In May 2014, investigators flew Suckow to North Dakota twice. Although he led them to what he believed was the burial area, he could not find KC’s body. Trudell said Suckow had made an honest effort. Later, investigators returned to the site with dog teams and backhoes, but they could not find a body, either.
Lissa traded fewer messages with Trudell that spring. When she asked him if he knew where Sarah had gone, he told her he did not. Lissa assumed, correctly, that Sarah had been taken into protective custody. She missed Sarah—or perhaps it was something else she missed. After Sarah’s silence, after James’s arrest, after Robert’s and Timothy’s confessions, Lissa was no longer the keeper of secrets, the one who knew more than anyone else.
In the beginning, she was grateful that James would be prosecuted, and when she heard that investigators were preparing for a trial, she was moved nearly to tears. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she texted Trudell.
“No problem. Thanks,” he replied.
The fear she had felt leaving her apartment dissipated without her noticing. In the winter and spring of 2014, she spent fewer weekends on the reservation, and when she went home to the apartment after work, she often fell into a deep, uninterrupted sleep. She felt exhausted, sick, but there was also a certain darkness that enveloped her during this time. One afternoon, Lissa woke to find the apartment empty. She called for her children, but they had gone out. She drove to the grocery store and thought, as she wandered the aisles, that even the people she knew looked unfamiliar: “Everybody moved on without me. I got so wrapped up in this case, and when I looked up, everybody was gone.”
Lissa wondered if Shauna had been right—one addiction for another, the same person, only sober.
To feel unnecessary, cast off, made Lissa desperate, and she became strident, even boastful with investigators. Burbridge still did not return her calls and, once, when he accused her by email of leaking information to the press—falsely, it was Jill—Lissa replied angrily, “Focus on connecting James and his crew. I’ve been following this guy for nearly two years.”
She did not speak with Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent, and knew of his work on the case only through Jill. Then, in May, Lissa heard from a source on the reservation that Suckow was in the badlands. She mentioned this to Jill, who mentioned it to Gutknecht, who called Lissa the next day. He wanted to know how Lissa knew, but she would not tell him. “He thought someone in law enforcement was giving out the information,” she later recalled. “I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to tell you something. I’ve got eyes all over fucking Fort Berthold. Anytime shit goes down, I get a private message about it, or people call. I know what the fuck is going on.’ He said, ‘So you’re not going to cooperate?’ I said, ‘No.’ ” A few minutes later, Trudell texted Lissa, demanding that she call him. When she did, Lissa thought she could hear Gutknecht in the background. “I told Darrik, ‘Fuck Steve Gutknecht.’ Darrik was like, ‘Well, I figured you’d talk to me.’ I said, ‘You know what? Tell him I heard it from you. Tell him it was you.’ ”
That Lissa still received tips from people on the reservation was true. She traded messages regularly with Tex, though he seemed to evade her attempts to speak in person, and he rarely offered anything of substance, remarking mostly on the weather and on an occasional visit from investigators. Once, he told her to come by his house, but when she did, no one answered the door. She circled the house, knocking on windows, until at last Tiffiany came out holding, in Lissa’s words, “some homely little-ass dog.” Tiffiany told Lissa that Tex was not home and retreated inside.
In the spring, ice broke on the lake and lodged in the banks like shards of glass. Rain fell. The roads thawed and cracked.
Lissa’s joints ached. She wanted to sweat, to pray, and told this to her friend who lived in Sanish, Tiny Crows Heart, who said he would gather branches to build the lodge. Waylon, her cousin, said he would join, since he knew the songs, as would Micah, since he still went everywhere with his mother. They met at Tiny’s trailer one afternoon in May. A fire burned in a low, gray pit. Lissa changed into a cotton dress and knelt by the lodge Tiny had constructed. With a thumb and forefinger, she stripped sage from its stem, rolling the leaves between the palms of her hands and packing them into her pipe. Then she lit another plug of sage, placed it in an abalone shell, and smudged the pipe and herself. She spun once around before entering the lodge. It was so small that she curled her back to fit, and when she emerged, she was soaked, stinking of medicine.
