by Sue Henry
Alex stared at her, shaking his head.
“Bad idea. There’s no one out there this time of year, Jess.”
“That’s just it. No one out there would be no one to mention that I was. It’s isolated, private, and, best of all, not a place I often go or am associated with. How could this awful person possibly find out I was there? I know Millie would let me use her beach house and wouldn’t breathe a word—to anyone.”
“She’s right, Alex,” Caswell said. “It’s not really a bad solution.”
Alex frowned, exhibiting a stubborn streak. “I like Idaho better. It’s farther away, and my folks would be around to help.”
“Alex, the idea isn’t how far, but how well hidden—safe—right?”
She finished the Jell-O, curled a lip at the broth-pretending-to-be-soup, and waved a cracker at him.
“I’ll take Tank, the shotgun, and my .44, food for a couple of weeks—catch up on the reading I’ve been meaning to do. No one will know where I am. Additional benefit? I won’t have to see everyone I know while I’m looking like a raccoon, or keep explaining that you didn’t beat me.”
Caswell grinned and nodded, noticing she had, unconsciously or not, slipped from would to will.
“I don’t really think your looks are at the heart of the issue, Jessie, but…We could fly her down in my plane, Alex. Set it down in the cove and taxi right up to the beach, like we did last July. It works. I like it.”
Alex chewed his lip, still unconvinced.
“What I don’t like is that you’d be down there alone. There would be no help if you needed it.”
“There’s the radio and half the bay to hear me if I used it. I can take my cellular.”
“It’s not secure, either. Anyone could listen.”
“So? They wouldn’t know where it was coming from unless we mentioned it, would they? We could check in at specific times so you’d know I was okay. Niqa’s not that far from Homer—about half an hour by boat. And it’s only two hundred and twenty-five miles from Anchorage…”
“Less by plane,” Caswell noted.
“…so you could be there fast, if I needed you.”
Alex only partially capitulated, but they both knew he was weakening—running out of objections.
“Well…call Millie and ask her. I’ll think about it. Now get some rest. If you’re not going to eat the rest of that, I’ll move it.”
“I’m not. Oh, ple-ease, bring me some real food, okay? Pizza—tacos—even a Big Mac. I don’t care, but I’m going to starve on this.” She rejected the bland contents of the tray with a dismissive flick of her fingers. “There’s nothing wrong with my appetite.”
“She’s better,” Alex told Cas, with a straight face. “Getting pushy and demanding.”
“Yeah. Linda’s like that, too.” Cas grinned. “You’d think she broke an arm or something. I think Jessie’d be pretty capable of taking care of herself on an island.”
“Yeah, I guess you might be right.”
“I’d be okay, Alex. Really, I would.”
“And if you weren’t?”
“Then you two will be my knights in shining airplane.”
“I don’t like it,” Jensen told Caswell as they walked out of the hospital a few minutes later. “I’d rather have her a long ways away from here—or where I could keep track of her every single minute, and that’s not possible. Even if I could, it wouldn’t make her completely safe and might just get us both killed. This guy seems to be a real loony tune, but an extremely cautious and clever one.”
“We could send someone with her—one of ours—or…Listen, I’ve got a friend with the Air National Guard Pararescue. Those guys are awesome, better than guerrillas anywhere—really know their stuff. This guy I’m thinking of can turn completely invisible on a patch of scorched earth—and also be deadly, if necessary. I’d rather one of them guarded Linda in a bad situation than me, if I had the choice.”
“Naw, it won’t work. You know Jess. She’s already refused a ‘baby-sitter,’ as she called it. She said she wouldn’t go if we insisted on sending somebody along—even you or Phil. She’s so damned used to doing things alone, by and for herself.”
Caswell picked up a paper cup someone had dropped in the parking lot and tossed it into a trash can.
“Let me kick it around a little,” he said contemplatively. “I might be able to come up with something. Now let’s get you something to eat before you seize up on me. You need something to take back to Jessie, too. Then we can figure out how to get her out of town as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.”
