A Wicked Snow

Just after 8 a.m. the day after Christmas, the phone rang in Bauer’s room at the “remodeled-for-the- Bicentennial-year” Whispering Pines. It was Bob Howe, the Spruce County sheriff.

“I’ve got an update for you,” Howe said, “a kind of a good news/bad news deal. Guess you ought to know all that’s going on down there. Found four more bodies overnight.”

Bauer was stunned. “Four?”

“Yeah. We’re up to twenty. A few more and we’ll top Corona down in Yuba City.”

Bauer instantly recalled how a few years before a California migrant labor contractor named Juan Vallejo Corona was convicted of killing twenty-five Mexican migrant workers in what had been the nation’s greatest mass killing in history.

“It isn’t a contest, sheriff,” Bauer said, quickly adding a laugh because he didn’t want to offend his only ally. “If it is, it isn’t the kind we want to win, right?”

“Guess so. Anyway, two have been preliminary I.D.’d based on their effects. Kind of weird. Turns out two had their wallets tucked inside their breast pockets. Smashed their teeth, yet the perp left their wallets. What a dope. One guy’s retired navy from Virginia; other’s retired army from one of the Dakotas. We’re working on the other two.”

“Can I get the names?”

“Yeah,” Howe said. “I’ll have some stuff for you at the office. Come by any time.”

“Thanks. I’ll do just that.”

“Now, if the fact that we’ve got a lead on identifying a couple of them is the good news, I do have some bad news, too.”

“Yeah?”

Howe went quiet for a moment. “This is big,” he said, his voice missing its jovial tone. “We sorta screwed up. Claire Logan’s sister made arrangements to have her sister’s remains sent to the funeral home, and our guys let the body go.”

The young FBI agent’s face turned red. “Jesus, Sheriff, we haven’t even processed the body. Get it back.”

Howe sighed. “I’d like to, but I’m afraid we’re a little too late.”

“Get a court order. The body is evidence.”

“The body,” the sheriff said in a very quiet, very embarrassed voice, “is gone.” His words trailed off into near whisper.

Bauer got on his feet. “What do you mean, gone?” he asked.

“Cremated. The sister had the body cremated. We’re talking Urn City. I told you we screwed up.”

Bauer couldn’t contain his outrage, though he surely made an effort to do so. He spat out his words: “Jesus Christ! That’s a fuck-up, big time! The body hasn’t been identified, hasn’t been processed for prints or trace. We didn’t even have a head!”

Howe was surprised that this nice kid from Idaho would even raise his voice. It wasn’t his fault that incompetence ran through the ranks of law enforcement in Spruce County. “I know,” he said. “I know. You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? You think we’re a bunch of loser locals, one step from being a rent-a-cop at some discount store? We made a mistake and my guys are real sorry.”

Bauer bit his tongue. He knew the answer to his next question, but asked anyway.

“I don’t suppose anyone took any tissue samples?”

Sheriff Howe continued to sputter in palpable embarrassment. “Sorry,” he muttered. “None taken.”

Bauer looked for a smoke. “There is a problem here, you know. We’ve got a body—rather we had a body— without a head and no real way to identify her.”

“It’s Claire Logan,” Sheriff Howe said.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Her daughter Hannah said so. She looked at our Polaroids and I.D.’d her mother. Said, ‘that’s my mom.’ Said it was her mom’s pink bathrobe. No doubt about it. Said she and her brothers got it for her for Christmas.” They each opened a gift Christmas Eve.”

To blow up at the sheriff would only make matters worse. Bauer said nothing more.

“I’d like to talk to her, okay?” he asked.

“She’s staying with her aunt, nice lady from the coast. They’re checked in at the Rock Point Inn. The kid’s pretty messed up. Lost everything and everyone. Her mom, her brothers, her dad years ago… she’s an orphan. Got to be rough.”

“And you showed her that photo of her headless mother?”

“Look, Bauer, we might be yokels out here, but we’re not cruel. We masked off that part of the photo. All she saw was the torso. She doesn’t know about her mom’s head being missing. Give us some credit, okay?”

The two-tone myrtle-wood decor of the Rock Point Inn lobby was the hotel’s signature feature and had been since the place was built in 1949. The lumber was harvested and milled in the town of Molten on the central Oregon coast. It was a rare wood, prized for its swirling grain and combination of light and dark. The wood was sold in tourist shops as boxes, tabletops, and lamp bases. No one who saw the lobby of the Rock Point Inn with its floor- to-ceiling myrtle wood would ever forget it.

Bauer asked for Sheila Wax, the victims’ assistance officer who was assigned to the Logan girl, apparently the sole survivor of her entire family. Wax showed up, coughed a hello, and ushered him into a secluded area near the lobby bar. Over her coat-rack shoulders, he could see the figure of a slight girl, bent over. Maybe reading a book? He wasn’t sure.

“Her aunt is over at Ressler’s making funeral arrangements. You know her brothers are dead, too.”

Bauer suppressed a grimace and nodded as pleasantly as he could. Of course, he thought, the aunt was at Ressler’s mortuary. She’s the one who ordered her sister’s remains cremated.

“How’s the girl holding up?” he asked.

“I’d say, not too bad considering all she’s been through. Really, if you ask me—and you did—she’s holding it together like a little trooper,” Wax said, then shrugged. “But God knows what she’s really thinking. She seems okay.”

She led him away from the lobby to a seating area with two couches and an overstuffed ottoman. A young girl sat quietly with her back facing them.

“Hannah, this is Jeff Bauer. He’s with the FBI. He’s here to help figure out what happened at your tree farm.”

She turned around, and the first thing that Bauer noticed was her brown eyes, enormous and so very sad. Though she wasn’t particularly thin for her age, she looked small. Her frame had been gulped up by a Bob-cats sweatshirt.

“Okay,” she said. Her braces caught the light. “I’ll do what I can, but I don’t think I can help that much. I mean, I really don’t know what happened for sure.”

Bauer sat down, knowing it was not the first time this ground would be trod, and with the ongoing discoveries at Icicle Creek Farm it would not be the last. He’d never interviewed a child before; in all, he’d barely conducted two dozen 302s since he’d been assigned in Portland, and all of those were adults investigated for racketeering and money laundering.

“I know this is a very bad time, Hannah. I don’t want to add to your grief, but Mrs. Wax is correct. I’m here to help.”

Hannah studied the FBI man’s face. The muscles in her throat constricted so tightly, she felt as if she’d suffocate. She needed help, and she wanted to believe that the man with the sparkly blue eyes and messy sandy hair that hung over his forehead was the one to give it to her.

“Okay,” she said, moving her eyes downcast and tucking her small hands into her lap.

“Good. First of all,” he said, “I want to tell you that I’m very sorry about what happened to your family. I am so very, very sorry.”

He touched her shoulder very gently and Hannah shuddered slightly. Her eyes welled up and she started to cry. Bauer didn’t know what to do next. What’s appropriate? He stood there, his hand on