I had known sociopaths and sadists in the army and in Vietnam. I had known them in law enforcement and in prisons and in lockdown units where they awaited execution. But Surrette’s letter was the cruelest use of language I had ever read. My advice is that no person of goodwill should ever read this man’s words, thereby giving a second life to his deeds.
Albert had let me appropriate his M-1, and I not only planned to hang on to it, I planned to use it. Maybe these were foolish and vain thoughts, but sometimes our own self-assurances are our only means of dealing with problems that are far greater than their social remedies. Sometimes, at least in your head, you have to link arms with Doc Holliday and the Earp boys and stroll on down to the O.K. Corral and chat up the Clantons in a way they understand.
I took the M-1 and the bandolier of clips to our room and put them in the closet, then picked up the telephone and made a call I didn’t want to make, primarily because I knew it would be a total waste of time.
I was rerouted a couple of times, but finally, I was connected to a special agent at the FBI named James Martini. “I’ve heard of you,” he said.
“You have?” I said.
“Apparently, you and your friend Purcel have quite a history with us down in Louisiana.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“How can we be of help?” he replied.
“I think Asa Surrette, the killer from Kansas, is alive and well. I also think he kidnapped the waitress Rhonda Fayhee from her home by Lookout Pass.”
“You got that scoped out pretty good?”
“No, not at all. I have no investigative power or legal authority in the state of Montana. That’s why I called you. I think Rhonda Fayhee is alive.”
“How is it you know that?”
I told him about my conversation with Seymour Little. I told him about the female items and the prescriptions for OxyContin and downers Seymour had been forced to pick up at the pharmacy by a man who trailed a fecal odor into the newsstand.
“Why do you conclude the prescriptions are being used to sedate the waitress?”
“Surrette is a trophy hunter. He’s about to send us one.”
“A lot of people say Surrette is dead.”
“He’s been on the property where we’re currently living. He left a message on the wall of a cave behind the house.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a grandiose statement based on an excerpt from the Bible.”
“Could you take a photograph of that and e-mail it to me?”
“I burned it.”
“You set lots of fires in caves, do you?”
I could feel my pulse beating in my throat.
“You there?” he said.
“It was an impulsive moment.”
“Really? An aunt of the missing woman received a postcard from the missing woman yesterday. It was postmarked Boise, Idaho. The handwriting seems to be hers.”
“You’re wrong, sir.”
“We’ll try to blunder through and see what happens,” he replied.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Forget I called. We’ll update you if we come across any information we think you should have.”
“You’ll do what?” he said.
I hung up, feeling foolish and vain and ultimately old, even for my years. Also, I had not told him about Gretchen Horowitz’s possible contact with Surrette. Why? I thought his agency wanted to hang her out to dry and I would be giving them the ammunition to do it. If they went after Gretchen for obstruction, of which she may have been guilty, they might take Alafair for good measure. What about the waitress named Rhonda Fayhee? I couldn’t get her off my mind. I called Special Agent James Martini back. “Someone I know may have established contact with Surrette,” I said. “This individual ran a notice in the personals and got a response from a guy who sounds like Surrette.”
“You mean you heard his voice?”
“No, I have not heard his voice. My daughter, Alafair, interviewed him in a Kansas prison. I think he has tried to kill her. I think he’ll try again. That’s why I have a personal stake in the investigation.”
“What’s the name of the person who made contact with the guy you think is Surrette?”
My head was pounding, the veins in my wrists throbbing. “Gretchen Horowitz,” I said.
“She’s a friend of yours?”
“You could say that.”
“Believe me, if I meet you in person, I’ll have a lot to say to you,” he replied.
I WENT TO ALAFAIR’S room and told her what I had just done. She looked at me for a long time. The window was open, and I could hear the leaves of last winter scudding dryly across the driveway. “I don’t know what to say, Dave,” she said. “Do you want to tell Gretchen or should I?”
“I will.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Rhonda Fayhee’s life is in the balance.”
“How about Gretchen’s?”
“Gretchen has choices. The waitress doesn’t,” I said.
She had been working on her manuscript with a blue pencil, deleting adjectives that were not in the predicate form, compressing sentences, paring the dialogue down to the bone until there wasn’t a rattle in a single line. She set her pencil at the top of a page and stared out the window. A brief sun shower had just blown through the valley, and a rainbow had descended out of the clouds into the middle of the north pasture, where the horses were standing under a clump of cottonwoods. “I know you’ve acted in conscience,” she said. “But I feel emptier than I think I’ve ever felt. I want to go away and be alone for a long while. It’s not your fault, so you don’t need to say anything more. As a great favor, please don’t say anything to me at all. I’ll be in your debt.”
She got up from her chair and walked downstairs and out the door. I heard her car start and drive away. When I looked at the pasture again, the rainbow had dissolved into a poisonous patch of henbane as quickly as it had formed.
