“Don’t give power away to a man like that. Don’t ever let him taint you with his poison.”
“I didn’t want you going after him, Dave. You’re shot to hell. You just won’t admit it.”
I rubbed my face. “You remember your Baby Orca T-shirt?”
“Don’t change the subject,” she said.
“I still have it in my footlocker, along with your Donald Duck cap and your Baby Squanto books and your tennis shoes with ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ embossed on the toes.”
She waited for me to go on.
“That’s all I was going to say,” I said. “I get your cap and T-shirt and your books and your tennis shoes out of the footlocker and I look at them and then I put them away. I’ll probably do that every three or four days for the rest of my life. That’s the way it is, little guy.”
I went back inside and made lunch for both of us.
* * *
It’s called an M-1 thumb. If you get one, it’s usually during the cleaning of the sweetheart of all World War II infantry weapons, a lovely creation by John Garand that the Imperial Japanese and the Third Reich had not planned to deal with. Had it not been for the M-1, the ground war in Europe and the Pacific theater may have worked out differently. It was a marvelous yet simple piece of engineering, its peep-sight accuracy and rapid-fire punch and knockdown power without peer. It took only seconds after the bolt locked open for the boogie-woogie boys from Company B to thumb another eight-round clip into the magazine.
With Albert’s permission, I unlocked one of his gun cabinets and removed his M-1 and a bandolier heavy with .30–06 clips and went up to the shooting range with them. I pulled back the bolt and wiped down the barrel and stock and peep sights and magazine and receiver. I eased my thumb down on the trip mechanism that released the bolt, the heel of my hand anchored on the operating-rod handle, and rolled my thumb and hand free before the bolt slammed home. The M-1 weighed over ten pounds and felt heavy in my hands, but in a reassuring way; its aim was not affected by wind or inclement weather or tall grass or underbrush scraping against the stock and barrel. Every inch of the M-1 was devoted to practicality and efficiency, even the tubular insertions in the butt where you could carry a cleaning rod and barrel swabs and a bore brush. It didn’t jam; it was easy to tear down. You couldn’t have a better friend in snow or tropical rain.
For the ultimate improvised gun-range target, Albert had placed a World War II salvaged tank turret on a mound of dirt against the hillside. It was tall and cylindrical and dark brown with rust and had a viewing slit in the top. It resembled the helmet worn by Crusader knights. I knelt on one knee, perhaps forty yards from the target, opened the bolt on the M-1, and pushed a clip loaded with armor-piercing rounds into the magazine. I sent the bolt home, wrapped my left forearm in the sling, aimed through the peep sight, and began firing. I saw rust powder in the air and the scoured streaks on the sides of the turret where the rounds didn’t impact dead-on, then the holes in the center where the rounds punched through the steel and out the other side.
After I fired the eighth round, the bolt locked open and the clip ejected with the ping that anyone who has fired an M-1 associates with it. I removed the plugs from my ears and gazed at the tank turret and tried to imagine what the same rounds would have done to the head of a human being, in this instance the head of Asa Surrette.
Why such a dark speculation?
Just before removing Albert’s rifle from his gun cabinet, I had once again accessed the photographs of Surrette that could be found on the Internet. I discovered two posts I hadn’t seen. One contained photographs, probably taken by a news photographer at Surrette’s crime scenes in Wichita. These are of a kind you do not want to see, not now, not ever. The second post included a photo of a typed letter Surrette sent the Wichita Police Department, one xeroxed on a copy machine in the WSU library. In the letter, he described in detail every moment of his victims’ torment, the degree of pain they suffered, and their pleas for mercy. He said the latter brought him a rush he had never thought possible.
I had known sociopaths and sadists in the army and in Vietnam. I had known them in law enforcement and in prisons and in lockdown units where they awaited execution. But Surrette’s letter was the cruelest use of language I had ever read. My advice is that no person of goodwill should ever read this man’s words, thereby giving a second life to his deeds.
Albert had let me appropriate his M-1, and I not only planned to hang on to it, I planned to use it. Maybe these were foolish and vain thoughts, but sometimes our own self-assurances are our only means of dealing with problems that are far greater than their social remedies. Sometimes, at least in your head, you have to link arms with Doc Holliday and the Earp boys and stroll on down to the O.K. Corral and chat up the Clantons in a way they understand.
I took the M-1 and the bandolier of clips to our room and put them in the closet, then picked up the telephone and made a call I didn’t want to make, primarily because I knew it would be a total waste of time.
I was rerouted a couple of times, but finally, I was connected to a special agent at the FBI named James Martini. “I’ve heard of you,” he said.
“You have?” I said.
“Apparently, you and your friend Purcel have quite a history with us down in Louisiana.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“How can we be of help?” he replied.
“I think Asa Surrette, the killer from Kansas, is alive and well. I also think he kidnapped the waitress Rhonda Fayhee from her home by Lookout Pass.”
“You got that scoped out pretty good?”
“No, not at all. I have no investigative power or legal authority in the state of Montana. That’s why I called you. I think Rhonda Fayhee is alive.”
