15 Legends Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  Harry wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Provided you find a policeman who hasn’t accepted Soapy’s bribes. This town is pitifully short on law enforcement personnel.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “I’m a private detective, Joshua. I can talk to lawmen and make recommendations, present evidence when I have it. But it is up to them to follow through.”

  Joshua thought hard, but what evidence did he have? None. Smith would simply say that the young man was unskilled at the game and had legitimately lost all his money. He grew angry, caught himself grinding his teeth.

  “Be careful. His reach is far,” said Harry. “There was a case of a man who came into town with a significant amount of gold, which he unwisely bragged about. People recommended that he have it stored in the vault at his hotel, for his safety. The next morning he inquired at the desk and was told they had no idea what he was talking about—there had been no gold stored in their vault and the clerk swore he’d never seen the man before.

  “And what does the town do about this sort of lawlessness? Smith paid to organize and outfit a regiment of guards, and the next thing we know he’s serving as grand marshal in the parade; he befriends important businessmen and politicians alike. You will never know if you are talking to someone who has Soapy’s cash in his pocket.”

  Joshua’s anger settled like a cold stone in the pit of his stomach.

  Harry pulled out a clean handkerchief and wrapped Joshua’s sandwich in it for him. “Let it be. Men like Smith may seem all-powerful, but they usually come to a quick end. One day, someone will shoot that man.”

  Chapter 10

  I gently lowered the cyclic and the JetRanger set down on the springy carpet of grass and dandelions that comprised our landing zone at Cabin Three. After flying the cleaning team here this morning and back to Skagway an hour ago, my duty now was to transport a lovely family of four—and their nanny!—for a week of roughing it.

  Cabin Three was the best we could offer in terms of size and furnishings, but already the Manhattan-born wife had quizzed me about the state of the kitchen and was appalled to learn that, not only did it not have gourmet features, there would not even be a microwave oven. Hello?—no electricity, no microwave. She also complained that she’d been unable to get a nail appointment in town before the flight. I really couldn’t see the point—her designer outfit would be in shreds long before the nails went.

  The mister had crossed the helipad with cell phone to his ear, continued a conversation with his broker throughout my safety briefing, and let out a curse as we crossed the first hilltop and he lost the signal. I could feel his foot tapping impatiently against the back of my seat throughout the flight.

  The two children, bless their little hearts, clearly had not had parental supervision in years. After roaring about the heliport and now having to touch every single thing inside the helicopter with their inquisitive little grubby hands, both of them were about to get a smack from me. It was the nanny I felt for. The poor girl had her hands full. If she should, by chance, discover the way to the highway and freedom, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that she’d gone over the hill.

  Barney stepped forward to meet the group. Thank goodness he was the sort of man who faced challenges with a sense of humor. He chuckled his way through the questions they tossed at him during his standard orientation talk, and I had the aircraft ready for liftoff the minute he walked toward it. From twenty feet off the ground, he gave a final wave to the three adults who looked as if it was only now hitting them. They were not in Central Park this time.

  “Interesting, huh?” I asked him as we circled the small meadow and headed toward town. “Personally, I’m ready to go back to the office and take bets as to how long they’ll last.”

  “Oh yeah. For my money, I figure the batteries on their emergency satellite phone will be gone in less than a day. Then things will really get interesting.”

  “The first group I flew—the ones with the kid who discovered the skeleton—they were more outdoor-oriented than these. And they ended up on the cruise ship.”

  Barney chuckled. “Some people don’t watch those survival TV shows.”

  Or, my guess, they’d done every vacation spot imaginable and couldn’t resist the lure of bragging to their friends back in New York that they had prospected for gold in Alaska.

  Back at the airport I shut down the aircraft, ready to make my bets and take some of Kerby’s money. But he had the door closed and seemed to be in the midst of an intense phone conversation. I looked around for Drake but spotted Mina first. We started for the break room, remembered the horrid coffee and decided to stroll down the street instead.

  “I can’t wait to start working on the identity of that set of bones,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “So, what does a private detective do first?”

  This chase wasn’t going away, so I decided I might as well get in the spirit of it. “Missing persons these days? Well, Ron usually gets online and starts searching databases. If it’s believed the person is still alive he’ll question their friends and check out their home. He’s even found people who had skipped out but were still posting on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Obviously didn’t want to stay too lost, I guess.

  “However, it’s probably a long shot to find information about someone who’s been gone since the 1970s in a modern online database—at least outside of law enforcement. And posting fliers around town isn’t exactly going to work in our case. This happened more than forty years ago, so if he had lived the victim would be in his seventies now. We have to assume his siblings or friends would also be in that age range, and odds are that they gave up looking for him a long time ago.”

  She paused on the sidewalk and chewed at her lip. “I wasn’t even born then. It seems so weird to think in these timeframes, doesn’t it? Anyway, I did some checking in the archives of the newspaper. The mid- to late-70s was the height of the pipeline construction. It was huge in this state. They hired people from all over, more than seventy thousand of them before it was all done.”

  “But wasn’t all that construction pretty far north and west of here?” I asked, trying to put my fuzzy knowledge of the state map to work.

