A Wicked Snow

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.

“I want to know what happened to him. I want to know if the man, the handyman they arrested out there in Oregon, did it. I expect he did. And I want an answer. For my brother. He was decent and deserves that much.”

“All victims deserve nothing less,” he said. As Bauer brought out a tablet of paper and a silver Cross pen, his eyes fastened on a photo atop a creaky table crowded with spider plants and cloudy jars of rooting cuttings. The framed photo pictured a man in an army uniform.

“Mr. Crowe?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the photograph in the chrome frame.

“Yes, that’s my brother…” Her voice fell to a near whisper. “I knew he was dead. I’ve known for a long time. Even so, this is very, very hard.” Her eyes watered.

Bauer would later say that was the only time the woman would express anything that resembled emotion. It was fleeting, but unmistakable. While she stirred heaping spoons of freeze-dried coffee into earthenware mugs, she told Bauer that while she had loved her brother, the truth was they had not remained particularly close. He left Idaho for the military and never really looked back.

“Oh, after he retired,” she said bitterly, “he said he’d come back here and live. I’m alone, you know. My husband ran out on the kids and me thirty years ago. Talk about a real jerk. The kids live on the coast now. No one wants to stick around Deer Lake.”

“That must be rough,” Bauer said, steering the woman back to her brother’s life. “I’m sorry about your brother. Your …loss.”

Barbara dropped powdered creamer into her cup. “You know, I’m kind of glad that he’s dead,” she said.

Bauer looked at her, but said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

“I realize it sounds a bit harsh,” she said, “and I don’t mean for it to be that way. It’s just that with him being dead, I know that he’s not coming back to Deer Lake. I know that I don’t have to wait. He was never really happy after he lost DeAnn anyway.”

Bauer pretended to understand, though he couldn’t quite grasp it. He’d rather have hope than finality, if indeed it meant the death of a loved one.

The dead man’s sister lit another cigarette and told Bauer that she had no firsthand knowledge of who Claire Logan and Marcus Wheaton were or why her brother would have landed in Oregon in the first place. She only knew what she had seen on television. As a way of appeasing the young man who had traveled so far, she offered him a box of her brother’s belongings.

“I have some of his papers if you want to go through them; you’re welcome to take them with you. Just send them back when you’re done.”

She held out a shoebox, and Bauer took it.

“Special Agent Bauer,” Layton said, holding the door open, “is it true that they found a dozen dead bodies out there in Oregon?”

“Twenty, ma’am, counting the dead woman and the two boys.”

“Were the others, the seventeen, were they all army? That’s what I heard. That’s what everyone is saying.”

Bauer shook his head. “Not all. I’m not really supposed to say. The investigation has just started.” Her eyes were so pained that he found it hard to refuse her simple request. “Not all army,” he said, “some are Marines. Even a couple of navy guys.”

“What does that mean?” she asked. “I mean, I wonder why?”

“We don’t know. Not yet.”

Special agents in six other states conducted interviews similar to Bauer’s chat with Barbara Layton. It turned out that Cyrus Crowe and the others unearthed at the Logan farm shared a number of similarities beyond their pursuit of a military career. All had been single and lonely. All but four had been sixty or older when they disappeared. All had few close relatives to report them missing, though in actuality most had been reported missing by someone. In some cases, there had been more than one report made.

One agent made the trek to rural Liberty, Mississippi, and talked to a woman who had filed a report with the Jackson police two years before. She was convinced her friend—a man who raised pigeons and cut her lawn with a riding mower—had met foul play on a trip out to Seattle or somewhere out there.

“But nothin’ was done. I called three times! The cops only do so much before they give up,” she said. “After a while I gave up. Someone else cuts my grass and I let his pigeons go. Thought he’d be real mad at me for that. But I guess not.”

