Degrees of Separation

by Sue Henry

  “Do you think you could pick out the motorcycle if you saw it again?”

  Terry frowned thoughtfully. “Well, maybe. But I might be able to pick out the guy’s leather coat. There was a green skull and crossbones on the left shoulder and some white letters I didn’t have time to read.”

  “You on your way home?” Jensen asked.

  “Yeah. Just finished work at the photo counter at Fred Meyer.”

  “Feel okay to ride?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just a little over a mile the other side of the bridge anyway.”

  “Trooper Pritchard’s got your address and phone number?”

  Pritchard nodded that he did.

  Jensen thought for a moment before asking, “You live alone?”

  “With my folks.”

  “Good. On your way then. Here’s my card. If you think of anything else we should know, give us a call. If we need you, we’ll be in touch.”

  The two troopers watched him pedal his bicycle away, then turned to each other.

  “Good kid,” Pritchard commented. “Hope he didn’t see too much of that guy and his bike. Some of those guys could make trouble for him.”

  “You mean you hope the biker didn’t see him seeing too much, right?”

  “Right. Most of them are weekend riders who act tough, but some of those guys can be vindictive, and from what I’ve seen and heard so far, I’m convinced Terry’s right. That guy ran Becker off the road on purpose. He won’t want to be identified.”

  “Dispatch said you think a bullet shattered the driver’s window?”

  “Yeah. Becker wasn’t hit as far as the paramedics could tell. I think there’ll be a slug in the cab somewhere.”

  “Are you good to take care of everything here? I’d like to get to the hospital.”

  Pritchard agreed that he was.

  At almost six thirty the sun had set and it was quickly growing dark when Jensen arrived at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. He found Ivan Swift, his detachment commander, already waiting for him with a frown of concern as he rose from a chair near the door.

  “Becker’s going to be okay,” he told Jensen before he could ask. “There’s a compound fracture of his right arm that will need surgery, but they’re concerned about the concussion, so they’ll wait a day or two, until they’re sure it’s okay to give him anesthesia. He’s groggy, but awake. You can see him if you want, but keep it short.”

  “I will, but I don’t want to make him go over what he’s already told you. What did he say about the accident?”

  “Not much. There was a motorcycle in his lane. He went into the ditch to avoid hitting it.”

  “I talked to Pritchard at the scene and a young man, Terry Larsen—Hardy Larsen’s boy.”

  “Oh yeah.” Swift grinned. “That Hardy, he’s quite a talker.”

  “Well, Terry didn’t see it happen, but he got a look at the motorcycle and rider heading toward town and thinks that’s what caused it all. There wasn’t anyone else on the road between him and the bridge.”

  “So nobody saw the actual wreck?”

  “Not as far as we know. Did Phil say anything about who it might have been?”

  “He was out cold when they got to him. Came to, but couldn’t tell who it was—just a guy on a motorcycle.”

  As they spoke, they had been walking toward the room in which Phil Becker had been put to bed.

  Pausing at the door, Swift stopped and waved a hand toward the door. “You go ahead. No need to crowd him with both of us in there. I’ll wait for you.”

  Jensen nodded and went in.

  Becker looked away from the nurse who was taking his blood pressure and gave Jensen a crooked half grin. His right eye was swollen shut from a cut and large bruise that ran cheek to hairline. He was lying propped with pillows in the hospital bed, and his right arm, supported on another pillow, was temporarily splinted and bandaged, broken between the elbow and shoulder.

  “Hey,” Alex said. “They tell me you’re gonna live.”

  “Yeah,” Becker responded woozily, moving nothing but his eyes. “They—ah—tell me that too. For a while there, wasn’t sure I wanted to.”

  “I bet! Swift already filled me in on what you told him. All I want to know is do you think the guy ran you off the road on purpose?”

  “Know he did!” The statement was quite clear and angry. “He fired a handgun at me as he swerved out of my lane and passed—hit the side window.”

