A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  Paine hated being wrong, and it was a good thing that she seldom was. “I can’t imagine who would take something like that from the vault,” she said, feeling for a cigarette and her silver-plated lighter, etched with her name and LAWYER OF THE YEAR. She rolled the flint-striking gear against the callused edge of her right thumb. The flame came and she drew on a cigarette, talking all the while.

  “This breach of security is very troubling,” she added.

  “I’m concerned,” Hannah said, “not so much because the evidence vault was violated, but that someone could find me after all these years. I thought I’d faded off the radar screen for good.”

  “I’ll go down to the courthouse myself if I have to. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Hannah thanked the judge and gave her her office telephone number.

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t a direct line,” she said. “Please don’t tell anyone we spoke. If you miss me, don’t leave a message, other than that you’ve called.”

  It felt very strange, very unsettling, to hear Veronica Paine say her mother’s name. After all the notoriety, all the infamy, that had attached to her mother, the name Claire Logan seldom came from Hannah’s own lips. It was curious and she knew it. God knew that Claire Logan had been a Jeopardy answer and a Trivial Pursuit question more than a time or two. Yet it was peculiar to hear “Claire Logan” uttered by someone who actually knew her. Hannah had certainly heard her mother’s name mentioned countless times, but when others had spoken of her, she’d seemed a figment, a bedtime story, and a ghost story.

  Most who knew Hannah assumed that she’d been orphaned as a little girl, which was only partially true. Her father had indeed died when she was in grade school. Her mother? That was the subject of great debate. Hannah wasn’t quite sure.

  Not an hour later, Hannah’s phone rang. It was Judge Paine, and she sounded slightly unhinged.

  “Hannah,” she said, “I’m terribly sorry. This is very, very bad. I truly am at a loss for what has happened.”

  “Just what has happened?”

  Paine chose her words carefully. “It turns out the evidence vault has indeed been compromised. Can you imagine that? It appears that some things are, in fact, missing.” She sighed heavily, and air escaped her lungs like a balloon stuck with a railroad spike. “I really don’t know what to say. This is very upsetting.”

  “What else is missing? And,” Hannah said, before allowing a response, “who could have done this?”

  Judge Paine admitted—hated to admit—she had no idea. No one she spoke to had a clue. The evidence review log, volume no. 4, was still in pristine condition. The Logan file hadn’t been looked at for more than eighteen months when a criminology student from the University of Oregon came to review it for a term paper. The retired judge was insistent that the college student couldn’t have taken the shoes.

  “This girl was very nice. Very smart. She interviewed me and several other ‘old timers’—even sent me a copy of the paper she wrote. Because of the sensitivity…” the judge continued, searching for words and drawing on a cigarette, “the magnitude of your mother’s case, I think you should get the authorities involved. At least talk to somebody.”

  When she hung up, Hannah did so knowing that there was only one person to call, an FBI agent named Jeff Bauer.

  Chapter Seven

  Jeff Bauer used to think about the Claire Logan case every day. Every night, too. It was like a leaky faucet dripping incessantly in the night down some hallway laid out with razor blades and broken glass; he could do nothing but just keep coming after the irritating and omnipresent noise. Got to shut it off. Thoughts of the woman simply couldn’t be extricated from his mind. They became a part of his every routine, from shaving in the morning (the white peaks of Gillette shaving foam sometimes reminded him of the snow banks) to eating an English muffin for breakfast (he’d had one that first morning on the case), it had always been there. For a time, whatever he did, wherever he went, Claire Logan was a kind of permanent memory tattoo. For a time, he marked his success on how many days had elapsed that he hadn’t thought of her. After ten years, his personal best for staving off thoughts of Logan was a mere nine days. After nearly twenty years, a month or two would pass before she came to mind. The relationship (some thought “obsession” was a more accurate description) with a woman whom he’d never met had cost him, too. Though he disputed it, his fixation on the Logan case had helped ruin two marriages.