9
On Thursday afternoon, Jessie had gone from the hospital to Alex’s truck, according to regulations, in a wheelchair. Though she felt much better, she was still sore from the battering she had taken in the rolling truck and had been exercising in her room to alleviate the stiffness and the slight depression she was feeling.
“Don’t leave this room,” Jensen had cautioned her. “There’s an APD officer outside, screening whoever comes in, and I’ve had a word with the nursing staff. Let this loony think you’re still incapacitated.”
It made sense, and Jessie had found she was glad to comply—grateful, even, for the guard at her door.
“I can walk from here,” she told him Thursday as he wheeled her toward the hospital doors.
“But you won’t. I want you to look as pathetic as possible. If this guy’s watching, I want him to think you’re hardly able to sit up, let alone protect yourself. He needs to think you’re going home and right back to bed—won’t be up for a week or more, from the look of you.”
“Oh, I see. Good plan.”
She slumped in the chair and suppressed a nervous giggle as she tried to look pitiful.
“I’m so glad to be getting out of here that it’s hard to take this seriously.”
“Do it anyway. Just think of the cause of the wreck and Nicky.”
Her snigger disappeared instantly, and he was sorry to have been the cause, though he felt it was necessary.
“We’ve been saying he ever since the accident. Have you decided that it’s a man now? Why?”
Cautiously sweeping the parking lot with his eyes, Alex thought about that.
“I guess I’m making an assumption. Tampering with the brakes on a truck seems more like something a man would do, though that doesn’t really make sense. A woman could do it just as easily—you just have to know where the line is and how to puncture it. I’m not sure, but I’m going to say he till I find out differently.”
She allowed him to lift her into the passenger seat of the truck, where she continued her weak-sister act as he drove directly to the Caswells’ in Eagle River.
“Great! You look terrible,” Linda—aware of the pantomime—told her, opening the door so Alex could carry Jessie in and set her, finally, on her own two good feet.
“Thanks a bunch. You don’t look too fantastic yourself. Oh, Linda, I’m so sorry.”
“What for? This wasn’t your fault.”
“I feel like it was. It’s me he’s after, not you—and not Billy.”
“Well, you can forget it. You think I don’t feel guilty for agreeing to that drive into town? Now that we’ve both got that out of our systems, let’s put it away and get this trip to the island planned right. Dinner’s about ready. Ben’ll be home soon and we’ll talk about tomorrow morning while we eat.”
“Wonderful. Something besides institution food.”
“Hey,” Alex reminded her. “Who’s spoiled you rotten with gourmet takeout for two whole days?”
The next day, very early on Friday morning, Alex and Cas flew Jessie and Tank southwest to Kachemak Bay, following a plan of action that had been arranged carefully, discreetly, and with uncommon care.
“Why don’t they have alleys anymore?” Jessie complained as she and the two men drove out of the Caswells’ garage and onto the street. “We ought to be slipping out the back of the house, to foil anyone watching from the front. I feel like a spy o
r a secret agent leaving a safe house.”
“Well, they don’t need ’em these days,” Alex answered. “Garbage trucks come to the curb instead. I’m watching. There’s nobody following us that I can see.”
Getting up while it was still dark, they had eaten a quick breakfast and were headed for Anchorage in Linda’s Blazer, from which Alex was keeping a close eye on the traffic around them.
“Don’t fret,” Cas assured Jessie. “Even if he were following us, he couldn’t get any farther than Lake Hood. The last thing he’d expect is for us to get into the Maule and fly off.”
The day before, to confuse anyone watching or following, Ben Caswell had flown his plane from its space at the end of Wasilla Lake to Lake Hood near Anchorage International Airport, where he had landed and sat watching people and planes come and go for half an hour. Seeing no one suspicious, he had left his Maule M-4, filed a flight plan for the next day, and gone home for dinner.
