One night, Lissa reread the defamation suit James and Sarah had filed against Jill. A final point most interested Lissa: “Plaintiffs have experienced a loss of business due to the Defendant’s action.” It appeared that comments Jill posted on Facebook had reached some of the companies that hired Blackstone. James and Sarah were seeking monetary damages. This worried Jill, who could not afford to pay for the company’s lost profits, let alone for a lawyer, but it gave Lissa an idea: If they could convince drillers to sever ties with Blackstone, then perhaps Tex would end his partnership, too. Blackstone would lose its tier-one status in bidding on contracts. It would have to leave the reservation.
“We need a strategy,” Lissa told Jill. “You know what I think? I think these guys built an empire around Tex, and the only way we’ll get inside is if we take it down, brick by fucking brick.”
* * *
—
LISSA CHOSE A pseudonym—Nadia Reinardy. She had made up the name in the nineties when she worked as a stripper during her first years out of college. She had liked how “Nadia” sounded—exotic, the way it rolled off the tongue—and “Reinardy” she had stolen from an old boyfriend, Tom Reinardy. A white guy. He had roomed with CJ’s father at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and after they all graduated, Lissa had decided she got along better with Tom and followed him to Minneapolis. The relationship had not lasted. In Lissa’s telling, she wasn’t good enough for his family, and Tom tried to control her. After they broke up, Lissa worked as a security guard at Mystic Lake Casino, south of the Twin Cities, where she met the only man she would marry and, within fifteen months, divorce. It was around that time, 1993, that she met another man, OJ Pipeboy.
He was a friend of her stepbrother, Wayne White Eagle, Jr. When OJ’s brother threw a party in Minneapolis, Wayne invited Lissa along. Lissa was twenty-five, OJ eighteen. He had a ponytail, a baby face, a faint mustache like the stroke of a paintbrush. He had a thick neck and thick shoulders and thick arms and thick wrists. He had gold chains dripping down his chest, gold rings lacing his fingers, but it was his voice—a smoky radio voice—that attracted Lissa to OJ. It was his voice that made her fall in love.
His mother was Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux from the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota, his father Lakota Sioux from Pine Ridge, but OJ grew up in the center of Minneapolis, in the only urban public housing project in the country that gave preference to Native families. Although federal programs to relocate Native Americans to cities had ended in 1972, the fraction of Native Americans who lived in urban areas had kept growing. By the nineties, roughly half lived in cities, and Minneapolis had more urban Indians than any city in the nation. Lissa had aunts and uncles who moved there, cousins who were born there. The American Indian Movement, or AIM, began in Minneapolis in the sixties when Clyde Bellecourt and other Movement founders organized neighborhood patrols to protect residents from police brutality. Due, in part, to the efforts of AIM, Minneapolis had Indian health clinics and community centers, as well as Little Earth, the housing complex where OJ’s grandmother was among the first tenants. None of these resources made up for the fact that OJ grew up poor. His father, a medicine man, was always on the road and had girlfriends all over the country. His mother drank. OJ mostly took care of himself, waiting in line each morning at the Little Earth gym for cereal and a carton of milk. There were two things he remembered clearly from childhood: how often he fought with other kids and how hungry he had felt.
By the time Lissa met OJ, he had more money than most Indians she knew. At the age of thirteen, he had fled Little Earth and gone to live with a woman named Linda who worked as an aide in his middle school. Linda was a member of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the wealthiest tribe in the nation thanks to its casino, Mystic Lake, and earned tens of thousands of dollars in payments from her tribe each month. The years OJ lived with Linda were the happiest of his life. They went on walks, gardened, hunted, fished, and tapped and boiled maple syrup. Then, when OJ was fifteen, he got in trouble, and Linda kicked him out. She gave him an option to come back, but by then OJ was supporting himself, earning, he claimed, $2,200 a day.
He had met a Vice Lord, a member of a black Chicago gang that had territory in South Minneapolis. The city had Native gangs, as well—raggedy kids who roamed Little Earth, scrapping it out with rivals—but it was the black gangs OJ admired, with their gold chains and expensive cars. The Vice Lord was a cousin of his sister’s boyfriend and took OJ under his wing. When OJ met Lissa, he had begun dealing on his own, copping his drugs from Vice Lords and selling them at Mystic Lake.
