by Sue Henry
For half an hour he caught nothing, though once something took the herring he had used as bait. Then he caught two Dollies in five minutes and had just swung his line back into the water when a shout of laughter drew his attention to the bridge on his left.
Two teenagers on bicycles were pedaling hard across it, the one behind calling to the other to slow down.
The fisherman watched, hoping they would continue along the main road that turned west at the end of the bridge. Instead, they turned left, in his direction, pulling into the parking lot with a crunch and rattle of gravel as they applied their brakes and slid to a dusty stop near the SUV. Dropping his bicycle, the taller of the two trotted over to the edge of the bank and looked down at the man in the water.
“Hey!” he hollered. “Catch anything?”
The other boy came to join him and immediately tossed a fist-sized rock into the current.
“Dammit!” the fisherman swore, turning to face the two with a scowl. “Cut that out.”
“Well, sor-ry!” the kid returned, with a challenging curl of his lip.
“Look,” the man begged, “I’m trying to fish here. Go somewhere else to throw rocks, okay?”
“It’s a free country,” the rock thrower snapped back. “We got as much right to be here as you.”
He picked up another stone and hefted it speculatively, a sly grin revealing a chipped front tooth as he awaited a reaction from the man in the water.
With a sigh the fisherman turned his back, intending to ignore the two. With a thook, the stone hit the water near enough to splash his face and right arm.
“Goddammit,” he growled, and swung around to make his way out of the river and clamber up the bank.
The two boys ran for their bicycles, shouting with glee. “Nyah, nyah,” the rock thrower yelled back over his shoulder, as they pedaled away in the direction they had come and vanished behind some trees.
The fisherman watched for them to come into view on the bridge, but evidently they had gone down the road beyond it, for they did not reappear. In a few minutes, however, he saw one of them sneak a look around the concrete pier at the near end that stood between land and water. Over the sound of the river, he could hear them hooting still and calling out challenges he was too far away to understand.
Rotten kids, he thought, wading back into the water and preparing to swing out his line. But he remembered being that awkward age—trying his best to swagger in manly fashion and confronting almost every new situation with defiance. As long as they left him alone, he would give them the benefit of a tolerance he knew they would resent if they realized it existed. At that age, you were either one up or one down, and none of them could stand to be one down. Individually, they were probably okay kids. It was measuring themselves against each other that made every encounter an irresistible dare. Aw, well….
He had just cast out when another log came sweeping along, closer to the bank this time. Almost submerged, it drifted past as he stepped back and scrambled to reel in and yank the line from its path, barely succeeding. In the attempt to save his tackle he saw only a broken branch, which revolved with the log to disappear beneath the gray water, and a flash of some blue fabric that sank out of sight as it rolled and drifted away.
Settling back into his former stance, the fisherman cast again, then lifted his eyes to watch an eagle draw lazy circles in the air high over the river. It was looking for salmon, no doubt, for, exhausted with spawning, some of the big fish would have floated into eddies that washed them against the bank to die and become dinner for the eagle. In a few minutes the large bird landed in the top of a spruce behind the fisherman and perched there, keeping an eye on the water below, a silhouette against the snow that remained on the highest of the surrounding peaks. “Don’t expect any of my catch,” he told it with a grin.
A strong tug on his line reminded him of what he had come here to do. In seconds the fish seemed to realize that the bit of herring it had swallowed in a gulp was not free for the taking but came with a sharp price. Solidly hooked, it ran upriver to the extent of the line he had cast, so the fisherman played out more until it stopped and began to drift back toward where he stood. Then, reeling as fast as he could, he took up slack until, once again, he felt the fish resist, much closer this time. It broke water, and for an instant he saw not the familiar light bluish-olive of a Dolly, with its bright orange spots, but dark spots on the silvery iridescence of a tail and body, slightly pink in spawning colors, that thrashed the water as it disappeared beneath the surface. A King! A medium-sized King, or Chinook, as it was also called.
Finally, a fish worth the catching! he thought, as he adjusted his stance, getting ready for the coming fight.
Three times the salmon ran and once it leaped clear of the water as it struck the limit of the line and all but danced on the surface. The fisherman heard a vehicle pass on the road behind him and prayed it was not a game warden about to apprehend him with an illegal fish on his line. But it continued on without slowing and left him to the battle joined.
Slowly the fish began to tire and its runs shortened. Closer and closer it came to where he stood. He had just calculated that in another run or two he would have it, when he heard the clatter of a bicycle falling onto the gravel in the parking lot behind him and running feet approaching fast.
Not now, he prayed. Oh, please, not now.
“Hey, mister,” a tentative voice behind him called. “Mister? I’m sorry I threw those rocks. But you better come and see. There’s a—there’s somebody dead in the water under the bridge.”
“Look, you little shit. I’m not interested in your games, so get out of here. Go play somewhere else.” He tossed the words back over his shoulder at the kid, not taking his eyes from the river for a moment.
“Please, mister. It’s not a game. There really is a dead woman. Re-eally! You better come.”
