by Sue Henry
As she had mentioned to Alex, the two Darryls were becoming good wheel dogs, and they would work well in a team for the Quest, both of them heavy through the chest, wiry and strong enough to work just ahead of her sled, managing its weight in the turns, keeping the lines tight. She planned to take Tank as lead dog on both races, for he would recover much more quickly than she and, barring the unforeseen injury or illness, would be eager and ready to go, for he loved to race—would be disappointed, even insulted, if left at home.
He whined slightly at her side, causing her to peer through her lashes to see that he had turned onto his side and, though he slept on, all four legs were in motion as if he were chasing a moose through his dreams. A cloud or two drifted across the blue sky, casting shadows that alternated with the sunshine, lightening and darkening her cozy nook in the logs, a condition she half noticed when she closed her eyes again. But as she considered her dogs one by one, mentally selecting teams that would work well for each race, the warmth of the day helped her to drift off into a nap and a dream of her own.
In the middle of the Iditarod was a seventy-mile stretch between Eagle Island and Kaltag on the Yukon. When she raced this flat, frozen section that followed the wide river’s graceful curves, if the weather was good Jessie usually put on her headphones and played favorite tapes. Now she dreamed she was there and the music she was listening to was classical, full of the delicate trills of a flute.
She had no idea how long she had slept when a sharp movement and breathy sound from Tank brought her drowsily back to the present. As she opened her eyes to see him on his feet and attentively staring at the dense forest on the hillside west of the meadow, she thought she heard a few notes of the thin echo of the flute in the soft sigh of the breeze that whispered past her ears. The sound was not repeated, and she reached out to lay a hand on Tank’s shoulder.
“What is it, guy? You see something? Hear something?”
He relaxed and turned to give her wrist a sloppy, affectionate lick.
She gathered herself up, sudden adrenaline waking her completely, and sat very still, waiting…listening intently. Nothing but the wind. What had it been? Left over from her dream—or the inspiration for the flute music she had imagined on the Yukon? Standing up, she considered searching for the source of the odd sound, tension and pressure once again a lump in her chest. Her breathing altered and resentment filled her mind. If it was real, it was unwelcome and disturbing.
Before she could decide to move, there was a sudden shrilling from the trees, and an eagle rose from it and flew out over the open space, clutching a still faintly shrieking squirrel in its talons. Tank’s attention turned quickly to the bird and they watched together as it circled and disappeared toward the east.
Jessie sank to her knees and gave him a good rubbing of ears and throat.
“Well, old mutt, you’re a good pup, but we’re still kind of flinchy, aren’t we?”
A rumble of her stomach reminded her that it had been a long time since her early breakfast, and she picked up her camera as she spoke again to the dog.
“You hungry, buster? Let’s go find something to eat, okay?”
Recognizing the familiar words, he dashed playfully around her, scattering sand and pebbles as they headed back along the beach. She picked up a stick of driftwood and tossed it for him to fetch until they reached the ramp to the deck, where she laid it on one of the huge logs to save for a future game.
Looking to the west, Jessie noticed that a bank of clouds was drifting in and would soon steal the warmth and glow from the day. It was dark and probably full of the storm Ben Caswell had predicted. Before she went inside, she checked the firewood that had been split and piled under the deck. Finding there was plenty, she remembered that she had planned to drag some in from the beach for cutting. Taking a large armful, along with some kindling, she lugged it up the ramp and into the house. She could collect driftwood another day.
By the time she had fed Tank, made a sandwich, and heated a can of soup to fill a large mug, the sunshine had disappeared and the wind was making waves of the ripples in the cove. So she retrieved a new Father Brad Reynolds paperback that she had brought along and settled in the upholstered rocker, with her stockinged feet on the table, to enjoy one of her favorite inactivities—simultaneous food for mind and body.