He had heard about Lissa from her brother Wayne—how smart she was, how she was trained in law enforcement and had a college degree—but Lissa was not what OJ had expected. She could talk smarter than anyone he knew and still sound like she came from the streets. She was pretty, too, with perfect skin and long, curly hair. OJ wanted Lissa because “everybody wanted her,” he would say. He wasn’t sure if he was attracted to her himself, but he knew that other men thought she was beautiful, and when she paid him attention, it made OJ feel good.
In 1995, Lissa moved with Shauna and CJ into a house in St. Paul, where she found a job assisting homeless families. That year, OJ called her, looking for a place to stay. One day, in lieu of rent, he gave her a baggie of cocaine.
It was around that time that Lissa asked OJ to call her Nadia Reinardy. After that, everyone they hung out with in the Twin Cities knew her by this name. Nad, OJ called her. Nadicus.
She would assume other names throughout her life, each one an escape from the shadows that trailed her, but Nadia was a different sort of name. Nadia was the shadow that trailed her, more ruthless and clever than Lissa had ever been. Where Lissa was loving and compassionate, Nadia was vindictive and petty. Where Lissa played by the rules, Nadia went behind everybody’s back. It was as Nadia that Lissa became an addict. Now when she remembered that time of her life, she marveled at how easily she had moved between her halves, like an actress in a one-woman play, inhabiting a role and then another. She supposed this should not have surprised her. She had long walked a line that separated cop from criminal. She believed in this line, in its thinness. She believed everyone had inside themselves the capacity for evil and for good.
* * *
—
ONE DAY IN early November, Lissa made herself a Facebook account under the name Nadia Reinardy. That she should become Nadia again made sense to her. She believed the skills she acquired as a criminal might help her in solving a crime. She knew what fit within state jurisdiction and what constituted a federal case, and she could inhabit the psyche of a criminal: Already, she recognized in James’s behavior some tactics she had used herself. When she searched for him on the Internet, she found him associated with multiple spellings of his last name—Henrikson, Henderson, Henricksen, and Hennikson. Lissa believed James had caused this confusion intentionally, since more names made a person harder to trace. Rick had mentioned that James had a criminal record, and indeed, one evening, when Lissa typed “James Henrikson” into a records database, she came up with twenty-two pages of results. James had been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from sexual assault of an ex-wife—he had been married twice before Sarah—to theft and manufacturing drugs. Once, he had been arrested for growing marijuana and spent a year in prison. James was still on probation.
That night, Lissa logged in to her Nadia Reinardy Facebook account and posted James’s criminal record to Jill’s page. “Had to do it,” Lissa captioned her post. “I blew some cash just to prove a point but didn’t realize it would be this fruitful.”
A few days later, as Lissa was driving home from the welding shop, a song came on the radio by a band she liked, Evanescence. Lissa had never listened closely to the lyrics, but now they caught her—Isn’t something missing? Isn’t someone missing me?—and gave her an idea. Once, she had made a video for her uncle Chucky aft
er his death by assembling a slideshow of images and setting it to a song. She decided to do the same for KC.
At home in the apartment that night, Lissa printed a few dozen photographs that Jill had sent her, trimmed them with scissors, and arranged them on the living room floor as she played the Evanescence song on repeat. Please, please forgive me, the singer crooned, and Lissa lifted an image of Jill in a hospital bed holding her newborn son. She chose another image of KC in a bathtub and a third of Jill holding his tiny body, pressing her lips to his forehead. Lissa surveyed the other photographs. There were more of KC as a baby and one when he was an older child, his hair darkened. Then he was an adult, posing with a motorcycle, and in the next photograph, he was in a hospital bed, the tube of a respirator curling from his mouth. It was a miracle, Jill had said, that KC survived the motorcycle accident. After he could walk again, he left Washington for Texas. Here, Lissa’s options thinned: KC in a bowling alley with his ex-girlfriend; signs reading NEBRASKA THE GOOD LIFE and WELCOME TO NORTH DAKOTA; sunsets over Lake Sakakawea; and, finally, James and Sarah.
