Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  Pete immediately swung the rifle in her direction, but before he could fire, she was once more out of sight.

  “Put it down and I’ll come out.”

  He lowered it.

  “Chelle,” Jensen called. “Don’t. It won’t work.”

  “I said put it down,” she said, ignoring his warning.

  “Do it, Pete,” Greeson said from behind him.

  He did, to one side and within reach, managing to remain behind Landreth.

  “Now,” she called, once more in view. “A deal? You let him go, and I come down there. I’m the one you want anyway. Right?”

  The pilot had stepped up behind Pete and, from where Jensen was located, he could just see him pull a pistol from under his jacket.

  “Chelle, get down,” he shouted. “The pilot’s got a gun you can’t see.”

  She was invisible in an instant, but not before a shot was fired in her direction from around Pete and Landreth. Shoving the other two back up the bank in the direction Chelle had appeared, Tom, the pilot, called out. “Okay. Deal. But my deal. You come down. Right now. Before I start with your idiot brother’s right kneecap. Hey, Ernie. Get out here, take this rifle, and hike your butt up behind her on that ridge to keep those two cops in line. Ernie. Goddammit.”

  With a sense of increasing disaster, Jensen saw the flaps of another tent move, and Ernie Tobias stepped out and grinned, stretching as if he had merely been napping, despite all the noise of gunfire and shouting. Damn it. Damn it. So he was part of their illegal poaching party.

  “Hey, Tom. Keep the noise down, huh? I’m trying to catch up on the shut-eye I missed last night getting over here in the dark. What’s the problem? Can’t take care of a couple of troopers and a female by yourself? You never had trouble with women before.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Get up that hill and let’s get this over with. You know the score.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the big agent answered thoughtfully, and Jensen began to glimpse a thread of cross-purpose in his slow-moving, relaxed attitude. There was a subtle tension and watchfulness under his seemingly easygoing exterior. He yawned, and ambled toward the pilot, tucking his thumbs in his hip pockets, but, as he turned his back to the hillside, he wiggled the exposed digits of one hand in Alex’s direction, then held out one singular index finger. Wait.

  Walking up to the two taking shelter behind Landreth, he dropped to sit on his heels and pick up the rifle Pete had laid down. Then, with a motion so casually smooth that it was graceful in its simplicity, he stood up and jammed the barrel into the soft flesh under the pilot’s chin.

  “Drop that thing,” he told him in a sharp, commanding voice. “Don’t even twitch. Just open your hand and toss it out in front of Pete and old Ed here.”

  “Hey. What the hell’re you doing?” Tom asked him, annoyed and confused. “We’ve got an agreement.”

  “Wrong. You thought we had a deal. Don’t assume I’m a fool, Tom. Drop it, or I drop you. Believe me when I say there’s absolutely nobody in the whole goddamn world that would rather see you dead—would actually enjoy killing you—more than me.”

  The gun dropped.

  “Now, Pete, turn Landreth loose. Then you and Tom step back, slowly, about five feet.”

  “Do what he says, Pete,” Greeson said in a strangled sound, the gun barrel jammed hard against his throat.

  Landreth staggered forward as the chocking pressure was removed, tripped, and fell to his hands and knees, gagging.

  “Come on down here Jensen—Caswell. You too, Chelle. It’s okay.”

  They did and as soon as Cas located another roll of Alaska’s omnipresent duct tape—good for solutions to almost every need or problem—secured the two remaining poachers in neat silver packages.

  By that time Landreth had recovered enough to talk.

  “Thanks,” he said eagerly, holding a hand out to Cas, who simply stared at him without responding. Taken slightly aback, he turned to Jensen. “Sure glad you guys showed up. I don’t know what they would have done to me if you hadn’t rescued me in time. They kidnapped me and forced me to come out here. Bunch of bastards. I had nothing to do with this. Nothing…”

  “How’d my plane get here, Ed?” Chelle asked in a low angry voice. “Tell me that, will you? How’d they get my plane and what’d you have to do with it?”

