Dream of the Wolf

by Bradley McKenzie

  “My first impression is really just that, it’s just an early feel in these first few minutes. But this presents itself as a straightforward sex assault. It looks like rape, as plain as the sun in the sky, an attack on a woman by a man. Alone with him in the forest at night, once she realized what was happening, she’d be in terror. Her primal instinct took over, for this woman that meant allowing him to take her sexually, hoping that afterward, he’d leave her be. He may have promised her that if she submitted he wouldn’t harm her. He may have meant it. Then he panicked, because she knew him, or could identify him, so he couldn’t chance her staying quiet.”

  Sheriff Hargrove tipped back his cowboy hat and placed his hands on his hips, above his badge and Colt autoloader. His eyes searched the mountainside where people camped last night. The victim had almost certainly been with them.

  Brouwer knelt. The girl’s jacket lapel held a smart phone and a soft leather wallet, Made in Italy threaded in ochre. The smart phone would likely show who was with her, but it was dead, and so she placed it in an evidence bag in her leather satchel. Unless Sheriff Hargrove stopped her, the phone would go to the state crime lab in Sheridan. He didn’t protest.

  Sheriff Hargrove took the wallet from her. “Catherine Kinderdine, just twenty years old, license from Illinois. There’s near two hundred dollars cash left, a black Infinity credit card. That’s serious credit and the card is in her name.”

  County Crime Scene technicians made their way past the meadow to the campsite where the party had taken place. At the sound of voices, crows rustled and cawed to their black horde farther up the mountain.

  “Catherine Kinderdine.” Brouwer studied the young woman in the wildflowers.

  If she knew her attacker, he would be in her phone, in some way. At the very least, Catherine would have mentioned him in a message to a girlfriend. The man that did this would have been at the campsite, just up the trail from her body. Any men who were on this mountain with Catherine are in for a nightmare of a day.

  As if reading her mind, the sheriff said, “If males were at the gathering with her up the trail, they were likely her age, so do we call them men, or boys?”

  She smiled and nodded. “In all practicality they’re probably just boys. But this is Wyoming, and whoever did this will answer for it as a man.”

  The meadow rustled as a breeze swept through the trees.

  “Skyrocket,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s what we called these flowers in Montana, at least where I grew up we did.”

  “The tall red ones are called that down here, too,” the sheriff said. “They’re also called Scarlet Gilia.” Crimson rust petals on green stems swayed lightly on the rocky edge. “Those are Indian Paintbrush,” he said. “It’s a very pretty spot.”

  Within the trees that lined the clearing, they stood together in the shade among thick spruce, cavernous with cool earth around them. The horses swished tails at black flies in the stillness of the meadow ledge.

  It felt good that they were working closely together, as they should be. Given how rocky Sheriff Hargrove’s start at Teton County had been, how hostile he’d been about the state government presence, and about her state field office even. She’d never been sure what to expect of him, if anything. The morning had been a pleasant surprise. Grateful that the politics were staying out of policing, working with Sheriff Hargrove was going to be okay, and she relaxed at the thought of the effort ahead.

  The sheriff joined his crime scene staff at the higher campsite, the most senior of which were now coming into the meadow to Catherine’s body.

  Beyond the shade of the soaring spruce and fir, the flowered meadow held an image of youthful life, stolen. Her first impression of the scene held. The priority was to identify any guy up here last night. Call him a boy or a man, call him whatever you want, but any male who was anywhere near Catherine Kinderdine last night, was about to meet Lane Brouwer.

  She felt good. It was her first homicide and she knew where to start.

  3.

  Gros Ventre Mountain peaks isolated her cabin from the valley and loomed over her acreage north of where Horse Creek tumbled out of granite into the valley floor. Duchess nosed the dirt at the red barn. A woodshed held square bales of hay for the horses and neatly stacked wood for her fireplace during winter, both now in low supply. The big gray mare plodded over to brush her nose against Brouwer’s cheek and she ran a hand along the powerful silken neck in return. In the barn, the black stud colt stood tall in the dark stall. A small thrift store radio on the barn windowsill, tuned to National Public Radio, kept them company with chatter. Duchess was a loner and preferred to wander the pasture during the day. The stud had become a house cat, inside the dark barn out of the wind, listening to stories.

