Light of the World

Chapter 4

It was nine P.M., and rain was falling heavily on the trees and the pastures and the hillsides and cascading down Albert’s roof when I got the call from the sheriff, Elvis Bisbee. “We found the missing Indian girl in a barn about two miles west of where you’re at,” he said. “She was tied up in the loft with a vinyl garbage bag taped around her head. The magpies probably got to her five or six days ago.”

“You’re talking about Love Younger’s granddaughter?” I said.

“Her name was Angel Deer Heart. She would have turned eighteen next month. I just came back from her grandfather’s house. That’s the part of this job I never get used to.”

“You’ve got to excuse me, Sheriff, but I’m not sure why you’re calling me.”

“One of our detectives interviewed Wyatt Dixon at the Wigwam, the same place the girl was drinking the night she disappeared. Evidently, Dixon is a regular there. He didn’t deny being there the night she disappeared.”

“You think he might be your guy?”

“I got to thinking about that biblical message in the cave above Albert’s house and Dixon’s run-in with your daughter. The more I thought about it, the more I had to admit Dixon is a five-star nutcase who needs looking at real hard. Can you break down that quote for me?”

“The allusion to the bended knee refers to Christ’s statement that eventually all of mankind will accept his message of peace. The alpha and omega allusion refers to Yahweh’s statement in the Old Testament that He existed before the beginning of time.”

“So the guy who wrote this has a little problem with ego?”

“It’s called the messianic complex. It’s characteristic of all narcissists.”

“I want to get a forensic team up to that cave in the morning.”

Through the window, I could see water pooling in the north pasture and the green-black sheen of the fir trees when lightning leaped between the clouds.

“The victim was raped?” I said.

“We don’t know yet. Her jeans were pulled off. Her panties were still on. Have you worked many like this?”

“More than I want to remember.”

“Dixon is supposed to come in tomorrow at eight. If he doesn’t, we’ll pick him up. Does your daughter still have that arrow?”

“I’ll ask her.”

“If Dixon’s prints are on it, I’m going to owe you and her an apology.”

“No, you won’t. I think you’re doing a good job.”

“In the last two years we’ve had ten sexual assaults on or near the university campus. A couple of the victims claim that university football players raped them. Sometimes I wonder if the country hasn’t already gone down the drain.”

I had grown up in an era when a black teenage boy named Willie Francis was sentenced to die by electrocution in the St. Martinville Parish jail, nine miles from my home. In those days the electric chair traveled from parish to parish, along with the generators, and was nicknamed Gruesome Gertie. The first attempt at the boy’s electrocution was botched by the executioners, one of whom was a trusty, because they were still drunk from the previous night. Willie Francis screamed for a full minute before the current was cut. Later, the United States Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, and the governor who wrote the song “You Are My Sunshine” refused to commute the sentence. Willie Francis was strapped in the electric chair a second time and put to death.

I did not speak of these things to the sheriff, nor do I mention them to those who pine for what they call the good old days. “See you in the morning,” I said. “Be careful on our road. It looks like it’s about to wash out.”

The early dawn was not a good time of day for Gretchen Horowitz. That was when a man with lights on the tips of his fingers used to visit her room and touch her with a coldness that was so intense, it seared through tissue and bone into the soul, in this case the soul of a child who was hardly more than an infant.

When Gretchen woke from her first night’s sleep in Montana, the rain had stopped and the cabin was filled with a blue glow that seemed to have no source, the windows smudged with fog or perhaps even the clouds, which were so low they were tangled in the trees on the hillside. She put water on her face and dressed and, while Clete was still asleep, eased open the door and got into her pickup and followed the two-lane along a swollen creek into Lolo.

At the McDonald’s next to the casino she bought a breakfast to go of sausage and scrambled eggs and biscuits and scalding-hot coffee, then drove back to the ranch and walked up the hillside and spread her raincoat on a flat rock and began eating, the first glimmer of sunlight touching the tops of the trees far down the valley.

She heard sounds, up on the logging road, and only then noticed the cruiser parked behind Albert’s house. Down by the south pasture, a second cruiser was coming slowly up the road, as though the driver were looking for an address. The driver turned under the archway and parked by the barn and got out. He was a heavy man who wore a suit and street shoes and a rain hat; in his left hand he carried a pair of cowboy boots. He opened the back door and pulled out a man dressed in skintight Wranglers and a long-sleeved snap-button red shirt and a straw hat. The man was barefoot, and his wrists were handcuffed behind him.

