Murder at five finger light (31 page)

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Authors: Sue Henry

Tags: #Mystery, #Alaska

BOOK: Murder at five finger light
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“I don’t think so,” Aaron said clearly, stepping from the doorway, where he had been nonchalantly leaning to listen and watch.
His interruption from the other end of the room drew surprised attention from all of them, as he moved to stand directly behind Jessie and, taking a handgun from the pocket of the light jacket he was wearing, pressed the barrel against the back of her head. Mouths fell open in shock and Jim started to stand up.
“
Sit down,”
Aaron snapped.
Jim sat. “Now,” Aaron told them, “you will all keep your seats, right—and your hands on the table? No questions, no talking.”
With a glance at Alex, who had inched forward in his chair, “Don’t even think about it, trooper. Very carefully, hand me your gun.”
With clear but watchful resentment, Alex drew it carefully from its holster and handed it over.
Aaron smiled and nodded in satisfaction as he stuffed it into a jacket pocket.
“Smart boy. I assume you value this woman, so don’t do anything stupid. Get up slowly, Jessie—very slowly. Come on around the table, Whitney. No one’s going to move an inch now, are you, folks?”
No one did, as Whitney moved past them to join Aaron and Jessie, who had stood up slowly, as instructed. Tank rose to his feet and moved to her side, looking up questioningly at her, then at Aaron behind her. He knew what a gun was—didn’t like the noise they made, but his mistress carried one when they did training runs or ran races, because of the danger of aggressive moose.
When Aaron glanced down at him he growled.
“Take care of that,” Alex was told, and he reached one hand to take firm hold of Tank’s collar, restraining him.
Moving the gun barrel down between her shoulders, with a firm hold on Jessie’s arm, Aaron drew her backward into the kitchen doorway, where they stopped in full view of everyone at the table.
Whitney followed, but slipped past him and disappeared into the hallway as soon as space allowed. When she reappeared she stepped close to Aaron and put an arm around his waist, so it was clear they were a couple. She was carrying the small duffel in which she had brought her clothing and personal stuff to the island. It looked heavier now—just about cocaine heavy, Jessie thought, glancing at it as Whitney stopped beside her. So if Karen and—whoever—had gone in the boat, they hadn’t taken . . .
“How do you think you’re going to get away from here?” Joe Cooper interrupted her thoughts from the other side of the table.
“I said, no questions,” Aaron reminded him. “But thanks to you and your boat, that won’t be a problem, will it?”
“It’s a long walk from here to there, over a lot of hard stones—difficult enough on your own. With a hostage?”
Whitney’s grin was full of sly satisfaction. “Now that I know where your boat is, I can bring it around to the cove to pick them up, can’t I?”
“Get going then, Whit,” Aaron told her. “Leave that. Jessie will carry it down for us. I’ll watch them while you go.”
She dropped the duffel close to his feet, spun to the door, and was gone.
The room was absolutely still.
Jessie could feel the barrel of the gun pressed hard against her spine and was tempted to simply drop to the floor beneath it. But that would leave the possibility of the gun being discharged by accident, or intent, at those gathered around the table, including Alex, who was in front of her. She looked down at him and he, reading her mind, gave her a tiny shake of the head saying
Don’t try it
.
Aaron caught the signal between them and shoved the barrel harder against her back. “I wouldn’t try anything dumb, Jessie.”
Tank growled again.
“I won’t,” she sighed, letting him think she had given it up.
In the silence they soon heard the sound of a boat approaching the cove below the platform.
Cooper tried reasoning again, shifting one hand on the table and speaking loudly to take Aaron’s attention away from the sound—and Jessie. “There’s law enforcement on the way, you know. They’re flying in and can easily follow your boat.”
“Just shut up,” Aaron told him. “You seem to think we’re making this up as we go along.”
“And you’re not? I could pick a lot of holes in your thinking.” Cooper grinned wolfishly. “You won’t get far,” he said confidently.
Jessie could feel the gun move as Aaron shifted behind her and remembered his nervous pacing in the tank.
“Aaron,” she asked suddenly, without moving, except to glance down at the floor to her right, directing Alex’s attention. “You were in the tank with us on purpose, weren’t you—so we wouldn’t suspect you had anything to do with this, just like Whitney was pretending to have been hiding for the same reason? Neither of you expected to be caught out and identified with this whole drug thing, did you? But for that last couple of hours, when they didn’t come back, you were afraid they meant to leave you down there with the rest of us to die. You thought Whitney would go off with them and lea—”
“Shut—up!”
he almost shouted, shoving her with the handgun so hard she was forced to take a step forward and to the right.
“And she would have left you there,” Jessie continued, still moving forward slightly, looking straight at Alex, who, quick to sense her intent, was ready and waiting, knowing he couldn’t stop her. “You
know
she would have, if we hadn’t been found before she could. So she had to try something else, didn’t—”
“I said
shut
—aah . . .”
As Aaron moved to follow her with the gun against her back, he stumbled over the duffel Whitney had dropped at his feet and was momentarily thrown off balance. The hand with the gun came up as he sought to clutch at Jessie, and he almost lost the weapon as he grabbed at her shoulder with the other.
Alex, already in motion, pushed Jessie out of the way and reached one long arm to snatch the gun from Aaron’s hand before he could regain his grip on it. Swinging him around, the trooper yanked his arm up between his shoulder blades and ran him against the wall.
“Get hold of Tank,” he instructed Jessie, who looked down to see that the husky Alex had released was now savaging one of Aaron’s pant legs in an attempt to get at the leg itself.
“Quiet,” Cooper said, waving Jim and Don back into their chairs as he passed Alex and Aaron on his way to the kitchen door, where he flattened himself against the wall to one side of it.
Seeing what Cooper had in mind, Alex slapped a hand over Aaron’s mouth to keep him still, and in the moment of silence that followed they could all hear Whitney’s steps as she trotted up the stairs toward the kitchen door. As she stepped through it, surprise and confusion widening her eyes, Cooper grabbed her from behind.
She struggled angrily, hitting at him and twisting in an attempt to break free. “Let go of me, you bastard.”
Jim went to help, and between them the two men managed to move her, still kicking and thrashing, into a chair that Jessie shoved from the table to an open space. Tying her hands together behind the back of the chair with a wet kitchen towel they finally subdued her, though she sat glaring at everyone, including Aaron, in a fury.
“Incompetent idiot!”
she snarled at him. “I should have known better—taken the stuff and the boat and gone by myself and left you here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
 
