by Henry, Sue
Delafosse groaned. “If an attorney walked in and confessed, I think I’d resign, Indian or no Indian. I really hated putting Kabanak through that kind of questioning.”
“Could he have done it? He…they…certainly have motive over the subsistence thing.”
Delafosse emptied his coffee cup and set it back on the room-service tray. “I don’t think…”
“Might have been the last straw, having Russell fishing on the Canadian Yukon one more time. He certainly saw the boat—described it down to the blue cover in the back.”
“Possible, I suppose, but I can’t really take it seriously. He’s well respected and has too much to lose, for himself and his people. Charlie, now. Him and Will I can take seriously. Interesting, though, that the stolen Zodiac from Eagle shows up on this part of the river. Says that Sean Russell could have come up in it, do you think?”
“Says also that Hampton couldn’t have had anything to do with the inflatable. Not humanly possible. Eagle’s a long ways away down the river.”
“Right. Where is Hampton, by the way?”
“In the bar next door. I told him I’d let him know when we were through up here, so I’d better go down.”
“Well, wait for me. I’ll go with you, get out of this mess for a while and finish it later.”
“Can you wait ten minutes? I haven’t called Jessie yet and it’s getting late.”
“Sure.” Delafosse sat down and unfolded the coroner’s report again as Alex went to the phone, eager to be in touch with Jessie Arnold. Before he dialed the number, he turned to Del for one last comment. “You didn’t ask Henry junior where he was when he saw the men in the boat.”
Chapter Sixteen
THE PHONE RANG ONLY TWICE BEFORE IT was picked up in Knik.
“Hello.”
Expecting Jessie, Jensen was startled for a moment by the male voice.
“Hello?”
“Ah…Ryan?”
“Yeah. Who…Alex?”
“Yes. Is Jessie there?”
“She went out to check on Sadie and the new pups. Be right back. Hey, how’s Dawson? Heard on the news that you guys are catching snow too.”
“Oh? Yeah. Snow.”
Alex could feel his whole body stiffen in resentment and confusion. In thirty seconds he had gone from a warm anticipation of Jessie’s voice to a jolt of unjustifiable jealousy that shamed and turned him cold.
Del, flipping through the pages of the report across the room, looked up with a startled expression at the tone of his voice, a question in the lift of his eyebrows.
A door slammed in the background on the other end of the phone line.
“Hold on,” Ryan said. “Here’s Jess.”
Jess? Jess was his own affectionate shortening of her name, and Ryan’s use of it somehow gave a tone of justification to his flash of hurt and anger. Wait now, he told himself…slow down…take a deep breath…count to ten…all the clichés for “watch out.”
He hardly heard the receiver change hands, bringing her bright voice and quick breathing into his ear.
“Alex? Are you psychic? How do you always know when I’m outside, near enough to hear the phone, far enough to have to run to get it?
“I was just taking a final peek at Sadie and the kids. Oh, you’re going to love these pups, Alex. They’re good ones, every one. Not a runt among ’em. They’ll all make runners, a leader or two maybe, with Tank for a father.
“How are you, love? Any closer to a solution?”
Her flood of words gave him a chance to regroup a little, but his voice was still a croak. “Fine. I’m fine…. How’re you?”
“Great! What a day of running! We caught a foot of snow last night and went over halfway to Susitna and back on the old Iditarod Trail today. God, I love the first run of the season with a fresh team. Makes me wonder how I got through the summer without snow. The mutts were like little kids—and I wasn’t much better, as I’m sure you can tell. Babble, babble. I’ll shut up. What’s going on in the Canadian wilds?”
“Ah…” He swallowed a lump and forced himself to reply. “Same old stuff. Hunting bad guys,” he said, with forced enthusiasm. “Nothing half as great as first runs”—a hesitation, then he heard himself say helplessly—“with Ryan.”
For a long moment there was complete silence on her end of the phone, while he felt like an idiot. Damn! Damn and damn!
When she spoke, her voice held a painful stillness.
“Alex?”
