by Sue Henry
down, Becker. Let’s take this one thing at a time—
questions first, accusations later . . . maybe. We need some answers, not a fight.”
Becker leaned back and stared at the canvas wall.
Jessie could see that his outburst had been fueled by disappointment. He thought she had let him down, and it had shaken his confidence, not only in her but in his own judgment of her. His disillusionment came out as exasperated anger, laced with more than a little fear.
“Phil,” she said with earnest sadness, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. What I just told you really happened.”
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He refused to respond, and Jessie sat looking at his unhappy face in discouragement. His lack of confidence upset her more than anything they had told her or the questions they had asked. If friends who knew her well didn’t believe her, who would?
What else did they have to frame her for Tatum’s death? She knew now why she had been abducted—
and she thought she might know who was responsible, though the why eluded her still.
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AS IT TURNED
,
OUT THEY HAD QUITE A LOT STACKED UP
to implicate her, or at least to imply that she could have been somehow involved in Mike Tatum’s murder. Her dislike of him didn’t inspire confidence, for it gave them a motive of sorts. For the next two hours, she and Billy sat on the bench by the door and watched while Becker and MacDonald searched everything Jessie owned.
Her truck was towed off to impound, but not before MacDonald climbed purposefully into the back and worked out how the secret compartment opened. In it, he found the arson kit Jessie had discovered in the shed and so carefully hidden, and, of course, knew immediately what it was and could mean. He did not ask her to explain its presence, just gave her a long, tired look and went to put it in the trunk of his car. He did not say how he had known where to look, but
Billy’s obvious discomfort communicated the truth to Jessie, who duplicated Mac’s disappointed look in his direction.
“I’m sorry, Jessie,” Billy said, close to tears and 246
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swallowing hard. “He made me tell. I thought it would be okay.”
“Don’t worry. It is okay,” she told him quietly, but it wasn’t—not really, not now—and he knew it.
Her .44, in its evidence bag, also went into MacDonald’s trunk.
The rest of what worried her most was in what they didn’t find. There wasn’t a scrap of anything to prove that anyone had taken her from her own living space against her will and held her for approximately twenty-four hours.
In a detailed search of the tent, Becker located a three-cornered cut in the canvas, behind the chair, but Jessie knew that there was nothing to show that she hadn’t sliced it herself.
There were no footprints outside, for the wooden foundation of the tent had not been laid over bare ground but over grass and weeds that surrounded the dog yard, and anyone could have walked there without leaving a sign. Though they looked for marks in the snow or mud, it was an impossible task, for dozens of firefighters had traipsed back and forth through the yard during the blaze that destroyed her house, and the crowd of visitors had added to the confusion as they came and went the next day, leaving their own tracks.
It was the same with tire tracks from a wide assortment of vehicles—even the backhoe shovel of the neighbor who had loaned her the tent and the fire trucks that had pulled into the drive, though it was easy enough to identify the ones that had been made last—those of her truck.
Jessie sat numbly watching, as they efficiently and
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professionally went through the little she still owned that hadn’t been burned and all that had been given to her after the fire. It would all be covered with the fingerprints of so many people that there would be no use in trying to identify them, for any such attempt would have to include literally hundreds of people—many who had never been to Knik Road but would have
touched the items elsewhere.
Had her abductors realized this? She wondered, and also questioned where they could be. Would they have gone, now that they had accomplished what they had evidently set out to do—set her up as responsible for Tatum’s death, perhaps for the fires as well, including the one that destroyed her caabin? Or would they, perhaps, still be somewhere close, waiting to see the result? In the midst of her helpless despair over what was happening, a fury was growing, hot and dangerous, that tensed her shoulders, neck, and jaw and clenched her hands into fists.
When they had finally finished the search, Phil
Becker left in the tow truck that removed Jessie’s pickup with its dog box, taking with him the evidence they had collected for the crime lab to test. But MacDonald came to talk to her before leaving. He told Billy that he could go home, but he would need to answer some questions later. The young man left, giving Jessie an apologetic look and a muttered, “Sorry, Jessie. Call you later.”
Inside the tent, they sat again at the table, Jessie, straight and stiff in her chair, to keep from slumping into a position that would look as dejected as she felt.
But that glowing spark of hot anger kept her from self-
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pity, kept her ready to absorb whatever blow came next, to fight, rather than flee.
MacDonald appraised her silently before speaking.
“Stiff upper lip, huh? Relax, Jessie. We need to talk this through. I need your help.”
“Seems like you’ve done just fine so far, with and without my help,” she told him sharply.
Another longer pause, as he leaned forward in his chair and considered.
“I guess I have that coming—from your point of
view. But it had to be done, you know, as much to help as to hurt you.”
“Sure.”
