The bone-crunching pain that exploded in the back of his head could have come from a sap or a chunk of pipe with a bonnet on it or maybe someone touching a Taser to his scalp. It didn’t matter. He crashed against the wall, taking the telephone stand down with him, landing on his face, his nose bleeding. He wanted to crawl away, but his arms wouldn’t work properly. A figure that smelled like rain and leaves and body heat was pulling his wrists behind him, fitting handcuffs on them, squeezing the steel tongues tightly into the flesh.
“Who are you?” Bill Pepper said.
The figure released his wrists and walked through the cottage, clicking off all the lights. The hallway dropped into total darkness. The figure closed the door to the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned Bill Pepper over and looked down at him.
“Tell me what you want,” Bill Pepper said, straining to see the face. “Who sent you here? I can’t fix anything unless you tell me what you want.”
He heard a sound that made him think of metal snipping against metal. “No, please,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve that. Please don’t do that. Listen to me. There’s no reason for this.”
He stared up at the face coming closer to his own, his viscera turning to water, the music of George Gershwin disappearing inside a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
Chapter 8
The phone rang at six-fifteen Saturday morning. Everyone else was still asleep. I picked up the receiver and went out on the balcony and closed the door behind me. In the east, the light behind the mountains was cold and weak, hardly more than a flicker touching the bottom of the clouds. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked by the creek bed, the top white with frost. The Caddy was gone. “Hello,” I said.
“This is Sheriff Bisbee, Detective Robicheaux. I need to confirm some information. You know a man named Clete Purcel?”
“I’ve known him for forty years. He’s staying with us at Albert Hollister’s place.”
“Right now he’s staying in a jail cell in Big Fork. Do you know any reason why he’d be in the Swan Lake area?”
“Maybe he went fishing. He didn’t tell me. What’s he charged with?”
“He got stopped at a roadblock at twelve-fifteen this morning.”
“That’s not what I asked. Why are you calling me about a traffic stop in Lake County?”
“I didn’t say anything about a traffic stop. He was carrying a cut-down pump in his car. He also had burglar tools in his possession, along with latex gloves, a throw-down, a blackjack, plastic ligatures, brass knuckles, and a boxful of buckshot. I almost forgot. He had some nylon fishing line with a hoop tied on the end. The kind of rig home invaders stick through a window to turn the latch.”
“He’s a private investigator, and he runs down bail skips for a couple of bondsmen in New Orleans.”
“He told me that. Otherwise, I might have thought he was planning to break into someone’s residence. He wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“No.”
“Glad we got that out of the way. What’s the worst homicide you ever investigated?”
“I never got around to ranking them.”
“You must have been a busy man. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Bill Pepper had his problems, but nothing that would warrant the mess I saw in his cottage this morning. Do you read me?”
“I’m trying to be helpful. To my knowledge, Clete never met Detective Pepper.”
“Then I wonder why he was at Pepper’s cottage. Just passing by, I guess. Maybe you should come up here. Pepper died with a plastic bag over his head. With luck, he died of asphyxiation. The blood loss is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Are you starting to get the picture?”
“No, not at all,” I said.
“When it’s this bad, it’s usually sexual. Does your friend have problems along those lines?”
“Pepper was mutilated?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“You’re looking at the wrong guy.”
“Somebody called in a 911 and reported a maroon Cadillac convertible with a Louisiana tag leaving the crime scene.”
“Who was the caller?”
“The issue is your friend, not the caller. He seems to have an extraordinary capacity for getting into trouble.”
“He’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”
“Pepper was dead when Purcel left the cottage. Why didn’t he report it?”
I didn’t have an answer. “Ask him.”
“Oh, I will.”
“What did the killer do to Pepper?”
“Probably several things. I’ll have to wait on the coroner’s report to know for sure. His penis and testicles were in the sink. You believe in an afterlife?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I suspect Bill Pepper found his hell right here on earth,” the sheriff said.
Clete had fallen asleep sitting on a bench in a holding can somewhere on the north end of Flathead Lake. In his dream, he was a little boy and had gone with his father and mother and sisters to Pontchartrain Park for July the Fourth. It was dusk in the dream, and the sky was printed with the fireworks exploding over the lake, and he could hear the popping of rifles in the shooting gallery and the music from the carousel. His father and mother were smiling at him, and his sisters were holding hands and skipping down the boardwalk, the wind smelling of salt and caramel popcorn and candied apples.
When he woke from the dream, he looked through the window and saw the pink glow in the sky and thought the neon-striped Kamikaze packed with screaming kids was teetering against the sunset, about to rip like a scythe through the air and plummet toward the ground, then rise again into the gloaming of the day. He closed and opened his eyes and looked at the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the names burned into the ceiling with cigarette lighters, the toilet where someone’s vomit had dried on the rim.
The sheriff of Missoula County pulled up a chair to the barred door and sat down. He placed a yellow legal pad on his knee and studied it. “Other people will be talking to you, Mr. Purcel. But since it was a member of my department who was killed, I want the first crack at you,” he said.
“Y’all towed my Caddy?”
“I think that’s the least of your worries.”
“Where’s it parked?”
“You want to explain what you were doing at Bill Pepper’s cottage?”
“I already did. To anyone who’d listen. I went there to talk with him. The back door was open. He was lying in the hallway. I didn’t touch anything other than the outside doorknob. I left the inside as I’d found it. I tried to call in the 911, but I didn’t have cell service. I got stopped at the roadblock five miles from Big Fork. Where’d you put my Caddy?”
“Why were you carrying burglar tools and ligatures and all those weapons in a duffel bag?”
“I’m sentimental about memorabilia.”
“That’s pretty amusing. You think cutting off a man’s penis and testicles is amusing?”
“The guy was a dirty cop, and somebody caught up with him. But it wasn’t me.”
“How do you know he was a dirty cop?”
“He was compromising the investigation into the death of Angel Deer Heart in order to earn favor with her grandfather.”
“So you went up to his cottage on Swan Lake to talk to him about that?”
“That and a couple of other things.”
“What might the ‘other things’ be?”
“He and another idiot in your department made sexual remarks about my daughter in front of her and others. This was right after your man kicked the shit out of Wyatt Dixon.”
“When were these remarks made?”
“Why don’t you ask your crime scene investigator? He was there.”
“You were just looking out for your daughter’s interests?”