The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

  There was a vehicle idling at the other end of the platform, an SUV, and Stevens could see the light bar and sheriff’s department markings as he walked closer. The driver’s door opened as they approached, and a woman stepped out in a heavy, fur-lined parka. “You must be the feds.”

  “Sure are,” Stevens replied. “Are you the welcoming party?”

  “Kerry Finley, Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy.” Finley looked like she was a few years younger than Windermere. A trim build and a ready smile. She held out her hand. “Glad you all could make it.”

  18

  Ronda’s like the den mother for all us riders,” Ash told Mila. “Especially the girls. You ever need anything while you’re out here—a bed for the night, a job for a couple weeks, bail money—you get in touch with her and she’ll make it happen.”

  Summer on Lake Superior. They’d ridden a drag up through Minnesota for a meetup outside Duluth, a group of riders at a friendly lakeside campsite, cookouts and bonfires and tall tales from the road.

  Music, too; some of the riders had instruments, old beat-up guitars and harmonicas, African drums. Someone brought out an accordion. They circled around the fire and played train-hopper classics, traditional hobo tunes. Played some newer stuff, too, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Johnny Cash.

  Mila lingered on the outside of the circle, as close as she could get to the music without being noticed, while Ash pointed out people she knew. Ash had talked Mila off the crystal again a couple weeks back, and Mila was feeling the comedown: depression, paranoia. She didn’t want to be here.

  She wanted to get high.

  “That old drummer, that’s Texas Johnny,” Ash was saying. “He used to play backup for Waylon Jennings before he started riding trains. Could have been a big star if he hadn’t bugged out and hit the rails. They say he hasn’t slept in a real bed in forty years.”

  Mila didn’t know who Waylon Jennings was, but Ash had moved on anyway, was talking about the young man with one arm playing the harmonica.

  “Lost his left arm to a hotshot,” Ash explained. “A rainy day and the train moving fast, he just slipped and . . .” She grimaced. “That was that.”

  Mila watched the harmonica player, the empty sleeve of his shirt pinned to his shoulder. He played better than she ever would and didn’t look too upset about his missing arm. Then the song ended and the music died out and all of the musicians looked across the fire to a big woman in a folding camp chair, like they were waiting for her approval.

  The woman gave it. “Well done, boys,” she said, smiling. “Now how’s your take on ‘Oklahoma Hills’?”

  Instantly, the band was off and running again, launching into the next song. The woman sat back in her chair, nodded along, satisfied.

  “It’s her birthday,” Ash whispered. “All she wanted was a meet-up and some music.”

  “Who is she?” Mila asked, and Ash blinked and looked at her like she’d asked who was president.

  “Who is she?” Ash repeated. “That’s Ronda Sixkill, girl. She’s basically the queen of the riders.”

  —

  Mila’s train made Seattle late on a miserable, rainy night. She stepped down from her hopper car in a freight yard near the docks and hurried across the slick ballast to the edge of the yard.

  She was cold. It wasn’t even below freezing, and she was already shivering. The rain seemed to seep through her clothing and even her skin, chilling her in a way even the snow couldn’t.

  You’d better toughen up, girl. It’s going to be a hell of a lot colder where you’re going.

  Mila walked down the tracks until she found a road crossing. She could see lights up the road a ways, a half mile or so, shining bright through the rain. She shouldered her packsack and followed the lights.

  Civilization turned out to be a couple of pawnshops and a check-cashing joint, all closed. A convenience store that could have been out of business and an all-night diner. Mila turned on her phone, searched for a wireless signal. Found a weak one, still usable, from the bigger of the two pawnshops.

  Bingo.

  Mila entered the diner, sat at the bar. Ordered a cup of coffee and wrote a message to Ronda.

  I’m here.

  —

  You ever need help while you’re on the road,” Ash said, “you get in touch with Ronda. She’ll make it happen.”

  Mila watched Ronda from across the bonfire. The big woman was definitely the center of attention. Every couple minutes, another rider would emerge from the dark with a flask or a bottle outstretched like an offering, and every time Ronda refused, cracked a joke instead, sent each rider away smiling. If there was such a thing as a celebrity among train hoppers, Ronda Sixkill was it.

