Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  Jensen half growled a reluctant agreement and strode off down the slope, intent on stopping Rochelle Lewis, who was out of her plane, walking on a float, headed for the bank. Caswell remained where he was to watch as the two met and were quickly joined by Ed Landreth. He could hear none of the conversation from where he stood, but it was obvious that Jensen’s requests for her to leave were meeting with inflexible resistance. There was much head shaking on both sides.

  After a minute or two, Landreth, who had seemed mainly to be listening, threw up his hands, palms out, and took a couple of steps away from his sister and the trooper. Turning, he spotted Caswell and began to climb toward him, leaving Chelle to the argument with Jensen, which, Cas considered, she was perfectly capable of continuing on her own and possibly winning, though Alex could be pretty inflexible himself at times.

  As he waited for Landreth to reach him, Ben’s thoughts drifted back to the previous fall, when Norman Lewis had first disappeared in his plane. Flying a supposedly routine charter, he had failed to report in at the time required by his flight plan and a search had been initiated between Anchorage and the landing strip at Gulkana, near Glennallen, a community a little less than two hundred miles to the northeast. No sign of his emergency beacon was ever picked up and no trace of his plane found.

  Rochelle had joined the Civil Air Patrol search team, flying almost continuously every daylight hour. When a reasonable amount of time had run out and the effort was finally abandoned, she had continued, sometimes with the company of her brother, more often alone. On her own, she had expanded the determined search to anywhere Norm might have gone, rationalizing that, for one of the only times in his life, he might, for some unknown reason, have ignored his own flight plan. CAP pilots flew a well-organized, standard grid pattern, labeling anything outside it the ROW—the Rest of the World. Chelle had flown a lot of the ROW, finding nothing, before the winter set in and ended the search by burying the country in snow.

  Cas had met her at the crash site of another Cessna 206, the popular, workhorse plane for charter pilots, where she had gone to be sure it was not Norm Lewis. He had flown Jensen in to investigate some evidence of tempering that made the crash appear a possible homicide. It proved an accident after all and was not the Lewis plane. Case closed.

  He had been impressed with her flying ability, though she was obviously and understandably obsessed with the search for her husband. Even so, he had noticed that she was levelheaded, practical, highly skilled in the care and operation of her plane and took no unreasonable chance in the air. Convinced that the pilot error listed for many airplane accidents should actually be labeled lazy, sloppy, and careless, Cas approved of Chelle Lewis as a pilot and found he could not condemn her tenacious determination to find out what had happened to her spouse. What a terrible situation not to know if someone you loved was dead, or alive and hurt somewhere, needing help. In Alaska it happened all too often and was frequently unresolved.

  Though people periodically lived through crashes and survived for weeks and, at times, months in the wilderness, there were thousands of square miles of it and small planes were notoriously hard to find from the air, even when you knew almost exactly where they were. After an especially severe Alaskan winter, it had been clear to all concerned that Lewis must have been killed or seriously injured, and that, injured, he could hardly have come through alive, or he would somehow have found a way to return to civilization or signal his location. Pilots had walked out before, but not in the dead of winter. Now, it seemed their assessment had proved true, but without his body they could not declare him officially dead.

  Though they did not know her well, both he and Jensen had come to respect Rochelle as, plainly, a good person doing the best she could in an unfortunate and stressful situation. During the winter they had occasionally checked on her.

  Alex’s musher friend, Jessie Arnold, had already known her slightly, for during the Iditarod each spring for the last few years Chelle had been part of a group of small planes—the Iditarod air force—that flew assistance for the famous sled dog race. Generous with personal support. Jessie had invited her for a weekend in Knik, and had visited her once or twice in Anchorage during the fall. With the new year, however, Chelle had seemed to close herself off and refused most, then all attempts at contact. Depressed and silent, she discouraged conversation, and finally, all they could reach was her answering machine. “I’m sorry,” she had told Jessie once. “I can’t. No matter where I am, it’s not where I want to be. I’m just so tired of waiting for the snow to be gone so I can get back in the air.”

