Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

But the ex-convict was also known as a pathological liar, and he later tried to sell his story to a detective magazine.

Houston PD and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office questioned two men Barbara Wellstone had carried on affairs with. They also questioned an Australian porn actor the daughter had informed on after she had been pinched with a brick of his marijuana. That the shooter had sought her out first may have indicated she was the target rather than the mother.

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But nobody was sure. Neither Barbara Wellstone nor her daughter was a sympathetic victim, and many people had motive to murder either or both of them. After a couple of years, media interest waned, the homicide detectives assigned to the investigation gradually moved on, and Barbara and her daughter became interesting mounds in a treeless cemetery outside Dalhart, Texas.

The only remaining problem for the killers was the homicide detective who had continued to work on the case long after everyone else had given up. Was his death a suicide? Or was he getting too close to the wrong people?

I knew those questions would probably never be answered. Not unless someone got the Wellstones into the iron cage where I thought they belonged.

THAT AFTERNOON I drove into the Swan Valley. The day had warmed precipitously, and in the distance I could see a single column of smoke rising from a dark green stand of timber on a mountain slope. June is the wet month in Montana, but this year the rains in the lowlands and the snows in the high country had been less than they should have been. I hoped wildfires would not have their way, as they had in the years 2000 and 2003. I hoped that Montana would remain the fine place that it was, a window into America’s pristine magnificence. But as I looked through the windshield of my truck, the signs of change were everywhere. Maybe that’s just in the nature of things, but who says you have to like it?

Better yet, who says you have to accept the presence of those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit? The minions of the Wellstones were hired cretins, men like Lyle Hobbs and Quince Whitley. Their kind attach themselves to an authority figure, one who pays them not to think, and then they go about hurting other people with the idle detachment of someone clipping his nails. Putting them in penitentiaries provides jobs for correctional officers and makes everyone feel better about our justice system, but in reality, it does little to change the way things work. The enlisted people who were punished for crimes inside the Abu Ghraib prison wouldn’t drop their pants in a latrine without permission. If Hobbs and Whitley were involved in the attack on Clete, they had not acted on their own. But the problem lay in the very fact that they were windups — lacking credibility, fearful of retaliation, ultimately dispensable.

It was time to take a different tack. The convergence of so many disparate elements at Albert’s ranch was too much for coincidence. Clete had trespassed accidentally onto the Wellstone ranch, setting off a reaction by the Wellstone employees and then the Wellstones themselves. A college kid with ties to the Wellstone Ministries had been abducted and murdered on the ridge behind Albert’s house. Later, a drifter with a Texas accent who looked part Indian and called himself J. D. Gribble had shown up at Albert’s secondary pasture, claiming to be a down-and-out rodeo man but with a singing voice like Jimmie Rodgers. In the meantime, a drifter who looked a lot like J. D. Gribble had been hanging around the Swan Lake café and nightclub where Jamie Sue Wellstone often stopped in for a drink. Last, Troyce Nix, also from Texas, had appeared on the scene, looking for a man who had put a shiv in him, a man I thought Albert knew was his newly hired hand, J. D. Gribble.

I had gotten Jamie Sue Wellstone’s cell number from Clete before I drove in to the Swan. I parked in front of the nightclub on the lake and punched her number into my cell, wondering at the levels of unhappiness people could visit upon themselves, usually over things that were only symbols for the things they actually wanted. But the fate and choices of others were not my business. The attack on Clete Purcel was.

After the seventh ring, I got Jamie Sue’s voice mail. I left my name and told her I would like to talk with her, at any time or any place of her choosing. I did not tell her where I was. Nor did I expect her to call me back. I had already placed Jamie Sue Wellstone in a categorical shoe box, that of opportunist and user of other people. However, I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that our judgments about our fellow human beings are usually wrong.

My cell vibrated while I was eating in the café. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. “Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Robicheaux?” the voice said.

“Yes?” I replied.

“This is Jamie Sue Wellstone. What is it you want?”

Go right to it, I told myself. “To talk about a guy by the name of J. D. Gribble.”

I could hear her breathing in the silence. “Is he all right?” she asked.

“As far as I know. When can we talk?”

There was a long pause. “Where are you?”

“At the café on Swan Lake.”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“You’d better not deceive me, Mr. Robicheaux.”

How strange can it get?

Fifteen minutes later, she turned out of the late-afternoon shadows on the highway and parked in front of the nightclub. Her little boy was strapped into the child seat in back. She walked into the café holding him against her shoulder, a diaper bag hooked around her waist. She looked through the front window, then studied the vehicles parked in the side lot. I pulled out a chair for her, but she ignored the gesture and asked the waitress for a high chair, then walked through the bead curtain and checked to see who was inside the bar. When she sat down, her expression was circumspect, her frown like a tiny stitch between her eyebrows. She had not spoken a word.

“That’s a handsome little boy you have there,” I said.

Still she didn’t speak. Her eyes were busy with thought, as though she was reconsidering the wisdom of meeting with me.

“What was Gribble down for?” I said.

She didn’t understand.

“He doesn’t deny he’s done time,” I said. “He just doesn’t say what for.”