THE DETECTIVES ASSIGNED TO THE Kristopher Clarke case worked in a three-story brick building on the edge of downtown Williston, seventy miles west of the reservation. On the bottom floor was the Williston Police Department; on the top, the McKenzie County Sheriff and the state Bureau of Criminal Investigations; and in the basement was a coffee room where officials from all departments met at eight-thirty each morning. They gathered at a table and passed around a stack of pawn tickets—computers, guns, watches, gold. If a ticket matched a theft, they had a case, and then they moved on to what had happened overnight. A man shot a urinal in a strip club. A woman had been raped. The calls came at all times of day. In 2012, the police department would field almost triple the calls it had received three years earlier, while detectives’ caseloads would double. Among these cases were some that languished for months: front-end loaders missing, the thieves long gone across state lines; city parks overtaken by roughnecks who, like wasps, constructed shelters under the bridges; sex workers insisting they were there on their own, though they seemed to have misplaced their IDs and the rooms they rented were in men’s names; and the case that had gone unsolved longest of them all: the disappearance of Clarke.
After the truck had been found in Williston in June, the case was assigned to a city detective, Ryan Zimmerman. He was the same age as Clarke, twenty-nine, bald, earnest, and relatively new to his job. From a storage closet repurposed as an office, Zimmerman phoned Clarke’s acquaintances. “KC is always out to have fun, but not the type of person to walk away from everything,” he noted in an interview with a childhood friend of KC’s. The detective paraphrased:
KC is a very private, very outgoing person.
KC break up with his ex-girlfriend was not the best, but it was not the worst.
KC never got in trouble unless it was racing his bike on the street.
KC Grandfather was his best friend.
KC walking away from his pickup would not happen, let alone leaving it unlocked. That kid does not leave anything unlocked.
He does know James HENDRICKSON and James is not good news.
By the middle of June, it became clear to Zimmerman that the city did not have jurisdiction in the case, so he passed it on to Steve Gutknecht, a Bureau of Criminal Investigations special agent. Gutknecht was older than Zimmerman by more than a decade—a serious man reputed among his colleagues for being a dogged investigator. Gutknecht had served long enough in the position to know how the oil boom was changing North Dakota. Prior to the boom, he had investigated five murder cases over his lifetime; since the boom arrived, in 2008, he had worked an average of one homicide every year.
Gutknecht approached the Clarke case as he had each one before it, sorting every shred of rumor, following every lead. The report he released in July contained thirty-nine points. “On June 15, 2012, S/A Gutknecht interviewed a confidential informant from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation who had some theories as to what may have happened to CLARKE,” one point read. The informant told Gutknecht “it was possible that Blackstone Trucking, because of its political affiliation with Maheshu Trucking, which is run by the Tribal Chairman Tex Hall who has strong political power on the Fort Berthold Indian reservation, may have ordered the killing of CLARKE because of his attempt to take business away.” This same informant theorized, alternatively, that Tesha Fredericks, who owned Running Horse, had an ex-boyfriend who murdered KC out of jealousy. Gutknecht ruled this out quickly; querying the boyfriend’s name, he learned the man had been in jail at the time KC disappeared, having beaten another man nearly to death.
Among the tips Gutknecht collected in the report, a majority pointed at James Henrikson. This did not make James a “suspect”—as Gutknecht explained to Jill, they lacked evidence to prove a crime had been committed—but it did make James a “person of interest.” So, that July, Gutknecht called James, and on the first of August, James appeared at the police department for a voluntary interview.
Zimmerman watched a live recording of the interview from an office down the hall. Gutknecht and James entered a small, carpeted room furnished with a wastebasket, a table, and two chairs. “I’m just closing the door for privacy,” Gutknecht said. “You can leave anytime you want.”
James sat down on the front of a chair, his legs splayed as if ready to spring out of it. His eyes were shaded under the bill of a hat, his skin tan, his hair neatly cut. He wore new jeans and a T-shirt fitted tightly across his bulging chest. His voice was high and nasal, incongruous with his body, and he had a giddy, confident manner that seemed especially odd given the occasion.
“He was fun,” James said when Gutknecht asked about KC. “Always happy. He worked pretty hard. We had him go on vacation, because he was pretty tired. We were like, ‘Hey, you’ve got to go on vacation, catch up on some rest, because you look like shit.’ But he did awesome with our company guys. Everyone loved him.” It wasn’t until after KC disappeared, James explained, that James heard KC had been planning to leave Blackstone. He heard it from a “company man”—a foreman who lived on drilling sites and oversaw the operations—who told him that Rick Arey had been approaching other company men to steal contracts from Blackstone for Running Horse. “I guess Rick and maybe KC had been trying to work for Running Horse for like four weeks,” James told Gutknecht. “We’ve been friends forever. I don’t see him doing that to me. I’ve given that kid probably fifty grand, easily. Meals and stuff like that.”
Gutknecht asked James about the day KC disappeared. The agent had heard that on the morning of February 22, KC had dropped by the Maheshu shop to turn in a company credit card. Had KC given this card to James?
“No, not to me,” James said.
“Sarah?”
“I don’t know.” James was talking faster now. “He didn’t tell me, not once, that he was leaving. I was always asking him if he was all right, and he was, like, so tired. He didn’t look good. I don’t know if he was drinking hard, partying.” Recently, James told Gutknecht, he had been talking to a guy named Johnny about it. Johnny thought maybe KC had gotten into drugs.
Had James any idea where KC’s gun had gone? Gutknecht asked.
James folded his arms, thought for a moment. “He always had it with him,” he said. “I don’t know what that was about.”
“So you don’t have anything to do with his disappearance?”
“No,” James said, laughing as if the question were preposterous.
“You guys never had a physical altercation?”
“No, never.”
“Because I think something bad happened to him,” Gutknecht said.
“What if he shacked up with some girl?” James said. He had been talking to Johnny about this possibility, as well.
“Who is this Johnny you’ve been talking to?” Gutknecht asked.
“He’s out in Washington,” James replied. He couldn’t remember Johnny’s last name. “Johnny Donkey,” James always called him.
Gutknecht changed the subject. “When I talked to Rick, he said he had concocted a plan with KC to ‘bring Blackstone to its knees.’ ”
“What?” James said. “I don’t believe that for a second. KC would never do that to me. I love KC to death. There’s no way KC would do that to me. I’m probably one of his best friends, so I don’t see that happening.”
