THE HOUSE AT 2505 SOUTH Garfield Road, in Spokane, Washington, was often mistaken for elegant, though anyone who had been inside knew it was cheerless and tacked-together, having had too many owners who had tried to renovate and given up. It was three stories, white, with vaulted arches over the entry and a sunroom lit with Christmas lights. There were two sets of double doors that opened from a sunroom into the main house, so that when a city detective, Brian Cestnik, arrived at 7:46 on the evening of December 15, 2013, he could see, from the street, a television on in the living room and a fluorescent glow emanating from the kitchen. He saw no one inside the house. The paramedics were gone, Doug Carlile pronounced dead. An upper floor where the wife had hidden in a closet was dark. Officers lingered in the street as Cestnik spoke with them. The first had visited a neighbor, a woman, who saw a white van pass her house three times in the hour before she heard the gun. A second officer had been the first to enter the house. A third had followed a canine into the backyard and noted some curious signs: footprints; water marks splashed across a wooden fence; and a welding glove, dry, which the officer found strange, since the ground on which it lay was damp.
Cestnik took notes and then delivered a warrant to the home of a judge, who signed it before midnight. By the time he returned to Garfield Road, a forensic team was waiting. They videotaped the residence, first from the street, leafy and meandering, and then up the driveway past a white Mercedes SUV and a blue Ford truck. The night was still, and the video would appear even more silent and granular. Beyond the driveway, in the darkness of the yard, the frame blackened and brightened again to reveal the fence, the metal gate, and the welding glove, palm-up on the ground. Then through a door came a bleach of light: A man laid out on the kitchen floor.
Carlile wore only boxers and shoes, his clothes tossed off by the paramedics, and in the hours that passed, death had flattened his raw, puffed nakedness to the hardwood. When the detective bent to inspect the body, he noted blood marbling the pale of Carlile’s back and caked around his mouth, crusted in the folds of his neck and the hair around his scalp. There were four entrance wounds on his torso and an exit above his belly button, while a fifth bullet had entered by a nostril and lodged inside his head.
Cestnik would say that except for a tooth flung across the room, Carlile’s body was relatively intact. It was the house that disturbed him—the promise of its exterior, the shabbiness once inside—and stranger, still, its adornments: colored lights blinking on a plastic tree, Bible verses scribbled on sticky notes throughout the rooms. Christmas was the detective’s favorite holiday. “Here we are at the happiest time of year, and this guy brutally murdered,” he would say. The radio was tuned to carols and soft rock. No one had bothered to turn it off. At times, Cestnik caught himself humming, and then the music would stop, the horror pushing above the innocence.
THE LEAD DETECTIVE assigned the case was a tall, gray-haired man in his early fifties, Mark Burbridge, whose manners once inspired a colleague to liken him to a pit bull. In the fifteen years he had worked in the homicide unit, and in his years before that as a cop, Burbridge had become famous among Spokane prosecutors for his bluntness and disregard for politics. One would describe a courtroom incident in which he “was practically in fisticuffs with an attorney.” What made him “a very good detective,” the prosecutor noted, was that he seemed utterly lacking in self-consciousness. Cestnik was comparatively shorter and more polite. He had been in the homicide unit only a year, but the two detectives had become close. They went on family vacations together.
Burbridge believed that the relatives of murder victims fit into two categories: those who could not contain their grief, who had “this deep, soul-wrenching, guttural cry,” and those who remained silent out of shock. But when he arrived at his office the night of the murder and found Doug’s wife, Elberta, waiting, he noted she fit neither category. “She was detached,” as the detective put it. She insisted he take her to her husband so that she could pray over his body.
Burbridge added Elberta to his suspect list, which would include a dozen names by morning. At the top were the Carliles’ four sons, each involved to varying degrees in their father’s business, as well as Doug’s partners and investors. Doug was a contractor and, in 2013, he had taken an interest in the oil fields. He founded two companies: the trucking service, Bridgewater, with James Henrikson, whom Doug knew from a prior job; and Kingdom Dynamics Enterprises, with James and two other partners in Spokane. That July, KDE bid on an oil lease on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The lease was 640 acres, located in Mandaree. Another company had leased the land in 2008 and decided not to drill, since the surrounding land was already leased, and the cost of bringing a rig to a remote location would have reduced their profits. But Doug had not been deterred. He solicited partners, among them James and others whom he promised a full return on their investments within ninety days. Even Burbridge, who knew little about the oil fields, sensed Doug’s promise had been unrealistic, and indeed, as Elberta now explained, Doug had struggled to lure investors. James had grown frustrated. One day, during an argument, he held Doug by his shirt collar as if to strangle him.
After Elberta left Burbridge’s office, the detective phoned Doug’s partners in Spokane, both of whom were out of town—“Homicide detectives hate coincidences,” he said. Then he called Tex Hall, whom Elberta had mentioned. Tex struck Burbridge as eager to talk. He told the detective that he had never met Carlile but knew of him, and that James had stolen $500,000 from his company with the help of another “crook” named Robert Delao.
At eleven o’clock that night, Burbridge dialed James. Their conversation began cordially. James confirmed he had an oil lease with Carlile but denied having any trouble on the reservation. His tone shifted when the detective asked if James had assaulted Doug. James replied that Doug was a liar who owed him almost $2 million. He insisted he had nothing to do with the murder. Burbridge added James to the suspect list.
