by Sue Henry
Bill Knapp went with Don and Aaron to search through to the other end of the island and back for Whitney and for Karen, whom Jessie had identified as the person she had helped to hide under Tim Christiansen’s body.
“Leave his body where it is,” Alex told them. “There’ll be an investigation and enough disturbance has already been done to that scene already. But Jessie says that Karen was frightened and may be reluctant to trust anyone. She and Whitney have to be out there somewhere, so make sure you’re thorough.”
Jessie went to take a look around the north end of the island and under the helipad. After a fruitless search, she was coming back when she noticed that Alex and Joe Cooper were standing together on the lower platform in earnest conversation. Alex nodded in answer to something, added a comment of his own, then tipped his head back in a hearty laugh at Cooper’s response. They seemed to have reached some kind of understanding that eluded her, but they were both serious again when Jessie trotted down the stairs to join them, Tank close beside her, unwilling to be separated from his mistress.
“Good,” Alex said to Cooper. “We’ll work that out. It won’t be a problem. I’ll call . . .” He hesitated and turned to Jessie as she slipped in under his arm.
“Hi there. Find anything?”
“Nothing. Let’s go up and see how Laurie’s doing.”
“Sure. Coming, Joe?”
Joe? Jessie considered the apparent change in the relationship between the two men as the three climbed the steps. Something had transpired that she didn’t understand, but she was sure Alex would clarify later, and let it go as they entered the lighthouse.
Laurie and Sandra had decided to once again examine every closet and storage space in the lighthouse where Whitney might have been incarcerated.
“Alex.” Laurie stopped him, as he, Jessie, and Cooper came in the door. She went to the nearby half-sized freezer and lifted its lid to rummage through the packages of frozen food. “We found a handgun in Karen’s things and Jim put it in here, but it’s gone, so someone took it out—probably Curt, from what Jessie says.”
“Who knew it was there?” Alex asked sharply.
“All of us,” Jessie told him. “We were all together when Jim put it there.”
“Not all. Karen was in the bedroom,” Jim reminded her, coming in from the common room.
“That’s right, she was. But I think the door was open.”
They looked at each other. It could have been anyone of them—or not.
“So Curt could have taken it?” Alex questioned. “Or Karen—or Whitney, for that matter?”
Yes, that was possible.
“You know,” Jim said, frowning at his own lack of attention, “I’d like to have a look at the space in the basement behind the wine—just to see if those packages Sandra told us about are still there.”
“What packages?” Alex asked.
“Drugs,” Jessie told him. “Someone had two good-sized packages of cocaine stashed down there. It’s probably what this is all about.”
Thinking back to what he had learned in Whitehorse about drug smuggling across the international borders of Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and the Pacific Northwest, a nasty picture was beginning to take shape in Alex’s mind.
The cocaine, when Sandra, Jim, and Jessie showed Alex where the packages had been, was gone. But in its place they found an unexpected and unpleasant surprise. Curt’s body lay there on the cold cement floor. He had been killed by a shot to his left temple.
There was a more welcome surprise when they were back upstairs and had gathered around the table to answer a few more questions from Alex.
The outside door was suddenly opened and Bill Knapp came in. After him, followed by Don and Aaron, Whitney limped into the kitchen, damp, dirty, and bedraggled, with dry leaves and grass in her hair and a bloody scrape across one muddy cheek.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“IT WAS CURT,” WHITNEY TOLD THEM FROM A SEAT AT the far end of the table, where she was drinking the water Jim handed her, while Laurie attempted to treat the cut on her cheek. She had pulled off the filthy sweatshirt she had been wearing over a T-shirt, now also stained, but not quite so dirty.
“When he woke me up, Curt told me he wanted one hostage within reach, just in case, and since I was the last one, he would keep me upstairs. He tied me up, gagged me, and left me on the bed. I had no idea where anyone else was, except that Jessie had gone out earlier to look for Karen. But after a while I heard Karen here, talking to Curt.
