Deadfall (22 page)

He doesn’t need to spend time searching the island for me, she thought. All he has to do is wait long enough and I’ll have to make a try at the supplies in one of the houses. So, she decided, I should make that try as soon as possible, before he’s settled in, ready and waiting.

It would be frustrating, for, though he could not be on both sides of the island at the same time, she had no way of knowing where he would be at any given time. She almost wished she had gone back to take a look, had some idea what he was
doing and, therefore, his plan of action. For all she knew, he could be waiting for her wherever she attempted to supply herself. But he could not watch all the buildings all the time, unless…What if Alex had been right? What if there were more than one stalker?

“H
e swears someone stole his boots.”

“Sure they did.”

“Says he can prove it.”

“How?”

“A week ago last Thursday he didn’t go straight home after work. Changed his work boots for a pair of tennis shoes and stopped by a bar, leaving the boots in his truck. He didn’t lock it—says he never does. The next day, when he looked for the boots to wear to work, they were missing.”

“Right. How does that prove they were stolen at the bar? They could as easily have disappeared in his own driveway, if, as you say, he didn’t notice they were missing until Friday. Or maybe they weren’t stolen or missing at all.”

Tuesday, the day following his arrest, J. B. Moule had continued to refuse to answer questions and insisted on having an attorney present. An appointed one had showed up close to noon and spent over an hour with his client. Now he was
attempting to convince Jensen that Moule had played no part in Jessie’s harassment.

Jensen was a hard, if not impossible, sell. But the young public defender, much in need of a haircut, while standing firm and addressing the homicide sergeant earnestly, was giving it his best try.

“He says his father and the boy next door will confirm that the boots were missing during the time he says they were. He made a fuss—was mad about it. He has a temper, you know.”

“I’m well acquainted with his temper. Because of it, his father would say anything J.B. wanted. I’d listen to the kid next door, but Moule probably has him intimidated as well. Anyway, if they
were
stolen, how’d he get them back?”

“Found them in his truck after work on Monday.”

“Right. You expect us to believe that? Someone borrowed them on Thursday, developed a guilty conscience over the weekend, and returned them on Monday.”

Jensen allowed his sarcasm to show in a loss of patience, then decided to let the defender see a little of what he was up against.

“Look. The boots belong to Moule, and the lab says that they match the prints we found in the trees beyond the dog lot at Jessie Arnold’s Knik cabin. He had the opportunity and his past threats toward me give him motive to harass Arnold. With John Timmons on the stand to demonstrate that his boots match the casts of those prints, no jury is going to believe those boots were stolen. Besides that, there’s a dozen parole violations we’re working on. He’s going back inside, whether or not he’s charged with harassment and attempted murder.”

However, when Cas met with Alex later at the crime lab, he had as many reservations as Moule had violations.

“The boots could have been stolen, Alex, and he’s got alibis for some of the stuff we’ve uncovered. I’m not completely convinced we’ve got the right man here. There’s no real link between him and the traps. He’s not a trapper and neither is anyone in his family, according to his father.”

“Well, maybe there’s a lot he doesn’t know—doesn’t want to know—about his misguided son.”

“What about those computer-generated notes?”

“There’ll be an answer to that one, just wait and see.”

“You’re not usually so stubborn, Alex. What is it?”

“I just don’t want to see this bastard slide out from under…”

He was interrupted as the door opened to admit Becker, who had been working on the problem of Mary Lou Collins and her missing boyfriend.

“I think I’ve got a line on a guy who may know where to find Jones,” he announced, pulling out a chair and perching on the edge of it with enthusiasm.

“Who?”

“Well, I’ve got a friend, Warren Thatcher—a pilot at Elmendorf—that I snow-machine with in the winter. He’s got a Harley he rides when we run out of snow, and he sometimes hangs with a couple of guys who drink at the Aces. Thought I’d give him a call and, sure enough, he knows Jones—doesn’t think much of him, but knows him to say hello to. Warren says Jones has a close buddy, a Dennis Falconer, who works as a mechanic in Wasilla and may know where we can track him down.”