  “It was. But parts of it run close enough to highways to give access to Skagway. And we’ve always been reachable by plane or boat.”

  “That’s a lot of strangers wandering around,” I mused. “And surely some of them went missing, maybe even finished their jobs and planned to go home but never made it.”

  “And in the days before computer databases and law enforcement agencies having access to each other’s information ...”

  “It’s going to be a huge task.” I wondered if it was even worth the effort. Maybe ’70s Caveman ought to be buried and left peacefully alone.

  I thought of the colorful shirt he’d worn and pictured someone back home who had that as their last image of a loved one. Even a sibling or wife in his or her older age would want answers. And the poor man had been murdered—the killer could still be around, thinking he’d gotten away with it.

  “I’m going to ask Chief Branson if he can let us look through his missing person files from that era,” Mina said. “He said there were no matches, but there might still be clues. Something he was too busy to notice.”

  I doubted that—police are usually pretty good at reading their own reports. However, Branson had been awfully busy these past few weeks, distracted now by the second set of bones and by his new case. Maybe Mina had a point.

  “Meanwhile, let me call my brother. He has access to a few national databases, and he might give us some leads or ideas of where to find some.”

  Her eyes brightened again. “Excellent! This detecting stuff is fun.”

  Yeah, well. Wait until you’ve spent a week in front of a computer screen with no results. I thought it but didn’t say it.

  Mina and I parted at the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue; she headed for her office and I, with nothing else o
n the agenda for awhile, walked home. Freckles was eager for a walk and I was happy to indulge her. We covered a mile or so, striding at a good pace to stretch our muscles. When we made the final turn onto our own block, I saw that Drake’s truck was in the driveway.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he greeted. He rubbed Freckles’s ears and I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing me or the dog.

  “Done for the day?” I asked.

  “Looks that way. Kerby’s got a flight booked later, but he said he would take it. I think I’m a free man for awhile. What would you like to do?”

  I was momentarily at a loss. I had told Mina I would call Ron and start trying to dig up information on our cave guy, but spending an afternoon with Drake sounded like a lot more fun.

  “There are tons of trails to hike,” he said, “or Chuey offered the use of his kayak. It’s a two-place. Might be fun to paddle along the shoreline.”

  Seeing as how I’d just finished a walk with the dog, I opted for the kayaking experience. Drake called Chuey and got instructions for finding and retrieving the boat from his backyard. We had it loaded into Drake’s pickup in just a few minutes and found the spot where Chuey had recommended we put it into the gentle water of the inlet. It took a little while to get ourselves familiar with the rhythm of paddling together but soon we were skimming along.

  There’s a whole different perspective at the waterline than what you feel even standing on a dock. That extra few feet puts you right there with the shore birds, and you can see fish darting away from your paddle. Gulls floated across our path but soon realized we had no food so they continued toward the commercial areas we had left behind. Along the rocky shoreline two river otters played before one chased the other into the water and they both glided away like silk. An eagle sat quietly on a dead tree limb, its white head turning as we glided by within twenty yards. I tapped Drake’s shoulder and pointed. He nodded and pointed out a tern’s nest.

  Rounding a bend, the port now completely out of sight, the sounds changed. No motors, no shouts from people, no vehicles. A seal called out and an answer came across the water. I pulled my paddle up and could hear only slight swishes as tiny wavelets hit the bow. Something inside me let go, as if my soul had come free of the bonds of tension that constantly clench away at every city dweller.

  Piloting can be tense work. It’s offset by the joy of soaring above the countryside, with no traffic lanes and few places where absolutely specific routes must be followed. But this, floating along surrounded by nature ... it was a completely different type of pleasure. My mellow mood stayed with me right up to the moment we came back to the harbor area and I spotted Kerby Allen pacing the small ramp where we’d launched.

  He greeted Drake with, “You don’t have your cell phone on?”

  My dear hubby merely acknowledged that we had taken some time off. I would have launched into all the reasons, such as the fact that Kerby had said he was taking the afternoon flight himself.

  “We got a call from Cabin Three, but the signal died before we could really assess the situation. I need you to get up there. Take the A-Star, in case you have to bring the entire party out. I’ll take yours and get to my meeting in Juneau.” He hurried off, while Drake and I worked to get the kayak ashore and loaded into our truck.

  All the while I was thinking that both Barney and I probably won our bets—the New Yorkers were giving up early and they’d used up all the battery power on the satellite phone.

  “Do you want me to—?” I began.

  “No, I’ll take it,” he said. What he didn’t say, but I read into his expression, was that there could be a true emergency. In that case, I was happy to leave him to the controls.

  I drove him to the heliport and he pulled his survival pack from the back of the truck before giving me a quick kiss and an assurance that he would call when he returned. I watched him preflight Kerby’s aircraft and soon the blades began to turn. Chuey walked out of the hangar and I told him I would offload the kayak at his house.

  “Don’t worry about putting it around back,” he said. “It’s pretty heavy for one person to handle.”

  I nodded.

  “By the way, thanks for encouraging Mina to go out with me. She’s a lot of fun.”

