Cold Company

by Sue Henry

  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.

  “Phil,” she said calmly, “would you mind stopping by my place for just a minute, so I can pick up my survival gear?”

  His answer was a sharp nod and a disgusted sigh of resigned agreement.

  To that gear, Jessie firmly meant to add her Smith & Wesson .44 and a jacket that didn’t have a shoulder soaked in her own blood.

  28

  “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” PRENTICE DEMANDED, trotting up to meet them as the patrol car stopped next to the motor home and Jessie got out. Stevie, not about to let Becker take advantage of an empty backseat to leave without her, didn’t budge.

  “We’ve got a suspect on the loose,” Becker told him shortly. “We’re going up the Knik to see if he can be found.”

  “You mean Dell?” The contractor’s face tightened into an astonished frown of disbelief and disagreement. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Becker snapped. “More than that, it’s probable. There’s other evidence besides the fact that he isn’t here. Where’s the rest of your crew? I want to ask them a few questions before we go.”

  “You can see they’re not here,” Prentice stated flatly, waving a hand at the cabin.

  The roof was empty except for Bill, climbing its slope with a piece of insulation to put between the two-by-twelves. J.B. and Hank were nowhere to be seen.

  “Where are they?”

  “Who knows? J.B. said he was having trouble with the tooth he had fixed and went back to the dentist. As soon as he left, Peterson took off too. He didn’t even bother to say where he was going. I can’t get anything done this way. Stevie, come out of there and get back to work.”

  She shook her head in stubborn refusal. “Dell’s in trouble and I’m going to help.”

  “Goddammit!”

  As Prentice fumed and Becker called dispatch from the car to report his intended activity, Jessie came out of the Winnebago zipping her jacket. She crossed the yard, unfastened Tank from his tether, and brought him across to the patrol car, where they both got in back with Stevie.

  “Tell Lynn Ehlers I’m with Becker, will you, Vic?”

  Through an open window she could still hear him swearing as they pulled back onto Knik Road and headed for the river.

  They found Dell’s locked Mustang concealed in some brush at the end of the road, where a track used by fishermen led down to the Knik.

  Becker walked slowly around the vehicle, examining the ground with care.

  “This isn’t the first time he’s been here,” he said, giving his partner a significant look. “There’re several overlapping tracks of the same tires. Here. See?”

  There were also a few boot prints that showed where the driver had stepped out into some mud. They led away from the Mustang but soon disappeared into the trees, headed south toward the glacial source of the river.

  “Now, here’s how it’s going to be,” Becker told Jessie and Stevie, as he took a shotgun out of the trunk of the patrol car. “You two are going to stay here, while we go up the river a ways. I want you to search this area while we’re gone, but I don’t want anybody taking off on her own for any reason, understand? You stay here—together. I don’t want to worry about who’s in the way if I have to use this.”

  They both nodded, Stevie hesitating for an instant before agreeing.

  “I mean it, Stevie. Jessie, keep an eye on her. If she starts to take off, you holler—loud.”

  Stevie gave the three of them an angry look, clearly aligning Jessie with Becker and his partner and deciding they were all against her.

  “I’m telling you, he didn’t do any of this,” she said. “Why won’t you listen?”

  “I can’t afford to,” Becker told her in a tired voice. “If you’ve got it wrong, it’s too dangerous to assume he’s innocent. There’s so much that says he probably isn’t. Can’t you see that? We’ll worry about who did what after we see if we can find him. But you won’t be any help if you keep me from doing my job. If you give me any more trouble, I swear I’ll have Pat take you back to town.”

  “I’ll come back on my own.”

  “No, you won’t! I’ll make sure of that, if I have to lock you up. Stay with Jessie, and see if you can find anything helpful to tell us where Dell’s gone.”

  The two troopers walked away into the trees, following the trail Dell had left sometime before. There was just enough to aid their search—a broken twig, a scuffed root, a footprint now and then—for he had evidently been more concerned with staying away from where he would leave tracks on the riverbank than with anyone following him through the woods. They lost the track periodically but managed to find it again for the first half mile or so. Then, where he had jumped a stream, it petered out, covered with hundreds of duck tracks, large and small. As they jumped the stream, the mother duck paddled her brood away from them toward the river, protesting loudly as she went. Though they made ever-widening circles around the place where the track came to an end, they couldn’t pick it up again.

  “Where the hell did he go?” Becker’s partner, Pat, asked in frustration.

  “Let’s go out along the river. Maybe we can find him farther on.”

  Once out of the woods and on the bank, they could move faster, though their two sets of tracks were clearly visible in the sand, gravel, and mud. Becker could see that the river was running higher than normal for this time of year—noisier, too. He turned and looked back toward the place where he had left the two women, but a stand of birch hid that part of the bank. Since he hadn’t heard Jessie shout, he assumed they were still together, doing what they’d been told, but he was worried anyway. He didn’t trust Stevie at all, and Jessie had been known to follow her own plan of action more than once in the past. Damned uppity women! He knew he shouldn’t have brought them along, but he also knew Stevie meant what she said about coming back alone.

