Death Trap

by Sue Henry

  “Before you saw them arguing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who pushed him?”

  “I didn’t know him. Some big guy.”

  “Is this the man who got pushed?” He handed Danny a mug shot of Belmont obtained from police records.

  Danny’s eyes widened as he stared at the picture and nodded.

  “His hair was shorter than this.”

  “Did you see him anywhere else?”

  “No. It was the other one that chased me.”

  Becker set another empty bottle of Killian’s on the hearth by Jessie’s stove.

  “I asked them everything I could think of that might help,” he said, turning to the boy. “You were very good at remembering things, Danny. Danny?”

  But Danny had drifted off with one arm around the dog. Curled up on the rug at Jessie’s feet he and Tank were both sound asleep.

  His mother shifted in her seat. “Oh dear. We’d better take him home, Doug.”

  “He’s fine.” Jessie grinned. “They both are. Be kind of a shame to separate such good buddies.”

  Jill settled back, amused at the picture made by the sleeping pair.

  “Okay, if you’re sure. I would like to know how the rest of this happened. You know, Doug, I think we might consider getting Danny a dog sometime soon.”

  Her husband rolled his eyes.

  “He’s still grounded and has to finish his chores before we talk about that,” he said, but didn’t dismiss the idea completely.

  “So it was Belmont who Eric threw out of The Sluice Box while Hank and I were there,” Jessie said, remembering.

  “Yes,” Becker agreed. “Eric was also one of the people on our list. We knew he and Belmont had had an altercation earlier, that Eric had barred him from the pub, and told him not to come back. Their confrontation supposedly got pretty heated, so we checked him out.”

  “Eric’s an okay guy, but I can understand your thinking. You checked out one of the lumberjacks, too, didn’t you?”

  “There was one who substituted once in a while who had no alibi. We had him on our list for a while, but eventually he was cleared by one of the other guys in the show.”

  “And you were out on the road searching for me,” Jessie said to Jensen. “I wish I’d known that anyone was looking for me. It would have made things easier—for me and maybe for Tank.”

  CHAPTER 24

  We drove back to town, where I picked up Jessie’s truck, a radio, some bottled water and supplies. I even tossed in a sleeping bag. At that point I was stubborn—determined to stay till I found her or something that would lead to her, and I didn’t know how long that would take. I went out the road and started looking. I didn’t trust anything I hadn’t seen or heard for myself, so I retraced a lot of ground and talked to a lot of people who told me things I already knew.

  “Some time after four o’clock that afternoon, Ehlers and Ray passed me on the highway headed back to feed their dogs and themselves before they started looking again. We divided up the areas that hadn’t been searched. I took the side roads beyond where we’d found the water jug. They said they’d search the ones on the other side of the highway.”

  “That’s a lot of territory,” Timmons commented.

  “Yeah, it was.” Jensen turned to Jessie. “And I kept remembering the feeling I had when we reached that old prospector’s cabin, before I got the door open. We already had two people dead and—”

  “And you thought you might find me dead, too.” Jessie made it easier by interrupting to state the obvious herself.

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “Hell,” Becker said, “it crossed all our minds. It was so totally unacceptable that we refused to entertain it out loud, but we had all admitted to ourselves that it was possible.”

  “Yes,” Jessie said softly, thinking back. “I had begun to think it was more than possible. I had no idea where I was, so how could anyone else? With another night on the way, I was terrified for Tank. I didn’t know how much longer he could be expected to obey me. There had to be a limit. I knew I could hold out a lot longer than he could, or would, but he would stay on that platform longer if I was awake to keep telling him. I was so tired and my muscles were cramped in knots. It hurt like bones were being broken. But if I relaxed, even for a minute, if I went to sleep…” She hesitated and let the sentence trail away, then sat up straighter, another emotional memory surfacing.

