“Mr. Swain have you been drinking?”
“You know damn well I haven’t been, and that you can’t hold me on that suspicion. You have to test me out here. You’ll look for anything. Hell, I can see right into you girl.”
He searched the trees along the road and placed his hands together between his thighs as if to warm them. At that moment, he seemed like any country boy from her childhood, and that feeling made her uneasy.
“Donald, why were you sent to the ADX? Tell me your story so that I can understand you.”
“A sweet little girl-child like you asking about ADX?” he shook his head. “Nah, it does not connect. The wires don’t spark. Something is very amiss here.”
She needed the conversation to go wherever it would.
“They four pointed you, at the ADX, didn’t they Donald?” she asked.
“Four pointed?”
“You spent twenty three hours a day in solitary confinement, all four limbs strapped to a metal slab. That’s what they do at the ADX. They strapped you down and you stared out a sky light, at the stars all night. That’s what they did to you, isn’t it?”
“You know about that place and what they do when they come for you and take you there. You are a girl who does her homework. You were your daddy’s little star I bet. But looking into me and my story has been a waste of your time. There’s nothing for you to learn. You have to see it with your own eyes to know a thing.”
She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.
“That’s quite a buck you took down with a bow,” she said. “You must know your way around out here, in the woods. Are you living in the woods?”
He shook his head, letting silence stand, after some time he said to her,
“You don’t know what you are. Since you were a little girl, you have been what you are. Desperate the join the flock so they’ll let you hide and leave you be, so you could believe that you’re free. I look into you girl and I can see you’re no more free than I was in that concrete hole they put me in on the other side of these mountains. You can pretend for now that we’re free citizens talking in a free country and you can keep up that act until you aggress upon me with state violence and entomb me in your empty system. Put me in that hole for good.”
“Why would I want to put you in a hole, Donald? Have you done something you need to confess to?”
“You don’t know it yet, but they do violence to us all. You’ll see it when they do it to you. They’ll come for you one day, and no one will help you.”
“Why don’t you follow me into town? We can sit down and you can tell me what you mean by all this poetic talk.”
“Girl, say to me what you know you have to. That I’m free to go.”
43.
The bleating sheep followed the predawn path tread by countless livestock over time to water. Irrigation pivots spiraled in a colossal bouquet of engineered agriculture fed by the reservoir above, rotating nozzles high over new crops in perfect circles, the water pumping rhythmically onto fresh greenery, the circles lush, surrounded by bone-dry loam.
The shepherds weaved the flock alongside the colossal circles of life in an otherwise barren high plain. Even though the sun had yet to rise, the horse’s hooves kicked dust. They left the flatlands and followed the sheep into the stark brown hillsides above.
Toward the small settlement of Thermopolis, they were not far from where springs in the earth boil water over terraces on badlands. The Wind River Indian Reservation lay below, a sizeable piece of the state of Wyoming, the reservation sprawls over millions of acres, dotted with villages along the Wind River, an uninterrupted vista below the mountain ranges and wildernesses to the north. The reservation population totaled perhaps twenty thousand people, sprinkled together in small settlements. The Indian Reservation was immense.
The shepherds arrived to dugout watering holes on a high plateau. The small hooves of the sheep punched wet loam. From his large dun horse, the head shepherd surveyed the flat broad lands. In the black mud, by the pool of water in the new light of day, were the footprints of a person, who, barefoot, had ran by the water.
The noisy sheep bleated along the dugout and jostled swiftly into a moving mass of dirty wool. The indents of human toes and forefeet were distinct in the mud, but were overran by sheep rushing to water. The shepherd turned in his saddled to face the western expanse. Long black hair flowed from a colossal boulder where a woman lay at the heights’ edge. Air ran and then dove in the ever-present wind of the high country, and the black hair swirled on an ancient stone shelf.
The site had always seemed sacred to the ranch hand. The ancient tribes that hunted the river valley to the south and the mountains to the north would have come to this boulder. It would have been a spiritual place, visited over many generations, the boulder a podium for sacred ceremony. Ancient tribal people would have stood at it and made offerings of gratitude for the generous bounty given them. The big dun high stepped to the boulder while fellow ranch hands sat on horses, reins at their length, water from dribbled from their horse’s bits over the edge of the dugout. Before coming to America, while in his native Chile, he had read that the massive valleys of the Rockies were like knife wounds into the earth. In a poem, these valleys were scars, all of the violence and the bloodshed of the people here is alive everywhere you look.
The sun arose behind mountaintops and poured light onto the girl’s body, onto the boulder, onto the brown earth over the loping hills. The shadow of himself on the tall dun drew away with the emerging sun. He had never seen a dead body before and felt it a sinful thought, but she seemed at peace, contented on the stone. She was with Jesus, the eternal freedom present in the slight curve of her mouth, and in her soft eyes. She was an American Indian girl, Arapaho, Shoshone, or both. Young and thin, her face was strong with fine features. Like a painting in rich earth oils, light brown in the sun light, the artist using the effect of light masterfully, accentuating her astonishing pose. She was naked and splayed on a stone dais, yet seemed unharmed.
