A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  “I’ve got work to do,” she said. “Short week, you know.”

  Bauer had one more question. “Did she leave a forwarding address?” he asked.

  Holm kept her head down and slammed her rubber stamp with rapid, machine gun–like emphasis.

  “Nope,” she said. “Good riddance, I say. I always had to hassle her about paying for her box.”

  The days following the fire were both seamless and numbing for Hannah. Like the small globe calendar that sat on her father’s highboy dresser before her mother put it away in a sock drawer, each day just rolled by, clink-clink, to the next. Leanna came from the coast to take care of her, but Hannah didn’t know her aunt that well. Claire didn’t have much room in her life for her sister. In fact, Hannah had only met her mother’s sister one other time—when she was almost five. Leanna and her new husband, Rod, came to visit one Sunday afternoon, but they argued with her mother and father and left in a tearful huff. Her mother never talked about Leanna after that visit.

  Hannah stayed in her motel room bed, curled in a ball. She felt numb, like when she and Erik and Danny used to play in the paraffin vat their mother used for sealing the ends of Western cedar branches used for garlands. With the hot wax coating their fingertips, they would tap against the big wood worktable, but couldn’t feel a thing. Leanna gave her a candy cane and Hannah sucked on it for three days. Her mouth was so dry, so cottony, she was sure it was because she had cried so many tears. She was dried up.

  She imagined that the fire hadn’t happened at all. She and Danny and Erik were on vacation. The boys were at a motel and their mother and father were in an adjacent room watching television or putting quarters into the Magic Fingers machine. In a moment, they’d be pounding on the wall telling all of them to go to sleep. “Right this minute!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  As the third day of the investigation drew to a close, Spruce County resembled a law enforcement convention with more uniforms and mustaches swarming the place than had ever been seen there. Oregon State Police, Spruce County Sheriff’s deputies, reserve officers from neighboring Cascade County, and of course, the agents from the FBI vied for parking spaces, restaurant tables, and hotel rooms with members of the media. And though he was probably the youngest of the lot, Jeff Bauer had the kind of amiable (“Let me work with you”) presence that made him a natural focal point. His good looks didn’t hurt either. When the camera went to him, it captured the image of a young man who knew what he was talking about even when he wasn’t supposed to say something. Such a performance meant a lot to the higher-ups back in Portland and even more so to the big guys in Washington, D.C. In fact, not saying anything at all while appearing to answer a question was an enviable skill, one others seldom achieved. Some cops could talk; and some couldn’t without making room in their mouths for a foot. Sometimes two.

  Bauer wasn’t the special agent in charge of the Rock Point case, though he felt he should have been. That honor and responsibility fell on the slightly stooped shoulders of a nearly retired agent named Sam Ross. Ross was named agent in charge of LOMURS as the bureau tagged it—for Logan Murders. It was an exciting case to most everyone but Ross, who was burned out and bored and more than ready to move on. He’d been in the bureau twenty-five years and didn’t give one whit about going out in a blaze of glory on January 18, his retirement day. He kept a pocket calculator and counted down the days and hours toward his gold Seiko watch, his retirement home on Loon Lake west of Spokane, and his none-too-great government pension. Ross met up with Bauer after the interview with the postmistress. They shook hands and Ross went to lunch. They met a second time at the motel, where the older man simply hung around and stayed on the phone with agents at the Portland field office. When it came time to talk with Marcus Wheaton, Ross pretended to be interested.

  “Important interview,” he said of the Wheaton interrogation. “Key, I’d say. Why don’t you handle it?”

  The offer caught Bauer off guard. “You want me to take the lead on it?”

  “That’s what I said. Got a hearing problem?”

  “No. I can do it.”

  “Good. I’m not really sure if we have any jurisdiction here anyway. Seems this is shaking out like a county case. But we’re here. Might as well work through this.”

  Inside, Bauer disregarded Ross’s comments. This was his case now. He notified Sheriff Howe.

  “We want to talk to Wheaton.”

