Chapter 15
As promised, staff at the trauma center was ready and waiting. There was no helipad per se, just a marked-off area in the parking lot. With his typical skill, Dad set the bird down so gently, Spence wasn’t even positive they were down until the crew with the gurney started heading toward them.
They handled her as gently as he ordered them to.
He caught Hetty watching him as he gave that order.
She had an odd look on her face, and somehow he knew she was thinking of those hours last night when feelings they’d kept buried for over a decade had broken free.
Once she was up and around, they would have to go there again, but for once he didn’t dread what would surely be a talk with a capital T.
Hetty didn’t hate him.
The moment when they wheeled her past those swinging doors and they closed after her, shutting him off from what would happen next, put him in mind of a million movie and TV scenes.
In reality, he felt more than a bit nauseous, his gut churning as she disappeared.
One of the staff asked if the cut on his forehead needed attention, but he said no. Nothing mattered right now but Hetty.
He stood there staring at those closed doors for what seemed like a long time. Then he started pacing. Dad appeared with a cup of hot coffee. He drank it for the jolt, if nothing else.
It seemed like forever before someone came out to talk to them.
A weary-looking woman with the hospital cap holding back graying dark hair.
“It missed the artery and there doesn’t appear to be any damage to the femur.
She got lucky there,” she said, “but she’s still lost a lot of blood. We’re transfusing now.”
“If you need more…” Spence began, but the doctor, whose name tag said “W. Masters” followed by some letters he had no idea the meaning of, shook her head.
“Not for her, but donations are always welcome at the blood center.” It sounded like something she was saying by rote, but he supposed that was a reflexive, and normal, request for an ER doctor.
“We found no pieces of the bullet, and cleaned out all the other debris that we found, which should hopefully prevent infection. We’ve placed a drain for now.
We’ll be moving her into the ICU. You won’t be able to see her for a while, so see to yourself for the moment, Mr. Colton. ”
When she’d gone, his father put an arm around his shoulders.
“Come on, let’s go outside. I think you need a bit of non-hospital-smelling air.”
He couldn’t deny that, but couldn’t seem to remember how to move.
Dad had to practically push him toward the doors.
Once they were outside, he automatically sucked in a long, deep breath.
He closed his eyes for a moment, as if that could make it all go away, but it only brought the image of Hetty, down and bleeding, vividly back into his mind.
“She’s a tough girl, Spence. She’ll be all right.” Spence looked at his dad in time to see him grimace. “And in the meantime, I’m sure there will be some folks with badges who will need to talk with you eventually.”
The rest of what had happened out there slammed back into him. “Dad… Hetty found a body out there.”
Ryan Colton went rigidly still. “This guy killed somebody else?”
“Not unless he’s been at it and gotten away with it for a while. That body was…not fresh.”
Spence could almost see his dad processing, and thought he should get it all out before he had to spend what would probably be a couple of hours with the state troopers.
So he quickly poured out the whole story.
He watched his father frown at the news of the plane’s engine losing power then smile briefly at Hetty, getting them down safely.
Ryan frowned again hearing about the shots fired near the campsite, the plane’s radio being taken out, the shots fired there, their escape, and finally what Hetty had seen in the moments before she’d been shot.
“She saw the guy?”
“At a distance, but yeah.”
“Does he know she saw him?”
“I…don’t know. I was…”
“Preoccupied with keeping her alive overnight. I get it, son.” He looked past Spence suddenly, and when he turned to see what had caught his eye, Spence saw two men headed their way, one in uniform, one not.
Dad nodded slowly. “I see they’ve already notified the authorities.”
“Gunshot wound, I think they have to.”
“Probably,” his father agreed, watching the two men approach.
“I was half expecting Eli,” Spence said with a grimace.
“If they knew about the body, it probably would be him,” Dad said.
Spence guessed he was right. Crimes didn’t get much more major than murder, and as a lieutenant in the Major Crimes Unit of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, his cousin Eli Colton, a big believer in being involved, had a lot of say in when and where he got assigned to cases.
In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if the Colton name was what had netted them a two-person response instead of just the local in uniform.
“So once they find out…” he began then stopped as the men got nearer.
“We’ll likely be seeing him,” dad agreed.
The two men reached them and stopped. Both Spence and his father nodded to the one in the Shelby PD uniform.
Bobby Reynolds was familiar to them both; they’d dealt with him on a few occasions back in Shelby.
For him to be here now, he must have come in by air, maybe on a state agency bird.
The man shoved a hand through his light brown hair and there was what appeared to be genuine concern in his face and voice when he spoke.
“How’s your flygirl?”
“She’s going to be fine,” Spence said firmly.
Reynolds nodded then introduced the man in plain clothes as Detective Sam Barton, from the Alaska State Troopers. Since Alaska had no counties, there was no county sheriff to turn to, and the AST handled…well, almost everything.
“Mr. Colton, Mr. Colton…you’re Eli’s uncle and cousin?” Barton asked.
“Yes,” Dad said.
“He’s a good man,” the investigator said.
“He is,” Ryan confirmed.
Then Barton shifted his attention to Spence, but without, Spence noted, asking Dad to leave them alone. The Colton name again, he guessed.
“Obviously, we’ll need some details about what happened up there,” Barton said.
He nodded toward the small park across the street, fairly empty at this early hour, although Spence knew it would fill up later as people rolled out to enjoy the predicted summer weather for the week.
Of course, any of the locals could tell you weather predictions for the area were notoriously inaccurate and to be taken with a pound of salt.
He remembered the day when it had been sunny in town, windy out on the sound and snowing up in the pass. None of which had been predicted.
