Dream of the Wolf

by Bradley McKenzie

  Sheriff Hargrove was troubled by her remarks. By how she was treated by his men, but didn’t pursue the subject, the time wasn’t right for that. He wanted a jocular culture at the county, but within professional parameters. When the moment arose, he’d offer guidance to his men about their behavior. Shutting off the desk lamp, he left her alone. In the morning, once she’d slept it off, he dropped the charges. She’d said she needed to drive because she waitressed every night, which was true. And he felt the need to make recompense. Before he handed back her licence, Lara Mazer pinkie swore she’d never drink and drive again. From her little red rusting hatchback, she smiled at him, thanked him for being cool. He grinned. “Stay out of trouble, or I’ll bust your ass.” She only smiled wider. But he checked in on her from time to time, and she was doing fine.

  Now he stood in a ditch below her body, naked and exposed on a hill. The lights of the police vehicles turned like an alarm, waking up the town, as more and more lights of Jackson came on in the valley below. The top of the embankment was a plateau. Lara Mazer lay at its edge, vertical on the hill’s incline. A large boulder sat a yard away, an overlook for tourists to park and survey Teton village and south Jackson on the flat bottomlands.

  Black haired, beautiful Lara, laid on display, disrobed and no effects with her. Made paler in the cool of dawn, her ghostlike skin contrasted her deeply black hair. Tattoos of birds decorated her shoulders, down to slender wrists. A peacock with feathers of blue, green, and silver wrapped her arm. On her right bicep, stencilled in plain black, an eagle spread its talons down to her forearm. Toward her collarbone, branches of a tree, with two blackbirds, crows sitting. In the view from the highway, the girl was floating in the air like her totem birds; she appeared as though upright, suspended, a dark angel descending into the forest from a night’s flight.

  Sheriff Hargrove followed Brouwer on a circuitous route to Lara’s remains. Brouwer knelt into the steep incline and captured Lara’s image. The camera flash reflected a stud in an ear lobe, and a fake diamond in her nose sparkled. Her eyes were open. There was no damage to her delicate features, no violence, no struggle, no destruction, her life gone. A cottonwood tree opened its arms to the valley above her and the massive boulder sat to her side. A plaque had been set in the boulder’s granite for tourists to learn about the settlement of Jackson Hole; the valley was a trading junction where white frontiersmen and mountain tribes met to do commerce. There was a manicured walking trail from a highway rest stop up to the boulder on the hill.

  The witness was a would-be tourist, of a kind. She’d fled a bad domestic scene in Salt Lake, only to come across someone carrying a woman down a road in the middle of the night and, in the bright of spotlights, up a hill to a view of the valley below. The killer was not afraid, but the witness was. She’d plunged into brambles, snapping twigs, lost in the mountains at night, falling with her nose bloodied, the commotion alerting the killer with its prey.

  What further inhumanity awaited Lara had the act not been disrupted by the witness? He wondered but the thought soon faded. He could’ve prevented this. He’d known from the White Buffalo Café security camera that Lara had been with Catherine Kinderdine and Helen Hearne only a day ago. He should’ve had the group of girlfriends placed under surveillance. He’d felt he didn’t have the men for it. Instead, he simply told Helen Hearne to stay put, but had no idea whether she had or not. Now Lara was dead and they’d lost a day on Catherine. The deep familiar guilt and shame were forever growing part of him. The familiar dread ached in his chest.

  Brouwer was speaking to him. He breathed in deeply; the air was thin and gray in his lungs. Even the dawn is dry and bleak up here.

  Brouwer broke into his thoughts. “He had something in mind for her that was interrupted by our witness, but even still, he took his time,” she said. “She was carried here, why, to be put on a side hill? I think her destination was the cottonwood, or the boulder, where she’d be more fully on display, but the killer ran out of time. This has a perversion beyond domestic assault, beyond a jealous boyfriend. The killer wanted to display her.”

  “Still,” Sheriff Hargrove said. “You have to admit, from below, she does look suspended in midair. From out on the highway she looks like she’s falling from the sky. This is an exhibition of sorts, maybe a makeshift one.”

