by Sue Henry
There had been so much going on that until he reached Jessie’s and found her gone, he really hadn’t begun to consider the details of what she had reported the night before. “He said that some kid had stolen his camera bag and that if I want my dog back, I have to get it back for him,” she had said. “Otherwise he’ll kill Tank.” It had, of course, occurred to Becker that the bag he held was probably the same bag Jessie’s caller had demanded that she retrieve for him. Therefore it followed that Ron Wease could be her caller. What was so important about this bag and its contents? Did it have anything to do with the dead man found in the pond? In itself, an argument behind a pub was not an unusual occurrence, even if a few punches had been thrown. He wondered if either Danny Tabor or Frank Monroe could have identified the body that was now fifty miles away in the crime lab.
He was thumbing through the photographs from the bag and considering the rolls of exposed and undeveloped film when he heard the door of his office open. Looking up, he was pleased to find the long-legged figure of an old friend lounging casually against its frame, western hat in hand, self-satisfied grin on his face.
Dropping the pictures on the desk, Becker moved enthusiastically around it and reached to pump the hand of his former partner, who had taught him much of what he knew about homicide.
“Jensen! You old rascal! What the hell are you doing back in Alaska?”
“Oh, I just thought I’d take a chance that you might need a hand at catching bad guys up here.”
The two stood grinning at each other until Becker waved Alex Jensen to a chair in front of the desk and regained his own behind it.
“What happened to the Idaho sheriff’s job? I thought you were committed to being Salmon’s main man for a couple of years.”
“Yeah, well—it wasn’t working out quite the way I thought it would. They managed to corral somebody else, so I’m off the hook. I had a talk with Commander Swift on the phone, and he’s willing to forgive my forays into the Lower Forty-eight and put me back to work.”
“Terrific! When do you start?”
“Now, if you’ve got anything for me.”
“Oh, yes! I definitely have something for you!” Becker slapped the surface of the desk with one hand in his relief at the unexpected assistance from a man he had worked with and trusted. “We’ve got a nasty homicide at the fairground. Someone used an ax to split the skull of a guy and leave him to float in the logrolling pond. The body was found yesterday morning, but he was probably killed the night before. Timmons is doing the post and will call as soon as he has anything.”
Jensen had straightened in his chair, alert and focused on what Becker was telling him.
“What kind of an ax?”
“Big double-bladed sucker—the kind you use to make firewood out of logs. Sharp—belonged to one of the guys who does the lumberjack show twice a day, and they keep those things honed to a razor edge. Someone came up behind this guy and sank it halfway through his head. Driver’s license in his wallet gave us ID. He’s Curtis Belmont, a smalltime hoodlum with a grand theft auto conviction.”
“Nasty way to die, but quick.”
“That’s what Timmons said. Whoever used it clearly wasn’t just trying to get the guy’s attention.”
“Prints on the ax?”
“Some from the guys in the show, who use and sharpen it every day, plus a couple unidentified that don’t show up on any records. They printed all the show guys and are going back over what dabs there are, but it’s unlikely they’ll get anything else.”
“Could one of the show guys be your perp?”
Becker shook his head and shrugged in frustration. “Maybe, but that’s a stretch, isn’t it?”
“Unless he hoped you’d think so.”
“This one doesn’t seem to have that kind of planning involved. I think it’s more a case of opportunity—using a weapon that came to hand. Those axes are supposed to be locked up when they’re not being used. But they say they could have missed one.
“We just don’t know enough yet. Plus, I’ve got another couple of things on my plate from the fair. As I told you on the phone, Jessie’s lead dog got swiped from the grounds yesterday.”
Knowing that Jensen and Jessie Arnold had been a couple until six months earlier when Jensen had moved back to his hometown in Idaho to take a job as sheriff, Becker was now feeling his way with caution into unknown relationship territory that he felt was none of his business.
“Right,” Jensen answered with an expression that gave away none of his feelings about Jessie. “Still missing?”
“Yes. Ah—listen, Alex. Does Jessie know you’re back? Have you seen her? Do you know why she wasn’t home when I stopped by a while ago and didn’t come to the fair this morning?”
“Did you expect her to be home?”
“Well—yeah. I mean—she didn’t actually say she’d be there. She was supposed to be at the Iditarod booth but didn’t show and didn’t answer her phone, so I thought I’d better take a look. Found a note on her door that she’d be back by ten o’clock, but it was well after ten when I got there.”
Jensen ran a hand through his blond hair and frowned. “Any idea where she went?”
“Not really. But I wouldn’t put it past her to go looking for that dog of hers. You know how independent she is, and she was pretty upset when he turned up missing, especially after the phone call I told you about yesterday. Hell, it was just yesterday I told you, wasn’t it? Yes, of course it was. How the hell did you get here so fast? And why didn’t you tell me?”
Jensen stood up and walked to the window to look out at the mountains to the south that still had a patch or two of snow on their tall summits.
“Sorry I didn’t let you know my plans, but it seemed like a nice surprise to just show up. I’d already talked to Swift and was coming anyway,” he said over his shoulder. “So I just tossed a few more clothes in the duffel, drove to Missoula last night, and caught the last plane out for Seattle. From there it was only three hours this morning. After what you told me, I figured I might as well—”
The phone on Becker’s desk interrupted with its summons.
