A Wicked Snow

Chapter Fourteen

1986 Save Our History project,

Rock Point High School, transcript

DARWIN REYNOLDS: When I got there the fire was nipping at the treetops. It was a fucking—excuse me—a freaking explosion, fully engulfed. It was around 2 a.m. on Christmas morning. I’d rather have been in bed. But it was bad. Real bad. Right off the roof of the main house the flames shot like a cannon. I could feel the blast of heat from the back of the truck.

INTERVIEWER: Were you scared?

REYNOLDS: Scared? That’s a dumb question. It was my job to put out the fire. None of us were scared.

INTERVIEWER: (embarrassed): Sorry. Was anything else burning besides the house?

REYNOLDS: Everything was on fire. When my squad got there, we were divided into three teams of two each. Rick [White] and I went out to the house. It was fully engulfed. We yelled for survivors. Nothing. Sam [Collingsly] and Scott [Armstrong] went to the barn and it was burning. Livestock had already been set free. Matt [Jared] and Myron [Tanner] covered the area by the wreathmaker’s shed. That’s where they found the girl.

INTERVIEWER: Hannah Logan? That’s where they found her? Describe what you saw.

REYNOLDS: I saw Myron and a kid, a girl. She was in a flannel nightgown that had been singed at the hemline. I don’t know if it was burned, but it was dark at the hemline. Could have been mud. She was screaming about her brothers. Over and over she was saying, “Danny and Erik, why? Why?”

INTERVIEWER: Did she ask about her mother?

REYNOLDS: Not a peep. She never said a word about Claire Logan. I think she knew what her mother had done. I think that little girl knew it. She was a tough little thing, tough enough to keep her mouth shut, you know. Hey, can I ask you for a favor?

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

REYNOLDS: Can you take the “fucking” out of this interview? I don’t want my kids to see me using that kind of language. You know, sounds kind of bad.

INTERVIEWER: No problem. Understood. What about Marcus Wheaton? Did you know him?

REYNOLDS: Saw him in Rock Point a time or two. You know those guys with tats that say Born to Lose? That’s what I thought about Wheaton. That was him all the way, the dumb fuck. Hey, I said it again!

Marcus Wheaton’s run of bad luck started the day he was born with a cleft palate to a mother who vomited at the sight of her baby instead of cuddling him in her arms. It didn’t get better as he got older, reconstructive surgery notwithstanding. Liz Wheaton sold cosmetics and perfume at the downtown Portland Meier and Frank department store during the day and worked stag parties on the weekends until the dim light of a motel room could no longer hide her advancing age. Reeking of the mélange of scents that permeated her workplace, Liz Wheaton never met a fragrance she didn’t try. Often, with a heavy hand. She was known by some of her after-hours customers as the “whore who smelled better than she looked.”

Marcus had been the result of Liz’s moonlighting. “The worst bonus I ever got,” she occasionally groused to her girlfriends. Marcus never knew his father because Liz was never sure which guy it had been. When he was seven, Liz told her only son that his disfigurement was God’s way of punishing her for her sins. By then, she’d given up the Saturday-night sex parties for Sunday church services at a suburban Assemblies of God.

When Marcus fled south to Rock Point, Liz followed her son, which was odd. After all, he was the baby she puked on, the one she’d have sucked into a sink had she not been raised Catholic. But Liz said she wanted to make up for all she had done. By then Marcus had forgiven her, though at thirty-one, he longed for another woman in his life. Marty and Claire Logan advertised for a helper on the tree farm, and Wheaton answered the ad. Wheaton needed to believe that despite his weight, the scar from his surgeries, and only one real eye, he could find a woman. It was too bad the woman was married.

The fire was one more bad moment in a man’s life corroded with disaster. It was, he would say later, the end of the big fall that started the day he was born.

On Christmas Eve night, a pair of sheriff’s deputies driving from Icicle Creek Farm found the mammoth handyman stooped over fixing a flat about a mile from the smoldering house. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The twin crescents of his buttocks caught the beam of the headlights and bounced a spray of white light into the black air. A radio was on, and the tune coming from the cab was the jangling sounds of Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. When he heard the sheriff’s Ford approach, Wheaton stood tall, hiked up his Levi’s, and waved the deputies past with his smoky-link fingers. A puff of moist, warm air hovered by his beefy face, like the steam venting from the nostrils of a dairy cow. Though he never looked directly at the cops, Wheaton shrugged, as if to say: Under control. Got it handled. Yes, sir, it’s just a flat tire. Paired with an older cop with forearms the size of kayaks, the young deputy with hair that brushed over the tops of his ears reached for the microphone as they passed. He was pissed off because he’d been left out of the action at the Logan place, so he ran the pickup’s plate numbers—just to see.