“Look. I haven’t known you very long. Phil has, and this whole thing has disappointed him pretty badly. He seems to think you just about walk on water. To think you might have wet feet doesn’t sit too well with him.”
Jessie looked away for a second or two, then back with a lift of her chin and a hint of pride in her voice.
“I’m sorry about that—but he didn’t bother to really listen or trust me, did he?”
“Maybe not. But you’re asking an awful lot. He’s been a staunch supporter of yours—defended you to Tatum—
called me in to replace him. It’s hard for a homicide investigator to see past his job sometimes, even—maybe especially—for friends. Give him a little slack.”
She didn’t disagree, just continued to watch him guardedly, wondering what was coming next and how he would approach it.
“Okay,” he said, referring to the notes he had taken as he worked. “Let’s talk about that gym bag I found in your truck. You want to tell me where it came from?”
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“And risk your misinterpretation—incriminate my-
self? I don’t think so, Mac. I think maybe it’s time I called an attorney.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Then I suppose I should give you a formal Miranda warning—shouldn’t I? Well . . .”
He took a deep breath and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. “Damn. Guess I just—ah—sort of—forgot,
didn’t I?”
Jessie stared at him, startled. “You mean . . .”
“Nothing, of course. I just said— nothing. This is a conversation—an informal interview—not an . . . You understand?”
Not an . . . interrogation, she understood and nodded slowly. He meant that he was not going to put any of this on the record but couldn’t say so. For some reason, he was giving her a break.
“Now, about that bag.”
She told him how she had found it on the shelf in her shed.
“Just sitting there, i
n plain sight, huh?”
“Yes. And I thought it over a lot. Anyone could have put it there. There’ve been a lot of people around here the last few days. In fact, there’s nothing you found that couldn’t be explained if someone else was responsible.”
“I know. And doesn’t it seem to you that there’s almost too much circumstantial stuff floating around here? There’s something missing in all this that I can’t quite get hold of. It’s all connected, but I can’t figure out how.”
Jessie thought about it and agreed.
“Mac, tell me one thing. Phil thinks I had something
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to do with Tatum’s murder. Why? It can’t be just because of the fact that I wasn’t here and some tracks that he thinks match my tires.”
“It’s partly the tire tracks. But it’s not simple. You must understand that I can’t talk about it, Jessie. Especially not to you.”
“When will you know something for sure?”
“Tomorrow, maybe the next day. But let’s get back to all this trouble and the people involved in it.”
“It all started when Anne showed up, right?”
“No. I think it started a long time before that.”
“You mean ten years ago?”
“Yes. It has something to do with what happened
back then, but I think the fires and Tatum’s death are new pieces to an old puzzle. I’m just not seeing what pattern they’ll make when they fit together—the picture on the box. Tell me more about this middle-of-the-night abduction. You think someone’s making a
concerted effort to make sure you’re blamed for Mike’s murder—and for the fires, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I know I didn’t do any of it. But I can’t prove that to you—with everything you’ve found.”
“No, I mean why pin it on you?”
He did have a habit of putting a finger on the pri-mary issues, Jessie thought. It had not occurred to her to wonder just why she had been selected as a patsy—
just to resent that she had.
“You don’t think it was just because I was a handy target?”
“It would make more sense if there was a better rea-
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son than that. Also be easier to figure out a less random selection. I think we should assume a motive and work on uncovering it. I think there is one.”
“And you believe me—that someone took me out of
here?”
“Well, let’s say it’s a tale I’m not quite convinced you made up. It fits much too well. Stuff that happened earlier bothers me, too. Your hat found conveniently at Mulligan’s. Anne Holman’s disappearance the night of the fire. That gun of yours was fired recently, Jessie.
From what I’ve seen, you take good care of your
equipment. Why would you keep it around in that condition when it would be so easy to clean? And—it wasn’t here yesterday when I looked for it.”
“You were here while I was gone?”
“You told Becker to tell me when you’d be home,
and I found Billy working in your shed. Why would you make an appointment with me and skip it—like Tatum did the meeting that he called and missed? That didn’t make sense either, until we found him.
“Why, again, would you keep that gym bag full of the kind of things that started your fire when it would be so easy to get rid of such an incriminating piece of evidence?”
“But I did keep it.”
“I know. And it wasn’t too smart of you. But you didn’t set fire to your cabin, did you?”
“No.”
“Who did—or who do you think did? You’ve got a good idea, don’t you? Intuition?”
Jessie hesitated, unsure of accusing anyone now.
“Come on, Jessie. Who?”
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“All right. Tatum. I’ve always had an unreasonable suspicion that he started it.”
“Interesting. Me, too. Do you know why?”
“No. It’s just speculation—his past history and the connection with Anne. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”
“Right again. Now, how do we prove it and get you off the hook?”
