Another flash of lightening lit up the hillside, burning another image into my memory, and along with it came the first fat drops of rain. This one was an image of my brother Martin, running on the trail just ahead of me, with a huge bundle of eight foot tall marijuana plants slung over his shoulder, obscuring much of his torso.
I could hear the heavy footsteps of our friend, Steve, who was breathing as heavy as I was right behind me, each of us with our own harvest bundled over our shoulder. We knew how stupid it was to be out in a lightning storm like this, especially since we had just seen the lightning strike that had just started a wildfire on the hillside just a few hundred yards from our hidden pot field.
Just a few minutes earlier we had been sitting on my deck, discussing the riches we expected from the harvest of this crop in a month or so. We were enjoying the lightning show, when a lightning strike lit an oak tree and the surrounding brush on fire in this dry September storm. Now we were running through the storm with our crop, harvested early and with a much diminished value.
We were almost to the fence that separated my property, on the far side, from the expansive “LJ” cattle ranch our little pot farm was on. I had called the fire department as soon as the lighting struck, and then we realized that the fire could well destroy our crop. And if not, the fire fighters might find it, although that seemed unlikely. We had waded out into the pond on the property next door, which was also across the fence from the cattle ranch, and then worked our way upstream through the cattails that choked the inlet stream which was also on the cattle ranch. Then we cleared an area about 10 x 30 feet to plant our little garden in. We had expected to make $60-75k from this crop, and now it was threatened by this fire, or perhaps the fire fighters.
The wail of the sirens was getting close as we reached the fence, and now we could see the flashing red lights out on the highway in front of my place! They were here, turning into my driveway, and were closer to my trailer than we were! There was no way to get our bundles of weed inside, or hide them anywhere on the back of my property. We stopped in our tracks, defeated. Busted!
Then Martin whispered, as much shout as whisper, "The fort!". We had grown up on this land. Our parents had bought 20 acres decades ago, and subdivided it and sold me and Martin our 5 acre parcels a few years ago. "The Fort" was actually on the “LJ”, a couple hundred yards past the far end of the pond. It was more hole than fort, but we'd called it that since we played there as boys.
It was a dugout cabin, built by the first white settlers, a century and a half ago. They dug a trench into the hillside, and covered it originally with the canvas and wood from their Conestoga wagon to provide shelter for the approaching winter. We knew of six of these dugout cabins in the area, but the fort was the biggest and most elaborate. They had used the lumber from their wagon that first winter, but expanded it the following year, adding a rock wall at the front, with a built in fireplace, and a now deteriorated wood roof.
The Fort was about a quarter mile downstream, which would be far enough away to avoid detection by the firemen. Without further discussion, we all started sprinting through the light rain for The Fort. It had been a few years since we played there as boys, or camped there as teenagers. A couple of years ago, a mountain lion had lived in it and had made a habit of eating neighborhood pets. After a couple of calves had gone missing, the owner of the LJ discovered the lion, and invited the sheriff to come dispatch it. This was running through my mind as we approached the fort. Yeah, THAT lion had been killed…
The bones of deceased pets, and the smell of death, announced our arrival at the entrance to The Fort. Wet and out of breath, we hesitated only briefly, before Martin headed through the gaping doorway. Steve and I were right behind, when we heard a thud, and Martin exclaim “FUCK!”. We stopped just inside the doorway, and I fumbled in my pocket for my lighter as Martin spewed a string of explicatives, punctuated with complaints about tripping on something in the middle of the floor he knew well since childhood. Steve and I had dropped our bundles, and had both produced our lighters. In the flickering light, we could see Martin, surrounded and half covered by his harvest, sitting on top of an obviously dead, naked woman.

The stunned silence was quickly broken with a flurry of short words, and involuntary, terrified noises. Then came the first of a series of realizations. “SHHHHH!!!”
“The area will be swarming with firefighters by now!”
We were outside the fort by now, huddled in the dark right in front, acutely aware of the need to make a plan.
“If they find the weed, we’ll go to jail!”
“The killer could still be nearby!”
“No, she’s been dead for a while”
“The killer knows about The Fort…FUCK! It could be one of YOU!”
“We’ve been all over the crime scene!”
“We really, really need to get the cops over here…there’s no way around it”
“What about the weed? We’ll go to prison for the rest of our lives!”
“We need to get our story straight. We found the weed, and were stealing it.”
“They’ll want to know where”
“We need to show them the rest, the plantation.”
There was a short, grim silence. “Is that it, then? Tell them we found the pot farm weeks ago, on The LJ, and were stealing it before the firefighters could find it…and went to hide it in The Fort?”
The long, uncomfortable silence grew into a full minute, and nobody was coming up with counter offers or “what ifs”.
We started jogging, and quickly broke into a full run, back up the trail, toward the flashing red lights in my yard.