When they reached Lake Hood this morning, while Caswell prepared the plane and ran through his preflight checklist, Alex hurriedly loaded supplies, the shotgun, Tank, and Jessie, then climbed in himself, closely followed by Cas. Jessie wore her .44 in a neat holster on her right hip, having found it difficult, with her two broken fingers taped together in splints, to reach under her jacket to her usual shoulder holster, but possible to hold and shoot the gun if necessary.
“Can you use that?” Alex asked, watching her put it on.
“Yes.” She demonstrated. “It’s a little awkward, but using the other hand to steady it, it’ll be fine.”
He had hoped she wouldn’t have to try it, but said nothing more.
The sun had begun to turn the peaks of the Chugach Range gold around the edges as they took off, circled, and headed east.
“This isn’t the way to Homer,” Jessie commented from the rear seat, where she sat hemmed in by supplies and Tank. The husky lay on the floor against her feet—alert, and doing as he was told. He had flown before, but was never sure how to respond to the unusual experience of being airborne and feeling the surface on which he lay move under him.
“Right,” Cas agreed, “and with my best planning. To anyone watching, we’re heading for Glennallen, or anywhere beyond—Fairbanks, Tok, the Canadian border. We’ll swing across the Chugach when we’re out of sight and head down the Kenai.”
“Good thinking.”
“Just making absolutely sure this is done right—no slips—jumping through all the hoops I could think of, necessary or not, so no one knows where we’re going. Taking good care of you.”
“Thanks, Cas.”
The long valley where the Knik and Susitna Rivers flowed into an arm of the sea drifted by beneath them, discernible in the rapidly increasing light, and in a few more minutes the sun began to cast its light between the spires of the mountains in long golden fingers. Looking down, Jessie recognized the landmarks she was used to seeing from ground level: the communities of Palmer and Wasilla, the road leading out of Wasilla to her own cabin, Pioneer Peak rising between her and the rising sun. It looked peaceful, benign, and safe as it slid away below.
She could see that new snow had already dusted the tops of the ridges, as Cas swung the plane to the south to cross their western end. From Anchorage, what appeared to be a large wall of mountains was really just an edge of the Chugach Range, which stretched beyond her sight about a hundred and fifty miles directly east until it came to an end at the Bagley Ice Field in the Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness. Intense morning sun added such brightness to some of the white, reflective surfaces of the snow on peaks and glaciers that they were too brilliant to look at without squinting.
It took only a few minutes to fly over them and reach Turnagain Arm, where Caswell turned the plane a little more southwest above the Kenai Peninsula, which was full of small lakes and muskeg and more mountains off to the left. Looking down, Jessie could see the highway, the only motor route that ran all the way down the peninsula, ending at the community of Homer on Kachemak Bay. Examining it carefully, she noticed a few vehicles, including an eighteen-wheeler headed up the long road to Anchorage from the port. A few puffy clouds had drifted in from the south, and as they flew through them, the plane bumped and jerked slightly for a moment or two in the turbulence.
“Alex. There’s a moose…look, down there.”
He craned his neck to see where she was pointing and saw a brown speck, very tiny but recognizable, browsing for breakfast in the reeds of a lake that looked like a silver puddle.
Jensen enjoyed flying with Caswell, though his tall frame never fit comfortably when it was doubled into the small Maule M-4. Seeing some part of Alaska spread out under him gave him a feeling for its enormity. Mountains that rose like giants from the ground—which he saw every day and forgot about most of the time—now looked much different, though they still towered impressively. It always surprised him that the coastline of the south-central part of the state was so rugged and uneven, with its deep arms and channels of ocean. From above, it was possible to understand that it was really a new, sharp mountain range, still forming—that these mountains were twice as tall as they looked, because at least half of each one was below the surface of the sea.
Looking ahead, he could now see the wide reach of Kachemak Bay, running northeast to southwest, and nestled beside it the small community of Homer. Pointing southeast from the town, at a right angle to the shoreline, was a three-mile-long protrusion of land—the Homer Spit. Too narrow to be a peninsula—hardly wider, in a place or two, than the road than ran its length—this finger of land had been the original reason for the town’s location and was the focus of much of the area’s business. In summer, the road, with a single lane in each direction, actually created traffic jams of tourists, who came by the hundreds to park their tents, motor homes, and trailers on the sandy, oceanside beach of the spit. Now it was deserted, shops and charter services closed, and Jensen could see foam blowing from the caps of wind-whipped waves on the unsheltered ocean side.