Was he being honest? Did he really believe that she had had nothing to do with this unholy tangle? Jessie didn’t know. But she also didn’t care much as long as he would work on it with that in mind.
She stood in the yard, a little later and watched MacDonald drive away, still a little surprised not to be arrested, but feeling better with an ally—any ally. She did not intend, however, to wait around for him to prove she was innocent. There were a couple of things she needed to do on her own, things she hadn’t mentioned to him, knowing he wouldn’t like what she had in mind. She could tell that, since they’d taken her truck, except for training runs with a team of dogs, he had assumed that she would be at home on Knik Road.
She had purposely not disabused him of this notion.
Relatively early in life, Jessie had decided that depending on other people to solve her problems was not only unwise but likely to compound the problem.
Though she could be stubborn, she wasn’t hardheaded; so this was not a rule she never broke, but she thought it over carefully before she did. Though the suggestion had been made—more than once and by more than one person—that she was, at times, too independent, she had given it serious consideration, disagreed, and con-
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tinued to take care of things that involved her in ways that satisfied her own standards of self-reliant behavior.
The situation in which she now found herself was no exception, and she meant to take care of parts of it herself, as usual—whether MacDonald liked it or not.
That he knew nothing about her plans made no difference. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t disrupt or hinder. She could only hope he would at least try to understand when, once again, she turned up missing.
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WHAT JESSIE MEANT TO DO WAS GO BACK TO THE CABIN
in the Little Peters Hills.
As she and MacDonald had talked, going over what they knew about the situation, she had come to the conclusion that the cabin somehow played a more significant role in what was going on than it seemed. Her acquaintance with the Holmans had started there; Anne had insisted on returning there; and, finally, it was where Jessie had been taken and held, evidently while Mike Tatum was being killed. More than ever, she wanted to find Anne and get some answers. No one in town had been able to find a clue to her whereabouts.
Either she had left the state, as she’d promised—but her promises had not been worth much so far—or she might be at the one other place she had visited since showing up at the airport. MacDonald would soon get around to searching that cabin for evidence, if he really wanted to prove Jessie’s innocence, though for the moment he seemed focused on the Tatum murder. Jessie had decided to get there first.
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It would have been easier with her own truck and dog box, but that was now out of the question. Whether MacDonald had not realized its significance or dismissed it, Jessie Arnold was a distance racer, used to running long hours at six to eight miles an hour, and so was her racing team. It might be slow going for some people, but in the long run traveling by dog sled covered ground, as every musher knew. The other advantages to this mode of travel were that it was quiet and required no roads. A musher could cut across country that few mechanical vehicles were equipped to
cover—only snowmachines could equal an experi-
enced musher with a good sled and team, which was why they were used to break trail for the distance races. They could go faster, but also were dependent on fuel. Dogs carried their own fuel and could go farther, if slower.
It was seventy miles by road to Trapper Creek. Traveling as
she would in a race, at an estimated seven miles an hour, Jessie knew she could reach the Little Peters Hills—almost the same distance across back country and a little farther to the west than the road—
in ten or eleven hours of running. With two short rest periods for her dogs or one long one she could be there by morning. It was a more than reasonable assumption, considering that her best dogs were in top form from continuous training and had recently completed one of the toughest races anywhere, the Yukon Quest. They had also been resting for more than a day and would be ready and eager to get back out on a trail. All she had to do was pack a sled and go, quickly, before she was intercepted by MacDonald, Becker, or anyone they
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sent to keep an eye on her, as she half expected them to do.
But first she intended to rearm herself. It would not be smart to go looking where she might run into trouble without some kind of protection. And she knew things about her own living space that no one else did.
Her cabin had burned to the ground, but to the ground only.
Retrieving heavy gloves and a shovel from the shed, Jessie went to the blackened ruin of what had been the front porch of the structure and began to dig away charred rubble from the north corner. Several times she had to lay the shovel down and lift away the remains of burned planks and their supports, but finally she had worked her way down to scorched dirt and revealed the outline of a narrow horizontal metal door and frame, attached to a concrete foundation. When she had
cleaned it off enough to open, a short flight of steps lay revealed below, leading down to what had been a sort of root cellar, a storage space under the house, partly for potatoes and some of the vegetables from her summer garden, kept from freezing until well into the fall before the onset of the real winter cold.
A few other things had also been stored in this
space: a large plastic garbage can with a tight lid held flour that she bought in large amounts and used to bake her own bread, some gardening tools put away for the winter, a box or two of old kennel records, other odds and ends that freezing would not damage, and on one back shelf, a rifle that Jessie’s father had given her when she’d moved to Alaska from Minnesota to establish her kennel and take up sled dog racing.