Over the following days, twenty detectives in the Spokane Police Department were assigned to investigate the case. Burbridge appointed one detective to work solely on identifying the van spotted by the neighbor, which was also caught on a security camera installed on the grounds of a neighboring school, and another to sort through a mounting pile of tips. The Spokesman-Review had published a police tip line, and although most of the tips investigators received were unhelpful, some had promise. One caller knew Carlile from a previous business deal. In the weeks prior to the murder, the caller said, Carlile had asked him to encourage a common acquaintance to invest in the oil lease on Fort Berthold. The acquaintance had not been interested, but Doug lied to his business partners claiming that the acquaintance was. James had suspected Doug was lying and had his wife contact the caller, who told Sarah the truth.
Burbridge was wary to name James a primary suspect just yet. Elberta’s behavior still bothered him, and there was the coincidence with the business partners, though both men had good alibis. There was also the man Tex had named—Robert Delao—whom Burbridge had heard of before. Among Spokane investigators, Delao was known as “a hardcore gangster” who could talk his way out of trouble. In 2010, he had cooperated with federal prosecutors to put seventeen gang members in prison.
Burbridge did not have to call Delao, because to the detective’s surprise, three days after Carlile’s murder, the suspect appeared at the homicide unit and requested an interview.
Delao was short and stocky, in his midthirties, confident and “personable,” Burbridge noted. He explained he had seen the tip line in the paper a day earlier and driven all night to Washington. Despite his journey, Delao looked perky, in a bright blue shirt and matching baseball cap.
They spoke in a small, yellow room, where Burbridge recorded the encounter on videotape. “Robert, I want to talk to you about Doug Carlile,” Burbridge began.
“Correct,” Delao said.
“James Henrikson.”
“Correct.”
“And everything that’s been goin’ on back there in North Dakota. You need to be honest with me today.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Delao said.
Delao explained that he had known Doug and had been shocked to hear of his death. He worried that given his criminal history in Spokane, investigators might suspect he was involved, and he hoped to preempt a misunderstanding. Delao had met Doug in 2013 while working for Tex. That summer, Tex received a contract to haul gravel, and Delao went looking for drivers. “First person to call me back was James,” Delao told Burbridge. “He says, ‘Hey, I’ve got some friends, and I’m helping them build their company up.’ ” Delao met James and Carlile for breakfast in Spokane. Carlile wanted “to do business with Tex,” and Delao promised to arrange it. The job fell through—Carlile did not get his license to operate on the reservation in time—but Delao hired him later to haul water for Maheshu. The job paid $38,000. Afterward, Tex told Delao he did not want to hire Carlile anymore. Many Indian-owned companies hired subcontractors like Carlile, but some owners considered this cheating. Tex told Delao to hire truck drivers directly instead.
“Do you still work for [Tex]?” Burbridge interjected.
“I don’t work for him now, no,” Delao replied.
“How come you don’t work for him?”
Delao laughed, blinked, moved a hand up and down on his thigh. “Well,” he said, “when I first met him and his wife Tiffiany, he showed me he had pictures of President Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. I was actually like, Wow, this guy’s doing something right. I felt honored. I was happy. I felt like I was in the right place in my life. Once I got to know him, I—my opinion changed. There’s a fine line between ambition and greed, and greed—he radiates it. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I was tired of people calling with lawsuits. I was tired of people calling me, threatening my life because they weren’t getting paid, and I was tired of his wife interfering with everything, including telling me what to tell law enforcement if I deal with them. It was just too much drama. James and Sarah and Tex and Tiff, they’re like the Hatfields and McCoys. When you talk to them, they’ll tell you each other is the worst piece of crap on the planet. What they will fail to tell you is they had an excellent relationship until—God, I didn’t want to be fucking recorded—but James and the daughter had an affair, one that continues to this day. There’s a child involved, too.”
“How good of friends are you with James?” Burbridge asked.
Delao sighed. “You know, he’s a pathological liar, so I’m simply someone he can use as his plan to make money. That’s the honest-to-God truth right there.”
“How did you end up in North Dakota?”
It was “James’s recommendation,” Delao said. The manager of Maheshu Energy “could not run the company,” so James suggested to Tex that Delao take his place. Delao felt comfortable on the reservation, since his daughter’s mother was a member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. “I’ve dealt with tribal councils, and, you know, [James] thought that I might fit in, be able to speak the lingo. And it worked. I did well, real well. I could relate to the Natives out there. I could go to the powwows, and at the same time, I’m not intimidated, so it was easy for me to organize the truckers.”
“I talked with Tex. He’s telling me there’s over half a million dollars in fraud that went on, and [Tex is] talking with Homeland Security and the IRS.”
“I understand. And you know what, if it goes to court, I will be happy to testify in my defense. I did not take anything from that man.”
“What do you know about James and his criminal activity?”
“Well, his record’s insane.”
“I don’t care about his record. I care about him right now.”
“He’s a pathological liar. He got involved in that disappearance with KC.”
“Did you have anything to do with that?”
“No, hell no. Fuck no.”