GUTKNECHT TOLD JILL Williams very little about his interview with James. He did not tell her, for example, that although James looked nothing like criminals Gutknecht typically encountered, James had bragged like a criminal, extolling his past crimes while denying the one now in question. Once, James told the agent, he had lost millions of dollars in a marijuana bust. “I felt like he was making stuff up as he went along,” Gutknecht later would recall. One thing remained clear to the agent: “Henrikson was the only one with a motive. In my career, as soon as you see a guy with a motive, that’s usually who it turns out to be. It’s not like storybooks or movies where there’s some type of surprise.”
Among the few things the agent shared with Jill was the fact that both James and his wife, Sarah Creveling, refused to take a polygraph test. Their refusal confounded Jill. Sarah had been eager to help in the beginning, and her distress at KC’s disappearance had seemed genuine, but since then, Sarah’s attention had waned. She wrote less often to Jill, and in this silence, Jill had grown suspicious.
The tips Jill received on Facebook hardened her suspicion, as did her and Lissa’s conversations with Rick Arey. Rick said that when he first met James, he was “fucking charmed by the guy.” James did not look like any man Rick had known in the oil fields before. His hair was carefully combed, and instead of canvas pants and old sweatshirts, which most men wore on the job, James worked in T-shirts and a puffy vest no matter the weather. “I’m not gay,” Rick said, “but this guy is a pretty good-looking dude. He makes you feel good when you’re around him. He’s somebody you want to like you.”
Rick’s impression changed on the day James interviewed him for a job with Blackstone in the late fall of 2011. They met at Better B’s, a busy café on the main street of New Town, where James chose a table in the center of the room. “He was loud, like he wanted everyone to see him,” Rick recalled. “The waitress comes up, and he says, ‘Rick, get whatever you want,’ and he orders steak and eggs, three pancakes, a glass of water, and a cup of coffee. I’m watching him eat, and he’s cutting big chunks up and piling them into his mouth, and he’s chewing with his mouth open. He was a fucking slob. He had that vest on, and he was flexing his muscles. He didn’t eat half of his meal. He had four bites out of three pancakes. He might have finished the coffee. I’ll never forget it. Them pancakes were as big as dinner plates.”
The job James had offered Rick paid $1,500 a week, a bit more than roughnecking on oil rigs, which paid $28 an hour. For never having to climb a rig again, Rick thought the deal sounded good. In January 2012, not long after they moved into the Maheshu shop, Blackstone received a contract from the tribe to spray water on a road to suppress dust. Rick dispatched trucks for weeks, until a worker for another company spun out on the road and died. “Nobody got in trouble for it,” Rick said, “but we looked like jackasses, because every swinging dick knew who was watering the road. We were the ones making an ice rink.” Rick ordered the trucks off the job, but James ordered Rick to send the trucks back. “He wanted the image that Blackstone was successful, that we put people to work,” Rick said.
James was ruthless with money. Drillers paid truckers by the load, so the faster truckers hauled, the more money Blackstone made. It was not uncommon for truckers carrying contaminated water to open the valves of their tanks as they drove, letting fluid pour out, or to dump in remote corners of Fort Berthold to avoid having to drive to waste disposal sites located beyond the borders of the reservation. James encouraged this, and it bothered Rick, who had started his career as a roughneck in Wamsutter, Wyoming. BP, the company he worked for, had trained him not to spill. “I know they fucked up the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, “but in Wamsutter, a fucking drop of antifreeze was a spill. On the reservation, people don’t understand that. Hey, this is dirty Indian land. Fuck it. That’s the mentality. That’s James’s mentality.”
By the time Rick left Blackstone, he had been glad to never see James again. But was James capable of physical violence? Rick was not sure. He was even less sure about Sarah. Rick believed James relied on Sarah more than James let on. Sarah kept the books, made payments, and rode to drilling sites with James, who rarely went anywhere without her. If James seemed out of place in the oil fields, the impression they made together was even more startling. Sarah was tall, lithe, blond, with bleach-white teeth. It was her teeth that had made Rick distrust her: Sarah drank coffee through a straw.
Jill also had trouble believing that James or Sarah had killed KC, but their silence suggested to her that there was something they were not saying. One day in October 2012, Jill posted a public message naming James and Sarah on her Facebook page: Why wouldn’t they take a polygraph test? Why didn’t they write to her anymore or donate to her fund to find KC? Why didn’t they spread the word about his disappearance?
Neither James nor Sarah responded. A few days later, Jill asked her followers to send letters to the tribal council requesting a public hearing about Blackstone and their “refusal to cooperate” with investigators. She had heard the next year was an election year, she noted. “I’m sure that Tex, being a tribal bigwig, would certainly want to use his power to do good and wouldn’t want to dirty his good name covering for a piece of crap like James.” Tex did not respond, either. When Jill made a poster for her supporters to hang around North Dakota, at the bottom, she wrote, “As if the horror of my son being missing is not enough, I have had to deal with the fear of there being a possible danger to my own life from the people who are involved with the disappearance of my son.”
On October 19, Jill was served with a lawsuit. She had just left her house in a suburb south of Seattle when the papers landed in her yard. The complaint was brief, six pages in all. Jill photographed the pages and sent them to Lissa, who called Jill and read them aloud: “The defendant…regularly posts defaming statements….Defendant has accused the plaintiffs for causing or contributing to the disappearance of Kristopher D. Clarke….The Plaintiffs have cooperated with the police….[James Henrikson and Sarah Creveling] are not connected with the disappearance of Kristopher D. Clarke and have no knowledge of his whereabouts.”
LISSA ENCOURAGED THE comments Jill posted and, in some cases, drafted them herself. After they met on the reservation, Jill had made Lissa an administrator of the Facebook page, and Lissa often spent nights culling the messages, which had become too numerous for Jill to respond to on her own. Among them was an assortment of condolences and tips, many hopeful if far-fetched. A hotel clerk writing from Brownwood, Texas, said she had checked in a man who bore a resemblance to KC and later noticed he had registered under the name Christopher Clark. “Please note that I don’t know if it was for sure him,” she wrote. “I felt very odd telling you this because I don’t want to bring your hopes up. Also I am not supposed to release any guest info because I can get in trouble & lose my job. So please keep me anonymous!” Others speculated that KC was alive. An oil worker who had known him wrote, “It makes me sick to think something might have happened, and [I] pray he just needed to get away from it all, as he was very stressed and burnt out from the work the last time I saw him. I wish you and your family the best.”
