Deadfall

by Sue Henry

  “Not that either of us could think of. He’s had a live-in girlfriend for a couple of years now. It’s a long shot, but worth checking, maybe. There are other possibilities that seem more likely to me.”

  “I agree. Something related to the Iditarod makes the most sense, I think.”

  “It seems like it. But the fact that someone sent the committee a negative letter doesn’t prove the sender is related in any way to the race or the mushing community—just that he knows she is. Could be someone who’s watched her, even on television, and used it as a means of harassment. I doubt it’ll be the last note received by someone that slanders Jessie.”

  But the next bit of depravity did not arrive in anyone’s mailbox. Returning home Friday evening with Caroline Tannerly, the rookie trooper who was impersonating Jessie, Jensen was confronted by a furious neighbor, parked and waiting in front of the cabin. He climbed out of his pickup and stomped across to wave a fist in Alex’s face.

  “Dammit. I don’t care if you’re the law. You’re gonna pay me for the nanny them damn dogs of yours savaged. A ‘gee whiz, we’re so sorry’ note tacked onto my shed just don’t cut it.”

  “Whoa, Jim. What note? Slow down a minute and tell me what you’re talking about. Nanny? You mean one of your goats?”

  “You better fuckin’ believe it. My best milker. Hadda be your damn dogs. No others around I know of. Whatcha gonna do about it, huh? What?”

  The older man was so angry, his face so red, that he looked near a heart attack, and was almost ready to hit something or somebody. Alex knew him enough to remember that Jim Bradford treated his goats almost like the family he didn’t have. His animals always won prizes at the state fair in Palmer, were extremely well cared for, and he always had a waiting list for the high-quality milk they produced.

  “Well,” Alex told him sympathetically, “whatever it takes, we’ll make it right, Jim. Now let’s go inside and have a beer while we talk it over. There are some things going on that you don’t know about.”

  Settled with a Killian’s at the kitchen table, Bradford calmed down and related his tale of disaster.

  “I took the truck to town yesterday, just after noon, to pick up a roll of fence wire—gotta weak spot in it, out by the trees. When I come back the goats was all up by the shed, crowded up like they was scared of somethin’. I looked ’round and didn’t see Gertrude, so I hiked on down to the end of the field. And there she was, layin’ on the ground, her udder and flanks all tore up, and there was dog tracks all over the place ’round her. Thought I’d hafta put her down, but the vet came in a hurry and took care of her. Says he thinks she’ll be okay when she heals up, but might be crippled in one back leg.

  “So, what else but your dogs? Hadda be….” His face grew pink as his temper took over again.

  “Wait a minute, Jim. This happened yesterday afternoon?”

  “Yeah. While I was gone to town.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have been Jessie’s dogs, then. We had them moved to Willow on Wednesday.”

  “Willow?” The old man frowned. “Then why’d you leave the note?”

  “Have you got that note?”

  He hauled it out of a pocket of his red Woolrich jacket and laid it on the table, slightly crumpled and grubby from handling, but readily readable. White paper—computer-printed:

  SO SORRY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR GOAT. YOU SHOULD BUILD BETTER FENCES, OR NOT KEEP THEM SO CLOSE TO A KENNEL. AFTER ALL, YOU CAN’T BLAME A DOG FOR BEING A DOG.

  JESSIE ARNOLD

  “Jim, Jessie never wrote this. She’s been in the hospital since Tuesday afternoon.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  Bradford turned to the woman Alex had carried into the cabin and whom he had assumed was Jessie. In his distress, he had never really looked at her; now he could see that it wasn’t her at all.

  “This is a trooper who’s helping me out, Jim. I’ll tell you what’s been going on, but you’ve got to promise to keep it to yourself.”

  The old man nodded—so thunderstruck he forgot to close his mouth—then turned back to stare and listen as Alex began a somewhat abbreviated explanation.

  Jim Bradford had no more than disappeared down the driveway when Phil Becker came to the cabin from the trees at the far end of the dog lot, where he and a forensics team had been searching the woods for clues.

