Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Right. What’s your name?”

“Detective Bill Pepper. I told the woman not to contaminate a possible crime scene. If she got her nose bent out of shape, that’s her problem.”

The crime scene technician was standing in the background. “Come on up to the cave with me. I want to show you a couple of things,” he said.

I grabbed hold of a pine sapling and pulled myself up on a footpath and followed the crime scene tech to the entrance of the cave. He was a rotund man with a florid face and the small ears and scar tissue of someone who might have been in the ring. He had put rubber bands around the cuffs of his cargo pants. “How you doin’?” he said.

“Better than that cowboy.”

“Here’s what we’ve got going on. The rain didn’t do us any favors. There was supposed to be a bunch of scat here, but I can’t find it. Same with the fingernail clippings. The boot prints are wiped out, too. Maybe somebody got here before we did.”

“Is Dixon lying about getting his feet stomped?”

“Detective Pepper said he wanted Dixon’s boots to be clean when he tried to match them with the tracks of the guy who was holed up in the cave. Sometimes Bill’s way of doing things is a problem for the rest of us.”

“Why is Dixon in cuffs? I thought he was coming in on his own.”

“He didn’t know the Indian girl’s purse was found last night behind a hay bale in the barn where she was killed. There was a receipt in it for a bracelet she bought from Dixon. The bracelet wasn’t on her body. The date on the receipt was the same day she disappeared.”

“What does Dixon say?”

“He weaves bracelets out of silver and copper wire and was wearing one in the Wigwam, and she saw it and wanted to buy it. He says he sold it to her for fifty dollars.”

“What was the deal with Miss Gretchen?”

“The gal who just went down the hill?”

“Down south you don’t call a woman a ‘gal.’ I especially wouldn’t do that with her.”

“I want you to understand something, Detective Robicheaux. Our department treats people with respect, our current sheriff in particular. The deputy and detective out there are the exception. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”

“What happened?”

“The lady, or whatever you want to call her, Miss Gretchen, came on a little strong about Bill’s treatment of Wyatt Dixon. When she was walking away, the deputy said, ‘Is she butch enough for you, Bill?’ Pepper goes, ‘I’d probably have to tie a board across my ass so I didn’t fall in.’ ”

“She heard them?”

“Probably. Would you tell her I apologize on behalf of the department?”

“If I were you, I’d tell your friends to do that.”

“She’s gonna file a complaint?”

“No, she’s not given to filing complaints,” I said, and looked back out the opening of the cave. “Is Dixon going to be charged?”

“Depends on what the prosecutor says. I think we’ve got a lot more work to do. I didn’t get what you were saying. The lady is not gonna file a complaint? So what is she gonna do?”

I looked at the biblical message incised in the soft patina of lichen on the wall and wondered what kind of tangled mind was responsible for it. “It’s nice meeting you,” I said. “I hope to see you again. Tell those two morons out there they put their foot into the wrong Rubicon.”

“Sorry?”

“Tell them to look it up.”

AFTER THE FIRST interview, Alafair waited three days in the motel for Asa Surrette’s attorney to return her call. It was January, and snow was driving parallel with the ground, and the landscape was sere and stippled with weeds, and in the distance the hills looked like piles of slag raked out of a furnace.

It was a land of contradictions, settled by Populists and Mennonites but also by fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of John Brown. In spring the rivers were swollen and streaked with red sandbanks and bordered by cottonwoods that fluttered with thousands of green leaves resembling butterflies. The Russian wheat in the fields was the most disease-resistant in the world, the harvest so great that sometimes the grain had to be piled in two-story mounds by the train tracks because there was no room left in the silos.

Or the skies could blacken with dust storms or, worse, clouds of smoke rising from a peaceful town, such as Lawrence, where guerrillas under the command of William Clarke Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson spent an entire day systematically murdering 160 people.