Among the messages from people familiar with Blackstone, Lissa noticed a common thread. The worker who knew KC claimed to have stopped using the company’s services “due to various issues that made me question their integrity.” Others noted more specifically that Blackstone had underpaid them or that workers in the company had a history of making threats. One man had been working for a shop that serviced Blackstone trucks when a mechanic in the shop overheard a Blackstone employee brag “they were going to get someone to beat a guy up.” Another man writing under the name “John Doe” offered, “There is a lot of hearsay on the reservation and rumors are created out of thin air. So for what it’s worth…I heard that when KC went out to Blackstone that he was wanting to get paid for some work. The situation had gotten out of control and KC got beat up pretty bad.”
It occurred to Lissa, KC’s disappearance aside, that among workers at Blackstone there was an undercurrent of violence. She sensed it not only in the theories they shared but also in the fear their messages expressed. Everyone who wrote to the page asked to remain anonymous—afraid, it seemed, of some vague retribution.
One night, Lissa reread the defamation suit James and Sarah had filed against Jill. A final point most interested Lissa: “Plaintiffs have experienced a loss of business due to the Defendant’s action.” It appeared that comments Jill posted on Facebook had reached some of the companies that hired Blackstone. James and Sarah were seeking monetary damages. This worried Jill, who could not afford to pay for the company’s lost profits, let alone for a lawyer, but it gave Lissa an idea: If they could convince drillers to sever ties with Blackstone, then perhaps Tex would end his partnership, too. Blackstone would lose its tier-one status in bidding on contracts. It would have to leave the reservation.
“We need a strategy,” Lissa told Jill. “You know what I think? I think these guys built an empire around Tex, and the only way we’ll get inside is if we take it down, brick by fucking brick.”
LISSA CHOSE A pseudonym—Nadia Reinardy. She had made up the name in the nineties when she worked as a stripper during her first years out of college. She had liked how “Nadia” sounded—exotic, the way it rolled off the tongue—and “Reinardy” she had stolen from an old boyfriend, Tom Reinardy. A white guy. He had roomed with CJ’s father at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and after they all graduated, Lissa had decided she got along better with Tom and followed him to Minneapolis. The relationship had not lasted. In Lissa’s telling, she wasn’t good enough for his family, and Tom tried to control her. After they broke up, Lissa worked as a security guard at Mystic Lake Casino, south of the Twin Cities, where she met the only man she would marry and, within fifteen months, divorce. It was around that time, 1993, that she met another man, OJ Pipeboy.
He was a friend of her stepbrother, Wayne White Eagle, Jr. When OJ’s brother threw a party in Minneapolis, Wayne invited Lissa along. Lissa was twenty-five, OJ eighteen. He had a ponytail, a baby face, a faint mustache like the stroke of a paintbrush. He had a thick neck and thick shoulders and thick arms and thick wrists. He had gold chains dripping down his chest, gold rings lacing his fingers, but it was his voice—a smoky radio voice—that attracted Lissa to OJ. It was his voice that made her fall in love.
His mother was Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux from the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota, his father Lakota Sioux from Pine Ridge, but OJ grew up in the center of Minneapolis, in the only urban public housing project in the country that gave preference to Native families. Although federal programs to relocate Native Americans to cities had ended in 1972, the fraction of Native Americans who lived in urban areas had kept growing. By the nineties, roughly half lived in cities, and Minneapolis had more urban Indians than any city in the nation. Lissa had aunts and uncles who moved there, cousins who were born there. The American Indian Movement, or AIM, began in Minneapolis in the sixties when Clyde Bellecourt and other Movement founders organized neighborhood patrols to protect residents from police brutality. Due, in part, to the efforts of AIM, Minneapolis had Indian health clinics and community centers, as well as Little Earth, the housing complex where OJ’s grandmother was among the first tenants. None of these resources made up for the fact that OJ grew up poor. His father, a medicine man, was always on the road and had girlfriends all over the country. His mother drank. OJ mostly took care of himself, waiting in line each morning at the Little Earth gym for cereal and a carton of milk. There were two things he remembered clearly from childhood: how often he fought with other kids and how hungry he had felt.
By the time Lissa met OJ, he had more money than most Indians she knew. At the age of thirteen, he had fled Little Earth and gone to live with a woman named Linda who worked as an aide in his middle school. Linda was a member of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the wealthiest tribe in the nation thanks to its casino, Mystic Lake, and earned tens of thousands of dollars in payments from her tribe each month. The years OJ lived with Linda were the happiest of his life. They went on walks, gardened, hunted, fished, and tapped and boiled maple syrup. Then, when OJ was fifteen, he got in trouble, and Linda kicked him out. She gave him an option to come back, but by then OJ was supporting himself, earning, he claimed, $2,200 a day.
He had met a Vice Lord, a member of a black Chicago gang that had territory in South Minneapolis. The city had Native gangs, as well—raggedy kids who roamed Little Earth, scrapping it out with rivals—but it was the black gangs OJ admired, with their gold chains and expensive cars. The Vice Lord was a cousin of his sister’s boyfriend and took OJ under his wing. When OJ met Lissa, he had begun dealing on his own, copping his drugs from Vice Lords and selling them at Mystic Lake.
He had heard about Lissa from her brother Wayne—how smart she was, how she was trained in law enforcement and had a college degree—but Lissa was not what OJ had expected. She could talk smarter than anyone he knew and still sound like she came from the streets. She was pretty, too, with perfect skin and long, curly hair. OJ wanted Lissa because “everybody wanted her,” he would say. He wasn’t sure if he was attracted to her himself, but he knew that other men thought she was beautiful, and when she paid him attention, it made OJ feel good.
In 1995, Lissa moved with Shauna and CJ into a house in St. Paul, where she found a job assisting homeless families. That year, OJ called her, looking for a place to stay. One day, in lieu of rent, he gave her a baggie of cocaine.
It was around that time that Lissa asked OJ to call her Nadia Reinardy. After that, everyone they hung out with in the Twin Cities knew her by this name. Nad, OJ called her. Nadicus.