Except for pauses to make mugs of tea and locate a package of oatmeal cookies in one of the half-sorted boxes, nothing disturbed the peace and quiet of Jessie’s reading for the remainder of the afternoon. When she finally noticed that the house was becoming uncomfortably cool, and dark enough to qualify as gloomy, she laid aside her book and took Tank for a quick trip to the beach, while a fire she had started in the fire-pit stove took the chill off the room.
It was lighter outside, the wind was stronger, and the tide was coming up the beach with enough strength to create a rattle in the medium-sized rocks that it reached with each surge. She spotted a gray harbor seal riding easily on the white-capped waves of the cove, with its large round head raised out of the water, seeming to watch her walk across to the front of the deck. From a distance, lighter coloring around the eyes made it appear to be wearing a pair of enormous spectacles. With barely a splash, it slipped beneath the surface, reappeared much farther from shore a minute or two later, then vanished for good.
Jessie took Tank back into the house and out of the wind, which so far had brought no rain—a condition that could clearly change at any time.
The fire had done its work and the room was rapidly growing warm. She lit a kerosene lamp, wondering briefly if it was a good idea to advertise her presence with a light in a supposedly empty house. But there would be no one to see it from the water or the other island, which had no houses on its near side—not even a tent camp of sea kayakers this late in the year. She made herself a cup of hot chocolate and another sandwich and, cutting a slice of Linda’s fruitcake, went back to the rocker and resumed her reading as it grew darker outside the large windows. Soon all she could see was her own reflection in the broad panes of glass.
At eight, she called Alex in Knik for a reassuring checkin. By nine-thirty, fire banked in the stove, Tank snoozing on a rug beside the bed, she was snug and warm under two blankets and a quilt, oblivious to the growing storm outside, and—for the first half of the night, at least—sleeping better than she had in a week.
13
Jensen was poaching eggs and making toast shortly after seven the next morning when Ben Caswell and Phil Becker arrived.
“What the hell happened to your front window?” Becker queried, examining the duct tape and plywood that filled the gap and darkened the front room.
Jensen told them about the middle-of-the-night stone-throwing incident, laying the rock and the note on the kitchen table.
“Damnation,” Cas said. “You hear from Jessie? She okay?”
“She was last night. It isn’t time yet for her to call this morning. I’m not so worried. It worked. He’s obviously still here.”
“You know, Alex,” Caswell mused, frowning, “it might not be the best idea in the world to let this guy go on thinking that Jessie is here in the house. This is getting serious. He might as well come right in after her—you, now—as throw a rock.”
“That occurred to me about two-thirty, as I was hunting through the shed with a flashlight for plywood,” Alex agreed. “I had the feeling he was out there somewhere watching me, and it wasn’t a sensation I’m particularly fond of.”
“I’ll bet.” Caswell glanced at Becker, who had accepted a cup of coffee and taken a bright red chair at the table. “But we didn’t come all the way out here just to share your breakfast.”
“Damn.” Alex grinned. “With all that bread Jessie baked the other day, I thought I had help getting rid of some toast. There’s raspberry jam we made last summer.”
“Nope, sorry. Already ate. But I did some thinking after we got back yesterday, and there’s a couple of things you might want to reflect on.”
<
br /> Jensen brought his plate and the coffeepot to the table, where he nodded and poured salsa on his eggs.
“What’ve you got?”
“You know what I said on the way back about a motive for this harassment?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it seems to me that there’s a couple of possibilities that could help us out along that line. Why, I wonder, would anyone focus so completely on Jessie? What kind of a grudge could he have? It would have to be personal and relatively obscure, because no one else seems to be able to think of anything that comes close to explaining it. Jessie’s thought through everyone she can and come up empty—well, maybe the ex-boyfriend, but that’s a stretch. The Iditarod committee has no ideas. You’re doing no better than we are.
“It would also have to be something pretty significant—at least to this guy who’s throwing rocks, poking holes in brake lines, and setting traps for dogs—or people. Those things aren’t just harassment. They’re malicious attempts to hurt—and I think we classify the truck accident as attempted murder or manslaughter, right?”
