Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Cobalt occupied the first floor of a dirty brick building on a corner lot on Main Street, just up the hill from the government wharf and the boat basin, and just north of where the road up to the highway really got steep. It was the kind of bar that looked abandoned in daylight and worse after night fell, windows boarded and graffitied over, the only entrance a plain steel door painted flat black.

  Above the first floor, the building rose from the pavement another two stories, four windows per level facing out onto the street, bedsheets or Seattle Seahawks flags for curtains, greasy anemic light emanating from behind. Apartments, or rooms at least: Deception Cove downtown living at its finest.

  Doubtless there was a front door to the residential component of the building, but Mason didn’t figure he could risk a look. Anyway, there was a fire-escape structure tacked onto the rear, flimsy wooden stairs backing onto the alley, and those ought to do well enough.

  Rengo had driven him as far as the top of the hill, in a beat-up old Toyota pickup with a rusted-through body but a motor the kid swore still purred. He’d dropped Mason off and turned around and driven off to hide again, Mason finally establishing in the kid’s mind that the state cops were likely to come looking after him too, sooner or later. Mason had watched Rengo go, his taillights red smears in the rain, and then he’d turned and found a side road a ways down from Main Street, hiked down the hill, and hoped nobody saw him.

  Nobody did.

  Now he stood at the rear of the Cobalt, listening to the throb of rock music from the first-story bar, uneven drums and an angry guitar. Down the block was the sheriff’s detachment and Jess probably in there, and Mason missed her like anything and wished she were with him. Wished he’d taken her away from Deception Cove after the Harwood thing, convinced her to make a life somewhere else, somewhere new.

  But Jess would never leave Makah County again; Mason knew it. What he really should have done was walk away from Brock Boyd outside Spinnaker’s restaurant.

  Do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

  If he’d let Brock Boyd claim his victory, just taken Lucy and walked, nobody would have seen him hit the dogfighter. Nobody would have any reason to believe he held a grudge.

  Mason knew he’d been stupid, and he was paying for it now.

  According to Rengo, Charlene Todd lived on the top floor of the Cobalt, the farthest unit from the harbor. Mason found his way to the fire escape and started climbing, hoping the “witness” would be home.

  The fire escape was flimsy, waterlogged wood. It swayed and creaked as Mason climbed, and he feared for some time that the whole thing would collapse underneath him. He hurried, trying to keep quiet, hoping the noise from the bar below was drowning out his boot steps.

  There was a wooden door at the second-floor landing; Mason tried the handle and it swung open. He closed it again, climbed to the top floor of the building and found another door there, and it, too, was unlocked. He pushed it open and walked inside.

  A narrow hallway. Dirty light bulbs spaced far apart, carpet tracked with mud and wet and who knows what else. A communal bathroom off to one side, the toilet seat up, the mirror a mess of more graffiti. A stink wafting out through the open doorway—weeks or months of uncleanliness. Opposite the bathroom door was Charlene Todd’s known address.

  Mason knocked on the door. There was no answer, no sound of movement from within. He waited in the hall and listened to the buzzing of the light bulb overhead, felt the throb of the bass from two floors below, resonating through the whole building and inescapable.

  This was not a happy place. It looked nothing like the Chippewa pen, but it reminded Mason of prison all the same—an undercurrent of desperation, thinly masked volatility. A violence coiled up and hidden and waiting to strike.

  He knocked on the door again and there was again no answer. He could have turned around and left and come back another time, and he probably should have, but instead Mason tried the door handle and it was unlocked and he’d pushed the door open before he could stop himself.

  Charlene Todd’s home was a single room with a window that looked out to Main Street. On a nice day, you’d have been able to see the water, if you craned your neck some. Square, more or less, enough space for a small bed and a table and chair; no cooking facilities to speak of, but a hot plate on a shelf by the door. Sketches taped to the walls, ballpoint pen on printer paper, landscapes of the harbor and the town and some profiles of animals—a bald eagle, a killer whale. A raven.