  “I didn’t see any vehicles. Thought you guys must be gone,” Jensen said, letting him in.

  “Nope. Couldn’t get here early this morning. Had a robbery in Palmer we had to cover first. We parked off the road farther down, and there’s indications that someone else’s been off the road there with a truck of some kind. No tire tracks we can identify, but at least we know it’s been used. There’s something else—in the trees. Get your jacket and come on out. You’ll want to see this.”

  Estimating the area from which the pictures of Jessie and Linda had been taken, the search team of three had sectioned off the perimeter with yellow crime scene tape and concentrated within it. Becker led Jensen to a spot behind a screen of brush. One trooper examined the area for clues and another was on his knees with a camera, taking flash pictures of the ground beside a birch. Alex nodded to them.

  “You said he’d leave something,” Becker said. “There it is. Love to know what he took away.”

  “He took the pictures. Doesn’t look like he was too worried about leaving these, though. Why not?”

  Beneath the tree were several boot prints, surrounded by the paw prints of a dog, or—from the number of them—more than one.

  The trooper with the camera lowered his camera and looked up.

  “Didn’t care because there’s not much to learn from them. It’d be extremely difficult to tell one dog from another, though I’m sure there were two of them and that they were big dogs—Rottweilers, maybe. The boots are Red Wings—common as the dirt they made prints in…well-worn, from the look of them. You most likely couldn’t tell them from a thousand others on Alaskan feet in this part of the country.”

  “So there’s nothing that helps?”

  “I didn’t say that. Just that the prints are probably no good for specific identification. We’ll do a thorough workup for specifics at the lab, but don’t get your hopes up.

  “He’s been here more than once. There’re two more places that look like someone spent some time—and both gave him a good view of the cabin and dog lot. There’s no fiber, no human hair that we can find, but some canine. To stay here any length of time without being spotted, he’d have to wear something that blended in well with this environment. I’m wondering if he might not have worn some kind of camouflage. Wouldn’t take much in the right colors—browns, grays.”

  He pointed to another part of the taped-off ground.

  “There was a very small amount of blood smeared at a low level on a tree over there. Looked pretty fresh. I cut it out for testing.”

  Jensen could see the pale blaze marking the birch the trooper referred to and shook his head.

  “That’s just about the height of a dog. I think you’ll find the blood’s from our neighbor’s goat. This guy’s branching out. Looks like he sicced his dogs on a milk goat and left a nasty ‘so-sorry’ note tacked to a shed door. Tore the nanny up pretty badly.”

  “Nice guy,” the cameraman commented wryly. “There’s one other kind of odd thing about these tracks. Don’t know if it means anything, but the weight of this guy seems to be distributed oddly.”

  “Oddly?”

  “Well, you know how a bare footprint looks. It has a heel mark, a ball of the foot and toe mark, but only a slim impression from the outside edge of the foot—no print under the arch, which lifts that part of the foot away from contact. In a shoe or boot it’s hard to tell, of course, but these prints seem to have made a heavier impression on the inside than on the outside of both feet—like he was walking very badly knock-kneed.”

  “What the hell would cause that?”

  “It might be the r
esult of a symmetrical physical deformity—or he might have been wearing some kind of insoles that threw his weight to the inside, but it’s something you hardly ever find on both feet. Odd. We’ll take casts of these. Along with some photos, they might be of some help later.”

  “Thanks. Anything else?”

  “Not so far. Sorry.”

  The search team spent the rest of the afternoon combing the woods and dog lot, but found nothing else. Jensen left the cabin a couple of times, but stayed mostly indoors with Tannerly as they waited to see if the phone would ring and give them a chance to record the mystery caller. It remained silent except for two condolence calls from friends of Jessie’s. Alex told them both that she was resting and couldn’t come to the phone, but appreciated their good wishes.

  When they finished working the scene, Becker and the other two troopers came in and, after a few diversions between car and cabin, Caroline Tannerly left with them, wearing a cap instead of the wig, and walking on her own two feet. If the stalker had been watching, Alex hoped he wouldn’t notice and would think Jessie was in the cabin.