He now had both troopers’ serious attention, though Alex almost automatically refilled both his and Becker’s coffee mugs.
“What could inspire that kind of hatred? Doesn’t seem like it would be a small gripe, but none of us has come up with anything large enough to fit, anything that seems worth it.”
“It could be something so personal it’s only in his mind and wouldn’t seem important to us,” Jensen suggested.
“True. I’ll grant you that it’s got to be very personal. But doesn’t it seem like we should be able to come up with something—even if it’s wrong—that connects to Jessie…unless it doesn’t?”
“What do you mean, doesn’t?”
“Well, think about it. What if she’s the medium—the message—not the target?”
“You mean…”
“I mean, what if it’s you—not her—he’s aimed at? These things do fit if you look at it from that angle. Last night, I was watching Linda struggle to put toothpaste on her toothbrush with her arm in a cast, and feeling unreasonably guilty for having allowed her to get involved in all this—like I had a choice. Then I thought how frustrated you’ve been about Jessie, and it suddenly occurred to me that, in a very real way, it’s worse for you to watch her being harassed than if it was directed at you. So…what if that feeling of failure is exactly what this bastard intends for you—that helplessness?”
He stopped, giving Jensen a chance to consider it.
“The worst way to threaten anyone who cares about his family is to threaten that family,” Becker added slowly.
It was true, Alex admitted to himself. Having Jessie hurt or killed would be the worst thing he could think of that could happen to him. He remembered her phobia about injuries to hands, and realized that the idea of some kind of horror being perpetrated on her caused his mind to flinch in just the same way. It was unendurable, intolerable—the very concept was almost worse than reality would be—a torture of the mind. It would be as effective a way to inflict mental agony on him as anything he could imagine.
He looked up at Caswell, who had silently watched the theory play itself out on Alex’s face.
“When you take time to kick something around, you don’t do it by halves, do you?” he said.
“Well…” Cas shrugged, and half smiled at his friend. “It occurred to me that it might be useful.”
“If this is true,” Becker asked, his mind racing ahead, as usual, “what can we expect? Will he switch to you, Alex, when he finds out Jessie isn’t here?”
Jensen nodded. “He might. Or it may just stop. He could decide to wait for her to come back, knowing she will have to, eventually.”
“So…what do we do now?”
“Several things, but first you said you’d thought of two things, Cas. What’s the second one?”
“It’s not such a big deal. Becker called last night to tell me what they found in your trees yesterday and mentioned the boot prints.”
“Yeah, the weight of the person who made them was distributed oddly.”
“Right, but that’s not what seemed inconsistent. If this guy set the traps in those two dog boxes, doesn’t it seem funny that there were no prints in the lot? Why would he be careful not to leave tracks near the traps and not care how many he left at his lookout sites?”
“Didn’t want us to notice them before they’d done their dirty work? Thought we wouldn’t look in the trees? Figured we couldn’t identify that particular pair of new boots?”
“Maybe—but that last one might not be true with a really good print. There’s almost always some anomaly. How could he be sure? Maybe there’s some other reason, if we can find out what it is. This guy seems to be terribly careful not to leave fingerprints on anything he sends—has to be wearing gloves. It’s a curious discrepancy for him to ignore his boot tracks, and even more incongruous to leave them in one place and not another.”
“You’re right. It may give us something to work on.”
The phone rang.
“Jessie,” Alex said, glancing at the clock, and went to answer it.
He was back in a few minutes, with the report that she was fine and sent greetings.
“That recorder came on when you picked up the phone. Are you recording your own conversations, too?” Phil asked.
“I’m recording everything. Seemed like it might be a good idea to have anything that could possibly concern this case on tape, admissible or not.”
“Yeah, you never know.”
