A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  Bauer smoked a cigarette and logged a couple hours writing the text for his 302s, the code used by the bureau for interview reports. He braved the weather for a drink and a sandwich at the coffee shop two doors down from his room at the Whispering Pines. It was, without a doubt, the worst Christmas of his life. He imagined all that he missed; his family gathered to celebrate into the evening. By 11 p.m., he tucked into bed in time to watch himself on the news. Sheriff Howe, with his gentle country-fried demeanor was the spokesperson, but Bauer was visible in several of the shots. He wondered if his mom was watching, too.

  Bauer didn’t know it then, however, but people across the country were riveted to the first broadcasts coming from snowy Oregon. The Logan farm was on its way to being the site of a story that would never be forgotten.

  Just after 8 a.m. the day after Christmas, the phone rang in Bauer’s room at the “remodeled-for-the-Bicentennial-year” Whispering Pines. It was Bob Howe, the Spruce County sheriff.

  “I’ve got an update for you,” Howe said, “a kind of a good news/bad news deal. Guess you ought to know all that’s going on down there. Found four more bodies overnight.”

  Bauer was stunned. “Four?”

  “Yeah. We’re up to twenty. A few more and we’ll top Corona down in Yuba City.”

  Bauer instantly recalled how a few years before a California migrant labor contractor named Juan Vallejo Corona was convicted of killing twenty-five Mexican migrant workers in what had been the nation’s greatest mass killing in history.

  “It isn’t a contest, sheriff,” Bauer said, quickly adding a laugh because he didn’t want to offend his only ally. “If it is, it isn’t the kind we want to win, right?”

  “Guess so. Anyway, two have been preliminary I.D.’d based on their effects. Kind of weird. Turns out two had their wallets tucked inside their breast pockets. Smashed their teeth, yet the perp left their wallets. What a dope. One guy’s retired navy from Virginia; other’s retired army from one of the Dakotas. We’re working on the other two.”

  “Can I get the names?”

  “Yeah,” Howe said. “I’ll have some stuff for you at the office. Come by any time.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do just that.”

  “Now, if the fact that we’ve got a lead on identifying a couple of them is the good news, I do have some bad news, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  Howe went quiet for a moment. “This is big,” he said, his voice missing its jovial tone. “We sorta screwed up. Claire Logan’s sister made arrangements to have her sister’s remains sent to the funeral home, and our guys let the body go.”

  The young FBI agent’s face turned red. “Jesus, Sheriff, we haven’t even processed the body. Get it back.”

  Howe sighed. “I’d like to, but I’m afraid we’re a little too late.”

  “Get a court order. The body is evidence.”

  “The body,” the sheriff said in a very quiet, very embarrassed voice, “is gone.” His words trailed off into near whisper.

  Bauer got on his feet. “What do you mean, gone?” he asked.

  “Cremated. The sister had the body cremated. We’re talking Urn City. I told you we screwed up.”

  Bauer couldn’t contain his outrage, though he surely made an effort to do so. He spat out his words: “Jesus Christ! That’s a fuck-up, big time! The body hasn’t been identified, hasn’t been processed for prints or trace. We didn’t even have a head!”

  Howe was surprised that this nice kid from Idaho would even raise his voice. It wasn’t his fault that incompetence ran through the ranks of law enforcement in Spruce County. “I know,” he said. “I know. You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? You think we’re a bunch of loser locals, one step from being a rent-a-cop at some discount store? We made a mistake and my guys are real sorry.”

  Bauer bit his tongue. He knew the answer to his next question, but asked anyway.

  “I don’t suppose anyone took any tissue samples?”

  Sheriff Howe continued to sputter in palpable embarrassment. “Sorry,” he muttered. “None taken.”

  Bauer looked for a smoke. “There is a problem here, you know. We’ve got a body—rather we had a body— without a head and no real way to identify her.”

  “It’s Claire Logan,” Sheriff Howe said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Her daughter Hannah said so. She looked at our Polaroids and I.D.’d her mother. Said, ‘that’s my mom.’ Said it was her mom’s pink bathrobe. No doubt about it. Said she and her brothers got it for her for Christmas.” They each opened a gift Christmas Eve.”

