Light of the World

Chapter 18

Asa Surrette was officially dead, even though he had left a note under Alafair’s windshield wiper outside the Lolo post office. I wanted to be angry at the authorities in Kansas and also at the FBI for concluding that he had died in the collision of the prison van with the tanker truck. Unfortunately, I had been guilty of the same obtuseness when Alafair told me she was sure Surrette was stalking her.

After we returned from the jail with Gretchen, I sat down with a legal pad and a felt-tip pen by our bedroom window and began writing down as many details as I could about Surrette. Any detective who has investigated serial killings, or any psychiatrist who has spent time interviewing psychopaths such as the cousins Angelo Buono, Jr., and Kenneth Bianchi or the satanist Richard Ramirez or the BTK killer, Dennis Rader, will be the first to tell you that behavioral science tends to fall apart when you probe the souls of men like these. It’s not unlike an attempt to fathom the origins of the universe. At a certain point, the laws of science lose their applicability.

When it came to motivation, misogyny was often in the mix. So was pedophilia. These two forms of psychosis did not explain the level of violence and savagery the perpetrators inflicted on their victims. I have my speculations, although they are founded on personal experience and not the results of any study I’m aware of. I have known many cruel people in my life. Their cruelty, in my opinion, was the mask for their fear. It’s that simple.

We all agree that anyone who is cruel to animals is a moral and physical coward and undeserving of the air he breathes. This same person, however, has a way of working himself into a position of authority over others, often children, even though all the warning signs are there. I’ve never understood our collective unwillingness to question the authority of a predator who happens to acquire a badge or an insignia or a clerical collar or who carries a whistle on a lanyard around his neck. Without our sanction, these pitiful excuses for human beings would wither and die like amphibians gasping for oxygen and water on the surface of Mars.

The motivations of a psychopath are almost irrelevant in an investigation. Psychoanalytical speculation about a moral imbecile makes for great entertainment, but it doesn’t put a net over anyone, and you do yourself no favor by trying to place yourself inside his head. The methodology of the psychopath is a different issue, one that frequently proves to be his undoing. In all probability, the perpetrator’s pattern will repeat itself, primarily because he’s a narcissist and thinks his method, if it has worked once, is fail-safe; second, the psychopath is not interested in the hunt but, rather, in assaulting and murdering his prey, unlike a professional thief, who is usually a pragmatist and considers theft an occupation and not a personal attack upon his victim.

Asa Surrette’s pattern in Kansas was not imaginative. He used his job as an electrician to enter the victim’s home and lie in wait. He bound and tortured and suffocated most of his victims and ejaculated on the women and girls but did not penetrate them. He posed them and took trophies home — purses, underwear, costume jewelry, wedding rings, driver’s licenses. If he took money from the crime scene, it was coincidental.

I had created two columns on my legal pad, one detailing the characteristics of Surrette’s crimes and the other a list of his jobs, the uniforms he might have worn, his travels, and his known friends.

I compared the information I had written on the legal pad with what I knew about his crimes in Montana, if indeed Asa Surrette was the same man who had shot an arrow at Alafair and left the message on the cave wall and murdered Angel Deer Heart and Bill Pepper and perhaps the pilot whose twin-engine Cessna had exploded west of Missoula.

The murders in Wichita were aimed at women and girls with whom he had no known prior contact. Was the same true of Angel Deer Heart? Why would a seventeen-year-old girl leave a biker nightclub full of music and excitement and go off with a seedy old man who had the social appeal of a soiled litter box?

Unless she knew him.

There was another troubling issue. To anyone’s knowledge, with the exception of the farmer from whom he possibly stole a truck, Surrette had never attacked a lone male. If Surrette was our man, why would he go after Bill Pepper in the cottage up at Swan Lake, and why would he sexually mutilate him?

I had only one answer: Surrette had planted the bug in Clete’s cabin and learned that Pepper had kidnapped and sexually abused Gretchen Horowitz. He murdered Pepper, knowing there was a good chance Clete or Gretchen would be blamed for his death.

Why go to all this trouble to do injury to Clete and Gretchen, neither of whom had done him any harm? It wasn’t adding up. Also, what was Surrette living on?

