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“Nothing.” I look around the tiny room. “And I do mean nothing. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was a spare room with some clothing in it. There’s not a single personal item. What do you know about him?”
She pauses, thinking, and then shakes her head. “Nothing, really. He comes with a stellar job history, and that’s all I cared about. Gran would have run a basic background check, but now that I think about it, I don’t knowanythingabout him.”
“That’s unusual, isn’t it? On a job like this, everyone working together?”
“It is. Hell, even I talk a bit. Someone mentions a divorce, and I say I’ve been there. Stuff like that. I’ve talked to Gunnar many times, and I still couldn’t tell you the first thing about him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I tell Dalton what I’ve found, and then it’s time to shuffle duties yet again. It’ll be twilight soon, and we need to find Gunnar. That puts Anders on Penny-watch while Dalton and I head out with Storm.
Earlier in this investigation, I’d thought about how much easier it was tracking someone who didn’t know we had a tracking dog. The reverse is also true. Gunnar knows about Storm, and he is being damn careful. His trail heads straight for one of the streams outside town. He took off his shoes and waded in, and it’d be damn cold, but it’s not midwinter. The water would only be uncomfortable.
When someone walks in water, a scent dog needs to find out where they left it. That means walking up one side and down the other, hoping to find that narrow patch where they stepped out and then headed inland. We take the far side first, presuming he’d head that way, but after close to a half mile, we have to admit there is no way he walked that far in cold water without his feet going numb. Back to the side closer to town.
As we walk, my brain spins. Storm and Dalton don’t need me to track, which means I’m free to think, and I’m working through the case with Gunnar as Bruno’s partner. Does anything not fit? No. It all works, but only in the sense that there’s nothing I know of to prove Gunnar couldn’t have done it.
Gunnar sees Bruno leaving periodically. Gets curious, mostly—I suspect—because it could be an avenue of manipulation. Oh, Gunnar doesn’t strike me as the blackmail sort. Like Yolanda says, he’s too forthright for that. He’d just let Bruno know what he knows, and that would give him power.
He discovers that Bruno is going out to Mark’s claim and checking it out while Mark isn’t there. Bruno and Gunnar strike a bargain to share the profits.
Then Denise shows up while they’re scouting the site, and they have to kill her. That same night, Penny also shows up, having tracked Yolanda and gotten turned around and gone too deep into the forest and then followed the sound of the mining equipment in the water.
This has been my theory all along. Both Penny and Denise saw too much. On the same night? Does that make sense?
I’ve been overly focused on Penny and Bruno, with Denise’s murder being—unfortunately—just another complication. It works even better if, as I theorized, Denise was dead when Penny showed up and that’s why Gunnar hit her from behind, getting her out of the way before she saw Denise.
But now that theory crystallizes with a different face in the role of “Bruno’s partner.”
What if…?
I have a question, and it’s easy enough to answer. I should have answered it sooner, but again, Denise’s case fell to a distant priority compared to the rest.
“Fuck,” Dalton mutters. “Gunnar must have gone the other way.”
I rouse from my thoughts to realize we’re back near Haven’s Rock. Dalton’s peering downstream, in the direction of the lake. We’d headed upstream because that’s the direction of Mark’s mining site. Of course, that presumes Gunnar was headed there. He could also have gone in the other direction, toward the lake.
“You have your gun, right?” I say.
Dalton lifts one brow, as if to say this is a silly question.
“Gun, flares, first-aid kit, flashlight?” I say.
“Yep.” He lifts a shoulder, indicating his backpack strap.
“Then would you be okay continuing on if I swapped spots with Will? I need to check something in town.”
I tell him my question, and he nods.
“Tell Will I’m heading toward the lake on this side of the stream. Make sure he has his gun and a light. He can catch up.”
I’m at the clinic alone. I sent Anders to join up with Dalton. April has headed to bed, and I’ve only run up to say that I’m doing something for the case and not bothering Penny, who is sound asleep. That’s all April cares about, and she leaves me to it.
I have taken Denise’s body out of the under-cabin cold storage. That is, sadly, a necessity in a town like this, where if someone dies—hopefully of natural causes—we would prefer to return their body to their loved ones as soon as we can… which might take a few days. Mark has left us with Denise’s body, on the understanding that we may need to investigate more.
We have her body unwrapped, and I’m combing through my notes.
Time of death is far from the precise science we see on television, where a suspect is exonerated because the victim died between midnight and one, and she has an alibi for that hour. The only way you’re going to get that precise is if there’s proof the victim was alive at 11:59 and found at one. It’s worse up here. Denise had been found in a pit dug into the permafrost and we’ve been keeping her in cold storage. All that slows the rate of decomposition.
