Degrees of Separation

by Sue Henry

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “this seems such a strange place to kill a man. Why here? There are two trails close by, including this one that joins the one that runs above it, which a significant number of mushers use on a pretty regular basis, right? It’s as if whoever did it wanted him to be found and I find that surprising.”

  “It’s more like the wild country we cross in races, but safer, away from a road or highway with the traffic that’s getting busier with all the new people who are moving into this area. When we run beside Knik Road, going up and down as we cross streets that run away from it, they forget to watch out for us sometimes.

  “A team was hit last year by a car turning off Knik Road onto the access that led to the house the driver was still building back in the trees. The team was dragged, three dogs died, and the musher was badly injured.”

  “Then would it be reasonable to make the assumption that either the killer didn’t know there would be mushers using these trails, or that maybe he—or she, for that matter; it could be a she, I suppose—wanted him to be found, or didn’t care if he was?”

  The question startled Jessie. It was not a conclusion she would have come to on her own and not one that she had heard from Alex.

  “I think it’s reasonable,” she answered slowly. “You should ask Alex about it. Is there anything else you’ve noticed?”

  Maxie looked again at the slope above them.

  “Well,” she said, “not exactly noticed, more like questioned. What, for instance, is on the other side of that hill?”

  “I feel like a total idiot,” Alex said when Maxie had presented her questions to him at Jessie’s urging when he stopped in for lunch just before noon. “How’d you like a job, Maxie?”

  She smiled from where she sat across the table and shook her head.

  “I think not. The Winnebago is enough for me, thank you.

  I’m a little over the hill to be chasing around in anything with flashing lights and a siren. Though it might be fun to come up behind people and startle them, and it’d be useful to be able to clear out slow-moving traffic ahead of me at times.

  “But I would like to know what’s on the other side of that hill.”

  “So would I,” he said, as he got to his feet, a frown drawing lines on his forehead. “Let’s go find out.”

  “You really want us to go with you?” Jessie asked, coming back from the kitchen, where she had put the lunch dishes in the sink.

  “Why not?” he said, heading for the door and reaching for his coat. “If Maxie wants to know what’s on the other side of the hill, she’d better come along. Maybe she’ll see something else I haven’t noticed.”

  Taking Knik Road toward Wasilla, he soon turned his truck off on a road that he knew led to a local builder’s new housing development in progress. Before what was now a street was put in and paved, however, there had been an older, narrower gravel road that provided access to a small log cabin in the center of a kennel that had belonged to an older musher. Though it was still there, the musher and his dogs were gone and the cabin, Alex supposed, would probably be torn down in favor of more like the first two brand-new houses they had passed, which were finished and occupied, though the yards around them would have to wait till spring for grass and shrubbery.

  “Damn,” said Jessie. “Chuck’s sold his place and they’ll tear the cabin down, won’t they? I wonder where he’s gone with his dogs. Pretty soon we’ll all be crowded out if this keeps up, and it will.”

  “Not for a while,” he told her, pulling to a stop in front of the seemingly abandoned cabin. “You own enough of the land surrounding your place so they can’t get close. We’ll be okay, I think, as long as you want to stay there.”

  “The Johnsons aren’t about to sell their place either,” she told him, thinking of her nearest neighbors. “So if we hang together they can’t build too close.”

  “Right. Let’s get out and take a look,” he said, turning off the engine. “Isn’t there a trail out back that Chuck cleared to go up the hill from here?”

  “Yes. It hooks up with the upper trail just on the other side, like mine does.”

  As the three walked up the drive to the cabin, Alex noticed that there were tracks in the new snow, single tire tracks that had to have been made by a two-wheeled vehicle, and footprints that led to the door. Maybe Chuck came back for something, he thought. But he wouldn’t have been able to move much on a motorcycle, would he?

  “Jessie,” he asked, “does Chuck ride a motorcycle?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” she told him. “Most mushers drive trucks, so they can transport their dogs. I’ve never seen him show up anywhere in anything but his battered old orange pickup with its permanent dog hotel box on the back.”

  “Well,” he said, hesitating to turn and examine the tracks more closely. “Someone has been here on a bike and left again since it snowed. Interesting.

  “Hold on a minute,” he told them, stepping toward the cabin to try the door.

  Unlocked, it opened easily with a small complaint from the cold hinges.

  Alex stepped in.

  Jessie and Maxie followed close behind and the three of them stood together, silently looking around.

  As expected, the place was empty of anything that had belonged to the musher who had built it many years earlier. It was cold and slightly damp inside, but not as cold as it was outside, and there was a trace of wood smoke in the air.

  Alex pulled off a glove and moved across to lay a hand on the old cast-iron stove that sat on the far side of the single large room in which Chuck had clearly lived, cooked, and slept. It was very slightly warm under his palm, or at least not as cold as the air surrounding it.

  And as he had moved across that space something else had caught his attention. There was, once again, under that trace of wood smoke, a subtle reminder of rosemary or lavender, something herbal—the same scent he had noticed in Robin Fenneli’s impersonal and empty house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  BACK OUTSIDE, THE THREE WALKED AROUND TO THE BACK OF the cabin, where, as expected, they found a snow-covered trail that led past an outhouse and disappeared into the trees as the hill took it up into the woods that, like Jessie’s, were a mix of spruce and birch, the latter now bare of yellow leaves.

