Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“The victim was raped?” I said.

“We don’t know yet. Her jeans were pulled off. Her panties were still on. Have you worked many like this?”

“More than I want to remember.”

“Dixon is supposed to come in tomorrow at eight. If he doesn’t, we’ll pick him up. Does your daughter still have that arrow?”

“I’ll ask her.”

“If Dixon’s prints are on it, I’m going to owe you and her an apology.”

“No, you won’t. I think you’re doing a good job.”

“In the last two years we’ve had ten sexual assaults on or near the university campus. A couple of the victims claim that university football players raped them. Sometimes I wonder if the country hasn’t already gone down the drain.”

I had grown up in an era when a black teenage boy named Willie Francis was sentenced to die by electrocution in the St. Martinville Parish jail, nine miles from my home. In those days the electric chair traveled from parish to parish, along with the generators, and was nicknamed Gruesome Gertie. The first attempt at the boy’s electrocution was botched by the executioners, one of whom was a trusty, because they were still drunk from the previous night. Willie Francis screamed for a full minute before the current was cut. Later, the United States Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana, and the governor who wrote the song “You Are My Sunshine” refused to commute the sentence. Willie Francis was strapped in the electric chair a second time and put to death.

I did not speak of these things to the sheriff, nor do I mention them to those who pine for what they call the good old days. “See you in the morning,” I said. “Be careful on our road. It looks like it’s about to wash out.”

THE EARLY DAWN was not a good time of day for Gretchen Horowitz. That was when a man with lights on the tips of his fingers used to visit her room and touch her with a coldness that was so intense, it seared through tissue and bone into the soul, in this case the soul of a child who was hardly more than an infant.

When Gretchen woke from her first night’s sleep in Montana, the rain had stopped and the cabin was filled with a blue glow that seemed to have no source, the windows smudged with fog or perhaps even the clouds, which were so low they were tangled in the trees on the hillside. She put water on her face and dressed and, while Clete was still asleep, eased open the door and got into her pickup and followed the two-lane along a swollen creek into Lolo.

At the McDonald’s next to the casino she bought a breakfast to go of sausage and scrambled eggs and biscuits and scalding-hot coffee, then drove back to the ranch and walked up the hillside and spread her raincoat on a flat rock and began eating, the first glimmer of sunlight touching the tops of the trees far down the valley.

She heard sounds, up on the logging road, and only then noticed the cruiser parked behind Albert’s house. Down by the south pasture, a second cruiser was coming slowly up the road, as though the driver were looking for an address. The driver turned under the archway and parked by the barn and got out. He was a heavy man who wore a suit and street shoes and a rain hat; in his left hand he carried a pair of cowboy boots. He opened the back door and pulled out a man dressed in skintight Wranglers and a long-sleeved snap-button red shirt and a straw hat. The man was barefoot, and his wrists were handcuffed behind him.

The man in the suit fitted his hand under the cowboy’s arm and began to muscle him up the slope past the rock where Gretchen was sitting. The cowboy had a profile like an Indian’s and a dimple in his chin and eyes that looked prosthetic rather than real. He slipped in the mud and slid down the incline, trying to stop himself with his bare feet, his clothes slathering with mud and fine gravel and pine needles.

“Get up!” said the man in the suit, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, twisting the cloth in his fingers. “Did you hear me, boy?”

The cowboy tried to get up and fell again. The man in the suit ripped the straw hat off the cowboy’s head and began whipping him with it, striking him across the ears and eyes and the crown of his skull, again and again. “You want to get tased? I’ll do it.”

“I think you might have what they call anger-management issues,” the cowboy said, squinting up from the ground. “I heered you ran into your ex at the Union Club and asked if her new boyfriend wasn’t disappointed by her poor old wore-out vag, and she said, ‘Soon as he got past the wore-out part, he liked it just fine, Bill.’ Is that true, Detective Pepper?”

The detective dropped the boots he had been carrying and picked up the cowboy by the shirtfront and sent him crashing through the pine saplings and into a tree stump. All of this was taking place thirty feet from where Gretchen Horowitz was sitting with her Styrofoam container balanced on her knees. She pushed the tines of her plastic fork through a small piece of sausage and a bit of egg and placed them in her mouth, chewing slowly, her eyes lowered. She heard the cowboy fall again, this time grunting. When she raised her head, the cowboy was sitting with his back against a boulder, sucking wind, his mouth hanging open, his face draining as though he had been kicked in the ribs or stomach. The detective removed a Taser from his coat pocket and activated it and leaned down and touched it to the back of the cowboy’s neck. The cowboy’s head jerked as though he had been dropped from the end of a rope, his face contorting. The detective stepped back and turned off the Taser and glanced down the slope at Gretchen. “What are you looking at?” he said.

Gretchen closed the top of the Styrofoam container and set it on the rock and got up and walked up the incline toward the detective. The trees were wet and motionless in the shadows, strips of thick white cloud hanging on the crest of the ridge. “What am I looking at? Let me think. A guy in cuffs getting the shit kicked out of him?”

“You better mind your business.”

“I am. I’m a guest here. I was eating breakfast. What’s your name?”

“What’s my name?”

“That’s what I said.”

He stared at her without answering.

“My name is Gretchen Horowitz. You don’t give your name out while you’re on the job?”

“Horowitz?”

“It’s Jewish.” She picked up her gold chain and religious medal from her throat and held them in her fingers for him to see. “This is Jewish, too. It’s called the Star of David.”

“You’re interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

“Say my name again?”