  “He lawyered up a couple of hours ago. Brinker’s the name. A good guy, but court-appointed and you know what they say.”

  “You get what you pay for?” Bauer said.

  “You got that right.” Howe chuckled as though he’d heard the remark for the first time.

  Forty-five minutes later, Bauer and Ross signed in to see Marcus Wheaton at the Spruce County jail. It was a nice jail, as those places go. Surprisingly modern, given it was more than twenty-five years old. It had been built during the then-governor’s push to make sure prisons and jails in Oregon were humane. There were six cells at Spruce County Corrections and Justice Center. Five were outfitted for men and ran the length of the building. A sixth was segregated from the others—a toilet with a beige tiled enclosure was its primary distinction. The men’s commodes—the other five—were stainless steel and planted in the open where anyone using them could be observed at all times. The women’s cell had been used infrequently. In fact, the last time it had an occupant was when a transvestite from Colorado got in a fistfight with a local fry cook outside the Crazy Eight, a downtown Rock Point bar. A straight bar. A guidebook to the gay Northwest apparently contained an embarrassing error.

  In late December, a couple of drunks and a kid serving out the last days of a pot possession conviction occupied the first three cells. Ostensibly for security measures, though Sheriff Howe later conceded it was because they wanted to keep an eye on Wheaton at all times, the handyman with the gas can was kept in the woman’s cell, which was adjacent to the sheriff’s office.

  The FBI agents followed Sheriff Howe into the interview room where Wheaton sat in a turquoise, plastic-molded chair and stared at the table as if the white-and-gold splattered surface held some keen interest. The room looked more like a kitchenette than any “justice center.” Wheaton was not handcuffed. When he looked up, it was with a single eye.

  “As I’ve said, I didn’t kill nobody,” he said.

  “Right. Tell that to Erik and Danny’s sister,” Ross said.

  Ross wanted to show the greenhorn how it was done, but also to get the damn thing going as quickly as possible. The sooner they were done, the sooner they’d be able to leave and return to Portland. Even so, Bauer was impressed. He didn’t know Ross even knew the twin boys’ names. He didn’t think Ross had paid a bit of attention to any of it.

  Ross must have sensed that Bauer was impressed, because in an instant, the older FBI man decided to do a little grandstanding to show the new kid how it was done.

  “How’s it feel to kill a couple of little kids? A bunch of old men…and a woman?”

  Wheaton shook his head. “You, mister, don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We know enough,” Ross retorted. “Enough to have you swinging from the gallows in Cutter’s Landing by Easter.”

  The big man stopped himself from bubbling over, though his anxiousness covered his bulbous face. “Where’s Brinker?” he asked.

  “He’s coming. Be here any minute.” Sheriff Howe drained the last of his Pepsi. “You keep talking, Marcus.”

  “You and Mrs. Logan had a little thing going? Usually it is the employee who gets fucked by the boss. Funny, you really turned the tables on her, didn’t you?”

  Bauer wasn’t sure where it was going, but Wheaton made it crystal clear.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, looking at Sam Ross with his good eye. “I’ll talk to him.” He pointed to Bauer.

  Ross shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He didn’t care at all and didn’t even bother preten
ding that he did. “You talk with Agent Bauer and I’ll get a head start on my beauty sleep.”

  After Ross departed for the hotel, Wheaton cleared the phlegm in his throat and spoke softly. Bauer had to strain to hear each word. He noticed the gauze wrapping over his ear wept some fluid.

  “I just want you to know. I would never hurt those boys. I’d never hurt Claire. Never in a billion years.”

  “If you didn’t, then who?”

  “I’m not saying anything about anyone else. I’m just telling you about me. And I’m telling you that I wouldn’t, couldn’t, hurt Erik and Danny.” The big man blinked back a tear from his good eye.

  “Then who? If not you? I mean, did Claire kill her boys?” Bauer asked. It was a question that had never been asked out loud. But it had been brewing in Bauer’s mind since the conversation with Della Holm at the Rock Point post office.

