Light of the World dr-20

by James Lee Burke

  “West of Victor?”

  “I want you and Purcel here. Now. Got it?”

  “No, I don’t got it at all.”

  “Some rock climbers called in the 911. I want you to see what they found.”

  “Doesn’t Love Younger have a place up there?”

  “Past tense. Either get your ass up here or I’ll have you charged as an accessory, Mr. Robicheaux. I give you my word on that,” he replied. “Tell Purcel the same. I’m sick of you guys.”

  I truly wanted to abandon all restraint and tell him to go fuck himself, but he didn’t give me the chance.

  * * *

  I doubted we had incurred a level of legal jeopardy that would allow the sheriff to charge us as accessories in a crime, but Clete and I did as he asked and drove south on Highway 93 to the little tree-lined town of Victor, couched against a backdrop of jagged blue-gray mountains whose peaks stay veined with snow through most of the summer. It had been a long day for the sheriff, and I didn’t blame him for his exasperation. The investigative process taking place in front of Love Younger’s cabin was one that was altogether too familiar. Law enforcement agencies don’t prevent crimes; they arrive in their aftermath. In this instance, the aftermath was one that I think Love Younger never would have anticipated as his fate. Even though I did not like him, when I looked through the doorway, I silently said a prayer that his end had come more quickly than it probably had.

  “Watch where you step,” the sheriff said. He glanced out the door. “You, too, Purcel. Get in here.”

  “What’s the point in bringing us down here?” Clete said.

  “You guys knew Dixon and the woman were on their way to do harm to Mr. Younger, but you didn’t inform us until I got ahold of you,” the sheriff said. He stepped aside to let a crime scene tech photograph the body on the floor. “How do you like it? Use your phone to take a picture if you like.”

  “I think I’ll go sit in Dave’s truck. You mind?” Clete said.

  “Is that a revolver under your coat?”

  “It’s a thirty-eight special. Old-school,” Clete said, peeling back his jacket to expose his holster and shoulder rig.

  “Do you have a concealed weapons permit?”

  “I don’t remember,” Clete said. “With all respect, Sheriff, we didn’t have squat to do with this. You guys were chugging pud for Love Younger long before we came to Missoula. Don’t put your problems on us.”

  “What did you say?” the sheriff asked.

  “You got a weapon, Sheriff?” I asked. “Any forensics that put it on Wyatt Dixon?”

  “Not yet,” he replied, his eyes leaving Clete’s face. “I think whoever did it sat in that stuffed chair over there and wiped the blood on that towel on the floor. I want you to smell something.”

  “I don’t think we can be of any help here,” I replied.

  “Just hold your water,” he said. He walked to the chair and pulled a fringed coverlet off the back and held it up to me. “The place smelled like a perfume factory when we got here. Take a whiff. Recognize it?”

  “No,” I lied. “I don’t.”

  “It smells like orange blossoms or magnolia to me,” he said. “My wife is the expert on flowers. What about you, Mr. Purcel? Does this awaken any memories in you?”

  “Sorry, I’ve got a head cold,” Clete replied. He pointed at a leather jacket someone had used to cover a round object on the floor. “Is that the rest of him?”

  “Yeah, it is,” the sheriff said. “I want both of you to see it.” He leaned over and picked up the leather jacket by one sleeve, pulling it loose from the blood that had congealed in Love Younger’s hair. “You guys had no idea Wyatt would do something like this? A man who evidently believed the Youngers sent rapists after his girlfriend?”

  Clete nodded as though agreeing with a profound truth. “The VC did that sometimes,” he said. “A guy who was genuinely medevac in my recon group did it, too. By ‘medevac,’ I mean he was nuts, you dig? He rolled a head into a fire where we were cooking a pig. It scared the shit out of us. Then we all laughed. I didn’t take any pics, or I’d show you one.”

  “I want both of you out of my sight,” the sheriff said.

  Clete’s face looked poached in the artificial light, his green eyes neutral and unblinking, puffing air with one cheek and then the other, like a man gargling with mouthwash. The scar that ran through his eyebrow resembled a strip of welted rubber on a bicycle tire. “One of your guys just stepped in Younger’s blood,” he said. “Too bad Bill Pepper and Jack Boyd aren’t still on the job.”

  Tell me Clete didn’t know how to do it.

  * * *

  We drove through Missoula and into the Jocko Valley and onto the Salish Indian reservation. We passed under a pedestrian bridge that had been created out of stone and dirt and trees for big-game animals, and through the tangle of shrubbery and birch trees planted along the retaining wall, I could see the multipointed racks of half a dozen elk crossing right above us.

  “One day you and I will come up here and stay at the campground on the Jocko and fish for a week, then head on up to British Columbia,” Clete said. “A guy was telling me you can take a dozen twenty-inch cutthroat trout a day on the Elk River. You don’t even have to rent a canoe. You can catch a dozen lunkers right off the bank.”

  “That sounds great, Clete.”

  “See, you drive into Fernie, and you’re into mountains even bigger than these. It’s like being in Switzerland, I guess. You could go to meetings. I could do a little roadwork and lighten up on the flack juice and get my weight down. We eighty-six all these bozos. What do you think?”

