“What were you doing on the Internet?”
“He told me he had terminal cancer. Some people I know in Miami hacked into his medical records. He was lying. I know what you’re thinking. I want you to stay out of it.”
“He’s going down.”
“I don’t let other people carry my water, especially you.”
“Because I wasn’t there to defend you when you were a kid?”
“It’s the other way around. You’ve been there for me in every way you could, and I’m not going to let you take my weight now.”
“You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, kid. You’ve made a documentary on music, and now you’re going to make one on the damage these shale-oil companies are doing. You can’t throw that away because of a bum like Pepper. Leave him to me.”
“That’s what you don’t understand, Clete. When a man molests a woman, he steals her identity. You don’t know who you are anymore. You feel like you don’t have an address or a mailbox or a name. You’re nothing.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“See what I mean? You don’t want to hear it. No man wants to know how painful it is. It’s like a stain you can’t wash out of your soul. I want to kill him, and I want to do it in pieces. I want him to suffer as much as possible.”
He picked up her hand. “I don’t blame you for not dime-ing him. He’s probably done it before and gotten away with it. The system chews up sexual assault victims. But I’m going to get him, and when I do, it will be for both of us.”
“I knew this was a mistake.”
“What is?”
“Telling you. You’re going to end up in prison.”
He started to speak, then gave it up and stroked her hair. His head had filled with images from her account that he knew would pursue him night and day, no matter where he went or how he tried to occupy himself. As he realized the magnitude of the theft that had been perpetrated on his daughter, he felt a sensation in his stomach that was like a flame punching a hole in a sheet of paper and spreading outward until it blackened everything it touched.
A SQUALL HAD JUST blown through Hellgate Canyon into downtown Missoula when we reached the tree-shaded neighborhood by the river where Bill Pepper lived. The limbs of the maple trees were in full leaf and shaking in great wet clusters in the wind, raindrops spotting the sidewalks, the flower baskets on Pepper’s porch whipping back and forth. It was only five-thirty, but he had turned on the lights inside. I had to knock twice before I saw him appear from the kitchen, wearing a fedora, a leather jacket on his arm. He looked through the glass straight into my face, then unlocked the bolt and opened the door. “What is it?” he asked.
Fear comes in many forms, most often as a sense of apprehension that soon disappears. What I saw in the face of Bill Pepper bordered on the kind of fear I’ve seen only in the faces of the condemned, men who had to sit in a cell and listen to the beating of their heart while awaiting the sound of a steel door swinging open and footsteps walking down a poorly lighted corridor. I’m talking about a level of fear that turns the skin gray and leaves a man’s hair soggy with sweat and his palms so stiff and dry he can’t close them.
“I met with Love Younger this morning,” I said. “I need to confirm a couple of things he told me.”
“You’re meddling in an investigation where you have no jurisdiction,” Pepper said.
“That’s not the case. My daughter was almost killed by an unknown assailant who’s still out there. Younger says you found a sporting goods salesman who sold a hunter’s bow to a guy who may have murdered Angel Deer Heart. This is information we have a right to know. Why didn’t you share it with us?”
“I’m on my way out of town for the weekend. You can come to my office Monday if you want to talk.”
“You nervous about something?” Alafair said.
“I’m in a rush. What right do you have to come to my house? To talk to me like that?” As though emboldened by his own rhetoric, he stepped out on the porch. Even in the wind, I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“Our request for information is a reasonable one, Detective Pepper,” I said. “I don’t understand why you’re upset.”
“I’m fine. I don’t know what you want or why you’re here. We’re still looking at Wyatt Dixon. To our knowledge, he’s the last person to see the girl alive.”
“We just ran into Dixon on the dirt road below Albert Hollister’s house,” I said. “He was on his way to see Gretchen Horowitz. He seemed perfectly relaxed talking to us. Does that sound like a guilty man to you?”
Pepper’s eyes looked from me to Alafair and back to me. “Are they cooking up something? Maybe claiming I abused Dixon?”