  She had broken the black stud horse in her lodge pole pen. An entrepreneur from back east spent senseless money on ranchland but never came west to see what his fortune had purchased. The horses on that land were untrained and unkempt, nearly starved when Brouwer drove up to the millionaire’s ranch and seized them. In the veterinarian’s stables, the young stud’s ribs drew plainly against the black sheen of hide. The stud colt was head shy, he backed away rocking his head; his former handler must have hit him. He menaced over her but was too mature to castrate. When she finally haltered him, his hooves thrashed down on her shins and boots, he reared and charged at her, leaving her curled in the dirt at the side of her barn.

  Holding a piece of hardwood from her winter woodpile that she had sharpened with her folding knife, she tied a long lead on him. He circled in high steps around her on the shank, his tail flicked in annoyance. Newly shod hooves sucked up and down in the mud and shit, and his nostrils flared pink at the strange predator tied to him on the long rope. He high-stepped at her and backed her against the red barn and she placed the honed wood against the clapboards and he pounded his heavy chest onto it. He reared back at the thudding contact, she held firm on the halter lead rope until he lunged at her a second time and again, he slammed onto the wooden stub. He blew at her and shook his main out in fury, but he never walked over her again. She hadn’t found it easy to use tough love on a hurt horse, but he needed to follow her commands to become healthy.

  The stud strode from the barn’s darkness into the pale dusk and followed Duchess to the watering tub; water ran from their muzzles, they faced opposite directions over the pasture toward the tree line. The young stallion now depended upon her and the boss mare.

  She climbed to her workstation in the loft of her cabin and sent an email to the hiking groups she lead that she wouldn’t be guiding hikes this week. She began printing out text messages and images stored on the victim’s smart phone SIM card.

  The last text message Catherine had received before her death came from a stranger. The message from the unknown contact on the night of the murder jumped at Brouwer. Someone had written:

  Coming to find you.

  Someone had come for her. Without a name assigned to the number, Brouwer began to search for any indication of who would send that to Catherine in the night, and for any information on how she came to be in that meadow with her killer.

  There was a lot to look at in Catherine Kinderdine’s personal communications.

  Kinderdine would have been twenty-one later in the summer. Social networking profiles showed her with the same group of young women much of the time. Alongside countless photographs of her with her girlfriends, the smart phone held an enormous amount of written information. Brouwer lay out crisp white printing paper lined with the girl’s life on a table, the printer in the loft office whined through page after page of stored text messages.

  Most of the messages were gossip, rumor and the social stratagems typical of a younger woman, the stuff of girls walking the sidewalk, looking down at their phones, texting one another.

  Catherine’s texts were almost exclusively with several women, and men were of little interest to them. This was a surprise. After an
hour of reading messages, Brouwer noted on a yellow legal pad that there were no men in Catherine’s life. Interactions with the few male contacts were sexless. When men did appear, they rarely messaged twice. A male contact texted:

  Want to go out sometime?

  To which she replied,

  Sure I wanna go out, but with who? Lol

  It wasn’t easy to understand the meaning of many messages but it was clear to whom she sent them. Two women accounted for the vast majority of her communications; their names were Helen Hearne and Avina Zadeh.

  Images of the girls lay emblazoned on white paper on the table beneath the desk lamp. Selfies on nightclub sofas in tight fitting, ultra-short party dresses, walking the strip in Las Vegas, dancing with strippers. In bathing suits beside a crystal blue Alpine lake, fenced by lodge pole pine and the mountain forest beyond. On a plane, snow peaked mountains beyond the wings, Avina Zadeh holds up a Cartier watch toward the lens, her smile ironic behind the extravagance.