  “You weren’t wearing your seat belt. Why?”

  “Wouldn’t work. The receiving end was missing.”

  The nurse finished with the blood pressure cuff, removed it, and turned to Jensen.

  “He really needs to rest,” she told him. “Could it wait until tomorrow?”

  It could—at least the rest of the details could.

  He told Becker to take it easy and that he would be back the next morning.

  Commander Swift was leaning against the wall outside the door.

  “Anything?”

  “He says it was definitely done on purpose. Also that his seat belt wouldn’t fasten. I’d like to have a look at that belt and see if I can locate the slug that he says came from the guy on the bike.”

  “We can do that now, if you want.”

  The pickup Becker had been driving, aside from front-end damage and an obvious need for total realignment, seemed in better condition than its driver.

  “He’s lucky it didn’t roll,” Swift commented, shaking his head.

  “A bullet definitely shattered the driver’s window,” Jensen said, opening the passenger door and beginning a search through broken window glass for the projectile. In a few minutes he had it in hand from the floor beneath the seat. “We’ll let the lab figure out what kind of weapon this was fired from.”

  Swift had been looking at the seat belt fastener.

  “No wonder he wasn’t wearing this. It looks like the end that the belt hooks into has been cut off.”

  Alex came around the truck to look and agreed. “Someone intended Becker not to be able to fasten it.”

  He frowned thoughtfully. “What I don’t understand is how whoever it was could have known Becker would be driving out the road in that direction. We had only decided to split up maybe an hour earlier. I went to talk to the bartender at Oscar’s in Wasilla and Becker was going looking for Jeff Malone’s girlfriend, Robin Fenneli, who supposedly lives off the Old Glenn Highway on the Bodenburg loop. We decided who would go where just before we left and I had no reason to tell anyone, nor did he. So how the hell…?”

  “He could have been followed.”

  Jensen agreed. “But why, and who? It seems to me that this thing was planned. Was someone trying to keep Becker away from the girl? Or just hinder our investigation?”

  “Cuts your team in half, but that’s not necessarily true if I assign someone else to work with you on the case. Could it have been Malone?”

  “That’s possible, I guess,” Jensen answered slowly, still frowning. “He rides a motorcycle, like Donny Thompson—rode with Thompson, actually. And they both have—had, in Thompson’s case—associations with the bikers that frequent Aces Wild.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Very. I think it’s past time to have another little chat with Jeff Malone.”

  Swift nodded agreement. “Keep me posted,” he said as the two men separated.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DRIVING ACROSS THE RAILROAD TRACKS FROM THE TROOPERS’ office to the business district of Palmer, Jensen noticed several motorcycles parked in front of the Aces Wild on Colony Way. On impulse, he decided to go in and see which of the bikers who habituated the place were hanging out on this particular night.

  After parking and locking his pickup, he crossed the street and walked slowly along the line of motorcycles parked in front of the building, checking out each one. Two had the type of ape-hanger handlebars Terry Larsen had identified. Both were black with matching leather saddlebags, though the fe
nders of one of them were pinstriped with a green design.

  Retrieving a notebook from his jacket pocket, Alex wrote down the license numbers and a quick description of the two. He went back to his truck, made a quick call on his cell phone, returned the notebook to his pocket, and went into the bar.

  The place was more than half full; several tables and every stool at the horseshoe-shaped bar were occupied. Carl Thompson, as he had expected, was not working. Instead, Mike, an older man, was mixing drinks and setting up beers, some for the barmaid on duty, a shapely blonde wearing jeans and a yellow tight-fitting and low-necked shirt, to deliver to the tables. Players were busy at both the pool tables and the dartboard at the back of the room. A group of bikers and their hangers-on were gathered across the room.

  Hardy Larsen was sitting two stools from the corner on the right-hand side of the bar, talking to a bearded man who Jensen recognized as a dog musher.

  He walked across to them and waited until Hardy finished the joke he was telling, which had something to do with a couple of fishermen and a mermaid.