  “Hey, Chelle. Don’t sound like that. It wasn’t my fault. They made me fly it from the other lake. Honest. I didn’t want to. They forced me. Threatened to kill me.”

  Greeson, immobilized and sitting on the ground, made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Don’t you forget what I told you, Landreth,” he growled. “This changes nothing.”

  Ed cast a nervous glance in his direction and shut up.

  “What do we do with this one,” Caswell asked Jensen, nodding in Landreth’s direction. “Take him in with the others, or not?”

  Landreth lost it.

  “No. They made me…Tell him, Chelly, please. I didn’t really have any part in this. They forced me…It wasn’t my fault…”

  She stood very silent, watching him panic, until he ran out of words and merely begged her with his eyes. Then she turned to the troopers with an unspoken question and a shrug of the shoulders.

  “Oh hell,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Take him back with you. We’ll pick him up later when we need him. Maybe you can get something worthwhile out of him.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “We can discuss it back in town.”

  “Chelly…” Landreth started.

  “Just shut up, Ed. There’re a lot of things I want to know, but not now. I’m tired of bailing you out.”

  Sniveling and whimpering, he gave up.

  One more exchange was particularly significant concerning Jensen’s questions about Ernie Tobias. The agent volunteered to go with Chelle, in her plane, to pick up Darryl, taped and waiting, and transfer him back to the poacher’s camp. He chuckled when they described where and how he would find the last poacher. While airborne, Chelle would call the Anchorage office for assistance from Fish and Wildlife and the troopers in investigating Greeson’s camp and illegal operation.

  As he started for the plane, Tom had a parting shot in his direction. “I’m gonna get you, Ernie, you fuckin’ shit. I wanna tell you that you better not turn your back on anything. Ever. I’m gonna get you. And if I can’t, I’ll make sure somebody does. I wanna tell you, you son of a bitch—”

  “So. Write me a letter,” Tobias told him, turning to pick him up by the shirt front and shake his dark glasses from his face. “I’ll be retired back in Madison long before you even think about getting out of jail. You’ll be an old—very old—man. So will I, but, if you ever come looking for me, I won’t hesitate to dead-cold kill you.

  “You bragged to me how you beat Karen bad enough to murder her when you found out she was a federal agent, then watched the plane she was in go down, and checked to make sure she was dead before you walked away. I’ll make sure you pay for that. Karen was a partner of mine and a very good friend. You didn’t know that, did you, Tom, old buddy. Never put two and two together. Gene might have recognized me and told you, but he tried to off someone else and gave me—not an excuse—a reason, but I might have killed him anyway.

  “So—for Karen—please, Tom. I ask you. Do something stupid and give me the chance. Just for Karen, you filthy bastard.”

  Chelle stared at him, mouth open, eyes wide, face pale, but Jensen kept his astonishment to himself. The intensity of Ernie’s anger was an awesome contrast to his usual soft-spoken polite manner. Wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it, he thought.

  There was a pause, then Cas spoke up in his usual practical way.

  “When you get back with Darryl, we better go tell the Texan just who that bear really belongs to.”

  “Naw,” Jensen suggested. “Let’s wait till he gets it skinned out.”

  23

  “WHERE DID YOU DISAPPEAR TO, ERNIE?” JENSEN
blinked in confusion below a frown that brought his eyebrows together close enough to almost match his full handlebar mustache. “We couldn’t figure out where you’d gone. Had to assume you were involved with the poachers, when you didn’t come back.”

  They sat on a log near the fire, waiting for assistance from Anchorage to show up to gather evidence from the poacher’s camp. On the way to the other lake, Chelle had relayed Jensen’s message. She returned to report their estimated arrival time and that the repair crew for Caswell’s plane had arrived at the other lake and was in the process of fixing the float. Cas had hurriedly gone off on foot to meet them, refusing an airlift in favor of some peace and quiet, and a last chance to enjoy a hike. They had all, however, appreciated a huge second breakfast from the camp’s supplies. Ernie commented that it was the first time he had eaten fried poached eggs.

