by Jerold Last
“What do you think?” asked Barbara. “Were our game poaching colleagues involved in your friends’ deaths?”
Suzanne had obviously been thinking about this question since we’d been attacked as we entered our cabin. “I don’t think so, but we can’t completely rule it out either. These guys were bumblers who lucked out not getting caught until now. Our killer seems to be a lot better organized than these game poachers. I’d guess there were two independent criminal activities, neither aware of the other. It was sheer chance that we stumbled into the one we weren’t looking for. If I’m right we get one benefit out of tonight’s fun and games. We can rule out four suspects in the deaths of the Roberts, including Ed Barclay who was somewhere at the upper end of my suspect list until now.”
The ambulance with two EMTs came by a short time later to stabilize the injured Park Ranger and transport him to the hospital. Jason flashed his badge and repeated the story about the Ranger having been injured in an accident. The EMTs gave him a long, skeptical look, but turned around to get a stretcher from the ambulance without any further questions. They carefully put air casts on both of Cordell’s arms and his leg, injected him with a painkiller, and carried him out to the ambulance. One of the EMTs apologized to the semi-conscious Ranger for the long, bumpy, painful trip ahead as they drove off to wherever the hospital was located.
We finished the whiskey, said our goodnights, and went to sleep.
Chapter18. The next day
Rising early, we decided a few miles of jogging might be a good wake-up ritual before breakfast, so invited the two FBI agents to join us. Barbara declined suggesting that her staying away from us in public would decrease the risk of blowing our cover as tourists. Jason, who was going to be doing things together with us from here on, opted to join us. We discussed what cover identity he’d use to explain his sudden appearance here at the Lodge. He decided to be Suzanne’s cousin from Anchorage who’d been able to get a couple of days off from work to join us for part of our vacation. Simple lies are always the best kind, as well as the easiest to remember.
Agent Culpepper, who was in pretty good shape, had no trouble matching our relaxed pace as we jogged along the fire road toward the lake and campground. He sped up a bit and fell into place next to Suzanne. “I’ll bet you like the air quality here a whole lot better than jogging in all that air pollution in Los Angeles.”
Suzanne laughed. “We live pretty far west of most of the smog, near the ocean. Unless there’s a Santa Ana wind blowing all the accumulated smog east to west, we have pretty clean air to jog in every morning. But this is better, thank you.”
We continued jogging away from the Lodge for about three miles at a relaxed pace, then turned around and returned to the Lodge for showers and breakfasts. While Suzanne was doing whatever it is that women do that takes twice as long as men to dry off and get dressed after a shower, I slipped out of the cabin to call Vincent’s friend George to find out about the Chilean nationals who’d visited Denali National Park.
While I had the FBI’s ultra-fancy cell phone in my pocket, I had to assume it wasn’t a secure phone. Gretchen was certainly a friend as well as an ally, but it stood to reason that all of the calls in or out on this phone were being recorded and would become part of whatever file the FBI kept on me. In fairness to George, there wasn’t any reason the FBI needed to know his identity.
I walked over to the public pay phone in the Lodge’s lobby. It only took a few seconds to pull Vincent’s note out of my wallet, unfold the paper, donate a quarter to AT&T’s Alaska affiliate, and dial the local phone number. Someone picked up on the second ring. A gruff voice with a South American accent answered, “---1174. With whom do you want to speak?”
“I’m looking for George,” which I pronounced as the Spanish version of the name, Hoor-hay. “Vincent Romero gave me your name and number.”
“Ah, muy bien, amigo. What is your name and how do you know Vincent?”
“I’m Roger Bowman. Vincent and I are partners in a private detective agency in Southern California. He’s been working with me since he returned to the US from Iquique a few years ago when he left Chile.”
“Very good, Señor Bowman. What may I do to help you today?”
“We came across an individual named Carlos Gutierrez, who’s carrying a credit card with a home address in Concepcion, as a possible suspect in a murder investigation we’re involved in. We can’t find a visa issued in that name to match the individual, so either the passport that goes with the phony credit card could be forged or US Homeland Security’s paperwork isn’t perfect. Could you find out whether there is such a person here in Anchorage? If there is, we could use an address and any information you can find out about him.”
I gave him the number of the credit card.
“I will be happy to do whatever I can, Señor Bowman. If you would like to call me back in an hour or so I might have some information by then.”
“Thank you very much. I should also warn you to be very careful here. If this man has done what we think he may have done, he’s very dangerous.”
“I am always very careful, Señor Bowman. That is why I am still alive.”
On that thoughtful note he hung up. I walked back to the cabin to pick up Suzanne. We walked over to breakfast together. Jason Culpepper was already there, drinking coffee. He motioned us to fill a couple of plates from the buffet table and to join him at his table.
Over bacon, eggs, sausage, buttered biscuits, and coffee we shrugged off cardiologist’s remorse and plunged into our meals. Culpepper asked what our plans were for today.
