“Look, ma’am, please listen to me carefully. All I’m saying is that your husband’s injury indicates he had been hit in front and back of the skull.
Again, the sink water ran.
“I’m not a cop,” Claire said. “And I don’t know what causes what. But if you are suggesting for one second that I know anything more than I’ve told you, you’re as fucked up as your boss.”
“I’ll ask you to leave now.”
“We want to talk with you again.”
“Fine. Then call Marv Nelson’s law office. Now get out.”
“There’s no need to be hostile, ma’am.”
“Hostile is walking into a woman’s house and so much as telling her you think she kissed off her old man. That’s the very definition of hostile.”
Hannah made her way down the stairs one hand over the other on the rail her father had crafted from a single piece of maple, cut not far from their farm. She stood in her nightgown, its flannel hem brushing against the landing. She wanted to tell the men to get out, just as her mother had. She wanted to scream at them for making her mother so upset. But she didn’t. She didn’t say a word. No one saw her standing there, so still and so quiet. No one turned to look in her direction when all three stomped out the front door.
A few minutes later, Claire came back inside.
“How long you been up, honey?” she asked, seeing her daughter. Her voice was sweet.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
Claire looked surprised. “Yes, dear. They’re gone.”
“For good?”
“I think so. I don’t think they’ll ever be back.”
And she was right.
Both Hannah and Bauer were exhausted by her disclosure. She, for what she had relived over coffee in the cafe, and he for the spinning wheels of a man who could do nothing to help the girl-turned-woman’s realization of a dark truth, something she simply didn’t want to believe.
“I’m talked out,” she said. “I’m checking into the motel and going to bed.”
“Want dinner?” he asked. He pointed to a placard on the table. “Pot roast is supposed to be their specialty.”
“I can’t eat.” She feigned a smile. “I doubt I can sleep. I’ll be up early and headed home at first light. Thanks for listening.”
Bauer stood and embraced her. He felt her warm, limp body, and whispered in her ear.
“This isn’t over, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “But someday it will be. I’ll… we’ll see to it.”
Bauer let go and Hannah walked to the door. Her skirt was wrinkled and her blouse hung on her like it no longer fit. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t want him to see that she was crying.
The morning after he returned to Portland, Jeff Bauer made the call that Peggy Hjermstad had been expecting for two decades. Peggy was in her late fifties by then, remarried and living on her small farm in Tillamook, near the Pacific Ocean. She and her new husband raised dairy goats and had developed a successful line of goat cheeses.
She’d kept her last name and was listed in the phone book, in case her daughter ever came looking for her again. “Though I don’t expect it,” she’d say to friends or acquaintances inquiring about it.
Bauer hated making the call not only because it hurt like hell to tell a mother her daughter was likely deceased, but also because he only had the word of a convicted arsonist that she was the victim.
“Ms. Hjermstad?” he asked when a sweet voice answered the phone.
“Some call me that,” she said warmly. “This is Peggy.”
He told her who he was, and he could hear the rattling of bits of metal against the phone. It had to be her charm bracelet. He’d remembered that she wore it when she came to the FBI office so many years ago. Among the charms she pointed out during that visit was a silhouette of a girl’s head with the name “Serena” engraved in curlicue lettering.
“I talked with Marcus Wheaton yesterday,” Bauer said. “There’s no easy way to say this. He identified your daughter as the female victim.”
Peggy let out a small gasp, but quickly recomposed herself.
“Does he,” she said, fumbling for words, “know where her head is? I mean, I know it doesn’t matter. I know that she’s gone. I’ve always known it. But I’d like to have her go to heaven in one piece.”
“No. He didn’t say.”
“Why did he kill her?”
“Said he didn’t. I don’t know if he’s a liar
“Oh my,” Peggy Hjermstad said, growing very quiet.
“I’m so sorry,” Bauer said.
There was silence.
“Ms. Hjermstad? I mean,
“I’m here,” she said. “The name caught me off guard, that’s all. Didi was the name of Serena’s poodle. A teacup. A pretty little apricot thing she loved to death. Wonder why she called herself that name?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Bauer said. “Some things we never know.”
Peggy thanked the agent for calling. “I knew she was never coming home when she didn’t call for my birthday or Christmas. Even so… it still hurts after all these years. Funny how it hurts. It almost seems like she’s died all over again.”
“I’m sorry,” he said once more. “I’ll let you know if anything else turns up, but this may be all we will ever know.”
“No need. I know all I need to know. My darling girl is gone forever.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was easy to get the assignment. Jeff Bauer had lived in Anchorage for five years when he worked the stolen Russian antiquities sting. He’d even been to Kodiak Island to fish with his teenage nephews one summer when his sister sent the boys up from Idaho. The idea that it was possible that Claire Logan had been right under his nose was more annoying than infuriating. Bauer wasn’t completely sure that Wheaton was telling the truth or making a play for some attention before he was measured for a piano crate and converted into a worm smorgasbord. The supervising agent in Portland knew Bauer’s history with LOMURS, as the case was still known in FBI-speak, and made it easy to procure a plane ticket and a hotel reservation in his name.
“Talk about a feather in your cap,” the agent told him. “You nail that bitch and it would be right up there with bringing in D. B. Cooper.”
There was some truth to the remark. Cooper was the man who “skyjacked” a Northwest Airlines 727 in November 1971. With parachutes strapped on, Cooper jumped out of the plane at an altitude of 10,000 feet with