“Yes?”
Pause. “Did I hear that right?”
Misery, mixed with irritation. He could hang up now. Just hang up and it would go away. She would go away. It could get worse. He drew a deep breath, “Yeah. I’m sorry, I…”
“Wait. Hold on.”
Listening closely, he heard her tell—not ask—tell Ryan to go water the dogs—that he knew had been watered hours ago—all the dogs. Please!
“Alex,” she said, quietly a minute later, “that wasn’t fair. I feel like we just had a six point five on the Richter scale. Not enough to bring down the house, but enough to shake us up pretty good. Where did that come from? Can you tell me?”
He looked up at the sound of the door closing behind Delafosse.
“No…well…” Where had it come from? Why hadn’t he kept his damned mouth shut. “I’m not sure.”
“But it’s there. Right?”
“Yeah, but…”
“No buts. Honesty. Can we figure it out? Did I do something? Not do something?”
“No.” Not to welcome Ryan as her friend and fellow musher wouldn’t have been the answer, to insist he stay elsewhere. These professional sled-dog racers took care of each other. Hospitality was taken for granted, single or not. In fact, most of bush Alaska was that way.
“Sorry.”
“If you’re jealous, it’s fear, Alex. How can you be afraid? I’m not going anywhere, you know. I wouldn’t intentionally hurt you, but I can’t live hostage to that kind of unfounded fear. I know what it’s like and I won’t.”
She had put a courageous finger precisely on a nerve. Yes…well. Afraid? Of what? Not that she was a friend of Ryan’s. It hadn’t much to do with Ryan, actually, or Jessie either, had it?
Suddenly, for the first time in a long while, he thought of Sally and realized, with the thought, how long it had been since the last time he remembered her. Until he had met Jessie last spring, Sally had been regularly in his mind. After eight years, he had still felt cheated by her death.
Now, with the thought of her, he recognized that he was afraid of Jessie leaving, too. Had been since the first.
And he was…was beginning to want something more permanent with her, though not yet ready to suggest marriage. He had a feeling she would probably refuse to consider it yet.
Yet? Damn it, just listen to yourself, he thought, as if with the idea of it he had suddenly found himself on his knees with a ring in his hand. However…
She was waiting, quiet as an Athabaskan, for him to speak first.
“Can you forget it?” he asked her.
“No. Can you?”
“No, you’re right. But I know where it came from.”
“Do you?”
“Sally.”
“Ah-h. I think I see part of it.”
“We can talk about it when I get home, if you’re okay with that.”
“Okay, if you are, but we will need to talk it out. And…” She hesitated.
“What?”
“Alex. I am not sleeping with Ryan.”
“It’s not the point…doesn’t matter.”
“It’s not exactly what you’re focused on right now. It does matter, but it’s just another subject we haven’t got clear. You guys tend to get unrealistic ideas in your heads, I think.”
They talked for another ten minutes, reestablishing themselves with each other, before Jessie said, with a smile he could hear in her voice, “We’d better stop. If I don’t tell Ryan to come back in, he’ll freeze. He’s proba
bly crawled in with Sadie by now.”
Alex agreed, chuckling at the image of the long-legged musher curled up in the doghouse Jessie used as a puppy nursery, insulated and heated with a light bulb. “Don’t tell him I was…stupid, okay? No need to make him uncomfortable.”
“I won’t. Love you, trooper.”
“And I, you. A lot, Jess.”
“Well, get the damned case solved then, and come on home, or I’ll be bunking with Sadie for company, if not warmth.”
Chapter Seventeen
DELAFOSSE KNOCKED BEFORE HE OPENED the door and stuck his head in to see if Jensen was still on the telephone and he should go away again, but his face held a confused irritation as well as concern.
“Storm warning’s canceled,” Alex told him. “Sorry about that.”
“Need an ear?”
“No. I just got a little torqued and made an assumption or two that were out of line. It’s okay. Jessie, thank God, takes her time coming to a boil.”