  He let it go for the time being and continued carefully south along the river, looking for any sign of Dell Mitchell, convinced he was on the trail of a killer.

  Jessie and Stevie watched the troopers move through the trees until they were out of sight before they turned without much enthusiasm to what they had been instructed to do. For perhaps ten minutes they searched the area around Dell’s parked car, finding several items of trash, which they collected and piled by the patrol car—a candy bar wrapper, a flattened 7-Up can, a twisted empty Marlboro pack, two tattered grocery bags, and a child’s blue plastic bucket, faded almost to gray on the side that had not been buried in the sand. Tank stayed with Jessie, sniffed around where she was searching, and came up with a Ziploc that had probably held a sandwich at some time in the past.

  “Trust you to find anything that hints of food,” she told him, earning a doggy grin as she plucked his treasure out of a bush, examined it, and found it too old to have contained the sandwich Dell had put together in his kitchen.

  “Nothing,” Stevie grumbled, tossing the bucket onto the pile. “This is busywork. He just wants to keep us out of his hair! Well, I’m not staying here!”

  “That’s not very smart, Stevie,” Jessie responded.

  “Look, I didn’t come out here to wring my hands, waiting for the men to come back and let us know
what they found.”

  Her attitude didn’t surprise Jessie. She had expected Stevie’s take-charge attitude to resurface and had wondered what she would do when challenged by it.

  “They aren’t just men, they’re law enforcement. Phil Becker’s had about all he’ll take from civilians—meaning you and me. I’ve given him enough grief in the last couple of weeks. But he meant what he said. He’ll send you back.”

  “Not if he can’t find me.”

  “Aw, Stevie…”

  “There’s a trail at the end of the road that goes up to where you can look down on the river. I’m taking it to look for Dell. You can stay here if you want to.”

  She whirled and started up to the road that lay above, leaving Jessie and Tank to watch her go.

  What am I supposed to do now, Jessie wondered, hold her at gunpoint?

  She hesitated. Should she let her go alone and wait, as Becker had instructed? But what if Stevie was wrong about Dell? What if he were involved in the recent murders, as everything they had seen at his house indicated?

  Though she had gotten to know the rest of the work crew at least casually, she knew Dell hardly at all. Though he watched everyone, he kept to himself, was usually quiet, and focused on his work, speaking when spoken to but volunteering little of a personal nature. Had that isolation been purposeful? Had he stayed out of her way, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him as the man from whom she had bought the property? She had never asked his last name and couldn’t remember ever hearing it. Had he used “Dell” as a cover, rather than Daryl, which she might have recalled from the paperwork?

  It was possible. But it was also possible that all this was circumstantial. She thought back to the red numbered circles on the map Becker had confiscated. Would anyone but the killer have known where to draw those circles? Though she couldn’t think how, she supposed that was also possible.

  While I stand here procrastinating, Stevie may be walking into trouble, she thought, and was suddenly angry at the whole situation and her place in it. If Stevie hadn’t insisted on coming, she wouldn’t be out here at all. In past circumstances would she have hesitated to do what she felt like doing, which was go after the woman?

  “Dammit, no,” she said out loud, causing Tank, who had sat down at her feet, to perk up his ears.

  I’m being so cautious about being independent that I’m waiting around for other people to tell me what to do. There’s got to be a balance. Sometimes waiting is dumb.

  By now Stevie was a good five minutes ahead and moving fast, not wanting to be stopped. If she wanted to catch up with her, she would have to go now, and quickly. There was no time to leave Becker a note and nothing on which to write one. Reaching down, Jessie grabbed up a handful of sand and gravel and stepped to the hood of the patrol car. Letting it trail from her fist, she drew an arrow that pointed in the direction Stevie had disappeared, southwest, toward the trail she had said started at the end of the road.

  Jessie and Tank started after Stevie at a trot. She did not notice that, behind her, the breeze was already blowing grains of sand from her arrow.

  There was the barest hint of a trail, more of a path really, which was not officially maintained. It snaked through brush and trees, rising and falling to follow the terrain. The first section was fairly easy to follow, but it soon grew narrow and rough, full of roots to stumble over and sharp rocks that made haste difficult.

  Tank had less trouble following it than did Jessie, who was soon thirsty and panting with the effort despite her conditioning. Though she trained and raced her sled dogs over all kinds of country, in a variety of conditions, this was a different kind of exercise than driving a sled behind a team of dogs, with its opportunities to ride the runners and rest while continuing along a trail. Climbing uphill over uneven ground strained muscles she seldom used. When the track dropped, it pounded her feet into the toes of her boots and punished her shins and calves as she strove to slow the descent that gravity encouraged.

  The battering she had suffered in the crash of the plane also took its toll. Her bruised ribs were soon protesting each breath she took. The pain in her shoulder renewed itself as she tried holding her arm close to her body to ease the ache of the ribs, but the effort cost more in balance than it bought in relief.