Sanish is on a high cliff at the north end of the lake, where the river pinches to its narrowest point. The slope is steep at first and then fans out onto grassy bluffs some hundred feet above the water. Lissa walked out onto one of the bluffs and sat. Micah, Waylon, and another companion spread out behind her, while Tiny tended the fire. From where she rested, Lissa could see the blinking colors of the casino, the pickup trucks parked on the beach, the dim lights of oil workers camped in the trees, the gleaming white yacht on its fateful perch, and the shadows of boats drifting in toward the marina. Darkness came. Flares brightened on the horizon like tiny rising suns. Waylon had forgotten his star quilt, so Lissa had given him hers. Now, as her sweat cooled and stiffened her dress, a chill sank into her. She had only her pipe, which she held in her lap, and two horse skulls, which she had placed on the ground next to her. The moon rose and shimmered on the lake. Lissa tried to pray. She found that when she focused on the words to the songs, she forgot the cold, but then Micah called out to her, and the cold returned, throbbing.
“Mom, are you okay?” he said.
“Shhht,” she said, quieting him.
She thought of the sun dance. When dancers “entered the circle,” it was said, they should be prepared to die. Now, as Lissa shivered, she prayed for her children, for Shauna, for the murdered and missing, and as she prayed, she heard footsteps breaking across the grass behind her. She wanted to turn around, but she gripped her pipe and remained still. Suddenly, Lissa was no longer in her body but watching herself from a hillside above. She saw she was flanked by two gray horses. Or were they people? Now the horses were gone, and a man and a woman were standing in their place, the woman bent to whisper in her ear. We hear your prayers, the woman said.
* * *
—
LISSA HEARD A rattling breath and opened her eyes. Micah was curled on the ground beside her. He had draped a quilt over her legs, and when the sun rose, they hid themselves from the light, and when they woke on the second morning, they were nestled in the quilt. The colors of the casino still blinked. The trucks had not quit their groaning. And beneath the Sanish cliffs, a body floated in the lake. A fisherman spotted it from the beach.
PART II
Bust
13
Us Against the World
THE DECLINE IN THE PRICE of oil coincided with some unsettling events on Fort Berthold—first, the reappearance of Daniel Mossett, a thirty-two-year-old tribal member who had been missing for months when, on the morning of May 19, 2014, a fisherman noticed his body floating in the lake. In the following weeks, the price of oil would fall below a hundred dollars a barrel and keep falling. The state medical examiner would determine that Mossett died of suicide and exposure, though it was rumored he was found with a bag bungeed around his head, which suggested he had been murdered. Lissa had taken an interest in his case and suspected his death was at least more complicated than the autopsy made it seem. And so his became another unresolved story whose fragments drifted like orphans amid the boom, clinging to other unfinished stories or disappearing altogether.
His funeral was held at the community center in Twin Buttes, where Mossett was from. As mourners followed his casket to the cemetery, the procession stalled on the edge of town where two oil workers had stopped in the road chatting, oblivious to the line of cars. A mourner got out and spoke to them; the workers moved aside. Lissa at first
felt angry with the workers, but then they took off their hats and bowed their heads, and the sight of this made her cry.
Tex Hall attended the funeral as well but left before Lissa could speak with him. Months earlier, news of another unsettling event had landed like a small bomb on the reservation—the murder of Doug Carlile.
For weeks after the murder, it had seemed that no one on the reservation except for Lissa and Tex knew of it. Then, in late January 2014, a federal court in Eastern Washington released a summary of interviews with investigators and witnesses regarding Carlile’s case. On page eight of the report, Tex’s name appeared. According to a detective, while Robert Delao worked for Tex’s company, Maheshu, a Spokane resident, Todd Bates, had often visited Delao on the reservation. During one of these visits, a Blackstone employee overheard Bates talking to James about a “job [that would] pay the same as the last job.” This employee “believed the last job was [Clarke], Henrikson’s operations manager who has been missing since February 2012.”
