Her stomach constricted, and she had to hold her breath and look into neutral space to hide the revulsion she felt. “Excuse me, I have hay fever,” she said. She took a Kleenex from her purse and blew her nose. “In your allocution, you said you did a ‘John Wayne’ on another victim. He was nineteen. This was before you stabbed and strangled his wife to death. What did you mean by a ‘John Wayne’?”
“I shot him. He grabbed my pistol and tried to kill me with it. He pulled the trigger twice, but it didn’t fire. So I shot him.”
“You were acting in self-defense at that point?”
“Yes, you could say that.”
“Does that seem like a rational point of view?”
“Your face is a little red. Is it too hot in here for you?”
“You took the body of one woman to your church and posed and photographed her. You put the body back in your van and then dumped it on the roadside. No one has ever figured that out. Do you want to talk about that?”
“Why I took her and not somebody else to the church?”
“The question is why you would kill your victim in one place and transport her to the church where you’re a parishioner. Why would you take a risk like that? Why would you photograph her in your church?”
“Maybe that’s just part of my dark side. Everybody’s got one.”
“I can’t write a book about you unless you’re honest with me.”
“I think you ask questions you already know the answers to. I think you ask questions that are supposed to degrade me.”
“My opinions mean nothing. The publisher and the reader are interested in you, not me. A large number of people will read whatever you tell me here today.”
His head was tilted on one shoulder, as though he were drowsing off or imitating a hanged man. “You’re a manipulator, but that doesn’t mean you’re smart.”
“Could be,” she said.
He straightened in his chair and shouted at the door, “On the gate, boss man!”
“You took the woman to the church to mark your territory,” she said. “Every animal does it.”
His eyes narrowed, and she saw his nostrils whiten around the rims. When the correctional officer escorted him out of the room, his eyes were bright and hard and receded in his face and still fastened on hers.
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.