“Later someone else came in a boat. I heard it come into the cove and then heard them talking in the common room, but I never got a look at them. I struggled till I got loose, and then took off out the kitchen door when the three of them went to the basement. I heard a shot as I went up the boathouse stairs, but I didn’t stop—just booked.”
“Where did you go?” Alex asked.
“To the east side, where there are lots of deep spaces between those big rocks. It was a mess going through them in the dark. I was in a hurry, so I slipped and fell more than once—that’s where I did this,” she said, putting a hand to her cheek. “Once after that I landed knee-deep in a tide pool. Ugh! Awful standing water that smelled rotten. Finally I found a good place between a big rock and the roots of a tree, crawled into it, curled up, and stayed there. I think I even went to sleep for a while.
“Later, I heard the boat motor start, so I stood up enough to see and watched it leave.”
“Why didn’t you come back then?”
“Well, there were only two people in it, so I figured it was possible that one of the three was still here and probably had a gun. What would you have done? I crawled back into my hiding place.”
“Did you see anyone else—hear anything else—any other boats?”
“Nope. But when I heard Aaron and Don shouting my name just now, I figured it was safe to come out. So here I am—what’s left of me. And I need a shower and something to eat. I’m starving.”
Alex glanced across the table at Joe Cooper, who had been casually leaning back in his chair, but now slowly sat up to place both elbows on the table, fold one hand over the knuckles of the other, and rest his chin on them. Jessie, next to Alex, with Tank curled up under her chair, saw him give the trooper a quick inquiring look, which Alex answered with a slight nod of his head.
“So,” Cooper asked Whitney in an offhand, indifferent tone, “you didn’t hear my boat—or see me tie it up and come ashore on that side of the island? Then when the other boat left, come to take it and follow them out?”
She turned to assess him questioningly, stiffening enough so that Laurie paused in her application of disinfectant to say, “Sorry. Did I hurt you?”
Whitney didn’t answer, simply stared resentfully at Cooper. But something alert and wary moved in her narrowed eyes as she answered him.
“No. And I think I would have if you’d been there,” she snapped and continued with a challenge. “Who the hell are you anyway? The third person in this charade, I’ll bet. Did Karen and Curt leave in the boat without you on purpose?”
Cooper lifted his chin off his hands, and his cold smile in response was an expression more predatory than sympathetic and held no more humor than the answer he snapped at her across the table.
“Nice try. But I was there—my boat is still there and was seen to be by others. Clearly, if you didn’t see it, or hear it, you weren’t where you say you were. Care to explain that?”
Giving him a look of disdain, Whitney turned to Alex. “Who is this guy?” she asked. “Do you know that he’s been stalking Karen Emerson practically forever—that he beat her, frightened her half out of her wits, enough to drive her out of Ketchikan? Why don’t you arrest him? Do you know him?”
Alex stared at her in silence for a few seconds, waiting to see if she would say anything else.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I know him. And you will too, very shortly, if what I think is true. Where’s the cocaine, Whitney? You might as well
give it up. Did they leave you here because you’ve made some bad mistakes?”
“Wha—” she started to say, rising from her chair.
“I don’t think so,” Aaron said clearly, stepping from the doorway, where he had been nonchalantly leaning to listen and watch.
His interruption from the other end of the room drew surprised attention from all of them, as he moved to stand directly behind Jessie and, taking a handgun from the pocket of the light jacket he was wearing, pressed the barrel against the back of her head. Mouths fell open in shock and Jim started to stand up.
“Sit down,” Aaron snapped.
Jim sat. “Now,” Aaron told them, “you will all keep your seats, right—and your hands on the table? No questions, no talking.”
With a glance at Alex, who had inched forward in his chair, “Don’t even think about it, trooper. Very carefully, hand me your gun.”
With clear but watchful resentment, Alex drew it carefully from its holster and handed it over.
