Yellow Bird

by Sierra Crane Murdoch

  * * *

  —

  AS WINTER APPROACHED, Lissa went less often to the reservation. Something was wrong with her body. Her ankles began to ache, and then the aching crept into her pelvis and spine and up her neck and into her fingers. Her hands and feet swelled to twice their size. One day, Lissa could walk only on the outer edges of her soles; the next, she could only crawl. She called in sick to the welding shop and, for days, remained in bed. The boys peered worriedly through a crack in her door until, one night, CJ entered, passed her a joint, and ordered her to smoke it. Her pain subsided. The next morning, Lissa drove northeast to the clinic on the White Earth Indian Reservation, where a doctor diagnosed her with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that inflames the joints, and prescribed medication. The swelling went down, but the pain lingered.

  Her diagnosis was in one way a relief to Lissa. Her body rarely failed her, and yet she lived with a persistent dread that it would. All it took was a common cold for her to wonder if the consequences of her drug use were, at last, revealing themselves. Once, not long after she arrived at prison, she had tested positive for hepatitis C, but when she was tested again years later at White Earth, doctors found an antibody in her blood—proof she had been infected—but no active infection. It was odd, because Lissa had never been treated for hep C. In prison, a few women had been chosen for treatment, and Lissa was not one of them.* Among those chosen had been Jayta Schmidt, a white inmate five years older than Lissa who had been in prison for fifteen years before Lissa arrived. Jayta was serving a life sentence for shooting a woman in the stomach three times. “You think you’re hot shit because you killed a bitch?” Lissa asked her once. “I didn’t kill a bitch. I killed a snitch,” Jayta replied. One day in the sewing room, Jayta taunted Lissa, claiming she had been chosen for the treatment because she was “worthy.” “You’re not worthy,” Lissa replied. “They’re just giving you a chance at life, and you’re going to fuck it up anyway, because you’ve been here so fucking long you don’t know anything outside these walls.” Jayta had brandished her scissors. Lissa told her to “sit the fuck down.” On the day Lissa left prison, Jayta had cried. Years later, Lissa read in the paper that Jayta killed herself after she was denied parole a third time. Lissa called the prison and learned no one had yet claimed Jayta’s ashes. “Can I come get them?” she asked. “I’m probably her only friend on the outs.” But the prison did not allow it.

  As soon as Lissa could walk normally again, she returned to work. She still spent evenings on the phone, exchanging messages with the men and women in whose lives she had planted herself. She was not sure what inspired Tex to reply after ignoring her for more than a year. She had heard from Sarah that Robert Delao quit Maheshu after Tex blamed him for conspiring with James to steal more than $500,000 from the company. Did that have something to do with it? Was Tex, like Jed McClure, the investor from Chicago, hoping she could help him get his money back?

  Lissa had not spoken to Jed in some time, but she had spoken to Darrik Trudell, the Homeland Security agent, who, with help from a U.S. postal inspector and an IRS agent, was making progress toward indicting James and Sarah for fraud. He could not share details with Lissa, but the case was seeming solid. The story he and his fellow investigators pieced together went like this: In June 2011, James introduced himself to Jed as the owner of Blackstone LLC, his last name spelled H-E-N-R-I-C-K-S-E-N. Jed ran a search on the name, checking for bankruptcies and other signs of financial irresponsibility and, when he found none, wired his initial investment. Jed then prepared a résumé for James to solicit other investors, spelling his name H-E-N-D-E-R-S-O-N as he had seen James also do. (Sarah changed it to H-E-N-R-I-K-S-E-N.) That September, Jed and Ryan Olness, the investor from Arizona, signed a joint venture with Blackstone LLC, entitling them each to a percentage of monthly gross profits. In the first few months, they received returns on their investments, but then the money stopped coming. Jed confronted James, who told him Blackstone was losing money. Meanwhile, Jed heard another story: According to company employees, James and Sarah had founded a new oil hauling company called Blackstone Crude. Jed suspected they used Blackstone LLC money to purchase trucks for the other venture. He began to search for associated companies and found at least five more registered to James and Sarah or their aliases. Even Sarah had used multiple names—“Sarah Hendrickson” and “Amy Peterson.”