I nodded to Suzanne, who answered for both of us. “It’s time to bike out to the clearing where the bodies were found and take a good look on our own without any more help from Ed Barclay. Can you keep up with us on a bicycle?”
The FBI agent chuckled. “I think so. I used to do bicycle races in college and still do a lot of mountain biking around Anchorage.”
We talked about how we’d get there and whether we should just tell the staff member we rented the bikes from that we would be biking together today. We decided the best strategy was to keep it simple, and he’d be Suzanne’s cousin joining us whenever the three of us were doing something.
“Let me try you out as my cousin, Jason,” Suzanne said with a smile. “How’d we get together here at the Lodge?”
“You called me last week to tell me you were coming up here for your vacation. I work in Anchorage, so all I had to do was get a couple of days off to join you here. It’s the first time I’ve seen you since Cousin Julie’s wedding in Seattle a few years ago. I knew about the arrangement between the Rangers and the Lodge thanks to the work I do in Anchorage, so knew where to go to get some sleep last night.”
“Sounds good,” replied Suzanne with another smile. “What have you been doing since you got here?”
“Serving as your guide so far. Gretchen was right by the way,” he volunteered. An early morning phone ringing from Chief Ranger Manfred Fleming asking where his missing Rangers were served as his wake-up call. Culpepper told him the agreed upon cover story and the Chief Ranger sounded satisfied. Fleming complained about the extra workload with half his staff gone, but didn’t sound at all suspicious.
We talked about what we should be looking for at the murder site over breakfast and coffee then arranged to meet at the mountain bike rental area in half an hour. Culpepper excused himself to make a few phone calls from his cabin.
After finishing our final cups of coffee, Suzanne and I went back to the cabin through the lodge’s lobby. I told her about my earlier call to George and dialed the pay phone to call George back. He answered on the second ring, waited for me to identify myself, and told me he had found out exactly what I had asked him to.
“I hope my news will not disappoint you, Señor Bowman. The credit card number you gave me was used by a local college student using a forged passport he created to go with it as identification. He produced the false Chilean passport
using computer software he’d designed for a class in graphic arts. He reasoned that nobody could check a passport from a foreign country on-line, so it would establish his being old enough to buy beer in a foolproof manner that couldn’t be easily checked.
“He used it to get into a bar despite being under age for drinking and again as a proof of his age to order a couple of beers on the Alaskan Railway train from Anchorage to Seward. He destroyed the fake passport and credit card so he wouldn’t be caught after he realized he’d probably broken the law.”
There was a pause on the line. I replied to him. “Thank you, George. If there is any charge for your services please send the bill to Vincent Romero. I’ll tell him how you helped us.”
“There will not be any charge, Señor. In our business we do not deal in money. Rather, we exchange favors for each other. In addition to Vincent, the Roberts were also very good friends of mine. I still owe Francis Roberts several favors from the old days, where he assisted me many times. I truly hope wherever he is now he has the opportunity to check off the box indicating that I had one last chance to do him a favor here. Adios, Señor.” There was a click on the line as he hung up.
I relayed this information to Suzanne. “There goes another lead and another theory into the wastebasket. I don’t know if this is progress or whether we’re going backwards. But I have a feeling that today’s wilderness biking may help us answer that question.
Less than an hour later the three of us were biking on the network of fire roads through the forest to the clearing where all of this had begun, guided by my FBI-issued GPS system. Jason seemed content to follow us at our speed, and didn’t seem to be doing much work to keep up with us. The ground beside the fire roads was squishy and wet in low spots, green and lush in the higher spots where sun penetrated the leafy canopy of forest, and bare dirt and stones in the darker areas. The mountain bikes, with wide tires and plenty of gears, ate the distance with little effort. This was definitely the transportation vehicle of choice for easy and quiet movement through the Denali wilderness, at least on the network of old fire roads.
The trees themselves, a mixture of aspen, birch, oak, and other varieties I didn’t recognize, were cleared from the fire road itself. They were not dense or cluttered, especially by California standards, so we could see some distance into the forest on either side. The terrain was uneven, with hills and dales, but we were gradually climbing into the foothills of the high mountains to the west and north of the Kantishna Lodge. There was no sign of other humans in the forest with us.
There was plenty of animal life around us, however. The quiet bikes didn’t scare them off, so we saw eagles and hawks roosting on tree branches overhead, occasional deer and moose grazing in grassy patches or eating berries and leaves from low shrubs, and even a bear or two rumbling through the forest well away from the road we were on. I checked our bearings frequently, finding to my surprise that the fire road was taking us exactly the right direction for where we wanted to go. Score a few more points for Ed Barclay, who had completely turned me around and thoroughly confused my normally excellent sense of direction during our helter-skelter ATV trip the first time we came out here.