  It had been almost two months since the last contact, Caswell thought, watching her shake her head at Alex. Her face was full of the animation and color it had lacked the last time he had seen her. As Landreth scrambled up to stand beside him, he was thinking that it might be good to give her something to work on, to get her moving and focused again.

  “He never was worth it, but she just won’t give it up,” Ed commented with an irritated grimace. “Hello, Cas.”

  Returning Landreth’s greeting with a wordless nod, he wondered if it was the other man’s criticism of his sister, or the familiar use of his name, that caused the stiffness he felt in his neck. Either way, Ben was not particularly enthused to encounter Ed again. Besides, he told himself, casting a glance at Landreth’s well-polished but inappropriate dress boots, he hasn’t the sense to put on suitable footwear.

  There was something about the younger man that always seemed to put Caswell on his guard, reminding him of his own reaction when a particularly smarmy piranha at a local truck dealership had made the mistake of assuming he would be an easy mark. He had bought his pickup elsewhere. Somehow he couldn’t quite buy Landreth either, and made no effort toward conversation as they stood together, looking down the bank while Jensen and Rochelle finished their discussion.

  “I have to know, Alex,” she told him again. “Have a right. Don’t do this to me.”

  “I know you’ll wish you hadn’t, Rochelle,” Jensen told her.

  “But you said he isn’t there. I’ve seen crashes before…helped with a couple of bloody ones.”

  “That doesn’t improve the condition of this one. It’s not bloody, it’s bad. Real bad. This one’s been here all winter…in the water and ice. Not an ordinary floater.”

  “I don’t care. Not knowing is worse than anything. I have to see to make it real. You know? Who is it, anyway?”

  “We don’t know. As soon as the helicopter comes we’ll get the remains to the lab and find out what we can. Fingerprints…dental records, maybe. Right now there’s no way of telling.”

  Chelle hesitated and looked out across the water of the lake before facing him again. When she spoke, her lips were stiff and he could see that her own reluctant struggle with what she was suggesting came at a cost to her pride.

  “I might know her,” she said. “Might notice something you wouldn’t.”

  She might, at that, Jensen admitted sadly to himself, though there wasn’t much chance; he was tired of trying to dissuade her. Without another word he gave in and, waving her up the hill, turned toward Landreth and Caswell standing above them.

  “Thank you,” she said as she brushed past him.

  “I hope you feel that way later,” he replied.

  Detective Sergeant Jensen worked homicide out of Detachment G in Palmer, center of the Matanuska Valley farms and dairies. It was a spectacular location, surrounded by the majestic peaks of the Chugach and Talkeetna mountains, forty miles east of Anchorage, a morning’s drive from Mount McKinley, and three hours from the fine fishing of the Kenai Peninsula, which he enjoyed as often as possible. He would not have been assigned to this case of a missing pilot and plane, except that, over the years, he had investigated more than one homicide that revolved around small plane crashes in the bush. So, when this plane had been located in a totally unexpected place within his detachment, with bullet holes, a dead woman in the passenger seat, and the pilot
missing, he had been assigned the duty.

  As he followed Rochelle Lewis up the slope, he was not at all happy about the situation, and still reluctant to have her at the site, much less for her to see the horror that remained in the plane they had found, even if it might cure her determination with shock. He was, however, aware that, as a pilot and as someone who was familiar with this particular plane, she might actually make his work easier, which, in turn, might make the whole thing easier on her in the long run.

  At the top, she paused next to her brother, greeted Ben Caswell, and turned back to Alex.

  “Where?”

  He gestured to the west of where they stood and stepped forward to lead the way. “Be careful to follow me. We want to leave the scene as uncontaminated as possible. That’s why we didn’t pull in right beside it with the plane. It’s just over the rise.”