“How is it you know that?”
I told him about my conversation with Seymour Little. I told him about the female items and the prescriptions for OxyContin and downers Seymour had been forced to pick up at the pharmacy by a man who trailed a fecal odor into the newsstand.
“Why do you conclude the prescriptions are being used to sedate the waitress?”
“Surrette is a trophy hunter. He’s about to send us one.”
“A lot of people say Surrette is dead.”
“He’s been on the property where we’re currently living. He left a message on the wall of a cave behind the house.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a grandiose statement based on an excerpt from the Bible.”
“Could you take a photograph of that and e-mail it to me?”
“I burned it.”
“You set lots of fires in caves, do you?”
I could feel my pulse beating in my throat.
“You there?” he said.
“It was an impulsive moment.”
“Really? An aunt of the missing woman received a postcard from the missing woman yesterday. It was postmarked Boise, Idaho. The handwriting seems to be hers.”
“You’re wrong, sir.”
“We’ll try to blunder through and see what happens,” he replied.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Forget I called. We’ll update you if we come across any information we think you should have.”
“You’ll do what?” he said.
I hung up, feeling foolish and vain and ultimately old, even for my years. Also, I had not told him about Gretchen Horowitz’s possible contact with Surrette. Why? I thought his agency wanted to hang her out to dry and I would be giving them the ammunition to do it. If they went after Gretchen for obstruction, of which she may have been guilty, they might take Alafair for good measure. What about the waitress named Rhonda Fayhee? I couldn’t get her off my mind. I called Special Agent James Martini back. “Someone I know may have established contact with Surrette,” I said. “This individual ran a notice in the personals and got a response from a guy who sounds like Surrette.”
“You mean you heard his voice?”
“No, I have not heard his
voice. My daughter, Alafair, interviewed him in a Kansas prison. I think he has tried to kill her. I think he’ll try again. That’s why I have a personal stake in the investigation.”
“What’s the name of the person who made contact with the guy you think is Surrette?”
My head was pounding, the veins in my wrists throbbing. “Gretchen Horowitz,” I said.
“She’s a friend of yours?”
“You could say that.”
“Believe me, if I meet you in person, I’ll have a lot to say to you,” he replied.
* * *
I went to Alafair’s room and told her what I had just done. She looked at me for a long time. The window was open, and I could hear the leaves of last winter scudding dryly across the driveway. “I don’t know what to say, Dave,” she said. “Do you want to tell Gretchen or should I?”
“I will.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Rhonda Fayhee’s life is in the balance.”
“How about Gretchen’s?”
“Gretchen has choices. The waitress doesn’t,” I said.
She had been working on her manuscript with a blue pencil, deleting adjectives that were not in the predicate form, compressing sentences, paring the dialogue down to the bone until there wasn’t a rattle in a single line. She set her pencil at the top of a page and stared out the window. A brief sun shower had just blown through the valley, and a rainbow had descended out of the clouds into the middle of the north pasture, where the horses were standing under a clump of cottonwoods. “I know you’ve acted in conscience,” she said. “But I feel emptier than I think I’ve ever felt. I want to go away and be alone for a long while. It’s not your fault, so you don’t need to say anything more. As a great favor, please don’t say anything to me at all. I’ll be in your debt.”
She got up from her chair and walked downstairs and out the door. I heard her car start and drive away. When I looked at the pasture again, the rainbow had dissolved into a poisonous patch of henbane as quickly as it had formed.
* * *
I am sure there are those who would dismiss Gretchen Horowitz as a sociopath. Her body count would indicate that. However, she was a complex human being, and I suspected that more than one person lived inside her skin. Sigmund Freud borrowed most of his clinical terminology from the ancient Greeks, who possessed a cultural insight into the foibles of human behavior like no civilization before or since. If I’ve learned anything at all from my years, it’s the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them.
I put the face of the pimp named Mack on the enemy soldiers I killed in Vietnam. What if I had not gone to Vietnam? Would I have found another way to release my rage upon other surrogates here in the United States? As a police officer, yes.
Gretchen drove up the dirt road at five that afternoon. She parked her pickup beside the north pasture and started walking toward the pedestrian gate. From the yard I could see Clete in front of their cabin, barbecuing a pork roast on the grill, fanning the smoke out of his face. I headed Gretchen off before she could go through the gate. “I have to talk to you,” I said.
She turned toward me. As always, there was a martial element in her body language, an intensity in her eyes, that you did not want to directly confront. She was holding a manila envelope in her right hand. “What is it?” she said.
“I dimed you with the feds.”
“About what?”
“Your contact with Asa Surrette.”
“Alafair told you I talked with him?”
“I wouldn’t have called them, Gretchen, but I think Rhonda Fayhee may still be alive.”
“So you’re telling me I might get picked up for obstruction or even aiding and abetting?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Now you want absolution? That’s what this is about?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said.
“Yeah, you did. You could have talked to me first. While the local jokers were figuring out ways to put away me or Wyatt Dixon, Alafair and I did some research on Felicity Louviere.”
“What did you find out?”
