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  Copyright 2018 -Bradley McKenzie - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Dream of the Wolf

  By: Bradley McKenzie

  Table of Contents

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

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  21.

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  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

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  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

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  41.

  42.

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  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  1.

  Her headlights seemed weak against the blackened mountains. The trip from Salt Lake to Jackson Hole asked a lot of her old van, and the worn engine whined and drank fuel. Hers was the lone vehicle on the blacktop that night but for the glaring lights of semi-trucks heading south out of the Rockies. Tires hummed, lulling her. She turned the volume up on her favorite death metal; the singer’s voice growled through crackling speakers but the dark music unsettled her, so she turned it off and listened to the tires. Well into Wyoming now, along the foothills, elk eyes glowed from the ditch. The animals raised their heads in her passing lights, indifferent to her entry into the wild.

  She pulled the van into a twenty-four-hour filling station. The crumbled edges of the former logging town sat silent with no movement among worn outbuildings. The highway was still, as though recently abandoned, and she anticipated headlights emerging from the mountains but none came. Her Pomeranian sniffed the ground from the gas pumps to the highway’s edge, and then faced the blackened hills that confined the town. The wide streets were empty yet an unfamiliar presence grew in the night around her. Zombie stood erect. He didn’t bark and he always barked. She needed to leave.

  “Zombie!” she called.

  He leapt in. She banged the side door closed and chugged the van onto Highway 89. A sign read No Service for 50 Miles and the moon, swept free of clouds, grew above granite peaks sawing the sky. Passing headlights became rarer as the dangers she might face while in the Rockies overtook the busyness of her mind. The decision to leave him worried her. What he thought of her had begun to eclipse any sense of her own wellbeing. The worn engine climbed toward the serrated sky. The highway moved below her lights, and she made her way north.

  When she got to the wilderness area, it was late. Anxiety vibrated through her as she wound through campsites marked on her map. The one she wanted, a grove of cottonwoods along the Snake River, was full. She drove further, leaving the highway, and crept the van along thin trail roads around campsites already occupied by quiet tents. Strangers slept in the treed dark.

  She drove deeper until the dense woods crowded the trail. A hand-painted sign indicated a private campsite further into the forest, and she followed the trail into the darkened trees. Finally, she came upon a secluded spot, a narrow clearing in large spruce trees suitable for a single hiking tent, and she carefully parked the old van into the space. It was past 2:00 a.m.

  The tablet computer’s glow cast shadows over the sleeping bag she’d thrown on the floor. She wanted to announce online she finally made it to Grande Teton National Park and then sleep, exhausted. There was no cellular service. Okay, she thought, that’s okay.

  Maybe she shouldn’t let him know where she had gone, not yet. What he would do when he learned she’d left was unknown. Zombie yipped and jumped at her legs as she bent over into the captain style swivel chair. She plugged the tablet charging cord into the cigarette lighter outlet, and Zombie leapt onto the seat and clawed the tinted glass, barking frantically. Perhaps an animal had come into her campsite, but only her reflection appeared in the windshield.

  “Come to me buddy boy, oh please come,” but Zombie refused. He bounded back and forth on the front seats mended with duct tape.

  She hadn’t missed her man during the long drive. His temper set off now at the smallest thing, the more unseen the trigger, the larger, more powerful the detonation. Infraction unknown, she’d said to herself as his voice boomed over her. He was bad for her, but she admitted her attraction to his physical strength, safety and threat alive in the same broad body. She wanted him with her now.

  This deep in the wilderness, there were no other campers. Turning on a flashlight illuminated piles of clothes. She chose a hooded sweatshirt from the mess, Slipknot scrawled across its front in white, she worked her bare feet into sneakers, and tied her purple hair behind her head.

  She needed badly to pee, but that meant leaving the van and going into the trees. A large clown mask purchased at a concert sneered at her from the floor and she kicked clothes to hide its sagging face. Sliding open the van door just enough for her exit, she closed Zombie in behind her.

  The sky moved over wavering pine, and thin strips of cloud raced across pinpricked blackness. Down a ledge, through spruce boughs long enough to touch one another, she pulled her jeans and underwear down and squatted. Pine needles floated in the growing pool beneath her. Pissing in the woods, alone in the dark, she missed the city lights. A breeze brushed the tops of spruce. Self-conscious despite her seclusion, she pressed the lens of the flashlight into the needled ground at her feet, so not to illuminate her squatting.

  A white light burst through the trees and split into fractured beams among thin pine poles. Shocked, she glanced back to the dark shape of her van, and then faced the source. Maybe a cowboy was searching for wild horses, like in the pictures in the brochure. Maybe a fellow traveler was searching for a campsite. At the thought of strangers coming, she pulled her pants up, hoping the light would continue through the woods. She cut her flashlight to remain hidden but could no longer see her van.