  A fourth member of the group was a twenty-three-year-old named Aoi Aoki, her fragile body nestled in with the others in images captured at an art fair in Miami Beach. In bikinis, in the salted foam of the ocean edge, they mocked the camera. Catherine Kinderdine’s light brunette hair held loose in a tie on her crown, and her hazel eyes blaze with precocity. The other women fawn around her to enter her frame, and she is the focus of each image. The women stand boldly together as a group. Before Catherine received the unknown text, these women told her they would take her into the woods.

  A short video of the women in a Las Vegas hotel swimming pool was stored on the phone. Catherine Kinderdine seems to have given her phone to a housekeeper asking for a group photo of the girls in the pool. The housekeeper had unwittingly began recording video. Catherine gives polite instructions for the photo she wants of her group. The housekeeper turned the phone around in her hands and searched clumsily for how to take a photo; as she fumbled with it, she did not know it was recording her furrowed brow, the patio stone and her own white shoes, and then the girls. Catherine holds the gaze of the camera lens. The other women ignore the detained photographer. The shaky camera follows their horseplay. Helen Hearne is a taller blonde woman, pale in an undersized black bikini; she pulled herself out of the pool with ease and walked purposefully at its edge, then boldly up the diving board ladder. After two bounces, she dove, and her lithe body rippled below the surface. She rose from the water with the shorter, darker girl raised on her shoulders. Avina Zadeh shrieked and begged not to be dunked, yet Helen Hearne plunged her into the deep and dragged her to the bottom of the pool; the darker girl struggled briefly to return to the surface. Helen frogged away to reemerge at the edge of the pool, where her eyes held the camera lens as though she knew it recorded her. Her mouth turned in a detached grin.

  These women took Catherine to the party campsite, toward her death meadow. Brouwer sat back in her chair and held a photo. Helen Hearne, the blonde-haired woman, was baleful and ironic, and Brouwer felt uneased by her. Her blue eyes had a hollow sureness, the kept presence of a woman who complicated things.

  The newly elected county men needed to lead this case and impress the valley out of the gate, and yet Sheriff Hargrove had let her take the phone chip at the body scene. Sending the chip to the state lab may offend the newly minted county officials as it showed they needed help from the state government, but she decided to do it anyway. The state lab could pull deleted information from the phone that the locals could not and her state colleagues would have the unknown number identified by the cellular provider, by subpoena if necessary. A courier would come at first light.

  At her small timber desk under a hinged lamp, she took a slow breath and held her hair, just enough length to tie. The stranger texting might have been a male and might have been her stalker. She dialed the unknown number into her Division smartphone and pressed Call. The phone had no service. It wouldn’t ping a tower.

  She slid on cotton scrubs and pulled a patchwork quilt over her body. The fan turned on the log ceiling. It wasn’t looking like any men camped with the girls last night. Only women were with Catherine on the mountain and the young woman had no men in her life. The lack of male presence in the phone was a serious complication, to be sure. Once she had the name of the stranger who texted Catherine, she’d have something to go on, otherwise there were only the girlfriends. She lay in thought, it wasn’t going to solve as quickly as she’d like. It would take a few days.

  4.

  Brouwer stood in Catherine Kinderdine’s Jackson Hole bedroom. Through French style doors to a balcony, the sun rose over the brink of eastern mountains. Catherine began to appear in Brouwer’s mind as a fully-grown woman; her bedroom was formally appointed and adult. No girly mess of clothes, instead, a large walk-in closet held snug rows of clothes and a vanity. No favored boys stalked the nightstand. Beyond the closet, a large soaking tub of hollowed hardwood sat cornered by views to the forest. Across the bathroom, a shower encased in glass sprouted two nozzles, one level with her head and the other aimed at her middle. Bras hung over the glass to dry and slight panties lay on the marble floor, the underthings gave a sense of Catherine’s recent presence; otherwise, Brouwer felt only absence.

  She stepped on the pedal of a wood-shelled garbage can, cotton balls colored with makeup strung in dental floss. Through the timber-lined French-style windows, the town of Jackson hunkered in its cradle of stone mountains. The tops of squat, thickset hotels were flat white dashes. While bathing in the deep hollow of hardwood, granite mountain faces would gaze on Catherine from the distance.

