Dream of the Wolf

by Bradley McKenzie

  The Kinderines were wealthy even by Chicago standards. The family business, the Upper Missouri Mining Co. had floundered in punched out western Montana for much of a century. Catherine’s father, David, took over from her grandfather in 1983 and promptly struck gold west of Helena in the Big Belt Mountains. For such people as the Kinderdines, hopeless confusion would surely be new terrain. They learned of their daughter’s death from a twenty-something homicide detective standing in a corral in Wyoming wearing cowboy boots, speckled with fresh horseshit. David Kinderdine kept asking in the background of the call, what is this? . . . What is this? . . . What is this? growing in alarm and eventually into shouting, a housekeeper screaming in Spanish. Stiff in her corral, holding her state issued smartphone, wanting to promise justice but unable to offer anything beyond empty condolences, Brouwer stood in silence with her horses.

  Penny, the mother, took over. She breathed in and out long slow breathes, composing herself, deep lung breathes, many years of Yoga. Penny seemed to be willing herself to calm too effectively, verging on drowsiness. Brouwer pushed her for any information about who in Jackson Hole had pursued Catherine romantically. Penny could talk about her daughter, controlling her emotion, but could not offer male suitors for Brouwer to shake down.

  “She loved art, fashion, clothes. Her goal was to create a line of clothing. She was going to fashion school in the fall.”

  “You say she wanted more and more to be in the mountains. Was part of the reason for this the friends she had made up here?”

  “Those goddamned girls, I should never have let her be in the mountains without me. Goddamn it, David, I did not want Catherine with these girls.”

  “Penny, tell me about these women, her girlfriends, what are they like?”

  “They are rich kids, spoiled brats that Catherine adopted. She always made friends easily, she had a soft spot for underdogs, but in Jackson, it’s touristy and transient. There’s so much new money sloshing around, no one knows whom any of these people are. They could be from any element. All I can tell you about these women is that Cat spent time with them while at the cabin.”

  “You don’t seem fond of them, Penny.” The girls seemed more provocative now, she thought of images of the young women in the short dresses, their legs entwined and shining in the blue lights of a nightclub.

  “Not fond of them? They’re troubled girls. They snowboard but do little else. I never met the brown girl, Avina Zadeh, but I met the blonde thing enough to know that they were trouble. Helen Hearne is a problem child.” Penny said. “I’m sure she was on some type of drug when I first met her. She looked right through me like I didn’t exist, in my own home, no less. Something about her is very strange, something about all of them. Girls have to have their friends and I wanted to trust Catherine’s choices.” She paused. “And this is a different generation altogether, these girls. They float around with no concerns, no cares. But they were too unhinged for Catherine. Their parents give them money and let them go wherever they want. In the forest at night, I never imagined this.”

  Helen Hearne. Every detail brought her to the forefront. Nevertheless, there was an outlier that Brouwer hoped had some promise. In her desperation to identify any male to interview, she scoured Catherine’s social media until a man finally turned up. It was a long shot.

  “Penny, few if any men were around Catherine, but a boy named Decklin Siboda is her friend on social media and is the only male in photos with your daughter while in Jackson. Can you tell me anything about him?” The boy had been on the fringes of several photos in Catherine’s social profiles. He was the only male Brouwer had to go on.

  “I’ve never met him. She didn’t have a boyfriend. Was he with her last night?”

  “No, he spent the night with his mother at their estate north of here. He wasn’t in the forest with Catherine. His mother confirmed his story this morning.” Identifying men who had been pursuing Catherine yielded nothing of value. Beautiful, with every gift in the world — there must have been men trying to win her. “Can you think of any man, any man at all, who would go out to the woods to find her or pick her up if she wanted to leave a party?” Brouwer asked.

  “I don’t know of any men, Miss Brouwer, but you need to look at these women, her so-called girlfriends. Whatever happened to Cat involved them. You need to talk to Helen Hearne.”