“Her mother died in Mandeville. Insanity evidently runs in the family. Felicity was known as anybody’s punch before Caspian Younger met her. You know what else we found out?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
“She got involved with some rural black people whose neighborhoods were being used as sludge ponds for petrochemical waste. She tried to stop a tanker truck from dumping a load in an open pit in St. James Parish and was almost run over.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“What’s it sound like? For all I know, she’s a schizoid. But I think better of her than I did. We also found out that Love Younger kept fuck pads in Atlantic City and Vegas and Puerto Rico, in the same casino hotels where his son had six-figure credit lines.”
“He’s not the oil industry’s answer to Cotton Mather?”
She stepped closer to me, her chest rising and falling, her shirt pulled tight on her shoulders. “I don’t like people fucking me over, Dave. And I think that’s what you did.”
“If you’d squared with your father and me, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
“What makes you think I didn’t square with him?”
I looked past her shoulder at Clete flipping the roast with a fork on the grill, his face happy at the prospect of having his daughter home and the possibility of inviting his friends to dinner. “I believe you did what you thought was right, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “I apologize if I’ve caused you harm.”
She puffed out one cheek and tapped the heel of her fist on the fence rail. “I was parked down at Harvest Foods. I’d left my window partly down. When I came outside, this had been dropped on the seat.”
She removed an eight-by-ten photograph from the manila folder and handed it to me. It was probably taken without a flash. The interior of the room was gray, the walls concrete and without windows, like those in a basement. The lighting was poor. A woman dressed only in her undergarments was bound in a chair, a gag tied across her mouth. The eyes had been razored out of the photo, creating the effect of a mask, making any positive identification of the woman impossible.
“Here’s the note that came with it,” Gretchen said. “It’s a Xerox. You can bet it and the photo and the envelope are clean.”
Regardless, I held the sheet of paper by the edges. The note was typed, unlike the one sent by Surrette to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. If the sender was Surrette, he was a smart man. There was no way to compare the notes. Even the dashes between the sentences had been replaced with conventional punctuation. It read:
Dear Munchkin,
I have already started casting our film. I think this lady is perfect for the role of “the sacrificial queen,” don’t you? We can add others as we go. You have no idea how many “volunteers” are out there and how easily recruited they can be. Please bring your equipment to our first meeting and we’ll get started immediately. We’ll have some cherry pie.
Sincerely,
Your biggest fan,
A.
“This has to go to the sheriff and the FBI,” I said.
“That’s what he wants me to do,” she replied.
“How do you figure that?”
“Because Surrette will disappear and I’ll look like an idiot. In the meantime, we’ll go crazy thinking about what he’s doing to that girl.”
“I’ll go with you to the federal building in Missoula.”
“You can take the note and the photograph, Dave, and do whatever you want with them.”
She unhitched the chain on the gate and started through it.
“You’re the beloved daughter of my oldest and best friend, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “Do you believe I would deliberately hurt either of you? Do you honestly b
elieve that?”
She rechained the gate and didn’t look back. I might as well have been speaking to the wind.
Chapter 27
On Wednesday, Wyatt Dixon was building a sweat lodge in his side yard with stones from the river, hauling them bare-chested uphill in a wheelbarrow, when he saw a chauffeured black Chrysler pull off the highway and park by the entrance to the steel footbridge on the opposite bank. Love Younger got out of the backseat and began walking across the bridge, his rubber-booted feet clanging on the grid, a straw creel hung from one shoulder, a split-bamboo fly rod in his right hand, a cork sun helmet on his head.
He stepped off the bridge and walked down to the water’s edge, where Wyatt was lifting a large stone into the wheelbarrow. “You mind if I fish along the front of your property?” he asked.
“Montana law allows you to go through anybody’s land, long as you’re within the flood line of the river,” Wyatt said.
“I heard there’s a deep hole under the bridge here. They say it’s full of German browns.”
“Have at it,” Wyatt said. He sat high up on the bank, a long-stemmed weed between his teeth, his straw hat slanted down on his forehead, and watched the older man wade into the water and thread his nylon leader through the eyelet of a woolly worm. What’s really on your mind, old man? he thought.
Wyatt could not reconcile the proportions of the older man with his wealth and status. Love Younger had the neck of a bull and the hands of a bricklayer. The few rich people Wyatt had known did not resemble Love Younger. Did Younger come up the hard way, racking pipe and wrestling a drill bit in the oil field? Or had someone bequeathed him money, a rich wife, maybe? Wyatt did not believe that great wealth came to people through hard work. If that were true, almost everyone would be rich.
He got to his feet. “You won’t catch none like that,” he said.
“Oh?” Younger said, turning around in the water, the current cutting across his knees.
“You have to face the opposite bank and throw the woolly worm at eleven o’clock from you. Then you let your line billow out in a big bell. As your worm sinks, it’ll swing past you and straighten the line. That’s when the hackle on your worm will start pulsing. By that time the line will be at two o’clock and the worm will be drifting right above the bottom. Them browns will flat tear it up. The best time is in the fall, when they spawn. They’ll knock the rod plumb out of your hand.”
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