  “I was so angry! I’m still angry. I’d had a long time to think and I knew that whoever had put us there meant for me to be that terrified and that angry. Damn him! He wanted me to watch Tank die—meant it to happen. Why? I’ll never understand how anyone can hate that much.

  “I didn’t know if he would come back to gloat, but I thought he might. I think he wanted me to wonder if he’d come and kill me, too. So I was torn between the impossible choices that he’d left me. Knowing that I couldn’t escape without sacrificing Tank—I’d already tried the only thing I could think of and it didn’t work—actually made things worse. If Tank were dead I might be able to pull the board over the beams with the chain. Then there would be a chance of getting out of there before the bastard came back—if he was coming back. Or I could stay and hope he’d let us both go. But what if he didn’t come back at all? Worst of all, I knew that Tank might die no matter what I did. The lowest point was when I realized that part of me wished it was over—almost wished Tank would try to get down and settle it.”

  Jessie lapsed into guilty silence at this admission, as startled at the intensity of her outburst as were those gathered in the room. Though Danny slept on, Tank had heard his name and raised his head to watch her closely. He whined, sensitive to her distress, and she laid a trembling hand on his head.

  “Jessie?” Frank Monroe said quietly after a minute.

  She looked up at him, eyes wide, half her mind still out there somewhere in the dark.

  “It’s all right, Jessie. Tank is all right and so are you. Come back here where it’s warm and bright. We love you.”

  As the afternoon progressed and the sun fell low enough to cast long arms of shadow across the highway, Jensen, driving through the alternating bars of light and shade, almost missed a slim side road that went into the forest at an angle. Continuing past it, he turned around at the next driveway, went back, and turned onto this suggestion of a road.

  It was narrower than those he had already searched, and pitted with deep potholes that had never been graded smooth or graveled. But it exhibited some use in a number of tracks that had been made by tires when the ground was wet and then dried into ruts in the mud. Dust swirled up behind Jessie’s truck as he followed the road, which rocked and bounced the vehicle, jarring him roughly. A bottle of water rolled off the seat on the passenger’s seat to dance a jig of rebounds on the floor.

  The road grew so narrow it became a track. Sharp talons of heavy brush clawed at the paint on both sides of the truck, screeching like fingernails on a blackboard. Jensen wrestled the vehicle around two sharp bends that had been created to avoid the effort of cutting trees and quite suddenly came to its end, on the banks of a creek, where he could drive no farther. For a long minute or two he sat in the cab, engine running, grateful to have the world grow still, and considered that he would have to back the truck over the whole quarter mile he had just traveled when he was ready to leave.

  It was dark under the canopy of the birch, and the thick black spruce seemed to absorb light. The dust his passing had created caught up and rolled past the truck, encouraged by a slight breeze. For a minute or two it obscured his view of the creek and its banks, and a little of it settled on the sleeve of the elbow he had rested on the open window frame. Then, as the air cleared, he noticed something oddly bulky beside a tree on the far side, where a trail of sorts seemed to continue into the forest.

  Silencing the engine, he climbed from the cab and reached back for his windbreaker, which he put on. Retrieving the water bottle from the floor, he twisted off t
he cap and drank, then stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket before he shut and locked the door.

  At the dull sound of the door closing, a startled squirrel dashed across the track in front of the truck and up a tree, where it sat sending out a tic-tic-tic of warning. Jensen could hear its small claws scrabble on the spruce bark as it climbed to a higher branch and recommenced its alarm. Tic-tic-tic. He listened for a moment and looked toward the source of the sounds until he located the bright eyes that glared resentfully down at the intruder.

  Turning, he walked quickly to the creek and looked across at the bulky object he had noticed from inside the truck. It was still unidentifiable; so he considered just how to avoid the most mud and water in gaining the opposite bank to take a closer look. At this point the creek had widened into a marshy area about fifteen feet across, which judging from several defining ruts was the result of a wheeled vehicle breaking down the banks in going back and forth through the water. To the left, where the banks were unbroken, three birch trunks had been cut and dropped over the flow. Dark bits of mud and a leaf or two clung to these from the feet of someone who had used them as a bridge. Jensen did the same, sustaining his balance with spread arms as the slender trunks gave under his weight.