This time I didn’t respond. There was a tic below his left eye, a twitch by his mouth.
“Just tell us what you found out from the sporting goods salesman,” Alafair said. “What did the purchaser of the hunting bow look like?”
“Middle-aged. He paid with cash. It could be anybody,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”
“That’s not what you told Love Younger,” Alafair said. “You told him the purchaser was wearing the kind of bracelet Dixon sold the Indian girl.”
“I’m leaving now. I don’t have time for this,” Pepper said.
“I think your boat left the dock a little early today,” I said.
“Say again?”
“You’re ninety proof, partner. I used to start at lunchtime, too, particularly when I was warming up for the weekend. By Saturday morning I’d glow in the dark.”
I saw a strange light come into his eyes, as though he had shifted gears inside his head and was no longer thinking about any of the things he had just said. “You’re from down there. You know how they do business,” he said.
“From down where? Who is they? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“It’s got to do with Albert Hollister and the girl. They think I’m involved. I’m out. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Sir, you’re not making any sense,” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
“What is it?”
He seemed to collect himself, like a man wanting a friend. “I’m sorry for what I did. They’ve got me figured out wrong. I think I’m gonna go back to Mobile. I always liked it there, living by the salt water and pole-fishing with the nigras at sunset. It’s a peaceful life there on the bay.”
Alafair and I stared at him. It was like watching a man disappear before our eyes. “Sorry you did what?” I asked.
“For my actions. I’d undo them if I could.”
“I think you need some help,” I said.
He closed the door just as the clouds broke and started to pour down, the raindrops hitting the rooftop and sidewalks as hard as hail. If there is a charnel house for souls, I believed Bill Pepper had just found it.
ALBERT WAS GONE when we returned to the house. The rain had quit and the sky had turned into an ink wash, and Molly and I grilled steaks on the deck and took them inside and ate at the dining room table with Alafair and watched the moon rise above the Bitterroots. Albert came in later, holding a FedEx delivery, his face ruddy from the wind. “This is for Gretchen. It was by the garage,” he said. “Where is she?”
“At the cabin, I think,” I replied. “Alafair and I had a talk with one of the cops who was up at the cave. Bill Pepper. Do you know him?”
“No more than I know any of them.”
“He was half in the bag and scared about something. He said it had to do with you and somebody he called ‘the girl.’ ”
Albert shook his head. “Isn’t he the one who beat up the cowboy?”
“Yeah, he knocked Wyatt Dixon around.”
“Why spend time talking with a man like that?” Albert said. He set the FedEx box on the table. The return address was a geological lab in Austin, Texas.
AFTER SUPPER, GRETCHEN had gone into her bedroom and lain down on top of the covers, her arm across her eyes, the
n turned toward the wall and fallen asleep. Clete sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and watched her sleep. He tried to think about the choices available to him. Have a quiet talk with the sheriff? Gretchen would end up shark meat. The sheriff would pull her jacket from Miami-Dade, and no credence would be given to anything she said. And the larger problem went way beyond Gretchen’s background. Again and again, victims of sexual assault were put on the stand and torn apart while the perpetrator either smirked at the defense table or shook his head in feigned disbelief. Rapes were downgraded to battery; child molesters were given probation. There was another problem, too. There was a sick culture in law enforcement, particularly among vice cops, and everyone knew it, Clete in particular: the corner-of-the-mouth jokes, the smug moral superiority, the collective rush in having set up a successful sex sting, the legal proximity to a sybaritic world where you could get laid in any way you wanted by just flipping out your badge.
For a vice detective with some loose time on his hands, after-hours New Orleans may not have been the Baths of Caracalla, but it was a pretty good surrogate.
In Clete’s opinion, the nation was still Puritan, at least when it came to the victimization of women. The temptress brought about her own downfall. The victim was the noun, the perpetrator an adverb. The moment Gretchen testified, she would be portrayed as a contract killer from Miami who had gone willingly to Bill Pepper’s home and entered into a tryst that ended in a lurid and inconsequential denouement on the Blackfoot River. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t charged with perjury.
