Light of the World

Chapter 26

I was in Elvis Bisbee’s office by nine that morning. I told him of my chance meeting with Seymour Little. He made notes on a legal pad while I spoke. “Okay, we’ll talk with this kid and check out the pharmacy,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”

“I’ve already been to the pharmacy. The prescriptions were phoned in by a scrip doctor in Whitefish. I called his office. He’s somewhere in Canada and not expected back for a while.”

“You went to the pharmacy?”

“That’s right.”

“What makes you think you can come here from out of state and conduct your own investigation?”

“I’m sorry you don’t approve.”

He set down his pen and stared out the window at the trees and the war memorial on the courthouse lawn. “Mind telling why the pharmacist shared his information with you?”

“I showed him my badge.”

“You explained to him you were from the state of Louisiana and you had no legal authority here?”

“That didn’t seem to be a problem for him.”

He remained motionless in his swivel chair. The tips of his mustache were as white as ash. The clarity in his blue eyes made me think of an empty, sunlit sky. He was one of those whose decency and sense of honor were not an issue. A less patient man would have been far more severe in his attitude toward Clete and Gretchen Horowitz and me. Elvis Bisbee believed the world was a rational place and that procedure in many ways was an end in itself. Without his kind, we probably would have chaos. However, there is a caveat to that kind of thinking. Those who are rapacious and prey upon the weak and who would undo the system are not bound by procedure, and they take great delight in the presence of those who are.

“Rhonda Fayhee is alive, Sheriff. I don’t think we have a lot of time,” I said. “I was almost sure Surrette had killed her. He has never kept his victims alive, except to torture them. This time he decided to do it differently.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t telegraph his pitch. He hides it in his glove or behind his thigh.”

“Why are you so sure it’s Surrette?”

“Because he’s getting better and better at what he does. He could have picked up the prescriptions himself. Instead, he used and degraded a kid who looks like a sack of broken Popsicle sticks. He also knew the kid would report him and we’d figure out the girl is still alive. Except we have no idea where she is or what she’s going through while we’re wasting time in your office.”

“Waste of time, is it?”

I got up from the chair. “Surrette is about to send us something. They all do. I don’t know what it will be. I don’t even want to think about it. But that’s what he’s going to do. Something is troubling me about our conversation, Sheriff.”

“Don’t hold back.”

“You’re an intelligent man. I think you already know all these things. Surrette is here for the long haul, and your department isn’t equipped to deal with him. So it becomes a whole lot easier to swat at flies rather than admit you’ve got a real monster in your midst. I don’t blame you for being impotent about your situation. I do blame you for pretending to be ignorant of it.”

He picked up the pen from his desk and balanced it on one end, then on the other, and finally let it topple onto the blotter. “Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. If you have any other information for me, phone it in. I make this request of you because I would like you to stay the hell out of my office for a very long time.”

WHEN SHE WAS little, Alafair could never hide secrets. Her emotions immediately showed on her face, with a transparency that was like looking through glass. She used to get into raging confrontations with Batist, the elderly black man who worked at our bait shop and boat dock. The issue was always the same: Tripod, her pet raccoon, who had only three legs but was a master burglar when it came to breaking into Batist’s stock of energy bars and fried pies. In one instance, I looked down the slope from our old home and saw Alafair racing from the bait shop with Tripod cradled in her arms and Batist in full pursuit, a broomstick cocked over his head. She powered up the slope through the pecan trees and live oaks and streaked past me into the house, Tripod’s tail flopping like a spring.

“What happened down there?” I said.

“Batist is mean! I hate him!”

“You shouldn’t talk about Batist like that, Alafair. Did Tripod do something that got him upset?”

“He didn’t do anything. Batist said he was going to cook him in a pot. I hope he falls in the water and gets hit by a boat. Why doesn’t he take his smelly cigars and go home?”

“Can you explain why Tripod has chocolate on his paws and all over his mouth?”

Her face was as round as a plate, her bangs hanging in her eyes. She looked sideways. “He probably found a candy bar on the dock.”

“Yeah, a lot of people throw their candy bars on the dock. Did you notice that Tripod’s stomach looks like a balloon full of water?”