Burbridge sat up in his chair. He had dressed that day in a white button-down shirt, khaki pants, and hiking boots. “Can I get a DNA swab from you?” he said. “Won’t hurt, just a little DNA swab on the inside of your cheek.” Delao opened his mouth as Burbridge tore open a small package, leaned forward in his chair and, with the precision of a dentist, stuck a swab in Delao’s mouth. Burbridge placed the swab in a plastic bag.
“Did you shoot Doug?” Burbridge asked.
Delao straightened. “No, I had nothing to do with it.”
“I’ve got to tell you, I’m pretty sure James had everything to do with it.”
“You know, I know it sounds bad, I’m his friend, but I don’t think he did. I really don’t think he did.”
“Well there’s no doubt Doug’s involved in a whole ton of fraud back there,” said Burbridge. “Let me tell you how this works. You’ve been involved in big business before, involving dope and other stuff. The big guy threatens everyone below to keep their mouth shut no matter what, but guess who’s always the first one to talk.”
“Yeah, he puts everyone away,” said Delao.
“He puts everyone away. I’m letting you have a chance to get in front of this.”
“That’s why I’m telling you, honestly, I’m sure somebody is going to get caught, and you’ll see, my name is not in this.”
“Did he ever call you up and say, ‘Hey, I need this guy taken care of’?”
“No. No. No.”
“I got to tell you, you look scared to death.”
“Look what we’re talking about here!”
“Let’s talk about the missing guy. If James didn’t do it, who did?”
“I know something happened to him,” said Delao. “Obviously. I never got to meet him, but everyone said he was a real charismatic guy. Real happy. Like how I am normally. Right now, I’m a nervous wreck. But normally I’m happy. I’m smiling. I’m all charm. I was told he was the same way. Somebody like that doesn’t just disappear.”
“Did James ever talk about how mad he was at the guy?”
“No, that’s the thing. He told me they were friends, and he just went away. That was it. His wife says she doesn’t know anything.”
“Tell me about Sarah.”
“How can I put it? Sheltered. The way she’s described herself to me, she went to college. I believe it was something to do with hotels. And I know everything is in her name. I know that. Because she’s the one with decent credit.”
“Is she manipulative?”
“Of course. Yes. Like most females with charm, yes.”
“How did you guys meet?”
“The gym. When I first met James, obviously he’s on steroids, and he looked like he had his shit together. He works out, carries himself like he has millions, which he doesn’t. So when I first met him, I was impressed. I said, if I can pick this guy’s brain, I’ll have it made. I honestly thought that by hooking up with him, I could possibly have the things he said he had.”
“James talks a big time, but he’s not big time,” said Burbridge.
Delao nodded. “He’s a pussy.”
“He wants somebody dead, he knows somebody who knows dangerous people, right?”
“I know what you’re getting at, but look at this: I cooperated”—with federal investigators in 2010. “I put away seventeen people.”
“I’m aware of that,” Burbridge said. “I want to make something clear. I’m not after you. I’m after the truth, and if you’re caught up in my truth, I’m going to destroy you, but you want to be a friend and up-front, I’m willing to work with you.”
“I know you think I’m in the loop, and I’m not,” Delao said.
Burbridge leaned forward in his chair again, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, the movement so deliberate it appeared scripted. “I got to tell you, you look scared to death, my friend,” he said. “I’m not kidding you. I think you’re part of this. Minimum, James called and said, ‘I need help,’ and you hooked him up with somebody.”
“No. Like I said, no.”
“If that’s what happened, and now you’re like, ‘Holy shit, he really did it,’ you need to step forward on this and get yourself in front, because I guarantee you, I’m coming, and those people who did the shooting, they’re going to roll back on everybody. If we get James first, I guarantee you he’s going to shit his pants and puke his guts on the table for me when they start talking life and the death penalty.”
“I know. I know,” Delao said. “I’ve been through it, so I know.”
THE INTERVIEW WAS perhaps most remarkable for the way Delao spoke about the oil fields, particularly about Fort Berthold. Even in the wake of the Carlile murder, as the sad fate of his life was becoming clear, the reservation seemed to contain for him a promise that after all the mistakes he had made, he would be redeemed. “Opportunities like that don’t just come,” Delao told Burbridge. “My only experience in life, really, is working for Tex Hall. Let’s say I didn’t have the oil field. What would I do? Sell cars? North Dakota is the only place in our country right now where somebody like me can go and make big money.” His annual salary at Maheshu had been $75,000. Later, Delao would insist under questioning that when he called James in January 2012, two months after his own release from prison, he had not wanted to go back to selling drugs. He wanted to go to the reservation, he explained, to make “an honest living.”
In this respect, Delao was likely telling the truth, but the stories he would tell over the following months would lever open a gap between this truth and his ambitions. It would become obvious that Delao had found it harder than he expected to distance himself from crime. One could sense him trying in the way he described the oil fields: “You have these guys living in their trucks in the middle of nowhere. They’re fighting depression on a daily basis, and now you’re giving them six-figure salaries. So they’re creating a breed of people, walking around with these false egos. They’re causing problems. I wouldn’t raise my kids there.”
Whether or not Delao grasped the irony of his statements, it was obvious he had worked hard. He put in eighteen-hour days at Maheshu while also doing odd jobs at the chairman’s ranch. “I knew all his fucking horses by name,” Delao said. He considered Tex the gatekeeper to his own material success—a belief similar to the one that drew James and Sarah to Tex, and then drew the Carliles.