“It looks rough,” he commented. “Glad we’re not going across in a boat.”
“Weather service says there’s a storm predicted in the next couple of days,” Caswell said. “Jessie, you can expect to be stranded till it’s over. I can land in this much wind, but not in a big blow. Better make sure you have lots of dry wood indoors.” He banked the plane a little to the left and headed south over the end of the spit, toward the other side of the bay. Jessie looked down to see the harbor, where containers were off-loaded from the ships and barges that traveled to and fro between Homer and the Pacific ports of the contiguous forty-eight states and foreign countries, bringing half of what was necessary for life in the Far North—from the down clothing that kept many of its people warm to the duct tape that seemed to hold everything together. They had already passed over a large public and commercial marina where dozens of boats were moored when they were not somewhere out on the waters of the bay, taking fishermen for the trip of their lives—if they could hook onto the bay’s enormous halibut—often several hundred pounds apiece.
Kachemak Bay, over thirty miles long, ran from Cook Inlet to the Fox River Flats. From three miles wide at its navigable upper end, it widened to twelve between Homer and Tutka Bay on the opposite shore. Scattered a mile or two offshore at the mouth of Tutka were a number of islands that partially sheltered it from the furies of the sea. They ranged in size from a mile or more across to so small they were not even large enough to hold a picnic at low tide.
It slowly became possible to make out a few tiny houses on the mainland of the peninsula, around the mouth of Tutka Bay, and that of Sadie Cove immediately to the east of it. The latter was responsible for the name Jessie had given to one of her female puppies, after her first visit to Niqa Island.
As she watched, the group of islands grew larger until she could make out the channels of water between. Jessie named some of the larger ones.
“There’s Cohen Island, Yukon, Hesketh, Herring, and Grass Isl
and—the funny one that always reminds me of a loaf of green bread.” It was a grass-covered hump in the water, sides rising straight up as tall as it was wide, which wasn’t much. “And there’s Niqa.”
She grew silent, watching it come closer.
Alex looked back to measure her mood.
“You still sure about this, Jess?” he asked. “We could get you on a southbound plane tonight instead.”
She gave him a long, pensive look that ended with a short nod.
“Yeah. I’m still sure. It’ll be fine, Alex. You’ll see. Just go catch this guy, okay? Let me know when it’s over, and don’t forward my mail.”
Well, that answers that, Jensen thought, exchanging a quick, conspiratorial glance with Caswell. They would not tell her about the new message from the stalker that had appeared at the hospital, in an envelope bearing Jessie’s name. With it had come a vase containing a seriously inappropriate arrangement of white lilies.
A nurse had brought it to the patrolman on duty, who was checking every get-well card and floral offering before it went into Jessie’s room and had passed it on to Jensen, when he saw what the envelope contained:
GET WELL SOON, JESSIE. I’M WAITING.
What had made Jensen even more furious were two snapshots folded in with the note. Each showed Jessie and Linda in the dog lot at the cabin—Linda carefully keeping watch, Jessie watering her dogs. The photographer had obviously been standing in the grove of trees just beyond the yard, close enough to clearly show both women in the pictures.
He and Caswell—who had expressed himself excessively in four-letter words—had taken the photos to the crime lab.
“Not much we can tell,” John Timmons had informed him later. “Kodak paper, ordinary size and film. Could have been developed anywhere—probably the local Carrs grocery, or Costco, where they get hundreds of jobs a week and wouldn’t pay attention to anything unless it was really unusual or pornographic. Crank ’em through a developing machine and send ’em back for pickup. No prints, but we expected that.”
“Dammit. He was close enough to shoot them both—and not just with a camera,” Jensen complained.