Cold Case Affair (11 page)

A family.

Because if she’d stayed, she’d have kept their son.

Muirinn’s mood shifted as her thoughts turned to the adoption.
How would you feel about me if I told you about our baby?

He shot her a concerned glance. “What’s up?

“Nothing.” She forced a smile. “I was just thinking how good it is to see you happy, Jett.”

And how I’d hate to do anything to destroy that.

They flew farther north in silence, the vast beauty brooking no conversation. Or perhaps it was a looming sense of foreboding as the sky grew darker, more oppressive.

Jett took the plane down alongside a sullen river. He landed on a gravel bar, wheels bumping wildly over the spit next to the wide and silent body of water. His prop slowed as they came to a halt near a crude wooden rack hung with strips of drying salmon flesh.

A deathly silence seemed to descend over the plane, broken only by the pop of hot engine metal, and the sharp
krak
of a raven perched high on a dead snag.

A cloud of midges hovered over discarded salmon guts at the water’s edge. Two scarred dogs were eating the scraps. They growled, heads low, then scuttled into the brush as Jett climbed down from the pilot’s seat.

The air felt sticky, close.

He helped Muirinn down from the plane, suddenly keenly
aware of his hunting knife at his hip. And as they crunched over a small stone beach, Trapper Joe appeared, his grizzled form silently separating from the dense shadows of the trees, shotgun in his hand. He watched them approach, lowering his weapon only when he recognized Jett. He pushed his cap back on his head, nodded his greeting.

A silent man.

A secretive man.

A man like so many before him who had fled north, escaping something—perhaps the law, or a dark secret—hoping to hide from the past in this vast and isolated wilderness, under the cover of the long, dark winters. It was out here that men like Joe hoped to start another life. But invariably that didn’t happen. Because the problems came with them. And Trapper Joe’s problems, his secrets from south of the 49th parallel, were hidden behind bloodshot eyes, too much whiskey, sun-baked and wind-worn skin. And silence.

He was a man of indeterminate age who lived completely off grid. A survivalist, with only his dogs for company.

No one knew his story, where exactly he came from. Local lore pinned him as an escaped con from Down South. The kids Muirinn grew up with used to say he had murdered a man. Adults, however, pegged him for an ex-cop. One who’d gotten on the wrong side of his badge. They cited Trapper Joe’s almost paranoid avoidance of local law enforcement as proof.

But regardless of Trapper Joe’s secret, those who knew of his ability to track found his art almost mystical.

“Joe—” Jett nodded, showing the old trapper the bottle of whiskey he’d brought with him, not wasting words on a man who didn’t like to use them. “We were hoping to show you something, ask your opinion.”

Joe narrowed his eyes onto Muirinn.

“This is Muirinn O’Donnell, Gus O’Donnell’s granddaughter.”

Trapper Joe said nothing, just turned and led Muirinn and Jett through the trees to the clearing where his camp had been set up.

Mosquitoes buzzed in a small cloud. Two Husky-Malamute crosses got up, growled. Joe waved them away, and they retreated a few feet to lie silently, watching, like barely tamed wolves. Again, Jett reminded himself that his knife was handy. Joe ducked under a tarpaulin that served as a deck cover and led them into the log cabin, motioning to a camp chair and sawed-off log for seats. Jett placed the bottle of whiskey on the Formica table.

The interior smelled of wood smoke and the cloying scent of wet dog fur. Strung along one wall were an assortment of animal traps and a pair of old gut snowshoes. Joe went to his woodstove, poured coffee, black. “Got no cream,” he said, plunking the chipped mugs onto the table.

He sloshed a dollop of whiskey into his own, offered the bottle to Jett and Muirinn. Both declined with a shake of the head.

Joe took a seat, his eyes still fixated on Muirinn. It made her feel uncomfortable. Jett tried to break the ice. “You haven’t seen Muirinn for a long time, huh?”

“Gus said you were a looker. He was right.”