Lissa circulated the summary online as soon as it was released. Among the tribal members who read it was Damon Williams, a tall, boyish, bespectacled man who in 2008 had replaced Steve Kelly as attorney for the tribe. Williams printed the summary, marked it, and delivered it to the tribal council, recommending they suspend Tex for thirty days while they commissioned an independent investigation. The council voted against suspending the chairman but agreed to hire an investigator. Several days later, Williams flew to Missouri to meet a former U.S. attorney with expertise in corruption.
* * *
—
IT WAS EARLY February in 2014—shortly after the council meeting, ten months before I would meet Lissa for the first time—that news of the scandal burgeoning on the reservation reached me. It arrived as a single photograph on my Facebook feed: Tex Hall dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, standing and smiling with a group of people who appeared to have just finished eating. To his right was Tiffiany Johnson, the woman I knew to be his partner, and beside Tiffiany were two people I did not recognize—a tan, blond woman in a black tank top, her teeth strikingly white, and a white man with a bad sunburn, his pecs bulging under a T-shirt.
The photograph, taken in Hawaii over a year earlier, had been shared by a tribal member I knew, but the person who had originally posted the photograph was yet unfamiliar to me: Nadia Reinardy.
Over the following weeks, other tribal members I knew would repost the photograph. I would learn that the white man and woman were James Henrikson and Sarah Creveling, and when I looked up their names, sorting through the many articles that by then were emerging, I read, for the first time, about Kristopher Clarke.
Meanwhile, beneath the reposted photograph, comments by tribal members accrued:
I wonder if he is spending tribal money on his family’s outings?
He flies first class. I seen him on my flight.
Chairman with a snake tongue. Shove his helicopter up his ass.
he living a more than comfortable life when we ppl frm our tribe struggling to survive n homeless…im sure that trip could have put someone in a home
Or even in a hotel. I hear all the time how it feels to be from one of the richest tribes. I just say we are one of the poorest. Idk how dude can live with himself.
I tried calling Tex at the tribal office, but no one answered. So I called Mark Fox, the tribe’s tax director, with whom I had remained in touch since my first trip to the reservation three years earlier. “He’s trying to say he’s the victim, but people think he has his hands dirty,” Mark told me. Mark was unsure what to believe, but he did not feel sympathy for Tex. “If you make a choice to partner with somebody, and you find out they have a questionable background, most people cut their ties and run like hell, because you don’t want that to come back on your legitimate business.” Mark had been hearing rumors about Clarke’s disappearance for years and wondered about Tex’s connection to James. The rumors were eroding people’s trust in the chairman, Mark said, and he wondered if the Carlile murder was a tipping point: “Stories are going to come out. Anybody trying to put Tex on a pedestal better be careful, because that pedestal will be knocked out from under him, and he won’t ever get back on it again.”
I was surprised by Mark’s bravado, given that he was part of the chairman’s administration. It was only months later, when Mark announced his bid for chairman, that I suspected some opportunism. But Mark was right. On August 28, 2014, the woman I knew then only as Nadia Reinardy once again posted the photograph of Tex vacationing in Hawaii, this time captioning it, “Vote Tex Hall if you want lies, embezzlement, and continued exploitation. Pictured left to right: James Henrikson, Sarah Creveling, and your majesty, king TEX!”
On September 11, five days prior to the primary election for chairman, the firm that the tribal attorney, Damon Williams, enlisted to investigate Tex sent a sixty-six-page report to the tribe. When the council refused to release the report, some hundred tribal members protested outside the chambers, among them Mark, until Judy Brugh, the councilwoman, unlocked the doors, let the protesters in, and gave them a copy. That evening, the protesters scanned the report and posted it on Facebook.
