“Avina Zadeh?”
Unlike Helen, the smaller girl stayed clear of him, choosing to curl up on a modern style leather chair with her knees in front of her, her forearms locked around her shins, hugging herself.
Helen positioned herself between him and the girl on the chair. She bathed in the light of sun that washed the white walled condominium with more whiteness and reflected the diamonds in her ears. She floated in light, a white-hot specter.
“Maybe I’ll have that water after all.”
Helen took a foreign looking mineral water from a stainless steel refrigerator and handed it to him. He kept the granite island between him and her. She wore tight black synthetic yoga pants, her legs bare down from her mid calves, and she moved with total ease on the balls of her feet. She was lissome but physical enough. A lifetime of dance gave her body a wired thinness and shrouded power.
Stepping away from Helen to see the girl behind her, he said, “Avina Zadeh is a nice name. Is it Persian?”
“How is her ethnicity germane?” Helen said.
“Oh, it’s not really,” said the sheriff. “We’re just getting to know one another. Do you speak Farsi?”
“Uh, hello, she’s American. Do you speak Gaelic or Dutch or whatever your ancestors were?” Helen said.
“Nope, sure don’t. I do speak Texan though, but never in polite company.”
The women stared at him blankly.
“It’s inappropriate for police to ask about cultural backgrounds don’t you think? What difference could it possibly make? It’s very intimidating.” Helen said.
“Oh it sure doesn’t make any difference.” He realized he was moving around the granite island subconsciously. Helen was following his movements, mirroring him. She had been coming toward him as he moved away and now they were face to face across the stone top.
“You girls haven’t had a good weekend have you?” he said.
“You girls have not had a good weekend,” Helen echoed. “Our best friend is dead and Lara was murdered. What a helpful insight. We have not had a good weekend.” Helen stood tall and straight, her shoulders back, her hands on the granite, her face blank.
He took a swig from the mineral water and appraised the dark red glassware of the bottle. It tasted like a public swimming pool. Helen uses offense as her natural defense mechanism. She has prepared herself to combat a hostile interview. She believes I’ll accuse her of murder. Not a proper reaction to a friend’s death, he thought.
“He’s here to help us,” Avina Zadeh said quietly from the leather and chrome chair. A massive painting of violent crimson slices on white canvass loomed large above her. She hugged her knees closer to her chest.
“Now that’s a fact,” Sheriff Hargrove said. “I want you to take me through the night that Catherine went missing from your campsite. Anything at all you can tell me. What you saw that night, what you heard. We need to know it all.”
As they talked, he studied the darker girl huddled in a defensive ball. She’d been crying, large black eyes swollen and rimmed with dark shadow. She reminded him of her, of the woman. Fear crowded in his mind like shadows growing as the sun descends. He hooked his thumbs below his utility belt into the back pockets of his jeans to hide his hands, in case they trembled.
True, the women did not look the same, but they reached into him in the same way, despite the passage of time that he’d come to depend on. Her reemergence confused him. The girl on the leather chair had an aristocratic nose, full lips and of course, the lightly browned skin, eggshell white painted over something dark and veiled. She is different from the other, he told himself, and he needed to keep in that way, to hold them apart. He needed to keep her from becoming as the other, from the two women becoming one. It was the strangeness of this girl, her unlikeness, which kept drawing the other girl into his mind. Avina Zadeh sat doll-like on the seat.
“Tell me about Catherine,” he said.
The lithe, blonde creature spoke, he did not know for how long. Everything she said had a power to it, aggression, as though he were under suspicion. His colleagues in special operations could use this blonde in advanced interrogations. She would scare the hell out of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He grinned to himself.
“You’re smiling,” Helen announced. “Of course you are, as the end of my best friend’s life is amusing.”
“Excuse me. Please continue ma’am.”
Avina Zadeh fidgeted on the leather chair beneath the hideous painting that cost a west coast mommy too much money. She’s not right with all this, she has a secret and her struggle to hide has washed all over her. I know your secret, Catherine had said to Avina. Sheriff Hargrove listened absently while Helen painted the picture she wanted him to see, in the language she had rehearsed. She was perfectly articulate, perfectly concerned, appropriately disturbed.