She would assume other names throughout her life, each one an escape from the shadows that trailed her, but Nadia was a different sort of name. Nadia was the shadow that trailed her, more ruthless and clever than Lissa had ever been. Where Lissa was loving and compassionate, Nadia was vindictive and petty. Where Lissa played by the rules, Nadia went behind everybody’s back. It was as Nadia that Lissa became an addict. Now when she remembered that time of her life, she marveled at how easily she had moved between her halves, like an actress in a one-woman play, inhabiting a role and then another. She supposed this should not have surprised her. She had long walked a line that separated cop from criminal. She believed in this line, in its thinness. She believed everyone had inside themselves the capacity for evil and for good.
ONE DAY IN early November, Lissa made herself a Facebook account under the name Nadia Reinardy. That she should become Nadia again made sense to her. She believed the skills she acquired as a criminal might help her in solving a crime. She knew what fit within state jurisdiction and what constituted a federal case, and she could inhabit the psyche of a criminal: Already, she recognized in James’s behavior some tactics she had used herself. When she searched for him on the Internet, she found him associated with multiple spellings of his last name—Henrikson, Henderson, Henricksen, and Hennikson. Lissa believed James had caused this confusion intentionally, since more names made a person harder to trace. Rick had mentioned that James had a criminal record, and indeed, one evening, when Lissa typed “James Henrikson” into a records database, she came up with twenty-two pages of results. James had been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from sexual assault of an ex-wife—he had been married twice before Sarah—to theft and manufacturing drugs. Once, he had been arrested for growing marijuana and spent a year in prison. James was still on probation.
That night, Lissa logged in to her Nadia Reinardy Facebook account and posted James’s criminal record to Jill’s page. “Had to do it,” Lissa captioned her post. “I blew some cash just to prove a point but didn’t realize it would be this fruitful.”
A few days later, as Lissa was driving home from the welding shop, a song came on the radio by a band she liked, Evanescence. Lissa had never listened closely to the lyrics, but now they caught her—Isn’t something missing? Isn’t someone missing me?—and gave her an idea. Once, she had made a video for her uncle Chucky after his death by assembling a slideshow of images and setting it to a song. She decided to do the same for KC.
At home in the apartment that night, Lissa printed a few dozen photographs that Jill had sent her, trimmed them with scissors, and arranged them on the living room floor as she played the Evanescence song on repeat. Please, please forgive me, the singer crooned, and Lissa lifted an image of Jill in a hospital bed holding her newborn son. She chose another image of KC in a bathtub and a third of Jill holding his tiny body, pressing her lips to his forehead. Lissa surveyed the other photographs. There were more of KC as a baby and one when he was an older child, his hair darkened. Then he was an adult, posing with a motorcycle, and in the next photograph, he was in a hospital bed, the tube of a respirator curling from his mouth. It was a miracle, Jill had said, that KC survived the motorcycle accident. After he could walk again, he left Washington for Texas. Here, Lissa’s options thinned: KC in a bowling alley with his ex-girlfriend; signs reading NEBRASKA THE GOOD LIFE and WELCOME TO NORTH DAKOTA; sunsets over Lake Sakakawea; and, finally, James and Sarah.
Lissa worked through the night, left for the welding shop in the morning, and began again the following afternoon. It was a Saturday, the third of November, when she finished. She uploaded the video to YouTube under the name Nadia and sent Jill the link.
“I hope you like it. Was hard to pick and choose,” Lissa wrote.
It was “perfect,” Jill replied, thanking her.
“It’s Nadia! Not me. Lol.”
Lissa could not sleep. She wrote Jill at eleven that night, when the first comments appeared below the video, and again at eleven-thirty, when it had been viewed five hundred times. By one-thirty in the morning, Jill was asleep, but Lissa remained awake. She toggled between the video and Jill’s Facebook page, which seemed to blink every minute with new messages. Lissa read each one carefully, making note of those she would mention to Jill the next day.
When Lissa woke in the late afternoon, on Sunday, she was still at her desk. The apartment was quiet, her children gone out. She had received a text from a friend that there would be a ceremony at the sweat lodge in Fargo that evening.
She went into the bedroom and, from a mess of clothes strewn about the floor, chose a T-shirt and a long, cotton skirt. On the dresser, she found her pipe and a drum, which she wrapped in a beach towel and carried to the car. She drove west on Ninth Avenue and south on Forty-fifth Street, past the grocery store where she shopped, past soybean and sugar beet fields and the hard, square growth of new apartments, to where the city faded into storage lots. There, behind a low berm of earth, was the sweat lodge, and in a trough beside it, a set of mudstones smoldering on a bed of coals. A man tended the fire, raked the coals with a pitchfork. Other men and women had gathered. Lissa greeted them one by one. She lowered to her knees, unwrapped the pipe. Pressing a plug of sage into the bowl, she sang a quiet song. The others rose and formed a line, and Lissa rose, too. At the door to the lodge, she spun once around. Then she went inside.
BY THE MIDDLE of November, Lissa was spending so much time on the case that her apartment had fallen into neglect. If Shauna stopped by to visit her mother, she found the laundry unfolded, the shower unscrubbed. The kitchen floors were tacky with spilled sugar, and bowls sat dirty in the sink, where the hard remnants of meals had blossomed into mold. Paper accumulated like fallen leaves, forming loose piles on the desk and on the floor of the hallway into the bedrooms. Lissa had not lain in her bed in weeks. If the boys saw her asleep, it was at her desk, mouth agape. This was not exactly unusual. Lissa claimed to prefer chairs to beds, and the apartment had long ricocheted between states of chaos and order. But now it seemed there was no order, and the boys, sensing their mother had little time to worry as to their whereabouts, came and went as they pleased.
It had been months since Lissa attended her addiction recovery meetings, having relinquished her leadership role to another woman in the group. Even to the sweat lodge, she was going less and less. Instead, she spent so much time on the phone that the boys took to imitating her. Obie, now fourteen, would coolly enter the apartment, while Micah, thirteen, pretending to be on the phone, would wave wildly for his brother to be quiet and then storm into a bedroom and slam the door. Shauna, now twenty-five, was less amused. “Our mom cares more about a stranger than her own kids,” she complained. She had moved to Fargo to see her mother—recently, she had relocated to an apartment next door—and now it seemed that on the rare occasion she discovered her mother at home, Lissa had no time to talk. Lindsay, twenty-two, sympathized with Shauna, while their brothers swung between their sisters and mother, defending Lissa one day and harping on her the next.
