Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  Candace Sweeney lowered her eyes, her cheeks coloring. Then she looked out the window at the mountains again, the long slope of the meadow dipping into the distance. “This valley is a paradise. Are there a lot of wild animals here?”

  “Elk and white-tail and some mule deer. A few cougars up on the ridge. A few wild turkeys. A moose comes down occasionally.”

  “You hunt the animals?” she said, a line creasing across her brow.

  “I don’t allow hunters on the property. Not any kind, not under any circumstances,” Albert said, shifting his eyes onto Troyce Nix.

  “I read a couple of your books. I thought they were pretty good,” Troyce said.

  Albert nodded but didn’t reply.

  “You never asked me what I do for a living,” Troyce said.

  “I already know what you do.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re not a lawman, or you would have rolled a badge on me. But you’re connected to the law, at least in some fashion. From the look of you, I’d say you’re a gunbull, or you used to be. Maybe you were an MP or a chaser in the Marine Corps. But you’ve been a hack someplace.”

  “Not many people use terms like ‘hack’ or ‘gunbull,’” Troyce said.

  “I know them because I served time on a Florida road gang when I was eighteen. Most of the gunbulls weren’t bad men. They’d work the hell out of us, but that was about all. A couple of them were otherwise, men who were cruel and sexually perverse.”

  Troyce Nix had never looked into a pair of eyes that were as intense as Albert Hollister’s. He took a business card from his pocket and wrote on the back of it. “I’m leaving you my cell number in case Jimmy Dale Greenwood should knock at your door. I’m putting down the name of our motel, too.”

  “Give it to somebody who has need of it.”

  Nix twirled his hat one revolution on his index finger, then his eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks for the glass of water,” he said. He set his business card down on a table.

  “You don’t need to thank me for anything,” Albert replied.

  He opened the heavy oak door for Nix to leave. Without saying goodbye or shaking hands or watching Nix and the woman leave, he walked back into the kitchen, hoping that somehow the world that his two visitors represented would exit from his life as easily as they had walked into it. He heard the lock click shut in the jamb, the wall vibrate slightly with the weight of the door swinging into place. He propped his arms on the marble counter and stared at the mountains at the south end of the valley, wondering why his age seemed to bring him neither wisdom nor peace. A moment later, the door chimes rang. He opened the door again and looked into Candace Sweeney’s face. With her tattoos and her jeans that were too tight, the pant legs stuffed in a pair of cowboy boots, she reminded him of the girls he had known years ago when he was on the drift, riding flat-wheelers, sleeping in oil-field flophouses, bucking bales and harvesting beets and hops.

  “We’re sorry we bothered you,” she said. “Troyce got hurt real bad down in Texas and almost died. His wounds still bleed, and he has trouble sleeping. Sometimes he gets an edge on.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” he asked.

  She looked over her shoulder at the driveway, then back at Albert. “I told Troyce I just wanted to apologize for disturbing you at work. But that’s not why I came back.”

  Albert waited for her to go on.

  “If that fellow Jimmy Dale Greenwood comes around here?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Forget we were here. Forget you heard about any of this. You don’t need to pass on any information to Troyce or me. Maybe you won’t believe this, but Troyce is a good man.”

  Albert continued to look at her without replying. Her hair was tousling in the wind, her black cowboy shirt with purple and red roses sewn on it puffing with air.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” she said.

  “With a gal like you, he’d damn well better be a good man,” Albert said.

  Her face suddenly went soft, like a flower opening in the shade.

  AS SOON AS I got back from my run, I showered and walked up to Albert’s house. He was behind the back steps, a tank of Tordon and 2,4-D strapped to his back, spraying leafy spurge and knapweed on a grassy slope that led into shade and fir trees. The air smelled like it had been rinsed in a chemical factory. I tried to find out why Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney had come to his house. Albert’s response to my questions was to widen the circle of his spray, whipping the applicator back and forth, hosing down everything in sight, letting the mist drift back into my face.

