Wisdom Spring (23 page)

I looked up information on his own company, Hillstrom Products, only to find out that it went under within months of him selling it.

“That alone is pretty suspicious,” I said to Jess.

“It is,” she agreed. “Almost like the company was fake to begin with, so it was ‘sold’,” she held up her hands like quotation marks, “to a crony, someone who could quietly make the company disappear.”

“I wonder if anyone from that church school is still living,” I said. “Someone who could confirm that he actually went there, because I don’t think he did.”

“What do you want to bet there isn’t anyone. I bet everyone who taught at that school has since died, probably in a variety of non-suspicious ways. Is it even worth checking?”

“Probably not,” I answered. “I’m sure you’re right. If need be, we can sic Joe on that. So, you want to hear my theory?”

“I do.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that Ben killed those people, but I don’t think it was a whim, or him going whacko all of a sudden. I think it was calculated. In fact, I think it was all calculated. I think everything in Gary Hillstrom’s life has been calculated. Coming to Homer served a purpose. I don’t yet know what the purpose was, but he was definitely here for a reason. Getting the job at Exchange Systems was part of the plan, as was moving to Massachusetts and starting a business. What better way to gain residency and establish yourself so you can run for office?”

“If all that’s true,” began Jess, “at what point did he stop working alone and start to develop this organization? We’re pretty sure Exchange Systems is a front, and it sounds as if his own company was a front. We’re missing a step.”

We looked at each other, neither one really sure where to go. And then I saw Jess shake, her face suddenly looked flush, and I thought she was going to throw up. But she didn’t, and she slowly regained her color.

When she could finally speak, she said, “Some of these messages actually hurt when they come in. It’s almost like the more urgent they are, there’s no subtlety. It’s almost violent. Anyway, look up ‘nobbas’ on Google.”

“‘Nobbas’?” I asked. “Did you get a spelling?”

“No. Try all different ways. I have no idea.”

So I did. We spent the next half hour trying different variations in Google, with nothing significant showing up.

Finally Jess sighed and said, “I could have sworn that was a message. In fact, I know it was, but…”

She stopped because I had started laughing.

“What?” she asked.

It had just come to me what “nobbas” meant, and it struck me funny that we had spent so long on it trying to come up with a meaning for it without taking a moment to think about the actual word.

“It’s not ‘nobbas’,” I said. “It’s ‘not boss’. That’s the step we’re missing. We’ve figured all along that this was Hillstrom’s show. But in fact, maybe it’s not. Maybe Hillstrom is just one of the players. Your father is saying ‘not boss’, meaning, Hillstrom might not be the boss. This may go back further than we think, and it may have started before Homer. I think the answer lies in that ghost town. We have to find it.”

Chapter 25

Mel Hutchinson was sweating. His ability to intimidate Corbin Mays was slipping away. For the first time since joining Mays’s staff, he felt vulnerable. Mays definitely now had the upper hand, and he knew it. Frankly, Hutch had to admit to himself that he wasn’t doing a very good job. The people he had hired to carry out some pretty simple assignments—kill the girl and her companion; find out who her companion was; kill Joe Gray; kill Mill Colson—were failing miserably. Colson was the only success, and even that wasn’t confirmed yet. What the fuck was going on?

“Update me,” said Mays. “Give me some good news.”

“We know that Gray was headed for Alaska,” Hutch was trying to sound as confident as possible. “I got word from two of my operatives that Gray hired a lowlife to fly him somewhere in Alaska. My guys were flying up from Seattle to intercept them.”

“And?”

“And I haven’t heard back from them yet.” The truth was, he should have heard hours ago.

“Do we know where?”

“No. The lowlife was directed to the guys in Seattle. He must’ve told them. Nothing was ever passed up the chain.”

“Was he going to Alaska to hide out or to meet the girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the latest on the girl? Do you have any clue as to where she is?”

“No.”

“Exactly what
do
you have for me?”

Hutch hesitated, and he knew Mays caught it. He had to be honest, but he wasn’t going to accept too much of the blame.

“The truth is, they’ve dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody has seen or heard from them since the fiasco in Canada. They could be anywhere. Canada is a big country.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Well, what’s your gut say? Do you think Gray is heading to Alaska to meet Norton and her protector?”

