31.
Girlish women’s faces stared from the darkness. Some of the women were world weary in spite of their youth, mere weeks before their deaths. Other women seemed naïve, unsuspecting, never to blossom.
The faces of missing and murdered women rolled before her in a digital slide show of loss, of brutality. To limit the number of files to review, for time and practicality, Brouwer concentrated on open homicides of Wyoming women within a youthful group, making their way from girlhood to womanhood. Until the weekend, there had not been unsolved murders of Jackson Hole women. But on the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation, two million acres of high plain abutting the Absaroka Mountains, speckled with small communities over a vast expanse, there were many open murders of women.
Most murders of young women, in any community, are prosecuted quickly, the nearest man to her drenched in her blood. The police taking her husband, lover or relative into custody while her body is still warm. Yet not all murders were purely domestic, nor were the attackers necessarily found within the daily life of the woman herself. These were the unsolved. Murders by strange men, unknown to the victim, over time, had accumulated for the tribal police, for Ray Stone.
She read the collection of female deaths with parallel details to Mazer and Kinderdine. Tribal police and the FBI had open homicide cases on Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone women from Wind River, girls otherwise entering adulthood and the prime of their lives. These files were open and police were working them, but many had gone cold, hopelessly without leads and without suspects. There were victims from Wind River that fit the Jackson killer’s method, strangulation by hand, an unremarkable way to die. The death of Catherine Kinderdine, throttled by an attacker blind with desire, rage and hate, was a destiny that many young women met. File after file had similar details to Catherine’s case.
Faces radiated toward her. Ashlyn St. Clair, bludgeoned to death with a small tool but ultimately died by asphyxiation, had been eighteen. The FBI agent working the case was a trainee agent assigned to the Reservation who took the position that St. Clair’s murderer had stalked her. The killer carried a metal tool, likely a plier that he happened to have on his person. He saw his opportunity and took it, pushing her into her suite when she unlocked the door. The FBI trainee worked several similar cases, and then asked for a posting back to Virginia, complaining of exhaustion and sleeplessness.
Many of the women simply never had homicide investigations formally opened. They had disappeared, no body, no blood, and no weapon, last seen getting into a car along a gravel road, talking to an unknown man outside a motel, walking to a friend’s house, turning tricks at an oil camp. Never seen again.
Others were particular. Noelle Frasier, 21 years old, a thin electrical cord wound around her neck with force great enough to decapitate her. Photographs show a scene where she had met death with many people in close proximity, leaving a party with someone and not returning, or perhaps someone coming toward the party and intercepting her. She died behind a steel Quonset of road maintenance equipment. No partygoer offered Ray Stone a suspect. Stone had shaken the partygoers down hard, interrogating them over weeks. They did not know who killed their friend.
Brouwer pulled the file from the thick manila package and Kelly Yellowbird stared back with vibrant eyes made oversized by the deft use of cosmetics. Despite the broad plains and bare sage lands of her upbringing, Yellowbird identified with urban street culture and rap music. In his initial investigation, Stone noted that she was musically inclined, taking voice lessons, modern and hip-hop dance classes and programs on the reservation as an adolescent. In a filed image, she is in a black one-piece body suit, stretching her legs on the floor of a dance studio lit by powerful overhead lighting. Stone noted that she was an excellent student, a freshman at the University of Denver studying Music and Theatre.
Stone began to ask her friends and family plainly, how could she have come to be murdered? How had she made her way to a circumstance where she could die violently? There were no answers for him. Ray Stone had closed more murders than many other investigators across the state combined. In the case of Kelly Yellowbird, he had no leads.
Alongside contemporary and urban dance, Yellowbird was a traditional dancer as well, in powwows and rodeos. She was princess of a rodeo in Casper adorned in traditional beaded and feathered Arapaho dress. The bright blue ankle length outfit patterned with beads and quills. Performing a social dance, held for multiple tribes joined in celebration. Her chin held high, she looks forward with confidence. Home to her village in Wind River from college for Thanksgiving, she met her death in the wilderness. Stone recovered no DNA but believed a sexual assault took place after her death and not before, a theory to explain the lack of vaginal trauma. No crushed larynx as Catherine had, yet someone took her life. There was no flesh of the perpetrator recovered from beneath her considerable fingernails. She was physically fit and strong from a childhood of dance instructions and sport. Yet someone overwhelmed her so totally and utterly, as if a phantom fell upon her from the sky. Ray Stone took this as an indication that she knew her attacker but couldn’t get a viable suspect from her suitors or acquaintances.
Kelly Yellowbird’s body was discovered on the edge above a deep valley, the hillside like the spine of an enormous crouching beast. Stone scrawled in his notes that the site where they found Kelly was the murder scene and not a body dumpsite. He had no footprints or tracks and no way to determine how the killer could have gotten her to this dark emptiness with only the moon as a guide. He believed she went to that place, in the night, under her own will, with the killer, but he had no evidence to support his instinct. Stone believed a killer chose Kelly beforehand and took her specifically to this place to die.