That same third week in December, Cestnik drove to Moses Lake, a town southwest of Spokane, where Elberta Carlile had gone to stay with her son after the murder. Seated in her son’s living room, Elberta described for Cestnik a day that past July when she had gone with her husband to the reservation. They had met a tribal member, whose family allotment they intended to lease, at Better B’s in New Town and then stopped at the Bureau of Indian Affairs office to place a bond—a requirement before their lease could be approved. “We were sitting there in the office, and there’s a poster up on the wall of James and Sarah,” Elberta told Cestnik. “I about fell over. I said, ‘Doug, look at this.’ There was something about criminal activity.”
Cestnik brought up a copy of the flyer on his phone and handed it to Elberta. He had found a link to it on the Internet a day earlier while searching for information about James. The word BEWARE was printed in large letters across the top. “Does that look familiar?” Cestnik asked. “Is that the one that was on the wall?”
“Yes,” said Elberta. “They’re saying a man disappeared and was never found, and it was after he had an argument with James over business and money. I’m saying, ‘Doug, do you realize? This man?’ And he goes, ‘We’ll talk about it when we get out of here.’ And I said, ‘What are we doing?’ I took the poster down so I could read it and keep it and have proof of it. Doug just told me, ‘I knew James had problems, but I didn’t know about this. I just wanted to give him a second chance in life.’ And I’m freaking out. We’d even stayed at their house on that trip. So we go back to the house, and I just want to ask them what’s going on, and I’m not sure if I should.”
“Did you ask them?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did they say?”
“They just looked at each other. They didn’t hardly say anything. They said, ‘Well, part of that stuff is true.’ So when I got home, I started doing research, and I found out a lot of stuff that appeared to be true.”
Elberta spoke cautiously, constantly revising, fretfully wiping tears. She was a tall, strong-looking woman, with thin hair that fell to her waist. After she and Doug went home to Spokane, she explained, the land deal fell apart. Their lease was approved, but by September, they still had not found a loan to finance the drilling. One investor demanded she be repaid in full even though the drilling had not yet begun. Doug did not have the money. He worked constantly, but for reasons Elberta did not understand, the truck operation acquired few contracts. Bridgewater, Elberta said, never earned the Carliles a cent. Doug spent much of that fall in North Dakota, while Elberta, disturbed by the flyer, did not follow him. They spoke every day. Doug wanted to rent Tex’s shop, or at least park his trucks there, since he believed a relationship with Maheshu would lend Bridgewater, as it had Blackstone, an advantage on the reservation. James warned Doug not to reach out to Tex, but Doug ignored him. One day, as Elberta recalled, Doug phoned Maheshu. “And you know who answers? Robert Delao. So, Doug tells him, ‘I need to talk to Tex,’ and Robert says, ‘He’s not in right now.’ Doug wasn’t off the phone ten minutes, and he’s getting all these texts from James. James flew into this rage, and we didn’t get it. How did that happen? Then we got it: Delao was a spy.”
Delao entertained Doug’s inquiry anyway. They texted regularly, and each time, Delao promised he would show Tex a contract, but he never did. Delao even met Doug once in Watford City, in a parking lot outside a cell phone store, where they discussed another contract that also never materialized.
Doug called Tex again later in the fall. “This time we got ahold of Tex’s wife, girlfriend, whatever she is to him,” Elberta told Cestnik. “We needed Tex on our side, because he’s with the BIA and all that, but we knew he would either have nothing to do with us because we knew James or he would help us. So Doug told her, ‘I’m going to be doing work over there, and I’d like to rent your shop.’ She said, ‘What do you know about Bridgewater?’ And he thought, Oh my gosh, they know. So he said, ‘I started Bridgewater. I got in with some despicable people, I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I’m no longer part of that.’ All the sudden Tex comes on the phone, and he said, ‘Good thing you said that Doug, or I would have never spoken to you again. James embezzled $514,000 from me.’ Doug told him, ‘The strange thing is, last time I called your office, I got ahold of Robert Delao, and James started texting me.’ That’s when Tex realized Delao was a spy for James.”
Elberta believed Doug had been scared but would not admit it. Even after the incident in which James held him by the collar of his shirt, Doug had not been deterred. “James said he was going to take him out if he didn’t get out of the way,” Elberta explained, and yet she and her husband had continued to believe the deal would work out in their favor. Doug assured her that once they got a loan, he would pay off or buy out their investors. The Carliles were deeply religious and believed that if they prayed, God would reward them. Whenever Doug ignored James’s calls, James tried Elberta instead. Once, she texted James, “The Lord is in control. If God is for us, nobody can be against us.”
James did not have patience for their proselytizing. “You need to pull your weight. I will not carry you, Doug,” he texted one day.
“Someday grasshopper you will learn that friendship is worth more than money,” Doug replied.
“Nothing is worth more than money, only my relationship with God and my wife,” James wrote. “God, wife, money, friends.”
The Carliles had one more option. Through a broker, Doug had found an investor in Dallas, Texas, who had a record of funding oil and gas production in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Appalachian Basin. The investor thought the lease looked promising. An Exxon subsidiary had successfully drilled land surrounding the lease, and from seismic data the investor estimated that if KDE drilled into the Bakken, as well as into a deeper formation called Three Forks, their wells would produce up to thirty-five million barrels of oil. In early December, the investor negotiated an agreement with Doug. When Doug shared the news, Elberta told Cestnik, “We were sitting on the couch holding hands. He said, ‘I will know by Sunday about the money.’ ” Doug also told Elberta that he believed James was involved in criminal activity. After he got the money, Doug planned to go to the FBI.