A retired Marine from Pittsburgh named Conrad “Connie” Patterson was also a loner. Connie was discovered missing when his Chinese pugs, Ding and Sing, weren’t collected as promised. The dog kennel owner reported it because he had to bathe the pugs a second time—four days after the owner didn’t show up.

“I still have Ding and Sing,” the kennel owner said. “Nice dogs. Nice guy, too.”

An army officer from Weed, California, was the oldest at seventy-three. He had a thirty-year career in the military before opening a secondhand store in the small northern California town. Business hadn’t been great, and when the man turned the grimy cardboard sign over to CLOSED never to flip it back, no one cared but the landlord. The agent who was dispatched from San Francisco to Weed filed a brief report: “No contacts made. No one knows anything about the victim.”

Darrin Hoadley left behind two daughters when he disappeared. The women, both in their late twenties, couldn’t stop crying when the agent, a woman, came calling three days after Christmas.

“We knew something like this would happen,” the elder of the daughters muttered. “He wouldn’t have left us for good… not without a reason.”

“How could this happen?” the other said, a blonde with violet eye shadow and an overbite.

The special agent, a seasoned veteran from the Salt Lake City field office named Donna Andrews, pulled some tissue from her purse.

“We’re doing our best to get to the bottom of it,” Andrews soothed.

“You’d better,” the older sister said, her anger barely contained and ever close to seeping to the surface. “I want someone to pay for this! Our father was a good man. For Christ’s sake, he was a man of God!”

The three talked for two hours in a room the female agent had rented at a motel, though she had no intention of staying overnight. Both sisters were married to staunch Mormons and didn’t want to talk about the investigation in their homes.

As in the case with the others, it appeared that Chaplain Hoadley was like the others—single. His wife had divorced him when she could no longer take the months apart when he was at sea. The girls were ten and seven at the time and saw their father only occasionally over the first few years following the divorce. Even so, somehow they managed to remain close.

“I have no idea why he’d go there,” the younger sister said of her father’s trip to Oregon. “He didn’t like the rain. He used to tell us he had enough of water from being on the Pacific all those years. He was stationed in San Diego.”

The women didn’t know if he had any friends in Oregon, but they suspected he probably did.

“He never knew a stranger. The men on the ship loved my dad. He was booked for fourteen weddings when he retired.”

“Did he know Marcus Wheaton? Claire Logan?”

The older of the two wrinkled her brow. “I read about them in the paper today,” she said. “But, no, he did not know them that we ever heard.”

“Even though he didn’t say that he was leaving town,” the other said, finally speaking up. “There is one thing that we always wondered about.”

“What’s that?”

“He sold his condo two months before he disappeared. We don’t know what happened with that money… and what about his pension? The navy wouldn’t tell us a thing about it, but I got the impression that he was still getting his checks. For the longest time I thought he was alive.”

“How much money did he have?” the agent asked. “I mean, was your father wealthy?”

“Not really. He spent most of his money on photography equipment. He bought two Nikons and a Hasselblad in one year. But the money from the condo was probably greater than two hundred thousand dollars. It had a view of the Hotel del Coronado. He loved that red peaked roof. My dad thought it looked like a circus tent. And it did. He was like that sometimes. He liked the circus.”

It was the box, or more accurately its contents, Barbara Layton had given Bauer in Deer Lake that gave the case an entirely new and, some would say, disturbing focus. It was true that Bauer gave the contents a cursory review before scrunching his six-foot frame into a seat on the flight to Portland and had fully intended to pore over the entire contents. But the bumpy ride and the queasiness in his stomach forced him to set everything aside. Upchucking into the box, he suspected, would be extremely poor form. It wasn’t until he got back to his apartment in Portland that he made a pivotal discovery.

The apartment building manager was lurking in the parking lot in the way he always did—giving young girls the creeps and making awkward conversation necessary from those who caught his eye. Bauer slung his bag over his shoulder and locked his car. And since conversation couldn’t be completely avoided, he told the lurking manager that he’d likely be “in and out” over the next few weeks.