  To blow up at the sheriff would only make matters worse. Bauer said nothing more.

  “I’d like to talk to her, okay?” he asked.

  “She’s staying with her aunt, nice lady from the coast. They’re checked in at the Rock Point Inn. The kid’s pretty messed up. Lost everything and everyone. Her mom, her brothers, her dad years ago… she’s an orphan. Got to be rough.”

  “And you showed her that photo of her headless mother?”

  “Look, Bauer, we might be yokels out here, but we’re not cruel. We masked off that part of the photo. All she saw was the torso. She doesn’t know about her mom’s head being missing. Give us some credit, okay?”

  The two-tone myrtle-wood decor of the Rock Point Inn lobby was the hotel’s signature feature and had been since the place was built in 1949. The lumber was harvested and milled in the town of Molten on the central Oregon coast. It was a rare wood, prized for its swirling grain and combination of light and dark. The wood was sold in tourist shops as boxes, tabletops, and lamp bases. No one who saw the lobby of the Rock Point Inn with its floor-to-ceiling myrtle wood would ever forget it.

  Bauer asked for Sheila Wax, the victims’ assistance officer who was assigned to the Logan girl, apparently the sole survivor of her entire family. Wax showed up, coughed a hello, and ushered him into a secluded area near the lobby bar. Over her coat-rack shoulders, he could see the figure of a slight girl, bent over. Maybe reading a book? He wasn’t sure.

  “Her aunt is over at Ressler’s making funeral arrangements. You know her brothers are dead, too.”

  Bauer suppressed a grimace and nodded as pleasantly as he could. Of course, he thought, the aunt was at Ressler’s mortuary. She’s the one who ordered her sister’s remains cremated.

  “How’s the girl holding up?” he asked.

  “I’d say, not too bad considering all she’s been through. Really, if you ask me—and you did—she’s holding it together like a little trooper,” Wax said, then shrugged. “But God knows what she’s really thinking. She seems okay.”

  She led him away from the lobby to a seating area with two couches and an overstuffed ottoman. A young girl sat quietly with her back facing them.

  “Hannah, this is Jeff Bauer. He’s with the FBI. He’s here to help figure out what happened at your tree farm.”

  She turned around, and the first thing that Bauer noticed was her brown eyes, enormous and so very sad. Though she wasn’t particularly thin for her age, she looked small. Her frame had been gulped up by a Bob-cats sweatshirt.

  “Okay,” she said. Her braces caught the light. “I’ll do what I can, but I don’t think I can help that much. I mean, I really don’t know what happened for sure.”

  Bauer sat down, knowing it was not the first time this ground would be trod, and with the ongoing discoveries at Icicle Creek Farm it would not be the last. He’d never interviewed a child before; in all, he’d barely conducted two dozen 302s since he’d been assigned in Portland, and all of those were adults investigated for racketeering and money laundering.

  “I know this is a very bad time, Hannah. I don’t want to add to your grief, but Mrs. Wax is correct. I’m here to help.”

  Hannah studied the FBI man’s face. The muscles in her throat constricted so tightly, she felt as if she’d suffocate. She needed help, and she wanted to believe that the man with the sparkly blue eyes and me
ssy sandy hair that hung over his forehead was the one to give it to her.

  “Okay,” she said, moving her eyes downcast and tucking her small hands into her lap.

  “Good. First of all,” he said, “I want to tell you that I’m very sorry about what happened to your family. I am so very, very sorry.”

  He touched her shoulder very gently and Hannah shuddered slightly. Her eyes welled up and she started to cry. Bauer didn’t know what to do next. What’s appropriate? He stood there, his hand on her shoulder, for a few moments and watched Hannah wrestle for composure. He felt sorrow, deep gut-wrenching sadness. But more than anything, a twinge of shame, too. He felt badly that his job called upon him to add to her misery by probing for information at the worst moment in her young life.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked gently.