“It’s certainly a possibility.”

“Anything is a possibility. That’s not an answer.”

“I don’t believe the girl and her friend were coming back to Washington. It’s possible my men were decoyed into going east in Canada. It could be the girl headed west instead. Yes, they could be in Alaska.”

“Another big fucking place,” said Mays.

Hutch’s cell phone rang. Please let it be good news, he thought.

It wasn’t. He listened for a minute, then told the caller to keep him abreast of any developments.

“Something else I’m not going to like, right?” asked Mays.

“It seems the helicopter has disappeared. As I said, the guys going after Gray never told anyone exactly where they were going. All they told their contact up the ladder was that they were going to some out of the way outpost in Alaska. That’s it. Now nobody can reach them by radio.”

“How about the lowlife who took him?”

“Dead. Nobody had any reason to question him. Their orders were to get rid of him when he landed back in the states.”

Mays was ready to burst, but he was trying to keep his emotions under control. Could things get any worse?

“Do you think Gray found out about the town?”

“No way. That would be impossible. There is nothing that leads back to the town.”

“Somehow that doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. How many men do we have there?”

“We always keep two. We rotate them out every few weeks. There’s nothing to do there except to chase away the occasional tourist.”

“Send four more men. I want six there at all times.”

“Isn’t that overkill?”

“Judging by the total fuck-ups of your crack team? I’d say no. Maybe Gray doesn’t know about the town, but we have too much still there to take a chance, so I’m certainly not going to leave it unguarded.”

“Okay, I’ll send some more guys up there. I’ve never been there, but isn’t it possible to just remove all the evidence and destroy the town?”

“It’s the safest and most remote place for the records. Nobody would ever look there. Besides, you don’t just destroy a town. It may be uninhabited, but we’d still catch hell from the authorities. Too much explaining and it might set off some red flags as to who actually owns the property. Someday, when the time is right, we’ll destroy all the records, but that day hasn’t come. We might still need them.”

Hutch’s phone rang again. He had never been so reluctant to answer, but Mays was staring at him expectantly.

“Yeah?” he said as confidently as possible, and listened as he was delivered the worst news yet that day. When he hung up, he felt like throwing up.

“I can tell by your face, the sweat dripping off your forehead, and your shaking hand that that was another wonderful call. The only thing missing is a growing stain in your crotch,” said Mays.

“One of my guys,” Hutch was hoarse now, “the one Gray didn’t kill in Rochester, still has Gray’s phone. He said he turned it on, got a call on it last night, and answered it.” The idiot should have let it go to voicemail to get the full message, he thought. “Before the caller on the other end realized that my guy wasn’t Gray and hung up, he said, ‘This is Mill.’ My guy doesn’t know anything about Colson, but figured a call on Gray’s phone was important enough to let us know.”

“Well this day is fucking complete. Obviously I was wrong when I hired you to be in charge of security. But I’m kind of stuck with you now, aren’t I? Would you go do your fucking job and come back here with some good news?”

After Hutch had left, Corbin Mays sat at his desk contemplating the recent events. He looked down at his hands and realized he was shaking. So many years in the making, and now, when it was so close to fruition, the whole thing could come tumbling down. All because of an insignificant girl who knew too much.

Chapter 26

We took a break to get a snack and use the bathroom. I brewed us both a cup of coffee and made my way back to the computer, where Jess was already back at work. As I handed Jess her cup, I said, “I had an idea. We’ve been looking for ghost towns, because that’s supposedly how Ben described it to Clyde. But what if it’s not exactly a ghost town? What if there is still a population listed? After all, if Ben lived there, it couldn’t have been a
real
ghost town.”

Jess typed “list of Alaska towns” into Google and clicked onto a site.

“Then it could be any one of close to 400 towns,” she said.

“Let’s narrow it down. We’re going to have to make some assumptions. I think we can safely rule out the larger, more established towns, so for now, let’s say we keep only towns under 200 people, although I think we’re going to find that it’s far below that number.”

While I was talking, Jess was plugging information into Google.

“There are all kinds of sites,” she said. “The information isn’t exactly consistent from one site to the next, but for the moment, we can use Wikipedia, which lists them in order of size, and has links to census information and the town description.”

“The census information could be good,” I replied. “That will be helpful for the next part of the process. For now we can make use of the town information.”

