by Sue Henry
Alex had been a little surprised to find the house empty and Jessie evidently still out with her dogs. A glance at the kennel had told him none of the ones in the team she had originally taken out were back in their places in the yard.
Assuming she was okay and would be back sometime fairly soon, he turned the conversation to what they had found on the hill.
In moving the body, they had found in the back pocket of his jeans Donny Thompson’s wallet containing several pieces of identification, a list of several phone numbers, and a small amount of cash. A front pocket yielded some small change and several keys on a ring, one evidently to a motorcycle. A red knit cap filled one jacket pocket. A well-used handkerchief lay in another.
There had been nothing else of significance to find but the frozen bloody leaves on which Thompson had fallen and lain facedown, and not many of those; no gun, no footprints, nothing to tell there had been anyone else there at all. But, with no sign of a gun, they had to assume that the man had not shot himself, so someone else had to have been responsible.
Jessie, her dogs, and the sled had made the only tracks in the snow in running over him, so it was clear that anyone else that might have been there had gone before the snow began to fall sometime shortly after midnight on Saturday.
As Ray Calb finished the last swallow of his coffee and rose to his feet to leave, thanking Alex for the food and shelter, there was a sudden uproar of welcoming barks from the dogs in the kennel, a sure announcement that Jessie had come home.
“Better get the van out of the way out there,” he said, shrugging on his coat and heading for the door. “Time to get Thompson to the lab anyway.”
After removing her dogs from their harnesses and taking them back to their boxes, Jessie watered them well before coming inside, where she was soon at the table with Jensen and Becker, warming her own hands on another mug.
“Jess, did you see anyone else on your run up the hill this morning?” Alex asked her.
She shook her head. “No. It was pretty quiet for the first day of decent sledding. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a couple of teams on the upper trail, but we had it all to ourselves. That won’t last long.”
Giving Alex a long look, she changed the subject before he could ask her anything more.
“You know I don’t ask questions about your cases. You couldn’t answer them if I did. But can you at least tell me if you know who it was? I’ve been afraid ever since I found that guy that it would turn out to be someone I’ve met and just didn’t recognize.”
The tall trooper gave a quick glance to the man still seated at the table, then nodded slowly, as he seemed okay with her request.
“She did find him after all, Alex,” Becker commented.
“Yes, well…I guess, after the way you found him, you have a right to that much, Jess,” he told her finally. “But I doubt you knew him. His name’s Donny Thompson, from out east of Palmer—a mechanic who works with his father, Bill Thompson. Ring any bells?”
She sighed in relief, and shook her head. “No. But I think I’ve heard the name somewhere from someone—maybe Hank Peterson. You know around here it’s definitely less than the proverbial six degrees of separation. Everybody knows somebody. If you ask one or two people, you can usually find a connection to number three.”
Alex nodded, but suspected that he would soon be asking a lot more than just one or two people before he discovered just how, and why, Donny Thompson had died on the hill, a long way from home.
CHAPTER SIX
AFTER SHARING HIS LUNCH WITH JESSIE, LYNN EHLERS TURNED his team north toward the kennel he shared with another sled dog racer on the Parks Highway between Wasilla and Talkeetna, a few miles from Nancy Lake. The snow had stopped falling for the time being, and the clouds had thinned enough to allow a hint of sun to fall through and brighten the day, creating purple-blue shadows that made the trail anomalies easier to read.
Running through the first snow of the season was always a pleasure to mushers, especially when it came early. Like kids let out of school, they enthusiastically hit the trails. Ehlers had passed half a dozen teams on his way to the Goose Lake area. He had not been surprised to find Jessie out with one as well and had been glad to hear that her knee was healed enough for it. It had saddened him to hear of the death of a favorite dog and he was astonished at her finding the dead man in the trail above her house. It had clearly taken the luster from her enjoyment of the day.
