Deadfall Read online

  “I’ll help. It won’t take long.”

  He picked up the package he had tossed on the sofa with the mail and reached across to lay it in her lap.

  “Here’s something to cheer you up—a package from my mom with your name on it.”

  Jessie tore off the brown outer wrapping from the package; the ends, covered with strapping tape, were impossible to rip. Bright birthday gift wrap covered the box and this she also tore off.

  “Looks like she forgot something—maybe the card—and had to reopen it,” Alex commented, noting the way the paper seemed to have been opened at one end and retaped.

  Jess opened the lid to find a soft blue hand-knit sweater inside the box.

  “Oh, how pretty. Your mom’s so nice to remember me.”

  She lifted it out and held it up, smiling, pleased.

  “What do you think?”

  “I like it—a lot.” Alex reached a hand to feel the softness.

  “Here’s the card.” She lifted it from the bottom of the box. “No, two cards.”

  The first was a humorous cartoon featuring Garfield the cat and enclosing a short, affectionate note from Keara Jensen. They read it together, smiling.

  “What’s the other one?” Alex asked. “Wonder why she sent two.”

  The envelope was sealed. Jessie carefully tore it open and removed a piece of paper folded like a business letter. Unfolding it, her smile vanished, and her face turned pale again.

  “Alex?” she croaked, in a strange, frightened voice, and looked up at him helplessly.

  He snatched it from her shaking fingers and read the few computer-printed words it held:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESSIE. DID YOU FIND THE PRESENTS I LEFT YOUR DOGS? I HOPE YOU APPRECIATE MY THOUGHTFULNESS. WE WILL RUN THIS RACE TOGETHER, BUT THIS TIME I GET TO WIN.

  4

  “Listen, Cas, I know I asked you guys to meet us in Anchorage for Jessie’s birthday dinner, but would you mind coming out here instead? We’ve suddenly got a very nasty situation. Some bastard is harassing Jessie, set traps in the kennel last night, and we really don’t want to leave the place unguarded. We could really use your help…. Great…. No, not now. I’ll fill you in when you get here. How soon can you make it?…Okay, see you shortly.”

  Jessie had categorically refused to leave the cabin for the special evening Alex had planned, and while he was in complete agreement, he was also in favor of salvaging something of her birthday celebration. He was also relieved for more than one reason when Ben and Linda Caswell readily agreed to the last-minute change in plans. It would be a good chance to get Ben’s take on the problems and his assistance, but he also empathized with Caswell, friend and fellow trooper, who would suffer no disappointment at substituting a pair of comfortably worn jeans and shirt for the sport jacket and tie the more formal dinner would have required. Neither man truly enjoyed wearing dress clothes, though they appreciated the positive response of their womenfolk when they were persuaded to do so. He recalled Jessie’s comment the first time she had seen him in a sport jacket and tie: “Hey, trooper, you clean up nice.”

  This evening, Jensen was satisfied not to have to make the effort, would rather concentrate on the circumstance of the traps and harassing note. In less than twenty-four hours three related incidents had occurred and escalated from confusion to actual threat. Alex had expressed only part of his concern to Jessie. Under the carefully controlled and thoughtful exterior he was trying to maintain, he was worried and apprehensive, fearfully aware that what had already happened should be viewed as a beginning and would probably, and quickly, get worse. What the hell was going on? Who was responsible, and why make Jessie a target? He had investigated this sort of thing before. It was unpleasant in the extreme, and he was maddened to have it happening to someone for whom he cared deeply. But, not ready to add to what was already considerably upsetting her, he kept his anxiety to himself.

  The birthday present from his mother had clearly undergone some tampering, either in transit or, more likely, after it reached their roadside mailbox. Alex had bagged both the package and note for removal to the crime lab for investigation, but it was unlikely they’d find anything other than his mother’s fingerprints and those of a few postal workers between Idaho and Alaska.

  Leaving the phone, he turned to see Jessie standing at the window staring out into the dog lot with a look of bewilderment on her face. Crossing the room, he stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

  “Jess…I think it would be better if you didn’t stand quite so close to the windows.”

  As she frowned and gave him a questioning look over her shoulder, he added, “We don’t know anything about this person, or what he or she is capable of, right? Better to be safe than sorry.”

  He walked with her toward the middle of the room.

  “You mean they might have a gun, don’t you?”

  “I mean…well, I don’t know. Oh, hell…yes. I guess there’s no sense playing games with it. Whoever it is could as easily have a gun as a trap. But what I really mean is that it’s time to be cautious. A lot of people are hurt just for making bad choices: putting themselves in harm’s way when they could have done something else—been more careful.”

  She looked up at him, silent for a long minute, then put her arms around his neck and hugged him close.

  “Thanks,” she said in his ear. “Thanks for thinking for me, while I’m still trying to get my head around this.”

  She leaned back and looked up at him with a frown.

  “I’m scared, Alex. I’m not used to being scared and I don’t like it. But what I like least is feeling that somebody else is in control of part of my life.”

  “You should be scared, and that’s not all a bad thing. It makes you more careful. We’re both scared. It’s a nasty, insidious situation.”