Aaron smiled and nodded in satisfaction as he stuffed it into a jacket pocket.
“Smart boy. I assume you value this woman, so don’t do anything stupid. Get up slowly, Jessie—very slowly. Come on around the table, Whitney. No one’s going to move an inch now, are you, folks?”
No one did, as Whitney moved past them to join Aaron and Jessie, who had stood up slowly, as instructed. Tank rose to his feet and moved to her side, looking up questioningly at her, then at Aaron behind her. He knew what a gun was—didn’t like the noise they made, but his mistress carried one when they did training runs or ran races, because of the danger of aggressive moose.
When Aaron glanced down at him he growled.
“Take care of that,” Alex was told, and he reached one hand to take firm hold of Tank’s collar, restraining him.
Moving the gun barrel down between her shoulders, with a firm hold on Jessie’s arm, Aaron drew her backward into the kitchen doorway, where they stopped in full view of everyone at the table.
Whitney followed, but slipped past him and disappeared into the hallway as soon as space allowed. When she reappeared she stepped close to Aaron and put an arm around his waist, so it was clear they were a couple. She was carrying the small duffel in which she had brought her clothing and personal stuff to the island. It looked heavier now—just about cocaine heavy, Jessie thought, glancing at it as Whitney stopped beside her. So if Karen and—whoever—had gone in the boat, they hadn’t taken . . .
“How do you think you’re going to get away from here?” Joe Cooper interrupted her thoughts from the other side of the table.
“I said, no questions,” Aaron reminded him. “But thanks to you and your boat, that won’t be a problem, will it?”
“It’s a long walk from here to there, over a lot of hard stones—difficult enough on your own. With a hostage?”
Whitney’s grin was full of sly satisfaction. “Now that I know where your boat is, I can bring it around to the cove to pick them up, can’t I?”
“Get going then, Whit,” Aaron told her. “Leave that. Jessie will carry it down for us. I’ll watch them while you go.”
She dropped the duffel close to his feet, spun to the door, and was gone.
The room was absolutely still.
Jessie could feel the barrel of the gun pressed hard against her spine and was tempted to simply drop to the floor beneath it. But that would leave the possibility of the gun being discharged by accident, or intent, at those gathered around the table, including Alex, who was in front of her. She looked down at him and he, reading her mind, gave her a tiny shake of the head saying Don’t try it.
Aaron caught the signal between them and shoved the barrel harder against her back. “I wouldn’t try anything dumb, Jessie.”
Tank growled again.
“I won’t,” she sighed, letting him think she had given it up.
In the silence they soon heard the sound of a boat approaching the cove below the platform.
Cooper tried reasoning again, shifting one hand on the table and speaking loudly to take Aaron’s attention away from the sound—and Jessie. “There’s law enforcement on the way, you know. They’re flying in and can easily follow your boat.”
“Just shut up,” Aaron told him. “You seem to think we’re making this up as we go along.”
“And you’re not? I could pick a lot of holes in your thinking.” Cooper grinned wolfishly. “You won’t get far,” he said confidently.
Jessie could feel the gun move as Aaron shifted behind her and remembered his nervous pacing in the tank.
“Aaron,” she asked suddenly, without moving, except to glance down at the floor to her right, directing Alex’s attention. “You were in the tank with us on purpose, weren’t you—so we wouldn’t suspect you had anything to do with this, just like Whitney was pretending to have been hiding for the same reason? Neither of you expected to be caught out and identified with this whole drug thing, did you? But for that last couple of hours, when they didn’t come back, you were afraid they meant to leave you down there with the rest of us to die. You thought Whitney would go off with them and lea—”
“Shut—up!” he almost shouted, shoving her with the handgun so hard she was forced to take a step forward and to the right.
“And she would have left you there,” Jessie continued, still moving forward slightly, looking straight at Alex, who, quick to sense her intent, was ready and waiting, knowing he couldn’t stop her. “You know she would have, if we hadn’t been found before she could. So she had to try something else, didn’t—”
“I said shut—aah . . .”