  It had been this way through the previous day, and much of this morning. Everything pointed to the women, the girlfriends, to Helen Hearne, and nothing, no information, about any men.

  Before ending the call, Brouwer had asked for, and been given, the code to the Kinderdine estate security software. Now, Brouwer opened the application on David’s home computer, in the office down the hall from Catherine’s private rooms. There were images of Catherine leaving the home last night.

  The smooth gray digital image, a full twenty seconds long, replayed on a loop. Catherine Kinderdine strode stone steps into the driveway. An image from a second home security camera, located on the overhang adjoining the main house to the guesthouse, showed Catherine farther on her walk. A vehicle enters the driveway from the main road and comes toward the house. Headlights shine at the camera. It stops several hundred feet away. A statue of a saddled horse with no rider sits to the right of the driveway entrance. The bronze horse sniffs at the stone ground, after its lost cowboy. Catherine moves her body into the blinding light of the vehicle headlamps; it sits and waits for her to come to it. Lights on high, it’s a dark sport utility vehicle obscured in the darkness. A second set of lights come on along the truck roof. The blinding floodlights create halos around Catherine. She shields her eyes with her hands and passes the rider-less horse.

  Her navy overcoat and hiking shoes are familiar, but something else is around her shoulder. She’s wearing a backpack not found at the scene. Brouwer zoomed in on the video. The lights of the vehicle brighten and the daughter becomes a shadow lost in bright light.

  5.

  On a painting hanging over the sheriff’s window to the sunny street, cowhands on horseback chased mustangs through a boiling river.

  Sheriff Hargrove hesitated on the phone to his wife. Brouwer turned to give him privacy but he waved her to stay. He was apologizing to Yolanda in a general way. Her voice came through the receiver in Texan Spanish, but he spoke English back to her, the full charm of his Texas accent on display.

  She lingered among photographs and medals lining his office wall. The sheriff knelt with a rifle beside a black bear, long and thin, lit by camera flash in the dark. The animal had humanness, the lanky heaviness of a cadaver. Another framed photo hung beside it. A group of men in combat gear, arms across one another’s shoulders, M16s bungeed across chests, white toothy smiles and sunglasses, rows of machinery and endless desert behind them.

  A corner-bookcase displayed high school sports trophies and an antique pistol. She recognized it as a U.S. Cavalry Colt Dragoon. His Army Commendation Medal hung on a plaque, given to him for meritorious service in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nearing him while he spoke on the phone, he leaned back in his chair allowing her to view the medals closely. He wanted her to see them.

  Busying herself while his eyes followed her and his wife dressed him down on the phone, she studied the stars and stripes encased in glass on a shelf. The flag pointed upwards, reminding that In God We Trust. The flag would have draped over a casket, folded twelve times by an honor guard of six men at a soldier’s burial. The corners of the flag tucked in sharply like a tri-corner hat, a reminder this time of the revolutionary war that gave birth to the country. The sheriff hung up the phone.

  “The flag is my uncle Billy’s, Daddy’s oldest brother, gone before I was born. He was 4th Infantry Division, Vietnam. I was 4th infantry myself, Iraq, of course. I think you’d have gotten along with him Lane. He was one hell of a cowboy. He and Daddy loved their horses.”

  He leaned back in his chair, official and proud, as though in his office he had asylum from the reprimands of Yolanda.<
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  She said, “I went through Catherine’s smart-phone before I rushed it to the state crime lab. Two things leap out at me from her phone. She has no men in her life in any meaningful way and she received a text from someone searching for her near the time of her death.”

  “So you’re saying she was single, and that someone texted her?”

  “It’s much more than that. It’s strange. She didn’t interact with men. At least not while up here.”

  “Maybe she just liked to be alone. Is it difficult to meet decent men up here?” He squinted at her.

  “Yes,” she said. “There are no decent men up here.”

  The sheriff grinned broadly.

  No sign of men in Catherine Kinderdine’s life, no immediate interest in a man, and perhaps a general preference for solitude, put Brouwer in unlikely company with the young socialite from Chicago, a young woman entirely different from herself.