W
hen Jensen and Becker drove to Wasilla to hunt up the man Phil’s friend had mentioned, they found an ancient service station that no longer pumped gas and had been converted into a garage of sorts that was hardly more than a workshop, cluttered with tools and parts, on a side street half a block from the airport. Old junker cars and several motorcycles stood around, the majority of which seemed to be a source of parts for others in various states of repair.

Following the sound of voices, they went through a side door and found two men in greasy coveralls examining the
engine of a Harley-Davidson that looked as if it had barely survived some kind of wreck. Jensen wondered if its driver looked as bad.

“Shit, Gus, take a good look at the thing. I still say it’s the fuel pump,” one of them was telling the other in an annoyed tone.

They turned their heads to see who had come in, then one of the two stood up and came toward them.

“Help you with something?”

One knee didn’t bend, and he swung the leg stiffly as he walked. Jensen, also noting that he had a prosthesis with a hook instead of a left hand, guessed that this man’s experience with motorcyles was more comprehensive than just their repair.

“We’re looking for Dennis Falconer,” Jensen told him, displaying his identification. “He work here?”

“Dennis? Whatcha want him for? He’s…”

A heavy wrench came clanging across the concrete floor toward them and the motorcycle fell over with a crash, as the second man shoved it and took off toward a door on the opposite wall.

Becker was immediately after him, bounding over the fallen machine, covering ground with a speed that allowed him to reach the door only seconds after his target had disappeared through it.

“What the hell?” the crippled mechanic asked, following as quickly as he could move, in a rolling gait that reminded Alex of the awkwardness of a man in a three-legged race.

At the door, Jensen saw that Becker’s famous flying tackle had connected and brought down the mechanic he pursued. The two were wrestling in the dirt of a vacant lot, dust flying, as the runner tried desperately to break Becker’s hold and get away. Between them, the troopers managed to subdue and handcuff him.

“What the fuck’s going on, Dennis?” Gus asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about, Gus,” he spat. “Call Teresa. Tell her to get hold of Spike and tell him…well,
just tell him…you know. Okay? And have her get Mary Lou headed my way with some bail money.”

“Yeah, sure.”

At the mention of Collins’s name, Jensen gave Becker a warning glance, and the younger trooper nodded knowingly as he dusted off his clothes and picked up the gray western hat he’d been wearing. It was more than a little crushed from having landed on the bottom of the tussle. A mouse that looked certain to turn pretty colors was rising under Becker’s left eye, but Falconer, his nose bleeding down the front of his coveralls, had suffered worse damage.

J
ensen was waiting eagerly, when Mary Louise Collins showed up to make bail for her boyfriend’s buddy.

“He hasn’t been charged with anything—yet,” Jensen told her. “But now that you’ve come to visit my office, you and I are going to have another little chat. I think you’d better give me some specifics on where to find Jones. And don’t tell me again that you don’t know. We’ve already been informed that you do.”

Collins stared furiously at him from a chair in an interrogation room at the Palmer troopers’ office.

“Is that what that idiot Dennis told you? In his dreams I know—the stupid S.O.B. Like I told you last night, I haven’t a clue where Spike’s gone. Haven’t seen him in more than a week.”

“And you intend to stick to that story?”

“Yeah, of course. It’s true.”

“I don’t think so, Mary Lou. I
can
hold you for obstructing justice, you know. And I may just do that.”

She glared at him through the long, dark lashes of her narrowed eyes.

“I haven’t done anything you can hold me for. You can’t arrest me for
not
knowing something.”

A knock on the door preceded Becker, with a satisfied look on his face.

“A minute, Alex?”

Outside in the hallway, he eagerly spilled what he was practically bursting to tell.

“Hey, you’re going to love this one. We printed Falconer when we brought him in?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember those two motorcycles stolen in Palmer last month?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, guess whose prints match some of the ones we lifted off the pieces of them that we found at the dump?”

“Oh, yeah? Well—it’s a small world, isn’t it?”

“They also match some we took off another one that was stolen, stripped, and left in a vacant lot in Anchorage a little over a week ago.”

“Chop shop?”

“That’d be my guess. Should we send someone to take a long, close look at that place where he works?”

“Un-huh—and wherever he lives. Tell Ed to lock him up and start the paperwork. I’ll be down in a few minutes and we’ll see what he’ll give up when he knows what we’ve got on him. You said
some—
on the prints. That mean there were more you didn’t identify?”

