by Henry, Sue
Riser was undoubtedly right, thought Alex, as he lowered the journal and yawned a huge yawn. Ozzy Wilson sounded like a bad case and likely to be dangerous. He felt glad that Addison Riser had a friend in Ned McNeal, and smiled to himself at the depth of his own involvement in a story that was almost a hundred years old and where participants were long dead. Riser made everything seem very real and interesting. Hampton had made a fascinating and unique find, a firsthand account of a famous trip. A couple more years and the communities along the route that the rush for gold had taken would be holding centennial celebrations for the Rush of 1897-98. Dawson itself was planning events in 1996 to commemorate the discovery of gold. It would be a summer worth visiting the Klondike community.
He raised the journal to read one last paragraph, for, glancing ahead, he had already noted its topic.
For the last few nights we have witnessed the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, in bands of glowing greenish-white in the dark sky. They move and pulse in swirls and curtain-like formations, and one can see the brightest stars through them. Almost ghostly in their silence, they yet seem almost alive in the rhythm of their movement. Beautiful and alien, one could watch them for hours, their fascination is completely compelling.
Well, Jensen decided, that’s enough for one night. Laying the copy of the journal next to his pipe, he turned out the light and slid down comfortably in the bed. Riser’s last description seemed to fit his own experience earlier on the river bank. The aurora seemed to have the same awe-inspiring effect on almost everyone who saw it. It made him feel connected, both to Riser and the country he had passed through.
He fell asleep remembering Jessie tell of watching the aurora during the nights on the Iditarod Trail. She had said the lights were so bright she could see the shadow of herself and her dogs on the snow.
Chapter Eight
“I HAD TROUBLE PUTTING THE DARN THING down,” Alex commented to Jim Hampton the following morning, as he poured more syrup than necessary on a generous stack of pancakes. “Have you read the whole journal?”
Hampton looked, if anything, more exhausted than he had the night before. Dark circles under bloodshot eyes said he hadn’t slept much, or well. Jensen had watched him swallow three aspirin while they waited for their food.
“Afraid not. And I didn’t get much more read last night. Couldn’t keep my eyes open, but kept waking up all night. How far did you get?”
“They were well on their way to Dawson, just past the incident with Oswald and the watch, when I conked out.”
Hampton stopped chewing the sausage and egg he had just forked into his mouth and stared at his plate. The frown that wrinkled his forehead said that was more than he had read, and that he was feeling an unexpected jealousy that someone else should get to read his discovery first.
He glanced up to find Jensen looking across the table at him, eyes wide, brows raised quizzically, and responded with a rueful grin at the expression. Still as a statue, the trooper remained, knife and fork poised over his plate, waiting.
“Sorry,” Hampton told him. “I just realized that I feel pretty possessive about that journal.”
“I read more than you did?”
“Yeah, but I’ll catch up with you. Don’t worry about it. I just never found anything like it before.”
“Don’t imagine many people have. If you want to know, I’m envious as hell that you ran across it and I didn’t. Hurry up and finish reading, then we’ll talk about it. Okay?”
They returned their attention to the breakfast on their plates.
“You know,” Jensen said, after a minute, “you might be able to find out more about Riser at the Yukon Archives in Whitehorse. Ever been there?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s all sorts of records. For instance, in 1898, what was then the Northwest Mounted Police established a checkpoint on top of the Chilkoot Pass and required everyone to have a year’s worth of supplies before they could go on into Canada.”
“I remember that from somewhere.”
“The names of everyone they let through, and the date, is on a list in the Yukon Archives, along with another, earlier list of the people who took boats on Lake Bennett and Tagish Lake. Mounties took their own boat out and actually wrote down the names, ages, and where they were from. Somewhere on down the river they had a post and kept a journal every day of who came and went, what kind of weather there was, stuff like that. That’s in the archives too. So is a journal or record from the Dawson post.”
“Hey. That could be helpful, if they kept it in 1897.”
“Don’t remember the years, but it’d be worth checking. They were there in 1897. You might find Riser, and the rest of the names, in there somewhere.”
“Report from Eagle that a Zodiac was stolen on Sunday or Monday sometime,” Delafosse shouted as they made time down the Yukon with two crime-scene investigators, one piloting the jet boat.
The day was overcast and cold, so they sat as low in the boat as possible, huddled in their coats, and yelled at each other to be heard.
“Could be the one you saw Tuesday morning, Jim,” Jensen called to Hampton, before turning to Delafosse. “Any description?”
“Yeah, but they all look pretty much alike. Have to check details to tell them apart.”
Coming around a curve, Hampton stood up to assess the riverbanks they were passing. “There,” he pointed. “See that bluff? And there’s the fish wheel. We’re almost there.” A wide sand and gravel beach opened up to the left: the place he had stopped to talk to Russell.
Pulling the boat in toward one end of its curve, they climbed out and tied it up. Looking carefully where they stepped, Jensen and Delafosse led the way along the edge of the water, looking for signs, which they soon located. Deep lines from the hard keels of at least two boats were clearly visible. In another place, scuff marks that could be those of an inflatable Zodiac were fairly easy to spot.
