by Henry, Sue
Picking up the key, the woman gave her a questioning look. “Isn’t it yours?”
“Well, not really. It was sort of left for me.”
“I’m sorry. We can’t give out any information unless your name is on record as renter, or renter’s agent. Are you listed?”
“No…I don’t think so. Well…maybe…I don’t know. I think it was my husband’s key. I found it in his things.”
“Oh,” said the woman, misinterpreting, “I’m so sorry. What was the name?”
Chelle let it go, since she now seemed more accommodating.
“Lewis. Norman Lewis.”
“And your name?”
Rochelle told her, and taking the key, the woman went to check a box of cards on a desk behind the counter. In a minute she came back.
“Sorry. No Lewis by either of those names.”
“No Lewis?”
“Not by those names. Sorry.”
Hesitantly, Chelle held out her hand, afraid of a negative reply. “Can I have the key back, please?”
But the woman was completely cooperative. “Certainly.” She handed it over.
Turning to leave, Chelle swung back with one more question. “Is there any way to find out which bank or branch this belongs to?”
“Not that I know of. Could be any one. Nobody puts location on the key, for obvious reasons.”
“Thanks, anyway.” Frowning, Chelle left to consult her list and delete one bank from it.
Street by street, bank by bank, she traversed midtown. Leaving the rest of Anchorage till later, if necessary. Response was similar at the next six banks she tried: no Norman or Rochelle Lewis on file. Discouraged and disconcerted, she began to feel she was hunting the proverbial needle. Could he have listed it under another name? Maybe. But he had used a number she could discover easily for the box in which she had found the key. Didn’t that mean he wanted her to find out what it fit as well? Nothing. She found nothing.
There were still a lot of banks to check, and she learned quickly, began to make her requests less hesitant. She stopped admitting that she knew nothing about the key.
“Lewis,” she stated with assumed confidence at the counter of a branch of the First National Bank of Anchorage to a dark-haired woman with a pleasant smile, who peered over reading glasses with bright eyes the color of weak tea. “Norman Lewis. My husband.”
The South Center Branch was where she and Norm did most of their banking, where the statements had originated, and which carried the half-paid loan on her plane. Norm had been inclined to keep all their business in one place when possible. If he wanted her to find it, he might have thought she would assume this too, or was it too obvious. She could hope, and did, while waiting for the woman, who soon returned with another smile, a file card in her hand.
“Norman Lewis,” she said, indicating the card. “Can I see some identification please?”
Rochelle’s heart leapt into her throat, and she fumbled her wallet open to lay her driver’s license on the counter between them. Carefully, the woman, Florence Gouge, from her name tag, compared the signatures and nodded. “Yes, you’re listed as agent.”
Agent? Chelle wanted to ask, but maintained her confidence in silence. Let the woman assume she already knew this.
But, when Florence looked up, her friendly smile faded slightly at the flushed appearance of Chelle’s face.
“Are you all right, dear?”
Holding out an unsteady hand, Chelle forced herself to relax and smile, though it felt as unreal as it probably looked on her stiff face. “Fine. I’m fine. Could I see that, please?”
Florence laid the card down on the counter. “See? You’re right here.” She pointed.
There in front of her, on a line at the bottom of the card, in blue ink, incredibly, was her own name: Rochelle J. Lewis. In what looked almost like her own handwriting.
She stared at it numbly. It was a forgery. She had never signed this card. What the hell…But…if she wanted to know what was in the box it belonged to, she couldn’t say so, could she?
“Would you like to access the box?”
“What?”
“Open it? Do you want to get into it?” the woman explained, as if she was speaking to someone with a retarded ability to understand. Her smile had disappeared entirely and she looked concerned.
This wouldn’t do. Rochelle shook herself mentally and forced her cold fingers to pick up her wallet and snap it shut efficiently, dropping it into her jacket pocket.
“Yes, please. I would.”
