eighteen

“I realize you’ve all just witnessed a traumatic event, but I need to take preliminary statements while the details are still fresh in your minds, so if you’ll find a seat for yourselves somewhere, we can begin.”

We were in the equipment hut with Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Patrick Quinn, surrounded by an array of harnesses, helmets, carabiners, rope, rain gear, boots, cables, and winches. Quinn had arrived first on the scene after Sydney Ann had made the 911 call, but he’d needed his four-wheel drive to maneuver through the muddy access road and an assist from a couple of the other instructors to locate Thor’s body at the base of platform six on the course. Mindy and the rest of us had been left stranded at the top of the platform while Sydney Ann had rappelled to the ground from platform seven and raced to check on Thor’s status. But it had been apparent to me even before she arrived that he hadn’t survived the fall.

In the midst of the chaos and confusion I’d hammered out arrangements with Etienne to have him and Alison escort their groups back to the cabins to await Lieutenant Kitchen, urging them to return directly to our lodgings rather than stop at the roadside café we’d promised. I suspected no one would be happy about missing this fabled watering hole, but circumstances had changed, so we needed to adjust. After dropping the group off, Steele could drive back here to pick us up when the authorities were through with us.

Florence had remained remarkably calm throughout the incident. “She’s in shock,” Goldie and Orphie had confided to me as they’d comforted her atop the platform. But the level of calm that Florence was exhibiting smacked of more than just shock.

It smacked of relief.

Per Trooper Quinn’s request, the six people in my group sat down on folding chairs and metal footlockers while Sydney Ann and Mindy sat cross-legged on the floor, looking even more stunned than the rest of us. Seating himself on an available folding chair, Quinn removed a pen and notepad from his shirt pocket, and after jotting down all our names, he put a bead on Florence.

“So let me start out by saying that I’m very sorry about your husband’s accident, Mrs. Thorsen.”

Florence nodded. “Thank you.”

“And since I’ve never ziplined, I’d like to have one of the instructors tell me how the process is supposed to work.”

Sydney Ann jumped in with the information about the guest harnesses, the stationary cable that served to anchor everyone, and how guests’ carabiners were always tethered to a hitching post until an instructor attached both clips to the zipline. “It’s against our regulations to allow any guest to be present on a platform without being anchored by two carabiners.”

Quinn canted his head. “And yet Mr. Thorsen fell to his death because neither of his carabiners was attached.”

“I attach him to center cable when he finish fifth zip,” argued Mindy. She pantomimed the motion of detaching his first carabiner from the zip and fastening it to the hitching post. “Click.” And then the second. “Click.” She held Quinn’s gaze. “Impossible for him to fall.”

“So how do you explain what happened?”

“I no explain. Man must have fiddled with carabiners. Detached himself. But Sydney Ann warn before first zip, ‘No fiddle with carabiners. Very dangerous.’ Maybe he not listen.”

“Why would he want to detach himself?” prodded Quinn.

Mindy shrugged. “This man act like beeg shot. He not like following instructions.”

Quinn glanced at the rest of us for confirmation. “Is that true? Did Thor Thorsen take pleasure in acting like a big shot?”

Glances fired back and forth between the five remaining book clubbers. “Thor was…difficult,” offered Goldie, “and quite hard to like.”

“He didn’t think rules applied to him,” added Orphie, “so he always ignored them.”

“He was obnoxious,” said Ennis.

“He didn’t like me,” confessed Grover. “In fact, he always went out of his way to insult me. Anything he could say or do to ruin my day, he’d do it. He thrived on making me feel miserable. Made him feel powerful.”

Quinn’s face softened as he regarded Florence. “I’m sorry you have to listen to this, Mrs. Thorsen.”

“I don’t mind, Officer. It’s all true. Thor was toxic. My one regret is that I didn’t discover his shortcomings until after I married him. He kept the real Thor under wraps until I had a ring on my finger.”

“There’s always divorce.”

Florence shook her head. “There was no divorcing Thor. Even if I’d gone through with it, I’d never be rid of him. He would have found a way to torture me until I died.”

“So…his death today,” questioned Quinn. “Would you label this a way out for you?”

Goldie sucked in her breath. “Are you suggesting that Florence might have had a hand in killing her own husband?”

He kept his gaze riveted on Florence. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what transpired right before your husband fell, Mrs. Thorsen?”

She folded her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes to focus on a random spot on the floor. “We were all bunched together on the platform, listening to Mindy tell us how she’d ended up in Alaska. And as usual Thor demanded to be first across the next zip, so he circled around me on the outside edge of the platform, but we accidentally bumped into each other. I remember him throwing his arms in the air to regain his balance, but the next thing I knew he wasn’t brushing past me.” She looked up from the floor to make eye contact with Quinn. “He was tumbling over the side.”

“You accidentally bumped into each other?” pressed Quinn. “Or did you give him a well-placed push on purpose?”

