Murder at five finger light (9 page)
“Come
on,
Craig,” a male voice called. “Get a move on or I’m gonna leave without you.”
on,
Craig,” a male voice called. “Get a move on or I’m gonna leave without you.”
“Keep your shirt on,” they heard someone answer faintly, then the sound of a second set of footsteps came along the passage and the two continued together, sharing quieter conversation that faded into silence with distance.
Though she had noticed that the curtains of the room were closed when she came in from the Harbor Bar, Jessie watched with interest as Karen got up, crossed the room, and tugged at them till not a hint of space remained for anyone outside to peer through. Returning to the bed, she gave Jessie a self-conscious smile.
“I know. I’m more than a little paranoid,” she said. “I’m also really tired. Goodnight, Jessie. And thanks again.”
With that, she turned over to face the wall, clearly meaning to go to sleep.
“You’re welcome,” Jessie answered softly, reaching to turn out the light between the two beds.
But from the expression on Karen’s face throughout the incident, Jessie doubted paranoia had much to do with it. What she had seen and recognized was the kind of fear that she didn’t believe could be faked. Whatever the veracity of Karen’s story, there was no doubt in her mind that the woman was sincerely terrified.
In Whitehorse, Alex Jensen put his cell phone away thoughtfully with a frown that lowered his eyebrows half an inch closer to his handlebar mustache as he drained the last swallow of his beer.
“Something wrong?” Inspector Delafosse asked from where he sat next to Alex at the bar, raising a finger to let the pilot who was waiting for them at the door know he’d been seen.
“No, not
wrong
. We’re just getting used to each other again, I guess. Mostly my fault for leaving Alaska in the first place.”
wrong
. We’re just getting used to each other again, I guess. Mostly my fault for leaving Alaska in the first place.”
“Mind my asking why you did leave?”
“Well . . .” Alex hesitated, casting memory back to the preceding February. “When my father died suddenly and I went back to Idaho to help my mother, Jessie was running the Yukon Quest.”
“I remember that situation,” Delafosse reminded him. “And I knew that they had offered you a job as sheriff and that you went back and took it.”
As they both stood up and put on jackets, Alex agreed.
“That’s almost right. I had already taken it—without talking it over with her—before I heard she was in trouble and came back. The timing was all wrong, but I’d already accepted it anyway.”
Delafosse gave him an understanding nod. “Big mistake?”
“Oh yeah. Part of it was misplaced concern for my mother—I told myself I was doing it for her. Didn’t take long for her to let me know that, as always, she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself and I should go back to Alaska, where I really wanted to be. But I think that I was really testing Jessie. I’d asked her to marry me and I guess I thought taking the job might influence her to say yes.”
“Bad assumption.”
“Got that right!”
The bartender collected the bill Alex dropped on the bar and extended thanks for the tip it included. The two men turned to meander their way through the tables to join the waiting officer.
“The real mistake was my determination to go ahead with the Idaho job when Jessie wouldn’t say yes. I should have refused it and come back. There was a certain amount of trust lost between us because of my stubbornness and her resistance.”
“I noticed there was something a bit tentative between you these days.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“Only to someone who knew you then and now, I think. Clair mentioned it.”
“Well, women talk to each other, don’t they?”
Del shook his head. “Clair said Jessie wasn’t talking, so she wasn’t asking. She just noticed.
“Hey, Ted. Thanks for the airlift,” he said, reaching a hand to the officer as they reached him.
“Not a problem. You ready?”
Following the two Canadian officers out into the night, Alex gave his relationship with Jessie final, silent consideration.
It’ll either work out
—
or not. Probably just needs time. When she gets back, maybe we’ll talk
—
if she’s ready.
It’ll either work out
—
or not. Probably just needs time. When she gets back, maybe we’ll talk
—
if she’s ready.
He couldn’t know that a lot would happen before they had such an opportunity for face-to-face conversation, meaningful or not.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THE DARK OF THE EVENING, THE HARBOR BAR WAS A bright oasis on the main street of Petersburg, leading Joe Cooper into it after a long walk from the ferry terminal at the edge of town.
Luck and misfortune had brought him there: his luck at catching a mere glimpse of auburn hair when the headlights of a car pulling into the parking lot illuminated shadows at the side of the terminal building; her misfortune in being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which allowed that sighting to happen. There was no doubt in his mind what he had seen from his vantage point at the rail of the ferry, where he had once again stood waiting to watch passengers disembark. Another might have questioned identification based on so little, but long surveillance and more than one such sighting had given Cooper an instinctive ability to recognize the woman he was following.
How she could be in Petersburg and not on the ferry was a question for which he had no concrete answer. She could not yet have left the ferry at this stop, so the only plausible explanation was that she had managed to elude his surveillance in Ketchikan, left the ship there, and had reached Petersburg some other way, probably by plane to be there so quickly.
It didn’t matter. A satisfaction lay in knowing he had picked up her trail again—that she had not managed to escape him. So he had gone quickly to collect the duffel he had left tucked in a corner of the observation lounge and joined the few people waiting to leave the ferry. Waiting in line to go ashore had been frustrating, but finally the gate opened and the Petersburg passengers had moved forward, allowing him to all but sprint to the place where he had seen her standing. It had been empty, of course. She had disappeared into the night. If he had been able to see her from the rail in the glare of the ferry and terminal lights, the reverse was true and she had fled. But in a town this size some local resident would have seen her and it remained only for Cooper to find that person.