  When they were satisfied, and Cas had headed west, Jensen filled his pipe, made himself comfortable, and asked questions, filling informational gaps with Ernie.

  “I started out to see if I couldn’t find out something about who these guys were and what we were up against,” Tobias told him. “Just got thinking about it and couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d come over and find a place to watch them for a while. One person would make less noise.

  “Then, I recognized Tom—he is Stoffel’s cousin—and figured, since I had already set myself up undercover in the Brooks Range as a dirty agent to them, that I’d go on in, play it up and see what I could find out about Karen. It worked.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “I didn’t like what I found out, even if I’d suspected it, but at least now I know what happened…who was responsible. By the time you guys showed up, I was almost ready to make a move anyway—just collecting facts—waiting for them to bring that bear back into camp—hoping they’d give me some idea what happened to Karen’s notes.”

  “Did they?”

  “Nope. Only that they don’t have them and were looking. You were right about the breakin at the Lewis place. It was Tom. I watched her house all night that next night, thinking he might come back to finish the job, but he didn’t show. Should have told you, I guess, but it didn’t seem necessary. I’m too used to working on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. Sorry.”

  “Same thing happen last night? You could have said something before you took off, you know.”

  “Yeah…well. Started to. But, you looked so comfortably asleep under those trees, I decided not to wake you up. Thought I’d be back before too long. Changed my mind. You got my apology, okay?”

  Alex nodded.

  “So—he admitted beating Karen Randolph?”

  All humor left the large agent’s face as he answered.

  “Yeah. Swears he had nothing to do with shooting down the Lewis plane, though. We’ll get it out of him eventually. But, if not, I don’t think it makes much difference. Your forensics man said the beating was the cause of death. Right?”

  “Right. They say anything about Lewis?”

  “No. Just that a pilot showed up to pick up Karen and managed to get airborne with her before they could stop him. They were about to go after them in another plane, but saw them go down and assumed they were safely dead.”

  A fragment of a question skipped through Jensen’s mind and was gone. But Ernie was right. They had a tight enough case to convict the guilty and would probably never find where Norm Lewis had crawled off to die in this rough country. Still, he’d like to have tied up that particular loose end. Would have made it easier on Chelle, emotionally and with the insurance. It was clear, though, that she was—would be—all right.

  Suddenly, he had a great desire to get back to town and home to Jessie—wanted to talk it all out with her till it fit and the lid could be closed.

  As he climbed steadily up the slope of the hill where he had collected trash, including Norm Lewis’s ace of spades, Caswell slung the Remington diagonally across his back, to have both hands free. At the top, where he had stood the day before, near the fire-blackened rocks, he paused and assessed the landscape in front of him. The marshy area, full of hummocks, mud, and standing water, and the now familiar rough hills, covered with bare rock and sparse trees, spread out in front of him again. Turning slowly, he reviewed the lake he had just left, shaped like a crooked, flattened letter W, and the rocky summit of the first hill he had climbed, headed the other direction.

  It was now near noon, and as Cas went quickly down through the trees and onto the flat space between the hills, hiking mostly in sunshine, he moved a little farther south than his original route. Almost across, he noticed a ravine that cut away to his left. Probably the start of Olson Creek, he thought, picturing the map in his mind. If he went down it a few hundred feet, he thought he could walk around the base of the hill and come out on the ridge above the lake, reducing the amount of climbing he would have to do and saving time.

  He altered his direction accordingly, and soon found himself on an uneven sort of trail, full of lumps and depressions. A minute or so later, he frowned, hesitated, and scrutinized it more carefully, as an uneasy realization set in. He was walking on a grizzly trail.

  He remembered reading that, singular and unsociable, roaming where they pleased, over decades, in a few particular places, enough bears travel the same route often enough to create specific depressions in the ground. Stepping in each other’s footprints, they wear out cup-shaped depressions in regular, alternating patterns: right forepaw, left hind paw, left forepaw, right hind paw.

