Light of the World (5 page)

“What’s in there?” Molly said.

“A dead mountain lion. It probably got hurt or shot and went in here to die.”

“You don’t think a homeless person has been living there?”

“We’re too far from the highway. I think the rodeo clown came back and was watching the house.”

“Let’s get out of here, Dave.”

I turned to leave the cave; then, as an afterthought, I shone the penlight along the walls and ledges. The surface of the stone was soft
with mold and lichen and bat droppings and water seepage from the surface. Close to the ceiling was a series of gashes in the lichen, a perfect canvas on which a throwback from an earlier time could leave his message. I suspected he had used a sharp stone for a stylus, trenching the letters as deep as possible, cutting through the lichen into the wall, as though savoring the alarm and injury and fear his words would inflict upon others.

I was here but you did not know me. Before there was an alpha and omega I was here. I am the one before whom every knee shall bend.

“Who
is
this guy?” Molly said.

T
HE SHERIFF’S NAME
was Elvis Bisbee. He must have been fifty and a good six and a half feet tall. He had a long face and pale blue eyes and a mustache he had let grow into ropes, the white tips hanging down from either side of his mouth. He stood with me in the shade at the foot of the arroyo at the back of the house, gazing up the slope at the bluff above the logging road. “The guy was wearing cowboy boots?” he said.

“I can show you the tracks.”

“I’ll take your word for it. You’re pretty convinced Wyatt Dixon is stalking your daughter?” He wore a departmental uniform and a short-brim Stetson and a pistol and holster with a polished belt. His eyes seemed to see everything and nothing at the same time.

“I don’t know who else would be out here,” I said.

“Albert likes to stoke up things. Right now it’s these heavy rigs that pass at the foot of your road on their way to Alberta.”

“Oil companies don’t hire deranged people to defecate on the property of a retired English professor.”

“It’s not Wyatt Dixon’s style, either.”

“What is? Killing people?”

“I grant Wyatt’s got a bad history. But he’s not a voyeur. He can’t keep the women off him.”

“Wyatt?”

“He’s an unusual guy. When it comes to rodeoing, he’s got a lot of admirers.”

“I’m not among them.”

“I can’t blame you,” he said, shaking a cigarette from a pack and staring up the slope. “I don’t think he’s your man, but I’m going to bring him in and have a talk with him. If you see him around the property, or if he tries to contact your daughter, let me know.”

“There’s something else. Somebody cut a message in the wall of a cave up there.” I recited it and asked, “You ever see anything like that written anywhere else around here?”

“Not that I can recall. Sounds like it’s from the Bible.”

“Part of it, but it’s screwed up.”

“Meaning Dixon would be the kind of guy who’d screw up a passage from Scripture?”

“It occurred to me.”

He lit his cigarette and drew in on it and turned his face aside before he blew out the smoke. “Let me confide in you,” he said. “A young Indian girl went missing six days ago. She was drinking in a joint near the rez and never came home. Her foster grandfather is Love Younger.”

“The oilman?”

“Some just call him the tenth wealthiest man in the United States. He has a summer home here. I’m supposed to be at his house in a half hour.”

His choice of words was not good. Or maybe I misinterpreted the inference. But a county sheriff does not report to a private citizen at his home, particularly at a prearranged time.

“I’m not following you, Sheriff.”

“You’re a homicide detective, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Mr. Younger is an old man. I don’t like telling him his granddaughter had personal problems. I don’t like telling him the girl is probably dead or close to it or in a state of mind that no seventeen-year-old girl should be in. That particular bar she went to is a hangout for ex-cons, outlaw bikers, and guys who would cut you from your liver to your lights for a package of smokes.
We used to call Montana ‘the last good place.’ Now it’s like everywhere else. A few years back somebody went into a beauty parlor just south of us and decapitated three women. I’ll let you know what Dixon has to say.”

He mashed out his cigarette against a tree trunk and field-stripped the paper and let the tobacco blow away in the wind.

A
LAFAIR HAD GONE
to town to buy several bottles of shampoo and baby oil and solvents to help Albert untangle the snarls and concrete-like accretions that had built up in the manes and tails of his horses. When she returned, I went upstairs to the back bedroom, where she wrote every day from early morning to midafternoon and sometimes for two or three hours in the evening. Her first novel had been published by a New York house and had done very well, and her second one was due to come out in the summer, and she was now working on a third. From her desk she had a grand view of the north pasture and the sloped roof of the barn that was limed with frost each morning and that steamed as the sun rose, and a grove of apple trees that had just gone into leaf and the velvety green treeless hills beyond it. She had a thermos of coffee on her desk, and she was staring out the window and holding a cup motionlessly to her mouth. I sat down on the bed and waited.

“Oh, hi, Dave,” she said. “How long have you been there?”

“I just came in. I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“It’s all right. What did the sheriff say?”

“He doesn’t believe Dixon is a likely candidate.”

She set down her cup and looked at it. “I think a guy was following me in town.”

“Where in town?”

“He was tailgating me in a skinned-up Ford truck on the highway. He had his sun visor down, and I couldn’t make out his face. At one point he was five feet from my bumper. I had to run a yellow light to get away from him. When I came out of the tack store, he was parked across the street.”

“It was the same guy?”

“It was the same truck. The guy behind the wheel was smoking a pipe. I walked to the curb to get a better look, and he drove off.”

“It wasn’t Dixon?”

“I would have said so if it was.”

“I was just asking. You couldn’t see the tag?”

“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.”

T
HREE 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
.”

W
YATT 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?