An Unforgiving Place, page 13
We both had our jackets on, but in a couple of hours, Hux would be down to a T-shirt. My favorite shirt of his was a faded red one from his grandfather’s auto body business, but he rarely wore that one out on the trail. It was more of a sleep shirt—not that I felt entirely comfortable knowing that.
“There they are,” Hux said.
I looked up to see Vince and Yiyin making their way toward us. Yiyin was dressed like an Instagram star, while Vince had on Costco’s best sweatpants. How in the world had they made it all the way out here in the first place? I wondered. Even Alaska’s most capable guide would have struggled to motivate this guy.
My plan was to stay close to the campsite despite Reynolds’s insistence on a big-game hunting expedition. I wasn’t taking any chances being out there on my own. It wouldn’t be hard to fake fatigue or injury if I had to—I had ample experience with both—but Vince had that covered.
“This is gonna suck,” Hux said as we watched Yiyin keel over while trying to adjust a strap on her backpack. “You sure you don’t want to switch hiking partners?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “You’d probably end up shooting Vince.”
“It’s possible,” he said with a laugh. “Just don’t let him touch that rifle; if he doesn’t blow off his own foot, he could take you out instead.”
I was more worried about Yiyin, who was chomping at the bit to get out on the trail with Hux. Weeks of self-imposed isolation could put a tremendous strain on couples who weren’t rock solid to begin with. Desperation set in too. After all, Yiyin and Vince had come out here for a reason. Since they were still here, I had to assume they’d fallen short of their goals.
“What’s your sat phone situation?” I asked him.
“Yiyin has one. It works—I already tried it.”
“Okay, good. If there’s a problem, text me the sign/countersign.”
“We’ve been over this, boss,” he said, his voice softening. “But, listen, if you’re not feeling comfortable with the plan—”
“I’m comfortable,” I said. “It’s just that I’m technically responsible for you.”
“You’ve got enough to worry about with that goon,” he said, referring to Vince. I looked over to see my hunting partner rubbing some Bengay on his kneecap. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got Yiyin’s sat phone if we need it. You’re good with a map—”
“I’m not that good.”
“Good enough. Just stay close to a body of water.”
“I will,” I said.
I tightened the straps on my backpack and checked the laces on my hiking boots. When Hux wasn’t looking, I sniffed my armpits. It wasn’t a bed of roses, but not godawful either. Vince probably wouldn’t notice, not that I was all that worried about what Vince thought of me.
“If you aren’t back by nightfall tomorrow, I’m going to the rendezvous point,” I said. “And I’m calling the rangers to mobilize a team to find you.”
“How about you try calling Yiyin’s phone first?”
“I will. But I’m not messing around.”
I watched Yiyin ditch her backpack—and her husband—as she skipped across the campsite toward us. She flashed a flirty smile at Hux. Oh God, I thought. Here we go. As she sidled up to him, she reached up and squeezed his bicep. I gritted my teeth.
“Are you sure you’re not an ex–Navy SEAL or something?” Yiyin cooed at Hux. “Because you look so damn fit.”
“Nah,” he said. “Just an Eagle Scout.”
Vince limped into our circle. “Hey, sorry,” he said. “I’ve got this old knee injury—”
“Just take some more ibuprofen,” Yiyin snapped at him. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad,” Vince countered. To me and Hux, he said, “I played football in college—”
“Sprint football,” Yiyin corrected him.
“Yeah, well, Princeton had a hell of a team back then—”
“They discontinued it in 2016,” Yiyin said, quick to cut him off as she focused her attention back on Hux. “The sport, I mean. They’d lost a hundred and five games in a row. There were safety concerns.”
“That’s not true—”
“It’s absolutely true,” Yiyin said.
“Yeah, well, you were into it at the time. You thought I was this ‘hot jock’—”
Hux cleared his throat. “We really should get going,” he said. “We’re already getting a late start.” He glanced at me, his eyes kind and almost comforting. “Don’t worry,” the look on his face seemed to say. “She’s a pain in the ass, and I’m just doing this because I have to.”
