Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  The monologue was cut off by a muffled bellowing sound in the background. The bellow was repeated. This time Jane could make out Trygve Knutsen’s accented and drunken voice yelling, “Yust what de fock is going on?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When traffic started to move again, Jane found herself shaking. She was pretty sure that the army Curtis had talked about consisted of himself and his gullible girlfriend. “To take up arms” meant stealing a handgun from a Tampax box in a convenience store in Kent. “The prisoner” was a drunk and confused foreigner who thought he was about to get lucky with a cheap pickup. And the idiots hadn’t even been clever enough to attach him properly to the radiator. It would all have been a farce, except for the fact that Marcia was dead.

  One thing was clear. Trygve Knutsen had never listened to this tape. He certainly hadn’t meant to hand it to her. In fact, she remembered him saying he hadn’t listened to it. Somehow he’d mistaken this cassette for one with his speech on it. She had to find out how.

  And, she realized, she’d have to hand over this recording to the Seattle police. But not before she made a copy.

  A flurry of previously mysterious details now made sense. Back in the ladies’ room at the Meade Hotel, Marcia had scrubbed away at her hands and said with real anger how much she loathed handling fish. To her they were the corpses of slaughtered innocents. She must have been working at the seafood show in hopes of meeting, then luring, her victim into captivity. In fact, Jane remembered Knutsen was a last minute substitute for the fisheries minister. He would have been a bigger fish to fry.

  Stacy’s description of Marcia’s touching farewell with Curtis clicked into focus, too. Stacy had said he’d kissed her good-bye as if she were going away on a long trip. In his mind she was embarking on a heroic mission into enemy territory. Even Curtis’s own ramblings made sense now that Jane had the context. To Curtis, Trygve Knutsen was indeed a killer—of whales and seals. Presumably he’d told Carla she had blood on her hands because she worked for a seafood magazine.

  Jane felt particularly dense not to have picked up on the name change. Diana was the goddess of the hunt. Both Diane Hunter’s names had to do with killing animals, while St. Francis was their protector and patron saint. Marcia, Jane thought, must have something to do with Mars and martial things. Marcia no doubt saw herself as a soldier fighting for a holy cause. She could imagine the poor ditz going over a “name your baby” book in search of a new, animal-friendly handle.

  She had plenty to tell the Hunters now. “Your daughter cut you off because you raise cattle for people to eat. She came under the sway of a fanatic.” She might soften things somewhat by adding: “If she had lived, she might have come to see things in better balance.”

  But Marcia hadn’t lived. While Jane finally thought she understood what had motivated her, she still didn’t know who had killed her or why. A loony episode had turned into a tragedy. What were those stupid kids doing running around with a gun, anyway? Were they prepared to shoot Knutsen if he tried to escape? Or to kill themselves in some kamikaze gesture? Marcia hadn’t done that, though. The gun that had killed her had not been found at the scene.

  As Jane pulled into the parking lot at the offices of Seafood Now magazine, she began to wonder if the board would go for this case and give her the trust income. She’d provided the Hunters with investigative services they couldn’t afford—including a trip to Norway—and found out about their daughter’s clandestine life. She felt a heady little rush, thinking about the life this case might buy her. No more tacky gigs leaning against white pianos.

  It was a struggle to pull herself together and face Norman. She had hoped he’d be out kissing up to advertisers, but he was in, hunkered down in his office, surrounded by his chaotic mass of paperwork. She handed him the envelope with Carla’s article.

  “Listen,” he said, flinging it aside, “I just got a fax from Amanda Braithwaite. She could be a potentially big advertiser. She wants you to cover some salmon thing here in town. It’s the first wave of her campaign. Some cooking demo or something.”

  Jane started to say, “No way,” but remembered Carla. Instead she said, “I interviewed Amanda over in Norway. I could use that interview and tie it in to this event, whatever it is.” She figured Carla could trot over and check out this cooking thing. Along with the Amanda tape, she’d have everything she needed to pry a few more bucks out of Norm.

  “By the way, Amanda seems to be expecting the cover,” she added. Maybe Norm had promised it to someone else, and she could enjoy watching him squirm.

  “She’s got it!” said Norm excitedly. “I figure she’s good for a full color insert if we promise her the cover. I’ll go with you to the demo and take a photographer and art direct something we can put on the cover. And we can use a big banner over the art. ‘Salmon Struts It Stuff.’ ”

  Jane’s heart sank. If Norm was going to be there, she couldn’t send Carla, she’d have to go herself. Hell. Yet another fishy event. She’d been suckered in because she felt sorry for Carla. She swore to herself this was the last thing she’d do for Seafood Now. Already she felt it might be quite a while before she ordered fish in a restaurant again.

  Norm rooted around in the teetering piles of paper on his desk. “This is a pretty fancy thing they’re putting on,” he said. “Some kind of TV link-up between several cities.” He shook his head sadly. “I hate to see advertising budgets get gutted by these events. They could have spent the money on pages.”