  Once across, he stepped to the object under investigation and found that it was covered by a plastic tarp printed in camouflage and fastened with bungee cords to keep the curious wind from twitching it loose. Unfastening the cords, he stripped back the tarp and tossed it aside to reveal a four-wheel vehicle with space for a single seated rider, possibly two. A rack in the rear allowed for carrying a limited amount of cargo. Many people in the area used similar rigs on expeditions into the wilderness during hunting season. Others used them to reach weekend cabins that were purposely built away from any road, and to carry supplies to them.

  The engine was cold, had not been used recently enough to retain heat. He reached for the tarp. If the outside of it was covered with grime, there was no telling how long it had rested there unmoved. But it was relatively clean, indicating that it had not been long since it was used to cover the four-wheeler.

  The bushes on which the tarp had landed swayed as he pulled it toward him, and something bright fell out of them to the ground at his feet. Bending, he picked up an orange bandana folded diagonally, with the two extended corners tied together.

  Jensen stared at the object in his hand, his mind racing. He recognized, not this particular bit of fabric, but the form of it—the way it was knotted. Jessie sometimes tied similar ones around her dog’s necks—especially Tank’s—loose, so if it caught on something it would slip over the dog’s head easily to avoid strangling. This bandana was new, crisp and clean, had never been laundered. Raising it to his nose, Jensen sniffed at it. It smelled of dog.

  In half a dozen strides he was back across the birch-trunk bridge on his way to the truck. Juicing up the radio, he tried to call the dispatcher and got back nothing but static. Too far away, too much in between. Slipping the bandana on his arm and sliding it up his jacket sleeve where he could see it, he slung the backpack he had prepared over one shoulder, once again locked the cab, and headed off into the forest. He hesitated before passing the four-wheeler and thought about using it, but not knowing what, or who, he might find, decided to do without the noise it would create.

  The track was much less of a trail than the one he and Becker had followed with Ehlers and Ray earlier in the day. A snake would have crawled straighter. It wound on and on, barely wide enough to allow access for the four-wheeler he had elected not to use, though in several places he saw tire prints that were fresh since the last rain and boot prints that matched those he had seen on the other trail as well. They brought Ehlers back to mind. The forest grew darker as the day slowly faded behind him, but it was just light enough to make his way. For close to half an hour he walked.

  While he was still in the thick of the trail, Jensen’s ears suddenly told him there was something foreign as the muffled sound of a human voice floated into them from—somewhere. He stopped, uncertain, trying to decide if he had actually heard anything at all and, if he had, which direction it had come from. The silence was extreme. Not a squirrel or a bird song broke it. Could it have been the babble of the creek he heard? Perhaps its path twisted through the woods and he was coming close to it again. As he stood like one of the motionless trees, a low crooning sound came again, continued, hesitated; then, as he strained to hear, the breeze picked up and blew it away in the rustle of leaves. He waited, but it did not repeat itself. Not running water, then.

  He stepped forward on the trail, which looped left around a bushy spruce, then turned right through a patch of tall brush. It grew a little lighter ahead. The trail straightened for a few feet, and he hurried along it almost at a trot.

  There was a suggestion of that sound again, definitely off to the right this time, and he realized he was passing the source of it. Retracing his steps, he saw that in the tall brush he had missed the hint of a division in the trail. A branch ran away between a large pair of spruce with branches that reached almost across it.

  Pushing his way through, he stepped out into an area without the birch trees to shut out the light with their dense leaf canopy. Only young spruce grew quite thick in the space. Like guardians they surrounded another old cabin so densely that all he could see was one corner, where the logs from which it was built dovetailed together in a typical alternating pattern. Cautious now, he walked around it until he found himself facing a door similar to the one he had yanked from its frame on the other cabin.