The shepherd pulled the big dun back from the girl on the rock, took the mobile flip-phone from his belt, and called the Wind River Tribal Police.
44.
“She was a very good basketball player, she played for Laramie College.”
Ray Stone said that Crystal Augustine’s play had led the Riverton Arapaho to the Wyoming State Finals her senior year. Well known in her town on Wind River, she was not exceptionally tall, but she was skillful and worked hard.
Brouwer stood over the exposed body of the girl, “Tell me more about her.”
“She was popular with parents and kids, a role model.”
Ray Stone sketched her using charcoal on a large artist’s pad. The boulder was broad enough that her upturned arms spread out and her wrists faced up to the sky. Her legs dangled off the smooth weather worn stone, her bare feet hung well above the ground. Partial livor mortis in her extremities, she had not been here long, not long before the shepherds found her at dawn.
“Elders knew her; her father owns a plumbing and heating business in Riverton. She got a job after college at the Casino. She’s in her early twenties but she had a supervisor role.”
“Would she have had friends in Jackson? Would she have socialized with women there?” Brouwer asked.
“She laughed a lot, she was a joker. Arapaho kids loved her and she was popular. It’s possible that she made friends outside the reservation,” he said. “This new generation, they get along better nowadays, whites and natives, I mean. Arapaho and Shoshone, different cultural backgrounds, those differences mean less now, maybe. Crystal comes from a successful family down here. She’s college educated. She is pretty, so to speak. Yeah, I think she could know the girls you are talking about, she could travel in many circles.”
A thin gold necklace lay on her breastbone. A tiny crucifix shone in the sun but otherwise she was unadorned. Long silky black hair fell back from her forehead and swirled around the rock in the wind.
Ray Stone crouched south of the rock, his head in close beside Crystal’s, his cheek brushed next to hers. Brouwer knelt with him. They saw what the girl saw. The woman’s feet pointed north toward the mountain wilderness, the Great Plains to the south. She was on the edge of the mountains, and faced the northern sky. A view of the valley floor and Wind River were behind her.
The dancing and theatre student, Kelly Yellowbird, killed while home last thanksgiving from college in Denver, laid on a trails edge. Lara Mazer taken up the hillside, the act disrupted, never reaching the sightseeing boulder on the plateau. Crystal Augustine laid on a rock, looking north to the sky.
“Kelly Yellowbird came home from Denver and was taken from her block in Fort Washakie with no witnesses, dozens of family within screaming distance, as if a demon came down and grabbed her out of the night air. Same thing here, we have no witnesses. Crystal left her shift this morning at the casino and drives to her apartment. No one sees a thing, Lara Mazer, same thing, she leaves a barroom and goes walking out into the night, and by the morning, she is on a hilltop, elevated, looking at the sky.”
A hawk screeched and floated in a broad cycle above the tree line to the north, over the reservoir in the distance. Brouwer said,
“Murdered, but with just enough force to take their lives, as though put to sleep. Bright lights dimmed, feminine power a threat that needs to be destroyed. Young women that embarrass, that expose inadequacy in a man that somehow came across them. His feeling of inadequacy boiled over.”
“These are homicides that are non-violent, if you will,” Stone said. “Controlled killing. If it were a man who felt the anger of inadequacy, he would have demolished them.”
Brouwer said, “The killer is in control of the situation entirely. These women did not fight back. They may have even willingly gone with him.”
She tried to think of what that meant.
Ray Stone agreed as though he had waited for her to arrive at this conclusion. He said,
“Someone in authority pulled up to these woman and they got into his vehicle. A vehicle they either recognized or believed they had to get into. Someone they needed to obey, someone in a position of power. Neither Kelly Yellowbird nor Crystal Augustine needed rides anywhere nor did they typically go with strangers. They didn’t need to. There are no signs the killer used force. The killer either knew them or they believed they had to go with him and couldn’t disobey.”
Brouwer took a deep breath and pulled her hair behind her head, tying it. She eyed the rolling plain below. Her stomach growled in a hunger pain, her hair fell out of the tie. She said, “He can convince them to come with him, he does it with words, or a gun, or whatever, but they don’t run.”
“It may be someone who is in a position the girls would obey and who also carries a gun.” Stone said matter of fact.
Sheriff Hargrove flashed in her vision, in the steam of the showers in the barracks, distant, not himself, the young Iraqi woman coquettish on his chest. She closed her eyes against the wind.
Ray Stone went on, “we can’t rule out the possibility that this is police. A police vehicle would explain why each girl does not run or struggle. Why there’s no fight.”
“It would explain a lot.” She wanted to stop Stone from going down this path. She searched for an argument to counter him. The walls of her stomach vibrated lightly.
“It would also explain why the county is fighting the state investigation so hard, why they’re making it all about those girlfriends,” he said. Stone had few reasons to trust the county. His efforts at getting help on the Reservation only ended up in petty fights over jurisdiction. Having fewer friends than she did was not easy to do. Ray Stone said, “How well do you know Sheriff Hargrove?”
