by Henry, Sue
“Oswald was Duck’s father…Will’s great-grandfather. I hear he’s been shot.”
Jensen nodded.
“Oswald came to Dawson from Wyoming in 1897 with another man, name of Franklin Warner, who evidently went back where he came from, wherever that was. Wilson stayed.”
“Tacoma, Washington.”
“What?”
“Warner came from Tacoma, Washington.”
“Now, how would you know that?”
Alex described Hampton’s find on the Yukon riverbank and its identification of the three men with whom Addison Riser had traveled.
Fitzgerald listened intently, obviously excited at the idea of the discovery. He asked several questions about the bones and, particularly, the journal. Though he shook his head at the name of Riser, he frowned at that of McNeal. “Now that sounds familiar.”
For a minute or two, he flipped through the files in two or three drawers, but came up with nothing.
“I know I’ve heard that name…run across it somewhere…but I’d have to do some digging to recover it. Sorry. Should remember a fellow Scot. It’s not as if there were that many of them here then.”
“Well, don’t go to a lot of trouble,” Alex told him. “It’s Wilson I was wondering about and you’ve solved that particular puzzle for me.” He got to his feet. “I’m keeping you from home and dinner. I’d like to see the museum, but I’ll come back sometime when I can really enjoy it.”
“Just let me know when and I’ll give you a private tour.” The curator walked him to the door, still ruminating over the Scot’s name as Jensen thanked him for his help.
“Anytime at all. I’ll think of where I saw McNeal. It’s here somewhere. Will you be in town long?”
“A couple of days, I think, but…” Alex pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to the much shorter man, who peered at it through his reading glasses. “I’d be glad to know if and when you find it.”
“Gladly. And I’d like a look at that journal. Can you get me a copy?”
“Better than that, I think. Del’s got the original in his safe. I’ll ask him to let you at least take a look and copy it.”
On that agreement, they shook hands and Fitzgerald let Alex out into the snowy night.
Chapter Thirteen
JENSEN TRUDGED AWAY FROM THE MUSEUM, making new footprints in the snow that had perceptibly deepened during his time with Fitzgerald. The blanket of white hushed the world around him so that every sound seemed softer and far away. For the most part, the few vehicles and pedestrians he saw moved almost as silently as shadows, except once, when the growl of a snow machine in low gear crossed a side street ahead of him and was gone. Houses he passed seemed cozy refuges in the storm, doors shut tight, windows cheerfully lighted. He caught glimpses of their inhabitants: a family seated round a dining table, an old man comfortably relaxed with a newspaper in front of a glowing fireplace, a cat on a windowsill watching the feathery snowflakes fall. A television set or two flickered with the strange white light that makes them hard to miss.
His steps slackened to a saunter as he appreciated the frosted fantasy of it. Sometime in the first few white days of every winter he would find himself walking through it alone, conscious of the world shutting down for the cold season. The landscape seemed to take a deep breath and relax into contemplation, readying itself for a few months’ nap. Snow silvered everything, softening shapes and lines.
The last few days had been very full of people and problems. For a few minutes it was pleasant to walk alone, without making the effort to speak or answer anyone. He lit his pipe and went along slowly, stem clenched between his teeth, hands in his pockets, satisfied to be exactly where he was, pleased with the interesting idea of the relationship between Ozzy and Duck Wilson.
To have met the son of a stampeder, however obnoxious, made the whole rush to the goldfields seem much more real. The journal, interesting as it was, still seemed like a story, almost fiction. Duck’s existence made it come to life in a new way. What an old curmudgeon…and wasn’t that a great word? He wondered where it had come from. Have to look it up in Jessie’s enormous dictionary, if he remembered.
Concentrating on the Wilsons, he almost walked past the door of the Downtown Hotel, caught himself, and went up the front steps.
In the dining room, Jim and Clair had settled at a table by a window, where, in warmth and comfort, they could watch the snow fall outside the glass. Their drinks had arrived, but they had waited for him to show up before they chose dinner. When they had all ordered, he sipped slowly at his whiskey, still feeling separate after his solitary walk and disinclined toward conversation. He was perfectly content to listen as Clair answered Hampton’s questions about the famous mining country around Dawson, a conversation that lasted through to coffee and dessert.
With Clair on her way home, Jensen walked with Hampton back to their hotel. Though it wasn’t late, he realized that a day in the cold air followed by a good dinner was making him drowsy. When they were about thirty yards from the hotel door, a figure in dark clothing came out and turned toward them. Then quickly it reversed direction and walked rapidly away.
The swiftness of the reversal, as if avoiding confrontation, caught Jensen’s attention and pricked lightly at the automatic alertness he had developed over years of practiced observation. Following the figure with his eyes, he relaxed and mentally tossed out his suspicion as the individual turned into the bar next door. Yawning for the third time, he stumbled over the top step as they reached the first landing of the stairs. A phone call and sleep were what he wanted, in that order.
Climbing beside him, Hampton seemed more awake. Briefly, Alex wondered about the woman Jim had mentioned a time or two in passing, but was too pleasantly relaxed to ask and risk starting a conversation. Had he called and told her about what had and was happening?