The tension between Shauna and Lissa had risen not long after Shauna came to Fargo. While working full-time, Shauna had enrolled in classes to finish her undergraduate degree. Lissa encouraged this and offered to watch her kids—an arrangement that suited them both in the beginning but over time strained their relationship. Shauna could be sullen and critical of Lissa, who reacted by refusing to watch her grandchildren, deepening Shauna’s resentment.
“My older kids are very judgmental, accusatory, disrespectful,” Lissa wrote one day in her journal:
CJ called me a “pill head” and told me to go back and lay in my room and pop some more pills. I believe “addict” and “junkie” were thrown in there a few times. But it doesn’t matter. All in all, basic old argument. I always owe him. Owe him for the awful life I gave him. I owe, I owe, and I owe. It seems no matter what I do I will never make up for the past. I fucked up here and there but the past is the past….No matter what I will never be good enough for my older kids. The damage is done. They can continue to hate and ridicule me all they want. They can do it AWAY FROM ME.
Now even Lissa’s younger kids were seeming bothered by her work on the case. One evening in November, Micah told Lissa he believed a spirit had taken up residence in the apartment. He had been napping on the couch after school when he felt the blanket he was lying under lift and fold across his chest. He thought for a moment that his mother adjusted the blanket, but when he realized Lissa was nowhere around, Micah leapt up and ran to his bedroom. After that, strange things kept happening. Obie noticed them, too. They would be alone in the apartment when a cupboard would open or a shampoo bottle would drop to the bathroom floor. It was not a coincidence, they insisted, and their stories confirmed something Lissa already suspected—that KC had been visiting her, as well.
She had been raised to believe in spirits, whose existence few in her family questioned, but Lissa’s sense of how spirits behaved was shaped less by her culture than by her own inquiry.
Her first real encounter had come while she was in prison. Dakota Women’s was located in an old Catholic boarding school, which several of Lissa’s uncles had attended decades earlier. Lissa noticed the spirits as soon as she arrived, clinging to other inmates like masks, possessing them, making them say strange things. The spirits scared Lissa, and one day, she told a priest about them. Though she had been raised Catholic, she had not yet been confirmed. The night before her confirmation, she had stolen a bottle of her grandfather’s liquor and drank most of it herself. The reservation priest had rescheduled, but Lissa missed that date as well. She never had much use for religion, believing it a ploy of white men to control the behavior of Indians, but what the priest at the prison said surprised her. While the Catechism acknowledged the presence of spirits, it warned against delving into the spiritual realm, since although God created spirits, like people spirits had free will and like people they could turn away from God. The spirits Lissa had seen among her fellow inmates were real, the priest said. He believed Lissa had a gift for seeing, but he told her to be careful.
After that, Lissa developed her own theories about the way spirits occupied the living world. She wondered if they did not drift in the air as she once thought but instead took shelter in everyday objects—in doorknobs, hot dogs, cigarettes touched to lips. In needles sunken in the crooks of arms.
She believed spirits were around all the time, and it was at night, when things got quiet, that it became easier to register their presence. The first time spirits entered her dreams had been in the summer of 2010, on a camping trip in White Shield with her relatives. They had erected a canopy by the lakeshore and gone fishing. One evening, Lissa climbed a bluff above the beach and found several large stones arranged so deliberately she was certain they were an effigy. That night, as she fell asleep, a man and three women came to her in a dream. Lissa was on a bluff picking sage when she noticed them standing on a far hill. Each time she glanced up at them, they moved impossibly closer. She picked frantically, arranging the sage in a circle around herself, and when she looked up again, the man and women were standing beside her, their eyes cloudy and white.
Later, she sent a photograph of the stones to an anthropologist, who told her they were shaped like the constellation Auriga. She also told the story to the Lakota holy man she knew, and after that, she paid more attention to her dreams. None would be so vivid as the one that came to her that night by the lake, but when a spirit began visiting her dreams in the fall of 2012, Lissa had no doubt it was KC. “I don’t know why but he likes it here,” she wrote Jill one night. “I’m sending him to pester u cause I’m wiped out. I just offered my pipe up and I talked to him.”
If Jill was bothered that a woman who had never known her son was claiming to have spoken to his spirit, she did not let on. Once, when Lissa wrote, “It’s him keeping me up but I’m going to ignore him tonight,” Jill replied without a hint of sarcasm that her son could be “persistent.” Jill, as Lissa put it, was “more open-minded than your average white girl.” She often visited a psychic, whom she believed had communicated with her son. Lissa distrusted psychics. They preyed on desperate people, she thought, whom they gutted of all ability to reason. Jill received frequent messages from psychics offering services for a fee, and Rick had even spoken to one who propositioned him to engage in something called “astral sex.” Rick was creeped out, but even he was more open-minded than most white people Lissa knew. “You know,” he mused one night, “before this KC thing happened, I was fine going through life drinking beer and hanging out with my buddies.” Now, he said, “It’s like God smacked the shit out of me. He’s like, Listen, you’ve got to wake up to what’s going on.”
Rick meant “God” not in a religious sense but in a spiritual one. “Everyone says, ‘the Bible, the Bible, the Bible,’ ” he said, “but everyone interprets the Bible different. I choose to have my own relationship with the Great Mystery. I’ve been ostracized by my family for that. Once, I was like, ‘Hey Uncle Bobby, if you don’t take Jesus as your lord and savior, are you going to hell?’ And Uncle Bobby said, ‘Yes.’ He’s fucking sixty years on the planet and he believes that bullshit? I’ve kind of gone anti-religion, even as far as, like, pagan ritual, the old yin-yang version, where they chop heads off lambs and put them on the altar. It’s all ridiculous when you get down to it.” Rick was done with God, he told Lissa—at least with the one he had known as a child—but into the space made vacant by his doubt had come a new way of seeing that was, he thought, more holy than the way he had abandoned. Rick believed in spirits. He believed people saw only what they allowed themselves to see: “God ain’t going to show you nothing that you can’t fucking comprehend yourself. I’m sorry to cuss, but I’m passionate about it. We’re talking about what’s wrong with the world, here. We’re talking about why people suffer. Because God can’t give them a fucking answer.”
