Death Trap Page 16

  “Where’s this water jug?” Becker asked. “You move it?”

  “No. I thought we’d better leave it where we found it for you to see. I don’t like this one bit, Phil. It’s out of place here.”

  As Ehlers led them around his truck, they could see that the road ended approximately fifty feet beyond the vehicle. A narrow trail extended beyond it, disappearing into a forest of spruce, birch, and shrubbery that was similar to but thicker than that which surrounded Jessie’s cabin back on Knik Road.

  “Over here.”

  Twenty feet in front of his truck, he stopped and pointed away from the road. Until they caught up to where he stood, the blue plastic water container that lay just a few feet from the uneven roadway was invisible in the brush.

  Becker and Jensen both walked into the bushes to take a close look.

  The container lay where it had fallen and was partially obscured by foliage. Pulling a bandana from his pocket, Jensen rolled it over and found “Arnold” printed on the other side, as they had been told.

  “It’s Jessie’s, all right,” he said. “I should know. I labeled this one a few weeks before the Yukon Quest.” Picking it up by the handle with the bandana, he carried it carefully back to the road.

  “There won’t be prints unless someone tossed it back there,” Becker said.

  “There’s some of mine on the neck of it,” Ehlers informed them, noting the glance Jensen gave him.

  “You never know. We’ll send it in to John and see.” Setting it down on the gravel, Jensen hunkered down to examine it scrupulously. All he could ascertain was that one side had a crack, indicating that it had landed hard.

  Becker turned to Ehlers. “You look around?”

  “Not after you said to stay put. The trail back there seems to have been used by a four-wheeler, but I have no idea where or how far it goes.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “Before we do that, you should see these.” Closer to the disappearing trail, Ehlers showed them a set of tire tracks in the damp ground at the edge of the road. “I’m no expert, but these look like the same tread that I saw where Jessie’s truck was found parked. I think her truck could have made these, too.”

  “You think she drove in here?”

  “If she did, it looks like she parked there, then turned around and drove out again. It’s a rough road, as you found out. That blue plastic thing could easily have bounced out without her noticing.”

  “Makes sense, but it’s a good way from where her truck was found,” Jensen commented, having secured the water container inside Becker’s truck. “Why would she drive in here?”

  “Just to turn around, maybe,” Becker suggested.

  “She could have done that closer to the highway, and there are no kennels on this road. Jessie knows them all. She would have known that. She wouldn’t have parked if she were just turning around. Besides, it’s an assumption that Jessie was behind the wheel. It could have been someone else.”

  The four stood looking down at the tire tracks on the ground. They were familiar to Jensen, who had seen similar tracks in Jessie’s home driveway many times in the past.

  “No one up this far saw her,” Ehlers told him, “and they all know Jessie. We found the last people who remember seeing her—Judy Clark and Mose Atkinson. But that’s back toward Nancy Lake on the other side of the highway from where her truck was found. She stopped to talk to them the morning she disappeared. I spoke to Ben Smith, who lives beyond them. He didn’t see or talk to her, but he wasn’t there that morning. He did see an unfamiliar truck headed out, as he came home later. The other kennel owner on that road wasn’t home—if you call it a kennel. I wouldn’t.”

  He curled a lip in disgust, turned and spat onto the road as if something vile had left its taste in his mouth.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse,” Ehlers’s friend Dick Ray spoke up for the first time. “We’re going to report it. There’s fifteen or twenty dogs back there, malnourished and going without water.” He shook his head at the behavior of some people and angrily kicked a rock off the road. It ricocheted off a birch trunk and vanished into the brush.

  “Who’s the owner?” Becker asked.

  But Jensen had swung around and was walking away toward the trail at the end of the road.

  “Let’s see where this leads us,” he called back. “I don’t believe Jessie would’ve come this far in just to turn around and drive back out. The truck was parked, and I want to know why.”

  With room for only one at a time on the narrow trail, they started along it single file, Jensen leading. Becker walked behind him, with Ehlers and Ray following closely.

  The foliage at the top of the tall birches closed in overhead, blocking most of the light. The track was rough, with exposed roots in some places and depressions in others that slowed their pace. But there were sections that clearly showed tire tracks and recent wear from a four-wheeler. In places it was scarcely wide enough to allow even such a small vehicle to pass, but whoever used it had cut a tree now and then and evidently hacked at the brush with a machete. The signs of wheeled passage continued.

  They had walked approximately a quarter of a mile when Jensen stopped and stepped away from the track. Reaching into the brush, he picked up a length of what looked to Becker like rope. But when Jensen turned and held it out for the three behind him to see, it was a leash—the kind used to tether a dog.

  “Shit,” Becker said.

  Without a word, Jensen folded the leash in half and in half again to make it easier to carry. He started on, moving even faster than before.

  “I know this place,” Dick Ray said suddenly. “I ran dogs on this trail last winter. There’s an old prospector’s cabin not too far from here. Beyond that, this trail hooks up to another that leads back to Nancy Lake.”

  “How far?” Jensen demanded over his shoulder, without slowing.

  “Maybe as far as we’ve come from the road.”

