Marian ran the water as hot as she could stand it, hoping it would work out the kinks in her body. Trainer had installed motion sensor lights in the shower house and bathrooms. At some point after Marian had shampooed her hair and lathered her body, the lights switched off. She stood in the dark, let the hot water run over her, let her body remain still, memories of Tate, the big things and little things, arranging and rearranging themselves in her mind, the night thickening around her. The water turned lukewarm, then cool. She reached for the lever and shut it off. The room remained dark. She waved her arms. The lights didn’t turn back on. Maybe the bulb had burned out. She wrapped her towel around her. Something moved outside the stall, and her body flinched, and she wondered if an animal had gotten in. But then she heard the hinges on the shower house door. “Hello!” Marian called out. “Trainer? Lyle?” She listened as the door swung closed. Her skin prickled with heat despite the water droplets that ran down her arms and legs. She cinched her towel tighter, her breathing tentative and shallow.
* * *
• • •
In the morning, Marian met Trainer at the barn. She told him about the bulb burning out.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
And then, “Were you up there? Last night? I heard someone when I turned off the shower.”
“I got my shower before supper,” Trainer said.
“Someone was up there.”
“Maybe a bear? I saw some tracks behind the main house.”
“Black bear or grizzly?” Marian asked.
“These were a black bear. Looked like a sow. If they can break into a freezer like they’ve been known to do, I’m sure they can figure out a shower house door. I’ll make sure and empty the garbage cans up there. Don’t want anything attracting them.”
Marian walked through the barn to the last kennel on her left, where Arkansas and Yeti had been staying together. The dogs were prancing in place by the kennel gate, both of them smiling their happy pant. Each kennel was the size of a single horse stall with a dog door on the back side that led to an outdoor run. “Hey, girls,” she said. She let herself into the kennel with them, then closed the gate behind her.
Though the dogs’ paws had healed, Marian had continued to massage lanolin into their pads each night and check them for abrasions and give the dogs a thorough checkup, and in the mornings, she’d check them again. “Lookin’ good,” she said. She picked up the pink chenille blanket off the floor that the dogs had been sleeping on. “I’m going to bring this in the house and wash it,” she told Trainer. But when she shook out the blanket, a piece of sandpaper fell out of one of the folds. She retrieved the sandpaper, not thinking much of it. One of the dogs might have carried it in. Trainer was always doing odd jobs around the property. It wasn’t until she saw the bloodstains and black smudges like the skin on the bottom of the dogs’ paws that the idea hit her—someone had hurt these dogs.
“Hey, Trainer, can I show you something?”
Trainer walked over to her and she handed him the sandpaper.
“I wonder if the dogs were chewing on it,” he said. “It may have torn up their gums. Did you check their mouths?”
“I check their mouths every morning. I check every inch of these dogs. Their gums are fine. I think someone intentionally hurt them.”
“That’s crazy thinking, Marian. No one here would do that.”
“Trainer, I wasn’t negligent. I keep running things through my mind, over and over again. These dogs didn’t get injured under my watch.”
“Probably not a good idea to be throwing out accusations.”
Marian blew the air out of her lungs in one big gust. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” The last thing she needed right now was to get in trouble with Lyle, and yet in her mind she kept thinking someone had gotten to the dogs, maybe during the vigil for Tate, or early that next morning. Someone wanted her out of the program, and she had no idea why.
9
PRESENT
August 2017
MARIAN
Bonners Ferry, Idaho
Nick Shepard lived in a single-story house with light blue siding and a stone chimney. The house abutted heavily forested public lands of evergreens and hardwood. As Marian pulled up the gravel driveway, Nick stepped onto the small side porch. She recognized him from the pictures she’d seen—long silver hair pulled back in a ponytail, a full grayish-white beard. He wore jeans and a red fleece top and a beret-style cap. When he and Marian shook hands, she found him to be warm and approachable, and his eyes much kinder than they’d appeared in the photos, almost sweet. He opened the door for her and invited her in.
“You have a beautiful spot,” Marian said. “There are so many trees.” And then, “Why Bonners Ferry?”
“Like Garbo, I wanted to be left alone.” Marian might have been taken aback, but Nick brushed the comment off with a wave of his hand. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked.
She said she was fine. Besides, she’d brought a water bottle with her. She followed Nick to a large pedestal table just off the kitchen. Did he have a limp? Yes, she was sure he did. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He seemed a little surprised by her question. “Oh, this.” He looked at his left leg. “Arthritis. I’ve had it for years. It stiffens up on me sometimes.”
She set her backpack on the floor beside her and took out a legal pad and a pen.
“The woman is prepared. I like that.”
Nick and Marian spent the next fifteen minutes talking about the work she did. Then Nick said, “But that’s not why you’re here.” He leaned back and supported his elbows on the arms of his chair. “When we spoke last, you were concerned by the way Tate misrepresented himself. There’s a way we rewrite experiences, a way we change and shape events to conform to a perspective we have of our self and of others. Though some of the things Tate told you or referred to may or may not have been true, it doesn’t matter. He incorporated them into his world, his being in the world. Do these stories and claims make him eerie, weird, unique, or do they hint at something darker? Real or not, what he was saying is, ‘I am part of all of these events, and they are part of me.’ The intent is to elicit a reaction, to reinforce his position,” Nick said.