  Charlene Todd lay on the bed, beneath the window, and Mason knew she was dead before he’d even crossed the threshold.

  She lay on her back on the bed, her feet toward Mason at the door and her head resting on the pillow.

  Her throat had been slashed. She’d bled out onto the bed, and the blanket and pillow beneath her were stained dark and damp. It was impossible to say how long she’d been dead, but she was dead and there was nothing Mason could do for her. She’d been about Jess’s age, he suspected, in her midtwenties, though it was hard to know for certain in the darkness of the room. He realized he should have expected this, that whoever had convinced Charlene to lie to the sheriff would likely want to keep her quiet now, now that she’d done the job for them.

  Mason stepped fully into the room. Closed the door behind him. He looked at Charlene Todd and felt guilty and empty and sick, that this woman had died to serve some machine with him at its center, that he’d fought with Brock Boyd and now another person was dead.

  He stood in the room with Charlene Todd’s body for some time, and he didn’t know how long. The music played far below and cars passed on the street outside, and rain fell against the window and Charlene lay on her back on her bloody bed and couldn’t provide Mason with any answers.

  Mason turned back to the door and pulled it open, and then he wrapped his hand in his jacket sleeve and wiped the door handle down as best he could, on both sides. He stepped out into the hall again and pulled the door closed with his hand wrapped in his jacket, and he went down the hall to the fire escape and prepared to let himself out.

  But the bathroom door was closed. Mason should have noticed but he didn’t, and then he heard the toilet flush and the door swung open. A man stepped into the hall, buttoning his pants, and if he’d just turned the other way, he might have walked back to his room without noticing Mason.

  But the man stood there in front of the bathroom for a beat; he was an older man, with a lined face and a stooped-over posture, stained Carhartts and a flannel shirt. Mason waited, frozen, the music pounding up from beneath, and maybe it wasn’t the bass resonating now but his heart, and then, slowly, the man turned and saw him.

  “Another friend of Charlene’s,” he said, his voice betraying no surprise. He hadn’t asked a question, but he looked at Mason through bleary eyes as though expecting an answer.

  He might have been drunk or it might have been drugs, or it might have been something else entirely. Mason wondered if there was a chance the man might forget about him after he’d found his way back to his own room.

  But then the man blinked, and his eyes cleared and he frowned. “You’re the one they’re looking for,” he said. “The one killed Bad Boyd.”

  There was no hope then but to leave and leave quickly, and that was all Mason could figure to do.

  He met the man’s gaze, and the man didn’t look afraid but rather curious, as though he was wondering what the man who’d killed Bad Boyd was doing here, in his hallway.

  “Call the sheriff,” Mason told him. “There’s been another murder.” Then he turned and reached for the fire door. Let himself out and into the rain again.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was the last thing Aaron Hart needed, another body on his hands. For all of the spiel the sheriff had spun to his favorite deputy about crime in Makah County being more or less simple, he couldn’t quite convince himself the Charlene Todd murder
wrapped up as nicely as it should have.

  The call had come in about an hour previous, closer to nine in the evening than eight, breaking up the meeting of the minds with Sergeant Shipps and the state patrol. Ernie Saint Louis at the Cobalt had a murder to report, and he was saying it was the man who’d killed Bad Boyd who’d done it.

  Ernie was in his cups, and deep, by the time Hart had trekked across the street to the Cobalt Hotel, a forensics team on its way from Port Angeles to meet him. No elevator in the Cobalt, of course, and Hart was near out of breath by the time he’d reached the third floor, found Ernie in his room with an open bottle and a couple more of them empty, asked him to explain the whole thing over again.

  Ernie swore it was Mason Burke who’d met him in the hall, had come out of Charlene Todd’s room and told Ernie there’d been a murder. And Charlene Todd was dead and murdered; there was no doubt about that. Her throat had been cut, and she’d died in her bed, not even forty-eight hours since she’d walked into the detachment and pointed Hart to the murder weapon at the bottom of the Deception Cove boat basin.