  Brouwer stood at the edge of the plateau. “The witness interruption makes it hard to figure. This ledge is sheer on the other side, if he’d made it another ten feet and dropped her, she’d be down in some rocks and poplar and hard to find.”

  Catherine Kinderdine was carried to a cliff but left on its edge, similar to this scene. But Catherine was killed there. Lara had been taken somewhere first and then brought here for something that didn’t fully take place. The challenge this presented was only growing.

  “It could be a simple body dump gone wrong,” he said. “When they heard the witness they fled, leaving her where she lay.”

  The gray bottomlands were coming alive with the dawning lights of towns. He brushed aside the sensation that he had stood here before, with Lara’s alabaster body in the daybreak, her black hair winding into the brittle grasses. He shook his head but said nothing.

  Agent Brouwer spoke, forcefully as always, somehow enthused, maybe always enthused; her whole life spent shining an apple for some weary teacher, raring to run some make-believe race. She said, “There’s a witness but the killer takes his time, feeling powerful, he lingered, taking enough time to display her, even if perhaps an improvised display and not as he planned.”

  “If someone wanted to kill young women and throw us off their scent,” the sheriff said, “they may stage the body dump like a sexual predator was on the prowl. Catherine was not disrobed the way Lara is. These body sites are different because they’re not sure how a sexually compelled killer would go about it. They don’t have the compulsion, so they’re missing the pattern. They want us to think it’s a sex killing, that a man is hunting the valley. They’d be smart to conjure that, they’d be sharp.”

  The feint lights of early traffic had begun to enter the valley below.

  “The witness saw a figure with Lara here, on the road,” Brouwer pointed. “Yet he climbed with Lara anyway. If this were a body drop, with the intent of staging it to appear like a pathological serial killer, then it was someone damned cold blooded. He was able to go through with it while a witness screams in the trees. That takes some serious nerve. That indicates to me it is someone who has killed before and had something specific in mind, a compulsion to fulfill. An imposter would have panicked and fled. I don’t feel that this is a staged scene, or a body dump, Sheriff. It’s too public, too brazen to be done for a fully practical motivation. A very powerful compulsion drove this behavior.”

  Brouwer went on about the pathology alive here, about the scene being a profile of the killer. She said something about the killer humiliating Lara, because he felt humiliated by Lara. Lara’s personal power, her female strength, was the threat that needed destroyed. She was talking about a man with an infantilized sense of male selfhood.

  Maybe and maybe not, he thought.

  Sheriff Hargrove eyed the highway. More traffic entered the rim of mountains surrounding Jackson. Brouwer has a right to lose herself in this, he thought. Understandable that she become lost in the spectacular nature of such a thing. She wants to find its deep meaning so it can have a meaning. She is utterly dedicated and fully trained as a homicide detective, yet lives in a place so wealthy and safe that, until this weekend, had never produced a body for her. Brouwer is whip smart and outworks three men, he thought, but she’s as green as the hay she feeds her horses. She believes this has to be done by some extraordinary hatred of women, that some sadistic beast must be responsible. She wants this to be uncommon.

  In their year together in Jackson, they hadn’t caught a body. In his past life, he had seen bodies enough for both of them.

  “Sure,” he said. Maybe Brouwer was right. Everyone was suppose
d to see Lara exposed, to look at her like this, the killer enthralled by her humiliation, titillated by her destruction. On the other hand, maybe someone simply needed rid of her.

  He drifted down the slope toward his truck.

  “This is out of control, Sheriff.” Brouwer called down to him from up the bank, boundless energy in her small voice. “Catherine was the first murder here in many years and now it’s two in a weekend.” She hesitated, unsure of what to say as he left her there. “This isn’t going right,” she said, trying to find words to keep him with her.

  “No,” Sheriff Hargrove said. “It’s not going right at all.”

  8.

  The boardroom was lined with sheriff’s deputies. They jostled for position along the wall, with faces close to one another, and foam cups in hand. Their rushed voices filled the room.

  Police from other agencies sat in the middle, around the boardroom table. Beside Officer Newberry of the Jackson Police, were Ray Stone, of the Wind River tribal police and a National Park Ranger Commander named Hager, down from Yellowstone that morning. Off the phone from a call to her headquarters, Brouwer entered the room and took a chair held open for her by Ray Stone.

