A Wicked Snow

“Did she ever have an account here?”

“Not now, but ever? At any time?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“She did.” Graves looked down at the folder. “Not now, not anymore, but she did.”

“When? When did she close it?”

Again a slight stall. “Recently,” he said.

“How recently?”

“I don’t want to say. I could probably get in trouble for this. You know, without the subpoena, the banking ethics guys will get on me. We have rules, you know.”

“I know,” Bauer said, though he sometimes hated the rules. He understood the reason for them. “This is a major investigation. Your help could turn out to be vital to solving this crime.”

Graves’ face went white. “I’ll tell you that she no longer has an account here. Hasn’t had one since she closed it on December twenty-third. All of her money is gone. Cleaned out.”

“Was the amount substantial?” Bauer asked.

“I’m really not going to say anything more. I can think of two hundred thousand reasons not to.” He nodded in the direction of the door, satisfied with his own cleverness. “You have a nice day and good luck on the case. Claire’s kids were very well behaved. So sorry to hear about her boys. Very, very nice little boys. Hope the girl will come out of this all right.”

As the pair walked toward the door, Graves leaned over to whisper in Bauer’s ear.

“She’s got an account at First Oregon, too. On Cherry Street next to the Marcie’s Silver Spoon. Ben Rafferty is the manager. Don’t tell him I sent you.”

An hour later, Rafferty, a dolt with half the intellect of his banking colleague Graves, outlined the same story to Bauer. Claire Logan had cleaned out her account on the same day. Her account totaled more than $220,000.

“She was in a hurry when she came in. We didn’t have much time to chat, but she said she was going to invest in her farm,” he said. “Too bad it burned down. Kind of ironic, if you ask me.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Bauer said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem,” Rafferty said. “You want the stuff she left in her box? I know the rules, but you’re making me feel like she’s never coming back.”

“I don’t know that,” Bauer said. “But what stuff?”

“Some paperwork,” he said, walking over to the vault to retrieve the contents of another of Claire Logan’s safe deposit boxes. “If you’re looking for an escape plan, you’re out of luck. I’ll get it for you.”

A moment later, Rafferty appeared with an oversized envelope. It was curled in a U-shape from being held in the narrow box.

Bauer opened the envelope and pulled out some papers. It took only a moment to realize what they were.

Jesus, he thought. What am I supposed to do with this?

Later that day, Bauer dropped the packet off with Veronica Paine. She was at her office; a ceramic tree fitted with twinkling lights sat on a small table between two visitors’ chairs. The room was cool. The heat had been kept off for the holidays.

“This belongs with you, I’d say,” Bauer said. “Doesn’t apply to anything I’m doing. And I doubt the sheriff should have it.”

“I’m intrigued,” she said. She smiled and took the packet. She put on her stylish readers and scanned the documents, pulling one after another and placing them face down on her office desk. She looked up at Bauer. Her face went from quizzical to concerned.

“I’m glad that you brought this to me. I’m taking this to Judge Wells. This is going to be sealed.”

The greatest disappointment of the Logan case happened so slowly that no one recognized it until it enveloped them like a dense fog, quiet and omnipresent. Law enforcement had discovered three obvious murder victims in the house, and seventeen bodies in various states of decomposition planted in two areas of the property. An extensive search employing a backhoe and infrared analysis turned up no other lime-stewed corpses or rotting hotspots. Twenty dead. The problem with the case was that the autopsies of the two boys showed they had been poisoned with sodium cyanide and were dead before the fire consumed so much of their flesh. The fire, probably started by Marcus Wheaton, had not killed them. While he theoretically could be charged with their murder, it was a poor case. Nothing could connect him with poisoning the boys. For a time, Spruce County prosecutor Veronica Paine thought she’d try, but she knew only too well that a loss would mean that the victims of Oregon’s worst mass murder or serial homicide (the debate raged for a decade, which was it?) would go without retribution.

After talking with Liz Wheaton, Bauer came to accept the possibility that her son had been duped by a very clever, if not diabolical, woman. Not that torching a house with the bodies of two little kids and some woman wasn’t a horrendous deed, but Bauer doubted whether the hefty, one-eyed man was really a killer. An accomplice, maybe, but a killer? After all, Bauer reasoned, the bodies started disappearing before Wheaton came to work for Claire Logan. Several years before. Since autopsies revealed that the missing military men had been poisoned with cyanide in the same manner as Erik and Danny Logan, it was clear that it could not be proven that Wheaton had a hand in the murders. Coupled with the fact that the only living witness, Hannah Logan, never saw Wheaton do anything other than spread the flocking. It was only an arson case.

Almost one month into the investigation, Paine telephoned Bauer at the Portland field office. He’d been back for a couple of weeks. Pending the outcome of further lab analysis from Washington, he fully expected to head back to Rock Point at some point, though it was not a federal case. There was no joy in Ms. Paine’s voice. She sounded tired and drained of emotion.

“We can’t make the murder charges stick,” she said. “We can’t connect Wheaton to the murders—not to the extent it would take to nail him.”

Bauer knew it was coming. Deep down, he’d known all along. The person behind the murders was exceedingly clever. “Brilliant” was the word he thought of first, but he didn’t want to waste an accolade on Claire Logan.

“I figured as much,” he said. His tone was calm and meant for the Rock Point lawyer to understand that it was resignation, not disappointment, he was registering. He added, “You had a lousy hand from the beginning.”

“We did. We all did,” she said. “The arson will stick and we’ll put him away for a long time. And,” she paused, “if we ever find out if Claire Logan is alive—and where she is—we can probably use Wheaton against her. He might be agreeable after a few years in Cutter’s Landing.”

“Yeah,” Bauer said, “especially if we can show how his girlfriend, his soul mate, is living the high life with all that money.”

An Associated Press story written by the barracuda reporter Marcella Hoffman broke the news two days later. The Lumberman ran the wire service piece because its own reporter couldn’t get an interview with Veronica Paine. Editors headlined the story: MURDER CHARGES DROPPED, WHEATON WILL BE TRIED FOR ARSON

A sidebar described the continuing mystery of the headless woman and the growing belief that Claire Logan had killed her two sons and seventeen men before faking her own death by decapitating some hapless woman. Though all but three of the men would eventually be identified, the headless woman, “Number 20,” as she became known by just about everybody, remained a mystery. She belonged to someone, Bauer thought, hoping that her mother, husband, boyfriend, sister, or someone would come forward and claim her. Didn’t she deserve to be more than a stand-in for the infamous Claire Logan? Oddly, it was her unshakable anonymity that gave Number 20 such notoriety. The woman’s gruesome plight was turned into a wildly popular catchphrase. “Drop a Twenty” meant “Lose your head; go crazy.”

But more than anything, people speculated about where Claire Logan had run off to.

One woman, a cashier at Wigwam, a discount store, mused that she was sure Claire Logan had taken all her money and gone to Mexico. “She’s down there, I’ll bet you. It makes me sick to think she’s down there laughing at