“Becker. Oh, yes, sir.”
Frowning and intent, he grabbed a pencil and began to scribble notes as he listened, gesturing Jensen back to his seat. “Yes, sir. Right away. He’s here. I’ll tell him.”
He hung up the receiver and scowled at what he had written. “Commander Swift,” he explained to Jensen. “Dammit. I think I was right about Jessie going looking for that dog on her own. Someone from Willow just reported a truck parked on the side of one of those roads near Nancy Lake. They’ve run the plate and it’s hers, but no one there has seen her. He thinks we better check it out.”
“What about the Belmont investigation?”
“We’ve done everything we can do at the scene. By the time we get back they may have more information for us from the lab.”
Gathering the camera, photos, and film he had spread on his desk, Becker put them back in the red bag to take with them.
“I’ll explain about this, but I’d like your take on it,” he told Jensen. Handing over the bag, he grabbed a jacket as they went out the door.
CHAPTER 15
Danny’s ride home with his parents had gone about as he expected it would. Both of them let him know exactly how angry and disappointed they were with his behavior.
Jill Tabor’s anger, however, was mitigated with relief at having him back safely—the emotional residue of more than a day’s imagination and worry over what might have happened to him. She kept reaching over the seat back to touch him, as if she wanted to be sure he was still there.
His father, on the other hand, let him know just how long he would be grounded for being so irresponsible—a month—and the chores he could expect to find added to his usual slate of duties. Mowing the lawn twice a week was high among them.
“That includes whacking the weeds around all the flower beds. And if I see so much as one single bla
de of grass over two inches high, you’ll be out there on your knees with a pair of scissors, young man.”
Danny slumped in silence in the backseat of the car and wondered if Mr. Monroe would be suffering the same kind of lecture. If so, he thought the old man would probably have a bigger word for it. He had terrific big words for everything.
“Alliance,” he said softly to himself.
“What?” his father demanded.
“Nothing.”
“Sit up straight,” said his mother.
Frank Monroe was doing his best to ignore the harangue he was getting from his nephew and the administrator of the Palmer Senior Center for Assisted Living.
“You simply cannot take off without permission,” his nephew had just stated in irritation, shaking his head and a finger in Monroe’s direction. “It’s not allowed.”
“Permission? I need permission to leave this place?”
“Yes, Mr. Monroe,” the administrator chimed in. “We must know where you are at all times. Read your contract. It states very plainly that we are responsible for transporting you and making sure you are safe and well.”
“I don’t recall the word permission appearing in anything I read or upon which I inscribed my signature.”
“Well, perhaps the precise word is not stated, but the contract clearly implies that we have legal authorization to make decisions concerning your welfare, and that translates to—”
“It does not translate to keeping me in a cage,” Monroe told her flatly. “I am a person—not an animal to be counted, inspected at will, and hauled around like cargo.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the nephew snapped. “I do not have time to be constantly searching for you all over town. Someone must be responsible for—”
“Then don’t,” Monroe told him.
“Don’t?”
“Don’t bother to waste your time searching for me. I’m perfectly capable of knowing where I am at any given time and taking care of myself. I don’t need a keeper.”
They suspended their confrontation of him long enough to give each other long-suffering looks. His nephew shrugged and raised his hands, palms up, as if to say, I give up.
The administrator decided to try one more time. “Mr. Monroe, we can’t allow—”
“Look,” he cut her off abruptly. “Evidently I have compounded the grave error in judgment I made by agreeing to reside here. I expected to be afforded privacy, some degree of dignity, and a modicum of the respect due an octogenarian with competent intelligence and a body that still functions adequately, thank you very much. Let us discontinue this debate. I will start with today’s classified advertisements to find myself another, more suitable living arrangement.”
“But you can’t—”
The administrator broke in on his nephew, her voice now sharply impatient. “We do have a contract, Mr. Monroe. Besides, what if you have another heart attack? What if you forget to take your medication, trip over something, fall and injure yourself? You could lie alone for hours, and no one would know or come to help you. Don’t you understand that?”
From her tone, he could almost have sworn she was hoping that any or all of what she had listed would happen to punish him for what she perceived as his stupidity.
“Well, then,” he told her with a thin smile that did not reach his eyes, “I will have to lie there, won’t I? But it will be a result of my decision and conduct, not yours—in my new residence, not yours. That should provide alleviation of your onerous burden of responsibility. You may anticipate hearing from my solicitor concerning our contractual agreement. And by the way, I have an extremely competent attorney, even if he is in his late sixties.”
Once again settling his hat on his head at a jaunty angle, he rose.
“Now, I am going to retire to my pigeonhole to indulge in a much anticipated shower. Tell Nurse Ratchet to stay the hell out of my room. You may also inform her that my name is Mr. Monroe, or at the very least Frank—not Frankie boy! And for your edification, I had a minor stroke—a transient ischemic attack—not a myocardial infarction.”