  “Descended from a Cherokee lawman,” Ash said. “I heard he was actually a railroad bull, but whatever. Ronda doesn’t need to be out here, that’s the crazy thing about her. Still goes back to her house every winter, plays host to whoever needs out of the cold.”

  Mila didn’t say anything. She was daunted by the big woman’s presence, her charisma, the obvious way the other riders deferred to her. “How am I supposed to get in touch with her?” she asked. “She doesn’t even know my name.”

  Ash grinned. “That’s a two-part question. You get ahold of her on the rider message boards. Whenever she’s at home, she’s online.”

  “Online?” Mila gestured around at the wilderness, the lake. “This isn’t exactly an Internet hotspot. How am I supposed to message her?”

  Ash slipped something out of her pocket, pressed it to Mila’s hand. A phone, a smartphone. A new one.

  “Where did you—”

  “Minneapolis,” Ash said. “That guy who was bugging me at the bar, the one who kept grabbing my ass? He left his phone on the table, and I swiped it.”

  Mila stared at the phone. It looked complex. It looked expensive. “Can’t he track it?”

  “I know a guy who cracks phones,” Ash told her. “He owed me a favor. You swipe yourself a phone charger and you’ll be set. Even when we’re not riding together, we can still keep in touch.”

  Mila slid her finger over the screen, unlocking the phone. It had a camera, she saw, and a lot of apps she didn’t recognize. There were pictures of the phone’s old owner, and there was music.

  “You could put a new phone card in,” Ash was saying, “but you don’t have to. You can connect to the Internet through any Wi-Fi signal. Send emails and look up places to go and whatever you need.”

  “Okay, great,” Mila said. “But I don’t even know this Ronda person. Why should she care about me?”

  “That’s the second thing.” Ash reached for Mila’s hand, pulled her into the light. Circled the bonfire to where Ronda was sitting.

  “Ronda Sixkill,” Ash said as they approached, “I think you should meet my friend Mila.”

  —

  Forty minutes and two coffee refills later, a car pulled up outside the diner. It hung there at the curb, long, low, and dark, the driver in shadow, but Mila knew who it was.

  She left a few crumpled dollars on the bar beside her coffee cup, picked up her packsack, and went back out into the rain.

  The car was big and old, a Buick or an Oldsmobile or something. Its wipers worked fast over the windshield. Mila walked to the passenger door. She opened it and slid inside.

  It was warm in the car, and dry. The seat was the softest Mila had ever felt. Ronda Sixkill sat behind the wheel. She was looking at Mila with those motherly eyes.

  “I guess you made it after all, kiddo,” she said. “Now what do I have to do to convince you to stay?”

  19

  Stevens and Windermere spent the night in the only hotel in Butcher’s Creek, the unimaginatively named Northwestern Hotel. The rooms were army-barracks sparse: twin beds, plywood furniture, and broken TVs. Meant for train crews, Kerry Finley explained. �
��They don’t see many tourists this far off the highway.”

  “Makes no difference to me,” Stevens said, yawning. “I feel like we just about crossed the Rubicon to get here.”

  He slept fitfully. Woke up to the phone ringing, light shining in through the windows, a blinding glare from the snow that covered the town.

  “Deputy Finley is downstairs with the sheriff,” Windermere said when he answered the phone. “You want me to tell them you need your beauty sleep?”

  “No amount of sleep is going to save me,” Stevens replied. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

  He dressed in a hurry, brushed his teeth, patted down his unruly hair. Found Windermere and Finley in the lobby with an older man who must have been the sheriff. He fit the mold: the mustache and the Stetson, the air of quiet competence, like he’d been bred specifically to keep order in mountains like these.

  “Judd Parsons,” he said, shaking Stevens’s hand. “Sheriff of Lincoln County. I hear you’ve met Kerry already.”

  Finley nodded. “Morning, Agent Stevens.”

  “Well, you sure look like federal agents,” Parson said, studying Stevens and Windermere. “And two of you, to boot. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the government doesn’t believe I can conduct a real investigation.”