  “I’m sorry the nice dinner you had planned is spoiled.”

  “Hey, that’s no problem. We can do dinner anytime. Rain check, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As she kissed him warmly, the phone rang and she flinched a little in the circle of his arms.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just all those wrong numbers.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  The caller was Caswell, suggesting that he and Linda pick up pizza and beer on their way to Knik. “We’ll stop in Wasilla at that great Greek place.”

  Later, however, as they shared the large pizza, thick with extra toppings and cheese, around the kitchen table, the phone rang again and, when Alex insisted on picking it up, brought only silence to his ear. He came back scowling thoughtfully.

  “Jess? Did you hear anything but silence when you answered those other wrong numbers?”

  “Yeah. For just a second or two at the end it sounded like someone took their hand away from the mouthpiece to hang up, and there was a short noise, like they were in a crowded place of some kind.”

  “Right. Music?”

  “Don’t know. Might have been. Yeah…maybe. It was so short.”

  “What’s going on?” Linda Caswell asked, laying a hand on Jessie’s arm. “You been getting obscene phone calls, too?”

  “Not obscene—just no one there when she answers,” Alex told her. “For the last two days.”

  “No, Alex.” Jessie shook her head. “It’s been longer than that. Three, or four days, at least. I think the first one may have been last Tuesday or Wednesday. Wednesday, because I had just come in from the grocery store in Wasilla. It was ringing as I came in the door. I had to put the sacks down to catch it.”

  “Tell me how it sounds to you, Jess. From start to finish.”

  “Well…it’s like the line is open, someone there, listening and not saying anything. I say, ‘Arnold Kennels,’ like always, then, ‘Hello,’ but no one answers. Then, just at the last second, that little piece of sound, and they hang up.”

  Alex considered this, nodding.

  Caswell leaned forward to claim the last slice of pizza. />
  “You’re thinking the calls might be connected to this business with the traps?” he asked.

  “Right. Could be another piece of harassment.”

  There was concerned silence for a minute while they all thought about the disagreeable situation. Jessie suddenly stood up to reach across the table, collecting empty plates, glasses, and discarded napkins—more comfortable with her hands busy.

  Ben Caswell periodically worked with Alex, and socially he and Linda fit well with Alex and Jessie, for both couples enjoyed bridge, fishing trips, meals at one home or the other, and spirited conversation. Jessie and Linda planned similar small gardens in the late Alaskan spring, starting vegetables and flowers indoors from seed, sharing, and setting them out when all danger of frost was past in late May or early June. Cas and Alex had an ongoing, relaxed competition over who caught the most salmon each summer. The foursome had a relationship they valued and—like many residents of the farthest north state—viewed as extended family.

  “Let’s talk the whole thing over a little,” Ben now suggested. “If we assume that the calls are part of it, you’ve had three different things: calls, the traps—with their tags—and the note. Anything else?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Okay. Is there anything at all that may provide a clue to the identity of whoever’s responsible? One at a time—calls first.”

  He laid a spoon down on the table in front of him to represent the phone calls.

  “They all have that same scrap of sound at the end. It might be something the lab could identify if they had a recording and could slow it down…do their magic stuff.”

  “How about caller ID?” Linda asked. “You don’t have it, do you?”

  Alex shook his head. “Never had a reason to get it.”

  “What is caller ID exactly?” Jessie asked Linda. “Do you have it?”

  “It shows the number and name of most of your callers, and lists them so you can see who’s calling before you answer or before your answering machine takes over. It has a memory, so you can tell who called even if you’re not home.

  “We got it last year, when somebody got our unlisted number and kept waking us up in the wee hours. Turned out to be a teenager down the street with a dog that Ben had chased out of our yard several times before he threatened to call Animal Control. The next time the kid tried his get-even game we knew exactly who it was, and his father put a stop to it.”

  “You said most. Who doesn’t it list?”

  “Well, it doesn’t list cellular phone identification or the ones from phone booths. It reads ‘Out of Area’ for long distance calls, but who’s going to harass you long distance?”

  Cas returned to his mental list and laid a fork down next to the spoon.

  “The tags on the traps might turn out to be something, but from the look of them—and the traps—there’s not a chance of fingerprints, as you said. The writing on the tags won’t be worth much. Block letters, capitals, make handwriting identification very dicey—especially with such a small sample. Might be useful in combination with something else that you don’t have yet.”

  “There’s going to be nothing on this, either,” Jensen anticipated, bringing the package box and wrappings to the table in its evidence bag. He laid the note, similarly protected, beside Caswell. “I’ll take it in for testing just in case I’m wrong, but anyone capable of thinking something out this well is going to know enough to wear gloves. Television and movies have spoiled the fingerprint game.”

  “Well, DNA has replaced some of it,” Ben noted. “This note is pretty unidentifiable—plain computer paper anyone could pick up anywhere. Could have come from one of thousands of laser printers in the area. Your mother addressed the package, so re-using the wrapping paper negated the need to write or print the address. Too bad. I’d like to see more of that block printing. Maybe there would have been something.”

