A Wicked Snow

Chapter Nineteen

A woman who appeared to be at least fifty, certainly old enough to know that her bird legs and paunchy tummy didn’t qualify her to wear the short skirt she had on, approached the front desk of the Whispering Pines Motel. Never mind that the ensemble was ludicrous for Oregon in the winter (and probably, given the conservative nature of that part of the state, wrong in any season). She lugged a purse the size of an overnight bag. She knew who she was looking for; she’d seen the fellow on the news the night before. The young FBI agent from Portland was standing there checking his messages. She’d come in person to deliver hers.

“Mr. Bauer?” she asked.

Bauer felt a chill down his spine as he turned around to face Marcus Wheaton’s mother, Liz. Her voice had a husky, steeped in bourbon, quality. He, too, had heard her on the news the night before.

“Liz Wheaton,” she said, extending her hand. “I got the message that you wanted to see me about my son. So here I am. And you know what I want to tell you?” She steamrolled ahead. “I want to tell you what you need to know to get this whole damn thing over with.”

Bauer shook her hand. It was as cold as a crab claw. “Hello, Mrs. Wheaton,” he said, “I’m glad to see you. Is this a good time to talk?”

The motel manager looked on. His eyes bulged. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. Actually,” she added, “it is not a good time. But here I am. I am a mother and that’s why I’m here. Mr. Bauer, my son might be a lot of things—fat, stupid, lazy, ugly. Whatever. But he is not— and hear me loudly and clearly—a murderer.”

“I see,” Bauer said. “Let’s sit down.” He motioned to a corner by the pop machine and the day-old Danishes left over from the free continental breakfast.

“Let’s not and just say we did.” Her voice was harder-edged in person than on TV when she was whining about her son being railroaded. “I want you to know that Marcus is a good boy, a decent young man. If he were killing those men and had killed those two little boys, I’d have known about it. I am his mother, for Christ’s sake. I know my son! He could never hide anything like that from me.”

The manager pretended to read the day’s paper while he listened to every word. Bauer longed for a private room with a stenographer and a yellow pad.

“Mrs. Wheaton,” Bauer said, “supposing you tell me what your son had to do with the fire and the murders. He was there, you know.”

“Of course he was there.” Her voice was rising and her pumps were digging into the Berber carpet like cat claws. “He worked for that bitch-on-wheels, Claire Logan. And like I told you, he was stupid. He was in love with her. Get it? She was the woman of his dreams. Don’t ask me why. Don’t even try to explain it. I told him over and over that she was just using him. ‘Go to town and get this! Harvest twenty-five more trees before lunch. Clean the goat barn!’ She had him on a string ten feet long!”

“I see. He was in love with her?”

Mrs. Wheaton set her suitcase-size handbag on a chair and stooped to fish through it for a lipstick. Sample-size containers of all kinds spilled out. She scooped them up, grabbed the shade she wanted, and started applying it to her thin lips, going over the edge to make them fuller. All the while talking.

“Mesmerized is more like it. Claire Logan mesmerized him. And for what? She’s knocking off all these old guys for their money, life insurance, I bet, and what is he getting? Nothing. He’s getting screwed. She screwed him big time. She left my boy and flew the coop.”

“How do you know that? I mean how do you know she’s not dead?”

“Listen, I know. I know because I’ve met Claire a time or two. Been out to the place. Met the kids. Poor Erik and Danny. I feel bad about the kids, I really do. I have a soft spot in my heart for kids,” she said.

I bet you do, Bauer thought. Real good with kids, aren’t you. “What do you mean? What about Claire Logan makes you think she’s not dead?”

Liz Wheaton hoisted her purse from the chair seat. “Because she’s as cold as a witch’s tit in a brass bra. She’s like some reptile. All Claire cares about is money. She’d do anything for money. Trust me. I know the type.”

With that she turned around and walked out the door.