He did not expect to see her in the well-lit, cheerful atmosphere of the Harbor Bar, but in such a gathering spot, where he could wait and watch without notice, he might learn something that would lead him to her. The place was clearly a casual after-work hangout, for many of the seats were taken by fishermen and processing plant workers, by themselves, or with their wives and girlfriends. The hum of conversation and crack of pool balls hitting each other on the table filled his ears as he hesitated just inside the door to give the room a sweeping glance. Confident his quarry was, as expected, not among the current patrons, he dropped the duffel and his jacket under the window, where he could keep an eye on them, and crossed to an empty stool halfway along the bar.
“A shot of Jack Daniel’s and a Bud,” he told the female bartender and, as she turned away, cast a look at the way she filled out the front of her red plaid shirt.
Nice hooters,
he told himself, allowing his appreciation to slide south when she bent over to pull the beer from a low cooler.
Nice hooters,
he told himself, allowing his appreciation to slide south when she bent over to pull the beer from a low cooler.
“Not bad, huh?” A low comment from the man behind the leer on the bar stool on Cooper’s right. “And the legs go all the way up under those jeans.”
“And how would you know, Perry?” A well-padded woman in coveralls on the left leaned forward to speak disdainfully around Cooper. “In your dreams maybe! You guys never quit, do you?”
“You’d just bitch about
that
if we did.”
that
if we did.”
“You like to trade places?” Cooper asked her.
“Naw. You’re better looking than he is—probably more interesting too. I’m Sylvia. You gotta name?”
But Cooper was already on his feet and switching her blended margarita with the beer and shot the bartender had just delivered.
“Okay—okay!” She gave him a resentful look. “Sorry to have
inconvenienced
you.”
inconvenienced
you.”
She slid over and Cooper took her abandoned stool, staring straight ahead to discourage further conversation.
In the mirror behind the bar, he watched Perry hook a sympathetic arm around her shoulders and snuggle her up to him. “Hey, who loves you, babe?”
Tossing a last indignant glance toward Cooper, she gave Perry an exhibition kiss that drew whistles and cheers from one of the tables in the room behind the pair.
“Hey, man. Don’t count your loose change in public!” someone called.
Disinterested, Cooper tossed down the shot and chased it with a swallow of beer. Catching the bartender’s attention, he pointed at the shot glass and she brought the bottle to pour him a refill.
“Seen a redhead you didn’t recognize in here tonight?” he asked casually.
“Not one I didn’t know.” She nodded toward a table across the room, where a woman with carroty hair was part of a group. “But it’s been busy, so I could have missed one or two.”
“Buy yourself one,” he told her, laying a bill on the bar.
“Thanks. I’ll drink it later.”
When a stool nearer the front of room became available, Cooper moved closer to the window and his duffel, where for the next hour he nursed another beer, patiently watched local people come and go in usual patterns, and glanced occasionally at passersby on the street, but learned nothing of value.
The only thing of interest was an attractive, honey-blond woman in a green slicker carrying a weighty plastic bag from the liquor store next door. She stepped up to the bar and waited for a word with the bartender, who nodded, then handed her a small black suitcase from behind the bar where she had evidently been holding it. He was too far away to hear the exchange between them, but noticed a look of puzzlement that crossed the blonde’s face at something the bartender said before she shrugged and turned away. The suitcase was similar to one he thought the redhead carried, but so were a thousand others used by travelers these days.
Still, knowing his quarry had at times used other people as cover, he was unwilling to let the incident pass without investigation. As the woman left the Harbor Bar with the bag, he drained his beer, left enough to cover his bill, collected his jacket and duffel, and followed just a minute or two behind her. By the time he reached the street, however, she had vanished into the dark as completely as the redhead he had glimpsed at the ferry terminal.
This meant one of two things: either she had gone somewhere very close, or she was out there beyond his line of sight, still moving away to wherever she was headed. With long-legged strides, he reached the nearest corner and glanced quickly up and down the street. Nothing. As fast as he could without being forced to run with the duffel, he circled the block with no result, then hiked to the lower end of Dolphin Street, thinking the woman’s goal could have been a boat in the harbor.
Everything there was calm and quiet.
He stood for a few minutes looking out at the dark water and the lights that glimmered over its small waves, two on an incoming fishing boat moving slowly back to safe haven. The sound of some kind of machinery working inside the seafood processing plant to his right drifted into his ears, mixed with the growl of the homing boat’s engine and a car passing on Nordic Drive behind him. Someone shouted something unintelligible in the distance. The briny smell of seawater rose from below the barnacle-encrusted pilings of the dock, along with hints of the petroleum fuels that drove and oils that lubricated the boats.
Looking to the east, he wished for a moon, but the sky was still heavy with clotted cloud. How fine it would have been, he thought, to have a full moon rising over that long, crystal white range of coastal mountains, to have illuminated that great barrier cast up by the tectonic movement of unfathomable plates beneath the ocean into sharp peaks with deep valleys full of never-melting ice age remnants.
With a sigh, he turned, knowing he had a phone call to make and still needed to find shelter for the night. Suddenly he longed, not for just a temporary place to recharge his body and mind, but somewhere that belonged to him, somewhere quiet and solitary where he could rest and not be obsessed as he had been for a long time now. With a consuming grief he yearned for . . . Sucking air through his teeth like an accident victim in deep pain, he reminded himself that particular loss belonged to another life and time. But the specific yearning immediately stirred a renewal of hot anger at the circumstances that had made such an existence untenable and had driven him so far. Directly, he blamed the woman he was determined to find tomorrow. Tonight, she had eluded him and the chance was slim that the suitcase had belonged to her anyway.
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