Avina Zadeh hid as best she could, right before his eyes. Unlike Hearne, she avoided eye contact and looked down at her tiny feet, or out the thick glass at the mountainside, her mind rolled back inside her. Present only when she glanced at Helen, Avina seemed to hope the stronger woman would provide answers.
The night of Catherine’s death, they had partied in a remote campsite. Avina and Catherine had gotten into camping together, hiking far into the mountains toward the tree line. They stayed some nights in small, specialized mountain climbing tents in a secluded spot, with the lake below, you could smoke a joint and drink wine and talk. The girls went up there with some servers from bars and restaurants. Altogether, only five women were with Catherine at the remote campsite, their names listed on the sheriff’s notepad. No men, but Lara Mazer was there. He looked at Helen’s block printing on the pad and reread it as she spoke.
Helen Hearne (of Seattle)
Catherine Kinderdine (Chicagoland)
Lara Mazer (Jackson)
Paula Fraser (Denver).
Avina Zadeh (?)
There were no men with them at the party site above Catherine’s death meadow.
“There are no men in Jackson hole,” Helen said. “Only boys who ride horses on dude tours, wannabe cowboys, or ski bums who spend the summer paddling canoes for fat people from Kansas or wherever.”
Catherine joined late. Avina had walked all the way down the trail to her truck to drive and get Catherine, to make sure Catherine could be there.
“Is this your truck?” Sheriff Hargrove held an image from the Kinderdine home security footage.
“You already know that it is,” Helen responded. “We didn’t know she was still up there with us. Lying out there, it’s awful. It’s horrifying. Someone followed us up there in the middle of the night. Someone took Cat from us.”
Helen held her drying hair in her fine grip, came around, and leaned next to him on the stone counter. Holding his eyes, she craned her long neck like a classical statue; her ice blue pupils were unmoving. “Sheriff, did the same man that killed Catherine also kill Lara?”
She was full of concern. Concern with what he believed. Concern with what he knew.
“We don’t know if the murders are related. We need your help to find that out.”
“Like I said, she must have wandered off down the trail. Or perhaps someone followed us and took her.”
“Had someone been following her Helen? Sending her messages?”
The women glimpsed one another as though it were the dumbest question they ever heard. “If she were being bothered we would know,” Helen said.
“Can you think of a time, say, when you went to lunch, and a man came by that wasn’t invited or that seemed to be watching her or the group?”
“Well, men stare at us all the time. Men think they are sly, they watch our bodies, and think we never notice. Every guy wanted Catherine, every guy that ever met her.”
“Avina, on the phone you said your residence is number 5, Indian Paint Brush Drive, is that right?”
He had gone by the mansion on the way there, really, the two mansions. Avina stayed in the guesthouse, itself over four
thousand square feet of designer cabin, in neo-Western style, not far from the Kinderdine estate in Wilson. Catherine and Avina could have easily walked to each other’s houses.
“Who does the estate belong to Avina?”
“It’s my godmother’s from Denver.”
“Where are your parents? You’re from Denver?”
“She is over eighteen so her parents are of no consequence in this,” Helen said on her behalf.
“Yes, I’m from Denver. But I’ve been in Jackson for over a year.”
Avina Zadeh spoke deliberately, staring at the empty ski runs slashed down the mountainside like green brush strokes. Her words came slow as she enunciated every syllable. Had she not had a dark cleverness behind her eyes, he would have thought her slow. Cunning, he thought, as he marked Denver by her name on Helen’s list.
Avina Zadeh met Catherine when Cat came into the restaurant where Avina worked, the White Buffalo Cafe. To stay at the guesthouse, meant that Avina had to have a job. It was like renting, but she did not pay anything, she said. She guarded herself as she spoke. Braced against Helen’s disapproval, she paused to give time for Helen’s correction, and when one did not come, she would continue. The black haired woman operated like an automaton. Helen had an aura that Avina did not want to enter, like a mirror she was afraid to look into. It was intimidation, as plain as the mountain outside the wall of windows. Even at that early stage, he knew he needed Brouwer there. He needed her help. He needed her to talk to these girls, these women, and he wanted to take Avina Zadeh out of all of this. Where a man may look at Helen Hearne and see high fashion editorial and Lara Mazer may bring to mind the girls of digital pornography, the petite Avina Zadeh was a sweet daughter lost, needing safety. She was another young woman who would face the carnage on her own.