I’d come away from that first trip feeling the clearing in which the apparent bear attacks had taken place was in the middle of inaccessible nowhere. It was becoming obvious that getting to and from the site via the fire road was going to be simple.
Suzanne broke the silence. “Isn’t it about time we left the road, Roger? I remember going through a lot more forest and tundra the last time we were here.”
“That’s funny. I was thinking exactly the same thing,” came from Jason Culpepper, right behind me.
“According to the GPS co-ordinates we’re headed right toward the clearing on this road,” I replied. “I do believe old Ed Barclay tried to make sure we didn’t realize there was a truck road in and out of the clearing where the murders took place. I’m thinking that might be a clue, which would fit very nicely into my current theory of why the murders happened when and where they did.”
Suzanne shot a quick glance back to Jason. “This is the part of our investigation where Sherlock here won’t tell us his murder suspect yet, but has done some fancy leap of logic and put some of the more confusing pieces of evidence together. Just ignore him until he’s ready to share his logic with us. Otherwise he can be completely infuriating with reluctance to share his theories until he’s sure of them.”
We pedaled on in silence for a minute or two before Suzanne felt she had to give Jason another bit of advice.
“Don’t encourage him, Jason,” cautioned Suzanne. “He can get insufferable when he thinks he’s solved a mystery but won’t tell you what he’s thinking just in case he’s wrong. If we’re not careful to talk about something else now he’ll start quoting Sherlock Holmes. He’s especially fond of the line from one of the more obscure short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time…’, the one that didn’t bark when he should have.
“So,” she continued, “what kind of tree is that just over to our left and what are those big birds nesting in it?”
Culpepper understood when and how to take a hint. “I’m pretty sure it’s some kind of an oak, and those are Golden Eagles. You can see where they get that name from the color of the feathers at the crown and neck. They migrate here to Denali in March to lay their eggs during the spring season, and stay here until it gets cold enough to make their food supplies scarce, in early to mid-fall. They’ve got a wingspan of 6 or 7 feet in flight. They eat squirrels, hares, other birds, and from the carcasses of dead larger animals.”
I smiled to myself. As usual, Suzanne had read me like a book. There really wasn’t anything else for me to say. Our trio proceeded further north and west on the fire road in companionable silence for about a mile.
Chapter19. The killing field
After fifteen or twenty minutes of bicycling on the fire road and five minutes of walking the bikes through a moderately dense patch of forest our eyes and the GPS system told us we were back to the place where all of this started. We leaned our bikes against a few strategically located trees at the edge of the clearing and stared silently at the killing ground where the Roberts had been murdered. The thoroughly scuffed up grassy areas and the fire pit helped us orient ourselves. This was no longer an official crime scene, so we just walked over to where the bodies had been found and began to look around.
Suzanne picked up a stick lying by the fire pit, perhaps the same one she had used to poke around in the ashes the last time we were here. Our first visit here to the murder scene seemed like a long time ago. “I assume these ashes were looked at carefully by the CSI technicians the second time around,” she said quietly, “but you never know until you look for yourself.”
She started stirring the ashes very carefully.
Culpepper and I stood by the fire pit watching her poking at the ashes for several minutes. It was time for us to do some detecting too. In a low voice I told Culpepper what my plans were. “We should look a bit more closely at the spots where they found the bodies. I think we also need to look around the edges of the clearing where the going is more difficult. I’m not sure any of the crime scene techs were thorough enough to look carefully at everything. My guess is they focused on the bodies and the grass they were lying on, and not much else. I have no idea what else we might find or where, but the FBI’s work on this case under your ex-partner Ed Barclay’s supervision was just plain sloppy so let’s not assume they did anything carefully or completely.
“Will you be OK here by yourself, Suzanne? Jason and I will start our search here in the clearing so you won’t be out of our sight.”
Suzanne’s shoulders hunched in a protective posture as she looked up at us and answered very quietly. “I’m fine Roger, and as you well know I can take care of myself. But it’s kind of spooky here. Do you have the same feeling I do, like we’re being watched? But not lik
e someone’s actually here.”
“Yes, I do,” I replied softly. “I’ve had that feeling since we walked into this clearing. Maybe it’s time we did something about it. Why don’t you finish looking around the fire pit and where we found the bodies, Suzanne, while Jason and I look more closely at some of the most likely hiding places for surveillance equipment around this clearing. If you find something, don’t say or do anything to call attention to yourself until we’re out of this clearing, just in case someone really is watching us.”
Jason and I walked over to the middle of the clearing, looking around us as we paced off the distance. “Have you done enough man hunting and surveillance to be able to feel when somebody is watching you, Jason?” I asked, still speaking as softly as I could.
“Heck,” he replied just as softly, “I’ve not only done that but I’ve hunted big game all my life, enough so that I can feel it when there’s a deer or an elk watching me.”