“Pepper didn’t share that information with me, Mr. Younger.”
“He didn’t?”
“No, sir. This is Clete Purcel. He’s the friend I told you about.”
“How do you do, Mr. Purcel?” Younger said. He rose slightly from his chair and shook Clete’s hand. Neither his son nor his daughter-in-law had uttered a word since we entered the room, and I had the feeling they seldom spoke unless they were spoken to. “My son and daughter-in-law adopted Angel from an orphanage by the Blackfoot Reservation. I did everything I could to keep her from drinking and hanging out with bad people. She was the sweetest little girl I ever knew. Good God, what kind of man would take a teenage girl into a barn and suffocate her?”
There are times in our lives when words are of no value. This was one of them. I have never lost a child, but I know many people who have. I have also had to knock on a family’s door and tell them their child was killed in an accident or by a predator. I have come to believe there is no greater sorrow than experiencing a loss of this kind, particularly when the child’s life was taken to satisfy the self-centered agenda of a degenerate.
“My second wife was killed by some bad men, Mr. Younger,” I said. “I didn’t want people’s sympathies, and I particularly resented people who felt they had to console me. At the time I had only one desire—to smoke the guys who killed my wife.”
He looked up at me, waiting.
“I got my wish. It didn’t give me any rest,” I said.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“Twenty-four years ago.”
“And even now you have no rest?”
“There’re some things you don’t get over.”
The foster parents of the girl were standing behind me. Caspian, the father, stepped between me and Love Younger. His unshaved and unwashed look made me think of a man who had gone into another country, one where a person can be dissolute without penalty, only to return home and find everything he owned in ruins. “I heard you say something to Felicity about a psychopath in Kansas, a man who might be living in this area,” Caspian said.
“My daughter is a writer. She had planned to write a book about a serial killer and sadist named Asa Surrette. She interviewed him two or three times but was so disgusted by the experience that she decided not to write the book. Instead, she wrote a series of articles that she hoped would expose him to the death penalty.”
“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 p
attern 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:
Dear Alafair—
I have read your articles and wanted to tell you how well written I think they are—I do not fault you for the way you have characterized me—I probably did not put my best foot forward during our talks—Nonetheless I believe there was a certain spark between us—One thing you did not understand about me was my origins—Some people were born before the primal dust of the world was created and have waited eons for their time to come round—Maybe you were also there before the hills and the mountains were settled—Perhaps we have much to share with each other—
Someplace down the road I know I will see you again—Until then I will always think of you in a fond way—
As ever—
Asa
“Why’d you dig out the letter now?” I said.
“You know why.”
“The line about being here before the primal dust of the world?”
“I looked it up. He lifted two or three lines from the Book of Psalms. It sounds like the stuff written on the wall in the cave.”
“I’m going to make some calls to Kansas.”
“You don’t think I’ve already done that? The paramedics removed the carbonized remains of four individuals from the gas truck and the prison van. I called the Eagle in Wichita and talked to a reporter who told me an interesting story: An autistic boy may have witnessed the collision. The boy told his mother that a man walking along the edge of the highway stepped in front of the gas truck and caused the accident. If that’s true, there should have been five bodies in the wreckage rather than four.”
I continued to stare at Surrette’s letter and wondered how I had allowed a man like this to come into our lives. “What did the cops say?”
“Forget the cops,” she said. “The reporter interviewed the little boy, who said the truck didn’t explode until after the collision. He said he could hear pieces of the van and truck rolling down the highway. Then he saw a great light in the sky.”
“Surrette climbed out of the van and lit the spilled fuel?”
“It’s the kind of thing he would do. Have you seen Gretchen?”
“What about her?”
“She’s acting strange. Maybe she’s still angry about those remarks the cops made up on the hillside.”
“Maybe it’s time we have a talk with Pepper. He told the grandfather of the murdered Indian girl that he’d found the store where a guy wearing the girl’s bracelet bought a hunter’s bow. Except Pepper didn’t tell us that.”
“You said ‘we,’ ” she replied.
