“Where is he?” Love Younger asked.
“The authorities in Kansas say he died in a collision involving a gasoline truck and a prison van.”
His eyes searched my face. “You don’t believe that?” he asked.
“Earlier this week my daughter was followed by a man in a skinned-up Ford pickup. She thinks it was Asa Surrette.”
“I asked if you believe he’s dead,” Younger said.
“Somebody scratched a message on a cave wall on the hillside above Albert Hollister’s house. It contained biblical allusions that indicate the message writer is megalomaniacal. Could Surrette have written a message of that kind? It’s possible.”
“Why would Angel go off with a guy like that?” Caspian said. His chin was tilted upward, his throat coated with whiskers that looked like steel filings, a hazy smile in his eyes.
“I don’t know, sir,” I replied.
“Be quiet, Caspian,” Love Younger said.
“There’s something we skipped over here, Mr. Younger,” Clete said. “You mentioned this guy Pepper. Evidently, he’s been reporting to you, but he didn’t report the same information to Dave, whose daughter is at risk. He also told you Dixon might have a partner. For me that doesn’t flush. From what I understand, Dixon’s a loner, a rodeo man bikers don’t mess with. A guy like that doesn’t have to rely on backup. Plus, his jacket has been clean since he got out of Deer Lodge.”
“His what?” Younger said.
“His record. The guy probably has Kryptonite for a brain, but count on it, he’s not our guy,” Clete said.
“You’re saying that Pepper is trying to earn his way into my good graces by manufacturing information?” Younger said.
“It crossed my mind,” Clete said.
Younger gazed out the window at the long floodplain of the Clark Fork and the great geological gorge the river flowed into. “How do we find out if Surrette is dead or alive?”
“You don’t,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“When is the last time any state of its own volition admitted it was wrong about anything?” I said.
Younger picked up the 1851 Colt and rubbed an oily rag across its blue-black surfaces, cocking back the hammer, locking the cylinder into place. “I made this like new,” he said. “It took me six weeks, but I did it. It’s like traveling back in time and somehow defying mortality. Supposedly, Wild Bill Hickok was carrying this when he got pushed into a corner by John Wesley Hardin.”
I waited for him to go on, not understanding his point.
“It didn’t help Hickok,” he said. “Wes Hardin backed him down. It was the only time Wild Bill ever cut bait. Past or present, our best-laid plans seem to go astray, don’t they?”
He set the revolver down heavily on an oilcloth, his face wan and older somehow, his hands as small as a child’s.
Clete and I were both silent as we drove down the hill to catch the interstate back to Missoula. The sun was bright through the fir and pine and spruce trees lining the road, the light almost blinding when it splintered on the wet needles. The Younger enclave, with its grand vistas, seemed to validate all the basic tenets of the American Dream. Love Younger had risen from the most humble of origins and created a fortune out of virtually nothing. He had also beaten the descendants of the robber barons at their own game. I thought I understood why people were fascinated with him. If such good fortune could happen to him, it could happen to any of us, right? There were those who probably wished to touch the hem of his cloak so they could be made over in his image. But as Clete’s Caddy coasted down the hillside through shadows that looked like saber points falling across the road, I felt only pity for Love Younger and his family.
“How do you read all that back there?” Clete asked.
“I don’t. I’ve never understood the rich.”
“What’s to understand? They get a more expensive plot in the boneyard than the rest of us.”
“Pepper is bad news. He’s using the investigation for his own purposes,” I said.
“So we’ll have a talk with him. Did you catch the broad’s accent?”
“No,” I lied.
“She’s from New Orleans or somewhere nearby.” Clete looked sideways at me.
“Good. Now watch the road.”
“I was just saying.”
“I know what you were saying. You also mentioned she wasn’t wearing any undergarments.”
“I’m not supposed to notice something like that?”
“We’re not getting personally involved with these people. You got it?”
“You know what the essential difference is between the two of us, noble mon?”
“One of us falls in love with every injured woman he sees. Then he finds out he’s in the sack with the Antichrist. Sound like anyone you know?”
“No, I recognize the presence of my flopper in my life. It has X-ray vision and goes on autopilot whenever it wants. Sometimes it does the thinking for both of us. I’ve accepted that. I think that’s a big breakthrough. You might try a little humility sometime, Streak.”
“I’m not going to listen to this. I know what’s coming. You can’t wait to get in trouble again. I’ve never seen anything like it. Why don’t you grow up?”
“You grow up, you grow old. Who wants to do that? Relax. Think cool thoughts and don’t eat fried foods. You know who said that? Satchel Paige. Everything is very copacetic. You got my word on that.”
After her last interview with Asa Surrette, Alafair published three articles about his crimes, their heinous nature, and the compulsive pattern that characterized his behavior from childhood until the day he was arrested. The thesis in each article was clinical in nature and ultimately not up for argument: A serial killer does not turn his compulsions on and off, as you do a noisy faucet. Surrette and his attorney maintained he had committed no crimes after the reinstatement of capital punishment in Kansas in 1994. Alafair believed otherwise.
The articles used direct quotations from the interview, and their arrangement created a damning portrayal of a man to whom cruelty, sexual conquest, bloodlust, and a pathological lack of remorse were a way of life.
At the time I asked if she had not become too emotionally involved in the subject.
“I have the quotes on tape. I didn’t make them up. He’s evil. The real question is, how could a man like this kill people in the same city for twenty years?” she said.
That was my kid.
When I returned from Love Younger’s home, Alafair asked me to come upstairs. An envelope and a piece of typewriter paper with a letter written on it in blue ink rested on her desk, next to her computer. “I never showed you this, Dave. Surrette wrote it to me after the articles were published,” she said.
“Why didn’t you want me to see it?”
“Because I thought it would make you mad. Read it.”
A strange thing happened. I didn’t want to touch a sheet of paper that Surrette had handled. I’ve known every kind of man in the world, and even held the hand of a man on the way to his electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. But I did not want to place my fingers on the paper that Asa Surrette had touched. I walked to her desk and looked down at his writing. His penmanship, if it could be called that, was bizarre. The paper was unlined, but every sentence, every word, every letter, was as uniform and neat and straight as the print created by a Linotype machine. Round letters were flattened and reduced to geometric slash marks, as though the penman believed forming a circle violated a principle. The greater oddity was the absence of punctuation. Surrette’s sentences and phrases were set apart by dashes rather than by periods and commas, as though he could not disconnect from his own stream of consciousness, or perhaps because he believed his own thought processes had neither a beginning nor an end. This is what he wrote in his prison cell and mailed through the censor to my daughter: