Dream of the Wolf

by Bradley McKenzie

  “You’ve done a lot of work in her phone, on her girlfriends. They were with her leading to her death.” He tapped the photo of the group of girls in the White Buffalo Café. “You can agree these women are of interest.”

  “I agree that they’re interesting,” she said.

  “I’m starting to like this woman for this.”

  “Who?”

  “Helen Hearne,” he said flatly. “She comes from serious money out West. Her mother is a senior exec at Boeing and her old man made some engineering software that sold big in China. They’re Seattle Aristocrats and their daughter runs wild. The alarming texts she sent Catherine don’t surprise me. I called Helen Hearne yesterday afternoon while you called Penny Carmichael. I let her know that her best friend in the world is dead and I didn’t like her reaction.”

  Brouwer adjusted herself in the leather chair and waited for him to continue and so he did. “The problem with her reaction was that she didn’t have one. She seemed to know that Cat, as she calls her, was dead. She shouldn’t know that yet. She seemed annoyed, as if I were bothering her. Well, I’m about to bother her proper. She knows something. I told her not to leave the county. She’s holed up in her suite by the ski resort.”

  Again, Helen Hearne floated to the center of this. Brouwer placed her hands on his desk and said,

  “Penny Carmichael believes Helen is responsible for this. She said so outright. But I want to gather more information and evidence before we confront Helen. We need physical evidence to tell us what happened to Catherine before we like anybody for anything.”

  “Evidence is something we are in terribly low supply of,” he said.

  Brouwer nodded in agreement. “I hope the coroner can explain the nature of her death. We depend on the county Coroner doing his job properly.”

  The sheriff grinned. “Why don’t you like Coroner Matheson? Did he give you his Jesus spiel?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I like. He’s not a forensic pathologist. He’s a retired family doctor. Matheson is not qualified for this job.”

  “Not qualified for the job? Don’t be afraid to give your opinion Lane. You’re not going to like what he has to say. But it’s the preliminary finding of an autopsy and he’s the coroner, so you’ll have to live with it.”

  “Should I be concerned?”

  “Matheson says there’s no vaginal trauma consistent with sexual assault.” He waited for her reaction. When she provided none, he continued. “I’m quoting the Coroner verbatim when I say that there’s an agent in the girl’s womanhood that may be a lubricant or a spermicidal, likely from pre-application to a condom. We need more time to confirm that. But no semen has been retrieved. If a sex act took place it appears to have been consensual. We’re not investigating this as a sex crime.”

  “Did he really write ‘womanhood’? Did he issue a cause and manner of death or not?”

  “The girl died by asphyxiation. Strangulation by hand, as there’s no indication of a ligature. We could’ve told him that. There won’t be full toxicology until tomorrow at the earliest to determine if she had drugs or alcohol in her system, or other agents of interest.”

  He handed her the Coroner’s report and she read it quickly, it was two pages long. The time of death was recent to the victim’s discovery, as she was without rigor mortis and was undisturbed by ravens. Coroner Matheson had not taken an x-ray on her neck, to indicate whether she had a broken hyoid bone, which would confirm force had been applied with the intent to kill. There was no new information.

  “And, as you say, her phone records show she was at the campfire site, at the party with her girlfriends. She died on the ridge where we found her,” he said.

  “Matheson says outright that no sex assault took place. That’s a mistake.”

  “She didn’t put up a fight, so the sex was consensual. This is not a rape. There was no foreign DNA found beneath her fingernails and no foreign fibers or fluids on her person. We couldn’t prove it was a sex crime even if it were.”

  Brouwer said, “The Coroner is concluding that her lack of a fight is indicative of consent. He is jumping to a dangerous conclusion.”

  “Coroner Matheson has ruled that this was not a sexual assault by a male perpetrator. It allows that a woman killed her. The perpetrator may indeed be female, in fact.”

  “There’s no evidence that there was sexual assault, but there’s no evidence that there wasn’t one either. As for the sex act being consensual, she may have believed that by submitting to it, she’d live. That’s rape. She may have been too afraid to fight. She was in the forest at night. The assailant may have had a weapon he didn’t use on her. He may have raped her posthumously.”

  He waited for her to continue and so she did.

  “Matheson’s preliminary findings will be laughed out of court by any expert the defense calls. We need to rectify this immediately Sheriff.”

  “Let me guess how we do that,” he said.

  “I need to send Catherine’s remains to the state medical examiner in Sheridan right now.”

  The room sat still. Her voice had risen, and she breathed through her nose. At commanding him, the pang of regret settled through her. The sheriff let the fact of her overbearingness deepen with the silence, and the clock across from his desk, a wood plaque overborne by a large Cutthroat the sheriff himself reeled out of Yellowstone River, ticked away over their heads.

  Finally, he grinned. “That senile old bastard Matheson, it’s a miracle he didn’t quote scripture in his damn autopsy report. I’ll release Catherine to your custody. Having contradictory positions put forward by two different doctors would be a hay day for the defense, so I’ll squash his report before he issues his findings. Send the body to your State medical examiner in Sheridan.”

  “Okay, thank you. If there’s trace evidence on Catherine they’ll find it.”

  “You always get what you want, don’t you?”

  “Eventually, yes, I do” she said.

  6.

  Days before her death, Catherine had deleted a short video from her phone. The state crime lab in Sheridan recovered the hidden recording and sent it to Agent Brouwer immediately.

  The video showed young people at a party, illuminated by the light of the phone and by lanterns on the walls of a house. A deep drubbing bass sound and white noise vibrated under the din of the crowd. Youthful faces were briefly lit as men and women wound through one another. Wearing costumes, as though at a carnival or masked ball, many donned wooden festival masks. Catherine Kinderdine briefly entered the frame and reached toward the camera for her phone, but a white hand, with finely polished nails, took her by the wrist and pulled her into the throng.

  On the stairs, youths in top hats, faces painted as day of the dead skulls, pushed their way down the crowded stairs. A gangly figure in a German trench coat and white Guy Fawkes mask leered over the girls and left the frame. Catherine ascended the narrow staircase. An African American woman, twenty years old maybe, weaved down the stairs through partygoers, a white skull painted on her cheeks, makeup ran from her eye sockets.

  Young women crowded the top of the stairs, at a door. Music pounded loud and incomprehensible, voices shrieked and deep bass pulsated. A blonde woman, with her back to the camera, stood next to Catherine. A door opened and the girls entered. A figure stood on a bed, a wooden caricature covered its face, and a long protruding tongue dangled from a gaping mouth and swayed as the figure moved. A silk robe opened at his chest and he waved the girls to the bed, they pushed forward into the room, and the mask looked to the camera. He was a fairy tale wolf.

  The video was less than a minute long, but it unsettled Brouwer. That an intelligent and independent young woman would enter that room with a man posing as a wolf disarrayed her image of Catherine. Catherine, in her bed of wildflowers, drifted in and out of her vision as she lay in her loft, hoping to get sleep before the long day ahead. Impatience yearned in her. She badly needed to interview the girlfriends, but first wanted to
know Catherine on her own, to gain a sense of who she truly was, before the girls could warp Catherine’s memory into what they wanted her to see. People close to her would muddle her. It would not be easy to define Catherine.

  Brouwer pulled the Americana quilt off her cotton hospital pants and tank top, now moist with sweat, and opened her bedroom window to the night’s limpid coolness. There was movement at her hay shelter. Tall lupine flowers, now in bloom, swayed in the wind that pressed valley floor at night. The flowers and brushes scratched the side of the barn where Duchess and the stallion stood asleep. A gate creaked on the far side of her corral.

  Her fox began its call. Gargling chatter at first like that of a squirrel rose into the sharp, haunting cries of the small red fringe dog. High pitched and nonsensical babbling fluttered across the night. Duchess shuffled in her stall and the young stallion snorted, pawing straw.

