A Wicked Snow

Chapter Forty

Glacial water splashing over her head could not have awakened Hannah with more bracing impact than did Bauer’s voice. He pressed his hand on her shoulder and was pushing it gently.

“Hannah, something terrible has happened,” he said. “A fire. Louise Wallace’s house is ablaze.”

She kicked off the bedspread and found the floor with her feet. Though it was 10 p.m., it was still gauzy daylight outside. She saw she was still in Bauer’s motel room. The television was on low, and Hannah could see that Bauer had kept some kind of vigil while she slept. He must have raided the vending machine a time or two, since peanut butter cups and Doritos wrappers curled next to his chair.

“What in the world?” she asked.

Bauer stepped back and stood in front of the green curtains. He was worried, and he could do little to hide it. “Marcella Hoffman called,” he said. “She’s already on her way out to Wallace’s place. There’s been a fire.”

“Fire?” Hannah’s mind sharpened, and she remembered how she had unburdened herself to Bauer. So in- timate had been her disclosure, Hannah felt a flush of embarrassment.

“This isn’t happening,” she said, looking for her purse. “What does Marcella have to do with it?”

Bauer shook his head. “She just hired the kid with the camera to keep a watch out there. The kid didn’t see anything. Not until he saw the smoke rising from the upper-floor door. Called the fire department, but by the time they got out there the place was half baked.”

“I’m going,” she said.

“There’s nothing out there.”

“My mother,” she said. “My mother could be there.”

“Get a coat,” he said. “Gets cold even at a fire site.”

“We can take my car.”

Bauer didn’t think so. “No, we can’t.”

“But it’s right out front,” she said.

“I’ve seen your car,” Bauer shot back. “And we’re not taking that pink thing anywhere. I’ll drive my rental. Come on.”

The Wallace house was remarkably unscathed by the fire, thanks in part to Marcella Hoffman’s insatiable need—and greed—for the ever-lucrative Claire Logan story. She promised her cameraman, Jackson, an extra $300 if he’d cover the house throughout the night. He parked across from the fishing cabins, surprised that all were boarded up for the season—a month early. He brought a sleeping bag, four liters of Coke, and a bag of barbecue chips. He was relieving himself against a 200-year-old cedar when Marge Morrison’s pickup passed by, headed for the highway. Twenty minutes later, he smelled smoke. When he walked closer to the Wallace house, he could see a thin stream of black smoke funneling from one of the turrets. A call to the fire department and one to Hoffman’s room at the Northern Lights brought immediate help and a surprising browbeating.

“I’m thinking of firing you right on the spot. If you called the fire department or the police before calling me, you don’t know the first thing about being a journalist.”

“I thought the women inside could use some help,” Doug muttered.

Smoke rubbed against the buttery yellow of the turrets, but there was no flame. Not that anyone could see. A squad of volunteer firemen with a pump truck and pickaxes arrived within ten minutes of Jackson’s call. It took only ten minutes to extinguish the fire. The staccato blue sheriff’s lights filtered through the smoky air.

By the time Bauer and Hannah arrived, the place was already considered a crime scene. Bauer parked next to sheriff’ Kim Stanton’s cruiser and surveyed the scene before he even reached for the door handle.

“This might be rough,” he said.

“I can handle it,” she said, getting out of the car.

“It started in the bedroom,” a fireman said. “Smoking in bed would be my guess.”

Hoffman and the other media types with their un-blinking eyes and cans of Coke and glowing cigarettes had gathered by the gazebo, the closest point to the scene the firemen and sheriff’s deputies would allow. If the sound could be turned off—the hissing of water against ash, the cracking of wood, and the shattering of glass—the scene would have been less ominous. A cloud of creamy white flowers had just unfurled in the garden. The air smelled of smoke and flowers. Hoffman was playing the part of queen bee, talking loudly and abrasively as always.

“Doug, get the shot!” Hoffman yelled at her beleaguered assistant. “The strobe of the fire truck lights makes good video!”