“He never told you what he had on James?” Cestnik asked.
“No,” Elberta said and began to cry. “We had a lot going for us, because we had God going for us, but we didn’t have the money, and in this world, you have to have the money.”
A SNOWSTORM WHIPPED across the northern prairie on the day that the Spokane detectives, Mark Burbridge and Brian Cestnik, arrived in North Dakota. It was fifty degrees below zero with wind chill. They had stayed the night at a hotel in Montana, where, by morning, their tires had frozen, thumping loudly for the first hour of their drive. The wind blew so hard that everything became white. Twice they had to stop in the road to wait for the snowy curtains to part, and when they came to Watford City, night had fallen, gas flares casting everything in orange.
The next morning, they ate eggs in the lobby of the hotel, empty but for an eighteen-year-old with a bad windburn who had worked his first shift in the oil fields that night. Then they drove north on the main street. “There were guys everywhere,” Cestnik would recall. “All the mom-and-pop stores were shut down, sold, and every business had to do with the oil field.” Wherever the detectives stopped, they asked after James and Sarah. Many people claimed to have heard of them, including a bartender who said when Cestnik mentioned Sarah, “Oh, you mean ‘Bentley’?” The woman knew Sarah from the gym and often spotted her driving an expensive car around town.
When they arrived at James and Sarah’s house at the north end of Watford City, they noted it was larger than other houses in the neighborhood, with gray siding and a wide porch with a view of the road. Cestnik knocked; a woman answered. Delao was inside, mildly surprised to see them. James and Sarah were not home, Delao said, but would return to the house in an hour. The detectives chatted briefly with Delao, and indeed, when they returned, two matching pickup trucks were parked side by side in the driveway.
Burbridge later described the encounter: “We went in the breezeway area, through the garage. I saw the Bentley sitting on flat tires. That’s one way to treat a car that beautiful. We knocked, and Sarah came to the door. She knew that we had been there already. She snarled at us, gave me the dirtiest look. She said, ‘You want my husband. I’m not going to talk to you,’ and stormed off. Didn’t even say, ‘Wait here.’ Nothing polite. I’d never met her before. She was extremely aggressive. It didn’t surprise me. I’m used to dealing with major, major bad guys. You don’t give her anything, because you don’t want her to read you. So it’s thirty seconds, forty seconds, and James comes to the door. It’s a screen door, and the inner door’s cracked. He was a big son of a bitch. I’m a big guy. I used to be a major weight lifter in college, and it was clear to me that he can move some weight. He benches five plus, probably. And he leaned out the door, and I introduced myself, and he slapped me on the shoulder. He said, ‘Hey, too bad you drove all that way. My attorney told me not to talk to you.’ That was the end of it. He shut the door in my face. I grew werewolf fangs. I wanted to rip that arm off that shoulder so bad. It was very clear to me at that point that he was my number one suspect.”
IF IT OCCURRED to Burbridge to connect the murder of Carlile with the disappearance of Kristopher Clarke, he soon forgot about it. He did not remember Darrik Trudell, the young Homeland Security agent, calling the morning after the murder, though Trudell insisted he did. Burbridge did remember Lissa’s calls—and remembered ignoring them. He would claim the first time he heard of Clarke was a week after Carlile was murdered, when Cestnik discovered the flyer. In any case, it was after Burbridge saw the flyer that he phoned the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Steve Gutknecht was out of the office; Burbridge was told to call Trudell. He called but would not remember what they spoke about. Neither Burbridge nor Cestnik told Trudell when they went to Watford City. Clarke was not his case, Burbridge said—“We’re not searching for his evidence.”
None of the evidence Burbridge gathered pointed clearly at James. It was only a hunch, a mass of accusations, that placed James at the top of his suspect list—hardly a sure bet, since on January 10, 2014, new evidence pointed at someone else.
Detectives had submitted the welding glove found in the Carlile’s backyard for DNA analysis, and got a match: Timothy Suckow, a white male, fifty years old, with a record of burglary and assault. Burbridge had never heard of Suckow before. In a records search, he learned that Suckow lived with his wife on the east side of Spokane. Burbridge assigned officers to surveil the suspect’s house, and on the thirteenth of January, officers followed Suckow to the offices of a company that cleaned up hazardous waste, where Suckow worked, and arrested him in the parking lot. While Suckow was detained at the police station, officers searched his house, where they found twenty guns, several black balaclavas, and a single welding glove. Meanwhile, the detective whom Burbridge had assigned to locate the van learned it belonged to the same company for which Suckow worked. Detectives searched the van and, in a center console, found a handwritten list on college-ruled paper:
glove?
badge
trenchcoat
2 boots
led lite
radios w
The appearance of a new suspect baffled Burbridge. In a month of interviews, no one had mentioned Suckow. None of the Carliles, nor Doug’s partners, nor Tex had heard of or recognized him. In photos taken upon his arrest, Suckow’s skin looked pale, his eyes sunken and dark. He had a shaved head and wide, muscular shoulders. Reporters suggested he was mentally ill, that he believed the world was coming to an imminent end, but no one could make sense of his involvement in the murder. Only one thing connected Suckow to the other suspects: James’s number was listed in his phone.