“Yeah, one more person. Think they might belong to Jones?”

“Worth a try. We might get lucky—if we can locate him. You might also check to see if he’s got prints on file.”

C
aswell sat down with Becker in Jensen’s office an hour later to discuss what they had so far and what they could do with it, but he wasn’t as focused on the stolen motorcycles or as delighted in breaking the case as the younger trooper. They
were still holding both Falconer and Collins for questioning, though they wouldn’t be able to hold the woman much longer without something with which to charge her. Both she and Falconer had continued to maintain that they knew nothing of Jones’s whereabouts, though Dennis Falconer was of the opinion that Collins could reach his friend if she wanted to. Jensen was becoming more inclined to believe the mechanic, who had admitted taking apart the stolen machines for parts but insisted that Jones was responsible for the thefts, and that he knew nothing about them—thought the machines belonged to Jones.

“How should I know they were stolen? He brought ’em in. I tore ’em down. I had no idea they weren’t his.”

“Yeah, and if my granny had wheels she’d be a…motorcycle,” Becker had not been able to resist commenting, earning an incredulous and amused look from Jensen.

“Do you usually strip fairly new machines in perfectly good, running condition?” Alex had asked. “You knew just what you were doing, Dennis. What did you do with the parts?”

“Spike took ’em. And I
don’t
know where he is. He said he had some personal business and would be back when he got back—maybe a week, maybe more. He
didn’t say
where he was going. Ask Mary Lou.”

There was an attitude about Collins’s denial that didn’t convince the troopers that she was as uninformed as she claimed.

“She’s laughing at us,” Caswell suggested. “There’s a look when she says she doesn’t know—a hint of sarcasm, almost a grin—that shows in her eyes.”

“I know what you mean,” Alex agreed. “I think she knows exactly where he is
—and
what he’s up to.”

Cas was thoughtfully silent for a time.

“By the way,” he asked, “did you check on that former boyfriend of Jessie’s?”

“Yes. He’s clean. Has all kinds of alibis. I’ve cut him from the list.”

Caswell nodded, then frowned, still thinking.

“Look,” he said finally. “Without a doubt we can put Moule away on parole violations, but we’re going to have to do more work on the harassment to convince me.”

“Why? Take me through it.”

“Well, here’s the picture, as I see it.” He stood up and walked to a blackboard in one corner of the office, on which he began to list the days and events of the previous week.

“The incidents with the traps happened on a Saturday.”

He wrote “
Saturday—traps found
.”

“One was found early that morning and one later in the day. They were probably set and left on Friday night.”

On the board, he put “
Friday—traps set
” above what he had already written.

“A note came that same Saturday in the birthday package that had been tampered with, right?”

He added “
note in package
” to Saturday.

“Two notes had come earlier—one in August.”

Alex agreed.

“Nothing happened Sunday. The note arrived at Iditarod Trail Headquarters on Monday.”

He wrote, “
Monday—ITC note
and
brake line punctured
.”

“Tuesday was the accident with the truck, but the brake line was most likely punctured during the previous night, not in daylight, when the perp might be seen, so put it under Monday.”

He wrote, “
Tuesday—truck crash
.” Then, “
Wednesday—flowers, note, and pictures
.”

“While Jessie was in the hospital, the lilies, pictures of the women in the dog lot, and another note arrived there. Nothing Thursday. Friday we flew Jessie to Kachemak Bay. A lot happened that day. The goat was attacked by dogs and the note left on your neighbor’s door. The boot prints were found in the trees behind the dog lot.”

On the board he wrote, “
Friday—goat injured & note to
Bradford
,” then went back and added “
boot prints made
” to the Monday notation.

“Actually,” Alex told him, “Bradford’s goat was hurt on Thursday. He came to yell at me on Friday about it.”

Caswell moved the note to Thursday.

“At two o’clock Saturday morning, you got a rock through the window with note number five. On Sunday, you went home to find the cabin had been trashed.”

He wrote, “
Saturday—rock breaks window; another note
” and “
Sunday—B&E, cabin trashed
.”

“That’s it, right? Except for the phone calls, I’ve covered everything?”

Jensen and Becker took a long minute to go over what Caswell had written, then agreed.