The man nodded, his eyes hinting for more information in the transparently pathetic way frequently employed by bad actors and the very lonely.

“On assignment,” he said, though he felt like a jerk after the words slipped off his tongue. It sounded so… so… Mr. Big.

“The Rock Point slaughter?” asked the tiny man with bug eyes and slicked back hair, a style that made him amphibian or vaguely reptilian. His ever-present olive-colored turtleneck didn’t lessen the image.

Bauer brushed past him. “Can’t say,” he answered, wishing he hadn’t even opened his mouth. “Sorry.”

In his apartment, Bauer fished out an Elton John cassette from his collection, Madman Across the Water, stuck it in the machine, and put up his feet and went to work. What he had wasn’t evidence, per se, but the personal effects given to him by what had been a missing, now a dead, man’s sister. He was not, Bauer was sure, compromising any investigation. Instead, he was giving himself a head start on a case that he was sure would be the biggest of his career.

Inside the box with the foxed edges were photocopies of Social Security documents, discharge papers, medical history (including test results indicating the presence of prostate cancer), a passport, and several news clippings. There were no financial papers. This omission was surprising and he made a note to follow up on that. Barbara Layton had said her brother had closed his bank account before leaving San Diego. It was the sole thing about which she was utterly convinced.

A news article folded accordion-style before being placed in an envelope fluttered to the floor. It had been cut from a newspaper called something-Guard. Bauer thought the first word might be Honor, but he had never heard of it. An advertisement on the reverse side provided fodder for his thesis. It indicated it was a news- paper or magazine aimed at military retirees. Who else, Bauer wondered, would want a mock cover of Life magazine with their picture inserted and “VJ Day Hero!” emblazoned on the cover. A headline in block letters read GREAT FOR THE GRANDKIDS. The article was not trimmed in its entirety, so Bauer focused on the other side that appeared to be a portion of a classified ad section. Further inspection showed five notices circled in the skipping ink of a dying blue ballpoint pen. The marked section contained personal “Meet a Mate” ads from women. One advertisement stood out from all the others:

Searching for a Silver Eagle. Come soar with me on wings of friendship… and more. I am 42 years old and own my own business. I’m told I’m attractive and I’ve kept my figure. You’ll have to be the judge. Yes, I have three children, but they are young and well behaved. I have a beautiful farm in the woods of the Great Northwest and am looking for the right man to share it with. I have everything…but You? Write Ms. W, P.O. Box 111, Rock Point, Oregon.

It was the address that made Bauer sit up and slide his feet under him as if he was going to jump up, which in a split-second, he did. It also drained the blood from his face. Bauer went for the phone and made two calls, the first to Derek Saunders, the Special Agent in charge of the Portland field office. Saunders wasn’t in, but his secretary took down a message. The next call was to the Spruce County Sheriff’s office in Rock Point. The discourse was brief. The Sheriff said he was heading out for a smoke break.

“You need to find out who had Box Triple One— 111—at the Rock Point post office,” Bauer said, his eager-beaver voice as evident as it had ever been in his entire life. He caught himself and slowed down before adding, “I’m on my way down there.”

“No prob,” the sheriff said. “Don’t get your panties bunched up and I’ll get what you need.”

Bauer made a quick trip to the bathroom, picked up his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and left Elton to finish his songs alone.

The postmistress at Rock Point was a wiry woman with a one-color-all-over curly brunette helmet, which hugged her head as if it were a midget octopus. She also had the surly attitude that most agreed came with the inky territory. Della Holm had been working at the “new” post office for nine years. Before that, she worked a dozen years at what had once been billed as the “Smallest Post Office West of the Rockies” in the back of the Mullins Hardware Emporium in downtown Rock Point. But that was over when a bureaucrat who had never set foot outside the Washington Beltway decided Rock Point needed a new post office. A new facility—was how the memo referred to the place. Facility. It was such an iceberg way of talking about something as important as a post office. A post office, Della knew, was the heartbeat of any town—no matter its size. Della hated the new building, a modular structure with indoor-outdoor carpeting and a butcher block counter because “it looks like a bureaucrat’s idea of cost savings for white-trash America.” Della was bitter because she had no longer had a claim to fame; she no longer could boast at the annual regional postmasters’ conference in Portland that her station was the smallest, biggest, busiest, prettiest. Nothing. She was now in charge of a post office that resembled an RV, and, she readily admitted to anyone who asked, it hurt her.