  It was tightly closed.

  There was no sound at all from within.

  CHAPTER 25

  The fair was still crowded with people that evening when Phil Becker drove onto the grounds and parked his truck in the employee lot behind The Sluice Box. Instead of going directly to the pub, where he had arranged to meet the head of security, Dave Lomax, he took a rear entrance into the arena where the lumberjack shows were over for the day and walked slowly across to the pond where Belmont’s body had been discovered.

  The bleachers on the western side of the arena were high enough to obstruct the last light of the sinking sun and cast the central space into deep shadow. To the south, the peaks of the Chugach Mountains were so pink with alpine glow that they could have been rose quartz. The surface of the logrolling pond rippled slightly in the breeze and became a kaleidoscope of glowing gold, purple, and red reflected from the sunset, but the water beneath was so dark it seemed deeper than it actually was.

  For a few minutes Becker stood looking down into it thoughtfully. Then he turned away and strolled slowly around the perimeter of the arena.

  Chunks of logs were stacked to one side of the bleachers waiting to be used the next day by the lumberjacks in demonstrations of skills with ax and saw. Two tall tree trunks, denuded of limbs and bark, had been raised beyond the pond for climbing races. Next to them, wheels sliced from the large end of a log had been mounted on posts and painted in black, yellow, and red concentric circles—targets for competitions in throwing axes like the one that had killed Belmont.

  Becker stood staring at these. He often played games of darts with friends, but found it amazing that anyone could hurl a heavy ax end over end through the air to hit anything.

  “Broad side of a barn, maybe,” he muttered to himself at the idea of trying it. The yard-wide targets seemed very small for such an activity, and he decided that it must take a lot of practice.

  The ax they had found in the dead man’s skull had not been hurled, but swung in an arc over the perpetrator’s head. Considering that, even from the downward angle at which it had penetrated, it was impossible to accurately judge the killer’s height. From the weight of the ax, the killer had to have been significantly strong to be able to swing it, and experience with the tool seemed necessary to hit such a minimal target. Belmont’s head, Becker remembered, had been just about the size of the red innermost circle on the targets—approximately eig
ht inches, ear to ear.

  Shaking his head at the thought, he turned away and left the arena through the arch that led to the area behind The Sluice Box, wondering if perhaps he should take another look at the lumberjacks instead of assuming that Wease was responsible.

  But you know,” he said, thinking back to that evening and his speculations, “most of the people in the bush all over the state use those axes all the time, and some of them are better than any lumberjack with them. The killer could have been any one of them. There were things we just didn’t know yet. Wease seemed most likely, but we couldn’t prove it. Then there was the additional problem of who had killed him and left him to bleed out on his kitchen floor. I figured that the butcher knife that sliced his throat was another weapon of opportunity—that both murders might have happened pretty much on the spur of the moment, with no prior intent. So I set out to see what else I could learn—and to warn the security people at the fair about the robbery we thought was being planned.”

  The Sluice Box was close to half full, though the crowd was steadily growing in anticipation of the live musical entertainment that would begin in less than an hour—a bluegrass ensemble this time. People seeking good seats had already filled the picnic tables nearest the stage, and a few stood at the tall tables near the front door.

  Dave Lomax, something of a ladies’ man, was leaning against the bar in conversation with a good-looking blond woman who was casually responding to his flirting while keeping her hands busy filling plastic cups with beer from the taps. Catching sight of Becker, he raised a hand in the trooper’s direction, glanced at his watch, and asked the woman a question. She shrugged and gave him a noncommittal smile, but rolled her eyes and winked at Becker as Lomax turned away.

  While he was making his farewells, Eric, the bartender, came out from the cooler behind the bar, frowned slightly at the sight of Lomax, then noticed Becker waiting by the door. Nodding in recognition, he came across the room and put out a hand that was damp and cold from manhandling heavy metal beer kegs in the back room.