Sheriff Hargrove spoke slowly, letting the words bludgeon the woman. He wanted to see if she had shame and took his time trying to bring it forth.
“She never pressed charges in court. They were lies, she was troubled her whole life. No one got charged with a crime. Which one of us is police here?”
“Which one of us is her family?”
She tried to bristle, to rise with the combativeness she must use to survive tough situations. With her bare shoulders back in a battle ready stance that had likely worked for her before but would not work now, she postured to fight like a bitch in a kennel.
“I could have done more to protect her myself and I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t help Lara the way I could have. So I guess we both failed her in our own way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about but I don’t like it. I never failed her. She was her own person. She made her own choices.”
The brown wall behind her, dullness on dullness, blurred into heaviness for him. He felt the heaviness of being very tired.
She may have been speaking when he said, “It’s asking a lot that such a young woman survive so many attacks. It was too much for anyone. The odds of young women surviving male assaults are long. That she survives more than one attack, by more than one assailant, in the brief time she had to live, well, it was pretty much a fixed game, wasn’t it? Life was stacked against her and none of us helped her. She was left to the animals at night.”
As he breathed out a sigh, his eyes lost focus. Sleep was approaching. The adrenaline that had fueled him the past days and nights was running low. Anxious energy slowed out of him, leaving him emptied.
From between the strands of the midday sun, her black robe emerged in shadow and took shape on the builder’s brown walls. Large brown eyes, framed by the black veil hood of her people, entered his gaze and never broke. In the desert city street, the young woman and young infantry lieutenant Hargrove, heavy with his pack and his M4 rifle, fused forever on an endless loop through time. He had a realization then, that when the woman on the desert street is looking at him, she can truly see him.
20.
Special Agent Lane Brouwer peered through the small window of the service bay door. Her dimpled face would have been cute framed like that in the sun, had she not been what she was.
She came through the screen door past the empty desk and into the service garage. The engine of a track hoe rattled in the salvage yard with the opening of the door. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness and Swindle Vetch made brief eye contact with Barney Oldman.
“Detective Brouwer, how can I help you today?” Swindle Vetch called out.
She walked along the hollow mouth of the underground service cavern, past the steps into the earth where mechanics descended below trucks.
“You mind if I take another minute of your time, Mr. Vetchoski?” she asked.
“Not at all ma’am, what can I do for you?” Swindle and Oldman both stood to greet her.
“Hello Mr. Oldman. How’s the casino business?” she asked.
It made sense the state police had a file on Oldman. He was a rising figure. He had frauds on his record and did a stretch of time for running guns with Arapaho braves out of Wind River Reservation into Montana. From a boyhood spent on both Crow Agency in Montana and Wind River in Wyoming, he had safe haven on both Indian reservations. He had serious weight on Wind River, and was a known underworld player. What would she think in seeing him here, with the Jackals? She could put them together now. He should’ve been more careful.
Barney Oldman stood and shook Agent Brouwer’s hand and said, “Casinos are busy places. I’m not sure we’ve met.”
She said, “My name is Special Agent Lane Brouwer. I’m with the Division of Criminal Investigation, Jackson field office. I’m investigating two homicides that may or may not be related. Have you heard about them?”
Oldman was young but smart and had come out of Deer Lodge prison with a plan to make Indian gangs in the mountain states reputable. To work with the Jackals Motorcycle Club, through connects at Deer Lodge, to make things happen for Native elders who wanted progress for their people and were not afraid to cross the line when necessary. He could handle himself.
“Yes of course, everyone’s talking about it,” Oldman said.
“What’re they saying?” she asked.
Oldman’s hair was in a pompadour at the front, long braids down the side, in the showy style of the Crow Indians of old. He wore an L.A Lakers jersey that showed tattoos on both arms. He answered her with his usual thoughtfulness.
“The people are sad and scared,” he said. “Young women are always in danger. Terrible things happen to our sisters. The elders have worried about this type of thing for a long time. It wears on the community, and warps things. These days’ young girls have to be tougher than men are. This type of thing has plagued our communities for some time, but the media has never seemed to care about it until now, until the victims from town appeared. So if a silver lining is possible in a tragedy like this, it’s that people are now aware of the danger facing our young sisters.”
Oldman wished her luck in her investigation and left through the office, and the screen door banged behind him.
“What can I do for you ma’am?” Swindle repeated.
She said, “That’s just it Travis. I think there’s a lot more you could do for me than you’ve been doing.”
“How is that? I gave you my security footage. I’m totally cooperative.”
She set her little body down on a steel folding chair across from him. “Well, a few of you were the last to the Mazer girl alive on Saturday night.”
“We’ve been through that.”
“I’ll shoot you straight,” she said. “If I don’t make progress soon, I have to expand my scope, start looking beyond the deaths of these girls, to see what I can shake out.”
Swindle Vetch leaned back in his chair. This chick has balls. He said, “My living quarters are upstairs here and I came home and didn’t leave. The barmaids told you the same thing. That I was not there, and I don’t know who killed her. Believe me lady, I’d tell you if I knew who hurt that girl.”