I breathed a little easier, even though every bone in my body was dreading this excursion with Vince. The Bengay odor was making me nauseous.
“You’re right,” Yiyin said. “We should go.”
“Bye,” Vince snapped at her.
I didn’t know what to say to my partner—Good luck? Bye? Have fun? In the end, I patted his arm and mumbled, “Be safe out there.”
“You too,” he said just as awkwardly. Vince and Yiyin were studying our interaction, no doubt confused by our stilted goodbyes. Was this how a couple who’d been together for years parted before a dangerous wilderness adventure? I wondered. The answer was obvious: Of course not. But I wasn’t about to make out with Hux for their benefit.
Hux forged ahead with long strides that made Yiyin break into a trot to keep up with him. I heard Hux ask her about her backpack, which prompted her to run back and grab it. I caught his eyes for a moment, but neither of us spoke. The time for goodbyes had passed.
Now it was down to business.
CHAPTER
14
VINCE LASTED AN hour before he threw in the towel. It was the varied terrain that did him in; he couldn’t handle the gravel, the tussocks, the many water crossings. Much of the game trail that Reynolds had marked on the map took us through thick brush, which was taxing in its own right, even though some other hunting party had long ago bushwhacked their way through it. But when Vince went down on all fours, there was no doubt he was done. He was sitting on the hard earth with his legs splayed out, massaging his bum knee and cussing like a sailor. Even Ollie seemed underwhelmed by Vince’s performance.
Hux and Yiyin had gone off in a different direction, which meant Vince and I were alone. So far, Vince had struggled mightily to keep up the pace. No surprise there. I should have had more sympathy for him given my experience in Sequoia, where the worst back pain imaginable had plagued me for the duration of the assignment, but I couldn’t. Vince was a wet blanket. He couldn’t even seem to appreciate the scenic landscape of the Takahula River.
In another way, though, I felt a little sorry for him: the tough guy who was constantly falling short in his wife’s eyes. I wondered about his marriage to Yiyin and their failed journey to become parents. To me, it felt like they had forgotten about each other in service of an objective that required the utmost intimacy. I couldn’t quite get my head around it.
“Did you want to turn around, then?” I asked.
“I don’t see how I could possibly go on,” he said flatly. “My knee’s busted.”
I was about to suggest putting one foot in front of the other, but I held my tongue. Ollie sat on his haunches. He seemed to sense we were in for a long wait.
“It wasn’t like this a few days ago, you know—my knee, I mean,” Vince said. “I aggravated it during one of our ‘relocations.’”
“Sorry?”
“Every few weeks, we relocate,” he said. “One minute you’re asleep, the next thing you know you’re crossing a river in your socks.”
“Zane makes you do this?”
“Oh yeah. It’s his operation, his rules.”
“Does he ever give a reason?”
Vince peeled a piece of duct tape off his blistered heel. “Nah. You want my own theory, though? I think he’s meeting up with his supply person.”
“Which is who?”
“Look, you’ve seen what kind of people Zane recruits—other than Diego, nobody here knows their way around a huckleberry patch. He has to replenish supplies every week to keep his clients happy.” He expressed his disdain with a snort. “This hunting trip is just a way to make us dudes feel ‘manly.’”
“Huh. Is it working?”
“Nope.”
I wanted to keep him talking without sounding overly curious, but it was hard to keep the investigator out of my voice. “Yiyin mentioned the shipments that come in—don’t those come to him?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Zane doesn’t talk about logistics.”
“Does he ever fly back down to Bettles? Or is he always here?”
“He’ll disappear for a day or two, but I don’t know where he goes.”
Of course you don’t, I thought. Vince wasn’t exactly the most observant guy in the wilderness. “So who’s meeting him up there?”