The man in the suit fitted his hand under the cowboy’s arm and began to muscle him up the slope past the rock where Gretchen was sitting. The cowboy had a profile like an Indian’s and a dimple in his chin and eyes that looked prosthetic rather than real. He slipped in the mud and slid down the incline, trying to stop himself with his bare feet, his clothes slathering with mud and fine gravel and pine needles.

“Get up!” said the man in the suit, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, twisting the cloth in his fingers. “Did you hear me, boy?”

The cowboy tried to get up and fell again. The man in the suit ripped the straw hat off the cowboy’s head and began whipping him with it, striking him across the ears and eyes and the crown of his skull, again and again. “You want to get tased? I’ll do it.”

“I think you might have what they call anger-management issues,” the cowboy said, squinting up from the ground. “I heered you ran into your ex at the Union Club and asked if her new boyfriend wasn’t disappointed by her poor old wore-out vag, and she said, ‘Soon as he got past the wore-out part, he liked it just fine, Bill.’ Is that true, Detective Pepper?”

The detective dropped the boots he had been carrying and picked up the cowboy by the shirtfront and sent him crashing through the pine saplings and into a tree stump. All of this was taking place thirty feet from where Gretchen Horowitz was sitting with her Styrofoam container balanced on her knees. She pushed the tines of her plastic fork through a small piece of sausage and a bit of egg and placed them in her mouth, chewing slowly, her eyes lowered. She heard the cowboy fall again, this time grunting. When she raised her head, the cowboy was sitting with his back against a boulder, sucking wind, his mouth hanging open, his face draining as though he had been kicked in the ribs or stomach. The detective removed a Taser from his coat pocket and activated it and leaned down and touched it to the back of the cowboy’s neck. The cowboy’s head jerked as though he had been dropped from the end of a rope, his face contorting. The detective stepped back and turned off the Taser and glanced down the slope at Gretchen. “What are you looking at?” he said.

Gretchen closed the top of the Styrofoam container and set it on the rock and got up and walked up the incline toward the detective. The trees were wet and motionless in the shadows, strips of thick white cloud hanging on the crest of the ridge. “What am I looking at? Let me think. A guy in cuffs getting the shit kicked out of him?”

“You better mind your business.”

“I am. I’m a guest here. I was eating breakfast. What’s your name?”

“What’s my name?”

“That’s what I said.”

He stared at her without answering.

“My name is Gretchen Horowitz. You don’t give your name out while you’re on the job?”

“Horowitz?”

“It’s Jewish.” She picked up her gold chain and religious medal from her throat and held them in her fingers for him to see. “This is Jewish, too. It’s called the Star of David.”

“You’re interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

“Say my name again?”

“What?”

“I want to hear you pronounce my name. You accented the first syllable. You think that’s funny?”

“No. You sound like you’re from New York.”

“Try Miami. That’s in Florida. New York is north of Florida. Why not let the cowboy put on his boots?”

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

“You don’t want to find out, bacon. Where’s your boss?”

I had gone into Missoula with Albert early that morning to buy a fishing license, and until we pulled into the driveway, I didn’t realize the forensic team was up on the hill.

“Waste of tax money,” Albert said.

“What is?” I asked.

“Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out of biker saloons or shoot at people with hunters’ bows.”

“Some of them are deranged and dangerous, Albert.”

“There’s nothing like fearing a man with a hole in his shoe.”

I didn’t feel like arguing with Albert’s proletarian views. “I’m going to walk up on the ridge. I’ll see you inside.”

“Tell that bunch I’d better not find their nasty cigarette butts on the property,” he replied.

As I worked my way up the slope, I could hear people talking on the far side of the trees. Then I saw a deputy in uniform, a second man in a baggy brown suit, a man in a checkered shirt I figured for a crime scene technician, and Wyatt Dixon, who was barefoot and hatless and sitting against the hillside, wrists manacled behind his back, clothes mud-streaked and sticking wetly to his skin. Gretchen Horowitz had just started back down the slope, her face as hot as a woodstove.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Don’t ask,” she said. She went past me as though I were a wood post.

I gained the road and looked down at Dixon. His teeth were red when he grinned. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“You all right, Mr. Dixon?”

The mud in his hair and the drip from the trees were running into his eyes, and he had to squint to look up at me. “Do not misinterpret the situation of this poor rodeo cowboy. I am honored to once again find myself surrounded by such noble men as yourselves. God bless America and the ground that men such as yourselves walk on.”

“Where are your boots?”

He studied the bloodied tops of his feet as though seeing them for the first time. “The detective stomped my toes proper and told me I wouldn’t need no foot covering for a while.”

“What do you want here?” the man in the baggy suit said.

I opened my badge holder. “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. What did y’all do to this fellow?”