Now Burbridge faced the same dilemma Gutknecht and Trudell had encountered before. While it seemed obvious that James was connected to Carlile’s murder, the detective had hardly enough evidence to gain a warrant for James’s arrest, let alone charge him with a violent crime. In the middle of January, Burbridge called Trudell, who offered an idea: Federal agents could use the evidence they had gathered while investigating James for fraud to obtain a warrant to search James’s house. In December, a Blackstone employee had told Trudell that James had a gun safe, even though James’s prior felony convictions prohibited him from keeping firearms. Burbridge accepted Trudell’s offer, and on January 14, 2014, Trudell and his fellow agents executed the search warrant. As Sarah and James made their way home from Denver, officers raided their house, confiscating three handguns, two shotguns, and an AR-15. Over the following days, authorities monitored James, who fled to a Bismarck suburb where he stayed with Peyton Martin. On January 18, Trudell arrested him.
James did not “puke his guts on the table” as Burbridge had suggested to Delao he would. Rather, on the day of his arrest, James evaded Trudell’s questions. In a video recording of the interrogation, he would appear stiff, his voice a strange, bending whisper as if he were letting air out of a balloon. “I guess nothing really happened,” James offered. “There’s something on the Internet, and then everybody starts to hate you.” He changed the subject to Sarah.
“Let’s talk about Washington, how you hired someone to have a guy killed,” Trudell said.
James laughed. “No,” he said. He mentioned Sarah again.
“What are we talking about there?” asked Trudell.
“Murder. They’re going to take her out.”
Trudell sounded annoyed. “Tell me what you want, and let’s start there. You can’t say that the boogeyman is going to get her, and we call witness protection. You give us something actionable. Why would someone want to kill Sarah?”
James did not answer the question.
It did not take long for investigators to realize that the case depended on Robert Delao and Timothy Suckow, the suspect whose DNA had been found on the welding glove. In January, Suckow was assigned a public defender, and by early March, he agreed to meet prosecutors for a “free talk” in which he would tell the whole story of the Carlile murder. Unless he lied, nothing he said could be used against him in court.
Trudell flew to Spokane for the talk, but almost as soon as he arrived, the deal fell apart. State and federal prosecutors were jockeying for jurisdiction in the case. In the meantime, Suckow had asked if he could get a better deal if he confessed to another murder. For the first time, it occurred to investigators that perhaps Suckow had also killed Kristopher Clarke.
The day after the talk fell through, Burbridge and Cestnik visited Delao at his house in Spokane. They told him he still had a chance to “beat Suckow to the table” and offered to find him an attorney. Delao agreed, and on March 2, 2014, he met with federal agents and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.
The story Delao told on that day diverged from the one he had previously shared with Burbridge: In January 2012, when he called James looking for work, James had not, in fact, offered a job but rather asked Delao if he knew anyone who could beat a person up. Delao told James he would think about it. “The last thing I was trying to do is call my old friends, because I’d done this cooperation,” Delao explained to prosecutors. He worried his friends would kill him, but he wanted the job, so he called a former cellmate who suggested Suckow. Delao once had worked for Suckow, stripping asbestos from buildings, and gave him a call. Suckow sounded interested. James bought him a train ticket to Williston.
In March 2012, a few weeks after Suckow returned from North Dakota, Delao met him at a bar in Spokane: “I said, ‘So what did you think of North Dakota?’ What I wanted was, ‘Does James really have all the money he was talking about, and am I really going to be able to get a job out there?’ ” Suckow acted cagey with Delao and said he had done “more than he signed up for.”
That same March, James told Delao he had more work, so Delao took a train to Williston. The work was not what Delao had hoped. James asked him to locate a kilo of heroin, which they would press into pills imitating the prescription opiate Oxycontin. A kilo of heroin could produce twenty thousand pills, which could sell for more than a hundred dollars apiece. Delao struggled to find a source, and after two weeks, James “fired” him. But that June, James asked Delao to return. Ryan Olness, the Blackstone investor from Arizona, met Delao in Williston. George Dennis and Justin Beeson, two truck drivers for the company, joined them. They drove to a drilling site serviced by Trustland, the rival trucking company owned by the tribe’s former lawyer, Steve Kelly. On James’s orders, they vandalized storage tanks and opened valves, letting hundreds of barrels of oil spill out.
James never mentioned KC to Delao, though he often talked about wanting to kill other people—Steve Kelly, Ryan Olness, and Jed McClure, the investor who was suing James and Sarah. In July 2012, James made Delao a full-time employee at Blackstone. Delao’s primary task—locating a source of heroin—remained the same, and he reached out to a friend in Spokane, Todd Bates, who said he had a hookup in Chicago. Meanwhile, James was having problems with a truck driver and solicited Bates to kill him. That November, Bates traveled to Watford City four times, and each time he failed to kill the driver, James grew more frustrated with Delao. Finally, in January 2013, Delao, Bates, James, and Peyton Martin, Tex Hall’s stepdaughter, traveled to Chicago, where James purchased $20,000 worth of heroin. Their dealer was a former Vice Lord called “the Wiz.” James asked Bates to ask the Wiz to murder Jed McClure. The Wiz agreed to do it for $25,000. In February, he met Bates at the Chicago airport, where Bates gave him a down payment of $9,500. The Wiz took the money and ran.