  “Sure,” I said. “When we get things squared away here, I’ll talk it over with Molly.”

  “Gretchen and Alf might want to go, too,” he said. “Canada is the country of the future. See, places like British Columbia and Alberta give you the chance to start your life over. They do things in a smart way up there.”

  It would have served no purpose for me to mention the Canadian exploration for shale oil that was destroying whole mountain ranges. Clete had transported himself into a brighter tomorrow in order to avoid thinking about the things we had seen today. If we were lucky, we’d make the trip to Fernie one day, but I knew he would never stop drinking, nor stop eating large amounts of cream and butter and fried food. If we had another season or two to run, we would probably involve ourselves in the same situations we had seen today. If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in motion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window. It just comes packaged on a strange CD sometimes.

  I checked in with Alafair on my cell phone. “Where are you, kid?” I said.

  “What’s with the ‘kid’ stuff again?” she replied.

  “That’s the way I always talk to my broads,” I said.

  “Well, lose it, Pops,” she said. “We’re up by Yellow Bay. The lead on the amphibian plane isn’t much help. So far we’ve seen four of them, spread out all over the lake. There might be more north of us.”

  “Don’t do anything else until we get up there, okay? Let’s meet in Polson and start over.”

  “The clock is running out for those girls, Dave.”

  The evening star was twinkling in the west. Even though their great bulk was dark with shadow, the Mission Mountains were lit on the tops by streaks of gold that probably reflected off the clouds after the sunset. The world was indeed a glorious place, well worth fighting for. But what kind of place was it for two innocent girls whose parents had been murdered and who were perhaps entombed in a basement, at the mercy of a monster, while the rest of the world passed them by?

  “We’re on our way,” I said. “I love you, Little Squanto.”

>   That had been her nickname when she was a small child. It was borrowed from the Baby Squanto Indian books she had loved, and I seldom used it today. I closed the phone so as not to embarrass her any worse than I already had.

  * * *

  We drove through Ronan and past the Salish Kootenai College and entered Polson, located at the southern tip of Flathead Lake. Alafair and Gretchen were waiting for us by the side of a Dairy Queen that had closed for the night. I could see the great blackness of the lake and a white amphibian moored by an island, rocking in the chop, the cherry trees on the slopes along the lakeshore alive with wind and the flicker of heat lightning. It was part of the chain of glaciers that had slid down into Montana aeons ago, scouring out lakes that contained mountain peaks a few feet under the hull of your boat, as though you were floating through the heavens rather than on top of a lake.

  I mention these things for one reason: The setting did not seem coincidental. The topography was primeval. It had been the playground of dinosaurs and mastodons. Some archaeologists believed there had been people here who antedated the Indians, or at least the ones who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. Had we somehow allowed Asa Surrette to entice us into a backdrop containing a seminal story encoded in our collective unconscious? Was he hoping to rewrite the final act? The idea sounded fanciful. However, there was a nagging question: Why would a psychopath from Kansas name himself Geta unless he was acutely aware of the name’s historical implications and wanted to reach back in time and gather the sand from a Carthaginian arena and throw it in our faces?

  Alafair and Gretchen got out of the chopped-down pickup and walked toward us when we pulled into the lot. “Molly is pissed,” Alafair said.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “You bagged out and left her,” she said.

  “I told her where we were going.”

  “That doesn’t cut it, Dave. She was getting her coat, and y’all drove off. She and Albert are on their way.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “She said she called the FBI and the sheriff. She was in fine form.”

  “Why didn’t she call me?” I said.

  “Because she’s so pissed off, she’s afraid of what she might say?”

  “Why’d you bring this?” Gretchen said. She was standing by the bed of my pickup.

  “Bring what?” I said.

  She lifted up a rusted chain. “The bear trap Surrette almost lured me into,” she said.

  I looked at Clete.

  “I put it in there,” he said. “You never know.”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “When you might need one.” He stared out at the black luminosity of the lake, his fatigue and powerlessness clearly greater than any hope he had for the rescue of Felicity Louviere and the two teenage girls.

  Chapter 36

  Asa Surrette did not like electricity. During winter, in the home where he was born, static electricity was always nestled in the house, in the rugs ingrained with dust, on the surface of doorknobs and refrigerator handles and pipes in the cellar, in the touch of another human being’s hand. It was symptomatic of a harsh and unforgiving land, of winter winds that could sand the paint off a water tower, of horizons that seemed to blend into infinity.

  Nor did he like electricity in the heavens, when it crawled silently through the clouds, flaring in yellow pools that leaped chainlike all the way to the earth’s rim, as though there were powers and spirits at work in the natural world that he could never control or understand. He sat in a straight-back chair on the first floor of a two-story stone house that had belonged to a California woman who no longer needed it. That was how he remembered her. She was the California woman who no longer needed things, not even her name. Now he sat in the almost bare living room of her former house, gazing at the light show in the sky, thinking about what he should do next, his fingers hooked under his thighs, his sandy-blond hair hanging in his eyes, a scab the size of a dime glued on his cheek.

