Deadfall (20 page)

As Tank, on his belly, crawled in beside her she wrapped an arm around him to hold him down and gripped his muzzle with her other hand to keep him still.

Very low, he growled.

“No,” she breathed in his ear. “Quiet, Tank.”

He was. Good dog. He was in danger, too, and seemed to know it.

She waited, listening with all her might for whatever would come next.

Dammit—dammit. I could die here. What went wrong? Where are you, Alex, when I need you? Knight in shining airplane, indeed. But—not your fault. How could any of us know he would find me so easily? How
did
he find me?

Did Alex even know yet who this monstrous evil was, or that the stalker was no longer lurking in Knik? How could he? With a sinking feeling, she remembered that the cell phone was not in her pocket. She had left it on the table in the beach house. Now, even if the storm cleared or calmed enough for her to call, there was no way to contact him—or anyone else, for that matter.

J
ensen stepped out of the interrogation room, where he had spent the last two hours with Moule, Caswell, and an APD officer who had operated a video camera, taping the session. Lifting both hands to his temples, he ran his fingers back through his hair, held his head for a second, and huffed in frustration.

J. B. Moule, contemptuous and recalcitrant, had told them almost nothing—practically daring them to prove they had anything with which to charge him. He had refused the offer of an attorney, but also refused to give them any information, except that he had been nowhere near Knik in the last month. Knowing he was already in serious trouble for parole violations, he had belligerently kept his mouth shut, glaring in anger at anyone and everyone.

“We’ll have to wait for word from John at the lab on the boots,” Alex told Cas. “Let him sit in lockup for the night. We’ll try again when there’s something more to hold over him.
How about we find something to eat. I’m as empty as last year’s bird’s nest.”

“Linda called and said to bring you home for some of that goulash you’re so fond of.”

“Hey, I’m for that. Let’s go.”

As they drove away from Anchorage in Jensen’s truck, Caswell called to check on the weather in Kachemak Bay, which was, if anything, worse than it had been in the morning.

“Well, no news may be good news,” he said, hanging up the cellular phone. “If she needed to, she could always use the radio at Millie’s.”

“Check with the office in Homer just to be sure, will you?”

Cas complied, but Jessie had not communicated by radio, either.

“She’s okay, Alex. It’ll clear tomorrow and you can get through, or she can. Maybe later tonight, even.”

“Makes me nervous.”

“We’ve got the perp, and she’ll be glad to hear it when you finally talk to her.”

T
hey reached the Caswells’ house to find Phil Becker waiting eagerly to fill them in on what he had learned about Mary Louise Collins. He had been assisting Linda in the kitchen—draining macaroni, mixing salad, opening beer for the two of them.

“Better get on the outside of one of these,” he told the other two troopers, uncapping a second pair of Heinekens as they came into the warm room, which smelled deliciously of bacon, onions, and cheese. “Beer goes bad if you leave it in the refrigerator too long. I barely rescued this one before it spoiled.”

Linda smiled at his foolery.

“He even set the table, Ben. Got the forks on the correct side, too,” she teased her husband.

“Use ’em right-handed—ought to go on the right side of the plate,” he responded, grinning. “Practical—reasonable, don’t you think?” he asked Alex.

“Absolutely. No question about it.” Jensen accepted the beer Becker handed him and raised it to his lips as he turned to Linda. “Need any more help?” he asked, and took a long swallow.

“Nope, we’re all set. Why don’t you guys go out on the deck. It’s been warm out there all afternoon. I’ll call you in about half an hour, when dinner’s ready.”

“Trying to get us out from underfoot, huh?”

“You bet. Too much law in one civilized kitchen.”

Laughing, she shooed them toward the back door.

The three troopers followed her advice and found comfortable chairs on the deck, facing the backyard and, beyond it, the picturesque mountains of the Chugach Mountains that lay to the south of Eagle River. The sun was about to go down behind the western peaks in a blaze of color, but until it did, the quiet space was, as she had indicated, warm for September.

Almost before they were settled, Becker began to talk.

“Mary Louise Collins,” he informed them, “is still in Palmer.”

“What a shame for Palmer,” Cas commented. “She can’t be much of a concerned citizen, or up to anything good.”

“You’re probably right, though she’s at least working steadily and has established a permanent address in a trailer park on the east side. But the company she keeps fits right in with what we know about her already.”