After having tea with a favorite aunt, she was perhaps as close as a mere one hundred yards from her family home. Her mother and father making snacks in the kitchen, dusk turning to night. Ray Stone walked the route Kelly walked. He marked the streetlights, the viewpoints. He sketched and followed up on any detail the neighborhood could offer him. He noted a burned out street light but otherwise the girl was on a well-lit street in her close-knit village, and yet suddenly she was in a valley almost thirteen miles from her childhood home, gone forever from her doting parents. He noted that the attacker subtly arranged Kelly, posed her to lie in the moonlight, and displayed her beneath the starry sky. She was facing the North Pole, Stone had written, and at an angle consistent with viewing the North Star.
There was nothing indicating who had taken Kelly. The simple blankness of the problem was maddening, and nothing led to progress.
32.
The image was of her cabin at night, contrasted in shadow and darkness by the light from the barn.
Brouwer had installed the camera alongside the motion sensing light in the fall hoping to catch a picture of her fox. Used by bear hunters, the camera took an exposure when animal movement triggered the light. The motion camera would capture an image of bear eating carrion placed near a tree stand, for the hunter to know the deadly quarry he endured cold nights to kill.
The figure was not exceptional in any way. Slim, made slighter by standing in profile peering into her cabin through a window, eyeing her.
It wore no night vision goggles and carried no light, comfortable coming through the forest at night with the naked eye in the moonlight. It carried no weapon or if it did, it concealed it. Its head was a rounded off nub. Its ears and nose cropped off. Constricted into a narrow fleshiness, like a thumb, by the woman’s pantyhose it wore on its head. Brouwer understood why the witness from Salt Lake City had not said with sureness whether it was male or female; it looked, in the shadows, to be both, or neither.
It had wanted to conceal its appearance even during the black of night in the forest. Was it prepared to confront her? Unsure whether she may survive to identify it, it was brave enough to come to her home, yet wary enough of her to hide its appearance. Sexless, with legs long and narrow, neither feminine nor
masculine it stood straight as though it were a child commanded by an angered parent or a forceful coach. It was looking into her home.
Brouwer chose not to take the image up the chain of command at the state police. A killer of women stalking her, watching her at night, with her alone at her cabin, it only served to prove Jennifer Hackett right, that they were right to close her command. They may go even further, and move her out of fieldwork forever, her personal safety compromised. She would tell command and the sheriff, eventually, once she was through all this. But she needed more time. Time, before her life in the mountains was gone.
It was getting closer to her and she was getting closer to it, as though drawn together, her and this thing. She lay down on the thin quilt, her government .45 on the sheet beside her.
A low roar awakened her. Like a hot days thunder at twilight, the rolling boom rattled her cabin. Out of bed and down the stairs in her cotton t-shirt and bare feet; she staggered out the front door into the darkness, into the roar. The ground shook as though buffalo were running past her on the plains but there was nothing. Blue stars in the sky shot and fell. The girls came toward her in white gowns though the sage, across the pasture, arms bare and glowing in the night. Wolves slunk past, crisscrossing with their noses to the ground, an alpha female hunter yelped snipes and commands at her pack.
The girls held their dresses up to cross the stream and she followed them down an embankment to a stone-faced mountainside. They enter a slight fissure in the rock, into a chamber of earth, and the alpha she wolf licked and muzzled at the girls as they lay down. The she wolf turned to bristle at the door.
A giant furred beast emerges from the tall blue spruce and drags its clawed feet along the white loamy ground. Its tale sweeps around the bottoms of the trees and piney limbs part across its chest twenty feet high. The beast is agile and moves with power coursing through its veins, but it is thin, and starving. On two feet but borne of black fur, its face is a man’s face, part woman and part dog. Its yellow eyes peer down at her slender body pressed in the vice of the jagged rock opening.
The stench of carrion and rot entered the slit of the stone cave. She gagged at the stench but could not move. Her stomach muscles clenching hard, and the stone teeth of the cave mouth pinch her. The animal lumbered toward her, tall and clumsy through the spruce trees.
The wolves whimpered low and the girls shrieked from the toothed hole behind her.
The towering creature swung its long black blood swathed head down to her and unleashed a roar onto her body. Leaning back on it crooked hind legs, its sharp pink penis juts from black fur. It screamed its howl onto her again. With her hands on her head, she crouched down onto the ground, and it leaned back again. She slid into the fossilized earth.
Peering into the fissure, the beast mimicked a womanish whimper. Cowering as though beaten, as though she should help it, but it is mocking her. A stinking mask of blood surrounded its golden fangs and its lips contorted in laughter like a bellowing fool.
The wolves in the stone chamber circled the girls and bared their teeth in futile maternity. She faced the yellow eyes through the opening, and sees that it’s desperate and foolish. The beast pulsed with disease and perverted wrongness. It was starving, rotting, wanting to die, and wanted to rip her apart by levering her ankles and splitting her into halves with the fury of an infant or a simpleton. It wailed into the mouth of the cave and its rancid breath choked her. She gagged to empty her stomach on the floor of stone but nothing came out of her.
33.