Clete could see the curve of her hip and the tautness of her thighs and rump against the fabric of her jeans and her back rising and falling as she slept. She had begun a spartan health regimen in California and had lost twenty pounds by dieting and working out with weights and running four miles every morning on the beach in Santa Monica. The combination of her chestnut hair and violet-colored eyes and statuesque carriage made men turn and stare as she walked by. Even more intriguing, she seemed to take no notice of the attention they paid her, as though she were a polite but temporary visitor in their midst.
It was hard for Clete to separate the daughter he was looking at now from the woman who had been called Caruso in Little Havana. Blood splatter and the curse of Cain did not rinse easily from the hands or the soul. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing about the makeup of human beings, he thought. Aside from psychopaths, every person who killed another human being took on a burden he carried for the rest of his life. The daylight hours allowed you to concentrate on making money and buying food and clothes and worrying about your bald automobile tires. The nocturnal hours were a little different. The gargoyles that lived in the unconscious had their own agenda and were not interested in the ebb and flow of your daily life. When you were in bed by yourself at four A.M., you could hear them slip their tethers and begin production of a horror movie in which you were the star, except you had no control of the events that were about to take place. How did you deal with it? You could try reds, four fingers of Jack, or even Nytol. Except you usually mortgaged the next day for a few hours of drugged sleep. There was another way: You could drop a solitary round in the cylinder of your .38 and pull back the hammer and, with one soft squeeze of the trigger, put the problem out of your mind forever.
Somehow Gretchen had escaped the life she had fallen into. But after she had shown mercy and trust to a rogue cop who had ridiculed her in front of other men, he had repaid the favor by drugging and binding her and torturing her with his genitalia. How did you address a situation like that? Did you hand your girl over to the system and hope she wasn’t degraded again? Did you allow her to return to the criminal life she had freed herself from? Did you allow others to wad up her life like a piece of used Kleenex and throw it away?
What conclusion would any reasonable person come to?
Clete wrote a note on the back of an envelope and propped the envelope against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. Then he pulled a duffel bag from the closet and checked its contents: a cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump, a box of double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls that he had hand-loaded, a .25-caliber semi-auto with acid-burned serial numbers, a push-button stiletto, latex gloves, plastic ligatures, a lead-weighted blackjack that could break a two-by-four in half, handcuffs, a set of lock picks, brass knuckles, a bottle of bleach, a slim jim, nylon fishing line, and duct tape.
Restraint, reason, working within the system?
Fuck that.
He carried the duffel bag outside and put it in the trunk of the Caddy and drove away.
The note on the table read:
Don’t worry about anything, kid. I’ll be back before morning. All this will be behind us.
Love,
Your pop,
Cletus
ONE HOUR LATER, Gretchen woke and did not know where she was; nor, for the moment, did she remember the events that had occurred in the home of Bill Pepper or on the banks of the Blackfoot River. Then she realized the sleep was an illusion and the reality was the assault on her person committed by Bill Pepper. The touch of his hands and his genitalia seemed to cling to her skin like wet cobweb, and the more she rubbed her hands on herself, the more she seemed to re-create what he had done to her, as though she had become a surrogate for the man who assaulted her.
She walked to the kitchen table and read the note Clete had left. She set it down and stood for a long time under the lightbulb that hung directly over her head, trying to think of answers to her situation and his. Through the window, she saw a cinnamon cub come out of the trees on the hillside and work his way through the fence in the moonlight. Albert had sent a chain e-mail through the valley telling others that the cub had been separated from his mother and to be careful while driving down the dirt road. The cub pulled his hind foot loose from the fence, the smooth wire twanging on the posts, then disappeared into the tall grass, creating a path like a submarine gliding just below the surface of the ocean. When Gretchen stepped out on the gallery, the cub bounded across the creek and through the cottonwoods, his rump bouncing up and down in the moonlight.
