A Wicked Snow (13 page)

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!"

As the third day of the investigation drew to a close, Spruce County resembled a law enforcement convention with more uniforms and mustaches swarming the place than had ever been seen there. Oregon State Police, Spruce County Sheriff's deputies, reserve officers from neighboring Cascade County, and of course, the agents from the FBI vied for parking spaces, restaurant tables, and hotel rooms with members of the media. And though he was probably the youngest of the lot, Jeff Bauer had the kind of amiable ("Let me work with you") presence that made him a natural focal point. His good looks didn't hurt either. When the camera went to him, it captured the image of a young man who knew what he was talking about even when he wasn't supposed to say something. Such a performance meant a lot to the higher-ups back in Portland and even more so to the big guys in Washington, D.C. In fact, not saying anything at all while appearing to answer a question was an enviable skill, one others seldom achieved. Some cops could talk; and some couldn't without making room in their mouths for a foot. Sometimes two.

Bauer wasn't the special agent in charge of the Rock Point case, though he felt he should have been. That honor and responsibility fell on the slightly stooped shoulders of a nearly retired agent named Sam Ross. Ross was named agent in charge of LOMURS as the bureau tagged it--for Logan Murders. It was an exciting case to most everyone but Ross, who was burned out and bored and more than ready to move on. He'd been in the bureau twenty-five years and didn't give one whit about going out in a blaze of glory on January 18, his retirement day. He kept a pocket calculator and counted down the days and hours toward his gold Seiko watch, his retirement home on Loon Lake west of Spokane, and his none-too-great government pension. Ross met up with Bauer after the interview with the postmistress. They shook hands and Ross went to lunch. They met a second time at the motel, where the older man simply hung around and stayed on the phone with agents at the Portland field office. When it came time to talk with Marcus Wheaton, Ross pretended to be interested.

"Important interview," he said of the Wheaton interrogation. "Key, I'd say. Why don't you handle it?"

The offer caught Bauer off guard. "You want me to take the lead on it?"

"That's what I said. Got a hearing problem?"

"No. I can do it."

"Good. I'm not really sure if we have any jurisdiction here anyway. Seems this is shaking out like a county case. But we're here. Might as well work through this."

Inside, Bauer disregarded Ross's comments. This was
his
case now. He notified Sheriff Howe.

"We want to talk to Wheaton."

"He lawyered up a couple of hours ago. Brinker's the name. A good guy, but court-appointed and you know what they say."

"You get what you pay for?" Bauer said.

"You got that right." Howe chuckled as though he'd heard the remark for the first time.

Forty-five minutes later, Bauer and Ross signed in to see Marcus Wheaton at the Spruce County jail. It was a nice jail, as those places go. Surprisingly modern, given it was more than twenty-five years old. It had been built during the then-governor's push to make sure prisons and jails in Oregon were humane. There were six cells at Spruce County Corrections and Justice Center. Five were outfitted for men and ran the length of the building. A sixth was segregated from the others--a toilet with a beige tiled enclosure was its primary distinction. The men's commodes--the other five--were stainless steel and planted in the open where anyone using them could be observed at all times. The women's cell had been used infrequently. In fact, the last time it had an occupant was when a transvestite from Colorado got in a fistfight with a local fry cook outside the Crazy Eight, a downtown Rock Point bar. A
straight
bar. A guidebook to the gay Northwest apparently contained an embarrassing error.

In late December, a couple of drunks and a kid serving out the last days of a pot possession conviction occupied the first three cells. Ostensibly for security measures, though Sheriff Howe later conceded it was because they wanted to keep an eye on Wheaton at all times, the handyman with the gas can was kept in the woman's cell, which was adjacent to the sheriff's office.

The FBI agents followed Sheriff Howe into the interview room where Wheaton sat in a turquoise, plastic-molded chair and stared at the table as if the white-and-gold splattered surface held some keen interest. The room looked more like a kitchenette than any "justice center." Wheaton was not handcuffed. When he looked up, it was with a single eye.

"As I've said, I didn't kill nobody," he said.

"Right. Tell that to Erik and Danny's sister," Ross said.

Ross wanted to show the greenhorn how it was done, but also to get the damn thing going as quickly as possible. The sooner they were done, the sooner they'd be able to leave and return to Portland. Even so, Bauer was impressed. He didn't know Ross even knew the twin boys' names. He didn't think Ross had paid a bit of attention to any of it.

Ross must have sensed that Bauer was impressed, because in an instant, the older FBI man decided to do a little grandstanding to show the new kid how it was done.

"How's it feel to kill a couple of little kids? A bunch of old men...and a woman?"

Wheaton shook his head. "You, mister, don't know what you're talking about."

"We know enough," Ross retorted. "Enough to have you swinging from the gallows in Cutter's Landing by Easter."

The big man stopped himself from bubbling over, though his anxiousness covered his bulbous face. "Where's Brinker?" he asked.

"He's coming. Be here any minute." Sheriff Howe drained the last of his Pepsi. "You keep talking, Marcus."

"You and Mrs. Logan had a little thing going? Usually it is the employee who gets fucked by the boss. Funny, you really turned the tables on her, didn't you?"

Bauer wasn't sure where it was going, but Wheaton made it crystal clear.

"I don't want to talk to you," he said, looking at Sam Ross with his good eye. "I'll talk to
him
." He pointed to Bauer.

Ross shrugged. "Fine," he said. He didn't care at all and didn't even bother pretending that he did. "You talk with Agent Bauer and I'll get a head start on my beauty sleep."

After Ross departed for the hotel, Wheaton cleared the phlegm in his throat and spoke softly. Bauer had to strain to hear each word. He noticed the gauze wrapping over his ear wept some fluid.

"I just want you to know. I would never hurt those boys. I'd never hurt Claire. Never in a billion years."

"If you didn't, then who?"

"I'm not saying anything about anyone else. I'm just telling you about me. And I'm telling you that I wouldn't,
couldn't,
hurt Erik and Danny." The big man blinked back a tear from his good eye.

"Then who? If not you? I mean, did Claire kill her boys?" Bauer asked. It was a question that had never been asked out loud. But it had been brewing in Bauer's mind since the conversation with Della Holm at the Rock Point post office.

Wheaton sat mute.

"Listen to me very carefully, Marcus. You might be a decent guy mixed up with a bad woman. You wouldn't be the first. Prisons are full of men who did something stupid for the love of the wrong woman."

"I don't follow you," the singed handyman said. His face was expressionless.

"Okay. I'll be direct. You were screwed by Claire Logan," Bauer said. "The corpse found beside Erik and Danny was not their mother's. Are you following me now? If you didn't put the body there to help Claire fake her death, then I'd say you were tricked just like everyone else."

"What are you talking about? Claire is dead. She just has to be..."

"Don't think so..."

Travis Brinker, decked out in a three-piece navy blue suit and a spanking new black leather briefcase, burst into the room. "This interview is over," he said.

"Too bad," Sheriff Howe deadpanned. "We're just getting started."

Bauer nodded. "Yeah, Marcus Wheaton wants to tell us something. We're ready to listen, too."

"This is over," Brinker said as Wheaton looked on. "Right
now
."