Marcus Wheaton’s name and an outstanding traffic ticket from the previous summer turned up a little unexpected gold. His address was the same as Icicle Creek Farm’s—the cops had heard the dispatcher give it out more times than a television ad for a lip-synching hasbeen’s greatest hits. Each time it crackled over the wire reminded them that they weren’t on the scene of the biggest story coming out of Rock Point in years. Maybe ever.

The older deputy with the white-sidewalls crew cut made his way over to the truck, and Wheaton straightened his hunched spine. He blinked his puffy eyes in the beam of the officer’s flashlight.

“Step in front of the vehicle, please.” The deputy shone his flashlight over Wheaton’s face and traced his arms. No gun, good. “Slowly.”

Sweat freckled Wheaton’s brow. His jacket was torn at the sleeves, and it appeared the spare tire he had hoisted from the bed of the truck had blackened his chest with a large, greasy smear.

“Marcus Wheaton?” asked the other deputy.

“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice raspy.

“You work for the Logans?”

He nodded. “For quite some time.”

“You know the place is burning tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“Know anything about it?”

Wheaton’s shoulders hunched and he sank into the ground. His eyes were fixed in an odd stare. He started muttering something about how tired he was and how he hadn’t really known what had happened on the farm. Then, strangely, he looked to the ground and told the pair of deputies that he didn’t know a damn thing about Icicle Creek Farm, the fire, or anything much at all. But his protestations were his undoing.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

The deputies exchanged looks, and the one with the head that begged for a “Firestone” tattoo coughed out the order that they were taking Wheaton in for questioning. “You’ve got something to tell us,” he said.

Then Wheaton turned his face and both cops lost their breath. His ear and the flesh from his temple to his jawline was shiny red and black. His hair was singed from the jaw line to the nape of his neck.

“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?” the older one asked.

Wheaton’s eyes evaded the cops. Finally, he answered, “I got burned.”

“Jesus,” the cop said, “you need a doctor.”

Inside of five minutes of the police request for medical help, Marcus Wheaton was on his way to the hospital for what appeared to be second-degree, possibly third-degree burns.

While the sirens caterwauled into the darkness of a landscape with no streetlights on the way to Rock Point General Hospital, no one had any inkling what was to be learned by the light of day. No one, save for Wheaton, probably had any idea that his world was about to be turned upside down. Only he knew that once the newborn baby bathed in the warm, wretched spew of his mother’s vomit, he was about to suffer the greatest indignity and betrayal of his life.

Early Christmas afternoon, Jeff Bauer surveyed what had once been Icicle Creek Farm. It was the initial of what would be dozens of visits, but it would always hold great power in his memory because it was the first time he saw the destruction brought by unmitigated evil. It was a large property, forty-five acres of Noble, Balsam, and Douglas fir. Some were only two feet high, while others had gotten away from the owners and hit twenty-five. A sign in front of a gorgeous Nobel proclaimed: RESERVED FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The noise of men, heavy equipment, steel shovels hitting rock and brick, and the sizzle of water on ash wove a dense fabric of sound. Bauer looked on in complete amazement at the destruction of what had surely been a lovely place. Only the wreath maker’s shed was completely unscathed. The house was gone. The building that had been used first as a chicken house, and later for storage, was partially burned. Bauer parked his car in a muddy patch in front of what had been the house but was now a smoldering grave. All that remained was a basketball hoop and a car with melted tires. On the orange hoop, someone had put up a wreath with pinecones and a red plastic bow. The car had a circle of wire affixed to the burned-out grille. It, too, had been festooned with a wreath. Drifting snow had melted and refroze, surrounding the enormous black holes where the various structures had collapsed into themselves.

Bauer had the gruesome responsibility of witnessing the recovery of more bodies. While it was not truly a federal case, it had the potential to be one—kidnapping was a possibility.

“They found the woman and two boys over there,” a cop in a black raincoat and stocking cap announced. The fringe of curly red hair peeking out from under the cop’s knit cap made him look like a circus clown. Bauer remembered him from the gymnasium. The deputy pointed inside the foundation walls; a cement rectangle stood starkly alone.

“Yeah, I heard,” Bauer said. He regarded a backhoe a hundred yards away as it exhaled diesel and lurched forward, its yellow bucket dumping sodden earth in a heap.

“Found two more before lunch.” The cop cleared a wad of phlegm from his throat and spat. It smacked against the muddy, melted ground. “So far.”

Bauer brushed past the redhead to get a better look. The coroner and two other men Bauer did not know by name, but whose county-issued ponchos indicated they were crime scene investigators, had planted themselves in the center of the house, amid the charred ruins. One held a high-powered lamp to illuminate the darkest shadows. A piano, its keys buckled like an old ivory necklace, was the focus of their attention.

“The woman’s under the piano,” Wilder said. “It appears her twin boys are next to her.”

