Deadfall (13 page)

J
ensen 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.”

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.”

A
lthough 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.

T
hough 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.

Alex thought it very possible that by now Moule might be out of prison, and decided it would be a good idea to check, for in this case as well, threats had been made during and after the trial. He couldn’t quite believe that incarceration would
rehabilitate this vindictive individual. It usually worked the other way around.

The third suspicious person was a woman. There was no doubt in the law enforcement community, given the evidence that the crime lab had collected and processed, that, five years before, nineteen-year-old Mary Louise Collins had brutally stabbed her next-door neighbor to death for a television set and a few dollars’ drug money. A legal technicality had forced a reluctant judge to dismiss the case halfway through the trial, after a full afternoon of Jensen’s testimony. Though Alex had tried his best to forget it, it rekindled fury and frustration every time it crossed his mind. His long and careful effort to build a clean case had been wrecked by a rookie policeman who, innocently enough, contaminated the most important evidence, leaving less than enough to convict Collins. To make it worse, she had taunted Jensen with an angry, contemptuous comment as she shoved past him on the way out of the court.

“Fucked up, didn’t you? Well, don’t think it’s over. Someday I may decide to make you sorry—or dead. And you’ll never know when or where it’s coming from.”

Could one of these three be responsible for Jessie’s harassment and stalking? Had one of them finally found an insidious way to get even with him? Tomorrow he would begin the involved process of finding out.

A
t three o’clock Saturday morning the storm broke over Niqa Island, wind howling as the sea, which had once again turned tide, roared and growled on the rocks of the beach. Rain swept in, pounding like a waterfall on the roof and deck of the house, startling Jessie awake. When she sat up in bed, Tank raised his head from his paws and cocked his head in mute question.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him and herself. “It’s only the storm.”

Snuggling back into the warm, comforting bed, she lay listening to the fury of nature, glad she was not exposed to it, and actually enjoying its clamorous barrage. The beach house had once again cooled and the air smelled fresh, but the bed and its covers had acquired the luxurious body temperature that always made it hard for her to get up on winter mornings. Smooth with many launderings, the sheets and pillowcase felt like silk against her face. Rolling over, cocooning herself, she
was drowsily amused at her own tactile pleasure and indulgence. She had always appreciated the sensation of being protected from the elements—warm and dry. Though she loved being outdoors in good weather or bad, there was a distinct pleasure in watching a storm do its worst from within a shelter.

Got to get some sleep, she told herself. But immediately after it came another thought. No, I don’t. I can do anything I want to—get up, build a fire, make some tea, watch it rain in the middle of the night if I like.

With that, she drifted off to sleep again, secure in her own independence.

Tank put his head down again, but remained awake and listening for a long time after his mistress was breathing in small half-snores. There was something he could almost hear in the wind, far away and overpowered by the rousing sounds of the storm. With his ears perked, he waited and listened intently, finally going back to sleep after moving just a little closer to the bed in which Jessie serenely slept.

S
he woke again just after seven in the morning, to a feeling of well-being and a steady, but gentler tattoo of rain on the roof of the beach house. Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she reached an arm over the side of the bed to give Tank a good-morning pat.

He gave her hand a very small lick and, with infinite dignity, padded away into the outer room, where he sat by the door.

“All right—all right. I’m getting up. I know you want out.”

Taking off the oversized T-shirt she had slept in, Jessie pulled on sweats and stuffed her stockinged feet into a pair of tennis shoes. Stretching her arms to relieve the soreness that still lingered from the wreck of the truck, she shivered in the chilly air. The fire was dead and the house had cooled consid
erably as the wind slipped fingers in through cracks and crevices to steal what was left of the heat.

Crossing the room, she opened the door, let Tank out, and went to build a new fire in the stove. While it began to warm the place again, she put a large teakettle on the propane stove to heat water for coffee and hot cereal, and, borrowing a rain slicker from the hooks by the door, made a quick trip to the outhouse that was hidden behind some brush a dozen yards from the door.

When she came dashing back, holding the slicker over her head, Tank was waiting for her by the door, ready to go back inside. Opening it a crack, she looked down at his wet coat and instructed him sternly, “Shake yourself. Shake.”

Water flew as he complied, familiar with this request, and they both went in quickly before the rain could drench them again.

“Not too great a day out there, huh? You hungry?”