  The four walked single file, Caswell bringing up the rear, over the top and down the other side, where part of the tail of a plane could be seen above a screen of brush on the lakeshore. Landreth slipped, slid, and swore a couple of times, but made it. In a few minutes they were gathered next to a battered fuselage, the nose of which was still partly sunk in mud and water beyond the bank. A winch attached to an outcropping of rock had been employed to drag the wreck almost free of the lake, and its weathered and dirty condition, except for the top of the vertical tail fin and rudder, very much evidenced its season underwater. The registration number, however, could easily be read through the grime. It was definitely the aircraft in which Lewis had disappeared.

  Water still ran slowly from under it, tracing small channels in the mud on both sides as it made its way downhill and back into the lake. Both doors were closed, and though the window glass was partially opaque with sediment from the water, a human shape could be seen inside. The broken fuselage smelled wet and dank, and underlying that was a cloying hint of something else that was grossly unpleasant.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Jensen cautioned. “They’ve scrambled the lab boys out of Anchorage and they’ll be here soon to get what they can, but it won’t be much.”

  Chelle nodded, numbly, her eyes wide, but it soon became obvious that her mind was anything but numb. After a minute she moved without speaking, walked slowly around the plane, pausing twice—once to look up the slope to where the tops of three of four narrow spruce were broken off in a direct line with the ruined fuselage, and once when she reached the door on the left side.

  Jensen stepped up beside her, pointing.

  “Bullet hole,” he said.

  Without actually touching it, he drew a circle with one finger around a puncture in the metal below the window on the passenger side. The way the metal was creased, angling slightly, gave the impression it had been shot from below.

  “Another. There.” He pointed to a similar hole in the engine cowling. “This wasn’t an accident. Someone shot this plane out of the air.”

  Rochelle’s face was white and she looked sick, staring silently at the two punctures.

  Ed nodded, slowly, frowning, but said nothing.

  “Looks like he tried to set it down on this puddle, probably the closest possible, and couldn’t quite do the job,” Caswell commented.

  “He tried, all right. And almost did make it.” She spoke suddenly, in a tone louder than necessary, and swung away to gesture at the broken trees above them. “If it hadn’t been for those, he would have. Couldn’t see them from the other side of the slope till it was too late and he was right on top. The floats are up there, aren’t they, Alex?”

  He agreed and she continued her analysis.

  “The branches and trunks took them off, slowed the plane down, and tipped it right into the lake.”

  Caswell nodded. She knew what she was talking about, had read the scene’s clues as a pilot would, from her own experience of flying.

  “Yeah, and whoever the passenger was, she didn’t die as a result of the crash,” Jensen said. “That bullet through the door couldn’t have been better placed if she’d been a clear, unmoving target. Looks like it got her where it did massive internal damage. She may have been dead before she knew she’d been hit.”

  He looked speculatively at Chelle, who looked back with eyes in a frozen face, stiff, blinking tears. At the questioning lift of his brows, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and nodded.

  “You sure, Chelle? This is going to be pretty ugly.”

  “Sure.”

  “Here, then.” He dug a small green jar from a jacket pocket, uncapped it, applied a fingerful liberally to his full mustache and into his nostrils, and handed it to her. Mentholatum, with its characteristic, strong smell. She followed suit, and took a handkerchief from one pocket to hold over her mouth and nose. The other two refused, shook their heads and took several steps back, a maneuver that did little good. When Jensen reached and opened the door, a wave of the foul odor of decomposition that had only been a hint before, enveloped them all.

  Landreth swung away, coughing and retching. Holding his breath, Cas turned to walk swiftly out of range, having seen everything already, and having no wish to repeat the experience. Chelle turned even paler, gagged and looked sick, but held her ground. When Jensen waved her forward, she joined him to look quickly at the thing in the passenger seat.

  Jensen knew that bodies that had been underwater for long periods of time were not pleasant, to say the least, waterlogged and unstable. Those that had been repeatedly frozen and thawed in that water could be hardly recognizable, depending on the length of time. This one was not the best, or the worst, though he was glad it had not been another few days, or a week.

