Forty-five minutes later, Bauer and Ross signed in to see Marcus Wheaton at the Spruce County jail. It was a nice jail, as those places go. Surprisingly modern, given it was more than twenty-five years old. It had been built during the then-governor’s push to make sure prisons and jails in Oregon were humane. There were six cells at Spruce County Corrections and Justice Center. Five were outfitted for men and ran the length of the building. A sixth was segregated from the others—a toilet with a beige tiled enclosure was its primary distinction. The men’s commodes—the other five—were stainless steel and planted in the open where anyone using them could be observed at all times. The women’s cell had been used infrequently. In fact, the last time it had an occupant was when a transvestite from Colorado got in a fistfight with a local fry cook outside the Crazy Eight, a downtown Rock Point bar. A
In late December, a couple of drunks and a kid serving out the last days of a pot possession conviction occupied the first three cells. Ostensibly for security measures, though Sheriff Howe later conceded it was because they wanted to keep an eye on Wheaton at all times, the handyman with the gas can was kept in the woman’s cell, which was adjacent to the sheriff’s office.
The FBI agents followed Sheriff Howe into the interview room where Wheaton sat in a turquoise, plastic- molded chair and stared at the table as if the white-and-gold splattered surface held some keen interest. The room looked more like a kitchenette than any “justice center.” Wheaton was not handcuffed. When he looked up, it was with a single eye.
“As I’ve said, I didn’t kill nobody,” he said.
“Right. Tell that to Erik and Danny’s sister,” Ross said.
Ross wanted to show the greenhorn how it was done, but also to get the damn thing going as quickly as possible. The sooner they were done, the sooner they’d be able to leave and return to Portland. Even so, Bauer was impressed. He didn’t know Ross even knew the twin boys’ names. He didn’t think Ross had paid a bit of attention to any of it.
Ross must have sensed that Bauer was impressed, because in an instant, the older FBI man decided to do a little grandstanding to show the new kid how it was done.
“How’s it feel to kill a couple of little kids? A bunch of old men…and a woman?”
Wheaton shook his head. “You, mister, don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We know enough,” Ross retorted. “Enough to have you swinging from the gallows in Cutter’s Landing by Easter.”
The big man stopped himself from bubbling over, though his anxiousness covered his bulbous face. “Where’s Brinker?” he asked.
“He’s coming. Be here any minute.” Sheriff Howe drained the last of his Pepsi. “You keep talking, Marcus.”
“You and Mrs. Logan had a little thing going? Usually it is the employee who gets fucked by the boss. Funny, you really turned the tables on her, didn’t you?”
Bauer wasn’t sure where it was going, but Wheaton made it crystal clear.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, looking at Sam Ross with his good eye. “I’ll talk to
Ross shrugged. “Fine,” he said. He didn’t care at all and didn’t even bother pretending that he did. “You talk with Agent Bauer and I’ll get a head start on my beauty sleep.”
After Ross departed for the hotel, Wheaton cleared the phlegm in his throat and spoke softly. Bauer had to strain to hear each word. He noticed the gauze wrapping over his ear wept some fluid.
“I just want you to know. I would never hurt those boys. I’d never hurt Claire. Never in a billion years.”
“If you didn’t, then who?”
“I’m not saying anything about anyone else. I’m just telling you about me. And I’m telling you that I wouldn’t,
“Then who? If not you? I mean, did Claire kill her boys?” Bauer asked. It was a question that had never been asked out loud. But it had been brewing in Bauer’s mind since the conversation with Della Holm at the Rock Point post office.
Wheaton sat mute.
“Listen to me very carefully, Marcus. You might be a decent guy mixed up with a bad woman. You wouldn’t be the first. Prisons are full of men who did something stupid for the love of the wrong woman.”
“I don’t follow you,” the singed handyman said. His face was expressionless.
“Okay. I’ll be direct. You were screwed by Claire Logan,” Bauer said. “The corpse found beside Erik and Danny was not their mother’s. Are you following me now? If you didn’t put the body there to help Claire fake her death, then I’d say you were tricked just like everyone else.”
“What are you talking about? Claire is dead. She just has to be…”
“Don’t think so…”
Travis Brinker, decked out in a three-piece navy blue suit and a spanking new black leather briefcase, burst into the room. “This interview is over,” he said.
“Too bad,” Sheriff Howe deadpanned. “We’re just getting started.”
Bauer nodded. “Yeah, Marcus Wheaton wants to tell us something. We’re ready to listen, too.”
“This is over,” Brinker said as Wheaton looked on. “Right
Chapter Eighteen
The homicide and arson investigators didn’t have it easy—even when they knew Claire Logan had probably advertised for her victims in a military newspaper. They needed to know more than just how, who, and when. The “why” would be helpful, too. But the crime scene was vast and the number of victims was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Only a cop who had worked an apartment fire in Detroit that killed thirty-one had even the remotest point of personal reference. The Logan house and outbuildings had, for the most part, been reduced to ash. The fire that ignited as children across the world dreamed of Santa and presents had burned so hot that no pour patterns survived the inferno. Investigators picked through the rubble in search of clues. Shards of metal and the coils of several mattresses survived, as did the burned-out remnants of the kitchen— a stove, a refrigerator, the ghostly web of a hanging rack for pots and pans. Jeff Bauer observed the police criminalists as they carefully bagged the charred remains of Claire Logan’s house. It was tedious, mundane work and, with the snow against the blackened debris, oddly reminiscent of the old black-and-whites shot at some early twentieth-century disaster like the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.
From the burned deadfall of Claire Logan’s house, one investigator recovered the blackened and burned figure of what appeared to be an infant. Horror seized him and he called for the others to help while he gingerly cleared away the debris and rubble that nestled the baby’s blackened body. Then he saw the baby’s black face peer from a hole in the debris, its small mouth appearing to cry out in a scream that no one could hear. The crime scene investigator started to laugh—a soft, then loud rolling laugh, the kind meant to get attention.
“It’s a doll,” he said. “It’s just a goddamn kid’s baby doll!”
And it was. A swarm of men in yellow slickers gathered to laugh, too. The kind of laughter that firemen know, and police officers, and EMTs, and even reporters with strong stomachs and the crime beat: the laughter of relief.
The investigator later told a newsman, “After all that we found out there in the fire and out in the earth, I started to expect the worst. What’s another dead baby to this nightmare? Makes my heart sick, those little boys died there.”
Scraps of wood, including a doorframe, the piano, and the floorboards that were pinned under the piano,