  Some two-plus decades after Claire Logan became a part of his life, Special Agent Bauer was back in the Portland field office of the FBI following a five-year stint in Anchorage, Alaska. In Anchorage, the handsome six-footer with a rangy physique and ice-blue eyes had been the case agent in charge of a sting operation that resulted in the arrest of forty-four men and women who had smuggled stolen artwork and other antiquities from Russia to the United States. Most of the arrested were baggage handlers and ticket agents, though two had been top pilots with a major U.S. airline. It was a great assignment—the second best, he told reporters when he made the rounds, of his career. He threw himself into it with utter devotion. He earned a commendation from the Justice Department and a divorce petition from his second wife.

  Two events had come together within a week of each other that brought forth a torrent of memories. The first was a brief letter and a notice sent by officials at the Oregon Bureau of Prisons and Rehabilitation Facilities and the state’s star prisoner. The second was a phone call.

  The notice was for a parole hearing for Marcus Wheaton, the sole individual convicted in the Logan tragedy. The hearing would be a formality and would end with the former handyman’s release. He’d earned more good time than any man in the history of the state, but because of his crime—and its notoriety—he’d been passed by a dozen times. State law would not permit incarceration a single day beyond his twenty-year sentence.

  Bauer wouldn’t have bothered much with the notice if a message from Wheaton himself hadn’t accompanied it.

  Dear Mr. Bauer:

  Soon the state will set me free. My lawyer tells me there is no possibility that I can be held beyond my sentence, despite the debate raging in Salem. I plan on disappearing and living the rest of my days away from the spectacle that has become my existence here in prison. Before I can do that, I need to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Maybe you do, too. I know things. I do.

  In our Savior’s arms,

  Marcus James Wheaton

  The debate to which Wheaton had referred was a hastily crafted resolution that a legislator from southern Oregon had pushed before colleagues and media at the state capitol earlier in the year. The representative was a known publicity seeker, a woman who piously harangued against violent crime and was swept into office three terms prior as “a mom who cares.” Fading into the crowd of lawmakers was not to her liking and every once in a while she climbed back onto her soap-box. She had sought the spotlight by attempting to bar Wheaton from release by applying present-day sentencing standards for his crime. No one thought it would go anywhere, and in the end, it didn’t. Justice, no matter how unfairly administered, cannot easily be rewritten.

  At five minutes past nine, Bauer set down his coffee and reached to stop the ringing of the phone on his desk.

  “Bauer here,” he said.

  “Special Agent Jeff Bauer?” The husky voice of a woman was somewhat familiar.

  “You’re talking to him,” he said.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to reach you so early. This goes under the heading of what I guess we used to call a blast from the past, Agent Bauer. This is Veronica Paine. We need to talk.”

  “Judge Paine?” He asked, though he knew there could be only one—the one he’d once called “Veronica Paine-in-the-ass.”

  “Retired, thankfully,” she answered, letting a touch of levity break the tenseness of her voice. They extended a few pleasantries, though no mention was made of the investigation and trial that had given them their connection for
life. Paine told the federal cop that she’d followed his career and congratulated him on the sting in Alaska. He returned a similar favor by telling her how happy he had been when she’d been appointed to the bench.

  Paine told Bauer that her husband had died following an afternoon of pruning the apple trees they’d espaliered along a fence. They had been blessed with two daughters, both of whom were living in southern California. Bauer shared nothing of a personal nature. He didn’t really have anything to say. His marriages had gone belly-up and neither of his wives had given him any children. At divorce time, buddies at the Bureau had told him he was lucky to be without the burden of child support payments. He went along with their congratulations, but deep down, he was as sorry as a man could be.

  Then it was the judge’s turn once more. She told him of the call from Hannah Griffin.

  “Hannah?” he asked. “Our Hannah?”

  “Yes,” she said, “Claire Logan’s daughter. Our Hannah.”

  She went on to tell him Hannah had been the recipient of some evidence that had been stolen from the Spruce County property vault.

