Degrees of Separation

by Sue Henry

Alex hoped they were. He decided he’d rather have his job than hers, but wished Malone had picked a less busy weeknight to play pool—if that was what he’d been doing for those three hours.

  Whatever it was, he still didn’t know how Donny Thompson had wound up on the hill behind Jessie’s house.

  It seemed that there was no way to ascertain for sure the whereabouts of Malone, Fenneli, or Donny during the time between nine thirty and sometime after eleven that Friday night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  HANK PETERSON WAS LATE AND DIDN’T ARRIVE AT THE ACES until almost six o’clock that evening, and when he came he had Stevie Duncan with him.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking a seat on the bar stool Alex had saved for him on the far side of the bar, where several were empty and he had figured they could talk without being overheard. “We stayed to help Vic get the site under wraps in case it snows tonight. Hope you don’t mind I let Stevie tag along.”

  “Let me tag along?” Stevie protested with a grin. “I drove myself here and will drive myself home. Nobody has a right to a particular bar stool, but”—she turned to Alex—“I’ll be glad to move across the bar if you want to talk to Hank about trooper stuff.”

  “Not a problem,” Alex told her. “It’s kind of trooper stuff, I admit, but I think maybe you can help. Buy you both a beer?”

  “Sure. Don’t want to go dry in a land of plenty. Thanks.”

  “So you’ve gone to work for Vic Prentice again,” Alex said to Hank, while waiting for the drinks to arrive.

  “Yeah, it’s nice to have a job close to home.”

  The bartender set up the beer, and as Hank raised the bottle to his mouth, a small earthquake suddenly trembled the place, making him set it back down untasted and wait for the shaking to stop, which it did almost immediately.

  “Damn! Don’t those things ever stop?” Stevie said, clutching at her beer with both hands.

  “Nope,” Alex said with a grin. “It’s just the fault settling after the bigger one we had Tuesday. We’ve had several in the last couple of days. One woke me up in the middle of the night last night.”

  “I’m beginning to hate them almost as much as Stevie does,” Hank said. “And she hates them a lot. Still, quakes and all, I’d rather live here than any place I can think of Outside.”

  Alex agreed, though he thought of Idaho as he did so, and reminded himself to talk to Jessie again about going to his mother’s in Salmon for Christmas. They would have to make up their minds soon and take care of making flight reservations for the trip.

  “So, what’s up?” Hank asked.

  “I’m looking for Jeff Malone and his girlfriend, Robin Fenneli,” Alex told him. “Have you seen either of them anywhere in the last couple of days?”

  “You know, I haven’t. For a couple of days the first of the week, it seemed like I saw him everywhere. He was looking for Robin, but she had sort of made herself scarce and he couldn’t find her. Maybe he did and they’re together somewhere. But it’s not anywhere I’ve been. You might try her place out on Boden—”

  “Bodenburg Loop Road,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Already been there earlier today and they’re not—neither of them. The place seemed like it’d been empty for a couple of days, but her car is locked in the garage.”

  “I saw her late the day before yesterday,” Stevie said and leaned forward to look past Hank to tell Alex. “She went past our work site headed for town on the Old Glenn.”

  “That would be Tuesday afternoon?”

  “Right.”

  “You were at Oscar’s in Wasilla last Friday night, weren’t you, Stevie?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah, for a while. I left when…Oh, that was the night Donny was killed, wasn’t it? He was there for a while.”

  “I talked to Cole earlier,” he told her and gently teased. “I understand he was giving you a bad time.”

  “Not really. Donny is—was—just Donny. He asked me to go riding with him and I don’t want anything to do with those Pirates and their motorcycles. So I told him I was there with another guy and left with him so Donny would leave me alone.”

  “Brody Kingston,” Alex said, surprising her.

  “How’d you know that? Oh, yeah—Cole, of course. Not much gets past him, but he was really busy that night, so I didn’t think he’d noticed.”