“Sign here, please.” Another card, once again signed in her handwriting, another signature that wasn’t hers. Below it a section labeled “Log of Box Entry,” with lines and spaces for date and signature.
Slowly, she signed and, as her hand shook slightly, thought, with dark amusement, that the name looked less like her own than the forgery above it. Florence, however, was satisfied.
“Come this way.” She held open a gate and led the way to a vault familiar in appearance to the others Chelle had seen. Stopping in front of box number 548, she inserted the bank’s key and stepped aside for Chelle to do the same with the one she had. It fit, turned easily, and allowed the box to slide forward, exposing a covered top with a hinge that would allow it to fold back.
“There.” Florence was once again smiling. This was correct and normal procedure. The keys worked and all was well. “Call me when you’re finished,” and she was gone, leaving Chelle alone with a box she had never seen but was evidently supposed to know all about. Who had forged her signature on the card? Norm, apparently. Did the bank care? Probably not. As long as their rules were followed they were covered and had no reason to care.
But she cared. And Norm had cared…hadn’t he? What was going on here, anyway? What do you want from me, Norm? This is not fair. You could have clued me in. I loved you, damn it! What the hell are you doing to me?
With a flash of yesterday’s anger, she flipped back the lid to the metal box, took a deep breath, and looked inside. Then, for a long moment, she stared silently down into the rectangular cavity.
An envelope, sealed, and there was nothing—not even her name—written on it. She took it out, tore it open and removed the legal-sized pages. Spreading them open, she saw immediately that what she held was not a letter, but an insurance form. It was a policy—with her name as beneficiary. Someone—presumably Norm, since it was his policy—with a yellow marker, had highlighted portions concerning the amounts: death benefits of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and double that amount in case of accidental death.
For a time she stared at it, uncomprehending. Five hundred thousand dollars? The figure was meaningless in its size. But it would pay off her plane…give her a living? He had meant her to be taken care of—to be able to get along without him.
But didn’t death have to be proved? Didn’t they have to have a body in order to prove it? And there was none. Was he even dead? What now? Did this make any difference at all? Where had he got the money to buy this policy? From what was missing from the account? And why was there no letter—no explanation? Why hadn’t he left her something personal?
She pocketed the papers and closed the lid on the box. Then she swore. Long and without reservation, she hissed words through her teeth that would have deeply offended Florence with her sweet smile—had she been present to hear. But she wasn’t. No one was. So Chelle ended up swearing at Norm again, until she finally ran out of words and burst into tears.
8
AS SOON AS HE REACHED HIS OFFICE IN PALMER THE next morning, Jensen called the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage to ask about the autopsy on the body of the woman from the plane.
“They’re on it now,” a lab clerk told him. “A rush job yesterday afternoon bumped it to this morning.”
“When’ll it be done?”
“You could check back about noon, I think.”
“Better than that, I’ll come in. Tell John not to take off for lunch till I see him, will
you?”
The next step was to present his idea from the night before to the commander of his detachment.
“So you finally located the Lewis plane. Really thought that was a lost cause,” Swift commented as Alex settled into a chair in front of his desk.
Ivan Swift was a short, compact man, built like a V, with heavy shoulders and a narrow waist. With his long thin nose and bright, intelligent eyes, he had always reminded Alex of a fox. His dark hair was graying at the temples. He barked his words and wasted none of them.
Different in style, but similar in their belief in the value of the details of crime, the two men respected each other, got along well, and Jensen was allowed much leeway in his investigations for the department.
“What’s the story on the woman?” Swift asked abruptly.
“Not sure yet. The autopsy’s still under way, but I’ve got some thoughts on it.”
“Go.”
“Remember that Fish and Wildlife undercover agent from outside who disappeared in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sting last year?”
“So? You think this is her? Why? It’s a long way from ANWR.”
“That’s why I’m waiting on the PM, but it’s a possibility. The timing for one thing. Also, because she was the only one shot. There wasn’t sign of Lewis. Gone. Vanished.”
