A Wicked Snow

fringe of curly red hair peeking out from under the cop’s knit cap made him look like a circus clown. Bauer remembered him from the gymnasium. The deputy pointed inside the foundation walls; a cement rectangle stood starkly alone.

“Yeah, I heard,” Bauer said. He regarded a backhoe a hundred yards away as it exhaled diesel and lurched forward, its yellow bucket dumping sodden earth in a heap.

“Found two more before lunch.” The cop cleared a wad of phlegm from his throat and spat. It smacked against the muddy, melted ground. “So far.”

Bauer brushed past the redhead to get a better look. The coroner and two other men Bauer did not know by name, but whose county-issued ponchos indicated they were crime scene investigators, had planted themselves in the center of the house, amid the charred ruins. One held a high-powered lamp to illuminate the darkest shadows. A piano, its keys buckled like an old ivory necklace, was the focus of their attention.

“The woman’s under the piano,” Wilder said. “It appears her twin boys are next to her.”

Bauer inched forward and broke into the conversation. “How the hell did that happen?”

“We’re told the piano was upstairs,” one of the investigators said, nodding solemnly in Bauer’s direction. “Some kind of a music room, I guess. The floor must have given way before falling down here on the victims— who, thank God, were probably already dead. Murdered or maybe just overcome by the smoke and heat. Coroner will make that call.”

On top of a charred floorboard mottled with ash and debris, the boys’ small bodies were laid out next to each other. Bauer bent closer. Their ears had been burned off, making their heads look like knobs. One appeared to be face down. The condition of the other body, seemingly more incinerated, made it difficult to determine. A third investigator loaded a camera and focused his long lens. Bauer was so absorbed, so riveted by the horror of what was in the ruins of the Logan house, he didn’t even notice the man with the camera until the flash-bulbs strobed the scene.

Jesus, he thought. A couple of kids. Twin boys… born together and died together. How often does that happen, anyway?

While the FBI out-of-towner stood behind them, the two investigators in ponchos used a couple of two-by- fours to hoist up what remained of the piano. They wore heavy, leather gloves to protect their hands from the still- smoldering remnants of the blaze. Sparks mixed with the steam and smoke. As the pair heaved, piano wires snapped and vibrated through the rubble. Once it was shoved to the side, they all saw a larger body; a woman’s pink garment, not completely destroyed by the fire, covered the torso like an impossibly cheerful death shroud.

“God!” one of the men gasped, and Bauer moved closer to get a better view.

The body flat on its back was headless.

“Where the fuck is her head?” said one of the cops holding the two-by-four.

“Maybe it burned off or something,” one said.

“Heads have a lot more bone than flesh,” yet another voice added. “Heads don’t burn up and skulls don’t roll away from a crime scene.”

Bauer said nothing. He was mesmerized by the sight and didn’t even turn to look at who had made the comment.

“Yeah,” he finally muttered.

A Nikon flash unit flooded the three cinder corpses with light as the photographer took more pictures. When he completed a roll, he licked the adhesive tab that sealed it, put it in his pocket, and reloaded. By the end of the day, he’d logged more than 400 photographs. And because he felt he was onto something special, he shot a roll for himself, which he hid in his back pocket. In the event that a major national magazine became interested in this story, he’d want to be able to send them some photos. He noticed that a reporter for the Spruce County Lumberman had also arrived on the scene. He’d heard others were on the way. The ABC television affiliate from Portland was en route before lunch. By the afternoon all networks were on the scene, mostly from Portland and the station in Salem. A San Francisco “Eyewitness” news team had chartered a jet and touched down around 3:30 p.m.

The Associated Press reporter, a tight-lipped, aggressive young woman named Marcella Hoffman, staked her claim to the story. She slugged her copy: “Merry Murders and Happy Homicides.” A photo that a friend from the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles had gladly requisitioned for a fee (“pays for some of this year’s Christmas”) accompanied the article. It was a standard driver’s license picture, but it was also the world’s first glimpse of Claire Logan. Logan stared with an intensity not usually seen in a DMV photograph. She had shoulder-length hair with a slight wave. Her earrings were medium-size hoops. Her features were patrician and symmetrical. She was beautiful by anyone’s measure.

By the end of that first day, the Logans’ bodies were slid into body bags and delivered by ambulance to the high school gymnasium. There they joined thirteen others, making a total of sixteen victims discovered at Icicle Creek Farm. Sixteen dead. With the exception of the headless woman, all victims had been male. With the exception of Mrs. Logan and her two little boys, all had been adult men.

Queasy from what he’d seen, Bauer checked into a room at the Whispering Pines, drank club soda, and reached for the telephone. His first call was to Portland. The FBI dispatch agent got on the line and told him that agents would be joining him in Rock Point, probably before nightfall.

“Hang tight, Bauer,” he said. “It goes without saying that this is more than your garden-variety serial killer.”

“I get that,” he said. He drank some more club soda.

“Quantico wants a lid on this as much as possible. All the military guys who are victims down there make this not only peculiar, but a little more sensitive than a runof-the-mill body dump.”

Bauer didn’t need a lecture. “I’m not talking to anyone,” he said. “Mostly because I don’t know what’s going on yet. This is pretty grim down here.”

“Right, Bauer. Now don’t forget, the sheriff down there is in charge. At least we want to let him feel he is.”

The second call Bauer made was to his mother in Idaho. He told her he was working a big case and she’s “probably heard about it on the TV news.” He also talked to one of his sisters and promised he’d tried to break away from the investigation to get home before the holidays were over.

“But I doubt it,” he said. “Tell mom that I love her. Looks like I’ll be in Rock Point for a while. I doubt I’ll ever see anything worse than this. No matter how long I live.”

Chapter Fifteen

Around five o’clock, the temperature dropped again, and the snow that had been spitting at the ground throughout the day began to fall with a renewed fury— more than eight inches in less than an hour. The north-south interstate became a skating rink, and the Oregon State Police did double duty pulling holiday motorists from ditches and away from Jersey barriers. The other FBI agents en route to Rock Point didn’t get any farther south than Willamette, an hour away. Despite the white-crowned mountains around them and their obvious love of the beauty of the frozen precipitation, Bauer knew Northwesterners just didn’t do that well driving in snow.

Bauer smoked a cigarette and logged a couple hours writing the text for his 302s, the code used by the bureau for interview reports. He braved the weather for a drink and a sandwich at the coffee shop two doors down from his room at the Whispering Pines. It was, without a doubt, the worst Christmas of his life. He imagined all that he missed; his family gathered to celebrate into the evening. By 11 p.m., he tucked into bed in time to watch himself on the news. Sheriff Howe, with his gentle country-fried demeanor was the spokesperson, but Bauer was visible in several of the shots. He wondered if his mom was watching, too.

Bauer didn’t know it then, however, but people across the country were riveted to the first broadcasts coming from snowy Oregon. The Logan farm was on its way to being the site of a story that would never be forgotten.