Much of the information the report contained was known or at least rumored on the reservation already, such as Tex’s partnership with Blackstone. But the report also contained some new findings. Allegedly, in the winter of 2012, Tex had authorized the tribe to hire Blackstone to spray roads with water to suppress dust. The job paid $500,000. Blackstone had been hired without the consent of the council, which, according to tribal law, should have solicited bids from Indian contractors before giving the job to non-Indians. Tex had never disclosed to the council that his own company profited from Blackstone. This appeared to be a conflict of interest, and it was not his first impropriety. In 2008, two years before Tex was elected chairman, he had worked as a consultant for an oil company called Spotted Hawk, soliciting leases from tribal members. Tex claimed the company owed him more than a million dollars, and after he became chairman in 2010, he had asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs to delay approval of a lease agreement between Spotted Hawk and the tribe. The Bureau delayed until August 2011. During that time, Tex tried and failed to win a settlement from Spotted Hawk. After the Bureau approved the lease, Tex continued to target the company, deriding Spotted Hawk in meetings with the Bureau and in council sessions. Such findings confirmed what some tribal members long suspected—Tex had tried to use his position as chairman to enrich himself.
While the report addressed some questions, it left many others unanswered: What was the nature of Tex’s relationship with James Henrikson? How was Tex connected, if at all, to the murders? And where was Kristopher Clarke?
On September 16, 2014, Tex lost the primary election. Mark Fox and Damon Williams, the tribal lawyer, won the most votes, advancing to the general election in November. That same September day, Sarah Creveling testified before a grand jury in Bismarck, Robert Delao was arrested, and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington charged James Henrikson with eleven counts—among them, conspiring to distribute heroin and soliciting the murder-for-hire of five men, two of whom were murdered.
* * *
—
NO MEMORY OF the time I spent on the reservation is as clear to me as the night I returned that fall of 2014. It was October, cold. I crossed the border at dusk. Trucks crept toward a darker horizon, and soon everything was black except for the lights—the crawling red fenders, the flash of passing cars, the casino blinking larger than when I had left it, the flicker of grass fires I mistook for flares, the diamond beam of drilling rigs, and the moon that rose above it all, made orange by an invisible haze. The lights etched their brightness like sun scars on my eyes. In the morning, I would recognize the place again, but that night I felt unsettled, like a visitor in a vast, unknowable city.
In daylight, too, it was clear things had chan
ged over the past year. Where before the highway had been marked with farmsteads, it had become an industrial corridor, with warehouses and stacks of pipe and, on a corner where the restaurant called the Scenic had stood alone, a new gas station and motel. One day, I stopped at the Scenic for lunch and found it full of white people like me. The inside was dingy and poorly lit, and when I looked out the window, which once had served a clear view of the lake, I noticed a new train depot and, arcing around it on a set of tracks, the matte-black tanks of an oil train.
If the place felt unfamiliar to me, I wondered how it felt to the thousands of tribal members who by then were returning home to vote in the November election. I had noticed that the casino, Better B’s, and the grocery stores in New Town were full of people dressed in city clothes. They had come from Cleveland, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Rapid City, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and reservations across the West and Midwest. Since the tribe lacked absentee voting, if you wanted to vote, you came home. More tribal members would come home for this election than any one before it—3,500 out of 8,000 eligible voters, the tribe estimated—and as I interviewed members about their decision to return, many said that although they did not live on the reservation, they worried about it. They lamented the crime brought by the boom, the oil spills, the “mismanagement.” When I asked one woman what concerned her most, she replied, “contamination.” In July, a wastewater pipeline had burst, spilling twenty-five thousand barrels of chemical brine into a creek near the water intake for Mandaree. The woman had recently moved her family to Bismarck and doubted she would live on the reservation again. Her mother had been displaced by the flood. “She always said, ‘I want to go home, but I can’t,’ ” the woman told me. “Sometimes I think, Are we going to be saying the same thing?”
Yellow Bird Page 27
