Degrees of Separation

by Sue Henry

  It was not. The place was closed up tight. There was nothing in the parking lot except for a ramshackle old Ford and the trailer Oscar sometimes used to haul things he needed for the bar, parked out of the way at the back of the building.

  “It’s not here, Alex,” she told him on the phone. “No motorcycles at all.”

  “Damn. I was hoping to solve that problem. Well, thanks anyway, Jess. You saved me a trip from here and back to check and I appreciate it.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll collect somehow later.”

  “You got it.”

  Pocketing her cell phone, Jessie drove out of the parking lot, headed for home and thought hard about where Donny’s motorcycle might be.

  There had to have been at least two people who went up the hill behind her house on Friday night—Donny and whoever shot him—maybe more. If there had been more, one of them might have driven the motorcycle away following the murder. But if there had only been one, with his own transportation—car, truck, or another motorcycle—then moving Donny’s might not have been possible.

  Could it be hidden somewhere near the road? It could have been moved from where he left it and run off into the nearby brush. If by some chance that were so, she might be able to find it.

  Pulling back into her driveway, she thought about it.

  It was as possible as finding it at Oscar’s had been, she decided, and worth a try, though she might come up just as empty of results.

  Climbing out of the pickup, she made up her mind.

  She didn’t feel like spending the day inside. As long as it wasn’t raining, she would take Tank for a walk with a purpose. If she found nothing, nothing would need to be said to Alex about this bit of amateur sleuthing, which he would not necessarily have encouraged.

  Inside the house, she put on a slicker and a wide-brimmed, waterproof hat in case it rained again. Pulling on a pair of knee-high rubber boots, she locked the door behind her and headed for the yard.

  Several dogs, including Tank, were snoozing on top of their boxes, but raised their heads as she appeared, then jumped down to meet her and barked when she continued in their direction, obviously hoping that, snow or no snow, she had a training run in mind.

  Ignoring them, she took Tank off his tether.

  “Hey. Wanna go for a walk?”

  The enthusiastic wagging of his tail and the doggy smile he gave her, tongue hanging out at the word “walk,” answered that question.

  Trotting close, he accompanied her down the driveway to the highway, where they took a right turn onto the path that ran beside it.

  As they walked along it, Jessie carefully searched the muddy ground for what might be tire marks from a motorcycle, but saw only the vague tracks of four-wheelers left by local mushers running their dogs before there was enough snow for sleds. They were not new, for the rain had washed the traces into vague patterns that were often filled with slowly disappearing puddles as the water soaked into the ground. Always they were the parallel tracks of four tires, double what a motorcycle would have made.

  After ten minutes of slow walking from the house she stopped suddenly, halted by marks that had not been made by tires. In the damp shoulder of earth that rose up to the pavement of the highway were a few prints that had been made by human feet, in boots. Some of them came off the road on their way down the short incline to the path on which she stood and, very near them, some went back up.

  The rain had blurred almost all of them. But as she followed where they led, across the path and into the trees, beneath the branches of a shrub that still clung to most of its leaves a few had been sheltered enough to be quite clear and distinct. The tracks disappeared where whoever made them had walked into the grove, onto the autumn birch leaves that heavily covered the ground, making a carpet that would preserve no marks of passage. But as she stood and looked carefully between the trees, she could see where some leaves had been disturbed, a track that could possibly be followed.

  Even where the boot prints had been made vague by the rain and were less distinct, it seemed clear to Jessie that they had been made, perhaps, by more than one person, where they had left the highway in favor of the woods, and only one or two where they came out of the trees and regained the road. One of the most clear pairs of returning prints seemed to have been made by a person who had drug his feet at every other step or two.

  Hunkering down to examine the prints more closely, Jessie saw that one of the boots had evidently been damaged, for a chunk of the sole was missing on the front outside of what was clearly the right foot. The prints had to have been left recently, because they overlaid the older four-wheeler tracks that had been left to dissolve on the trail.

  Rising, she stared once again into the grove of trees, thinking hard.

  It was very quiet in the woods. Most of the birds that filled the area with warbles and chirps throughout the summer had, as usual, fled south as the weather turned cold. A light breeze ruffled the few small leaves that stubbornly clung to the denuded birches, a sound much lighter than their whispered conversation with the wind a few weeks earlier. A squirrel chattered somewhere out of sight, probably in contention with another over the spruce cones they all collected and stored away in secret places for the winter period of hibernation. Then they would periodically rouse to nibble seeds from the pockets in the cones.

  A bright beam of sunshine suddenly lit up a few of the pale birch trunks and the thick covering of gold that lay beneath. Glancing up, Jessie could see that the clouds had thinned a little and were drifting north with a few patches of blue between.

  Taking a deep, appreciative breath of autumn, she turned back to her discovery of the footprints and the questions they had brought to mind.

  Could the tracks really be linked to the death of Donny Thompson, or were they just the result of more than one someone walking home along the path and moving off the highway to avoid traffic? Would the track through the fallen leaves lead to where Donny Thompson’s body had been found? If so, how many people had there been going up and coming down? Had one less person returned to the road because he was lying dead in the upper trail, where she had found him? Who had made the tracks?

