Points West (A Butterscotch Jones Mystery Book 5) (2 page)

Of course, a lot could be blamed on the CIA. Chuck was less
sure about aliens.

“Damn it.”

Chuck picked up the phone and dialed the number for the
private airfield where the Wings
hangared
his plane
when in Winnipeg. It said a lot that he had the number memorized. He’d been spending
a fair amount of time in the Gulch for one reason or another.

It was good that he was a patient man.
The same bear as last time
. He hoped not; everyone involved with
that affair was supposedly dead or arrested. Maybe she meant the time before
that and that Chuck’s people were back snooping around. The Wings would
probably know what was going on, but he wouldn’t be able to tell Chuck anything
over the phone either. It would have to wait until he got to the airport.

At least he wouldn’t have to pack a bag for the trip. He had
left some winter clothes at Butterscotch’s cabin at Christmas. Nor did he need
to bring a gun. One thing the Gulch had plenty of was firearms. The two
thoughts weren’t much of a silver lining, but one had to take comfort where one
found it.

Danny, the Wings, was waiting for the Mountie, nursing a cup
of cooling coffee. It wouldn’t do to drink too much. Taking
a
whizz
in midair was tricky business, especially at night, and there were
no midway rest stops for freight pilots. Once he was up and over the mountains
there was no setting down.

He didn’t like to fly into McIntyre’s Gulch after dark when
he had cargo since he couldn’t land on the road, but the weather was clear and
the lake was frozen solid, so with the beacon on they could make a safe
landing. Big John would just have to bring the pub’s supplies down by sled in
the morning. And it made sense to get back to the Gulch as soon as possible.

This man dying on Butterscotch’s doorstep was a bad
business. The Wings had done some snooping about how the man got there. The
body had no identification and the man had used a fake name—unless John Smith
really was his name, and how could it be?—when he rented his snowmobile in
Seven Forks.

It was also odd that he had used Stoddard to fly him into
Seven Forks. Okay, it made sense in one way because the Wings had already had a
client that wanted to fly out earlier in the day, a brass-balled bitch she had
been too.
Weird accent.
Called
herself
Jane Doe—which was none of his business. But if you wanted privacy for
something then you had to make other plans, which this other guy had done.

Wings had talked to Stoddard briefly and he had seemed
uneasy about his passenger. He warned the Wings that this John Smith seemed
like a man who wouldn’t want people knowing his business and everyone should
keep their nose out of it. But still, Stoddard charged twice as much as the
Wings did and wasn’t nearly as good a pilot. If he had waited a day—a half a
day, Smith could have saved some money and flown with him. How much was privacy
worth?

Apparently a lot.

Or maybe it wasn’t about privacy but about flying at a
certain time. Like right away.

Headlights turned onto the airfield. The Wings recognized
the Mountie’s jeep and was relieved. It was time to give this problem to
someone else.

“Hey, Danny,” the Mountie said, locking his car door and
pocketing the keys. He had only a small briefcase and a brown paper bag.

“Good to see you, Mountie.”

“I hear there’s been another bear attack in the Gulch.”

“Aye.
This one’s name was John
Smith.”

“Sounds like an alias.”

“
Aye, that
it does.
A lot of those floating around today.”
And if anyone would
know an alias it was Danny McIntyre Jones.

The Mountie nodded and then looked to see if anyone was
standing close enough to overhear them.

“I brought sandwiches for us, if you want to eat before we
get started.”

“No thanks, Mountie. Let’s be going. It’s only getting
darker.”

“Okay. You can fill me in while I eat.
Didn’t
have time today for lunch.
Or dinner.”

The Mountie stowed his bag and briefcase in the plane and
then helped Danny remove the chocks from under the wheels. He was clearly
getting used to the routine of takeoff. Danny hadn’t been sure in the beginning
that he was going to like the Mountie, but Chuck Goodhead had turned out to be
a good man. And it had been a lucky day for the Gulch that he came to town.

Butterscotch could do a lot worse than this man.