  He could hear no sound from the basement. He slipped off his loafers and pressed his feet flat against the floor, wondering if he would feel any movement from below or the vibrations of a voice, even a whisper, through the wood. It wasn’t impossible. Not for him, it wasn’t. When he was in twenty-three-hour lockdown, he had come to believe he possessed not only a third eye but sensory powers that went far beyond the skills blind people developed out of necessity. That said, he had to keep his ego in check. His IQ and the classics he had read and his study of people and their weaknesses gave him a tremendous sense of confidence in his dealings with others but made him vulnerable. Excess confidence could lead him into entanglements with women, all of whom carried elements in their emotional metabolism that were like a drug.

  Women were devious and alluring by nature, the sirens who waited on the rocks, their breasts bare, beckoning with their pale arms for the ship to sail just a little closer, through the froth of a wine-dark sea, their teeth white and their lips opening like purple flowers.

  He did not like these images. They alarmed and attracted him at the same time, not unlike the smell of opium burning, or the smell of men in a steam room, or the happy cries of children playing in a park. Each of these things was a thorn inside a rose, and when he tried to think through the connections, nothing made any sense, and he felt a sense of anger and impotence that made his nails cut into his palms.

  He was having other problems: his posture in a straight-back chair and the way he unconsciously gripped its undersided. The prison psychiatrist had latched on to that one — after he caught Asa Surrette spitting in his coffee cup when he stepped out the door for a minute. He said Surrette’s body language indicated the residual stress and anger and rebellion characteristic of people who went through severe toilet training. The psychiatrist became enthused by his own rhetoric and began to riff on the subject, enjoying himself immensely. “Some adult children of dysfunctional parents, people such as you, Asa, were probably strapped down for hours, usually by the mother. Do you have any memories of her giving you enemas? You don’t need to repress those memories anymore. Are you feeling anger about these things? You can be honest here. Oh, excuse me, you’re not angry? Then why is your face so heated? Did your mommy reward you when you went poo-poo?”

  Asa Surrette decided he might return to Kansas and visit his old friend the psychiatrist when this Montana situation was resolved. Maybe fix him a cup of coffee he wouldn’t forget.

  Right now he had to unload ten bags of crushed ice, each weighing thirty pounds, from the Mercedes SUV that the California woman didn’t need anymore. The Mercedes was parked in the garage, down by the lake. And the woman from California was parked three feet under the dirt in the cherry trees next to the garage, may that loudmouth tub of lard rest in peace.

  Few people realized how easy it was to take others under your sway. A kind word at the supermarket, a tip of the hat, a show of sympathy at a funeral or after a 12-step meeting, that’s all it took if the situation was right and the target was trusting and needy.

  Introspection was a luxury he could not afford at the moment, and the foibles of the folk had nothing to do with the problems dropped on him by Felicity Louviere. She was slipping away from him, about to be saved by mortality, the very weapon he had always held over the heads of his victims. She’d even thanked him for her pain. How sick was that?

  He stood up in the bareness of the room. Even though the house was built of stone, it seemed to swell with the force of the wind sweeping down from the mountains to the north. I’m your master and unto me your knee will bend, he heard himself saying. I have powers you cannot imagine. I can reach into the grave and extract your soul and make you my handmaiden for eternity. The choice will be mine, not yours. You will not reject me. Do you not understand that, you stupid woman?

  He realized he was grinding his molars. His words seemed pretentious and self-mocking. “Damn her to hell,” he said under his breath, and wondered if anyone had heard the fear in his
voice.

  * * *

  We started up Eastside Highway and stopped at eleven P.M. down by the shore. We woke up people, confused most of them, and probably frightened some. It was late, and I could not blame them for their reaction. We had no legal authority there, and the implications of our questions were not the kind anyone would want to deal with on a Sunday night. Flathead Lake and its environs were supposed to be a safe harbor from the problems in the rest of the country. The residents kept looking beyond us into the darkness, unsure who we were and yet fearful that we were telling them the truth. How do you explain to people who are basically good and trusting that their lives are predicated on an enormous presumption, namely, that the justice system works and that evil people will be prevented from coming into their lives?

  Surrette could be dismissed as a psychological monstrosity whose mother would have been better off raising a gerbil. Here’s the rub: He’s not the only one. If you’ve ever been inside, either as a correctional officer or as an inmate, you know what “con-wise” means. The majority of people who stack time, male and female, are not different from the rest of us. They have families and work histories and skilled trades and are surprisingly patriotic. Some of them have remarkable levels of personal courage and are stand-up in an environment that would break a lesser man or woman. Most of them are also screwups. In other words, they belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges.

  But ask anyone who has been inside about the bunch in permanent lockdown. These are the ones who scare you, even when they’re draped with waist and leg chains, and they scare you because looking into their eyes assures you they love evil for its own sake. Talk to the trusties who mop the floors in the lockdown unit and wheel the food cart from cell to cell. They do not make eye contact. Nor do the correctional personnel who sometimes have to enter a cell with body and face shields and cans of pepper spray and sometimes, like anyone who has witnessed a state execution, need to stop at a bar before going home that night.