Muirinn flushed. “Thank you.”

“You weren’t at his funeral.” Joe’s voice was creaky, as if from disuse, but it didn’t disguise the accusation in his words.

Guilt washed through her. “I was stuck out in a jungle, in Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea.” She found herself trying to justify her absence again. “It’s one of the last places on earth where there are still tribes that have had no contact with the rest of the world, and no one could get news to me,” she said,
needing
Joe to understand. “It was part of
the project, to feel as cut off from communication as the locals of the area.”

He sipped his coffee, eyes unwavering. “Even though you was pregnant?”

Muirinn felt her cheeks warm again. “I was entering my sixth month. My doctor said everything was good. Plus, our photographer was a qualified paramedic.” Muirinn cleared her throat, feeling small, judged. “Gus must have really meant something to you, Joe, for you to have trekked all the way into town for the service,” she said.

He studied her in silence. “What do you want me to look at?”

“These.” She slid the four photos onto the table.

He pursed his lips, gray whiskers standing out. He tapped his dirty fingers on two photos. “These two were taken down inside the Tolkin Mine.”

Muirinn glanced at Jett, heart pattering. They’d been hoping to avoid too many specifics. But she couldn’t lie now—not if she wanted his trust. “Yes. How do you know?”

Joe picked up one photo, his thatch brows lowering as he examined it more closely. Then his eyes shifted up slowly, warily, and met hers. “What you want to know?”

“Is there anything at all that you can tell us about who might have made those prints?”

“Why?” he said quietly.

Muirinn exhaled cautiously. She’d hoped it would be easier. But Joe had read enough already to make Muirinn believe that if she were less than honest, he’d clam up. She needed his trust. “Gus was trying to solve a mystery.”

“The bombing.”

She nodded.

Jett leaned forward. “Joe, the reason we came out here to see you was—”

“Was because you don’t want anyone in town to see these,” he cut in, shaking his head. “Gus spent years trying to solve this thing.”

“Did he ever discuss it with you?”

The trapper didn’t respond. He just stared at the photos.

“Joe,” Muirinn said, leaning forward, “my grandfather believed that the bomber had an accomplice, and that means there are at least two people who might still be out there trying cover up the murder twenty years later.” Muirinn paused. “These photos recently came into Gus’s possession, and those prints could belong to the men responsible for killing my father. And, yes, right now it’s best that no one knows that Gus had these. It could be…dangerous.”

“You think it was what got Gus killed?”

“What makes you think he was killed?” Jett asked, very quietly.

“No way Gus went all the way down that shaft alone. No truck. Nothing. It didn’t smell right to me.” Joe wavered, as if weighing the potential blowback for what he was about to reveal next. He cleared his throat. “Two people were at the mine with Gus the day he died.”

Muirinn’s pulse quickened. Jett placed his hand on hers, warning her to go slow with Joe.

She swallowed. “What makes you say that?” she said, voice cracking.

“Prints. I saw them at the scene. Left by a man and a woman.” A nerve began to twitch under his eye. “They were with Gus. And they killed him.”

M
uirinn’s heart thudded. But suspicion unfurled slowly through her. “How do you know this, Joe?” she asked very quietly. “Were you there?”

He moistened his lips, lifted his cap and scratched his head. “I went to look after I heard they’d brought up his body. That’s when I saw the tracks. They told me Gus was not alone when he died.”

“But how could you tell?” Muirinn asked. “There must have been police and rescue personnel tracks all over the place—”

“My own prints included,” interjected Jett.

His gaze shifted to Jett. “The SAR people’s boots have individual identifying marks in the heel lugs, right?”

“That’s right,” said Jett. “It was something we started after that kid and his family went missing in the bush. We did it so that trackers like yourself wouldn’t confuse our prints with the prints of the missing.”