Reaching the top of the stairs, they had turned toward their rooms when Jensen noticed that both the doors were ajar. Knowing he had left his locked, he was suddenly wide awake himself; he stopped and threw an arm in front of Hampton to impede his forward motion.
“Wha…? Hey, I didn’t leave that open.”
“No. Neither did I. Be quiet and wait here.”
Pulling his hands from a search for his key in his jacket pockets, Alex moved quietly toward his door, which was nearest. As he went slowly and carefully down the hall, he regretted, not for the first time, the lack of the .357 Magnum he carried in Alaska but had not been able to bring across the border into Canada without authorization. In this case, it made him feel somewhat naked and vulnerable. Stopping to listen outside, and hearing nothing, he stood to one side and pushed the door open with his knee.
The room was empty, but nothing was the way they had left it. Drawers had been dragged from the chest and upended, mattresses and bedding pulled from the beds, both men’s bags emptied and the contents scattered across the floor. He stepped next door to Hampton’s room and repeated his listening and opening procedure, with the same results. No one was there, but the room was in chaos.
Bending, he examined the doors in turn. Both had been kicked in, probably with one blow of a heavy boot, for a dark streak remained on his door where the perpetrator’s foot had slipped slightly and the frames were both splintered.
“What the hell happened?”
Hampton, sensing from Jensen’s reactions that no one was there, had come down the hall to look in over his shoulder. He started angrily toward his room, only to be stopped by Jensen.
“Don’t. We need a constable to take fingerprints.”
“But…”
“Look. Can you step in and, without touching anything, see if you can tell what if anything’s been taken?”
“Yeah. But you really think whoever made this mess is going to leave fingerprint evidence?”
“Probably not, but that’s the drill, and sometimes we get lucky.”
“But a hotel must have a thousand.”
“Still…”
Why would someone break in to steal the journal? A copy? Not even the original?
After everything he could do alone, and a quick, careful phone call to the RCMP office, he retreated into the hallway where Hampton, who had taken off his coat and gloves, stood watching. Jensen walked back to the stairs and sat down at the top to wait.
“You going to stay here?”
“Yeah, better watch the place till someone comes with the equipment to check it out.”
“I think I’ll go down to the pub next door for a beer. That okay?”
“Sure, Jim. I’ll come and let you know when they’re finished up here, or if we have any questions about your stuff. Here, give me those clean clothes you picked up at the office. I’ll put them in your room when they’re through.”
Hampton nodded, handed him the tidy bundle, and was gone with a thump of boots on wooden steps.
Actually relieved to be alone to think, Jensen settled, leaning an elbow on one knee, chin in his palm. It was irritating to lose access to the room and bed he had been anticipating. However, the shot of adrenaline he had experienced on discovering the breakin had had a stimulating effect, and he was back in the game, wide awake, his mind already turning over possibilities.
Del Delafosse had left a constable, Mel, in charge of the post in his short absence, but he would depend on Alex’s careful assessment and conclusions. Besides, he was now alone, not constantly sharing the case. It gave him a sense of autonomy and challenge that had been lacking before and he did not resist it.
Who would want to know what was in the journal enough to risk breaking into the rooms to get it? And why? Was it somehow connected to the murders? What was in the rest of the journal? Now he wanted to read it all, see how it ended. If the present Wilsons were related to the Wilson in Riser’s account, did that fact have a connection to the theft? The murders? From the afternoon’s encounter with Duck, there seemed to be very little chance of getting information from him, and Will was dead. What about Will’s parents? Who and where were they? Why was he with his grandfather? What a tangle.
Okay. Who’d had the opportunity?
Charlie, the kid Hampton had seen with Will on the river, about whom Duck had undoubtedly lied? It seemed he was probably still somewhere in the area, especially if Duck’s lies were any indication. He could have slipped in and torn the rooms apart till he found what he wanted, and was it the journal? But why? What reason could there be to his killing either Russell or Wilson? According to Hampton, the kid and Will had tried to kill him. Was it more than the robbery it appeared? Who else?
Duck Wilson? Pretty thin, he thought. Be harder for him to go unnoticed in the hotel. Why would he break in? No reason occurred to Jensen, as he pictured the old man ka-thumping his way up the stairs. Had anyone in town seen him? Questions would have to be asked. Did the journal hook him up to Hampton somehow?
Standing up, he went back to his room and, careful not to leave or destroy prints on the phone, called the desk and asked the clerk to come up. But the man could contribute little when he arrived.
No one had asked for either of the officers or Hampton during the afternoon. He had seen no questionable person go up the stairs. Only those staying at the hotel. But, yes, he had been away from the desk several times during the day. The repair to the faucet in fourteen, twice to the dining room, couple of rest room visits, helping carry down some luggage from the second floor. Every day was like that…not all spent in the lobby. Anyone could have come and gone, if they were careful not to be seen. He had not heard the doors being kicked in, but scowled as he examined them without touching. He would give them two other rooms and have the doors repaired tomorrow. Still grumbling over the damage, he disappeared down toward his desk.