Jensen turned back to Caswell. “You know, you could be on to something with this idea that it’s me he’s really after,” he said. “Have you got any more ideas?”
“No, but we should go through the files to see if there’s anyone you put away who’s been sprung recently. Or somebody who might have been carrying a grudge for any other reason, for that matter.”
“That’s not going to be easy.”
“Time-consuming. You may want to take a look at your own case notes for the last few years.”
“I can do that. But I don’t think it would be smart to make any assumptions on this one. We keep looking at things that would tie it to either me or Jessie, right?”
“Absolutely. It’s just an idea—not carved in granite. A question, not an answer.”
Although it was Saturday, the troopers’ office in Palmer was busy when Jensen sat down with Ivan Swift, his detachment commander, and asked to be relieved of his other cases in order to work on Jessie’s case full-time.
“If you hadn’t asked, I was going to call you in today,” Swift told him, rocking back in the office chair behind his desk. “Sure you don’t want someone else working this one? Can you stay objective about it?”
“Yes, sir, I think so. And if we’re looking for someone out to get even with me, I may be able to put a finger on it faster than someone else.”
Swift nodded thoughtfully. “I understand that you and Caswell got Jessie out of the area yesterday.”
“That’s right. After the wreck last week, we decided it was time to find her a safer place, but she refused to leave the state.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me? You certainly picked yourself one with a mind of her own, Jensen. Hope you value that quality.”
Alex grinned. “Don’t have much choice, but I’d just as soon she thought for herself.”
“Well, take the time you need. I’ll assign one of the clerks to search the records for anyone recently out of jail who might be hell bent on revenge. Who was that kid who swore he’d get you a couple of years ago? That drive-by shooting conviction. Remember?”
“Calvin Porter. Nasty piece of work, but he’s still in prison out of state, and won’t get out till long after the year 2000.”
“There’s always others. Don’t neglect the relatives, either. I seem to recall a distraught mother or two shouting things in court through the years. People get emotional at verdicts—but most cool off later
. It’s the few that carry a grudge we have to investigate.”
“Believe me, we will.”
“We’re not too overloaded at the moment. So use Becker and Caswell where you can. I’d like to see this one solved quickly. We all like Jessie. Proud to have her as part of the family, so to speak, and I hate to have this happening to her.”
Alex left the commander’s office with relief and a grin, appreciating Swift’s regard and concern for Jessie, and glad to be working with people who were also personal friends.
Though Caswell and his plane were tied up on a short run for another case, Jensen and Becker spent the day going through records of past cases, making lists of the names of anyone who might have had a grievance or might have exhibited a strong inclination to seek revenge for perceived injuries. At the end of the day they had sifted out three.
One was the kid Ivan Swift had asked about that morning, Calvin Porter. Though Alex didn’t see it as necessary, Becker insisted on putting his name on the list.
“There was an older brother involved. He got off, remember? We couldn’t prove he’d been in the car. But he swore to a reporter that he’d get even for his little brother’s conviction. He threatened the judge and jury, just about everybody in the courtroom—including you personally, as I recall hearing it. We kept tabs on him for a while till he left the state. So I don’t care if the younger kid’s still in jail, I think we should take a look at the older one—find out where he is and what he’s doing.”
Alex agreed, but his focus was directed at the other two names, one of which he remembered more clearly than usual for a nine-year-old case.
James Robert “J.B.” Moule had been a troublemaker with a sheet several pages long whom both the troopers and police in several Alaskan communities had been glad to see convicted and given a twelve-year sentence. He had been only twenty-four at the time of his trial, but his crimes had been many and most were violent—armed robbery, rape, assault, theft of all kinds. In an argument over a six-pack of beer, he had assaulted another young man with a baseball bat and had crippled him for life. His vicious temper had driven away all his family members, except his father, who had testified for him, supported him throughout the trial, wept when the sentence was handed down, and clearly encouraged his son to blame Jensen’s testimony for his conviction and incarceration.