  “Her brothers’ shoes,” she said. “Exhibit Number 25.”

  Bauer tilted his head toward the phone and held his chin with his free hand. He sank into his chair like a melted chocolate. “Jesus,” he said, “why would anyone want to do something like that?”

  “Because people are basically fuckheads,” Paine answered. The coarseness of her language seemed appropriate; though he’d never heard a woman, a judge of all people, say the term fuckhead.

  “Speaking of which,” Bauer said, “Marcus Wheaton’s getting out of prison soon.”

  Paine let out a loud sigh. “So I heard. I doubt it, but anything’s possible these days.”

  “I got a note from him. Says he’s willing to talk. He wants to tell us what we’ve always wanted to know. Or so he says.”

  Paine lit a cigarette. Bauer could hear her suck the smoke deep into her lungs.

  “He’s had plenty of time to think of a story. I wouldn’t bank on him saying much, other than he loved Claire and blah, blah, blah… she done him wrong, like some crying-in-your-beer country song.”

  “I guess so,” Bauer said. “But I’m going anyhow. I still like Willie Nelson. By the way, did Hannah say if there was a note?”

  “She didn’t. And I didn’t ask. Should have, I know. I was just so startled to hear from her and so angry that someone would dredge up the past and shove it on her doorstep in such a cruel, outlandish way.”

  “Like a fuckhead,” he said.

  “You got that right.”

  Paine declined Bauer’s request for Hannah’s contact information.

  “She’s started a new life and she can contact you if she wants to,” she said. “I know that you can find her if you wanted, anyway. But don’t. Stay away from your databases. Let her come to you.”

  The house on Loma Linda should have been quiet at that hour. It should have been still as the warm summer night. At 2 a.m., the sprinklers hissed outside in the backyard, kicked on by a timer that ensured the Korean grass would never scorch to brown. Amber’s guppy tank sent a pool of light across the hall. Aunt Leanna’s Seth Thomas ticked the hours like a bomb. Ethan snored softly, oblivious to Hannah’s unhinged torment. She pressed her face against a pillow, trying to suppress the recollections that were coming after her in a nightmare that had been absent for years. It was no use. She shivered. It was cold. Even awake, she could still see the nightmare. The woman in the coveralls was there. The woman—a nearly gauzy figure, though Hannah knew it was her mother—wore coveralls that were not blue. They were wine colored, she had long thought as the ephemeral memory took shape. She bent closer to the figure she saw in her mind’s eye. The fabric was blue, mottled with splashes of red, a color that her brain had blurred and processed and whirled into a reddish hue. Hannah knew why it was that color and the realization nearly stopped her heart. As if she could control the memory, she focused on the vest. It had been slashed somehow and was leaking bits of white fluff, floating above her mother’s head, mixing with a light snowfall.

  A voice called out. It was a harsh, but controlled whisper. It came from the faceless woman in the cover-alls.

  “Now that you’re here, Hannah, you might as well be helpful. Get a shovel.”

  The girl of Hannah’s memory did as she had been taught. She obeyed the strident command without hesitation. Mechanically, she spun around, ran across the snow, and returned from the potting barn. Her fingers froze around the staff of a shovel. She stepped closer to her mother, noticing for the first time that they were standing in front of an open trench.

  “Are you going to help me? Start filling it in.”

  In her jagged memory, Hannah tried to see what was in the trench, dirt falling from the shovel onto something in the dark of a deep hole. Something gleamed. As dirt fell, the movement sent light to brass buttons. But it was more than that. The figure in the hole stirred slightly.

  The man in the hole was still alive, maybe barely so. But his chest heaved. Hannah could not see his face. Her mother had already covered it in a white powder.

  “Hurry up,” she said, her tone decidedly impatient. Not unnerved at what they were doing. Just annoyed that Hannah wasn’t doing what needed to be done.

  “I have a mess to clean up tonight and three pies to bake in the morning.”