Crime is about money, sex, or power. I had a feeling all three were involved with our visitor from the land of the Yellow Brick Road. As I stared down at my legal pad, I realized there was one element missing from all the forensic evidence gathered by authorities during the twenty-year period Surrette had been torturing and murdering people. He had not left messages with biblical or messianic overtones. Even when he called the authorities or the news media to tell them where they could find a body, he made no grandiose claims. Where and when had he taken on his new persona? In prison? Or had the transformation not been of his choosing?

Some people in A.A. say a recovering drunk should not go inside his own head without an escort. I was beginning to think they were right.

I went into Alafair’s room. She had worked all night on her new novel and had eaten breakfast while the sky was dark, then had gone to bed. She was sleeping on her side, her long black hair scattered on her face, her mouth slightly parted. She had grown into a tall and lithe young woman who spoke with a South Louisiana accent and whose posture was always erect and whose eye was clear and whose sense of principle governed every aspect of her life. Even in sleep, an aura of peace and strength seemed to radiate from her face. The window was open, and up the hillside I could see the darkness of the pines and cedars and fir trees, and I knew that inside the deep shade on the hillside was the tiger William Blake had written about, burning brightly in the forests of the night, his brain dipped from a furnace and forged with a hammer and chain. The tiger was Asa Surrette, the bane of us all, the trees lighting when he padded through the undergrowth, his guttural sounds a prelude of things to come.

Where are you, sir? How brave and fearsome would you be on a level playing field? Do you swell with pride when you remember the child you hung from a pipe in a basement? I wonder how well you would fare if you were faced with the prospect of eating eight rounds from a 1911-model .45 auto?

Alafair’s eyes opened and looked into mine. She lifted herself on one elbow and pushed her hair over her forehead. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I replied.

“That look on your face.”

“Let’s stay close together until this stuff with Surrette is over.”

“I’m not afraid of him. I wish he would come around.”

“Caution and fear aren’t the same thing.”

“You don’t know him, Dave. I do. He’s a frightened, pathetic little man.”

I pulled up a chair next to her bed. “So was Hitler,” I said. “Don’t underestimate the power of evil. Sometimes I think it finds a vessel to operate in, then discards it and moves on.”

“I think you’re giving Surrette too much credit.”

“About fifteen years ago, a twenty-one-year-old kid broke into a home in the Blackfoot Valley and tied up the husband and wife in chairs and butchered them alive. The husband had a seventh-degree black belt in karate. When the kid was awaiting execution in Deer Lodge, some inmates got out of lockdown and took over the cell house for three days. The kid killed or helped kill five more people. On the day of his execution, he had to be awakened from a sound sleep.”

Alafair went into the bathroom and washed her face and came back out. “Want to go back to Louisiana?”

I didn’t answer.

“Of course not,” she said. “Because we don’t run away from problems. That’s what you always taught me. And we never allow ourselves to be afraid. You said it over and over when I was growing up.”

“I didn’t say close your eyes to reality.”

“Where’s Gretchen?” she said.

“At the cabin with Clete.”

“None of this is her fault. Don’t put it on her, Dave.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“You were thinking about it.”

“She’s a lightning rod, Alf.”

“Let’s get something straight, Pops. I’m the one who stoked up Asa Surrette, not Gretchen.”

“It’s not all about you. He has other reasons for being here. I just don’t know what they are.”

She put her hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. “You worry too much. We’ll get through this. What is it Clete always says? Good guys über alles?” She took her hand away from my neck. “You’re hot as a stove. You have a fever?”

“Like you say, I worry too much,” I replied.

He had his hair barbered by a stylist and his suit dry-cleaned and pressed and checked into a motel under the name of Reverend Geta Noonen, way up a long mountainous slope next to a river, almost to Idaho, in an area where people still lived up the drainages and off the computer. Inside his room, he threw away his pipe and tobacco and dyed and blow-dried his hair a sandy blond and, for twenty minutes, used a brush and washrag in the shower to scrub the smell of nicotine off his skin and nails. He shaved his chest and armpits, pared and clipped his nails, and layered his body with deodorant.