I AM SURE THERE are those who would dismiss Gretchen Horowitz as a sociopath. Her body count would indicate that. However, she was a complex human being, and I suspected that more than one person lived inside her skin. Sigmund Freud borrowed most of his clinical terminology from the ancient Greeks, who possessed a cultural insight into the foibles of human behavior like no civilization before or since. If I’ve learned anything at all from my years, it’s the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them.
I put the face of the pimp named Mack on the enemy soldiers I killed in Vietnam. What if I had not gone to Vietnam? Would I have found another way to release my rage upon other surrogates here in the United States? As a police officer, yes.
Gretchen drove up the dirt road at five that afternoon. She parked her pickup beside the north pasture and started walking toward the pedestrian gate. From the yard I could see Clete in front of their cabin, barbecuing a pork roast on the grill, fanning the smoke out of his face. I headed Gretchen off before she could go through the gate. “I have to talk to you,” I said.
She turned toward me. As always, there was a martial element in her body language, an intensity in her eyes, that you did not want to directly confront. She was holding a manila envelope in her right hand. “What is it?” she said.
“I dimed you with the feds.”
“About what?”
“Your contact with Asa Surrette.”
“Alafair told you I talked with him?”
“I wouldn’t have called them, Gretchen, but I think Rhonda Fayhee may still be alive.”
“So you’re telling me I might get picked up for obstruction or even aiding and abetting?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Now you want absolution? That’s what this is about?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said.
“Yeah, you did. You could have talked to me
first. While the local jokers were figuring out ways to put away me or Wyatt Dixon, Alafair and I did some research on Felicity Louviere.”
“What did you find out?”
“Her mother died in Mandeville. Insanity evidently runs in the family. Felicity was known as anybody’s punch before Caspian Younger met her. You know what else we found out?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
“She got involved with some rural black people whose neighborhoods were being used as sludge ponds for petrochemical waste. She tried to stop a tanker truck from dumping a load in an open pit in St. James Parish and was almost run over.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“What’s it sound like? For all I know, she’s a schizoid. But I think better of her than I did. We also found out that Love Younger kept fuck pads in Atlantic City and Vegas and Puerto Rico, in the same casino hotels where his son had six-figure credit lines.”
“He’s not the oil industry’s answer to Cotton Mather?”
She stepped closer to me, her chest rising and falling, her shirt pulled tight on her shoulders. “I don’t like people fucking me over, Dave. And I think that’s what you did.”
“If you’d squared with your father and me, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
“What makes you think I didn’t square with him?”
I looked past her shoulder at Clete flipping the roast with a fork on the grill, his face happy at the prospect of having his daughter home and the possibility of inviting his friends to dinner. “I believe you did what you thought was right, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “I apologize if I’ve caused you harm.”
She puffed out one cheek and tapped the heel of her fist on the fence rail. “I was parked down at Harvest Foods. I’d left my window partly down. When I came outside, this had been dropped on the seat.”
She removed an eight-by-ten photograph from the manila folder and handed it to me. It was probably taken without a flash. The interior of the room was gray, the walls concrete and without windows, like those in a basement. The lighting was poor. A woman dressed only in her undergarments was bound in a chair, a gag tied across her mouth. The eyes had been razored out of the photo, creating the effect of a mask, making any positive identification of the woman impossible.
“Here’s the note that came with it,” Gretchen said. “It’s a Xerox. You can bet it and the photo and the envelope are clean.”
Regardless, I held the sheet of paper by the edges. The note was typed, unlike the one sent by Surrette to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. If the sender was Surrette, he was a smart man. There was no way to compare the notes. Even the dashes between the sentences had been replaced with conventional punctuation. It read:
Dear Munchkin,
I have already started casting our film. I think this lady is perfect for the role of “the sacrificial queen,” don’t you? We can add others as we go. You have no idea how many “volunteers” are out there and how easily recruited they can be. Please bring your equipment to our first meeting and we’ll get started immediately. We’ll have some cherry pie.
Sincerely,
Your biggest fan,
A.
“This has to go to the sheriff and the FBI,” I said.
“That’s what he wants me to do,” she replied.
“How do you figure that?”
“Because Surrette will disappear and I’ll look like an idiot. In the meantime, we’ll go crazy thinking about what he’s doing to that girl.”
“I’ll go with you to the federal building in Missoula.”
“You can take the note and the photograph, Dave, and do whatever you want with them.”
She unhitched the chain on the gate and started through it.
“You’re the beloved daughter of my oldest and best friend, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “Do you believe I would deliberately hurt either of you? Do you honestly believe that?”
She rechained the gate and didn’t look back. I might as well have been speaking to the wind.
ON WEDNESDAY, WYATT Dixon was building a sweat lodge in his side yard with stones from the river, hauling them bare-chested uphill in a wheelbarrow, when he saw a chauffeured black Chrysler pull off the highway and park by the entrance to the steel footbridge on the opposite bank. Love Younger got out of the backseat and began walking across the bridge, his rubber-booted feet clanging on the grid, a straw creel hung from one shoulder, a split-bamboo fly rod in his right hand, a cork sun helmet on his head.