“Good. I won’t ask over what. Listen. Which bar did you say Hampton was headed for? I looked here and next door, and couldn’t find him either place.”
“Did you ask?”
“Here, not there. Bartender’s on a break. I also got sidetracked by Sean Russell, who stopped me on the boardwalk outside the hotel to make a few more demands. He evidently saw Kabanak and his son leaving here, and is now convinced the Hans are somehow connected to Russell’s death, but doesn’t like accusing his friends. He’d had more than a couple of beers and was pretty upset. Kept saying he should have at least tried not to get into arguments with his old man, even if they didn’t agree. The fight they evidently had when he saw the old man last is tearing at him some. Says he’s going to stay in Dawson till he gets what he wants—his father’s body or somebody’s arrest, or both.”
“You ask him about attacking Hampton?”
“Yes. He’s mad and upset about that too. Wouldn’t say much, but I told him what he would be up against if he tried anything like it again. He’s getting to be a real pain.”
“Well, guilt or guilty, let’s go track down Hampton. He said next door. Maybe you missed him in the men’s room.”
Snow was falling hard on Dawson, making it look straight out of the gold rush. False fronts on most of the buildings were reminders of shapes commonly constructed a hundred years earlier. The few figures that hurried between doorways could have been frozen miners. Seen through the veil of flakes, their modern clothing was not apparent and the silence of their steps, muffled in the inch or two of white carpeting the wooden walkways and unpaved streets, gave them a ghostlike unreality. Alex thought that all it needed was a rinky-dink piano and some rowdy Klondikers spilling nuggets or gold dust on some bar to complete the illusion.
Opening the door of yet another saloon, a block from the hotel, supplied the piano and a rousing rendition of “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” but no sign of Jim Hampton, though they hunted through every pub in town. Returning to the bar next door to the hotel, they went in, stomping the snow off their boots and shaking it from their jackets and hats. The bartender, returned from his break, met them with conspicuous politeness at the end of the long bar near the door, distinctly aware he was in the presence of the law.
“Help you…gentlemen?”
Delafosse described Hampton, a skill he had perfected in the last half hour.
“Oh, the canoe guy from Colorado.”
“He was here?”
“Drank one Bud, then they left.”
“They?”
“Yeah. He and that grubby city kid, the one that was around with Wilson before…well…”
“Charlie?”
“Never got his name. They talked, sort of growled at each other for a minute or two, your guy wrote a check for the beers, and they left.”
Jensen frowned. “Check? Personal?”
“Traveler’s.”
“He had cash at dinner. Let’s see it.”
The bartender rummaged in the drawer under his till and finally fished it out and laid it on the bar between them. Fifty dollars, signed by James Hampton, dated in Dawson, Yukon Territory. Alex turned it over to find something scrawled across the back. In the poor light, it was hard to read. The bartender handed Jensen a small flashlight, retrieved from somewhere below the bar.
“Charlie—the kid!” it read.
The officers looked at each other, then at the bartender.
“Better keep it,” Delafosse said, pocketing the paper rectangle.
“Hey, that’s fifty dollars you’re walking away with. The boss’ll take it out of my pay.”
The inspector wrote a quick receipt on a page from his notebook, while Jensen asked a few more questions.
“Any idea where they went?”
“Nope. Didn’t say anything. Just wrote the check.”
“The city kid say anything?”
“Huh-uh. Looked like somebody worked him over pretty good. Eye going black, nose had been bloody. But for that matter, the canoeist looked like he’d gone a round or two with somebody. I got the feeling he wasn’t too happy about the kid showing up, or leaving with him either, but he said it was okay when I kind of let him know, you know, subtle-like, that he had help if he wanted it. Just shrugged and pointed at the check. Hey! Maybe he knew you’d be in looking for him?”
“Maybe. How long ago’d they leave?”
“Better part of an hour, maybe more.”
A constable Delafosse had sent to check on Hampton’s truck caught up with them on the steps of the hotel, where they had paused to consider their next move. It was still snowing heavily, covering everything in sight with several inches of clear and lovely white, so thick in the air that it all but hid buildings just across the street. Streetlights were vague glows in the distance.