Leaving them both staring after him, he strolled from the administrator’s office and down the hall, swinging his cane and feeling better than he had in months—except, of course, for his time at the fair with Danny Tabor.
A most commendable alliance, he told himself, remembering.
It was much later that evening, after Danny Tabor had gone to bed without argument and his parents were settled in the living room to watch a movie on television, when a pickup cruised slowly along the street. Swinging around in the intersection at the end of the block, the driver took the pickup past again so he could get another look at the house.
“That kid,” he said to his companion, Ron Wease, “is the only person who got a look at you and Curt behind The Sluice Box. We’ll just tuck him away somewhere till we’re through with this.”
“Through with this, hell! We can’t go through with this now.”
“Why not? Curt’s obviously not going to be a problem, thanks to you. And the kid won’t be if we stash him—like the woman—maybe with the woman and that damned dog. What the hell were you thinking about with that dog, for shit sake?”
“I can think of a more permanent solution for the kid.”
“But unnecessary—and unpleasant at the moment. It was stupid enough of you to leave Curt’s body at the fairground, when there’s thousands of miles of wilderness where it’d never have been found. This thing is going to go as planned, dammit. And nobody’s going to suspect that I have anything to do with it. If you hadn’t lost your temper with Curt, they wouldn’t suspect you either. But you’ll be long gone before they go looking for you.”
“What about the photos? That cop has all the pictures I took.”
“But you said that only one roll had been developed. They’re just pictures of the fairground anyway.”
“What if they develop the rest?”
“Why would they, and what if they do?”
Wease hesitated, thinking of one particular roll he had exposed that might be of interest to the police. “I dunno,” he said with a scowl.
“So don’t worry about it. You’ll get your bag and camera stuff back, and that’ll be it.”
But Wease had other ideas. It was time, he thought, to opt out of this operation and disappear—now, not later. As they drove back through Palmer toward the fairground, he thought about it and made up his mind. The rest was only a matter of how to accomplish his vanishing act. Where he would go was something to figure out later. But he already knew it would be somewhere far away and out of reach—of this guy, as well as the police.
CHAPTER 16
Nancy Lake was a small community and recreation area approximately twenty-five miles northwest of Palmer along the Parks Highway between the towns of Houston and Willow. That particular stretch of the highway was an area popular with mushers, so it was scattered with their kennels and dog yards. There the noise of their dogs did not bother the neighbors, most of whom had dogs of their own. The residents lived either close to the highway or on the gravel roads that branched away from it, where immediate access to wilderness trails from the back of their properties made it especially attractive to dog team trainers. The area was a tangle of roads and the trails mushers had carved out of the forest to allow passage for sled dog teams.
Becker elected to take a direct bypass from Palmer to Wasilla and pick up the Parks Highway there rather than fight the endless traffic that was currently snarling all roads to the fairground. As he passed an intersection in the middle of Wasilla, he glanced toward Knik Road and swore.
“Damn. I should have gone out to Jessie’s last night when she called instead of waiting till this morning. Maybe I could have talked her out of going out hunting on her own.”
“Probably not.” Jensen grinned. “She’s inclined to run her own life, Phil. Wouldn’t be Jessie if she…” He let the sentence die, keeping his assessment to himself, and turned his head to st
are out the passenger window as they went by a gas station or two and the run-down North by NorthRest Motel on the outskirts of town.
Becker cast a sympathetic glance in his direction, speculating about the relationship between his two friends. But he wisely decided not to ask questions and for the moment let Jensen’s thoughts remain his own. Still, he couldn’t help wondering if—
“Tell me about this stuff.” Jensen interrupted his friend’s thoughts by turning to unzip the red bag that lay between them on the seat of the truck that Becker drove instead of a more revealing squad car.
“I was trying to mentally organize that stuff with other things when you showed up,” Becker began. “Let me lay out what I know in the order it happened. Then maybe we can make sense of some of it. First, yesterday morning this guy Belmont was found dead in the pond in the small arena. Second, yesterday afternoon Jessie’s dog was snatched at the fair. Third, we got a report from the Tabors that their son, Danny, had been missing since the day before. Fourth, another report came in about an old man, Frank Monroe, missing from the Palmer senior center for about the same length of time. We put up flyers with pictures and descriptions of both, with no results until today. Fifth, Jessie got that phone call at home last night from the guy that took her dog. Sixth, Danny and Frank Monroe turned themselves in at the fair security office this morning, and they did have the red bag with photography stuff in it. The boy said that Wease dropped it, and he picked it up accidentally. Ron Wease was there. He immediately interrupted what Danny was telling me and demanded it back, but I thought I’d better take a look to see why it was so important to him. He was adamant about wanting that bag right then. Didn’t like it at all when I held on to it. He was still arguing with me about it when Danny’s parents came in to get him.”
“And it stands to reason that it’s the same bag that was mentioned to Jessie in the phone call last night, so he must be the caller.”
“Not established yet, but I have to agree that it’s at least possible—even likely. But it’s also possible that there’s something about what’s in it that would make it attractive to someone else. Proving it will be another thing. But Wease, of course, claimed he never called threats to anybody, and we can’t prove he did.”