  “Well, he evidently did. Good save, Stevie,” Hank told her. “Nobody much gets past you either.”

  “Have either of you got any idea where I might find Malone or Fenneli? Any ideas at all? I’ve already checked his house and hers, and where she works.”

  Hank frowned, thinking, then shook his head.

  “I think she’s got a brother in—” Stevie started, but Alex interrupted.

  “Peter’s Creek—another dead end.”

  “Seems like you’ve covered all the bases I can think of, unless you catch up with him floating around someplace,” Hank said slowly. “Maybe Bill Monroe would know something. He plays pool at both of Oscar’s places pretty regularly and must have played Malone at one or the other, or both, for that matter.”

  “He was at the Other Place Friday night.”

  “Yeah, he was. I was playing him when you guys got there.”

  There was little else to learn from Stevie. Hank, however, did know old Chuck Landers and where he had moved with his dogs to another old cabin at the far end of Knik Road near the historic town of Knik.

  “He’s got a friend out there who sold it to him when that housing development started to go in and they made him an offer for his land. They’ll probably tear down the cabin on it though. Wouldn’t fit well with those uptown houses and condos they’re building.”

  “I’ll tell Jessie. She was wondering where he’d gone,” Alex said, putting on his coat. “Thanks, guys. If you see either Malone or his girl, let me know, will you?”

  Five minutes later he was on his way to Wasilla and on out Knik Road, hoping that something hot and filling would be waiting with two cooks in the kitchen at home.

  There was. Maxie had volunteered to make a kettle of what she said her son Joe called her infamous firehouse chili. And Jessie had a pan of corn bread keeping warm in the oven.

  “Could you just move in and spend the winter, Maxie?” Alex asked after scraping the last spoonful of chili from his second bowlful.

  “You’d regret that invitation when you began to realize the limitations of my culinary repertoire,” she told him. “I’m not even second cousin to a natural-born cook. If I don’t have a recipe for things they can turn out to be very strange and, at times, inedible. Nobody starved at my house, but both my husbands were much better cooks than I am, and so is my son Joe.

  “I once got creative and tried a batch of lemon cookies with my own improvements on the recipe. Joe called them incredulies. You could have used them for hockey pucks.”

  “Well, anytime you want to do more of this chili, I’m up for it.”

  “Me too,” Jessie chimed in. “Will you at least write it down for me, please?”

  “Sure.”

  “Becker asked if one of us could give him a ride home from the hospital in the morning just after ten,” Alex remembered to tell Jessie. “The doctor is springing him as soon as he’s checked him once more. His sister, Alvina, is flying in tomorrow afternoon to take care of—and I quote—‘her baby brother.’ So he won’t need mothering.”

  “We can do that,” Jessie assured him. “I thought Maxie might like to go for a drive around the valley anyway, if the weather’s decent. The viewing up the Knik River road is nice and there’s one place where you can see the glacier from just off the road. We could do that after taking Phil home and getting him settled.”

  “I’d love that,” Maxie agreed. “I’ve always driven right through Palmer, aiming to make it at least to Tok Junction on my way Outside. It’d be nice to take a look. Could we go out to the end of Knik Road and see old Knik and the part of the Iditarod Trail that passes through out there?”


  “Good idea. We’ll do that too.”

  Dishes done, kitchen cleaned, they had settled back at the table with coffee and a plate of cookies.

  “Store-bought,” Jessie informed them. “Sorry.”

  Then she said, “No, I’m not. These are pretty good, and I don’t make great cookies either, Maxie. But Alex does a pretty fancy job on double chocolate brownies.”

  “As long as somebody does,” Maxie said, smiling. “How’d the rest of your day go, Alex? Find out anything helpful? Or can you tell us if you did?”

  He took a bite of the oatmeal cookie he was holding and chewed it thoughtfully, deliberating, while the two women waited patiently.