  Hannah drew her knees up to her chest. “I was asleep,” she said. “I heard some yelling coming from outside. I sleep with my window open a little. Even in winter. It was my mother yelling at Marcus.”

  “That would be Marcus Wheaton,” Bauer confirmed.

  She nodded. “Right. Marcus worked on the farm, but he was also a friend of my mom’s. Mine, too. He lived in a trailer my mom brought in so he’d have a place to stay. He worked for us as a handyman and tree cutter.”

  “What was your mom yelling?” Bauer asked.

  Hannah pondered the question for a moment. “I couldn’t make out the words at first; I hadn’t woken up all the way. I went to my window and I saw them by the wreath shed. Marcus was carrying the big gun we use to flock the trees. We call it the sno-gun. He had the tank, too.”

  “What time was it?” Bauer asked. “Do you know?”

  “I looked at the clock when I got up. It was 11:40,” she said. Bauer noticed that she seemed proud that she could be so precise.

  “That’s a great help,” he said. “What happened next?”

  “I don’t really know. I went back to bed and a half hour later I woke up a second time. Smoke was coming into my room. I opened the door and it was so black and dark and thick. I didn’t know what to do. I called out for my mom—her room is next to mine. But she didn’t say anything. I went back to the door, opened it, and crawled on my hands and knees. The floor felt cold.”

  The pace of her story accelerated. It was as if Hannah Logan wanted to get the whole tale out between a single pair of breaths. She was a runaway train. Inhale… tell the world what happened… exhale. “The floor was wet. I couldn’t see what it was, but I could smell it. I put my hands to my face in the dark and I could smell it.” Tears fell down her cheeks.

  “What? Smelled what? The smoke?”

  Hannah shook her head rapidly. “No,” she answered. “Well, yes, I smelled the smoke. But when I held my hands to my face… I smelled the snow.”

  “Snow?” Bauer scratched his head. He didn’t get it.

  Hannah nodded. “Not real snow. I smelled the snow stuff we use on the trees. Marcus had sprayed the snow all down the hallway, down the stairs… the house was covered inside with snow.”

  Bauer was utterly perplexed. The image of a house with floors and furniture coated in fake snow just didn’t compute. “Why would anyone do that? That stuff is flame retardant.”

  “No. No,” she said, starting to cry. “Mom used the old stuff. We had a shed full of it. Got it half price because it wasn’t any good. You see, it wasn’t safe. It burned up.”

  Sheila Wax caught Bauer’s eye. The VAR woman was beside herself with alarm. The girl had gotten herself out of the house and to safety when she obviously wasn’t supposed to. Wax knew it and so did Bauer: She’d been left to die.

  “I went to my brothers’ room,” Hannah continued, crying harder, “and I tried to get in. I couldn’t. The door was stuck. I called for Erik and Danny. But they didn’t answer. I called for my mom again, but she didn’t hear me.”

  Between sobs, the kind of deep, guttural cries that break the listener’s heart, she told the FBI agent she didn’t see anything that night but a burning house, barn, sheds, even their car.

  “I never saw anyone until the fireman came. I never saw my mom, my brothers, or Marcus. Everyone was gone. Everything was burning.” Hannah stared down at her lap and went quiet.

  “I think she’s had enough,” Sheila Wax interrupted. “Maybe a break now?”

  Bauer agreed, but he had one more question ricocheting around his mind. He took a deep breath and mulled it over for a moment. He wanted to know what Hannah could tell him about the other bodies police were finding planted around Icicle Creek Farm like a human crop.

  “Hannah,” he said very gently, “we discovered something else at the farm. Something very, very bad.”

  Her eyes fixed on Bauer, but she said nothing.

  “Others may have died there, too. Besides your mother and brothers.”

  He used the word “may” to soften the incontrovertible facts.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “We were hoping you could tell us. It appears that some men, some army guys, were found dead.” Again he chose words that he hoped would lessen her fear, soften the blow, and yet help in the investigation.