“Nothing. He slipped down the slope,” the man in the suit said.

“He must have slid a long way. Did you say something to Miss Gretchen?”

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“The woman who just left here. She was angry about something.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Right. What’s your name?”

“Detective Bill Pepper. I told the woman not to contaminate a possible crime scene. If she got her nose bent out of shape, that’s her problem.”

The crime scene technician was standing in the background. “Come on up to the cave with me. I want to show you a couple of things,” he said.

I grabbed hold of a pine sapling and pulled myself up on a footpath and followed the crime scene tech to the entrance of the cave. He was a rotund man with a florid face and the small ears and scar tissue of someone who might have been in the ring. He had put rubber bands around the cuffs of his cargo pants. “How you doin’?” he said.

“Better than that cowboy.”

“Here’s what we’ve got going on. The rain didn’t do us any favors. There was supposed to be a bunch of scat here, but I can’t find it. Same with the fingernail clippings. The boot prints are wiped out, too. Maybe somebody got here before we did.”

“Is Dixon lying about getting his feet stomped?”

“Detective Pepper said he wanted Dixon’s boots to be clean when he tried to match them with the tracks of the guy who was holed up in the cave. Sometimes Bill’s way of doing things is a problem for the rest of us.”

“Why is Dixon in cuffs? I thought he was coming in on his own.”

“He didn’t know the Indian girl’s purse was found last night behind a hay bale in the barn where she was killed. There was a receipt in it for a bracelet she bought from Dixon. The bracelet wasn’t on her body. The date on the receipt was the same day she disappeared.”

“What does Dixon say?”

“He weaves bracelets out of silver and copper wire and was wearing one in the Wigwam, and she saw it and wanted to buy it. He says he sold it to her for fifty dollars.”

“What was the deal with Miss Gretchen?”

“The gal who just went down the hill?”

“Down south you don’t call a woman a ‘gal.’ I especially wouldn’t do that with her.”

“I want you to understand something, Detective Robicheaux. Our department treats people with respect, our current sheriff in particular. The deputy and detective out there are the exception. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”

“What happened?”

“The lady, or whatever you want to call her, Miss Gretchen, came on a little strong about Bill’s treatment of Wyatt Dixon. When she was walking away, the deputy said, ‘Is she butch enough for you, Bill?’ Pepper goes, ‘I’d probably have to tie a board across my ass so I didn’t fall in.’ ”

“She heard them?”

“Probably. Would you tell her I apologize on behalf of the department?”

“If I were you, I’d tell your friends to do that.”

“She’s gonna file a complaint?”

“No, she’s not given to filing complaints,” I said, and looked back out the opening of the cave. “Is Dixon going to be charged?”

“Depends on what the prosecutor says. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. I didn’t get what you were saying. The lady is not gonna file a complaint? So what is she gonna do?”

I looked at the biblical message incised in the soft patina of lichen on the wall and wondered what kind of tangled mind was responsible for it. “It’s nice meeting you,” I said. “I hope to see you again. Tell those two morons out there they put their foot into the wrong Rubicon.”

“Sorry?”

“Tell them to look it up.”

After the first interview, Alafair waited three days in the motel for Asa Surrette’s attorney to return her call. It was January, and snow was driving parallel with the ground, and the landscape was sere and stippled with weeds, and in the distance the hills looked like piles of slag raked out of a furnace.

It was a land of contradictions, settled by Populists and Mennonites but also by fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of John Brown. In spring the rivers were swollen and streaked with red sandbanks and bordered by cottonwoods that fluttered with thousands of green leaves resembling butterflies. The Russian wheat in the fields was the most disease-resistant in the world, the harvest so great that sometimes the grain had to be piled in two-story mounds by the train tracks because there was no room left in the silos.

Or the skies could blacken with dust storms or, worse, clouds of smoke rising from a peaceful town, such as Lawrence, where guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson spent an entire day systematically murdering 160 people.

Just after Alafair had given up and decided to return home the next morning, she got a call from Surrette’s attorney, the same one who’d negotiated Surrette’s allocution and sentence, trying to ensure that his client not be exposed to the death penalty reinstated in 1994. “Asa would like to see you again,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

There was a beat. “Why? To help with your project. To give his side of things.”

“Your client is a narcissist. He’s had no interest in helping anybody with anything. If he wants the interviews to go forward, the questions will be on my terms. He’ll make an honest attempt to answer them or we’re done.”

“You’ll have to work that out with him.”

“I’ll work it out with you. There will be no proscriptive areas of inquiry.”

“I think you’ll find Asa pretty forthcoming. He likes you.”