  “Let’s follow it up,” Alex suggested and led the way around the outhouse and into the first of the trees.

  Single file, Maxie in the middle, they tromped in their boots through the undisturbed light snow that covered the trail as it wound gently around several large spruce that Chuck had evidently been unwilling to sacrifice in creating it. Soon the hillside grew steeper and, like the one on Jessie’s side of the hill, the trail went up in curves laid out to teach dogs to swing themselves and a following sled successfully around trees and shrubbery. Halfway to the top there were two switchbacks, and Jessie paused briefly to examine the second of them.

  “See how well this is supported?” she asked the other two. “He really knew how to build a track. His dogs were always ready for almost anything and this is obviously where he started teaching the new ones. Only another musher would appreciate just how carefully he laid out and built this trail. It will come out on top at the main trail, just west of the one that runs down to my yard.”

  She started on up with a shake of her head. “Oh, I am going to miss him. He taught me a lot in the early days. Gotta find out where he’s gone from here.”

  “Have you ever met Robin Fenneli?” Alex, who had looked carefully, but said nothing as they climbed, asked Jessie a moment or two later.

  “Don’t think so,” she answered. “Have you?”

  “No, but the more I find out about her, the more I want to,” came the answer, as he momentarily disappeared around a last spruce and came out on the upper trail, where she had said they would.

  The three of them stopped there and looked around carefully.

  Some musher—probably a rookie, Jessie thought—had been too impati
ent to wait for more snow, for there were parallel sled runner tracks in the snow of the trail, with dozens of dog prints between them. They disappeared not far beyond where she could see that her home trail turned down the hill.

  “Well,” said Alex, turning to Maxie. “What do you think?”

  She frowned and bit her lower lip for a second or two as she examined the area more closely before answering.

  “I’m thinking just about what I expect you’re thinking,” she told him finally. “That it was just as possible that whoever killed this Donny Thompson came up here from either side of the hill. And just as possible that they went down the way they came, or that they went on over the hill and down the opposite side.

  “It’s, of course, impossible now to tell which, but knowing that much might have told you something about whether the shooting was planned, or happened spontaneously. And, if you knew that, it might explain something about why he was killed and who killed him.”

  He stared at her, eyes narrowed in thought for a long moment after she stopped speaking, then reached up to run a thumb under the band and resettle the Western hat he favored wearing. Then he smoothed both sides of his handlebar mustache around the grin that spread itself across his face before he spoke.

  “Your mama raised no dummies, did she, Maxie? I’m getting more serious by the minute about that job I mentioned.”

  “Fenneli’s been in that old abandoned cabin, Phil,” Alex told Becker at the hospital later. “I know she has. I can smell it.”

  “Get serious, Alex. You can’t tell the difference between a guilty and an innocent suspect by smell. Guilt doesn’t have a specific smell. They don’t smell different. Well—maybe if they’re scared or nervous, or have spent a long time hiding out without a bath.”

  “I am serious. There was an herbal scent of some kind of lotion or perfume inside her house—the one out on Bodenburg Loop Road that you were heading for when you went off the road. I caught a whiff of it again in Chuck Landers’s old cabin. So I know she’s been there, and not long ago. The stove had been used. It wasn’t completely cold. There were motorcycle tracks in the drive and I know she’s riding hers because her car was locked in the garage at her house. She was at that cabin earlier today, probably this morning after staying the night. It makes a great hiding place. Who would know? Chuck’s gone and everyone thinks it’s empty.”

  “Okay! Okay! I believe you. So where’s she now? How are you going to find her?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know who will know how to find Jeff Malone, and I think that eventually Malone will be the key to finding Fenneli, if he hasn’t already. Hank Peterson knows half the valley’s population and somebody he knows will know somebody else who knows something. So I’m meeting Hank at the Aces at five thirty to find out what he knows, or who he knows who may know that something.”

  Becker nodded. “Sounds like a plan to me. Wish I could help, but…Hey, I didn’t tell you that the doc says I can go home tomorrow and I’ll need a lift. So can I count on you for it after he checks me out in the morning—sometime after ten o’clock?”

  “Sure. And if for some reason I get hung up on this case, I’m certain that Jessie and her friend Maxie will be glad to transport and mother you.”

  “No mothering will be necessary. My sister’s flying in from Spokane tomorrow afternoon. She’ll do just fine in that department.”

  “You want one of us to pick her up at the airport in Anchorage?”

  “Again, not necessary. She’s going to rent a car and collect some groceries and stuff on her way out here—has already made a list of what she thinks’ll be good for me. You haven’t met Alvina, but I’ve always been her baby brother. Need I say more?”

  “Got it! Good luck with that. Just don’t expect similar treatment when you come back to work. I’m more Grendel than Mother Goose, if you remember.”

  “Ah, yes. That does ring vague bells. Go on and talk to Hank. If he doesn’t have an answer, he will know someone who knows something.”