When he was tempted to retrieve his pipe from the wastebasket and core it out and refill it with the dark mix of imported tobaccos he had loved for years, he put a piece of licorice in his mouth and sucked it into a tiny lump and did push-ups in front of the television and then ate another piece until the craving passed. He showered again and kept the cold water on his face and head and shoulders so long that he was numb all over and had no desire other than to get warm and to put hot food in his stomach.

Yes, he could do it, he told himself. The sacrifice of his only vice was small compared to the reward that awaited him west of Lolo, on the ranch owned by Albert Hollister. He took a print shirt from a box of eighteen he had bought at Costco and put it on with his beige suit and a pair of new loafers and looked into the mirror. Clean-shaven and blond, he hardly recognized himself. He looked like an aging sportsman, a sun-bleached fellow strolling along a beach in the Florida Keys, his mouth effeminate in an appealing way, the palm trees lifting against a lavender sky, a woman at an outside bar glancing up at him.

Not bad, he thought.

He ate supper at the counter in the café attached to the motel. Through the back window, he could see the river flowing long and straight out of the hills, the rocks protruding from the riffle, the surface dark and glistening with the last rays of a red sun. A man in hip waders was fly-casting in the shallows, working the nylon line into a figure eight above his head and laying the fly onto the riffle as gently as a butterfly descending on a leaf. Except the man who had registered as the Reverend Geta Noonen was not interested in fly-fishing. He could see a swing set on the motel lawn, down by the water, and a little girl throwing rocks in the current while the mother watched. He put a forkful of meat loaf in his mouth, blowing air on it as he chewed, as though it were too hot to swallow.

“The food okay?” the waitress asked. She was young and uncertain, her bones as fragile as a bird’s. Her pink uniform was splattered on one side with either grease or dishwater, and she kept looking away from the man’s face as she waited for him to answer.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“I thought it might be too hot. I put it in the micro because you were in the washroom.”

“You have a nice place here.”

“It’s out of the way, but we like it,” she said, refilling his coffee cup, her face filling with pleasure because the customer had complimented the place where she worked.

“It’s a family-type diner. That’s the best kind. I bet it’s American-owned,” he said.

“Yes, sir, it is.”

He gazed out the window, his eyes sleepy and warm with sentiment. “Salt of the earth,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I was talking about those people out there. Mother and child. That’s the salt of the earth.”

“You talk like a preacher.”

“That’s because I am.”

“Which church?”

“The big one, the one that doesn’t have a name.”

She seemed to think a moment. “Meaning Jesus doesn’t belong to just one denomination?”

“That pretty much says it all. Watch yourself.”

“Sir?”

“You’re about to spill that hot coffee on your foot.”

“I know better than that.”

“I bet you do. I bet you know plenty.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“About the restaurant business and public relations. About the people who come in here. You’re a good judge of people, I bet.”

“I can tell the good ones from the bad ones.”

“Which am I?”

“You’re a preacher, aren’t you? That speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”

“You better be careful. I might run off with you. If my daughter had grown up, I bet she’d be like you.”

“You lost your daughter?”

“It was a long time ago. You have a sweet face, just like she did.”

She blushed and was about to reply when another customer came through the front door and tapped on the counter for his order to go. “Excuse me,” she said. “I better get back to work.”

As she walked away, she did not see the change of expression in the face of the man who called himself the Reverend Geta Noonen. He set down his fork and looked at it with deliberation, then picked up his coffee and drank from it and stared at his reflection. By the time he set the cup back in the saucer, his expression was once again benign and ordinary, his attention focused on his meal, his eyes drifting back to the scene behind the motel, where the mother was pushing her daughter back and forth on the swing.

He put a two-dollar tip on the counter and waited until the waitress was in the vicinity of the cash register before he got up to pay his check.

“I forgot to ask if you wanted any pie,” she said. “We have peach cobbler that’s good. The cherry pie isn’t bad, either.”

“I never pass up cherry pie. What time do you close?”

“Ten. I usually don’t work this late. I’m filling in for somebody else. In the morning I have to come in early and open up. I don’t mind, though.”

“You belong to a church?”

“I go at Christmas and Easter.”

“I’ll wager they know you’re there, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t mean to be too personal a moment ago. But I need to tell you something. You have an aura. Certain people have it. I think you’re one of them.”