Sean Russell had been in town since his appearance in the RCMP office. Alex couldn’t think of a reason he would have broken in, or wanted the journal. Did he even know it existed? Would he care? Could he have been looking for information about his father’s death? If so, what? There was something about Sean’s behavior that made him uneasy, but it was hard to tell with people you didn’t know. Their watchful distrust of law enforcement was enough at times to make it seem they were hiding something.
Could taking the journal be a cover for something else? Nothing else appeared to be missing, unless Hampton had lied about his room.
Jensen paused and frowned. Hampton had been alone all the while he and Delafosse were on the river. He had not stayed in his room as he had indicated he would. He had asked for clean clothes after his confrontation with Sean. Could it have been to keep Jensen from going upstairs? To allow more time, widen the window of opportunity? Nothing from his room had been taken, he said. He could have done it before he went out to the Visitors Center. Could the fight with Sean Russell have been staged, or at least instigated?
Though his concentration was interrupted by a constable coming up the stairs with a fingerprint kit, he had one last, unrelated thought.
They had not searched Hampton’s truck when it was brought back from Clinton Creek.
Chapter Fourteen
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, JENSEN WAS BACK on the snowbound streets of Dawson, heading for the RCMP office where Hampton’s pickup had been parked in the lot following its return from Clinton Creek. Leaving the constable to play dippity-dab with his black powder and tape, Alex headed straight across town, long legs covering ground in steps that had no relation to the casual walk he had enjoyed earlier. It had stopped snowing for the moment and the temperature had dropped. He noticed the difference and added to it by creating a windchill in his hurry.
Retrieving keys to the vehicle along with a flashlight from a constable in the office, he walked across to where it was parked at the back of the lot, near a second access gate. In approximately four inches of snow that rose around its tires and covered the body, the pickup looked as if it had hunkered down protectively in the dark, resenting the weather. The snow-blanketed windshield darkened the cab too much for Jensen to see anything inside through the driver’s window.
Brushing away flakes with a gloved hand to reveal the slot for the key, he unlocked the door. A small cascade of snow fell from above the door as he opened it, but the interior remained dark as the light that should have blinked on did not. Taking the flashlight from a pocket, he thumbed it on and directed it into the cab.
Someone had been there before him. The seat was partially dusted with snow that had fallen or blown through the wing window, which flopped broken and half missing where that someone had reached through to unlock the door on the passenger side. The glove compartment gapped empty of the contents that had been pawed out onto the floor. The cab, like the hotel rooms, had been thoroughly ransacked: tools, water bottle, maps pulled from behind the seat and dumped in a disorderly pile in the middle of it. The visors both drooped down over the windshield like sleepy eyelids. A forgotten empty Coke can and a set of socket wrenches had been pulled from under the seat. The overhead light had been purposely smashed, scattering fragments over the seat.
Jensen stood still for a long minute or two, assessing the condition of the cab. The pickup had not been moved. He knew it had been refueled when it was brought in from Clinton Creek and now he found that the gas gauge still read full. No hot-wiring effort was obvious. Whoever had broken in had not wanted the truck, but whatever they were looking for in it. What? Who? The same person who had torn apart the hotel rooms seemed likely from the look of it.
Knowing there had been no tracks on the driver’s side, Jensen half closed the door gently to keep more snow from avalanching off the cab, and walked around behind the bed, with attention to where he put his feet. Standing beside the rear
wheel he could see that the snow on the ground below the passenger window had been disturbed, but long enough ago for new snow to partially fill the tracks. Whoever had broken in had moved around enough to flatten a space perhaps eighteen inches across. From it a series of depressions showed where an individual had come and gone from the street, hidden from the RCMP office window by the body of the truck.
Cautiously, Alex moved to these tracks and knelt beside two that seemed particularly distinct. Gently, he waved a gloved hand above one of the depressions, taking care not to touch, and blew a puff of air directly into it. The new uncompressed snow was light enough for the air to lift most of it from the print, leaving only a thin layer clinging to what had been solidly packed by the weight of the person who made it. Though it was too indistinct to make taking a print for identification worthwhile, Jensen could see the shape of the boot that had made it. It was a type he recognized, often wore himself, with a pointed toe and a riding or bulldogger heel that left a deeper impression than the rest. Western. No boot could have been more familiar to a man who had grown up seeing it every day on the feet of ranchers and cowboys in his home state of Idaho.
After a long look, he moved to the second print, obviously of the opposite foot. There he repeated the procedure and found more clues. The print was clear enough to show what looked like a crack in the sole of the instep on this left foot. The back of both prints indicated wear at the heels, and the toes curved up slightly, as the type tends to do with long wear and poor care. The boots were not new.
With a satisfied grin completely lacking in humor, he stepped back next to the bed of the truck and stood calculating the length of the space between prints, which told him the person who made them had been of average height.
Striding off across the lot, he went to find a constable with a tape measure. As he went through the office door, he was conscious of the whine of a snow machine passing on the side street and grinned to himself. Lovers of winter recreation in Canada were evidently as overjoyed with the first snowfall as they were in Alaska. Several times in the last hour or two, he had heard and seen snow machiners exuberantly zipping through the streets of Dawson.