“He was going to hurt Tripod, Dave. You didn’t see his face.”

“Batist can’t read or write, but he takes great pride in the work he does for us. When Tripod tears up the counter, Batist feels like he’s let us down. You and Tripod have to see things from his point of view.”

Her face crumpled and she began to cry. When I tried to pat her on the head, she ran out the back door, slamming it as hard as she could, Tripod bouncing in her arms.

She had a horse named Tex that I let her ride only when I was close by. While my wife, Annie, and I were gone one afternoon, Alafair put on Tex’s bridle and bit and used the slat fence to climb up on his back. She was wearing her Baby Orca T-shirt and the Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill that we had bought at Disney World. For whatever reason, she decided to start quacking the bill. Tex responded by pitching her end over end into our tomato plants. When we returned from town, Alafair had dirt in her hair and a scrape on the side of her face, but she refused to tell us what had happened. I looked through the side window and saw Tex standing by the shed, his reins hanging in the dirt.

“Did you ride Tex while we were gone?” I asked.

She squinted as though she couldn’t quite recall the event. “Maybe for a little bit. Yeah, I think I did.”

“You fell off?”

“No, he went up in the air and threw me over his head!”

“Okay, so let’s not do that again. What if you had been knocked unconscious?” I said.

She shut her eyes, tears leaking down both cheeks.

“What’s wrong, little guy?” I said. “It’s not that bad. Just don’t do it again.”

“You said the tomatoes are for the black people. Now I smushed them, and they’re not going to have anything to eat, and everybody is going to get mad at me,” she said.

Many years down the road, the same little girl was still in my life, no different in my mind from when we lived in an idyllic world south of New Iberia. When I returned from the courthouse in Missoula, I went into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. Through the window, I could see Alafair watering the potted petunias and geraniums on the deck with a sprinkler can. She swept the can back and forth over the flowers, hitting the deck as often as the pots. Then she refilled it and started watering the pots a second time. “Did you water last night?” I said through the screen. “Your catch saucers are overflowing.”

“Oh, I didn’t see that. Sorry,” she said, setting down the can.

“You want something to eat?”

“No, I’m fine.”

She gazed at the lawn and at the horses drinking from the tank in the south pasture and at two chipmunks eating the shells that had spilled from the bird feeder.

“Something on your mind?” I said.

She turned and looked me full in the face. “What kind of morning have you had?”

“Sheriff Bisbee indicated he didn’t need to see me in his office for a long time.”

“Can you come out here?”

“I’m fixing lunch. Come inside.”

“I think I’d rather not be in a confined space right now.”

I opened the sliding screen door and sat down at a table with a ceramic top that Albert had bought in Mexico.

“Gretchen made contact with Asa Surrette,” Alafair said.

I nodded, keeping my expression blank. “When?”

“Saturday.”

I watched the shadows of clouds moving across the pasture and up the hillsides and over the fir and larch and cedar trees on the ridges. I looked at the sun and felt a pain that was like a laser burning through my retinas. “This happened three days ago?”

“She ran a notice in the personals. She told Clete about it.”

“But not about Surrette calling?”

“No, she hasn’t told him about that.”

“Is there any reason you’ve kept this information from me?”

“I waited for Gretchen to tell y’all. I made a mistake.”

“You didn’t think you could trust me?”

“Dave, we can’t be sure she actually talked to Surrette. Any crank could have read her notice in the paper.”

“Stop it.”

She had one hand resting on the deck rail, as though the wind were affecting her balance. “You didn’t want me to go to Kansas and interview him. I wouldn’t listen to you. I’m to blame for a lot of what’s happened.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear this, Alafair.”

“I have another problem,” she said. “After I met Surrette, I wrote articles that were meant to inflame the reader. I wanted to see him sent to the injection table. No, that’s not accurate. I wanted to see him boiled in his own grease.”

“That’s what he deserves,” I said.

“Using journalistic advantage to promote someone’s execution doesn’t make me feel very good, even if the subject is a sorry sack of shit.”

“You wanted to cap him yourself?”

“I could shoot Surrette and take a nap after I did it.”

“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:

“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 believe that?”

She rechained the gate and didn’t look back. I might as well have been speaking to the wind.