  “Will you stop that?” I said.

  “I have to finish this before the wind comes up,” he replied.

  “When I first saw Troyce Nix, he was showing a photo to people at the revival on the res. He was about to show it to me until his girlfriend mentioned I was a cop. What’s that tell you, Albert?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It tells you he’s here on a personal mission, and the mission is to do the guy in the photo some serious damage.”

  “That might be.”

  “Does this have something to do with J. D. Gribble?”

  “A man’s past ends at my front gate, Dave.”

  “Good way to get your throat cut.”

  Albert’s eyes looked like small blue lights inside the softness of his skin. “Would you kindly take yourself someplace else?” he said.

  “Is Gribble a fugitive?” I asked.

  “Don’t know and don’t give a shit.”

  “Is Gribble the man in that photo?”

  “I gave Nix back his photo without looking at it. I suspect Nix is up to no good. The woman seems like a good person. Why she’s with the likes of him is beyond me. Case closed, conversation over.”

  How did Albert Hollister remain functional inside an academic bureaucracy? Why was he not beaten to death by his colleagues?

  You got me.

  I WALKED BACK up to the cabin and tried to think. J. D. Gribble’s possible status as a fugitive was an issue between Albert and Gribble. Troyce Nix’s possible beef with Gribble was Gribble and Nix’s grief and none of my own. The only relevant issue for me was Clete Purcel and the decades he had invested in being my closest friend. A deviant had attempted to burn him alive and in all probability would take another run at it, possibly with different methods but with the same depraved intentions. Gribble had told the FBI he had heard a car or truck engine in the darkness, then the sound of the vehicle’s door slamming. Alicia Rosecrans, the FBI agent, had concluded that perhaps two perpetrators were involved, the driver and the man in the mask. But the man in the mask may have opened the vehicle’s door, started the engine, then slammed the door later. Or Gribble could have simply been mixed up.

  I needed to concentrate on the man in the mask. I was convinced he was the same man who had abducted and murdered the college kids on the mountainside behind the university and killed the California couple in the highway rest stop. It wasn’t a matter of forensics; it was a matter of mathematical possibility. How many men like Clete’s tormentor could be living in the same sparsely populated area?

  Unfortunately, there were precedents that went against the math. The Hillside Strangler was actually not one man but a team of two cousins, both of whom seemed to have souls that were fashioned in a furnace. What is the probability that two monsters, with little in their background that would explain the depth of their cruelty to innocent and trusting young women, could come from the same family?

  Years ago, in a midwestern city whose collective ethos was heavily influenced by the humanitarian culture of abolitionists and of Mennonites, I attended twelve-step meetings with some of the best people I ever knew. Most of them were teachers and clerics and blue-collar workers in the aircraft industry. They were drunks, like me, but by and large their sins were the theological equivalent of 3.2 beer. The meetings were small, the content of the discussions restrained, the mention of sexual indiscretions infre
quent. Two ex-felons, recently discharged from the state pen, were required to attend the meeting by their PO. They sat quietly in the back of the room, deferential, neatly dressed, and polite. They were well liked and gradually were considered twelve-step success stories in the making. I became accustomed to seeing one of them sitting in front of me at Sunday-morning Mass, his wife and two children next to him in the pew.

  Then the two of them were busted ninety miles to the north of us, in a wheat-farming town where the biggest social event of the season was the John Deere exhibition at the high school gym. The charge was homicide, but that convenient abstract term didn’t come close to what these men had done to their victims. They had lain in wait for girls leaving bars by themselves at two A.M., offering them rides, maybe a toke or two of some Acapulco gold or a steak at an all-night café. Once the two ex-felons got their hands on their victims, they raped and tortured them for hours, degrading and humiliating them and putting them through every ordeal imaginable before snuffing out their lives.