  “We’re looking for a connection between your Jane Doe here and the unknown victim on Sheriff Truman’s caseload in Boundary County,” Stevens told him. “If we can’t find a connection, we’ll get out of your hair, let you do your thing the way we’re sure you know how. But if there is a connection between your Jane Doe and Sheriff Truman’s, it means—”

  “You can stop calling her Jane Doe,” Parsons said, interrupting. He held up his hands, a peace offering. “All due respect, agents. But we made her ID while you were on your way up here.”

  —

  The town was tiny, hardly more than a village. There was a big Northwestern tanker train slowing to a stop on the main line; as Windermere watched, two men stepped out of a crew cab pickup and disappeared inside the lead engine. A moment later, two different men emerged from the locomotive and climbed in the backseat of the truck, which drove away from the tracks, across the town’s main street, to stop in front of the Northwestern Hotel.

  “Kelly-Anne Clairmont,” Sheriff Parsons told them, leading them out to his Lincoln County SUV. “She’s an Indian girl, lives in the village here. We found her ex-husband’s car abandoned on a forestry road behind the Benson property. It’s stuck pretty good in the snow back there, three miles or so from town.”

  Stevens and Windermere followed Parsons into the truck and buckled their seat belts as the sheriff pointed his vehicle down the main road out of Butcher’s Creek.

  “Your team get a read on the state of the body?” Stevens asked. “You’re treating this death as suspicious; must have been some sign of—”

  “The state of the body was bad,” Parsons said. “That old wolf saw to that. I’m treating the death as suspicious because of the carnage, but I’m betting we’re going to find what killed Kelly-Anne wasn’t so suspicious at all.”

  “Anyone talk to the ex-husband?”

  Parsons gave him a look, like What kind of backwoods bumpkins do you think you’re dealing with? “Called him as soon as we found the car,” the sheriff said. “Asked him if he knew where his car was. He said Kelly-Anne took it to the bar a few nights back, never came home. Said give him a heads-up if we knew where it was, he could use the damn thing back.”

  “The bar,” Stevens said. “That’s the one in town there?”

  “The Gold Spike, yessir. Only bar between here and Eureka. Kelly-Anne was a . . .” The sheriff laughed. “You could say she was a local favorite around there.”

  “Does the ex have a story for the last couple of days?” Windermere asked. “What’s he been up to while Ms. Clairmont was missing?”

  Parsons found her in the rearview. “You’re pretty sure this is a homicide, huh?”

  Windermere held his gaze. “We got a young Native woman the next county over, strangled to death and dumped in the snow. Now we have another young woman’s body here. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pattern to me.”

  “If we started trying to link every dead Indian around here, Agent Windermere, we’d drive ourselves crazy.” Parsons chuckled to himself. “Now, I don’t know what Sheriff Truman has been telling you, but deaths like these aren’t exactly uncommon in winter.”

  He slowed the truck. They’d reached a snowy forestry road. “These are the mountains, young lady,” he said over his shoulder. “You make too many mistakes, it’ll cost you your life.”

  20

  There was a cluster of vehicles parked at the foot of the forestry road, another SUV with Lincoln County sheriff markings, a Ford Super Duty with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. There was a young woman, too, in a different uniform. She carried a rifle slung over her shoulder.

  “That’s Becky LaTray,” Parsons told them as they climbed from the car. “Fish, Wildlife, and Parks warden. She came out when Jim Benson saw the wolf. She found the body.”

  He called over and the warden looked up, saw Stevens and Windermere, straightened, and came across to them.

  “Becky, these are a couple of our friends from the federal government,” Parsons said. “They’re investigating dead Indians and want to know if Kelly-Anne here was murdered.”

  LaTray was a pretty, fresh-faced thirtysomething. She bore a passing resemblance to Deputy Finley, if not in appearance then in overall attitude; neither woman looked at all bothered by the chill in the air or the bleakness of their surroundings—or the grisly nature of the case, natch.

  These mountain girls, Windermere thought. Without even trying, they make me look like a slug.