“No, I didn’t push him,” cried Florence. “He was the one who did the initial shoving so he could get to the front of the line.”

“So you deny being the person who unfastened his carabiners, Mrs. Thorsen?”

“Of course I deny it. I wouldn’t dare monkey with those things. Besides, they looked so tangled, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out which carabiner went with which harness.”

“Carabiners not tangled,” challenged Mindy. “I know which clip belong which guest.” She made a V of her index and middle fingers and directed them at her face. “I have good eye. Never make mistake with harness, even if woman say straps tangled.”

As he studied Mindy, Quinn clicked his pen to retract the point, then clicked it again to advance it. Retract. Advance. Retract. Advance. “How long have you been an employee at Last Frontier Ziplining, Mindy?”

Her eyes shifted nervously. She held up her forefinger as if it were a roman numeral. “One week,” she said in a small voice.

Quinn’s voice rose an octave, cracking with disbelief. “Seven days?”

“Not full seven. I have weekend off. But I make no mistake all that time.”

He stared at Sydney Ann, nonplussed. “Just how long has this outfit been in operation?”

“Counting today?” She forced a smile. “A week.”

He made a notation on his pad. “With a flawless performance record until today. I suppose congratulations are in order. You avoided any fatalities until day seven.” He shook his head. “How much training were you required to go through before you earned your instructor’s status?”

Mindy and Sydney Ann exchanged dubious looks, accompanied by slow shoulder rolls. “Zipping,” reflected Sydney, ticking the list off on her fingertips. “Rappelling. Knot tying. CPR. Safety tips.” She crooked her mouth at Mindy for validation. “About two weeks?”

“Ten days,” corrected Mindy. “They give us weekend off.”

“Almost two weeks,” repeated Quinn. “Two weeks to qualify you to be entrusted with the lives of countless tourists.”

“We move clip from one cable to another,” Mindy fired back, demonstrating the process in slow motion for him. “One cable to another. It not like brain surgery.”

“And you couldn’t possibly have made a mistake and failed to tether Mr. Thorsen to the anchor cable. Is that your claim?”

Mindy shook her head adamantly. “If I not attach to cable, man’s carabiners would be flopping from harness. Boomboom, boomboom. Man’s carabiners not floppy. They fastened to hitching cable.”

“Until they weren’t,” Quinn pointed out. “What line of work were you in before you were hired here, Mindy?”

“I work as chamber maid in lodge at Denali.”

“And before that?”

“In Belarus? I work for family company what make room freshener. All organic. Very healthy. I make up name for scents. Cinnamon Potato,” she said proudly. “Alfalfa Garlic.”

Which probably explained why she’d needed to seek alternative career opportunities in another country.

“I’d love a job like that,” mused Goldie. “Only instead of room freshener, I’d like to be able to give names to eye shadow and blush. Whisperberry.” She pronounced it slowly and sensuously, as if she’d been dying to say it out loud for a long time. “What color do you think that sounds like?”

“Shell pink,” fantasized Orphie. “With maybe a hint of bergamot.”

“Bergamot?” Goldie gave her a squinty look. “What’s bergamot?”

“I think it’s a town in Germany,” said Florence.

A sharp knock sounded on the door.

“What?” Quinn called out.

A man poked his head through the opening. “Need to speak to you for a sec, Sarge.”

Quinn left the room for a quick two minutes before returning. I suspected he’d been on the receiving end of unwelcome news because when he rejoined us, his body language screamed of exasperation. Retaking his seat, he ranged a long look at us and sighed. He nodded at Mindy. “After Mr. Thorsen fell, why didn’t you rappel to the ground immediately to check on his condition?”

“It against company regulation to leave guest on platform without instructor, so I no could leave. Sydney go instead. She by herself on platform seven.”

He lasered a look at Sydney Ann. “And how long did it take you to reach Mr. Thorsen?”

She puffed out her bottom lip. “Ten minutes? Maybe less? I made the 911 call, then rappelled to the ground, but it seemed to take me forever to reach him because I had to fight through a whole bunch of scrub brush.”

“What was his condition when you reached him?”

She spoke her words slowly, self-consciously. “He landed facedown, so I rolled him over and checked the pulse in his neck, but I couldn’t find it. So I detached his harness and pulled his jacket and shirt apart to listen to his heart, but when I still couldn’t hear a heartbeat, I knew…you know…that…that he was dead. That’s when I sent out an SOS text to the other instructors on the course. So they converged on platform six to help get the stranded guests through the rest of the zips so they could get down.”

Quinn jotted something onto his notepad before returning his gaze to Mindy. “So, to reiterate: it’s your opinion that Mr. Thorsen detached his carabiners merely to showboat?”

“Showboat?” Mindy’s features puckered in confusion. “What you mean, showboat?”

“A showboat is the same thing as a big shot,” interjected Grover, “only on a grander scale.”

Mindy crossed her arms and nodded her head emphatically. “Man was showboat.”