  Underneath the phone he found a couple of ivory-colored engraved invitations. “I’m glad she sent that fax,” he said. “I’d forgotten about these.” He kept one and handed the other to Jane. It said that she and a guest were invited to a salmon tasting and extravaganza at the Four Seasons Hotel the following Wednesday at five o’clock. She sighed, feeling resigned to her fate.

  On her way home, Jane bought a blank cassette tape. She stuck the original ransom tape and the blank in her stereo system and made a copy, thankful that her furry intruder had left the system for her to use.

  Then she called the Seattle police and told them she had something in her possession relating to the murder of Diane Hunter. She was told a detective would call her back.

  Finally she called the Hunters and told them what she had discovered. Barb was on one extension and Phil was on the other.

  They were horrified to learn that Marcia had been involved in kidnapping, but equally horrified that she’d become an animal rights crusader. In cattle country that was no doubt high treason.

  Jane said she thought it was all Curtis’s idea. She didn’t know if that was true or not. Actually, Curtis seemed to have done very little other than make the pompous tape. It was Marcia who’d got the gun, lured Knutsen to her house and manacled him.

  “This animal thing—it explains a lot,” said Barb. “We had no idea.”

  “If she hadn’t cared so much about you,” said Jane, “she might have been able to tell you. It sounds like she couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the two parts of her life, so she made a complete break. Given time, she might have learned how to deal with it all.”

  “She raised little calves for the Four-H,” said her father, “and then she turns into one of these animal nuts? It’s that bastard she got mixed up with. I hope the cops take care of him.”

  “But she cried and cried when those calves were sold, didn’t she?” said Barb. “She begged to keep them, but we told her they weren’t raised as pets. We tried to explain it to her.”

  “I still have no idea who killed her,” said Jane. “This Norwegian could have done it, I suppose. In fear, or something. But he’d already escaped by then. There’s a lot that’s still unclear. I’ll try to talk to him tonight—when it’s morning in Norway—and see if he can explain where this tape came from.” She also told them that she planned to hand over the tape to the police. It had been a difficult phone call, and she was relieved when she could hang up.

  A Seattle police detecti
ve arrived to pick up the tape. Detective Olson was a breezy young man in a sports jacket and slacks, with a splashy hand-painted tie and a large high school ring, the same one who had interviewed Jane that first night, after the body was found.

  When Jane had first started Uncle Harold’s work, she had assumed, based on movies and TV and the mysteries she’d read, that the police would be terribly threatened by an amateur conducting an investigation into a criminal case. She had learned very quickly that they couldn’t have cared less. They just kept on gathering facts and putting a case together, and because they were working several cases simultaneously, they didn’t have time to wonder what anyone else was doing.

  While her first instinct was to impress Olson with her brilliant detective work and to pump him breathlessly for information about the case, she was now sophisticated enough to know that the police always controlled the agenda in any interview and that they weren’t about to surrender control of the situation to any well-meaning civilian. She vowed not to gush on or to volunteer a lot of information, but to answer simply but fully and wait for the next question.

  “I think this is important,” she said, handing him the cassette. “I believe this tape was made by Diane Hunter’s boyfriend. I got it from Trygve Knutsen, the Norwegian fisheries official who was staying in the room next to the one where the body was found.”

  Olson’s eyebrows shot up, but all he said was, “Tell me why you think it’s her boyfriend.”

  “I recognize the voice,” said Jane.

  “I didn’t realize you knew the victim,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Or her boyfriend. How are you associated with them?”

  Jane took a deep breath. “Diane’s parents sought me out to ask me about how I found her body in the bathtub. They were naturally distraught, and they told me they wanted to know more about Diane’s life. I offered to help them find out what I could, being here in Seattle and all, and I talked to the boyfriend.”

  “But you never knew the Hunters before this, did you?”

  “No. I got to know them because I was there after Carla found the body.”

  “Okay. So you volunteered to help them. As a compassionate gesture.”

  “That’s right. They’re from out of town and so forth. They seemed overwhelmed.”

  “So what did you and the boyfriend talk about?”

  “Nothing. He wouldn’t talk to me. Told me to go away. I just told him her parents had asked me to find out about her life in Seattle. He basically threw me off the porch.”

  “Okay. And you say Mr. Knutsen gave you the tape?”

  “Yes. He told me it was a tape of a speech he gave at the convention.” Here Jane was tempted to tell him that she was posing as a fish journalist, but she stopped herself.

  “So you spoke with the Norwegian, too,” he said. “When was this?”

  “Last week.”

  “Here in Seattle?” said Olson.

  “No, in Norway. Her parents asked me to. I was going to be there anyway.”

  Olson’s eyebrows shot up again, but he didn’t ask her anything more. “I’ll listen to this, and I may get back to you with more questions.”

