Death Trap

by Sue Henry

  Jensen sorted through the bag and took out the pictures that Becker had been examining earlier. Slowly he flipped through them and frowned, puzzled.

  “Nothing much—just some snapshots of the crowd and buildings in the center plaza of the fair. Not even very interesting.”

  “Right. What I’d like to know is what’s on those other rolls of film—the ones that have been exposed but not developed. Might tell us something else.”

  “We could send them to the lab and find out, but it’d be faster to drop them off at one of those places that develop film in an hour. But if there’s nothing any more damaging than what we’ve already looked at, you’ll have nothing. Unless you can prove that he called Jessie.”

  “And if he did, you can be sure it was from some pay phone.”

  “Might be from one at the fairground. They could run a check to see if any were made to Jessie’s from those.”

  “Still wouldn’t prove he made the call, if there was one. Must be a lot of calls made from those phones.”

  “Not so many as if half the world didn’t carry their own cell phones. Now there’s a thought. Does Wease have a cell phone?”

  “True, to the first. I don’t know, to the second. Let’s get a look at what’s on that film first.”

  So on the way back to town we dropped off the film,” Jensen told the group. “First we spent a couple of hours hunting for Jessie and not finding her. Her truck had the keys still in it, as if she hadn’t intended to leave it where it was for very long.”

  “I didn’t,” Jessie agreed. “I got out to take a look at a couple of kennels that were back in the trees where I couldn’t see much from the road. But I was coming right back.”

  “That wasn’t the only time you’d left the truck.”

  “No. When I knew the owner of a kennel, I’d drive in and hop out to talk to them. I wanted word about Tank to reach as many mushers as possible—people who knew dogs and could be on the lookout for him.”

  Jensen nodded. “That particular road had half a dozen kennels along it. You could have gone to any one of them.”

  Jessie frowned and shook her head. “That’s not right. There were only four kennels along the road where I left the truck, and I’d talked to two of them on the way in—Judy Clark and Mose Atkinson. I got out to take a look at one of the others, the third dog yard down that road, about a mile from Judy’s place. I didn’t see anyone around, but it was a terrible place. That’s the last I remember.”

  “Lynn Ehlers got to Clark and Atkinson later and figured out that their road was the last place anyone could confirm seeing you that morning. There was still no one at the other kennel you went to. But Ehlers talked to the owner of the fourth kennel on that road—we interviewed him later. He said he had passed an unfamiliar truck headed out toward the highway as he was on his way in from a trip to town. Your truck was not found there, however. It was a mile east of that road, on another road on the other side of the highway.”

  They stared at each other, comprehension dawning.

  “But I never got to the road you’re describing,” Jessie said, frowning.

  “In that case it’s no wonder everyone near where we found the truck denied seeing you,” Becker broke in. “They hadn’t. I’m sorry we gave them such a bad time. When we couldn’t find you, we wound up driving your truck back to town and going over it top to bottom—with no results, I might add. Not a print on the wheel but yours.”

  “When we were through searching the truck for any idea where you were, I drove it out to your place while Phil went back to pick up the pictures,” Jensen told her. “I thought you might show up or that there might be something inside your house to give me a clue where we should concentrate our search for you.”

  Alex Jensen drove Jessie’s truck up the long driveway from Knik Road and parked it in front of her new log house. Shutting off the engine, he sat for a long minute appreciating the structure that had replaced the cabin that had burned several months earlier. The replacement was larger, more house than cabin, and its log walls and green metal roof were appealing, as were the steps and wide porch leading to the front door. But it felt odd, as if he had come back to a place with familiar anticipation only to find it subtly changed in ways that scrambled recognition.

  It made him wonder if Jessie had experienced similar changes in the months he had been absent. If she had stepped out that front door to meet him, could he have expected a welcome?

  Considering possible transformations in the woman and her environment, he removed the keys from the ignition, opened the door, and climbed out. Immediately, seeing a stranger instead of the person they expected to leave the pickup, several of the dogs began to bark. A human voice from the back of the dog yard startled him further.

  “Shut up, you guys. Hey there, Alex.”

  Locating the source of the voice, he was pleased to find it was Billy Steward, Jessie’s handler and kennel assistant, who was walking toward him from where he had been cleaning straw from dog boxes.

  “Jessie’s not here,” Billy informed him, halting a few feet away, a rake in his hand. “She know you’re home? I guess she must, you’ve got her truck.”

  Home. Jensen thought the word didn’t accurately depict his presence, but let it pass.

  “You see her today?” Jensen asked, knowing the answer but hoping anyway.

  “Nope. She’s at the fair, but she left me a note.”

  “Did you meet her friend who was here last night?”

  “Didn’t know anyone but Jessie was here. Why? Something wrong?”

  Jensen, realizing that Billy didn’t even know Jessie’s lead dog was missing, related as much of the story as he knew, including where they had found her apparently abandoned truck.

  “Ah, jeeze,” the young man commented when he had heard everything Jensen had to tell. “She’s gotta be really upset about Tank. What was she doing out the highway?”

  “Looking for him would be my guess.” He gazed over the empty spaces in the yard that usually held upward of forty dogs. “Where are the rest of her dogs, Billy?”

