, staring. It was not pieces of something in the snow. Part of the disturbed snow itself was red with something she recognized and refused. It couldn’t be blood, could it?
If it was, maybe a yearling moose had been hit on the road and moved away, uphill far enough to fall and die there.
But it wasn’t large enough to be a moose.
Before she stepped forward and dropped to her knees next to the partially uncovered thing, she knew what it was—that it was no moose—and that he was clearly dead.
Brushing aside the icy red and white snow that still hid much of it, she exposed a blue plaid shirt under a half-zipped jacket, then the face of the man whose body the sled’s passing had turned over in the trail, caught by the edge of the brake she had stepped on to slow it. The ground where he had lain, facedown, was bare of snow and covered with soggy gold birch leaves that had fallen from the surrounding trees. He lay stiff and cold, eyes half closed, skin pale and a little bluish, the shoulder and front of his shirt and jacket stained with the blood that seemed to have mostly seeped into the birch leaves. But enough had colored some of the snow to dye what the team’s passing had scattered around him.
Dead. And not by accident. The bullet hole in the side of his head was either his own doing or someone else’s.
If it was suicide, there would be a gun somewhere nearby, for his hands were empty, but Jessie had no intention of looking for it. Frowning, she sat back on her heels, looking down at him in confusion and shock.
Leaving him where he was, she slowly stood up, backed away as carefully as possible, and, turning, jogged back to her waiting team.
All the dogs came to their feet as she stepped onto the back of the sled.
“Okay, guys. Take us home, Tank.”
Pulling the snow hook, she let them trot on down the twisting trail toward home, trusting her good leader to guide them without incident.
Twenty minutes later they were pulling into the yard.
Leaving the dogs in harness, snow hook down again and Tank to be trusted, she walked to the house, up the stairs, and threw open the front door.
Alex glanced up from where he was reading the Sunday paper at the table, having hiked to the box at the end of the driveway to retrieve it.
“Hey. You’re back ear—” he started. Then, seeing her pale face and serious expression, he stood up, eyes wide. “What’s wrong, Jess?”
Closing the door, she leaned against it and took a deep breath.
“There’s a dead man on the trail up there,” she told him, waving a hand in the direction of the hill she had just come down.
“We ran over his body. From the look of it, he’s been there since before it snowed.”
CHAPTER FIVE
JUST OVER AN HOUR LATER, ALEX HAD TAKEN HIMSELF AND FELLOW trooper Phil Becker up the hill on a snow machine on the track Jessie’s team and sled had made coming down. An investigator from the crime lab had followed them on a second machine, having come in response to Jensen’s phone call to report the circumstances and request assistance.
Alex stood looking down at what he could see of the body in the trail, having examined the area carefully before stepping into the depression created where Jessie had knelt earlier.
A small amount of light snow had fallen on the dead man, or drifted over him on the gentle breath of a light breeze. Cautiously, he reached a mittened hand to brush it away from the face, noticing that it had not melted in contact with the skin; therefore, the body was cold and not recently dead.
“Recognize him?” he asked Phil Becker, who was standing farther away.
“Shit yeah! As a matter of fact, I do. It’s Bill Thompson’s youngest boy, Donny. What the hell could he be doing up here?”
“He run dogs?”
Becker shook his head. “No mushers in that family. Bill and Helen have four boys and a girl. They’re all into motorcycles and snow machines. Thompson’s a mechanic. Has his own shop out at Sutton on the Glenn Highway. Donny and two of his brothers work with him off and on. The oldest, Carl, is bartending at that biker bar in Palmer.”<
br />
“The Aces Wild?”
“Yeah.”
Tall and lean, Jensen shook his head as he frowned down at the dead man, reached up with one hand to remove his Western hat, slapped it against his leg to rid it of the snow that was falling more thickly again, and put it back on.
Becker, younger, shorter, and stockier, shifted his weight from foot to foot and huffed, his breath creating a small cloud that quickly disappeared as it drifted off in the cold air. “This sucks. I guarantee you, Bill’s not going to take it at all well.”