He took a swig from his canteen. “I don’t even know. I get the feeling he’s got all kinds of people working for him behind the scenes—rangers, locals, probably some natives.”
“Alaska Natives?”
“Yeah. Indigenous people.” He winced in pain as he shifted position. “Look, I don’t know what’s PC around here. I haven’t seen any Eskimos if that’s what you’re asking.”
As much as Vince would have benefited from some stiff correction on his cultural knowledge of the local area, I decided to let it go for now. He was, after all, dealing with someone who epitomized the practice of cultural appropriation. “Have you seen this supply person?”
“Nope,” he said. “But I heard him on his sat phone with somebody once—Emily, sounded like.”
“Emily Wiseman?”
“You think I’m sitting there listening for a last name?” He made no effort to hide his irritation.
“Sorry.” I decided to play dumb with a smile. “I just—well, one of the rangers we ran into on our way up here was named Emily.”
“Then it’s probably her.”
The NPS presence in Region 11—Alaska and its parks—was fairly small. I sincerely doubted there was more than one Emily working with Brinegar’s team. But I also wondered why a young ranger like Emily would act as a mule for a guy like Reynolds. Extra cash on the side? It seemed unlikely, but not out of the question. I’d encountered opportunists before, and experience told me they came in all stripes and colors.
“So, whose idea was it to come to Alaska?” I asked. “Yiyin’s?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
Vince was proving himself an easy target as an inadvertently helpful witness. He had a number of weaknesses—his wife’s withering opinion of him, his physical shortcomings, his disdain for nature. All I had to do was exploit the right one.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You’ve met my wife. Yiyin always gets her way. Whatever it is she wants, she gets. If you’re in her way, watch out. She’ll trample you, humiliate you, defeat you. Whatever it takes. That’s how she made her millions.”
Her millions? I had to admit that Vince had caught me off-guard. “Pardon?”
“She sold her first company for two hundred and eighty million dollars, her second for four hundred million. After that she became a venture capitalist, got bored, started another company. She works hundred-hour weeks and loves every second of it.”
“And you’re, what—along for the ride, as you say?”
He snickered. “We met at Princeton. I went to law school, she went to Silicon Valley. For a while, we were happy—just two normal twenty-somethings going to bars, renting a cheap apartment, living it up in the city. And then the money hit—a windfall of it. Yiyin convinced me to quit my job. I took up golf. Pickleball. We traveled. She worked every second of every day no matter where we were. But it wasn’t so bad, I guess—living that life, I mean. I got up every day at noon and went to bed whenever I felt like it.”
“You don’t sound thrilled about it,” I remarked.
“Yeah, well, it was all about me, you know? I was the ‘supportive spouse,’ the stay-at-home-dad that didn’t have kids. Then one day she decided she wanted to have a baby, which, well, okay, sure. Because when you’re used to getting whatever you want, whenever you want it, it’s supposed to happen instantaneously. This time it didn’t. Months became years. We saw a reproductive endo in San Francisco who told us exactly what the problem was, and things went downhill from there.”
I supposed that a proper suburban housewife by the name of Carlin Hopper never would have pursued this line of thought. It was too intrusive, the kind of thing most women kept quiet about out of courtesy. On the other hand, as a federal investigator, I had little time for courtesy.
“What was the problem?” I asked.
“What do you think?” His tone was bitter. I understood, though, what he was telling me—that he was the problem. It certainly fit with what we already knew about Zane Reynolds and the operation he was running up here.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry about what? That I’ve got a plumbing problem? I’ll tell you what, though: for me, it was a relief. I never wanted kids.”
“So then why are you still here?”
He palmed the gravel and tried to get up, wincing as he put weight on his knee. Ollie watched him with disinterest. Vince hobbled a few steps, stopped, and bent forward to catch his breath. He looked out at the glassy surface of Takahula Lake, glistening in the distance.
“Yiyin doesn’t want to deal with the optics of a messy divorce,” he said. “And I don’t want to go back to my law firm with my tail between my legs.”