She was imposing her will. She wanted the state to look into the Jackals and this was her avenue. She may be convincing the attorney general to build a state’s case on the club, and now had a window of opportunity.
“I have airtight alibis for everyone in the Nite Ride that night. It’s too neat and tidy, everyone confirming stories for one another. I think you can point me where to look.”
“The barmaids were last with the girl. You want to talk with the women. I find that if something is out of order, the women tend to know what it is. The barmaids think the young woman’s friends have something to do with it. The circle she ran in turned against her.”
“Candy Bear thinks that these young women had a falling out and it went really bad somehow,” she agreed.
“You read about girls killing other girls they don’t like. It ain’t pretty but it happens. Candy Bear was close with the girl so she would know. Candy Bear has told y’ all this from the start.”
“What I want to know about is the Jackal mechanic. This Donald Swain fellow that Candy Bear listed, he was there that night, in the Nite Ride, but I can’t find him. Why I can’t I find him?”
“I really don’t know ma’am, but he’s on that video with me going home to the garage to sleep. We left the waitresses safe and sound.”
“I’ve talked to everyone who was in that bar that day but him. I saw him on the video but I want to hear from him. He needs to come see me and eliminate himself and he hasn’t.”
“Well, I told ya’ll his name is Donald Swain and he’s from Colorado and we hired him for some odds and ends you can see here.” Swindle waved to the old Freightliner big rig from Montana in the service bay. Motorcycle parts lay on heavy wooden tables, the garage thick with decades of dirt and grease. “I don’t know a lot more about him, frankly.”
“Is Mr. Swain here today?”
“No. He doesn’t stay here no more.”
“Where does he stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he’s still in town?”
“I believe that he is ma’am.”
“What do you drive?”
“Well you probably know already but I drive an F150 and my Harley and I own that black Pete out front. You inspected it yourself. I haul with it when we’re short drivers.”
“Does Mr. Swain have a vehicle?”
“He has an old bronco type rig.”
She wrote that down. It was important to her.
“Does Swain’s Bronco rig have spotlights on its rooftop?”
“I believe it does.”
“Both of you were here together in the same bunk room that night and didn’t leave?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You’re listed on the club charter as a founding member of the Jackal’s Outlaw Motorcycle Club of Denver. There’s no crime in that, as the Jackals aren’t considered a terrorist organization.”
Swindle held his tongue. She went on.
“The Jackals are in several lines of straight forward business up here. You have a service garage and a junk yard, for a parts business. You also have a distribution and shipping company with several tractor-trailers and drivers in your fleet making runs throughout the mountains states. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Is there anything else? What else should I know about your organization? Are you in any other business?”
“No ma’am.”
“You’re saying to me that you’re not in the land development business then?”
Swindle sat still. He fought off a hard swallow.
“Sorry?” he said.
“Is this your signature?” She held out the articles of incorporation for a numbered holding company.
“It is.”
“And this company owns significant holdings of land within the limits of the town of Jackson and adjacent to that, in Teton County?”
“It does.” Through the small square window of the bay door, dust hung in the sun. The track hoe engine whined.
“So then y ‘all are in the land business, come to think of it?”
“Well, now ma’am, that’s something else. That company has assets that include land, not the same thing as being in the land business.” They had formed a limited liability company to file plans with the county planning commission for a subdivision of land. The land would become lots and houses, an extensive new neighborhood and commercial area of Jackson. The county had approved the plans and the pipes were in the ground. Money, real money, was at stake. Mountains of cash from selling homes, like a legit big business, were on the line now, and he’d greatly prefer that she didn’t concern herself with how they’d made the money to buy the land in the first place. He’d greatly prefer that she went on her way. The position she was taking was a very bad one for him.
The old walls dulled the sound of the track hoe in the junk yard. The boom arm of the hoe lifted rusted fenders and steel drums, and clanged steel into steel. As its throttle opened, the hoe’s engine whined as it worked. She waited. Her grayish eyes like lake water after a rain. When you drown, no one can tell; you make no noise, no splashing. You sink quietly.
“Are you here to talk about the girl or the land? The two issues are not in any way related, not by any stretch of imagination,” he said.
“Maybe not, but we have the deaths of two young women on our hands, and when things like this stay unresolved, two young women murdered in the prime of their lives, well, before long we go down every trail we can and we don’t stop, and anything that’s in the way gets torn apart. Do you understand me?”
“I think it’s pretty clear to me. You don’t mince your words at all ma’am.”
She left him in his chair, in the dim. The track hoe’s engine rose again into a high-pitched throttle lifting pipes in its grasp, and again a load clanged dumbly against the steel box.
21.
She left the window overlooking her corrals and clicked on her small TV.
Fatigued in the high definition camera, the eager camera operator pushed it close to her, and her tawny hair looked thin and wet with sweat. The television camera lights baked her face. Despite dark circles fading into her cheeks as though she had been skiing all day in a blizzard, her eyes still challenged.
