Unbearably Deadly (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 9)

by Jerold Last

  “At best, Fred Fleming is a lousy manager and the others are taking advantage of his lax management style. At worst, there’s a lot of time being spent off the books even though the Park Rangers are being paid as if they were on the clock.”

  Ingrid sipped some more water. “I tried to follow Ranger Ed Farrell once. He headed through the woods behind the Lodge to wherever he was going, but I lost him in a particularly dense patch of alders about a half-mile west of the Lodge. I also tried following Dallas Corddell once when he drove his jeep off the regular road in the middle of nowhere. I was afraid he’d see me if I got too close, so I stayed back a ways and followed the dust and tire tracks. We hit a patch of wet tundra where I lost his trail, so I don’t know what he was doing either.”

  She took another sip of water. “The National Park Service isn’t known for its generosity. Park Rangers usually work hard for a salary they can barely live on. They don’t often live high on the hog. My four colleagues all seem to be living beyond their means. Fred Fleming and Ed Farrell drive big new trucks that must have cost them at least 30 grand each. They all seem to party a lot and buy unlimited amounts of beer. I live with two official uniforms and do a lot of laundry. They seem to have a fresh uniform every day, so must have at least five sets each. If I get a vacation, all I can afford is Anchorage or Fairbanks. The others seem to be able to afford the lower 48 states and international travel. They always seem to have plenty of cash in their pockets when we go anywhere together. I could go on, but I assume you get the idea.

  “All of this just doesn’t pass the sniff test. I think they’re all dirty. One way or another they’re pocketing cash from somewhere, over and above their National Park Service paychecks.”

  Ingrid continued her story for about fifteen minutes longer, but didn’t say anything new or exciting.

  After Ingrid’s narrative was over Barbara asked her a series of questions about her whereabouts during the episode when the bear Suzanne and I found in the woods was shot, and where was she when the Roberts were killed? She answered both with “working”. But she was working on her own so there wasn’t any way to independently verify her whereabouts for either time. Barbara also asked her a long series of questions about her specific duties, asked her who she reported to, and asked what kind of performance evaluations she had received on the job.

  They were finishing up the process when Gretchen motioned for Jason to come over to join us. “Jason, I want you to prepare all the necessary forms and head over to the courthouse in time to catch the noon recess. Get a judge to sign the subpoenas for all of the necessary bank and phone records. If you have a choice, Judge Oren Harris will give you the least resistance. Your probable cause is a confidential informant who told us they had witnessed suspected criminal activity involving some, or all, of the participants. We need all of the deposit and withdrawal statements over the last two years for checking and savings accounts belonging to all of the suspects in this case. That’s basically all the names of the Park Rangers, bus drivers, and concession employees at the National Park plus ATF agent Bednor and FBI Special Agent Ed Barclay. You can tell the judge whatever you know about this case, but make sure he knows there are two murders involved.

  “As soon as you have the warrants, call all the local banks and ask whether any of the suspects has an account there. If you find any, and you will, tell them you have a warrant then drive on over and get copies of all the records. Do the same for the telephone records. We’re looking for patterns here. If anyone made a big deposit, is there a matching withdrawal from someone else’s account to match it? Are any of these folks chatting with each other over the phone? You’ve got the idea. If you can figure out how to do it, I’d love to know whether the various concessions were giving kickbacks to the Park Rangers. Think about how we might be able to investigate the possibility. Keep me in the loop as you go along. And Jason, Ingrid’s statement was a big help. Thanks.”

  The door to the interview room opened and Barbara came out, followed by Ingrid Ravenswood. Barbara joined our little group while Ingrid kept going on out of the FBI offices.

  “You’re next, Suzanne,” Barbara said cheerfully. “Come on into the interview room. Roger, I have to ask you to wait outside in the waiting area while we take your wife’s statement. If this mess goes to trial I want us all to be able to testify you didn’t hear what Suzanne said in her statement so we can use your testimony as corroboration of what she tells us.”

  I went out to the designated waiting area, noting that Ranger Ravenswood had continued onward, out to the street and beyond. She and Jason seemed to be observing the rules regarding no further contact between them. I found a comfortable seat, pulled out my laptop computer, and started catching up on my e-mail.

  I was still sitting out in the reception area waiting for my turn to give the FBI agents a formal statement and answering accumulated emails when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hi there!” Joe Corti, accompanied by Lloyd Farquahr, was looking for a place to sit down while waiting their turns to be interrogated for their formal statements.

  “Good morning Joe, Lloyd,” I replied. “I guess sooner or later we’ll all be going through here to either give our statements or see the jail cells, wherever they are.”

  Corti smiled wryly. “So you and Suzanne were fishing for more than graylings when I met you for the first time a few days ago. You both did a real good job of playing the role of an innocent tourist. I didn’t suspect you were both undercover FBI agents until everything came down yesterday. Tell me, was anything Suzanne told me about how she grew up in Northern California the truth?”

