Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“The female had two arrests for solicitation in Los Angeles. The man was an independent film producer of some kind. LAPD says he may have been hooked up with some porn vendors. They were traveling on his credit card. From the charges, it looks like they were bar-hopping their way from the Swan Valley back to Spokane.”

“I don’t see how we figure in to this, Sheriff,” I said.

“They were in a saloon in Swan Lake. According to the bartender, they were drinking with Jamie Sue Wellstone, the sister-in-law of Ridley Wellstone.”

“I still don’t get the tie-in,” I said.

“Maybe there isn’t one. But when Mr. Purcel called in about the little wood cross he found up on the hill, he mentioned two thugs who work for the Wellstone family, guys he had trouble with. Maybe that’s all coincidence. What’s your opinion?”

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“Let me be honest here,” Joe Bim said. “Sometimes I like to believe that the victims of violent crime invite their fate. Maybe this porn dealer and his hooker girlfriend were killed by their own kind. But the thought of what happened to those two college kids doesn’t give me any rest. They were taking a stroll on a beautiful summer evening behind the school they attended, and a degenerate sodomized and raped the girl and snuffed out her life and made her boyfriend beg or commit oral sex on him before the perp blew his head off.

“We lifted Seymour Bell’s thumbprint off the wood cross. There were no other prints on it, so the cross probably belonged to the boy. Why would somebody rip it from his throat? Why deny a kid about to be murdered a symbol of his religion? It’s thoughts of that kind that make me want to blow somebody out of his socks. Did you guys ever feel like that? Did you ever want to blow the living shit out of certain people and drink a beer while you did it?”

Clete and I looked at each other and didn’t reply.

JOE BIM HIGGINS was not an inept lawman or administrator and probably didn’t need my help in his investigation. But an execution-style murder had been committed within sight of the cabin where Molly and I were living, and to pretend an act that evil had no relationship to our own lives, to wait for the authorities, with their limited resources, to assure us that our environment was safe, is the kind of behavior one associates with someone who relies on the weatherman to protect him from asteroids.

Clete and I drove to Missoula and went into the big stone courthouse where the sheriff kept his office. We explained that we wanted to ask questions of some people who had known the two murdered college students, that we did not intend to impose ourselves on his investigation, that we would report any meaningful discoveries immediately to him, that, in effect, we would not become an unwelcome presence in his life.

He was sitting in a swivel chair with one booted foot on the wastebasket. He chewed on a hangnail and stared out the window at the trees on the courthouse lawn. “How would you describe your relationship with the FBI?” he said.

“We don’t have one,” I replied.

“That’s what you think,” he said.

“Sir?” I said.

“An FBI woman was in here an hour ago asking questions about Mr. Purcel. You worked for a greaseball up at Flathead Lake?” he said.

Clete was standing in front of the sheriff’s desk, looking into dead space, his face impassive. “His name was Sally Dio. His private plane nose-dived into the side of a mountain.”

“Really?” Joe Bim said.

“Yeah, I heard ole Sal looked like marmalade hanging in one of the trees. All the whores in Vegas and Tahoe were really broke up about it,” Clete said.

“This FBI agent thinks maybe you had something to do with it,” Higgins said.

“Funny none of them told me that,” Clete said.

The room was quiet. Joe Bim let his eyes linger on Clete’s face. “I got a shitload of open files in that metal cabinet. Don’t make me regret what I do here today,” he said.

“You won’t, Sheriff,” I said, trying to preempt any more of Clete’s remarks.

Joe Bim removed his foot from the wastebasket. “I think the homicide of the two college kids is a random act. If that’s true, we’ve probably got a serial killer operating on the game reserve. A connection with the double homicide at the rest stop is anybody’s guess. The FBI says the male, the porn producer, was Mobbed up, so maybe it was a contract hit, an object lesson of some kind that has nothing to do with the college kids.

“The boy who was killed behind Albert’s house was shot with a forty-five. The killer at the rest stop used a nine-millimeter. But there are a lot of similarities just the same. The shooter picked up his brass at both scenes, and he made both males show submission to him before he shot them. He also enjoys hurting women. You ever investigate a torch murder?”

“Both of us have,” Clete replied.

“You saw the vic at the crim

e scene?” Higgins asked.

“I’ve never stopped seeing the vics,” Clete said.

Joe Bim removed two manila folders from his file drawer and opened them on his desk. The faces of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell stared up at us from their photos. Two of the photographs had been taken for school yearbooks. Two of them had been taken in the morgue. The disfigurement done to their features by their killer or killers was of a kind you hope no family member will ever be forced to look upon.