Hampton identified the first mark as where Russell’s boat had been when he stopped for coffee, and showed them a much lighter, slimmer mark where he had landed his canoe.
“Don’t know about the other mark, or the inflatable,” he told them. “The marks either weren’t here, or I didn’t notice them. But there was only his boat and my canoe when I stopped.”
Delafosse took a number of pictures. Then, while Jensen drew a sketch of their placement, the other two measured the distance between the marks, calling out the number of feet.
“How can this make any difference?” Hampton asked, when they finished and the inspector had retracted the tape he had carried in one pocket.
“Probably won’t, but you can’t ever tell. We’ll collect everything we can find and see if anything falls together.”
Higher on the beach, Hampton showed them where Russell had set up his tent, and the remains of his fire. In the edge of the water, weighted down with a large rock, a constable located a plastic bag holding a few empty, unburnable cans and plastic containers.
“Garbage,” Hampton muttered and started to reach for it, when Delafosse stopped him.
“Unlikely, but still evidence,” he said, lifting it carefully out of the river, dripping water. “Grist for the mill. At least he knew enough to drown the food scent in case of bears.”
The bag went into the boat, along with some other small bits of trash that Alex picked up, scattered near the fire: four screw-on bottle caps, a piece of rag, and a green ballpoint pen that had been all but invisible between two rocks. “Wasn’t too careful with the small stuff,” he frowned, dropping it all in an evidence bag. “Doubt he’d leave this kind of stuff on the floor of his house. Shouldn’t leave it here, either.”
Hampton nodded, appreciating the irritation that matched his own.
Beyond the blackened stones of the fire, Del stopped and squatted to examine the ground. Resting on his heels, he moved a rock or two, then asked Jensen to bring a trowel from the boat.
He watched while the trooper carefully scr
aped away a layer of earth where the rocks had been. In just a minute, a patch of dark rust-colored sand was exposed. Halting his exploration, Jensen glanced at the inspector and cocked an eyebrow.
Delafosse nodded. “Blood, and not frozen immediately or it would have retained a brighter color, so it must have been shed during warmer hours. Now, look from here to there.” He pointed along a line from the stain to a section of the brush surrounding the beach. Something, more than likely some body, had been dragged across the stones, eroding the thin coating of sludge deposited at high water by the river, and disturbing the sand between them.
“Russell?”
“Be my guess, but remarkably little spatter or tissue for a shotgun.”
When they followed the drag marks up into the brush, however, and lifted away some broken branches, they found not evidence of Russell but another body exposed to their inquiry; flat on its back, a green billed cap covering the face, surrounded by tangles of dark hair and full beard, a red plaid shirt made rusty by a massive amount of blood that had soaked, then frozen to it.
“Damn it.” Delafosse lifted the cap with two fingers to expose a single bullet hole above the dead, staring eyes. Laying it back, he stepped away and turned toward the beach.
“Hampton. Come up here, but don’t walk on those marks.”
When he had joined them, the inspector lifted the cap once more.
“This the guy that held you up on the river?”
Hampton took one long look and turned away, once again pale and swallowing hard. “Yeah. The one with the shotgun. Will.”
Jensen empathized with his reaction. No matter how many times he was called on to examine the body of someone who had died violently, it always made his own stomach turn over at first sight. Later, concentrating on the investigation allowed him to distance himself and regard the body as a source of the information he needed to work on a case. The waste of a life always made him angry, but that anger was useful. It intensified his determination to identify the perpetrator and established an odd sort of bond with the victim, who must helplessly rely on him for justice.
Being sickened at the sight of a murder victim, however, did not, in itself, indicate innocence. Many who killed, he knew, were not sadistic or cold-blooded enough to tolerate their own handiwork; they simply did not anticipate the result.
“You know this guy?” he asked Delafosse. “This the one that rang bells for you?”
The inspector sent Hampton back to the boat, before answering.
“Yes. I thought he was still in prison. He’s old man Wilson’s grandson. Mean as hell, but obviously met somebody meaner, or very lucky.”
“He’s been shot more than once.”
“The body shot may go clear through, but he was alive afterward, judging by the amount it bled out. Looks like the head shot killed him. I’d like to turn him over, but we’d better get the team to work first.”
When the investigation had started, he turned and walked away from the body in the opposite direction, along the line of brush. Jensen followed, taking care to watch where he stepped, but they were soon beyond the crime area.
Above the far end of the beach, Del stopped and stood looking out across the river, frowning, deep in thought. Alex halted a few feet behind him, rested one booted foot on a log and leaned both forearms on his knee, comfortably waiting until his friend was ready to share whatever was occupying his thoughts.
A light wind had come up and rustled through the dry leaves and twigs with a chill breath that crept into coat sleeves and down collars. As he filled his pipe, Alex glanced skyward. In the last twenty-four hours the temperature had dropped considerably. The sky had turned a flat white, signaling the possibility of snow. The surrounding hills were white most of the way down, ending in a horizontal line that had descended slowly during the last few days. Sourdoughs, he knew, still called these first powderings, which signaled the end of the year’s prospecting season, “termination dust.”