  Walking out into the cool night air, Brouwer wound around thick sagebrush, rough against her thin cotton bottoms, and then down the slope behind her cabin. Above the rustling creek in the cottonwoods, rose the finely-tuned hum of mosquitoes. Rifle targets in the shape of men, masked in balaclavas, threatened from a side hill. Her routine rifle and pistol practice had ripped the targets apart. Though barely summer and deep into night, the thin grass was dry. In the cottonwoods, the ground lit by moonlight, tiny footprints and scat droppings decorated the creeks’ edge. The fox was making its way against the odds of the valley, the long odds of life in wolf country. In the woods by the quiet stream, she anticipated more of her little friend’s chirpings. A gray wolf began to howl instead, over the trees, his claim to the forest echoed on the mountainside.

  At the rustling creek, she looked to the stars, clearing her mind of thoughts that crowded the edges. Her cottons pyjamas pants hung low on her hip bones. The light breeze cooled the sweat on her chest and neck. The girlfriends, Helen and Avina. They will know, if perhaps only intuitively, who killed their friend. Catherine’s death was about women somehow, not men. She felt confused by this and tried again to clear her mind.

  Her mobile phone began to vibrate low in her pocket and she felt very tired.

  Sheriff Hargrove jarred her, his voice deep and loud, “We have a second body Lane, a second woman.”

  “What?”

  “The witness is in a camper van in a secluded site, deputies are with her. She’s in a panic. She doesn’t know the area, I’m on my way there now. You’ll see my truck lights as you head north from your place. Look, Lane, this woman from Salt Lake, she saw someone carrying a dead woman on a trail road in the wilderness.”

  7.

  A white female body lay on a hillside over a slender trail road. The trail road snaked below the woman, and then climbed sharply, weaving around interlinking mountainsides quilled with pine.

  Sheriff Hargrove stood tall and still on the road. His three quarter ton diesel truck sat at an angle blocking the road from the east, red and blues slowly turning in the dawn. Brouwer’s Cherokee faced unlikely traffic to the west. The lights of Jackson lay in the gray below.

  He watched Brouwer pick her way toward him, washing the beam of her flashlight over the dirt. She dropped a plastic marker along the grassy shoulder. She called out that the tire track, off road grip, was deep enough for a plaster casting.

  The sheriff scanned the road. He told Deputy Ridge to search the ditch then made his way to the base of the side hill and stood below the woman. Large gray wolf tracks were visible in the light dust, the paw prints of a pup followed the deep padding of a mother wolf. The wolf and its offspring had crossed before dawn, leaving the girl undisturbed. Perhaps they were silent witnesses, he thought, to meaningless carnage only a man would wreak.

  “You recognize the girl, Sheriff?” Deputy Ridge called.

  “I do,” Sheriff Hargrove replied. He ambled into the grassy ditch at the base of the hill, his hands in the pockets of his chore jacket. “It’s Lara Mazer,” he said. “I can see its Lara from here.”

  This past Christmas season, when they patrolled heavily for impaired driving, Lara Mazer got herself pulled over near town limits. Deputies took her into County lock up on drunken driving charges. Her stark beauty captured the attention of the young deputies at the County that night. They called her arrest on radio as a “Police Signal 10,” a code within a code that a woman worth checking out was in custody. A deputy frisked her down during his coffee break, another peered in the window of the holding cell while she changed into a county jumper.

  Lara Mazer entered the Idaho system at 16 as a runaway hitchhiking west from a Greyhound station. She thumbed rides during daylight when it was safer, and spent what money she had for buses through the night, when it was not safe at all. She was determined to get to Portland, and made it as far as the panhandle. The Idaho Patrolman who picked her up noted she was truant from school for several days but hadn’t been reported missing and was never sought after. Later, while still a minor, she was booked for possession of a controlled substance, marijuana. That same year, she filed sexual assault charges against her mother’s boyfriend, when the charge met resistance, she didn’t press. She made accusations that she was the victim of a series of sexual assaults dating back into her early teens, originally recorded in lengthy juvenile case files at Idaho Social Services. Maybe she was wary of the system, she let the charges die on the vine.