  Picking her way among the slender lodge poles, she shielded her eyes from the light beams. The tops of the pine opened as curtains to the jagged Teton Mountains, vast black spearheads in the sky. Confused now, unsure what direction she moved in, she came to a trail road and black side hill. The source of the beam was a spotlight on a truck roof. A figure moved on the road; someone was coming toward her.

  She curled herself in tall grasses. Her heart pounded, she hugged her knees. The stars were hard and clear in the sky. She forced herself to kneel and see the road. The strange floodlit truck sat idling, its driver’s door open. A black figure walked the road in silhouette, carrying a slender, lifeless woman, her black hair falling long and straight to the ground.

  2.

  In the early hours of the previous morning, Special Agent Brouwer treaded the steepness of a mountain trail. Her gray mare Duchess followed nonchalantly on the rein
s behind her, and crows danced and fluttered black wings over blue spruce further up the slope. At dawn, German hikers had found a girl left in the forest, at elevation and a decent hike from a well-worn trail.

  Improbable that a killer would carry a body up a mountain, she thought. The body site would be the murder scene. She stopped herself from thinking any further. Special Agent Brouwer was just twenty-seven, and this was her first homicide. Adrenaline coursed through her, followed by guilt at her excitement. She focused on her training and all her private study as she led her mare to the girl.

  Roots of spruce and pine laddered the trail into deep steps like a giant’s staircase. It wasn’t late enough into summer to be tourist season proper, and the sun wasn’t fully above the mountains ringing Jackson to the east, but the valley below teemed with hikers and anglers. A stand of Engelmann pine towered over the narrow path, roofing it as a covered bridge, shading her. Sharp pine scent and the cool of mossy earth refreshed her.

  “We got very lucky,” she said to Duchess, who nickered.

  The girl could have been disposed of in the vast mountain woods and never found. Her discovery so soon after the murder was good luck. From the spires of blue spruce, the horde of crows cawed excitedly, like youthful laughter in the distance. Duchess plodded behind her on the way to the body and to Sheriff Hargrove.

  This was the first murder since the sheriff’s election a year ago. The youngest sheriff in Teton County history, at forty years old, Hargrove had worked homicide in Austin, Texas after returning from Iraq. Then he came north to Jackson Hole to run for this job. During his election campaign, the sheriff had spoken poorly of Brouwer’s agency, the Division of Criminal Investigation, and the state government in general.

  Early on, she’d thought of him as just another showboat good old boy, a jock politician with an easy smile and a hundred dollar hat. In their year working together as state and county agencies, he didn’t take much of anything seriously, or not seriously enough, to her mind, anyway. Lighthearted and aloof, backslapping with his young deputies, his offices down the hall echoed with the fraternal laughter of a locker room. We’ll find out if he’s serious now, she thought.

  She knotted her reins to a mountain alder branch. Duchess whinnied and nuzzled with the Sheriff’s blood bay gelding. The trail split off into a clearing that overlooked jagged granite and the Targhee basin to the west. Sheriff Hargrove stood tall in the clearing, waiting for her.

  “Is it just you and me?” she asked.

  “I asked them to begin processing a scene higher on the trail. People had gathered up there last night, a party. The doused campfire is still wet. I thought you and I would have a look alone before we hand it over to forensics.”

  “You didn’t approach yet?” she asked.

  “Not without you. I figured we’d approach her together.”

  That was thoughtful of him. He was a gentleman when serious.

  She picked through the wild grasses and yarrow in the meadow toward the sheer ledge, scanning the ground. Sheriff Hargrove searched beside her. In wild grasses, patterns were becoming visible in the soil, made clearer in the rising sun, and so she photographed them and acknowledged them with colorful plastic flags.

  Supine with pale arms casually to each side, the girl lay among brightly colored wildflowers tousled on the stone ledge, on tall stems, the red, violet and white petals bound over her, entwined by Wyoming wind. Over the eastern ridge of the valley bowl, the sun crept and shrank shadows back from the colorful ledge, which held her from the severe plummet below.

  “The hiker kept telling me ‘madchen, there is a girl, a girl, a girl.’ Seeing her close I think he meant fraulein, a young woman,” the sheriff said.

  “I’d say she’s about twenty years old,” Brouwer said.

  “She hasn’t been lying here any longer than a matter of hours; no animals have been at her. This is high, and the party site is higher yet. Much higher and they’d be above the tree line.”

  Light brown hair swept over the young woman’s features and her partially open, hazel green eyes. Her complexion was tan and smooth over delicate bones. Brouwer knelt and drew back the long hair from the woman’s face, exposing image after image with her Nikon.

  The sheriff said, “She’s a dainty thing, weighs a buck ten soaking wet. She could be carried by any decent-sized man.”

  Through the fir trees far below, Jenny Lake glittered, the alpine water broken into glacial crystals by the sun. Twigs and branches were broken off bushes leading out of the meadow to the trail. Brouwer photographed them and marked the base of each bush with more plastic flags.