Bauer approached the sheriff, and a pair of firemen huddled halfway between the house and gazebo.

“One victim,” a fireman said. He was a handsome man with big shoulders and a mop of dark hair. He wore the kind of expression that indicated no matter how many times he’d had to do it, it hurt to say the words.

“Who?” Bauer asked.

“Woman. Elderly. Louise Wallace, I’d say. Found her in bed. Looks like there was a propane leak from the kitchen cooktop. Coroner’s taking her now.”

“Mrs. Wallace never hurt a soul,” Stanton said.

Three men carried a stretcher with a shroud-covered figure to the open jaws of an ambulance.

“Has she been identified?” Bauer asked.

“Not yet. Badly burned. Her face is in bad shape. We call her a ‘crispy critter.’ A visual identification won’t be possible.”

“Dental?” he asked.

“She apparently had china clippers, but they’re gone.”

Bauer’s expression revealed that he was unfamiliar with the term.

The young fireman was only too glad to explain something to the FBI. “China clippers. False teeth.”

Bauer nodded, and just as he did so, Hannah turned and grabbed his wrist. She put her fingers to her lips to indicate that he shouldn’t say anything. Her eyes were glistening with tears, spilling down her cheeks. He obliged. While Hoffman cackled on about how she was going to do this and that, Hannah and Bauer walked over to the car away from the ears of the media. Hannah’s crying eyes held an intensity that Bauer hadn’t seen since she was a child.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Call the airport,” she said. Her voice was low, muffled by her own sobs. “Notify the harbormaster. We can’t let Louise off this island. She’s alive. I don’t know who the woman that the coroner picked up is, though I suspect it is Mrs. Morrison.”

Hannah was possessed by what she was certain was absolutely true. Bauer didn’t get it, and his puzzlement annoyed her.

“What gives here?” he asked. “Pull yourself together. I knew you shouldn’t have come out here tonight.”

Bauer put his arms around her. He didn’t care what Hoffman or any of the other vultures thought. Hannah was in quicksand.

“The moonflowers,” Hannah sobbed into his shoulder. He held her, but she pushed away from his embrace and faced the garden. In the fading light of the day, the white of moonflowers floated above the greenery. “They were my mother’s favorite. They used to be mine, too.”

“You sure?”

“Jeff,” she said, “Louise Wallace is my mother. I know it. I feel it. And I think that Marge Morrison is victim 21. I think my mother did what she did best. She killed again.”

“This morning you didn’t think Louise was her.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t really want to know. But I feel certain now.”

Just then Marcella Hoffman walked up. She was wearing a Kodiak Island sweatshirt and jeans a size too small. Her hair was floppy in the summer wind. It was clear she’d been in bed when her associate alerted her that Louise Wallace’s house was spouting smoke and flames. She repeated an old nursery rhyme as she approached. Bauer’s face was stone. Hannah had turned away when she saw her coming.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children…” Hoffman stopped herself when it was apparent that neither the FBI agent nor the CSI from California thought much of her cleverness. “Hope I’m not interrupting,” she said, switching gears. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary, Special Agent Bauer. What can you tell me?”

Bauer didn’t want to respond to her at all. But experience with the woman had proven that Hoffman refused to be ignored. “Not a thing,” he said. “Wish we did. I’d tell you just to get you off my back.”

She let out an exaggerated laugh. “Very funny. Really, what’s happening here? I knocked on Hannah’s door first. No answer. Funny, isn’t it?”

“Not as funny as you think,” Hannah said. She glared at Hoffman, and Bauer defused the confrontation by pushing Hoffman aside.

“I’ll say this once nicely,” Bauer cut in. “Please leave her alone. Go find another story. Can’t you dig up anything else to write about?”

“Nothing as good as this,” Hoffman snipped, undaunted. She looked around the scene.