  As it grew dark, he turned on the lights, stoked the fire, and set about making himself some dinner. It seemed terribly quiet in the cabin without Jessie, especially since there weren’t even the usual small sounds from the dogs outside. In the back of his mind, he kept feeling that he had forgotten to feed them, then remembered they were gone. Normally he would have brought Tank in to keep him company, but even the affectionate, dignified lead dog was off with Jessie on the island. He wondered if the two of them had eaten dinner yet.

  Tossing a foil-wrapped potato into the oven to bake, he seasoned a small steak to broil, and absent-mindedly made a salad that was much too large for one person. Running out of cooking chores, he retrieved a Killian’s long-neck from the refrigerator, switched on the television, and sat down to watch the news.

  Jessie called at eight and, in the brief couple of sentences they had agreed would be best, let him know she was fine and missed him. An hour later, he had flipped through the TV listings, discovered a rerun of The Great Escape, a favorite, and settled on the sofa to watch Steve McQueen and his compatriots tunnel their way out of captivity. The movie claimed his interest through dinner, a quick kitchen cleanup, and half a cup of tea. He watched McQueen bounce his baseball off the wall of his solitary confinement cell, but dozed off, warmed by the woodstove and pleasantly full of food, while the escape was still in its creative stages.

  Something obnoxiously loud and full of Chuck Norris fighting a conglomeration of shadowy ninjas had replaced World War II when the telephone brought Alex back to consciousness. Stabbing awkwardly at the off button on the TV remote, he staggered up to answer it. The caller ID indicated that once again the call was unidentifiable, so he started the recorder before lifting the receiver and waited silently for Jessie’s voice to say, “Arnold Kennels. Hello…hello?”

  It worked. There was silence on the open line for perhaps ten seconds, then the short sound he had wanted to catch—as if the caller had taken his hand away from the mouthpiece to hang up the phone and allowed the background noise to be heard for a second or two—sounds like those that would be made in a crowded place by other people—a bar, maybe, or a restaurant, a gathering of some kind. The receiver on the other end of the line went down and the sound changed to that of a closed line.

  The recorder he had attached had automatically clicked on. He was able to play it back and assure himself that he had captured an example of the harassing calls that could be analyzed and might possibly lead somewhere.

  Satisfied, he went to bed, anxious to make an early start to the Anchorage lab the next morning.

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning when a fist-sized, note-wrapped rock shattered the window that overlooked the dog lot, sending shards of glass flying across the outer room.

  Alex unwrapped the note:

  I’LL GET YOU NEXT TIME, BITCH.

  Well, at least he thinks Jessie is at home, Alex decided, assessing the damage with disgust.

  12

  Jessie spent the afternoon outdoors, enjoying the sunny day, but though she felt safe and relieved to be away from the harassment, she found that a significant part of her mind and emotions was still very much attached to Knik. She couldn’t quite relax and allow herself to let go of the wary watchfulness that had so quickly become a part of her everyday life. There was also a niggling thread of guilt at leaving Alex to solve the mystery of the mysterious stalker—a feeling that she should be doing something herself, not hiding out. But it had been clear that he would do a better job without her to worry about, and there had been little choice, really. Well, she decided, it will take some time. By tomorrow I’ll be able to let more of it go.

  From the boxes of groceries she took three slices of wheat bread and, tearing them to pieces, scattered them along the bench on the deck for the opportunistic jays. But while she watched them greedily gobbling up the offering and took several pictures, using a zoom lens to fill the frame with the cocky birds in their brilliant plumage, she couldn’t keep herself from occasionally lowering the camera to glance around, checking to make sure she was alone. Aside from a small boat with a red canopy that, made tiny by distance, sped across the open water of Eldred Passage heading for Tutka Bay, there was no sign of anyone at all. The day was warm, fingered by a gentle breeze that rippled the surface of the cove, holding only the natural sounds of birds and water washing the larger rocks of the shingle as the tide continued to go out.