Bauer inched forward and broke into the conversation. “How the hell did that happen?”

“We’re told the piano was upstairs,” one of the investigators said, nodding solemnly in Bauer’s direction. “Some kind of a music room, I guess. The floor must have given way before falling down here on the victims— who, thank God, were probably already dead. Murdered or maybe just overcome by the smoke and heat. Coroner will make that call.”

On top of a charred floorboard mottled with ash and debris, the boys’ small bodies were laid out next to each other. Bauer bent closer. Their ears had been burned off, making their heads look like knobs. One appeared to be face down. The condition of the other body, seemingly more incinerated, made it difficult to determine. A third investigator loaded a camera and focused his long lens. Bauer was so absorbed, so riveted by the horror of what was in the ruins of the Logan house, he didn’t even notice the man with the camera until the flash-bulbs strobed the scene.

Jesus, he thought. A couple of kids. Twin boys… born together and died together. How often does that happen, anyway?

While the FBI out-of-towner stood behind them, the two investigators in ponchos used a couple of two-by-fours to hoist up what remained of the piano. They wore heavy, leather gloves to protect their hands from the still-smoldering remnants of the blaze. Sparks mixed with the steam and smoke. As the pair heaved, piano wires snapped and vibrated through the rubble. Once it was shoved to the side, they all saw a larger body; a woman’s pink garment, not completely destroyed by the fire, covered the torso like an impossibly cheerful death shroud.

“God!” one of the men gasped, and Bauer moved closer to get a better view.

The body flat on its back was headless.

“Where the fuck is her head?” said one of the cops holding the two-by-four.

“Maybe it burned off or something,” one said.

“Heads have a lot more bone than flesh,” yet another voice added. “Heads don’t burn up and skulls don’t roll away from a crime scene.”

Bauer said nothing. He was mesmerized by the sight and didn’t even turn to look at who had made the comment.

“Yeah,” he finally muttered.

A Nikon flash unit flooded the three cinder corpses with light as the photographer took more pictures. When he completed a roll, he licked the adhesive tab that sealed it, put it in his pocket, and reloaded. By the end of the day, he’d logged more than 400 photographs. And because he felt he was onto something special, he shot a roll for himself, which he hid in his back pocket. In the event that a major national magazine became interested in this story, he’d want to be able to send them some photos. He noticed that a reporter for the Spruce County Lumberman had also arrived on the scene. He’d heard others were on the way. The ABC television affiliate from Portland was en route before lunch. By the afternoon all networks were on the scene, mostly from Portland and the station in Salem. A San Francisco “Eyewitness” news team had chartered a jet and touched down around 3:30 p.m.

The Associated Press reporter, a tight-lipped, aggressive young woman named Marcella Hoffman, staked her claim to the story. She slugged her copy: “Merry Murders and Happy Homicides.” A photo that a friend from the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles had gladly requisitioned for a fee (“pays for some of this year’s Christmas”) accompanied the article. It was a standard driver’s license picture, but it was also the world’s first glimpse of Claire Logan. Logan stared with an intensity not usually seen in a DMV photograph. She had shoulder-length hair with a slight wave. Her earrings were medium-size hoops. Her features were patrician and symmetrical. She was beautiful by anyone’s measure.

By the end of that first day, the Logans’ bodies were slid into body bags and delivered by ambulance to the high school gymnasium. There they joined thirteen others, making a total of sixteen victims discovered at Icicle Creek Farm. Sixteen dead. With the exception of the headless woman, all victims had been male. With the exception of Mrs. Logan and her two little boys, all had been adult men.

Queasy from what he’d seen, Bauer checked into a room at the Whispering Pines, drank club soda, and reached for the telephone. His first call was to Portland. The FBI dispatch agent got on the line and told him that agents would be joining him in Rock Point, probably before nightfall.

“Hang tight, Bauer,” he said. “It goes without saying that this is more than your garden-variety serial killer.”

“I get that,” he said. He drank some more club soda.

“Quantico wants a lid on this as much as possible. All the military guys who are victims down there make this not only peculiar, but a little more sensitive than a runof-the-mill body dump.”

Bauer didn’t need a lecture. “I’m not talking to anyone,” he said. “Mostly because I don’t know what’s going on yet. This is pretty grim down here.”

“Right, Bauer. Now don’t forget, the sheriff down there is in charge. At least we want to let him feel he is.”

The second call Bauer made was to his mother in Idaho. He told her he was working a big case and she’s “probably heard about it on the TV news.” He also talked to one of his sisters and promised he’d tried to break away from the investigation to get home before the holidays were over.

“But I doubt it,” he said. “Tell mom that I love her. Looks like I’ll be in Rock Point for a while. I doubt I’ll ever see anything worse than this. No matter how long I live.”