Gretchen felt a tear in her eye as she watched the cub scramble under the rail fence on the far side of the pasture and head up the hill over rocks and snags into the darkness, the slag from an old geological slide rattling down the incline.
Bill Pepper had lied to her about everything except one item. He’d told the truth when he said he had thrown her tote bag in a tree by the side of the dirt road. What he had not told her was his motivation, which was probably to show his contempt for her possessions and to create a situation where he would continue to control her when she was forced to climb naked into a tree to recover what he had taken from her.
She removed her Airweight .38 from under her pillow and placed it in the bag, alongside the expandable baton and can of Mace, which were still in the bag when she plucked it out of the tree. Then she put on her scarf and her red nylon jacket, the same kind James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. As she drove slowly under the arch onto the road in her chopped-down pickup, the subdued power of the Merc engine vibrating through the floor stick into her palm, she thought she saw the cub moving through the trees and wondered if he would find safe harbor for the night.
BILL PEPPER TURNED his van off the two-lane highway and descended a gravel road through a grove of birch trees to the edge of Swan Lake. The moon was above the mountains, turning the lake into an oxidized mirror filled with pools of both shadow and light, the dark green sweep of the weeds as thick and undulating as wheat below the surface. He got out of his van and glanced once over his shoulder at the highway, then entered the shingled cottage at the bottom of the incline and locked the door behind him.
Bill Pepper loved his cottage. It was snug and warm during the hunting season, and in summer it was a retreat from the city and the tourists who flocked to western Montana and clogged the highways with their campers and mobile homes. This night was different; the lake and the c
ottage provided little comfort for the problems that had beset him. A heart-pounding fear had followed him all the way from Missoula, fouling his blood and his thoughts and his vision and any hope of restoring his self-respect. For the first time in his life, Bill Pepper wondered if he was a coward.
Couldn’t he take the heat? He’d been a patrolman in South Central and Compton and what the Hispanics called East Los, and he’d taken sniper fire through his windshield on the Harbor Freeway. Pimps and dealers got off the streets when they saw him coming. Black hookers did lap dances for him in his cruiser. An unpopular Crip who had spent two years in isolation in Pelican Bay made fun of his accent and kept calling him Goober and “Bell Pepper wit’ the big belly” when Pepper tried to question him about an armed robbery. Bill smiled tolerantly and looked once over his shoulder and then smiled again just before he pinned the Crip’s head against a brick wall with a baton and spat in his face and broke his windpipe. The irony was that the street people and even members of the Eighth Street Crips started yelling at his cruiser from the sidewalks, “Hey, Mr. Bill, you de motherfuckin’ man!”
He set his Glock on the coffee table in the small living room and looked out at the vastness of the lake and the Swan Peaks rising like jagged tin in the south, and directly across from the cottage, a thickly wooded mountain that was black against a sky twinkling with stars. Just one week ago opportunities had been opening up for him right and left: He had money in the bank, a new van, and was reporting to one of the richest men in the United States. Then it all went south because of a girl named Gretchen Horowitz. An idle remark about her being butch, that’s all it was, and he got a shitload of grief dropped on his head. How about the uniformed deputy who wised off first? Why didn’t the girl go after him?
He had not turned on the lights in the cottage. He got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, then sat back down and uncapped a pint of brandy and mixed it with milk in a jelly glass and drank it in the dark. The leafy canopy of the birch trees was swaying in the moonlight, the shadows sliding back and forth on his lawn and porch. If Bill Pepper had learned any lesson in life, it was that terrible events always had small beginnings. His father had befriended a Negro vagabond and lost his life. The Watts riot had begun not because of police beating an innocent person but because a crowd had gathered when a patrolman arrested a black taxi driver who was DWI. Within days National Guardsmen were firing .30-caliber machine guns into apartment buildings and eighty-one people were dead and flames were rising from a quarter of the city.