At the tone of Jensen’s voice, the commander’s eyes narrowed and a pair of creases appeared between his brows.
“On his own?”
“Could be.”
A pause. Then, “You think he set her up?”
Swift’s thoughts were jumping ahead as fast as Jensen had anticipated they would.
“Maybe. Don’t even know it’s her yet, but…possible, if it is.”
“Guess we’d better find out. Enough left for prints?”
“Yeah. The body’s bad, but it was pretty well protected in the cockpit. They started on the ID last night.”
“Okay. You’re back on it full-time. Need help?”
“Becker?”
“On the Oppner case.”
“Caswell? We may need his plane.”
“Done. I’ll call and set it up. You tell him.”
“Thanks, Ivan.”
As Jensen drove the forty miles to Anchorage from the Mat-Su Valley, he remembered all he could about the ANWR operation in northern Alaska that had resulted in the arrests of many people involved in the illegal hunting and transportation of big game—moose, caribou, grizzly, sheep, wolf, and musk ox. After working three years to set up the sting, Fish and Wildlife agents and other law enforcement personnel from inside and outside the state had come down like hawks on the guides, pilots, and managers of two guiding services they had infiltrated and on whom they had succeeded in collecting evidence of wrongdoing. People had been arrested as far away as Georgia.
Wisconsin Special Agent Karen Randolph, like several others from out of state, had been an undercover plant. Her assignment had been one of the hunting camps of Dale Stoffel, a notoriously crooked and so far unconvicted pilot and guide. Sometime during the hunt she had supposedly arranged with him, she had disappeared and there had been no sign of her since. Stoffel insisted she had never showed up for the hunt, and went on claiming it consistently throughout his arrest and conviction for two other operations. He had been sentenced to eighteen months and had lost all the planes, cars, and equipment related to the crimes. Still in jail, he continued to allege that Randolph had been his client on paper only—a no-show for the actual hunt. They had not been able to prove otherwise, or locate conflicting evidence, or Randolph’s body, if she were dead, as they knew she must be.
Alarm bells were now ringing in Jensen’s mind, telling him something concerning this case needed attention. If the dead woman from Lewis’s plane was Randolph, the whole thing blew up significantly as more than the murder of a woman and a missing pilot. It would mean that Lewis had also been involved. What else would explain the presence of a federal agent in his plane? Could he have been part of the illegal activity? Part of the sting? His name had not been in the paperwork that Jensen had seen, but he had been brought in only at the last, to assist in the arrests, and knew a minimum amount about the case. Lewis might have been included, but how? Was it possible he had killed her? And, dead or alive, where the hell was he?
His plane had crashed not only far from where its flight plan indicated it should have been, but far from ANWR as well. Why? Other illegal hunting locations had been identified, one suspected in the Beluga Lakes area, though the focus had been farther north. Still…
But it was no use leaping ahead. He must wait for the coroner’s results. It all hinged on that. If the body turned out to be someone else—and it certainly could—there was nothing to connect it or Lewis to Stoffel and his poaching operations.
Lewis might possibly have been having an affair with someone his wife knew nothing about. Jensen assumed that Rochelle Lewis had wondered about it, though she had said nothing to indicate it. That could be what made him feel she was hiding something, could explain her obsession with finding Norm. He needed to talk to her again, soon, get a better reading. But first—the autopsy and fingerprint results.
He pulled into the parking lot of the crime lab to find Ben Caswell leaning against a fender of his truck, waiting. A satisfied grin spread over his face when he saw Jensen and stepped forward.
“Hey, you pulled it off again, huh?” he said as Alex climbed out of his truck. “Got us both out from behind a desk, for which I am humbly grateful.” Snatching off the out-of-uniform baseball cap he wore, he pretended to sweep the ground in front of Jensen’s advancing feet. “Thank you, thank you, oh mighty emancipator of slaves.”
