Chapter 12
Lonnie heard Beed’s call for emergency backup and rushed to the scene. She arrived within seven minutes, alongside six other police and trooper patrol cars, to find Officer James Beed flat on his back, dead in the snow at the base of the porch steps.
The officers cordoned off the house and yard with bright yellow plastic police tape, strung from trees to fence posts. The city crime scene van, a large, black panel truck with the logo and insignia of the State of Alaska Crime Lab emblazoned on the sides, weaved through the maze of police cars and came to a halt in the street in front of the house. Two men and a woman in black coveralls and large, puffy black parkas with the words “Crime Lab” stenciled in yellow across their backs climbed out of the van and approached the scene to begin the meticulous process of evidence gathering.
“Damn,” said one Fairbanks Police officer, who stared down at Beed’s body. “Jimmy was such a nice guy.”
“To think he survived two tours in Iraq with his National Guard unit just to come back here and get killed like this,” said an officer named Clark.
“Think it’s gang-related?” said the first.
“Dunno. CSI is gathering evidence,” Clark replied, “but it seems a bit too clean to me for a gang shooting.”
“Someone with a place to hide,” Lonnie said contemplatively.
“Yeah,” Clark said. He looked out to the road, past the gaggle of police cars, ambulance, and the CSI van. “Jergens and Porter just drove out looking around the neighborhood to see if they can find anything.”
The city cop’s radios started chattering. Officers Jergens and Porter found the Blazer abandoned in the woods less than half a mile away. Footprints led from it, but the track was lost where the owners of the prints had stepped onto the plowed surface of the street.
Lonnie tried to focus on the radio traffic and started toward her car. She got in the front seat of the cruiser and sat down. She had been tired when she arrived — now she was exhausted. The realization of this exhaustion told her that if she kept going, mistakes would be made. Lonnie had been working for nearly twenty hours straight. She was going to fall over if she didn’t get some rest soon. She climbed back out of her cruiser and found the on-scene commander, a police sergeant named Rimes. She asked him to send a copy of the report to Commander Stark as soon as it was ready, and then turned her shift over to another trooper at the scene.
With permission of the shift commander, she signed off for the night and headed to her cozy two-bedroom A-frame chalet-style house on the banks of the Chena River. She pulled her cruiser into the garage at the rear of the house and closed the door, then sat in the cruiser in silence for a moment and went over the day.
Her shift started at 03:30, thirty minutes before the blackout. Just another day in the sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying job of fighting crime. She had recently closed a major drug case and had no other projects on the table. She only need worry about work and her own needs. The men in her past were distant memories stored in the far reaches of her subconscious mind. She was single, self-motivated, and charging up her career ladder.
By the end of the day, all her single-minded focus had been derailed at the mention of one name.
Marcus Johnson.
Lonnie walked into the house and went straight to the master bathroom. She turned on the shower and peeled the uniform from her heavy-feeling limbs. She hung her pistol belt from a peg within arms’ reach of the shower curtain and dropped the clothing into the laundry hamper. She pulled the pin out of the knot rolled tightly at the back of her head, and long, shining black hair cascaded down around her smooth, bare shoulders until the tips touched the angle of her shoulder blades.
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror beside the walk-in closet door. Her figure was still very good, she thought. At thirty-seven and having lived at the edge of safety for the past ten years, many people showed more physical signs of stress in their bodies. Lonnie, whether through the course of her physical fitness and dietary disciplines, or through sheer luck in her genetic makeup, looked ten years younger than her calendar age.
She was not tall, but not short either, standing at five feet, four inches. Neither was she thin or fat. Her face was smooth and oval-shaped, with a mildly squarish jaw. Her skin was light, but not white. A slight shade of tan glowed evenly over her entire body. Large, almond-shaped eyes looked out from beneath the slight fold of skin at her eyelids.
Other Korean women were jealous of her eyes, and often commented that she must have had a very popular surgical procedure to make them so perfect, but she never had. Her nose was small and narrow, neither round nor pointed. It was a fun, perky nose that crinkled at the edges when she smiled.
The medium thickness of her lips spread gently over straight, pearly white teeth. Her long, slender neck stretched to a lithe, fit body. Smooth courses of muscle ran under svelte skin. While she was very strong for a woman, her shoulders, arms, and abs did not reveal the iron temper of the muscles that lay within them. Her body looked warm and comfortable, even delicate.
Full, round breasts hung on her chest. While they were not extremely large, at times she wished they were smaller, as her size 34C chest seemed to constantly draw men’s eyes when she wore T-shirts or tight sweaters or was not covered by her body armor and coat. As a whole, her figure caused men to trip over themselves while staring. She often felt men’s eyes on her and she knew they weren’t admiring her hair or her level of fitness. She hated going to the gym until the Alaska Fitness Club opened a “women only” club.
Beneath her breasts, was the rest of her body. Her own shape never impressed her. But Marcus had said that her figure was a sculptor’s dream. Lonnie’s narrow waist, full hips, and round buttocks topped her proportionate smooth and fit-looking legs. The muscles in her thighs and calves rippled beneath the smooth, creamy, golden skin that wrapped them as she turned in the mirror. Her college girlfriends had tried to talk her into modeling, but her body was her own treasure, not to be shared with strangers on the pages of a magazine. It was hers alone now.
Only two men had ever seen her the way she now saw herself in the mirror. Marcus and Jerry. And to only one of them did she regret showing herself, although he had seen her most often.
Marcus had only seen her body once, a few months before he proposed. It was an awkward moment, the memory of which she had treasured. In Germany, before Linus and Cara’s wedding, they were staying in a hotel together. Marcus was very old-fashioned and wanted to stay pure until they were married.
When they checked into the hotel, they discovered that there was a mistake on the reservations and they were booked into the same room, although he had asked for two. They had no choice — all the rooms in the city were taken for the many events that were going on related to the collapse of the Berlin Wall; the room did at least have two beds. Marcus was willing to share the room, as long as they didn’t break their vow of chastity.
Lonnie had thought he was very old-fashioned indeed, and wondered if he would really be able to restrain himself once they were alone in the room. She resolved to obey his wishes, if he was able to stay in control. If not, she wouldn’t resist too hard.
They had gone to the hotel swimming pool before dinner. When they finished the swim, she headed up to the room to shower. Marcus stayed down at the pool and chatted with a military friend who happened to be in the same hotel. Back in the room, Lonnie finished the shower, and since Marcus was still downstairs, walked naked back into the room to dress.