She came to him while he stood in the sunlit room with the two young women full of life force and strange mysteries. He knew she would come to him when he laid eyes on the lost and scared Avina Zadeh. Her black silhouette suspended in the sandy street, desert wind winding her robe around her form. She moved with grace. The call to prayer from minaret’s above the mosque sounded over the ancient russet city through a horn amplified in crackling loudspeakers. Caramel eyes, large and wild through the slit of her black hijab, held him. Her black abaya robe flowed over her in waves, and tightened her in the wind. Armored vehicles rumbled behind him, radio static, small arms fire crackled, and a chopper drummed the sky.
Avina Zadeh did not speak without looking at Helen Hearne first, and hesitated until the more dominant woman passed on the opportunity. Finally, she looked at the sheriff fully for the first time and ripped him out of his death princess nightmare. The tiny woman on the leather chair said, “Sheriff Hargrove, what happened to Catherine?”
12.
Nathan Petrie stabbed the borehole of the hunting rifle into the flab under his jaw and spoke in pressurized words, “Is this what you want, you Fascist cunt? Is this what you want?”
Holding her .45 out to the side, she stood her ground. By kneeing his weight in the center of Robeitha’s back, Deputy Ridge compressed her into the filthy carpet, and cuffed her to the coffee table.
Officer Newberry entered quietly through the screen in the back. Brouwer followed, face-to-face with Petrie as he moved backward down a narrow hall. Once in the kitchen he had room to turn, but seeing Newberry he began to panic.
“Watch me Nathan.” Brouwer slowly placed her colt back into her holster but kept her grip on it. “We’re not here to hurt you, but you have to help us. You’re not helping yourself Nathan.”
“I didn’t do this to these girls.” He spat through teeth.
“Nathan, if you didn’t do this, put the gun down,” Brouwer said. “You were in Alpine with your mother, that’s what I came here to ask. Don’t make this something else.”
She slowly released the hammer of her auto-loader, put her hands in front of her and stood straight, with her shoulders square before him.
“Tell him to get out of here,” Petrie motioned toward Newberry.
She nodded at Newberry and he slowly backed down the rear steps of the trailer.
“Just hand me the damn rifle Nathan,” she said.
“You’ve taken everything away from me, you should take my life too,” tears streamed down his face into his red beard. He shouted at Robeitha if she were okay, she screamed at the top of her lungs.
They pressed into the small, rust colored kitchen. Late afternoon sun threw their shadows tall along the walls. With his left hand, Petrie pulled the screen door open, the muzzle slipped off his neck, and the barrel leveled out towards the alleyway. In that moment, he knew his mistake, and she lunged toward him. He turned the rifle into the kitchen at Brouwer, “Say goodbye you little cunt,” he said. Ducking under the rifle, she leapt, driving her shoulder into him, they came through the screen door and she curled her boot in front of his feet. They pitched forward over the banister together and she moved her weight on him to take him over the rail. As they spilled over it, a deafening blast shook the side of her head and then she landed hard in a children’s wading pool. Petrie tumbled down on top of her, smashing onto her slight frame. The rifle landed on its muzzle on the asphalt and bounced and Petrie scrambled after it. Newberry had his black pistol drawn, yelling at Petrie to freeze. As she rose, she pulled the telescopic rod from her left hip with her right hand, and opened its length. Petrie dove forward after the rifle, skidding it over the cracked pavement. She cracked the metallic ball on the end of the rod into his temple. He fell forward, raking his hands on the broken pavement. Standing behind him, she raised her arm across her body, whipped the lead ball into his head again, and the metal orb thudded on his skull. Dark blood pooled around his head. He was motionless.