  When the bread disappeared, so did the jays, though two squirrels chased each other up the trunk of a nearby evergreen and a large, inquisitive raven perched on the wooden handrail to watch her closely and assess the possibility of additional scraps. Ignoring it, she called Tank, who had been exploring new and fascinating smells between the pilings on which the house was raised, and they walked slowly west along the sweeping crescent of the beach, avoiding the big rocks, keeping to the pebbles and sand above the high tide line.

  As she walked, Jessie examined the varicolored, water-worn stones and white pieces of broken clamshell, picking up a few pieces, pocketing one of a smoothness particularly pleasing to her fingers. Bleached pure white by the elements, the shells reminded her so much of skeletal remains that she had always called them beach bones, and on each trip to Niqa, she took home a handful to add to a gradually filling glass jar on her desk. She also looked carefully for small flat stones with notches chipped in two opposing sides, for, hundreds of years earlier, they had been shaped by Native fishermen to use as sinkers for their lines and could sometimes be found, though she had always been remarkably unsuccessful in her attempts and retrieved none now.

  Over the edge of a low rise above the beach, the meadow spread out: a wide-open space full of tall grass, and beyond, dense forest met it at the bottom of a steep slope, full of brush and all but impassable. Along the water side of the rise, huge logs had washed in, driven by a combination of winter storms and high tides. A few were piled atop each other; others lay half buried in sand and had been there so long that runners of beach peas had thrust their way up to cling and camouflage sections of the pale, sea-silvered driftwood with their bright green foliage and purple blossoms.

  Among these, Jessie found a gap where two logs lay together in a V, forming a deep, sun-warmed space carpeted with sand and affording a view of the north side of the nearest island across the waters of the cove. Here she sat, wiggling her hips to make a comfortable depression in the sand, then leaning back against a log to watch an eagle draw lazy circles overhead as it searched the waves for fish.

  Tank abandoned his olfactory examination of a drying pile of bull kelp the tide had abandoned, flopped down beside his mistress, stretched his jaws in a huge yawn, and laid his muzzle on his forepaws for a rest that soon turned into a nap.

  It had always seemed to Jessie that time on Niqa was somehow different from time anywhere else. It passed too quickly, filled with the comings and goings of pe
ople who enjoyed each other’s company. She had never been alone on the island before, and wondered if the time would stretch out without conversation and activities to fill the days. She also wondered briefly what Alex would be doing with his time, how he would go about finding the person who had upset her life—both their lives—so completely. Involuntarily, she felt her body tighten as if a fist had clenched inside her. Part of the reason she had lost her appetite, had not been able to sleep well or lower her guard in the last few days, had been a constant feeling of weight and pressure in her upper chest and throat. She laid a hand flat against her breastbone and, taking two deep breaths, felt the sensation lessen slightly.

  Leaving the beach house, she had borrowed a faded, billed cap from one of the hooks by the door. Now she purposely pulled it down to cover her eyes, ignored a stab of concern at not being able to see what was around her, and closed her eyes. Stubbornly, she refused to contemplate any danger and chose to think instead about the coming winter’s sled dog racing schedule and what preparation her dogs would need to be ready for it, what gear she would need to acquire or repair, what events she would enter this year.

  She was considering the possibility of entering the state’s second premiere distance race, the Yukon Quest, as well as the Iditarod, feeling that she finally had enough well-trained dogs to field two teams. The Quest took place in February, however, and her own physical recovery time between the races would be critical, for both were exhausting endurance tests. There would also have to be someone at the kennel to keep up the training of her Iditarod team to get them ready for her return from racing between Fairbanks and Whitehorse in Canadian Yukon Territory. In the twenty-five years since it had started, the Iditarod had changed and become a more professional event, with highly technical equipment and training methods. The Yukon Quest was close to the same length, but more like sled dog racing had been in the Iditarod’s early days. It had fewer checkpoints and longer runs. Though both races took mushers through difficult wilderness country in winter weather, temperatures during the Quest were usually colder because its course ran through interior country far from the coast.