  “I will, but first I’m going to see Cole Anders at Oscar’s in Wasilla. I want to know as much as he can remember about who was there the night Donny was killed and when they arrived and left. I’ve a hunch the timing could be important on this.”

  Becker agreed. “I think you’re right. We already know that at least two people went up the hill from the Knik Road side and that one of them was Donny, because we found his motorcycle there in the brush on the other side of the road. So he didn’t go home to Sutton as he told Malone he was going to. Malone supposedly stayed at Oscar’s playing pool until almost midnight—at least that’s what he claimed. Could be you’d better find out who he played, if Cole or anyone else can remember. He could have slipped out and come back, I guess. The restrooms are next to the back door and it’s unlocked when the place is open so people can come and go to the parking lot in back.”

  It was an idea Alex hadn’t considered.

  “I’ll do that now,” he agreed. “I have time before meeting Hank.” He left the hospital reflecting on several new possibilities.

  Just prior to four o’clock in the afternoon, the bar held only a few people when Alex walked into Oscar’s and looked around.

  Cole Anders was, as expected, working behind the bar, and the same waitress he remembered talking to the night of Becker’s accident was across the room, delivering drinks from a tray to a table by the dartboard, where a game was in progress between two couples. Two men in shirts and ties that said they probably worked in offices somewhere in Wasilla sat across from each other at a table in the middle of the room, their sports jackets hung from the backs of their chairs. A young blond woman in jeans and a blue sweater was practicing shots at the pool table. The stools at the bar were all empty.

  “Hey, Alex,” Cole greeted him as he took the stool farthest from the door. “How you be?”

  “Pretty good. You?”

  “Same ole, same ole. What can I get you?”

  “Just coffee, please. I’m still on the clock. But I have a couple of questions for you if you’ve got a minute.”

  “Sure. Give me five,” Cole told him, setting the requested caffeine-filled mug on the bar in front of him. “Cream? Sugar?”

  “No, thanks.”

  In less than five minutes, he was back to stand leaning toward Alex across the bar, bracing both hands on the edge of it.

  “You sound serious. What can I help with?”

  “I know it’s been almost a week, but think back to last Friday night and tell me what you remember about Jeff Malone—when he came in with Donny Thompson and when he left. Robin Fenneli supposedly stopped by as well. Do you remember her?”

  Cole frowned, thinking.

  “Yeah. Can’t say I know her, but I’d recognize her in a crowd. As I remember it, Jeff and Donny came in just after eight, maybe eight thirty. They waited for the table so they could play a game of pool, which I assume Donny lost, because the next time I noticed, Jeff was playing someone else who had put a quarter up. I kept an eye on Donny because he was trying to make a date with Stevie Duncan, who wasn’t having any of it. He bought her a drink, but she left not long after that with Brody Kingston, just to get away, I think. It amused me. Stevie’s pretty good at getting rid of guys she isn’t interested in, and she clearly wasn’t interested in Donny.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Oh, must have been about nine thirty, but by that time the place was packed. You know, Friday night and all. We’re always busy on Fridays, so after eight or nine I’m pretty slammed behind the bar.”

  “But you saw Malone’s girlfriend, Robin, come in?”

  “Yeah, I did. Robin’s one of those women you tend to notice—tall, not pretty, but striking, all that dark hair and those eyes. Pretty well stacked. I don’t know what she sees in Malone, but…ah well.” He grinned.

  “I understand she wasn’t here long.”

  “She only stayed for one drink. I heard her say she’d worked late and wanted to go
home. Jeff told her he’d be along soon, but I didn’t see him go out the front door until after eleven.”

  “And when did Donny leave?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t notice, but it must have been shortly after Robin. I noticed later that he was gone but Jeff was still here playing pool. Like I said, it was really busy that night. He played several games, but sat out some when he lost and someone else took over.”

  “Could you say that he was here all the time between eight thirty and when he left, after eleven?”

  Cole looked at him thoughtfully.

  “Officially, you mean?”

  “Well—yeah, if it has to be, I guess. Could you testify to that if necessary?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No. I think he was, but I couldn’t say for certain. There’s no way I kept any kind of close track—had no reason to. He could have been sitting down somewhere close to the pool table with a quarter up, waiting for his next game, and I wouldn’t have seen him through the crowd that was sitting, standing, or moving around between here and there. Or he could have gone out and come back. A lot of people were coming and going from nine to midnight, and both the front and back doors are unlocked. To make it more complicated, the restrooms are just inside the back door. I was busy as a one-armed paperhanger and more concerned with making sure I got the orders right than who was here. You could ask Gena, she was serving tables that night and might have noticed.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks, Cole. Keep it to yourself, will you?”

  “No problem.”

  Alex left a few minutes later, none the wiser for having spoken to Gena, who, like Cole, was unable to swear that Jeff Malone had been in the bar the whole time between when he said he arrived and when he left.

  “There was too much going on,” she told him. “I have to agree with Cole that he could have been here for the whole time if he says he was, but there’s no way I can be sure. I practically run my legs off going back and forth to the bar on Fridays with the usual crowd. It was raining that night, so it was even more crowded. But the tips are good.”