“So that trace from you and your team could be excluded right off. Cops issue boots, too. I know who wears what shoes. You get a good mantracker, he can tell a whole story—like finding a fossil. You can build the whole damn dinosaur. You can see who came first, who walked on top afterwards, what the weather was like.”

Again, Muirinn was reminded of the old rumor that Joe was ex–law enforcement, or ex-military. It fit. It was why Jett had thought Joe might actually be able to help them.

But what he was saying raised more questions.

“Why did you go to the mine after they’d brought my grandfather up, Joe? Was it because you didn’t buy what the police were saying about his accident?”

He shrugged, avoiding eye contact suddenly. “I liked Gus,” he said, as if that explained it all. The fact was Joe found very few reasons to like any humans at all. If he was admitting a fondness for her grandfather, it probably meant a hell of a lot.

“And you didn’t think to mention this discovery of yours to the Safe Harbor police?” Jett said.

He cast a withering look at Jett. “I mind my own business. They can mind theirs.”

“Tell me about the prints, Joe. What led you to believe my grandfather was murdered?” Muirinn swallowed the sharp lump swelling in her throat as she spoke. Jett reached out, covered her hands, and she realized they were clenched tightly in her lap.

Joe drained his coffee, swiped the back of his hand hard across his mouth and splashed a few fingers of straight whiskey into his mug. “This is how I read it. Gus was on the Tolkin property, and he was looking for something. He had a flashlight with him—”

Muirinn threw Jett a questioning look.

Jett nodded. “He did. A flashlight was found with his body.”

“So that tells me Gus went there to poke around somewhere dark, maybe look down a shaft. His prints were going back and forth between the Sodwana headframe and D-shaft.”

“Like he might be timing how long it would take between the two points underground?” Muirinn offered.

Joe nodded. “Yep. Like that. But he’s not feeling well, okay, or maybe he’s tired, or he’s thinking and pondering, or confused, because he shuffles some, sits down a couple of times.”

“As if he might have been short of breath, or his heart was giving him trouble?”

“Yep. That would do it. Then tracks from two people intersect with his, and they stop and talk to him. You can see this from the prints.”

Joe’s whiskey-coffee breath was strong, and Muirinn felt slightly queasy. She glanced out the door, suddenly craving clean air. Suddenly afraid of what Joe was going to say.

“You okay, Muirinn?” Jett said softly, hand on her shoulder.

She nodded, mouth dry.

“What can you tell us about those two sets of prints that intersected with Gus’s tracks?” Jett said, taking over for her.

“One set was made by a man, hiking boots, size 12. Other set was probably from a woman. ’Bout a size 6.”

“A woman? You’re sure?” said Jett.

“Well, could be a young male, but the prints looked like a woman’s running shoes to me, and the gait was more like a female. So my take is that this couple comes up to Gus, they stand and they talk. Then they start walking with Gus back to Sodwana. Then they stop and there’s a tussle. And from that point on, the prints change. Woman is walking on one side, man on the other. Gus in the middle. Tight formation. The couple’s gait is sort of angled in toward Gus, like they was pushing him, escorting him. And then Gus’s stride, the depth
of depression changes, like he is reluctant, leaning back, maybe collapsing, dragging his feet a bit.”

Muirinn swallowed, nausea deepening.

“By this time, they’re getting close to the headframe building, and their trace gets all messed up with all the other prints that came later. Police-dog prints all over them, too.”

Silence.

Heat intensified in the cabin as the sun baked down outside.

A mosquito whined near Muirinn’s head, and one of the huskies whimpered softly, paws twitching in his dream as he slept near the door.

Jett broke the gravitas.

“Why does that scenario say murder to you, Joe?”

“Because it tells me Gus was forced to the headframe building, and then I figure he was forced down into the shaft by those two people, because, like I say, Gus wouldn’t have gone down there alone.” He shrugged again. “Maybe once down there on the 300 level, in the dark and heat, the stress of it all gave him the heart attack. Thing is—those two people never told anyone he was down there. That’s murder in my book.”