  Did I do that? I might have mentioned his interest but I certainly hadn’t done any matchmaking. I suspected it was a case of two small-town people who’d known each other their entire lives, then suddenly a whiff of pheromones hits the air between them and the magic just happens. I wondered whether the feelings would hold through the summer or if I would still be around to witness the end.

  Chuey had already gone back to his work, and the A-Star was a speck on the horizon now. I drove the kayak to its home and realized I was hungry. I went back to our place and made myself a peanut butter sandwich, which I shared with Freckles while I calculated the time difference back to New Mexico. I dialed my brother’s cell phone.

  He didn’t sound the least bit surprised to hear from me. Hm. Am I really that predictable?

  He gave me a quick primer on missing person searches and suggested I try something online called name us.

  “No, it’s N-A-M-U-S,” he said when I botched the web address. “Dot gov. They maintain databases of missing person reports that can be submitted by civilians or law enforcement. Coroners can also input data about human remains that have been found but not identified. If your skeleton has a family who’s looking for him, someone may have submitted the information.”

  While he talked I found the site. We chatted a few minutes about things going on back at the office, most of which I already knew because every time he couldn’t answer a customer’s question about their billing or payments, he had generously given them my email address. Luckily, I had all the records at my fingertips and there’d been no crises yet.

  “Just start your search with the basic information you have,” he suggested. “If that doesn’t turn up any results, maybe the local police or the medical investigator can provide more data.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve already kind of been through those avenues. The remains are so old and the department so small that the chief isn’t exactly making this one a priority. I’m kind of helping out a reporter friend who’s bucking for one of those stories that will boost her career.”

  “Plus, you’re putting yourself in the position of that family who never knew what happened to their loved one. You feel for them. I know you, little sis.”

  Yeah, he did.

  “Well, if the online search doesn’t get you anything call me back. I’ll see if I can come up with any other connections for you.”

  We ended the call with my sending good wishes to his kids, whom I could hear arguing in the background, and his fiancée who was probably the most patient woman on the earth.

  I began following links on the website, amazed at the detailed types of information one could provide—dental anomalies, tattoos, scars and markings—in addition to the standard questions about gender, race and age. Unfortunately, all I really knew about our set of bones were those very basics. And the fact that he had somehow ended up in Alaska in the 1970s. Not surprisingly, the search turned up nothing. All I could guess was that either Alaskan law enforcement had been slow to add info, or not many missing person records go back that far in time.

  I tried a few other angles, adding data for the possibility that the man had come from a nearby state. Washington, Oregon, and California turned up too many results to fathom. In British Columbia and the Yukon Territories nothing really matched up with the dates. I changed the “date last seen” field from 1979 to 1989, thinking maybe our guy was a fashion outcast. I was placing a lot of trust in his clothing to help with the dates. It didn’t make much difference.

  If our guy had come to the state to work on the pipeline, he was only one of thousands. Likely one of hundreds who decided to stay and live here after the job was finished or who had no one back home who would expect him to return. If no one had reported him missing, we m
ight never know the answers.

  I stared at the screen, dimly hearing a vehicle stop in front of the house. Drake came in a minute later, smelling of jet fuel.

  “So, what was the huge emergency?”

  “Ha—I’ll fill you in after I grab a shower.”

  I was ready for some down time so I turned off the computer and sank back into the sofa cushions, pondering the efforts we were putting toward this search. Mina was investing a lot of work and staking her professional reputation on building a big story here. I wondered if she was prepared for the very real fact that the murder might never be solved.

  Chapter 11

  Harry Weaver’s words resounded in Joshua’s head as he dragged his feet toward his rooming house. Someday, someone would shoot Soapy Smith. If Joshua only had a gun—he would be that man! He would rid the city of that vermin. His anger flared once more and his teeth began to grind. Suddenly he was hungry.

  Mrs. McIlhaney’s soup smelled good, but her designated supper time was six o’clock and it was nowhere near that yet. Joshua made his way quietly up the stairs and unwrapped the sandwich Harry had sent home with him. A five dollar bank note floated to the floor.

  It was another debt to repay but for the moment Joshua felt nothing but profound gratitude for his friend’s kindness. He would give Mrs. McIlhaney two dollars for another week’s rent on the room. The other three would keep him fed. He weighed his options:

  One, beg a shipboard job to cover his passage on the next steamer to San Francisco.

  Two, get his money back from Soapy Smith. If necessary, kill the scoundrel to do so.

  Three, with the recovered money head for the Klondike gold fields.

  He sat on his bed, gulping down each bite of his sandwich and feeling his energy return. What would be wrong with all those options? Rid the town of Soapy Smith and then head for the gold fields, return quickly enough that he could get aboard a steamer before anyone realized that he, the killer, had come back. As Harry had told him, the local police had few resources and even if Harry’s company assigned him the job of bringing Joshua in—unlikely, since he was on another quest already—surely Harry would take pity and look the other way. Smith was a con man and thug, after all. Maddie’s gentle face appeared to him, shocked at the evil thoughts racing through his head. He shook off the vision as a nugget of icy resolve formed deep inside him. Getting rid of Smith was the right thing to do.