  Hesitant to try to follow the disturbed leaves into the woods and take a chance of ruining that indistinct track, she decided to leave it to Alex. What she should do was tell him what she had found—show him what she couldn’t help assuming might be evidence.

  Gathering several handfuls of the driest leaves, she spread them carefully and lightly over the clearest of the prints under the bush as some kind of protection in case it rained again before she could show him.

  “Come on, buddy,” she said to Tank, who was sitting where she had told him to stay, a few feet from what she had found.

  Walking a short distance toward home, she took the cell phone from her pocket, called Jensen’s number, and was glad when he answered.

  “Alex, I think you should come home, soon if you can, before it rains again.”

  “Why? Something wrong, Jess?”

  “No, but I’ve found some things I think you’ll want to see—some things that might have to do with Donny Thompson’s death.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  JESSIE HAD MEANT TO GO BACK TO THE HOUSE UNTIL ALEX ARRIVED, but the question of where the track makers had come from drew her and she decided to at least take a look on the other side of the highway. Climbing the short slope to the pavement, she waited for a truck to pass, lifted a hand to wave as she recognized the driver as a neighbor, then went across, Tank trotting by her side. There, she walked slowly along the shoulder looking for tracks to match those she had found on the other side.

  A short way along, she found herself standing in front of what had been a dirt road sometime long before she had come to the area, built a cabin, collected her first few dogs, and began training them, and herself, to race. It ran at right angles to Knik Road and was half blocked with brush that had grown up along and out onto it, so that only the first forty feet or so
could have been accessed by a vehicle. One had tried, however, probably a truck, for there were tire tracks sunk about an inch into the soil softened by years of weather and disuse, and turned muddy by the recent rain.

  It seemed the truck had pulled in, then backed out again onto the highway, for there was a confusion of its tire tracks where the two roads joined and some of the mud had been carried out onto the pavement by the tires.

  She walked slowly along the side of the old road, following where the tracks led her, careful to stay away from them.

  What stopped Jessie and inspired her to clutch at Tank’s collar to keep him close against her knee was identifying the singular track of a motorcycle’s tires between the parallel truck tire marks.

  As far from the highway as it was possible to go, halted by the obstruction of vegetation that had grown up in the way, she found the place where the driver had parked what she assumed must have been a pickup. There the tire marks where it had stopped were a little deeper than the incoming or outgoing ones.

  The motorcycle track seemed to have stopped behind it and there were boot prints, indistinct from the rain, beside it, as if the rider had swung off, then someone had pushed it around the truck and the tracks disappeared into the brush on one side of the blocked and muddy road. There was no sign of its return to the highway, or of the motorcycle itself. But whoever had pushed it had walked back into the soggy disorder of prints behind the truck.

  Even in the confusion of what she saw on the ground, she decided there must have been more than one person who crossed to the other side of the highway.

  Alex, she knew, would be better at interpreting all she had found and she should leave it to him. It was time to go home and wait until he came, which from his reaction on the phone would be soon.

  “She’s got it all just about right,” Becker said to Jensen as they followed the trail of disturbed leaves uphill through the grove to the west of Jessie’s dog yard. “And she did a good job of preserving what evidence she could—those footprints and tire tracks on both sides of the highway and on that old side road.”

  Jensen agreed that she had, but frowned anyway.

  “I just don’t like her getting involved. And I told her so, damn it. I should never have asked her to check out Oscar’s.”

  “I think you could give her a break on this one,” Becker suggested. “Would we have found all she did before the weather took it, while there was enough left to work with? We’ve been sorting out people, not tracks. How long would it have been before we located Donny’s bike? Now, at least we know, or think that it’s out there in the brush where—whoever it was—moved it out of sight. And we know there were two of them who went at least partway up the hill, all the way to where we found Thompson, and that two came back down, so one of them must have killed him.”

  “Yes, but that’s about all we know except for Thompson—obviously the one that didn’t come back down. Only one of those boot prints has anything individual about it to prove whose foot was in it—that one with the damaged sole—if we can find it and whoever wears it.”

  About halfway back to Knik Road, the two men were still following what Jessie had thought might be the way the killers had come and gone up the hill, when Becker suddenly stopped and pointed at a birch they were about to pass.

  “That branch isn’t a dead one that broke from the weight of the snow. It would likely have broken clear off if it were dead dry. Going up or coming down, one of them probably grabbed at it to keep his balance.”

  Stepping close, the two examined it in silence for a few seconds.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Jensen agreed. “And here…”

  He pointed a finger at some rough bark on the tree trunk. “What does that look like to you?”

  “Like someone fell against it and tore his coat?”

  “My thoughts exactly. But those few threads are the color of half the coats in the valley—Carhartt brown.”

  “Wait a minute. Look close. That’s wool, not the usual waterproof stuff. See? And there’s a green thread or two mixed with that brown.”