  “She may not have been carried here. There are imprints on the ground, a lot of movement here.”

  “I don’t see good footprints.” Sheriff Hargrove palmed the lid of his white Stetson and wiped his forehead with his field jacket sleeve.

  “There was movement, and crashing into brush.” Brouwer stood over the young woman. “But there are no scratches on her arms or face.”

  “She didn’t put up much fight. No violence to speak of, she was barely touched,” the sheriff said.

  In the girl’s hair, magenta flower petals lingered. Bees buzzed lazily back and forth. A heavy wool pea coat lay crosswise on her pelvis, and an oversized opening on a cashmere sweater exposed a slender neck and collarbones. A gold necklace, its pendant a golden key with a blue diamond on the bow, refracted the sun. The pendant lay on her breastbone.

  “This necklace was expensive,” Brouwer said.

  “Would that normally be worn camping?”

  “She might never take it off.”

  She snapped on medical gloves and placed her hands over the dark purple bruising on the still throat, holding the delicate neck for a moment, and then snapped images of the wounds. The young woman appeared only slightly harmed but the killer used plenty of force. Her neck might be broken.

  “She may look barely touched, but there was anger here. There was rage,” Brouwer said. Its presence may have been fleeting, but this girl died instantly, in a moment of fury.

  “Maybe,” said the sheriff. “But the amount the violence applied is small, as these things go. I worked a case of young women murdered out in the Hill Country, brutalized to where half the battle was identifying them. Sexual sadism. What I call evil. We worked it for seven years, day and night, just to get a son of a bitch injected in Huntsville. I don’t see anything like that level of women hating here.”

  “It’s here,” she said.

  Sheriff Hargrove had seen violence that she hadn’t, in Iraq, and in Texas. She said, “I understand what you mean. She wasn’t bound. No ligature marks on her wrists or throat, nor was she visibly tortured or beaten. This is not a case of sexual sadism. It’s much more garden variety than that.”

  They stood together over the victim for some time.

  “Under kill,” she said. “But certainly a forceful murder, that’s the paradox. When a woman knows her attacker, it’s worse for her, there’s the violence of rage. In a stranger killing, a predator hunting women, there is a hatred of women in general, hatred beyond the pale. This looks pragmatic, a crime of necessity, just enough force to end her life but also enough to be damned sure it ended.”

  “I gotta wonder why she didn’t fight,” the sheriff said.

  Fingernails, unbroken and finely polished, had not clawed flesh. No defensive wounds, no struggle. Why didn’t she fight her attacker? Brouwer knew the answer.

  “It may be that she didn’t fight him because she thought submitting to sex gave her a better chance at survival.”

  She searched the leggings crumpled at the girl’s calves and lifted the Navy pea coat from her pelvis. Her underwear was intact and her petite frame unharmed.

  Sheriff Hargrove said, “The Coroner will tell us if she was raped. I’m not convinced from first blush that’s what this is.”

  “It’s possible she wasn’t,” said Brouwer.

  “But not probable?” he smiled.


  “Not probable,” she said.

  “Pulling at her pants, leaving her underwear up, looks like an amateur attempt to stage a sex crime, it’s juvenile and squeamish,” the sheriff said.

  County Coroner Matheson made Brouwer uneasy. The new County officials, including Sheriff Hargrove and Coroner Matheson, had won the local election as part of an upstart political movement. Coroner Matheson was an elderly, and long retired, family physician who beat out a certified forensic pathologist. In a debate hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, a local came up to the microphone and asked the candidates’ opinions on the opioid crisis afflicting other states. Matheson quoted the Old Testament, saying that greed ruled medicine. Wretched doctors were becoming wealthy prescribing terribly addictive painkillers to our youth, he said. God was watching, and in the afterlife, the Lord would heap burning coals upon the heads of the greedy. The few folks who sat through the debate struggled to follow along as Doctor Matheson rambled on stage for half an hour, often straying into scripture. The townspeople were not especially religious, but they voted for him.

  Sending the body to the state medical examiner in Sheridan would be far superior, but she chose to wait to make the case for doing so. Sheriff Hargrove welcomed the presence of her state agency in this case, and she didn’t want to push her luck with him, not yet. She had to be patient with the newly minted County officials. If the male ego is fragile, she thought, the men at Teton County were bird-bone brittle.

  The sheriff continued. “She may have come into this flower bed to relieve herself and someone followed her. When camping, women have to find a place to pee. Someone from the party site followed her here. It’s why her pants are down.”

  Sheriff Hargrove grinned at her. He had caught the look on her face; perhaps he could tell she didn’t like his theory. He seemed to be playing devil’s advocate.

  “Let’s take a bit of time then,” he said with a nod. “I want you to tell me what you see, Special Agent Brouwer.”

  Brouwer ran her hands from her forehead down her tawny hair; its length could hook just behind her ears. She left her hands on the back of her neck.