Sitting upright with the roar faint in her ears, she clutched the crosshatched handle of the .45 automatic and her feet danced her down the wooden stairs. At the last step, she turns in one motion with her back against a wall covering her from the front of the house. With the pistol by her cheek, she steadied her breathing to calm herself and focus.
Did she see a figure crouch as she ran down the stairs? A door latched or a window closed with a click. Pointing the pistol across the darkness of her house she took wide slow sidesteps out into the living room to face the kitchen. Her tank top clings to her slick body. She is alone.
The motion light at the barn illuminated her house in an instant. The motion light tripped the camera for a second burst of light. She fell to the hardwood floor. A figure moved outside. She leapt up onto her bare feet in one movement and ripped open her cabin door. She ran hard around the corner of the cabin into the night air. She braced for contact. The motion light on the barn was now at her back and cast broad arches of light fully before her. There was no one at the side of her cabin.
Walking out into the sage, twigs and grass crunched beneath her bare feet. Across the pasture toward the trees that hide the stream, the piney scent of sage, the whishing sounds of crickets in swarms. She sees a human figure in the dark.
The silhouette was at the tree line watching her. The light timed out and shut off behind her, casting her into darkness lit only by the moon. Her eyes adjusted to the night and shapes and patterns emerged out of the void. The breeze was cool now on her underwear and muscle shirt and the sweat on her legs shone in the moonlight. The figure opposite her was still but she sensed slight movements. It held its shoulders back to appear large and bold. If she moved, it would run. Her only chance with the pistol at that range was to hope that it ran straight away from her. She needed to bring her arm up in one motion to squeeze the trigger with perfect timing. She waited. The figure began to move, but not away from her. It was walking toward her.
It stepped toward her into the sagebrush away from the tree line and then it was gone. Her heart pounded in her chest. It was lying on the ground, out of sight.
She ran in small steps over the dry ground and maneuvered past sagebrush toward it. Something black above the silvery sage, the thing was running in a bent crouch, near to being on all fours, and it ran briskly toward her. She lost its position, knelt and opened fire. The .45 bucked in her hand as she cracked rounds at the dark movement in the field. The percussion of her sidearm echoed over the tree line, each round a flash of orange and white fire blinding in the darkness.
She ran as hard as she could back to her cabin. Her small feet placed precisely through the rough ground cover, weaving among knotted silver shrubs. Through the door of her cabin, she slid on the hardwood floor, then pumped her legs up the stairs to her guns. She rammed the top floor window open with her foot, and slid the clip into the AR-15, pulled its receiver back and released a round from the magazine into the chamber. She arced the perforated muzzle over the pasture below.
There was no sign of the thing that ran toward her on four legs through the sage at night.
34.
Captain Newberry of the Jackson Police Service took the call from the hunter. The caller was hesitant to reveal his identity to the captain, as he had likely been hunting wolves when he saw what he saw. Wolf hunting is a crime punished with severity in Wyoming and the witness wisely remained anonymous. The secret hunter had seen something last summer, something he could not explain, could not shake from his memory. It had bothered him for a long time and became more troubling to him since he had read about the young waitress left off the trail.
He hunted in the twilight. He followed a trail from a wetland meadow into the tree line that inclined the mountainside. The pine and spruce trees were spaced from one another with little underbrush. The rocky ground was a warped bowl of sand and stone. He took the hill at a good pace with his rifle in his right hand. His left hand carried field glasses, no longer effective in the mounting dusk. Through a stand of pine, his back to the small lake and meadow, he climbed onto a ridge craggy with rocks and bright fireweed. Large rocks sat as monoliths among colorful flowerings. Blue spruce towered the mounds of rocks. He stopped to rest on a large boulder having run his way up the gradient. Through the thick bows of blue spruce lay a clearing where something white floated through the black.
A white figure emerged out of the black cut between blue spruce that edged the clearing b
elow. It was a striking blonde woman in a thin white gown, her pale arms to the side of her holding another woman’s legs. From the darkness that shrouded the thick spruce, another woman appeared holding the shoulders of a third woman carried in procession.
The wolf hunter crouched behind the boulders not believing his eyes. They were so near to him that he held his breath. They carried the young woman into the small clearing and lay her in a bed of yellow avalanche lily, the dangling yellow blooms in the clearing swayed and dropped with the careful placement of the girl. She lay still and soundless. The yellow avalanche lily root was a delicacy for the grizzly bear, and it hanged with bowed blossoms around the girl’s tawny nakedness. The hunter sat still, so close to the girls that a whisper would have alerted them to his hidden presence above.
He watched them perform their ritual.
The two girls who carried the third, laid her among the lily, and then sat cross-legged beside her in the yellow. The blonde-haired woman seemed to be stroking the girl’s forehead, as though comforting her. The girl lay still in the yellow flowers and green grass; she was alive, her bare breasts moving slightly with her breathing. A fourth woman, tiny, in sheer white gown, emerged from the shadows of the cut between the blue spruce and walked delicate bare feet along a row of rocks partly buried by the green earth of the clearing. The girl slowly turned her face toward him. Despite his rifle and sidearm in his backpack, his heart raced. He was afraid to make a sound.
Dream of the Wolf Page 17