“Okay, then,” she said, “out of the 400 or so towns, we can now eliminate about half. That’s still a lot left.”

“And here’s the slow part,” I said. “Out of the 200 left, let’s click onto each link and see how the town is described. If it’s a seasonal fishing or hunting village, or a pipeline village, we can eliminate them. I think native villages as well—this is definitely a white man conspiracy. If they are too close to one of the larger towns, those can be crossed off, or on a major road. Anything with a historical significance won’t work. We just want something anonymous and out of the way. I know it’s a lot of towns, but I think we can eliminate them pretty fast.”

We got to it. She printed out the entire list of 400 towns, and we crossed off the top 200. It was time-consuming at first, but once we had the hang of it and knew where to look on the linked page, each one only took a couple of minutes. As we eliminated towns, we crossed them off the hard copy. A couple of hours later, we had narrowed the list down to eighteen towns.

“That’s not bad,” I said, sitting back in my chair. I looked at the clock. It was two o’clock. Scott had said not to bother calling. If he was in the air I wouldn’t get through, and if he was on the ground he probably wouldn’t have service. So I had no idea where they were. “The next step is less clear, so it’s good that we only have eighteen to work with. I want to look at the census information and see if there’s anything that doesn’t seem right—population swings or sudden drops—anything that sends up a flag. We need to go back ten or twenty years before Ben came to Homer, so let’s examine the census information for the last fifty years for each town.”

That was a much slower process, and it was almost five o’clock when we had narrowed it down to three towns, all with populations under ten: Hidden Ridge, Moose Hollow, and Wisdom Spring. Each one had an anomaly that warranted further research.

Hidden Ridge’s population had peaked in 1948 with a population close to 300. A small zinc mining operation had been going on since the early ‘20s, and by the late ‘40s production was at its highest level. But the mine played out over the next twenty years, and by the late ‘60s it was boarded up and abandoned. At that point the population had sunk to just over sixty residents. In 1980, there was a sudden surge, and the population almost doubled. We couldn’t find the reason for it. Then in 2000, the population was listed as twenty-four. In 2010, it was eight. The timing of the surge fit within the timeframe and was certainly curious.

Moose Hollow was suspicious in another way. The oldest of the three towns, Moose Hollow started out as a hunting camp—mainly for moose hunting, as the name implied—back around the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1930s a lumber mill was built and workers were brought in. By 1960 the records showed a population of 225. In the early ‘70s, they were bought out by a larger corporation, but the population actually decreased to about 150. That raised a flag for me. In 2005, the mill burned down and most of the population left. The current population was listed as six.

My money, though, was on Wisdom Spring, for a couple of reasons. First, all of the other towns had an easy link from the list to their Wikipedia site. Wisdom Spring had no link, as if it was removed altogether from Wikipedia. We found the information on a personal web page of the grandson of one of the town’s former residents. Luckily Jess, being a researcher, investigated further than most people would have. I never would have found it. Hillstrom’s people probably hadn’t yet either.

The other reason was its story. Like Hidden Ridge, it was once the home to a fairly thriving zinc mine. Opened in 1917, the mine went through its growing pains. In a remote section of central Alaska, its first obstacle was transportation. The road leading to the mine was hardly more than an animal trail. It took them two years to clear a road leading to a “main” road. They also weren’t totally prepared for the Alaskan winters and many workers died in those early years. They eventually got their act together, and by 1930 were actually making a profit. A typical mining town, it consisted of forty or fifty houses—some not much more than shacks—a general store, a stable and blacksmith (in its early days), a bar, a hotel, a small church that was also a school, and little else. Population-wise, its high point came in 1953 when it topped out at just over 200. It maintained a steady population for about ten years when, like Hidden Ridge, the mine finally played out. The people left and for the next five years it lay dormant. But like Moose Hollow, a company swooped in in the late ‘60s and this time bought not just the mine, but the whole town. By then the state owned the land and the buildings and sold it to the company for pennies. Supposedly the company—the name of which we couldn’t find—was going to reopen the mine, but the writer of the story wasn’t aware of any mining activity there. The 1970 census showed the town’s population at ninety. The 1980 census had it at 110. By 1990, the population was down to a dozen, and by 2000 and 2010, it was listed as zero.