Dale opened his hands above the tabletop. “Look, I don’t even know who these skinheads are except for him. . .” He tapped the photo of the youngest boy again. “Sandy Whittaker told me that her nephew was a member of this local neo-Nazi group. They threatened me when I first got here in October. Then the other day—“
The day before Michelle Staffney showed up on Christmas Eve.
“The day before Christmas Eve they jumped me at the KWIK’N’EZ. You can ask the fat girl who works there. I got in my Land Cruiser and drove away. They chased me in their pickup trucks. I took the back way from Jubilee College Road and lost them at the muddy old quarry area.”
“‘Back way’ is right,” said the sheriff. “That’s all private land. Why would you drive across country like that with these bad boys after you?”
Dale shrugged. “I remembered Gypsy Lane. It’s an old overgrown road that we used to. . .”
“I know,” interrupted McKown. “My uncle Bobby talked about it. What happened out there?”
“Nothing,” said Dale. “My truck got through the mud. Theirs didn’t. I drove on back to the McBride farm.”
“Were the boys all alive when you left them?” McKown asked softly.
Dale’s jaw almost dropped. “Of coursethey were alive. Just muddy. Aren’t they alive now? I mean. . .”
McKown swept the photos back into the folder. “We don’t know where they are, Professor Stewart. A farmer found their pickup trucks out there in the mud yesterday afternoon. One of the pickups got turned on its side. . .”
“Yes,” said Dale. “I saw that. The green Ford followed me up and over a muddy hill there and tipped over at the bottom. But both boys—both men —got out of it. No one was hurt.”
“You sure of that, Professor?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I saw them hopping around and cursing at me. Besides, the chase—even the truck tipping over—all happened in extreme slow motion. No one was going fast enough to get hurt.”
“Why do you think they were chasing you?”
Dale held back his anger at being interrogated. “Sandy Whittaker said that Derek and his pals had read on the Internet some essays I wrote about right-wing groups in Montana,” he said slowly. “The skinheads called me names both times they encountered me—‘Jew lover,’ that sort of thing—so I presume that’s why they wanted to hurt me.”
“Do you think they would have hurt you that day, Professor?”
“I think they would have killed me that day, Sheriff McKown. If they’d caught me.”
“Did you want to hurt them?”
Dale returned the sheriff’s hard gaze with a hard look of his own. “I would have happily killed them that day, Sheriff McKown. But I didn’t. If you’ve been out there you must know that. They must have walked out of that muddy mess and left tracks.”
“They did,” said McKown. “But we lost their tracks up at the cemetery.”
Dale almost laughed. “You think I jumped them up at the cemetery? Killed all of them? Hid their bodies somewhere? Just me against five skinheads less than half my age?”
McKown smiled again. “You had a weapon.”
“The Savage over-and-under?” said Dale, literally not believing this conversation. “I didn’t have it with me.”
McKown nodded, but not reassuringly.
“And it’s a single-shot,” Dale said with some heat. “You think I went home and got the over-and-under, went back to the cemetery, and shot them all? You think they’d just stand around there and wait to be shot while I reloaded?”
McKown said nothing.
“And then why would I call you about the dogs and Michelle. . . about this delusion of mine the next day?” Dale went on, losing the heat of anger and almost faltering. “To throw you off the trail of the skinhead murders?”
“Doesn’t sound very likely, does it?” McKown said agreeably.
“Not something a sane person would do.” Dale’s voice sounded bleak even to himself.
“No,” said McKown.
“Are you going to arrest me now, Sheriff?”
“No, Professor Stewart, I’m going to drive you back to the McBride place and let you get on with your day. We can stop over at the pharmacy on the way so you can get your prescription. And I will ask you to stay around the area here until we get some of this confusion cleared up.”
Dale could only nod.
“Oh, there is one other thing.”
Dale waited. He remembered that Peter Falk as Columbo always said that right before trapping the suspect into confession.
“Would you be so kind as to sign this for me?” McKown moved the folder and slid a copy of Massacre Moon: A Jim Bridger Mountain Man Novel across the scuffed tabletop. The sheriff unbuttoned his shirt pocket to retrieve a ballpoint pen. “It’d be a real treat if you could sign it ‘To Bill, Bobby’s Nephew.’ We’re both real big fans.”
It was only early afternoon when Dale got home. The sheriff touched the brim of his Stetson and drove off down the lane without coming in. The house was cold. In the study, the ThinkPad was open and turned on.
>Did you really kill Clare, Dale?
TWENTY-FIVE
THE five black dogs returned shortly after midnight. Dale watched from the darkened house, through the kitchen window and then from the dark dining room and then from through the parlor drapes and then from the study as the hounds circled the house, their pelts and eyes picking up the starlight, their forms visible only as negative space against the softly glowing snow.
Dale softly slapped the bat against his palm and sighed. He was very tired. He had not slept all day or evening, and the sleep the night before had been while sitting on the kitchen floor. Now, as then, he knew that if the dogs wanted to come in, they would. They were larger than ever. Larger than barrel-chested huskies, taller than wolfhounds. If they wanted to come in, the kitchen door would not hold them out.
Feeling an urge not dissimilar from an acrophobic’s desire to leap from high places, Dale found it pleasing to consider opening the door and going out into the night, allowing them to drag him down and off. At least the waiting would be over.
He went into the darkened study. The only light here was from the glow from the words he had not disturbed in almost twelve hours.
>Did you really kill Clare, Dale?
He decided to do this thing. To have a conversation. He leaned over to type.
>Are you really Duane?
No new words appeared while he watched, of course, so he took the bat and walked the short circuit down the hallway to the kitchen and back, checking to make sure that no hounds had forced their way in through any of the unprotected windows. The question went unanswered. He had not really expected an answer.
He tried again, typing, walking, finding a response this time, tapping in more words, walking, reading, thinking, and then typing again. In this way a sort of asylum conversation ensued.
>I didn’t kill Clare. I didn’t kill anyone.
>Then why did you remember doing so?
>It wasn’t a memory. Perhaps a fantasy. And how do you know what I’m remembering or fantasizing?
>Have you reached the point, Dale, where you can’t tell your fantasies from your memories?
>I don’t know, Mr. Phantom Interlocutor. Perhaps I have. Are you a phantom or a memory?
No response on the screen when Dale returned. He tried again.
>Look, if I’d killed Clare Two Hearts, I’d be in jail right now. The memory—the fantasy—had me follow her to New Jersey and kill her and her boyfriend at a public campsite. If it had happened that way, I would have left clues everywhere—plane tickets, talking to the kid at the canoe rental place, car rental bills, credit card signatures, probably footprints and fingerprints. I would have flown back to Montana a gory mess. Ax murders aren’t antiseptic acts, you know. The cops would have arrested me within twenty-four hours. Old boyfriends are the first suspects.