  The people at the meeting I had been attending were stunned. No one could deal with it, explain it, or reconcile himself to his own naïveté. What are the odds of two men like this finding each other at a small, family-oriented twelve-step meeting in a city associated with Toto, Dorothy, and the yellow brick road? What are the odds that all of us, including me, would be taken in by them? What are the odds that one of them would sit with his family in front of me at Sunday Mass?

  The answer that presents itself is not a pleasant one: There are more of them out there than we think, and they recognize one another when we do not. If you doubt this, check the statistics on the number of children who disappear each year and are never seen or heard from again.

  But the attack on Clete Purcel was not random. When people kill one another, it’s always for reasons of money, sex, and power. I suspected that whoever was behind the attack on Clete was driven by all three.

  I called the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to patrolwoman at the NOPD, and later had become my plainclothes partner at the Sheriff’s Department in New Iberia. She was an attractive, enigmatic woman, and I was convinced several personalities lived inside her. She was the subject of an IA investigation after she had an affair with a confidential female informant. She also had an affair with Clete Purcel. She was the only cop in the area he allowed to bust and hook him up after he had destroyed a saloon in St. Martinsville and almost killed three outlaw bikers with a pool cue.

  On occasion her eyes would turn warm and linger on mine, as though one of the women who lived inside her was having thoughts about straying. But I never questioned her integrity or challenged her authority, and I always respected her courage and the grace with which she conducted her life. I also learned that anyone who mocked or treated her disrespectfully did so only once. When our former sheriff retired and Helen took his place, Helen won the hearts of the entire community, and no one publicly discussed her sexual persuasion.

  I called her and asked if she could run Leslie and Ridley Wellstone for me.

  “The oil and natural-gas guys?” she said.

  “Right,” I replied. But I knew what was coming.

  “Is there a pattern here?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You have trouble with rich people, Streak. Entertain the trout and let Montana take care of its own problems.”

  Then I told her what had happened to Clete Purcel.

  “I’ll get back to you in two hours,” she said.

  Her phone calls produced a surprise.

  CHAPTER 16

  I HAD EXPECTED HELEN to find compromising material on the patriarch of the family, Oliver Wellstone, or on Leslie, the Berkeley-educated humanist who had given up on the flower children and gone to the Sudan, where his features had been melted off his face like wax on a candlestick.

  But it was Ridley, the over-the-hill cowboy, the stoic, laboring painfully on his aluminum forearm crutches, whose name had figured in a double-homicide investigation many years ago. The case had almost been forgotten and written off by everyone except a Houston homicide detective who had worked on it for a decade before he was found asphyxiated in his garage, his car motor running for twenty-four hours in the middle of July. He left no suicide note and, according to his friends and colleagues, had shown no signs of depression or worry in the days leading up to his death.

  But the homicide detective had left behind a case file bursting with notes and transcriptions of interviews with people who occupied every stratum of Houston society.

  Thirty-one years ago, Ridley had met a salesclerk by the name of Barbara Vogel in a Galleria jewelry store. She was approaching middle age, but her suntanned skin was as smooth as tallow, her chestnut hair cut like a young girl’s, giving her an appearance that was both asexual and yet strangely erotic. But it was her brown eyes that made Ridley return to the store twice, finding excuses to talk about jewelry, finally asking her to have dinner with him at the River Oaks country club, the same club that had excluded his parents from membership years before. Barbara Vogel’s eyes were warm and guileless and seemingly intrigued by everything Ridley had to say. Her body had the firmness of an athlete’s, and she could talk about any subject and had experience far beyond that of a salesclerk. She said she had been a barrel-racing rodeo queen in Dalhart, the owner of a boutique in Fort Worth, and an insurance appraiser in Beaumont. She also knew quail hunting, the price of slaughter beef, and the depth a drill rig was expected to hit a pay sand in a certain offshore quadrant. She also hinted that she was part owner of the jewelry store.