Three doors down from the mortuary was the main local branch of the Oregon State Bank. A phone call made by Bauer that afternoon had secured an appoint- ment with Darwin Graves, the bank manager. Graves was a pleasant fellow with a moon face speckled with acne scars. He smelled of Clearasil and Head & Shoulders shampoo. He wore a brown knit tie and a plaid shirt, rolled up to the elbows.

“I can’t give you any records,” Graves said, ushering Bauer into his office.

Bauer was nonplussed. It was part of the game. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll get a subpoena here tomorrow.”

“All I can do is confirm whether she had an account here or not.”

“She,” of course, was Claire Logan.

“That will be fine.”

Graves flipped through a manila folder. If it was meant to telegraph that he had more to say about Claire Logan and her accounts at Oregon State, then it worked like a charm.

“She doesn’t,” the bank manager said.

“Did she ever have an account here?”

“Not now, but ever? At any time?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“She did.” Graves looked down at the folder. “Not now, not anymore, but she did.”

“When? When did she close it?”

Again a slight stall. “Recently,” he said.

“How recently?”

“I don’t want to say. I could probably get in trouble for this. You know, without the subpoena, the banking ethics guys will get on me. We have rules, you know.”

“I know,” Bauer said, though he sometimes hated the rules. He understood the reason for them. “This is a major investigation. Your help could turn out to be vital to solving this crime.”

Graves’ face went white. “I’ll tell you that she no longer has an account here. Hasn’t had one since she closed it on December twenty-third. All of her money is gone. Cleaned out.”

“Was the amount substantial?” Bauer asked.

“I’m really not going to say anything more. I can think of two hundred thousand reasons not to.” He nodded in the direction of the door, satisfied with his own cleverness. “You have a nice day and good luck on the case. Claire’s kids were very well behaved. So sorry to hear about her boys. Very, very nice little boys. Hope the girl will come out of this all right.”

As the pair walked toward the door, Graves leaned over to whisper in Bauer’s ear.

“She’s got an account at First Oregon, too. On Cherry Street next to the Marcie’s Silver Spoon. Ben Rafferty is the manager. Don’t tell him I sent you.”

An hour later, Rafferty, a dolt with half the intellect of his banking colleague Graves, outlined the same story to Bauer. Claire Logan had cleaned out her account on the same day. Her account totaled more than $220,000.

“She was in a hurry when she came in. We didn’t have much time to chat, but she said she was going to invest in her farm,” he said. “Too bad it burned down. Kind of ironic, if you ask me.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Bauer said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem,” Rafferty said. “You want the stuff she left in her box? I know the rules, but you’re making me feel like she’s never coming back.”

“I don’t know that,” Bauer said. “But what stuff?”

“Some paperwork,” he said, walking over to the vault to retrieve the contents of another of Claire Logan’s safe deposit boxes. “If you’re looking for an escape plan, you’re out of luck. I’ll get it for you.”

A moment later, Rafferty appeared with an oversized envelope. It was curled in a U-shape from being held in the narrow box.

Bauer opened the envelope and pulled out some papers. It took only a moment to realize what they were.

Jesus, he thought. What am I supposed to do with this?

Later that day, Bauer dropped the packet off with Veronica Paine. She was at her office; a ceramic tree fitted with twinkling lights sat on a small table between two visitors’ chairs. The room was cool. The heat had been kept off for the holidays.

“This belongs with you, I’d say,” Bauer said. “Doesn’t apply to anything I’m doing. And I doubt the sheriff should have it.”

“I’m intrigued,” she said. She smiled and took the packet. She put on her stylish readers and scanned the documents, pulling one after another and placing them face down on her office desk. She looked up at Bauer. Her face went from quizzical to concerned.

“I’m glad that you brought this to me. I’m taking this to Judge Wells. This is going to be sealed.”