  The head was tipped back and to one side against the back of the seat, and what was left of the face was a dark, greenish-purple horror with visible teeth, almost defying identification. In amazing contrast, the hair, an ordinary light brown, had retained its color, though it had darkened with water, and was now drying in the air, even releasing a wisp or two of curl. It was long enough to have been pinned up high on the back of the head in a neat bun, the style probably intended to accommodate a dark western hat that lay on the floor by the woman’s feet. The left hand lay in her lap, the right dangled by the door, and both were deeply wrinkled from long immersion but did not exhibit the decomposition evident in the face. Seat belt still fastened, the body was dressed in a pair of black denim pants tucked into laced leather boots, and a black down jacket over a blue sweater. The colors and textures of the fabrics were easily distinguishable, their hues only slightly muted with sediment.

  The pilot’s seat was empty, one end of an unfastened seat belt lying across it.

  Chelle took it in at a glance, but as she started to turn away, her stomach churning, a gleam in the woman’s lap caught her eye. Leaning forward a few inches, she pointed and spoke between clenched teeth. “There. What?”

  Jensen shut the plane door and, taking her arm, guided her quickly away as she gagged and fought the results of shock and the breath she had taken in order to speak.

  “It’s a wedding ring. There’s also a watch. We noticed them earlier. The ring has an unusual pattern that we may be able to track down. Did you see anything about her you recognize?”

  “God…no. Nothing.”

  “You have no idea who she was? Why she was killed?”

  There was a hesitation as she swallowed hard.

  “No…none. Wish I did.” She turned her head away, wiping her eyes and trying desperately to breathe enough clean air to clear her airways of the smell, the indescribable taste that clung in her nose and mouth, renewed with every breath. Jensen dug into a pocket and handed her a piece of peppermint candy that she sucked gratefully.

  Without another word, she turned and walked up the hill toward the broken trees, slowing as she passed the twisted metal of the wrecked floats, but not stopping until she stood at the top and could look out over the rolling plateau, her back to the lake and the plane it had yielded up.

  It was a broad, flat, Ice
Age bowl, approximately forty miles from east to west, formed by some mighty glacier centuries earlier between Mount Susitna and the Alaska Range. Filled with small lakes and streams between swampy muskeg and low rocky ridges, it would be difficult ground for anyone to cross on foot. Many of the lakes were mere ponds, too small to set a plane down or take off. Behind her, unseen, not far to the west lay the much wider waters of Beluga Lake, where Norm could have landed his plane with room for hundreds of others. Its cloudy beige waters were fed by the melt from Triumvirate and Capps glaciers, and flowed in a winding river of the same name over thirty miles to the coast of Cook Inlet, passing through smaller Lower Beluga Lake on its way.

  Leaving the plane, Norm might also have climbed this high to avoid the brush that tangled the lakeshore, she thought, focusing on him, trying to block out the horror she had just witnessed. It was important to assess what he might have done, if they were to figure out where he had gone, and she needed something to take her mind off what she had seen in the plane. Jensen was right—it had been worse than she expected.

  On the slope behind, a rock rolled from under a boot and he stepped up to join her. After a minute’s silence, she began to tell him what she was thinking, working it through objectively, out loud.

  “He was alive, Alex. It’s the only reason he would leave the plane. He was alive and she was dead, whoever she is. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left her there. Do you have any ideas?”

  He shook his head and frowned. “They were flying low, or the bullets wouldn’t have done enough damage to disable the plane…or kill her. An extremely lucky shot. Planes are really hard to shoot down.” He was concentrating on what she could tell him. She was an intelligent, insightful woman, and her initial observations were valuable. “What do you think about the way he came in? Cas says he hadn’t much choice, pretty much just fell out of the sky.”

  “He’s probably right. Not knowing how fast he was going and how far out the engine quit, I can’t say for sure. It could have been several miles, or much less, but Norm was no dummy. This kind of terrain would be deadly to have to come down on—chew a plane to pieces. Floats or not, he would have headed for the nearest water of any size. From altitude he could have seen this lake, but from lower down, the ridge would likely have hidden the slope, and the trees between it and the water. They aren’t very tall around here, or thick—but they’re solid. By the time he committed and cleared it, it’d be too late to make any changes. No other choice.”