  From any logical point of view, Mason Burke was the prime and only suspect. And Hart figured that was probably the way it would all shake out in the end. But in the meantime, there was plenty that niggled at him. The first thing was how Burke had figured out so quick it was Charlene Todd who’d snitched on him. The second was, why’d he go and tell old Ernie to call the law and there’d been a murder, when he could have said nothing and bought himself time to keep running? But the most troubling thing about this whole development, from Hart’s eyes, was why Burke would bother to kill Charlene Todd at all.

  Hart didn’t know Mason Burke very well. He knew the man’s history, and they’d shaken hands once or twice. But he knew Jess Winslow, better than a little bit. He figured he knew her well enough to trust she was an all-right judge of character.

  Hart could believe that Mason Burke had killed Brock Boyd. The men didn’t like each other, and from the sound of it, both of them had had something to prove. Burke had a killer’s pedigree to start with, and he’d likely seen Boyd as pretty close to fair game, Boyd being a criminal himself, and a dogfighter at that.

  The way Hart saw it, if Burke had killed Boyd, he probably slept just fine at night afterward. Just as he’d likely not lost any sleep after what had happened with Jess and Kirby Harwood on Dixie Island. But Jess swore the first murder—the one down in Michigan that had sent Burke down this path—had been a long-ago mistake, something that had changed Burke almost as much as it had changed the unlucky bastard on the other side of the equation.

  As Hart surveyed Charlene Todd’s little room, and Charlene lying dead in the middle of it, he didn’t see fair game, and he didn’t see how Burke could have either. Charlene was destitute, and she was by and large harmless. She’d done nothing wrong but tell the law what she’d seen.

  Why would Mason Burke risk capture just to punish her? It was a hell of a chance to take when Charlene had already told her story. And Burke, to Hart’s mind, seemed smarter than to do it—or at least the sheriff hoped his favorite deputy wasn’t shacking up with a guy that dumb.

  But if Burke hadn’t come to kill Charlene Todd, then why had he come here? And if not Burke, then who had killed her?

  Hart knew he was playing the same game Jess Winslow had been playing, letting his mind spool out with conspiracy theories and hunches, not seeing the facts laid out before him. Charlene Todd was dead, and Mason Burke had been in the room with her. Smart money said Burke had killed her, and Hart might never know exactly why.

  All the same, the questions bothered him. And when Doc Trimble showed up from the coroner’s office, and the forensics technicians arrived on loan from Clallam County, Hart decided he’d put them to work.

  “I need it all, Shay,” he told Trimble as they stood in the doorway and looked in at Charlene’s body. “Full workup on the deceased. Everything you can tell me.”

  Trimble nodded, but she looked skeptical. “You’re the boss, Sheriff,” she said, “but I can tell you right now, it looks like she died from a knife.”

  The doc was wearing more makeup than usual, a nice crimson dress underneath her lab coat. Hart surmised he’d interrupted some kind of evening.

  “Yeah, I get that,” he told her. “Time of death, though—that’s what I’m after. As close to the minute as you can peg it.”

  Mason Burke had been in with Charlene around quarter past eight, Hart figured. If the coroner could pin down a time of death within a reasonable proximity, the sheriff knew it would go a long way toward erasing the nagging doubts in his head.

  But in the meantime…

  “Dust the room; all of it,” he told the forensics team, Bobby Yee and Ray Franklin, with whom he’d worked more than a few cases in Clallam County. “You might probably get the phone book, but I want every fingerprint accounted for. Anything unusual in this room, document it.”

  He stepped back and watched the team get to business. Figured to work this case harder than any open-and-shut case had ever been worked in Makah County, get ahead of this homicide spree before it claimed any more victims. Probably it was Mason Burke who’d killed Charlene Todd. Undoubtedly he’d killed Brock Boyd.

