Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  “Let me know if you decide to cater out, Lynn. I’d be in the market.”

  Ehlers spread jam on a second piece of toast, took a bite, and chewed thoughtfully until Jessie had refilled her own coffee mug and come back to the table.

  “What the hell was all that about?” he asked.

  She hesitated, mug halfway to her mouth, and gave him a look that was on the embarrassed side.

  “Becker wants to know anything he can about the crew,” she told him. “So I’m finding out what I can.”

  “Set you to snitch, has he?”

  Stung, Jessie scowled at him. “Dammit, Lynn, I don’t like it. The whole business upsets me. But somebody knew we were going up there and flew the plane that forced us down, killed Bonnie Russell, and almost did for Cas and me. Somebody left those roses. Somebody is killing women and following Hansen’s pattern of taking them up the Knik to get rid of the bodies. I don’t like being suspicious of everybody, but—snitch?”

  “Hey.” Ehlers raised a defensive hand. “Sorry, wrong word. I didn’t mean…”

  Another knock on the door interrupted him and Prentice stuck his head in.

  “Did Dell call in, Jessie? He hasn’t showed.”

  He didn’t show. Phone calls to his number roused only the answering machine, and the crew labored a man short that morning. By lunchtime, Vic was growling.

  “Dammit, we need him. He go out partying last night, Stevie?”

  Jessie, who was feeling well enough to do more cleanup in the yard, stopped to listen to the answer.

  Stevie swallowed the bite of apple she was chewing and affected a casual disregard that Jessie found a bit counterfeit.

  “I don’t think so. He doesn’t hang out or drink much. Might have gone hiking, though. He does a lot of outdoor stuff and goes a couple of times a week—I think.”

  As if she doesn’t keep a close eye on him, Jessie thought.

  “Where does he go?” she asked, startling Vic, who hadn’t noticed her presence.

  Stevie shrugged. “How should I know? The trails up Pioneer Peak, maybe—he mentioned it once. Up the river?”

  “Did he mention going upriver?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember exactly. He goes different places, I think. Why?”

  Prentice frowned.

  “It’s not like Dell to miss work without letting me know. Never done it before.”

  It seemed to Jessie that Stevie was telling the truth about what she knew—and that Dell had evidently succeeded in keeping his female working partner at arm’s length. She remembered seeing them together at Oscar’s in Wasilla and wondered why the relationship didn’t take. Stevie was an attractive woman—dark hair worn short, friendly gamine grin, something soft and gentle about her that escaped around the edges of the image of toughness she projected for obvious reasons. It seemed odd that he hadn’t responded to her apparent interest, but she could be right and he might have another girlfriend. Stevie was clearly trying to keep her business to herself, but Jessie felt certain that if she had detected the young woman’s interest in Dell, the rest of the crew was aware of it as well.

  “You know, Stevie,” Prentice mused in a thoughtful voice, still frowning in concern, “if he went hiking and didn’t come home last night—wasn’t there this morning and isn’t here now—there has to be a reason. It’s just possible he’s still out there somewhere—hurt, maybe. If you have any idea where he went, now might be a good time to say so.”

  Indifference shifted to disquiet on Stevie’s face as she considered that idea. Jessie could identify with her struggle between uneasiness and the revelation of her private feelings. It was difficult to be the interested one, especially when that attraction was not returned—embarrassing, humiliating even. Prentice was Stevie’s boss, and the last thing she wanted was to appear weak or ridiculous in front of him. Unrequited crushes could look juvenile.

  “We-ell,” she said slowly, a flush spreading over her cheeks, “on my way back from the grocery store last night I drove past his place, okay?”

  Jessie doubted that Dell’s place was actually on the route between Stevie’s—wherever that was—and the grocery, but kept her mouth shut.

  “He was putting stuff in his car, and he had a fishing pole.”

  “A fishing pole?” Vic questioned attentively.