  Though he had heard of such bear trails, Caswell had never seen one. As he moved a few steps along it, he thought of the enormous vitality of the bear they had been forced to shoot earlier in the day and wondered if it might have used this track. He recalled that no one knows why bears do this. They have their own hidden reasons, and do for themselves alone what has meaning only to them. But, inspired by the depth of the depressions, he decided that they could not leave a more unmistakable sign of their passing, or a greater impression on any witness to the mute record of their sheer numbers and perseverance. It was almost more awe-inspiring to stand in the path of generation upon generation of this species than it had been to meet the great bear himself.

  The grizzly trail made walking difficult, for the depressions were awkwardly spaced for the length of a man’s stride. Cas stopped a moment to look more closely at them and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. A grizzly had passed here recently, for no rain had blurred the huge prints of his feet, larger than dinner plates. The forepaws were easily recognizable, for an inch and a half in front of the toe prints were the sharp marks of each individual claw.

  Squatting beside one print, Caswell examined it in detail and noticed that, in the damp dust of the track, the print looked very clean. He could see whorls and ridges that he knew were as unique to the bear as fingerprints were to every human. He shivered. This bear had to be fresh out of hibernation and hungry. Not pleasant to meet this time of year and he had already had one encounter on this day. Standing up, he took the Remington from his back, ducking under its sling, determined to carry it at the ready for the moment.

  Since the trail curved along the hillside in the direction he wanted to go, he trotted along it a little farther, till it turned down the ravine and he continued on along the slope toward the lake, keeping careful watch and speaking to himself to make enough sound for any bear in the area to hear him. When he ran out of nonsense to say, he began to recite poetry.

  “Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold and the mate of the Nancy brig…” he had started, when he saw something blue and covered with dirt next to a tree ahead of him. Reaching down, he lifted it, and found he was holding a torn piece of a plaid cotton shirt, with a ripped sleeve and pocket attached, covered with dark brownish stains.

  “Oh God,” he breathed, wanting to drop and forget it, knowing he could not.

  Instead, still holding it, perhaps twenty feet farther, he found another piece, along with the similarly stained and ragged waistband of a pair of denim pant
s. Around a curve, he was suddenly standing in an almost circular clearing, where every bush and small tree, every bit of vegetation, dirt, the roots of trees, and old dead leaves had been raked from the ground and was scattered around a ragged pile in the middle.

  Adrenaline pumped into Caswell’s body along with fear that straightened his spine and brought him to an abrupt halt, for he knew he had stumbled onto a cache created by one of the grizzlies that used the trail he had just left. As he looked, however, it became evident that the cache was an old one, long abandoned from the look of it. Snow had flattened and washed the clutter.

  Slowly, he stepped forward and, among the brush and dirt, several white bones came into view. Scattered in disorder over a wide area was what the bear had dismembered—ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, broken long bones of the arms and legs, and the fragmented pieces of a human skull. A few red hairs, probably from the tail of a fox clung to the bark of a stick on the ground.

  There was no doubt in Caswell’s mind that he had found Norman Lewis. He could not prove it, or identify the man with anything he now held or saw, but he knew it as surely as he knew that the bear had not been solely responsible for the man’s death.

  Walking forward a few feet, he picked up part of one of the long thigh bones he knew had separated the knees of this man from his hips. It was broken, as was another like it that he could see not far away. And within the break was the unmistakable mark a bullet makes when it hits living bone, and still imbedded in that broken bone was a slug that could have come from one of the casings he had searched for on the hill by the fire-blackened rocks.

  Someone had shot Lewis before the bear found him. Shot and made it impossible for him to escape his four-legged attacker. It didn’t take much to figure out who, he thought.

  Cas moved nothing else, but took the scraps of clothing he had found and the incriminating piece of bone he still held, and headed for the lake with long strides, forgoing his poetry recitation, oblivious to the possible presence of bears. Concentrating on what he had learned, he simply forgot to be afraid or watchful, wanting only to be able to put the grief he carried away somewhere before he rejoined Jensen, Tobias, and Rochelle—before she could see what he had found and carried back.