Chapter 18

A Christmas Present

Wayne had wrapped the present with care. He had put it under the tree. Now, it was Christmas morning. The time had come for his father to unwrap his gift, and Wayne sat nervously on the sofa across from George, who was in his favorite easy chair, as his dad held the pretty package in his hand.

The beloved son had loaded his Kodak Instamatic disc camera with film. He was ready for the moment, and as George undid the ribbon and clawed through the bright wrapping paper, he couldn’t imagine what his son had gotten him for Christmas. It was heavy to hold.

As he pulled the paper away, he held in his hands a statue of a bugling elk. It was a handsome object, approximately a foot high. A bull elk, depicted as it would be in the wild, posed as it also would be sounding its deep, sonorous call. George held it in his hands. He was pleased, and Wayne, happy too that his father liked the present, raised his camera and took the picture.

Though George gushed over the present, Wayne was self-effacing, telling his father that it wasn’t anything really special, that there were probably 40,000 of them just like it. But he was glad George liked it, just the same.

Still, his father could see that it appeared to be very carefully made, and that it was artfully painted. Even the joined pedestal was nicely done. Wayne didn’t know, and there was no way for George to know, that Mike Shook’s sister-in-law, Karlene Shook, who was now divorced from his younger brother, Steve, had cast this bugling elk by hand. She had given it to Mike and Teresa. It was one of a kind.

Wayne had no way of knowing whether the elk, or the stag-handled hunting knife he had pilfered, or the stack of silver dollars he grabbed were among items listed as missing by family members. So it was a bold, or just plain reckless, move on Wayne’s part to give his father a piece of the loot from his night of murderous butchery. In the twelve days since the murders, the Ravalli County sheriff had kept a tight lip about the case. But that didn’t rule out the possibility that Sheriff Dye knew these things were missing from the Shook house, and that he was actively searching for them. For whatever reason, Wayne just couldn’t resist putting this plaster-of-paris treasure under the tree for his father. He had even shown the statue and the knife around at work.

“You think my dad will like it for Christmas?” he asked Rick Mace, gesturing to the elk that he held up in his hand.

“Sure,” Rick said, not much interested.

“I think he’ll like it,” Wayne said.

Rick also didn’t make much of the knife that Wayne showed him. It was a bone-handled affair with a broad, snub-curved blade. Rick didn’t look close enough to see that it was a Kelgin, signifying that it had been custom made. The knife had been a Christmas present to Mike from his father the year before. Bob Shook had given each of his sons and his son-in-law a knife that year.

No one missed the statue or the knife or the silver dollars Mike had collected, because Sheriff Dye had not yet allowed the families into the house, except for an initial brief visit to get the children’s clothing and take out the beds they would need when they returned from the hospital in Denver. As a result, while the investigation was officially and publicly ruling out any hypothesis of robbery, there was actually no way for sheriff’s detectives to know if anything was missing or not.

No one at Conlin’s noticed anything different about Wayne on the Saturday when he returned from his day off, rested from his Thursday night in Hamilton. Later they would recall that he had made himself scarce for a few days, but at the time of the tragedy, Wayne didn’t strike them as different in any way. When they found out about the Shook murders, the saleswomen couldn’t believe it. But there it was on the front page of the Saturday edition of the Missoulian. Joyce was grief stricken as she remembered the day in August when Mike and Teresa had come into the store. It was a vivid memory: the three of them sitting down, doing the paperwork. It crossed her mind that they hadn’t even had the furniture in their house long enough to make a single payment on it.

Sheila Claxton couldn’t believe it either. She called her former mother-in-law in Hamilton, trying to learn more, hoping to somehow get a better grasp of the horrible news. Sheila remembered the day, not four weeks earlier, when Wayne had returned from the delivery south. She hadn’t forgotten his tirade about Mike Shook, but it never crossed her mind to make even the slightest connection between Wayne’s outburst and the Shook murders. After all, Wayne was Wayne. He was subject to fits like that. He was a weird guy. That certainly didn’t trip any neurons in her brain to suspect that he had anything to do with it.