“Yeah, right. I’m supposed to believe—”
Something in the tone of the boy’s voice stopped what he was saying and made him glance back.
The smaller of the two boys stood above on the bank, freckles standing out on his pale face, eyes wide, lips pinched tight to control their trembling. Nothing of the smart aleck remained. He was suddenly just a kid in trouble, looking for an adult to take charge of something beyond his ability to handle.
Startled, the fisherman went on reeling in his line, hands automatically continuing with their occupation, while he considered the situation.
“Please, mister.”
A dead woman? Not likely. What the hell had they found?
The salmon did not leap again, but its dorsal fin appeared above the surface as it struggled weakly against the line.
With a sigh, the fisherman lowered his pole to horizontal above the water and gave it a sharp jerk. With a last twist from the tired salmon, the line parted, recoiling as it lost tension. The fish vanished into the depths of the river, taking his tackle and bait with it.
The fisherman raised a hand, pushed back the brim of his hat with his thumb, and gave his watery opponent a disappointed but respectful half salute with two fingers. Turning, he climbed from the water and went to see what could possibly have engendered such a shift in attitude in the boy who trotted along beside him toward the SUV.
“Thanks, mister,” he said. “It’s really gross. You know—gross! And scary,” he whimpered to himself.
9
VIC PRENTICE AND ONE OF HIS MEN HAD ALREADY BEEN walking around in the basement space when Jessie stepped outside that morning. She had raised a gloved hand to wave and hiked to where he stood, assessing one of the forms with a grin of accomplishment on his face, while Dell used a hose to spray water over the concrete and forms.
“A couple more days and we can strip the forms off,” he said. “In this warm weather, the mud’s curing faster than I expected.”
“Doesn’t it have to be dry?” she asked, wondering about the water Dell was using.
“With concrete it’s more a
matter of a reaction between the cement and water,” Vic informed her. “If you don’t keep it wet, it won’t cure correctly. Concrete can even harden under water, if it’s the right mix. This is doing fine, but we’ve gotta keep it damp for a bit longer.”
“Terrific. Then the basement floor, right?”
“Right. Remove the forms and the floor will cozy up to the walls to make sure they don’t shift with the weight of the backfill. I’m going to put you to work painting waterproof sealer on the outside before we add blue board insulation and have Peterson shove back the dirt. Then we’ll be able to walk up to the building when we start with the cabin floor and logs.”
“What else can I do?”
“Well…” He thought for a minute. “Nothing, yet, but as soon as the forms come off, you can lay sill seal on top of the walls before we bolt down the plate and the first logs.”
They were gone in an hour, leaving Jessie to spend the rest of the day with her dogs. She had not taken time to sort through the information she had collected in Palmer the day before, had a number of chores to do in the dog yard first, and planned to sit down with the paperwork later in the day. It was time to change the straw that made a bed for each animal inside its box, so she and Billy Steward were soon hard at work. Billy raked out the old straw, which Jessie replaced, spending a few minutes with each dog as she did so, checking its health and well-being carefully.
“Bliss, you old faker, come out of there.”
The dog to which she referred lay soaking up the sun, half in and half out of her box, completely relaxed. She had opened one eye just wide enough to see Jessie coming, but, not wanting to move, had closed it again, feigning a snooze. Her head came up with a doggy grin as her owner dropped to her knees and gave the bitch’s ears a friendly rub. With an affectionate lick to Jessie’s bare wrist, she stood up, stretched, and leaned against the gifted hands that explored her belly.
“Pups on the way,” Jessie commented, with a frown. “I didn’t mean to breed her this year.”
“Sorry,” Billy told her. “I should have noticed that Tux was loose.”
“Not your fault.” She stood and shook her head. “If I hadn’t forgotten to tighten the ring on his box, he’d never have pulled it out. Besides, Tux should sire good pups and I promised you one from the next litter, didn’t I?”
Billy grinned and agreed, before using the rake to finish cleaning out Bliss’s box.
They had completed their work in the yard and were repairing a sticky throttle on the four-wheeler when Jessie looked up to see the crime lab van once again travel the length of her drive and park beside the motor home. As she stripped off her gloves and moved to meet him, a lift lowered John Timmons to ground level in his wheelchair. Dressed casually in sweats with the sleeves cut out of the pullover, the muscles in his brawny arms were noticeably impressive as he maneuvered himself rapidly over the rough ground and halted near the basement excavation. Behind him, two lab assistants had climbed out and begun to unload shovels.
Timmons grimaced at the concerned expression on Jessie’s face as she realized that more digging was about to commence.
“John—?”
Spinning himself around with gloved hands on the wheels of his chair, he faced her directly. “Sorry, Jessie. Hold on now till I explain. We’re not going to dig up your project, I promise. But we’ve got to take another look.”
“Why?” She stopped in front of him, hands on hips, demanding an answer. “You think there’s somebody else buried here somewhere?”
“I don’t know, but we’ve got to check. The necklace that was buried with the old man?”
“The butterfly Becker showed me.”