“Are you serious?”

“If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t ask you back. What did you say to him, anyway?”

“He has one reason for wanting to see me again. I bother him. I told him why he took the body of one of his victims to his church and photographed it.”

There was another beat. “Ms. Robicheaux, there is one area that should not be explored in your interview. You know what it is, too.”

“No, I don’t,” she lied.

“Asa has admitted to eight homicides committed during the 1970s and ’80s. Those are the only crimes he will be discussing, because those are the only crimes he committed.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure of what he told me. I’m sure the authorities, including the FBI, have never found evidence of any kind that Asa was less than truthful about any of these matters.”

“The same guys who couldn’t catch him for thirty years? The same people who caught him only after he contacted them and then sent them a floppy disk traceable to a computer in his workplace?”

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you,” the attorney said.

It was snowing the next morning, in clumps that floated softly down and broke apart and melted on the highway and were blown into a muddy spray by the trucks leaving an oil refinery whose smokestacks were red at night and streaming in the morning with gray curds of smoke that smelled like leakage from a sewage line. Asa Surrette was locked in a waist chain, waiting, when Alafair entered the interview room. Through the slitted window, she could see the snow blowing like feathers on a series of small hills that seemed to blur in the distance and then dissolve into nothingness.

“You keep looking at the hills,” he said.

“The winter here is strange. It contains no light.”

“I never thought of it in those terms.”

“Is it true there used to be eighteen Titan missile silos ringed around the outskirts of Wichita?”

“That’s right. They were all taken out.”

“Nonetheless, people here lived for decades with mechanized death buried under the wheat?”

“So what?”

“Had war started with the Soviet Union, this place would have become a radioactive Grand Canyon.”

“Yeah, that kind of sums it up.”

“Did that enter your thinking when you committed your murders?”

He looked at her with a gleam in his eye that was between caution and hostility. “No. Why should it?”

She didn’t answer.

“Why do you keep glancing out the window?” he asked.

“It’s the sense of nothingness that I get when I look at the horizon. The reality is, there is no horizon here. The grayness seems to have no end and no purpose. Is that how you felt when you stalked your victims?”

He wrinkled his forehead, craning around, the chain on his waist tinkling. “I think that stuff you’re talking about comes from Samuel Beckett. I read him in my literature class. I think his work is crap.”

“What did you feel after you killed your victims?”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

“Nothing?”

“What’s to feel? They’re dead, you’re not. One day I’ll be dead. So will you.”

“How about the misery you caused them in their last moments? The suffering their loved ones will undergo the rest of their lives?”

“Maybe I’m sorry about that.”

“You felt remorse?”

“Maybe I felt it later. I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about things in sequence. People’s emotions don’t happen in sequence.” His wrist chain clinked as he tried to raise his hands in order to make the point.

“You haven’t answered the question, have you? What did you feel after you killed your victims?”

He straightened his back against the chair, breathing through his nose, his expression composed, his gaze roving over her features. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I thought about how I had stopped time and changed all the events that would have happened. I tore the hands off the clock.”

She felt her eyes moisten. “Did they beg?”

“What?”

“For their lives? For the lives of their children? What did they say to you when they knew they were going to die?”

“I already talked about all that.”

“No, you didn’t. You told the court only what you chose for them to hear. Do the voices of your victims visit you in your sleep?”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“No, you don’t. I have no interest in statements about your behavior or your motivations. You’re a psychopath, and nothing you say is reliable. That means the book I write about you will be unreliable. You’ve had an enormous influence on me, Mr. Surrette.”

“Oh?” he said, the corner of his mouth wrinkling.

“I’ve always opposed capital punishment. Now I’m not so sure.”

His eyes dulled over in the same way they had during the first interview, as though he had gone to a place inside himself where no one could follow. “I don’t think I want to do this anymore.”

“You didn’t stop killing people in 1994, did you? There were other victims, in other towns or other states, weren’t there?”

“No.”

“People like you can’t shut down the mechanism. It’s always there. It’s like a craving for morphine or pornography or booze or any other addiction, except much worse. How do you give up tearing the hands off the clock and changing history?”

“You’re not going to write the book, are you?”

“No. You’re not only untrustworthy as a source, you’re too depressing a subject. I’m going to do something else, though. I’m going to publish an article or a series of articles stating my belief that you never stopped killing. That if anyone ever deserved the death penalty, it’s you.”

The room was sour with his smell. He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted forward, his eyes glowering under his brows. His unshaved cheeks looked smeared with soot. “You came here acting like an intellectual. You’re nothing but a cunt and not worth my time. On the gate, boss man!” he said.