Somehow it seemed that trouble had followed Jessie like a specter in the past few years. It reminded him of the difficulties she had experienced during the Yukon Quest, the race during which he had met her for the first time and been immediately attracted. He recalled his concern when she had vanished during the race, relief when she reappeared safely, and regret in realizing where her affections lay when Alex Jensen had reappeared in Alaska. He and Jessie had become good and lasting friends, however, which pleased him.
Now it seemed another unwelcome problem had shown up in her life. Who, he wondered, would the body in the trail turn out to be? Possibly, as she had suggested, it was not a Knik Road resident, as most of them had lived there a long time and were well known to their neighbors. That was not as true as it had been in the past, for in the preceding few years there had been a flood of newcomers who, as Wasilla grew, were finding the Knik Road area perfect for building new houses in small planned communities. Perhaps this guy was one of them, for, evidently, from what she had described, he had probably not been a musher. But why would he have been on that upper trail, which was traveled mostly by those with dogs and sleds? How long had he been there anyway? Not more than a day or two, he guessed. Anxiously awaiting the first snowfall, frustrated mushers had been out cleaning up the trails they planned to use soon.
Who was he? What had he been doing there? And who had killed him, if he had not killed himself? Could a plan for suicide have given him an inclination to hike off into the forest?
Ehlers decided he would soon check with Jessie to see what had been learned about the dead man.
Coming to a partially frozen creek that needed to be crossed, he turned his attention to getting his team and sled over without incident to dogs, sled, and himself.
“Come on, guys. We’re almost home.”
Leaving Alex and Jessie, Phil Becker was also thoughtful as he drove Knik Road back to Wasilla and took the connecting highway across to the Alaska State Troopers office on South Valley Way in Palmer. There he planned to write up his report on the morning’s activity, while he waited for Jensen to show up and accompany him out the Glenn Highway to take what would certainly be shocking and highly unwelcome news to the Thompson family.
It was not a duty either of them was looking forward to, but one which should be done in person. The reaction of the family to the unpleasant news would be important, as would gathering as much information as possible concerning their youngest son. Perhaps they knew something, or could direct attention to someone who did, that would give the troopers a direction in which to focus the initial phases of their investigation.
It seemed odd to have found Donny Thompson’s body in a location so unrelated to anything he knew about the young man, though he was not someone Becker knew well or pleasantly. He frowned as he drove and considered what he did know.
Donny hung out with a fast crowd, though mainly on the fringes, where he might have felt a need to prove himself. On two occasions Becker had pulled him over for driving his motorcycle erratically. In the second instance, late in the evening, after several hours at the pub where his brother was bartender and should have known better than to let him leave for home drunk, Donny had been arrested for driving under the influence. Convicted, he had spent three days in jail, besides paying a substantial fine along with the significant cost of retrieving his wheels from impound when it was at last released.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have learned little from the experience, and Becker expected there would have been a repeat of his performance in hi
s future had he lived. It could be there would be some kind of information to be gained through contact with the bikers he hung with. So that too was worth putting on the list for inquiry.
Pulling up at the Alaska State Troopers office, Becker got out, locked his car, and shook his head ruefully at the idea as he headed inside to wait for Jensen. It was often all but impossible to get any real information out of hard-core bikers. They often tended to close ranks and play stupid when confronted by the law. The ones who weren’t hard-core usually didn’t know much that would help.
Hank Peterson, Jessie’s Friday night pool opponent, was not far away. Across the railroad tracks that ran through the middle of town and west a block or two from Becker’s office, he had just lost a game of pool and returned to his bar stool in the Aces Wild. Setting back his empty beer bottle, he nodded to Carl Thompson’s questioning look and watched as the bartender retrieved the empty and set a full one in its place, collecting the price from the small pile of bills and change Hank had left on the bar for that purpose.
“Where’s Donny?” he asked the older Thompson brother. “Thought I might catch him for a game this afternoon.”