IN THE DAYS after Lissa posted the video, she monitored the number of views obsessively. In less than a week, the video had been seen 120,000 times. Eighty-five percent of those who shared it were women, a majority based in North Dakota, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming—states many oil-field workers hailed from. Lissa even sent the video to James’s parole officer, noting in an email, “This man is on probation under your watch.”
About a week later, the video vanished from the Internet. On Jill’s Facebook page, a black box occupied the space where the video had been, and the YouTube link opened to an error message. Lissa wondered if someone had contacted law enforcement to have it taken down. She posted the video again.
James had never been active on social media, and Sarah had deleted her Facebook account, but now others appeared on Jill’s page in their defense. “I do not know where KC is, but I know for a fact this mother has twisted SO MUCH of the info on this site,” one man wrote. The man, whose name was Brian Baker, wished to correct Jill’s story: “KC said he would be back in 2 weeks. I don’t think James or Sarah knew anymore than that. James and KC were good friends, they never had a fall out or argument of any kind!…Blackstone did end up finding out that KC and Rick were working for the other company. But there was nothing ‘shady’ going on. Rick told Blackstone he just wanted to be paid more, so all that stuff he says does not make since to me.”
Lissa had not heard of Brian Baker before. Oddly, neither had Rick. Brian had no information on his Facebook page, and his name was too ordinary to summon with a Google search. Then, one morning in early November, Brian wrote to Jill directly:
You can’t be trusted!…You don’t want help, you only want money. James and Sarah would gladly help you. You’ve never reached out besides for money, why don’t you publicly apologize and see where that gets you?
Jill forwarded the message to Lissa, asking if “Nadia” could post a reply. Lissa logged in to Nadia’s account and wrote to Brian, who replied immediately. She responded in a private message: “How could you be so mean to a mother that is missing her son?”
“I was never being mean,” Brian wrote. “I’m sorry you thought that….I want answers just like you do and everyone does, I want to help!”
Lissa considered her opening. “Who are those people to you anyway?” she asked. “You sound as though you take everything personal like they are siblings of yours or something.”
“They are very dear friends I’ve known for years. What is Jill to you?”
Better to stay as close to the truth as possible, Lissa decided: “I met her through the page, and I flew to North Dakota to meet her when she went there with a lady from the reservation to look around.”
If Brian believed “Nadia,” he did not say. He was concerned, he wrote, that Jill had targeted James and Sarah when neither were yet “suspects.” He had no idea where KC had gone, he repeated, and he mentioned the anonymous caller who told KC’s grandfather that KC was working in Montana.
Lissa baited Brian: “I pulled James’s criminal history and…he is a drug dealer, a thief.”
“Why would you think he’s a drug dealer?!”
“You obviously have never seen his rap sheet.”
“Yes I have, and better yet I know him.”
“Well why won’t they take a polygraph to shut everyone up?”
Brian did not respond right away. After eleven minutes, Lissa assumed he had abandoned the conversation, but then a new message appeared: “They were given legal advice to never take one. And a lot of the time the results are not admissible. And the police said they were very helpful….Doesn’t that make since to you?”
Since instead of sense. It was the second time Brian had made this mistake.
“I mean NO disrespect for Jill what so ever!!!!” he continued. “But she doesn’t even know KC was missing for 4 months. KC told many people he didn’t like his mom. I’m not trying to be rude. I can imagine her hurt, but he told people that.”
“And you’re real tight with your mom?” Lissa replied. “Don’t a lot of people have resentments towards their parents? I don’t talk to my mom very often. Resentments. You know. You haveta know. That’s why you’re way far away from your home.”
“I’m close with my mom, maybe a week or two could go by. But never 4 months.”
“Good for you. I can’t say the same. I have nothing against Sarah. She seems like a nice person, young, a lot going for her, but she needs to lose that loser! That girl would be better off without him. You watch! The minute she tries to gain some independence from him, she will be missing, too, or beat up. People like him are predictable. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I know them both, and James is not a loser. He does not look good on paper but he is a good person, he’s helped anyone who’s asked! And Sarah is very very sweet and kind, always putting others before her.”
“What do you think happened to KC?” Lissa asked.
Brian didn’t know. “It’s driving me nuts!” he wrote. “I feel like there has to be some sort of clue….What do you think?”
Lissa took several minutes to compose her reply. “I think James killed him or had him killed cause KC knew things about James and about that business. Also I think Sarah knows something about it after the fact. But I also think that money is a terrible demon. I think KC will be found soon and everything will come to light. James is a sociopath and he has most people fooled, including his wife, and including you.”
“Wow, you’re very opinionated ha ha,” Brian wrote. “I don’t believe at all James killed or had KC killed. There’s nothing to know about the company….James and Sarah are very open with books and checks and there’s nothing weird going on.”
Lissa printed the conversation with Brian and reread it several times. Then she printed all the incriminating information she had gathered on James and called an investigator she knew in Minot, a North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent named Mike Marchus.
They met one day in early December on a street near the Minot police station. Mike remained in his car as Lissa handed him the criminal record. He was pudgier than she remembered, with arched eyebrows and military hair. “A friend,” she called him, though he had helped send her to prison. For years he had monitored her when she lived in Minot, kept track of her drug deals, until one day, in 2005, officers had acquired a warrant and raided her house. Still, Lissa trusted Mike more than any other cop. Even while he surveilled her, they had spoken often on the phone, and once, when a little girl disappeared from a house next to Lissa’s, and Mike was assigned the case, Lissa had tried to help him. The girl was never found.
“It’s a classic RICO case,” Lissa now explained to Mike—a conspiracy eligible for federal prosecution through the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. If James was guilty of theft or fraud or trafficking drugs on the reservation, as his record suggested he might be, then the case “could go federal,” to the FBI and U.S. attorney.
“I’m not federal,” Mike told Lissa.
“I know,” she replied. But perhaps he could share the case with a detective who was. She suspected there was more to James’s crimes than the record she had found online contained, and she planned to find out. Jill had invited her to Washington for Christmas, and since the courthouse in Bend, Oregon, where James’s arrest records were kept was five hours south of the town where Jill lived, they intended to make a trip. Lissa promised to bring Mike these documents, as well.