He stepped off the bridge and walked down to the water’s edge, where Wyatt was lifting a large stone into the wheelbarrow. “You mind if I fish along the front of your property?” he asked.
“Montana law allows you to go through anybody’s land, long as you’re within the flood line of the river,” Wyatt said.
“I heard there’s a deep hole under the bridge here. They say it’s full of German browns.”
“Have at it,” Wyatt said. He sat high up on the bank, a long-stemmed weed between his teeth, his straw hat slanted down on his forehead, and watched the older man wade into the water and thread his nylon leader through the eyelet of a woolly worm. What’s really on your mind, old man? he thought.
Wyatt could not reconcile the proportions of the older man with his wealth and status. Love Younger had the neck of a bull and the hands of a bricklayer. The few rich people Wyatt had known did not resemble Love Younger. Did Younger come up the hard way, racking pipe and wrestling a drill bit in the oil field? Or had someone bequeathed him money, a rich wife, maybe? Wyatt did not believe that great wealth came to people through hard work. If that were true, almost everyone would be rich.
He got to his feet. “You won’t catch none like that,” he said.
“Oh?” Younger said, turning around in the water, the current cutting across his knees.
“You have to face the opposite bank and throw the woolly worm at eleven o’clock from you. Then you let your line billow out in a big bell. As your worm sinks, it’ll swing past you and straighten the line. That’s when the hackle on your worm will start pulsing. By that time the line will be at two o’clock and the worm will be drifting right above the bottom. Them browns will flat tear it up. The best time is in the fall, when they spawn. They’ll knock the rod plumb out of your hand.”
Wyatt knew Younger was not listening, and he wondered why he was going to such lengths to explain a fishing technique to a man who probably cared little or nothing about it.
“I see you’re an expert,” Younger said, wading out of the stream. “Can I sit down?”
“Suit yourself.”
“I’d like to buy that acreage you have behind Albert Hollister’s place.”
“It’s owned by the Nature Conservancy. I lease the grazing rights.”
Younger’s eyes dropped to Wyatt’s shoulders and back. “Where’d you get those scars, boy?”
“On the circuit. Before that, my pap give them out free.”
“He was a harsh disciplinarian?”
“He couldn’t spell the goddamn word.”
Younger opened his straw creel and took out a bottle of dark German beer. “You want one?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“You look like you’re part Indian. Your profile, I mean.”
“That’s what people tell me. I ain’t.”
“What’d your folks do?”
“Chopped cotton and broke corn. My pap taught me how to put dirt clods in the bag when we weighed in. Sometimes my mother cleaned at a motel on the highway, at least when they was still drilling there’bouts.”
“My father made shine and transported it up to Detroit,” Younger said. “I was fifteen before we had a wood floor. Your pap wasn’t much good, huh?”
“I don’t know what he was. I don’t study on it no more.”
Younger gazed at the mountains that bordered the river and at the cottonwoods that grew along the banks, their boughs swelling in the breeze. “You’ve got yourself a fine place here,” he sa
id.
Wyatt popped a pimple on the top of his shoulder and didn’t reply. He wiped his fingers on his jeans.
“Name your price.”
“I ain’t got one. That’s ’cause it ain’t for sale.”
“You sound like a man who’s at peace.”
“Peace is what you get in the graveyard, Mr. Younger.”
“I get you mad about something?”
Wyatt pulled the weed out of his mouth and flipped it down the bank. “I went up to your place to tell you Bill Pepper was trying to put your granddaughter’s death on me. You had me thrown off the property. Now you cain’t wait to give me a suitcase full of cash.”
“Maybe we have a lot in common, boy.”
“I don’t like nobody calling me that.”
“I had a son like you. He had no fear. He was an aviator.”
“What happened to him?”
“He crashed in a desert and died of thirst. Another son died in a car wreck. I had my daughter lobotomized.”
Wyatt didn’t reply. He could feel the older man’s eyes on the side of his face.
“In ancient times, you would have been a gladiator, Mr. Dixon.”
“I think I’ll stick to rodeoing.”
“It’s been an honor talking to you,” Younger said. He put one hand on Wyatt’s shoulder and got to his feet. His hand felt like sandpaper on Wyatt’s skin. “What became of your folks?”
“I ain’t sure. I got these blank spots in my head. I see people walk in and out of my dreams, like they’re trying to tell me something. These are people I used to know. But I cain’t remember what happened to them or who they are. I get the feeling they’re dead and they don’t like staying under the ground.”
Wyatt stared at the river for a long time and listened to the humming sound the current made through the hollowed-out places under the bank. A cloud had covered the sun, and there was an impenetrable luster on the water’s surface, as though the light that lived in the rocks and the sand on the bottom had died and the world had become a colder and more threatening place. When he looked up, he realized Love Younger had mounted the suspension bridge and was walking toward the opposite side, indifferent to the bridge’s bouncing motion or the rapids below. Wyatt tried to remember what he had said to Love Younger that might have driven him back across the river, but the words were already gone from his memory, along with the images of the people who spoke to him in his dreams and that rarely gave him rest.