She put a can of dog food in a bowl for him, made herself some instant oatmeal, and they ate breakfast together near the crackling fire, Jessie with her feet in the pit near the stove. He finished first and sat quietly beside her as they both looked out the window at the rain.

The waters of the cove were dark and uninviting, but the wind that had driven them into white froth during the night had calmed for the time being, though Jessie doubted it was gone for good. No boat, person, bird, or animal was to be seen, and the neighboring island was all but invisible in a bank of fog—a dim gray outline against a barely lighter gray sky, across the arm of water that separated the two.

The jays did not appear on the deck to commence their morning solicitation, but a single, courageous raven coasted in to strut up and down the bench, casting accusatory glances through the window to express its displeasure at not being fed. It was hard to tell if it was the same bird that had appeared the day before, since all of them looked alike: feathers, feet, eyes, bill—pitch-black.

Ravens had always amused Jessie with their antics, for they seemed the jokers of the Arctic world, and indeed were so designated in many tales of Northwest Coast Native cultures. In them, Raven was the Creator, the Trickster, the Shape Changer, who stole the Sun, Moon, and Stars from their hiding place in a great carved wooden chest and fled across the sky, where he was forced to abandon them, bringing light to the world. Legend said he had once been white, but the angry Magician, from whom the bright glitter had been snatched, sent fire after Raven that scorched his feathers black and reduced his beautiful voice to a rough croak.

As Jessie watched, the bird ruffled its damp feathers, scattering tiny drops of rainwater, cast one last disgruntled look, spread its wings, and sailed away toward the shelter of the trees.

With a smile, she got up to refill her coffee mug.

W
ith rain on the menu, Jessie spent the better part of Saturday indoors, finishing the book she had started the day before. It was quiet and peaceful, and the patter of rain on the roof made her feel safe and secure. Gulls, riding the wind over the cove, caught her eye several times, and two fishing boats ran through the passage between the islands in the early afternoon seeking shelter by the shortest route they could find, for the waves grew larger and more threatening as the day wore on.

Although she enjoyed caring for the dogs in her kennel, training and running them, it was good to feel unencumbered by daily chores. A completely lazy, slothful day seemed just what she needed to revitalize her flagging energy and alleviate the fatigue she had been experiencing since the accident. She had to giggle when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, for both eyes were black and looked as if she were wearing an excess of stage makeup. Around three o’clock she baked a chicken and ate with her fingers, relishing the freedom from
plates and silverware as well as from designated mealtimes. There was something satisfying about the solitary privilege of greasy fingers—like drinking milk directly from the carton—that, however childish, made her feel more independent, gave her back control of her life.

When she had eaten her fill, she noticed that the rain had almost stopped. Taking Tank, she went for a short walk on the beach. The west end of its crescent ended in an interesting section of rock, part of which had fallen away, exposing the structure of a hill. It was distinctly volcanic, layer on layer, but these layers had been shoved and twisted until they looked like loops and folds of huge gray ribbon. While she examined them, Tank explored the tide pools between the rocks and found a small crab that skittered off under a stone when he sniffed at it, startling him into a half bark. When Jessie turned to see what had inspired it, he gave her an embarrassed look and trotted off to pick up a piece of driftwood that he brought and laid at her feet.

“Another game?” she asked him, and threw it for him to retrieve. They played until it started to rain again and they were both getting wet through.

He carried the driftwood back to the beach house, where she added it to the one from the day before.

“We’ll be able to keep track of how long we’ve been here, if you keep carting in sticks,” she told him.

Warm and dry again, she started another mystery, feeling luxuriously indulgent, for it was seldom she got to read a whole book in one or two sittings. She ate the rest of the chicken, smearing grease on most of the first dozen pages, and finished up with cookies and tea.

Tank snoozed on the floor beside her until she was ready to call it a night, then he rose and moved to the rug beside her bed.

The night was not quite as serene as the previous one had been. Two or three times Jessie woke in the dark to hear Tank moving around the house, sniffing at the floor and windows,
but he didn’t seem to want to go out when she got up and went to the door.

Must be an animal of some kind, she thought, and went back to bed, knowing he would let her know if there was anything to worry about. He came, each time, and lay back down on the rug, chin on paws, making himself comfortable.

S
unday morning dawned to similar weather.

“If the storm’s going to get worse, I wish it’d get on with it,” Jessie told Tank as she gave him his breakfast. “I’m getting bored with this constant drizzle.”