“Don’t know,” Carl answered with a frown and a shrug, hands busy mixing a pair of screwdrivers for a couple at the other side of the horseshoe-shaped bar. “Haven’t seen him since Friday. He was here early that night, but left about seven with Jeff Malone. Hasn’t been home since then either. Must have tied one on and, when it started to snow, decided to bunk with one of his buddies here in town. He’s probably nursing a two-night hangover and will show up later looking like death warmed over.”
“Too bad I can’t stay much longer,” Hank said with a grin. “I’da had a better chance to beat him if he was hungover.”
Carl took the screwdrivers around to the other side of the bar and came back to the till, where he entered the amount of the sale and made change from the cash drawer.
“Donny may not stay, if he comes in at all,” he told Hank. “The old man was pretty pissed at him for not coming home yesterday. He was supposed to help fix a truck engine and didn’t show.”
Turning his head as Carl moved away to answer a request from the blonde in tight stretch pants who was waiting tables, Hank noticed that an older man sitting by himself at the bottom end of the U-shaped bar, two empty stools away, had been silently following his conversation with Carl.
“Hey, Stan,” he asked, “you seen Donny in the last couple of days?”
“Nope. Haven’t seen him in over a week. Maybe he’s drinking somewhere else these days.”
“Better not be,” Carl commented with a grin, as he passed on his way to the cooler to retrieve three Budweisers to add to a vodka tonic already on the waitress’s tray. “We need the business. Here you go, Jill.”
“Change for a twenty,” she reminded him, got it, and turned to deliver the drinks to a table across the room.
“You feel that shaker this morning?” Stan asked, changing the subject. “Woke me up just before five.”
Hank shook his head. “I’m so used to ’em that I sleep right through the little ones. Takes a pretty significant quake to make me sit up in bed—like the one we got Friday night. I was playing pool with Jessie Arnold at the Other Place and it completely scrambled the balls on the table. Cue ball never touched the one she was aiming at, but it rolled right into the corner pocket anyway.”
“Yeah, that was a good one. Seems like there’ve been more like that lately.”
“Naw. You’re just noticing ’em more for some reason. How long have you been up here, Stan?”
“All my life. Born in Kodiak, where my dad was a fisherman. Lived there till I got married and moved here thirty years ago, back when Palmer was just a stop on the railroad, before it got all citified.”
“So you were here for the big one in sixty-four.”
“Oh yeah. March twenty-seventh, Good Friday, just after five thirty in the afternoon. Now that was a quake! Biggest one ever recorded in North America—eight point seven on the Richter scale, but some people say it was over nine!
“Shook us pretty good, but it was worse in Anchorage than it was out here in the valley. The ground opened up and a whole block on one side of Fourth Avenue dropped down about ten feet. Took the second story of the businesses along the street right down to ground level, including the Denali Theater. The marquee looked like it was sitting on the sidewalk. Couple of blocks away the whole concrete front of the new Penney’s building fell off on a car and killed the woman driver. A lot of the Turnagain area collapsed and a whole bunch of houses fell over the cliff or broke up.”
“The control tower at the airport fell over, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. Guy who didn’t get out in time died inside.”
In a rare free moment, Carl Thompson had stopped to listen to what Stan was saying. Turning toward a man sitting farther along the bar, he asked, “Hey, Hardy. You were in one of those bars in Anchorage that day, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, I sure was. Won’t ever forget it either!”
A tall man wearing a green baseball cap stood up shaking his head and moved to a stool next to Stan, bringing his drink with him.
“I was covering sports for the Anchorage Daily News and had finished my story, left the office, and gone to the Highland Fling on Fourth between D and E streets. A bunch of us from the paper usually showed up there on Friday nights for their twofers. Back then the News was an evening paper, but it was going to mornings that weekend to compete with the Times, which would change our working hours and pretty much end our weekly get-togethers.
