Howl of a Thousand Winds

by Howl of a Thousand Winds (retail) (epub)

  “How long has she been out here?” asked Ollie Berger, the reporter from the Fayette Leader, a local weekly paper serving the tri-county area.

  “Well, the snow didn’t start until about three o’clock yesterday afternoon, and the hunter found her around eight this morning, so I’d say less than a day,” the sheriff said, readjusting his hat.

  The reporter scribbled some more.

  “I’ve only been here about a year. Does this sort of thing happen often in these parts?” Berger queried.

  “Oh, we get about two a year,” Kane said, warming to a subject he had expounded on repeatedly during his time with the department. “When most folks think about cold and snow, they think of places like Buffalo or New England. But when the winds start pushing the clouds around, the weather in this part of Iowa can get about as brutal as the North Pole. Tears up houses, knocks trees down, rips up pretty good. Sometimes this far outside of town, the electric gets spotty during a good blow, and we’ve seen people actually freeze to death in their own kitchens.

  “It’s funny when you think about it. A tropical storm bustin’ through Florida or Louisiana will tie up the TV people for days with pictures of wrecked palm trees and roofs missing shingles. Of course, it’s easier to get a camera crew around streets filled with palm fronds than a dirt road covered by three feet of snow. During the winters here, the wind gets up to 70 miles an hour pretty often, but with the white stuff covering up the evidence of the damage until the thaw, I guess it’s not as impressive to CNN.

  “Besides,” the sheriff added with a wink, “I think some of those TV news people just don’t want to leave their nice warm studio to go trundling through the snow in the middle of winter. But don’t quote me on that.”

  “So you think this goes down as another storm-related death,” Berger said, more of a statement than a question.

  The sheriff barely hesitated to offer his prognosis.

  “We try to warn people every year to use some sense when the snow bags open up, but there’s always somebody who thinks they’re smarter or tougher than Mother Nature. I suspect that’s what we have here, somebody who thought a nice little hike in the middle of a blizzard was a good idea.”

  “So, no signs of foul play, right?” the reporter asked, never looking up as he continued to write in longhand, flipping to a clean page about every three paragraphs.

  The sheriff tightened his collar after a particularly bitter drift of wind sliced down his back.

  “Of course the coroner has to make the official call, but it looks like she might have just run out of steam, and the cold weather got her.”

  ***

  The next morning, the medical examiner pulled his wheeled Craftsman tool cabinet over to the stainless steel table where Connie Cleary’s body lay intact for the last time.

  It was only the fourth autopsy Dr. Clifford Langdon had officially performed since being hired by the county three weeks ago, so the notion of using a storage box designed for car mechanics was still a head-shaking novelty. The irony was compounded by the fact that several of the tools he extracted from the top drawer looked very similar to the kind of equipment used by mechanics.

  One of the first items was an old tape measure. While the previous staff had done a good job of keeping the equipment clean, if not quite sterile, the yellow-coated metal tape showed tiny flecks of blood around the 32-inch mark, a silent testament to the number of autopsies that had involved abdominal injuries.

  Langdon read several efficient measurements aloud for the overhead microphone, pushing the foot switch each time he spoke to start and stop the recorder. While repositioning various limbs, the 31-year-old doctor noticed that there was an exceptional amount of resistance, as if some parts had not yet thawed out.

  Not that the exact time of death really mattered in a case where homicide had quickly been ruled out, the examiner would have a tough time pinning down that moment, with the usually-reliable time frame markers of rigor mortis scrambled by the joints which had been frozen by sub-zero temperatures.

  As instructed, the after-hours technician had left the sheathed body on a wheeled cart in a warmer outer office instead of following the normal procedure of placing it in the morgue’s cold storage facility. Langdon had suggested the change in hopes that the body would have thawed more, allowing for an easier autopsy.

  In the macabre humor unique to those involved in the mortal remains business, the medical examiner couldn’t help but draw the morbid comparison between the current subject of his ministrations and the frozen turkey that had been thawing in the sink of his girlfriend’s apartment this morning.

  “Why is this thing out of the refrigerator?” he had asked, the semi-rigid piece of water-covered poultry interfering with his normal kitchen routine of rinsing out the coffee mug after his regular second morning cup.

  “You have to let it thaw about an hour for every two pounds,” came the muffled reply from the adjacent bedroom. “That bird is about 22 pounds, so it needs to thaw all day before I can start working on it.”

  Now, trying to work on his own frozen specimen, Langdon calculated in his head that the 105-pound woman currently residing on the stainless steel table probably needed another 30 hours in somebody’s water-filled kitchen sink before he would be able to properly manipulate the various extremities.

  Since he had no intention of returning on Thanksgiving Day to finish this case, or the day off he was taking on Friday, he decided to simply dig into his toolbox full of power equipment to expedite the process.

  Grabbing the guardless rotary saw, Langdon again reflected on the similarities between the tools in this “body shop” and Coy’s Collision Center, the auto body repair place located on the outskirts of town that fronted a graveyard of deceased Fords, Chevys and Plymouths.