Her eyes filmed, and there was a visible lump in her throat when she looked back at him.

He walked out of the café into the night, the stars like a spray of white diamonds from one horizon to the other, the highway that led to Lookout Pass climbing higher and higher into the mountains, where the headlights of the great trucks driving into Idaho tunneled up into the darkness, then dipped down on the far side of the grade and seemed to disappear into a bowl of ink.

Reverend Noonen walked onto the lawn where the mother had been swinging her little girl. The swing was empty, the chains clinking slightly in the breeze. The man glanced at his wristwatch and looked back at the lighted windows of the café, inside which the young waitress was wiping off the counter, bending over it, scrubbing the rag hard on the surface where some of his spilled food had dried. He worked a toothpick between his teeth while he watched her, then heard voices from the parking lot and realized the mother and her child were moving their suitcases from a battered van into a room at the back of the motel, in an unlighted area where no other guests seemed to be staying.

The woman was struggling with a suitcase while the little girl was climbing through the side door of the van, trying to pull out a sack of groceries that had already started to split apart, her rear end pointed out. The man removed the toothpick from his mouth and let it drop from his hand onto the grass, then walked into the parking lot. “My heavens, let me help you with that,” he said.

“Thank goodness,” the mother said. “I’ve had enough problems today without this. Our room is just over there. This is very kind of you.”

In the morning he rose with the sun and showered again and put on fresh clothes and ordered a big breakfast in the café. The owner was doing double duty, running the cash register and carrying plates from the serving window to the counter and the tables.

“Where’s the little lady who was working here last night?” said the man who called himself Reverend Geta Noonen.

“That’s Rhonda.”

“Where might she be?”

“She didn’t show up this morning.”

“She has a glow about her. Sorry, what was that you said?”

“She didn’t come in. It’s not like her.” The owner looked out the window at the highway, where the sun was shining on a rock slide. The rocks were jagged and sharp-edged, and some had bounced out on the shoulder of the asphalt. The owner frowned as he looked at the broken rock on the roadside.

“Maybe she’s sick,” said the man sitting at the counter.

“She didn’t answer her phone,” the owner said.

“Does she have folks here’bouts?”

“Not really. She lives way up a dirt road by Lookout Pass. I’ve always told her she should move into town.”

“I bet she had car trouble. Her cell phone wouldn’t work out here, would it?”

“I called the sheriff. He’s sending a cruiser. You want more coffee?” the owner said.

“Maybe a piece of that cherry pie to go. I guess every man should be allowed one vice.”

“What’s that you say?”

“I’ve got an addiction to desserts. I can’t get enough. Especially cherry pie.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come again?” the owner said.

“Nobody likes pie and cobbler and chocolate cake and jelly roll doughnuts as much as me. I don’t gain weight, but I can sure put it down. I hope the lady is all right. She seemed like a sweet thing.”

The owner turned around and looked at the shelf where he kept his pastries. “Sorry, the cherry pie is all gone.”

“I’ll have some the next time I’m by. I like it here. You’ve got a nice class of people.”

The owner began picking up the dirty dishes from the counter and didn’t look up again until the man had left. He dialed the number of his missing employee and let the phone ring for two minutes before he hung up. Because he didn’t know what else to do, he went outside into the harshness of the sunlight and looked up and down the highway, waiting for her car or a sheriff’s cruiser to appear. Then he crossed the four-lane and began kicking the fallen rock off the edge of the road back onto the shoulder.

Geta Noonen loaded his suitcase into the used SUV he had just purchased and drove slowly out onto the highway, the gravel that was impacted in his tire treads clicking as loudly as studs on the asphalt. He passed the owner and tapped on the horn and stuck his arm out the window to wave good-bye. The owner waved back and continued to clean the broken rock out of the traffic lane, lest someone run over it and have an accident.