  Wheaton sat mute.

  “Listen to me very carefully, Marcus. You might be a decent guy mixed up with a bad woman. You wouldn’t be the first. Prisons are full of men who did something stupid for the love of the wrong woman.”

  “I don’t follow you,” the singed handyman said. His face was expressionless.

  “Okay. I’ll be direct. You were screwed by Claire Logan,” Bauer said. “The corpse found beside Erik and Danny was not their mother’s. Are you following me now? If you didn’t put the body there to help Claire fake her death, then I’d say you were tricked just like everyone else.”

  “What are you talking about? Claire is dead. She just has to be…”

  “Don’t think so…”

  Travis Brinker, decked out in a three-piece navy blue suit and a spanking new black leather briefcase, burst into the room. “This interview is over,” he said.

  “Too bad,” Sheriff Howe deadpanned. “We’re just getting started.”

  Bauer nodded. “Yeah, Marcus Wheaton wants to tell us something. We’re ready to listen, too.”

  “This is over,” Brinker said as Wheaton looked on. “Right now.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The homicide and arson investigators didn’t have it easy—even when they knew Claire Logan had probably advertised for her victims in a military newspaper. They needed to know more than just how, who, and when. The “why” would be helpful, too. But the crime scene was vast and the number of victims was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Only a cop who had worked an apartment fire in Detroit that killed thirty-one had even the remotest point of personal reference. The Logan house and outbuildings had, for the most part, been reduced to ash. The fire that ignited as children across the world dreamed of Santa and presents had burned so hot that no pour patterns survived the inferno. Investigators picked through the rubble in search of clues. Shards of metal and the coils of several mattresses survived, as did the burned-out remnants of the kitchen— a stove, a refrigerator, the ghostly web of a hanging rack for pots and pans. Jeff Bauer observed the police criminalists as they carefully bagged the charred remains of Claire Logan’s house. It was tedious, mundane work and, with the snow against the blackened debris, oddly reminiscent of the old black-and-whites shot at some early twentieth-century disaster like the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

  From the burned deadfall of Claire Logan’s house, one investigator recovered the blackened and burned figure of what appeared to be an infant. Horror seized him and he called for the others to help while he gingerly cleared away the debris and rubble that nestled the baby’s blackened body. Then he saw the baby’s black face peer from a hole in the debris, its small mouth appearing to cry out in a scream that no one could hear. The crime scene investigator started to laugh—a soft, then loud rolling laugh, the kind meant to get attention.

  “It’s a doll,” he said. “It’s just a goddamn kid’s baby doll!”

  And it was. A swarm of men in yellow slickers gathered to laugh, too. The kind of laughter that firemen know, and police officers, and EMTs, and even reporters with strong stomachs and the crime beat: the laughter of relief.

  The investigator later told a newsman, “After all that we found out there in the fire and out in the earth, I started to expect the worst. What’s another dead baby to this nightmare? Makes my heart sick, those little boys died there.”

  Scraps of wood, including a doorframe, the piano, and the floorboards that were pinned under the piano, were sent back East for examination. While the murder of the boys, the woman, and the men found in the ground at the Logan farm were the focus of the growing investigation, the arson was also of critical importance. Speculation ran through town that Claire Logan and Marcus Wheaton had been in on the blaze together. It seemed from statements he made that he protected her, might have even loved her. Della Holm, the postmistress, beat that drum to her customers as they came to the post office to send back gifts that hadn’t suited them. Others gossiped, too. As Bauer and others continued digging—literally and figuratively—they learned more details about the woman and her connection to the one-eyed, son-of-a-bitch slob who was locked up at the jail.

  One woman called Bauer at the Whispering Pines Motel and told him the story of the time Claire gave her a ride home from work. She did not want to give her name.