  “Lynn Ehlers has them out the road in a kennel pretty close to where you found her truck. Jessie can’t race this winter because she hurt her knee a couple of months ago and had to have surgery on it. Doctor told her not to even do training runs, so Lynn took her dogs for the winter.”

  “Ehlers? A musher from Minnesota?” Jensen asked, thinking it might not hurt to check this Ehlers out, considering the location of the kennel Billy described.

  “Yeah—friend of Jessie’s. He helped out a lot when she got hurt.” Billy looked at the ground and kicked at a pebble with one boot, clearly uncomfortable to be talking to Jensen about another male acquaintance of Jessie’s. “You know him?”

  “Met him during the Yukon Quest last February. He been around lately?”

  “Not when I was here.”

  For a longish bit of silence, Jensen assessed the boy’s discomfort, until Billy finally glanced up at him.

  “Pete still keeper of the house key?”

  “Yup.”

  Jensen stepped across to where Pete, a dog he knew well, lay dozing in the sunshine on top of his box.

  “Hey, Pete. Good old boy.” Taking time to give the old dog a pat or two and rub his ears, he reached into the box and retrieved the extra key to Jessie’s front door from a hook hidden inside.

  “I’m going in to see if there’s anything that will tell me where else we might look for Jessie,” he told Billy. “It’s official. I’m back with the troopers and to stay.”

  “Hey—it’s okay by me. Jessie won’t mind. I mean, it’s you, after all, right?”

  “Right.”

  But he didn’t know if that was true—official or not. Though Phil Becker had kept him up-to-date on what was going on in Jessie Arnold’s life, Jensen had not communicated with her in six months’ time. This was not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because it was what she had said she preferred when he saw her last,
in February, at the end of the long race from Whitehorse to Fairbanks. “I’ve never been good at dividing myself—can’t live in two pieces,” she had said when he had asked her to give it time so they could try to work it out. He had respected her decision, knowing their separation had been as difficult for her as it had been for him. “I love you” had been her very last words. And that he did know had been true.

  Walking toward the new log house, he felt more than a little the intruder. He had lived with Jessie in the old one, felt at home there in a way he had discovered the hard way was impossible in Idaho. He smiled a little ruefully, remembering what his mother had told him less than a month earlier: “I think you’d better make up your mind to go north again, Alex, my boy. You’re doing the part of yourself that’s existing here no good at all.” She had been right, as usual. But had he done himself any good by coming back to Alaska? That remained to be seen. And to see about it, he needed to see Jessie—who had disappeared. A dead man had been found at the fairground, where she was working, and now she was nowhere to be found. Were the two things related? He disliked coincidence.

  Climbing the steps, he unlocked and opened the front door, stepped in, and closed it behind him. Without moving, he stood looking around. The space was larger than that of the old cabin, but still strangely familiar. As anticipated, the kitchen was in the back to the left, where it had been in the old cabin, with a big oak dining table nearby. The woodstove he remembered stood near the center of the room, as it had before. A different but comfortable sofa sat near it, piled with colorful pillows. A couple of easy chairs completed the friendly circle around the stove.

  Where there had been a bedroom in the old cabin, there was now open space with a door to a bathroom that backed up to the kitchen. A wide window looked out into the woods to the rear of the lot, which allowed afternoon sunshine to pour in and gleam from the polished wood floor. Another easy chair and a reading lamp sat there under a stairway to a new upper level. The wall beside it had built-in shelves from top to bottom that were partially filled with books and a new music system.

  The interior space felt empty, for it was very tidy and free of pictures on the walls and other memorabilia that Jessie had collected over the years—all destroyed in the fire, he knew. Hanging on the wall near the bathroom door was a rifle he recognized that had belonged to her father. A cast-iron dragon humidifier that puffed steam from its nostrils, now as cold as the woodstove on which it sat, had obviously been retrieved after the ashes cooled, and repainted, for the colors were subtly different.

  The stairway led up to a loft, where he could see two doors, to what appeared to be a bedroom and an office. Slowly he crossed the room and went up, glancing into the office as he passed the first door, but continuing on to stand in the bedroom doorway. The brass bed it contained was not the one in which he remembered sleeping, but similar. It was spread with a quilt he recognized by its silver stars and northern lights. Jessie must have somehow snatched this favored thing from the fire. An open door in the bedroom led to another bath. It was larger than the one downstairs, painted white and accented with the cobalt blue that she loved. Seeing that it held a good-sized shower stall, he recalled bruises suffered from knocking his elbows on the hardware in the narrow confines of the one in the old cabin.

  It seemed strange to be standing in Jessie’s house without her. A book she had been reading was spread open, pages down, marking her place, on the bedside table. An oversized T-shirt of the kind in which she preferred to sleep hung on a hook on the wall. A flat bowl on a chest of drawers held a few pieces of jewelry and a colorful Iditarod pin. Reaching with one finger, Jensen separated a single diamond stud from the coils of a chain. He remembered giving her a pair for her birthday. One of them had been lost in the woods on an island in Kachemak Bay. He had promised her a replacement but had never got around to it.