  The red of blood oozed and bloomed against the snow.

  Hannah broke down and cried into her pillow. She had helped her mother. She had done so without question. But that wasn’t the worst of it. And deep down, she was sure that God would never forgive her for what she had done.

  Hannah sat up with a start. The nightmare was bad enough, but it wasn’t what woke her. A pair of headlights glowed from behind the blinds, splintering the light like a moonlit picket fence. She could barely breathe. Just as she was about to rouse Ethan, the lights dimmed slightly as the driver pressed the accelerator and drove off into the California night.

  Chapter Eight

  From a grimy window that needed a dousing of sudsy water and a squeegee, Hannah watched the sun shine against the backlit trees on the eastern side of the parking lot. Had the car she’d seen outside her window been a terrible dream? Had she only heard what her mind wanted to tease her with? Her eyes were slightly puffy and underscored by the dark circles of a sleepless night. She’d looked better; much better, and she knew it. She could hear a puffed-up, self-satisfied Ted Ripperton in the hallway talking about the Garcia case and how he was going to “nail that bitch for killing her son.” She shut her door and went to her desk. In front of her were photographs of tragedy and love. Pictures of Enrique Garcia taken at the autopsy were blurry Polaroids of the unspeakable tragedy of abuse and possible murder of a child; framed snapshots of Ethan and Amber occupied another corner. Her husband and daughter smiled in a way she doubted Enrique or his sister, Mimi, could have ever experienced—carefree, worry-free. Her husband and daughter wore smiles that indicated they had been enveloped in uncompromising love.

  At a few minutes before 10 a.m., Hannah answered Paine’s call from Spruce County.

  “Oh,” was all she could manage when the former prosecutor confirmed that the shoes more than likely were genuine.

  “I’m sorry,” Judge Paine said. “And I’m worried.”

  “It’s some prank, isn’t it?” Hannah asked.

  The judge didn’t know. “It well could be, but I think it would be foolish to treat it as such. Hannah,” she said haltingly, “I contacted Jeff Bauer. I didn’t tell him where you are. But I told him I’d tell you where he is.”

  “Portland,” Hannah said.

  “Why, yes. How did you know?”

  “I read it somewhere,” Hannah said. She didn’t want to say that she’d tracked Bauer’s career for years. She’d never let go of him because he’d done so much for her. “How is he?” she asked.

  “Fine, I suppose,” Paine said. “He’s concerned. He want
s to help. I think you should call him. Here’s the number.”

  Hannah pretended to take it down; on the “B” page of her address book, where she’d written it years ago. Just in case. Paine promised to do a little more digging at Spruce County, but she was unsure how much she could really find out.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve busted heads over there. You don’t know it when you’re building them, but reputations fade, my dear,” she said somewhat ruefully. “My name used to invoke the fear of God, or at least a few hours in the cooler for contempt. Now, I can’t even get the cleaning lady to do my refrigerator once a week.”

  “My mother’s name still holds a lot of power,” Hannah muttered before she thanked Paine and said good-bye.

  Hannah considered calling Ethan to let him know what the judge had said, but she knew he’d want her to “take the ball and run the rest of the way.” Ethan was the type to use a sports metaphor for nearly every occasion. Instead, she dialed the Portland field office of the FBI and asked for Special Agent Bauer. Her stomach twisted and she pressed her hand against her abdomen to stifle the pangs of anxiety. She pulled off an earring and pressed the phone against her ear. After a minute that ticked like an hour, a somewhat familiar voice got on the line. While Bauer’s voice had deepened with age, his manner was still compassionate. For an instant, Hannah let herself feel safe.

  “Hannah, is it really you? Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Bauer. It’s me.” Hannah shifted in her office chair. “Once again, it’s me, a little angry and a little bewildered.” She kept her confident tone; at least she imagined that she kept it. So many thoughts were racing through her, it was very difficult. She didn’t want Bauer to think she was weak, not when he’d done so much to ensure that she’d be strong. And safe.