  They got married after making a spontaneous champagne-soaked flight on his private jet into Juárez. Barbara Vogel didn’t bother to tell Ridley that she had been married twice already and her first husband had gone to prison for embezzlement. She also didn’t bother to tell him about her outstanding debts, her love of charge accounts, and her friendship with a collection of white trash who hung at a notorious bar in North Houston once known as the Bloody Bucket. Ridley got to meet a few of the latter when she bought a motor home the size of the Taj Mahal, loaded her friends into it, and drove to a Waylon and Willie concert in Austin. When she and her friends returned to the Wellstones’ sprawling estate, they were wiped out on reds and weed and purple acid and could hardly stand up in the yard. Most of them went to sleep on the lawn furniture and didn’t wake up until Ridley turned on the sprinkler system.

  Ridley also discovered his wife’s affection for unusual fashion. She favored skintight riding pants, push-up bras, and western shirts unsnapped at the top that exposed both her cleavage and a diamond cluster that spelled out RICH BITCH.

  Two years into the marriage, Barbara’s teenage daughter showed up, fresh out of rehab, her hormones blinking in red neon. She hung paper all over town and threw a roach in a horse stall, setting the barn on fire. She also got caught screwing her former high school drama teacher on his desk. The kicker for Ridley was the night both Barbara and her daughter piled his collector’s Rolls into a live-oak tree by Rice University. They not only left the scene, they told the cops later that they had not been driving the car, implying that Ridley was the man the cops needed to question.

  The divorce should have gone smoothly. Ridley’s attorneys offered Barbara a three-million-dollar settlement. Barbara’s attorneys sued for seventy million and the house. They also indicated their hired psychiatric consultant had noted definite signs of sexual abuse in Barbara’s daughter and that nobody was ruling out criminal charges being filed against Ridley, with as much attendant publicity as Barbara’s attorneys could generate.

  The double homicide took place on a humid September night in a quasi-rural area dotted with oak trees and split-level ranch houses. The spacious grounds surrounding Barbara’s house were bordered by a piked iron fence, the gates electronically locked, the hedges and gazebo and gravel walkways monitored by security cameras. The underwater lamps in the swimming pool automatically clicked on at su
nset, creating a brilliant patch of blue light in the backyard, turning the flowers and umbrella and banana trees into a Gauguin painting. Fall was at hand, and the languid air was tinged with the odor of chrysanthemums and charcoal starter flaring on a grill. No one in the neighborhood paid particular attention to the visitor who arrived at Barbara’s house in a yellow cab.

  He was tall and wore gloves, a raincoat, and a slouch hat, although the thunder in the clouds was dry and the local meteorologist had said there was little chance of rain that evening. The visitor punched in the security numbers on the gate and entered the grounds as the cab turned around in the lane, then parked under a tree.

  The visitor’s weapon of choice was a cut-down pump twelve-gauge, loaded with double-aught bucks, hanging from his shoulder on a looped cord under his coat. While a neighbor broiling steaks stared aghast, the visitor walked poolside and paused in front of the recliner where Barbara’s daughter lay in a bikini, a movie magazine on her lap, her face lifted in either disdain or annoyance. The visitor raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger six inches from her forehead. Behind him, the visitor heard Barbara drop a tray with two cream-cheese sandwiches on it and try to run for the patio door. He pumped the spent shell casing onto the tile and caught her with a wide pattern across the back of her blouse. He crossed the St. Augustine grass, ejecting the casing, and looked down at his handiwork. He touched her once with the tip of his shoe, then buttoned his coat over his shotgun and got into the back of the waiting cab.

  The two homicides had all the signs of the classical hit. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump and the dispassionate execution of the victims were marks of a professional killer. The gloves and raincoat ensured that no fingerprints would be left at the crime scene and the killer would not have blood splatter on his clothes. The stolen cab was a perfect getaway vehicle – commonplace and innocuous and easily dumped in a restaurant parking lot five minutes from the crime scene.