She locked her fingers together over her stomach and looked Ray in the eyes.
“Because when I think of who I am looking for, the sheriff has started to come into my mind. You said you felt this killer was able to roam at night; Hargrove is a veteran infantryman and country boy. He cruises the streets at night when not on patrol.”
“I do that too,” she said.
“Hargrove looks like a man who hasn’t slept in a year. He had a personal relationship with Lara Mazer. You saw her phone records; Sheriff Hargrove was calling that girl from his home phone, before he started living on county property. Before staying at his office, he may have camped in the wild. These young women went with someone when their instincts would’ve told them to do otherwise. They didn’t run and didn’t fight back. The exact opposite of what their fathers taught them to do out here. They saw someone powerful they felt they needed to obey.”
“Please no, Ray. You can’t believe this,” She set down on her haunches and held her hair behind her head. The wind watered her eyes.
Ray Stone said, “I’m standing beside the body of a beautiful young Arapaho woman because that piss-ant county won’t let you coordinate a task force on a serial killer and why? Is it because they don’t think a girl out here is as valuable as a girl up in Jackson? Or could it be because the sheriff didn’t want us looking into Lara Mazer and Kelly Yellowbird at the same time, with the same resources?”
Brouwer could not allow it to be possible. Ray is making accusations without evidence she thought. Or am I only defending the sheriff out of emotion? She felt that emotion strongly and purely for the Sheriff at that moment. She recognized it as love.
She managed to say, “For now, let’s look only at what we know. They do not scream or flee at the point of abduction. A killer may simply have walked up to them in the dark, taking them. A position of authority is helpful, but not necessary. Not if sufficient planning has been done, to catch the girl truly off her guard.”
Her concern for the sheriff came through in her quavering voice. She breathed in and out and looked away from Stone down at the prairie into the wind. Her fear for the sheriff beat in her chest.
Stone was angry. She hoped he had been speaking purely out of anger – that Teton County would not cooperate with Wind River and the State of Wyoming made her angry too. Another young woman was dead. He stared at her, but he seemed to grow calm. Stone nodded an acknowledgement that he had gone too far.
Adrenaline coursed through her, unfocused energy swelled. She wanted to gain command of herself and said, “We can see that the killer is in control of the act of killing but not of his desire to do so. He’s losing control of his desire and his need to make these offerings. He has entered into frenzy. He can no longer stop himself from killing.”
She wiped away tears with the ball of her hand and her cheeks dried quickly in the wind. Ray Stone placed a hand on her vested shoulder.
“You and I will summarize our evidence and evaluate these crime scenes,” he said. “No more goddamn theories.”
The two detectives stood on the flat brown ledge. Crystal’s hair swirled in black waves from the smooth rock.
45.
Avina followed Decklin out of his parent’s mansion into the driveway with the .380 pressed at his spinal cord. By continually stopping, he forced her to jab the pistol into his back.
“Move!” she tried to shout, but her voice sounded weak in front of the enormous house at night. She had thought of him as skinny, but he was powerful. His broad shoulders moved casually with his long stride before her.
“We’re going in my truck,” she said.
“Where can you take me?”
“Where do you think? The lady cop thinks you killed Catherine and you’re going to tell her what happened,” she said.
“Oh yeah? And what are you gonna tell her?”
He took his time now, feigning pain at walking outside in bare feet. His green robe tangled on his hands behind his back.
“I know what Catherine knew about you Avina,” he said.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“That you’re nobody, a fraud.”
“Yeah I’m a fraud. That doesn’t make me special.”
The Land Rover was parked do
wn the lane behind rows of Quaking Aspen. It was too far, and too much time alone with him.
“We’re taking your car,” she announced.
“I don’t have a car.”
“Your mom’s then,” a compact Mercedes Benz coupe sat on the stone courtyard beneath Fir trees.
“You’ll have to go back in and get the keys Avina.” His voice smiled as he walked ahead of her.
“We’ll take my truck then. Keep walking.” She searched the courtyard. She had not thought this far ahead. He laughed at her and arched his neck. He said,
“You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know where to take me. You can’t go to the police. You’re an imposter. Catherine knew you were a phony, a cheap fake. You are a knock off chick. Do you really even live in that house or are you just some squatter that broke in?” He made his voice sound joyful, as he had that skill.
She stopped walking and let him go down the driveway. The light of the courtyard fell behind them.
She said, “You killed Cat. I can kill you at any time and say you tried the same thing on me. I blew away a rapist. They love that shit up here. That’s what guns are for; it’s why everyone owns one. They dream of shooting a punk like you out here; they live for it. Where do you think you are, San Francisco? You can try me.”
He turned to face her, walking backward. He said, “You think that bitch cop will help you? No, she’ll want to know where a hood rat like you gets all that money. It’s all over TV. They’re going to charge you and Helen with Catherine’s murder. It’s you that’s going to prison, bitch.”
She rushed quickly toward him in anger and he lunged forward, head butting her hard. His skull thudded into hers, knocking her to the ground. Night stars exploded into auras and fell as she fell.
Dream of the Wolf Page 21