  The eyes of sheriff’s deputies settled on the soft cotton shirt that clung to Brouwer’s body, which was still hot from the work of the morning. A faint blush burned her cheeks as she opened her notes and reviewed her comments.

  Sunlight spliced through the blinds and streaked Sheriff Hargrove with shadows at the front of the room. The group was restless, so Brouwer signalled for the sheriff to begin. He did. “Within a timeframe of less than twenty hours, we’ve recovered the bodies of two female homicide victims, both within a year of the same age. The two women were acquainted.”

  The sheriff pressed a button on the laptop and the stencil outline of a face projected onto the wall. A ripple of laughter rose along the walls of the room. The sketch was useless.

  “Although we have a witness, unfortunately, she cannot give clarity around facial features, or physical appearance in general,” the sheriff said. “She couldn’t say with confidence whether it was a man or a woman that carried Lara down the road.”

  A young deputy said, “We do know it’s a human being though right?” to more laughter.

  “Be quiet,” said the sheriff. There was silence.

  The sheriff paused, lowered his head in thought and rested a hand on his Colt .45 ACP pistol. A sliver of light from the window caught his badge and deputies shielded their eyes from the glare. He said, “The Kinderdine woman came from privilege on a level most folks can’t comprehend. The public will be enamored of this. We need to close this out right away, before this gets altogether out of hand. This investigation falls under county leadership, but the State Division of Criminal Investigation is here in the person of Agent Brouwer. She can handle anything that crosses jurisdictions and will rank as the lead investigator.”

  Deputy Ridge raised his hand and said, “Sheriff, these killings are similar in detail, young women strangled and left in the forest at night. Are we looking for a serial killer, or are we looking at two different crimes, independent of one another?”

  “It’s too early to say. There are some similarities, but an awful lot of differences, between Catherine’s meadow and Lara’s hill. The witness interruption brings into question what the killer truly intended for Lara. County crime scene technicians are processing everything from those sites and that takes time. But we’ve recovered very little physical evidence from Catherine’s meadow and that’s a troubling concern,” the sheriff said.

  “We do know one thing,” said a Deputy from along the wall.

  “What’s that?” asked the sheriff.

  “Whoever’s doing this has amazing taste.”

  The Deputies erupted into shocked laughter.

  Sheriff Hargrove turned his back to face the outlined image of the killer on the overhead screen. He placed both hands on his waist above his pistol and badge, and let guffawing and nervous energy ripple through his county staff along the wall.

  “I see my own deputies,” the sheriff said finally, with his back to them, “and I’m afraid I’ve been leading you down the wrong path as police.” The room went deathly silent. The senior police from other agencies put their heads down instinctively, as though forced to church and a prayer was coming.

  Sheriff Hargrove faced his men along the wall. “Ya’ll want to crack wise, like you’re hard-as-nails homicide men. You clown around as if you’ve seen it all, well let me tell ya’ll, you haven’t seen a goddamned thing. Your crudeness don’t hide your fear neither, not to me it don’t.”

  The room was still. The Park Ranger made a motion to hold his coffee cup but curled his fingers back instead.

  The sheriff stood in the light and shadow. “Look out that window; does this look like Chicago to you? Where detectives are mired in so much meaningless cruelty, they no longer feel empathy at an innocent's death? No? I didn’t think so, not by a damned sight. Never toy with such a sacrifice son; it was made by others, not by you. You haven’t earned the right to survive on gallows humor; because you’ve never sold your soul, just to see the gallows at work. You boys are overdue for a terrible lesson.”

  The sheriff leaned back and craned his powerful neck. He wiped the sides of his mouth with his fingers and continued,

  “Lara Mazer was a citizen of the Town of Jackson and you will pursue her attacker until you fucking drop. Catherine Kinderdine’s face will be on every cable news channel in America within one day. You can tell me then if you find this deal funny. You will interview every single person in this goddamned town. You will rest, when I tell you to rest, and if you ever disrespect a victim in this county again, I will end your policing career on the spot. Special Agent Brouwer; the floor is yours.”