“I’ve given my life to the government and I get this?” she would ruminate over and over. “Who ever heard of such an incredibly stupid idea as a carpeted meter work area? Those idiots!”

She pinned up a drawing of Uncle Sam holding a mailbag with the words SIZE MATTERS! She pretended it was a gift from a disgruntled customer who sympathized with her plight, and she didn’t have the heart to take the darn thing down.

On December 28, Della Holm was busy hating the world and fiddling with the Pitney Bowes label maker when Sheriff Bob Howe and the pleasant-looking out-of-towner, a young FBI agent named Jeff Bauer, arrived. She didn’t protest when the sheriff inquired about the holder of Box 111. She could have asked for a warrant. She could have said a flat-out “no” and told the cops to beat feet. The information was confidential. “Our patrons have a right—are guaranteed the right—to privacy,” she had read in the manual when she first started her so-called career. That was in the days when she was young enough to still believe the government gave a hoot about her tiny post office and doing things the right way. Instead, tired of hand stamping half the stuff that came through the slot in the counter, pissed off because her pension wasn’t going to be enough, Della brushed her creatures-of-the-deep hair from her eyes and told the sheriff what he wanted to know.

“Claire Logan,” she said, “rented that box for years. Icicle Creek Farm has a separate box, though. This one’s for her ‘personal’ mail. All addressed to Ms. Logan. Ms. Shoot, who is she fooling? She’s a Mrs.! Husband was a nice guy, Marty Logan.”

“Lot of mail for Ms. Logan? Her private box?” Bauer asked, ignoring the commentary.

Della Holm looked at the young man, for what probably was the first time, and nodded an acknowledgment. He was about the same age as her own son, a history teacher at Rock Point High. If his appearance hadn’t been so pleasant and his manner so earnest she’d have likely been a bigger bitch.

“That’s what I thought I said. Though to be fair, her mail came in fits and starts,” she said. “Sometimes she’d get four pieces in a day. Sometimes she’d come in and bitch when I didn’t have any for her. Like it was my fault or something. The woman was a piece of work.”

Bauer nodded. He expected that Claire Logan was many things; a piece of work was at the top of the list.

“Not that I paid too much attention, and I never read any of it for sure—a violation of USPS codes. But I did notice that the mail came in cycle-like. At the end of each month.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Holm. By chance is there any mail in her box?”

Her response was lightning quick. “No,” she said.

“Would you please check?”

“No need to check. She doesn’t have a box anymore. Closed out both on Monday.”

“Closed them?”

“That’s what I said.”

Bauer was extremely interested in the timing. Claire Logan gave up her post office boxes two days before the fire, two days before her purported death. Sheriff Howe didn’t seem quite so interested. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and let out a sigh.

“Did she say why?”

“Yes, she did. She said she was going traveling after the holidays. Didn’t say where and I didn’t ask. I’m not the nosey type.”

She slammed another stamp on a parcel and muttered something about how people never put enough postage on anything.

“Got what you need?” Howe asked Bauer, jamming his hand in his pocket in search of his car keys. “Wife’s got French dip makings for lunch, leftovers from our Christmas prime rib, and I want to get home.” He patted his round belly as if it were a baby that needed feeding. Bauer just smiled. And like a petulant child left out of a conversation, Della pounded the rubber of a “hand-cancel” stamp against a manila envelope addressed to someone in Eugene.

“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!”