  There were similarities in sound as well when the spinning saw blade began its nerve-rending screech once it struck the thick bone of the sternum. Once the less-than-surgical incision had been completed, the doctor plucked the rib spreader from its drawer, another device that would look quite at home alongside the dent pullers and frame straighteners at Coy’s.

  While Langdon was accustomed to working in the chilled environs of the morgue, he couldn’t help but notice the numbness beginning in the tips of his fingers while working the prongs of the metal device into position as the cold crept from inside the body. Once in place, and after a few grunts while forcing the handles of the device together, the leveraging tool finally succeeded in parting the ribs and allowing him access to the chest cavity.

  But instead of digging right in, Langdon froze.

  At medical school, his professors had cautioned prospective doctors that they were never allowed to appear surprised, particularly not in the presence of a patient. Third year students were taught that such unguarded expressions undermined a patient’s confidence in their care provider.

  In this instance, the patient was long past caring about her doctor’s confused countenance. It was just as well, since Langdon had a better chance of explaining Martian magma displacement than hiding his astonishment at what lay before him.

  Inside the chest cavity, every organ was frozen solid, yet pristinely intact.

  Usually in freezing cases, different organs deteriorated and died at varying paces, leaving behind the chronological evidence of their cessation by the differing colors and shapes that resulted when the body first flooded different organs with blood to raise the temperature, then systematically shut off the flow altogether as the organs failed. Once the heart stopped, meaning blood flow stopped, the biological race was on between the discolorations caused by necropathy and those caused by cooling temperatures.

  The organs inside this body were perfectly preserved, as if quick-frozen and vacuum-sealed like cheap grocery-store beef.

  Langdon’s rational, scientific mind knew this was impossible. Victims who died from hypothermia froze from the outside in. It would take days of exposure to sub-zero temperatures for the inside of a
human body to freeze solid, a slow process that allowed plenty of time for the organs to decay at a measurable rate.

  According to the accompanying police report, this victim had been found less than a day after the storm, not nearly enough time for this kind of internal freezing.

  But even the timing was secondary.

  The condition of the entrails was the truly remarkable part.

  While logic insisted that it wasn’t possible, Langdon couldn’t ignore the evidence at hand, and that the condition of the body meant that the impossible had taken place.

  This body had frozen from the inside out.

  Chapter Seven

  Browning, Montana

  Tuesday

  November 20, 2012

  On his way to the Native American Cultural Center, Micah had time behind the wheel to process through the phone call he had received from Charlie Reever, and contemplate his upcoming meeting with the tribal elder known only as Old Joe, a Blackfoot medicine man.

  The call from Reever was disturbing, if for no other reason than the man didn't come off as the typical crackpot conspiracy theorist or grieving family member with an axe to grind. If what he said was right, Micah's story on the storm might not be done.

  As for Old Joe, a long list of people might consider him a different kind of crackpot. That list would probably include Rory Thornton, Micah's editor, who was still 20 kinds of upset over Micah's feature on Native American superstitions last month. For Micah, the piece was almost cathartic, as it was the first time since joining the Associated Press three years ago that he had publicly acknowledged his Native American heritage.

  Throughout most of his adult life, Micah had rarely mentioned the fact that he spent the first six years of his childhood on the Blackfoot reservation in Browning, Montana, the son of a Native American father and white mother.

  When he was six, an electrical fire started underneath the shoddy government-built house he shared with his mother and father. His father, who had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, died in the fire. His mother had braved flames to save her son before the fire finished burning his childhood home to the ground.

  To this day, Micah was still uncomfortable around open flames. It wasn't a deep fear, more like a mild case of what might feel like claustrophobia to others.

  With her husband gone, and with it the only real link to a reservation that had never embraced the white woman, his mother took her son to California.

  Micah didn't exactly hide his roots; he just didn't bring it up in conversation. Whenever the question of his slightly darker skin came up, people usually assumed the surname "Roaz" to be a derivative of the Hispanic name "Ruiz," hung the unspoken ethnic label on him, and filed away the categorization accordingly.

  Those six years on the rez bubbled to the surface when he started working on the news story about a swindler pretending to be an "Indian" medicine man. The guy was selling cheap wooden trinkets on the Internet, claiming they were Native American talismans. Ads went on to boast that he had personally blessed and charmed the items with secret Native American rituals that would ward off evil spirits for those willing to pony up the $20. From there, the rip-off artist began to specialize, selling certain kinds of "artifacts" to treat different kinds of maladies, issues, or heartaches. For example, at just $5 plus another $4 for shipping and handling, a stick carved to look like a bundled papoose was advertised to provide a "calming effect on unruly or undisciplined children" when slipped into a child's hand or pocket. Not only did parents buy thousands of the charms; adults wanting to stifle and silence the obnoxious offspring of strangers at grocery stores, DMV offices, and public gatherings began ordering them in bulk.