  Nothing further in Lara Mazer’s file until her little red car slid into ploughed snow this past December in Wyoming. Sheriff Hargrove had taken the time to watch the cruiser’s dash camera footage. The young deputy made her do the road side sobriety test, a town Christmas decoration, a stocking overflowing with presents, hung from the street lamp as she walked the line. Two older women, stoned and drunk, sang along with hard rock in the back seat of her rusting hatchback. Snow fell in the blue and red lights. Lara mocked the young deputy by goose-stepping like a fascist, stamping her feet onto the roadside, as her friends laughed hysterically in the back seat.

  She went into lockup on a slow night that Christmas, bored and amused by her own arrest.

  “You shouldn’t be able to have your driver’s license taken away in a town with no public transit. Y’all are removing the only way people have to get to work. This is all part of the war on the poor.” She feigned interest in the facility like a tourist at a struggling local museum, the scent of floral perfume on her neck, Bavarian liquor on her lips.

  “We arrest rich drunk drivers too, so we’re at war with everybody,” Sheriff Hargrove said, setting a heavy wool blanket and bedroll beside her on a cot in the women’s drunk tank.

  “What do y’all do all night, stand around and stare at prisoners?”

  Sitting at a desk near the cell, normally used for processing, the sheriff would talk to her as long as she would oblige him.

  “Normally, our valued guests are not worth staring at,” he said.

  A middle aged woman lay flat on her back on white cement, her head lolled in the indent of the drain in the floor. Thick matted hair seeped into the drain, craggy scars on her cheek glistened in fluorescent light.

  “Oh yeah, I have a cellmate. I like slumber parties,” Lara said.

  “Don’t worry about that old girl, that’s just burned out Bernie. She won’t hurt you.”

  “She looks pretty stationary.”

  “You’d be surprised. Old Bernie has outrun and outfought my deputies at least twice that they’re willing to admit.”

  The woman lay downright still. The sheriff said, “Bernie never hurts anyone unless they hurt her first, but like I said, we don’t get many clients like you at our humble accommodations.”

  “Oh, now I get to ask, what do you mean by ‘like me’?” Lara pretended to chew her nails, in mock anticipation.

  “Well, I heard about your comedy routine during the sobriety test. Only the most dedicated comedian goes to jail to get a laugh.”

  Lara lay down on the cot as if to hide her smile. The cot was a concrete slab protruding from the w
all, and her bent knees pointed at the ceiling. She said, “The cop posed down so hard he deserves a brownie badge. Dude was ripe for parody.”

  “I hear you,” the sheriff smiled. “There’s nothing worse than a young cop when he’s bored. But I’m not convinced this is his fault. You’ve had too good a time partying tonight to take your Geo Metro out tobogganing. In fact, I had a look at her and I’m not sure she’s road worthy. I think maybe she needs to be retired for good.”

  “How dare you speak ill of the USS Lindsay Lohan, I once drove her all night through the mountains in a blizzard.”

  “Now you’re scaring me. Lindsay’s not enough car for these winters,” he said.

  “She’s maybe almost killed me twice or three times.”

  They both smiled.

  “I think you should ask for your one hundred dollars back,” the sheriff said.

  “Are prison guards allowed to flirt with females in captivity?” She hiccupped to the roof.

  “I’m not a guard. I’m the sheriff of this County, and you’re not a wild animal in captivity. But no, we’re definitely not allowed to flirt with anyone.”

  “Well, Mr. Sheriff of the entire County,” Lara said. “I think you picked the wrong profession then. As for me not being a wild animal, maybe you oughtta let your little cop bros know that.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the sheriff, looking back toward the administration desk. There was no one there, and no one manned the charge desk. The deputies had made themselves scarce when he arrived.

  “Well, you don’t seem half bad, but if you’re the boss of this place, then you should know, that your young bucks stand around gawking at folks like this place is a damned zoo. It’s a hostile feeling. Me and this gal, Bernie, we may have found ourselves here tonight but we’re still women, and we deserve sanctuary, you don’t know what happened to us that brought us here.” Her voice caught with emotion and she stopped short. She stared at the tiled ceiling.