  They went on, trotting now to keep up with the tall trooper who was stretching his long legs to cover ground rapidly without breaking into a run.

  Briefly Becker pictured the abandoned body of Ron Wease, as they had found him on the floor of his bloody kitchen, and hoped. He did not allow himself to examine the suggestion of dread that hovered close behind that hope—just clung to the shred or two of optimism he could dredge up as he hurried after his friend and partner.

  In total, they covered close to half a mile of winding trail before they found the old cabin Ray had mentioned. Trees had grown up around it over the years of its existence and abandonment, darkening the small clearing where the four men paused to assess the ancient building. Constructed of weathered logs, with a sagging sod roof, it appeared close to collapse—a natural return to the fallen and decaying logs that littered the floor of the forest and nurtured its growth.

  Again Jensen led the way across the clearing to the wooden door of the cabin. It looked solid, obviously opened out, and was tightly closed. With a quick, unreadable glance at Becker, he stepped up and, taking firm hold of the rusty piece of iron that had been nailed on as a handle, gave it a yank. With a warning screech, the whole door came away from the frame, the nails that had held the hinges rusted through.

  “Jeeze.” Throwing up his arms, Jensen arrested its fall. The hand-hewn planks from which it was made were dry and weighed so little that he was easily able to lift it away from the opening and lean it against the log wall to one side. Without hesitation, he stepped through the doorway into the cabin, followed by the other three.

  It was empty.

  “Careful,” he warned, waving a hand at the floor, which Becker could see was rotted through in more than one place, where the collapsing sod roof had allowed rain and snow to soak the planks of which it was made. Even the narrow beams that had supported the roof were bowed and broken. One had already fallen, scattering sod in lumps of dirt and dried grass beneath the resulting hole. In one corner, under another hole, a small, square
cast-iron stove had dripped enough rust to dye the planks on which it rested.

  “Look,” Becker said, pointing.

  They were hard to see in the dusk of the cabin’s interior, but on one still solid part of the floor a double line of boot prints had disturbed the dust and dirt that lay upon it—going across to a small window and returning. Someone had walked across this dilapidated room—recently.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jensen said nothing until they had returned to the trucks they had parked on the side road. He had lifted and leaned the door back in its place and left the clearing last, allowing Becker to take the lead on the way out. Falling in behind Ehlers, he walked head down, silent and thoughtful.

  “What now?” asked Ehlers when they stood by his pickup. “Somebody had obviously been there.”

  Jensen gave him a long look, then shrugged.

  “Keep looking, I guess. There’s got to be a reason that water container from Jessie’s truck wound up beside this particular road. We’ll send it to the lab, but I doubt we’ll get much in the way of prints. Maybe she did just turn around and bounce it out. I wonder, though, why she didn’t come to you for help when she headed out here yesterday morning. She would have had to pass your kennel, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes. I’ve wondered that myself. Maybe she wanted to search by herself for some reason. She’s like that sometimes.”

  There was a moment of silence while they stared at each other.

  “Maybe she did,” Jensen agreed finally, refusing to be drawn in by Ehlers’s knowledgeable observation about Jessie.

  Becker decided to break the tension. “Well, we’ve got to get back to town. There’re two murder cases on our plate at the moment. You going to keep on here?”

  “Yes—as long as it’s light, or until we find Jessie.”

  When they were back in the truck and Becker was about to back out to give Ehlers room to reach the highway, Jensen held up a restraining hand. “Wait,” he said. “Let them go first.”

  Becker complied, although this made it more difficult for Ehlers to turn his pickup around and meant he had to back it several times until he had clearance.

  “What was that about?” Becker asked as the other truck swung onto the highway and disappeared, leaving a thin cloud of dust hanging in the air above the unpaved side road.

  “You took a pretty good look at the boot prints in that cabin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about the pattern of Ehlers’s boots in the trail?”

  “Didn’t pay attention. Why?”

  “Come and look,” Jensen said, opening the cab door to climb out again.

  They walked back to where the narrow trail began, and he pointed to a section of damp earth that was bare of fallen leaves and other forest detritus.

  “He was walking right in front of me. I stepped around these last few prints he left—there.”

  Now familiar with the pattern of the prints he had crouched to examine in the cabin, Becker saw what Jensen meant.

  “They look similar.”

  “More like the same. Redwings. I have a pair myself, on their way up here from Idaho in a box I had my mother mail.”

  “I couldn’t swear to it without lab work—casts and photos. But if they’re the same size and the minute details match…” Becker allowed his words to trail off in thought. “But why would Ehlers make tracks in that cabin, then take us there to see them?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it.” Jensen’s forehead creased in a frown.

  “You want to get the boys from the lab out here to make sure of this?”

  “It’s not much to go on. Maybe later. Right now I want to know just who this Lynn Ehlers is—everything I can find out. I met him when Jessie ran the Quest, but I don’t know anything about him really. It’s time we did.”

  Becker got slowly to his feet and gave his partner an uneasy look.

  “What?” Jensen asked.