They found an empty picnic table in the park and sat down.
“This guy had a rifle?” Barton asked.
“Yeah. High-power, I’d guess.” He grimaced. “Didn’t have time to dig out a spent round for you, but there’s one in the cabin of the plane, somewhere in the back. And I can get you to a tree I think has another one buried deep.”
Barton looked appreciative. “Learned from Eli, have you?”
“And my sister. She’s on the SAR team.”
“Kansas Colton. Stationed locally, right?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Now, about the shooter—”
Spence nodded. “I never saw the guy, but Hetty got a glimpse of him right before he shot her. Probably why he shot her.”
“We’ll need to talk to Ms. Amos, of course—”
“When the doctors say you can,” Spence said firmly.
The two men blinked. Exchanged glances. “Of course,” Reynolds said.
Spence had the feeling they wouldn’t stop short of applying a little pressure to those doctors if they felt they had to. So he’d just be darned sure he was around in case they tried.
“Any idea why he’d come after you? For that matter, which one was he after?”
“None. And he shot at both of us, as it happened. Maybe he just likes taking potshots at people. Or he decided that camp is his. Or that the whole hunting area is, and we trespassed. Or he hid something he didn’t want found…”
His voice trailed off. He knew he had to tell them, and the sooner, the better, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. The two men waited, as if they sensed this would go more smoothly if they didn’t push. He wasn’t a suspect, after all.
“There’s something else…” he began. “We found a body up there. One that’s been there a while.”
The two men went very still. “A body?”
Spence tried to remember the way both Eli and his sister talked about cases, when they did. Tried to give the kind of concise version they always managed.
“Appears to be a woman, long dark hair, mostly buried, but with her head and left arm above ground.” He got out his phone and brought up the string of photos he’d taken. He picked the one that best showed the position and condition of the body and showed it to them. They went very still.
“Arranged,” the one in plain clothes murmured.
“What I thought,” Spence agreed.
Dad had gone stiffly still beside him. Rigid, in fact. Belatedly, it hit him. He looked at his father apologetically. “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t think about—”
Ryan Colton let out an audible breath. “It’s all right, son. I just wasn’t prepared for that.”
The two cops were looking at Dad with interest. “It’s ancient family history,” Spence said quickly. “Almost thirty years ago ancient.”
Both men nodded then and he wondered how much of the Colton history was common knowledge around here.
He’d never wondered that before, and he felt rather guilty that he’d so successfully put it out of his mind.
True, he hadn’t even been born yet, but it had shaped his father and older cousin, and he should be more aware.
“Is this connected to the shooter you encountered?” asked Barton.
“No idea. Like I said, it looked like she’d been there a while.”
“What’s that on her hand?” Reynolds asked, peering closely at the image on the phone.
“A fake, I’d guess,” said Barton. “Nobody’d leave a real diamond that size behind.”
Spence hesitated then reached into his pocket and brought out the small bag with the ring they were staring at in the photo.
“I know removing evidence isn’t good, but there were signs of recent animal predation in the vicinity, and I thought it would be better to have it than get there and find it’s vanished into some rodent den or something. ”
The two law enforcement men stared at the bag. Barton reached out to take it, almost gingerly.
“I didn’t touch it directly,” Spence explained. “I used some sterile gauze that was in that bag, and it went right back in.”
Because I used all the rest of that gauze on Hetty’s leg.
“Look,” he said abruptly, “I need to get back and see how Hetty’s doing. If you want to talk to me more, come on inside.”
“We’ll need a formal statement from both of you,” Barton said, then, rubbing at his jaw, changed it to, “Two formal statements from both you and Ms. Amos.”
“Right now,” Spence insisted, “I need a formal statement from the doctor, saying she’s going to be all right.”
He didn’t get that when they first went inside.
There was no news yet, he was told, and to please take a seat.
After a brief conversation with the woman who appeared to be in charge of the emergency intake, Barton led Spence over to a private meeting room.
He went, after his father nodded at him encouragingly, saying he’d stay right there and interrupt with any word on Hetty.
The room was very small, a table with two chairs on each side, and not much else. Except a painting on one wall that looked to Spence to be of a spot along Thompson Pass. A spot he’d been to a time or two, he thought as he studied the piece. He wondered idly who had painted it as he sat down.
It didn’t hit him until the two other men sat across from him that this was likely the private room where bad news got passed along. He suppressed a shiver, thinking about people who had probably had their lives upended in this room with word that their loved one or family member had not made it.
He shook it off and looked at Reynolds and Barton.
“You want this in chronological order or order of importance?” Not to him, of course. To him, Hetty was the most important, but he’d been around Eli and Kansas enough to know what these guys would consider important.
“Let’s start with the as-it-happened version,” Barton said.
Spence walked them through it, from the engine shutting down, Hetty’s skillful landing, them radioing for help, checking the area for any wildlife to be cautious around, setting up the campsite, even, embarrassedly, admitted he’d stupidly left his rifle in the storage shed, thinking he’d already checked for natural threats and he’d be right back anyway.
He’d never expected a human threat.
He went through the rest, ending with Dad’s arrival, thinking that We spent the night in the cave was far too simple an explanation for what had really happened in those intervening hours.
“And you never saw the shooter?” Reynolds asked again.
“No. All I can tell you is what she told me.” He went through Hetty’s description of the man, including the possible scar that might not be a scar.
He didn’t know how long they’d been sitting there, going over it again and yet again, before the door opened. Rapidly, without even a knock. His father was there, a look of pained worry on his face.
“Dad?” he asked, a little shakily as he got to his feet.
“She crashed, son. It’s bad. They…don’t know if she’s going to make it.”