  But Hannah became agitated and stood up. Sheila Wax glared at Bauer and moved closer, as if to brace the girl from falling.

  “I don’t know,” she said, crying loudly. “I really don’t know. Anything. Anything more.”

  The interview was over and Bauer knew it.

  Later that night at the Whispering Pines, over a cold beer, a greasy tuna-melt, and an impossibly limp kosher dill spear, Bauer flipped through a folder Sheriff Howe had left at the hotel’s front desk. He felt rotten. He’d made a young girl cry. Real nice. Among the papers were the names of the first non-Logan victims to be partially identified by Spruce County authorities. One was a man from Deer Lake, Idaho. Bauer called the Portland office.

  “I grew up near there,” he said. “That one’s mine.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Federal law enforcement agents from across the country were yanked from their holiday gatherings by phone calls from overstuffed-with-turkey field office chiefs. Jeff Bauer, as it turned out, was not the only lowest man on the totem pole. There were others, too. The flight to Deer Lake was white-knuckled from its liftoff from the small airport just north of Rock Point to the icy, slag-rimmed Idaho mining enclave about an hour from Boise, the city of potatoes and Mormons. Bauer didn’t much care for flying to begin with, but for crying out loud, he could envision nothing worse than a ride on one of those twin prop planes he felt were more suited to crop dusting than passenger service. The gate agent at Mountain Air laughed when Bauer asked for a window seat.

  “Every seat’s a window seat on this one,” the sheepish agent said.

  Bauer flipped through the airline’s complimentary newsletter—it wasn’t even a real magazine—as the plane bounced around over the mountains, making the kind of noise that reminded him of a bowling alley, knocking pins and rolling balls in the gutter. He was en route to see the sister of the first identified victim, an army retiree named Cyrus Crowe. The file, like Crowe’s body when unearthed on the farm, was almost skeletal. Like several others—though not all—Crowe’s teeth had been extracted with a blunt object, probably a hammer. The forensics guys on the scene in Rock Point recalled a case in Cleveland in the 1960s where a serial killer had done the same thing to a half-dozen victims to avoid detection. And it worked in that case. None of the Cleveland victims, street whores and runaways, were ever claimed. No dental charts were produced, and because the victims were never named, neither was their killer. But Crowe was identified because of a distinctive eagle tattoo that had been preserved as though it were a scrap of tanned hide. A Missing Persons data bank in Washington, D.C., had a description of the tattoo among its vast files of the missing but not forgotten. Crowe had been sixty years old, had served twenty-five years in the army, retiring as a staff sergeant. He’d been married, but sadly his wife—pregnant with his only child�
�died in an auto accident in 1962. He had one surviving relative, a sister named Barbara Layton. She reported her brother missing when he didn’t show up for Thanksgiving at her home in Deer Lake, November 1972. It had been more than four years since Crowe’s disappearance. According to the report, the sister gave up looking after three years.

  Bauer parked the rental car, a maroon Pacer with a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the mirror, in front of the white-gabled house that had been converted to the duplex that had been Barbara Layton’s home for the past decade. A hand-lettered sign pitched next to the mailbox fringed with icicles indicated the other unit was available for rent.

  Barbara Layton came to the door in a cloud of smoke. A cigarette hung from her lip; deep pink lipstick crept into the fissures around her mouth. She looked older than her years—late fifties, according to the FBI file. Bauer introduced himself, and the woman with the nicotine-ravaged voice extended her arm and motioned him inside. A wood stove sent out a blast of dry heat that nearly knocked him to the braided rug–scattered floor. She offered coffee and Bauer accepted.

  “He never got over DeAnn’s death,” Barbara said. “And, of course, the baby, too.”

  DeAnn had been the name tattooed with the image of a red rose with a broken and bleeding stem on his forearm.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Bauer said, acknowledging the death of the man before asking questions that would form the backbone of his investigation. He launched into a few rudimentary facts and emphasized that the case was only beginning and more, hopefully much more, would be known later. She said she understood and told the handsome young man that she would be grateful for any information he came across.