  “All of it was, Joe,” I replied carefully.

  He and Lloyd Farquahr, who hadn’t said a word, found seats conspicuously as far away from me as they could to wait until their names were called.

  Suzanne took about 45 minutes to complete her statement. She came out to tell me it was my turn, took my seat, and asked if she could borrow my laptop. I left her reading and answering her e-mail while I got my turn to sit in the hot seat.

  Well, it was more like a warm seat, or even a tepid seat. Barbara took me through my statement from when I first learned about the death of Roberta and Francis Roberts until this morning. She stuck to the facts and things moved along pretty quickly. It was actually a reasonably pleasant experience, which gave me time to think about everything we’d seen and heard in a much more organized fashion than I’d had a chance to do before. Something clicked into place and suddenly I was very sure I knew who it had been in the bushes when Cathy had taken her shot at Suzanne. There wasn’t much any of us could do about it until we returned to the Lodge, so I didn’t say anything about my deduction, which was pure speculation, in my formal statement.

  “There’s time for you and Suzanne to grab lunch before the helicopter will be refueled and ready to go,” Barbara was saying as I realized we were done with the statement. “Take an hour or an hour and a half for lunch. The statements should be ready for both of you to sign and you can fly back to the Lodge then. Today’s a busy day for us here. The first hearings and the arraignment for Ed Barclay should be this afternoon. Why don’t we plan on having the chopper fly back to the Lodge to pick you up all packed and ready to go and return you to Anchorage some time tomorrow afternoon or evening. We can have dinner together and compare notes. You should be able to fly back to California some time tomorrow or the next day and start forgetting about all the bad stuff you’ve seen here.”

  “Sounds good to me, Barbara,” I replied. “But there’s one more thing you can do for me. There’s something I want to check. Could you give me copies of the personnel files for all of the Park Rangers and concession employees? I’m especially interested in where they’ve been and what they did before they got to Alaska. I assume you’ve already collected these data for your case files.”

  “I’ll have copies of those files ready for you after lunch, Roger. Do you want to tell me what you’re looking for?”


  “Not yet, but soon,” I replied.

  We signed our statements after lunch and prepared ourselves for another helicopter ride from the roof of the building containing the FBI offices to the Lodge.

  Barbara handed me copies of the files I’d asked for. They filled two thick loose-leaf binders, with literally hundreds of pages in each binder. “Enjoy a little light reading for the trip back, Roger,” she said with a wry grin.

  We were in the air heading north within 10 minutes. The scenery below looked just about the same as it had during the several trips we’d taken in the last few days. I was quickly bored, so turned to the two binders Barbara had prepared for me. The files were arranged between tabs marked with the various suspects’ names. I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking for, so flipped directly to the file for one of the Park Rangers. It was easy to quickly scan through the lists of training sites and dates, followed by postings and dates, and the psychological evaluations at each post for the person in question. I scribbled everything to be found on a blank sheet of paper. I repeated the same search procedure for all of the other files, comparing each with the notes I’d just made. I found the match I was looking for surprisingly easily. Then I went back and read the entire files of both individuals very carefully. And there it was, right in front of me. The information in the files gave us motive, means, opportunity, and connections.

  It was hard to talk over the noise of the engines, so I stowed the binders and my notes under the seat and decided to wait until we were back at our cabin to share my suspicions with Suzanne. Just in case, I checked that my pistol’s magazine was fully loaded and made a mental note to cock and lock it as we left the helicopter. But I was pretty sure we’d be safe until very late tonight. If anyone intended to make another try for one or both of us, they’d try to catch us when we were both asleep.

  Chapter24. The Bear

  By mid-afternoon we were back to the park and finally relaxing at the cabin. I divided the files in half, pushing one of the piles toward Suzanne. “Can you look at these, please? A fresh set of eyes may see something I missed.”

  I explained what I was looking for and why. We shared the bed and the files. Several hours later we both reached our points of diminishing returns. In a latitude where it stayed light until 11 PM in the summer months, supper was usually served later than at home in California.

  “Let’s go over and get dinner,” I suggested. “You can tell me what you found over the appetizer, and we can discuss what to do about it over the main course.”

  Fifteen minutes later we found a table with clean place settings on our own in the Lodge’s dining room. Nobody seemed to be hosting. A harried looking waiter I didn’t recognize whipped by carrying a handful of dishes. He saw us, did a quick calculation of his workload, and asked. “Would it be OK if I just brought you the appetizer of the evening so you can get started? We’re very short-handed this evening!”

  “Sure,” I told him.

  He was back in a minute or two with a large plate containing a smoked salmon appetizer sliced thin on a bed of lettuce with sliced tomatoes and sliced onion, served with a small loaf of bread in a small basket for us to share. He also added a couple of bowls of soup and told us, “You can have grilled or poached salmon for dinner, or our world famous house meat loaf. I’m afraid those are the only choices available tonight.”

  Both of us opted for the grilled salmon.