Robeitha, screaming inside the trailer, jumbled with screaming from the yellow trailer next door, and the German shepherd’s barking. As he handcuffed Petrie, Officer Newberry lowered his ear to Petrie’s mouth. Red bubbles formed at Petrie’s lips.
“He’s breathing,” Officer Newberry said.
“Good, stay with him,” said Brouwer.
A bullet hole from the big game rifle was small and jagged in the side of the little yellow mobile home next door. Waist high for an adult and head height for a child, the bullet entered the home mere yards from where Petrie lay on the wet asphalt.
Through the screen door of the yellow trailer, she entered a sunlit living space. Children’s wooden blocks strewn into a kitchen cordoned off by a counter and tall stools. She announced herself as state police. Low voices panicked down a long hallway to a master bedroom at the back, where an infant began to howl.
A thin woman in shorts and athletic top lay over the blonde haired girl, her hands petting down the girl’s stringy hair. The girl held a baby boy, maybe two years old beneath her. Rising to her knees, the woman straddled her children. The rifle round had entered through the wall in the bedroom where they hid from the yelling next door. It missed the window but came through the wall unobstructed, then through the wall of the tiny bathroom, through the plastic waterproofing in the shower and finally, through the far wall of the trailer. The rifle bullet passed clean through the home without harm into the roof of a white shed.
Brouwer stood over the young family. She was soaked wet. Her flannel western shirt clung to her body. Sweeping her brown hair behind her ears, she searched her hands, spattered with blood from the blows to Petrie’s head. Blinking dumbly, the woman held her children, and shook her head in disbelief. Tears shone on her cheeks.
13.
By the time the St. John’s Medical Center diagnosed Nathan Petrie with a fractured skull, he was no longer a person of interest in the murders of Catherine Kinderdine or Lara Mazer. The Lincoln County Sheriff’s office confirmed his story. He’d been visiting his mother in her communal care home in Alpine at the Idaho border, captured by security cameras and recalled by a nurse who had worked the front desk. He spent most weekends with his mother in Alpin
e. Now he was in a coma in St. John’s.
County Attorney Leeman put the emphasis on coma as he spoke to the Governor’s office. He rounded his mouth into a small O and leaned casually behind his custom lowered desk. Above him hung a painting of the Great Plains teeming with grazing bison, their mass slaughter yet to come.
Jennifer Hackett, the Governor’s chief-of-staff, had been quiet on the speakerphone until then. She came across as put upon, as though humoring the county. Listening to the local yokels as a courtesy, a task performed with the patience necessary for a political player. She took her time. Finally she said, “Maybe Agent Brouwer was overly aggressive, she got caught up in the moment. Nevertheless, the state stands by our detective and her response to Mr. Petrie pulling a gun. We’re behind Agent Brouwer one hundred percent. I’d be surprised if folks lined up to side with a pederast like this Petrie fellow. Should someone start a big fuss over this incident, Petrie won’t be the only one with lumps.”
Attorney Leeman smiled at Hackett’s implied threat. He turned his herringbone cuff to expose his watch; perhaps he had wagered on how long it would take Hackett to get aggressive. Leeman soaked up animosity and conflict seemed to fuel him. But Jennifer Hackett was no shrinking violet, she was a political heavy weight. Close to both the Governor and the state attorney general, Hackett had personally wished Brouwer condolences when Leeman, Sheriff Hargrove and Coroner Matheson swept into office with a fresh rash of county trustees.
You’re going to have your hands full up there, these people are a new breed, Hackett had said to Brouwer. Leeman and his kind may be a new breed, Brouwer thought, but their ideas are old ones and they’re coming to the center of power. The governor was losing ground to the upstart movement and to appease them, he had withdrawn state resources, shuttered women’s health clinics, slashed teacher’s salaries; fire sold public lands to insiders, killed legislation to protect wildlife from natural gas drilling. The enfeebled Governor did what he thought they wanted, and prayed their local support would dry up. It didn’t. Now he masqueraded in the Capitol as though part of the movement himself.
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