“Go on.”
“Joe Bim Higgins said there was only one print on the cross — Seymour’s. Higgins assumed the killer had gloves on and tore the cross from Seymour’s neck and flung it down the slope, probably in a rage. But what if Seymour broke the cord on the cross and threw it in the brush for us to find?”
“No, Higgins said there were cuff burns on Seymour’s wrists. If he was forced to ride in a car, his wrists would have been cuffed behind him. He couldn’t have gotten his hands on the cross.”
“Let’s go back up the mountain,” I said.
We walked up the switchback trail through dense stands of fir trees until we reached the crime scene. It was windy and bright when we came out of the shade into sunlight, and both of us were sweating heavily. Far below, we could see the state two-lane that led over Lolo Pass into Idaho, and a long silvery creek meandering through cottonwood trees, the same creek Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the Indian woman Sacagawea had followed on their way to Oregon.
“What are we looking for?” Clete said.
“Think of it this way: Maybe the killer brought Seymour up here in order to send Albert a message. But what if the motivation was more complicated? What if the killer was after information of some kind?”
“Too much of this is speculative, Dave.”
“No, predators are always cowards. They don’t take chances with guys like Seymour Bell. They kill them outright.”
Clete bit on a hangnail and made a face. “You got a point.”
The crime scene’s forensic integrity had deteriorated dramatically since our first visit there. Deer and elk scat was everywhere. Tree branches were broken, and the soft layer of humus and pine needles was pocked with the hoofprints of large animals. A rotted larch trunk had snapped at ground level and crashed across the anvil-shaped rock that was stippled with Seymour Bell’s blood.
“Figure it this way,” I said. “The boy died within a few feet of that rock. The car tracks are about fifteen feet south of the rock. So everything that happened here probably took place within a circle that had a diameter of not more than twenty-five feet.”
“Yeah?” Clete said.
I walked to the edge of the slope where Clete had found the small wood cross and broken leather cord. What were you trying to tell us, kid? I thought.
“Take a look,” I said.
The rotted larch, shaggy with moss and decay, had cracked cleanly across its base and fallen in one piece, allowing sunlight to flood onto a fir tree next to it. At the bottom of the fir tree’s trunk were gashes in the bark. They were lateral and thin and overlapping, as though a dull metal surface had been jerked repeatedly against the smoothness of the bark. I knelt on one knee and touched them with my fingers. “The killer locked that kid’s wrists around the tree. Look at how the ground is churned up,” I said. “I think maybe he was tortured here.”
“But why would Bell throw away his cross?”
“Because he didn’t want his executioner to take it with him,” I said.
“Yeah, but why would a degenerate motherfucker like that want the kid’s cross? Unless the guy is into fetishism.”
I got to my feet, dusting grains of dirt off my hands. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Dave, if what Seymour’s roommate told us is true — I mean about Seymour being a fighter — maybe there’s another possibility we haven’t looked at.”
I waited for him to continue. In the distance, the wind was blowing the snowcap on Lolo Peak, powdering the sky with it, smudging the light.
“What if we’re not dealing with just one guy?” Clete said.
TROYCE NIX HAD flown into Spokane on pain pills and adrenaline, then had gone directly to a Toyota dealership and purchased a repossessed SUV. The vehicle had to be prepped before Troyce could drive it away, so he checked into a motel on I-90 east of the city and told the salesman to deliver his purchase when it was ready.
The motel was almost to the Idaho line, a leftover from an earlier time, constructed of pink stucco, set back in the deep shadows of cedar trees and fringed with purple neon. Next door was a steak house and saloon that featured live country music. Troyce ate a twenty-ounce porterhouse and sipped a Manhattan while he listened to the music from the bandstand. It wasn’t long before a fellow traveler caught his eye and nodded politely to him.
The fellow traveler looked western enough, in tight stonewashed jeans and a hand-tooled belt and a short-brim cattleman’s hat. But the clipped mustache hid a feminine mouth, and the wide shoulders inside the snap-button shirt couldn’t disguise the flaccidity of his upper arms. Nor was the fellow traveler shy about glancing back at Troyce from the bar, flexing his buttocks against his jeans.
He wasn’t quite Troyce’s type, but it had been a long time between drinks.
The next afternoon Troyce’s SUV was delivered to the motel. The only problem was that Troyce’s interlude with the fellow traveler had proved both exhausting and complicated in ways he hadn’t expected. As a result, his wounds ached, his pain pills and alcohol intake had collided in his nervous system, and he didn’t trust himself to drive. Fortunately, he met another pilgrim, this one a honky-tonk in-your-face piece of work by the name of Candace Sweeney.
She said she would drive him all the way to Missoula for fifty bucks and drinks and the cost of a bus ticket to Livingston, where she claimed she had a job cooking at a dude ranch. “It’s not a bad gig if you don’t mind rich old guys scoping your jugs every time you lean over the table,” she said.
It was twilight as they drove into the Idaho Panhandle and the mountains and lake country around Coeur d’Alene. In the glow of the dash, Troyce could see the tattoos of flowers on the tops of Candace Sweeney’s breasts, and the tiny pits in her cheeks, and the black shine in her hair, which she wore in bangs, giving her a little-girl look that didn’t fit anything she was saying.