A Wicked Snow by Gregg Olsen Page A

heart.
    "Sandy?"
    "Yes, Patty? Oh dear," she said when recognition came. "Have your heard? They're hauling bodies out of the Logan family's tree farm. I haven't had time to call you; things have been off the meter over here for the past two and half hours!"
    "Logan?" Patty's heart sank. She knew the family. Everyone in Rock Point did. The Logan place had been their destination just ten days before when she and her children went to get their tree, a perfect, pyramidal-shaped Noble fir.
    "Claire and her two little boys are missing. It's real bad out there. I mean real bad! Place is burning to the ground and the girl..."
    "Hannah?"
    "Yeah, she's the only survivor we know about."
    Patty's knees weakened, and she slid into the soft folds of her velveteen davenport. "Michelle goes to school with Hannah," she said. Michelle was her daughter, thirteen. Patty hung on every word while her sister went on about the investigation under way. She remembered how Claire's daughter had rung up the sale for the Christmas tree in the little kiosk set up outside of the wreath shed. She was a pretty girl, big brown eyes with thick, ash-blond hair, held in a ponytail. Michelle and Hannah had been in the same second-and fourth-grade classes. They were best friends back then. By seventh grade, though, they'd stopped seeing each other outside of the classroom. Michelle told her mother that Hannah was no longer much fun to be around. Patty thought it might have had to do with what was going on at home with the girl's mother.
    "They're taking Hannah to the hospital for an exam, then back here," Sandy went on. "You got any clothes that might fit her?"
    "Yes," Patty answered. "Hannah and Michelle are about the same size."
    "Well, she hadn't barely a stitch on when they found her. She was wearing her nightgown and socks. Soaking wet, too. The poor thing was out in the snow when they found her."
    Patty mumbled something about Christmas being ruined, hung up, and spun around for her car keys. She hurried to her daughter's bedroom in search of some- thing for the Logan girl to wear. The room was a mess, and she couldn't find anything clean. She thought of the Christmas tree and rifled for a package under its fragrant boughs. Ten minutes later, she was at the hospital with a pair of Michelle's blue sailor-style jeans, brand new panties, socks pulled from under the tree, and a bright red Rock Point Bobcats sweatshirt still warm from the dryer. Patty handed the clothing to a duty nurse, explaining they were for the Logan girl.
    "Where's her mother?" Patty asked.
    The nurse shrugged. "Haven't a clue. Seems like she ought to be here, considering what her daughter's been through."
    "Can I do anything?" Patty asked.
    "Not that I can think of," the nurse said. She stuffed the clothing into a plastic hospital garment bag and zipped it up. "Police are going to talk to her. The FBI's even been called."
    "Oh dear," Patty said. "I wonder what's going on."

    Entering his mid-twenties, Jeff Bauer was the kind of federal cop that more senior special agents labeled a "greenhorn" or some other antiquated term left from the days of Eliot Ness, or at the very least, before color television. It only meant he was young and, even he had to admit when the occasion called for it, brash. He had graduated with honors from Stanford University with a degree in criminology and psychology. It wasn't family money that got him to Palo Alto, either, but a widowed mother who typed indexes and rewrote obits for the Boise Statesman and who had the good sense to push her only son into applying for every scholarship she could find. Instead of pursuing a doctorate in psychology as he had once pondered, Bauer enrolled in the FBI Academy in Virginia, where he graduated a respectable thirty-fifth in his class. He had a sandy thatch of hair, clear blue eyes, and the chiseled features that were a gift of genetics, still crisp from youth. He was on the slender, though not slight, side, with a stomach that