  It would be unusual, Alex knew, to open the door to information concerning an ongoing case to anyone not law enforcement and directly involved with the investigation, especially of a murder case. Part of his willingness to do so now, he was sure, had to do with Becker’s absence and the need to talk it out with someone. Jessie and Maxie, already involved, could be trusted to keep anything he told them to themselves and would, he hoped, not take it upon themselves to seek answers to subsequent questions on their own if he was not around to provide them.

  Finally he nodded.

  “Considering that you both know a fair amount about this case anyway, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t tell you most of it. Maybe you’ll come up with something useful that I haven’t got a handle on yet. You certainly did that about the other side of the hill, Maxie. I bet you’ve been thinking about it some, haven’t you?”

  She had to admit that she had. “Yes. I know it’s really not my business, but I can’t stop wondering about it all. And I keep running up against a lack of information on how the people who seem to be involved relate to each other,” she said. “It’s how people relate to each other that really counts when they hurt each other, doesn’t it? There doesn’t seem to be a reason for someone to kill Donny, so there’s something, probably several somethings, about his relationship with whoever did that we don’t know.”

  “I know what you mean,” Alex agreed. “I’m still having some of the same trouble. But let me start at the beginning and set the scene and what I’ve learned for you. That may help you some and it may help me to put it in order.

  “As you both know, this all started for us last weekend, when Jessie ran her team and sled over Donny Thompson’s body in the trail above the house.”

  Jessie and Maxie both listened carefully as Alex went on to tell them pretty much in chronological order what he had discovered that might or might not have to do with Thompson’s death. He talked for close to half an hour with few interruptions, and when he had finished they all three sat quietly for a minute or two, thinking it all over.

  “There are several things I don’t understand,” Jessie said finally. “Like how does the woman from Sutton who ran her motorcycle off the road and hit the tree fit into all this? Or does she? Also, why would someone try so hard to hurt Becker, disabling his seat belt, shooting at him, running him off the road, and how did they know he’d be going out that way at all?”

  “I don’t know the answer to either of those things yet,” Alex told her. “But I do think that whoever sabotaged the brakes and steering on Sharon Parker’s bike meant for her to have an accident, and that that person was the one who went out the back door of the Alpine Inn that the bartender refused to identify. He said he didn’t know, and though I didn’t believe him, I couldn’t pry an identification out of him.

  “As for Becker, it was no accident. Someone tried hard to kill him and I have no idea who or why. It could have been one of the Road Pirates, or at least someone wearing one of their coats. Whoever did that may have thought he knew something they didn’t want known. But if he did, or does, he isn’t aware of it. It may be as totally unrelated as it seems. We’ve talked about every possibility we could think of—in this and other cases—and couldn’t come up with anything he thought would lead anywhere in terms of a reason.”

  As Jessie leaned back in her chair, thinking so hard she was frowning, Alex turned to Maxie, who had been sitting quietly, taking sips of her coffee and listening intently.

  “You’ve got a look on your face that tells me you’ve got a thing or two on your mind that I haven’t touched on,” he said. “What? I’m more than interested in a new point of view.”

  “You’re right,” she told him, reaching for another cookie. “Bear with me while I talk around this idea a bit, okay?”

  “Better than okay.”

  “Well, to begin with, I think that with Becker unavailable to share responsibility for this case you’ve taken on a huge task by yourself. So much that there simply hasn’t been time to put it into perspective as you would if there were two of you working, both adding facts, ideas, and, particularly, balance to keep your analysis on track.

  “Second, I think there are too many details—too many people and places and things that have been happening. It feels as if you are walking around and around something, trying to see it from every possible angle. Perhaps you only need one or two—the important one or two, of course.

  “You’ve told us a lot in chronological order. Some of it’s relevant, but I think some of it’s not and has inadvertently been included along the way as you tried to gather everything that could lead you to a conclusion. Becker’s accident may not signify at all, for instance. But to figure out what does and what doesn’t, you might consider going back to the basics of a week ago and take it one thing at a time, just the things you know for sure are true and pertinent to Donny’s death, yes? Follow each thing or idea one at a time until it runs out, then ask yourself what else you need to finish it. Does that make sense?”