As Aaron moved to follow her with the gun against her back, he stumbled over the duffel Whitney had dropped at his feet and was momentarily thrown off balance. The hand with the gun came up as he sought to clutch at Jessie, and he almost lost the weapon as he grabbed at her shoulder with the other.
Alex, already in motion, pushed Jessie out of the way and reached one long arm to snatch the gun from Aaron’s hand before he could regain his grip on it. Swinging him around, the trooper yanked his arm up between his shoulder blades and ran him against the wall.
“Get hold of Tank,” he instructed Jessie, who looked down to see that the husky Alex had released was now savaging one of Aaron’s pant legs in an attempt to get at the leg itself.
“Quiet,” Cooper said, waving Jim and Don back into their chairs as he passed Alex and Aaron on his way to the kitchen door, where he flattened himself against the wall to one side of it.
Seeing what Cooper had in mind, Alex slapped a hand over Aaron’s mouth to keep him still, and in the moment of silence that followed they could all hear Whitney’s steps as she trotted up the stairs toward the kitchen door. As she stepped through it, surprise and confusion widening her eyes, Cooper grabbed her from behind.
She struggled angrily, hitting at him and twisting in an attempt to break free. “Let go of me, you bastard.”
Jim went to help, and between them the two men managed to move her, still kicking and thrashing, into a chair that Jessie shoved from the table to an open space. Tying her hands together behind the back of the chair with a wet kitchen towel they finally subdued her, though she sat glaring at everyone, including Aaron, in a fury.
“Incompetent idiot!” she snarled at him. “I should have known better—taken the stuff and the boat and gone by myself and left you here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“YOU TOOK A BIG CHANCE,” COOPER TOLD JESSIE, WHEN the pair of Alaska State Troopers from Ketchikan had showed up in another floatplane not long afterward to take Aaron, Whitney, and the cocaine in the duffel into custody. They had brought with them a forensics team of two to examine the south end of the island, where Tim Christiansen lay under the blue tarp, and to take his body home for examination and eventual burial.
“Not such a big one,” she said, smiling. “Alex and I know each other well enough so that he knew I was about to try something.”
“He
wasn’t too happy about your taking that risk.”
“Never is. But he wasn’t in that tank, so he couldn’t have known, as I did, just how much Aaron believed they would have left him there.”
“Would they?”
“Yes, I think they really would. I know Karen wouldn’t have hesitated for a second and, as you saw, Whitney’s pretty much out for herself. The other guy, the one Karen left with in the boat, I never saw. None of us did.”
“I did,” Cooper told her. “But I already knew who it was.”
“Who who was?” asked Alex, folding himself down to a seat on the helipad on the other side of Jessie and laying a hand on her shoulder.
She looked up and smiled at him before turning back to Cooper.
“Yes, who was it?”
“A rather large drug-smuggling fish I’ve been angling for in the last couple of years,” he told her.
“Why you? I thought you were after Karen.”
“Joe’s an undercover agent who’s been working for our side and now will be part of the cooperative effort to coordinate with the new RCMP Border Enforcement Team that Del and I met with in Whitehorse,” Alex explained to her before Cooper answered. “These arrests will make a good dent in part of the smuggling traffic between here and British Columbia. But that’s information you can’t pass on, okay? He’d like to keep his cover for a while longer.”
“Sure. But I thought . . .”
“You swallowed what Karen Emerson fed you,” Cooper said with a grim smile. “You couldn’t have known it was all lies. She’s very, very good at that. And I was after her. She was my link to the real kingpin—that guy she left with in the boat.”
Jessie thought about that for a minute before saying, “But they could have gone anywhere. How will you catch them?”
“They’re already in custody in Petersburg. I called on the radio from Tim’s boat and got both a plane in the air to track them and a Coast Guard boat to apprehend them in the lower end of the sound.”