  The sheriff’s smile died as he asked, “So you sent her smartphone chip to the state DCI lab? In spite of the County leading the case?”

  “We need the identity of the unknown person who texted her before her death as quickly as possible. The message reads I am coming to find you. We need to know who sent it. The DCI will subpoena the cellular provider for the records of that number. When we get the identity of that person then we have someone to press and press hard.” She leaned toward him with her fingers locked together on his desk.

  Sheriff Hargrove turned to the window and she followed his eyes. A young mother with a baby swaddled in a wrap struggled to unlock a car.

  “I need you to run things by me Lane. Keep me in the loop. We need to cooperate.” He smiled warmly.

  The mother curled her baby into the car seat.

  Brouwer pulled the oversized binder of printed texts out of her leather satchel and placed it on the shining desk. She said,

  “Catherine’s phone holds endless messages between her and her girlfriends. They’re a tight knit clique. Mostly normal girl stuff, I think, but some of it maybe not. I’m not sure yet what I’m looking at but some of the messages between these women stand out as menacing, maybe even incriminating.”

  “Incriminating how?”

  “They were very close. Yet at times, they are abusive with one another. There may be some bullying, social pecking order stuff. It’s hard to determine the intention of language in text. There’s no tone in text, so no clear connotation. I need to decipher it before I confront them.”

  “Connotation, intention, what the hell were they saying to each other?”

  “Well, as an example, they trade harsh insults but I can’t tell yet whether the messages were meant to be ironic or menacing.”

  “Lay it on me, Brouwer. I’m all grown up.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear but it didn’t stay, “Her friend Helen Hearne could be pretty vicious with her. She calls Catherine ‘Slut . . . skank . . . robopussy.’ A lot of wicked language actually, it could be infighting or could be within the terms of how they interact with one another as friends.”

  He shook his head, “This Helen Hearne gal don’t sound very friendly to me. I can’t say I like the way she comes across. We’ve been asking about Catherine around town, folks don’t mention Cat without bringing up this Helen Hearne.”

  “It’s not clear what any of these texts mean, or if they mean anything at all. Many of the messages are in slang. Song lyrics, passages one might call poetry, nicknames for people and places, snowboarding terms. They use their own made up expressions for things. They speak their own dialect, their own code.”

  “Code?” he asked. “It’s so hard to follow that you think they have a code? We need CIA to decode girl’s texts,” he laughed.

  “Well, maybe it’s just hard to follow for me. Maybe I’m too old to get their references.” She smiled.

  “But you’re still young! You’re not much older than they are, you’re a damned spoiled millennial yourself,” he smiled his broad grin. “Give me some more examples.” He reclined in his leather swivel chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but he always seemed that way.

  “They have colorful names for people around town. They call one woman ‘Burnt Face’ and ‘the old crone.’ It has to do with an incident they had with her on the street.”

  The sheriff narrowed his eyes at her, “Burned face old crone? Well now, that’s not very nice. It sounds like they’re talking about old burned out Bernie, a local street drunk. It’s odd that they’d know Bernie. What else?”

  “Avina Zadeh is very close to Catherine and, with Helen Hearne, was at the party site near Catherine’s body. This Avina Zadeh had been sharing secrets with Catherine.”

  Catherine had told Avina Zadeh, I know your secret now. Again later, Catherine told Avina, your secret is safe. To me you are skyrocket. Later still, she messaged Skyrocket Not Afraid. They shared secrets and a nickname Skyrocket. The wildflower used as a sobriquet between Catherine and Avina. The same wildflower later decorated Catherine’s makeshift funeral bier. The girl described her friend’s death scene only weeks before the murder.

  “Well, I see why you need time to decipher it,” the sheriff said. “Nothing they say makes sense to me. These girls are over my head. They inhabit some other plane of existence. But I’d like to hear more examples of their code.”

