Deadfall (11 page)

T
he flight back to Wasilla was pleasant and uneventful for Jensen and Caswell. In a sharp assessment of the surrounding air and water, they saw no boats or planes that might have observed their takeoff from the Niqa Island cove. Alex heaved a great sigh of relief as they passed back over the Homer Spit and started up the peninsula.

“Now,” he said, “I can get on with catching this bastard.”

“How are you going to go about it?” Cas asked. “He’s given you nothing to work on—no prints, no clues to his reasons for all this. Where are you going to start?”

“I sent Becker and a team to search the area where those photos were taken. Maybe they’ll turn up something. I reminded him of that old theory that at a crime scene there’s always something left and something taken away. We might get lucky.

“Then I’m hoping to catch that phone thing on the recorder. That first time—when you and Linda were there—I
heard the same sound Jessie heard, just before the hang-up. Now he knows my voice, and when I answer the damn thing, the receiver goes down immediately on the other end. So I had Jessie record a few hellos and I’m going to play them when it rings. If it fools him into the same sort of response she’s been hearing, I’ll get it on tape. We can have it checked and maybe be able to tell something about where he’s calling from. It doesn’t show on the caller ID. Could be a pay phone or a cell phone that doesn’t give a number.”

“Might work at that. Any results on the soil samples Timmons was trying to get a lead with?”

“Nope. Nothing except the dirt from the dog lot. There wasn’t enough to make a definitive analysis of anything else. There was some old animal blood—wolf, wolverine, who knows? He says he may be able to use it later as a comparison, but not to pinpoint a definite location.”

“It’s worth a try. Is that rookie, Tannerly, still going to play Jessie this evening?”

“Yeah. I’ll pick her up at your place after work. She’s going to wear a blond wig and ride back to the cabin with me. If he’s watching, he won’t be close enough to tell the difference if I carry her in and he doesn’t see that she’s shorter. The most important thing is to keep him from knowing Jessie’s gone, if he doesn’t already. Moving the dogs may have clued him in, but we might have done that anyway till she was well enough to take care of them. He might have followed us to Lake Hood, even though we didn’t spot him. How could we? We don’t know what he looks like and there was enough traffic on the road for him to disappear in if he was there.”

Caswell frowned in concentration. “What concerns me most is that we have no idea
why
any of this is happening. Did Jessie come up with any possible names?”

“No one she could really imagine doing this. And you’re right. If we could just get a handle on the motive behind this, we’d have a good chance of figuring out the who. I can’t help wondering about that ex-boyfriend of hers. She never says
much, but the reason she finally left him was that he tended toward abuse. When it turned physically violent, she wasn’t having any. She expressed it to me as, ‘Hit me once, shame on you. Hit me twice, shame on me.’ She got out and he wasn’t at all happy about it.”

“Sounds possible. But why would he have waited till now? Is there something that might have set him off?”

“Not that either of us could think of. He’s had a live-in girlfriend for a couple of years now. It’s a long shot, but worth checking, maybe. There are other possibilities that seem more likely to me.”

“I agree. Something related to the Iditarod makes the most sense, I think.”

“It seems like it. But the fact that someone sent the committee a negative letter doesn’t prove the sender is related in any way to the race or the mushing community—just that he knows she is. Could be someone who’s watched her, even on television, and used it as a means of harassment. I doubt it’ll be the last note received by someone that slanders Jessie.”

B
ut the next bit of depravity did not arrive in anyone’s mailbox. Returning home Friday evening with Caroline Tannerly, the rookie trooper who was impersonating Jessie, Jensen was confronted by a furious neighbor, parked and waiting in front of the cabin. He climbed out of his pickup and stomped across to wave a fist in Alex’s face.

“Dammit. I don’t care if you’re the law. You’re gonna pay me for the nanny them damn dogs of yours savaged. A ‘gee whiz, we’re so sorry’ note tacked onto my shed just don’t cut it.”

“Whoa, Jim. What note? Slow down a minute and tell me what you’re talking about. Nanny? You mean one of your goats?”