  “Right again,” Alex agreed, looking carefully. He used his knife to ease away the bit of rough bark that held the threads and dropped it into an evidence bag he retrieved from a pocket. “Maybe the lab can give us something on it.”

  Though they had examined the hillside all the way to the spot Donny Thompson had died and back down, they found no other clue to the identity of those who had accompanied him to his resting place.

  Back at the highway, they crossed to the old overgrown road on the other side. There they closely examined all the tracks, human and vehicular, and took photographs of them all, especially those made by the boot with the damaged sole. Following the tire tracks of the motorcycle into the brush, they soon found where someone had, as Jessie had suggested, shoved it down a slight incline to rest out of sight in bushes so thick they had a struggle to haul it back up. It was Donny’s, green and black, and in one pocket of its saddlebags they found an insurance card and registration in his name.

  “Might be fingerprints,” Becker suggested at the end of the effort, when they, and the bike, once again stood on the old road, all three dirty and scratched.

  “We’ll get it back to the office, have the lab pick it up, and see what they can find,” Jensen said. “But I doubt whoever it was would be that stupid. It was a cold rain and they probably wore gloves. Still, you never know.”

  In half an hour the two had loaded the motorcycle into the back of Jensen’s pickup and were headed back to the office in Palmer, where it would be collected and delivered to the crime lab in Anchorage for a careful going-over for prints, or anything else that might be helpful.

  Jensen wasn’t hopeful, but every possibility had to be followed.

  Monday afternoon was quiet and uneventful for Jessie. She spent an hour inspecting equipment she would need as soon as it snowed again and she could start serious training runs with her dogs. But all of it had been checked before, when she was unable to use it, so there was little to do.

  It was frustrating to have had all the snow melt away so quickly, before she could take advantage of it. Still, patience was the name of the game at that time of the year. All she could do was hope it wouldn’t, like some winters, start with a long, seemingly endless cold spell that continued deep into November with temperatures dropping toward zero and no snow at all.

  At close to three o’clock that afternoon, with everything neatly in order, she closed and locked the storage shed and went indoors.

  There she curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a book she had been meaning to get around to, but found herself reading the same page over more than once, gave up, tossed it aside, and, instead, decided to make a run into Wasilla for the items necessary to make a meat loaf.

  Pushing a cart around the big Carrs store, she collected ingredients for the meat loaf, some baking potatoes, salad greens, tomatoes, and green onions. Heading for another aisle for tomato sauce, she hurriedly turned a corner and almost crashed into Hank Peterson, who was inconveniently parked crosswise in front of the spaghetti sauce, talking to a short redheaded woman, who was looking up at him and laughing at something he was saying.

  “Hey,” the woman called, spying Jessie.

  “Hi, Stevie,” Jessie returned, rolling her own cart up to add to the traffic jam in the aisle. “I haven’t seen you in months. You been busy this summer building stuff with Vic Prentice?”

  “Yeah, well…he had a job in Seward—a duplex that pretty much took the whole season. He took me on again this year, so I’m just back home for the winter. What’re you up to? Gone to the dogs again? How’s your knee?”

  Stevie had been an energetic part of the construction crew responsible for building Jessie a new house after her old one was burned by the same arsonist who had torched Oscar’s old place a year and a half earlier.

  Shorter than either of her two friends, she looked as Jessie remembered her, an infectious grin on
her face and a colorful bandana tied around her short hair. She had a way of being, or seeming to be, constantly in motion, even when she stood still.

  Jessie had started to answer her questions when a woman with two small children, one in the cart, an older one following behind, came down the aisle, smiled, and waited patiently while the three carts blocking her access to the applesauce were moved to one side with apologies from their drivers.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Come along, Jill.”

  “Glad to hear you’re okay,” Stevie said, turning back to Jessie. “Are you gonna run the Idi—?”

  “Hey,” Hank broke in to ask a question. “Is what I hear via local gossip true—that you found Donny Thompson’s body in the trail above your house over the weekend?”

  “Jeez!” Jessie answered, frowning and shaking her head. “Guess I should have known word would spread like wildfire in this community. Yes, unfortunately, it is true. Actually, it was pretty awful.

  I ran over him with the team and sled, but I didn’t know who it was at the time. I was glad Alex was home to take care of it.”

  “Good Lord!” Stevie’s eyes widened in reaction to this news. “Donny’s dead?”

  “You knew him?”

  “Yeah. Well, I’d met him. What the hell happened?”

  “He was shot, right?” Hank told her, glancing at Jessie for confirmation.

  “Right.”

  “Any idea who might—?”

  He dropped the question abruptly, as Jessie began to shake her head.

  “I don’t even want to know and I try to stay out of anything Alex is investigating. He didn’t tell me much anyway, just asked a few questions.”

  “Like what?” Stevie asked, but gave it up at Jessie’s frown. “You know…,” she said thoughtfully. “I saw Donny Friday night at Oscar’s in town. He bought me a drink and asked if I was there with anybody. I told him I was, just to discourage him, then made sure I went out the door with Brody Kingston. I don’t want anything to do with that wild crowd of bikers he’s part of.”