 
 
 
“YOU TOOK A BIG CHANCE,” COOPER TOLD JESSIE, WHEN the pair of Alaska State Troopers from Ketchikan had showed up in another floatplane not long afterward to take Aaron, Whitney, and the cocaine in the duffel into custody. They had brought with them a forensics team of two to examine the south end of the island, where Tim Christiansen lay under the blue tarp, and to take his body home for examination and eventual burial.
“Not such a big one,” she said, smiling. “Alex and I know each other well enough so that he knew I was about to try something.”
“He wasn’t too happy about your taking that risk.”
“Never is. But he wasn’t in that tank, so he couldn’t have known, as I did, just how much Aaron believed they would have left him there.”
“Would they?”
“Yes, I think they really would. I know Karen wouldn’t have hesitated for a second and, as you saw, Whitney’s pretty much out for herself. The other guy, the one Karen left with in the boat, I never saw. None of us did.”
“I did,” Cooper told her. “But I already knew who it was.”
“Who
who
was?” asked Alex, folding himself down to a seat on the helipad on the other side of Jessie and laying a hand on her shoulder.
She looked up and smiled at him before turning back to Cooper.
“Yes, who was it?”
“A rather large drug-smuggling fish I’ve been angling for in the last couple of years,” he told her.
“Why you? I thought you were after Karen.”
“Joe’s an undercover agent who’s been working for our side and now will be part of the cooperative effort to coordinate with the new RCMP Border Enforcement Team that Del and I met with in Whitehorse,” Alex explained to her before Cooper answered. “These arrests will make a good dent in part of the smuggling traffic between here and British Columbia. But that’s information you can’t pass on, okay? He’d like to keep his cover for a while longer.”
“Sure. But I thought . . .”
“You swallowed what Karen Emerson fed you,” Cooper said with a grim smile. “You couldn’t have known it was all lies. She’s very, very good at that. And I
was
after her. She was my link to the real kingpin—that guy she left with in the boat.”
Jessie thought about that for a minute before saying, “But they could have gone anywhere. How will you catch them?”
“They’re already in custody in Petersburg. I called on the radio from Tim’s boat and got both a plane in the air to track them and a Coast Guard boat to apprehend them in the lower end of the sound.”
“Why did they leave the cocaine here?”
“They didn’t think they had, but they were in such a hurry to leave that they didn’t check till later, so they didn’t know that Whitney had pulled a switch on them. They had turned around and were headed back when the Coast Guard caught up with them. Whitney is probably lucky they didn’t make it. You saw how they dealt with Curt—and he’d been helping them use the lighthouse as a stash on the run north from Seattle, or Canada.”
“So,” Jessie said thoughtfully, “Laurie was right about someone being here when they weren’t. She wanted to talk to you about it, Alex.”
“She has, and I reassured her it wouldn’t be happening again. Jim was pretty angry about it.”
She turned back to Cooper with another question.
“Karen was never your girlfriend, was she, and you never beat her as she claimed?”
“Never.” His tone turned bitter. “My taste runs more to human beings. I don’t hit women—even her kind.”
“She seemed truly terrified of you.”
“She had reason to be. She’s been running and I’ve been following and watching her run for—long enough. She knew I knew everything about her. But I waited, hoping she would lead me to the rest of the group. Unfortunately, I waited too long and Tim paid for it.”
“You think she killed Tim? She said he was her friend.”
“He was—once—a long time ago in Ketchikan, before I told him what she was into. Then he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. She really cared about him, so that’s what made her hate me. Yes, I know she killed him. Who else would have? She must have thought she was killing me because he was wearing my jacket after I took his by mistake that night. She tried once before, so it makes sense that she would again, the moment she had an even chance. She thought she had one—that it
was
me, not Tim.”
Alex’s eyes narrowed and he nodded slightly to himself. It was one important question he believed Cooper had answered correctly.
“A woman scorned,” he commented, and Cooper nodded.
“Would you have killed her?” Jessie asked hesitantly.
He stared out across the waters of Frederick Sound to the mountains on the islands in the distance, but Alex thought he was seeing little of the view.
“She’s not worth killing,” he said finally in a level and controlled tone that displayed his abhorrence more coldly than if he had raised his voice. “I hope she’ll get what she deserves in a court of law. But if she’s true to form she’ll probably give up the rest for some kind of consideration. She has no loyalty whatsoever to anyone but herself.”
Later that evening, when everyone was gone, including Joe Cooper, Jessie and Alex, after an enjoyable and relaxing dinner with Jim, Laurie, Sandra and Don, slipped out to spend a few minutes by themselves, settling side by side on the steps of the helipad. Tank padded along behind, refusing to be separated from Jessie, and lay down at her feet.
Alex took out the pipe he had brought along and was soon puffing clouds of his favorite and familiar tobacco into the still air.

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