  Thoughtfully, he laid a knife beside the fork and spoon—three different parts of the same puzzle.

  Jessie suddenly sat up straight and looked at him, her eyes wide.

  “What?” Alex asked. “You think of something?”

  She got up so quickly her chair rocked on its legs, almost tipped over, and returned to the floor with a thump. Crossing the room to the desk, she opened a lower drawer filled with file folders and searched through them until she found the one she wanted. Bringing it back, she spilled a pile of envelopes and letters out across the surface of the table.

  The other three moved the bottles and silverware aside as the pile widened, spread by Jessie’s searching hands. Flipping over several envelopes, she glanced at their addresses and put the ones that didn’t interest her back into the folder.

  “There’s more?” Alex asked. “You got more notes from this person?”

  He began to help her look through the assortment of mail.

  Jessie Arnold was a well-known Iditarod musher. Though she had never won the race, she had come close, once taking second, and for several years she had placed in the top ten finishers. People from all over Alaska, as well as from places in the other forty-nine states and a few foreign countries, knew her name and often wrote her letters. She answered and kept them all, even the ones that were negative in tone, though frequently the people who wrote disapproving ones lacked the nerve to include their names or return addresses.

  “Here.” She lifted an envelope from the pile and handed it to Alex, who examined it as she went on hunting through the rest of the pile.

  Cas and Linda leaned over to look as Alex took out a single sheet and opened it to reveal another computer-printed note with no signature.

  GIVE UP THE IDITAROD. YOU’LL BE SORRY IF YOU DON’T.

  The address on the envelope was on a label that was also computer printed.

  By the time they had finished examining it, Jessie had found another with an address on the envelope so much like the first that it could have been printed at the same time. This one read:

  STOP RUNNING DOGS IN THE IDITAROD OR YOU WILL BE STOPPED.

  “I knew that note in the package looked familiar,” Jessie said, scooping the rest of the letters back into the file. “These were in the mail sometime in the last month. One is postmarked late in August, the other isn’t postmarked.”

  “These don’t sound quite like the first,” Alex observed. “No reference to a shared race.”

  “Which came first?” Caswell asked.

  “The postmarked one. I noticed, because the lack of a postmark on the other made me wonder if someone local could have put it in our box.”

  The postmark was, indeed, August, and had been applied in Anchorage.

  “We could find out where,” Cas said. “But I’ll take a guess and predict that it was mailed at the big airport post office that’s open twenty-four hours a day—not at a local branch.”

  “Who is it?” Jessie pounded a fist on the table, making silverware jump and an empty beer bottle fall over. “Why have they picked me to badger? This just isn’t fair. It leaves me feeling helpless, with nothing to do—no way to respond.”

  “Unfortunately, Jessie, it doesn’t have to be fair, and there doesn’t have to be much of a reason for it, except in the mind of the perp. That, in fact, is the very idea of this kind of harassment—to create fear that you have no way of responding to directly.”

  Caswell picked up the note that had come in the package and examined it through the protective plastic.

  “This person seems to have some objection to your participation in the Iditarod or is using it as an excuse for some other slight, imagined or real. Who knows? But each note seems a little more sophisticated, but the threats are pretty clear.”

  Alex agreed, worrying one end of his handlebar mustache. “I think that concerns me more than anything else about it.”

  Linda had been mostly listening to the exchange about the notes. Now she turned to Jessie, and gave her a straight, serious look.

  “I think you should consider getting out of
here, Jessie. Go somewhere where this person can’t follow you—let them cool off. Maybe our guys can find out who’s responsible and clear it up. But you’ll be safe—out of range. That’s what I’d do.”

  Jessie stared at her, mouth open, and began to shake her head before Linda had even finished her statement.

  “I couldn’t—not just take off. There’re the dogs to take care of. Besides, can’t they catch this person just as well if I’m here as they could if I were gone? Alex? Ben? No. I won’t go. This is where I live—my home. I didn’t do anything, so why should I leave? Where would I go anyway?”

  “How about a trip to Idaho?” Alex suggested. “I’d been thinking we should go maybe next spring. Why don’t you go now? My folks would love to have you.”

  “Ale-e-x! Not a chance. Out…of…the…question!”

  “Go ahead, Jess. Tell us how you really feel about it.” Alex grinned at the Caswells.

  Jessie was forced to laugh at herself, but it didn’t discourage her from presenting one more rationale.

  “If I left, the harassment would probably stop. Then how would you find out who it is? You’ve both all but admitted that you don’t have enough evidence to identify anyone, really. You need more. How are you going to get it if I’m not here as the target?”

  Alex was anything but happy at her choice of the word target to describe herself, though he knew it was accurate and, unfortunately, appropriate—also that she could be right.

  5

  The next day, Sunday, passed quietly, with no further suggestion of trouble, though Jessie and Alex were both watchful and uneasy. Individually and together, they had been up and down several times during Saturday night to check the dog lot from the window. Alex had disabled the motion detector so the floodlights remained on all night. Because light did not reach to the back of the yard, Jessie had moved as many dogs as possible closer to the cabin, within the bright circle.