Buffalo Jump Blues (20 page)

B
rady and Levi Karlson had been born into a rough-and-tumble logging family in Kelso, Washington, in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, the infamous volcano that claimed fifty-seven victims when it erupted in 1980. Their grandfather, Quincy Karlson, was included in the tally, albeit indirectly; he'd collapsed from a heart attack while shoveling two feet of ash off the roof of his carport. His son, the boys' father, also Quincy, called “Squint” for his hooded eyes, had died some twenty years later, while working as a chain setter for Weyerhaeuser. When a cable slipped, a log crushed his pelvis, and his last words to the feller who tried to comfort him were to tell Melissa he loved her and that she should remarry for the sake of their sons, who were five, and to never let them cut a tree as long as they lived.

The first part of the promise she kept, tying the knot with Augustine Castilanos, a timberlands baron whom she'd been rumored to have been having an affair with for years. The second part had gone by the wayside, as the boys had worked out of logging camps their summers off from high school, cutting pulp from hemlock stands on the western slopes of the Olympic Peninsula. The foreman of the camp hired girls to shake the bark off his crew—the prostitutes were known as Hoh River Hohs, as the camp was on the upper Hoh River—and Brady and Levi had lost what little innocence they may have had to high school dropouts and meth addicts from Hoquiam and Aberdeen.

One such young woman, Twyla Jane Curry, who called herself TJ
Spice, a stripper from Hoquiam with a half dozen arrests for solicitation, had been discovered by hunters about six miles from the lumber camp. Or what was found was what was left of her. Her body had been dug up from a shallow grave by a black bear, which the hunters shot as it stood over the remains. An autopsy found semen in the victim's vagina, though it was too degraded to provide DNA for comparison. That it was a homicide there was no doubt; the woman's skull had been caved in by a heavy piece of wood that had shed splinters into the wound. Proximity dictated that the half dozen workers at the camp were questioned, and three months after the murder Augustine Castilanos, who may have harbored reservations of his sons' involvement, reached into his pocket to place the boys in a military academy in Massachusetts, thus getting them away from the relatively short arm of the law's investigation. The fact was that the bear had generated more ink than the deceased. The woman's underclothes were revealed in a nearby pile of scat, a detail one of the hunters leaked to a reporter who had traveled from Olympia for his scoop; the headline in the
Olympian
read “The Purple Panty Murder.”

At this point in the deputy's narrative, Ettinger, who had been sitting back with her hands cupped behind her head, leaned forward and fixed Huntsinger with skeptical eyes and an upside-down smile.

“I heard about this case,” she said. “It came up when we had a grizzly bear unearth a couple bodies in the Madison Range. I seem to recall that it was solved.”

“It was and it wasn't,” Huntsinger said. “A bridge gnome copped to it, but he'd copped to other crimes where he admitted he was just looking for a way to get indoors for the winter.”

“A bum who sleeps under the overpasses cops to murder? If he wanted a pass to the pen, wouldn't you think he'd pick a lesser crime?”

“I know. It doesn't compute, but boozers like him, they can piss on a match and start a forest fire. We're talking zombie IQ here.”

“Did he retract his confession?”

“No, but he said he committed the murder with a two-by-four, and the slivers of wood found inside the skull were red alder. Two-by-fours are made from all kinds of spruce and pine, but not from alder. So the thinking is he made it up. Anyway, they cut him loose.”

“And this is all you have, those boys being a few miles from a murder scene four years ago?”

“Well, they were questioned about a roof fire in Kelso.”

“Why was that?”

“It was the home of the quarterback of the football team, who had beaten out Brady Karlson for the position.”

“Arrested?”

“No. Nobody talked and there wasn't sufficient evidence.”

“Anything else?”

“Not really. Fighting with players from a rival team. Game violation for jacklighting deer. Your usual country bumpkin bullshit.”

“Okay, what about after they left town?”

“I was getting to that.” Huntsinger rifled through his papers. He said that enrollment records showed they had indeed attended the military academy, where their grades were good and their lacrosse, which they'd only played at a club level in Washington, head-turning. At least it turned the head of the coach of the Dartmouth team far enough around to recruit them.