  During his investigation, Micah found out that not only were the items merely cheap geegaws from China with the tags pulled off, but that the "medicine man" was actually a former convict from New Mexico whose family lines flowed back through Louisiana and the southern area of Czechoslovakia. Micah's research on Ancestry.com showed no genealogical stops with any Native American tribe along the way, but it did hint at some kin who had been involved in selling fake Voodoo Zemis and counterfeit Gypsy charms.

  The story also outlined dozens of people who had filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the state's Consumer Protection division from people who had paid for items that were never shipped or who received items that didn't live up to the advertised claims. It also included one case where a toddler was hospitalized after choking on a papoose given to him by an irritated Walmart shopper.

  Two days after the story broke, police arrested the thief and confiscated more than 30,000 knick knacks, including a gross of wooden five-pointed stars that were supposed to keep purchasers safe from "arrest or harassment by the white man's law."

  That story lit the fuse of Micah's curiosity about Native American superstitions and mythology, something he had heard about often while growing up. The results of that curiosity ultimately led to the feature that appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country the week that Thornton was on vacation. As part of that story, Micah had mentioned his own Blackfoot heritage, which was the sin that brought on his editor's wrath.

  Thornton insisted that Micah's background crossed a journalistic boundary, claiming that it was a conflict of interest for a Native American to do a story on a Native American topic.

  "It would be like allowing a reporter who belongs to the Rotary Club to do a story on the Rotary Club," Thornton said during the closed-door session the day after the editor returned to the office, and nearly a week after the story ran.

  "It's nothing like that," Micah retorted. "If I was a white reporter, there would be no problem with me reporting on white people, or other white issues, would there? You comparing my heritage to membership in a club is out of line."

  Unable to come up with a palatable defense, Thornton fell back on the only response he could think of, one that sounded eerily similar to the "because I'm the mom" explanation trotted out by exasperated mothers for decades.

  "I'm the boss," Thornton said. "You want to stay here, you'll do it my way. There are hundreds of J-school grads out there who would love their shot, just lining up to take your place. You cross me on this, they'll have it. Discussion over."

  While his anger and anti-authoritarian nature tempted him to do otherwise out of sheer defiance, Micah didn't intentionally seek out another Native American story. In fact, he decided to do an innocuous story about weather as an irony-laced "screw you" to the boss, the news equivalent of meaningless conversations between strangers who can't find anything else to talk about so they open with "sure is cold today" or "hope we get some rain soon."

  His research turned out to be a lot more fascinating than he expected, particularly in the area of winter storms.

  Unwilling to do another tired story on more popular weather related catastrophes like hurricanes, tornados, and floods, Micah began figuratively digging into snowstorms. Within a day, he had pages of notes on snow-related tragedies that sometimes involved more deaths than modern catastrophes sensationalized by the talking heads on Fox and CNN which generated video content for days or weeks. While Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Andrew each killed around 65 people in the latter half of the 20th century, and history-making Hurricane Donna took the lives of 164, several winter storms had compiled death tolls in the hundreds.

  For example, the Great Blizzard of 1888 claimed the lives of more than 400 people in the northeast around New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Nearly 200 people died from the storm and subsequent cold in New York City alone. At least another 100 men were killed at sea when as many as 200 ships and boats were wrecked or grounded.

  Just two months before that, another series of snowstorms dubbed the "Schoolhouse Blizzard" in January of 1888 swept through Montana, the Dakota Territory, and Nebraska, killing nearly 250 people including dozens of schoolchildren trapped in their one-room schools. Other people died during the fast-moving, unexpected storm when they were
caught in the open, unprepared for the rapidly plummeting temperatures and blinding snow.

  In the Knickerbocker storm of 1922 which struck Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, 98 people were killed when snow caused the collapse of the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington D.C. According to the records Micah found, wet snow had accumulated on the flat roof of the theater, which had been built just five years before. The weight of the snow caused the roof to fall in on the balcony during a crowded showing of the silent comedy movie "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford." The collapse also took down part of the brick wall, which buried victims and hindered rescue operations.

  In November of 1940, the Armistice Day Blizzard resulted in 154 deaths along the Mississippi river, including dozens of duck hunters who were caught unaware without enough protective clothing to keep them from freezing to death. The storm continued to cut through the Midwest, causing damage and taking lives.

  Another November storm, called the Great Thanksgiving Storm (also known as the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950) killed 383 people across 22 states from Alabama and Florida up to Ohio and across to New Hampshire. Some of the deaths in the south were caused by heavy rains, wind, and flooding, while many of those along the western spine of the Appalachian mountains froze to death.

  In more recent times, Micah learned that 70 people died in the Great Storm of 1975, which stretched from the Rockies to the Eastern Seaboard.

  One of the worst storms in the last 100 years occurred in 1993. The Storm of the Century killed 310 people, bringing four to 12 inches of snow to Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, and as much as four feet of snow was measured in Tennessee, and drifts as high as 14 feet were reported in North Carolina. The storm eventually hit 24 states, collapsing factory roofs and building walls. People froze to death in their living rooms after as many as 10 million homes lost power.