Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“If that fellow Jimmy Dale Greenwood comes around here?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Forget we were here. Forget you heard about any of this. You don’t need to pass on any information to Troyce or me. Maybe you won’t believe this, but Troyce is a good man.”

Albert continued to look at her without replying. Her hair was tousling in the wind, her black cowboy shirt with purple and red roses sewn on it puffing with air.

“You’re not going to say anything?” she said.

“With a gal like you, he’d damn well better be a good man,” Albert said.

Her face suddenly went soft, like a flower opening in the shade.

AS SOON AS I got back from my run, I showered and walked up to Albert’s house. He was behind the back steps, a tank of Tordon and 2,4-D strapped to his back, spraying leafy spurge and knapweed on a grassy slope that led into shade and fir trees. The air smelled like it had been rinsed in a chemical factory. I tried to find out why Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney had come to his house. Albert’s response to my questions was to widen the circle of his spray, whipping the applicator back and forth, hosing down everything in sight, letting the mist drift back into my face.

“Will you stop that?” I said.

“I have to finish this before the wind comes up,” he replied.

“When I first saw Troyce Nix, he was showing a photo to people at the revival on the res. He was about to show it to me until his girlfriend mentioned I was a cop. What’s that tell you, Albert?”

“Nothing.”

“It tells you he’s here on a personal mission, and the mission is to do the guy in the photo some serious damage.”

“That might be.”

“Does this have something to do with J. D. Gribble?”

“A man’s past ends at my front gate, Dave.”

“Good way to get your throat cut.”

Albert’s eyes looked like small blue lights inside the softness of his skin. “Would you kindly take yourself someplace else?” he said.

“Is Gribble a fugitive?” I asked.

“Don’t know and don’t give a shit.”

“Is Gribble the man in that photo?”

“I gave Nix back his photo without looking at it. I suspect Nix is up to no good. The woman seems like a good person. Why she’s with the likes of him is beyond me. Case closed, conversation over.”

How did Albert Hollister remain functional inside an academic bureaucracy? Why was he not beaten to death by his colleagues?

You got me.

I WALKED BACK up to the cabin and tried to think. J. D. Gribble’s possible status as a fugitive was an issue between Albert and Gribble. Troyce Nix’s possible beef with Gribble was Gribble and Nix’s grief and none of my own. The only relevant issue for me was Clete Purcel and the decades he had invested in being my closest friend. A deviant had attempted to burn him alive and in all probability would take another run at it, possibly with different methods but with the same depraved intentions. Gribble had told the FBI he had heard a car or truck engine in the darkness, then the sound of the vehicle’s door slamming. Alicia Rosecrans, the FBI agent, had concluded that perhaps two perpetrators were involved, the driver and the man in the mask. But the man in the mask may have opened the vehicle’s door, started the engine, then slammed the door later. Or Gribble could have simply been mixed up.

I needed to concentrate on the man in the mask. I was convinced he was the same man who had abducted and murdered the college kids on the mountainside behind the university and killed the California couple in the highway rest stop. It wasn’t a matter of forensics; it was a matter of mathematical possibility. How many men like Clete’s tormentor could be living in the same sparsely populated area?

Unfortunately, there were precedents that went against the math. The Hillside Strangler was actually not one man but a team of two cousins, both of whom seemed to have souls that were fashioned in a furnace. What is the probability that two monsters, with little in their background that would explain the depth of their cruelty to innocent and trusting young women, could come from the same family?

Years ago, in a midwestern city whose collective ethos was heavily influenced by the humanitarian culture of abolitionists and of Mennonites, I attended twelve-step meetings with some of the best people I ever knew. Most of them were teachers and clerics and blue-collar workers in the aircraft industry. They were drunks, like me, but by and large their sins were the theological equivalent of 3.2 beer. The meetings were small, the content of the discussions restrained, the mention of sexual indiscretions infrequent. Two ex-felons, recently discharged from the state pen, were required to attend the meeting by their PO. They sat quietly in the back of the room, deferential, neatly dressed, and polite. They were well liked and gradually were considered twelve-step success stories in the making. I became accustomed to seeing one of them sitting in front of me at Sunday-morning Mass, his wife and two children next to him in the pew.

Then the two of them were busted ninety miles to the north of us, in a wheat-farming town where the biggest social event of the season was the John Deere exhibition at the high school gym. The charge was homicide, but that convenient abstract term didn’t come close to what these men had done to their victims. They had lain in wait for girls leaving bars by themselves at two A.M., offering them rides, maybe a toke or two of some Acapulco gold or a steak at an all-night café. Once the two ex-felons got their hands on their victims, they raped and tortured them for hours, degrading and humiliating them and putting them through every ordeal imaginable before snuffing out their lives.

The people at the meeting I had been attending were stunned. No one could deal with it, explain it, or reconcile himself to his own naïveté. What are the odds of two men like this finding each other at a small, family-oriented twelve-step meeting in a city associated with Toto, Dorothy, and the yellow brick road? What are the odds that all of us, including me, would be taken in by them? What are the odds that one of them would sit with his family in front of me at Sunday Mass?