She refilled his water dish, along with her coffee cup.

“Well…I’m not staying inside all day, but we’ll wait awhile and see if it lets up,” she decided.

Lacking a shower, she washed in some of the warm water left from breakfast, brushed her teeth, and combed her short hair. Changing into jeans and a warm sweater over a turtleneck, she strapped on the handgun in its holster. Dressed and ready for the day, she used the last of the warm water to rinse out the few dishes she had used, left them to dry in the rack by the sink, and quickly sorted the rest of the groceries that were still in the boxes on the large table.

“Hey,” she told Tank, “Linda was thinking about you, too.”

A rawhide chew had been included in the bottom of the last box.

“You want this?”

The husky came across the room and raised his muzzle expectantly, but waited without begging, retaining his self-respect—pleading was for puppies. Jessie gave him a pat, along with the prize, which he took back to a spot near the stove and began to gnaw.

At eight o’clock, as she had done the morning before, she called Alex to speak for a few minutes. He mentioned that
Caswell and Becker had dropped in for a conference but he had nothing to tell her, except that they had a couple of new theories. The cell phone, crackling with storm-induced static, finally forced a frustrating end to the call.

Jessie put it down with an uneasy, troubled feeling. There had been something about the tone of his voice that made her wonder if he was telling her everything. Of course they had agreed to keep their telephone contacts brief and avoid speaking of specifics in case they were overheard, but it seemed more than that. Maybe she was just letting her imagination run on overtime.

At ten o’clock, she had finally had enough of the solitaire she had been apathetically playing on the table by the front windows. Her book held no appeal, and she had done all the small, make-work chores she could think of. Resolutely, she got to her feet and searched through the rain gear hanging near the door. Donning a pair of waterproof pants three sizes to big for her, she cinched them up around the waist with a belt and retrieved a dark green slicker that proved a better fit. Measuring her feet against several black knee-high rubber boots, she selected a pair and pulled them on, tucking in the too-long pants.

“Okay,” she said to Tank, who, sensing an outing, had positioned himself by the door. Double-checking to be sure she had the cell phone in one slicker pocket, she dropped a handful of ammunition for the .44 in the other, along with a ring of keys for various buildings on the island, drew the hood up over her head, took a machete for clearing trails from its nail on the wall, put the shotgun over her arm, and opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll hike over to the other cove.”

Behind and to one side of the beach house, two trails rose sharply up the hill. One rambled in curves that made it longer but less steep, while the other ran farther east, more directly up the steepest part of the slope. Jessie started up the latter, Tank dashing back and forth ahead, pleased to be out and given a chance to run. From one of the trees, a squirrel ob
jected loudly to their invasion, and the dog stopped to watch it twitch its tail in time to the
chit…chit…chit
of its warning call.

There was a third trail that ran from the eastern end of the beach along the top of the cliff. But taking it would mean a longer walk that was more exposed to the rain still steadily falling. It was also possible to walk the beach at low tide, from one cove to the other, but below the steep rocky precipice it was a maze of large rocks, slippery with seaweed over jagged barnacles, and a mistake in timing could strand a hiker. In only one place was it possible to climb the cliff from the rocks. In a narrow indentation a rock slide had opened an abrupt and highly difficult opportunity to reach the ground high above, if one was exceptionally careful—and desperate. Though the tide was once again on its way out, the length of this route would have exposed Jessie to the rain, and she had not even considered it.

For about five minutes she climbed the trail she had chosen, watching where she put her feet: the large, gnarled roots of the evergreens made it uneven, at times almost creating steps to clamber over. Finally it leveled out a little, and she paused between three large spruce to catch her breath and look out over the tops of trees below to the waters of the cove. The fog was lifting slightly and glimpses of neighboring islands faded into temporary view, only to disappear again the next minute. It looked like a long day of bad weather was in store, the beginning of a system that would probably last for several days.

The beach was empty and colorless compared to Friday afternoon’s brilliant sunlight. She visualized Caswell’s plane, where it had rested on the stones, rocking gently against the shore, and suddenly felt solitary in a different way—a little lonely for the first time. A gull floated into sight below her and glided in to land on the roof of the beach house. Following it, a raven—possibly the one she had already seen—coasted silently out of the trees and perched on the deck. It marched the length of the bench in its characteristic swagger, swaying
back and forth, foot…foot…foot—making her grin in spite of herself. Ravens were such clowns.