The investigator, Raymond Calb, had stood back, leaning on the snow machine he had driven up the trail from Jessie’s yard, silently awaiting his turn at the death scene. Behind the machine was a sled that would be used to carry the body down to the van he had left below.
“What do you think, Ray?” Jensen asked, waving him forward. “We’re not gonna be able to find anything much under all this snow, are we?”
“Not much,” came the expected answer. “There’s no way to tell if it’s a case of murder or suicide unless, and even if, we find a gun. That’s going to mean a lot of careful work removing snow and the leaves under it in an area as wide as it could have been thrown. If he shot himself, the recoil would probably have forced a handgun away from his head. If it flew out of his hand it could have wound up several feet from where he was standing. If someone else shot him, it’s unlikely there’ll be a gun to find. But we won’t know that until we’ve looked.”
He hunkered down to carefully turn and take a long look at the dead man’s head before continuing. “There’s a little stippling on the skin around the entrance wound, so the gun wasn’t held directly against the skin. The bullet went in at an upward angle and there’s an exit wound on the other side toward the rear. We’ll have to keep an eye out for that as well, but probably won’t find it.”
Jensen nodded. “From what I see, he was lying on leaves, so this occurred before it snowed—Friday evening at the latest. With all these leaves there won’t be any tracks or prints to be found.”
“Right. Ground’s pretty well frozen, as well as our friend here. We’ll have to check temperatures for the last two days and nights, and his internals, before we can begin to estimate a time of death. Don’t expect much else, Alex. Any evidence we get will probably be found on the body itself. Let’s start by getting him bagged and on the sled. We’d better tape off the area as well—help us see how much needs to be searched and keep anyone from driving a dog team or a snow machine through it for the time being.”
About the same time, on a rise that allowed a view across Knik Arm toward the Fort Richardson and Peter’s Creek area, Jessie sat on her sled, elbows on knees, chin in her cupped hands, and stared unseeing out across the saltwater inlet. The snow had all but ceased and the rugged, dominating wall of the Chugach Mountains rose sharply in black and white, stone and snow, to the south. Far to the west the horizon lay below a line of clear bright blue sky, but she had noticed little more. Having snacked her dogs, she was letting them rest for the moment and trying to sort out the turbulent feelings that had taken her swiftly away from the law enforcement response to what she had found earlier.
After relating what she had run over on the upper trail, she had gone back outside and, while Alex was on the phone to report it to headquarters, had driven the team out of her yard. They had run, not into the woods but along a track adjacent to the highway that was well used by both snow machines and dog teams. In just a few minutes she had turned south, crossed the highway at Settlers Bay, and taken the crooked road down over the bluff to the flats below.
Along that side of Knik Arm ran part of the original Iditarod Trail, established by gold seekers back around 1900, who had landed from ships near what ultimately became the city of Seward and taken the difficult and dangerous trails through both the Kenai and Chugach mountains, then north and west over endless hundreds of miles of untamed country that eventually, days later, led them to the small mining community of Iditarod. It owed its existence to gold, and when that inducement played out, it had become a ghost town as miners scattered elsewhere. Until then, far from the ocean, almost everything necessary, or desirable, to survival and the search for yellow metal came laboriously in over the rough trails by strings of packhorses in summer, or on huge freight sleds pulled by dogs in winter.
Jessie had run her team along several miles of the historic trail, as far as the old town on Knik Road, where it turned more to the north. Instead of following it, she had continued along the arm to Goose Bay, where she had stopped to snack and rest the team. There she sat, allowing herself time to sort through her feelings.
The man in the trail was not the first dead person she had ever seen, or even discovered. But combined with the stress of having Pete put down the day before, it had rocked her emotions harder than she expected. She thought back, recalling a friendly old man she had found drowned and washed up on a beach in Kachemak Bay years before.
But that was different—not violent—not bloody. This is too much death all at once, she thought, and shuddered, remembering the way the sled had rocked in passing over today’s corpse. If only we hadn’t run over him….
It made her remember the body of a boy who had been dropped almost ninety feet from the historic Kiskatinaw Bridge on the Alaska Highway in British Columbia to his death on the stones of the shallow river below. That particular memory made her feel a little sick and she consciously pushed it away.