  She wet her forefinger on her tongue and flipped through several sheets of messages, “I dunno. They seem to call marijuana sticky, but they may also call sex sticky. As in, I went to his hotel room and got sticky. The girl writing that may have had sex or just smoked pot.”

  The sheriff burst out laughing and stomped his boot heel on the hardwood. “Jesus Special Agent Brouwer, that’s terrific police work!” He smacked his desktop.

  Blood rushed to heat her cheeks. She tucked her hair behind her ears and raised her voice over his laughter. “There may be stuff on the phone of greater interest than her girlfriends.”

  “Well, I doubt that, frankly” he grinned. “What do you have from the Kinderdine house? Sorry I couldn’t join you.”

  “She left the house under her own power. Security footage has her getting into a vehicle that wouldn’t come down the driveway even though her parents were away. The plate is not visible so I sent the digital files to the state DCI lab for analysis. They may be able to scrub the recording for an ID on the vehicle, its plate or at least the make. But it’s a dark colored sport utility vehicle or four-by-four with lighting on its roof.”

  “You sent the phone chip to the state lab. Now you’re saying you also sent the footage from the Kinderdine mansion to the state lab in Sheridan?”

  “I feel that we have better resources for video and audio forensics in Sheridan.”

  Her heart picked up a bit, her voice sounded overconfident and brash to her own ears. She didn’t want to blow her role here. Honesty was best, she always thought, and so was plain speaking. Just try to be diplomatic, she told herself.

  “Okay. Well, I trust you, but I don’t speak for County Attorney Leeman. We need to be careful you and I. Pissing off Attorney Leeman is something you don’t ever wanna do. Leeman may look like a downtown yuppie but he’s as hard as a coffin nail. And the man detests Cheyenne. He hates state government more than he hates the federal one. I never knew that was possible, I never heard that one before, but it’s how the man is wired.”

  Sheriff Hargrove was being easy on her, supporting her even. She nodded understanding. “The last thing I want to do is offend the prosecutor. I’m here to bring Attorney Leeman evidence. All the state is offering is our superior resources. Leeman should welcome the use of them.”

  “You’d think that he would,” Sheriff Hargrove said. “The problem is that you’re involved as state police, as a DCI agent, that’s bad enough, and now you got the state crime lab involved. That allows the state’s attorney general and other state brass a path to try to gain control over this case. Before we know it, the state politicos will be sticking
their noses into this.”

  “The state police simply want to offer better resources for this case. We want to help.”

  “Yeah, I believe that you do Brouwer. The thing is that Catherine comes from the Kinderdine Clan, a gold and copper mining interest. Our victim was sole heiress to all that, and they even had granite quarries and cattle out here somewhere back in the day. The State’s attorney general and the piss ant Governor himself are gonna wanna show that they’re on top of this. They’ll want to impress the Kinderdine class of people. This will have media and profile if we don’t bring someone in and damned soon. If there’s media, there’s a governor not far away. I’m concerned about creating conflict, because Leeman won’t allow the state to grandstand in Jackson Hole. He’ll push back. You need to be careful.”

  “We’ll bring her killer in then, just as we would for anyone. That’ll put an end to any politics before they can begin.”

  Sheriff Hargrove handed her a photo across the desk. “To that end, Catherine was seen in public earlier on Friday,” he said. “She had lunch with her so-called girlfriends at the White Buffalo, a high end spot in Teton village.”

  A gray tinted photo of the girls around a table, a waiter showing a bottle of white wine for their approval, Catherine with Helen Hearne, Avina Zadeh, and a woman new to the group. The new girl, traditionally pretty, had long black hair; colorful tattoos spiraled down her forearms.

  “The manager knew them,” the sheriff said. “Avina Zadeh works there and they eat out and go for drinks a lot. I mean a lot. I know the newcomer, the tattooed girl. Her name is Lara Mazer. They’re a fast crowd. Deputies are tracing Catherine’s steps that day to see who all she came across, if anyone was following her around, and if she had a stalker.”

  “I believe the unknown number that texted her last night may be a stalker,” Brouwer said.