Termination was a good word for what had happened to the two men whose bodies they had found along this river. Both had been shot, but the MO did not appear to be similar. Who had put an end to their living season? The same person? And why? Several people had had the opportunity, and probably more that they didn’t know about, since the river was like a highway for those who lived and worked along it. At the rate northerners in both the Yukon and Alaska carried firearms, most of them had the means, also. But who would benefit from the deaths of two such different people? A retired politician and an ex-convict. Had they even known each other? Or whom had they both known? What connected them?
He was about to ask, when Del turned around and spoke.
“How do you feel about Hampton now, Alex?”
“Well, not much different, I guess, but…Why? You see something I didn’t?”
“No. I just can’t get over the fact that he is connected to both these killings in one way or another. I just can’t understand why. He has no obvious motive, unless he killed this one to get back at him for the theft of his gear, and that doesn’t fit well, does it?”
“Nope.”
“There’s too many people involved somehow, damn it. All the tracks on the beach are unidentifiable, scrapes on rocks and dents in the sand. Looks like an army held maneuvers down there. Not much to go on.” He sighed and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets.
Jensen took his foot from the log, straightened up, and continued his own thoughts out loud.
“This Wilson wasn’t killed with a shotgun, Del. Would the same shooter kill two people with different guns? Possible, yes. But a man usually sticks with his weapon of choice, given the opportunity. Could we have more than one killer here? One who blasted Russell and one who, it seems, shot Wilson in the back, then finished him later with the head shot?”
“You mean Hampton might be involved?”
“No…I don’t think so…somehow. But…I haven’t thought far enough for the who, just a possible how. Another thing. Why would enough time elapse between the two shots to allow Wilson to bleed out on the beach? From the way the blood is spread down there, it looks like he was conscious enough to move around some. Plainly he was still alive, so why wasn’t he shot again right away? There must have been a reason to delay shooting him the second time. Time to talk?…To try for information of some kind?
“Was the senator killed here too? If the blood we found is Wilson’s, Russell’s could be around somewhere close. That shotgun would leave a massive amount of evidence.”
“Right. We’d better get looking.”
Though they searched the beach and surrounding area thoroughly, they found no sign of the results of a shotgun, but one of the constables picked up a battered slug that had probably gone through Wilson. Since his body had been moved from where he had evidently been hit, there was no way of telling from which direction it had been fired. Finally giving up, they assisted in bagging the first patch of bloody sand for lab analysis, and collecting or photographing everything they could find of importance. When the two Canadian officers had finished with Wilson’s body, they examined its back.
“Entrance wound all right,” Jensen confirmed. “He was shot in the back?”
“And whatever the reason, it put him down pretty good, but didn’t kill him. You’re right. From the way he bled, the head shot wasn’t made for a while afterward. That does make me wonder why.”
Jensen turned to look down at the marks the boats had left at the edge of the water. “Have you considered sending someone along the river to talk to anyone who might have seen the boats Hampton described, and the Zodiac?”
“Meant to do it last night, but I was tired enough to let it slip. Get it going when we get back to the post.”
“You know, the other thing that interests me is that both this man and one of the stampeders in Riser’s journal are named Wilson. I know it seems crazy, but could they be connected somehow?”
“Pretty common name, but we could check. Old man Wilson’s lived aroun
d here for a long time. I suppose it’s possible.”
“Yeah…common. Probably not related.”
Alex went to help the constables lift Will Wilson into a body bag they had brought from the boat. There was no metal box this time, since the one assigned to Dawson had already gone to Whitehorse with Russell. As they lifted the bag to transport it across the beach to the river, Alex looked toward the boat and saw Hampton huddled dejectedly on a seat in the back.
Everything he had told them so far had seemed sincere, but Jensen’s experience told him to wait, watch, and give it time. People who were innocently involved in a crime had different ways of perceiving it than did those who were guilty and trying their best to hide it. Given long enough, a cover-up could hardly fit all the facts revealed in a case, would eventually slip to expose fabrication and duplicity. Lies lead to more lies, some of which would prove to be insupportable by evidence. So far, the inconsistencies in Hampton’s situation did not add up to falsehoods, but it wouldn’t hurt to let time prove them one way or the other.
Hampton watched the proceedings from his seat in the boat, feeling depressed, discouraged, and queasy. He had caught Delafosse’s questioning look when they found Wilson and correctly assumed that the inspector was reassessing his suspicions. Would he be arrested? Should he call his father in Denver? He would have to call soon, anyway, for he had not checked in since he left Dawson for Forty-Mile and didn’t want either his father or Judy to worry. When he was traveling alone he called before he started a specific stretch of water to say where he was headed, how long it should take, and when he would call again. It was a system that worked well and prevented worry for all involved. At the moment he wished he had his father along to talk over the situation in which he found himself.
The thought of Judy made him wish for her. If she had been with him, maybe none of it would have happened. Suddenly, he ached for her practical rationality and support, missed her terribly. He realized that, partly because he could not, he was more than ready to head home for a number of reasons, one of which was there waiting, and some of which were currently scouring the beach for clues.