  “Yes.” Stevie scowled. “And that’s all I know.”

  She slid off the lumber on which she was perched and walked away toward the halfbuilt cabin, pulling on her leather gloves, going back to work a few minutes early.

  Prentice turned to Jessie.

  “So he probably went upriver.”

  “Maybe, but there’s other fishing places and a hundred places he could have gone if he wasn’t fishing. This area’s a hiker’s paradise.”

  Still frowning, Prentice pulled off his cap and ran a hand through his thinning hair. She knew he was more anxious than he appeared, for when he was stressed the soft sound of his southern upbringing thickened his voice slightly and his grammar went to hell.

  “It’s only been a coupla hours. If he don’t show up by tomorrow mornin’—or call—well, we’ll see about it.”

  Jessie nodded agreement but turned toward the Winnebago and its telephone. It was, she thought, something Becker should be made aware of before tomorrow.

  As she walked across the yard, she glanced at the roof where the rest of the crew, not to be outdone, had followed Stevie and was now back at work. J.B. was sitting back on his heels, hammer in hand, watching Jessie with a speculative look on his face.

  Oh, not again, she thought.

  But the minute he saw that she was aware of his scrutiny, he looked away quickly and went back to pounding nails.

  27

  BECKER SHOWED UP SOONER THAN JESSIE THOUGHT POSSIBLE, considering that it took two phone calls to track him down. He had been at the crime lab, working on identifications for the construction crew and going over back histories of the women whose murders had been attributed to Robert Hansen. Hearing of Dell’s disappearance, he made the trip from Anchorage to Knik Road in just over half an hour, without his siren. He came with another trooper and a warrant to search the current residence of Daryl O’Dell Mitchell.

  “I already had the warrant,” he told Jessie. “Dell is Mitchell—the nephew of the old man whose body you found. I should have figured that out at least a week ago.”

  Jessie stared at him, confounded. “Dell. O’Dell. I didn’t recognize him at all,” she said finally.

  “Well, he didn’t have a beard or long hair when you saw him, did he? And you only saw him once.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s also a heftier man than he was when you saw him—muscled up from working construction and driving a truck. Who would have expected him to show up on Prentice’s crew? And why?”

  “He came asking for work. He was qualified. I needed a man, so I hired him.” Vic answered the question simply. “He’d asked before about this specific job. Guess he heard about it from someone in the community. He wanted to work a log cabin for the experience, was how he put it. It’s the only one I’m building this summer, so I put him on.”

  “Now he’s missing?”

  “Yeah, well—he didn’t show up this morning, which is unusual. He’s a good, dependable worker. Stevie says he may have gone up the river last night. I’d sure like to know he’s not hurt somewhere out there.”

  “I’d like to know why he went,” Becker said, all business. “I want to borrow Stevie for an hour, so she can show us exactly where she saw him last.”

  Stevie came down from the unfinished roof, removed her tool belt and agreed to go along, but she asked, as had Bonnie Russell, if Jessie could go too.

  Why does everybody want me to hold their hand? Jessie wondered, not particularly enthused about joining the investigation but slightly curious, now that she knew who he was, to see where Dell lived. She agreed to go, hoping it wouldn’t take long.

  “Tell Lynn I’ll be back so
on, if I’m not here when he comes at five,” she told Hank Peterson, who had climbed down after Stevie and stood listening.

  “No problem. You’ll be safe with the cops anyway. You okay with this, Stevie?”

  “What?” She swung around to face him. “Oh, yeah. I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.” The look she gave him was a kind of thank-you for his friendly concern.

  Everybody likes Hank, Jessie thought, as they walked to the patrol car. He’s like an older brother—or younger, depending on who’s counting. Then the penny dropped and she suddenly realized what was behind his concern for Stevie. He was attracted to her. She was hung up on Dell, but Hank, who had to know it, was interested in Stevie anyway. What a tangle. Somebody’s bound to get hurt here, she thought, shaking her head and hoping it wouldn’t be Hank. Oh, hell, she decided, it’s their business, not mine, and climbed into the back of the car.