Sheriff’s deputies and firemen went about their business as the steamy smell of burning materials drifted through the slowly blackening air.

Hoffman stood her ground and lit a cigarette. “Any of you seen Liza?”

Neither responded, but the look on their faces told her what she needed to know.

“Liz Wheaton. Marcus’s mother,” Hoffman repeated.

“What is she doing here?” Hannah asked.

Hoffman let out her skin-crawling laugh once more. “She’s the reason we’re all here.”

It was Bauer’s turn to jump on Hoffman. The veins in his neck pulsed. He could feel his hands tighten as though he were going to punch her. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

Hoffman stepped back. “This is no big deal, so don’t get hostile with me.” She sucked on her cigarette. The ember glowed like one of the devil’s eyes. “Why not? Why shouldn’t Liza be here? We wouldn’t be here without her. I told you this was like some goddamn reunion! The Claire Logan Case Reunion. I like that. Maybe I’ll lead with that on the show I’m doing for Fox.”

Hannah flashed to Joanne Garcia at the hospital and how she had wanted to throttle her. The same feeling of rage pulsed through her now. She fought it while wondering if she did grab DF and snap her neck, whether Bauer would stop her. Probably not, she thought. He hates her as much as I do.

“You’re one sick bitch,” Hannah said, edging toward Hoffman.

Bauer stepped between the two. He was more interested in hearing what Hoffman could say about Liz Wheaton than refereeing a fight between the reporter and her big “Get.”

“What do you mean, the reason we’re here?”

“Didn’t they teach you how to work your sources at the FBI academy?” she asked, crushing out her cigarette with the heel of her boot. “Liz or Liza or whatever she wants to be called and I became friends when I did my ten-years-after update. I told you that. She got a job at the court clerk’s office in Spruce County. Small county. Not enough workers who can alphabetize or type, I guess.”

A sheriff’s deputy called for additional assistance from one of the volunteer firemen with a halogen light, wanting him to illuminate the inside of the house. The man ran over to the front door.

Hoffman kept her eyes on Bauer and Hannah, clearly enjoying her moment of revelation. She told them that when she and Liz/Liza became friends she pressed her to get her an interview with Marcus Wheaton. Wheaton had refused; he didn’t like the way he looked.

“Camera shy. The pig,” Hoffman muttered.

“He is very heavy,” Bauer said. “He’s quite ill, you know.”

Hannah said nothing. She looked past Hoffman to the gazebo and the moonflowers, and fleetingly her childhood in Rock Point came to mind. The good times. The times before her father had died—had been murdered, she corrected herself. The times before Marcus Wheaton, Didi, and the men in uniform—the Silver Eagles, as her mother called them.

Hoffman paid Hannah no attention. As observant as she prided herself on being, she was no great student of human behavior and emotions. She couldn’t see anguish or rage unless it was broadcast at her through a TV screen. She went on to say how Liz came up with the idea to track down Hannah.

“Believe you me, I had nothing to do with it. She did it on her own.” Hoffman fixed her gaze on Hannah and continued. “She knew Marcus would see you. She convinced herself he’d tell you where to find your mother. Or at least where he thought she might be.”

“How did she find me?” Hannah asked, her stomach once more churning.

“Through prison and parole records. Copies of victims’ names are kept with the file for notification if someone is released, or escapes.”

Hannah shook her head. “But my name’s not on the list.”

“I know,” Hoffman answered. “I mean, that’s what Liza told me. She said your uncle’s and aunt’s names were included in the file. It wasn’t that hard to find you after that. I mean any pimply-faced kid from a collection agency could do it. Liz sent the shoes. Wanted to get your attention. I guess it worked.”

Bauer’s appearance had grown hot. He wanted to knock Hoffman across the face.

“Liz is going to prison,” he said. “You might be getting that jailhouse interview yourself—on the inside.”

Hoffman laughed. “What’s the charge? She didn’t break the law. And I certainly didn’t.”

