A Wicked Snow

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.