“From Gomers to Ivy League gods,” Martha commented.

Huntsinger nodded. “Their names popped up in the school newspaper a few times. Brady made all Ivy League second team as a sophomore. Coverpoint position, whatever that is.”

“No black marks? Panty raids? Sneaking into a girls' dorm after midnight?”

“The only thing they got into trouble for was throwing snowballs.”

He said a student had suffered a detached retina during the “On the Green Snowball Fight,” an annual event that happens on the night of the first snowfall. The Karlson twins were among several
boys mentioned in the incident. For which the coach benched them for the season opener against Sacred Heart. After which they had kept their heads down for the remainder of their junior year. Which brought them up to the summer and the present time.

Huntsinger spread his thick fingers across his too-many-sweet-buns stomach. He shrugged. “That's all I found. But you got to admit, a bear is sort of quirky.”

Martha thanked him and dismissed him. “He's going to shrug himself right out of a job,” she said after the door had shut behind him. “We're missing something here, aren't we?” She propped her chin on her fist.

Stranahan did the same on the other side of the desk.

“Don't,” Martha said.

“Mary Ellen,” Sean said.

“Mary Ellen?” Her jaw bobbed on her fist.

Sean nodded. “John Running Boy overheard one of the brothers say something about a Mary Ellen. Something about Brady getting Levi out of trouble—Remember what happened with Mary Ellen.”

“Ellen as a last name?”

“Or middle, I don't know. But what if ‘Mary Ellen' happened sometime during their three years at Dartmouth? She could be a student.”

Martha tapped keys on her computer.

Sean walked around the desk to look over her shoulder.
Mary Ellen Dartmouth,
she had Googled. Nothing popped up worth tapping a key.

“Eliminate her name. Add missing and murder.”

She did. Nothing.

“Eliminate Dartmouth and put in Vermont and New Hampshire,” Sean said.

“Quit your backstreet driving.” But she typed it in and shook her head as the possibilities popped up. “I all but fired Hunt in my head and now I need him. He can work the Web as well as anyone in the department.” She scrolled down the list of sites and stopped.

UMass Women's Crew Team Member Found Dead

The article, from the
Hanover Evening Sun,
was dated November 5 of the Karlsons' junior year, some eight months previously.

Martha read aloud:

“Mary Ellis, a member of the UMass Minutewomen's crew team who was reported missing November 2nd after participating in the Green Monster Invitational in Hanover, was found dead yesterday in the Connecticut River. Chief Deputy John Hirvela of the Hanover County Sheriff's Department said Ellis's body was reported by a man walking his dog in the early morning hours on the New Hampshire bank of the river, about a mile east of the starting line for Saturday's race. Hirvela said an autopsy is pending and would not confirm a cause of death.

“Ellis, 20, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and a junior at UMass, was a sweep rower in the Minutewomen's eight crew ‘A' boat entered in Saturday's race . . .”

Martha continued moving her mouth, reading the rest of the article in silence. She read a follow-up story biting her lower lip and sat back in her chair.

“If Mary Ellen turns out to be this Mary Ellis, it gets interestinger, I give you that,” she said.

“It doesn't say who was at the party,” Sean said. The follow-up had reported that Ellis was last seen at an after-race party of fifty or more people on the Green at the Dartmouth campus, but had not returned to her room at the Courtyard Marriott, where the team was overnighting. Her roommate said that Mary was having a “good time” when she'd seen her around nine p.m., that Mary said she could get
a ride and had a key to the room. She didn't report Mary as missing until the team gathered in the lobby after breakfast to board the bus. She had assumed Mary had spent the night elsewhere and didn't want to get her in trouble for missing curfew. No, she hadn't remembered anyone from the party with whom Mary had been fraternizing.

Martha looked up the Hanover County sheriff's office and made a direct call and asked to speak with Chief Deputy Hirvela. And got him, mouthing “small miracles” to Sean, who had sat back in his chair. She spoke into the phone, listened, scribbled notes.