She cringed hearing her own words. “Public help is vital to catch a killer at large in the Jackson area. The murders may be connected but we need more information.”
The number of the tip line scrolled on the screen. The screen changed to an image of Catherine Kinderdine in Chicago at Christmastime, the street filled with shoppers at night, snowflakes swirled above yuletide lights on lampposts, downy whiteness settled on her cashmere shawl.
Killer remains at large in Jackson bold on the screen. Brouwer’s own face again, demanding that, if a woman had an unusual interaction with a man, she must come forward. The suspect, although familiar with the Parks, was not necessarily a local. The killer might be capable of surviving in the wilderness and was comfortable travelling in the woods. “We are looking for an off road vehicle with lights on a roof rack.” A reporter broke in with a question about the suspect’s appearance and she told him they had no composite sketch and had no image of the possible killer. “We are working on a profile.” The same reporter broke in asking if a serial killer was hunting women in the Park. She replied that it was a likely possibility, foolishly, and the reporters turned feverish, and Hargrove looked pissed. They pressed forward, their arms outstretched with recording devices. They asked about the girls. Is the killer female? Did young women kill their friends? Is it possible to have a female serial killer?
“Several young women are persons of interest and are being questioned,” she said. “These crimes have a sexual component to them which makes them more likely to have been committed by a man.” County Attorney Leeman would not like this comment, she thought. He would think she was pushing her own agenda, pushing a sexual component she couldn’t prove, to look solely for a male killer of women.
Brouwer had not gotten sleep since the discovery of Catherine’s body Saturday. She stood at her kitchen sink. Her own image reflected back at her on the window in the night. Her hair framed her jaw and she held it behind her head. Two women in the same clique dead within two days. Could the murders be unconnected? She intertwined her fingers behind her neck. Gaining the confidence of Avina Zadeh was working, Avina was opening up, and she knew more than she was saying, but playing it cool to build trust was taking too much time. Time she didn’t have.
The motion light came on at the side of her barn, perhaps tripped by her friend the fox. Maybe a deer was looking for hay. A shadow moved at the corner and she shut the light off in the kitchen to see clearly out the window. Duchess nosed into the pen from the mouth of the barn like a black tongue. The mare began to rock her head up and down, pawing, shaking her mane out.
She opened her cabin door and walked into the dark night. Wind pushed clouds across the giant moon; the motion light went off at the barn. She picked her way in the dark to her corral, knowing the path by heart. Duchess winnowed and clomped toward her. The conundrum of no male suspects bothered her, but something deeper made her anxious, Sheriff Hargrove was aloof, his mind somehow elsewhere, but he had his own way of things, and she felt she could trust him. But County Attorney Leeman was becoming a problem. His approach to this was a concern.
A stylish dresser, youthful shaved haircut and tight fitting tweed suits, large black designer eyeglass frames, Leeman was a big city man all the way. He stood out in Jackson. He was not who he appeared to be either, he could not be, not given the power he swayed. He was a dammed good prosecutor from back east, which should be all that mattered. She didn’t give a damn about his ideology. Elected alongside Hargrove, he came in the county building and introduced himself to the receptionists
as a libertarian. More like a librarian, she had joked to herself. But she didn’t smile about him now. Leeman’s politics hadn’t bothered her and still didn’t, but his plan for this case worried her. He was a type of man she had never seen before.
Attorney Leeman asked her about the girls, about Avina and Helen, many times per day. He saw her come out of her office to her Jeep and he ran out to talk to her. She cut the engine and rolled down the window. He placed a tweedy forearm on her roof.
“Those were good interviews with the girls,” he said. “I think you have them around your finger now. You had a game plan and you pulled it off, they think you’re one of them. You know what you’re doing.”
“Thank you sir but I’m on my way out just now.”
Leeman asked about the Zadeh girl, could she have done it? Could she have killed Catherine? Brouwer didn’t know, but she didn’t think so.
“I quite like your angle that she could not bear to let Catherine leave her alone, that Catherine was leaving her,” he said.
“I don’t know if she could have done it, maybe she could have,” she admitted to him. “The girl is guilty, but I don’t know of what.”
“What does that mean ‘she is guilty’?”
“It only means that she carries guilt, that the girl has shame. She didn’t necessarily help strangle Catherine. The girl is deeply troubled. I’d say she’s traumatized by all this.”
Leeman didn’t understand.
“What does that mean?” he said. “The brown girl is a space cadet. I think she’ll roll on the blonde. I think you have them. But it’s Helen that I want. I give you my permission to cut a deal with the brown girl; I think you’re quite close with her. She needs you. She can finger the blonde for Catherine. You can dangle something for her; let her know that if she doesn’t rollover on Helen, she fries with her. That’s the game. We get the brown girl to commit to testifying against Helen for Catherine’s murder and we’re on casino money.”
Dream of the Wolf Page 12