  “I needed a job and Claire gave me one. I twisted cedar garland for most of October through December and I was good at it. She said my garland was flawless. She was nice to me. One night when my car wouldn’t start, Claire offered to give me a ride home. Her husband was dead by then. Just after we got onto the highway we hit a deer. I remember the jolt and how the doe lurched to the side of the road. The deer was still alive and making this awful noise, kind of a gurgling sound. Anyway, Claire turned off the car and reached over me to the glove box and grabbed a hunting knife. I saw a gun in the glove box. You know that little light? Well I could see the gun very plainly. Anyway, she got outside and grabbed the deer’s head like she was going to hug the poor thing, then took that knife and slit its throat. She started screaming and I was freaking out. I didn’t blame her. But you know why she was screaming? The deer sprayed blood on her jacket. She was mad at the deer. And I said, ‘Claire, why didn’t you just shoot it? You got a gun.’ And she turns to me and kind of smiles a weird smile. ‘I was pretending it was my husband and I wanted to feel him die.’ Then she laughs and I started laughing. I don’t even know why I’m laughing, except for the fact that she is. I thought it was pretty cold killing that deer the way she did. A bullet through the head would have been quicker.”

  Bauer wrote his thoughts in a report he knew he’d probably never officially file. He wasn’t a forensic psychiatrist; he was a federal cop and his job was to catch a killer, not profile one. Even so, he kept a notebook of observations that he hoped would help him find young Hannah’s mother:

  Claire Logan is a classic loner. Her pleasant façade masks a bitter and angry woman. No one is good enough; no one is worth anything. Her ambitions and desires take precedence over all others and their needs and wants. She has no close friends. Her only living family member appears to be an older sister. Her first husband died in an accident, and there was some suspicion of Claire’s possible involvement. None was proven. She was—is—a very controlling woman. With the exception of Marcus Wheaton, she’s never been able to retain an employee longer than a single Christmas season. Those who knew her insist that she was brilliant, abrasive, and full of grandiosity when it came to her business and her lifestyle.

  A week after the remnants of the Logan house were flown in a commercial aircraft’s cargo hold to the labs at Quantico, word came back to Bauer and the others working the case that an accelerant had, in fact, been used to burn down the house. Significant traces of acetone were found on the doorframe and floorboards. The piano, however, was clean. This puzzled Bauer at first, until he remembered the original location of the piano— the second floor. Bauer felt a chill. The brave little girl had been the final intended victim.

  The volunteer fire department’s pump truck had arrived eleven minutes after the ca
ll—a remarkable, an incredible, response for a rural area, but the two-story farmhouse was already a blazing shell when the team arrived. They said it looked like the sun had crash-landed on Icicle Creek Farm. As the steam rose from the spray of their hoses, they knew little property and no people could have survived such an intense fire. Oddly, like a blackened monument, it was the piano that stood alone in the center of the debris. And as the days passed, that monolithic burned-out instrument commanded the most attention. The piano was of considerable interest because the bodies of the two boys and the headless woman had been sandwiched between it and the floor.

  Further chemical microscopic analysis revealed an abundance of cellulose and mica particles found in the area under the piano. At first it was thought to be packing material, but a sharp-witted chemist put two and two together—the chemicals and the business of the tree farm. The acetone and the cellulose were two components of Christmas-tree flocking material. The cellulose provided the puffy white bulk of the spray and the mica added silvery sparkles that some revelers found especially festive. Hannah Logan had told investigators that she had seen Wheaton with the sno-gun that night…and as she felt around in the smoke, she touched a coating of spray flocking on the hallway and the stairs. Bauer theorized that Wheaton used the flocking to increase the speed of the fire. Traces of kerosene were also identified.

  A photo lineup showing Marcus Wheaton’s one-eyed mug among five others (his lawyer would argue that the lineup was unfair because each of the other men had two eyes) got a positive identification from a salesman for Cascade Floral, Inc., a Portland wholesaler. Beyond mums and roses for the floral trade, the company specialized in supplies for Northwest tree growers. Among their product lines were various brands of cellulose and rayon flocking. When the FBI agent showed up to ask about the various products they sold, the counter salesgirl tried to sell him on buying rayon over cellulose.