Not Wayne, who would be expected to come, as he always had, to her Christmas cookie party this year. It was becoming a tradition. Every year, she threw a cookie party, and everybody was supposed to bake a dozen of the same kind of cookies. Then they would swap, and everybody would end up with a dozen assorted cookies. It was great fun for the eight women who had become regulars. As far as she knew, Wayne loved it, too. He was the only man who came. In fact, he usually was the first to arrive, and often the last to leave. And everyone was delighted that he belonged, because he baked the most delicious chocolate-chip cookies.

It was no different this year at the Christmas 1985 cookie party. Wayne came early, so early in fact that Sheila wasn’t ready for him. She had just gotten out of the shower. Why did he arrive so early, she asked herself. He knew when the party was supposed to start. It was just Wayne, being himself. Just Wayne, carrying a dozen chocolate chip cookies under foil wrap on a dinner plate. Just as they did every year, everyone had a good time and Wayne was among the last to leave.

Three years before, when Wayne entered the ordinary, workday lives of the women at Conlin’s, none of them knew he had been a prime suspect, as a teenager, in the horrifying sex murder of Donna Pounds, a case that still came up occasionally in conversations. The year before, on Christmas Eve in 1984, when Debbie Deer Creek was found, nobody at Conlin’s suspected it was Robin, Wayne’s late-summer fling. Nor did anyone draw a link between Wayne and the murdered girl found only three months before along Crystal Creek east of East Missoula, where Wayne lived. Yet something new had crept into almost everyone’s perception of Wayne, and it wasn’t so much because Wayne had changed. He was still the same old Wayne. It was more the result of his co-workers having becoming weary of his stupid attentions. For reasons they found difficult to pinpoint, they were now a little afraid of him. When Wayne showed up so early for the cookie party, Sheila was uncomfortable about it because she was only in her bathrobe as she opened the door for him. She made note of it. In the past, if something like that had happened she might have dismissed it or laughed it off, but for reasons she didn’t quite understand, it irritated her. He knew when the party was supposed to start.

Kris Wells, as manager of the store, was noticing more hints about Wayne’s temperament than she had seen before. Whenever he had one of his little fits, it seemed to be more extreme. Although he wouldn’t holler and scream or in any way become violent, she detected an ominous undertone, and glimpsed a side of him that quite possibly could be violent. There seemed to be a deep rage within him that wasn’t so hidden anymore.

That was the only reason she didn’t fire Wayne, which she had wanted to do for a while now. Wayne was the very best worker in the warehouse, but she was tired of catering to his moods and displeased that he was drawing pictures all over the boxes in the warehouse. She finally had to tell him to stop. He had also filled an entire four-pane window with the silhouette of a large black spider. He had drawn a likeness of the hideously deformed protagonist in the film The Elephant Man on a large pillar, and there were the posters of Conan the Barbarian and Rambo. His four-by-four-foot plywood storage cubicle, unlike the personal areas of the other guys, was plastered with pinups of nude women. He was overtaking the warehouse with his own postpubescent, Edward Gorey touch, and it was an affront to Kris’s sensibilities.

She was walking on eggs every time she dealt with him, and managing Wayne was especially hard when he was experiencing one of his prolonged bitchy spells, which seemed to cycle up once a month. The women used to joke about his menstrual moods, when Wayne would be on edge or particularly and unmercifully demanding, even though he was just a four-dollar-an-hour warehouse grunt, acting as if he were Lord God Almighty.

Kris became self-conscious about the special treatment Wayne seemed to demand. With the other guys in the warehouse, she could simply ask “Hey, would you do this?” But not with Wayne. To avoid setting him off, or initiating one of his moods, she found herself asking him as nicely as she could. When even that didn’t work, it was wise just to avoid him.

So she didn’t fire him. She wasn’t directly concerned about herself so much, because though she was the manager, if Wayne were to be terminated, Rick Mace, as his direct supervisor in the warehouse, would have to do it. And Kris was concerned that Rick would bear the consequences, whatever they might be, She didn’t dare find out.