The morning was bright and cool when Geta Noonen drove into Missoula and went into a hardware and farm-supply store and came out with four hundred dollars in boxed and bagged purchases. After he had covered them with a tarp in the backseat of the SUV, he drove downtown and found a parking spot under the Higgins Street Bridge, one hour in advance of the Out to Lunch concert held weekly in the park by the Clark Fork. He slipped on a pair of aviator glasses and bought an ice cream cone from a vendor and strolled along the river walkway, pausing on an observation deck that allowed him an unobstructed view of the children riding the hand-carved wooden horses on the carousel and the kayakers practicing their maneuvers in the rapids by the bank.

As the sun rose into the center of the sky, he took up a position by a concrete abutment in the shade of the bridge and watched the cars filling the lot. When he sighted a rusted compact with two teenage girls in it, he folded his arms over his chest and gazed at the riverbank and the crowd filing under the bridge to the concert. The two girls locked their vehicle and walked through the man’s line of vision without noticing that he was watching their every move.

He strolled close to their car, then placed his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky and the mountains that ringed the city, like a tourist on his first day inside the state. He stooped over as though picking up a coin from the asphalt and sliced the air valve off one tire, then another. After the tires collapsed on the rims, he inserted the knife blade into the soft folds of rubber and sawed through the cord so they could not be repaired. He folded the knife in his palm and dropped it in his pants pocket and watched the concert from the back of the crowd, his eyes fastened on the two teenage girls.

At 1:05 P.M. the girls returned to their rusted compact and stared in shock at the slashed tires.

“I saw a couple of bad-looking kids hanging around your car,” the man said. “When I walked over, they took off. I got here too late, I guess.”

The girls were obviously sisters, perhaps two years apart, with blue eyes and blond hair that was almost gold. The older girl had lost her baby fat and was at least three inches taller than her sister. “Why would anyone do this to us?” she said.

“Guess it’s the way a lot of kids are being raised up today,” the man said. “I’d offer to change your tire, but you’ve got two flats and probably only one spare. Is there somebody you can call?”

“Nobody’s home,” the younger girl said.

“Where are your folks?”

“Our mother works at the Goodwill,” the older girl said. “Our father drives part-time for a trucking company. He’s in Spokane today. He’ll be home tonight. He’s a minister. We have assembly at our house on Wednesday nights.”

“I’m Reverend Geta Noonen. Call your mother and ask if it’s all right if I drive you two home,” the man said.

“There’s no point in worrying her.”

“I tell you what. I’ll put your spare on, and we’ll take the other rim to the tire store and get the tire replaced. Then we’ll come back here and put it on, and you’ll be on your way.”

“I have to be at work at the Dairy Queen at three-thirty. I can’t think. I don’t have any money, either,” the older girl said.

“I’ll pay for it, and you can pay me back later.”

“What does a tire cost?” she asked.

When he told her, she looked as though she were about to cry.

“Look, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Take my cell phone and tell your mother what’s happened. We’ll drop the rim at the tire store, and I’ll drive both of you home. I’ll take you to work, if need be, or I’ll take you to pick up your new tire. We’ll handle it together. There’s no problem that can’t be solved. Whereabouts do you live?”

“Out Highway 12, west of Lolo.”

“You’ll have to give me directions. Now call your mother and tell her everything is okay.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You don’t owe me anything. You’re giving me a chance to practice a little of what I preach,” he said.

Forty-five minutes later, he turned off Highway 12 onto a dirt road and headed up a gulch between wooded hills that were scarred by logging roads from the days of the clear-cuts. “It’s sure pretty out this way. Do you know if there are any rentals hereabouts?” he said.

“We rent out a room sometimes,” the older girl said.

“I just need a place to come and go, and a small storage area,” he said. “I’m a traveling minister, kind of like the old-time saddle preachers, except I don’t have a saddle.”

“You want me to ask my mother?”

“I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t be any trouble. Say, that’s a big ranch up there.”

“That’s Mr. Hollister’s place. He’s a writer. Three of his books have been made into movies.”

The man pushed the sun visor across the driver’s window as he drove past the archway over Albert Hollister’s driveway and did not look at the rock-and-log house up on the bench or glance in the direction of the barn or the horses in the north pasture.

“Imagine that, a man who makes movies tucked away here in the backcountry. This life is sure full of surprises,” he said. “Is that your house in that green hollow at the end of the road? If you ask me, you have yourselves a regular paradise up here. It’d suit me to a T.”