Stranahan looked at the walls until she hung up. “Well?”

“Open unsolved. She drowned. They're working it on the theory that she was raped and then jumped into the river and drowned, or that after the rape someone forced her head under the water. Or she was killed before the rape. They can't rule that out. Just when you think you've found something that men aren't capable of, it turns out they are. That's a working assumption I've found useful in this occupation.”

She shook her head. “Tears in the vaginal walls pointed to forcible sex, but the rapist was apparently wearing a raincoat because no semen was recovered. Hirvela said there were bruises on her arms and throat consistent with being held down or pinned against the ground. Forty-seven people who were on the Green the evening of the party were questioned. Levi Karlson was among them, but so were a lot of other athletes. Karlson admitted speaking to Ellis in a group setting, but said he left the party alone at ten o'clock, and she was seen after that by other people.”

“Did anything point to him?”

“No, but Hirvela spoke to a lot of people that night and Karlson was one of two or three that stuck out. Nothing solid, just a vibe. But enough to make him contact Levi's roommate to verify the story that he'd gone home at ten p.m. Guess who the roommate was?”

“His brother.”

“You got it. But there was nothing to tie him to the girl, and Hirvela only spoke to him the one time.”

“Mary Ellen was the name John Running Boy remembered.”

“So you said.” Martha's eyebrows ran together. “Ellis was the number four seat on the boat. Hirvela spoke to the crew coach, who said the numbers three through six seats are the boiler room, where the most powerful sweep rowers sit. Mary Ellis was five ten, a hundred fifty pounds. The coach told Hirvela she was the strongest woman on the team, that she could choke out an Adirondack bear if she got an arm around its neck. Not an easy person to rape unless she was drunk or somebody slipped her a roofie, but the toxicology report was negative. She'd had a few beers, but over the course of the evening. She was sober enough to resist.”

“They were two strong boys. Psychopaths can treat something like this as a challenge. They're not after sexual gratification so much as prevailing in the challenge.”

“I'm aware of the theory.” Martha's expression made it clear it wasn't necessarily hers. “You do realize, Sean, that this is circumstantial. At best. There isn't any direct evidence linking them to either the death of the prostitute, the crew woman, or, for that matter, Theodore Thackery.”

“Don't forget Gary Hixon,” Sean said. “The fact that someone died at the Buffalo Jump seems to have got lost in the shuffle.”

“Or him. All this”—she gathered invisible wool from the air by wiggling her fingers—“it's just speculating with some words overheard by a fugitive from the law who refuses to give a statement saying he overheard the words.”

“They're skaters,” Sean said. “They've been protected by money and influence their whole lives.”

“Which gets us nowhere. Me, anyway. I have no clout where they've gone. But I promise you, I will put them through the interview process when they come back to the valley.”

“Let's just hope nothing happens in the meantime,” Sean said. “I mean to anyone else.”

He watched as Martha's fingers went to her carotid and subconsciously brought his own to scratch at the ermine tail wound in his pocket. And felt a slight creeping sensation at the back of his neck. Joseph had worn the tail at his mother's insistence. She had woven it into his hair so that it would keep him safe, repel the spirits. But the tail's magic wasn't doing him any good in Sean's pocket, and less than an hour before, Sean had deliberately asked Joseph to check on the whereabouts of two men who might have reason to look suspiciously on his presence.

“I can't send him out there,” he said, and before Martha could respond, he had punched the recall on his phone.

“Hello?” It was Joseph's mother.

“Hello, Darleen. This is Sean. Is Joseph around?”

“No, he went out somewhere with Jerry.”

“Is Jerry's truck still on the street.” Joseph had said that Jerry lived practically next door.

“Hold on.” She was back. “No, it's gone.”

“You said
with
Jerry. Not just borrowing his truck.”

“He said he was going fishing with Jerry. I don't know where.”

At least he wasn't alone. But that was small comfort.

“Please have him call me as soon as he gets back.”