The greatest disappointment of the Logan case happened so slowly that no one recognized it until it enveloped them like a dense fog, quiet and omnipresent. Law enforcement had discovered three obvious murder victims in the house, and seventeen bodies in various states of decomposition planted in two areas of the property. An extensive search employing a backhoe and infrared analysis turned up no other lime-stewed corpses or rotting hotspots. Twenty dead. The problem with the case was that the autopsies of the two boys showed they had been poisoned with sodium cyanide and were dead before the fire consumed so much of their flesh. The fire, probably started by Marcus Wheaton, had not killed them. While he theoretically could be charged with their murder, it was a poor case. Nothing could connect him with poisoning the boys. For a time, Spruce County prosecutor Veronica Paine thought she’d try, but she knew only too well that a loss would mean that the victims of Oregon’s worst mass murder or serial homicide (the debate raged for a decade, which was it?) would go without retribution.

After talking with Liz Wheaton, Bauer came to accept the possibility that her son had been duped by a very clever, if not diabolical, woman. Not that torching a house with the bodies of two little kids and some woman wasn’t a horrendous deed, but Bauer doubted whether the hefty, one-eyed man was really a killer. An accomplice, maybe, but a killer? After all, Bauer reasoned, the bodies started disappearing before Wheaton came to work for Claire Logan. Several years before. Since autopsies revealed that the missing military men had been poisoned with cyanide in the same manner as Erik and Danny Logan, it was clear that it could not be proven that Wheaton had a hand in the murders. Coupled with the fact that the only living witness, Hannah Logan, never saw Wheaton do anything other than spread the flocking. It was only an arson case.

Almost one month into the investigation, Paine telephoned Bauer at the Portland field office. He’d been back for a couple of weeks. Pending the outcome of further lab analysis from Washington, he fully expected to head back to Rock Point at some point, though it was not a federal case. There was no joy in Ms. Paine’s voice. She sounded tired and drained of emotion.

“We can’t make the murder charges stick,” she said. “We can’t connect Wheaton to the murders—not to the extent it would take to nail him.”

Bauer knew it was coming. Deep down, he’d known all along. The person behind the murders was exceedingly clever. “Brilliant” was the word he thought of first, but he didn’t want to waste an accolade on Claire Logan.

“I figured as much,” he said. His tone was calm and meant for the Rock Point lawyer to understand that it was resignation, not disappointment, he was registering. He added, “You had a lousy hand from the beginning.”

“We did. We all did,” she said. “The arson will stick and we’ll put him away for a long time. And,” she paused, “if we ever find out if Claire Logan is alive—and where she is—we can probably use Wheaton against her. He might be agreeable after a few years in Cutter’s Landing.”

“Yeah,” Bauer said, “especially if we can show how his girlfriend, his soul mate, is living the high life with all that money.”

An Associated Press story written by the barracuda reporter Marcella Hoffman broke the news two days later. The Lumberman ran the wire service piece because its own reporter couldn’t get an interview with Veronica Paine. Editors headlined the story: MURDER CHARGES DROPPED, WHEATON WILL BE TRIED FOR ARSON

A sidebar described the continuing mystery of the headless woman and the growing belief that Claire Logan had killed her two sons and seventeen men before faking her own death by decapitating some hapless woman. Though all but three of the men would eventually be identified, the headless woman, “Number 20,” as she became known by just about everybody, remained a mystery. She belonged to someone, Bauer thought, hoping that her mother, husband, boyfriend, sister, or someone would come forward and claim her. Didn’t she deserve to be more than a stand-in for the infamous Claire Logan? Oddly, it was her unshakable anonymity that gave Number 20 such notoriety. The woman’s gruesome plight was turned into a wildly popular catchphrase. “Drop a Twenty” meant “Lose your head; go crazy.”

But more than anything, people speculated about where Claire Logan had run off to.

One woman, a cashier at Wigwam, a discount store, mused that she was sure Claire Logan had taken all her money and gone to Mexico. “She’s down there, I’ll bet you. It makes me sick to think she’s down there laughing at all of this. Hope she chokes on her money.”

A man who worked as a guard at the Stoneway paper mill disagreed. He was certain that Marcus Wheaton had killed his employer, probably in fit of jealousy over one of his competitors for her affection. The disappearance story was “complete and utter bullpucky.”

“She’s dead. I’m convinced that headless body was hers. Wheaton gave her what she deserved. I’d have done the same thing.”