Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

Clete sat up in bed at two A.M., his eyes wide, his throat thick with phlegm. Three deer had just walked through Albert’s yard and knocked over the water sprinkler. Clete got up and removed a carton of milk from the icebox and drank it in a deep chair that looked out on the valley. He could see the outcroppings of rock and the silhouette of the trees on the hilltops, the wind bending the trees against the starlight. But the windswept loveliness of the night sky and the alpine topography were of no help to him. He put his face in his hands, and when he drew in his breath, it sounded as ragged as a fish bone in his throat.

When he woke in the morning, he was wired to the eyes, a pressure band tightening across one side of his head. The clinical term for the syndrome is “psychoneurotic anxiety.” It’s almost untreatable, because its causes are armor-plated and deep-seated down in the bottom of the id. The level of tension is not unlike what you feel at the exact moment you realize you have stepped on a pressure-activated antipersonnel mine. Or if you have to open the door on an abandoned refrigerator in a vacant lot five days after a child has disappeared from the neighborhood. Or if your job requires you to climb out on a fourteenth-story ledge in order to dissuade a jumper who is determined to take her infant child with her. The analogies are not exaggerated. The tension is such that at one time patients who suffered from it were lobotomized with their full consent.

But Clete already knew all these things, and he also knew, waking at nine A.M., that understanding the mechanis

ms of fear and buried memories did nothing to get rid of the problem. VA dope didn’t help, either, or vodka and orange juice for breakfast and weed and downers for lunch. He had already mortgaged too many tomorrows to get through the present day. Eventually there would be no more tomorrows to mortgage, and the day would come when he would find himself drawing an X through the last empty square on his calendar.

What he needed to do was find the dude with the gas can and look into his face, he thought. What all predators hated most was to be made accountable. It wasn’t death that they feared. Death was what they sought, onstage, with the attention of the world focused upon them. But when you took away their weapons and their instruments of bondage and torture, when you pulled the gloves off their hands and the masks off their face, every one of them was a pathetic child. They were terrified of their mother and became sycophantic around uniformed men. The fact they were reviled by other felons and that cops would not touch them without wearing polyethylene gloves was not lost on them.

But how do you get your hands on a guy who has probably been killing people for years, in several states, leaving no viable clues, threading his way in and out of normal society? How do you find a sadist who probably looks and acts just like your next-door neighbor?

Clete fried up a ham-and-egg sandwich for breakfast and ate it in his skivvies and tried to keep his mind free of memories from the hillside. Through the window he saw a four-door silver Dodge come up the dirt road and turn under the arch over Albert’s driveway, an Amerasian woman behind the wheel.

SPECIAL AGENT ALICIA Rosecrans was not an easy woman to read. Clete figured she was a dutiful federal agent and inflexible on most issues of principle, but he also suspected she was a private person with her own code and one day would be in trouble because of it. For Clete, bureaucracy and mediocrity were synonymous. Alicia Rosecrans probably wouldn’t hit a glass ceiling. It would get dropped on her.

She was good to look at, the way she wore her jeans loosely on her hips, her shirt hanging over her firearm. She had just had her hair cut, and the freshly clipped ends lay in a curve under her cheekbones. But it was the self-contained look of intelligence in her face that intrigued Clete most. How many female cops did you meet who were so confident that they didn’t need to compete with their male colleagues? Answer: somewhere between not many and none.

Clete had put on his slacks when he saw her coming up the walk and was combing his hair in the mirror over the lavatory when she knocked on the door. He washed his face and wiped it off with a towel, buttoning his shirt at the same time, wondering at his own preoccupation with his appearance because a federal agent was knocking on his door.

As soon as she was inside, the first thing out of his mouth was an apology for the messy state of his living room and kitchenette. Why was he acting like this? He was probably thirty years older than she was and looked it, from his girth to his fire-hydrant neck and the hypertension flush in his cheeks. She sat down on the stuffed couch backed against a bank of windows and unzipped a folder on her lap. When she looked up at him, he noticed how little lipstick she used and the fact that its absence made her look even more attractive and confident.

“We’ve interviewed the people we thought might bear you a grudge,” she said. “Because you almost beat Lyle Hobbs to death, we started with him. He says he was shopping at Costco in Missoula Saturday night. He has an AmEx receipt that shows he was there. Except Costco closes at six. So in effect, he doesn’t have an alibi. You think Hobbs could be our guy?”

Her choice of language contained implications that were hard to track and tie together, and Clete could not tell if his confusion was because of his sleepless night and the booze in his system or because Alicia Rosecrans just wanted to put thumbtacks in his head. At first she had mentioned his almost killing Lyle Hobbs, as though incriminating Clete, then she had talked about “our” guy, indicating that the two of them were on the same side. He sat down at the breakfast table, three feet from her, and paused before he spoke.

“In my view, Hobbs is capable of anything,” he said. “But let’s straighten out something here. If I’d wanted to beat him to death, he wouldn’t be walking around. Second of all, Hobbs is a child molester and should have had his wiring ripped out long ago.”

“Right,” she said, looking down at the papers in her lap. “We also interviewed Quince Whitley. He says he was in a motel outside Superior on Saturday night. He says he picked up a woman in a bar there, and she was in the motel with him. He says he paid cash for the room because the motel doesn’t take credit cards. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t remember the woman’s last name or know where she lives.”

“Does he have a receipt for the room?”

“No, but the owner remembers him because of the damage someone had done to his face.”

“Yeah, this guy Troyce Nix worked him over in a convenience store or something?”

“Here’s the short version. Quince Whitley rented the motel room, and maybe he even took a woman there. But there’s no proof he was in the room at the time you were abducted. He has a pronounced southern accent. You heard the abductor’s voice. Could it be Whitley’s?”

“The guy who sapped me was whispering. According to Gribble, he was wearing a mask. That probably explains why I could hardly hear his words. Look, this is what I don’t get. My eyes were taped, my wrists cuffed behind the trunk of a tree. Why would he need to wear a mask?”

“The perpetrator loses his own identity and takes on the self-manufactured image of a terrifying figure that can reduce his enemies to trembling bowls of pudding,” she said. “Also, if he decides to take the tape off his victim’s eyes, the impersonality of the abuse increases the humiliation and emotional pain of the victim. The perpetrator retains his option of ratcheting up the victim’s suffering and stays high on several different levels. It’s all about control.”

“You learned this at Quantico?”

“In Sociology 102 at Imperial Valley College.”

“I think you’re looking at the wrong guys. Hobbs and Whitley are hired help. Whatever they do, they do for money. Their kind seldom if ever act on their own.”

“Maybe they had permission. There must have been two guys on that hillside — one to drive Albert Hollister’s truck with you in it, and one to drive the getaway car.”

“I was with the perp on a very personal level. He blew his cigarette smoke on my skin. When he said he burned people for fun, he meant it.”

She studied Clete’s face, her eyes unblinking behind her small glasses. “Who do you think we should be looking at?”

“A guy who wants other people to suffer as bad as he has. Maybe a guy who’s been burned up in a French tank. I wouldn’t exclude the sheriff.”

“You’re serious? Joe Bim Higgins?”

“Half his face got fried with a phosphorous shell. I think I’m not one of his favorite people, either. Listen, the person who will kill you is the one who’ll be at your throat before you ever know what hits you.”