On top of her, straddling her, her petite body could not move beneath him. Security ties gripped his hands together but he had them in front of him now, and held her hands together over her head, grounding them into the small stones. His dense weight shocked her and crushed her pelvis under his movement. She bucked beneath him but it didn’t budge him. When his elbow came down onto her jaw, the night went fully black.
Conscious again, dragging backward, his tied hands gripped her wrists, and she scrambled her legs after him as he pulled her. Throwing her in a heap behind the Mercedes, he kicked her hard in the stomach, and she gasped at the vacuum of air in her lungs. He would stomp her head into the road and smash her skull. Instead, she was flung hard onto the coarse carpet of the car’s open trunk.
“You worshipped Catherine. You wanted to be just like her. Hell, you wanted to be her,” he said. “Well you’re in luck, because I can give you the ultimate Catherine experience.”
When the trunk slammed closed, she was entombed in darkness.
46.
Brouwer leaned over Ray Stone’s passenger seat, filled with binders stacked over the past week. Accordion bags of notes on the Jackson and Wind River murders crowded his Dodge truck cab.
Crime scene technicians carried heavy plastic containers to vans with gaping back doors. Wind River tribal police were processing Crystal Augustine’s apartment.
Brouwer dialed her phone, put in on speaker, and set in on a stack the files on the big Dodge’s seat.
“Lane?” Jennifer Hackett answered.
“Jennifer, I’m sorry I don’t have time to explain.”
“Explain what?”
“I need an investigation opened immediately by the state of Wyoming into the homicide deaths of Lara Mazer, Crystal Augustine and Kelly Yellowbird,” said Brouwer.
“Lane, we told you to report back to State police headquarters a day ago. Where are you?”
“I’m on emergency patrol with Wind River tribal police where I’m assisting in the investigation into the unlawful deaths of three Wyoming women.” She held the passenger door open and raised her voice toward the phone.
“No, that’s not what you’re doing. What you’re doing is getting your ass to Cheyenne to take your job here while you still have one, assuming you still have one.”
“I need you to hear me out,” Brouwer said.
Hackett cut in, “The state of Wyoming will not interrupt the county prosecution of the murderers of Catherine Kinderdine. You have stretched yourself too thin if you can no longer see that. You’re way out of line using your command to investigate homicides out on the Reservation when you’ve been asked to report back here.”
“Wind River police have requested state assistance and the Division agreed on an emergency basis. I’m still state police and I’m still up here. I’m with a body.”
“You’re at a crime scene?” Hackett lowered her voice. “Brouwer listen to me, we lost this one. You need to come into headquarters. You’re lucky that we’ll look after you with a job in Cheyenne.”
She imagined herself in a cheap pantsuit in an office building in Cheyenne. She saw a laneway of partition boards running people into small cubicle pens, bureaucrats corralled like livestock while Hackett with her long curls bounced by, lording power over underlings. She relaxed. That fate would never be hers. Whatever happened, whatever may come of her, if she had to shovel horseshit on a dude ranch, so be it. She was not leaving this valley.
She said, “Jennifer, I’m not coming to the capital. There’s more work to do in the field. I need you to talk to the attorney general. I don’t have a lot of time.”
The wind swept the treetops above the small houses near Crystal’s apartment, a complex of wide three story buildings. She had to get to the casino to start interviews with anyone who saw Crystal on her shift.
“Excuse me?” Hackett was no longer a put upon friend. She was stung. “What do you mean you’re not coming to the capital? You’re leaving Jackson Hole. You’ve been transferred to Cheyenne to join me here, as horrible as that apparently sounds to you.”
“Jennifer, you’re not hearing me. I have a state’s case to bring forward for three murders on Wind River and in Jackson.”
“A state case against whom?”