  But just in case it wasn’t Burke who was doing this, Aaron Hart figured he’d need every scrap of a clue he could get his hands on.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  She’d been bumped off the Boyd case, but Sheriff Hart had let Jess keep her badge, and that’s how she found herself parked with Lucy in a county cruiser a day or so later and a couple of miles west of Deception, aiming a radar gun at eastbound traffic coming out of Finlayson’s Bend.

  She had the dog in the back seat and Gillies riding shotgun. Gillies, who ought to have been working the night shift that evening and instead had been downgraded to babysitting duty, working tandem with Jess while Mitch Derry out of Neah Bay caught the overtime and the state patrol handled the manhunt.

  It was embarrassing, Jess thought, for her and Gillies both. Sheriff Hart obviously felt like she needed caretaking, someone to keep an eye on her while Shipps and his men left no stone in the county unturned in their search for Burke. Jess might have been insulted if she’d believed Hart meant it personally. But she figured he was trying to look out for her, keep her busy without jeopardizing the case, and she supposed she’d have done the same thing if the roles had been reversed.

  Gillies, for his part, had just about bent over backward trying to convince Jess that he didn’t blame her for their newfound partnership.

  “I don’t care what Burke did or didn’t do,” he told her, studiously avoiding eye contact. “You’re still a hell of a deputy, and I can’t see how this case changes any of it.”

  His disappointment was obvious, though he tried to put a brave face to it. “Hell, those state police assholes are more or less crowding us out anyway,” he said. “Wouldn’t be much to do even if they did let us help investigate.”

  That was a lie, and they both knew it. Shipps and his men may have been handling the hunt for Mason Burke, but Hart still had to work the Boyd murder case—and the new one, Charlene Todd, with Burke pinned for that too.

  That one was a head-scratcher, and even Hart knew it. And Jess hoped the sheriff would see soon enough that there was no way Burke could have done it, or would have done it. Though Charlene Todd had more or less damned Burke with her testimony, Jess knew he wasn’t the kind of man who’d ever seek vengeance. Especially now, with the whole county knowing his face and looking hard for it.

  Burke hadn’t killed Charlene Todd. Jess was certain. But nobody else in the county seemed ready to listen to her, and it drove her crazy to be sitting here with Gillies playing speed trap instead of actually hunting for the real killer.

  The lipstick on the broken wineglass in Boyd’s garbage—as far as Jess knew, neither Sheriff Hart nor the state police had come up with an explanation yet. Nor did it seem to Jess that anyone cared to look for any motive Charlene mig
ht have had to point the finger at Burke for Boyd’s murder. Hart wouldn’t know that Charlene had been lying, but Jess did. What she didn’t know yet was why.

  A mustard-yellow Chevette, a hatchback about three decades old sagging low on overloaded springs, came racing out from around Finlayson’s Bend and tripped the radar gun first at fifty-three per. Thirty-five miles an hour was the speed limit here, down from fifty on the other side of the bend, more than a few wrecks in the trees and crosses by the roadside, thanks to drivers who’d ignored the slowdown and skidded, especially in the dark and the wet.

  Jess hit the lights and pulled out after the hatchback, the little car chugging along steady at a speed that defied explanation once you caught a look at the smoke churning out of its exhaust pipe. In the back of the cruiser, Lucy settled in for the chase, though it wasn’t much of a pursuit; Jess and Gillies were coughing as they pulled up behind the Chevette, the driver glancing through the acrid fog in his rearview and his shoulders slumping, the car slowing and pulling over to the side of the road.

  Jess and Gillies swapped glances, reaching for their seat belts. “Here we go,” Gillies said, and he tried to sound excited, but Jess could tell he wasn’t exactly turned on.

  The driver was a man named Douglas Bealing, address out in Neah Bay. He was four years older than Jess, according to his license, and she didn’t recognize him. He sat behind the wheel with his hands at ten and two, stared straight ahead with a look of confusion that might well have been permanent. Jess leaned in through the open driver’s-side window to chat with him; Gillies stuck to the passenger-side, his hand on his holster.