“Excuse me, Officer,” Ennis called from his perch on a footlocker at the back of the room. “If Thor did release his own carabiners, won’t his fingerprints be all over the metal?”

“They would be,” said Quinn, “if all trace of prints hadn’t been obliterated when his harness was detached. From what I was just told”—he bobbed his head toward the door—“the prints on the carabiners are smudged beyond our capacity to lift them.”

It took Sydney Ann a couple of heartbeats to comprehend what Quinn had just said, but when enlightenment struck, she rounded her mouth into an O of indignation. “Are y’all saying you can’t get any fingerprints because of me?”

“I’m saying the fingerprints are unsalvageable,” Quinn responded in an even tone.

“Well, what’d y’all expect me to do?” she huffed. “Are y’all saying I shouldn’t have touched him? That I shouldn’t have bothered to check for a pulse or listen to his heart? I spent a whole half hour of training time breathing into the mouth of a plastic dummy to get CPR certified. I know what to do to revive someone, but he was beyond any help I could give him.”

“Sydney Ann did the right thing,” applauded Goldie. “I’m sure it was pure accident that she screwed up the way she did.”

“Does that mean we’ll never know the real reason why Thor detached himself from the anchor cable?” asked Florence. “I can’t imagine what he was trying to prove—I mean, other than showing off.” She fluttered her fingers in the air. “Look, ma. No hands.”

“What if none of this had anything to do with showing off?” suggested Orphie in a conspiratorial tone. “What if Thor was trying to detach someone else’s hooks and detached his own by mistake?”

“You think Thor was trying to kill one of us?” squealed Grover.

Orphie shrugged. “Why not? He didn’t like any of us. Maybe he saw this as the best chance he’d ever have to get rid of one of us. It wouldn’t have been too hard, what with the straps being tangled like they were.”

“Straps not tangled,” charged Mindy between gritted teeth.

“Unhook the clips,” Orphie continued, “leave them draped over the hitching post thingie, and no one’s any the wiser…until they step too close to the edge.”

The group pondered her theory as they crossed glances. “But which one of us did he want to kill?” whispered Florence.

“By the same token,” Quinn spoke up, “if all of you despised Mr. Thorsen as much as he despised you, what would have prevented one of you from deciding that this was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of getting rid of him? Quite successfully, I might add. And by a serendipitous twist of fate, there are no fingerprints to link any of you directly to his death.”

Sydney Ann threw her arms into the air. “Go ahead,” she railed at Quinn. “Why don’t y’all just shoot me now and get it over with.”

Goldie gasped. “Oh my god. Is she confessing?”

“I believe she’s referring to the unwitting part she played in corrupting the fingerprint evidence,” explained Ennis.

“I didn’t do that on purpose!” swore Sydney Ann.

“So are you going to arrest her?” asked Orphie.

Quinn ranged a look around the room, his flinty expression cowing everyone into silence. “As I told you when we began, I’m only taking preliminary statements this morning, but I’m ruling this as a suspicious death, and none of you are above suspicion. Whether this is a case of criminal negligence on the part of the instructor or an intentional homicide remains to be seen. I’ve just begun my investigation, so you can expect to see a lot more of my face in the days to come.”

I hung my head in despair. No problem there. Maybe he and Lieutenant Kitchen could form a tag team.

“I don’t know what your itinerary looks like, Mrs. Miceli, but you’ll need to remain in Denali until further notice. That applies to the Last Frontier instructors also.”

I stared at him, dumbstruck. “But…we’re planning to leave tomorrow.”

“Not now, you’re not. I’m sorry.”

“But…but…it’s going to be impossible to book accommodations for all our guests on the spur of the moment at the height of tourist season. What are we supposed to do, sleep on the bus?”

“You work in the travel industry, Mrs. Miceli. I’m sure you’ll find some way to resolve the problem.”

Easy for him to say. I knew I should have packed more antacids. But as he stood up, summarily dismissing us, I realized I had much more to worry about than overnight accommodations.

Two guests dead in four days.

Two book clubbers dead in four days.

Oh my god. Were they killing each other?

I cast a wary look at the faces around me. Whether I wanted to believe it or not, there was a good possibility that someone in this room was a cold-blooded murderer.

“Do you think Thor’s death might be related to the death of one of our other tour members in Girdwood a few days ago?” Goldie called out as Quinn made his way to the door.

He stopped in his tracks. “Are you talking about the Bigfoot homicide?”

“Is that what they’re calling it?” asked Orphie. “Oh my goodness, wait until Emily’s father finds out. Won’t he be surprised? He’s the one who saw it, you know.”

“He didn’t actually see it,” I corrected.

Quinn regarded us in an obvious fluster. “The victim was a member of your tour group? You’ve suffered two deaths in how many days?”

“Four,” I said in an undertone.

“Okay, folks.” He herded us back to our seats. “Sit yourselves back down. No one’s going anywhere yet.”