Muirinn tensed, perspiration prickling over her lip. “What else could you tell, Joe?”

“The prints went back to D-shaft, just the two sets, no Gus this time. And they went to where two vehicles were parked behind the main D-Shaft buildings. The woman got into one vehicle, and the man into the other. Both vehicles had standard truck tires, one with winter tread and a real heavy oil leak. Left a black puddle.”

Muirinn chilled. An oil leak. Winter tires.

Gus’s vehicle?

Maybe he
had
driven out to the mine, and one of those
people had driven his truck back to his house to hide the fact that Gus was ever at the mine.

She glanced at Jett. He hadn’t touched his coffee. Neither had she.

A soft wind began to swoosh through the stunted conifers outside, a pine cone clunking onto the metal roof.

Jett cleared his throat. “Joe, Gus’s housekeeper said he was gone three days before he was actually reported missing. Then it took another thirteen days before we found his body down the shaft. And you’re saying you could read all this information from prints that were made on the day of his death? Because those prints would have been over two weeks old.”

Joe’s eyes narrowed. “The time lapse is what helps tell me the story. Who was there first, who came after. There was rain the night before Gus went out to Tolkin. His prints, and the prints from the man and woman, were made in wet mine silt. Then they baked solid under hot sun for the next couple of weeks. That gray glacier silt bakes good as damn clay. Easy to see what prints were made atop of those.”

Muirinn thought of the fine gray silt Jett had pointed out when he’d come around to fix Gus’s truck. It could have come from the shoes of one of the two people who’d forced Gus down the mine shaft, after they’d driven Gus’s truck back to his home to cover their tracks. “How come the police or SAR didn’t look for any of this?” Muirinn snapped suddenly.

“It wasn’t being treated as a crime scene, Muirinn,” Jett said quietly. “To be honest, we were all just looking for an old and eccentric man who’d wandered off.”

Muirinn’s mood darkened. “And how do you know those two photos were taken down inside Tolkin Mine?” She pointed angrily to the crime scene shots Joe said were taken underground.

“Mud down there is very black, especially at the deeper levels. Anyone can see this was shot in a tunnel.”

“And what can you tell us about those underground prints?” Muirinn’s voice came out thick.

Trapper Joe studied them for a long moment. He got up, opened a drawer and retrieved a big old-fashioned magnifying glass. He pored over one of the photos in silence. Muirinn swatted at a small cloud of bugs, the smells in the cabin growing more cloying as the sun rose and the heat baked down.

“See there—” Joe pointed with a blackened fingernail. “And there—the smoothness in the lugs of the sole on the one side? This man favors his right leg. His left is injured, and from this wear on the sole, it’s a permanent disability.”

An unspecified chill stole into Jett, despite the heat in the cabin.

Joe held their eyes for a moment, running his tongue over his teeth, waiting. But neither Muirinn nor Jett offered him more information.

He grunted, turning his attention to the next photo. “From the ruler alongside this underground print,
these
tracks were made by a size 10 winter work boot, Vibram sole, standard mining issue. You can still buy these from Big Bear, the Safe Harbor outfitter on Main. This trace was made by a well-built man, solid, judging by the depths of the boot depressions, maybe ’bout five-eleven if we’re looking at an average ratio between foot length to height. His limp is pretty bad—it would be real obvious to anyone watching him walk.” Joe creaked his chair back, got up and began to imitate the limp, conjuring up the man’s movement from the prints. One long stride, a swing of the left hip, then a short stride accompanied with a drag of the leg. “And he was getting tired. Like this.” Joe dragged his left leg more.

The chill deepened in Jett as he watched Joe, an image of another man filling his mind, a man who made the exact same movements Trapper Joe was making.

A man both he and Muirinn had just watched hobbling out of the airport hangar.

He felt Muirinn glance at him, but Jett did not meet her eyes. He stared instead at the table, telling himself it was nonsense—lots of men working Tolkin had these kinds of injuries, not just his father. It was an occupational hazard.