  Brouwer stood. The faces of the deputies were blank and colorless. The room was silent as if void of air. She focused on a point above their heads and started. “Thank you Sheriff. It’s likely that these murders are related but we can’t confirm that with real certainty at this point. Both involve similar, if not the same, off road vehicle. We are, as of this moment, patrolling for an off-road vehicle with lights along its roof. The sheriff and I are set to interrogate people of interest.”

  Sheriff Hargrove pressed a button on the laptop and the PowerPoint slide changed on the wall. In the photo, the two victims glow, holding one another on a sofa in the darkness of a lounge. Catherine sat on Lara’s knees, and lay back on her chest, posing.

  “This is a photo from their social networks,” Brouwer said. “Lara Mazer and Catherine Kinderdine came from very different walks-of-life, different family backgrounds, if you want, but they were friends while in Wyoming. In this photo, they are together in a hotel bar near town square.”

  Brouwer caught the eyes of Investigator Ray Stone, of the Indian Reservation police, and his eyes smiled at her, as they always did. Ray Stone was always light hearted, given what he had seen in his long career working homicide, she was unsure how.

  Her only major investigation had been in support of Ray Stone on Wind River Indian Reservation. Stone had allowed her full access to his resources, his people and offices, and had provided her the formal invitation necessary for her to enter tribal lands. Her presence on Wind River was allowed only under sanction by the tribal authorities, and Ray Stone made sure she was welcomed. He spoke Arapaho and his native Shoshone, and was an authority on homicide investigations statewide, having worked his home Reservation for decades. She felt a secret relief. Ray Stone was an ally and she could count on him. As for the rest of the police there that afternoon, the only thing she knew was that they had total loyalty to Sheriff Hargrove, and they were officially scared shitless.

  She was also grateful that her work through the afternoon had broken their first lead. Finally. She nodded to Sheriff Hargrove and he advanced the slide for her again, and deputies began to murmur at the fleshy face now looming on the wall.

  A deputy said, �
�That’s the sorry bastard that throttled a high schooler when I started here. Our county paramedics saved her life.”

  She interrupted the clamor and the room quieted. “We have a lead that Catherine Kinderdine may have been meeting her assailant. Someone had texted the statement I am Coming to Find You, to Catherine leading up to her death. Someone was pursuing her that she ignored and perhaps insulted. We have potentially identified who that man is. We are just waiting for confirmation from the cellular provider.”

  The slide advanced to a mug shot of the man on the wall. “You need no introduction to Nathan Petrie,” she said. Deputies murmured in hushed voices.

  Agent Brouwer had searched the sex offender database for anyone who had recently returned to the area and whose crimes may eventuate to sexual assault involving strangulation. She found pay dirt with Nathan Petrie.

  She spoke over the excited chatter of the room. “This next slide is closed circuit footage of Catherine Kinderdine leaving brunch at the White Buffalo Cafe. She was not alone in the parking lot.”

  Nathan Petrie is wearing shorts and a cap. In the grainy image, he passes Catherine Kinderdine on her way out of the Café on Friday; Lara Mazer had been at the very same brunch.

  Brouwer said, “Nathan Petrie has only recently been released from the pen at Rawlins. Jackson Police are monitoring him at his trailer as we speak. He has priors for attempted sex assault where he choked a young woman unconscious. Catherine and Lara were in his nearby presence, while they were together, the morning of Catherine’s murder.”

  Brouwer positioned the cursor over the timer and the video moved back and forth at the moment where Nathan Petrie crossed paths with Catherine Kinderdine. Nathan Petrie strolled across the parking lot; Catherine had her head down in her phone, her youthful body sashayed on scorched asphalt.

  9.

  Four motorcycles rested at the Nite Ride Saloon. The bar was a single story of cracked stucco squatting amongst ramshackle buildings off an exit to the 189. Custom outlaw motorcycles sat low with sun glinting on chrome pipes. Long forks extended to thin front wheels to cut the highway, and fat tires in the back to sit riders low on slung saddles. Each chopper the handcrafted nature of a trusted weapon.