  LaTray shook Windermere’s hand, then Stevens’s. “I’m hardly the person to talk to about murder,” she told them. “All I really know is wildlife, and that wolf had pretty well had his way with the body before I showed up.”

  “County coroner’s taking a look,” Parsons said. “Should give us an official cause of death in the next couple of days, if you’re sticking around.”

  “Tell him to put a rush on it,” Windermere replied. “Look for signs of strangulation—crushed larynx, thyroid cartilage, petechial hemorrhages. Ligature marks, sexual assault, too. The works.”

  Parsons didn’t look happy about it, but he reached for his radio. Windermere turned back to LaTray.

  “I guess you’re thinking the wolf came by postmortem,” she said. “Found Ms. Clairmont’s body and scavenged a meal.”

  “That’s right. They rarely attack people, especially not healthy young women.” LaTray pulled out a camera. “The wolf was gone when I got here, but I took a few pictures of the scene.”

  She handed the camera to Windermere, who scrolled through a couple shots, then handed the camera back. The wolf had clearly been at the body for a while. His teeth had done serious damage; the snow was littered with torn clothing and worse.

  “So where is this wolf now?” Windermere asked, scanning the trees that lined the side of the road. “He still out there somewhere?”

  LaTray nodded. “We’re keeping our eyes open,” she said. “Now that he has a taste for people, he’ll probably come back sooner or later.”

  “And then?”

  LaTray patted her rifle. “And then we do what we have to do,” she said grimly. “Preferably before he does any more damage.”

  —

  Stevens and Windermere rode up to Kelly-Anne Clairmont’s abandoned Taurus in LaTray’s Super Duty pickup. Stick close to the woman with the biggest gun, Stevens figured. Especially when there’s a hungry wolf in the area.

  The snow was thick on the narrow road, and LaTray drove at a crawl, keeping her tires in the tracks from Sheriff Parsons’s Explorer up ahead. The SUV seemed to be cutting a fresh
path; any trace of Kelly-Anne Clairmont’s passage had been erased by the last snowfall.

  “How’d she wind up all the way back here?” Windermere asked. Outside was nothing but thick trees and mountains, and off to the south somewhere, Jim Benson’s ranch.

  LaTray met her eyes in the rearview. “I mean, people get lost,” she said. “Pretty easy to do when it’s whiteout conditions. Especially if you have a couple drinks in you.”

  “You’ve seen a lot of these,” Stevens said.

  “In a professional capacity? Not really. The wolves stay away, for the most part—or we hope they do. But as a Montanan in general? Sure.” She shrugged. “The winters are hard up here.”

  “So we’ve been told,” Windermere said.

  Parsons’s brake lights came on, and LaTray stopped the truck. She looked across the cab at Stevens. “You all are thinking this was a murder, huh?” she said. “I have to say, we don’t see too many federal agents around here. Especially not for—”

  “Dead Indian girls,” Windermere said. “That’s what the sheriff said, right?”

  LaTray colored. “I was going to say Native Americans. The sheriff has his own way of talking, but he doesn’t talk for everyone.”

  “Yeah, well, the jury’s still out on whether this was a homicide.” Windermere was reaching for the door handle. “In the meantime, we’re just enjoying our Montana vacation.”

  —

  The little Ford sat in deep snow just ahead of where Sheriff Parsons had pulled his Explorer to the side of the forestry road. It was a tiny thing, mid-eighties, rusted all to hell, the snow almost up to the top of the tires.

  “So here’s the car,” Parsons told them. “Wayne Clairmont’s been asking for it back, so as soon as you all have had your look at it, we’ll tow the thing back to his yard.”

  “You mean as soon as you clear Wayne’s alibi for the night of his ex-wife’s murder,” Windermere said. “Right?”

  Parsons looked at her hard. Windermere held his stare. Finally, Parsons raised his hands. “I guess we’re playing hardball,” he said. “Fine, then. You and your colleague can interview every man, woman, and teddy bear in this town, if you like. But you’re in charge of telling Wayne he can’t have his ride back.”