Around the same time, oil companies began dropping contracts with Blackstone. As BEWARE flyers appeared on the reservation, drivers went to work for other water haulers. Tex was losing confidence in James and Sarah, but after he ended their business partnership, he allowed Delao to remain at Maheshu. Some believed Delao was James’s spy, but it was Peyton who “would tell James everything,” Delao explained. “Peyton was James’s inside guy. Anything that ever happens at Tex’s house, Peyton reports to James, so James is always one step ahead of Tex.” In fact, Delao rarely spoke to James, he said. “Tiffiany told me I wasn’t allowed to talk to him. It was because of the whole affair. She would constantly go through my phone to be sure I wasn’t talking to James or her daughter. When Homeland Security”—Darrik Trudell—“and Mr. Gutknecht came to Tex’s office to talk about the KC situation, I was rehearsed by Tiffiany Johnson. She said, ‘When law enforcement comes, one, you cannot mention my daughter. Two, anything negative about Tex, clam up.’ ” Without telling Tiffiany, Delao still met James now and then at the gym in Watford City, where they conferred about Peyton, Suckow, and eventually Carlile.
Delao told the story eagerly, betraying none of his earlier reluctance, and so, in April 2014, when Suckow made his own confession, prosecutors were struck by the difference in the two witnesses’ tones. In a recording of the confession, more than four hours long, it would be difficult to make out the hit man’s words, which conveyed an immeasurable sadness. Suckow appeared unusually small in the video, sunken into his red jumpsuit. He spoke slowly, rocking back and forth, rattling his stomach chains, and when he cried, he cast his eyes toward the ceiling, his bottom lip quivering uncontrollably.
Before Suckow had gone to North Dakota in 2012, he had never killed anyone, he explained. As he understood it, James had hired him to “take care of” Steve Kelly, the owner of the rival trucking company, so that “he could have the whole rez to himself.” Suckow had decided he would simply beat Kelly up. On February 21, 2012, he had taken the train to Williston, where James met him. They slept that night in Watford City. The next morning, James drove Suckow to Maheshu, and that was when James’s request changed. “He started telling me about KC,” Suckow said, “how he was threatening to leave the company and take some of the truckers with him. That’s when he asked me to kill him. I didn’t even think he was serious. When we got to the shop, he wanted to introduce me to everybody. I was like, I don’t know about that shit.
“It was the morning,” Suckow continued. “When we went into the shop it was empty except some garbage, some cans, recycling in the corner. He was telling me, ‘I’ll bring KC back here, and you just put a choke hold on him.’ Even though I was a big guy, I didn’t feel very comfortable about—I’m not a fighter. I’m not very confident about my strength. And he told me he carries a gun. I said, ‘I’m not going to choke him out if he’s going to carry a gun.’ He said I could hit him with something. I looked around the shop, and all I could see was those floor jacks.”
Suckow looked up. His lip quivered. His chin furrowed. His voice rose and began to shake. “I went back over by the door. I still remember. I didn’t believe it was real. There was a part of me that just didn’t believe it. And I stood by the door.” Suckow began to cry. “I shook KC’s hand. I didn’t think—I didn’t think—” He stopped, looked around the table. “I’m really not violent,” he said.
PROSECUTORS SHARED THE story with Jill, leaving little out, and when Jill repeated the story to Lissa, they cried together on the phone. Suckow had known that KC was dead when his last hit “went soft,” he said. He had emptied a garbage can and removed a plastic bag, which he wrapped around his victim’s head, and pulled KC into a bathroom, where he left him while he mopped up the blood. When Suckow finished, he drove KC’s truck to Watford City and returned to Maheshu with James and George Dennis, the truck driver with whom James seemed close. They stuffed KC into a cardboard box, which Suckow sealed with masking tape, while George backed up his truck to the garage. They drove, again, to Watford City and south into the badlands, turning west on a dirt road. George parked at the head of a ravine, and James and Suckow continued on foot. The ground was wet and soft. Suckow dug a hole as deep as his chest. It had begun to snow when he returned to the truck, and the box, damp, broke when he lifted it. He carried KC like a child, cradled in his arms.
Lissa sensed relief in Jill, but it was tempered by the fact that her son’s body was still missing. The only evidence linking James to the first murder was circumstantial, one man’s word against another, and without proof that KC was dead, the likelihood that they could prosecute James for KC’s murder was alarmingly low.
In May 2014, investigators flew Suckow to North Dakota twice. Although he led them to what he believed was the burial area, he could not find KC’s body. Trudell said Suckow had made an honest effort. Later, investigators returned to the site with dog teams and backhoes, but they could not find a body, either.
Lissa traded fewer messages with Trudell that spring. When she asked him if he knew where Sarah had gone, he told her he did not. Lissa assumed, correctly, that Sarah had been taken into protective custody. She missed Sarah—or perhaps it was something else she missed. After Sarah’s silence, after James’s arrest, after Robert’s and Timothy’s confessions, Lissa was no longer the keeper of secrets, the one who knew more than anyone else.
In the beginning, she was grateful that James would be prosecuted, and when she heard that investigators were preparing for a trial, she was moved nearly to tears. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she texted Trudell.