  Though Jessie knew Becker had Dell Mitchell’s address, he asked Stevie for directions and followed them. She wondered why but didn’t ask, assuming he had his reasons.

  They pulled up outside a small house on the outskirts of Palmer, which from the style and overgrown shrubbery in the yard had been built sometime in the fifties. Becker sat for a moment, looking it over.

  “That where he parks his car?” He indicated a patch of oil-stained gravel next to a carport half filled with firewood, evidently stacked there to keep it dry but leaving no space to park a vehicle.

  “Yeah. That’s where I saw him putting stuff in the car.” Stevie glanced at Jessie and flushed again. The street was not a dead end, but part of a circle that began and ended in another. There was no way she would have passed this house unless she had done it purposely.

  Jessie held her tongue and didn’t smile; though she couldn’t resist a wink, which made Stevie’s lips twitch as she held back a giveaway grin.

  “What’s he drive?”

  “Old Mustang—blue,” she answered. “Except for one tan front fender.”

  There was mail in the box by the road and the morning’s newspaper on the front step. Clearly, Dell had not been there to collect them.

  Armed with his warrant, Becker tried the door. It was unlocked, so they walked in, Becker calling out Dell’s name.

  “Stay here by the door,” he cautioned the two women, and the two troopers searched the house room by room to be sure there was no one home.

  The house had an empty feel. Jessie looked around the living room in which she stood, as they waited. The main window that faced the street was covered with faded drapes. They were lined with light-blocking material that plunged the space into gloom, making it too dark to see what appeared to be books and papers of some kind on a small table. By the table was a folding chair, positioned as if someone—probably Dell—had been working there. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished—two chairs with a coffee table between them stood near a woodstove with a pipe that vanished up the chimney of a fireplace. A shelf unit against the wall opposite the window was half full of paperbacks, videotapes, and CDs for a new-looking entertainment center on an adjoining wall. There were no pictures or decorations. An empty glass and a beer bottle had been left on the coffee table, along with a newspaper folded to the television guide.

  As she was wishing for more light to see what was on the table by the window, Becker returned, walked directly across the room, and opened the curtains. Glancing down, he stopped dead and grunted in surprise.

  “What is it?” Jessie asked.

  “Come here, carefully. Don’t touch anything.”

  She walked across to the table, followed by Stevie, and looked down.

  On the table was a map that Jessie knew was from the assessor’s office, because she had one like it. Next to the map was a small pile of newspaper articles, which Becker flipped over one by one with the eraser of a pencil taken from his pocket. Every one of them had something to do with the latest string of murders and bodies that had been found, including the old man Jessie had found in her basement. She recognized the headline, DEAD BODY DISCOVERED IN LOCAL MUSHER’S BASEMENT, and her resentment flared again at the reporter responsible.

  An enlarged copy of a map that included the Knik River drainage lay in the middle of the table. On the original had been drawn several concentric circles, with Anchorage in the center. In the upper right quarter were numbers, one to twenty-three, with circles drawn around them. A line from each indicated a specific location along the river.

  “Phil?” Jessie questioned, recognition dawning, “is this what I think it is?”

  The map had been creased in half horizontally, the lower half folded under. Becker used the pencil to unfold it, and the rest lay open to view, with several more numbered circles around Seward on the Kenai Peninsula.

  “It’s a copy of the recreation of Hansen’s map from the Gilmour and Hale book,” he said.

  “What book?”

  “Butcher, Baker,” he answered, through tight lips. “There’ve been two books published about the Hansen case. This was the first—came out in 1991. It included the police recreation of a map Hansen drew of where he buried the women he killed. This is an enlarged copy. He admitted burying women in sites one through seventeen. The rest he denied, though they were marked on his map.”

  “What are these, then?”