  Beauty devices on a vanity’s onyx top. A hair straightener and a blow dryer wrapped in cords. Nail polishes and mascara, eyeliners and skin creams. A vintage blown-glass bottle of perfume sat among feminine trappings. Brouwer lifted its glass stopper. A floral scent, faint against wood and mossy earth, offered a reminder of where Catherine’s body had lain in the night.

  The rows of clothes in the walk-in closet were wardrobe enough for three women. Heavy snowboarding pants and snow goggles lay on the floor of the closet-room beside worn jeans and more sleek underwear. Drawers framed a mirrored dressing space. Brouwer opened each drawer and held the clothes up; there were no papers or notebooks and no false bottoms to the drawers. Below the hanging clothes were shelves at the floor for shoes. She opened those still boxed, held up sling backs and pumps and returned the boxes to their places on the shelf. Catherine lived in Chicago and only vacationed here, often alone, her parents allowing her the place to herself, yet the room brimmed with dresses, pencil skirts, leggings, tights and sheer body suits squeezed together, not a spare inch of space remained in the ample closet. It was as though she were a hoarder of female finery.

  Brouwer pulled out a section of summer dresses by their hangers and lay them on the polished floor, and spreading them, they billowed out. Sections of the dresses, the breasts, kidneys and pelvis of some, were missing, sliced out with something very sharp, perhaps a razor. A ballerina leotard had its breasts removed. Brouwer pulled a pair of distressed leather pants. They were by a French design house and were genuine vintage, worn by previous women. A triangle cut at the vagina, dissected the genital area from the garment. Running her fingertips along the cleanly sliced edge, alarm grew in her. Dread, mixed with cold comfort, Catherine’s attacker had not bound and sliced her in such a manner as had been done to her garments. She thought of the sheriff’s offhand remarks that Catherine had been strangely unharmed, as these things go. Brouwer photographed the sliced spaces in Catherine’s clothing.

  A narrow door at the end of the walk in closet had gone unnoticed; covered to look like a mirror, it opened into a small room. Through the hidden door, she turned on the light in the small room and a large image of a naked woman stared back. It was Catherine’s friend, Helen Hearne. On her body, drawn in felt marker, was the outline of a garment of some kind, a costume drawn in leaves and branches sketched onto Helen’s nude body. On a worktable stood a woman’s tors
o, measuring tape and strips of textile draped over the breasts and partial shoulders of the wooden statuette. A fine cloth covered something bulky and Brouwer pulled the cloth onto the floor exposing a Singer sewing machine. This is where Catherine designed clothes. A mannequin in the corner modeled the leather triangle, removed from the vintage pants, remade into a bikini bottom. A large artist’s sketchpad lay on the heavy wooden worktable. Opened to a random page, and scrawled in black ink, it read the goddess is the she-wolf, she rules without mercy. Brouwer placed the artist’s pad in her satchel.

  At the bedside of Catherine’s private rooms, a fireplace of stone masonry loomed in the corner and fortified her bed. Kneeling at its open mouth, Brouwer ran her fingers along the black stone hollow. No fire had ever burned in the hearth. A large painting sat high on the stone chimney depicting a group of young women dancing in the forest, in slight, sheer white gowns, medieval, Slavic faeries frolicking in the forest at night. A white moon loomed massive above them. On the dresser, an ancient near-east fertility goddess sat obese and happy with engorged breasts, a feminist icon of some kind.

  Brouwer unlatched a door and stepped onto the balcony, to the nasal cries of common nighthawks in a clearing below. The massive log home sat snug in the forest against the perpetual mountains; its warm amber glowed from timber and stone. A powerful feeling of loss emptied through her. She wished this young woman had stayed home and not gone into the forest at night. Yet, she had gone, and Brouwer had to do right by her, somehow.

  Brouwer had called Penny and David Kinderdine at their primary family home near Chicago to notify them of their daughter’s murder, a duty the sheriff willingly allowed her.

  Penny Kinderdine pulled air from the phone, hyperventilating. She tried to scream but no sound came. A true scream did not seem available to her vocal range, to her lungs, to her genes, only gasping sounds came forth.