We arrived to my yard out of breath to the point of exhaustion, and soaked to the skin, but still pumped with adrenalin. There were at least 7 or 8 firefighters already up the hill, working on the fire, and another two remaining with the 2 firetrucks in my yard. As we arrived next to the 2 men, I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
I felt a wave of nausea come over me as my knees buckled. On my hands and knees, I puked at the feet of the nearest firefighter. We were all panting too hard for sentences, but single words were starting to punctuate the gasping, among them were “dead, woman”. The Volunteer Fire Capitan looked aghast.
“What?” he sputtered.
“Yeah, …dead...puff…woman”, I gurgled. “Call police”
He stood there, blank stare on his face.
“There’s a dead woman, in the fort”, Steve squeaked, as he pointed back where we had just run up from.
Finally, after another long, stunned pause, the Capitan climbed into the truck and got on the radio. The other firefighter stood looking at the three of us in awkward silence. We looked up the hill, at the men putting out the last smoldering areas of burning brush. The rain had made quick work of what we had expected to be a catastrophe. We had pulled up our pot farm, and were now surrendering it to the police, for nothing!
It seemed like forever till the first law enforcement showed up. He was a young Highway Patrol officer, who didn’t seem to know if he should be interviewing, or securing a crime scene. When he understood that we would need to hike to the crime scene he decided we should all wait right where we were. A short time later, three sheriff’s deputies showed up in two cars, and we were reluctantly leading them back down the cow path, towards the Fort, while telling how we had just found the weed and wanted to hide it.
To my relief, one of the cops stopped us a good thirty feet from the Fort, while the other two proceeded to the doorway. I thought it absurd, that they both had their guns drawn, as if the dead lady was going to do something. But I guess they had the same concerns as we had, that the bad guys could still be around. Their flashlights confirmed that the only occupant of the seven by fifteen foot room was indeed dead. They holstered their guns, and joined the rest of us. It was quickly decided that the two of them would stay at the scene, while the one who had stayed out with us, escorted us back to my yard, and called for the coroner and CSI unit.
By the time the detectives showed up, the fire was completely out, and a parade of volunteer firefighters filed past, thankfully without stopping to chat. Prather is a very small town of less than 200 people. These men were our neighbors, and undoubtedly wondering why so many police had showed up to a tiny lightning fire. I didn’t want to talk, and didn’t know which of my neighbors to trust.
The investigation was turned over to Fresno City PD the next day. They interviewed each of us separately, but didn’t tell us anything about the case. They just wanted to know what we saw, and if we’d seen anybody in the area of The Fort in the weeks before finding the body. They gave us each a card, at the end of the interview, and asked us to call if we remembered anything. They had cleared out The Fort, including our pot, but never went looking for the remainder of the plantation.
The following day, Martin got a phone call. The dead woman’s name was Debora Snead, and her friends and family had put up a reward for finding her. Martin was listed in the police report as having found her, and therefore, entitled to the reward. But they now wanted to use the reward money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer. Martin didn’t feel entitled to any money for stumbling across a dead woman, and didn’t object to the redirection of funds. (it was later discovered that the way the trust was written couldn’t be modified after the fact)
The friend who had called Martin was our source of information, as she had been close to the investigation from the start. Debora had disappeared during a midnight walk forty miles away in Fresno, over two months earlier. She had been wearing pajamas, slippers with socks, and a robe. When we found her, she was wearing only socks. I don’t intend to share any other details of the gruesome scene in The Fort that night, except that her PJs and robe were there. She told us that the police were focusing on Debra’s husband, who hadn’t gone looking for her that night, or reported her missing for almost 48 hours. He claimed he thought she had “run off with somebody”, and so didn’t bother looking. That didn’t make sense to friends and family, who said they would know, and that she wouldn’t just disappear like that.
The memory came to me in a dream. The Fort was a thousand feet from the back of my five acres. You get there, from my house by following Dry Creek past the pond. But only two hundred feet further downstream, Dry Creek crosses under the road. You can’t see The Fort from the road because of the steep, rocky and brushy terrain, but it’s not hard to get to from there. I was startled awake by the memory of a truck, an early sixties, Chevy truck, parked at the culvert the tiny seasonal creek passes through. It was the middle of the night, and I was driving home from my second job. As I rounded the corner I saw the truck, parked where there wasn’t really room, and sticking out into the road. As I slowed to pass the truck, I saw a man. He was an American Indian, about six feet tall and stocky build, with long black hair. He was coming up from next to the road, down by the culvert…down towards The Fort! I had stopped to ask if he needed help, which is still common in rural areas like this. He said his wife was sick, and indicated down the embankment he had just come up.
“Down There?” I exclaimed.
I opened my car door.
“She’s fine!” he snarled at me.
“OK, man. No problem” I responded curtly, and drove home…to the next driveway, a thousand feet away, where my headlights could probably be seen from his truck. I woke knowing that he was the killer, and he knew that I’d seen him, and knew where I lived.