A Wicked Snow

Chapter Twelve

Patty Masour knew the scanner codes better than anyone in Rock Point, Oregon. She was the part-time dispatcher at the Spruce County Sheriff’s Department, a job she shared with her sister, Sandy. The code sputtering over the scanner next to her davenport meant trouble, big trouble. Multiple homicide in the woods of the county. She turned off her TV and told her husband she felt uneasy about what she had half heard crackle, and she dialed her sister.

“County Sheriff. Merry Christmas and hello,” a woman’s voice answered. Her voice was flat, her words sounded as though they were read from a card, not words from the heart.

“Sandy?”

“Yes, Patty? Oh dear,” she said when recognition came. “Have your heard? They’re hauling bodies out of the Logan family’s tree farm. I haven’t had time to call you; things have been off the meter over here for the past two and half hours!”

“Logan?” Patty’s heart sank. She knew the family. Everyone in Rock Point did. The Logan place had been their destination just ten days before when she and her children went to get their tree, a perfect, pyramidal-shaped Noble fir.

“Claire and her two little boys are missing. It’s real bad out there. I mean real bad! Place is burning to the ground and the girl…”

“Hannah?”

“Yeah, she’s the only survivor we know about.”

Patty’s knees weakened, and she slid into the soft folds of her velveteen davenport. “Michelle goes to school with Hannah,” she said. Michelle was her daughter, thirteen. Patty hung on every word while her sister went on about the investigation under way. She remembered how Claire’s daughter had rung up the sale for the Christmas tree in the little kiosk set up outside of the wreath shed. She was a pretty girl, big brown eyes with thick, ash-blond hair, held in a ponytail. Michelle and Hannah had been in the same second-and fourth-grade classes. They were best friends back then. By seventh grade, though, they’d stopped seeing each other outside of the classroom. Michelle told her mother that Hannah was no longer much fun to be around. Patty thought it might have had to do with what was going on at home with the girl’s mother.

“They’re taking Hannah to the hospital for an exam, then back here,” Sandy went on. “You got any clothes that might fit her?”

“Yes,” Patty answered. “Hannah and Michelle are about the same size.”

“Well, she hadn’t barely a stitch on when they found her. She was wearing her nightgown and socks. Soaking wet, too. The poor thing was out in the snow when they found her.”

Patty mumbled something about Christmas being ruined, hung up, and spun around for her car keys. She hurried to her daughter’s bedroom in search of some- thing for the Logan girl to wear. The room was a mess, and she couldn’t find anything clean. She thought of the Christmas tree and rifled for a package under its fragrant boughs. Ten minutes later, she was at the hospital with a pair of Michelle’s blue sailor-style jeans, brand new panties, socks pulled from under the tree, and a bright red Rock Point Bobcats sweatshirt still warm from the dryer. Patty handed the clothing to a duty nurse, explaining they were for the Logan girl.

“Where’s her mother?” Patty asked.

The nurse shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. Seems like she ought to be here, considering what her daughter’s been through.”

“Can I do anything?” Patty asked.

“Not that I can think of,” the nurse said. She stuffed the clothing into a plastic hospital garment bag and zipped it up. “Police are going to talk to her. The FBI’s even been called.”

“Oh dear,” Patty said. “I wonder what’s going on.”

Entering his mid-twenties, Jeff Bauer was the kind of federal cop that more senior special agents labeled a “greenhorn” or some other antiquated term left from the days of Eliot Ness, or at the very least, before color television. It only meant he was young and, even he had to admit when the occasion called for it, brash. He had graduated with honors from Stanford University with a degree in criminology and psychology. It wasn’t family money that got him to Palo Alto, either, but a widowed mother who typed indexes and rewrote obits for the Boise Statesman and who had the good sense to push her only son into applying for every scholarship she could find. Instead of pursuing a doctorate in psychology as he had once pondered, Bauer enrolled in the FBI Academy in Virginia, where he graduated a respectable thirty-fifth in his class. He had a sandy thatch of hair, clear blue eyes, and the chiseled features that were a gift of genetics, still crisp from youth. He was on the slender, though not slight, side, with a stomach that stayed above his belt and a waistband that didn’t roll. Women noticed him. That alone denied him a kind of welcome among the jaded, craggy-faced, scotch-and-water-gutted agents with thirty years of fieldwork. His first assignment had been in Portland. It was a small office with eighteen agents and five clerical staff. The Federal Building in downtown Portland was undergoing renovations when the new kid arrived for his first work assignment. He shared his cubbyhole office with a U.S. Marshall Service agent who, thankfully, was never around.

It was barely 5:30, Christmas morning, when Bauer got up, emptied his bladder, and shuffled to the kitchen. He resuscitated an English muffin by sprinkling water on it and running it through the toaster. Bauer pulled the metal ring from the top of a pop can, hooked the tab onto a long chain he had made, and sloshed Dr Pepper into the back of his throat. Warm, sweet. Not too bad. He didn’t wait for coffee to brew. He turned on the radio to listen to Christmas tunes. Karen Carpenter’s butterscotch alto filled the room, and for a blissful, melancholy moment he relaxed, closed his eyes, and conjured images of Christmas at home in Harper, an Idaho paper mill town just outside of Boise. He knew that in a few hours, his sisters would be converging on their mother’s house with presents and a ham the size and weight of a bowling ball. Boise was only an hour from Portland by air, but that Christmas morning Bauer had holiday duty. He was low man on the totem pole.

A few minutes before six, the phone rang and his sleepy eyes popped open. It was the dispatcher calling. The man’s voice was devoid of humanity or warmth. No Christmas cheer there.

“You’ll need to get down to Spruce County,” the dispatcher said. “Big to-do down there. Big snow dumping down that way, too.”

The reason for the call was some sort of criminal activity, of course, not a weather report. And Bauer was summoned not because he was the most suited for the job, but because he had no family and the bureau director thought he’d be able to “hold down the fort” for a few days. Holding it down, as the agent in charge put it, was hardly a solo job. A handful of agents on a skeleton crew made sure the holidays went better for those with kids, wives, dogs, gerbils, and the other trappings of real life, than those with giant microwave ovens. The dispatcher, a guy named Walter with a Polish last name that no one could pronounce, let alone spell, said that an enormous fire on a Christmas tree farm had resulted in several deaths, most likely members of a family.

“That’s a case for local law enforcement,” Bauer said. He glanced out the window at the Willamette River, a silver strand with a shoreline dotted with boat hulls. In the glow of the streetlights and the light of an awakening morning on the riverside path below his window, a man and a small boy rode by. Shiny new wheels sparkled in the light.

“Yeah,” the dispatcher said. “You’d think so, but not after what a volunteer fireman found.”

The little boy outside fell down and the father ran to pick him up.

“And what was that?” Bauer asked.

“The skeletal remains of a man in a uniform found in a grave near the barn.”

“Uniform?”

“A Marine lieutenant’s.”

Bauer set aside his poor excuse for an English muffin.

“Still there?” the voice asked.