My wardrobe is mostly functional, but since meeting Chuck I have
added some clothes with sleeves that aren’t unraveled and jeans that aren’t
pre-stretched to someone else’s shape. I even have a high tensile strength bra.
I was wearing all of these things but I doubted Chuck had noticed them on
account of the body.

The corpse lay on a sheet of plastic tarp on a makeshift
table on plywood and sawhorses out in the Bones’ woodshed, which wasn’t a
woodshed but really a distillery. The deceased looked the same as he had hours
ago except he was grayer and the new coat had been removed.

“I know him,” Chuck said, looking shaken. We all looked
pretty pale in the lamplight, but Chuck was almost as gray as the corpse. He
had had a long cold snowmobile ride in from the lake and had to be feeling
chilled. We needed to get this over with and then get home to a fire. “He’s a
police officer in Winnipeg.”

I touched his arm, trying for compassion when mainly I felt
alarm.

“I’m so sorry! Was he a close friend?” Our voices were
hushed in the presence of the dead but our words still had form, our
exhalations fogging the air.

Color flooded his cheeks and I realized that anger was
replacing shock.

“No. Brian didn’t have friends. In recent years he’s barely
had colleagues. One doesn’t when one spends every waking hour rendering oneself
odious. What he mainly had were bitter rivals and political minders.” I
blinked, not expecting that Chuck would actually know the man and also dislike
him so much. Chuck was very much a live-and-let-live kind of guy. “Look, Brian
was all impulse in an unprocessed, unfettered state, and none of it was good
impulses. In fact I think he was a traitor—a double agent.
Maybe
a triple one.
I know he was crooked and took bribes.”

“What kind of triple agent?” I asked.

“Russian mafia, CIA—who knows.
I
think he was the one that told the Russians about the downed plane and he had
something to do with the black box you found. I think he was finally caught in
the act right around then by internal security and our side started using him
to leak false information to other organizations ever since.
Which
is a dangerous thing to do.
And since he was also unburdened with any
charm or tact or scruples, I can’t say that I am surprised that someone has
finally killed him.”

Chuck had never,
never
been this forthcoming about his work. He had to be deeply disturbed by this
man’s death, which only increased my unease.

“A police officer!
Here?” The Bones
sounded horrified. I sympathized. A dead policeman was bad news. The residents
of the Gulch are detached from the rest of society and prefer—no, require—that
it remain this way. The death of a law enforcement officer made that difficult
and worried people like us who leave no footprints—or fingerprints—behind. “You
think one of your people killed him?”

Doc sounded hopeful. Chuck shrugged.

“Maybe.
They had moral cause.
Still, this doesn’t feel like something another officer or professional would
do, no matter how angry. It’s too haphazard.
Sloppy.
Professionals don’t usually give in to impulse and this killing looks damn
impulsive and poorly planned. And why the hell was he coming to the Gulch? His
interest in this place should have ended when the box blew up.”

“Damned if I know why he was here. He died without saying a
word. What killed him exactly?” I asked Doc. “Can you tell?”

“Bears?”
Doc suggested with a grim
smile. He has lousy bedside—and graveside—manners. “Seriously, near as I can
tell without doing an autopsy, this man has had an overdose of blood thinners.
Could be Coumadin or Warfarin, maybe Plavix, but I am betting it’s something
nastier like rat poison. He was bleeding internally and that would only happen
with a prescription medication if he massively overdosed. Of course, that
bullet in his shoulder didn’t help either. He was losing blood internally and
externally and his heart couldn’t cope.”

“Bullet?”
Chuck asked.

Doc pulled back the dark shirt which had a small hole in it.
It had already been partially rucked up when he examined the body so the hole
wasn’t obvious. “The shirt is wet. Part blood but I think he packed the wound
with snow.”

“It’s a small hole,” Chuck said. He was putting aside anger
and beginning to think like a cop again.

“A through-and-through flesh wound. Twenty-two
caliber
, I’d say—a woman’s purse gun. And the shooter wasn’t
that close when it happened or it would be worse than this scratch.”

I nodded, not bothering to comment on the Bones’ gender
biases. He knew his bullet wounds.