Lissa worked through the night, left for the welding shop in the morning, and began again the following afternoon. It was a Saturday, the third of November, when she finished. She uploaded the video to YouTube under the name Nadia and sent Jill the link.
“I hope you like it. Was hard to pick and choose,” Lissa wrote.
It was “perfect,” Jill replied, thanking her.
“It’s Nadia! Not me. Lol.”
Lissa could not sleep. She wrote Jill at eleven that night, when the first comments appeared below the video, and again at eleven-thirty, when it had been viewed five hundred times. By one-thirty in the morning, Jill was asleep, but Lissa remained awake. She toggled between the video and Jill’s Facebook page, which seemed to blink every minute with new messages. Lissa read each one carefully, making note of those she would mention to Jill the next day.
When Lissa woke in the late afternoon, on Sunday, she was still at her desk. The apartment was quiet, her children gone out. She had received a text from a friend that there would be a ceremony at the sweat lodge in Fargo that evening.
She went into the bedroom and, from a mess of clothes strewn about the floor, chose a T-shirt and a long, cotton skirt. On the dresser, she found her pipe and a drum, which she wrapped in a beach towel and carried to the car. She drove west on Ninth Avenue and south on Forty-fifth Street, past the grocery store where she shopped, past soybean and sugar beet fields and the hard, square growth of new apartments, to where the city faded into storage lots. There, behind a low berm of earth, was the sweat lodge, and in a trough beside it, a set of mudstones smoldering on a bed of coals. A man tended the fire, raked the coals with a pitchfork. Other men and women had gathered. Lissa greeted them one by one. She lowered to her knees, unwrapped the pipe. Pressing a plug of sage into the bowl, she sang a quiet song. The others rose and formed a line, and Lissa rose, too. At the door to the lodge, she spun once around. Then she went inside.
* * *
—
BY THE MIDDLE of November, Lissa was spending so much time on the case that her apartment had fallen into neglect. If Shauna stopped by to visit her mother, she found the laundry unfolded, the shower unscrubbed. The kitchen floors were tacky with spilled sugar, and bowls sat dirty in the sink, where the hard remnants of meals had blossomed into mold. Paper accumulated like fallen leaves, forming loose piles on the desk and on the floor of the hallway into the bedrooms. Lissa had not lain in her bed in weeks. If the boys saw her asleep, it was at her desk, mouth agape. This was not exactly unusual. Lissa claimed to prefer chairs to beds, and the apartment had long ricocheted between states of chaos and order. But now it seemed there was no order, and the boys, sensing their mother had little time to worry as to their whereabouts, came and went as they pleased.
It had been months since Lissa attended her addiction recovery meetings, having relinquished her leadership role to another woman in the group. Even to the sweat lodge, she was going less and less. Instead, she spent so much time on the phone that the boys took to imitating her. Obie, now fourteen, would coolly enter the apartment, while Micah, thirteen, pretending to be on the phone, would wave wildly for his brother to be quiet and then storm into a bedroom and slam the door. Shauna, now twenty-five, was less amused. “Our mom cares more about a stranger than her own kids,” she complained. She had moved to Fargo to see her mother—recently, she had relocated to an apartment next door—and now it seemed that on the rare occasion she discovered her mother at home, Lissa had no time to talk. Lindsay, twenty-two, sympathized with Shauna, while their brothers swung between their sisters and mother, defending Lissa one day and harping on her the next.
The tension between Shauna and Lissa had risen not long after Shauna came to Fargo. While working full-time, Shauna had enrolled in classes to finish her undergraduate degree. Lissa encouraged this and offered to watch her kids—an arrangement that suited them both in the beginning but over time strained their relationship. Shauna could be sullen and critical of Lissa, who reacted by refusing to watch her grandchildren, deepening Shauna’s resentment.
“My older kids are very judgmental, accusatory, disrespectful,” Lissa wrote one day in her journal:
CJ called me a “pill head” and told me to go back and lay in my room and pop some more pills. I believe “addict” and “junkie” were thrown in there a few times. But it doesn’t matter. All in all, basic old argument. I always owe him. Owe him for the awful life I gave him. I owe, I owe, and I owe. It seems no matter what I do I will never make up for the past. I fucked up here and there but the past is the past….No matter what I will never be good enough for my older kids. The damage is done. They can continue to hate and ridicule me all they want. They can do it AWAY FROM ME.