Brouwer held a hand to her forehead. “We don’t know yet.” The slender figure lurking outside her cabin flashed in her mind. “I need a case opened so we can lawfully hold people of interest to question them. I need a state investigation under which we can locate and search a possible encampment in the woods. If the killer is off the reservation then tribal police cannot search him out. The county will not search the woods in county limits, not now. We need state police authority. We need to act fast before the county muddies the waters by charging these girls and a serial killer walks out of here free.”
“Do you have the basis for a case or not?” Jennifer Hackett asked.
“We have three known victims of the same killer, so far,” Brouwer said. “We want a joint task force investigating the murders of these women to run regardless of the actions of the county. I need five units of state highway patrol up here immediately. We need a helicopter to search the back mountains for a hideout or camp.”
She was gambling by working with Wind River without orders, over Hackett’s head. The tribal police had requested state police assistance and the state had granted it, but never assigned her. She was playing a wager that Hackett would trust her, even though, she finally realized, she didn’t trust Hackett.
“If we don’t take action now Jennifer, the state police will never live this case down,” Brouwer said. “Nobody involved with it, I mean no one, will come out of this unscathed by the public.”
“Jesus Lane, listen to yourself, five patrol units? Helicopters? Do you sound like someone standing down? We gave this investigation to the county to prosecute. They’re bringing Avina and Helen in as soon as they get warrants for them.”
Brouwer leaned into the dashboard speakerphone.
“Goddamn it Jennifer. We are being manhandled by the good old boys at the county, allowing them to grandstand on these deaths, when, as we speak, there is a pathological murderer hunting women in our state.”
Ray Stone held a hand up for her to hold it at that, and some moments passed. He winked at her.
Jennifer Hackett finally spoke, “Okay Lane, listen, it’s just me, it’s just Jennifer. You can trust me, whether you know it or not. Tell me what is really going on. I have never even heard of the murders you are working on. Who is Christine Yellow Tail?”
Brouwer leaned further into the cab of the dodge truck, bending over the phone on the seat. “We don’t know who killed Catherine. The county may be right as much as I hate to say it. We have to leave the Catherine Kinderdine case to the county. For all I know; Helen Hearne killed her. I just don’t know. However, I can tell you this: Catherine Kinderdines’ murder is a separate case from a series of other murders taking place as we speak. We have a murderer hunting women in this region. Whoever killed Catherine Kinderdine did not kill these women. What we’re asking for is a state attorney general investigation into the murders of Kelly Yellowbird, Lara Mazer and Crystal Augustine, and we cannot have any more time wasted on empty politics.”
“Can you make the case that you have two separate murderers at large?”
“Yes,” Brouwer said. “Whoever killed Catherine does not fit the same profile of the man that killed these women. The murder of Catherine is utterly different from that of these victims.”
“How is that?” Jennifer asked. “Both Lara and Catherine were disrobed and strangled, within a few miles of one another, and were from the same social group.”
“Catherine’s murder was disorganized. The killer was afraid of her and did not know what he was doing, he was unprepared, and was ashamed of what he done. It’s why her face was covered. The killer spread her hair over her face so she wouldn’t see him. He was ashamed of his actions, and could not handle her judgme
nt of him. He needed to cover her face to escape judgment. Her killer depersonalized her; it’s why he laid her jacket over her pelvis. He wanted to hide her body and his shame. That her jacket covered her shows that Catherine knew her attacker, which is also, why she died more violently than the others, why Catherine’s killer crushed her neck. He acted out of hate, out of rage, caught up in the moment and he left a sloppy crime scene. He didn’t dominate her because she intimidated him. He couldn’t even think clearly enough to toss her off the ledge. The disorder of her crime scene shows that the killer was in high anxiety during the attack. The act against Catherine was impulsive and the violence was sudden.