“But there was no hole in the coat, was there?” I asked. The
Bones shook his head. “So he got shot while he had his coat off. His brand new
coat that still had the tags on it.”

I was trying to add things up.

“No hole in the coat,” Doc affirmed again.
“But lots of blood on the lining.
Another thing, either this
guy was a diabetic who had begun taking insulin or he’d been using drugs.”

“Drugs wouldn’t surprise me really, though I never saw any
sign of that kind of thing at work. Brian was nasty, not inefficient or stupid
like most addicts are.”

Doc grunted.

“I don’t think he’d been using long. He’s too healthy to be
a long-term drug user. I wonder if that’s how a blood thinner was administered.
That wouldn’t be at all standard, but damned effective if you want to kill
someone.”

“Why the hell would he have his coat off?” Chuck asked the
ceiling. “It hasn’t been above twenty degrees all week.”

“The coat was rather long. Maybe he was answering the call
of nature and it was getting in the way,” I suggested.

Chuck grunted agreement. I think our lips were freezing and
it was getting difficult to speak clearly.

“And though shot, he didn’t go back to Seven Forks for help.
He just put on his coat and kept driving for the Gulch.” Chuck exhaled. “If we
backtrack
the trail I bet we find a corpse.
Probably between here and Seven Forks.
Probably closer to
the Gulch, or he’d have gone back for medical assistance in Seven Forks.”

“Unless he knew it was someone from Seven Forks who shot
him,” Doc added.

“The snowmobile was one of
Anatoli’s
,
right?” I asked the Bones.
Anatoli
rented them as a
sideline to smuggling prescription meds.

“Yeah, but you can’t suspect him of shooting this guy.
Anatoli
never used a wussy gun in his life.”

“I don’t suspect
Anatoli
.” I
didn’t. The Russian was former mafia and would not have let Brian live long
enough to reach the Gulch if he had set out to kill him. In fact the body would
never have been found.

Chuck picked up the corpse’s hand. It still moved but not
easily. Rigor was wearing off but the body was freezing. He leaned over and
sniffed. I was glad that he was wearing gloves. The gray body was giving me the
creeps.

“He’s fired a gun. Did he have a weapon on him?”

“No,” the Bones said, and I shook my head.

“At least I didn’t see one.”

“So he probably dropped it somewhere on the trail and was too
weak or too distracted to go back and look for it.”

We all thought about this for a minute.

“Was he married?” I asked, thinking ahead. A grieving widow
and maybe orphans would make things so much worse. That was the kind of story
that attracted the press.

“No, but there were women—lots of them.
Enough that the office gossiped.”
Chuck frowned and
began to look thoughtful.

“Seriously?”

“Not really,” Chuck answered with growing distaste. “And I
think some were for hire. His last lady friend came to the office and accused
him of seeing a prostitute.”

“Ha! Therefore Hell hath enlarged herself!” the Bones
said,
ready to believe that a woman had shot him in a
crime
passionnel
. It was the safest
theory for us.

“Uh-huh, and poison and a small handgun points to a woman
scorned.
Except he must have been shot after he left Seven
Forks and I don’t think a hooker or ex-girlfriend would follow him that far.
Not unless she was a psychotic Girl Guide. I mean, why not just shoot him at
home?”

“No.” Chuck agreed. “I don’t think this is a love-gone-wrong
killing either. At least, it’s not just for that reason.”

“When did you see him last?”
I
asked Chuck.

“I think … Thursday afternoon.”

“This is a long way from Winnipeg, so he must have flown in.
Unless he drove to Seven Forks before the last storm, but that would mean he
lead-footed it the whole way. We better talk to the Wings. Maybe we can figure
out a timeline.” Hanging out with Chuck has taught me to think like a
policeman.

“I already did. He flew into Seven Forks with a pilot named
Stoddard. Stoddard wouldn’t take him all the way to the Gulch. And there was a
strange woman in Seven Forks who arrived a couple hours before Brian. The Wings
flew her in yesterday morning. She gave the name of Jane Doe and never pulled
her muffler off of her face or the hat off her head.”