Now even Lissa’s younger kids were seeming bothered by her work on the case. One evening in November, Micah told Lissa he believed a spirit had taken up residence in the apartment. He had been napping on the couch after school when he felt the blanket he was lying under lift and fold across his chest. He thought for a moment that his mother adjusted the blanket, but when he realized Lissa was nowhere around, Micah leapt up and ran to his bedroom. After that, strange things kept happening. Obie noticed them, too. They would be alone in the apartment when a cupboard would open or a shampoo bottle would drop to the bathroom floor. It was not a coincidence, they insisted, and their stories confirmed something Lissa already suspected—that KC had been visiting her, as well.
She had been raised to believe in spirits, whose existence few in her family questioned, but Lissa’s sense of how spirits behaved was shaped less by her culture than by her own inquiry.
Her first real encounter had come while she was in prison. Dakota Women’s was located in an old Catholic boarding school, which several of Lissa’s uncles had attended decades earlier. Lissa noticed the spirits as soon as she arrived, clinging to other inmates like masks, possessing them, making them say strange things. The spirits scared Lissa, and one day, she told a priest about them. Though she had been raised Catholic, she had not yet been confirmed. The night before her confirmation, she had stolen a bottle of her grandfather’s liquor and drank most of it herself. The reservation priest had rescheduled, but Lissa missed that date as well. She never had much use for religion, believing it a ploy of white men to control the behavior of Indians, but what the priest at the prison said surprised her. While the Catechism acknowledged the presence of spirits, it warned against delving into the spiritual realm, since although God created spirits, like people spirits had free will and like people they could turn away from God. The spirits Lissa had seen among her fellow inmates were real, the priest said. He believed Lissa had a gift for seeing, but he told her to be careful.
After that, Lissa developed her own theories about the way spirits occupied the living world. She wondered if they did not drift in the air as she once thoug
ht but instead took shelter in everyday objects—in doorknobs, hot dogs, cigarettes touched to lips. In needles sunken in the crooks of arms.
She believed spirits were around all the time, and it was at night, when things got quiet, that it became easier to register their presence. The first time spirits entered her dreams had been in the summer of 2010, on a camping trip in White Shield with her relatives. They had erected a canopy by the lakeshore and gone fishing. One evening, Lissa climbed a bluff above the beach and found several large stones arranged so deliberately she was certain they were an effigy. That night, as she fell asleep, a man and three women came to her in a dream. Lissa was on a bluff picking sage when she noticed them standing on a far hill. Each time she glanced up at them, they moved impossibly closer. She picked frantically, arranging the sage in a circle around herself, and when she looked up again, the man and women were standing beside her, their eyes cloudy and white.
Later, she sent a photograph of the stones to an anthropologist, who told her they were shaped like the constellation Auriga. She also told the story to the Lakota holy man she knew, and after that, she paid more attention to her dreams. None would be so vivid as the one that came to her that night by the lake, but when a spirit began visiting her dreams in the fall of 2012, Lissa had no doubt it was KC. “I don’t know why but he likes it here,” she wrote Jill one night. “I’m sending him to pester u cause I’m wiped out. I just offered my pipe up and I talked to him.”
If Jill was bothered that a woman who had never known her son was claiming to have spoken to his spirit, she did not let on. Once, when Lissa wrote, “It’s him keeping me up but I’m going to ignore him tonight,” Jill replied without a hint of sarcasm that her son could be “persistent.” Jill, as Lissa put it, was “more open-minded than your average white girl.” She often visited a psychic, whom she believed had communicated with her son. Lissa distrusted psychics. They preyed on desperate people, she thought, whom they gutted of all ability to reason. Jill received frequent messages from psychics offering services for a fee, and Rick had even spoken to one who propositioned him to engage in something called “astral sex.” Rick was creeped out, but even he was more open-minded than most white people Lissa knew. “You know,” he mused one night, “before this KC thing happened, I was fine going through life drinking beer and hanging out with my buddies.” Now, he said, “It’s like God smacked the shit out of me. He’s like, Listen, you’ve got to wake up to what’s going on.”
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