Alex chuckled at the unusual antics that were a contrast to Caswell’s more customary watchful, quiet demeanor. He was hardly ever silly, though he sometimes displayed a wicked sense of humor. It said volumes of how tired he was of being a desk jockey for most of a winter that had been more than normally lacking in crime investigations requiring planes and their pilots.
Ben Caswell was not the sort to enjoy pushing paper. He found most of his pleasures in life outdoors and they usually involved his compact Maule M-4. Alex always enjoyed working with him because he didn’t waste time running in speculative circles. Sparing of words, he worked ideas through carefully in his head before trying them out verbally. Whatever he was asked, his commonest response was “Let me kick it around a little,” or “Can I get back to you on that?” He had a talent for sorting through the facts of a case and separating items worth consideration from the trivia that could just as well be ignored. His memory was phenomenal, and there was something of the bulldog in his stubborn pursuit of ideas and solutions to the cases on which he worked. In addition, he could fly rings around a lot of other pilots, a detail that had more than once saved their bacon, Alex remembered thankfully.
He was proud to count Caswell as a personal friend, and it pleased him that not only did Cas and Jessie like each other, but Ben’s wife, Linda, had become a friend as well. The foursome frequently went to movies or got together for dinner or a weekend of hiking or fishing.
Now he laughed at Ben’s clowning and laid a hand on his shoulder as they turned to walk toward the crime lab.
“Give it up, Cas. You’d have found some other excuse for yourself if I hadn’t needed you on this one.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. What’s the deal, anyway? Something about yesterday and the Lewis thing, right?”
“Right. I’ve got this feeling I can’t get rid of that Norm Lewis—”
“Took off on his own?” Caswell interrupted.
“You, too?”
“Well, I’ve been kicking it around off and on. Then finding the plane and no Lewis yesterday really got me going. What’s your take on it?”
“I took the file home last night and went through it again,” Alex told him. “What I came up with is that…”
He paused as they went through the door to the lab and into the front hallw
ay, where they turned left, headed for the director’s office.
“I think the woman in the plane…”
As he was about to complete the sentence, a wheelchair came whipping around a corner, cruised up to the two troopers, and stopped bare inches short. A fuzzy-haired man with a frown beetling his dark brows looked up at them accusingly.
“Where’ve you been, Jensen?” he demanded in a deep voice that reminded Alex of someone shaking gravel in a can.
“And good morning to you, John,” he nodded. “Driving in from the valley. You got something?”
“Thought you were in a hurry for ID on that woman you gave me yesterday.”
“I am. But, short of using the siren, I got here as fast as I could. What’ve you got?”
“More’n you probably expected.” The growl of an answer drifted back over his shoulder as he spun the chair and started swiftly back down the hall. “Let’s hit my office and take a look.”
Jensen and Caswell exchanged amused glances as they hustled to catch up. Both of them were well acquainted with John Timmons, who had worked as assistant to the coroner at the lab for longer than either of them could remember. He had not always been a prisoner of the chair he handled so well. A skiing accident had deprived him of the use of his legs five years earlier. It had not, however, significantly changed his attitude toward life, which pretty much amounted to hurling himself at it headlong, work or play. Wheelchair racing had replaced skiing in his quest for speed and challenge. Some Machiavellian mechanical genius—or madman—had built him a four-wheeled version of a dirt bike, and he now raced off road, as well as on, whenever he got the chance, though winter restricted his opportunities. When cold weather and cabin fever set in, he turned to a luge run he was designing for the vertically challenged, as he termed himself, and which, so far, perhaps luckily, remained on paper.
The chair he used at the lab was fitted with a lift that brought him up to a level at which he could work. This, plus powerful arms and shoulders, and a set of braces that held him rigidly in a standing position part of the time, allowed him to continue doing autopsies as always. Since no one could do them better, or come up with more accurate results and creative ideas from them, he would have been sorely missed had he been forced to change occupations.