  Suzanne sliced the bread thinly and put the sliced rounds back in the basket. As we helped ourselves to salmon and the fixings to go with our mystery soup I asked, “What, if anything, did you find in the files, Suzanne?”

  Suzanne tried a spoonful of the soup, made a face, took a bite of smoked salmon, and began answering me. “The logical thing you were looking for was most likely to be whether anybody in the stack of files had a relationship with anyone else before they got here. I started with Cathy, given she’s implicated in the murders by having the dart gun. It made sense to list all the places she’s been and look for whether there were any matches with somebody else in the stack of files. As I’m sure you already know, I hit the bulls eye with that approach. She flunked out of Park Ranger training school at exactly the same time Ingrid Ravenswood was at the Ranger Academy. So they’ve known each other for a long time. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that she’s been in the same area as each of Ingrid’s postings after Ms. Ravenswood became a Park Ranger.

  “My best guess would be, and it’s consistent with both her and Ingrid’s personnel evaluations and psychological profiles, is that they’ve had a sexual relationship since they met at the Academy. Poor Jason, I guess that means she was playing him for information and it’s not about romantic love for Ingrid when she’s with him.”

  I’d finished my share of the smoked salmon and my soup by then, and was not so eagerly looking forward to the grilled salmon. “What else do you think we might conclude about her dating Jason, Suzanne?”

  Suzanne tried the soup again, pushed it aside, and nibbled at her smoked salmon. “If she was using Jason to get information about what the FBI was doing, either she didn’t trust Ed Barclay or she wasn’t concerned about whether the FBI was investigating illegal poaching of bears in the National Park. Which in turn suggests the bear poachers and the illegal gold miners didn’t know each other existed and Ingrid had to be involved in the illegal gold mining. Two illegal gangs were stealing two different things from Denali National Park at the same time and probably didn’t know the other gang was at work. Talk about parallel play!

  “We don’t have any evidence she was doing the actual mining, so it’s most likely she was on the management side of the conspiracy. Ingrid’s record shows she’s highly intelligent. My best guess is she set the whole operation up, and was the one on the other end of the video surveillance at the illegal mine. She must have grabbed the air rifle and the phony bear claws and followed the Roberts to the clearing the day of the murders.”

  The dirty dishes and bowls from the first courses were pushed to the side of the table to make room and the grilled salmon plates appeared. The small piece of undercooked salmon sat on a forlorn lettuce leaf garnished with a slice of tomato. The rest of the plate contained a pile of overcooked fried potatoes and onions and a narrow slice of lemon.

  I tried a piece of the salmon, which tasted almost as bad as it looked. “Very good, Suzanne. That’s just about as far as I got comparing the files. You’re usually a lot better about analyzing detailed data than I am. Did you find anything else interesting in those files you read?”

  “I’m not sure, but might have,” she answered thoughtfully. “The whole gimmick of faking a bear attack to cover up the cold blooded murder of two innocent tourists bothers me. Given the need to have prepared ahead of time for the claws on the end of some kind of club to be ready to go when you needed them, there’s a strong proof of premeditation in the method. It’s also an especially vicious choice of method since the Roberts were both alive when “The Bear” attacked them. So they must have felt pain even under the influence of the Immobilon drugs. There’s no clear motive either. It had to be “wrong place, wrong time”, even though the odds were pretty good they hadn’t seen anything.

  “Remember how hard we had to search to find the mine in that big clearing even when we were looking for it? The whole scene screams overkill. It seems like those killings were more about unfocussed rage than covering up the illegal mining. So I looked very carefully at the psychological profiles for some indications of that kind of homicidal rage in one of the suspects, or the more likely indicators of a bad childhood which could have predisposed to that kind of personality.”

  We’d both eaten a couple of bites of the salmon, less of the potatoes. By unspoken mutual consent we agreed that was enough and pushed the plates away. Suzanne resumed her analysis. “Maybe it’s the kind of work at the National Park or maybe there’s something about the Alaskan wilderness that attracts those personality types, but there were several suspects in the
files who fit the profile. They had a bad childhood in a dysfunctional family, a sealed juvenile record with law enforcement, foster homes, erratic performance in school, and/or difficulties with substance abuse or making stable relationships as adults. Both Cathy and Ingrid fit that profile, but so did several of the other staff members. I suspect, but doubt we’ll ever be able to prove, that Ingrid was ‘The Bear’ who killed the Roberts.”

  “We’ve got Cathy on charges of possession of the dart rifle someone shot you with, and certainly by inference she was involved in the Roberts murder, if only as an accessory,” I agreed. “It’s going to be very hard to prove anything about Ingrid unless Cathy decides to confess. I doubt she’ll say anything unless we can think of some way to make her think Ingrid is talking to the FBI and implicating her. I wonder if there’s some way to use her relationship with Jason to drive a wedge between them?”

  “What do you think Ingrid actually did herself, and what do you think was Cathy’s role in the killings, Roger?”