  On December 12, 2013, Trudell and his fellow investigators interviewed an employee who had begun working for Blackstone on or about the day KC disappeared. The employee confirmed what Jed suspected: James and Sarah were running companies on the side, depositing profits into these companies’ accounts while paying expenses with Blackstone LLC’s. One side company, Blackwell LLC, employed James’s best drivers as subcontractors; 20 percent of the profits these drivers earned benefited Blackstone, while the other 80 percent went into another account.

  The next day, Trudell interviewed Ryan Olness in Arizona. By the time the agent returned to North Dakota, he believed he had evidence to charge James and Sarah with fraud.

  Two days later, on the fifteenth of December, Doug Carlile was murdered.

  * * *

  —

  A DENSE COLD sank into the prairie. Lissa’s body gripped with a pain so strong she could not sleep, so, in the early hours of December 16, she noticed a message from Tex Hall as soon as it appeared on her phone. Lissa wondered why the chairman was awake. Then she read his message: Carlile had been shot in his Spokane home by an unidentified gunman.

  Lissa texted the news to Trudell, who called the Spokane Police Department. Lissa wanted to text Sarah, too, but told herself to wait. Instead, she monitored the news. An article in The Spokesman-Review noted that Carlile and James had leased an allotment in Mandaree and hoped to drill for oil. James wanted to buy Carlile out, but Carlile had refused. Before he died, Carlile told one of his sons, “If I disappear or wake up with bullets in my back, promise me you will let everyone know that James Henrikson did it.”

  A day passed. Sarah still had not mentioned the murder. In lieu of asking about it, Lissa texted Sarah a photograph of a milkshake.

  “Dairy Queen!” Sarah replied. “I love blizzards ha ha.” Given the circumstances, Lissa thought Sarah sounded oddly unperturbed. She had been at the gym, she told Lissa, and she griped about Jill, who had filed for bankruptcy with her husband, which did not bode well for the defamation suit.

  The next morning, when Sarah still had not mentioned the Carlile murder, Lissa texted Sarah a link to the Spokesman-Review article. “I’m worried about you,” she wrote. “Did he tell you about this?”

  “Yes,” Sarah replied. “I can’t believe it. It’s so sad, and I just hurt for that wife.” Doug’s wife, Elberta, had been inside the house when the gunman killed her husband. Sarah knew Elberta and Doug. They were working on some deals together, Sarah said, and Sarah had once visited them in Spokane. The night of the murder, Sarah and James were at home in Watford City eating dinner with friends. The police called James to ask where he was, because Elberta had said she believed James killed her husband. “But it wouldn’t make since,” Sarah wrote to Lissa. “That guy owes us and a lot of other people a lot of money. Why would James do that if money is owed? Right?”

  Lissa suddenly felt tired of playing games with Sarah. She urged Sarah to go home to her parents and to believe the news reports, which were sounding more certain of James’s involvement in Carlile’s murder. But as they combed together through articles posted on the Spokesman-Review website, the news drove Sarah only deeper into denial. “Wife says shooter was a stranger,” one subhead read: “Carlile’s wife told police that the couple had just returned home when an intruder confronted Doug Carlile in the kitchen. Already at the top of the stairs, the wife returned to the kitchen, where she saw a white man she didn’t recognize, clad in all black and wearing gloves, pointing a gun at her husband.”

 
That the shooter was white ruled out Robert Delao, who was Latino, but when Lissa pressed Sarah for other ideas, she had none. Sarah fixated on money. Doug, she claimed, owed her and James almost $2 million.

  “What did the project consist of?” Lissa asked.

  “Oil lease, buying and reselling. Flipping.” Now that Doug was dead, Sarah did not know what would become of the lease. “Doug was telling everyone they were getting paid soon. Now…someone else will have to take over.”

  “Sarah,” Lissa wrote the next day. “You know this is basically the same story as KC….Do you question or second guess any of this?”