  She pointed out but did not touch three new circles that had been drawn with a red pencil. Inside each was a number: twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-six. All three indicated sites on the upper reaches of the Knik River.

  “I would have to assume they indicate new burials, or at least new victims, buried or not. I know this is the one Bonnie Russell stumbled across, and it wasn’t underground.” He indicated number twenty-five. “He must be following Hansen’s lead—adding to his list.”

  The idea that Dell was the person responsible for the abducted and murdered women—that he had been working in her yard and was probably also responsible for the roses that had been delivered to her—made Jessie feel cold. It could have been Dell she saw in the yard the night she and Lynn Ehlers came back from Oscar’s. She had not had a good look at that retreating figure. That he could have been so close, watching her—watching everything that went on, including the excavation of his own uncle—seemed unbelievable. Where was he now? Why hadn’t he covered his tracks by coming to work that morning? What was he doing that was so important he would risk exposure?

  Clearly, she decided, I am no better at judging people than I am at not having my own way. It was frightening that she could have been so mistaken.

  “What are you…” she started.

  “Jesus!” Stevie said suddenly.

  Both Becker and Jessie had forgotten she was there, looking over his shoulder.

  “If you think Dell did those murders, you’re wrong,” she told them, whitefaced and adamant. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  They stared at her, startled.

  If he did, Jessie thought—remembering that Prentice also liked Dell and was concerned about him—it’s going to be tough on the crew.

  “Phil,” the second trooper called from the kitchen. “You’d better see this.”

  The drawer he had opened in his search was the second of four in a vertical set beside the back door. In it lay two boxes of cartridges and a cleaning kit for a handgun. Though the box for the gun was there, the weapon itself was missing.

  On the counter sat a loaf of bread, a few crumbs, and a knife that appeared to have been used to apply mayonnaise and mustard. Opening the refrigerator, he showed Becker the remains of a block of cheese. In the garbage was the empty package from some sandwich ham.

  “Looks like he made himself a lunch. From the dirty dishes in the sink, I’d guess he had fried chicken and coleslaw for dinner. This may mean that wherever he went he meant to be gone long enough to get hungry.”

  “Agreed,” Becker told him. “Good work, Pat.” He stood looking into the drawer, with its evidence that De
ll had also taken a gun with him, and glowered. “Guess we’d better get going upriver and find him.”

  Becker called the crime lab for a team to go over Dell’s house and left everything that was on the table by the front window except the map, which he carefully stowed in a plastic evidence bag as Stevie watched and glared at him. He closed the house, and they all went back to the patrol car in silence.

  “We’ll drop you off…” he had started to tell Jessie as they climbed in, when Stevie once again interrupted.

  “No!”

  He twisted in the driver’s seat to give her an irate look. “What do you mean, no? You can’t just…”

  “I mean you’re not going without me, that’s what I mean.”

  “Oh, no. You’re going back to Jessie’s. That’s what I mean.”

  “You can’t stop me from driving up there myself—and I will,” she countered, angry and stubborn, frowning from under the purple bandanna she had chosen for work that morning.

  “Watch me. I can arrest you.”

  “For what?”

  “For obstruction of—oh, hell. For getting in the way,” Becker barked. “I haven’t got time for any more of this shit.”

  He jerked the car into gear and stomped on the gas, throwing the others back in their seats as he took off, scattering gravel.

  “Well, either I go with you or I go alone, but I’m going, so live with it,” Stevie told him in a determined voice. “Dell’s out there somewhere and he’s no killer. He may need help. I’m going to find him if I can.”

  Becker, concentrating now on pausing for a stop sign, did not answer. Jessie, wisely keeping out of the argument, like the second trooper, saw his shoulders slump in a sigh of defeat and guessed she would also be going along—to help him keep tabs on Stevie, if nothing else.

  She glanced at the woman, who was now staring out the window, arms folded, teeth clenched, and wondered suddenly how often she had looked the same way to people around her.