  He stared at her, thinking hard, then nodded.

  “You’re right, Maxie,” he told her. “It reminds me of that old thing about trying to fit rocks, pebbles, and sand into the same jar. If you don’t do it in the correct order they won’t all fit in. But if you put the rocks—the essential stuff—in first, then the pebbles—important and related stuff, but not so essential—in second, they’ll all fall down among the rocks. Then, last, you pour in the sand—the related but not really important stuff. And it will all fit nicely into the jar.”

  “Exactly!” she said, and told him what she considered were the three rocks he should consider essential enough to put in first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  TWO HOURS LATER THE THREE OF THEM SAT IN ALEX’S TRUCK next to a half-built condominium across the street from Chuck Landers’s old cabin—headlights off, engine silent.

  All three were warmly dressed against the late October temperature, which hovered just above freezing. In addition, Alex wore insulated ski pants and Maxie shared a wool blanket with Jessie.

  The streetlights for the new housing development had yet to be installed, so it was very dark. Heavy clouds, which Jessie hoped promised snow, had swept in earlier, canceling any light from an almost full moon.

  They had been there just over half an hour, but the cabin they had visited earlier that day had remained dark and there was no hint of anyone inside or out.

  “Maybe she won’t come back,” Jessie suggested. “And if she does, won’t she notice the tire tracks and footprints we left this afternoon?”

  “Probably,” Alex agreed. “But she’ll have no way of knowing who it was, will she? Could have been Chuck coming back for something he forgot.”

  “He wouldn’t have left the tracks of three people—or gone up the hill.”

  “Give it a little,” Maxie advised. “It’s pretty dark to count tracks. If she thinks she’s found a good hiding place, she won’t want to search out another one this late in the day. I bet that even if she notices someone’s been there she’ll choose to stay the night and consider moving tomorrow.”

  “I agree,” Alex said. “Besides, when you think about it, there can’t be too many places that would be empty and so convenient to hole up in.”

  They waited another half hour, an
d even Maxie was beginning to think it was a hopeless idea when Alex sat up suddenly to peer through the frame that would eventually be condo walls at a single headlight coming slowly, quietly down the street in their direction.

  “Want to make bets?” he asked. “Anyone else you can think of would be riding a motorcycle on this street? It’s gotta be Fenneli.”

  As they watched, a motorcycle hesitated in front of the cabin across the street, seemed to be looking the place over carefully, then, evidently seeing nothing suspicious, pulled into the drive and up close to the front of it.

  Alex had rolled down the window an inch so their breathing inside the closed cab wouldn’t fog up the glass, and they heard the low mutter of the engine across the street die as the rider shut it down. Cautiously, still alert, the person, who was almost a shadow without the motorcycle’s headlight on, climbed off, took a duffel bag off the back of the machine where it had been secured, something else from a saddlebag, walked quickly to the front door, opened it, hesitated again looking in, turned on a flashlight, shone the light around the interior, then disappeared into the cabin and shut the door.

  Inside, the soft glow of light moved as if the person were looking around carefully, then it became stationary, as if it had been laid down. In a minute or two another smaller light appeared below the level of a front window, grew larger, then disappeared.

  “I think she’s lighting a fire in the stove,” Alex said softly.

  He was correct, for shortly a thin wisp of smoke, pale against the dark hillside behind it, floated up from the stovepipe that extended above the shingled roof.

  “Stay here,” he told the women quietly. “I’m going over there.”

  “But…,” Jessie started to protest.

  “No,” he said, opening the driver’s-side door carefully to avoid making noise and stepping out to stand on the icy ground. “If she has a gun—and she may—I don’t want to have you over there dividing my attention.”

  “Okay—for now. But close the door. We’re about to freeze in here.”