  “Alex, are you sure you aren’t reacting to—”

  “To whatever—ah—friendship he has with Jessie? Am I just jealous—out to get him?”

  “Could have sliced the tension in pieces back there. Might as well get it out and take a look at it.”

  Jensen turned without answering and walked away toward the truck, where he climbed into the passenger seat and waited for Becker.

  They had driven several miles toward Palmer in silence when he finally responded.

  “Maybe you’re right, Phil. I think I’m aware enough of the strain between us to set it aside, but—maybe not. Still those prints are so much the same it worries me. I didn’t make them up. There are a few other things. He volunteered to look for Jessie. He found the water container and made a point of explaining any prints of his that are found on it. Pretty convenient, isn’t it? I’d be suspicious of anyone else under the same circumstances. I can’t treat Ehlers any different, can I?”

  “From that angle, it makes sense to take a look,” Becker admitted. “But other parts of it don’t make sense, Alex. What connection does Ehlers have with Wease and Belmont? If Wease was Jessie’s caller and in on a robbery plan, where does Ehlers fit in?”

  “It’s a small town. They could have met since he moved up here from Minnesota. Look, all I really want is to find Jessie. Her being missing for a few hours would tell me there might be something wrong. This amount of time elapsed makes me sure there is. Where the hell is she, dammit?”

  Becker drove on, thinking hard about the division of Jensen’s attention. Jensen’s worry about Jessie was growing by the hour, while at the same time he was trying to concentrate on the rest of the confusion that confronted them both.

  “Look,” Becker suggested abruptly, “I think we should split up. You concentrate on finding Jessie. I’ll concentrate on these murders and the connections. I can talk to the boy and the old man. We can cover more ground and maybe come up with some answers.”

  For a long moment Jensen was silent. Then he nodded agreement. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Danny’s parents retrieved their son at the senior center and brought Frank Monroe along with him to meet the troopers at Becker’s office. There Becker heard from both about Danny’s flight from the man in the truck and his panicked arrival at the senior center. Danny had not stopped to take a good look at his pursuer, so his description was lacking in details, but he was sure he could recognize the man again if he saw him.

  “You hadn’t seen the man before, but you would know him if you saw him again, right?”

  “Yeah, sure I would! He got out of his truck and tried to grab me.” Danny’s face twisted with anxiety as he remembered.

  “I might want you to look at some people to see if you could pick him out,” Becker said.

  From Danny’s expression, he was not happy at the idea. But when Frank Monroe laid a hand on his shoulder and assured him that he would have protection and company, he nodded and agreed.

  “There has to be a reason why he came after you,” Becker told them. “Can either one of you think of a reason?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “What kind of truck was it?” he asked.

  “Brown and white,” Monroe answered. “Might have been a Chevy. But it came and went so rapidly that I had no opportunity to examine the license plate. I did observe that it was Alaskan, however.”

  Becker decided to let it go for the moment and asked for details of their two days at the fairground.

  The boy was much more willing to talk about his adventures in escaping Ron Wease and hiding out. He talked for five minutes, telling it all, with Monroe adding a word or two of clarification.

  “Parts of it were scary, but it was fun, most of the time,” Danny finished.

  “What did you like best?” Becker asked.

  “Doing things with Mr. Monroe—like being a scarecrow and sleeping under the table. And I really liked the dog.”

  “What dog?”

  “There was a woman named Jessie at the booth for the Idi
tarod. She let me pet her dog named Tank. She said you had to be really responsible if you had a dog. I’m going to try to be really responsible.” He cast a quick look at his father to see if this statement had registered.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Doug Tabor told him, knowing exactly where his son’s promise was aimed, and suppressing a grin.

  “Did you see the dog or Jessie again after that?” Becker asked hopefully.

  “Nope. I was going to, but I got chased after that, so I didn’t go back.”

  “Did you see the man who chased you with anyone else at the fairground?”

  The boy frowned, trying to remember. “Yes,” he said finally. “When I was hiding under the cabin he talked to a man with rainbow hair, and they walked off together.”

  “Rainbow hair?”

  “You know—they dye it at the fair—all different colors. It went out in points.” He made pulling motions with both hands from his scalp into the air to illustrate what he meant.

  “I remember that vendor,” Monroe smiled. “The spikes of hair made him somewhat resemble the Statue of Liberty, but each one was a different color. We observed the man who chased you with someone else, too, Danny. He was with another security guard in front of the office when we intended to turn in the bag the first time, remember? You hid in the T-shirt rack.”

  They related that incident, then told about hearing Wease in conversation with the barn manager and on the phone on their first night under the table. When they were finished, Becker, who had been making notes, asked Danny about another time and place.

  “Tell me more about the two men you saw arguing behind The Sluice Box,” he requested. “What did they look like?”

  “It was too dark to see much, but one had a blue jacket. The other one—the one who chased me when I accidentally took the red bag? He was taller.”

  Becker had hoped the boy would at least be able to put Wease and Belmont together. Ready to go on to another question, he swallowed it, gratification flooding in as Danny continued.

  “But I saw the one with the blue jacket before. He got pushed out the back door of The Sluice Box, and then I saw his face.”