“It’s gone,” he said, breathless from hurrying, “and not long ago, because there’s not much snow over the bare ground where it was parked before the storm started again.”
“Where the hell would Hampton have gone with Charlie?” Delafosse wondered aloud. “Doesn’t seem like he would have willingly gone off with the guy he says held him up and tried to kill him on the river.”
Jensen kicked reluctantly at the small drift that was building up along the edge of the boardwalk. “Maybe he did or didn’t go willingly. But Will was the one he said shot at him, not Charlie, and Kabanak’s son did say once that he saw three men in the boat.”
“You mean he’s been having us on, all this time?”
“I don’t know, but it sure looks questionable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Very. If they were in it together, a lot of things about the whole thing would make more sense.” He turned to the constable, still waiting for his instructions.
“Call Carmacks and let Johnson know to watch for that truck headed for Whitehorse. They have to go through there if they’ve gone south. No, damn it. They could take the Campbell Highway to a couple of kilometers before Carmacks, but it’s two hundred and twenty-five kilometers to Ross River, and another three hundred and seventy to the Watson Lake junction with the Alaska Highway, with no way off on the full length of the road. Have Johnson get up to the Campbell turnoff. If they’re going either way he can stop them there.”
“Could they possibly have gone north?” Alex ventured. “Over the Top of the World?”
Astounded, Del swung to face him. “Not a chance. It’ll be howling a blizzard up there. No one would even entertain the fantasy: Not in a hundred years, on that road. Some spots are so exposed I swear you could fall for minutes at a time, down thousands of feet, before anything got in your way. And when it blows, like it has to be blowing now, there are places you can’t see even a suggestion of the road, or any of the drops, for that matter.”
“Does either Charlie or Jim Hampton know that? It’s a road on a map to outsiders, isn’t it?”
The inspector’s expression grew troubled. “Merde.” He swore in French only when his emotional state was extreme, as it was just
then, in a combination of irritation and concern. “You’re right, or course. We’ll have to check it out. But, no…they’d have to cross the river first, and the ferry’s closed for the duration…or should be…but I suppose…Damn it, Jensen. Come on.”
Even with his longer legs, the trooper had to practically sprint to keep up with Delafosse, as he headed for his truck at the RCMP office. Once inside, windshield wipers thrashing on high speed to swipe the snow from in front of their faces, the inspector headed directly for the ferry dock, on the riverbank east of town.
Alex recognized the shape of the steamboat Keno through the falling snow as they quickly passed it. One of a fleet that had played an important part in opening the Klondike, it was similar to those that transported gold, silver, lead, and zinc from the mining country during and after the gold rush. Another thing he wanted to have time to thoroughly explore.
At the river, they got out of the cab and stood staring into the curtain of white. At the bottom of a gently sloping gravel ramp, where the ferry should have been securely tied up, was an emptiness. Barely visible, rapidly being obscured by the falling snow, were parallel tire tracks, leading directly to where the small ferry should have been. It was impossible to see across to the far side of the river.
The inspector now swore profusely in his second language. Jensen wasn’t disappointed not to understand all Delafosse had to say concerning tourists, murder investigations, the Yukon River, snowstorms, and how late it was. He ended his volley of invective by kicking the tire of his pickup, but had the grace to look a little embarrassed when he noticed Jensen’s grin.
Back in the truck, they drove to the RCMP office, where Jensen called the Alaska State Troopers in Tok, to let them know someone was attempting to cross what was currently and without a doubt the most dangerous highway between Canada and Alaska, though there was little chance they would make it. Delafosse put on a pot of coffee and they set about making a reasonable game plan.
“We can’t go after them until it stops snowing…tomorrow morning at the earliest. I think our best bet is to get in the air with a helicopter as soon as it clears and find out where they’ve gone off the road, as they certainly will. Then we can decide how to reach them…take the big plow truck, or snow machines, depending on the circumstances and distance.”