“No problem. Thanks,” he replied.
The fear she had felt leaving her apartment dissipated without her noticing. In the winter and spring of 2014, she spent fewer weekends on the reservation, and when she went home to the apartment after work, she often fell into a deep, uninterrupted sleep. She felt exhausted, sick, but there was also a certain darkness that enveloped her during this time. One afternoon, Lissa woke to find the apartment empty. She called for her children, but they had gone out. She drove to the grocery store and thought, as she wandered the aisles, that even the people she knew looked unfamiliar: “Everybody moved on without me. I got so wrapped up in this case, and when I looked up, everybody was gone.”
Lissa wondered if Shauna had been right—one addiction for another, the same person, only sober.
To feel unnecessary, cast off, made Lissa desperate, and she became strident, even boastful with investigators. Burbridge still did not return her calls and, once, when he accused her by email of leaking information to the press—falsely, it was Jill—Lissa replied angrily, “Focus on connecting James and his crew. I’ve been following this guy for nearly two years.”
She did not speak with Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent, and knew of his work on the case only through Jill. Then, in May, Lissa heard from a source on the reservation that Suckow was in the badlands. She mentioned this to Jill, who mentioned it to Gutknecht, who called Lissa the next day. He wanted to know how Lissa knew, but she would not tell him. “He thought someone in law enforcement was giving out the information,” she later recalled. “I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to tell you something. I’ve got eyes all over fucking Fort Berthold. Anytime shit goes down, I get a private message about it, or people call. I know what the fuck is going on.’ He said, ‘So you’re not going to cooperate?’ I said, ‘No.’ ” A few minutes later, Trudell texted Lissa, demanding that she call him. When she did, Lissa thought she could hear Gutknecht in the background. “I told Darrik, ‘Fuck Steve Gutknecht.’ Darrik was like, ‘Well, I figured you’d talk to me.’ I said, ‘You know what? Tell him I heard it from you. Tell him it was you.’ ”
That Lissa still received tips from people on the reservation was true. She traded messages regularly with Tex, though he seemed to evade her attempts to speak in person, and he rarely offered anything of substance, remarking mostly on the weather and on an occasional visit from investigators. Once, he told her to come by his house, but when she did, no one answered the door. She circled the house, knocking on windows, until at last Tiffiany came out holding, in Lissa’s words, “some homely little-ass dog.” Tiffiany told Lissa that Tex was not home and retreated inside.
In the spring, ice broke on the lake and lodged in the banks like shards of glass. Rain fell. The roads thawed and cracked.
Lissa’s joints ached. She wanted to sweat, to pray, and told this to her friend who lived in Sanish, Tiny Crows Heart, who said he would gather branches to build the lodge. Waylon, her cousin, said he would join, since he knew the songs, as would Micah, since he still went everywhere with his mother. They met at Tiny’s trailer one afternoon in May. A fire burned in a low, gray pit. Lissa changed into a cotton dress and knelt by the lodge Tiny had constructed. With a thumb and forefinger, she stripped sage from its stem, rolling the leaves between the palms of her hands and packing them into her pipe. Then she lit another plug of sage, placed it in an abalone shell, and smudged the pipe and herself. She spun once around before entering the lodge. It was so small that she curled her back to fit, and when she emerged, she was soaked, stinking of medicine.
Sanish is on a high cliff at the north end of the lake, where the river pinches to its narrowest point. The slope is steep at first and then fans out onto grassy bluffs some hundred feet above the water. Lissa walked out onto one of the bluffs and sat. Micah, Waylon, and another companion spread out behind her, while Tiny tended the fire. From where she rested, Lissa could see the blinking colors of the casino, the pickup trucks parked on the beach, the dim lights of oil workers camped in the trees, the gleaming white yacht on its fateful perch, and the shadows of boats drifting in toward the marina. Darkness came. Flares brightened on the horizon like tiny rising suns. Waylon had forgotten his star quilt, so Lissa had given him hers. Now, as her sweat cooled and stiffened her dress, a chill sank into her. She had only her pipe, which she held in her lap, and two horse skulls, which she had placed on the ground next to her. The moon rose and shimmered on the lake. Lissa tried to pray. She found that when she focused on the words to the songs, she forgot the cold, but then Micah called out to her, and the cold returned, throbbing.
“Mom, are you okay?” he said.
“Shhht,” she said, quieting him.
She thought of the sun dance. When dancers “entered the circle,” it was said, they should be prepared to die. Now, as Lissa shivered, she prayed for her children, for Shauna, for the murdered and missing, and as she prayed, she heard footsteps breaking across the grass behind her. She wanted to turn around, but she gripped her pipe and remained still. Suddenly, Lissa was no longer in her body but watching herself from a hillside above. She saw she was flanked by two gray horses. Or were they people? Now the horses were gone, and a man and a woman were standing in their place, the woman bent to whisper in her ear. We hear your prayers, the woman said.
LISSA HEARD A rattling breath and opened her eyes. Micah was curled on the ground beside her. He had draped a quilt over her legs, and when the sun rose, they hid themselves from the light, and when they woke on the second morning, they were nestled in the quilt. The colors of the casino still blinked. The trucks had not quit their groaning. And beneath the Sanish cliffs, a body floated in the lake. A fisherman spotted it from the beach.