“But if she made millions, you’d get a nice chunk of that in the divorce—right?”
He shook his head. “We signed a prenup. Being the lawyer and all, I insisted on it.” He barked a laugh. “Can you believe that? I was such a moron.”
I watched him trip on a rock and pitch forward. He landed on his hands with a grunt. “This sucks,” he muttered. “Alaska sucks.”
I offered a hand, which he took without looking at me. He didn’t thank me, nor did I expect him to. “Why don’t you just go home?” I asked.
He scrutinized my face, searching for an answer to a question he hadn’t yet voiced, perhaps. I felt myself squirm under his gaze. Maybe I’d taken this line of questioning too far.
“You ask a lot of questions,” he said.
“I … well, that’s just kind of who I am.” I forced a laugh. “Fred says I’m nosy.”
“Nosy people ask stupid questions. Your questions aren’t stupid.”
I gripped the straps on my backpack and tried to turn his attention back to the trail. A part of me was hoping that Vince would focus on keeping up with me and forget about my questions—for now, anyway. He was a lawyer, after all. He might start to wonder about my real intentions if I asked too many questions.
“I’ve seen two women leave here pregnant—or at least they claimed they were pregnant,” he said. “It’s how Yiyin keeps convincing me to stay.”
“How many couples have there been since you got here?” I asked.
He thought for a moment. “There’ve been a few. I don’t know. Some didn’t stay long—only a day or two. Maybe they realized being out in this arctic wasteland wasn’t for them.”
Arctic wasteland? God, this guy was a real downer. “Did they leave angry?” I asked. “I mean, it’s a big investment to come all the way to Alaska.”
“He’ll refund the fee if you don’t get pregnant.”
This was a surprise, hearing that Zane Reynolds had a charitable side. It didn’t quite compute with the hardcore survivalist persona, but maybe Vince had his facts wrong.
“So you said he’s had some success, though? How do you explain that?”
He looked at me for a long moment, almost like he was trying to dissect something in my expression. I realized I needed to change my tone—be more casually curious, less impatiently direct. He was a lawyer, after all. He knew what an interrogation was.
“Vince?”
He shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“What about Tim and Kelsey Greer?” I asked. “Did they have success?” I knew for a fact that Kelsey wasn’t pregnant when she left here because her autopsy failed to indicate any evidence of such, but I wanted to hear his answer just the same.
It didn’t come quickly. I shifted my feet, waiting for him to respond.
He licked his chapped lips. A stiff wind rattled the low-lying brush until at last he pointed a finger at me. He was smiling. “You’re good.”
My mouth went dry. “Sorry?”
“The two of you—I almost bought it.” He shook his head, like he was entertained by his own musings. “I mean, I did buy it for a while there.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“You’re not married,” he said. “No chance. You like him too much.”
I swallowed hard, willing myself not to panic. Even though Vince outweighed me by over a hundred pounds, he was out of shape, unarmed, and injured. If he wanted to hurt me, he wouldn’t have the easiest time of it.
As expected, though, he made no move in my direction. He tightened the straps of his backpack, which always keeled to the left, no matter what he did. As I stood with my hand poised on Ollie’s head, waiting for Vince to make a move, I could feel the arctic sun beating down on my neck. The collar of my jacket felt damp with sweat.
“Look, I’m not gonna say anything to Zane,” he said. “I can’t stand that guy. But at least tell me who you really are.”
I blew out a breath, remembering one of my earliest lessons as an undercover agent, back when I was dealing with pimps and drug dealers on the street: When it’s over, it’s over. Cut the cord. I could interview Vince back in Bettles, or even down at the field office in Anchorage. It didn’t have to be here—and maybe it was best if it wasn’t here.
“My real name is Felicity Harland, and I’m a special agent with the Investigative Services Branch,” I said. “We’re a federal agency that investigates crimes in National Parks.”