Not so for the other victims, someone who believed that he loved them, that he cared for them, laid Lara, Kelly and Crystal, to rest peacefully. Unlike Catherine’s killer, the loving killer is prepared. He’s not impulsive, just the opposite, he’s compulsive. He’s acting out an elaborate fantasy life that he is no longer in command of. This killer, at a specific location that he had organized and planned ahead of time, approached and displayed Mazer, Yellowbird, and Augustine in a manner he had foreseen. This killer personalized them; he did not hide them, he displayed them. The crime scenes show control, not disorder. He took them where he wanted them to be. He shows calmness in doing what he did. He controlled his mood and emotions during the crimes. This killer had the presence of mind to take any evidence with him. These scenes show total control, but also, at the same time, a compulsion, that he controls the victim, but not his desire to destroy them.”
“If he is acting out of compulsive fantasy, what’s the fantasy?”
“He’s laying with his queen. He feels that she is powerful, to be honored. He brought them into a ceremony, they became afraid of him and acted out and he killed them, in his mind, he may not even have meant to. He humiliated them after the fact because he felt hurt and rejected and lashed out.
I’ve spoken to criminologist colleagues in Sheridan, as to why someone would disrobe a woman and present her to the Polar star. We believe this comes from Anglo-Saxon mythology. It’s a white male fantasy. He places them on platforms, dais, as an offer to the sky God Wotan. He wants them to face north, to the sky above the mountain forest, where the Northern paradise lies. He is a king, with his queen in the northern paradise above the mountain. You enter paradise in the Polar Star. He’s taking the woman, in marriage, to the kingdom of the Wotan. Kelly and Crystal wed him before the Polar Star. The witness interrupted Lara’s wedding. He begins with a marriage to a princess and ends by making a funeral offering of his queen. He will act out this ritual until I stop him.”
There was silence and ruffling of a hand over a phone mouthpiece.
“Detectives, this is your Attorney General speaking.”
Jennifer had walked into the Attorney General’s office with Brouwer on speakerphone. Never to be outdone, Jennifer was never short on boldness. The State Attorney General said, “Do you have a person of interest?”
“Hello sir,” Brouwer said. She hesitated. “I have someone to question who arrived in the area from Federal prison in Colorado. The timing of his arrival coincides with the thanksgiving weekend murder of Kelly Yellowbird, a young woman taken from Fort Washakie. I need state patrol officers and resources to assist the Wind River police. Someone is killing women out here. We may have someone else who needs questioned about his whereabouts over the weekend. What we need is . . .”
“Direction,” Ray Stone interrupted her.
There was a long pause, muffled conversation on the other end.
“Detectives Brouwer and Stone,” the Attorney General said, “We will strike a task force between Wind River and the Highway Patrol. Agent Brouwer of the DCI will lead the task force, to hell with the County. Get enough probable cause to bring all suspects in out of the public. We will send Highway Patrol units to assist you tonight. We can get you a chopper in the morning. In the meantime, there is a highway maintenance office in Jackson owned by the state, use it as an office and interview room. You have done good work, now go ahead and pursue your investigation.”
47.
Avina Zadeh began to breathe. The slender canister of bear spray slid to the bottom of her underwear. She worked her legs to the side; it was many moments before the car squealed on the stone drive. Something pressed into her back. She clicked on the pencil flashlight and maneuvered it around the trunk, Catherine’s backpack pressed against the seat backs.
The car took off forward and then swayed hard in a corner, and tires hummed on pavement. She ran her hands over her jeans and her phone was gone. She rolled back into the end of the small trunk. They were going up a hill. He was taking her somewhere to kill her.
Avina pulled out the thin canister of bear spray and pulled out the pin, her mind racing. If he opened the trunk with the gun on her and saw the bear spray, he would shoot her. She had to get him to put the gun away or he would open fire when she sprayed him.
The car stopped. Light showed through the seats from the cab of the car as he opened the driver door, a binging sound. She shoved the metallic canister down the front of her pants and the trunk lid flew open: he was huge above her, but held no gun. Diving into the black cavity, he grabbed her by the neck and the inside of her thigh, and dropped her hard on a ground of white dust. Pulling her by her hair, dragging her, she stumbled behind him.
They were on a hillside, the lights of Jackson in the flat night below. The light on a cellular tower blinked above them on the top of the hill.