  Part of him felt voyeuristic and part quite at home. He left the bedroom and stood for a long minute on the balcony that ran the length of the house, looking down into the space below and attempting to reconcile those feelings. Giving up, he decided he should get to work. There would be time enough for resolutions when Jessie was back home where she belonged.

  Jensen had gone back to the top of the stairs when he heard the rapid pounding of feet on the outside steps. He started down, intending to answer a knock that never came, for the door burst open and a man came hurriedly through it. Catching sight of Jensen halfway down, he stopped abruptly and stood staring up with a challenging frown.

  “Ehlers?” Jensen asked. “Lynn Ehlers, I think.”

  “Where’s Jessie?” Ehlers asked without responding to the query. “I hear she’s got a dog missing. And what the hell are you doing in her house?”

  CHAPTER 17

  For a long minute Alex Jensen stared down at Lynn Ehlers, who stood just inside the door of Jessie’s new log house. Then he continued his descent and ambled casually across the room to confront the man and his demand.

  “I’m looking for some clue as to where she’s gone,” he said reasonably. “What are you doing in her house?”

  Ehlers ignored the question. “I have a feeling she might not want you in here,” he said. “You have no right to be going through her stuff. What do you mean, ‘where she’s gone’?”

  For another minute Jensen let him wonder, while he wondered just how much to tell this man whom he considered a possible source of leads.

  “We found her abandoned pickup out the Parks Highway, and she’s disappeared,” he said finally, watching closely for Ehlers’s reaction to this bit of information.

  “It’s in the driveway,” Ehlers stated flatly. “I just passed it on my way in.”

  “We brought it back to town.”

  “We?”

  “Phil Becker and I. I’m back working with the Palmer troopers. You know Becker?”

  “I know him. So? Where’s Jessie?”

  Jensen was not pleased by Ehlers’s belligerent attitude, but held his temper. “We don’t know that yet. Got any ideas?”

  Ehlers thought for a minute. “Judy Clark says Tank’s gone missing. She must be out looking for him.”

  “Without her truck?”

  “Well, she can’t have hiked off very far. She’s got a bum knee. Did you check around where you found it?”

  “Yes, and it had been sitting there for over four hours. Can you think of a reason she’d leave it that long?”

  Ehlers shook his head and shrugged an unspoken negative response, the frown that creased his forehead changing to include worry along with hostility. Jensen’s questions had put him on the defensive, which he found unwarranted.

  The two men stood staring at each other in a confrontation they both knew had little to do with the subject at hand—and everything to do with Jessie Arnold personally.

  Jensen finally broke the loaded silence. “How long has it been since you saw her?”

  “Over a week. I stopped by to see if she needed anything from town, or help with the dogs she had kept here. But her knee’s healed enough so she gets around okay on her own if she takes it easy.”

  “Sure you didn’t see her earlier today?”

  Ehlers fielded this insinuation with an elevation of temper. “No, dammit. Not today. Would I be here looking for her if I knew where she was? Just what the hell is this all about anyway? Seems like more than just a stolen dog to me.”

  “It is. A man’s been murdered at the fairground in Palmer. Some of what we’ve learned about that may relate to a runaway boy and a blackmailing phone call Jessie got last night from whoever took Tank. She may not have gone off by choice.”

  The anger on Ehlers’s face shifted to concern. “Oh, shit!” he said. Closing the door he had burst through, he crossed to the dining table near Jessie’s kitchen and sat down heavily in one of her colorfully painted chairs. “Tell me. And what can I do to help? There’s no sense wasting time circling each other like a pair of pit bulls.”

  So we both looked throug
h the house for clues to where you might have been headed, but found nothing,” Jensen explained. “Then Ehlers volunteered go back out to the kennel on Parks Highway where he was keeping his dogs—and yours, Jessie. He said he would gather some people there who were familiar with the area and begin a search for you. He left and I went to the office to meet Becker. But I went back later.”

  There’s no way of telling where that threatening phone call was made,” Becker told Jensen when he returned to the office. “There was no record of a call to Jessie’s from a pay phone on the grounds. If Wease used a cell phone it must have belonged to someone else.”

  “Well, it was a long shot. Anything from Timmons at the lab?”

  “Not much. The prints on the ax belong to the lumberjacks in the show, as we expected. I’ve got a man checking on all of them, but just to clear them. I don’t expect anything really. We know the ax shouldn’t have been left in the arena. They think it was somehow overlooked when they locked up the equipment they use twice a day. The shed where they’re kept was still locked, with no sign of tampering. If it was left out, it could have been a lucky opportunity for the killer, not planned ahead of time. It may actually have inspired the killing.

  “It’s interesting, though, that Timmons says the dead guy was beat up pretty good before he was killed. Danny Tabor said that he saw two men arguing just before he took off on his bicycle that night. We know one of them was Wease, and I’m wondering if the other could have been Belmont. I didn’t make anything of it when I talked to Danny because Wease interrupted before he could give me any details. But I think we’d better go have a chat with the boy in the morning. Let’s concentrate on the other loose ends tonight. Knowing Jessie, she’ll probably show up soon, wondering what all the fuss is about.”