  “There’s no reason for James to do this,” Sarah replied. “And Doug and his whole family knew about everything we went through with KC. James made a point to let them know, hey this is what people say about me….Of course I stop and think about things….But it just doesn’t make since.”

  “I’m worried about YOU in this whole matter.”

  “I don’t know what to think. I do worry for my safety.”

  “If James is putting hits out on people…what happens to you if someone retaliates? Everyone knows James is totally dependent on you!…That makes you a target!”

  “I don’t understand why James would put hits on these people. Unless he has a whole life I don’t know about.”

  “Answer me this. Honestly. Do you think James has the ways and means to carry something like this out? Fuck whatever the motive could be!”

  “Honestly, I’ve thought about it. If it’s possible I sure don’t know how, and he would have done a good job at hiding it from me.”

  “Your parents must be hysterical!!!!”

  “My mom called me this morning, she’s freaking out. Wants me to leave everything and leave ND.”

  “I’m in total agreement with your mom! If you were my kid, you’d be hog tied in the backseat going home!”

  Sarah did not go to Washington—she could not “abandon” her husband, she told Lissa—and Lissa gave up on telling her to. Instead, Lissa told Sarah not to speak to the press, nor to police, before consulting a lawyer. News outlets had called with interview requests; Sarah blocked their numbers. On January 5, 2014, when two police detectives from Spokane dropped by her house in Watford City, Sarah did not speak to them, either.

  On the fourteenth of January, police raided Sarah’s house. Sarah texted Lissa on her way home from Denver, where she had been with James on a business trip: “Oh man Lissa, I’m scared. People are really trying to hurt James and or me.”

  Lissa was asleep. When she woke the next morning—the fifteenth, a Wednesday—she was on the couch in her welding boots, her phone in the limp palm of her hand. She was late to work and did not text Sarah until her break. Sarah had arrived home to find a door kicked in, clothes scattered across the bedroom floor, the lining of her jewelry case ripped out, and her cash, computers, documents, and guns gone.

  “Guns? Wtf you guys doing with guns?” Lissa wrote.

  Sarah explained that she had a concealed weapons permit and owned “a couple hand guns” and “then like a hunting rifle”—“nothing crazy.” They chatted briefly about Robert Delao, who was at the house gathering his things, before Lissa had to go. “I’m so confused and sad with what’s going on,” Sarah wrote.

  Lissa replied that she would text Sarah after work. She wrote Sarah that evening four times. The next day Lissa texted, “If you don’t wanna talk just tell me. But don’t let me worry about you.”

  Sarah did not reply.

  * Prisons have a constitutional obligation to provide medical care to inmates. North Dakota corrections officials were unclear as to why Lissa had not been offered treatment but suggested that some inmates diagnosed with hep C do not receive medication if their prison term is shorter than the length of time it would take to complete treatment. Lissa’s term, however, was long enough.

  12

  Confessions

  THE HOUSE AT 2505 SOUTH Garfield Road, in Spokane, Washington, was often mistaken for elegant, though anyone who had been inside knew it was cheerless and tacked-together, having had too many owners who had tried to renovate and given up. It was three stories, white, with vaulted arches over the entry and a sunroom lit with Christmas lights. There were two sets of double doors that opened from a sunroom into the main house, so that when a city detective, Brian Cestnik, arrived at 7:46 on the evening of December 15, 2013, he could see, from the street, a television on in the living room and a fluorescent glow emanating from the kitchen. He saw no one inside the house. The paramedics were gone, Doug Carlile pronounced dead. An upper floor where the wife had hidden in a closet was dark. Officers lingered in the street as Cestnik spoke with them. The first had visited a neighbor, a woman, who saw a white van pass her house three times in the hour before she heard the gun. A second officer had been the first to enter the house. A third had followed a canine into the backyard and noted some curious signs: footprints; water marks splashed across a wooden fence; and a welding glove, dry, which the officer found strange, since the ground on which it lay was damp.