“The Fling was a long, narrow place on the north side of the street with a restaurant on Fourth, a bar behind, and a parking lot out back on Third. There was a tremble that we felt, but thought was just the usual minor stuff, so nobody moved. Then seconds later the place got slammed so hard I thought the building would collapse. All the lights went out and it went on shaking for several minutes. Stuff in the bar started falling and breaking—bottles, glasses, the big mirror behind the bar. You could smell the spilled whiskey. People were yelling bloody murder and trying to get out, but you couldn’t stay on your feet. I saw one woman crawling toward the back door.
“I just grabbed my two drinks and sat there hoping I wasn’t going to die. Finally it stopped and I had to jump over a hole in the floor to get out the door, and when I got to my car out back it was right on the edge of a crevasse ten feet deep, so I wasn’t going anywhere in it. Then I realized I was still holding the drinks I had grabbed on to in the bar so they wouldn’t fall off the table.
“I heard later that the bartender at the 515 Club down the street had just served some drinks and was still carrying some empty glasses on a tray when the thing hit and he left in a hurry out the front door. So he turned around, went back inside, and put them where they wouldn’t get broken. Then he got out again.”
There was laughter and Hank noticed that several other people in the room had moved close to listen. As he turned back to the bar, a man on the other side stood up frowning and went out the door, leaving most of the beer he had just ordered where it sat.
Hank gave Carl a questioning look.
Carl shook his head. “He lost his wife and child when the Turnagain bluff fell into the inlet.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“JESSIE OKAY?” BECKER ASKED WHEN JENSEN ARRIVED AT THE OFFICE. “She seemed a little upset.”
“She was, but she’ll be all right. It’s been a bad weekend for her all around. Yesterday she had to have one of her oldest and favorite dogs put down. Finding a dead guy practically in her backyard this morning shook her up some more, but she’s tough and she’ll be fine in a day or two.”
“Good. You think we ought to check with Timmons at the crime lab before we go out to Thompson’s?”
Alex considered calling the medical examiner, then shook his head. “John won’t have anything for us until tomorrow at the earliest, maybe Tuesday. We might as well get on out to Sutton,
like it or not.”
“You want to stop at the Aces and tell his brother before we go?”
“No, we’d better go out and tell his parents first. But Carl may know who Donny was with Friday night, before it snowed, so I want to talk to him too.”
Ten minutes later the two had left the office and were heading out of Palmer in Jensen’s pickup, rather than a patrol car.
From the junction of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, the Glenn Highway runs almost 140 miles northeast to Glennallen. Fifteen miles along it, on the north side of the Matanuska River between the scenic peaks of the Chugach and Talkeetna mountain ranges, lay the small community of Sutton, which was founded around 1918 as a station on the Matanuska branch of the Alaska Railroad, which transported coal from its mine to Anchorage. Throughout World War Two Anchorage was heated with Sutton coal.
On the outskirts of the town, Becker directed Jensen to a cluster of buildings including a two-story frame house, white with gray trim. The other two or three buildings were built of concrete block with metal roofs. The largest of these had two huge roll-up doors to allow access for large vehicles and bore a hand-painted sign: THOMPSON’S AUTOMOTIVE. A fenced area toward the rear of the yard held what appeared to be the owner’s personal junkyard, full of a variety of vehicles—cars, trucks, motorcycles, whole or in pieces, some rusty with time spent in the elements of Alaskan winters. Many appeared to have been cannibalized for parts.
The doors to the shop were shut and no one seemed to be around.
“Must have finished his work for the day,” Becker said, peering through a window into the dark shop.
He followed Jensen up the steps onto the wide porch of the house next door and the two waited for an answer to their knock.
It took a minute or two, but a woman wearing an apron over jeans and a brown plaid flannel shirt finally opened the door and gave them an apologetic smile. She was wiping her flour-covered hands on a handful of damp paper towels that she had obviously carried along from the kitchen. “Sorry, I was making bread. Can I help you with something?”