“Tate told you he came from a ranching family. A strong masculine image was probably important to Tate. He presented himself as the product of a male-dominated culture. He may have associated physical strength and independence with a rancher. Let’s go a step further. Tate said his father was mayor. That would have been another way of him saying he came from a position of male power. This is all part of Tate’s script for how he perceived himself and how he wished to be perceived by others.”
“Why wasn’t he worried about being caught? He had to know at some point I would find out,” Marian said.
“But he was caught, at least on one occasion. You questioned him about his father being mayor. Tate had a way of manipulating the situation to make you feel as though you had done something wrong. I’ll need more information from you to pursue this line of thinking further, but for now let’s just say that Tate wasn’t concerned with the consequences of his actions. He was confident that he could spin whatever spiel necessary to maintain his position.”
“I was gullible,” Marian said. “And weak. I wanted to believe him.”
“You weren’t weak. You were manipulated. There’s a difference.” There was a large picture window next to the table that looked out onto a patio and backyard. A hummingbird feeder hung in front of the window. Nick paused for a long minute as if watching the feeder, as if waiting for a bird to appear. “Do you have a picture of Tate on you?” Nick asked.
Marian reached for her phone in her bag. She pulled up a picture of Tate, one she’d taken in the oil sands.
Nick looked at the photo intently. “I’ve seen him before,” he said. “The name sounded familiar. I
can’t place the face, but I know we met.” Nick handed the phone back to Marian. “I told you I would run a background check on Tate. You were right. Tate did not have a criminal record. You may want to ask the sister if Tate was ever in trouble as a young person, if he ever had a juvenile record, but for now we can assume Tate was a law-abiding citizen.”
Marian retrieved a business card from her back pocket. “I found this in Tate’s room,” she said. “It may be nothing.” She handed Nick the card for an attorney in Norfolk, Nebraska. “I’m not sure why I held on to it. Tate had just died. I couldn’t sleep. I’d gone to his hut and was looking through his things. At that point I still believed Tate had grown up in Montana and had graduated from the University of Montana like he’d told me.”
“What was Tate’s connection with Norfolk?” Nick asked.
“According to his sister, that’s where he went to school. Northeast Community College.”
“How long was he there?”
“A year, I believe. He commuted from home.”
“Do you mind if I keep this? It might be worth making some calls.” Then Nick told her he’d be discreet. He’d done this sort of thing before.
“Let’s change gears,” Nick said. “Let’s talk about the cases. There were four victims. The first, Natasha Freeman, was twenty-nine. She worked as a teacher’s aide at an elementary school in Helena. She disappeared from her vehicle one night, about a half-hour drive from her home. Her body was found two weeks later, just before Christmas, by a couple who had gone snowshoeing. Freeman had been left in the woods about three miles from her vehicle. Her clothes were found near the body. Examiner reports showed that she’d been strangled from behind. There was no evidence that she had been raped. A boot was recovered farther up the hill, and some broken branches were identified. It looked like there’d been a struggle. Authorities believe she was murdered at the site where the couple came upon the remains. There was snow on the ground when she disappeared. By the time her body was discovered, new snowfall had covered any prints that might have been left.”
Marian had been jotting down the details of what Nick said. She thought of the pictures she’d seen of Natasha. “She was beautiful,” Marian said. “That’s what I thought when I saw her picture.” Marian looked up and met Nick’s eyes.
“The second victim was younger, barely twenty years old,” Nick said. “She’d recently moved to the Whitefish area. Erin Parker disappeared in the fall, almost two years after Natasha’s murder. Friends said she’d hitchhiked to a trailhead in the forest. She didn’t show up for work the next day. A search party was set in motion. Two months later a man was in the woods with his dog. He was cutting firewood and came upon Erin’s remains. We didn’t make the connection with Freeman until the examiner’s report determined that both the hyoid and the laryngeal bones had been fractured. Parker was killed by forearm strangulation from behind. And, as with Freeman, her clothes had been removed. Interesting thing with this one, though,” Nick said. “When her phone was recovered from a ditch along one of the highways, there was a picture of her at the trailhead. Someone else had taken the photo. The phone had been wiped clean of any fingerprints.”
Nick asked, “Did you ever notice any scarring from scratches on Tate’s body?”
“Not that I recall,” Marian said.
“There was a sign of a struggle between Parker and the killer. We have reason to believe she put up a fight. The killer may not have walked away unscathed,” Nick said.
“With this particular case, there was some dismembering of the body—clean, postmortem cuts to the wrists, made with a sharp-edged instrument, possibly an axe. The victim may have had the killer’s DNA under her fingernails. Her hands were never recovered.”
