A Wicked Snow

her shoulder, for a few moments and watched Hannah wrestle for composure. He felt sorrow, deep gut-wrenching sadness. But more than anything, a twinge of shame, too. He felt badly that his job called upon him to add to her misery by probing for information at the worst moment in her young life.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked gently.

Hannah drew her knees up to her chest. “I was asleep,” she said. “I heard some yelling coming from outside. I sleep with my window open a little. Even in winter. It was my mother yelling at Marcus.”

“That would be Marcus Wheaton,” Bauer confirmed.

She nodded. “Right. Marcus worked on the farm, but he was also a friend of my mom’s. Mine, too. He lived in a trailer my mom brought in so he’d have a place to stay. He worked for us as a handyman and tree cutter.”

“What was your mom yelling?” Bauer asked.

Hannah pondered the question for a moment. “I couldn’t make out the words at first; I hadn’t woken up all the way. I went to my window and I saw them by the wreath shed. Marcus was carrying the big gun we use to flock the trees. We call it the sno-gun. He had the tank, too.”

“What time was it?” Bauer asked. “Do you know?”

“I looked at the clock when I got up. It was 11:40,” she said. Bauer noticed that she seemed proud that she could be so precise.

“That’s a great help,” he said. “What happened next?”

“I don’t really know. I went back to bed and a half hour later I woke up a second time. Smoke was coming into my room. I opened the door and it was so black and dark and thick. I didn’t know what to do. I called out for my mom—her room is next to mine. But she didn’t say anything. I went back to the door, opened it, and crawled on my hands and knees. The floor felt cold.”

The pace of her story accelerated. It was as if Hannah Logan wanted to get the whole tale out between a single pair of breaths. She was a runaway train. Inhale… tell the world what happened… exhale. “The floor was wet. I couldn’t see what it was, but I could smell it. I put my hands to my face in the dark and I could smell it.” Tears fell down her cheeks.

“What? Smelled what? The smoke?”

Hannah shook her head rapidly. “No,” she answered. “Well, yes, I smelled the smoke. But when I held my hands to my face… I smelled the snow.”

“Snow?” Bauer scratched his head. He didn’t get it.

Hannah nodded. “Not real snow. I smelled the snow stuff we use on the trees. Marcus had sprayed the snow all down the hallway, down the stairs… the house was covered inside with snow.”

Bauer was utterly perplexed. The image of a house with floors and furniture coated in fake snow just didn’t compute. “Why would anyone do that? That stuff is flame retardant.”

“No. No,” she said, starting to cry. “Mom used the old stuff. We had a shed full of it. Got it half price because it wasn’t any good. You see, it wasn’t safe. It burned up.”

Sheila Wax caught Bauer’s eye. The VAR woman was beside herself with alarm. The girl had gotten herself out of the house and to safety when she obviously wasn’t supposed to. Wax knew it and so did Bauer: She’d been left to die.

“I went to my brothers’ room,” Hannah continued, crying harder, “and I tried to get in. I couldn’t. The door was stuck. I called for Erik and Danny. But they didn’t answer. I called for my mom again, but she didn’t hear me.”

Between sobs, the kind of deep, guttural cries that break the listener’s heart, she told the FBI agent she didn’t see anything that night but a burning house, barn, sheds, even their car.

“I never saw anyone until the fireman came. I never saw my mom, my brothers, or Marcus. Everyone was gone. Everything was burning.” Hannah stared down at her lap and went quiet.

“I think she’s had enough,” Sheila Wax interrupted. “Maybe a break now?”

Bauer agreed, but he had one more question ricocheting around his mind. He took a deep breath and mulled it over for a moment. He wanted to know what Hannah could tell him about the other bodies police were finding planted around Icicle Creek Farm like a human crop.

“Hannah,” he said very gently, “we discovered something else at the farm. Something very, very bad.”

Her eyes fixed on Bauer, but she said nothing.

“Others may have died there, too. Besides your mother and brothers.”

He used the word “may” to soften the incontrovertible facts.

“Who?” she asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us. It appears that some men, some army guys, were found dead.” Again he chose words that he hoped would lessen her fear, soften the blow, and yet help in the investigation.

But Hannah became agitated and stood up. Sheila Wax glared at Bauer and moved closer, as if to brace the girl from falling.

“I don’t know,” she said, crying loudly. “I really don’t know. Anything. Anything more.”

The interview was over and Bauer knew it.

Later that night at the Whispering Pines, over a cold beer, a greasy tuna-melt, and an impossibly limp kosher dill spear, Bauer flipped through a folder Sheriff Howe had left at the hotel’s front desk. He felt rotten. He’d made a young girl cry. Real nice. Among the papers were the names of the first non-Logan victims to be partially identified by Spruce County authorities. One was a man from Deer Lake, Idaho. Bauer called the Portland office.

“I grew up near there,” he said. “That one’s mine.”

Chapter Sixteen

Federal law enforcement agents from across the country were yanked from their holiday gatherings by phone calls from overstuffed-with-turkey field office chiefs. Jeff Bauer, as it turned out, was not the only lowest man on the totem pole. There were others, too. The flight to Deer Lake was white-knuckled from its liftoff from the small airport just north of Rock Point to the icy, slag-rimmed Idaho mining enclave about an hour from Boise, the city of potatoes and Mormons. Bauer didn’t much care for flying to begin with, but for crying out loud, he could envision nothing worse than a ride on one of those twin prop planes he felt were more suited to crop dusting than passenger service. The gate agent at Mountain Air laughed when Bauer asked for a window seat.

“Every seat’s a window seat on this one,” the sheepish agent said.

Bauer flipped through the airline’s complimentary newsletter—it wasn’t even a real magazine—as the plane bounced around over the mountains, making the kind of noise that reminded him of a bowling alley, knocking pins and rolling balls in the gutter. He was en route to see the sister of the first identified victim, an army retiree named Cyrus Crowe. The file, like Crowe’s body when unearthed on the farm, was almost skeletal. Like several others—though not all—Crowe’s teeth had been extracted with a blunt object, probably a hammer. The forensics guys on the scene in Rock Point recalled a case in Cleveland in the 1960s where a serial killer had done the same thing to a half-dozen victims to avoid detection. And it worked in that case. None of the Cleveland victims, street whores and runaways, were ever claimed. No dental charts were produced, and because the victims were never named, neither was their killer. But Crowe was identified because of a distinctive eagle tattoo that had been preserved as though it were a scrap of tanned hide. A Missing Persons data bank in Washington, D.C., had a description of the tattoo among its vast files of the missing but not forgotten. Crowe had been sixty years old, had served twenty-five years in the army, retiring as a staff sergeant. He’d been married, but sadly his wife—pregnant with his only child—died in an auto accident in 1962. He had one surviving relative, a sister named Barbara Layton. She reported her brother missing when he didn’t show up for Thanksgiving