I GOT BILL PEPPER’S address from the phone book and at four-thirty P.M., we headed down the dirt road toward the two-lane. Half a mile south of Albert’s ranch, we saw a bright orange pickup coming toward us, a man in a white straw cowboy hat behind the wheel. He stopped and rolled down the window. A bouquet of cut flowers wrapped in green tissue paper rested on the dashboard. “Howdy-doody. I come to see Miss Gretchen,” he said.
“To my knowledge, she’s not home, Mr. Dixon,” I said.
“Then I’ll have to talk to y’all.” He shut off his engine and stepped out on the road. The sun was shining in his eyes, but he seemed to take no heed. “I heard those cops talking about the message on that cave wall.”
“What about it?”
“I know what it means. I don’t want to get drug into it. Not unless that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Drug into what? You’re not making a lot of sense, partner,” I said.
“The Indians on the rez have been talking about it a long time. The Bible says he’ll come from the sea, and you’ll know him by the numbers in his name. All this countryside was under the ocean at one time. I think he’s here. That was him or one of his acolytes up there in that cave.”
Alafair leaned across the seat. “Who’s here?” she said.
“Him,” Dixon said. “Him, the one the world’s been waiting on.”
THE RIVERS WERE blown out by the spring runoff and the constant rains, but Clete knew a creek high up on a logging road in the Bitterroots where there was a long stretch of white water that boiled over into the trees, then above it a chain of beaver dams and deep pools and undulating riffles sliding so clear over the gravel bed that you could count each pebble five feet below the surface. He had loaded his ice chest with beer and canned fruit juice and ham-and-onion sandwiches and had put it on the backseat and his waders and fly rod and fly vest and net and creel in the trunk. He had put on his canvas coat and porkpie hat and was ready to go. There was only one problem. He couldn’t get his mind off his daughter.
He went back into the cabin. “Come with me,” he said.
“I have things to take care of,” she said. She was sitting at the breakfast table, her food cold on her plate, her laptop open.
“What’s bothering you, kid?”
“Nothing.”
“I saw the Airweight under your pillow.”
“I have nightmares sometimes. It’s the way I am.”
“Did you meet a guy last night?”
“No.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I just did.”
“Then what is it?”
“I have to work some things out.”
He took off his hat and sat down at the table. She closed the laptop. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what it is,” he said.
“I used some bad judgment.”
“With a guy?”
“Not the kind you’re thinking about.”
“Who or what are we talking about?” he said.
“I’ll handle it, Clete.”
He put a hand on her arm and saw her flinch. “I’m getting a bad feeling here,” he said.
“So butt out
.”
“Is it those cops who wised off to you?”
“Stay out of it.”
“You went after them, didn’t you?”
“I acted like a fool. Everything that happened to me is my own fault.”
“What did they do to you?”
“I went to Bill Pepper’s house. I was going to tear him up. Then I saw a swing set in his yard and a basketball hoop over the porte cochere. When he opened the door, I saw pictures of him with his grandchildren on the wall. He pretended not to recognize me. He asked if I was a church lady.”
“A what?”
“He said this lady was going to enroll his granddaughter at Bible camp. He said he thought I was her. He’s a very convincing guy.”
Clete felt a shortness in his breath, a watery sensation in his heart. “Tell me what happened.”
“I think he put Rohypnol or maybe some sleeping pills in a glass of Pepsi he gave me.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t remember all of it. He put his hands on me first. Then he did some other things.”
Clete saw the blood go out of her cheeks, the blank stare in her eyes. “Get it all out at once,” he said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re going to deal with this together.”
“He rubbed his penis on me. All over my skin. He kept saying things with his mouth close to my ear. I couldn’t keep his breath off my face.”
Clete felt his scalp tightening, his hands forming into fists on his knees under the table.
“He drove me to a place on the Blackfoot,” she said. “For a long time he let me think he was going to kill me. Then he cut my clothes off with a knife and poured whiskey and weed on me and rubbed it all over my body and left me to walk naked back to town. Two kids gave me a raincoat and took me to my truck.”
The whites of her eyes had turned pink, although she had not shed any tears. Clete had to cough into his hand before he spoke. “You’re not going to report him?”
“He scrubbed me with bleach. There’s no DNA on me. My clothes are gone. I have nothing to prove my story.”