IT WAS BELOW zero, the highway dusted in a powder of snow, when Lissa departed Fargo with Obie and Micah on the evening of December 21, 2012. The boys had been reluctant to miss Christmas with their relatives, but Lissa had offered to take them to see the ocean and had added that perhaps they might lure west whatever spirit was haunting the apartment. So, they had packed the van with changes of clothes and driven to Bismarck, where they spent a night with a cousin, before continuing on to Washington.
Jill’s house was no larger than a double-wide trailer, on a cul-de-sac at the edge of a forest. It was modest, loosely cared for, with latticework around the front and gardens gone to seed. After Lissa and the boys had settled in, Jill served beef and barley soup for dinner and fretted over what they would do the next day. Obie and Micah were eager to see Seattle, but the idea upset Jill, who said things wouldn’t be right the day being so close to Christmas. So Lissa waited for Christmas to pass before she took the boys out.
She could recall seeing the ocean three times herself, first with her mother in 1971, when she was three years old. They had been living in Los Angeles, Irene one of forty students selected to attend a new Indian Studies program at UCLA. One day, Irene and Lissa took the bus to San Francisco and a ferry to Alcatraz Island, which, when they arrived, had been occupied for more than a year by Native American activists. AIM would later lead similar occupations—of Mount Rushmore; of the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters in Washington, D.C.; of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where, in 1890, a cavalry massacred around three hundred Lakota men, women, and children—but Alcatraz was the first.
By then, Irene had met a Yakama Indian from Wellpinit, Washington, named Willy Phillips, who had been hired as an undercover spy to sleuth out drug users among students in the Indian Studies program. Irene learned this only after they started dating, though it had not mattered anymore, since Willy, a decorated Vietnam veteran with PTSD, was fired for drinking too much. They married and moved to San Jose, and then Willy took up with another girl, and Irene did not see him much anymore. One night, in an Oakland bar, Willy was stabbed to death. This Lissa remembered—how suddenly Willy was gone for good; how Irene, after three years in California, phoned the reservation and said she was ready to come home; how Lissa’s grandparents, Madeleine and Willard, appeared in San Jose with a station wagon and, while their daughter packed, took Lissa to the beach.
That was the second time Lissa had seen the ocean. The third time she remembered had been in the winter of 1997, when she was twenty-eight years old. She had been two years into her addiction by then. Her house had been raided, and her children, Shauna and CJ, taken and placed in foster care. Lissa had been desperate to get clean, so she and OJ had fled Minneapolis in a hurry, rented a car and pointed it west until they came to the edge of the continent and could not drive any farther. The beach had been flat, cold, vast—somewhere south of Seattle. Lissa had taken off her shoes and socks and waded into the frigid water. Then they had driven to Portland and rented a motel room on Division Street, which OJ had wanted to leave as soon as they arrived. One day, Lissa returned to the motel and found him high, laid out on the bedcover. He screamed at her, acted crazy. She took him to the emergency room. That evening, when they returned to the motel, OJ beat her brutally and then left on a bus for Minneapolis.
Lissa remembered wandering a wide boulevard on the east side of Portland. She entered the first strip club she came to. It was a lingerie modeling shop, under renovation. The proprietor took one glance at her bruised face and said she could not dance looking like she did. He found her a room in a hotel nicer than the one she and OJ had been living in. When she said she would not sleep with him, he had told her this was okay, and when he left, she lay on the bed and cried. The proprietor was kind to her. While Lissa waited for her bruises to heal, he tasked her with monitoring cameras in the club, keeping an eye on the dancers as they greeted clients. He paid her forty dollars at the end of each day, and when he realized she had a knack for business, he invited her to partner with him. He even gave her a car for her birthday and hired an attorney to get her kids back, but Lissa told him she could not stay. At the end of that summer, she went home.
That was the last time she had seen the ocean. Obie and Micah were not yet born. Now they drove as far west as they could go, to the edge of the city, and parked beneath an overpass, a highway roaring overhead. Obie was acting sullen and refused to leave the car. It was afternoon, the shadows of homeless men shifting in the almost-dark, and when one approached for a cigarette, Lissa gave him a whole pack. “Keep an eye on my son,” she said. The man brought over a chair and sat, looking dutiful as he smoked.
They rode the Ferris wheel, lights spinning over a boardwalk, and then stood on a pier that jutted into the sound. The day was damp, the water the color of clay.
Lissa’s phone blinked with a message from Jill: Were they sure they wanted to go to Oregon the next morning? Jill was broke and hated for Lissa to cover the cost of gas and court records. She hoped they were having a good time. She had saved them leftovers.
“We are going tomorrow,” Lissa replied. “Regardless end of story.”
LISSA HAD BEGUN to lose patience with Jill. The intimacy they had found over the phone had waned upon her arrival in Washington. Still, they acted close, and this posturing made Lissa feel claustrophobic. At the house, Jill hardly took her eyes off Lissa, asking where she was going if ever Lissa stepped outside. After days of this, Lissa was glad to leave for Oregon and would have preferred to make the trip alone had she not planned another stop after the courthouse requiring Jill’s presence—Sweet Home, the town where KC’s grandfather, Robert Clarke, lived.
Jill had not seen Robert in years. He was the father of KC’s father, who had long been absent. It was no secret KC favored Robert over Jill, and it was for this reason, Lissa suspected, that KC had been missing for months before Jill even emailed Robert. Jill and Robert had spoken intermittently after that, trading what information they had. Robert told Jill about the anonymous caller who had claimed KC was in Montana, and he sent her the last emails he exchanged with KC a day after Christmas in 2011:
You are my thoughts, you are the fireplace on a cold morning, you are the constant reminder that I still have a life. So much for sentiment, all is true. Wishing you the best, Love Gramps
KC’s response had been no less sweet:
I feel the same about you. You have done more for me and cared more than anyone else on the planet. Still lots of work here. I got a sinus infection and been sicker than shit the last few days. I’ve been taking antibiotics and getting better though. Love you with all my heart.
Reading those emails had to hurt, Lissa thought, but in reply, Jill had sounded strong. She suggested the anonymous caller was, in fact, James, and she worried Robert was in danger.
Now as Lissa and Jill drove to Oregon, Jill did not seem as strong. When they arrived at the courthouse in Bend, they found it under renovation and were forced to sit cross-legged on the floor as they read the pages Lissa had requested, sorting them into piles for the clerk to copy. They would have more time to read later, but Lissa could not help herself. When she came to a document that excited her, she handed it to Jill, who showed little interest.
