Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

As ever—

Asa

“Why’d you dig out the letter now?” I said.

“You know why.”

“The line about being here before the primal dust of the world?”

“I looked it up. He lifted two or three lines from the Book of Psalms. It sounds like the stuff written on the wall in the cave.”

“I’m going to make some calls to Kansas.”

“You don’t think I’ve already done that? The paramedics removed the carbonized remains of four individuals from the gas truck and the prison van. I called the Eagle in Wichita and talked to a reporter who told me an interesting story: An autistic boy may have witnessed the collision. The boy told his mother that a man walking along the edge of the highway stepped in front of the gas truck and caused the accident. If that’s true, there should have been five bodies in the wreckage rather than four.”

I continued to stare at Surrette’s letter and wondered how I had allowed a man like this to come into our lives. “What did the cops say?”

“Forget the cops,” she said. “The reporter interviewed the little boy, who said the truck didn’t explode until after the collision. He said he could hear pieces of the van and truck rolling down the highway. Then he saw a great light in the sky.”

“Surrette climbed out of the van and lit the spilled fuel?”

“It’s the kind of thing he would do. Have you seen Gretchen?”

“What about her?”

“She’s acting strange. Maybe she’s still angry about those remarks the cops made up on the hillside.”

“Maybe it’s time we have a talk with Pepper. He told the grandfather of the murdered Indian girl that he’d found the store where a guy wearing the girl’s bracelet bought a hunter’s bow. Except Pepper didn’t tell us that.”

“You said ‘we,’ ” she replied.

I GOT BILL PEPPER’S address from the phone book and at four-thirty P.M., we headed down the dirt road toward the two-lane. Half a mile south of Albert’s ranch, we saw a bright orange pickup coming toward us, a man in a white straw cowboy hat behind the wheel. He stopped and rolled down the window. A bouquet of cut flowers wrapped in green tissue paper rested on the dashboard. “Howdy-doody. I come to see Miss Gretchen,” he said.

“To my knowledge, she’s not home, Mr. Dixon,” I said.

“Then I’ll have to talk to y’all.” He shut off his engine and stepped out on the road. The sun was shining in his eyes, but he seemed to take no heed. “I heard those cops talking about the message on that cave wall.”

“What about it?”

“I know what it means. I don’t want to get drug into it. Not unless that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Drug into what? You’re not making a lot of sense, partner,” I said.

“The Indians on the rez have been talking about it a long time. The Bible says he’ll come from the sea, and you’ll know him by the numbers in his name. All this countryside was under the ocean at one time. I think he’s here. That was him or one of his acolytes up there in that cave.”

Alafair leaned across the seat. “Who’s here?” she said.

“Him,” Dixon said. “Him, the one the world’s been waiting on.”

THE RIVERS WERE blown out by the spring runoff and the constant rains, but Clete knew a creek high up on a logging road in the Bitterroots where there was a long stretch of white water that boiled over into the trees, then above it a chain of beaver dams and deep pools and undulating riffles sliding so clear over the gravel bed that you could count each pebble five feet below the surface. He had loaded his ice chest with beer and canned fruit juice and ham-and-onion sandwiches and had put it on the backseat and his waders and fly rod and fly vest and net and creel in the trunk. He had put on his canvas coat and porkpie hat and was ready to go. There was only one problem. He couldn’t get his mind off his daughter.

He went back into the cabin. “Come with me,” he said.

“I have things to take care of,” she said. She was sitting at the breakfast table, her food cold on her plate, her laptop open.

“What’s bothering you, kid?”

“Nothing.”