  Cestnik took notes and then delivered a warrant to the home of a judge, who signed it before midnight. By the time he returned to Garfield Road, a forensic team was waiting. They videotaped the residence, first from the street, leafy and meandering, and then up the driveway past a white Mercedes SUV and a blue Ford truck. The night was still, and the video would appear even more silent and granular. Beyond the driveway, in the darkness of the yard, the frame blackened and brightened again to reveal the fence, the metal gate, and the welding glove, palm-up on the ground. Then through a door came a bleach of light: A man laid out on the kitchen floor.

  Carlile wore only boxers and shoes, his clothes tossed off by the paramedics, and in the hours that passed, death had flattened his raw, puffed nakedness to the hardwood. When the detective bent to inspect the body, he noted blood marbling the pale of Carlile’s back and caked around his mouth, crusted in the folds of his neck and the hair around his scalp. There were four entrance wounds on his torso and an exit above his belly button, while a fifth bullet had entered by a nostril and lodged inside his head.

  Cestnik would say that except for a tooth flung across the room, Carlile’s body was relatively intact. It was the house that disturbed him—the promise of its exterior, the shabbiness once inside—and stranger, still, its adornments: colored lights blinking on a plastic tree, Bible verses scribbled on sticky notes throughout the rooms. Christmas was the detective’s favorite holiday. “Here we are at the happiest time of year, and this guy brutally murdered,” he would say. The radio was tuned to carols and soft rock. No one had bothered to turn it off. At times, Cestnik caught himself humming, and then the music would stop, the horror pushing above the innocence.

  * * *

  —

  THE LEAD DETECTIVE assigned the case was a tall, gray-haired man in his early fifties, Mark Burbridge, whose manners once inspired a colleague to liken him to a pit bull. In the fifteen years he had worked in the homicide unit, and in his years before that as a cop, Burbridge had become famous among Spokane prosecutors for his bluntness and disregard for politics. One would describe a courtroom incident in which he “was practically in fisticuffs with an attorney.” What made him “a very good detective,” the prosecutor noted, was that he seemed utterly lacking in self-consciousness. Cestnik was comparatively shorter and more polite. He had been in the homicide unit only a year, but the two detectives had become close. They went on family vacations together.

  Burbridge believed that the relatives of murder victims fit into two categories: those who could not contain their grief, who had “this deep, soul-wrenching, guttural cry,” and those who remained silent out of shock. But when he arrived at his office the night of the murder and found Doug’s wife, Elberta, waiting, he noted she fit neither category. “She was detached,” as the detective put it. She insisted he take h
er to her husband so that she could pray over his body.

  Burbridge added Elberta to his suspect list, which would include a dozen names by morning. At the top were the Carliles’ four sons, each involved to varying degrees in their father’s business, as well as Doug’s partners and investors. Doug was a contractor and, in 2013, he had taken an interest in the oil fields. He founded two companies: the trucking service, Bridgewater, with James Henrikson, whom Doug knew from a prior job; and Kingdom Dynamics Enterprises, with James and two other partners in Spokane. That July, KDE bid on an oil lease on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The lease was 640 acres, located in Mandaree. Another company had leased the land in 2008 and decided not to drill, since the surrounding land was already leased, and the cost of bringing a rig to a remote location would have reduced their profits. But Doug had not been deterred. He solicited partners, among them James and others whom he promised a full return on their investments within ninety days. Even Burbridge, who knew little about the oil fields, sensed Doug’s promise had been unrealistic, and indeed, as Elberta now explained, Doug had struggled to lure investors. James had grown frustrated. One day, during an argument, he held Doug by his shirt collar as if to strangle him.

  After Elberta left Burbridge’s office, the detective phoned Doug’s partners in Spokane, both of whom were out of town—“Homicide detectives hate coincidences,” he said. Then he called Tex Hall, whom Elberta had mentioned. Tex struck Burbridge as eager to talk. He told the detective that he had never met Carlile but knew of him, and that James had stolen $500,000 from his company with the help of another “crook” named Robert Delao.