Tate kept an axe and a shovel in his truck. Marian had used it to split wood for her stove. Nick had been right. These kinds of details were not in the articles she’d read. The room had suddenly taken on an eerie quality: the gray light that filtered in through the picture window beside them, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the other room. A long-haired cat jumped onto Marian’s lap, startling her back against her chair. The cat was purring loudly. His claws snagged Marian’s jeans before the cat lay down.
“I should have asked if you were allergic to cats.”
“No, it’s fine,” Marian said. And all the while she was thinking Tate could not have done these things, not the man she’d loved. Her shoulders tensed; her neck felt stiff.
“In the Stillwater murders, the killer took different measures,” Nick told her. “As I’ve said before, not everything that pertains to a crime is released to the media. When I was working cases that appeared to be connected, I’d reconstruct the crimes, look for differences. No two cases are exactly the same. It’s in the differences that we find our clues. Just as you can’t walk through a room without leaving physical traces—a hair, skin cells—you can’t commit a murder without leaving psychological traces. We have to focus on understanding the killer’s logic, his style of thinking, why he does the things he does, and the place to begin that inquiry is with an examination of the extant crime: where the body is found, how the victim was treated, whether the crime was committed there or elsewhere, what weapon was used. Serial killers, like most humans, adapt to circumstances; they change, and what is different from one murder to another is far more informative than what remains the same.”
Then Nick asked Marian if she’d ever seen Tate with a camper or a small trailer.
She never had.
“The third victim went missing a little over two years after Parker’s remains were discovered. Lynn-Marie Pontante was just shy of nineteen years old. She was working at a stable where she was given a place to live and a small income. She was last seen paying for gas at a convenience store. A boyfriend was questioned in her disappearance. He was the one who’d reported her missing. Seven months later her remains were discovered about a mile from where the remains of Erin Parker were found. A father and his son were hunting for turkey when they came upon an abandoned camp trailer. About fifty yards from the trailer they found Lynn-Marie’s clothing, and eventually her bones. And like the other two victims, Pontante died from forearm strangulation from behind. But the difference in this case was the condition of the skeletal remains, particularly that of the pubic bone and the coccyx.
“Lynn-Marie had narrow hips, a narrow pelvic region. She’d been told that sex would be painful, that she might need to go through physiotherapy for vaginismus. And her pelvic region was too small to deliver a baby naturally. Though there was no evidence of penile penetration, her pubic bone was separated, and she had a fractured coccyx, or tailbone, most likely from a blunt object or a fist inserted into her vaginal cavity.”
Marian had instinctively held her breath as Nick spoke, something horrible lurching inside her.
“The killer took his time with this one. He used the trailer to buy him that time to play out his script. The trailer was old, no doubt a leftover camp of one kind or another used by hunters over the years, maybe some loggers. What matters is that our killer knew these woods. He knew about the trailer. He was taking more risks. There was evidence of the victim—fingerprints, hair, the victim’s blood, even though the cause of death was still strangulation. There were other fingerprints also, other DNA samples, but none that we could get a match on. Not everybody is in the CODIS database, and there were no doubt various people who’d used this trailer over the years. But the question is raised regarding the location of the victim’s death. The victim’s remains were found outside the trailer. In this situation it’s prudent to assume she was tortured and killed inside the trailer, and then her remains were disposed of.”
At some point Marian had set her pen aside, as if there were something very cold in the act of writing these details down. And there was the humbling effect of it all. Marian was still a living, breathing part of this deeply unbalanced world.
; Nick told Marian that if his memory served him correctly, and that wasn’t a sure thing these days, Pontante disappeared from the property where she worked and was living. Her vehicle was still at the premises, as was her purse and other personal items.
Nick stared down at the table. His body remained still. Then he sighed loudly and apologized. “I lost my train of thought.” He told Marian that earlier that morning he’d been looking over some portraits he’d written on each of the victims and the events surrounding their disappearances. He should probably have those notes in front of him, he said.
Marian stroked the cat’s fur while she waited for Nick to continue. She felt the reality of these women’s lives and deaths so palpably, her chest ached with an impossibly heavy weight.
“The fourth victim was Melissa Marsh,” Nick said.
Marian thought of Melissa’s sister, Emily, who had worked with Marian in Utah. Emily had kept a picture of Melissa on her phone screen, and each time Emily would swipe the phone to enter a coordinate and record a sample, Marian would notice the moment of hesitation, and she’d know the young intern was remembering her sister’s death all over again. The photo had been taken just days before Melissa’s disappearance.
“Marsh worked at a veterinary clinic,” Nick said. “She was walking from the clinic back to her apartment. There were people who saw her that day on the road, including a witness who’d seen her accept a ride from someone. Authorities didn’t believe the case was connected with the other Stillwater murders. They canvassed the area near her apartment. They dragged the river behind where she lived. I told them they needed to look in the forest, that the body would be found in a similar location to the others. They didn’t believe me. They were looking for similarities, and this case was different. A year later a man hunting for black bear came upon her bones. They were scattered in about a fifty-yard radius off a logging road in the Stillwater forest. Dental records confirmed they were the remains of Marsh. Pieces of her clothing were found at the scene as well.”
The Last Woman in the Forest Page 9