“You better fuckin’ believe it. My best milker. Hadda be
your damn dogs. No others around I know of. Whatcha gonna do about it, huh? What?”

The older man was so angry, his face so red, that he looked near a heart attack, and was almost ready to hit something or somebody. Alex knew him enough to remember that Jim Bradford treated his goats almost like the family he didn’t have. His animals always won prizes at the state fair in Palmer, were extremely well cared for, and he always had a waiting list for the high-quality milk they produced.

“Well,” Alex told him sympathetically, “whatever it takes, we’ll make it right, Jim. Now let’s go inside and have a beer while we talk it over. There are some things going on that you don’t know about.”

Settled with a Killian’s at the kitchen table, Bradford calmed down and related his tale of disaster.

“I took the truck to town yesterday, just after noon, to pick up a roll of fence wire—gotta weak spot in it, out by the trees. When I come back the goats was all up by the shed, crowded up like they was scared of somethin’. I looked ’round and didn’t see Gertrude, so I hiked on down to the end of the field. And there she was, layin’ on the ground, her udder and flanks all tore up, and there was dog tracks all over the place ’round her. Thought I’d hafta put her down, but the vet came in a hurry and took care of her. Says he thinks she’ll be okay when she heals up, but might be crippled in one back leg.

“So, what else but your dogs? Hadda be….” His face grew pink as his temper took over again.

“Wait a minute, Jim. This happened yesterday afternoon?”

“Yeah. While I was gone to town.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been Jessie’s dogs, then. We had them moved to Willow on Wednesday.”

“Willow?” The old man frowned. “Then why’d you leave the note?”

“Have you got that note?”

He hauled it out of a pocket of his red Woolrich jacket and
laid it on the table, slightly crumpled and grubby from handling, but readily readable. White paper—computer-printed:

“Jim, Jessie never wrote this. She’s been in the hospital since Tuesday afternoon.”

“What the hell happened?”

Bradford turned to the woman Alex had carried into the cabin and whom he had assumed was Jessie. In his distress, he had never really looked at her; now he could see that it wasn’t her at all.

“This is a trooper who’s helping me out, Jim. I’ll tell you what’s been going on, but you’ve got to promise to keep it to yourself.”

The old man nodded—so thunderstruck he forgot to close his mouth—then turned back to stare and listen as Alex began a somewhat abbreviated explanation.

J
im Bradford had no more than disappeared down the driveway when Phil Becker came to the cabin from the trees at the far end of the dog lot, where he and a forensics team had been searching the woods for clues.

“I didn’t see any vehicles. Thought you guys must be gone,” Jensen said, letting him in.

“Nope. Couldn’t get here early this morning. Had a robbery in Palmer we had to cover first. We parked off the road farther down, and there’s indications that someone else’s been off the road there with a truck of some kind. No tire tracks we can identify, but at least we know it’s been used. There’s
something else—in the trees. Get your jacket and come on out. You’ll want to see this.”

Estimating the area from which the pictures of Jessie and Linda had been taken, the search team of three had sectioned off the perimeter with yellow crime scene tape and concentrated within it. Becker led Jensen to a spot behind a screen of brush. One trooper examined the area for clues and another was on his knees with a camera, taking flash pictures of the ground beside a birch. Alex nodded to them.

“You said he’d leave something,” Becker said. “There it is. Love to know what he took away.”

“He took the pictures. Doesn’t look like he was too worried about leaving these, though. Why not?”

Beneath the tree were several boot prints, surrounded by the paw prints of a dog, or—from the number of them—more than one.

The trooper with the camera lowered his camera and looked up.

“Didn’t care because there’s not much to learn from them. It’d be extremely difficult to tell one dog from another, though I’m sure there were two of them and that they were big dogs—Rottweilers, maybe. The boots are Red Wings—common as the dirt they made prints in…well-worn, from the look of them. You most likely couldn’t tell them from a thousand others on Alaskan feet in this part of the country.”

“So there’s nothing that helps?”

“I didn’t say that. Just that the prints are probably no good for specific identification. We’ll do a thorough workup for specifics at the lab, but don’t get your hopes up.