“Why? Who’s she seeing?” Jensen asked.

“Well, I tracked her to the pub were she works—that pit called Aces Wild—and spoke with the owner, an extremely stupid sort who looks and acts like he got the shit kicked out of him once too often.”

“That’s a biker bar we know personally.”

“Right. She’s the night bartender—been there over six months. The owner, a questionable alcoholic named Purdy—
who’s probably his own best, or worst, customer—says, and I quote, ‘She may be a bitch on wheels, but she keeps the S.O.B.s in line.’ I’d say keeping things cool would be a valuable ability, considering the regulars in that hole. Evidently she doesn’t take guff from anyone, and looking the way she does, I’d be willing to bet she gets handed plenty.”

“Why? What’s she look like?” Caswell questioned, the only one of the three who had not seen Collins.

As Jensen grinned and nodded, Becker drew an hourglass shape in the air, “Great pair of…”

“—Ears?” Linda Caswell finished, giving him a grin, along with an all-innocence, wickedly wide-eyed glance, as she stepped out onto the deck with a bowl of chips in her good hand. “I’ll just assume that’s what you were going to say.”

Leaving the chips, she vanished back into the house, as he sputtered till his ears turned red and the other two men burst into guffaws at his expense.

“If you’re going to say something you don’t want her to overhear, never turn your back on a door Linda might come through,” Cas advised, when he could catch his breath.

“Collins
is
pretty spectacular in that particular department,” Becker confirmed.

“She’s that, all right,” Alex agreed, “but powerful, too—broad shoulders and strong arms. She could easily have killed that old woman five years ago, and she’s probably in better shape now than she was at nineteen.”

“She’s living with a guy who works Aces as a bouncer,” Becker told them. “Tough, leather freak—biker—former professional wrestler from the East Coast somewhere, tattoos and all. Purdy says he’s bonkers over her, would do anything to keep her and keep her happy. She evidently leads him around by the balls. Interesting, since—and here’s the bomb—he’s missed work for over a week and she won’t say where he’s gone.
On business
was all Purdy could get out of her, even when he threatened to fire—would you believe
—Spike?
Spike Jones.”

“You
are
kidding, right?”

“Nope. Can’t be what he was born with, but that’s what he calls himself. Thought I might go back tonight and put a little pressure on Mary Lou, see what I could find out about him. Whatcha think?”

Jensen frowned thoughtfully, remembering Collins’s vitriolic last words as she left the court five years earlier. Her furious statement echoed again in his mind: “Someday I may decide to make you sorry—or dead. And you’ll never know when or where it’s coming from.”

She was definitely not the type to shrug off old hatreds.

He shifted uneasily in his chair, emptied his beer in one long swallow, and looked up at Caswell, who was also frowning.

“It’s not as clear, that’s for sure,” Alex said. “But we’d better check it out before we assume Moule’s our man, and before we interrogate him again in the morning.”

Cas nodded, chewing at his upper lip.

“You got Moule?” Becker questioned in surprise. “Hey, fill me in.”

They did, and used the briefing to review the facts of the afternoon’s arrest. Becker listened in fascination till they finished, then asked, “John’s working on the boots?”

“Yeah,” Jensen told him. “I think maybe I’ll see what he thinks before we check out Collins at the Aces.”

“We’re all going?”

“Looks like we’d better.”

As he headed for the phone, Linda called them to the table, so he made the call short, reaching Timmons at home, where he abandoned his own dinner to share what he had learned in the lab before leaving for the day.

“It’s the same pair of boots, all right. Couple of nicks and scratches match up perfectly.”

“No doubt?”

“None. But if they fit, I can’t quite see how he made the prints with that odd pressure point.”

“Trying to make it look like someone else wore them?”

“Maybe. Or someone else
did
wear them.”

“Who?”

“How could I know? That’s your department, friend. I just draw the pictures. You have to decide what they mean.”

Shaking his head, Alex hurried to join the other three for dinner, where for at least half an hour, he forgot the boots and focused on enjoying his meal.

T
he Aces Wild occupied the ground floor of a square, nondescript two-story building that had been built near the railroad tracks in the center of Palmer when the town was young. Age had not improved its unattractive appearance, nor did the collection of motorcycles parked in front. The walls were predominantly a dirty yellow-brown that had flaked away around corners, doors, and windows to reveal a colorful history of the varied decorative inspirations of its past owners, none of which had lasted long. Once a retail store of some kind, it had originally had large plate-glass windows on either side of the front door. Plywood had been used to cover them, and then coated with the same ugly paint that insulted the walls.