  Acknowledging that chasing Stevie might have been a mistake, she continued until she reached a fairly flat space, beyond which the track disappeared around a shoulder of the mountain. There, for a few steps, she slowed, attempting to gather strength and get her breath back as she took a drink from her water bottle. Pausing, she listened to see if she could hear Stevie moving ahead of her, but the air was full of birdcalls and the rush of water falling somewhere close at hand, muffling any other sound. Between two trees, she could see an eagle describing circles high in the air over the river hidden below, riding thermals. How lovely it would be to coast so easily and effortlessly on the wings of the wind.

  Glancing down at a damp spot in the trail ahead of her, she noticed the tracks of an animal. Neat and evenly placed, they led straight along the track toward the curve to the right. Apparently a fox had taken the high road to wherever it was going. Jessie smiled and started on again, feeling a bit better. The fox was right. Even if it was uncomfortable for her at the moment, it was easier to travel the rough track than to leave it for the brush and trees below.

  She reached the curve, turned, with Tank following close behind, and stopped so abruptly that she felt him bump into the back of her tired legs.

  A man was standing in the center of the track, head cocked to one side, with an expectant and mocking look that narrowed his lips but was not quite a smile. He held a rifle casually at his side—pointed directly at her. Beyond him, sitting on a rock, wrists fastened behind her with a pair of handcuffs, was Stevie, a piece of duct tape over her mouth, distress and anger written in tears on her face.

  29

  PHIL BECKER AND HIS PARTNER HAD WALKED A LONG way along the riverbank without finding any indication of the man for whom they searched. When they came to a place where the brush grew thick right up to where the flow of the river was carving out a new curve in the bank, they went around the obstacle, rather than wade. The trees thinned, then ended, and the ground turned into rock on a point beyond the brush. One of the many streams that scoured the face of Mount Palmer ran tumbling and splashing over the stones in a small waterfall.

  “Look here.”

  Becker stepped over to see what his partner had found, and there on a flat stone was the print of a boot, its tread defined in the dried mud it had left behind after stepping in a pool created by the waterfall.

  “That’s it, matches the others we saw,” Becker said, kneeling to look at it closely. “He came through here.”

  “Yes, at least someone did, but it had to be long enough ago for the mud to dry—last night or early this morning.”

  They were clambering over the rocks when somewhere higher on the mountain the sound of a shot stopped them. Listening, they could hear someone shouting angrily far above, though it was impossible to distinguish what was being said.

  “Want to bet Jessie and Stevie did not stay where we left them?” Becker asked. “Let’s get up there.” He turned and started to climb the rocky slope in the direction of the shot. Longer-legged, he had soon outdistanced his shorter partner, then suddenly lost his footing and fell to hands and knees on a stone slippery with moss.

  “This is impossible,” he complained. “Let’s get into the trees. It’ll be easier there.”

  It was, but not by much. The ground was steep and covered with years of nature’s compost, fallen branches and decaying leaves. The two troopers scrambled and slid, making headway, but not as fast as they would have liked. There was no more yelling from above, but halfway up they heard something or someone crashing downhill through the brush, out of sight on the glacier side of the rocky slope they had abandoned. As they continued to climb, the trees thinned, but the brush grew thicker in their absence.
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br />   “Damn this to hell,” Becker panted, struggling with the shotgun he was carrying, as it caught on a bush and all but brought him to a halt. Yanking it free, he lunged on up the hill, swearing mentally when he could no longer afford the breath. He could hear Pat’s ragged gasps behind him as his partner managed to keep up only because he had nothing to carry.

  They broke out onto the trace of a trail so unexpectedly that Pat stumbled to his hands and knees. He scrambled to his feet and both men stood for a moment, huffing, starved for air. The track ahead made a turn around the same rocky slope they had experienced below and Becker headed for that curve at a lope. On the other side the track lay empty, but in the depression of a footprint lay a clean shell that had been ejected from a rifle.

  “The shot we heard,” Pat panted, removing an evidence bag from his pocket to retrieve it.

  Around the shell were the boot prints of two people—one larger, one smaller—that headed along the trail but disappeared where it headed downhill and wound away into the brush.

  Taking the time to go back to the curve they had passed, Becker searched the ground and found another set of boot prints. These stopped on the south side of the curve, except for one that angled toward the river and had broken the lip of the track, causing a small amount of earth to slide downhill.

  “Someone went over the edge at this point,” he observed with a worried look. “There’s no blood, but they were probably hit by that shot we heard and fell into the brush.” Who was it, he wondered, Jessie or Stevie?—having no doubt it had been one of them. Wasting no more words, he swung around to follow the two sets of prints that continued along the track.

  “We split up?” Pat suggested.

  “No. This’ll be faster if it goes on down to the river.”

  They trotted on, watching cautiously for any sign of motion on the track ahead of them, but saw and heard no one.

  Far below, Jessie’s tumbling body finally rolled to a stop against the trunk of a birch and lay still. For several minutes she did not move but merely hung against the thing that had abruptly halted her plummet down the steep, rocky, brush-covered side of Mount Palmer. Tank caught up and came to stand next to her, waiting.