Her hands were cold. As she turned and reached for the heavy mittens she had removed to find the snacks for the dogs in the sled bag, she heard, then saw, another musher and team approaching from a trail that ran south from Nancy Lake and the Parks Highway, an area heavily populated with kennels.
Most of her dogs were immediately on their feet, some barking, tails wagging, as the other team drew closer. Standing up, she recognized the driver, who pulled up close by, set his own snow hook, and came across to give her a hug, then held her at arm’s length and grinned.
“Hey, Jessie. Back on a sled must mean your knee is okay. Yes?”
She nodded as she said, “Lynn Ehlers! Haven’t seen you in weeks. Thought maybe you’d gone back to Minnesota.”
“Not likely. I’m afraid I’m well and truly hooked on Alaska. It’s where most of the action is. How’re you?”
“Oh…okay mostly. Not so good at the moment. Stay for a bit and I’ll tell you about it.”
A concerned frown replaced his grin. “Give me time to give these guys a bite and some water.”
“Sure.”
She sat back down on her sled and watched as Ehlers found snacks for the dogs in the string of ten he was driving. Both teams had calmed down quickly, used to parking next to other dogs in races and on other training runs. Most of hers were back to resting, several snoozing, as they would have in a race, where many teams came and went in close proximity at the checkpoints.
“There. They’ll hold for a bit,” Ehlers said, sitting down beside Jessie on her sled with a day pack in one hand, thermos in the other. “Sandwich?” he asked, setting the thermos down and pulling several from the pack. “Tea? Cookies?”
“Sandwich, thanks, if you’re sure it’s an extra. I came away without lunch. Too much going on at my house.”
“Yeah?” he asked, handing her a tuna sandwich in a Ziploc bag and filling the cup from the thermos with hot tea that steamed in the cool air. “We’ll have to share this. I didn’t expect company, but there’s lots of sandwiches and cookies. I always think I’m going to be hungrier than I am and wind up taking half of it home again. What’s up at your place?”
“Well,” Jessie said, with a sad frown. “To begin with, I had to have old Pete put down yesterday.”
“Oh, Jess. I am sorry. He was a good old guy.”
Ehlers knew most of her dogs, having cared for them while her injured knee was healing. This included Pete, though she had kept him at home.
“Yeah, me too. But even worse, I took the gang out for a f
irst run in the new snow—up on that trail that loops above and comes down at my place.”
“I remember that one. Taken it a couple of times myself.”
“Well, you probably didn’t run over a dead man in the middle of it. We did—this morning.”
Ehlers froze, sandwich halfway to his mouth, and gave her a startled look, eyes wide. “Good God, Jessie. What…?”
“I don’t know, Lynn. As soon as I knew what I’d found, and that he was dead, I went straight down to the house and turned it over to Alex. He was on the phone reporting it when I decided I just couldn’t stick around with all of what was about to go on there. So I went out the door, pulled the hook, and just took off.”
He gave her a long thoughtful look, combined with a puzzled frown. “No dogs? No team? That’s a mushers’ trail. Who was it? Did you recognize him? Anyone we know?”
Jessie shook her head. “I don’t think I had ever seen him before. It was nobody I know who runs dogs and uses that trail—but I was more than a little shook up. The snow hook had caught and turned him over as I stepped it down to slow the sled. There was a fair amount of blood on his clothes and the leaves and snow from what looked like a gunshot wound in the right side of his head.”
It was well after noon when the three officers finally finished their job and came down off the hill with, as predicted, little to show for it. The snow had slowed and finally stopped falling while they examined the crime scene, but clearing away snow had them all chilled and damp by the time they had finished and were ready to leave.
Alex and Becker followed Calb, the snow machine, and the body on the sled down the hill and into the yard, where they helped to load all three into the van he had driven from the crime lab.
“Come in and warm up before you go,” Alex invited. “I’ve got homemade stew that must be ready by now.”
Both men were more than willing to take advantage of dry heat laced with the stew’s enticing aroma, and they were soon adding to the warmth with mugs of fresh coffee and bowls they emptied rapidly.