Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“Jesus Christ,” Clete said.

“We have other open homicide cases here in Missoula County, cases that have been total dead ends,” Joe Bim said. “One involves a guy we called the Mad Hatter. Some guy in a stovepipe hat went into a beauty parlor down in the Bitterroot Valley, made three women lie in a circle, then shot and killed all three of them. Then he cut off their heads. We don’t have a clue who he was, where he went, or why he did it.

“Somebody out in Hellgate Canyon killed an eighty-year-old woman in a nursing home with a screwdriver. Maybe it was an inside job, maybe not, we just don’t know. We’ve pulled ten-to twenty-year-old human bones out of campgrounds, but we have no idea who the vics are or how they died. This is supposed to be a place where tourists roast hot dogs on their summer vacations.”

“We’re going to start at Cindy Kershaw’s dormitory, Sheriff. We appreciate what you’ve told us,” I said.

“I pulled a week’s worth of surveillance tape from the health club where the Kershaw girl worked. You want to check it out?”

“What’s in it?” Clete said.

“A kid who could be my granddaughter,” Joe Bim replied.

We went into a separate room where the sheriff plugged an edited and synthesized cassette of the health club’s surveillance tapes into a VCR.

Most cops and newspeople tend to use categorical names for both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes, particularly violent ones that involve depravity and sadism. Why? The answer is simple: It’s easier to believe the perpetrator is a genetic aberration or the product of a subculture that is unconnected to our lives. By the same token, the victim is someone unlike us, perhaps a person who, like a candle moth, chose of his own accord to swim through flame, perhaps someone actually seeking an executioner.

Then you look at a videotape of an eighteen-year-old girl wearing down-in-the-ass jeans, her baby fat exposed, vacuuming a rubber-matted floor with headphones on, the vacuum pack on her back swaying to music that only she heard.

In the background, people in workout dress clanked iron and sweated on the vinyl padding of the Life Fitness and Hammer Strength machines and pounded along on the treadmills as though they were traversing great spans of topography. On the opposite side of a glass window, a man lay on a table while a physical therapist pushed his knee up toward his chest; his mouth opened wide with a muscle spasm.

“Would you back it up a few frames?” Clete said.

“You see something?” Joe Bim asked.

“Yeah, the guy by the watercooler,” Clete replied. He waited a moment. “Hold it right there.” He studied the frozen image of a lean man with uncut hair who wore his shirt outside his slacks. The man was watching Cindy Kershaw, his arm propped on top of the watercooler. His face appeared only in profile on the screen. But there was something wrong with one of his eyes, as though a drinking glass had been cupped over it and pressed deeply into the skin, recessing the entire socket.

Clete tapped a fingernail on the television monitor. “I can’t swear to it, but he looks like a dude by the name of Lyle Hobbs. He was a driver for Sally Dio. He also does security for Ridley Wellstone. He also has a sheet for child molestation in Reno.”

“You’re fairly certain about this?” Joe Bim said.

“I’m not real objective about this guy. Hobbs is a bucket of shit. That guy by the watercooler looks like him. That’s all I can tell you,” Clete said.

“It’s Hobbs,” I said.

Both the sheriff and Clete looked at me. “How do you know?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s Ridley Wellstone on the therapist’s table,” I said.

CINDY KERSHAW’S ROOMMATE at the university had graduated with Cindy from a high school on the other side of the Sapphire Mountains. Cindy’s father had died in a logging accident when she was five, and she had been raised by her mother, who cooked in a café and ran a small feed business with a man she sometimes lived with. The roommate’s name was Heather Miles. On her shelf were a half-dozen stuffed animals and three trophies she had won as a barrel racer. Her eyes were ice blue, her features Nordic, the anger in her face like a cool burn.

“No, she didn’t have other boyfriends. She didn’t sleep around, either, because that’s what you’re talking about, right?” she said.

“No, not at all,” I replied. “But when a woman is attacked in a ferocious manner, as Cindy was, the driving engine is almost always sexual rage. So if we exclude the people who knew her — old boyfriends, maybe somebody who felt rejected by her — we can start looking at what we call a random perpetrator. He’s a hard guy to catch, because usually he has little or no connection to the victim.”

“Seymour Bell was her only boyfriend. Everybody liked her. It was the same in high school,” Heather Miles said.

“Were she and Seymour intimate?” I said.

“She didn’t talk about it. Why do you keep asking those kinds of questions? What do they have to do with her death?” Her bed was neatly made, the blanket tucked tight on the corners. She was sitting on top of the blanket, her face turned up at mine, her hands opening and closing on her thighs like those of someone who was trapped. “You’re making it sound like it was Cindy’s fault she got killed.”

“Did she know a guy named Lyle Hobbs?” Clete asked.

“I never heard of him. Who is he?” she said.

“A geek and a child molester. He showed up on the surveillance tape at the health club where Cindy worked,” Clete said. “You know a guy by the name of Ridley Wellstone?”

“No, I never heard of him, either.”