“No.”
“Alafair, are you sure the truck parked across the street was the same one that tailgated you? You couldn’t see the driver’s face, right?”
I saw a light in her eyes that I had seen in the eyes of many other women who had reported stalkers or obscene callers or voyeurs or violent and dangerous men who made their lives miserable. Sometimes their complaints got lost in procedure; sometimes they were trivialized and conveniently ignored. In most homicides involving female victims, there’s a long paper history leading up to the woman’s death. If someone feels this is an overly dour depiction, I recommend he visit a shelter for battered women.
“I wish I hadn’t said anything, Dave.”
“I didn’t explain myself very well. A homeless or deranged man was up on the old logging road behind the house. I’m just trying to put that guy together with the guy in the skinned-up truck. The two don’t fit. Why would some guy in Montana single you out as the object of his obsession?”
“I didn’t say he did. I told you what happened. But it didn’t sink in. So forget it.”
“The sheriff is going to pick up Dixon and talk with him. I’ll call him and tell him about the guy who tailgated you.”
“He didn’t just tailgate me. He was following me. For seven miles.”
“I know.”
“Then stop talking to me like I’m an idiot.”
“The sheriff said a seventeen-year-old Indian girl disappeared six days ago. He thinks she may be dead. Maybe there’s a very bad guy operating around here, Alafair.”
She rubbed her temples and widened her eyes and closed them and opened them again, as though revisiting an experience she couldn’t get out of her head. “I know who he is. I know, I know, I know.”
“The abductor of the Indian girl?”
“The man who followed me today. I thought his face was in shadow because he had his visor down. I don’t think that’s what I saw at all. I think he was unshaved and had a long face like a Viking’s. I think I sat across a table from him three years ago and talked to him while he breathed through his mouth and tried to slip his finger on top of my hand. I remember his hair in particular. He put gel on it once so he could slick it back and impress me.”
“Don’t do this.”
“It was him, Dave. I feel sick to my stomach.”
“Asa Surrette is dead. He’s not only dead, he’s probably in hell.”
“I knew you would say that,” she replied. “I just knew it.”
Three years earlier, Alafair told me of her plans to write a nonfiction book about a psychopath who for years had tortured, raped, and murdered ordinary family people in the land of Dorothy and the yellow-brick road, making his victims suffer as much as possible before he strangled or suffocated them. She told me this at the kitchen table in our home on East Main in New Iberia, on the banks of Bayou Teche, while the sun burned in a molten red orb beyond the live oaks in our yard, the moss in the limbs black against the sky. Her research would begin with an interview at the maximum-security unit east of Wichita, where the killer was kept in twenty-three-hour lockdown.
I told her what I thought of the idea.
“Why drizzle on the parade when you can pour?” she said.
She had a degree in psychology from Reed, didn’t she? She was a Stanford law student who would probably clerk at the Ninth Circuit Court, wasn’t she?
I told Alafair not to go near him. I told her every horrible story I could remember about the serial killers and sadists and sex predators I had known. I told her of the iniquitous light in their eyes when they tried to tantalize listeners with details about their methods in stalking victims, and the obvious pleasure they took when they suggested other bodies were out there. I told her of their inability to understand the level of suffering and despair they had imposed upon others. I told her how they picked at themselves while they talked and how their eyes reached past you and settled on someone who did not know he or she was being watched. I told her of their thespian performances when they made the big score in custody — namely, finding a defense psychiatrist who would buy into their claims of multiple personalities and other psychological complexities that gave them the dimensions of Titans.
They saw themselves as players in a Homeric epic, but what was the reality? They were terrified at the prospect of being transferred into “gen” or “main pop,” where they would be shanked in the yard or the shower or lit up in their cells with a Molotov.
I compared them to the moral cowards who sat in the dock at Nuremberg. I told her that Jack the Ripper’s name was used today with an almost comic-book connotation because his victims were the poorest and most desperate and vulnerable of women in London’s East End. I told her I doubted Jack would have been given the sobriquet “Ripper” by the newspapers of his time if the victims were the wealthy female members of Victorian society. I told her of his final victim, an Irish prostitute who slept every night in either the workhouse or an alley. Her name was Mary Jane Kelly. The last words she spoke to a friend on the evening she died were “How do you like me jolly hat?”
“If you go inside the mind of a guy like Surrette, you’ll never be the same,” I told her.
“I can’t handle it, but reporters from the Wichita Eagle can?”
“People ‘handle’ cancer. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with.”
“I’ve already made the arrangement. I’m driving to Wichita tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You will not be happy until you do just that.”
“You worry too much. I’ll be fine.”
“Alf—”
“Stop calling me that name.”
“Be careful.”
“He’s just a man. He’s not Lucifer. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not your little girl anymore.”
“Don’t ever say that again. Never.”
Wyatt Dixon saw no great puzzle at work in the universe. You got yourself squeezed out of a woman’s womb; you got the hell away from home as soon as you could; and you enjoyed every pleasure the earth had to offer and busted up any man who claimed he had authority over you. You rodeoed and got bull-hooked and stove in and stirrup-drug and flung into the boards and whipped like a rag doll when you tied yourself down with a suicide wrap, but you wore your scars like the Medal of Honor, and you took the women you wanted and drank whiskey like soda water and doffed your hat to no man and in effect said to hell with the rest of the human race.
Then one day, way down the line, on a morning you thought might last forever, you heard a whistle blow unexpectedly, and minutes later, against all your wishes, you climbed aboard a passing freight and sat on the spine and rode through a canyon alongside a river that had no name, wondering what lay in store on the far side of the Divide. Was it the end of the track? Or was the party just getting started?
He didn’t study on his childhood. He wasn’t sure he’d had one. He knew he was born in a boxcar not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. He also knew he and his family lived in a tenant shack up in Northeast Texas and picked cotton and broke corn close to the birthplace of Audie Murphy. Sometimes he had dreams about his father and would see him sitting by the window, dressed in strap overalls without a shirt, his dugs like those of a woman, drinking from a fruit jar and staring at a railroad track on which a train never passed. For the young boy, the father’s silence could be like a scream. Wyatt would wake from the dream and sit for a long time on the side of the bed, waiting for the light to break in the east and burn all the shadows from the room.
He had learned long ago not to walk too far through the corridors of his soul. Whenever he allowed himself a moment of reverie, the scene was specific and controlled and always the same: He was in the bucking chute at a fairgrounds, his thighs clamped down on the horse’s sides, the haze and dust from the arena iridescent in the lights blazing overhead, a Ferris wheel rotating against a salmon-colored sky, the audience in the stands waiting breathlessly for the moment when Wyatt would say, “Outside!”