  “Hey, Alex,” Hardy greeted him as the chuckles of those around him died. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “That’s true,” Jensen agreed, “but I saw your son, Terry, an hour or so ago, headed for home on his bicycle.”

  “Yeah, he rides that thing everywhere, rain or shine, even when there’s snow on the ground. Wants to do the Iditabike if they run it again. Crazy! You couldn’t pay me enough to ride a bicycle a couple hundred miles at down to forty below. Buy you a beer?”

  “I wouldn’t object too strenuously.”

  “Here,” said the bearded man next to Hardy, as he drained and pushed back his bottle and stood up. “Sit here. I’ve got to be on my own way home or Doris’ll feed my dinner to the dogs.”

  “Thanks, Bill,” Jensen told him, and watched as he went out the door before turning to Hardy.

  “I was impressed with your boy,” he told him. “He’s a sharp kid.”

  “He keeps his nose clean.” Then, as Hardy cocked his head slightly toward the group of bikers who had pushed two tables together across the room and were noisily putting away drinks, he said, “That’s more than you can say for some of them these days.”

  “Have to agree with you there.” Alex nodded as the bartender set him up a Killian’s. “Thanks, Hardy.”

  “No thanks necessary. Gotta take good care of the Mat-Su’s finest.”

  “Seen Jeff Malone tonight?” Alex asked casually.

  “Nope. He was in last night though. Donny Thompson’s funeral is Saturday and he’s bound to be there. Those two were tight. You going?”

  “Hadn’t thought about it. You?”

  “Naw. Never did like funerals. Guess the next one I go to will be my own—when I won’t give a damn.” Hardy chuckled to himself, reminding Alex of something his father had once said about whistling past a graveyard.

  A howl of laughter rose from the bikers across the room, turning heads at the bar. As it faded, the front door opened and Jeff Malone came in, stripping black leather driving gloves from his hands, and turned in the direction of the laughter. As he walked toward it, he took a look around the room. Seeing Alex watching him from the bar widened his eyes. He hesitated, then nodded slightly in recognition and moved toward the group of bikers without looking back again.

  He wore black leather boots, jeans, and a black leather jacket, like many others. But, as he passed, Alex noticed a green patch on the left shoulder of the jacket—skull and crossbones with white letters under it: “Road Pirate.”

  He nursed his beer along slowly and kept a discreet eye on Malone until close to half an hour later, when the man chugged the last of his first beer. When he got up from the table and crossed the bar in the direction of the restrooms that were off a hallway in the rear of the place, the fact that he had taken his jacket with him did not escape Jensen’s notice. With a quick good-bye to Hardy Larsen, he was immediately on his feet and following.

  Malone did, indeed, visit the men’s room. But when he came out, he didn’t go back into the bar. Instead, he pulled on the jacket and headed straight for the back door, where he ran unexpectedly into Jensen, who was waiting for him just outside.

  “Making an early night of it, Jeff?” he asked quietly, startling Malone, who hadn’t noticed him leaning against the building in a shadow and whirled to face him. “Late to arrive and early to leave. My presence wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would it? And where were you tonight before you came in here? Out the Old Glenn Highway this side of the Matanuska River Bridge, maybe?”

  Malone stared at him as if he were crazy, opened his mouth, shut it again, and finally said, “Why would you think that?”

  “Oh, an accident that was no accident, involving someone of your description who took a shot at my partner, Phil Becker, after forcing him off the road into the ditch and from there to the hospital. All of it was intentionally caused by a biker wearing a jacket with the same green patch on the shoulder as yours. You care to comment?”

  “Yes,” Malone said angrily, “I would. I’m not the only one who wears the Road Pirate logo. There are a number of us. And I haven’t been anywhere near that bridge. I just came back from Sutton, where I went to see Donny Thompson’s brother, Lee. You can ask anyone at the Alpine Inn, including the bartender.”

  “I will ask him. So tell me exactly what time you went to Sutton and how long you were there.”

  Malone told him and it was clear, if what he said was true, there was no way he could have been in both places at the same time. Obviously, he couldn’t have bamboozled close to a dozen people in Sutton to lie about his whereabouts. The biker who caused Becker to wreck his pickup had to have been someone else.

  “Okay for now, until I check it out—and I will. Who else wears that green logo on their jacket shoulders?”

  “No way!” Malone returned sharply, shaking his head. “I’m no snitch to sic you on anyone else. Do your own investigating.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and walked back into the Aces, where, Jensen was certain, he would spread the word that the law was looking for one of the Road Pirates, or someone wearing one of their jackets. There was always that possibility. But somehow both Becker’s accident and Donny Thompson’s death were related—tangled in the same knot. Now it would be up to him to untangle it, and soon, before someone else got hurt—or dead.

  There wasn’t much he could do about it then and there. He would let the case turn over in his mind as he examined everything that he already knew about it. Maybe tomorrow morning Becker would have remembered something to add to the mix that would give him a better direction in which to aim his search than trying to track down and question every member of the Road Pirate brotherhood.

  Besides, he hadn’t had dinner yet and it was growing late.

  Walking around the building, he noticed that the motorcycle with the green pinstriping was absent from the space where it had been parked earlier. Had someone else left the bar in a hurry? Did it belong to Malone? Or was it just coincidence?

  Whatever! Circling a block to reach the road that led through Palmer and on toward Wasilla and Knik Road, he gave questions up for the time being and let his mind wander where it would.

  The direction it took was toward the meat loaf Jessie had promised earlier in the day, that he knew was now waiting at home—as was she.

  Time to be there!

  The house was deliciously full of the scent of the meat loaf when Alex came through the door less than half an hour later.

  Jessie stood up from where she had been watching television, Tank at her feet, and they both came to meet him.

  “How’s Phil?” she asked, taking his coat to hang next to the door. “How bad is it?”

  “He’ll be okay, I think, but it’s going to take a while. Hit his head on something in the wreck and has a broken arm, but he’ll mend. It’ll just take time.”

  “Thanks be,” she breathed. “I almost
called the hospital, but decided I’d better wait for your report. You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Yeah,” he told her, bending to give Tank a pat. “I made a stop to check out a couple of things that might be important in finding out what happened. But right now I’m starving. I’ll be strong enough to tell you a bit more after sustenance.”

  She grinned and headed for the kitchen, calling back over her shoulder, “You’re just lucky it was my turn to cook. Wash up and I’ll have food on the table when you come back. There’s baked potatoes and salad to go with.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  He headed up the stairs toward the bathroom to do as directed. Hopefully there would be enough leftover meat loaf for sandwiches tomorrow, as it was a favorite of his.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AT THE HOSPITAL THE NEXT MORNING JENSEN FOUND PHIL Becker awake but looking and feeling as bad or worse than the day before. The injured side of his face was a huge purple bruise that had swelled badly. An IV dripped pain medication into his unbroken left arm. His right lay as before on a pillow, still awaiting surgery to put the shattered bone back together.

  “Thrown to the side. Caught the dash,” he muttered, clenching his teeth to keep from moving his jaw as he saw Alex looking and attempted to explain. “Two teeth loose ’n’ a som-bitchin’ headache.”

  “Don’t try to talk,” Jensen told him. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions. Just raise a finger for yes, none for no. Okay?”

  Becker lifted the index finger on his left hand.

  “You have any idea who it could have been?”

  No response from Becker.

  “Terry Larsen, Hardy’s son, was bicycling behind you on the road. You must have passed him on your way toward the bridge. Did you see him?”

  Becker raised a finger.

  “He told us the motorcycle rider was all in black, including his bike, and wore a full face-covering helmet?”

  The finger came up again.

  “And his motorcycle didn’t touch your truck at all?”