And five-eleven was a pretty damn average height.

Joe piled the photos neatly, and pushed them abruptly back toward Muirinn. “If I was a betting man,” he said looking at Jett very intensely, then Muirinn, booze and the scent of stale sweat wafting across the table as he moved, “I’d say the owner of those boots worked the mine. ’Cause—” he watched Jett again “—if this man went down to the 800 level at Sodwana and hiked all the way underground to the blast site, he’d have to know where he was going. He’d have worked that section before it was shut down, known those tunnels and rock like the backs of his own hands. And he’d have to know his explosives.” He rubbed his stubbled jaw. “You ask me, you’re looking for an experienced miner who was blasting rock in that old section before it closed. To be that experienced, I reckon he wouldn’t have been younger than thirty at the time of the blast. Add four years from when the Sodwana section was closed, then another twenty years since the blast—your bomber is older than fifty-four. Could even be in his sixties now.”

Jett felt the blood drain from his face, but he said nothing. Again, he told himself that tons of miners could fit that profile.

What if we know the killer, Jett? Maybe some secrets really are better left buried.

He felt sick.

Joe was watching him oddly. Heat and claustrophobia closed in on him. He needed to get out of this place.

Jett lurched to his feet and stomped out of the cabin.

Muirinn and Joe followed him. “Jett?” Muirinn said, placing her hand on his arm, but he shrugged her off and kept walking. “That storm is going to be coming in soon. We need to leave.”

The wind blew hotter and harder, a soft rushing sound beginning in the tops of the conifers as they walked in awkward, ominous silence back to the plane, Joe following behind, shotgun in hand.

As they took off, Joe stood watching them from the beach below, until he was just a tiny speck alongside the wide brown river in a vast and lonely wilderness.

Muirinn sat quietly, watching Jett. His hands were tense on the controls, a muscle at his jaw pulsing. She knew he had to be thinking of his father—how could he
not
be?

Because she sure was.

The image of Adam Rutledge hobbling out of the hangar was burned fresh into her brain, and Joe had mimicked Adam’s movements so exactly it was almost as though he’d morphed into Adam himself for a ghostly split second.

“Do you trust him?” Muirinn said as the plane reached elevation and leveled out.

“Joe?” Jett exhaled heavily, features grim. “I trust him not to go to the cops, if that’s what you mean.”

“I mean, can you trust that he knows what he’s talking about? About those prints, that man and woman. The two vehicles.” She hesitated. “The limp.”

“Joe might be short on words, but not brain cells. He’s sharp. I told you what he did with that kid.”

Muirinn peered down at the ground below as they flew.
“That could have been Gus’s Dodge leaking oil at the mine, Jett,” she said softly. “And there was gray silt in his cab. If those two people were walking in wet silt at the time, it would have caked to their boots, and it would explain how so much got into the bottom of Gus’s truck.”

He shot a sharp glance at her. “So you figure Gus drove his own truck to the mine, and either that man or woman drove it back?”

She closed her eyes, resting her hand on her tummy, tired suddenly. “I don’t know what to think,” she whispered.

Silence hung for several beats, broken only by the whine and rumble of the engine.

“I guess I’m scared of the truth, Jett, of what we might find,” she said softly. “If it’s all connected—the Morans, the police—the truth could blow this town and families apart again, just as if we’d planted a bomb in Safe Harbor ourselves.”

Jett said nothing, eyes focused dead ahead as he flew.

And Muirinn’s mouth turned dry.

It wasn’t just the town that would blow apart. If they found out that Adam did have something to do with the death of her father, the truth could shatter for good the fragile beginnings of their relationship.

Muirinn sneaked another look at Jett’s rugged profile. She understood something crucial now—the lies that could bind, and divide. Because as much as she wanted justice for her father, for Gus, for her mother, she sure as hell didn’t want to blow Jett’s life out of the water, or her chances of a future with him.