As the three troopers approached, the door swung open and two men sauntered through it. The beefier of the two was dressed in black jeans, heavy boots, and a leather vest over a grungy T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off to expose his well-muscled and tattooed arms, one of which was wrapped around the shoulders of his companion, an anorexic youth in a studded leather jacket with hands crammed into the pockets. He did not appear pleased with his present company, but hunched his shoulders and allowed himself to be dragged along by the larger man, pale, greasy hair hanging lifelessly from under a filthy orange bandanna that encircled his head.

“You’re late,” the biker groused. “You’d better have my goddamn stuff.”

“Aw-w, Mike—come on. It was a fat weekend. Gimme a break, okay?”

The biker looked up, caught sight of the three men walking toward them, scowled, and studied them through narrowed eyes before yanking the youth off in the opposite direction, a derogatory “Pork” floating back, just loud enough to be heard.

“Don’t bother,” Jensen told Becker, who had taken a step in their direction, his attention attracted by what appeared to be a drug deal in progress. “It’s not going to happen while we’re here.”

He opened the door and they walked into the controlled chaos of egotistical male one-upsmanship. Somewhere in the crowd of mostly men and a few scattered women a jukebox was blaring heavy metal music. Two pool tables were in use at the front of the room, with several quarters lining the rail of each, challenges for the winners of games in progress. Another noisy bunch was gathered to watch and make rude comments as a tall man with a drink in one hand used the other to skillfully toss darts at a board on the side wall.

“Gotcha now, Shorts. He’s wailin’.”

“Damn fuckin’ wizard on the triples.”

The board was situated so that anyone heading for, or coming from, the restrooms—creatively labeled
HOGS
and
SOWS
—must pass directly through the line of fire.

A television set above the U-shaped bar in the rear was tuned to the Monday Night Football game, watched by most of the drinkers that filled the tall stools around it, though Jensen wondered how they could hear the commentary over their vociferous efforts to encourage whichever team they favored, combined with the rest of the noise in the place.

Unable to make himself heard to Caswell and Becker above the din, he jerked his head in a direction away from the hazardous game of darts and led the way around the bar to an open space, where a pair of distracted barmaids in jeans and tight, low-necked T-shirts were busily coming and going with trays of mixed drinks and pitchers of beer. When the space was
momentarily unoccupied, he stepped up and leaned across, put his elbows on the bar, and waited to catch the eye of the dark-haired woman who was working hard in the well to keep a steady supply of liquor flowing into glasses, fill pitchers, and pluck the tops from beer bottles.

“Hey,” a frustrated whine at his elbow. “Move it and wait your turn. You’re in my way.”

Looking down at the young woman with a tray who faced him, he smiled vaguely, as if he didn’t understand, then turned back to watch Collins, and waited.

“Doncha hear so good? You’re in the…”

Mary Lou Collins swung around to see what was causing the problem and her eyes met Jensen’s. Like a video that had been paused, catching a performer in mid-action, she froze, staring at him with immediate recognition. A look of irritation and dislike swept across her face, replacing the harried smile she had been giving someone at the bar the moment before. Glancing at Becker and Caswell behind him, she took two strides that brought her to a point directly opposite him, face to face, and curled a lip.

“Well, well. My old pal, Jensen. What the hell are you doing in my bar, cop?”

“I want a word with you, Mary Lou.”

“Just like that? You got anything says I have to talk to you?”

“That’s not the way it works, and you know it. You can give me a few minutes here, in
your
office, or we run on down to
mine
. Your choice.”

“Fuckin’ bastard. What do you want, anyhow?”

“Watch your mouth. I’ll tell you what I want when you come outside with us.”

Resentful and angry, she first attempted to stare him down. He watched her mind work shrewdly behind the wrath in her eyes, as she reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to refuse—that only humiliation in front of the very people she worked hard to manipulate lay in that direction.

Even angry, she was, indeed, an exceptionally attractive woman. Her thick, dark hair hung below her waist in waves, commanding attention. The expression on her face, however, was anything but engaging.

Spinning around, she beckoned imperiously to an older man, who, on his knees, was refilling the cooler with bottles of Budweiser from a carton on the floor, and barked an order.