  Jane tried not to feel let down. In the movies, of course, the policeman would have sat next to her on the sofa, listened to the cassette on her tape machine, grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “That’s fabulous. You’ve answered so many of our questions! Let’s go arrest Curtis Jeffers for kidnapping and conspiracy, and then we’ll find out who killed Marcia!”

  Instead he stuffed the cassette in his pocket and strolled out. Trying not to feel disappointed, Jane turned her attention to the next task before her, which necessitated counting nine hours ahead on her fingers. Knutsen would get to the office around midnight, Seattle time. The police hadn’t asked her not to get in touch with him, so she decided to go ahead and call tonight. She wanted to know herself just where this tape had come from.

  Knutsen answered with a frightened-sounding “Hello” and seemed relieved when she said she was calling about her article. “The tape you gave me wasn’t your speech at all,” she said.

  “No? I’m sure that’s the right one,” he said. “Unless the taping service made a mistake.”

  “The taping service?”

  “All these events are recorded. The taping service sells you a cassette if you are wanting one. I ordered it, and it was delivered to my room. It was on my bureau when I packed. I was sure that is what it was.”

  “I’ll check with them,” said Jane. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “So you are really writing about fish?” he asked, sounding more confused than ever.

  “Yes,” she said in reassuring tones. “You will be able to read all about the salmon campaign.”

  “I am glad,” said Knutsen, adding hastily, “I am afraid I must go,” before she had a chance to start in on Marcia or his nocturnal ramblings at the seafood show. Jane hung up feeling certain that Trygve Knutsen had no idea what was on the tape and probably no idea that he’d been the victim of eco-terrorists.

  However, what he had said did give Jane an explanation for Marcia’s presence back at the hotel. It sounded as if she had come back, after imprisoning Knutsen and changing her clothes, in order to leave the ransom tape. Presumably she’d taken the key to his room from him after he’d passed out.

  What happened after that was more speculative. Could Knutsen have escaped, become enraged, found Marcia in his room, attacked her and turned Marcia’s own gun on her in some kind of a struggle? But why would he have become enraged? Because his sexual pride was hurt? Because he felt so strongly about Norway’s right to harvest its minke whale population? But in that case, how had Marcia ended up next door?

  It was late. She was very sleepy. She got ready for bed, wondering if she should tackle Curtis Jeffers in the morning, if possible before the police got to him. That little weasel had a lot to answer for, she decided. Then she remembered his talk about taking up arms. Curtis was pretty scary.

  Maybe she should just put together a report on what she had for presentation to the board. She’d provided a distraught family with background on their daughter’s life. Answered some nagging questions about their estrangement. Allowed them to get on with their grief. Surely that’s what Uncle Harold would have wanted her to do—provide them with investigative services they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.

  It might be enough for the board. But it wasn’t enough for Jane. Until the Hunters knew why their daughter had died, she couldn’t feel she’d closed the case. But she had no idea how she would ever find out what had happened to Marcia.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The phone woke her the next morning at eight. Gunther Kessler was on the line.

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “To apologize,” he said. “To apologize and to offer you a business proposition.”

  Jane remembered how badly she had wanted to find out just what Kessler was up to. She didn’t accept the apology, but she said, “What did you have in mind?”

  “I have learned that you work more or less as a detective.”

  “How have you learned that?” she asked sharply.

  “And I have cleared you of all suspicion in the matter I am investigating.”

  “How gratifying,” she said.

  He cleared his throat. “My firm is an excellent one, and we pay well. Occasionally we use freelance operatives who are in a position to get themselves in places we can’t. Are you interested in discussing this further?”

  “Frankly,” said Jane, “I’m not that keen on doing business with someone who goes through my things and treats me like dirt. Just who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Mrs. da Silva,” Kessler said very politely, “I think you should at least hear me out. First of all, I think you could use the money.” Great, she thought, he’d probably checked her Visa balance. “Secondly, I’d like to make up for our recent unpleasantness by offering you a commission and treating you with p
rofessional respect. To be honest, this case has been very maddening, and I sometimes become a little ruthless when I can’t come up with a solution. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  “All right,” said Jane. “All right, we can talk. But no promises.” While Kessler had been sweet-talking her in his ponderous, overrehearsed way, she had suddenly flashed on one of the instant rosy scenarios for which she was such a sucker. His glitzy security firm hired her on a freelance basis and liked her work. For the first time she would be paid to investigate something, really paid, and by a client, not that fusty old board. She would get her foot in the door and maybe something to start a résumé with. And later, if all else failed, she could moonlight as an investigator, not a lounge singer. Who knows? she thought. If she did a good job, maybe this could get her back to Europe. She figured it was at least worth a conversation.

  She also had another, more disquieting thought. Kessler had spotted her as a complete phony right away. Why would he want to hire such a klutz? Jane thought it would be poor salesmanship to bring that up.