“She stole government property. The boys’ shoes were property of the state of Oregon. And Ms. Hoffman, if there’s a way to tie you into it—any way at all—you’re going down, too. I’ll do whatever I can to see you pay.”

“You should be thanking me—” Hoffman started to say.

“Hey!” the deputy with the halogen light called out. Everyone turned to the sound of his voice, ratcheted up with urgency and fear. “Got another one in here. Another body!”

Liz Wheaton had survived the Kodiak fire. It had been her body the deputy had discovered on the floor of Louise Wallace’s kitchen. She was airlifted to a hospital in Anchorage where she was treated for smoke inhalation and burns on both hands and portions of her neck. Her recovery would not be swift, but she’d make it. She’d be well enough to face charges back home in Rock Point. Federal charges were also a possibility. What’s more, among the things recovered from her purse was a list of names and phone numbers, including Bauer’s room number at the Northern Lights, the Griffins’ home and work numbers, and Veronica Paine’s cell number. Everything smelled of White Shoulders perfume, heavy and sickeningly sweet. A bottle had broken and doused the contents of her purse. To those who had come to know Liz Wheaton, it had become the smell of fear and lingering hate. Testing would be needed to confirm it, of course, but gunshot residue appeared on the sleeve of a sweater she’d been wearing. If GSR was the only tie to a firearm—and to Judge Paine’s murder. Investigators expected a search of her place in Rock Point would turn up more.

“A mother’s love can be deadly,” Bauer deadpanned to agent Ingersol when they spoke on the phone.

“As devoted as she was to Wheaton, he’d never returned the favor. He’d never given up the one thing she wanted—the whereabouts of Claire Logan.”

Bauer looked out the motel window. The “Vacancy” sign had been dimmed. The media was flocking to the island in numbers that had never been seen.

“In a way it was a sick triangle.” he said. “Maniac Killer, Crazed Mother, and Duped Lover.”

As word of the fire and the secrets it seemed to reveal filtered through the island grapevine, the healing process of the ladies of the First Methodist would not come easily. They had been devastated by Louise Wallace’s betrayal and heartbroken over the death of their beloved friend, Marge Morrison.

Unable to sleep, Hannah sat up in her room at the Northern Lights and tried to pack, certain that Claire Logan had escaped the island. After learning that a woman traveling alone and matching Louise Wallace’s physical description was at the Anchorage airport for a red-eye to Seattle, Bauer took the first flight to Anchorage. He’d arranged for the plane to suffer a “mechanical failure” and endure a two-hour delay. Manufacturing such delays was a common tactic to slow down a felon’s escape route while the Feds figured out what to do.

At 2:45 a.m. a bleary-eyed Bauer and two other agents from the Anchorage field office boarded Alaska Airlines Flight 21 with an eye on the passenger seated in 4E, first class. She was listed as Lucille Watson. The gate agent admitted that her passport photo was dark and a little on the fuzzy side; however, he was sure she was the woman in the First Methodist cookbook, Louise Wallace.

The first two agents boarded the plane and went to the woman, who was bent over reading the in-flight magazine. A Baileys Irish Cream sat on the console next to her. Bauer came up close behind them. He felt his gun in his waistband. Ready, should he need to draw it.

Just as he prepared to tell the woman she was under arrest, she looked up and smiled.

It wasn’t her. Bauer knew that in an instant when his eyes met the woman’s puzzled gaze. The wheels were in motion, and there was nothing he could do about it. Headed for her daughter’s in Tacoma, Washington, a retired teacher from Homer, Alaska, received the shock of her life as two other agents rushed back behind her.

“Oh, my God,” she called out in complete horror, knocking over her Baileys. “One of them has a gun!”

A couple of passengers screamed, and one of the flight attendants accidentally triggered an inflatable life preserver to fill with air. Bauer and the other two pulled the terrified woman from the plane as fast as they could, but in the end she wasn’t Claire Logan.

Not even close.