“He’s probably psychotic. Why pay any attention to anything he says?”
“Because he had motivation to kill Detective Pepper. He’s also one of the last people to see Angel Deer Heart alive.”
I didn’t want to remind the sheriff that he had spoken favorably of Dixon after Alafair and I had trouble with him. “Does he have an alibi for last night?”
“His neighbors across the river say there was a light on in his barn and they thought they saw him shoeing horses until after midnight.”
“So he’s not your guy?”
“Probably not. But he has information about the Deer Heart girl that he’s not sharing.”
“What kind of information?”
“He thinks she was adopted for reasons other than humanitarian ones.”
“What reasons?”
“He’s a little vague on that.”
“Why’d you call me?” I asked.
“Because I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with. What makes it worse is that Wyatt Dixon has almost convinced me.”
“Of what?”
“That there’s an evil presence in our midst. That the cave behind Albert Hollister’s house is the source of something that I hate to even think about.”
“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I said.
“Come down here and tell me that after you look at Bill Pepper’s face in the crime scene photos. One of his eyes looked like an eight ball. The coroner says he was alive when he was castrated. Where’s the Horowitz girl?”
I looked out the window. Gretchen’s pickup was parked by the guest cabin. “She didn’t do this,” I said.
“We talked to a homicide investigator at Miami-Dade. She was known in the trade as Caruso. You want to vouch for Caruso, Mr. Robicheaux?”
AFTER CLETE WAS released from the holding jail in Big Fork, he did not ask Gretchen if she’d had anything to do with the death of Bill Pepper. At the cabin, she kept waiting for him to stop talking and look directly in her face and ask the question, but he didn’t. She fixed bacon and scrambled eggs and set his plate on the table and sat down across from him and waited some more. He started eating, buttering a biscuit, drinking his coffee, spearing his fork through the eggs, but he didn’t ask the question.
“I went looking for you,” she said.
“I figured you would,” he replied.
“You didn’t find Pepper, did you?”
“Not alive, I didn’t.”
“You think I did him?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“If he’d drawn down on you or tried to attack you again, you would have blown him out of his socks. Maybe you would have broken a couple of his spokes. But you didn’t have anything to do with what happened inside that cottage. Neither did I. Anyone who thinks different doesn’t know anything about either of us.”
“I told you what I wanted to do to him. I told you how I wanted him to suffer.”
“You’re like most brave people, Gretchen: too brave to know you’re supposed to be afraid, and too good to understand you’re incapable of doing bad.”
She thought she was going to cry.