“He’s been here more than once. There’re two more places that look like someone spent some time—and both gave him a good view of the cabin and dog lot. There’s no fiber, no human hair that we can find, but some canine. To stay here any length of time without being spotted, he’d have to wear something that blended in well with this environment. I’m
wondering if he might not have worn some kind of camouflage. Wouldn’t take much in the right colors—browns, grays.”

He pointed to another part of the taped-off ground.

“There was a very small amount of blood smeared at a low level on a tree over there. Looked pretty fresh. I cut it out for testing.”

Jensen could see the pale blaze marking the birch the trooper referred to and shook his head.

“That’s just about the height of a dog. I think you’ll find the blood’s from our neighbor’s goat. This guy’s branching out. Looks like he sicced his dogs on a milk goat and left a nasty ‘so-sorry’ note tacked to a shed door. Tore the nanny up pretty badly.”

“Nice guy,” the cameraman commented wryly. “There’s one other kind of odd thing about these tracks. Don’t know if it means anything, but the weight of this guy seems to be distributed oddly.”

“Oddly?”

“Well, you know how a bare footprint looks. It has a heel mark, a ball of the foot and toe mark, but only a slim impression from the outside edge of the foot—no print under the arch, which lifts that part of the foot away from contact. In a shoe or boot it’s hard to tell, of course, but these prints seem to have made a heavier impression on the inside than on the outside of both feet—like he was walking very badly knock-kneed.”

“What the hell would cause that?”

“It might be the result of a symmetrical physical deformity—or he might have been wearing some kind of insoles that threw his weight to the inside, but it’s something you hardly ever find on
both
feet. Odd. We’ll take casts of these. Along with some photos, they might be of some help later.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

“Not so far. Sorry.”

The search team spent the rest of the afternoon combing the woods and dog lot, but found nothing else. Jensen left the
cabin a couple of times, but stayed mostly indoors with Tannerly as they waited to see if the phone would ring and give them a chance to record the mystery caller. It remained silent except for two condolence calls from friends of Jessie’s. Alex told them both that she was resting and couldn’t come to the phone, but appreciated their good wishes.

When they finished working the scene, Becker and the other two troopers came in and, after a few diversions between car and cabin, Caroline Tannerly left with them, wearing a cap instead of the wig, and walking on her own two feet. If the stalker had been watching, Alex hoped he wouldn’t notice and would think Jessie was in the cabin.

As it grew dark, he turned on the lights, stoked the fire, and set about making himself some dinner. It seemed terribly quiet in the cabin without Jessie, especially since there weren’t even the usual small sounds from the dogs outside. In the back of his mind, he kept feeling that he had forgotten to feed them, then remembered they were gone. Normally he would have brought Tank in to keep him company, but even the affectionate, dignified lead dog was off with Jessie on the island. He wondered if the two of them had eaten dinner yet.

Tossing a foil-wrapped potato into the oven to bake, he seasoned a small steak to broil, and absent-mindedly made a salad that was much too large for one person. Running out of cooking chores, he retrieved a Killian’s long-neck from the refrigerator, switched on the television, and sat down to watch the news.

Jessie called at eight and, in the brief couple of sentences they had agreed would be best, let him know she was fine and missed him. An hour later, he had flipped through the TV listings, discovered a rerun of
The Great Escape
, a favorite, and settled on the sofa to watch Steve McQueen and his compatriots tunnel their way out of captivity. The movie claimed his interest through dinner, a quick kitchen cleanup, and half a cup of tea. He watched McQueen bounce his baseball off the wall of his solitary confinement cell, but dozed off, warmed by
the woodstove and pleasantly full of food, while the escape was still in its creative stages.

Something obnoxiously loud and full of Chuck Norris fighting a conglomeration of shadowy ninjas had replaced World War II when the telephone brought Alex back to consciousness. Stabbing awkwardly at the off button on the TV remote, he staggered up to answer it. The caller ID indicated that once again the call was unidentifiable, so he started the recorder before lifting the receiver and waited silently for Jessie’s voice to say, “Arnold Kennels. Hello…hello?”