The next day, they left Bend and continued west toward Sweet Home. When they came to Sisters, a piney enclave on the east side of a range of mountains, Jill’s phone blinked with a message from Robert. He was “sicker than hell”—they better not come. Jill wanted to turn around, but Lissa refused.
The boys had fallen asleep. Snow fell. Their wheels spun on a slick of white. The banks on either side of the road were taller than the van and the trees so laden with snow that they formed a tunnel through which Lissa drove. The snow seemed to calm Jill, and when they reached the top of a pass, they stopped and got out together to photograph the trees. Then they descended through a mossy valley, so green that they might have entered another world.
They found Robert’s trailer some distance out of town, on a thin lawn beside a creek. It was getting dark, but there were no lights on inside. Lissa knocked gently at first, then harder. Jill looked like she might cry. “We came all this way,” she said, forgetting her earlier reluctance.
“Is he hard of hearing?” Lissa asked.
“Yes, very. Yes. I forgot that.”
Lissa knocked again and waited. A minute passed. Then she heard footsteps, and the door opened revealing a man with stooped shoulders, long ears, and white wisps of hair retreating from his forehead. His jeans hung on a pair of suspenders. He did not look pleased to see them. “Huh,” Robert said. “You’re here anyway.”
His trailer was crowded, boxes stacked on the surfaces as if he was preparing to move. “Find someplace to sit,” Robert said. “Can’t believe what it’s like living in one of these when there’s nowhere to put anything.”
“At least you got somewhere to put something, right?” Lissa said.
“Some people got, yeah…” Jill said, trailing off. She was breathy, talking to herself.
Lissa pushed aside a box and sat at the table. She noticed a set of photographs and reached for them, listening quietly as Jill and Robert spoke. In one photograph, KC was no more than five, smiling largely on a leather sofa in the crook of his grandfather’s arm. In another, taken some years later, the two of them stood in a parking lot against a backdrop of forest, a camera slung around Robert’s neck.
“That Mountrail County sheriff—boy, he was a real ass,” Robert told Jill. “I don’t know what his name was. I don’t remember. He says, ‘Even if I find him, I don’t have to tell you anything. He’s twenty-nine.’ ”
“I got the same story,” said Jill. “I got, ‘Well, maybe he wanted to disappear.’ ”
“After I found out that was a phony call, it must have been two, three weeks, and I still hadn’t heard from KC. That caller told me the only reason KC hadn’t called was there was nowhere to get service in eastern Montana up around the oil fields.”
“Somebody’s trying to throw you off,” Jill said.
Lissa looked up. “Did you ever get the phone records?” she asked Robert.
“No, see, I wasn’t smart enough to save the records. I thought everything was all right. I didn’t—” Robert sounded tired, like he was ready for them to go. “What a mess,” he said. “How’d you find this place?”
Jill nodded to Lissa. “She can find anyone,” she said.
Robert didn’t seem to hear. “I have to take Tom”—a neighbor—“to the doctor once in a while. He’s had hip replacements, knees. Albany—you go down a one-way street, turn, go a block, and think you can go back the other way, but hell, you don’t know where to go.”
“How often was KC calling you then?” asked Jill.
“Oh, I don’t know, probably average once a week, maybe go two weeks without a call. When he was in Texas”—working at the car dealership—“he’d get upset ’cause he couldn’t sell anything and then he wasn’t very friendly. Then he’d have a good week, and he’d call. In [North Dakota] he called me on the road. Sometimes we’d talk for twenty, thirty, forty minutes, but all of it was about the job, and how the job was going, and the hours he was working. A couple times he mentioned that he was saving money.”
“Did he ever tell you he had any problems with James?” Lissa said.
“No,” Robert said. “It was all a big surprise that there were any problems. I found that out from Rick Arey. I was trying to figure out where that house was that Judd and KC lived in. I finally called Judd on the job where he was working, and he talked a little bit, but he had to get back to work. [Then] I called Sarah, and she went into hysterics. I didn’t get anything out of her. She just said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and hung up. The bawling hysterics, I mean, not laughing.”
“Do you have any other pictures of KC?” Lissa said.
“That box right there is full of them.”
“Can I look?”
“Help yourself. Turn the lights on overhead there.”
Lissa rose, lifted the box, carried it to the table. Once, Robert continued, he visited his grandson in Washington and “took a whole pile of pictures,” which he later gave to KC. “I don’t know if he ever went through them or not,” Robert said. “The people he was renting from, they sent the box to me.” His voice cracked and quieted. “They’re not organized. You can keep any of those you want.”
Jill began to cry. “It’s okay, Jill,” Lissa said. “It’s part of what we got to go through.” Lissa lifted a photograph from the box and handed it to Jill. “Is this you?”
“I don’t know,” Jill said. She had left her glasses in the car.
Lissa lifted another, this time of Robert’s late wife—KC’s grandmother. She had planned to make an album, Robert explained, but then she had surgery and never woke up. That had been a few years ago.
Now night was falling across the windows of the trailer. “I don’t have anything to give you guys,” Robert said. “I’ve got coffee if you want it.”
“We should probably hit the road,” said Jill.
“Would you mind if I did a video of you?” Lissa said. “If you had something to say to KC—”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not very good at that sort of thing,” said Robert.
“If he was alive?”
“There’s no way that he’s alive, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think there’s any use wondering anymore.”
A WEEK AFTER Lissa and Jill visited Robert Clarke, they heard that he had died. This did not surprise Lissa. In Fargo, she loaded onto her computer an audio recording she had made of their visit and listened to it over and over. Even in the distant scratch, Robert’s grief was deep and unmistakable. As Lissa and Jill left the trailer that night, Robert had put on his shoes and followed them outside. “Got to bring the cat food in,” he said. “We trapped a coon the other day and it chewed the cage up so bad trying to get out that it bloodied itself, must have broke teeth.” Lissa had barely heard Robert over the crickets singing in the fields beyond the property, above the wind scattering leaves across the lawn, but in that moment, she recognized in his voice something she had heard in her uncle’s on the day, now more than two years ago, that Chucky told her he had come home to die.
It was not, as people sometimes said, that they had nothing left to live for. It was that the living became too much. It was the living, not the wanting to die, that weakened a person, Lissa thought, and it was this weakness that invited bad spirits. So it had been for Chucky: A bad spirit had taken hold, and he could not let it go.