He dragged her through the sage, between the thick brushes; her trailing feet lifting gray alkali. He threw her to the ground, she reached into her pants but he was on top of her, his weight pressing her into the rock hard earth, and the night stars spun above him.
“I have to have some fun with you,” he said. “You’re just too nice to look at. I have to make that little Persian thing purr, and then you can go see Cat. You can be ghosts together. You can be nymphs in the forest and run around naked all you want.”
She clenched the waistband of her jeans as he tried to draw her arms up above her. His bound hands tightened into a hard grip around her thin wrists as he pulled on her like that, with her holding the top of her tight jeans. He was excited, his hardness pressed out from his thin cotton boxer shorts over her stomach. Then, his forehead slammed down into hers, and brought the total black of the dead of night, the stars became sharp and crystal white. But when her eyes refocused, he was no further along in raping her, and she knew she hadn’t been unconscious for more than a moment.
Because he had to let go of her wrists to work her pants and underwear down off her hips, she was able to raise her hands up over her head, as he saw this, he tried but couldn’t reach them. Using what force she had left, she pressed down on the bear spray canister tab but nothing happened.
He postured up, surprised, and a cloudburst misted into his face and chest.
Bright pain pierced her eyes; the inside of her mouth stung with stench, mist enveloped her head. His weight shifted back on her and she emptied the can into his open mouth, running it across his wide eyes. Shooting clear liquid hard against his face, it splashed onto her. He gagged and heaved at the coating reek but could not muster a sound. He was off her, drool stringing from his mouth. She pulled the gun from the seat of his shorts and stood up behind him. Her eyes were running freely with tears. She spat at the foulness, stinging filled her mouth, nose and eyes. She squeezed the trigger. The deafening crack made her jump, the sound ripped back and forth through the clear mountain air. Moving away from her, he lurched and stumbled back toward the car, with his tied hands thrashing in the night before him. He was blind. She let another round of the pistol crack into the dry earth. He swayed through the headlight beams of the car hung up in heavy sagebrushes, trying to vomit, but gagging without effect.
She followed behind him, working her jeans up over her thighs.
“Get in the trunk!” she screamed.
He stumbled around the heavy sagebr
ushes toward the Mercedes.
48.
Sheriff Hargrove sat in his truck in the night. The bright green of the dashboard distorted in the dark. His vision blurred, then focused, then blurred in fatigue. Images rolled, morphed into the green dash lights.
The Vahedi mansion filled the night, its timbered acreage, its stone and beamed outbuildings, and its walkway spanning the main house, three-car garage and generous guesthouse to the north. A light came on in an upstairs room of the guesthouse and he jolted awake. Rubbing his eyes, he looked. There was no light.
He slouched in the seat of his truck, his radio silent. He adjusted the pistol on his hip and reclined his seat. The mansion was broad and muscular in the late night, spruce trees behind it dense and black around an anterior driveway. To the north, Ursa Major had wound some degrees around Polaris, the North Star. His eyes blurred looking at the tree line, and images began to roll into his mind. A vintage cartoon hunter strode after a wolf with an elongated nose and absurdly large paws into the spruce boughs.
He shook his head. Stars shone bright in the clear sky, but he did not want to name them or the constellations of them, as the sky made him uneasy. He sat in the truck in the Vahedi woman’s yard, his engine and lights off, unseen from the main road. The Vahedi estate would fetch fifteen million, give or take five million, he did not follow the local market, but money came from all over hell to own a piece of Jackson Hole. Wealthy people voted for him, believing that he kept people and property safe. It’s how you look, Yolanda had said.
“Like what, a guard dog?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re the German shepherd type guy; it’s why you’re hot.”
“I’m not a shepherd I’m a hound dog!” he whooped and jumped her bones right there at the kitchen island, the kids out with her visiting mother for the afternoon. Her sundress up over her round hips, her G-string dangling from an ankle before falling to the floor, her long black hair over his shoulder down his back.
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