“Yeah. Well, it turned out to be related to an old case, a particularly nasty one. You remember Hansen, the Anchorage baker who murdered all those prostitutes in the seventies and eighties—flew a lot of them out and buried them up the Knik River?”
She nodded, her attention now fully focused, as he briefly went over the case of the first and worst serial murderer in the state of Alaska.
In February of 1984, Robert Hansen, a churchgoing family man who was respected in the community, had gone on trial for assaulting, kidnapping, and murdering a number of prostitutes who had disappeared from the Anchorage tenderloin district over a twelve-year period. Three days after the trial started, confronted with a landslide of evidence collected by the Anchorage Police Department and the Alaska State Troopers, he changed his plea to guilty and, in two days, confessed to seventeen homicides. He was sentenced to 461 years plus life without parole for the four murders with which he was charged. The district attorney agreed not to charge him with the rest in exchange for his acknowledgment of their commission and his agreement to assist the state troopers in locating the bodies.
“Hansen confessed to only seventeen of the murders,” Timmons continued. “He identified ten or twelve of the burial sites for the troopers—along the Knik River, a couple of other rivers and creeks, at Horseshoe and Figure Eight lakes—when they took him out on helicopter flights, but on a map they found in his house he had marked twenty-three different locations.
“In April when the ground had thawed they went back to the locations he had identified and dug up a few more of the women he had killed. Several other bodies were found in subsequent searches. One was found by accident by an off-duty police officer, but there were a number that were never located. He claimed that six of the marks did not indicate that a body was buried there at all and refused to talk about any more of the missing women. One, whom he claimed to have dropped off the Knik River railroad bridge, they hadn’t a prayer of finding.
“A total of twelve women were identified and accounted for. The others—the ones he confessed to killing that they didn’t find, and the ones he refused to take responsibility for—were not only lost but their identities were lost as well. Somewhere out there in the wilderness, there are still the remains of known or nameless working girls—Hansen’s victims or victims of someone else.”
Timmons paused, and Jessie waited, knowing there was more. Somehow the butterfly necklace tied the Hansen murders to the body of the old man she had found in the basement excavation. She also wondered about that last phrase: victims of someone else?
“The necklace,” he went on at last, “was described back then, by an exotic dancer in Anchorage, as belonging to her roommate. The roommate vanished in 1979, while they were both working at a place called the Wild Cherry. We looked for it in a collection of the things Hansen took from the women he murdered—souvenirs found in his attic—but it wasn’t there. Now, over twenty years later, it turns up here, with another body. I’m afraid the missing dancer may be here—buried like the old man. So you can understand why we’ve gotta have a look.”
Jessie nodded. “Of course.” But her heart sank, as much at the possibility of another body somewhere on her property as at another delay in building her cabin. “Nothing’s going on here for the next couple of days till the concrete is dry. Will it take longer than that?”
“I certainly hope not. It shouldn’t.”
They began the careful process of going over the ground in Jessie’s yard in search of any differences in soil color or texture that might reveal the presence of another burial, poking into it and digging it up in places. It was obviously a difficult task in a yard that had been heavily used as a kennel, especially considering the fire and the amount of earth that had already been moved from one place to another in digging the basement. They were still at it hours later when Becker’s patrol car cruised up the drive.
Climbing out he crossed to Timmons, who was leaning from his chair to grab up a handful of dirt, which he rubbed between his fingers, frowning thoughtfully.
“Hey, John. Don’t like to interrupt you, but I think you’d better load up and come with me. Couple of kids and a fisherman found a floater in the Knik. A woman.”
Jessie, who, on her knees at a dog box, had been examining the condition of her pregnant bitch Bli
ss with careful, knowledgeable fingers, heard what he said, got up, and trotted over.
Timmons dropped the dirt he was examining and brushed his hands on his knees.
“The hell you say. When?”
“This morning—less than two hours ago. The lab said you were out here, so I thought I’d better round you up.”
“Right. Shit, I hate floaters—almost as much as Jensen,” Timmons growled, then stopped abruptly and glanced at Jessie, realizing the name he had dropped might not be welcome to her.
Becker lowered his head, refusing to meet her eyes, and scuffed at the ground with the toe of one boot.
Jessie couldn’t help smiling at their chagrin. They looked like a pair of boys who had accidentally used a four-letter word in front of the preacher.
“It’s okay, John. You can mention him, you know. We didn’t split as enemies.”
“Hurrumph.” He nodded once, sharply, as he cleared his throat. “Yes—well. We’d better pack up and get on over there, Phil.”
“Right.”
As Timmons called his men from their search, Becker turned to Jessie with a request. “I’ve got a woman in the car who came out from Anchorage asking questions about the body we found here.” He nodded toward the patrol car, and Jessie realized for the first time that there was someone in the passenger seat. “I brought her along to talk to John, but I can’t take her out to this new scene and haven’t time to go back to the office. Would you do me a favor and drive her back to her car in Palmer?”
“Sure,” Jessie agreed. “I have to take Bliss to the vet anyway. Who is she?”